Love Thy Neighbour III

She sometimes wondered how much sound traversed the building's dark stone walls. She frequently invited friends to her place for dinner and drinks, and their conversation often grew rather raucous. However, she seldom heard any of her neighbours, and never got any complaints, so she didn't worry too much. Only, late at night she heard footsteps above her head. Pacing, slowly, on wooden floorboards. Then stopping.

It didn't really disturb her much, she just wondered what he was doing, walking about his apartment, so late at night. That was all. Other than that, the apartment was as perfect as ever. She had noticed, though, how scatterbrained she had been of late. For instance, she once left her keys in her front door, though she didn't remember doing it. She just found them there, after a panicked twenty minutes looking for them. After that she would put things down and not be able to find where she'd left them. Her USB stick. A Kodak receipt she needed to pick up some photos. Just little things like that - small enough to be of little physical significance, yet important enough to feel their loss. But she didn't blame it on the apartment. It was otherwise perfect. It was just a small series of unfortunate coincidences.

She replaced the USB (had nothing important on it anyway) and forgot about the photos for a few days. When she remembered, she headed over to the shop where she'd left them in to be developed. But the woman behind the desk couldn't find any package with her name on on the shelf. Was she sure she hadn't collected them already? Yes, she was sure.

But was she? Yes. Yes? What was happening to her at the moment? Perhaps it was the paint fumes. She didn't feel any different. But she wasn't normally one to lose things. Or to not remember doing them. How strange.

Back at the apartment, she decided to make herself pancakes to take her mind off things. A sure-fire solution. Of course, she had no eggs, nor any flour. She could easily have popped back out to the shop. But then she thought about the kind man upstairs and his offer to help whenever she needed it. He might have eggs, or flour. Maybe she could even invite him down to have pancakes with her. Why not! She didn't often see him with guests. Perhaps he was lonely. So she left her apartment and climbed, for the first time, up the stairs to the fourth floor.

The door was slightly ajar. She knocked, and called his name. No answer. She knocked again. She heard a muffled sound, which she took to be an invitation to come in, though it could easily have been the television. She pushed open the door to a darkened room. A darkened, bare room with sparse, grubby furniture and dirty plates scattered around like detritus on a cinema carpet. It shocked her, slightly, to find out that he had been living in such squalor. But the next thing she saw shocked her three-thousandfold, and sickened her to her very core.

A wall of photographs. Photographs of her. Sprawled out over the wall like rising damp. Darkly glossy. Her face, over and over. Photos of her from years ago. Photos of her from yesterday, leaving the building. Photos from her USB stick. Photos from the Kodak shop. And photos, most disturbingly, of her sleeping. She couldn't breathe. Her heart was pounding sickly, like the marching a faraway army from a strange land, coming to rape and plunder. It filled her ears with its dizzying, disturbing iambs.

Then she heard another sound, separate from her body, and she'd have jumped out of her skin, were it physically possible. Were she not frozen. It was a sound she'd heard before, only closer, more palpable.

The sound of pacing, slowly. On wooden floor boards.

Then stopping.