I moved to Chicago and rented a room in a house I found on Craigslist. It was posted by a guy named Andy who seemed like a pretty decent dude when we spoke on the phone. He’d originally moved in with a girl, but after a month she moved out while he was at work, screwing him with the whole lease.
“By the way,” he’d said on the phone, “you’re signing the fucking lease.”
The house was a two bed, one bath, first story walk up right across the street from the L, and in a very nice little neighborhood made up of mostly 35-45 year-olds. Young families with young kids and cool dogs. It was cheap and actually a pretty nice place, but in comparison to the other houses on the street it was a dump. The building was a duplex, with a couple, Chris and Rachel, living upstairs, a backyard, and a communal basement with laundry machines. It was the basement that was noteworthy early on. There were two rooms: the first was right at the bottom of the stairs with the washer and drier.
From there, a door lead into another and much bigger unfinished room, with a carpet-less floor, rough stone walls, and and an unusually high ceiling with the tin ceilume you always see in the older buildings in Chicago. It was as long and wide as the house, and flanked by three glass cube windows near the ceiling, about nine feet up, that looked out into the backyard on one side. Across from them were three wooden doors, and a furnace at the back of the room. When Andy showed it to me I asked why he didn’t keep anything in there. It was a very big space to not take advantage of. He just shrugged and said he’d never even been in the room for the two months he’d lived there.
I let it go because I didn’t want to spend much time in there either. To be honest, the room was kind of creepy. I’m sure it was just that lingering fear you always get as a kid being in an unfinished basement, where you turn off the lights and take the stairs three at a time so the monsters that undoubtedly live down there can’t grab your ankles and drag you off into the darkness.
But I think it was the three doors that put me off the most.
They were made of old craggy wood that seemed to be out of place, even with the dirty floor and dungeon-like walls. I poked my head into one when Andy was showing me around. Inside was a small, windowless 6x8 cell with a wooden bench on one side and what looked like a tool rack on the other. The air inside was stale, and I noticed there were some orange rust stains etched into the wall under the rack. Similarly, there was a faded black stain above the bench. I thought it might be mold or something, so I pointed it out to Andy. He furrowed his eyebrows and said he didn't know, but said he’d ask the landlord, Rick, about it. I wasn’t too worried and signed the lease before I left the house.
I liked Andy pretty much immediately. We were around the same age and while we were pretty different guys, we got along great. He was the type of guy that could talk to anyone and seemed to be genuinely interested in what they had to say. We had a good dynamic: I was good at recognizing the potential for a good bar or the makings of a funny story to be made, and once that was established Andy was good at taking it to the next level. I’d set it up, he’d knock it out of the park.
The house was great, too. It was right in the middle of where I wanted to be, but not so close that I couldn’t get away from the action if I wanted to. Groceries, a liquor store, a gym, bars, restaurants, and work were all right around the corner. Chris and Rachel because friends as well. One day I was walking up stairs with laundry and I passed them on the stairs.
“You guys going into the haunted basement?” I asked.
“Oh God, don’t tell her that.” Chris replied. “She’s crazy about ghosts.”
“Oh my gosh, have you seen those doors down there? Have you really seen any ghosts or anything?” Rachel asked, with her eyes wide.
“You know, just small things every once in a while.” I said. “Doors shutting, misplacing things you just set down, a strange, soaking wet Japanese girl crab walking down the stairs, weird noises. Nothing too crazy.”
Rachel looked mildly terrified for a second before she rolled her eyes and brushed passed me. Chris laughed a little bit and followed her down. The conversation did remind me about those stains I saw, though, so when I got back upstairs I asked Andy if he’d spoken to the landlord about them yet. Andy said it’d slipped his mind, so I said I’d give him a call.
The landlord was an odd dude to begin with. He had this weird speech impediment that caused him to sound like he had peanut butter on the roof of his mouth, and he would always let his eyes or pauses linger a little too long. Something was just a bit off. Even still, I remember the conversation because it was even more strange than usual.
Me: Hey Rick, it’s me from Blah Blah Blah. Hey I was looking at the basement when I moved in a few weeks ago and I noticed that the room next to the laundry room had some black stuff on the walls. I was worried it was like mold or something.
Rick: (long pause) how did you get in there?
