[story] The St Mary's house of horrors

This is the true story of my 2nd-year flat in Oxford, shared with 5 unsuspecting friends. A story that the postgraduates of Corpus Christi College are tired of hearing. A long, infamous story of infestation, flooding, deadly gas and acoustic torture in a flat that left us sullen and sleepless for an entire year. A flat of unrelenting horror. A door down from an inoffensive pub and a simple church. Alas, any God had turned a blind eye to the happenings on St Mary's Rd. 

Like every resident in Oxford's underbelly of Cowley, we had our fair share of crime and harassment; Three locked bikes stolen from our front garden, and in their place once huddled a cosy pair, together enjoying the sweet sting of heroine; Lulling screams of 3am street brawls through our unglazed eastward windows, which left us freezing in winter and blistering in summer; Our trash searched and thrown about nightly, and on the fateful rugby evenings at the Black Swan, we additionally enjoyed every square inch of our street-front being coated in the spirituous piss of armies of drunken men. Yes, we were truly knee-deep in Cowley culture.

Indoors was no respite; we soon learned not all previous tenants had vacated. Something burrowed up through the fireplace at night, spreading ash across the floor and scattering unwelcome surprises along the basement staircase - a basement near impenetrable due to a ceiling-high stack of old furniture and garbage charitably left behind for pests to shelter in. A rat the size of our (soon to be feces-covered) toaster chased us away and to the letting agent, who begrudgingly had the basement cleared and the house baited with poison. From inside the walls, the now decomposing rat corpses unleashed the second plague upon the house; black flies, the size of marbles and emerging hundreds in number every day despite a fierce battle fought with insect spray and a Henry Hoover. The ordeal made the early pigeons cooing from within the walls a soothing morning delight.

That the flat stood upright (unlike the backyard fence) was itself a miracle. Beyond snow-season-ready unclosable sky-windows and quick-detach doorhandles that threatened to lock us in our rooms, the plumbing left much to be desired; An anonymous pipe dripped something sinister and unidentifiable onto the basement floor, which pooled beneath a ceiling hole and soaked the groundfloor bedroom carpet with the unyielding stench of piss; The washing machine, perhaps being fed water from the upstairs toilet, infused our clothes with the pungent aroma of human shit, which followed me in-suitcase to Japan and back; The temperature of the upstairs showers was impossible to adjust from absolutely scalding, except inexplicably by the divine hand of Patrick Inns (God bless). 

And my God, what Godless showers. They were barely more than spout and floor. The drain was clogged daily with arm length hair, which had worked its way through the pipes and become indestructible. After mere minutes, shower water was flooding out of the basin, over the bathroom floor, down through the tiles and exploding dust-soaked through the kitchen lights. Gallons of bleach and Drano were poured down in vain, which on one auspicious evening, erupted into a hot yellow cloud that pierced the eyes and left us short of breath. Only after did a flatmate warn us a visiting plumber had treated the drain with sulfuric acid, and our acid-base reaction had filled the bathroom and upstairs corridor with deadly chlorine gas. At last our letting agent was persuaded to mechnically unclog the shower pipes, which was attempted on my birthday, and the day my last remaining flatmate left for Christmas break. To celebrate my new loneliness, the plumber burst open the waste pipe, gushing grey water water down through the kitchen ceiling and walls, and over the counters, appliances and crockery. Anything sent from the upstairs toilets would arrive neatly through carved holes onto the servery. 

Yet, home invasion, dilapidation and a shit-stained kitchen were the least of our agonies. Our true haunting came from the neighbour's property. An incessant torment which drove us to the brink of insanity, and to war with the council; The neighbour's off-balance boiler fan. It rumbled. Every few minutes, it switched unpredictably between two modes; 'loud whirring and grinding' and 'low hum of a car idling on the roof'. It vibrated our walls seemingly at resonance, creating an acoustic torture chamber that left our middle floor bedrooms uninhabitable. Drowned out by traffic in the day, the drone of the fan crept upon us at night and made sleep impossible. We rolled around restlessly in cold sweat, cursing aloud each time the fan changed modes. We tried industrial earplugs, moving our beds around to find quiet nodes among the standing waves, and swapping bedrooms when our sleep deprivation bubbled over. Flatmate relations were breaking down, and we begged each other for just one more night away from the worst afflicted rooms.

The neighbours ignored our pleading letters for weeks, then did their landlord, then did our letting agency. The Oxford City Council were reluctant to intervene, citing that the neighbour's engineer had deemed the fan 'functional', and demanding video evidence of an auditory phenomenon well below in pitch what any smartphone microphone could hope to pick up. After months of angry emails, phone calls and frustrated meetings at the council, two workers visited our flat in an after-hours emergency appointment. We stood hushed, them in uniform and us in our pyjamas, intruding Andrea Vitangeli's messy bedroom. We held our breaths, practically frothing at the mouth, as the fan quietly hummed. Finally, the younger worker's whisper punctuated the silence; "that'd drive me crazy - no, I couldn't sleep through that". Alas, the older half-deaf and half-brained worker was unconvinced, and indignantly insisted we must apply to rent a special low-frequency microphone from the council if we wanted any hope of help. This proved an elusive microphone with a long waiting list, which never graced our flat. 

Tired and defeated, we fled St Mary's, joining the wailing choir of damned souls whose mail turns up in stacks of hundreds on the doorstep daily, never to be opened nor returned. Now far from Cowley, and the ordeal having long ago become a stale and irritating talking point, I still sometimes wake in fright from dreams of unending stench, blisteringly hot showers, blood curdling screams of crack addicts and monotonous rumbling. I very much doubt that Patrick Inns, Robert Laurella, Andrea Vitangeli, Lisa Schut, Hannah Estcourt and myself will ever fully recover.

Let this story impart upon you these valuable lessons three:

1. Avoid College & County and NOPS like the plague (hit me with Libel you negligent, defrauding fucks).
2. Never mix bleach and acid. 
3. When the sun goes down, and a shimmering moon casts its menacing gaze upon Cowley, stay far far away from 70 St Mary's Rd.