Category: The Apartment

The Apartment ~ Part 3

October 31st, 2023

The damage was indeed minimal, the medical examiner had confirmed it. The knock to the head would have been painful but was in no way fatal. Detective Jung didn’t really need the report to tell him that but it was nice to have confirmation. Jung had been a cop for fifteen and a detective for three. His days were spent traversing the depraved depths humanity and every year his hair got a little more grey, as if giving up its pigment was the price of justice.

Jung initially hadn’t even noticed this injury, obviously a few days old from the bruising and retreating swelling. He had been much more concerned about all the blood on the floor and the fact that the young man’s head had been staring glassy-eyed at him from completely the wrong way around. That his neck had been broken was obvious, that he had fallen from the narrow, precipitous staircase was equally obvious. There was a carpet on the tiny upper landing which could easily trip someone up. Or maybe the young man had been drunk, it was the season for holiday parties. If he had stumbled in late the night before or even early that morning, it would have been an easy thing to lose balance and have an accident.

Jung was sure it was an accident. The facts and timetable added up. A young, healthy man falling from the third floor landing, straight down to the unyielding concrete of a basement was surely an accident. The result of an unfortunate set of circumstances. Death by misadventure. There had been no one around and it was dark. The architecture of the old house could charitably be described as ‘quriky’. That the boy’s head had ended at such a bend was disconcerting but nothing that couldn’t be explained by the angle of the fall.

Nonetheless, the scene had chilled the detective. There was some baser instinct screaming from the primitive depths of his brain that something wasn’t quite right. Jung pushed these ideas aside, deciding that he had been too long in contact with the ghoulish capabilities of humans and that it might be colouring his perception of the facts. Most officers had seen things that they would rather forget. Humanity had quite a few of its own natural-born demons without creating more out of shadows. Or perhaps it was the troublesome words of the neighbour that had unnerved him.

She had been the one to find the body, she had nearly fallen on him on the way to the laundry room. Jung had to step over the up-turned laundry basket to get to the corpse. The old woman had been upset, understandably. She hadn’t know the boy well, just the passing pleasantries between tenants and she’d been out of town for the last week or so. She answered all of the detective’s questions and added her own two cents in a low conspiratorial tone.

“I don’t know why the landlord still rents out that apartment. She won’t ever let anyone be happy, not if she can help it. Not after what happened to her. She was so young you know. Too young, really. Too young to be married and much too young to have a baby. Everyone always wondered at how it happened. She was barely out of childhood herself. But they got pregnant and in those days there wasn’t anything you could do but have the child. They were married after all. We all hoped it would work out in the end.

She had such a difficult pregnancy. People don’t talk about how difficult it can be and she got it real bad. She looked half-dead by the time she delivered. Delivery was awful for her too, weak as she was and it nearly killed her. In earlier days it would have. Things didn’t get better either. They were both overwhelmed. Her man got out of it by staying longer at work. There were rumours about him and his secretary.

He left on a business trip, or at lest that’s what he said it was. He left his poor young wife at home with a sick, colicky, baby and no help. She had practically been chained in the house since the birth, the baby was that fussy. Some of us tried to help here and there but it wasn’t enough and she looked dead behind the eyes, all the time that baby never stopped wailing.

He came home a few days later. The apartment was quiet. He soon found out why. She’d smothered the baby in the crib. She pushed the blanket down so hard she broke the baby’s neck. I guess she couldn’t take the crying anymore, being alone without family or her husband to help. Then she opened up her wrists in the bathtub. Guilt, I guess. He left a while later. Ever since, no one’s been able to stay. There’s been other accidents you know. Not all as bad as this one but things happen. She takes it out on everyone who tries to live there, her guilt, her anger, her desperation. The landlord shouldn’t rent it. She won’t let anyone live in peace.”

Jung had thanked the woman for her time and politely excused himself. He had dismissed the story. He had checked and though it was true, it seemed in poor taste to dredge up the old tragedy and tack it onto this new accident for the sake of community gossip.

Still, it seemed odd about two necks broken. And there were other accidents. Jung shook his head to clear away the macabre thoughts, determined not to let a story give him the creeps about his work. Officially speaking, the young man’s death was the result of an unfortunate accident.

It is also true, unofficially, that when Jung removed the police tape from the apartment door he had been startled by the appearance of a woman’s face in the darkened glass of the big front window.
The Apartment ~ Part 2

October 24th, 2023

Rumours and whispers cling like cobwebs to old houses. These homes collect the stories of people’s lives and sweep them into the corners. They become creatures of dark and shadow, disappearing in sunlight. They can be swept away for a time but will always come creeping back. He had heard the whispers of the neighbours. He tried not to listen to rumours, but he couldn’t ignore the looks he got, he couldn’t ignore it when the woman downstairs had met him in the hall one day and asked how he was doing. He couldn’t ignore that while he was answering she appeared to be looking beyond him into the open door of his apartment, like she expected to see something.

