So there's some things to be said about the Alamo.

Obviously, it's not the one that boasted Come and Get It at one point in time, preceding an inevitable slaughter. Instead, it's a seventy year old, two story white stucco dropped solemnly on the corner, one block away from highway avenue. An empty lot is directly across, well used by visitors. The house on the opposite corner burned down a year or so back because of some homeless people trying to light some candles. I can't recall what it looked like exactly because that was a time when my head was rarely clear. Two years straight--nothing but smoke.

Anyhow, across on the south side there's a dinky duplex sitting next to a single tree. It might have fit in another neighborhood where there were others like it, but out here it was alone. Usually it did have one or two lower income families living in it at a time. Sometimes none. It's really not a big deal, since we're all low income citizens. On the north side of us, our only true neighbor is another duplex, though empty. It looks like a large shed with a driveway, and is riddled with hotspots, according to the neighbor.

I've considered calling it in to an inspector, but I always love a good burn. And no one will rent or buy the place anyway, so long as I tell all the people stopping to look at it about all its dirty little secrets. I can take novels' worth to the grave, but if I have to find out about it with some work... well, it's free game. At one point the owner had pitched the place to me, taking care not to mention what the ex-repairman would inform me on.

So that's the neighborhood in a nutshell: For Rent.

That said, in light of it all, the Alamo was the only sane choice. The building itself is a triplex, split into a mess of rooms. Despite the walls thrown up to cut it in thirds, it’s all connected in a roundabout way. The roof is flat, with the windows to the upstairs room more or less providing walk out access to it. Access to the roof was more or less a snap for anyone with the dexterity to go to the East side of the house and shimmy up the porch arches.

The East Side of the building, cut off as it was due to the lack of a second story room, is only accessible through a vent that resides in the hallway of the middle apartment. It spills out into a utility closet, and was discovered by Em, the first iteration of roommate that had gotten heavy into meth by the end of the lease. After I moved out into the West side of the Alamo, he'd utilized the vent to break into the apartment to steal some spare mattresses that had been propped against the wall. It remains empty to this day, albeit with a new set of locks.

The West side contains the neighbor and previous roommate, an architect major at Texas Tech, who was basically renting the place to hold his projects and supplies while he slaved on campus. Oh, and sleep and the occasional meal. Texas Tech is noted for its brutal and highly competitive architect field. His side has an upstairs and a downstairs, complete with fireplace, kitchen, and dining room all lined up in a labyrinth of hallways that ends in a bathroom. It is utterly filled with antique and rare fixtures and furniture. Very rustic. Very expensive.

I reside in the center apartment on the second floor. The middle section is the largest of the three. My roommate goes by Tink, and she's a spiritually aligned woman who has completely smashed my expectations of boarding with the opposite sex. I quickly found that most of my habits weren't remotely acceptable in terms decent, clean and respectable living. I take out the trash when there's no more room for bags in that part of the kitchen, surrounding the trashcan. Such a lax attitude towards giving a shit for one's abode was quickly deemed unacceptable. It's been a struggle of adaptations. I'm very lazy.

Tink occupies the downstairs room and, for all intents and purposes, has taken control of the living room in aesthetic terms. Her room is high roofed with a derelict chandelier of sorts barely rigged with electric lights. From it, long flowing curtains and clothes drape down and out to the corners of the room, completely obscuring the view of the roof like a gypsy's tent erected inside. Most of the colors were quiet and rustic, though they ranged from maroons, golds, all the way to blues and greens. The muted colors had a mental cooling effect, and it was the same theme that followed in the living room, which doubled as a dining room as well.

My only mark on the living room is a roll bar with Cepek spotlights that I've yet to sell. It's the only remnant left from an accident one year ago, which left a mighty Z71 crippled for life due to the application of a Malibu to the driver's side at fifty miles an hour. It was quickly put down at the scrap yard outside of town, the final drive being a screeching, rumbling sprint down the highway. I'd removed the rollbar though, sensing it had some value to the next gung-ho truck owner. One year later, I've sat down my statement, as I'm no longer willing to stand by it.

The rest of the living room is a decently organized, with the other half containing a kitchen table and a collection of firewood to fuel the second fireplace. The kitchen was nondescript, with the exception of a non-working oven and some scorch marks over the kitchen stove tops (this was due to a amateur attempt at creating THC oil wax with a butane extraction method that went horribly, horribly wrong). Despite the cheapness of the place, the home was built with the intentions of luxury, and it showed once the grand scale of the place was thought of a single home. Six bedrooms, three kitchens, two fireplaces, and four bathrooms. But separate, it was just cheap housing.

Upstairs, a large typography poster and JOB cigarette mirror rests by the entrance to my corner of the place, which is where most of the 'action' occurs, in the vaguest sense of the word. It was here that the first decent batch of THC wax oils was made, instead of blowing up into a 4-alarm fire. Here I found my previous roommate huddled in the closet, after the first time I moved out, eyes blood shot after a meth-binge crash that left the place in ruins. Ounces had been weighed--and smoked here. It was here that I waited for the first time effects of shrooms. A life changing experience, if only I could remember what the big change was. I do remember the wooden floor boards moving up and down, undulating like the slow swell of a calm ocean. Mesmerizing.

