Apartment 16 (38 page)

FORTY

Seth had been gone for over five minutes. And she had stood, nervously, outside the front door of apartment sixteen, fingering a cigarette lighter inside the womb of a deep coat pocket, while listening for any sign of him inside the apartment.

Once she thought she heard him approach the door on swift feet, almost as if he was running back to the front door. But the door hadn’t opened. And the feet had sounded tiny, like a child’s.

When she called out, ‘Seth? Seth?’ the footsteps stopped and her memory of them became vague, making her believe they had occurred somewhere else in the building, in another apartment, on another hard floor. Maybe they had.

And then she thought she heard a door close deep inside the flat. Far off, far behind masonry and wood. But again, the sound might have been generated from another place somewhere inside the building. It was hard to tell.

But she couldn’t stand outside for much longer. And what was he doing in there anyway? She wondered if Miles was right. That it was a setup, an ambush. This couldn’t go on any longer. She took her hands out of her pockets.

‘Hello. It’s me.’

‘Apryl. You all right?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Beats me.’

‘Are you inside?’

‘No, I’m still waiting outside. He’s been in there ages. I don’t know what he’s doing. He told me to wait here. Do I wait all night?’

‘I don’t like this. I’m coming in.’

‘No. Don’t. You’ll ruin everything. I promised him.’

‘It could be a trap.’

‘No. I told you . . . I think he’s harmless,’ she said to calm Miles, but wasn’t sure she believed it any more.

‘You think he’s harmless! Jesus, Apryl.’

‘I just don’t know what’s taking him so long. So I’m going in. The door’s on the latch. I just wanted to tell you I’m leaving the line open. You know, just in case.’

‘Apryl, don’t go inside. I don’t want you to. This is all wrong. You’re trespassing. I don’t like the sound of this at all.’

‘It’ll be fine. Trust me. Just listen out. To be on the safe side. I won’t stay long. I just want to see what’s in there. I’ll see you in a few minutes.’

‘I’m getting fed up with this. It’s so damn foolish. Don’t you feel absurd?’

Apryl pushed the front door open.

The hinge squeaked and then whined as the heavy door swung inwards. To reveal an unlit hallway. From the light of the landing she could just make out its shadowy far end in a derelict penthouse apartment. ‘Seth,’ she whispered into the gloom. ‘Seth. Seth.’

Taking a step inside, she looked for a light switch. And found an ancient ceramic device that looked like her grandmother’s butter dish turned upside down. She flicked the switch down but it clunked, emptily, and there was no response from the elaborate glass lights attached to the walls.

Guided only by the light from the landing, she moved further down the deserted hallway, her feet creaking the floorboards. The place smelled of dust and stale air.

‘Seth’, she said again, louder this time. ‘Seth. Where are you?’

Passing another two light switches, she flicked them up and down. They were useless. Dead.

She was running out of light from the landing. The darkness in the apartment swallowed the yellowish glow before it could spread fully from the mouth of the front door. Then it suddenly went even darker, right around her.

Looking over her shoulder, she saw that the front door had silently swung half shut, its weight pulling it back to the frame. She retreated, anxious with every step that her heels didn’t make too loud a sound on the floorboards, and propped the door open by wedging her compact underneath. Then returned to the middle of the hallway.

This time she took more notice of the doors she was passing. The smaller ones painted white she assumed had cupboards behind them; the others must open to rooms like they did in Lillian’s apartment. ‘Seth,’ she said. A note of command mixed with irritation sharpened the word to cut the silence.

Taking out her lighter, she sparked it into life and raised it to see better.

The walls were skinned with an ugly paper. It was browned with age and had a rough texture against her fingertips. Every other thing had been taken down from the walls as in the other apartments she had seen. Like they were not to be trusted. There was no sign of the paintings Seth promised to show her, or any sign of him either.

‘Seth? Seth? You’re freaking me out now. Where are you?’

A few steps further and she ran out of all but the thinnest electric light and the pale flicker from her disposable lighter. Its bright but short flare scattered into the cold, heavy atmosphere, showing little beyond a small radius. But it managed to reveal a closed door on the left-hand side of the passageway. In her great-aunt’s flat this would have been the living room. And inside it, she heard a distant voice. ‘Seth? Is that you?’

As if from a great distance he cried out, ‘Apryl, no! Don’t come in. Stop!’