It has started small enough.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Just a branch the wind was blowing up against the side of the house or even his bedroom window. Tap. Tap. Tap. No, it was coming from inside somewhere. Tap. Tap. Tap. Maybe one of the neighbours had a space heater running? Tap. Tap. Tap. He couldn’t shake the fact that it really did sound like the knocking of human knuckles on the door down the hall. He didn’t sleep well at all anymore. There was always someone else in his dreams. A vaguely defined shape that leered at him out of the ether with a threatening presence.

It got worse as the other residents of the old house left for the holidays. The building seemed to turn inwards and he swore he could feel something looking at him. He felt like an intruder, he wasn’t wanted here and whatever wraith was grasping at him in his mind had crossed over into the waking world.

Crying. What had woken him was the sound of crying. It was muffled as if the person didn’t want to be heard, but unmistakable as a sound. Who could it be? The neighbours were gone but the noise seemed too close to be anything else. The room down the hall? A perverse wave of fear rolled up his spine and settled like a stone in his belly. Confused and drowsy, he staggered to his bedroom door. Softly pulling it open he stood in the doorway and listened. It definitely sounded like the room down the hall. With limited success he admonished himself for his childish fear of the dark and headed for this second doorway. As he touched the handle all the noises stopped and there was only the empty house and its darkened windows peering out into the night.

Still, he wanted to make a thorough search and turned the handle. Nothing. He opened the door to the tiny room. Nothing. Only the detritus from his move – boxes stuffed inside one another and crumpled newspaper on the floor. Some drunk girl, he thought. Just some drunk girl staggered home from her office Christmas party.

Comforted by this idea, he went back to bed.

It would have been easy to ignore that one night. But it happened again. And again. And again. And again, until it had happened every night for a week. Once again, he tried to chalk it up to stress. Work was no longer an adequate distraction. There was hardly anyone left in the office and the semi-deserted building felt alien. The cheap plastic holiday decorations seemed especially artificial and pitiful. Gradually, the shadows slithered into his mind. Asleep or awake they were always present as the finality of the winter darkness settled in.

Now he was sure he was seeing her -the spectral figure from his dreams had breached the gate. The first time had been not as an apparition but solid. He had been eating breakfast at the big front window when he’d glanced up into the blackness of the glass and she was there. Crying, as he had since learned she always did, but solid. More disturbing that her apparent reality was that she was looking at him. It had been so personal, like being a child called out in front of the class.

Soon he was catching glimpses of her in mirrors and the dimness of winter windows. He saw her pale face and heard her hideous whimpering, as if in great pain. In her hands she tightly clutched a knitted blanket. The blanket has once been white but was now red and rusty with blood. It dripped and she wrung it in her trembling hands.

At first he thought he was hallucinating and wondered if he should see a doctor. Nothing like this ran in his family but you couldn’t be too careful. He could believe it was his imagination until he came home from work on his last day before the office closed for the holidays. For once he hadn’t been thinking of the tapping or the crying or the strange reflections. He was thinking of booking train tickets home.

He turned the key in the lock and entered his apartment. He kicked off his shoes and dropped his bag onto the floor. With a loud groan, he sank on to the sofa. He closed his eyes for a brief moment. Happy thoughts about seeing his family were interrupted when he began to notice a soft whimpering.

A cold chill clutched at him and fear knotted in his chest. There she was, plain as day, in the hallway leading to that tiny bedroom. Worse than the abhorrent sobbing was that she was looking right at him. Her dark eyes drilled into his very soul and he was paralyzed, neither being able to move or look away. Her sobbing became more intense and desperate until each cry convulsed her entire frame, the bloody blanket clenched to her breast.

She lurched towards him and sagged slightly as if the effort of her wailing had finally become too much. The hateful spectre seemed to pause momentarily. Any relief he felt at the stopping of her advance was dashed as she contorted and undulated forward. Her moaning rose to a howl and a cascade of blood erupted from her mouth. The macabre smell of decay accompanied by the metallic tang of the blood filled his nostrils.

Shrieking, he scrambled for the door. His foot caught the strap of his messenger bag. As he fell, his head cracked loudly on an end table and he blackness overtook him. When he woke, the room was dark with only dim light from the streetlamps peeking in.