Me: The door was open
Rick: (long pause) yeah, don’t go into that room. I’ll be by later on, don’t go back in there.
Me: Is there something we should know about? Is it mold?
Rick: Now listen. I’ll be by later on. We’ll see. Make sure you shut the door.
Then he hung up.
I thought I should go tell Chris and Rachel what Rick had said. When I got down stairs it was just Chris, who was separating his laundry.
“Hey man, I just spoke to Rick and he said that we shouldn’t go in here.” I said pointing to the door.
Chris gave me a strange look and said, “That’s weird that you say that now. We came down here and Rachel was saying she felt an energy or something, like one of those guys on the ghost hunting shows, and I was like okay, whatever. So we’re doing laundry when she just stops and stares at that spot right there and freezes up.” He pointed to the wall that separated the two rooms. “And then she got all squirrelly, like she couldn’t get out fast enough. She said we should both go back upstairs. Did Rick say anything about what was in there?” I told him he didn’t. “Man, please do me a favor and don’t tell Rachel that. I’m not kidding, she’s really scared of ghost stuff and that would freak her out.”
It was another week before I went back to the basement for laundry, but when I did I noticed a new padlock on the door. I meant to ask Rick about what that stain ended up being, but I never ended up doing it.
Chicago in the summer time is one of the best places ever. I was new to the city and totally blown away by the amount of action going on. Cubs and sundress season were in full swing. Every guy was wearing sunglasses, if you get my meaning, and we spent a lot of time outside and at the beach. Our backyard was an especially nice thing to have. It wasn’t as nice as the rooftop decks all over the place, but I had a grill and would cook in exchange for booze. Andy thought he was getting a good deal because all he would ever bring was Old Style tall boys and Malort. Well, joke’s on him: I LOVE Old Style tall boys and Malort. We’d sit out there and bullshit all night, until the neighbors would yell at us.
The problem was for a full week we'd been having power outages. This was starting to be a problem because our alarm clocks in the morning wouldn't go off and we'd be late for work. That and there was always the fear that the refrigerator would crap out and we'd have to throw everything away. This was especially a problem because I had acquired quite the slaughter house of meats in my freezer for the grill nights. Several times I had to go down stairs with a flashlight to play around with the breaker. We’d told Rick about it but he was taking his sweet time sending a guy over to check it out.
One day I was walking home from work, debating whether I was going to do sausages or a steak for dinner, when I opened up my front door and was struck with a absolutely rancid smell. I don’t have a very strong sense of smell at the best of times, so the fact that this stench hit me so hard meant it had to be serious. My first thought was the refrigerator. I stormed across the room thinking about fucking Rick and him not dealing with the electricity yet. But when I threw open the door expecting this smell to knock me out, I saw that the fridge was still working perfectly. My next thought was that a raccoon had gotten in and pissed or died somewhere. I tried following the smell, but it seemed like it was coming from everywhere.
Andy came home later and had a similar reaction. He called Rick and explained the situation, while I opened every window in the house. When Andy got off the phone he said that Rick was sending a guy over to check it out, but in the mean time we should leave. I told Andy that would definitely be the case, and we took off for the bar.
A few hours later, Andy got a call from Rick saying we should be fine to head home. The smell was gone and we went out back to have one last drink. I asked Andy if Rick said he found out what the smell was, but he hadn't. What he did say was that he was finally sending an electrician to find out what was going on with the power outages. That was enough to get my boozy brain to forgive all and we went to bed.
That night I woke up to use the bathroom when I saw that the power had gone off again and my alarm clock was dead. I was pissed, but I knew that the issue would soon be fixed. I decided to go see if the breaker had blew a fuse. I knew that the breaker wasn't to blame, but there’s just something about an appliance mysteriously breaking that makes you want to at least look like you know how to fix it, even if no one is watching. Ever have your car break down and you need to open the hood even if you have no idea what a problem would look like, much less how to fix it?
I go down stairs with my flashlight and I start dicking around with the breaker. In old houses there’s noises all the time, and I didn’t like going into that basement anyway, but I was half drunk and determined to convince myself that I was a handy man. Even still, the noise made me pause. I heard the sound of creaking wood and the sound of heavy metal lightly knocking against something behind me. I stopped what I was doing and listened. I could still hear a very faint sound of metal scraping on wood when that same smell hit me. It wasn’t as pungent as before, but it was more localized and I knew right away where it was coming from. I turned my flashlight on the padlocked door and saw the lock wobbling slightly. I quickly and quietly went back upstairs and had a few more drinks in the dark.
