TALES OF TERROR

The Television Set

I live in Oak Park, just outside of Chicago, Illinois. See, we have an ordinance here where you're not allowed to put up a "For Sale" sign in front of a house. So many homes are vacant here that they'd be absolutely everywhere if we could put them up, so in order to ensure people want to live here, we make it so it doesn't look like nobody wants to live here. Thus, no "For Sale" signs.

I live alone with my pet cat, an all black cat which I found out recently is a rarity. His name is Calvin. He was the runt of the litter. This isn't really important.

The story all started about two months ago. That's when I first got up late at night after a bad dream and went out for a cigarette and saw my neighbor from directly across the street was sitting in front of his large, bright television, which was facing right out his window at my house.

I did not think anything of it.

As days went on, I kept looking out my window and seeing my neighbor just sitting there watching TV. After two weeks, I came to the conclusion that he could very well be dead. It just didn't make sense that he was just sitting there, TV on, not leaving the couch for weeks. I could only see the back of his head, and he very well may have moved while I was at work, but knowing it was there the light of his television kept me up at night, and for hours on end there would just be no movement. I came to the conclusion that I should call the police to ask if they could check up on my neighbor. I didn't know him very well, we met twice. He was an older guy, I used to see him shoveling snow or raking leaves and I'd offer to help and he said no both times. He was a fairly active guy for his age and it didn't add up that he'd just sit there for days watching TV and not leaving his house.

So I called the police and told them and they offered to check it out.

I saw them pull up and couldn't help but watch. I was very curious, and even though I thought all that would happen was they'd call up an ambulance or something and remove my neighbor's dead body, not something I'd usually be extremely interested in watching, I had grown so curious about what was going on over there that I couldn't settle for the simple answer that my neighbor simply died in front of his television.

After knocking a few times, I saw them open up the front door and walk in. They looked around, one of them left the living room so I couldn't see where he'd gone (I could only see the one room where my neighbor's windows were). The one officer turned off the television and also left my sight. They both left and drove off.

About twenty minutes later I got a call explaining that the house was empty and my neighbor had moved out. They said a real estate agent had probably just accidentally left the television on. I went onto a few real estate websites and, as it were, the house was indeed for sale. Anticlimactic, but at least it was a far less morbid conclusion than I'd expected. I was sort of embarrassed that my mind had immediately gone to death when it really was so bland and simple, and I felt like a pretty bad person for actually feeling a slight sense of disappointment when I found out my neighbor hadn't died as I'd assumed.

That was a reasonable answer, a totally logical one. I had no way of knowing without the real estate signs up front, and I had no reason to question it. My neighbor had moved out. Plain and simple.

When I went to bed that night, it had pretty much entirely left my head.

My bedroom window faces out towards my neighbor's house. For the last two weeks I had been watching the television from my bed. It was how I went to sleep, just confusedly staring in wonder, slightly disturbed knowing I could be looking at the back of the head of my dead neighbor.

And since I had been staring at that television for the last two weeks, it took a few minutes to register the horror when I crawled into bed and looked at the television, still on across the street.