Everything is explainable, everything is evidenced. It’s only when the unexplainable things happen to you do you understand how far this is from the truth.
I live alone in a small, shabby apartment across from this lonely, out-of-place mansion in New Jersey. It’s the only place I can afford. Currently, i get by doing some work in a small café about 20 minutes away from my apartment.
Although, I don’t prefer living alone, sometimes you lack choice, sometimes you lack company and in my case, I lacked both. My dating life has been uneventful, if at all really, and my friendships have been even less fortunate and so here I am, the twenty-five year-old sob story.
Really, though, the house fits me quite okay. Altogether, I have a sofa that opens up into a bed a 22-inch Television set, a kitchen with a portable stove, and a much too small bathroom [#livingthebillionairelife].
The mansion opposite my apartment though, is perhaps the most interesting part of my life. It is the site of one of the most mysterious murders cases in all of the States It was the biggest case about thirty five years ago in New Jersey, finally closed with no conclusion. The victim was found on the floor of her room with a hole pierced in her chest. The murder weapon was pulled out, but no fingerprints were found- not on the doors, not the windows nor vents. Since any possible escape had been locked from the inside, the case was truly puzzling. No witnesses were found, even though the woman was known by many and people, like they always do, eventually forgot all about her.
Some say, the home is cursed by her spirit and that anyone who enters the house shall never come out- oof typical horror-scare, right? Well that’s what I thought too. I personally have never been scared of ghosts and deny, on all grounds, believing they exist. Of course, the bungalow is a not visually the most comforting but I knew that nothing would happen, so I never had a problem with it.
I work as a waitress at the Capulas Café on Haddon Road, going in at eight in the morning and coming back at four in the afternoon. However, for the last few weeks, I have been taking on the next shift as well because I’m rather short on money and they need someone to fill in anyways.
Working in a café means seeing all types of good food eaten by people, this naturally makes me hungry but a stale salad doesn’t exactly satisfy the feeling. So, getting home where I can make a bowl of steaming hot soup for myself is my favourite part of this relentlessly tiring day. My day starts and ends the same way, every day. Go to work, serve some food, if I am lucky get tipped, have a ten-minute break, back to work, and then heading home. For me, it’s heading home bit that is rather scary because for the past few days my shift has been ending at midnight, when roads are lit up scarcely and the only people present are the drunk young college students siting on their bikes with warm beers in their hands. Luckily, I’ve always manage to get back home safely.
I am just about to leave work when I get a text from my friend saying that she is in town but leaving tomorrow asks if there’s any chance at all that I can come over [ now at 11:50 in the night]. I’m not all that tired today, so, I say that I am up for it and will be there in twenty minutes. I’ve soon left work and have started walking down the long road which the café is placed on and is so far stretched that you can barely see the dead-end of it far in the distance.
My friend’s name is Tanya. We met 3 years ago at my earlier job in Lambertville, which is a small town near New Jersey.
We were both cashiers at a supermarket called Ken’s Bazaar. The Bazaar shut down due to some lease problems and after that, I moved here, though she stayed back with her family. We had managed to keep somewhat in touch.
She is staying at an inn which is placed at the end of the road. I have now reached the part of the road where the long line of the bikes with drunk college students that extends both ways of the road has ended. I have never been this far out on the road. It’s all deserted. I’m all alone. As I’m walking I hear a sound. It must have been nothing. I keep walking. That’s when I hear it again. A screech filled with agony, the sound of a child crying. I look around but there is no child, there is no one. The main city is far away so it is unusual that I hear such a sound. Just as I convince myself it is all in my head, I hear the sound again but this time it sounds closer. This time I turn back and start running. I don’t get too far when in one of the alleys I see a woman. I start to run to her as I do not want to walk here alone. However, as I get closer I can see the person’s face- deep, red and not really a face at all, just an unfortunate disaster of scarred flesh. Parts of the rest of the body have no uniform skin, just pieces of flesh that have been torn into as if someone ripped it out of her. She is wearing a red and white dress which I know realize is a dress covered in a deep hue of blood. “Aaah”, I shriek again, this time louder than before. The woman starts approaching me and I am too slow to realize the situation, too frozen to move. So by the time she gets to me, I have moved maybe a single step. I have no voice left in me, no scream would come out. Quickly, the woman lifts her palms, revealing grime-filled nails as long, and sharp. Slowly, she digs her nails into my shoulder, deep and then deeper. She starts whispering to me saying something I cannot figure out. I shriek, but my voice comes out weak. This when I a pool of blood trickling down my arm. I am about to faint, I can feel it. I try to yell again but there’s no one around. I look around for a moment, and when I look back, I’m not on the road at all. I’m lying on a cold marble floor, above me is a twinkling chandelier. All the doors, the windows, the vents are shut. It takes me a while, but I recognise it finally, from the pictures I had seen. I was inside the woman’s home. The one who had been killed over thirty-five years ago. Here I was, all alone.
My eyes don’t stay open for too long, and soon the darkness swallows me whole.
A long while later, I realize that I’ve left, not the mansion but myself. There’s this sensation of something yet alive in me and I know as I can but look at my ruined self from afar, I know that this is just my soul.
Even later, finally, my soul is let loose from my body.
It wanders for a while until it stumbles across a mirror and had I been alive I would have shrieked and shrieked as what I see in the mirror is the woman who killed me. The same scarred, red face. The same ripped flesh. The same white, stained dress. A closer look, and I realise it’s the woman whose face had been all over newspapers, all those years ago, the centre of a horrible murder scandal.
I look at the gaping wound in my chest.
No weapon. No fingerprints. Just silence.
And then—
I remember.
I was her.
Somehow, I had lived her story again.
And somehow…
I had killed myself.