This happened a while back, and I now write it because it doesn't bother me that much anymore. I was sent one summer to another country, to my extended family; people who I barely knew, so naturally I had nothing to talk about with them and nothing to do with my afternoons, except roaming around the neighborhood. Not a bad place in general; some graffiti sprinkled here and there, medium houses, the occasional loud group of little kids, rarely any cars would drive by.
About the third or fourth day of my stay, I discovered an apartment building that had been abandoned during the last stage of construction. It looked awkward, surrounded by bent cyclone mesh, patched here and there with wood, dirty, splattered with ash colored stains. It made the rest of the street look bland, but also benign, by comparison. I couldn't help myself, I had to get inside. When I tried to climb the mesh, though, I got interrupted by a group of kids.
"I can see your panties!" said one giggling.
"I can see your pig face." (I've always been juvenile) My reply made his face turn serious.
A tall fat boy, chewing gum, told me the place was haunted, I shrugged and kept climbing. The other kids tried to intimidate me with stories of disappearances and ghosts. I made it to the other side of the mesh, then pig-face told me, seriously, that for reals, there was a little boy who got murdered and tossed into the cement mix, his tortured soul possessing the building. I turned around to walk toward the building, his voice caught a high pitch, almost desperate.
"He kills! I swear!"
I turned around to see them and smirked.
"Let's see."
I turned around again as the children stood in silence, and began exploring. It would have been a terrible place to live, the apartments and stairs being narrow and terribly lit. Some apartments had no doors or windows installed and had become deposits of rubbish and filth, with the occasional anemic plant desperately clinging to life. The only element that wasn't a compressed mass of grayness and despair was the elevator shaft. For some reason, the architect decided to make the elevator doors wider than the apartment doors, almost double. I climbed the stairs and found nothing of interest, but also no traces of other trespassers. No graffiti, for example, no food wrappers nor old bottles.
The fourth floor's elevator doors were missing, and I wanted to peek but I had no flash lights on me. I realized how dark it was already, so I climbed down the stairs. The children were gone, and I went back home.
The following day I packed myself a lunch, a canteen, a flashlight, batteries, my army knife and went to the building again. A block ahead, I saw one of the kids from the day prior, this time playing with two girls and a little runt whose gender I couldn't make (not that I wanted to, anyway). He merely took a glance as I approached the part of the mesh I climbed the day before. The girls stopped skipping their rope to look. They looked concerned, as all scared kids do, but I stopped noticing when I saw that the fence was bent lower than the other day. I felt like kicking it, for a moment, thinking "Are you calling me fat?". I shrugged it off and climbed, and went exploring. The tallest weed I've seen had been yanked, only a couple of inches of the stem left, roots partially showing, and some of the dirt and rubble had been moved... perhaps? Could have been an animal, could have been the wind.
I went up to the fourth floor, light in hand, to take a peek down the elevator shaft. There were no cables and no marks on the wall. I sighed in disappointment, but suddenly a little light shone at the bottom. I knelt down and pointed the light to the floor. There was rubble, and the little light was the reflection of some round metallic shape. I climbed down the stairs to the first floor and tried to open the door, but it wouldn't budge. The door on the second floor, whoever, did open, and I took a closer look. I saw, buried in the rubble, an arm holding a wrench.
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