Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-29458657-20160805183834/@comment-29458657-20160808174301

Thank you for your help!

As time passes, I start feeling more lonely. The set of apartments I live in has never been a nice place to stay. Although, it is the perfect place for ghosts to haunt. The lights on the hallways are dim and when one goes out it takes months before anyone comes to repair it and there are carvings in the walls of words. However, the worst part of this block is some of the residents. At night, the best thing to do is to lock yourself in your flat and stay with a bat near your bed in case anyone decides to give you a visit. Of course, nobody would kill you, but they would still cause you harm.

Some residents used to say it was actually fun to live here, but this was only before they left. I still remember when one drunk man jumped in my apartment with a knife, wanting to steal something or even worse. I think I was eleven when that happened and thankfully my father put him down. I still remember his malevolent smile and his mad eyes. The man wasn't taken away and he still lived in the block up until the bottles got the best of him and, once when drunker than usual, he fell on the stairs and cracked his head, dying.

From this year on a lot of murders took place in my block. Yesterday, a woman was found dead in the elevator. She has been strangled to death, but there are no prints. We swore not to use the elevator ever again, except for one guy who left not long after hearing about the murder. As I said, I'm getting lonelier.

At this moment, there are just seven apartments in this block where people live: mine, Gregory's, Joseph's, Gina's and Clara's (they live together), Michael's, Lisa's and an idiot, Bruce, who tries to make life horrible for everyone, but no one suspects him for the murders because he is so weak, absent and stupid to the point that he just couldn't kill someone and hide it.

Gregory lives next to my apartment, on the seventh floor. He is one of the friendliest people in the entire neighbourhood. Greg links the murder of this woman to the disappearance of the little girl a week ago (which caused her parents to leave) and to the death of Larry, who was found dead at the entrance with his eyes gouged out. To this day, Gregory remains my only good friend in here.

I sit with Gregory in his welcoming flat and we discuss the major problems we face. Of course, there is no bigger problem than the murderer who moves freely around our lifetime home. He always points out the vague similarities between the murders. The people are always strangled in some way, no matter if this is the cause of death or not and that there are never prints of the killer found. Greg has a notebook that he claims to be full of information regarding the murders, but he never lets me see it. I ask him about a local musician and he doesn't even finish his sentence, as there is knocking on the entrance door. Gregory gets up to answer. I go to the entrance and find Lisa. She says that Joseph asked for me to go to his flat for us to talk. I run there in a hurry. This guy hates me so I knew it had to be interesting. I found him in his living room, dressed in his usual dusty suit and looking at a photo of his dead friend.

"Henry, what do you think is going on in here?" he asks.

"I don’t know, sir. Do you?"

"Look, Henry, the policeman who I called yesterday said he needs more evidence to find this damn murderer. Now, I know you dislike me in the same way I disliked you since you were just a kid randomly running around here with your big-mouthed parents. But if we want to survive and get justice, we must be united. Now, first I would like us to visit the two girls that live on the last floor. I just can't handle them by myself."

I knew what he meant. These girls were always agitated and impolite. I agree to go with him, we shake hands and go to see Gina and Clara. I observe that he slowly changes his behaviour as the situation worsens. We go up the stairs, over rivers of dirt and I ask myself again: how did my parents get in this hellhole? They say it was better in the past, but it just couldn't get so bad.