Two days later we were partying in the back yard again. It had been a beautiful day, but now it was getting late and people were starting to head back home. One of Andy’s friend’s, Jen, and I were the only two left at the table, my back to the house, she across from me. She was from the same state as me, and had moved to Chicago as well in that great migration that all Midwesterners seem to do. We were having nightcaps and telling funny stories. I told her about work and the kind of things I did in the neighborhood, like how a few weeks before Andy and I had hustled a few guys in Pop-a-shot at some dive bar. She asked about Chris and Rachel upstairs, and I told her that they were great and were getting married soon.
“You should tell them to come out.” Jen said.
“I don’t think they’re home, they usually would have come out already.”
“No I think one of them is in the basement.” Jen said, pointing over my shoulder to the glass cube window at the grass line. Sure enough, there was a faint light showing through the glass, and something moving around inside.
I started walking towards the window and made it a couple of steps before this terrible feeling cut right through the drunk and stopped me in the middle of the yard. It wasn’t like fear or anticipation. It felt off kilter somehow. Just wrong. I took a few more steps closer and made to see through the window. I was about five feet away, but still, for a moment through the fogged window I was sure I saw a face a few inches away from the glass.
“Who is that?” Jen asked.
I waved and the figure moved away out of sight. I said that I didn’t know. It was a communal basement, after all. I knew that Andy was home and Rick had an electrician over the day before, so maybe it was one of them. I went back to the table and Jen and I finished our drinks, had another, and then called it a night.
It wasn’t until later that night I was laying in bed next to Jen when I remembered two things that kept me up for the rest of the night. The first was that the locked, unfinished side was the only part of the basement that had a window. The second, was that the window was nine feet off the ground.
It was fall now, and my work schedule/daylight savings time had made it so I didn’t see the sun until the weekends. I’m not sure if it was because of this, or coming off the horns of Halloween, or what that got me in a more excitable mood that I normally was, but I remember getting home and feeling very jittery every night. It was like when you drink too much coffee and suddenly feel like someone is about to sneak up on you.
Also around this time I had developed a deep hatred of going into that basement. I would watch horror movies all the time and complain about how the dumb tropes like something appearing in the mirror or jump scares pr whatever were so dumb, but goddamned if I wasn’t expecting every single one of those things every time I walked down there. The place seemed to radiate menace, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. It felt like something animals must feel when a volcano is about to erupt or something.
Then I found out Chris and Rachel were moving out. I ran into them coming home from work as they were loading their stuff into a U-Haul. Rachel was looking grey and tired sitting in the front seat of the truck, and I asked Chris what was going on. He gave me an exasperated look and said that they couldn’t stay in that house anymore. I tried to pry, but he brushed me off and said he was looking for a sublease, and he’d let me know when they found someone.
No one ever moved in and I never saw Chris and Rachel again.
Towards the end of November I got sick. It was one of those bugs that come at the absolute worst time. I was gearing up to head home early for Thanksgiving and see all my family and friends, but was feeling like dog shit. Sensitive skin that’s too hot or too cold and never in between, sweating, stuffed nose, and fever.
Last minute I took the day off work and resolved to load myself up on Nyquil and sleep it out. Now the thing about Nyquil is that it either does one of two things to me: either it does nothing, or it simply paralyzes me so I can’t move but also can’t sleep. Guess which one I got? The house could have been on fire and I wouldn’t have been able to move. So I lay in bed for the day, aggressively trying to fall asleep and failing miserably.
At some point I achieved what I like to call “School Sleep”. It’s not exactly sleeping, you’re still slightly aware of your surroundings and could be in deep lucid thought about something. But as soon as an outside force acts on you, you can be awake and alert, but whatever you had been thinking about is immediately forgotten.
I was in School Sleep when I started thinking about the basement again. At first I wasn’t certain of why, but then I realized that it was because I could hear something coming from the vent under my bed. It sounded at first like wind blowing through the alley next to me, but then it started to pick up a sort of organic regularity. I tried to convince myself it wasn’t coming from under the bed, but the more I thought on it, the more certain I was that it was coming from the vent.
