Apartment 16

EIGHT

Three other passengers on the bus were aware of him talking to himself. They pretended to be unmoved by his muttering presence. Embarrassed by the realization that his inner voice had become audible, Seth stopped whispering and looked out of the bus window instead, peering down to the street to keep his mind distracted from its inward meanderings.
What was happening to him? It was hard to say. Hard to remember what he was like before this. The normal business of humanity had begun to appear strange to him. Alien. He wondered if he was more enlightened now, or just losing his mind.
The entire front of his face burned and the skin was tender. In his joints, any movement created a painful grinding of the ball in the socket. Every muscle felt like it was being assaulted by a yellow acid that responded angrily to exertion. A pulsing headache forced his eyes into a squint or closed them entirely near strong light. And the further he travelled from his room the worse he felt.
Below in the street the beggars sat, their legs under dirty white blankets on the cold pavement; but at least they seemed capable of salvation, of a second chance, when he had finally been consigned to an incurable demise, a disintegration both physical and mental. That’s what it felt like. A long and tangled series of disappointments, habits, unfortunate choices and periods of introspection had brought him to this.
He couldn’t stop his thoughts now; they raged and changed direction and reappeared unexpectedly like a bush fire. And it was as if the last vestige of his former self only survived to impotently monitor the transformation.
Furious with himself, he tried to fathom why he had left the Green Man. Fever had prevented him from getting more than a few hours of fitful rest between his shifts at Barrington House. And every time he woke during the day, he’d found his sick, sweating body had turned the bed into a cold swamp, while the sunlight filtering through the thin curtains of his room seared his eyes and made him groan and then cry out with a pillow held over his face. If he kicked the blankets off for relief from the heat, he would quickly freeze and be forced to pull the damp bed linen back over his cramped body. Eventually, he’d risen at three in the afternoon to gulp water and swallow painkillers. Perhaps then, some deluded sense of duty, some sad parody of a Protestant work ethic, had obliged him to dress and leave his room for work.
But it was something more than that. He felt almost compelled to go back. As if some important business connected to his bizarre dreams and Mrs Roth was to be concluded. Or maybe his judgement was now so impaired that he couldn’t account for his actions at all. It was possible.
After alighting from the bus, he trudged from Hyde Park Corner to Lowndes Square. Sweat covered his forehead and re-soaked the back of his shirt and jumper. There was so much cloudy liquid leaking out of his pores even the lining of his overcoat was sodden by the time he pulled himself up the back stairs of the building. Each footstep hurt his head and jarred his lower back; his breathing was ragged and painful in his hot lungs, yet still he smoked himself nauseous.
‘Ahh,’ he said, and put his hands over his hot ears when Piotr appeared.
‘Today, you would not believe what happened. There will be the big trouble. The Jorge was out driving when he should have been here. I cannot be responsible for the building with him gone so long . . .’
Seth ducked into the stairwell and fled down to the staffroom, clutching his head and the fragile swollen cargo inside. Meningitis. Maybe the tissues of his mind were inflamed and pressing against the inner walls of his skull. Piotr’s voice chased him down the stairs: ‘And he get paid for this driving. When it say in our contract that we cannot maker the money outsider the building. It is not fair. Why is he allowed . . .’
He could die in that chair behind the semicircular desk tonight. Maybe the dreams were the prelude to a coma. Yes, he’d driven his mind to the point of extinction; slowly unravelled himself until he realized there was no point to his existence, so nature was kicking in to relieve the species of a burden. He giggled and then sniffed.
In the staffroom Seth stripped down to his pants and socks and washed his body with cold water from the sink. Using paper towels he then dried himself under his arms, around his neck and in the small of his back. By the time he’d dressed in his uniform – grey polyester trousers, a synthetic white shirt, a pullover, tie, and navy blue blazer – his body was slick with sweat again.
He turned the lights off and lay on the small couch beside the water cooler. Sipping a hot lemon drink full of paracetamol, he waited for his shift to begin.
Over the next few hours his illness allowed him to do nothing but exist inside it. He rocked back and forth in his chair with a hot face clasped in both hands. The bright lights of reception burned his eyes and the gurgling radiators threatened to desiccate his body. Covered in his overcoat, he passed in and out of consciousness.
But just after midnight, Seth became aware of a presence in the communal areas of the building. As if locked in with him for the night, someone seemed to be out there, flitting between floors, pointlessly running up and down the stairwells and taking short, inconclusive rides in the lifts. Like a bored, restless child might do after gaining access to a private building.
