"Vagrants," a story from 2011

            For a long time I'd lived with my parents in a townhouse in a pretty quiet part of the neighbourhood; however we'd always been pretty unlucky and had awful neighbours. When we first moved in to the apartment, the woman and teenage daughter next to us routinely sold heroin and other fascinating substances out of their house. After they moved out, the next family to live there was an incredibly loud family with an even louder, unrelenting yappy Chihuahua that I wanted to kick over the fucking fence.

            Those of you who are not familiar with townhouses, I’ll provide some background. Essentially it’s like having a house, with all the annoying disturbances of an apartment building. The only reason we've even stayed here for so long is because my dad is best friends with the owner, so we get an incredible deal on the monthly rent. A few days before I came back from college my first summer, my old neighbours who were probably the best yet – a middle age couple with a pretty cute kid – left and some new tenants moved in. I didn't really keep up or bother meeting them because I can't be bothered to meet with the neighbours unless they're either: incredibly fucking annoying OR park on our side of the driveway.

            On my first night back it was about 3 am, so I decide I wanted to smoke a little weed and listen to some music to have a nice relaxing night. My room happens to be the one room adjacent to the identical one in the other townhouse, so when I opened up the window for some fresh air I could tell there's light coming from their window, spilling out onto the patio. Remembering it's 3 am, I briefly wondered what the hell they're doing up so late, but I simply decided getting high mattered far more that figuring out what my new, undoubtedly retarded neighbours were doing up at 3. I searched my backpack for my pipe, and realised I’d left it at my dorm. I sigh, and go downstairs to get an apple to make into a cute little piece. I jogged silently down the stairs to the kitchen, got everything I needed and then walked back into my room.

            My window is closed. I stepped backwards, and peeked out my room down the hall towards my parents inquisitively, wondering if perhaps they had come in and closed it, but their door was closed with no light on and I hadn't heard them up and about anyways. I simply shook my head and again decided I really did care more about getting high than I did about my window being closed so I opened it again and finished off a bowl. As I disassembled the pipe and threw the apple outside, I realised the light next door was no longer on. Clearly they were up and they hadn't just left a light on. I moved away from the window and sat down on my computer to browse the Internet for a bit when the window slammed shut ungodly hard, and the blinds rolled down.

            I was high, yes, but being stoned doesn't grant you the powers to slam windows shut with your mind. I was scared. I stared at the window and as I was sitting there taken aback my mum walked in the room and made me wet myself for the second consecutice time in about 4 seconds. She was pissed at first but when she saw me in genuine shock she at first was worried. I explained to her what happened, but her concern turned to disbelief as she dismissed me and told me to “stop being a fucking goof” and “go the fuck to bed it’s 3 am,” and I’m pretty sure she whispered something about me needing to ‘stop being such a goddamned pothead’ as she wandered back to bed and closed her door. I sat there and called my dog into the room, then scratched under his neck as I contemplated what the hell actually just happened.

            Nothing happened for the next few weeks, so I just chalked the window up to me being an idiot somehow; or something similar to that and pushed it out of my mind. My puppy went missing a few months later, in late August. A few days after his disappearance, I was being a lazy ass sitting on my MacBook in my room while I was on the phone with my friend when I heard a smack and a noise that sounded like a tear. I jumped up like someone had pushed a tack into my ass, and looked back. There was a slightly oblong shaped hole in my screen, with the edges jutting in. Initially I thought 'shit, a bird just killed itself on my screen', but then I went outside to investigate and look for the poor bird and something horrifying dawned on me.

            The important part here was that my window was closed. It was while I was outside, and it was the whole time I was in my room before I had run outside. Secondly, the window of the room adjacent to mine was open; the screen was out; and their light was on. Slightly unnerved, I went back inside up to my room just to make sure there was no bird somewhere in the blankets of my bed. This was also when I noticed the screen was now missing from my window entirely. It hadn’t been ripped more than previous. It was just totally gone, metal frame and all. My first instinct was to go over to my neighbours, and kick their shit down and yell at them for stealing my screen but I remembered being outside and seeing their window and how far away it is from mine… it just wasn't possible.

            I waited for my parents to get home. Downstairs. I didn't even bother explaining about what the hell just happened to them, just awkwardly hung out with them and reluctantly slunk back upstairs when it was around time to go back to sleep.

The blinds are up, and after an encounter like that I would have rather put them down so I walked over and looked out the window again, noticing that my neighbours room had its lights on. I was staring at it in a trance for a few seconds when I realised someone was standing in the way of the light and casting a shadow. And that was the unnerving part. They were just standing there like a cardboard cutout. It was absolutely inhuman and quite unsettling, but not as unsettling as what happened next.

