There are a lot of pressing things going on right now, and most of them seem connected to Nosleep and the Infected Town. It makes it hard to just write about what I did last week, since I’m dying to share these new experiences and possible clues with you. But I’ve decided you need the story in chronological order, at the very least to avoid confusion. And maybe revisiting these events on paper will help clear things up for me.
So instead of telling you what’s happening here in California (no worries, there are still no signs of moldiness, just increasing amounts of weirdness), let’s go back a week, before I’d ever heard of Jess, Liz or Alan.
After leaving the police station, I still had the whole day left and really wanted to feel like exploring this town was worthwhile. I decided to check out the apartment building.
Hillside Apartments is a four story building on the south end of town, not far from the bridge. It’s a very normal-looking brick building from the outside, probably built sometime in the eighties, no signs of structural decay. The only strange thing, as you’re walking up to the front doors, is that all the windows on the face of the building are covered in black from the inside. As with the town sign, I thought at first that it was black spray paint or something of the like. As you might have guessed, though, it’s mold.
The front doors were locked. There was a keypad and callbox, but neither seemed to have power running to them. I made my way around to the parking lot of the building, past a row of dusty cars, and up a wheelchair ramp towards the back door. It was stuck or something. The handle turned and there was no sign of a deadlock, but no amount of pushing on my part would make it open. I half-heartedly gave the crowbar a few tries, but soon gave up.
The ground floor windows around front were low enough to slide through easily. Luckily for me, the third window I attempted was unlocked and slid open, only sticking once or twice. I plopped my backpack through, then followed head first. I had to push my way through the rotting Venetian blinds.
I found myself in an apartment bedroom. After turning on my flashlight, I let the beam wander around for only a moment before reaching back into my back for the respirator again.
This place looked worse than the police station basement. Black mold covered the floors, walls and ceilings. Water gathered in one corner of the ceiling as under a busted pipe, letting gray droplets escape to join the pool of water on the decaying mattress underneath. Furniture had been reduced to vague shapes, stained and rotten, in tones of gray and black.
I left the bedroom and walked into a living area that could have been inhabited yesterday, if not for the mold. Again, the place didn’t just look deserted, it looked like it had been evacuated. A few bottles and cans littered the coffee table in the living room, near an entertainment cabinet with an expensive looking (yet seemingly decaying) sound system and TV. A couple plates sat on the counter in the kitchen, covered in black gunk, along with a sink full of dishes growing green algae. But the creepiest things were the family photos lining the walls - mom, dad, two infants - grinning at me from silver frames. All left there hanging, mold beginning to creep over their happy, normal faces. Anyone moving out would take those, surely. I could explain away the dishes and even the electronics, but family pictures? People run back into fires for family pictures.
I left the apartment, unnerved, and turned back to see which number it was. Only there were no numbers on the door. I shone my light down the hall to either side. No numbers on any doors. Why?
The more I discovered in this town, the weirder it seemed to get. I decided to do a thorough sweep of the apartment building and see if I could enter every room. It would take a while, but I wanted answers. Maybe I’d even go back to the police station once I’d given the man time to leave.
I find, when exploring, that a systematic approach works best for me. I usually choose a corner in the highest or lowest accessible area of the building and spread out from there. This ensures that, if the building proves interesting and you want to make sure you’ve seen all of it, that you don’t end up confusing yourself and skipping or backtracking.
This building wasn’t all that big, so I wasn’t worried about getting lost. What did concern me was the idea of someone else being in the building with me. I couldn’t shake the feeling.
Hillside Apartments is much darker inside than it has any right to be. Darkness breeds everywhere, so deep that the corners look like a void. At one point I turned off my flashlight, on the ground floor mind you, and discovered I couldn’t see my hand if I moved it more than five inches from my face. It was an unnatural darkness for 11 am on a Saturday, even inside. Glass crunched under my boots as I made my way down the hall, and I looked up to see that every fixture was missing a bulb and had been grown over with mold. The windows all hosted their own colonies, too, eliminating all light from the sun.
My goal was the stairs, but I tried every apartment on the way there. More than a few were locked, but the doors I could open showed me much the same scene as that first apartment. Stained, moldy couches, cushions flattened with use. Full trash bins and half-loaded dishwashers. Broken desktop computers and TVs. Personal effects left behind and slowly being taken over by mold - pictures, books, clothes, magazines, jewelry boxes.
