Neuronal Hellscape

I’ve been an apartment-dweller all of my adult life, and over the years I’ve had all kinds of apartments. Some were bright, airy, and filled with hope and good cabinetry. A few were mediocre and could have used some renovation or better sound-proofing. One was the result of a bait-and-switch, where the leasing agent showed me a lovely model and then when I arrived from out of state, the apartment they gave me was a run-down pit of despair and some twisted individual would use the washers and dryers in the laundry room as a toilet.

But even that place was no match for the Hellscape, a one-bedroom, midrise apartment about which the only good thing I can say is that I could hear “Taps” from the military base across highway. This place had so many structural issues, I don’t know how it wasn’t condemned. For example, the lovely south-facing floor-to-ceiling windows let in so much heat from the afternoon sun that I needed to run the air-conditioning year-round unless the temperature outside dropped below freezing. In the summer the air-conditioning would simply conk out, and my apartment would get to about 85°F—with the blinds drawn.

Point is, that place was hot as hell, which made it perfect for a demon.

No, I’m not kidding. I really think there was something malevolent in that place. I got the creeps the day after I moved in, when I plugged in the old laptop, the one with the battery that used to recharge without a power source. I put the laptop on a kitchen counter, plugged it into a surge protector, plugged the surge protector into a socket, and the laptop hissed and let out a squeal—and I hadn’t turned it on yet.

That was the first clue.

The second clue was always feeling watched. At first I thought it was because of the floor-to-ceiling windows. Eh, probably just feeling exposed, I thought. But every now and then I could swear someone was standing behind me in the bathroom, and watching me when I showered. The feeling of being stalked was so strong that I looked behind the light fixtures and the mirror and studied the tiles for cracks where cameras could be hidden. I hated showering in that bathroom. Even stone patterns in the tiles looked like the faces of the tortured.

Inigo never chattered or babbled when I gave him a bath, like he did in the previous apartment. Occasionally he would look past me, flatten his feathers, hiss, and nip my hand the way birds nip their mates in the rump to get them to fly away from danger. This, after not so much as threatening me with his beak for almost two years because his pain meds mellowed him out. He was only ever happy in that apartment when the blinds were open and the sun was directly on him.

Sometimes I felt that way, too. I’m pretty nocturnal, but I often got the creeps there after the sun went down. I don’t think I had a good night’s sleep the first five or six months I lived there. The same nightmare would come at least twice a week, featuring a giant, well, whatever it was. I don’t even know how to describe this thing, and I’m almost afraid to. It looked kind of like a black, seething, morphing neuron with small red clouds where eyes would be. In these nightmares it would hover over me, float around the bedroom, hang out in the corner, and make its presence known in other ways. I’m capable of lucid dreaming, and none of my tricks worked against this thing. I couldn’t kick its arse. I couldn’t push it out a window or off a cliff.

Then one night I woke up, looked to my right, and in the dim, bluish light that came through the slats of my blinds, I saw a hazy profile of a man in a Civil War Union soldier’s uniform. He stood rigid, looking directly ahead of himself as though on guard duty, and appeared to be superimposed over the nightstand. No facial hair. Maybe around 5’10”. Somewhere in his mid-20s, or maybe younger because people back then aged faster than they do today.

I’m aware that most people have experiences like that at least once in their lives. They wake up and think they see a living creature or being next to them, usually spiders or people. A lot of women see a man standing at the foot of the bed, probably because we’re raised to be terrified of male intruders in our bedrooms. These visions are usually hallucinations that happen either as you fall asleep or are waking up, and they can be terrifying.

However, seeing this soldier actually made me feel better. I figured he was a hallucination, and one from the right side of history at that. I rolled over and went back to sleep, undisturbed for the rest of the night.

A few weeks later, I woke up in the middle of the night and there he was again, standing next to the bed, superimposed over my nightstand, staring straight ahead of himself as before. This time he had a musket with a bayonet.

