 I live on the third floor of a block of flats. Pretty standard arrangement, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, dining, living, everything else room. You know, that sort of thing. It's furnished, and the whole place feels a little bit like an upmarket hotel. It's the nicest place I've ever lived, but yeah, I think I'm done here. The road I'm on is made up of residential buildings rather than houses on either side of the road. It forms a kind of corridor of noise. If you've got the windows open, you can hear conversations taking place at street level as if you were standing right next to the speaker. This is somewhat less than optimal at night, but I'm a pretty heavy sleeper. Sorry, I was. The seagulls are worse. They scream. I don't know if you've ever lived near enough the ocean to know, but at night, seagulls scream. It can vary. Some nights they sound like someone discovering a headless baby. Sometimes they sound like lost souls falling to hell. But they always, always sound so very human. I can't stand them anymore. There's floor to ceiling windows in both the bedroom and the living room. Effectively, the entire south facing wall is made of glass. There's even a small balcony, but there's not much of a view. There's another block of flats directly across from me. If I were one floor up, I'd be able to see clear over the top of them. But as is, looking out it's nothing but red brick and the bits of other people's flats you can see and do. A bit rear window, really. There's a staircase going up the middle of those flats, with glass running its entire length. It's about 20 feet away from our balcony, so you've got a pretty good view of people coming and going, if that's your thing. It's not mine, normally. Something happened in those flats the other night. It was four in the morning when I was woken up by a couple who were returning from an evening out. The younger gentlemen's conduct at whatever club they had patronized that evening had apparently been less than exemplary. And the young woman was voicing her displeasure at some volume. To put it bluntly, she was screaming her head off. I'd been drinking, at home and alone, not that it's any of your business, the night before, and was starting with an absolute belter of a hangover. The man of the pair was now defending himself at a similar volume against these accusations as they moved on down the street. I wondered if there was anything around I could throw at them. My throat felt like I'd swallowed a pint of sand and tasted like something was dying in there. I reached out to my bedside table to find my water glass empty. Brilliant. I swung my feet out of bed and my head took a sickening lurch off the one side. I stood up and shambled my way into the kitchen. I'd left the blinds open on the living room window. It was a light night. It barely ever gets dark in summer. I downed a glass of water, felt sick, and poured myself another to take in more slowly. I wandered over to the window. I was bollock-naked, which was a bad sign. I only went to bed like that when I got really trashed, but screw it. If people wanted to look through my window, that was their problem. I stood there for a little while, looking down at the street. I was lonely, to be honest, and wishing I'd been out. You might know the feeling all my friends are pretty settled. Their Saturday nights revolve around a glass of wine and a new pasta recipe, and no one seems to want to go out and get wrecked like we did in the good old days. I could go out alone, but what would be the point? It's not a pleasant feeling, knowing that everyone else is doing a better job of growing up than you. I'd had just about enough of feeling sorry for myself and was about to head back to bed when I noticed a girl walking down the street below. She was tall, she looked my height at least, and I clear six foot barefoot. With her dress, I mean, you could write what I know about fashion on the back of a postcard and still have room for the first scene of Hamlet, but it was short and it was low cut, and thereby ticked every box as far as I was concerned. I watched her for a while. She stopped at the door of the flat's opposite. She'd be climbing the stairs any moment, and that would mean she'd be looking directly at me for half her trip. I closed the blinds. I wasn't quite so devil may care about nudity when it came to a hot girl, it seemed. The lights flashed on in the stairwell, and she started walking up. The way the staircase is positioned, you see people walking up half of one flight and half of the next, first towards, then away from you, over the course of four floors, there out of sight for the other half of the time. I watched her climb the stairs. I decided she was the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen. I had a vague idea that I'd watch which floor she went to, then seek her out and take her for my wife the next day. The possibility exists that I may still have been drunk from the night before. The automatic lights flashed on as she came up each staircase, first walking