• Something odd happened in my old apartment building.

    Well, no, the word odd is putting it lightly; the better word for it would be unexplainable for me at least. Something happened that I’m sure no one would believe me.

    Mainly, it happened in the apartment above mine.

    There was this tenant, a man I think, he would always be yelling, shouting, but it was so muffled I couldn’t hear what’s being said, but that’s normally because I would try not to notice it, my work keeps me busy so I tend to not notice everything around me right away.

    But the first time it happened, it startled me so bad I broke my favorite coffee mug from the sudden noise. The noise was a loud bang, as if something heavy was being dropped from high up, like the guy decided it would be a good idea to toss his bowling ball around for fun.

    While cleaning up I waited to hear if someone decided to go and give the guy a good talking too, or if I would be hearing a yelling match with the other tenants, but nothing happened.

    Wondering why that was I went up to the fourth floor, the apartment that I lived in was very old and it only had a staircase with no elevator, it had six floors in total, seven if you counted the old basement. My apartment was on the third floor so it wasn’t much of the bother for me going up or down stairs, but as I did the old stairs groaned from underneath my weight. The building itself was old, one of those turn of the century apartments to hear about or see if you live in the area, so much of the interior was the same, in fact we still had one of those old boilers tucked away in the corner near where the washing machines were.

    Many people who would look at this place would think of it as falling apart and should just be demolished, but I had rather liked the old classic look compared to the newer and more state of the art apartments and condos.

    State of the art, ha, that was just another term for overpriced and cheap building materials.
    With the older buildings you know that they would be built to last when comparing them to the new apartments. Not to mention it was a lot cheaper than those overpriced places.

    Though it didn’t really matter where you lived if you weren’t able to get along with your neighbors, both side by side and above and below, although I never really knew the people on the sixth to the fourth floors, I had no reason to go up there and it would have been seen as weird if I did.

    When I reached the fourth floor I paused and said a slight hello to an elderly woman that lived on the fifth floor, I knew this because I had helped her carry a bag of groceries to her door, and I didn’t want to leave such a nice lady to struggle alone with it ether. And since then when we saw each other we would say hello and chat from time to time. Nothing major, just small talk.

    She asked me why I was on the fourth floor and I told her about the noise that had been coming from the apartment room above mine. She frowned and looked at me as if I was crazy. Asking me about what noise I had been hearing.

    I told her about the man living in the apartment above mine, which was apartment 405, about how he kept screaming and throwing stuff to the floor like he was fighting someone. She looked at me with a scowl before shaking her head; she hadn’t heard anything like that in the years that she had been in the apartment building. If she had she would have complained about it to the super a long time ago.

    I knew what I heard, but the woman wouldn’t budge no matter how I persisted, in the end I could only chalk it up to high-strung nerves from work and had to leave it at that.

    But the next day something else happened strange wet stains would appear on the carpet floor, with no real explanation as to how they got there. I knew it wasn’t me since I never had any kind of liquid over a carpeted floor, I knew how much of a bother it would be to get the stain out so I never drank while walking around my apartment. What’s more the water from my skin and shower all seem to turn a reddish brown color, it happened in both the kitchen and the bathroom. I figured it was rust from the old pipes in the building and ask one of my neighbors across the hall if it was happening to them, but it wasn’t.

    The reddish brown water in my apartment only seemed to last for a minute at best, so I chose to move on. Only when it had the sounds from apartment 405 started again and then stop just as abruptly as it began.

    Followed with an oddly forming stain in the middle of the ceiling, I couldn’t figure out why that was happening. Along with the old boiler that seemed to be leaking from time to time. But it was the noise, the noise from apartment 405, I just couldn’t stand it, there seemed to almost be no end at times.

    For days this seemed to go on, my sleep became erratic, because of the constant noise I couldn’t work like I normally would. I know that everyone runs into that one guy in every apartment building they live in who makes everyone’s life a living hell, but this was just insane, I thought things couldn’t get any worse from that.

    Then one day it did, it happened when I turned on the tap in the kitchen, the water came out in a black sludge, it looked almost like oil or something… something organic.

    Horrified and disgusted I ran to the super of the building and showed it to him. He said he would talk to someone in a few days but I learned that he completely brushed me off, annoyed and exhausted from the noise above my apartment I called up my dad to see if he knew anyone I could contact about faulty pipes. He told me not to worry that he had a friend who worked in the business that I could get a hold of.