Half an hour later, he struggled from his chair to investigate the most recent noise close to his desk: a swish of clothing and the bumping of quick tiny feet. Most of what he had heard when half asleep seemed too distant to be of pressing concern, occurring far off and upstairs. But the most recent sounds raced across reception and past his desk until a creak and whump of the fire doors leading to the west block staircase brought the commotion to an end.
Pursuing the noise into the stairwell, he heard the faint sound of running feet retreat up one floor, and then stop. He went up to investigate.
The flats on both the first and second floors of the west wing were empty. One apartment was for sale, and the tenants of the others were overseas, so there should have been no one up there for any reason he could think of. It now appeared that somebody was.
Allowances had to be made for the presence: wind moving through the air risers; a maid or a nurse from the upper floors – there were two he knew of – wandering about to smoke a cigarette or to make a call from a mobile phone; or maybe it was a resident coming downstairs only to find they had forgotten a wallet and returning to their apartment.
Above him, at the foot of the next staircase, a light in the ceiling flickered. But everything else was the same as it always had been at this time of night. Or was it? There was a smell. Again. Faint, but undeniably present, and growing stronger the further he investigated. Walking around the corridor and sniffing, he noticed a trace of sulphur in the hall. It was as if someone had not long struck a match. A hint of smoke, too, in the way it clung to the clothes of one recently in the presence of a bonfire. And something else: a cooking odour. Yes, a kind of chargrilled, meaty smell like roasting animal fat. The same thing he’d smelled up by flat sixteen last night. ‘What the f*ck?’
In front of each door he passed on his ascent Seth sniffed at the letter flaps to determine whether anyone was inside the apartments cooking meat. But the odours were stronger in the middle of each of the landings and virtually nonexistent near the apartment doors. It was as if someone passing through the building was leaving a scent.
The stairwell above had fallen silent, and lacking the strength to go any higher he walked back down to the ground floor and sat behind his desk. Unable to keep his eyes open because of the painful pressure behind his face, he closed them. And fell into a deep sleep.
A glance at the clock told him that it was shortly after half past one when the disturbance began again. This time it was more insistent. From behind his desk he heard the west block lift click, groan and whirr into life. Up it ascended, through the dark shaft to the higher floors.
Someone had summoned it from above. Seth glanced at the metal panel beneath the lip of the desk. A red light moved behind the digits until it showed that the lift had stopped at the eighth floor of the west wing. Flat seventeen had been empty for four months, since Mr and Mrs Howard-Broderick had moved to their apartment in New York. Flat sixteen, he knew well enough, had been empty for half a century.
From his chair he watched the illuminated panel. Observed the lift descend. Floor by floor, from the eighth down towards the ground floor. His floor. Right where he was waiting.
With a hydraulic wheeze the lift slowed, then settled with a clunk on the ground floor. The door remained shut.
Gingerly, Seth moved out from behind his desk and walked across reception. He peered through the little window in the outer door of the lift. And saw nothing but the mirrored rear wall. Anxious the inner doors might suddenly slide apart as he peered through the little glass square, he stepped back and pressed the button to open the door.
The carriage was empty. He saw nothing more than his own pale face peering back from the mirrored interior. He sniffed and winced. Once again he could smell smoke and burnt fat, pungent inside the lift, even worse than it had been in the stairwell.
He closed the outer door and shut his eyes. The brief exertion had worn him out. He was too ill to care about a bad smell and a faulty lift. The virus had returned with vigour and these scant movements felt like they had nearly killed him. He was barely able to stand, and clung to the railing as he staggered down to the staffroom to gulp chilled water from the cooler.
But relief was still some way off. After he returned to the desk and slumped into the leather chair it was as if the nocturnal disturbances were only just beginning.
At two in the morning, for the second time that night, the lift in the west wing clanged to a halt on the ground floor. But this time it wasn’t empty.
Dizzy and blinking, Seth stood up and leant on the desk with his elbows. Squinting through a migraine that travelled through his head in waves, he saw something crawl out of the lift carriage on a number of legs he couldn’t count. Only as it scuttled near to his desk did he recognize the shrunken face of the thing to be that of Mrs Shafer.