A draught seeped out of the gap between the door and the floor and cooled across her hands. The flame of her lighter flickered blue, then flattened itself against the metal cuff before going out. Impossibly, it was as if he had been calling from a great distance. She stayed still, her body tense, the nerves down her spine prickling. She listened.

Someone else was speaking again inside the room. Yes, she could hear a voice. No, voices. Was that a television? A radio? Moving closer to the door, she pressed her ear to the wood. The sound seemed distant, like she was passing Yankee Stadium during a home game. It must have been coming from beyond the building.

Her mind suddenly filled with what Mrs Roth and Mr Shafer had told her about the noises they heard inside this apartment. She pressed the phone to her ear and stood away from the door. ‘Miles?’

‘Yes, I’m here. What is it?’

‘I don’t know. There are no lights in here. I can’t see much. But I can hear something. Or is it outside? Can you hear anything down there?’

‘Like what?’

‘Like a crowd.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Is it windy out there?’

‘What?’

‘Windy? Is there wind outside?’

‘No. It’s bloody cold and wet, but there’s no wind for once. What are you talking about?’

‘I can hear something.’ And she could. Either it was getting louder by the second or her hearing was improving. It was like a storm. Or like something really loud and far away but not tuned in properly. From beneath the door the cold air increased its force and made her take another step away.

‘Apryl? Apryl?’
She heard Miles’s little voice chirping from the phone.

‘Seth? What are you doing?’ she said at the door and repositioned the lighter before her face. It sparked but wouldn’t ignite in the draught.

‘Down here,’ a voice called from inside that room, from right behind the door. At least that’s what it sounded like. Was that Seth?

‘What?’ Quickly, desperately, her fingers scraped at the metal wheel of the lighter. She raised her phone. ‘I think I can hear someone. In this room.’

‘Apryl, you’re worrying me. What the hell is going on?’

Apryl held the lighter up. It sparked, then died. Then lit up again on the next attempt. She took a hesitant step right to the threshold of the room, the flame held up near her face. Choked by the thump of her own heart, she squinted over the lighter and decided to take a peek into the room to see what Seth was doing. It must be him in there. With someone else. Or he was talking to himself? She touched the door handle.

And the door swung open.

It had been pulled open from the other side. She sucked her breath back inside her mouth. The little flame of the lighter was extinguished, instantly, by the sudden darkness and cold that rushed out of that room. That came roaring out like a tremendous pressure forcing itself from a confined but volatile space. Yes, it was all alive in there. The air was alive and full of so many screams she lost her balance before the force of it all.

The thin light from the landing was doused and all definition from everything in her line of vision – the dirty wallpaper, the vague suggestion of a ceiling, the cornice – vanished. All gone. Eclipsed by something so dense and black only her sense of temperature remained.

As Seth came out of there, fleeing right out of forever, her hair plastered itself against her skull and her eyelids trembled in the sudden punch of an arctic wind. And with him came a slipstream of howls so wretched and frantic she was forced to add her own long scream. But at the very least, hers came from a living mouth.

FORTY-ONE

Seth collapsed in the hallway, on the other side of the door, panting, sobbing. Then looked up and saw the hooded boy a few feet to his left, agitated, the hooded head whipping from Seth to the traumatized figure of Apryl. She leant against the wall a few feet to his right, one boot turned at an awkward angle and no longer supporting her weight. Further down the hallway, the front door gaped.

‘Seth! Seth!’ the delinquent voice shrieked from out of the trembling hood. ‘Get that fuckin’ tart in there. Bang her in there. Do it now or you’ll be sorry. He’ll take you down there wiv ’em instead. You or her, like. Fuckin’ do what I says!’

Apryl stared at Seth in shock, unable to speak.

‘He wants to meet you,’ he said, his voice sounding pathetic and wheedling to his own ears. ‘In there.’

Apryl shook her head, then turned to run.

‘Seth!’ the boy screeched, and rushed after her. ‘Get her inside. In there I can help you wiv the bitch. Just fuckin’ get her in and we’ll do the rest. Come on!’

As Seth got to his feet and began the pursuit, he realized he was crying.

‘Apryl. Apryl.’ He seized the collar of her coat and yanked backwards. In one long motion she came back at him, her feet airborne. Before clashing hard against the floorboards. Her face screwed up to cry. She was hurt, had banged her tailbone against the floor. Immediately, he wanted to apologize.

‘That’s it. That’s it. You got her,’ the boy shrieked from between the pointy toes of her boots that kicked out and scraped for purchase on the marble tiles.