            The lights flickered for a fraction of a second, and the person's shadow was gone. My stomach lurched. I pulled in air sharply. Nobody can move that fast. Nothing can move that fast. It was literally in a blink of an eye, just gone. I closed the blinds and slept with the door of my room locked and the lights on that night. In the end of August, my parents informed me they were having a nice little vacation to a quiet resort a few miles out for a week. They told me as long as I kept the house standing I could throw a party or have a good get together. I was through the roof. I was fucking ecstatic.

            They drove off, and I went to pick up one of my good friends Kate, and we decided to celebrate my temporary-brand-new bachelor pad with a good smoking session at around 11. We walked into the house with a few grams and some comfy clothes that we could shake off really quick. As soon as we actually entered the house however, we both realised it was freezing. It was late August, yes, but it was absolutely disconcerting how cold it was. Kate was quick to remark on this and by the time I had even just reached the thermostat in the living room she was shivering and rubbing her arms, regardless of the fact I'd given her one of my thick snowboarding sweaters. Something told me the clothes might not come off as quickly as I had assumed they would. The Thermostat told me simply that it was 5 degrees inside the house, which is a crock of shit because it's set to 26. I told Kate about this and she flatly remarked 'I guess your heater's fucked, man.' Apt observation Kate.

            Like punctuation on her sentence, there's an ungodly loud bang upstairs. Kate turns to me and, looking almost hurt she says, "I thought nobody was home!” I was mad and not about to let this get in the way of a good night, I decided to be tough and said something along the lines of "If we aren't right now, we’re going to be." I ran upstairs and my bookshelf had been violently thrown on the ground. The wood on it was split, and books and assorted shit that was on it has been thrown various distances across the room. Kate helped me clean everything into a neat pile, and after we discussed what I should do with the trashed bookshelf. I began to explain the 2 other things that happened before she arrived. We agreed that it's definitely my neighbours, somehow getting into the house and probably using the window to distract me from them stealing my stuff. She tells me we should go to their house right now and confront them.

            We walk out into the darkness; with whatever little light there still was cast by street lamps and the moon – it was about 11:30 - we had never started or actually even seriously contemplated starting our smoking session. I walk across the driveway and notice their car isn't in it and then I begin to think; I've never even seen their car. I've never seen it leave. I've never seen them walk in or out of the house. Except for the shadow, I haven’t even seen them at all. I come to that slightly jarring conclusion and stop in my tracks at the point their driveway turns into the path to walk up to their doorway. Kate notices this and turns around and asks me if I'm okay. I simply said, still slightly taken aback “Kate... I've never even seen these neighbours. Never heard them. With the luck I have with neighbours, that doesn't happen.” She cutely cocked her hip to one side a bit, and in a very confident voice told me "Well now you will. It's probably a good idea to let your neighbours that you're not okay with them coming into your house and getting all in your shit."

            I said, "No, I mean like... There might not be anybody there to answer us. It might be that nobody lives there." She twisted her face into this adorable confused look, stared at the house then back toward me and asked me simply "Someone has to live there. You haven't asked your parents about the neighbours even once?" I simply told her that I “really don't give too much of a shit about the tenants of a building that I am not actually living in, I'm used to people moving out because the landlord got tired of putting up with their crap.” This was usually for not paying the bills, or fucking the place up by throwing parties every weekend. My parents had even said that they were questioned by the police on a few occasions, wondering if they'd heard any screaming or fighting next door, as someone else had called in a domestic disturbance.

            She mulled the thought over for a moment and started talking, mostly to herself. "Domestic violence? Maybe it's just... whoever the fuck next door bothering the tenants, until they can't stand it and move out. And now that there's nobody there, they’re trying to kick you out?" Hearing this snapped me out of my trance, and threw me into an angry fit. Nobody kicks me out of my own house. I marched right up to the door and pounded with probably a lot more force than necessary. Nobody answered.

            We went to look through the front window, but the light was off, and even though the blinds were apparently nonexistent, the glass was smeared with enough fingerprint grease to open a McDonalds so we couldn’t see through. We walked to the back patio, and tried to look inside their back window. The window was again smudged, this time with the blinds closed, but we could tell one of the rooms had a light on. As I looked over to Kate, I saw motion out of the corner of my eye - the door in my room opening ever so slightly. I pushed Kate gently and pointed towards it, not wanting to make a sound. The door opened silently, with an absolutely grating and horribly awkward slowness, as if whatever opening it was opening the heaviest door on earth. It finally opened enough for whatever to enter the room, and when it did we caught a glimpse of it before it locked eyes with me and let out a tremendous shriek that rattled me right down to the marrow in my bones. It exploded the light inside the room in a brilliant flash that Kate and I had burned into our retinas for a few minutes. After a few seconds of recovering, I looked back with tears of fear in my eyes and the blinds to my room had been drawn.