In one corner of the room two desks sit, facing away from each other in a sort of base of operations. The desk facing the door holds the typewriter and a mess of computer screens thanks to a dual set up. This was the main work table, and the desk behind it serves more as storage for a meager collection of books, DVDS, comics, and school texts. The two desks had been an utter bitch to move up the stairs, and the sight of them turned heads to anyone who entered my bedroom for the first time. First at the desks, and the steep, seemingly too narrow staircase, and then back. Yes, we hauled these big bastards up here. No, they won't be getting moved out any time soon.

Otherwise crammed into the room was a dresser, one full sized futon, a coffee table, and a single bed, crammed in the corner. Random rock posters dot the room, as well as stoner related memorabilia. The place is, in a way, the ultimate smoke room, but I see it as more of an operating room. All the tools I need to get by occupy the immediate space, and in a semi-organized manner. Plans were made and executed here. Decorative aside, I aim to make sure some real work gets done up there.

The only other thing worth mentioning about the place is that it's also occupied by a single spirit.

I first noticed a sense of discord in the place the first year I'd moved in. The staircase had a strange sense of foreboding--almost uncanny. It does not matter if you are walking up or down it. If you are along, walking it's length, a strange coldness creeps up your spine. The irrevocable feeling of something watching you from the top or bottom of bottom of the stairs materializes to the point of irrational terror. Many a time I have turned only to find--nothing.

I would brush it off as nothing, and would move out of the center duplex to the West side within the year to shed off the weight that was the addict-roommate. For a year I didn't think about it, as the West side seemed comfortably uninhabited by anything of the unknown. When Tink moved into the center apartment, a month preceding my move back into it, she confronted me and said the place was being inhabited by something unseen.

I knew immediately what she'd been talking about. The staircase, right? Of course it was the stair case. Tink would later confide in me that she was a sort of medium, and that her presence might possibly give it more form. I just nodded in the same way I do with these sorts of things, but when I moved back, much to my shock she was right. More than the watched feelings, sounds began echoing through the house. Knocks and random shouts from seemingly inside the walls. The spirit seemed most fond of waiting until one of us is in the bathroom, alone. Rackets will occur upstairs or in the basement, and once a visitor claimed he heard a sort of party upstairs. Raucous laughter and talking. It disappeared when he stepped out, and not a single person was to be found in any of the apartments.

I suppose it could be chalked up to mere pipes, fluctuations in 40 plus year old wiring, or even just the fact that we pertain to decent amounts of drugs. But we all shared our singular, unexplained event. For me, it was a harrowing moment in my bedroom, alone, just as I was about to sleep. I'd turned out the lights and had commenced stripping off my work uniform. Tired as I was, falling asleep in uniform only to get back up and go back to work felt something like killing my soul, so I made a point to have it off or changed once before the next day.

About the time I was peeling off my socks, I heard a single and unmistaken breath of air being exhaled behind me. Like a sigh, almost impatient. Terrifyingly real. I froze and swallowed, imagining the horrid face of some apparition hovering behind me, waiting for to turn around and claim my soul by digging in through my eye sockets. Of course, once I managed it, there was nothing. Only a window with the tree leaning back and forth outside past the roof. I slept with a light on that night, and I don't feel shame in the slightest by admitting that.

The cincher was when a mutual friend of ours, Ant, spent the day in the house during a hard winter day. He was homeless, at least when he wasn't crashing on the futon or at another friend's home. We both returned to work to find him nervous, more so than usual. He had no qualms. No hesitation. He told us that he'd been in the kitchen when he'd turned to the stairs, for no reason, just in time to see a shadow slowly walk from my room, down the stairs, and around the corner of the stairs towards the living room, only to disappear.

He spent the night elsewhere that night.

After a few months living here, Tink's final prognosis is that the entity may more may not be anyone in particular, but that it was certainly upset because of the split stairwell, which made sense. It was always those damned stairs, and I shudder to think of the day that I waltz up, place my hand on the banister and start my ascent, only to look up and see the shadow of something standing there, twitching and shuddering in and out of our reality. One of my greater nightmares, right alongside parasites and financial aid paperwork.

That said, the entire place is for sale. The only reason it hasn't been bought is that the landlord and owner is an utter cheapskate. A depression baby, World War II veteran, and a man of Jewish decent all rolled into one. His price is set high and has scared away most prospective buyers with a steadfast refusal to budge on the price of 110,000 dollars on a seventy year old, derelict, crumbling home that's been hacked apart.

But, in a strange future, I could see myself buying it if I can ever manage the money and convince him to come down on the price. The first thing I would do is take a sledge hammer, a wheelbarrow, and a crosscut saw. I would tear down that wall splitting the staircase to the other upstairs room, piece by piece, hacking at it with thunderous blows from a twenty pound hunk of metal.

Then I'd block and fix that vent that lets you crawl in through next door.

~RDS