Chapter 36: You Can't Get Rid Of Us.
As we grow older, we forget most of our past, and it inevitably comes back to haunt us. Despite being kids, we are scared of things we do not know, things which are unknown. But those things we were scared of as kids are as real as they can be. Right now, I'm a 27-year-old adult living in the suburbs of New York. It sure is cramped, with the ever-growing populace here, and housing is a nightmare from the depths of hell. The apartment I was lucky enough to get was...
The apartment I was lucky enough to get was a small, one-bedroom unit on the third floor of an old, creaky building. The walls were thin, and the plumbing groaned and rattled, but it was home, or so I thought. The first few nights were uneventful, filled with the usual sounds of city life – car horns, distant sirens, and the hum of my neighbors' conversations. But then, strange things began to happen.
It started with a feeling, an unsettling sensation that I was being watched. I would catch glimpses of movement out of the corner of my eye, shadows that disappeared as soon as I turned my head. At first, I dismissed it as my imagination, a trick of the dim lighting and my exhaustion from long days at work. But then, things escalated.
One night, as I lay in bed, I heard a faint whispering. It was barely audible, a soft murmur that seemed to come from the walls themselves. I strained to hear the words, but they were indistinguishable, like a foreign language spoken just beyond comprehension. The whispers would come and go, always at the edge of my hearing, never loud enough to make out, but enough to keep me awake, staring at the ceiling in the darkness.
I tried to ignore it, to convince myself it was just the sounds of the old building settling. But then, objects in my apartment began to move on their own. I would find my books rearranged, my furniture subtly shifted, and my belongings misplaced. One morning, I woke to find all the chairs in my tiny kitchen stacked on top of the table, balanced precariously. It was as if someone – or something – was playing with me, taunting me.
The final straw came one night when I was jolted awake by the feeling of cold hands wrapping around my ankles. I sat up with a gasp, looking down to see nothing but the rumpled sheets. My heart pounded in my chest as I scanned the room, but there was no one there. Yet, the feeling of icy fingers lingered, and I could still hear the faint whispering, closer now, almost inside my head.
Desperate for answers, I began researching the history of the building. What I found chilled me to the bone. The apartment complex had been built on the site of an old orphanage, one that had burned down decades ago under mysterious circumstances. Many of the children had perished in the fire, their spirits never finding peace. The more I learned, the more I realized that the shadows, the whispers, and the icy touch were the remnants of those lost souls, reaching out from the past.
One evening, determined to confront whatever was haunting me, I performed a cleansing ritual I found online, hoping to banish the spirits. As I lit the candles and burned sage, the temperature in the room plummeted, and the whispering grew louder, more frantic. I could feel the presence of the children, their sorrow and anger pressing in on me from all sides.
Just as I finished the ritual, a sudden gust of wind blew through the room, extinguishing the candles and plunging me into darkness. The whispering stopped, replaced by a deep, oppressive silence. For a moment, I thought it had worked, that I was finally free. But then, a child's voice, clear and cold, whispered in my ear, "You can't get rid of us."
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