            "What the fuck was that!?" Kate whispered in a very distressed tone with the most upset look on her face, and we began to discuss what we'd just seen. For a split second I'd seen its gray, rotting skin, covered in bruises and sores, with hair drenched in something damp, sticking to its body from the moisture, like it had just emerged from a sauna. The face of the creature was horribly swollen and disfigured, not unlike the victim of a horrendous beating in which its face was permanently distorted into some horrible, disturbed version of what it once was. Kate told me that she noticed disgustingly yellowed, decaying eyes sunken deep into its head, with flat, distorted pupils which completely eclipsed its iris'. Kate and I stood there, loosely holding each other and shaking for what seemed to be hours but really couldn’t have been more than about 30 minutes - it was almost 1 in the morning now.

            Kate says in a voice not much smaller than mine, 'we should call the cops. We have to. They need to search the house.' Needless to say, I was in complete agreement. I called them, informed them there was an intruder in the house who we observed from the back patio and they showed up at around 1:20 am. They searched through the entire house and didn't find anything, besides the shattered glass from the light bulb strewn evenly around my room. Despite desperate pleading to search the townhouse next to me the police told me that they would not, as there were no reasonable grounds for a search and they would need a warrant to enter the premises. I walked into the room to discover the window was, unlike when we were outside, wide open with the blinds drawn. I tried to close the window, however it had literally been forced open and would not budge an inch. If I had put any more force on the drawstring to close the blinds, it would have torn right off. Kate and I cleaned up the glass, which had practically turned into powder, and then collapsed on the bed holding each other.

            Kissing her on the forehead lightly, I told her that I was tired and out of ideas, short of going to their door and beating the goddamned thing down with a crowbar. Kate perked her head up unexpectedly and hit my jaw practically making me bite my fucking tongue off, and told me "That might actually be a good idea baby,” as she gently rubbed my chin and made me tilt my head up a bit, accepting her gentle touch.

That's when I notice it and my skin crawls with goosebumps.

"Fuck… Kate. They didn’t search the attic did they?" I asked. She replied. "I don’t think so… why?"

            I pointed. In the roof of my closet, there was a little ‘hatch’ that leads to my attic, and the tile that was supposed to be in place over the hole was not. I bolted straight up and out of bed so quickly I bodily flung Kate off the bed. I ran downstairs and turned on every damn light I could while I was going to the garage and grabbed a crowbar, as well as a tire iron for Kate. I handed her the iron and she asked me innocently "John, are you high?" and I told her in a very serious tone "No. Now if you would rather not be a part of this then you can go… sit in the car or do whatever until I'm back." She deliberated for a few seconds and then decided she would to come with me. I showed her the most devastating way to swing her iron, told her where to aim for and told her when to just fucking run. We went over our plan, and I grab a computer chair and use it to propel first Kate, then myself into the attic. We look over in the far corner and sure as hell there's another hole into the same attic. Wondering why the hell you would ever want to share attic space with a neighbour, I dropped back down to collect the computer chair - we were going to need it to exit the building if we did actually go in. It was nearly 2:30 now.

            Dragging the computer chair over the uneven slats in the attic in a fashion as to not fall through the roof was difficult. Doing it quietly, as to not give away our little D-Day intrusion was even more impossible. We got it over, however, and then positioned it carefully and silently set it down on the floor in the room. I dropped down first and then steadied Kate as she came down. I reached out and quickly turned on the light. It was my room. The exact same layout, except it was completely, entirely empty. The only thing in it was the chair that had been recently imported. I went and opened the door to the hall a bit, but Kate whispered my name and pointed. We looked over to the window, and right in front of it was a black stain. We approached closer and noticed it was actually two separate spots, as well as an indent in the carpet itself. Like someone had stomped around merrily in tar, then stood in the same spot for a decade.

            As we were investigating the stain, the door to the room slammed with a deafening crack that split through the otherwise complete and wholesome silence with an impressively intimidating air. We began to cautiously walk towards the door, and we heard someone else walking – or how it actually sounded – how a small child may sprint and 'slide' down the stairs, hitting every step loudly with the heels of their feet. With blood rushing through my body so hard I could hear it pumping through my ears, I opened the door ready to smash anything on the other side with the force of a thousand suns. We noticed the door across the hallway was open, the farthest room from my townhouse. We slowly and carefully ambled down the hallway, and pushed the door back.

