Midnight Pub

The scary part of town

~littlejohn

There is a neighbourhood in my home town that I am scared of and I am very squirrely about admitting it in the wrong social context.

It's not a "bad" neighbourhood, mind you. For one thing, it's a regular, middle-class neighbourhood, where people take their kids to school then go to work and then get back home to watch TV and all that. And even if that weren't the case, I grew up in a bad neighbourhood, so bad neighbourhoods don't scare me.

That's not the problem.

Two or three hundred years ago, one of those many, scary plagues took a turn for the worse and a lot of people died. We don't know exactly how many. Most of those who died were poor slum-dwellers. Their death was an unsavoury subject to many of their contemporaries, and an uninteresting problem to others, so nobody bothered to write it down. They were buried in hastily-dug common pits, and the living poured quicklime over their bodies before covering the pits again.

There's no sign of that two hundred years later, it's all concrete and apartment blocks, but *I know*.

Streetcars pass through that neighbourhood all day, and nobody pays attention to that, it's just part of the heavy traffic. But late at night, when the last streetcar passes, you notice how the concrete trembles behind it. You notice because it's late, and it's dark, and it's quiet, and you know it disturbs those who sleep underneath the concrete.

If you stick your ear to the ground in the midle of the summer, you hear them clawing at the pavement. You hear a rustling like that of dead leaves, but there are no dead leaves in the summer.

On late autumn nights you can hear them shivering and their teeth clattering, tick, tick, tick, like flickering streetlights.

An apartment there is pretty expensive from what I hear. It's a good area and the apartments are spacious and comfortable. Most of the apartment buildings are either new, or very well-kept. But I don't want to live in one. It's not that I'm afraid of the people under the pavement.

They just look like tombstones to me.

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Replies

~tlf wrote:

That was really well written. Turned nicely and gradually away from my expectations to give me a chill :)

~stargazer wrote (thread):

I do a lot of stuff in the paranormal field. That story has a very interesting perspective.

~tatterdemalion wrote (thread):

This is beautiful... it makes me nostalgic for home.