I kind of messed up the timeline for this stuff, so here’s a quick runthrough before I continue the story.
TIME A: Tons of parties, vomit being cleaned up by me, tarantula, punching, etc. I start witholding rent at this point, and am subtracting $200 a month from the rent for cleaning costs.
TIME B: His girlfriend leaves him. His friends stop hanging out with him. He smashes his bathroom. He uses mine for a time, is denied access, uses neighbor’s for a time, is denied access, and is angry at me for refusing him access to my bathroom. I fixed his faucets so they wouldn’t leak all over the place and sent him a bill. He gets really pouty and angry and does the famous shit on the stovetop. He does experiments with various places to piss and poop, eventually settling on leaving it in baggies around the house. When I tell him this is unacceptable, he responds with a demand to use my bathroom, which I refuse. Around this time, while cleaning the stove top, I find the cat in the oven. It has a collar on it so I put it in a box and return it to the owners, not explaining where I found it, and advising them not to look in the box. I don’t know how that turned out, and I didn’t give them my name. I hope it got hit by a car and wasn’t killed by Jed.
TIME C: Jed starts trying to get at me by playing his subwoofer really loud at odd hours, and demanding to use the bathroom. I get back at him by packing away all of his stuff, (including the audio equiptment) and storing it in a friend’s storage unit across town. I think that he started to really go truly crazy at this point. I come home finding him taking things out of my room and putting them into his truck. I restrain him and call the police. By this point he is beyond all rationality and is completely flipping out, so he is put in the copcar for a while and the officer helps me unload my things from his truck. For some bizarre reason the officer does not arrest him, but after “talking to him” lets him go. I think my calm temperment made the officer not realize he was violent and that is why I was restraining him. (My motto in life: “So it goes.”)
TIME D: I dub this time the sealing. I really don’t mind cleaning up poop and piss, I used to be assistant manager of an apartment complex, but it is taking too much time to clean. I buy a range-top, and seal things off after writing a surrender letter to Jed, declaring that he has evicted me from the common area. Shortly after I come up with my Home Alone security system, withold rent except for a nominal $50 a month, and go on with life as if I did not have a crazy room-mate sealed away in the other end of the apartment. Time left on lease at this point: 2 months.
Edit: Time D is when he shits in the bushes and is arrested for the night.
TIME E: The black time. I am not sure what exactly went on in the apartment during these two or three weeks. This is around the time finals are going on, so I really don’t care. Water starts leaking from the wall, so I re-enter the common area to see what is up. This description really deserves its own post, and will clog the time-line up, so I’ll elaborate later. I fix the water leak, which he had been covering up with newspapers, and promptly exit. Once he finds out I was in his area he flips out and makes a lot of noise over there, but I do not investigate.
Remainder: There is one further, final re-entry by myself, with a flashlight. I couldn’t get in with my key because the door was messed up, and his sliding door was blocked with a mattress, so I kicked down the door and entered. After a quick walk-through I call the fire department, the landlord, the police, and an ambulance. This is full of drama and will be detailed in its own post.
The Black Time:
I’m very preoccupied with work and school at this point. Since my point of entry on the house is opposite from the front door, the only real contact I have with Jed at this point is what I can hear from him through the walls, and whatever odor seeps under the door past my homeland security setup. This is pretty tolerable as a condition, definetely worth the $50 a month I was paying for it, but I was starting to get worried. I was worried about Jed’s tarantulas getting into the ventilation system, so I sealed that off with plastic wrap and duct tape. Then I started worrying about fire. Jed liked to play with heating elements and flames, and he was an alcoholic, so I was worried that with the sealed off vent I wouldn’t know if the house were on fire. At around 3pm, I was studying, when I noticed that my feet were getting wet. Upon inspection, the carpet next to the wall was wet. I went around to the front of the house and found that the door was ajar. I went back to my apartment and picked up a plumber’s wrench and a flashlight to see what was wrong.
I’m not exactly the best at descriptions, as you can probably tell from the poor quality of writing in this thread, but here’s the best I can do. I’ll try to portray these things from my perspective at the time, and not reveal what they eventually turned out to be.
I unlocked the front door of the apartment and pushed it open, after confirming that Jed’s truck was gone. The lights in the place were out and the shades were drawn. The light shone inside and revealed that there were strange particulates hanging in the air. Not quite smoke. I would almost say that the odor was so thick in the apartment that it could be seen with the naked eye. Upon reflection, I imagine that what I was seeing was mold spores.
As the arc of light from the bright outside swept across the room, a few things were revealed in sequence: First off, the common area was absolutely covered in free student newspapers. There were obviously things underneath because the newspapers bulged, and I could even identify an easy chair covered in newspapers in the corner. The kitchen was crammed with garbage. I could identify two large bulky garbage bags in the corner of the common room. Investigating them further, I discovered that they were covered in some kind of glistening brown muck. The whole place smelled absolutely rank. I swept my light across the place a few times, just to make sure Jed wasn’t there lying in wait with a knife or something, and I proceeded into the apartment, leaving the door open. I took some vic’s vaporub from my pocket and doubed just under my nose. The garbage bags had been hastily pulled out of the common room closet, the one which contains pipes leading to Jed’s bathroom. I shined a light into the closet and a rat or mouse or something ran very quickly under the newspapers in the common room. I looked and saw that there were several dents in a pipe in the common closet, and it was otherwise soaked. Finding no immediate source for the water, I proceeded into the hallway area towards Jed’s room.
