The Apartment

Casper married his wife in 2000.They went looking for Apartments that they thought would suit their income and location. The ones they settled on were La Selle Apartments in Rose La Selle, United Kingdom. After they moved in, things in our marriage settled down. There was this nice patch of woods with a path out back. On certain days, he would enter the woods and look about.He is the type who have to see proof and stuff before he can fully believe anything weird. But he got this feeling in the woods that was unlike any other. It was as if the woods were magical or something. At night, the trees would be alight with fireflies.Sometimes when he would walk in the woods, and wander around, he saw some weird things, but they didn't seem totally odd for a patch of woods.It was fairly well trodden, there were paths, and the occasional patch of illegal trash dumped.

After living there for a year, things got real weird. Isolated incidents began to pile up, and start to get annoying, then scary. Casper became unemployed, and spent a lot of time in the apartment, taking care of their son. Before, they weren't in the apartment that much. But now he was there, and while he tried to convince himself a lot of stuff was just the imagination, it didn't help that other people noticed stuff  too. There was this brownish-red stain in our tub that would not go away. It started at the side of the tub, poured down the side, and swirled around the drain.He thought it was varnish or something,they would clean it, bleach it, and it would go away... Only to fade back a few weeks later.

They had a son and he slept in the room, with a huge window that faced a playground. That window had the feeling that something very large was floating there and watching the son.He don't know why we felt this way, but the cats would NEVER be in that windowsill. The creepy feeling got so bad, they had to shut the blinds. Also,the son began to "talk" to something in the room.They'd be sleeping then both would wake up, look at the same thing in the window,and the son would point and look likehe could see something in the air we could not, like he was talking to something, about human size inheight. Then things began to disappear.

            One day,Casper was taking down the tree. This tree had branches that were of various sizes. Once they have been labeled with colored tape, but the tree was 30 years old.He piled the branches by side all across the sectional couch. Then he lay down in bed to rest. He went just about an hour and when he came back, the branches were all over the floor and he blamed the cats.Then he tried to sort them again,and went back into the living room a minute later, and they were all over the floor again. He heard nothing. The cats were asleep in a box.He then piled them again on the couch .After a minute, when he turned around, they were in a cone-shaped pile on the floor, and had very obviously been stacked by someone.He called her wife, to tell her about it.He then grabbed the branches and put them in the box, and while it seemed like they were fighting him, they were always difficult to stuff ing that old box.The cats were nowhere in sight, and both of them were hiding in the closet. So he put the tree back in the box, tied it up, put pentacles on it, and dragged it to the dumpster. No, it did not show up again.

Their economic situation went from bad to worse.They were finally given an eviction notice.When they were packing, dark patches would fill corners of the room, like shadows where shadows should not be. In their eyes, they would see moving things, but couldn't quite see them, and it was almost like they were teasing them.They thought they was just imagining things, because they couldn't see anything, but all their friends noticed it independently. The cats would avoid it, and sometimes hiss at it.They lastly moved out and abandoned it in the apartment.

-Nurul Liyana Ramli