「故事·听力」My New Neighbors Hide From Everyone But I Found Out ...

My New Neighbors Hide From Everyone But I Found Out Their Secret

Hey, I'm Jason. Before I start... I've been wondering, where are you guys from? Leave the name of the place where you live in the comments, I think it will be awesome to see how big the community is.

And there's also a reason why I am asking. I'm 100 percent sure that none of you have ever been to my hometown. I was told I can't name it here, but the fact is that unfortunately there are a lot of places like that in the world.

I live in an abandoned city. And as you'll see, sometimes it's really creepy.

Forty years ago it was a nice flourishing Midwest town, while now 99.9% of the houses are empty and have been like this for a long time already. The reason for this is that the town was built around a huge plastic factory. Fifteen years ago the factory closed down and over time everyone left, since there were no jobs left, like, at all. Thousands of people lived here, and now the population is just... ten people. Three of them are my parents and I.

First my parents worked at the factory, then both of them managed to get jobs as the city was dying... Now they both work online, so... “Why don't you guys just leave?” – you might ask. It's complicated. I think they are just too afraid to start over. Living here is cheap, and I guess they just don't want to change anything... even though we have to buy groceries in the neighboring city. And that's pretty much all of our interactions with the outside world – I am homeschooled, so I don't really spend time with anyone my age.

Technically there are other people living here, but just a couple of households in different parts of the town. Most of them are old people who just can't move out. And that's what made the following events even creepier. 

So here’s how it all started. One morning I stepped out on the front porch to go for a run, looked around the block and… I saw something in the second story window of the house right across the street. I… I didn’t have much time to understand who that was, but it seemed like there was only half a face looking at me. The moment I saw it, the figure closed the curtains. I decided to skip the run and go tell my dad. 

Dad did not believe me at first, of course, but agreed to take a look. The man was not in the window anymore, but he noticed an old black van right by the house. And I gotta say: we hadn't see another car here in YEARS.

Well, okay, ghosts don’t usually drive vans, I guess, but serial killers do. Dad didn’t freak out like I did, he just crossed the road and knocked on the door. No one answered. There was nothing we could do, so we decided to just keep our guard up. 

And when, during the same afternoon, we were leaving to go get some groceries, we saw the van on the road, right near the house. The next thing we saw was a man with a box walking from the van toward the house. He turned his head, noticed us, and started walking faster. Half of his face was covered with bandages.

That night I could not fall asleep. Every noise I heard was definitely the half-faced man trying to get into our house... to eat our souls, I guessed. 

After a couple of days, it only got worse. We started to notice other people around that house. Like a woman, whose hair was, like, unbelievably long, and children, who seemed to appear out of nowhere and then disappear after a second. Two of them seemed to be twin girls. 

It all became totally clear to me that, somehow, a portal to another dimension had opened across the road and images of dead people from the past started to appear in that front yard. Don’t ask where I got this idea from, but it seemed obvious at the moment. Another thing was that the last owners of the house took the curtains with them, and the first thing that the man did was hang heavy black curtains on the windows, which you could not see through. And when I was trying to think about what he was trying to hide, I got scared to death after a couple of versions. 

My parents and I decided to mind our own business for a while and not to be these dumb horror film characters that never seem to have a self-preservation instinct. After all, nobody had bothered us. Yet.

But of course, when my parents left for the city the next day and I stayed on guard, I was kinda freaking out. I was looking out of the window the whole time for what was going on across the road. The bandaged man appeared in the second story window many times, but he was not watching us anymore, he was doing something on the computer. The van was away for the whole morning. The lady was driving it. And when she came back... oh my God, I remember my shock all too well.

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