While personal effects remained, every identifying detail or number seemed elusive. Rot covered the date on a newspaper I found. Mail left in piles on a bookshelf had been so waterlogged that the names and addresses were illegible. It became a kind of game for me to try to find one piece of evidence as to when the town had last been functioning and who had lived here. Even a year would have made me jump for joy. I still want to confirm this. If I find that the town had been inhabited in 2012 or 2013, there’s more evidence that it’s the place where Alan and Liz lived.
At one point I came into the lobby, which is large enough that the beam of my flashlight didn’t reach the opposite wall, swallowed instead into darkness. I didn’t linger here for long. I hated feeling like I was in such a vast place, like the mouth of a pitch black cave. Quickly, I found a door marked “Stairway” and went inside.
Whereas the lobby brought out my agoraphobia, this space seemed uncomfortably cramped. I felt I was being encroached on from all sides by the grimy walls as I made my way down the concrete steps, so much so that I kept swinging my light left and right to make sure the passage wasn’t getting narrower. Raspy breathing filled the space, and I'm not sure it was my just own.
Immediately upon leaving the stairway, my light found shelves filled with rusty machinery and a ceiling of blackened pipes. Custodial and maintenance tools littered the floor. The hallway ahead gave me the creeps - like the lobby, my light was swallowed by blackness before it ended - so I turned right and went down a shorter corridor to an open door.
At first glance, things looked typical for the building - decay reigned, but everything was recognizable. A hulking mass of rusted machinery took up half the room, and pipes and ventilation shafts crisscrossed the moldy ceiling. In one corner of the wall was a set of iron ladder rungs leading up to a trapdoor in the ceiling.
When I shone my flashlight towards the boilers and their pipes, something struck me as odd. It looked like something was behind the machinery. I came closer, peering between pipes and around twisted hunks of metal, but couldn’t get a good look. There was definitely something back there. Finally I squeezed myself between a boiler and a wall, changed my flashlight to the other hand, and got a good look at my discovery.
It was laying on a pile of mold, as though the fungus had gathered around in a mound as a makeshift bed. Can mold pile up so high?
I’m not sure what it was, but I have an idea after reading Jessica’s story. It was tiny, smaller than most humans. It lay in the fetal position, all curled in on itself, except for its shrivelled white legs, which hung at an unnatural angle from its hips. There were no toes or anything recognizable as feet, from what I could see, and no hands besides two fused masses of flesh the end of its arms.
I could see its ribs through its flesh on the torso, but all other details you associate with a human being were gone - no belly button, no nipples, no hair. It was too pale to be flesh toned, with a hint of gray like a decaying corpse. The head was bald and withered. Its face was turned towards me. At least, I thought it was. There were no eyes, no nose… just a smooth expanse of pallid flesh over the largest mouth I’d ever seen. The creature was smiling, broadly, from ear to ear and chin to cheekbones. Its teeth were human shaped but far longer, and seemed fused together. There was no gap between teeth of the upper jaw and teeth of the lower.
I freaked out. While trying to squirm out of the space between boiler and wall, I noticed something about the creature. No movement, no breathing. Not even a twitch or any kind of reaction to my presence. I realized, after a minute, that it was dead.
That was enough for me. I couldn’t stand to be in the building another minute. I raced up the stairs and, avoiding the lobby, went back to the window I entered through. I fell through so quickly that I knocked the wind out of myself when I landed. As I had upon leaving the police station, I found sanctuary in my car. Except this time, I drove straight out of town.
I rationalized these events back at the motel, between a hot shower and a cold beer. Maybe it had been a doll of some kind, or a mannequin, or even a petrified animal. I think at one point I decided it was a fucked up student art project. But now I think I saw the same creature Jess had seen in the basement of the building seven months ago - only this time it wasn’t moving around.
So the next day I continued into San Francisco, glad to be putting distance between myself and the ghost town. But that doesn’t mean things are over. I’m not done trying to figure things out, I’m just not brave enough to do any more solo exploring. Whatever I decide to do, I’ll keep you updated.
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Credits
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