Peephole

m/f, hanging, footplay, necrophilia, frottage

Even though he could easily afford to live elsewhere, Carl lived in an incredibly shitty neighborhood. Drug dealers and addicts alike roamed the cracked, weed-riddled streets in broad daylight. Despite always being left empty, his car was broken into on an almost monthly basis. Scarcely a night went by without loud sirens blaring in the early morning hours.

The apartment itself was shitty as well. The building was an old house that had been divided into a bunch of tiny one-room, one-bathroom studios. Carl’s was on the second story and there was one more on that level, two on the ground floor and one in the basement. The ancient wooden floors creaked at the slightest provocation. Hot showers rarely lasted for more than a minute. The walls were basically uninsulated and the house was always sweltering in the summer and freezing in the winter.

The house had had an attic but when the roof had leaked into it, years ago, the owned had decided to just tear it out rather than fix it up. The result was that the two second story apartments seemed incredibly spacious because of the high roof/ceiling. But the exposed rafter beams gave the apartment a dreary, industrial feel. And now, when the roof leaked during a storm, it did so directly into Carl’s apartment, prompting the use of strategically placed buckets.

Carl had originally come to live there when he was a dirt-poor undergrad, subletting the room for the summer from an acquaintance. The rent was insanely low and so, despite its flaws, he agreed to stay after the person he was subletting from said that they didn’t want to come back. He eventually graduated with a degree in Computer Science and quickly found a job in the city. He made almost six figures but he still lived in the dilapidated old house for one reason:

The peephole.

It wasn’t until the end of his second year in the apartment that he discovered it. His room had come furnished with a few simple things: a small wooden coffee table, scratched and wobbly. Two beat-up bar stools for a tiny kitchen counter. A chest of drawers with an indefinable and unremovable smell to it. A few assorted paintings of banal landscapes, faded with age. And a large mirror, hung on the wall that divided his room from that of his second-story neighbor.

The mirror in particular had always creeped him out. It had a strange sheen to it that seemed unusual. He didn’t consider himself to be particularly attractive or exceptionally ugly but he disliked seeing his doppelganger in the apartment every time he walked into the room,
One day, he became particularly fed up with it and took the mirror down. He set it on the floor, turned it around and leaned against the wall. Problem solved.

Seeing the back to the mirror, Carl finally realized why it had looked so strange to him: it was a one-way mirror and he could see right through it to the ugly floral wallpaper on the wall it was leaning against.

This revelation naturally lead to his discovery of the hole the size of a dime that ran straight through the wall from his room to that of his neighbor. There was a strange tint to their room and he surmised that their side of the peephole was also covered by a one-way mirror.