“Taps” is getting to me, but hey, happy you’re there on guard duty.

“My name is Paul.”

Crystal clear.

In a panic I grabbed the little café lamp on the nightstand, fumbled with the switch, and aimed the light right at him. He evaporated, leaving behind an after-charge not unlike when musicians exit the stage but you can still feel them nearby as they get ready to come out for an encore. It took about an hour before I could relax enough to fall asleep again.

There was no sign of the Neuron for a few months after that. Occasionally I’d wake up and Paul would be there, standing on post with his musket and bayonet. He wouldn’t say anything or look directly at me, but sometimes it felt like he was scanning the room.

What’s odd is that Paul appeared not long after the county started digging up a plot of land across the street to lay some pipes. It was a nice spot of green, and before they started digging it up, people would go there to play catch with their kids or toss frisbees around with their dogs. I thought for sure the county workers were going to find bones there, and being that Virginia has all kinds of Civil War history, I decided to poke around on the internet and see if any Union soldiers named Paul might have died nearby. My efforts were largely fruitless.*

Unfortunately, this story does not have a happy ending. That September I had a horrific nightmare in which the Neuron returned. This time it was almost like a bundle of them, yet still only one creature, large enough to take up a whole wall in the bedroom. It attacked Paul, tore his legs off, and dragged him away through the little hallway that led to the bathroom. As the thing carried him off, Paul’s mouth opened in a silent scream and he reached out to me.

That was when I decided to move, even before the crappy property management company tried to raise the rent $500 a month “because we’re going back to pre-COVID rates.”

I never saw Paul again after that. Even worse, that horrible thing not only came back to plague my sleep several times a week, it intruded upon my waking hours, too. The closer I got to moving day, the more aggressive it would get. I would try to pull a half-loaded moving box across the floor and suddenly it would lurch forward as though pushed, and I’d land on my arse. I could swear it knocked things out of my hands, too, including two small ramekins and one of Inigo’s favorite food bowls. The ramekins were wrapped in paper and they shattered when they hit the floor. Inigo’s bowl, which was wrapped in bubble wrap as well as packing paper, flew about two feet forward on its way down before it broke, too—at which point I yelled “FUCK YOU” so loudly that the dog that lived across the hallway started barking. I had had the ramekins and Inigo’s food bowls for almost 20 years by then, and in all of my moves, with all of my fanatical overuse of packing paper and bubble wrap, I had neither dropped nor broken a single thing. Not one. But there was force behind the ramekins and the food bowl when they hit the floor.

I moved that December, a month before my lease was up. My current landlord had a special running where the first month was free, and I wanted to get out of Hellscape so badly that I just paid the December rent there and moved. However, I kept the keys in my possession until the last day of the lease, which was a few days after Christmas. I didn’t trust the property managers not to make the apartment available to new tenants for December after I had paid for it.

And I had to finish some business.

I deliberately went after sundown to return my keys. I was not going to leave that apartment without trying to help Paul, and the Neuron would just have to get over it. I walked around the apartment thinking of strength and release and picturing Paul strong and healthy. I stood in the bathroom and thought of pure, clear water running from a stream on a dewy spring morning. When at last I stood in the little hallway between the bedroom and the bathroom, I put my hand on the wall closest to where I had seen the Neuron drag Paul away. I thanked the young, brave soldier for all he did and tried to do, and then told him to rest in peace and go to the light.

I could swear that as I left, I heard him say “Thank you. I will.”

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*I didn’t find anything about anyone who fit Paul’s description, but Paul Revere had a grandson named Paul who fought in the Civil War on the Union side. He was captured by the Confederates at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff about 30 miles from where I lived in Arlington and was later released. However, he died of wounds sustained at Gettysburg, which is in Pennsylvania, and he was a Brevet Brigadier General, not a foot soldier, so they’re probably not the same Paul. It makes me want to go to Ball’s Bluff National Cemetery, especially because the battle took place on my birthday.