I

For me, it started with Zeus, my little Bolognese terrier with splashes of other things: he’s a scraggly gray thing that looks like a tiny thundercloud with paws. 

The hour was late, and the winter gave us Southern Californians plenty of chill to whine about. So it was not without a huff and an eye roll that I consented to take Zeus out for the second time in under two hours. Probably he’d snacked on something in the bushes that didn’t agree with him, and I wasn’t going to risk the new rug.

And out we went, my breath puffing white, the streetlamps buzzing. Two weeks ago, my neighbor Charlie, a scrawny bachelor two decades my senior, had seen a coyote loping across the street. “Careful with your little fella there, Jim,” he’d said, continually forgetting my since-retired request to call me James. 

I have a lot of neighbors. The building itself, containing a few hundred condos, is the kind of twisting, ill-mapped directional hell that might await sinful delivery people in the afterlife. At the north end is a drive-in gate leading to a driveway that snakes around the back of the complex before spitting you out the south end, near my unit. Walking it is a good jaunt for the aging Zeus.

He performed his urgent business and we strolled farther, his little paws pattering. The moon shone a cold halo just above the complex. 

A dozen sniff-stops later, and we were walking past the drive-in gate. I dug out the tennis ball in my pocket and showed it to Zeus, who huffed excitedly. I let go of his leash and tossed the ball, and he scurried off after it. 

On the fourth toss, Zeus accidentally bopped the ball forward with his paw and disappeared after it around a bend. I hurried my pace—especially when the barking began. 

I knew that bark, too. It was the startled yap at the sudden, the unexpected. And as I reached the bend, growling had been added to the mix.

I found him maybe twenty feet away, standing rigid before a screen in the stucco outer wall, located just below what I thought was Mrs. Bailey’s first-floor balcony. Probably a rat, I thought. With tent cities bubbling up across local alleys and avenues, we’d seen a wave of rodents. The issue had stirred some colorful voices at last month’s HOA assembly.

I stopped and just watched him. It’d been a long time since I’d seen Zeus this amped, this focused. 

“Hey. Buddy.”

Strolling up behind him, I knelt and peered at the screen. I hadn’t brought my phone but reached for it anyway, just to confirm the flashlight option was out.

 Except something was coming into view, pressing through darker-dark behind the mesh: the whites of a pair of eyes, like two moons coming into quiet existence in a void. A vague face drew in around it, though I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination. Zeus yapped. 

Some kind of figure was there, and leaning closer.

“Oh.”

There was a child behind the screen, maybe a boy, though it was hard to tell, and no more than four or five years old. His expression was neutral, the way a tree might look if it had a face. His hair blended with the shadows of the space where he crouched.

Shocked, I picked up Zeus’s leash and tugged him away. He tottered over to me and I lifted him up. Half-kneeling, I approached the screen, which was screwed on. 

“Are you okay?” I asked the child. Zeus yapped again, right in my ear, and I reprimanded him. “Are you stuck?”

The child was silent. His lips were near non-existent, his nose a button. His skin, best as I could tell, was a light olive. The eyes were detached. I couldn’t tell what he was wearing.

He cocked his head and looked past me. I turned instinctively. 

When I turned back, he was gone.

I set Zeus down and, clutching his leash, stood there watching the screen and listening. Even as I no longer saw the child, I could feel a strange kind of stain on the air. 

I positioned myself so I could see inside what I thought was Ms. Bailey’s unit, where the TV flashed a blue fever through the slated blinds. Trying to moderate my breathing, I entered the nearest hallway, went to her door—unit 181—and knocked.

The door clicked open to half of Ms. Bailey’s puffy-eyed face. Her hair was pulled back and she wore a bathrobe. 

“Hi,” I said. “Ms. Bailey, right?”

She nodded. “Uh-huh. You’re…”

“James. 192.” 

“Hi.” She looked down at Zeus. “Is this the one doin’ all the barking just now?”

She didn’t sound amused. “Yeah. We were just walking down in the driveway by your place. Saw something weird under your balcony.”

With a frown, she opened the door further. “What do you mean?”

A few minutes later we were down by the driveway, and I was polishing off my slightly amended version of what Zeus and I had seen: a “strange blur of movement” under her home.

