Vampires - Part I
In the three years I lived in my Cambridge apartment, I don’t think I ever lost my fascination with the Hogans who lived directly across from me. The only time they ever seemed to leave their house was at night; during the day, the house was silent, unreadable.
THIS IS PART 1 of a FOUR-PART STORY
After having lived in some difficult places, I felt blessed to find an apartment on what seemed like a very ordinary street of unprepossessing houses in north Cambridge. I’d never lived so close to neighbors before and I wasn’t sure who any of these people were -- the small, feisty, redheaded woman with her six children in the house next door, the weird tribe of nocturnal beings across the street, the hard-drinking Irish lady and her female partner on the corner. I quickly became friends with Maureen next door (she was the most popular person on the street) mainly because we had children the same age, and because -- not to put too fine a point on it -- we were both active alcoholics who would sit and get blitzed at her kitchen table just about every afternoon of the week. What better place to park oneself with a bottle of wine as the kids were getting out of school? I spent three years on that street, and the whole time I was there I don’t think I ever lost my fascination with the personalities who conducted their daily routines behind the facades of those closely spaced houses, or with the Hogans who lived directly across from me.
Their house… well, I never went inside it and I don’t know anyone else who did, either. But it always looked as if it needed a paint job, the door knob rusted, the windows aslant, the exterior shabby, and one rarely saw a light on in the place. It was impossible to tell who lived there or how many or what they did or who they were. Everyone referred to them as “the Hogans,” but the only time they ever seemed to leave their house was at night; during the day, the house was silent, unreadable. One would have thought it was empty.
I knew a little bit about the Hogans because a writer friend of mine, Jane Barnes, lived in their rental apartment, a tiny place that jutted out from, and shared a wall with, the dark, mysterious Hogan residence. Jane painted the walls of her apartment the minute she moved in. She scrubbed the place top to bottom. She got the wood floor gleaming and put her touches everywhere -- a sumptuous bowl of fruit on the kitchen table, an array of books on newly-constructed shelves, a fall of silk thrown over a chair.
But no matter what she did, the apartment had a rank odor of decay, as if an army of rodents had died in the walls and under the floorboards, or as if a body had perhaps been left to decompose in the neighboring basement.
It was difficult to hang out with her there because of the odor. But perhaps even creepier were the droning sounds that drifted through the wall every night, a cross between a long, low moan, as if someone were suffering, and a dirge, as if the Hogans had gotten together and with their out-of-tune voices were chanting some sort of ode to the devil.
Cover Image: Night Windows by Edward Hopper (1928)