Well, our neighbours are dead.
This isn’t a threat – in all honesty, I’m about as dangerous as a paper bag – I just think that the people who live one up and over from us are dead and starting to decompose.
Last night there was a smell. It didn’t bother me too much, but Ed seems to smell like my mother (not like that, think the other way) and freaked out about the stink. After a while, I could smell it too – it was a fishy stench quite unlike the “someone’s cooking” smell you get sometimes. Also, it was after 11 at night. Our bedroom smelled like rotting fish, and the smell was getting stronger by the minute. Ed tried to cover it up with incense and Febreze, thinking someone was just cooking a late night snack – but the smell didn’t go away, and soon overtook the anti-stink measures we put in place.
Ed is now “that guy”. As much as we give our neighbours cute nicknames, I am certain that others must do it too – and now Ed will be known as that weird guy who knocked on everyone’s door just before midnight to ask if they could smell that smell. On the plus side, he got a tour of our next door neighbour’s suite (they installed bidets!) and met some of the other people in our building. Unfortunately, he’s now the weird guy on the 3rd floor AND he never found the source of the smell.
We thought it started to fade, but I think we just got used to it and eventually we turned in (after Ed drove me fucking insane with his non-stop sniffing and complaining and searching and worrying and talking when all I wanted to do was read in peace). When we woke up this morning, everything seemed fine – no smell. Maybe it was a one time thing?
Except it wasn’t! The fishy smell came roaring back, even stronger than before. We had to do the unthinkable – ask the Troll to come into our suite and ask if she could smell it. I knew Ed wasn’t crazy and smelling phantom stinks, but maybe we were both oversensitive to it? The Troll came in (we laid out a trail of children to lead her into the stink zone), and she verified that she could also smell it and it was gross. Okay, then. It wasn’t just us.
We talked a bit about where the smell could be coming from, wondering about the upstairs people. It was then that she told us the people above the suite next door weren’t actually there – they moved in in October, then left for Hong Kong at the beginning of December and haven’t been seen since.
Okay, the spooky italics were for my own amusement, but WHAT IF:
- What if they never went to HK at all?
- What if a terrible accident and/or murder occurred upstairs?
- What if they’ve been rotting all this time and the decomposition has reached a point where it’s starting to leak into the suites below?
- WHAT IF THEY’RE DEAD AND OOZING CORPSE JUICE INTO MY BEDROOM??
That’s totally what happened, isn’t it: they’re dead, and it smells very bad.
It’s easy to dismiss me and think “Oh, that Kimli. She’s so crazy! Always overreacting to easily-explained things!”, but I keep thinking about the LAST time it smelled really, really bad in our apartment:
A masturbating hobo was found in our crawl space.
So, yeah. I’m a little paranoid when it comes to outrageously bad smells that have no easy answer.
This kind of stuff seems to happen to me an awful lot.
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Ew no! We had neighbours below us in the old ‘hood that cooked some disgusting smelling stuff- it stunk like they had a boiling pot of a combo of dead rotten fish, cat pee, (we even thought one of the cats had been peeing somewhere and went around sniffing the carpet to try to find it), dirty socks, dead animal carcasses and poopy rotten diapers- it happened usually once every week. We literally had to close all the windows, and the stink would still come up thru where the plumbing was in the floor! We guessed it was some weird weekend specialty dish they were making as it happened a lot- nasty!- and we smelled that same smell coming from a nearby restaurant across the street too. I feel for ya- I know the smell exactly-makes your eyes water! D-sgusting!
A rotting bloated corpse would smell a lot worse than that.
Unless they were bludgeoned to death with a salmon.
A more likely explanation for the odor’s fishy overtones is that they were actually Cthuluite Deep Ones, and the recent drop in turbidity in Vancouver’s water supply caused some sort of bathtime auto-immune response.
Water CAN be too pure, people.
On a side note, we had a dead mouse in our air conditioning system once when I was a kid.
Every time the AC kicked on, you got that ‘Oh So Fresh Smell Of Death’.
I feel Ed’s pain – my sniffer is far too sensitive for my own good. That said, it sounds like it’s pretty rough in your place right now.. is it worse in your unit than the hall? It actually could be related to plumbing..
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