‘Seth. No,’ she said, in between the moans and sobs she made from the pain that prevented her from struggling, that shut her down.

Walking backwards with long strides, clutching her collar, he slid her along the floor after him. Slapping her hands against the hard smooth surface she tried to slow her inevitable passage towards that door, which rattled from the force of the storm that hammered it from the inside, as if eager with excitement. The collar of her coat passed up the back of her head as she tried to wriggle out of the jacket. He twisted the collar tight in his fists and pulled her shoulders towards each other so the movement of her arms was lessened. He heard his own breath, loud about his ears. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ he sobbed at her.

As the hooded boy followed them down the hallway, its short arms swished in the air. ‘In. In. In. In.’ Its voice had begun to squeal.

‘Oh, God no. Please, Seth,’ she wept at him, her pretty face all red and smeared with eyeliner as she turned her head to the side to watch the door she was being hauled closer to. The terrible icy air belched around the frame, giving her a taste of the black infinite void that waited to claim her

Seth quickly reached one hand behind his back and seized the door handle. Apryl’s struggles became frantic when his grip loosened on her collar, and she almost got to her feet. But he kicked one of her legs and she went down and onto her side, whimpering, with her leather jacket all twisted around her face and neck. It had become an effective sling and he could just yank her through there with it.

The hooded boy skipped and panted with eagerness beside their struggles, like a weasel at the sight of a small hole with a rabbit inside. Its legs started a stamping motion and a strange little whinny came out of the dark hood as it readied itself to follow her into the darkness, to finish up.

The door swung itself open wide and a colossal blast of freezing turbulence swept over them, like a wave across the deck of some floundering ship. Just beyond the door a tremendous number of voices gathered, emitted from mouths Seth did not want to see. They screamed from above, and howled from below; they screeched from the sides and hurtled upwards towards the door, as if another chance at life were presenting itself in this unexpected pinpoint of light.

With all his strength, Seth took a step backwards into the darkness and wind. And then took another, and pulled the screaming girl in there with him.

FORTY-TWO

‘Apryl! Apryl! Fuck it!’ Miles tore the phone from his ear and began to run towards the front entrance of Barrington House. Up the steps he went, taking all three in one long stride, landing on the polished marble before the wide glass doors. Skittering sideways on leather-soled shoes, he was unable to breathe for the fear and shock and panic that scream had brought into him: the terror in her voice, lost inside a battering wind that made the signal crackle, break and then end. He reached for the keypad and punched at the stainless steel buttons. One. Nine. Four. Nine.

Inside the heavy brass clasp that held the two glass doors together he heard a loud
thunk
as the lock mechanism disengaged. And through the doors he banged, then hurled himself down the long carpeted hallway. Only as he neared the wide circle of the reception desk and the silent conservatory with its chairs and coffee table and magazines and dried rushes in vases did he manage to breathe again. To suck a great draught of warm air into lungs unused to vigorous exercise.

Through the fire doors, she’d said. These fire doors. To the staircase and elevator. He could hear her street-smart voice with its
apartments
and
elevators
and movie dialogue words, all swirling inside his thoughts that he couldn’t slow down.

He launched himself up the stairs. Then stopped. And stood uselessly with all of his limbs shaking and his reason trying to douse enough of the fire of panic to tell him that the flat was eight floors up and he was almost broken from just running through the reception area. There was the lift. Take that. It was on the ground floor. Yes, he could see inside the carriage: the mirror at the back and the wooden panels and yellowish light filling the space.

By the time he got inside the lift his hands were shaking. His index finger depressed the wrong button, the button for the fifth floor. Then hit number nine. Five stayed lit. So did nine. ‘Fucking hell!’ he shouted at himself, then steadied the finger and pressed eight, the floor with the numbers 16 and 17 stencilled next to the button.

What was he doing, that crazy bastard Seth? Attacking her? Or worse?

How long did this thing take? It seemed like a full minute dragged by while the lift carriage clunked and wheezed before it even began to ascend, up there, towards Apryl.

What would he do? Only now that he’d stopped running and stabbing his fingers at the buttons and was forced to stand still and wait did he have time to consider what would be required of him. He wondered if he could even fight if it came to it. He simply wasn’t sure. The last time had been at school, decades ago.

‘Oh Jesus,’ he said, at the preposterousness of the whole night. What had Apryl been thinking? As the lift stopped, uselessly, at the fifth floor, his trepidation turned into anger at her. The crazy stories, the wild speculations about murder, and now this, going undercover with an unhinged security guard as if she were some amateur sleuth. He swore at himself for allowing himself to become involved. He’d never really stopped to consider that she could be just as batshit crazy as her aunt.

