Living above the Songs of Vanished Horses

Five minutes to midnight, five minutes till the last full day in the bedsit begins.
I am surrounded by half packed things. Boxes stuffed with books and CDs, random leads for devices long since discarded, bits of paper, bank statements I am afraid to throw away, DVD box sets, graphic novels. I look around the room, at the guitar case leant against the bed, the spider plant and it's tendrils creeping over a bag of clothes, a black shirt hanging over the mirror. Little things are scattered about where I sit on the floor. Let me see; a Superman 'S' patch, for sewing onto a jacket that I got free with a magazine. A train ticket from Worcester last year, 22 October 2010 'Birmingham Stns to Worcester Stns'. A photograph of the clock tower in Brighton. An empty pack of Paprika flavour crisps. In a clear plastic sleeve is a CD by a band called Sacrilege entitled 'Turn Back Trilobite'. Here, against the sofa is an unopened calendar for 2010 of 'Natural Patterns' produced by Oxfam. I have no idea why I have it, if I bought it (vastly unlikely) or if someone gave it to me, which is more probable, but God knows who.
Everything seems dusty. A white asbestos-ghost miasma covers the things I have retrieved from the top of shelves and the storage space above the cooker and the sink. I think this dust is the remants of the painting done here last Autumn. I remember the Polish builder, the streaks left on my leather jacket (annoying), and on the back of the elephant I found by the sea.

I meet up with Andy at lunchtime. He has picked up the keys for the new flat. We discuss what we shall call it; The Mews? The Stables? (The workshops below the flats used to be stables back in the nineteenth century). The flat, he says, feels strange, particularly the back section where our bedrooms are strikes him as oppressive in their current emptiness. The views from our windows, he goes on to say, show a suburbia reminiscent of those legendary places from our respective adolescences; Woodstock Drive and Mulgrave Road, Sunday white-out, drizzle gloom, and that slow candle-drip down to evening. I think of popping over there, after work, but though I have the keys, I am suddenly afraid -irrationally spooked- at encountering that emptiness there. I imagine going around Andy's after this fictional trip, telling him in the basement-capsule of his flat that 'there is something there, waiting for us'.
I begin to pack in the evening. Andy telephones, tells me he has been thinking about the 'haunted north section' of the flat all day. He imagines me going there after work, getting creeped out by something, then coming around his, to tell him I have 'seen something' there. Not such an odd coincidence as might appear, given our history of creating hauntings out of nothing.
It was -or perhaps is- inevitable, that we would -and will- do so with the new flat; a placebo-haunting, full of Tulpa-shadows and hypno-goggle eyed steep stairs, step up through the stables, and over the child gate there that might keep the night-mares out...