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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/SubstantialBite788 on 2024-09-25 01:57:47+00:00.

She dropped her cigarette and crushed it out with her foot. Shocking, because she was barefooted, and yet, not shocking, because it was Julie Byers. She was a frail, gaunt woman. Her arms and legs were wire thin. Her shrunken face was dwarfed by her large forehead and fringed with matted, blond curly hair.

Julie was homeless but lived with everyone. She hopped from trailer to trailer, spending a week or so in one home, wearing out her welcome and then moving on to another. She had the tenacity of a cocaine-addled salesman, knocking on doors, camping out on front porches, begging and pleading for entrance. Resisting her was futile. Calling the police, useless. She was persistently introducing herself as if no one knew who she was or had even perceived that she had existed. An existence such as hers was too irritating and obnoxious not to notice. Her presence was abrupt and unwelcomed. Someone had dropped her off in the trailer park like an unwanted mutt and she was too dumb to find her way out.

I had been lucky. She had never thought to grace me with her presence. Maybe it was me. I’m not very sociable. When I see her, I do my damn best to avoid her. Maybe it was my trailer. Not the nicest on the lot, a bare bones trailer with a set of stairs and a driveway, not much more. I’m not one for landscaping, or deck building, or even home maintenance in general. The less I build or accentuate, the less I have to take care of.

Or maybe it was my neighbor Mr. Greer, a mean old bastard that smelled like rotten eggs and whiskey, never ventured further than his lawn chair. He’d sit there all day at the edge of his driveway with a scowl on his face. He hated life in general but had a special disgust for people, and especially Julie Byers.

“Pitiful, rotten bitch,” he would say every time he saw her, a favorite platitude of his. It was consistent and frequent, like a grumpy, old fat parrot.  

I confronted him on one occasion to no avail. I cared little for Julie, but the spite was a little overboard and frankly, it pissed me off. Yeah, she was down and out, struggling, but she was a person, worthy of human dignity. I had never really expressed those sorts of sentiments before. Probably something I heard on a sitcom. He was unaffected by my emotional appeal.

“She’s fucking worthless. Pitiful, rotten bitch!”

“Alright, enough. Give it a rest. You can keep your damn mouth shut. I’m tired of hearing it.”

He rolled his eyes towards me without moving his head. I saw an unnatural sway of his pupils as they dilated and contracted rapidly to an abrupt focus.

“I didn’t ask your opinion. She’s a pitiful, rotten bitch that doesn’t deserve to exist. She’s a waste of existence.”

That was the extent of our conversations. I thereafter resigned to never again speak to the cantankerous turd. Fate guaranteed that I wouldn’t have to work hard to achieve that goal either. Not long after, Mr. Greer was found dead in his lawn chair. The silly thing is I saw the dead bastard. I saw him out of the corner of my eye, but I didn’t want to turn my head and draw his attention. I just figured he had fallen asleep. Later that night, the flashing lights of an ambulance woke me up.

“What happened?” I asked my neighbor Angie.

“Old man died, right there in his chair.”

“No shit!”

And ever since, that trailer had sat there empty. Three or four months I gather. No relatives had come by and collected his belongings. No one had come to clean the property or to sell it or even to show it. Management didn’t seem to care. If they didn’t care, then I sure as hell wouldn’t care. I thought it would be nice to have the corner lot to myself, with only one neighbor to my left and rid of that nasty old man.

And I guess that’s why Julie finally felt safe to approach me and introduce herself.

“Hey boy, you like movies?” she asked as she started pulling out a pack of cigarettes from her back pocket.

I had just pulled up into the driveway, coming home from work. I didn’t see her until I had shut the car door. If I had seen her in time I would have kept driving.

“What’s your name? My name is Julie Byers. Some folks call me July, being that I’m all sunny and what not and account of my name sounding similar. We ought to watch a movie tonight, me and you. What kind of movies do you like? I like horror movies but sometimes I’ll watch a comedy. What’s good is to watch a really scary movie and then watch a comedy after. It balances out your nerves. Although sometimes you can’t balance out a really scary movie. I don’t care how funny a comedy is. You try to laugh and think about that funny movie, but that scary stuff keeps poppin in your head whether you want it to or not.”

