I moved into my new apartment about four months ago. It was nothing glamorous, just a bedroom, bathroom, and combined kitchen/living space. The rent was cheap, the building was clean, and moving cut my commute by twenty minutes. I can honestly say that I didn’t really have anything notable I could complain about.
That was until my things started going missing.
It was inconspicuous at first, always something small that I wouldn’t miss. The first time I noticed it was around a month ago when my friend Ricky came over. I had a small bookcase in the living room decorated with a whole collection of trinkets. It weighed heavily with sentimental value, but I highly doubt anything on those shelves would sell for more than $10 on eBay. Ricky enjoyed combing through the countless artifacts on display, making idle chatter as he did. Easily his favorite of my treasures was an old Rubik’s Cube, gifted to me by a friend back in college.
I’ve never been much into puzzles, and to my knowledge neither has Ricky, but every time he visited, without fail, I would catch him trying to solve the damn thing. He never succeeded, always leaving the cube more scrambled than he found it. He’s a bit rough around the edges, but one thing that I’ll give him credit for is that Ricky has manners. He always put the Rubik’s Cube back on its display. That’s why I was so taken aback when he asked where it was the last time he visited.
“Hey, where’d ya put that old Rubik’s Cube?” Ricky asked.
“What do you mean where did I put it? It’s not on the shelf like it usually is?” I replied, confused.
“Nope, display’s empty, see?” he said, pointing to the small plastic display the cube generally rests on top of.
Sure enough the dusty translucent plastic was laid bare, no colorful crown of speckled reds and blues sitting upon it.
“I haven’t touched it since I moved in,” I stated, confidently.
“And I DEFINITELY put it back in its place last time I manhandled it,” Ricky added.
He was right, I saw him place it back on the shelf last time he visited.
“Maybe the wind blew it off the shelf or something?” Ricky offered.
Obviously I was doubtful, but I checked under the bookcase just to be sure. There was nothing waiting for me but dust and grime, a shadow of neglect. I thought the whole ordeal to be odd, but nothing to get worked up over. That was until two weeks later I discovered that my phone charger had also gone missing.
I’m not an organized person by any means, I’ll throw things into drawers and cabinets with a vague idea of categorization in mind, but I’m only human and sometimes things slip through the cracks. My phone charger was not one of those things. Every day before I left the house I wound pat down my pockets.
“Phone, charger, wallet, keys,” I would repeat to myself.
And every night before I go to sleep, I would check the drawer in the nightstand by my bed. My wallet and keys would always be resting on top of a pile of loose change, hair elastics and old receipts. Seeing everything was in order, I would plug my phone in and set it to rest on top of the nightstand.
I woke up late that morning, I was exhausted from work and my phone was dead, so no alarms to rouse me from my slumber. I rolled over, half awake to check my phone, noticing it was only halfway charged. I sat there for a moment, perhaps a moment too long, given my early morning stupor, before I started feeling out for the cord of my charger.
Nothing.
That’s weird, it must have fallen out at some point during the night. I thought to myself, before turning over to face the outlet. What I saw next I still can’t explain.
The power outlet was gone.
At first I thought I was dreaming or something, I pinched my wrist, plugged my nostrils, but nothing worked. This was real. I ran my hands over the spot the outlet had been the previous night. The drywall was perfectly smooth, almost cold to the touch, and colored a pale blue, seamlessly matching the shade of the surrounding paint.
Now reasonably, this freaked me the hell out. I’ve been living here for months and I’ve used that exact outlet almost every single night. My mind raced with possibilities to rationalize this. Ghosts, hallucinations, an elaborate prank by my landlord, nothing seemed to make sense.
After a few hours of agitated pacing around my apartment, I decided to just go on with my day. Rationally what else could I do? Try digging the outlet back out of the wall? I wasn’t about to risk losing my security deposit, not in this economy. Regardless of the situation with the outlet, I found that my charger had vanished as well, so I had some shopping to do that day.
Charging my phone using the outlet across the room was inconvenient to be sure, but an adjustment I could see myself living with. And so life went on with a comparative level of normalcy for the next few weeks. I found myself losing track of things, but nothing as important or valuable as my phone charger.
That was until last night.
My day was going as usual, I woke up, walked across the room to get my phone, went into the kitchen to fix myself some breakfast, then sat down on the couch to watch whatever was on TV. It was my day off, so I took things slow, rotating from bathroom to kitchen to couch for most of the afternoon. When night fell, I slowly roused myself from the depression I had worn into the sofa to go to sleep.
I walked into the bedroom to plug my phone in for the night, then lazily trod to the bathroom to brush my teeth. Already half asleep, I slumped through the doorway of my bedroom. What was waiting for me there made my skin crawl.
My bed was gone.
I knew for a fact that I woke up in that bed that morning, but staring back at me was a darkened indentation in the carpet, the pale beige stained with dull gray, thick with dust. It was like the shadow of something that wasn’t there.
Immediately I panicked.
The bed was by no means small, it was a queen’s size, easily weighing a couple hundred pounds. Even then nothing could have just carried it out the door. The only reason the bed frame could fit in there in the first place was because it came disassembled. The box alone barely fit through the slender frame of the door.
I crossed the threshold of the room and examined the void where my bed once was closer. The whole room looked… wrong. It was uncanny in a way that made me shiver, like a supermarket with barren shelves, or an empty school, late at night. I bent down and ran my hands through the stained carpet, rubbing the dull gray powder between my fingers. Sure enough, dust, thick and coarse, clinging to my trembling fingers. I could clearly see the small craters made in the carpet by the bed’s legs. When I turned around, I saw it.
The door was gone.
Just like the outlet, I was staring at a perfectly smooth, pale blue stretch of drywall. No frame, no handle, nothing. I spun around in a panic as I saw that my posters were gone, as was my nightstand. All that remained was the lamp in the corner, casting the barren room in a dim, orange light. I circled around in an absolute frenzy, watching as my bedroom dissolved in front of me, before I noticed the windows had remained intact.
I ran straight for them, I blinked and all but one were swallowed by the wall. Straining my eyes open I unlatched the remaining window and began to lower myself down.
Thank god I was only on the second floor.
The night air felt like ice on my skin as I clung to the ledge of the window with sweaty palms. I couldn’t tell you why, but I felt compelled to take one last look into my apartment before running off into the night. In hindsight, I really wish I didn’t.
In the hollow shell of what was my bedroom I saw it standing there. Impossibly tall, with skin the color and texture of tar, its neck bent to the side against the ceiling. Its arms were too long and too thin, wisps of boiling oil with fingers that looked like branches. Its silhouette was almost impossible to make out as the arms spread covering the whole of the room in thick, jagged brambles.
It looked like a shattered nightmare, splintered and refracted against itself.
That’s when I fell. It wasn’t so much my hands, moist with a cold sweat betraying me, as much as the very ledge I was clinging to being taken out of this world. What happened next is almost entirely lost to me as I sprinted into the night as fast as my legs would carry me. Landing at a friend’s house, about three miles down the road.
I’ve been staying with them ever since, thankfully the fall didn’t break anything but I’m still sore, exhausted, and down one apartment, plus all my belongings. I’ve been writing this all out on my phone, hoping to get some advice as to what to do now.
Half out of curiosity, half out of a desperate desire to get my things, I went back to my old apartment this morning. I traced my familiar walk up the steps, counting off the apartment numbers as I did. 624, 625, 627… I only stopped once I reached the end of the hall.
I retraced my steps and counted again, but when I got to the spot my old apartment should have been in, there was nothing. No old brass plaque reading 626, no splintered wooden frame, no oily painted door.
Nothing but a stretch of pale blue drywall.