            It hits us. The smell. Many smells can be unrelenting. Many smells can be disgusting. Other smells can be completely horrendous. But only a few smells, built into our very human instinct, can trigger that reaction of vomit. Of wanting to puke. Smells such as vomit itself, of blood, of rot and decay. It seemed that all of these smells permeated the master bedroom. I leaned over and with a violent lurch; emptied my stomach and added to the sickening mix of scents and mystery fluid all over the floor. As we turned on the light, we were frozen by what was sitting in the middle of the room. There was a nest. A fucking nest.

            Seeing this, so out of place in a townhouse bedroom completely pushed any thought of the horrible smell out of my mind. I might as well have had anosmia. I walked up to the nest, which was seriously a big bowl made of paper mâché, wrapped human hair, slapped together with a completely unnatural sheen seemingly made of blood and spit, a slick coating. I urged Kate to look closer, but she just stared aghast at the walls. Hanging, were the skinned and mutilated bodies of neighbourhood cats and dogs. I walked up to what appeared to be one of the fresher corpses and with a tear in my eye, scratched under my dog's neck for the last time. Kate motioned me back over to the nest, and I noticed a few bowls with unidentifiable liquids in them, some of them clear, some of them red, some of them black. Kate told me that these were actually skullcaps - from humans. That fact, out of all the things in this room, suddenly made us realise the seriousness of what we were doing, and we elected to get the fuck out of there.

            It was also about this time that as we re-entered 'my' room, we noticed the computer chair was gone. The full force of just exactly how fucked we were hit us, as all of the adrenaline rushed out of our bodies and was replaced simply with pure, unadulterated fear. I don't think you would judge me if I told you that tears ran down my cheeks as it dawned on us that we would have to go downstairs to leave the townhouse. Kate and I took some very deep breaths and walked slowly down into the absolutely paralysing dark, fumbling for a light-switch to hopefully throw the impenetrable darkness aside. Surprisingly I find a switch, but the light it led to was so dim so that it honestly almost made the lighting worse. In hindsight, it would have been a stellar idea to bring my own flashlight.

            As I walked through the living room, I found myself stepping on an old, 70's style rug. In the incredibly low light I could barely make out an overturned couch facing the wall, right near the front window and entrance hall. Trying to distinguish between 'black' and 'not quite as black', I saw a figure by the front door slightly darker than the rest of all the darkness. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Kate change her stance and grip the iron harder, then quickly throw me a glance to silently tell me that she could see it too. I leaned over and said, "We should just fucking smash it right now, it's in the corner because it's scar-" and that's as far as I got. At exactly that moment the thing jumped directly at us and unleashed an ungodly scream that still makes my skin crawl and my bones hurt when I think about it today. It was like nails scraping on a chalkboard, mixed with a person's final dying scream, and broken bone scraping against broken bone, all in one sickening, terror inspiring package. Words can't even describe it anywhere near as well as what it actually was, but that comes somewhere close.

            I swung. I swung with every ounce of survival I had. So did Kate. I connected somewhere in the general region of the thing's face. I could tell not only by the fact that it made a most sickening crack and squish, but also because it truly, truthfully felt like I shattered every bone in my hand. Like when you connect and hit a baseball really, really hard with a bat. The thing squealed and dropped to the floor in such a manner that almost made me laugh, then began to skitter away on all fours with a sound akin to a spider with paws of a dog on a slippery wooden floor. It bounded away as I sprinted toward it. It jumped directly through the front window - which shattered brilliantly - and escaped into the night. Kate and I didn't waste any time getting the fuck out of there. It was just before 4:00 in the morning.

            We called the police again, telling them we had heard a large crash next door. According to the official Police report, it told us that "A group of dangerous vagrants had been squatting the premises for an undetermined amount of time" - which was totally fine with me. I'd rather not let them know we were essentially the cause for the crash and broken window. I dropped Kate off at her house. We never did have our smoking session, or wind up fooling around like I had hoped we would. But after experiencing that night, I would have rather lived without that than died with it.

I walked back into my room after dropping her off, and sitting on my floor was the window screen, with the hole wired shut. I picked it up and inspected it closer. It was tied with one solitary, thick strand of human hair. After retching, I made a final trip that night.
I drove all the way to the dump, and threw the screen out. I came back and relaxed in my room and looked up at the ceiling to see one single, black-tar handprint. My stomach lurched and I shot upright in bed as my hair stood on end - I heard that same scream again, somewhere in the distance.