All the while she’s inching forward. I wanted to tell her that I got to go, make up something, but I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. She’s masterful at this game. She knew I wanted to ditch her. She knew she wasn’t welcomed, but she didn’t care.

The screen door on Mr. Greer’s trailer swung open and slammed shut. We both turned and looked. It swung open again, but not in a smooth mechanical motion as if blown by the wind, but in a deliberate way to signify anger. An angry swing- I know that sounds crazy, but that’s what I saw. Julie saw it too. She shook and trembled.

“He’s still there. He don’t like me.”

It happened several more times, swinging out slowly then slamming shut. By this time, she was up on my stairs and after one more vicious slam, she flung her arms around me and buried her head in my chest. I fumbled for my keys and opened the door. She unleashed me and hopped inside the trailer. I didn’t have the heart to throw her out.

“It’s just the wind. Maybe a good comedy will make it go away.”

We watched several movies, her on the couch and me in my recliner. She talked incessantly. She narrated the scenes as they happened and provided a full commentary at the end of each movie. I feel asleep during the middle of the last movie, drifting off to a cacophony of slap-stick shenanigans, with slide whistles and kazoos and her nonsensical babbling.

I was awakened by a chilly breeze and an unexpected moment of silence. The television had been turned off. The front door was open, and the screen door was tapping against the exterior wall. A moderate wind was blowing through the night air. Julie was gone.

I can’t even begin to express the joy and relief that welled up inside of my soul. I felt like I had been freed from prison, able to do as I pleased. I went to close the door, somewhat miffed that she would just leave it wide open. As I reached out to grab the screen door, I noticed Julie standing on Mr. Greer’s front porch. She was staring into the trailer, stiff and unmoving.

“Julie,” I yelled. No response, her gaze affixed. “Come back inside. What are you doing?” Aggravated, I jumped off the porch and stomped across the lawn.

I got to the bottom of the stairs. The inside was dark, but there was a patch of moonlight coming through the back bedroom window. Julie noticed nothing. As I grabbed the rail to climb the stairs, she started to lift off the porch and float. There was an audible hum vibrating throughout, shaking the trailer and causing the metal railing to ring so slightly. Before I could pull my hand away from the railing, I felt a piercing shock of electricity.  A shadow moved into the moonlight, an eclipse both obscuring and illuminating. A corona of a tall slender silhouette, skinnier than humanly possible, taller than the inside of a trailer would allow. A quick glimpse of an alien or a demon, of which I didn’t know, but I suspected it wasn’t human. Julie’s body was yanked into the trailer. The door slammed shut, the hum faded.  

I was hampered by an immense fear and yet burdened by an overwhelming sense of guilt. After about an hour debating with myself, in the relative safety of my own home, I decided against calling the police and acting on my own. They would think me a madman if I explained that my vagrant neighbor had just been lifted off the ground and abducted by an unseen force. The other consideration was how was I even to fight such a force. Maybe a stealthy get-away, avoid a confrontation altogether. That was my plan: sneak in, grab Julie, and get the hell out of there.

I grabbed an old rusty filet knife from my toolbox, a knife I had neglected for years but still sharp enough to cut hoses and other miscellaneous shit I needed cutting. Not too sanitary for cleaning fish, but not beyond usefulness.

With my filet knife and a small stepladder, I made my way to the solitary window at the back of Mr. Greer’s trailer. I surmised it was probably the window over the kitchen sink and the entrance where my presence would be least expected.

I folded out the stepladder and placed it right up against the trailer wall. The window was unlocked and easily pushed opened. I peered inside but the darkness was unusually opaque, not a sliver of light or even a tinge of grey. The light from outside seemed to be absorbed into the darkness, destroyed as soon as it reached the interior. At once I felt a need to go back and get a flashlight, but then I would make my presence known. Still, I wasn’t too keen on stumbling around in the dark chasing after a chatty cat who may have already been killed by some mystical evil force, a force not likely to be easily injured by a filet knife.

I was frightened by a sudden moan for help. I heard Julie to the left in a distant corner of t…

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