Last summer I rented a unit in an old apartment house, The Capulet Arms, in Long Beach. A few weeks after my arrival my elderly neighbor Jim informed me of the existence of a haunted room inside the building. Jim’s tone had become very grave when he looked at me and said that he hoped I would never encounter room 731. I remember asking him if apartment 731 in The Capulet Arms was the same place as “room 731.” The answer to the question was seemingly obvious but something had made me pose it to him anyways. Jim had not responded on that day as we sat there and stared at the sunlight shimmering on the ocean. We were drinking stingers on the balcony of his twelfth floor apartment which overlooked the Long Beach recreational harbor. The unanswered question hung in the air and neither of us spoke for a long time after I asked it.

Cars whizzed down Ocean Boulevard below us and a chill crept into the air as the sun began going down on the water. Jim and I often sat in silence for significant lengths of time, but as this afternoon turned into evening I could sense that he was troubled about something. He had appeared cheerful before he had mentioned the mysterious room 731. Afterwards he had seemed to degenerate into a morose, pensive state. I sensed that perhaps he wanted to be alone with his thoughts so I finished my drink and told him I’d probably stop by again later.

Out in the hallway I began wondering about his abrupt change in mood. Jim hardly struck me as the type to worry about such an odd, fanciful notion as a haunted room, but the subject clearly had affected him. Why? It seemed kind of silly. Jim was a retired sailor and sailors are often prone to superstition, but the notion of a haunted room in the Capulet Arms seemed kind of foolish for some reason. I decided to walk past apartment 731 so I descended 5 flights of stairs to locate the unit. Quickly I discovered that the seventh floor contained only seventeen units and they were predictably numbered from “701” to “717”. Apartment 731 did not exist. I smiled to myself and shook my head at my own naivete. Jim was a wonderful man in his eighties, but he did consume an overabundance of liquor. His conversation often contained extraordinary insights and pithy observations about life and society in general, but he did tend to ramble when he had consumed one stinger too many. His statements about “room 731” must have been the product of some disjointed thoughts and his inebriated state of mind. It amused me that I had given them any credence at all, but there I stood at the furthest end of the hallway on floor seven. I had been looking for an apartment that had never been built. I shook my head again and hoped that Jim would not have too bad of a hangover in the morning. Clearly he had been drinking quite a bit before I happened to stop by that afternoon.

Jim had been very welcoming from the time I had moved into the Capulet Arms. I enjoyed our conversations about the history and people of Long Beach and had even started to develop a bit of a taste for his favorite drink, the stinger. I had never heard of a “stinger” before I met Jim. In actuality it is a pretty nauseating combination of such ingredients as crème de menthe and whiskey, but it kind of grows on you. Jim and I often reclined on his balcony and gazed at the harbor while we drank our cocktails. He would sit in his wheelchair and I would relax on a wooden rocking chair that he had crafted many years before. We would lose track of the number of stingers we threw back as we chatted. Something about life in The Capulet Arms made heavy drinking seem very natural.

The weeks drifted into each other and I really was enjoying my summer by the ocean. Sometimes the power would go out in my unit, but that was the only drawback to living there. I would be working on my laptop and all of a sudden my computer would shut off and I would be blanketed in blackness. It always happened at night. Either I would light candles and read or just go to sleep. On one particular evening a power outage occurred as I was checking my banking account online. I just sighed and shut my laptop. Evidently I would need to wait until morning to see if that particular check had cleared. I decided to call it a day and go to bed.

That night I fell asleep almost immediately which is extremely unusual for me. Hours later some soft but insistent knocking at my door interrupted my deep slumber. The power was still out so I climbed out of bed and felt my way to the door. Still disoriented I peered through one of the two peepholes and saw a gorgeous, scantily clad blonde woman looking back at me. How could she see me through her side of the peephole? There was no way that she could, but it really felt like she was staring right into my face. I opened the door.

“Jim needs you.” she said.

“What? What happened? Is he OK? Who are you?” I asked. My brain was too cloudy too make any sense of this.

“Jim needs you.” she said with more urgency. “I am Yvonne.” she added as an afterthought.

She grabbed my hand and pulled me into the hallway. I felt myself following her. My confusion and anxiety began to mount, but I did not ask any questions. I just followed her. What happened next defied any of my later rationalizations. She led me to a room on the seventh floor and pulled rather than pushed open the door. A man in a sailor uniform sat in a barren room on a cloth-covered couch. His pants were around his ankles and one of his hands cradled his large erection. Yvonne pulled me to him and then down to my knees. My memory is of beautiful Yvonne and I taking turns pleasuring the unidentified sailor. I felt like I had to do it. I also felt her fear.

None of it could have happened. I awoke in my own bed the following morning. The memories of Yvonne and the anonymous sailor were excruciatingly vivid. The whole episode had been quite an amazing, harrowing dream. Normally I don’t even remember my dreams. Of course I never mentioned it to anyone.

A few weeks later I logged on to my own website and saw that my webmaster had updated the site with a black and white gallery of a busty, blonde, steely-eyed beauty. It was Yvonne. It was not just someone who looked like her: it was Yvonne. Shock ran through me and I felt weak. Nothing made any sense. Where had these photos come from? Did Yvonne actually exist? I walked away from the computer without turning it off. I felt Yvonne's eyes watching me from the monitor. My pulse began to race and a light sweat broke out all over my body. It took quite a while for me to control my breathing. Finally I was able to approach the computer and shut it down.

Days later I mustered the courage to phone my webmaster and find out where he had acquired the photos. He was nonplussed by my queries.

“You gave them to me.” he said. “They were in that last package of content that you sent me.”

Something akin to fear coursed through my system. I had not sent him these photos. The first and only time I had ever seen Yvonne had been in my dreams.

Who is she??


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.- XXOO Tanya