Creepy Short Stories

Slum

Slum

My first job was at a 24-hour restaurant called Flavi's, on Third and Burlington in Westlake. It was a real hole-in-the-wall place, the type where patrons line up beneath the menu board; specializing in burgers, gyros, and all-day, grease-heavy breakfast.

I worked graveyard shifts. So did most of my customers – the medical crowd (there were two middle-sized hospitals nearby), cops, firefighters, and the assorted civil servants that filtered in and out of the neighborhood.

A middle-aged LAPD officer used to come by, sometimes with a partner, sometimes alone. Let's call him Officer Carlos Nunez. Officer Nunez didn't look like a cop. If I'd seen him at the grocery store, I'd have thought he were a professor or an attorney or a realtor. He had a square jaw and high forehead, curly brown hair, an endearing bald spot and the friendly, diplomatic face of a sitcom dad.

Officer Nunez had stories. On lazy nights he could entertain his audience for hours, that "audience" consisting of eagle scout-looking fire babies, bored security guards, and nursing students off clinical shifts. Thirty years with a badge and a car had given him plenty of material.

When there were no kiddies to impress he talked to me. Some of his stories were pretty dark. He saved those stories for the coldest, windiest nights when Flavi's was empty, save for him and me and the cooks.

Though it was nearly a decade ago, what he told me on one of those nights still lingers in the back of my mind.

"There's a building," he'd started, "less than a mile from here. Near Sixth and Alvarado. It was abandoned, repossessed by the bank. They should have bulldozed the dump."

It had been low-income housing. The Primrose Apartments. Originally office space, the building was bought at auction in 1999, gutted, and divided into cheap little white-walled units where the roofs leaked and the air conditioning never worked.

In the early 2000's, Nunez was dispatched to The Primrose every couple weeks, for the reasons one would expect. Domestic disturbances. Possession with intent to sell. Drunken brawls in the parking lot, solicitation, truancy, noise complaints. Nothing out of the ordinary for a public housing complex lodged within the bowels of a major city. Yet somehow, embarrassingly, the building played on his nerves.

"I never liked the place," he told me. "It was creepy. No building erected in the 70's has the right to be as creepy as that one."

If he'd been asked to put a finger on the epicenter of this innate creepiness, he'd have pointed to a little closet on the first floor. The way he described it was, coming from the back entrance (which only employees and cops ever used), a left turn would take you to a set of double doors, through which the elevator lobby and the leasing office were accessible. A right turn lead down a narrow hallway, past the janitor's storage, to a dead end.

The little closet in question was opposite the janitor's. The door was unlabeled, innocuous, and should have functioned as glorified wallpaper. But for Nunez, who'd stumbled upon the closet while looking for a restroom, even a glance towards it filled him with irrational dread. A funny smell lingered about the door; he'd catch a faint tendril of the stench every time he walked through the back door.

One night, Nunez and his partner, a lady cop who went by Rusty, were dispatched to The Primrose to investigate a domestic disturbance – a man threatening his girlfriend with a butcher knife. They found the woman locked in the bathroom and the boyfriend pounding on the door.

Let's call the woman Marisol and the man Modesto.

Nunez and Rusty managed to cajole the pair into cooperating. Rusty stayed in the bathroom with Marisol, Nunez sat in the kitchen with Modesto. Modesto claimed that Marisol was cheating on him with her ex-husband. He'd seen the ex hanging around the elevator lobby.