text: A few months ago I stayed a few weeks in a small duplex in the suburbs of NYC while I worked a freelance job. It wasn’t the best neighborhood. As in, while walking home in the dark I would often comfort myself by thinking I was in a foxhole in Afghanistan. To paint a picture, the place was situated between an abandoned gas station and a Boost Mobile, and the section 8 housing across the street sported three sports cars in the parking lot. A few days after I moved in, I was getting ready for work, and just as I was leaving I found a series of photos under my door. They were of me, inside an apartment that looked identical to mine. I was tied to a chair over a pentagram, surrounded by... Teletubbies. Now, I’m going to go on the record here and state that I fucking hate Teletubbies. I don’t mean they annoy me, I mean they genuinely scare the endorphins out of me. You know how some people are with clowns? I’m that but with Teletubbies. Aside from teaching kids how to walk like morons and how to count in an annoying manner, there’s a sinister atmosphere around the freaky impish dancing of those furry sinspawns. In a parallel universe, where the water is tears and air is made of fear, they exist as bloodthirsty lunatics, something you’d want to fire a twelve gauge into, only to recoil in horror as it continues its death march towards your soul. Oh, and did I mention they’re 10 feet tall? Fuck that. Whoever invented them is in need of dire intense psychiatric evaluation and should be on an FBI watch list. But I digress. There was no doubt the photos were me. I looked at my face in the photos, my expression was the epitome of fright, the same face of every rational American when Trump was elected. I was so baffled I couldn’t quite process it. My logical reasoning short-circuited, as it seemed so unreal I just threw them in the trash and went on with my day, hoping I could bury that memory in some dusty corner of my mind, behind my distant high-school knowledge of algebra and the French Revolution. But then it happened again, the very next night. This time I couldn’t just brush it off. I observed them closely they might be coming from my neighbor’s apartment. Because in each photo, the room looked just like my room, but the doors and windows were flipped, like it was a mirror. I realized that must be how the apartment across the hall from mine is set up, like a backwards layout to mine. So I called the police. But I didn’t know what to say. The officer took one look at the photos and said, “you know, I could be sitting comfortably in my squad car, using my police database to spy on the 20-year-old nursing student next-door and score some dates, but instead I have to deal with this bullshit. Did you know, right now my arch enemy in the department is dealing with a guy on meth who hijacked an ice cream truck and is running down innocent people? And my partner is in a high-speed chase with a college freshman with alcohol poisoning driving her dad’s BMW down the wrong lane on I-95, yet I’m supposed to one-up their stories tomorrow at the water cooler with this horseshit?” He was there for a mere 20 minutes, and most of it was spent arguing my way out of being charged with a false-report. Seeing that the fuzz was unable to help with my dilemma, I figured my next step was to do some investigative work on my own. So I took the photos to a developing center, and they confirmed the photos were developed by hand, and were authentic. They could find no signs of photoshop or digital manipulation. I thought I was going crazy, but as work piled up and I was missing phone calls from my clients by the hour, I figured I could distract myself from the astounding reality that I’m being terrorized by Teletubbies with some good ol’ fashion excel spreadsheets of hair-care product inventory. If I can make some quick cash over the next few weeks with this job, I can get the hell out of there sooner than later. But it only got worse. Day after day, I would wake up, in excruciating pain, with more photos slipped under my door. After a full week had gone by, I decided to set up a camera to record myself as I slept. But upon awakening the next morning, my camera had suddenly shit the bed. It wouldn’t even turn on, and the SD card was corrupt. The following day was a Friday, so I had another plan--I’ll just pull an all-nighter. I gulped down six Red Bulls, figuring even if my heart explodes, it would be better than dealing with this. From dusk to nearly dawn, I was awake. But all that caffeine mixed with the waterfall of emotions caused my heart to beat like a dog in heat and my brain to flatline like a vegetable. Just before the sun came up, I knocked out. Not more than an hour had passed, and I awoke again, in the same position I was in when I knocked out. But this time, in excruciating pain, and once again, more photos on the floor. Over the course of the week, I had continued to contact the landlord to inquire about the apartment across from me, but she refused to answer. I finally went down to her office and banged on her door, upon answering I shouted, “who the fuck lives next door? And what do they want from m--“ she cut me off. “Nobody lives there, dude. It’s been under construction since the last guy dropped a deuce hotter than a Hiroshima bomb and caused a catastrophic detonation of the plumbing system. It’s speculated he ate from the Chipolte down the street earlier that day. I suggest steering clear of their pork burritos.” Well, that was a bust. But I wasn’t having it. I was sleep deprived, terrified, angry, and ready to go full Harambe on whoever was hiding out in that room, because somebody was in there, and I was not going to be their sacrificial lamb to the church of satanic Teletubbies any longer. I stormed back into the building, and armed with a can of pepper spray and a baseball bat, I kicked down the door and bursted in, ready for a death-match with some Teletubbies--but the room was empty. In fact, it looked like nobody had even stepped foot in the apartment in ages. Regardless, I crossed into the bedroom, where the photos were taken. Lo and behold, was a chair bolted to the floor, with a pentagram painted around it in blood. Just to the right, a tripod with a camera was set up in the corner. I hauled my ass out of there faster than Sonic the Hedgehog on adderall. I called up the police and waited anxiously outside. And sure enough, it was the same cop. “You again? Jesus, what is it this time--mutant Ronald McDonald with a chainsaw? Santa Claus with a lightsaber? This better be good!” I took him upstairs to the apartment, but upon entering the room, the chair was gone, the camera was nowhere to be seen, and the pentagram had disappeared faster than an 8 ball on Miami Beach. I moved out that day.