“Could be rats, right?” she said. “Or a possum? I never let Romeo out. My cat.”

After some hesitation, I asked, “You don’t think any child could get loose down there?”

“What?” Arms crossed, she bent over to peer past the screen. “No child could fit in there.”

She probed me with tired, bewildered, curious eyes. On a trail of apologies, I escorted her back to her door. I could tell she was preoccupied as she re-entered her home, and so asked if everything was okay.

“It’s fine.” A tabby cat—Romeo, I presumed—appeared and threaded his way through her legs. Zeus whined for a closer hello. 

We parted with hollow smiles. It stayed with me, her expression as she shut the door. She looked embarrassed, as if I knew something I wasn’t supposed to.

*

A couple weeks later I was bolted to my desk, to my massive Apple monitor. Three days to deliver a rough cut, and my eyes burned with a million bad takes for a bad flick. My cup of cooling coffee sat next to my emergency pack, from which I resignedly drew a smoke.

I’d just gotten up when Zeus started growling. I made it three steps toward the balcony before stopping at the little white spheres: the eyes staring in from the sliding glass door. Against the night and the glare from my living room lamps, I could barely see anything else. 

In several more steps, the spheres were gone, melted into darkness. 

There was that feeling of “stain” again, drifting over me like fine itchy particles. I couldn’t move, the cigarette dangling from my mouth. I mean, if those had been eyes, they didn’t look attached to anything. I’d seen no hint of a shape or form. 

Zeus studied me, perplexed. The stain feeling was disorienting, like a thick cloud. Everything felt unreal.

I put the cigarette away, put Zeus in the bedroom, and was out maybe ten minutes later, hurrying up the sidewalk toward Brennan’s Tavern just a block north. I’d made it halfway past my building when a voice called down.

“Jim!”

I glanced up. Charlie stood on his second-floor balcony, a thin shadow defined by the bright-dimming bead of the joint he was smoking. I greeted him.

“Where you off to?” he asked.

“Brennan’s.”

He flicked away embers. “Thought you weren’t a drinker.”

“Not when I’m crunched,” I said. And I wasn’t. But I still liked being in a bar, the random chatting, the liquor-misted, indifferent eyes. “Just need a change of scenery.”

He took one last drag and stabbed out the joint. “Want company?”

Charlie wouldn’t have been my first choice, but right then any companionship was welcome. I beckoned him down. I didn’t like waiting, though. I wanted to move, to keep moving. Without him, I might’ve just kept on walking, hoping that stain feeling might leave me.

Soon he popped out and joined me, delivering a locker-room backslap before we headed off. Like most folks, he asked about my latest project. Anything for that distant brush of tinsel.

“It’s a silly indie feature,” I told him. “Got a couple days for a rough cut.”

“Ouch.”

I’m guessing that’s why Charlie gave me a pass on conversation, assuming my head was with the project. 

“Charlie,” I said, as Brennan’s sign glowed dull and green into view. “Have you seen anything weird around the building lately?”

With surprising swiftness, he replied, “You talking about the legs?”

I looked at him. 

“Chris didn’t tell you?” he asked, referring to the night watchman. “I mean, I didn’t see them.”

“No,” I said. “Chris didn’t tell me.”

Charlie opened the tavern door. I went in and he followed. “I was doing laundry late. Chris comes in on his rounds. Tells me about someone sitting on a third-floor balcony, on the north end.”

“You mea—”

“Yes. Like, on the edge, legs dangling over.”

I not-so-subtly led us to the emptiest area in the Tuesday-dead bar. 

“He said when he turned his flashlight on them,” Charlie went on, “they were the longest, skinniest legs he’d ever seen. He thought they were fake until they moved away, outta sight.”

Operator error, my dad would remark, usually whenever some piece of tech or gadgetry would fail someone, particularly my mom. Later he’d expanded it to include any testimony about the fuzzier fantastic stuff like UFOs or Bigfoot. Reality didn’t change for you. You just goofed.

But there it was again: that stain feeling, the sticky unpleasantness I could feel in the rubbing of some phantom fingers. Operator error? I wasn’t sure. And I tried to ignore the deeper certainty that no, it wasn’t.