    A plumber came in the next day; I showed him the peculiar stains on both my carpet and the one of the ceiling, which had grown in size since I had first seen it days before. He looked at the ceiling and determined that it was from water damage from long ago, but that was ridiculous the stain wasn’t there before I moved into the apartment, if there had been a stain I think the super would have done something, then again he probably wouldn’t.

    The carpet was another matter, the man told me that the odd wet stains in the carpet was from me spilling something, which like I said before I don’t carry drinks over a carpeted areas. Not like that would have changed the man’s mind, I was just both tired and fed up and got right to the point and showed him the issue of the brown water, which then turned red and black almost just as fast.

    The man looked at it, then back at me then to the dark oozing water again and me once more looking both horrified and shocked that I hadn’t dealt with this sooner. He told me that he would go down into the basement and see what was causing the problem with the water, I warned him as he left that there was a really old boiler and it was prone to leaking if he wasn’t careful.

    It was then that the banging started in apartment 405 again.

    This time instead of trying to ignore the sounds I looked up at the ceiling in anger, I was so sick and tired of this guy constantly banging on the floor and yelling, but what astounded me more was that during all of this not one person seemed to have heard it, I mean how could they not? It was so loud and distracting; it would have driven anyone crazy from it!

    Much like it had done to me.

    With anger driving my body forwards I headed up to the fourth floor, by the time I had gotten to apartment 405 the noise had once again ceased, still tired and angry and knocked loudly on the door and waited, tapping my foot incessantly for someone to answer.

    But no one came.

    I knocked again.

    Still more silence.

    Did this guy really think I’d let him off now that he was pretending to not be there?

    I reached for the door to open it, thinking that it would be locked, only to find to my surprise that it wasn’t. The door opened with a slow deep creek revealing nothing to be inside.

    I stood there with the door wide open looking into a completely empty apartment, there was nothing in there, no furniture or food, nothing that indicated a person had been living in that apartment. There was no one there, but how was that possible?

    I know what I heard, I know what I heard, and those sounds couldn’t have been made without someone doing something in this place. But there was nothing, absolutely nothing.

    As I stood there gawking at the barren apartment I noticed that something did begin to form, something in the middle of the floor.

    It was a stain, a stain of black ooze, just like what had been coming out of my fascists in my apartment. But what’s more the stain was in the exact same spot that was on my apartment’s ceiling. The black sludge-like liquid began to grow, and grow until it was the size of the stain on my apartment’s ceiling but what’s more was the shape it took.

    It looked as if a person was there, laying on the floor, then the banging started, only this time I saw what was making it. Footprints were forming, heading right towards me!

    Oh god, oh god! I needed to run, I had to run!

    Fear enveloped me, I ran, I ran all the way down to the second floor, my lungs felt like they were on fire my knees were shaking, I felt like I wanted to vomit but that changed when it happened.

    The plumber who had gone down in the basement to find out what the problem was screamed as if something was eating him alive, quick as I could I ran down to the basement and was overcome with a horrible overpowering stench of something so foul my gag reflex started, I covered my mouth and nose with my hand as I fought the second urge to throw up, my eyes watered from the mere stench, it was so horrible, something that I still can’t even put into words.

    The man who had ventured into the basement was gone, he had run as if something had possessed him, he even left his tools behind, now all scattered haphazardly across the cold cement floor.

    I wondered what could have sent a man running like that, screaming in terror, and soon I realized why. There in the corner of the basement was the old boiler, now open and that horrible stench was coming from what was inside.

    It was a corpse.

    A bloated decomposing body resting snuggly in the contents of the old boiler, its skin was a sickening grey color with patches missing revealing rotting muscle tissue, from where I was I could see a number of stab wounds the now generated a black oozing substance of what I could think of what used to be blood. While the water itself, which was being sucked up by the dead body like a sponge, was black and thick like some kind of oil.

    The police are still working on the homicide to this day, while the investigators were working it was found that the dead man was a tenant of the building who had gone missing twenty years ago, a man who was occupying the apartment 405.

    It was said that he was in some kind of love affair and the husband of the woman the man was seeing would often come by to him, yell and destroy things before just suddenly disappearing without a trace.

    What’s more the old boiler seemed to still be connected to both my apartment and 405, the super had a new one installed for the other apartment yet left 305 and 405 alone. Why he did this I didn’t know, and in all honesty I didn’t care anymore with all that had happened I just wanted to forget.

    And if you were to ask me now if those sounds were still coming from the still vacant apartment 405 you’d have to ask the new tenant of 305, since I got out of there as fast as I could.

    But I know one thing for sure, I don’t think I will ever be able to shower or sleep peacefully again, and I am never ever going to live in an old apartment building for as long as I may live…