The Noxious Neighbors: Part 1
He carries the last box of books up the stairs to the new apartment and he puts them down on the landing so he can unlock the door. He pulls the key and swings the door open and he looks at the four walls of the cramped studio and feels…. he doesn’t know. Loneliness perhaps? Definitely sadness. He feels the end of something but feels no new beginning and that is painful.
He turns around in the doorway to pick up the box and eyes the door to the neighbor’s apartment. The new apartment is in a duplex built above a Peruvian restaurant. There is only he and the neighbors in the building. He hasn’t met them yet. He doesn’t want to. The one good thing he expects now that he has his own place is total solitude. He will read and eat food and watch television (once he gets one) and mind his own business. He thinks that is all he wants. What he knows is that he wants a drink.
He goes through one of the fifteen or twenty boxes that lie on the carpet of the apartment and digs out the bottle of tequila. He goes through another box and comes up with a shot glass. He drinks two shots in a row there on the carpet and then crawls over to the mattress and sits on it with the bottle in one hand and the shot glass in the other.
He is thirty years old and this is not how he had pictured his life turning out. He had imagined that he would have a career of some kind. He had thought he would have a few things figured out. He at least thought he would be in some sort of solid relationship but now she is across town in the old apartment and he is here on the mattress.
He pours another shot and puts it down his throat. This apartment does not feel like home. He has two more shots and then falls back onto the mattress and doses off.
He awakes to the low hum. It’s pulsing through the walls and it annoys him. Is this how living here will be, large washing machines running and vibrating the walls all night? If it is then he must get used to it and he lies back down. He begins to drift off again but he dreams of her and that is annoying as well. Then the screams begin and he is instantly awake.
He sits up and tries to figure out if the scream was part of the dream or if it was real. Could a scream from a dream wake him up? He thinks not. He knows not because now the scream is piercing through the room again. It is muffled by the wall which means it is coming from the neighbor’s apartment. The machinery is still vibrating the walls. Maybe the screams are from a washing machine that has an overly human sounding alarm?
He digs his watch out of the carpet and looks at it using the light coming from the window. God damn it, its 3:39 in the morning. This can’t go on, especially if he gets a job some day. He pulls himself off of the mattress and stumbles over at least four boxes trying to get to the door of the apartment. He wipes the sleep from his eyes and stands in his stocking feet, contemplating the walk across the hall.
It comes again: the scream. It is not a machine he realizes now. It is most definitely not. It could be a woman but it seems too low. It is incredibly frightening listening to the scream through the door. In fact it's blood curdling.
He opens the door to the hall and stands on the landing. The scream comes again. It is screeching out through the neighbor’s door and there is a light coming from under the door, a blue light that could be from a television. A television, that’s it! He glances down the steps to the gate below and notices thick dark droplets of some kind of liquid dribbled out all the way up to the landing. He reaches down and touches one of the drops and holds his finger up to the light of the hallway. The liquid is sticky and it is red on his finger. It is a dark red, like spilled blood.
The scream comes again and PB James realizes he has no choice but to find out what is going on behind the neighbor’s door. He is standing in his boxers and a t-shirt and he is very scared. He reaches up and knocks on the door.
To be continued in Part 2.
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