“Want anything?” he said, already pulling toward the bar.

I said no at first, then asked for a coffee. I checked my watch. Chris got off at three. I’d try to catch him. 

When Charlie returned with the drinks, I found myself telling him about the child in the wall, about Zeus’s reaction and Ms. Bailey and all the oddness of that night. I left out that stain      feeling. Past stoned eyes and mouthfuls of lager, he seemed to consider all of it pretty seriously, though I could tell he was more concerned about the idea of a kid possibly stuck in the walls. Whatever ineffable wrongness gnawed at me didn’t appear to reach him.

“Why didn’t you tell Chris about it?” he said. “Kids could get hurt in there.”

I made up some bull that I couldn’t find him that night. Truthfully, it hadn’t even crossed my mind. I’d just been focused on getting myself and Zeus to the light of home.

When I got back to the building, the door to the main office was open. Chris was in there, seated and fiddling with his phone before multiple monitors. I knocked to announce myself and he sprang forward in his chair.

“Yo James,” he said, “Everything okay?” 

I regurgitated the story yet again, as well as the one about the skinny long legs Charlie had told me, and I asked whether Chris had seen who it was. Some color drained from his face.

“That was weird, yeah,” he said. His eyes were busy auditioning follow-ups, questions, notions.

“Was it someone in that unit?” I asked.

“I went up there and knocked,” he said, “but no one answered.” He shook his head. “Those legs, though.”

I watched him, trying to keep a neutral face as his throat worked up the following words:

“The way they went up and over the edge,” he said, “was more like…I don’t know, crab legs. Crab legs with small feet.”

*

That Monday was the monthly HOA meeting. For the first time since I’d moved in a few years ago, I attended the general assembly portion, the hour when the “public” (probably the same belligerent faces) showed up to whine about the grime in the elevator, an improperly secured bike or their neighbor’s dog. The board members—three women and two men, on the late side of middle age—sat before us with resignation, ready to listen, to rebuke, to placate.

I hunkered in the back, marveling at the tension and entitlement of some of my fellow thirtysomethings. Then I raised my hand.

“Last week,” I said, “I came across a child in the walls.” 

It came out even more direct than planned. 

“Excuse me?” asked the board president, a portly woman named Debbie.

“I saw him behind one of the screens near 181,” I said. “Next to the driveway. He looked maybe four, five? It was past midnight, too.”

Voices stirred, from board and audience members alike: when, exactly? Did I know whose child it was? Had I seen him before? What was he doing? Was he hurt? Did he say anything? As I fielded the questions I watched the HOA board. Some looked concerned, others confused. One, an older fellow with a ponytail, didn’t seem to care. Distantly, I felt it: the stain, creeping through like an odor. 

Another voice quieted everyone. It didn’t so much as cut through as drift over the squawking cluster, and settle with the same weight on every ear:

“I get a visitor sometimes.”

Ms. Bailey stood near the exit, wearing a long coat and looking marginally more presentable than she had when I’d darkened her door.

“Dolores?” said someone who apparently knew her first name.

Ms. Bailey’s gaze was angled down, her arms crossed like she was hugging herself. “Every once in a while,” she said, “I’ll come out in the morning and find things in strange places. Food unwrapped, or on the floor. Once the pantry door was wide open.”

A pall settled over the HOA board and the crowd. You could feel the swelling of things to say. One board member muttered it might’ve been the rodents.

 “But I never saw any,” Ms. Bailey went on. “Rodents, that is.” With a sigh, she flicked her eyes directly toward me, almost accusingly, like I’d egged her into this admission. “One morning, though, very early, I felt Romeo—my cat—licking my toes.”

The stain feeling grew, as if her every word cracked the door that much further, letting in an invisible agent that slightly altered the very texture of reality. Even though I was the asshole who’d brought it up, I suddenly wanted to yell Stop.

“I don’t think it was Romeo, though,” Ms. Bailey said. “I was half-asleep. But I saw what looked like a child scurry away from my room. By the time I got up and after it—him—he was gone. If he was even there.” Again she looked at me. “I don’t know if this is the same child as 192 is talking about—”

“James,” I said.