towards me. She was blonde. She had the face of an Empress, then away. She had the sort of body it should have been illegal to display in public without a license. The lights snapped off behind her. It was like she had a spotlight following her. She reached the top floor and went off to the left out of sight. And there I was stuck on my own again, as I'd always been of course, but it had been nice to feel otherwise for a while, no matter how ridiculous that was. I was half hoping that she might show up in one of the windows on that side of the building, but she didn't. I was ready to give up when the ground floor lights flashed on again. Someone else was coming up the stairs, and there was something wrong with him. He was wearing a floor-length coat with a hood pulled tightly around his face. He was moving slowly, swaying slightly with each step. It's difficult to describe, but he carried himself like there was more of him underneath the coat than there should have been. He stopped at the first floor landing and stood for a moment, staring out into the street. I could feel my heart pounding. Was he looking for someone? Or was he checking that no one was watching him? The street was deserted. He turned back and resumed his slow shuffling gate up the stairs. He went out of sight. I kept watching, waiting for him to reappear. The next set of lights snapped on, and something the size and approximate shape of a man came up the stairs on all fours. He wasn't crawling in the way that a human might, on hands and knees. He was lying flat on his belly. He was using his arms and legs, but he was undulating his body from side to side, moving impossibly fast. Suddenly flying up the stairs. I watched, horrified. I think I would have screamed, and I don't know what would have happened then, but there was part of my mind, the main part, I believe, that refused to accept what was happening. It couldn't grasp it in any real sense. I was dreaming. I was mad, but it was not possible that this hooded figure that walked like, but not quite like a man was warming its way up the stairs faster than I could have taken them at a run. He disappeared up another staircase, the last before the top floor, and when he reemerged, he was walking up red again with that same strange, shambling movement. He was heading for her room. He was following the girl I'd been watching. It's not my disbelief that bothers me. I assume that's pretty natural in this sort of situation. No, what kept me from going to my phone and calling the police and the reason I'm beginning to hate myself is that I didn't want to cause fuss. I don't know if I really am that timid, but I just thought there must surely be an explanation that he'd just fallen over drunk and decided that crawling was safer, that he'd been expecting rain tonight. Anything which would mean that I wouldn't have to face an embarrassing explanation when it turned out it had all been a result of my misunderstanding. So I didn't do anything. I stood there and watched as he knocked on the door. I realized them that I couldn't see his hands. They had to have been inside his sleeves. Why? From where I was, I couldn't actually see the door open. All I saw was whatever had crawled up the stairs, suddenly lunging forward, not leading with its hands like you might go for someone if you were trying to strangle them, but with its whole form. It seemed to me that it lost something of its shape as it did so. Then the scream. It was brief, no more than a few seconds, but that was enough. It was terror and agony in equal measure, the sort of sound that quite simply cannot be made by a living being in the normal course of life. It also sounded quite a lot like the noises the seagulls make every morning. I waited for the lights to come on in the stairwell as people rushed out to see what was happening. They did not. I sat there until dawn, waiting for the thing to reemerge. It never did. I kept a watch on that building all through the next day, waiting for the police to arrive. People came and went all day, none of them in uniform. I've been keeping an eye on the papers since then. As you've probably guessed, there was nothing. The obvious explanation is, of course, that it didn't happen. I dreamt it, or I'm mentally ill, whatever. The thing is, though, I can't bring myself to believe that. I can still remember all too clearly how it felt. Not the fear, but the paralyzing indecision, the agonizing over whether or not to do something, to tell someone that was all too real. I spent a few nights afterwards watching the street outside, always from behind the blinds. I've not seen that man, or whatever it was, since. I don't think he knows I saw, but I'm going to have to move out anyway. I think I'm at the start of a nervous breakdown. I can still see the way he moved up the stairs. I have to use the lift now. And every time the seagulls give out one of those dreadful screams, so like the one I heard that night, I feel like I'm going to break down crying. And, of course, how do I know it's really seagulls? At all.