He roused himself shakily from the floor and considered phoning the police but was at a loss as to explain himself. The was woman gone, as she always was. The only ghastly souvenir that remained was a small pool of blood at the entrance to the hallway. It wasn’t equal to the tidal wave he had witnessed but it was enough for him to believe that he hadn’t experienced a hallucination or a stress-induced breakdown. Gingerly, he put a hand to his head. It was swollen and painful, but his fingers came away clean and he felt that any damage was minimal.
The Apartment ~ Part 1

October 19th, 2023

Part One

The apartment was small but bright and as clean as a shoddy Victorian can realistically expect to be. The houses, once grand homes of the genteel dynasties, were now shabby hodgepodges of faded opulence. They had all been cut into labyrinths of bric-a-brac suites now more commonly used by students, people on fixed incomes, and young professionals who were sure that such dingy accommodations were only temporary.

The new renter fell into the latter category. He had just taken a job in the city. He felt it was the start of a real career and was certain that he would soon be moving on to better things. It was a lucky break – not many people found such opportunities straight out of college. He had been resigned to the experiences more common to his generation. Floundering around from one low-paying contract to another and collecting side hustles to make rent. Low wages and high rents were crippling a lot of his friends. He had been lucky. A family connection had got him in at the company of his father’s friend. The job had necessitated a quick move but the promise of a better start than he had rights to was more than enough to put up with such a small inconvenience.

He had had difficulty finding a place on such short notice and so close to the holiday season. University kids usually snapped up anything remotely affordable. The renter was grateful for coming across a small ad online. Spacious two bedroom available. Close to transit. Available immediately. The ‘spacious’ part had been a lie, but he’d expected that when he reached out to the landlord. A ready deposit had been enough to secure the apartment. The landlord had muttered about stupid kids who couldn’t handle the city and leaving without notice.

Move-in day had been easy. He didn’t have much stuff, just his student furniture. The downstairs neighbour had been nosy, asking endless questions. About him, his job, his family, his hometown. He had given short, polite responses in between slinging boxes. She was an older woman, short and roly-poly. Her wispy hair was dyed a startling shade of red and clashed jarringly with a Barbie pink cardigan embroidered with snowflakes and more tiny sequins that were within the bounds of taste. She had persisted in being ‘neighbourly’ for a half-hour or so until it was obvious that the new renter wasn’t interested in talking, which was practically a crime in her book. Somewhat huffily, she traipsed back down to her apartment on the second floor. He didn’t pay much attention until she stopped at the bottom of the landing. She looked at him and with a slightly pompous air and remarked that she hoped “he stuck around. No one stays long in the attic apartment. Not with all the weird things that happen.”

He didn’t thing anything of it. Surely it was just the parting shot of a disgruntled pensioner, upset that the younger generation had no respect for her. He had seen it before. It was the default setting of a certain kind retiree. The kind that spent most of their time on the porch noticing or at least trying to notice, everything that went on in their patch of the world and yelling at dog walkers that got too close to the begonias. They spent their winters ‘down south’ in mysterious places like Ft. Lauderdale, Florida where news stories about men harassing fast food workers with live alligators are what break up the monotony of playing bridge while wearing polyester elastic pants, waiting around to die, and complaining that their kids never call.

He continued to not think anything of it in the coming days, he was busy with his new job and with unpacking. The few times he’d seen her in the hallways they had exchanged hellos. Gradually he established a routine in his new place and began to feel at ease.

One morning while sitting by the big front window, the first odd thing happened. He’d seen a group of kids across the street. They seemed caught up with all the exuberance that children feel with the winter break fast approaching, running and laughing and kicking chunks of ice like footballs down the street. Once boy had caught sight of the light in the uppermost window of the old house. He shouted to his friends and pointed. The renter realized that his presence had a mild sensation amongst the group of kids. More points followed as the cheerful laughter was abrupted silenced and replaced with hurried murmurs. He thought this was a little weird and waved to them, thinking that they were just surprised at how quickly the old tenant was replaced.

The effect was immediate. Instead of returning the wave, the group of kids took off running. There had been other things since. People in the street were always polite but seemed to look at him with assessing gazes, like they were trying to puzzle something out. A few times someone had started to tell him something only to abruptly stop and change the subject. When he’d pressed them to continue, they were dismissive of what they called old rumours and gossip.

He began to notice odd little things. His keys would go missing only to turn up later in strange places. Once he had even found them inside the fridge. His sleep was no longer restful, his dreams plagued by a soft whisper and a feeling of dread, being trapped. Several times he was sure he’d seen a shadow in the darkened corner of his bedroom. Most disturbingly at night when he was drifting confusedly between the waking world and his troubled dreams, he thought he heard noises in the tiny room down the hall. Sometimes it sounded like a sort of quiet singing. Sometimes he swore he could hear a baby wail.

Exhausted and frustrated, he threw himself into his work. He put his experiences down to the stress and uncertainty of both the move and the pressure at his job. It would be a short time later that the renter’s experiences crossed the line from odd but possibly explainable, to downright uncanny and foreboding.

Category: The Apartment

The Apartment ~ Part 3

The Apartment ~ Part 2

The Apartment ~ Part 1