As people chewed on our stories and on what they might mean, as the HOA board shared glances and inaudible comments amongst themselves and this shapeless topic grew yet more shapeless, I noticed an emergent worry that we’d gone from attracting the homeless’ rodents to getting their children—poor abused runaways, maybe, surviving between our lives. 

Debbie mentioned that, to her knowledge, Chris had reported nothing out of sorts on his nightly patrols. Others said he needed to be more thorough. “I pretty much, like, never see him out of his chair,” said one brittle mom. “And he always acts, like, exasperated when I talk to him.”

I’d be exasperated, too, if I had to endure nightly visits of entitled mommies and old bored farts. I understood why Chris was more open with the likes of me or Charlie.

Ms. Bailey’s voice cut back in, more forceful. “I don’t think my visitor was homeless. He looked almost Asian.”

This struck me. My child hadn’t looked at all Asian.

“What does that have to do with anything?” said one younger guy, whose name I thought was Jason.
“No, it’s j—”

But Ms. Bailey had lost her sway, and the conversation popped and snapped across the room until Debbie, the board president, noted the time and began winding things down.

 Everyone seemed that much more animated, as if reacting to something they weren’t completely aware of.

*

As the meeting finished, I kept watch of Ms. Bailey, who left early, pretty much right after she’d spoken her piece. I hurried out after her and caught her in the hall. She looked flustered.

“Hello,” she said flatly. “I’m sorry for not remembering your name—”

“Don’t worry about it.” I leaned closer and, in a lowered voice: “So you saw…”

“The imp.”

I blinked. “Imp?”

She nodded, her gray ratty curls bouncing. “It’s what some of us have called it.”

“Who else has seen it?”

We began walking, the corridors seeming to warp and to lengthen with menace, the stain      feeling still there.

“Only a few other neighbors,” she said. “We don’t know if we’re seeing the same thing. That’s why we call it the ‘imp’. We can’t decide on what it looks like, or what it is. Harry Newman in 235 said he found muddy footprints in his hallway—with four toes. They came from nowhere and went nowhere. The Barlowes in 156 said their young daughter saw long thin legs sticking out of a heating vent.”

“Why haven’t I heard more about this?”

“The same reason I was hesitant to tell you when you came to my door. What do we say that wouldn’t just frighten people? What sort of solution is there? Especially for something no one can agree on what it is, or grasp.”

I shuddered, and took a long breath.

“Most of the building is in the dark,” Ms. Bailey continued. “Or they know, and are keeping quiet. I come every month to the HOA assemblies, and no one has said anything about the imp. You were the first.”

“Okay. But—”

“What can be done?” She offered a dark, defeated grin. “Exactly.”

I told her about Chris’s sighting, wondering aloud if the legs he saw draped down that balcony might’ve been similar to the ones seen by the Barlowes’ daughter. 

“Maybe,” she said. “Probably. One or two have called the police, I believe. But they come and scope things out, and nothing comes of it.”

I took this in.

“It’s as if we’ve all been swept into the same fever      dream,” she said.

“Except not. The same, I mean.”

She nodded ruefully. “I think it’s growing, too.”

“Growing?”

“It feels like, eventually, it’ll go from something no one talks about—to the only thing we can talk about.”

*

Work—and, by extension, my great big Apple computer—became my refuge. Even as a seasoned editor who could afford to be selective with projects, I took whatever floated in: the short and the feature, the absurd, the arty. I wanted to merge with the realities of the films I cut, where I could order the mess, extract from incoherence the small flickering miracle of coherence. Or something like it.

I kept watch of Zeus. Since the night I saw the child, or “imp”, I’d not walked him around the driveway. I went instead across the street and tossed the tennis ball in the empty library parking lot. Thankfully, no coyotes.

The stain feeling remained—once like a passing breeze, it’d become a chronic presence, soaked into the walls and the carpet, following me into the mailroom, squatting on my shoulders as I sorted my mail. Back notes to every breath. Echoes to every step. 

“What is that feeling?” I asked Ms. Bailey and Jennifer Barlowe when we’d gathered to try and discuss whatever was going on.

“What feeling?” Ms. Bailey asked, with something like a mixture of suspicion and curiosity.

