Unrequited Love

I'd never been a good person. I'd found joy in torture for longer than I could remember. And I'd haunted the townhouse of 1705 5th Street since my death in 1925. While my body had long been decomposed and my spirit nothing more than the essence of this home, those three things I knew were absolutely true.

Other things feel more like dreams, things I'd made up with my mind after decades stuck in never-ending limbo. When I was three, my mother made ice cream in our kitchen using the blackberries that grew behind our home. When I was six, I thought it would be a fun experiment to see how long my baby sister could go without breathing. When I was eight, my father came home drunk and beat the ever-living shit out of all of us. When I was thirteen, I had a crush on a girl I was too nervous to confront. I spent my time after school following her around and looking in through her window. When I was fifteen, I found a small cat on the side of the road that I trained to catch mice for me to experiment with. When I was nineteen, I was tired of the mice and decided to start killing girls I lured from campus. When I was twenty, I developed a habit of smoking. When I was twenty-two, I graduated with a degree in psychology. By age thirty, I had a doctorate, this townhouse, and my own practice, where I received my patients in the back parlor. By forty-five, I'd murdered roughly thirty-three women.

They never did find the bodies. Or learn who the Bay Area Serial Killer was.

A year later, I'd collapsed in the kitchen after suffering a massive stroke. It was my Monday afternoon patient who'd gotten suspicious and finally discovered my body—eight days later and well into early decomposition.

Since then, families, college students, single men, gay couples, and squatters have all stayed in my townhome. More. None of them had ever lasted more than six months. In the seventies, a rental agency acquired the property, bringing in all kinds of riff-raff, easy to scare. Especially the inebriated ones.

The most recent tenant had purchased the home from the rental agency I'd been most interested in. Almost immediately, she began renovating it from basement to roof. While many women had been in and out of the residence, none of them ever fit my victim's profile—long brown hair, trusting eyes, and soft, round features—like my mother. Like all the victims before.

I was not keen to let this one slip through my fingers anytime soon. This one I wanted to savor.

For a year, I was silent. I let her tear things up, slap on new paint, replace fixtures, redo the bathroom. I let her make the house hers. I watched, my excitement building as she fell in love with her new space. She would collapse in her bed completely exhausted, and I would watch her sleep. When she made breakfast in the morning, I would listen to her sing. Throughout that year, I simply observed.

I'd never allowed myself to enjoy the women I'd killed long enough to see there was more to them than just their looks and how much their bodies and minds could sustain before they finally died. It was... interesting to see how this one lived before her inevitable demise.

On the night of her housewarming party, I wasn't sure if it was a need to satiate my murderous heart or a desire to no longer be alone in death. To no longer have an eternity of solitude. For my memories to exist in someone else's mind.

After everyone left, I began doing small things—turning on lights, opening doors, tapping the walls, and moving things in the night—normal haunting things.

They spooked her. That was obvious. She would retrace her steps, think out loud, and check that the doors and windows were locked and the basement and attic were empty.

Slowly, she began questioning her sanity—triple-checking that no lights were left on, the oven was off, and the hallway closet door was shut.

That's when I began to go beyond anything I'd ever done before, teeming with excitement over playing with my pet. I would leave handprints on the foggy bathroom mirror. I'd whisper her name in the dead of night, making her check the halls, her closet, and under the bed. The telephone would ring, and my whispering would be all she heard on the other line. The tapping on the floors and ceilings turned into loud banging. In a day or two, fresh flowers would wilt, and fruit would rot.

Her friends would come over, and I would go silent again. In September, her mother came to stay with her for an entire month while she received help from a psychiatrist. A priest even came to "exorcise" any spirits. I stayed hidden through all of it.

By October, she thought all of her problems were gone. She was on a regimen of what one would prescribe someone with acute schizophrenia. Her schedule and diet were strict. Friends came and checked on her every day. All was well again in my lovely little mouse's world.

I let her think so, too. At least for a little while.

But I was growing impatient. I was tired of watching. I wanted to be seen. Heard. Felt.

Halloween night was when I struck. I always had the most power on this day, and she was already spooked. Some kids egged the "haunted house on 5th street." The eggs hit like gunshots against her front door and windows. Bang bang bang.

Minutes later, she was on the phone with her psychiatrist for about thirty minutes. After the call, she sent a text. Then decided to take a bath.

The bathroom was dark, lit by unscented candles casting long, dancing shadows. The water was mixed with lavender salts and bubbles. She had settled in the porcelain basin. Her neck rested against a plush towel.

All was silent. All was well. I whispered her name for the first time in months. Drug it out. Let myself taste it.

"Jude."

It felt foreign on my tongue after so long without saying it. So long that it felt like a blessing.

Her eyes shot open. They were wide and lined with tears. Before she could move, I shoved her below the water level. Her body thrashed. Water sprayed everywhere, pooling in fragrant puddles on the tile floor. But she would not escape my strength. On this night, I was infinite.

Just when I knew she was on the precipice of drowning, I let her go. Her head broke through, gasping for breath, choking on the water in her lungs and mouth.

It would have been a peaceful end, but death naked just wouldn't do. In her final moments alive, I'd found myself caring for her eternal comfort.

She stood, body trembling and dripping with sudsy bathwater. Jude reached a trembling hand toward her towel and wrapped it around herself, stepping onto the soaking rug.

Without a second glance, she strode out into the hallway and didn't stop until she was in her room. Jude toweled off her hair, her body. Then began stepping into clothes.

She was preparing to leave.

Horror consumed me. It was the most real emotion I had ever felt. Even fucking with previous tenants didn't fill me with as much joy as her leaving terrified me. If she walked out of this house, she wouldn't return. I knew it. No amount of persuading from her psychiatrist or her friends or her mother would get her to walk through that door again.

Shoving her into the water was hard. But the energy that surged through me at the thought of her leaving, the tangible fear, made choking the life out of her easy. She sat at the foot of her bed, lacing up her sneakers.

I felt her swallow as I gripped her skin. Then I squeezed. I squeezed her slender neck until her eyes bulged and her face turned purple. She scratched at her skin, searching for hands she couldn't touch.

Just as her heart rate began to slow and her body quaked with attempts at a final breath, someone came bursting into the room. Her chanting made my entire being quiver. It felt like fading candlelight. Like dying all over again.

Jude gasped for breath and fell to the floor on her hands and knees, choking and coughing. I looked at the person who had entered her room and saw that it was someone I didn't recognize. She was older. Her hair was long and white and frizzy. Smoke plumbing from her fisted hand. I was burning from the inside out.

"Jude!" said the woman. "Are you okay? We need to get out of here."

Jude shook her head and motioned for the woman to help her. She obliged, and they turned to leave. Another rush of energy coursed through me. I slammed the door shut, locking them in with me.

The woman, some kind of psychic or spiritualist, wafted her smoke toward me again. She shouted words I couldn't understand. Again, I felt as though I were vanishing.

"Let her go!" She shouted at the room.

I will not be alone, I tried to call out. But, of course, they could not hear me.

The more she chanted—the more the sealed room filled with smoke—the less grip I held onto the physical world. Eventually, I had nothing. I was nothing. Nothing more than a whisp of energy. I watched helplessly as the strange woman dragged a half-conscious Jude out of our home. She escaped while I faded back into nothing.

It took a few months before I felt like more than just a bit of essence floating around the house. By then, all of Jude's stuff was gone, and the house was on the market again. Soon, someone else would move in.

Maybe I would haunt them, as I had done the people in the years before. Something to keep me entertained through my eternal existence. But nothing would ever come close to the last two years with her.

There would never be another Jude.