The Man from Downstairs

Samira Clarke opened her eyes and drew in a deep breath. She had been dreaming of that boat again, the one on the horizon that was floating away without her. She did not know how or why but she knew somehow she was supposed to have been on that boat. Something in the way she felt a despair as she watched it drift off made her wake up every time with a certain dread in her chest. She picked up her phone and looked at the time. 3:41 am which was almost the same time she had woken up last time, and the time before that. She glanced to her side and saw her husband Jeff sleeping peacefully. Samira took a drink of her water and lay back down. She rolled over to her side facing the window and as she stared at the curtain gently being blown by the wind, she wondered where this dream came from and why she kept having it. Samira had recently been trying to contemplate herself by meditating more and exploring spirituality which was something many people had been working on during this pandemic. She had even tried some techniques for astral projection a few times. Maybe they were actually working. Her husband had been the one to start with all this spiritual stuff a couple of years back and recently they had been practising more. ‘I’ll think of that later’ she thought as she put off her thoughts to be able fall back to sleep.

That morning when they all woke up to start their day she told her husband about that same dream again while she made breakfast for the family. “What do you think it means?” he asked her.

“I don’t have a clue” said Samira, “I thought maybe you’d have some ideas since you’re such a pro at this” she teased him.

The door in the basement slammed shut and they heard their downstairs neighbor stomp up the stairs and slam the side door to go outside. Samira and Jeff looked at eachother and rolled their eyes. Not even a minute later, the door opened and slammed shut again and then the second door downstairs only to be repeated as he once again left the house. About 30 seconds later, a strange smelling smoke wafted through their apartment. “I don’t know how much longer I can take this guy” said Samira, annoyed.

When Samira and her family moved in, they were warned by the landlord that there was a man living in the basement apartment who had not gotten along with the previous tenants. They had moved out because of him. The landlord told them that if they had any issues to let him know as he would deal with him. The first year went without a hitch. They barely saw him or heard him and things seemed to be going well. Then the pandemic happened and things changed. Things got so bad they had a few screaming matches between the levels which more than once almost broke out in actual physical altercations. There were strange things going on and the energy in the house had changed to a heavy and negative one. Samira couldn’t wait to get her job back so they could start looking for a new place. Like many others, she had been laid off at the start of the pandemic.

“See you later” said Jeff as he kissed her goodbye and led the kids out of the house. She closed the door behind them and prepared her canvas and paints, put on some music and began painting. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a shadow flit across the wall to the next room. She looked at Pogo, her dog which was lying in her bed calmly licking at her paws. It was not the first time she saw something like this in the house. In fact, only the other day, Jeff had said he had seen something similar. She decided it was time to smudge the house again. When she finished her painting, she realized she had painted the same boat from her dream. She tried as hard as she could to remember anything else from her dream but couldn’t. Frustrated and a little spooked out, she turned her attention to other things.

That night before going to sleep, Jeff played another astral projection technique from his phone. This technique was supposed to clear your chakras so that the person would remain lucid during their dreams. As they both lay side by side on their backs, the sound of waves and birds played, and a man’s voice came on, guiding them through each chakra moving their energies. Samira must have dozed off a few times but she managed to come back every time to continue the technique. As she was about to reach the third eye chakra, she fell asleep. After a while, she thought she became conscious but she was in a dream. She looked around and waved her arms to disperse the fog that encompassed the area. Some of it cleared away and in the distance she saw people wandering around as if in a daze. She walked towards them. Samira was in the middle of them all but they did not see her. Their faces seemed as though they were each concentrated on something different but what she could not tell. Slowly she moved away towards a tunnel off in the distance that caught her attention. As she got to the entrance of the tunnel, she was pulled into it so fast she was not able to resist. Before she knew it, she found herself somewhere new, in the middle of a dense forest. She walked around a little until she found a clearing where a group of huts stood. As she approached one of them, she heard people inside speaking a language she did not understand. She did not dare peak inside fearing they would see her. Samira did not know why she didn’t want to be seen, just that it was her gut telling her it would be better this way. As she turned around to leave, something bumped her and all she could see was a big angry face pushed against hers. Scared, she turned to run. She ran so fast her run turned into a leap and then she was practically flying through the trees. She knew the angry face was behind her, tailing her. She willed herself to go faster and as she rushed through the last trees, she reached a beach. She looked in front of her not wanting to stop running and she could see a boat on the horizon. She tried to go faster towards the boat, it was her only way out. Samira soared through her leaps but it was not enough. The boat drifted further and further out into the waters. She slowed down knowing the boat had left her behind again. She dared not look behind her, she knew the angry face was catching up to her.

Samira opened her eyes and sat up. She looked at her phone and it was 3:43am. This time she remembered everything. She wrote her dream in her phone worried that if she fell back asleep right away she would forget again. Samira did not have that dream again for some time after. Perhaps she unconsciously blocked it from coming back out of fear.

Some time went by and the issues with the guy downstairs were the usual, if not getting slightly worse. He continued to angrily slam doors and now left bottles with strange messages in them all around the property. He creepily watched when Samira brought the kids and dog to play in the backyard. He constantly walked around aimlessly at all hours of day or night looking like a zombie and making the whole family feel uncomfortable. His condition seemed to be deteriorating.

Then one night Samira had the dream again. This time, she was ready. She knew if she stayed lucid she would be able to control her actions and feelings. The dream started by the huts. She nervously looked around, knowing that last time she had been here, that face had shown up, seemingly ready to attack her. This time though, she would not let it scare her away. She needed some answers as to why this dream kept coming back. She felt a hot wind blow against her and turned to see the angry face. It was so consumed with anger that she could not even make out the features. “Who are you and what do you want?” she asked. This was not her voice, she thought. This voice was low and masculine. She willed her mind to raise herself up and looked down. This was not her body. It was the body of a man and the figure beside him was a whirl of flesh and blurred colors that seemed to churn like a tornado. “You left me behind! You got on the boat and didn’t wait for me knowing I was coming! You left me to be taken by them and turned into a slave. The rest of my short life was a torture because of you” the angry figure said. The man stared at the figure and started to weep, “We were all scared, we couldn’t wait, I’m sorry! That was lifetimes ago! Why won’t you just let me be” he wailed. Samira finally understood that she had been having someone else’s dream. She had somehow gotten caught up in it. She looked at the man’s face and recognized it. It was the face of the man who lived downstairs. Suddenly, she understood that the angry face was a spirit from a past life that kept torturing her neighbor out of vengeance. The spirit had been so consumed in his bitterness and resentment that he blamed the man for having left him behind to suffer and his only solace was to torture him so that he might suffer as he had and still was. And it was working. The man was just as lost in real life as he seemed right now in his own dreams. Except in real life he did not understand or remember any of this. Samira intuitively started to pray. Just then, both the spirit and the man noticed they were not alone and looked right at her. She started to run again and they ran after her. All the way to the beach they ran and the boat was there, but this time it was close to the beach, ready to go but still waiting. All three of them looked towards the boat. Without any words, the man and the spirit moved towards the boat and got on. The boat started to drift away with them on it.

Samira woke up. This time there were no feelings of dread but at the same time she was not sure how she felt. Strangely, she thought she would have felt relief, but she felt nothing. She looked at the time and saw it was 4am. She sighed and fell back asleep.

After that night, Samira and her family never saw their neighbor again. The man from downstairs had disappeared without a trace. The dream never came back and Samira always wondered to which horizon that boat had taken them.