Crying from above

At 18, I was lucky enough to move out of my parents' house and into a run-down two-room apartment in a neighboring town. I didn't pay any attention to the fact that one of the previous owners had died there—it happens, you know. A little later, I got quite a fright because I learned he died right on the very sofa I inherited, the one I'd slept on without a second thought until this fact came to light. Incidentally, residents in that building often died of both natural and unnatural causes. The apartment above mine was once inhabited by a cheerful family—an elderly aunt, her drug-addicted daughter, who had turned the apartment into a hellish den (later, with nothing better to do, my friendly neighbors and I broke down the door of the apartment, which had been empty for five years and had no owners—insulin syringes in the corners, the remains of a distillery in the kitchen), and her young child. One day, one of my daughter's friends stabbed my aunt to death with a syringe. After that, the young woman went completely wild, neglected to keep an eye on her child—somehow, the child died—and, quite naturally, some time later, she died herself.

One day, I caught a pretty bad cold: a temperature of 39 degrees Celsius, fever, aches, and a delirious half-sleep. And in this delirium, I heard a sound coming from the empty apartment upstairs, like a cross between a drawn-out, mournful meow and a sad, sad child's cry. Since I was aware of the whole story that had happened in that apartment, the thought occurred to my rather sluggish head that it was that very child crying there. And I couldn't think of anything better to do than mentally call the poor thing over to me, like, "You're alone there, and I'm alone here, you're lonely and miserable there, I'm no better off here—come down, we'll somehow get along." Oddly enough, the sound stopped almost immediately, and a few minutes later I fell into a deep sleep. The next day, after waking up, I felt much better; my fever had gone down, and the only reminder of my illness was a sore throat.

If you're expecting me to start telling you how, from then on, I started hearing baby footsteps in my apartment, objects moving around on their own, and so on, you're wrong. Absolutely nothing happened. It's just that from that day on, my life went downhill. Suffice it to say, I nearly lost my arms and legs, spent some time in a mental hospital, and a lot of other unpleasant things happened. Of course, I don't deny that this whole story could be a fabrication, compounded by my poor health at the time, and that I brought my life downhill myself. But there's one "but." Life began to straighten out right around the time I moved back into my parents' house, as if some curse had lifted, all my bad luck had suddenly vanished.

The reason I remembered all this is because just the other day, I was studying all night, sipping well-brewed coffee, and in the morning, I finally decided to take a nap before work. And believe me or not, in that caffeinated daze, I heard that same sad, sad "meow-whine" coming from the apartment upstairs, which some good friends of my parents had recently sold and was currently vacant. I didn't call anyone; to hell with it. But I'm thinking of making some inquiries—who knows, maybe a child had once died in that apartment, too.

By the way, I remembered another detail. In that same "bad house," in the apartment across from mine, a young family once lived, but it so happened that the wife started cheating, and the husband, overcome with grief, hanged himself in the bathroom. By chance, the next tenants of that apartment were a couple whose husband shared the same first and last name as the man who had been hanged. Soon enough, the wife began cheating, and the couple broke up. The man began drinking heavily, but had no intention of hanging himself. Sometimes he'd only say that he'd drunk himself into oblivion that evening, and that the next morning, for some reason, he'd woken up lying in the empty bathtub with the clothesline ripped down.