“It’s like I can feel a bad stench,” I said. “Like I’m wearing some thin rotting crust on my skin, like I constantly need a shower. But showers don’t help. Nothing does.”

“I’ve been feeling light-headed,” said Ms. Bailey. “And dizzy. It’s been getting worse, too.”

“I feel dry all day long,” chimed Jennifer, “like I’m always dehydrated. I’m going through moisturizers like water. And going through water like water.”

Jennifer’s husband Dennis felt fatigued. Another person we spoke to had been stricken with tinnitus. From those we approached, and who were willing to indulge us at least a little, it became clear none of us were feeling quite the same thing, even if we were all pretty sure it came from the same source. Then again, what source? 

One night found me back at Brennan’s, sipping hearty tequila, overlooking a leap into absolute despair and depression—a valley I couldn’t crawl out of. I considered selling, or renting, or AirBnBing, but knew the guilt would follow me. I felt stuck. I saw potential buyers or tenants walking in and suffering some bad migraine—or worse—that wouldn’t let up until they left those walls, only to return when they came back. I saw them waking up to a blank-eyed child in bed with them, licking their arm.

Charlie walked in. It was almost clairvoyant how quickly he spotted me.

“Hey Jim.” He pulled up to my table, beer in hand. “Hear about Chris?”

A chill passed through me. “What happened?”

He took a long gulp. “Quit. Just last night.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I don’t know why. I asked Debbie. She wouldn’t say. And I never had his personal number. I’ll miss the guy.”

I nodded.

“I’m sure it had something to do with the weirdness going ‘round like a cold.”

I tensed. I hadn’t really spoken to him about it all. Like Ms. Bailey, I tended to wait for other people to bring it up. At that point, I wasn’t sure how far the imp thing had spread, who knew, who didn’t. But the uneasy winds of gossip were blowing.

When I elaborated, Charlie said, “Last week I heard a lotta creaking in my walls, in my bedrooms, like something big was moving in there. It went up fast and over my ceiling. Thought maybe it was a couple big rats.”

Despite being my source for Chris intel, Charlie was apparently one of those—mostly— still in the dark. All the other stories slammed together in my head and for a few throbbing seconds, I couldn’t speak. Then I did my best to fill him in, connecting it with the strange legs Chris had seen, the kind he’d mentioned a while back, and my persistent stain      feeling.

He made a whistling face without whistling. “That’s quite a bowl of bizarre,” he said. “The power of suggestion, huh?”

“Sorry?”

“Power of suggestion. You know, one person misperceives something, passes it along to someone who passes it along to someone who thinks they had a similar thing happen. And on and on. A chain reaction.”

Dad: Operator error.

“Not sure if it’s as simple as that,” I said.

He shrugged with concession. “The place has definitely felt wonky. Again, though, suggestion. We could just be reading everyone else’s pointless anxiety. I mean, I’ve had a lot of gut issues lately. I’m sure some little antenna in my brain is picking up whatever people are feeling.”

“What kind of gut issues?”

“Well, not gonna be graphic about it. But mostly it’s like…” He paused, eyes traveling the ceiling. “Dunno. I’m just…nervous a lot, in a way that reminds me of the week before I went into the Army. Antsy, a life-death kinda excitement. Like I’m waiting for something to happen.” 

Our eyes made furtive contact. 

“What do you think’s going to happen?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, rather impatiently. “I know we’re getting fumigated, though.”

“What?”

“You didn’t hear?”

“No, I didn’t.” The information flow across this complex was very haphazard.

“They’re gonna bomb the whole place. Board’s gonna announce it at the next meeting.” Charlie took a sip of beer. “Too many rats.”

II

They announced it with an email and a slew of flyers. The fumigation was officially on the calendar for the following month. Everyone was asked to turn in a set of spare keys to the office, to pack up food and belongings and leave all their drawers and shelves open. Plan to be gone at least three days, they said.

As neighbors, we were unified in the burden of it all. The date swam somewhere in almost every conversation, which only occasionally dipped into the questionable nature of the whole thing, as neither I, nor anyone I’d spoken to, had ever seen that many rats.

