I have never believed in ghosts, and really, I still don't. I don't think that's what's happening here. My apartment's in a new building, on the side of a hill a few miles away from a local university in western North Carolina. As far as I can tell, I'm only the second person who's ever lived in it, and the last person who lived here moved out without any incidents other than a few weekend noise complaints from their downstairs neighbors.
I'm pretty sure that, whatever it is that's going on, it's not been here for hundred of years or anything like that. It's also not just affecting me, though . This apartment's shared between me and two other guys, Paul and Reston (can't seem to remember his first name, because everyone calls him that). Both of them have been going through the same thing as I have.
We all moved in together back in August. None of us knew each other or anyone else in town before that, so we spent the first week or so getting to know each other. Reston was coming here from a smaller suburb near Durham, and Paul was an out of state student. They were both history majors, which came in handy later in getting access to a collection of older newspapers at the library when we wanted to find out if anything odd had happened here before (to our surprise, nothing had).
During that first week, I don't think that anything so out of the ordinary happened that it can't be explained by natural causes. I lost the key to the apartment on the second day, and we found it later under some shrubs on the ground floor two doors away. We went hiking on the Blue Ridge Parkway that first weekend after the start of classes, and we met a guy on the trail who told us that we might want to turn back because the path ahead got "a little dangerous". We didn't listen, but there was nothing that we could see later on that would have prompted his warning.
Later on during our first month, we had a few "blackouts" that only affected our room and lasted exactly three minutes each. Paul's phone stopped working and he had to get a new one that also turned out to be broken (the next replacement worked like a charm), and the microwave ended up completely non-functional for no apparent reason. What was really odd, though, were the dreams that we all started having.
We didn't talk about them at first, because we didn't know that we were all having them. They also didn't cause any problems to begin with, because they were infrequent. The first I can remember happened on the night between the last day of August and the first day of September. I was underwater, staring up through a few inches to the surface and the face of a boy who was looking down, dressed in a strange hat, suspenders, and a button-up shirt. He smiled and put his finger to his lips in the universal shushing motion while I struggled to breathe, held down by his other hand. I woke up completely out of breath and covered in sweat.
During the entire month of September, I probably had two more dreams like that. Paul says he had two, and Reston says he had three. They were all different, with the only commonality between them being that, in each dream, we ended up murdered in various ways. I was stabbed several times by a smiling young woman with black hair and a butcher knife, then I was run down by a speeding truck in a blind alley while I fought to get away. Paul says both of his dreams in September were about someone shoving him out of the window of a building. Reston only told me about one of his, where someone pummeled him repeatedly while wearing that same insane smile, this time coated in blood. He swears to this day that he could feel the punches.
Early in October, the frequency of the dreams picked up, and so did the frequency of other odd events. The refrigerator stopped working, and by the time that maintenance came to repair it a few hours later, the food had already gone bad and started crawling with maggots. Our kitchen sink seemed to come on without any help from us at least once a day, even though maintenance said that nothing was wrong with it.
The murder dreams only kept going until the end of October, but now, they hit once every few days. I know that my performance in my classes started to drop off, and my parents said that I sounded tired every time that I called home. We still didn't know that we were all having the same dreams, but I think that we all thought that we were going individually insane.
We found out that the dreams were a shared horror in November. That's also when they took a really strange turn. See, when I said that the murder dreams stopped, they did. Instead, I started having dreams every night where I was standing in some kind of concrete plain. There were stars in the sky above, so vivid that I could see the band of the Milky Way, but nothing around me for miles. No plants poking up through the concrete, no sign of life anywhere. I could walk improbable distances, but I would never seem to get anywhere. It was all so vivid, but also completely unreal.
During one of those nightly sojourns, I apparently actually got up and started walking. In ended up in the living room and bumped directly into Paul, startling both of us back to wakefulness. We looked at each other in the dark, and then he asked the question that was hanging in the air, "What were you just dreaming?" We asked Reston the next morning. It was the same answer.
We thought at first that maybe the place was haunted. Well, I didn't, but Reston did. He was kind of superstitious even before all of this started, and whatever his dreams had shown him, it was enough to get him thinking that the old tenant might have died. So we did our research going down that avenue, to no avail. Then Paul and Reston looked through the local newspapers going back to 1880 in the library. Apparently this part of the town hadn't even been built until the 1970s, and there definitely hadn't been any deaths of the sort we had been dreaming about. There had been one shooting, but it was on Locust Avenue half a mile away, and none of us had ever dreamed about that particular fate.
Toward the close of November, I started noticing something unusual in the sky whenever I was trapped in that concrete wasteland. Just a few degrees above the horizon, there was a new, purple star, brighter than all the rest. With each night, it seemed to grow a little higher and get a little larger. When it reached the halfway point between the horizon and the band of the Milky Way, it stopped moving up, but it didn't stop growing.
On the first day of this month, I started hearing things. Same with Paul and Reston. Something started muttering to us. It was in nearly human words at first, but then it just settled into a scratching sound coming out of the walls. It ended up nearly constant within a week, and so loud that it sounded like a fan. By that point, our grades were already fucked, so we all decided that we would withdraw at the end of the semester and leave that apartment behind. We also decided to spend as little time in that room as we could, but we always end up going back there to sleep. I'm not sure why. The star gets larger every night, to the point where it's not really a star anymore. It looks more like a cancer on the sky, something malignant and toxic that keeps watch over us all.
Obviously the possibility has occurred to all of this that this could be some sort of shared delusion, and that's what we're really hoping for. It's kind of bad when you hope that you're crazy. It's the end of the semester now, though, and the scratching's just getting worse. I'm kind of afraid to open my closet, and I haven't done that in three days. I feel like I'm going to see something if I do that, something that I really don't want to see. Honestly, I'm sure that none of this is rational, but it's just...I mean, the scratching has to be coming from somewhere.
We don't talk to our neighbors, we don't even talk to our families anymore. I don't answer the phone when it rings. The water here tastes evil, and I'm so glad to be getting away, you really just have no idea. I'm leaving tomorrow. If this doesn't stop when I leave, I'm probably going to end up in an insane asylum, but that's beside the point. Fuck this place, fuck that water, fuck the rotten food in the fridge that's been decaying since it shut down a week ago. Fuck the sounds in the walls, fuck the fact that I can't see out the window because it's pitch black in the middle of the day. I am not staying here another night. Just need to get some sleep, and then I'm going to hit the road.
Submitted December 22, 2014 at 04:06AM by TudorGothicSerpent http://ift.tt/1sY5iOq nosleep
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