I was a little uneasy, because the whole place was filled with debris. The common furnature that came with the apartment was lodged in the strangest places. Like the hallway to Jed’s room had the common couch in it, upturned. I climbed over that after making sure Jed wasn’t under it. I was a little more nervous because my egress had been essentially blocked by this couch, and walked past the debris. It looked like he was salvaging equiptment and building materials from local construction yards. I could identify in the hallway, piping materials, a toilet lid, cinderblocks, scrap wood, and a box of pilfered nails. Jed’s large sledge hammer (or geologists hammer, I don’t know which) was lodged in the door of his room. I pushed it open and the damn thing fell out, giving me a fright. Anyway, I proceeded into his room, which was strangely clean. There was nothing in there, but the floor was absolutely soaked. I realized what happened; he realized there was water everywhere and threw all of his shit outside of the room into the hallway, and leaned his mattress against the sliding door (where it remained, to my knowledge, for like two weeks. I have no idea where he was sleeping.). The leak was coming from his bathroom, so I went in with my wrench ready to clock the shit out of my crazy room mate if he should jump out at me.
I saw the familiar smashed bathroom fixtures, and I was very thankful for the vic’s vaporub, but the stench stung my eyes still. There was a bathtub covered in newspapers. I proded it with my wrench and the newspapers gave way, like they were on top of jello or something soft and organic. I prodded it harder and what I can only describe as fecal fluid seeped from the sides of the newspaper. I think he was taking shits in the bathtub and covering it with newspapers, like some kind of foul lasagna. The leak was coming from under his sink, which he had dislodged through some violence. I could see the remains of a cinderblock on the pipe, so I think he might have been hitting the pipe with a cinderblock. I turned off the water to the sink, stopping the leak, and decided that it would be best if I left before he returned.
On my way out, I climbed into the kitchen area and opened the fridge, just out of curiosity. There was a ball-like, organic mass in the middle, with tendrils of mold growing out of it. It was roughly the size of a human head with a large dent in it. Not desiring to get toxic mold in my nostrils, I closed the fridge and surveyed the common closet again. The walls of the closet were covered in a black shiny material which glistened. Upon closer inspection, it was mold. I didn’t know that mold looked like that. I prodded the newspapers a little bit, but remembering the rat, and not wanting to get bitten, I left the apartment, closing the door behind me.
I got a towel and did my best to dry out the carpet. I left my sliding glass door open to help air the place out. I printed out a notice to Jed that I had entered and fixed his sink, and placed it under the door. I later heard Jed come home, and he obviously discovered I had been in there, because he started freaking out, swearing, and throwing things around. I heard the couch in the hallway get rammed into my door. He threw a tantrum for another five minutes, and then I heard the front of the apartment door slam. I heard him approach my sliding glass door, swearing, and I can only imagine that after seeing it open, he decided not to come any further. Like I said, the guy was afraid of me. He left in his truck a few minutes later, to return in ten minutes. I heard strange moaning and stumbling around in the apartment after that. I think he was moving furniture or something. I heard breaking glass a few times, but after that, silence.
jollygrinch came out of the closet to say:
Spiders freak me out. Just the thought of one of his 6 coming flying at me from under some news paper would be enough to make me torch the place and run screaming into the night.
Excellent writing and story. Anxiously awaiting the most assuredly horrifying conclusion, preferably involving flaming spider death.
Oh I completely forgot about that. Yeah. I was not only afraid of Jed popping out with a knife, I was also afraid of those tarantulas. They were like a big unknown X-factor in the apartment. Normally I’m not very frightened of just godawful messes or rats, but if you throw giant tarantulas into the mix it really drives me up a wall. Especially in terrain like that. I was imagining setting my hand down on a part of the couch right as I was climbing over it and setting it right down on top of one of those hairy bastards. They could move, too. The fact that there were newspapers all around for them to hide under didn’t help. And I imagined they had plenty to eat while in that apartment, and possibly gave birth to a jillion other little tarantulas.
323LX came out of the closet to say:
Can you please answer my question about the batteries from the previous page too??
I was worried about this too. Apparently it worked out though, because it could sit for long periods of time without draining the battery. I tested it and it lasted a weekend with no problem, not even slight sluggishness. I think it went into sleep mode or something. I had a crazy backup system whereby the car wasn’t required to even lift the bar, but instead just nudge a little thing that would roll down a ramp, knocking the bar out of place, just in case it was running too low on power to lift the bar, but I never had to use it because the batteries lasted. They even lasted for a week while I was away on break.
anus_presley came out of the closet to say:
I hope someone makes a Doom3 mod based upon this story.