The lift finally reached the eighth floor. But now he was this close he didn’t want to get out. Peering through the little latticed observation window in the door of the lift, he checked the landing outside. No one there, but the front door of an apartment was open. Must be sixteen.

‘Fuck it.’ Trying to be as careful as possible, he opened the outer door and peered to the side to make sure no one was waiting out of sight. ‘Apryl!’ he hiss-whispered. ‘Apryl.’ Then waited, halfway out of the lift, for a response.

Nothing.

He moved out of the lift and walked forward to peer into sixteen, at an unlit shabby and empty hallway.

Standing in the doorway, he called her name twice more. Screwing up his eyes, he peered at the far end of the passageway, but it was too dark to see anything clearly. He’d have to go inside.

Which he did, slowly, hardly able to believe that he was actually doing this: trespassing inside a private flat in a private building. And he’d taken no more than two steps inside when he tensed into a squat and said ‘Jesus!’ out loud.

He could hear it too now. The crowd. The storm. The voices. What she had been asking him about. And it was sweeping and circling beyond the middle door on the left side of the hallway. The one through which Apryl’s great-uncle had hurled Hessen.

Outside the room, he doubted whether he’d have the strength to even touch the door handle. But then he heard her. In the distance, in there, over there. Crying. In all of that roaring and excited screaming as if a tribe of apes had gathered in thrashing trees above a leopard, he heard her. In tiny broken snippets. Wailing and calling out for mercy, as if she were being murdered.

‘Christ!’ Miles threw himself at the door.

And fell into nothingness. Into absence.

A place where only the freezing temperature and the din of thousands of screaming voices registered. But he fell against a solid floor that he could not see, with his hands clamped about his ears. And when he twisted his body about to look for the screaming girl, he felt his feet and lower legs vanish over an edge, in which an even colder and faster wind belched upwards, as if it was striking the side of a great sheer mountain face and had nowhere else to go but upward, into forever.

Scrabbling backwards, he managed to crawl away from the lip of whatever he had fallen onto, when a collection of things like fingers, as thin as pencils and as hard as bones, snatched at his ankle as if it were an unexpected handhold presenting itself in some terrible climb up through oblivion.

He scrambled to his knees, his arms held out to prevent being blown into the precipice he sensed was gaping all around him in the pitch black violence. His shirt ballooned outwards and his tie slapped his face like a dog’s tail. ‘Apryl!’

He saw her, thrashing from side to side, her fingers raking upwards at the two stooped figures busy about her. Her booted feet kicked out and she threw her hips in a desperate struggle. He could see the silver tips of her heels flashing in what little light struggled to get through the open doorway he had fallen through.

On his hands and knees he crawled closer to the struggle. And saw a child. In a coat. Impossibly, a child in a hooded coat was whipping its little arm in and out, in and out against her face, that thrashed from side to side to evade the blows. It then started to kick at her body in order to move her. To shuffle her towards . . . Miles thought of what his own leg had just been hanging over. The other man, barely able to stand in the typhoon, snatched at her arms, trying to gain a purchase.

On his feet, Miles took two steps, steps that were more like the staggers of a drunkard, towards them. He had to wrap his arms about his ribs in a desperate attempt to stay the terrible racking shivers that threatened to topple his freezing body over the edge. But then pulled up short at the sight of what flashed in and out of the lightless void around the struggling figures.

He saw faces without flesh, and raw meat on bones twisting horribly in and out of the thinnest light, and hind legs kicking out at the other blind grasping things. And before this moving tapestry of disfigurement and whipping bone-things with jaws too far separated from skulls, a reddish face with long, brownish arms extended from impossibly small shoulders seemed to be rushing forward at the struggling trio. And then flashing backward as if pulled on some invisible harness, away from the light, before repeating the motion, in which it came closer each time to Apryl and the wind-blasted silhouettes that would not be coming back if they went over the side.

The hooded child looked up at Miles at the last possible moment, when Miles’s foot connected with the middle of its torso. Helped by the wind, it surged backward like a kite in an updraught, and was immediately swallowed up by moving, sinewy limbs too thin to be of much use apart from clawing at the darkness. But against the sole of his shoe the hooded thing had been palpable, as heavy and solid as an actual child. And practically sucked off the ledge upon which they all clung.

