31 Days of Halloween

Day Twenty: Apartment 10B

There was a rumor about apartment 10B. Supposedly, a woman had lived in that apartment with her husband and young daughter. They were a happy family, attending church and throwing parties and doting on their precious baby. They were family goals, everyone thought so when reminiscing on the couple. But after the baby turned a year old, the wife stopped going to church. The priest asked about her whereabouts with the husband, but he always gave an exasperated sigh and said she was sick. Always sick.

Soon, the husband stopped attending church as well or going out with friends. Everyone called him, asking where he was. He would say "I'm sorry, but with Emma sick I have to take care of her and the baby." No one was allowed over to the apartment anymore; everyone feared Emma's debilitating illness and wondered if it was catching when the husband stopped taking their calls. Whatever was happening there, the neighbors were no help. There was never a sound that emanated from apartment 10B.

And then the smell started. Their immediate neighbors feared their refrigerator had died and all their meat was rotting so they knocked on the couples' door. When they didn't get an answer, they complained to the landlord. When the landlord couldn't reach them, in person or over the phone, he told the neighbors they could either deal with it or move. He wasn't a nice man overall, but this was the final straw for most.

After two weeks of the smell intensifying, the remaining neighbors couldn't take it anymore. They called the fire department and said there was a gas leak in the apartment next to them. When the door was finally broken down, anyone standing by the door immediately gagged and ran from the room. People puked over the handrails or straight onto the floor, unable to make it to a bathroom. One firefighter procured a gas mask and went after the source.

What he found was by far the worse scene he had ever seen, and he had been to plenty of fires and explosions. He had seen carnage, but nothing like this. The husband was slouched on the sofa, his mouth gaped open and maggots spilling from his lips. A wadded and moldy cloth was stuffed into his throat and something black and ink-like was beneath it, soaking into the fabric. His body was slowly rotting and gray, the lifeless and bloodshot eyeballs angled up to the ceiling with a look of fear still etched across his features.

In the bedroom was the baby, peaceful in her death with a tiny yellow blanket wrapped tightly around her little body. Blood had caked and dried to her neck and had soaked into the mattress, rusty stains blossomed underneath her. The firefighter cried silently and made the sign of the cross over the infant, or so the story goes. Emma was nowhere to be found in the apartment.

No one ever found Emma, and her husband and baby's deaths were ruled as part of a breaking and entering gone wrong. The apartment was gutted, and everything was thrown into a dumpster or burned out back after the funerals; the family didn't want to keep any of the possessions. No one could really blame them. A year after the family was murdered, the apartment was back up for rent. But no one who lived in the town would rent it, only out of towners and none of them lasted longer than a few months.

People claimed they could hear people talking around them when they were alone inside, or they would set something down in one place and it would be found in another, minutes or days later. There was a sense of darkness in the apartment; the neighbors could feel it too, especially at night. Some people said a figure of a woman with matted red hair and a hunched, imposing posture would be standing in front of their windows and then they would look again, and the woman would vanish. The townspeople said it was Emma, back from the grave, but they didn't know what I knew.

Emma hadn't been murdered the night of her family's death. She had been the one to do the killing, slashing her baby's throat before suffocating her husband. She had run that night, hiding out just out of town until she could come back for her home. But there was nothing left of hers in that apartment. And that angered Emma, making her want to do horrible things to the people living in her home.

How did I know that, you might ask? Because I'm Emma. And if I can't have my home...I'll just take yours.