Let me tell you this thing about my downstairs neighbor (MDN). Visual: He's pudgy, mid-30s, white, has kind of a receding hair line.

Once about three or four months ago when I came home from work I found his dog on my landing, barking her head off. She was filthy. I returned her to him immediately, and he said, very casually, "Oh. You have my dog." (The dog didn't look overly pleased to see him, by the way.)

"Yeah, she was on my landing."

"Hmm. She's been missing for three days. I wondered where she'd gotten off to." Missing for three days? Shouldn't you be, I don't know, relieved or something? You know, instead of leaning against your doorframe and slowly scratching your big ol' belly? Weird.

A couple of weeks later, I ran into him at the mailboxes. "So, how's your dog?" I said.

"Oh, you probably haven't heard her barking lately, have you?"

I hadn't noticed her barking or not barking, but I said, "No. I haven't."

He looked uncomfortable. "That's because she's not my dog. She's my friend's dog. He, uh, took her back."

"Oh. Cool." I didn't know what else to say. I remember thinking, This guy's creepy.

OK, fast forward to the day before yesterday. As I walked up the stairs past MDN's apartment, I was overcome by an awful stench. It smelled like that time D found a decomposing rat in his attic. Like rot. It was stronger when I got into my bedroom, where the window was open. "Maybe I need to take the trash out," I thought. I don't have a garbage can in my bedroom, but I thought maybe the smell was wafting in from the kitchen. There are months when I forget I even have a kitchen, and thus I have been known to forget there is trash in there, sometimes with decomposing chicken or whatever in it. So I took the trash out. It made sense at the time.

(This is going somewhere, stay with me.)

Yesterday, walking up to my apartment again, I smelled the same stench. It seemed stronger. When I walk upstairs to my apartment, I can see inside MDN's apartment if he has his window open. He did, and I noticed he had a bunch of cleaning stuff out in his living room, various detergents and sprays and the like. OK? Noted.

Back in my bedroom, which overlooks MDN's backyard, I had the window open. The stench was even stronger. Bad smell + cleaning detergents = trying to clean up a dead body, in my sick mind, because I watch far, far too many true crime/forensic science-type shows for my own good. I kind of chuckled to myself. I need to stop watching that shit, I thought.

But then early this morning I woke up. I looked at the clock. 4 a.m. I rolled over, pissed off. I tried to go back to sleep, but then I realized what had woken me up: a sound. A DIGGING sound. I shit you not.

"Noooooo," I thought. "That's not digging. That's...uh, it's uh... Shit. It's fucking DIGGING!" I was half asleep, but I shoved open my blinds and looked out my window into his back yard. It was pitch dark, so I couldn't see a thing. But the digging sound? It stopped. And it didn't start up again for the rest of the night.

I lay in bed with my eyes wide open until I had to get up for work. You know what I was thinking, right? Of course you do: He's disposing of a corpse, and he thinks I've seen him, and I'm next.

So, I don't know. Part of me is dismissing the whole thing as my overactive imagination. The other part of me is... kind of freaked out.