In his dimming senses and great upheaving struggle to breathe, Miles knew that the man in the white shirt, with frost bearding his face and eyebrows, was Seth. And with the last of his strength in this terrible exposure, the deranged nightwatchman tried with all of his might to haul Apryl over the edge, and into the abyss, by the one arm he had managed to seize by the elbow.

She flopped onto her belly and her head and shoulders disappeared over the edge and into a cluster of writhing white things with snatching hands. The swooping thing with the reddish head was almost upon them again.

Miles fired himself off his front foot and hit Seth in the centre of the chest with his shoulder.

Before he landed, half on and half off the invisible platform, the only thing supporting them in the maelstrom, Miles heard Seth issue a high-pitched scream. And at the edge of his upturned eyes as Miles fell, he was sure he saw the thin reddish thing embrace Seth’s flailing shape in a horrible motion that reminded him of a crab using its pincers to stuff matter into its jaws.

And then Miles’s head was plunged for an instant into what felt like bracken and sharp sticks, and then thrust against cold dead meat the next. Until he hauled himself backwards, away from the edge and onto the ledge.

Only to see Apryl from the waist down. The rest of her was lost as if decapitated, and hung over the edge of the platform. She was being clawed into the void by whatever was thrashing in a place that was mercifully only partially lit. On his knees, screaming for several seconds before he realized he was screaming, he snatched at her ankles. Seized one, then another, with numb fingers, and hauled her backwards. And onto the solid surface he still could not see. Where Apryl rocked from side to side, clutching her face, blind and concussed by the terrible cold.

With the last of his strength, shouting until his vocal cords threatened to snap, he maintained his grip on each booted ankle. And on his backside, he shuffled like he was rowing a skiff, and pulled her after him. Back towards the open door and the light.

She moved. On the floor, beside him, where she was all huddled against the wall across from the door he had slammed behind them as they came out of there on their backs, frozen and gibbering. On the other side, in what disguised itself as a room, the last murmurs of the wind and the highest screams of the damned finally hushed away into silence.

Then came another movement and a sound from Apryl. A whimper. Miles rolled to where she lay crumpled inside her own coat and the shadows. ‘Apryl. Apryl. Apryl,’ he muttered, as much to himself as to her, to add something real and familiar to this sinister place. ‘It’s me. I’m here, sweetheart.’ He reached out to touch what he thought was an arm, but she pulled herself quickly against the wall, withdrawing every limb inside the coat, keeping her face covered, while making those little crying noises.

‘It hurts.’ Her voice came out of the sobs.

‘Apryl, it’s me. Miles. It’s all right sweetheart. I’m here.’

But she didn’t respond and just shivered underneath her coat against the wall.

Looking about himself in the darkness he made sure all of the doors were closed. From somewhere inside himself a red spark of anger lit up and spread. He got to his knees. ‘The police are on their way,’ he called into the echoing apartment. ‘Do you hear?’

Apryl began to cry softly now and rock back and forth as if she were in great pain. As his sight adjusted just enough to see more of her down there on the floor, Miles could tell she was holding her arms tightly to her body with her head dipped down. She was really hurt. He had to get her out. Right now.

She came away from the floor without resistance. Up and onto her feet as if she were used to being led. But she didn’t unwrap her arms from about her chest, and she kept her body bent over and her face angled towards the floor until they were outside the apartment and on the landing in the yellow light before the lift doors. Where he coaxed her and said, ‘Show me, Apryl. Show me where it hurts.’ Only then did she reveal her injuries.

He saw the black flesh about her wrists and all over her hands, as if they had been injured as they reached out to fend something off. Those beautiful white hands were black with something that shone dully like hard leather, or frostbite. And not all of the fingers were there any more.

Her frail arms wavered in front of her as she raised her face at last, showing him the beautiful parts that were pale and tear-stained, and the place where the hair was missing from one side of her head.

He clutched her to his chest and swallowed. Clamped his eyelids shut on that final sight of the thing that had followed them right up to the threshold of that space. Something on all fours, snatching at her within the doorway. Until she kicked at it. Stabbed her boot heels into it with what was left of her mind and strength. Stamped it away like a bundle of sticks. And he knew that what had vanished, still clutching as it was propelled back into the seething absence, had been all that was left of Felix Hessen. And Miles had been close enough to the painter to be seeing him again, and perhaps every night for the rest of his life, as Hessen reached for the girl with arms so long and thin they must have been bone.