“Oh trust me, I hear them all the time,” said Mrs. Regan, in 293, when we chatted in the mailroom. “In the walls, the pipes, or whatever. Plus, with a building this big, not everyone is going to know everything.”

I made a bigger vacation out of it. The three days got absorbed into two weeks in which I tossed Zeus and a suitcase into my car and jetted down south to visit a friend in San Diego before heading east for a couple days, camping in Joshua Tree and going further east to Prescott, Arizona for another friend, then making the loop back. I wanted to jettison everything for a while, to reconnect with a world of firm straight lines.

About four days into my journey, the stain feeling finally left me. That I can confidently say. What I also say, with equal confidence, is that the faintest touch of it reached me again when I got a text from Charlie. It was a picture, taken from the nearby hill overlooking our neighborhood. Nearby tree branches framed the photo, in the center of which was the big bulging circus-tent of our complex. 

Check out our humble abode, Charlie wrote.

On a lark, I zoomed in on the picture. I noticed a line of what looked like strange vehicles parked together across one section of that long driveway. I wasn’t even positive they were vehicles. The more my brain tried to define them, the more they slipped away. I just called them machines in my reply text, asking if Charlie knew what they were.

Rat-killing gizmos? he wrote back. No idea.

*

I buffered my return with another overnight jaunt to Joshua Tree. By then it’d been about five days since the “three days” had lapsed, and Debbie of the HOA board had sent out a rather patronizing “all-clear” email congratulations that treated our homecoming like soldiers returning from abroad. 

I texted with Charlie and some others who’d braved that first step back, and had been assured that no one had collapsed, that we were free to resume our “normal” lives. Of course, with what had lived in our normal lives before the fumigation, I had to ask Ms. Bailey: Has anyone seen the imp? 

After a few seconds and not a few heartbeats, I followed it up with, Or any sign of it? 

Moments later, she wrote: 

What do you mean?

I didn’t press. I was afraid to. The fumigation had probably killed whatever had been living in those walls. I dared to feel hopeful, and felt terrible about that because even with all this unease, I had visions of a dark-crammed child wheezing out its last few moments.

I drove home. As we neared the entry gate, Zeus propped himself up by the passenger’s window, tail all a-wag. I pulled in and rolled all around the driveway, watching, nodding at people passing with laundry baskets or going to their cars. There was a kind of cleansing in the air. If the stain feeling was one of dust and mold, even decay, this was bright lemon-freshness, the recent sweep of a thorough housekeeper.

I parked and unloaded my suitcase and Zeus. We made our way over the lot, passing the area where he and I’d first glimpsed the—

The screen was gone. I slowed, frowning. Zeus tugged. Probably I was just mistaken. It had been dark that night, and I’d been tired. And afraid.

We kept walking. I noticed they’d since painted the railing on the outer staircase a light blue. At least, I thought it’d been green.

I passed someone hauling trash out to the dumpster. He nodded at me and I nodded back, even though I didn’t recognize him.

We reached my place and yet again I paused. My doorknob was a handle. Had the knob fallen off as they checked the units? Had they replaced it? Or was I just brainfarting because I’d always had a handle? 

Operator error.

Zeus happily hurried in first, going right for the water dish which was empty and which I went to fill up. I surveyed the living room. Nothing seemed moved or out of place.

After quenching Zeus’s thirst, I sat at my desk and closed my eyes. I felt right, rejuvenated, even. Some electric god-touch had zapped back that which had dangled on the edge of decay. I thought I used to feel something wrong here that’d only been growing wrong-er, but I sensed now a click-back to a kind of rightness that was so vibrant and strong I felt hard-pressed to even remember what it was before that had been wrong. 

I felt rustled from a nightmare, guided back from a dangerous detour.

I opened my eyes. I reached over and turned on my desktop, and the partially      bitten peach logo popped up on the screen. I had the funny thought it used to be some other fruit, but again, as with the doorknob-doorhandle, I’m sure it was more operator error, though it’s hard to imagine being mistaken about something I worked on every day. Weird. Maybe that vacation had reset more than I’d imagined needed resetting. As we knew from that long-overdue fumigation, the longer you delay, the more vermin, and the more they feast.