I couldn’t make out words, but I was certain after a point that there were two voices talking. The first voice would go up and down in timbre, and at some points seem shrill and high, before the second voice would interrupt it and it would return to a more measured tone. I wondered if Chris or Rachel had left their TV on and it some how bounced through the air ducts or something, but it didn’t seem likely.
The voices went on for what seemed like a long period of time until finally, it seemed as if both were becoming agitated and whatever conversation was taking place reached a climax. I heard a voice with a strange aspect to is say something like, "But I've already done that for you!" The second voice said something that sounded authoritative. For some reason, that snapped me out of my stupor and I opened my eyes and, with effort, rolled over. The voices immediately stopped. I lay in my bed still sluggish drowsy from the medicine, but my eyes were open and I was definitely awake. I thought I heard a door near the back of the house open and shut. I sat there for a little bit, staring at the ceiling and wondering why I could still remember that bizarre dream I had just had.
Then I heard a voice from under my bed tell me in a whispery but unmistakable voice to go back to sleep.
It was not easy coming back from Thanksgiving. Since that last experience before I left I was pretty much freaked out and did not want to go back to that house. I told Andy about it, and while he agreed it was pretty creepy he didn’t buy it. I didn’t want to argue that he should leave with me. I barely wanted to leave myself because I realized how much of a little bitch I sounded like, but I was seriously done with that house. Being inside it at that point made my skin crawl. I spent a lot of time staying with friends.
It was winter now, and everyone was holed up in their houses most nights. I could only depend on the charity of my friends for so long before they finally told me to fuck off and go home. I hated being this way, but it was getting to the point that any time I saw the house as I rounded the corner onto my street my stomach would drop. I especially kept my eyes off the glass cube windows if I was cutting through the backyard.
The week after New Year’s Day the heat went out. It was in the deep of Chicago winter, so this sort of thing was life threatening. On top of this, the electricity was getting dodgy again, so we were staying at friends’ houses, this time with a legitimate excuse. Andy was pissed and said he’d call Rick to make sure he got everything fixed that day, but I told him I’d do it. I wanted to ask him what the fuck was in the basement.
When I got Rick on the phone, he was his usual bizarre self. He asked me if I planned on renewing the lease, which was a ridiculous thing to ask at that point, but I ignored the question and got straight to the point.
“Rick what’s in the basement?” He went quiet, and for once it wasn’t his usual, leery pause. It was a choked, panicky silence. It drew on for what was likely only a few seconds, but I felt myself sweating under my clothes as I waited for a reply. “Rick?”
He was still quiet, but he finally just said that he didn’t know but he’d send someone to look into it. I couldn’t get another word out before he hung up. He didn’t answer again. I called Andy back and told him that Rick said he’d send someone over, but I didn’t know when and he wasn’t answering the phone.
“That fucking guy said he’d fix the electricity too, but now that’s fucked up again. Screw this, I’m breaking the lock and doing it myself.” I went cold and told him not to. We argued for a little bit before Andy hung up on me, too.
I raced home. The sky was blazing blue and it was bitter cold, but I was sweating as I ran the 12 blocks home. I burst in through the front door and was about to head downstairs when I had to stop. That same feeling of complete wrongness settled over me again. It took some effort, but I slowly, slowly made for the stairs. When I got to the bottom I saw that the door was opened, with the broken lock and a set of bolt cutters lying on the floor. Brilliant light spilled in from the glass cubed windows and illuminated the room brighter than it had been the first and only other time I had seen it.
The center most door was hanging wide open.
It felt like the the force of my fear was physically holding me back, but I had to look for Andy. I had to know if my buddy was in trouble. So I took a step. Then another. And then another, until finally I forced myself around the threshold of the door and looked inside.
It was the same kind of room as the first one I saw that last spring. A small, windowless, 6x8 cell. The difference was that where the air was stale before, this time it reeked with that same repulsive odor we come home to in the summer. The tool rack with the rust stains was there as well, and across it was the bench, this time with a fresh, wet, black stain over it.
I heard the final door creak open.
Submitted April 27, 2016 at 09:46AM by ALLFATHER2233 http://ift.tt/1Uga1X2 nosleep
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