I think my neighbor’s baby isn’t human part 1. I can hear it rattling in my memories as I write this. Hear the memories of its cries as if they were still drilling into my skull, scrambling my brain. Right now. I say it because it doesn’t sound like any baby I’ve ever heard or anything I’ve ever heard, period.
I guess I should go back a while to when I think things really began. I live in an old apartment building. It used to be a motel, I think it’s not that big and pretty cheap. I won’t say where it is. There’s three floors. I’m on the second. The entrances to each apartment are outside, so I go up the outdoor stairs and walk across the cement balcony to reach mine.
I’m not really familiar with the other tenants. I say hi to a few of them if I see them, except for one, my neighbor. I wouldn’t say we’re all that close or friends or anything, but we’re close enough that we’ve chatted a few times while out for a smoke and we’ve exchanged Christmas cards the past two Christmases. She lives in the first apartment after the stairs. I’m the second. And there’s two more after me. So there’s four people on each floor. I can’t say her real name, so to make things simple, let’s just call her Carrie.
I’m not sure when exactly I can say it all started, but looking back on it, it must have been last October. It had been around two weeks, I think, since I’d seen her last, which I didn’t notice or think about it all at the time. Her car was still there now that I think about it. But I never saw the lights on in her place again. It’s only something that strikes me as odd now that I look back on everything around that same time. There was a new car parked in our lot, a white van. It was parked in a different spot every time I saw it. But not everyone at the apartment had a car, so it was no biggie. One day when I was coming home from work, it was parked in my spot. The van was on. I just pulled in another spot. I knew nobody parked, got out and made my way to the steps and felt a heavy thump against my head. I almost fell over, shook myself out of my days and saw a very strangely dressed man that had fallen on his butt from our collision. He was wearing a fancy tuxedo top but had pajama pants, a pair of big woolly socks, sandals, and on his head, sunglasses, a ski mask and a medical mask. Sorry, man. You okay?
I went over to help the strange stranger up. He backed away from me, almost like he was afraid. And he grabbed at his face, seemed to calm down when he felt the fabric of the mask. He touched his glasses to make sure they were still in place. If he was trying to hide his identity, he sure wasn’t being subtle about it. Then he did something even stranger. He suddenly jumped up, grabbed me by the shoulder and said, , sorry, man. You okay? I thought he was making fun of me at first, the way he said it, just like me. But it was impossible to tell with his mask. And the guy was absolutely shaking. He repeated himself, squeezed a bit harder on my shoulder, and I shook him off, watched him with my mouth dropped as he ran in a full print to the white van. There was someone else in there in the passenger seat, I think a woman. The masked guy did a double take at me before slamming the door and speeding off, almost taking out the stop sign. I scratched my head, laughed it off. When I got to my apartment the next day, he was parked outside on the curb.
When I got back from work and the next morning, the next evening, on the third night, I heard something from Kerry’s apartment. The walls are a little thin. If someone is yelling or stomps or drops something, you can hear it. It’s not too bad and it’s usually never a problem. It was Carrie’s voice. It sounded like she was arguing with someone. I tried not to eavesdrop, but I couldn’t help overhearing her yell again after a pause. It almost sounded like she was talking to herself. I couldn’t hear the exact words, but that’s what the tone of her voice seemed like. Then something dropped with a heavy thud, and I heard what sounded like sobbing and another voice.
I went to bed around 2:30 a. M. I woke up in a cold sweat. I had a terrible nightmare that I didn’t remember and I really needed to piss.
As I stumbled through the dark, I could make out a dim glow outside the front window. I slowly groped through the shadows until I was bathed in that glow. It was a deep white, a pale white, if that makes sense. I tried to see where it was coming from through the window and I saw something that absolutely boggled my mind.
Outside the glow was made up of white and black, like a chessboard or a zebra print or the static on a television screen. It was swirling, twisting in strange patterns, like some kind of weird disco light. And it was most prevalent in front of Carrie’s apartment. I’d seen some wonky lights at raves and stuff before, but this was something else entirely. I’d never seen anything like it. I struggle to even describe it properly.