Covered in a vast silken kimono, the bulk of her body traversed the carpet with a surprising swiftness. The sack-like head rested on the tabletop of her back, dwarfing her shoulders. Clumsily pinned under a tapestry of scarves, her hair was wet. Tendrils of it glistened on her forehead and temples where a few pins had dislodged. ‘How many times do we have to ask before the job is done properly?’ Her voice was on the verge of a scream. ‘They’ve been on the roof time and time again, and still we can’t get a picture. Are these men not trained?’
She’d made this complaint before. Behind her on the carpet a slug trail of moisture leaked from her abdomen. It reeked of meat gone bad in a rubber bag.
‘My husband,’ she said to Seth, who held a hand across his mouth to withstand the stench, ‘is a very important man. He must see the financial news. He doesn’t just sit around on his fanny all night.’ A small front leg waved in the air to add emphasis. There was a tiny human hand on the end of the thin limb. ‘I want Stephen, now!’ Seth backed away from the edge of his desk.
Swinging the bag of her head around on an oily neck, she then shrieked, ‘And who might you be?’ She was addressing the hooded boy who stood and watched Seth from the main doors of the reception area.
‘I told you, didn’t I? That you were gonna see fings the way they really are,’ he said to Seth, ignoring Mrs Shafer, who raced back across the floor of reception shrieking for the head porter, until her bulbous body finally stuffed itself back inside the lift. When Seth glanced over to the front doors the hooded boy had vanished. The entire foyer was empty and silent again save for the humming of the wall lights. And the smell of burnt meat.
Seth stepped out from behind his desk. He checked the carpet for Mrs Shafer’s stains. There were none. He thought he was going to cry. When he sat back down, the desk and security monitors seemed somehow larger, looming over him and coming closer until they held him in a corner. Then the front doors of the building retreated into the far distance, as if he were looking at them through the wrong end of a telescope.
Seth shut his eyes and pulled his coat over his head until his breath turned wet against his face. After taking his shoes off he sat on the floor behind the desk and curled his body under the coat.
‘We need help,’ an elderly voice said. ‘Please come with me.’ It was Mr Shafer who woke Seth. But he was not as Seth had ever seen him before.
Naked, Mr Shafer tottered beside the desk on his long, bony feet. All of his toenails were yellow and cracked. His limbs were wizened and his ribs pushed against the thin bluish skin of his torso. Hook-nosed and unshaven, his grey head appeared too big for the spindly neck to support. Below the hollow pelvis, Seth looked at the stub of genitals and the shrunken sack and then looked away. Such was the state of his emaciation it seemed impossible that he could still be alive.
‘Can you come up please?’ Mr Shafer said, politely, a tone that usually served as an antidote to his wife’s shrieking.
Obeying instinct, Seth stood up and walked around his desk until he towered over the shrunken old man. Like a child, Mr Shafer held Seth’s elbow with his long fingers. There was no strength in his touch.
So slowly, it was as if Mr Shafer were walking on a tightrope, Seth led him to the lift. And stared at the enormous hump deforming the elderly resident’s back and shoulders. Under the taut skin, a vast network of gristle and black vein had grown to a hillock. It disgusted Seth, but he felt an urge to touch it and see if it was hard.
‘What’s wrong?’ he said, and felt immediately foolish for asking such a question, when Mr Shafer had come down to reception naked and his wife was a grotesque arachnid. But Mr Shafer said little more apart from mumbling about it being ‘the right time’.
As soon as they entered the Shafers’ apartment on the sixth floor, Seth covered his mouth and nose with the sleeve of his blazer. But that did little to keep out the stench. Scores of bin bags were piled up against the walls of the long corridor that ran the length of the rectangular apartment. Each sack had been labelled with a yellow sticker that read ‘Medical Waste’.
All of the doors to all of the rooms branching off the hallway were open. A brownish gloom filled every room, as if the smell was visible. Each was filled with more of the plastic bags, and with piles of newspapers and magazines, plates encrusted with dried food, and crumpled clothes; it was as if nothing had ever been discarded from their long and miserable occupation of the suite. Under his feet the carpet was moist and covered in whitish stains.
There was no sign of the nurse. ‘Where is your wife?’ Seth said in a tense whisper.
Mr Shafer lifted the chicken bone of his forearm and pointed forward, to the living room at the end of the corridor.
‘Your nurse?’ he repeated, desperate to keep control of his voice. ‘You have a nurse.’
‘She was no good,’ Mr Shafer said and blinked his milky eyes. ‘Your help will be sufficient.’
‘What can I do? Is it the television again?’
Mr Shafer cut him off with a shake of his grizzled head. ‘It will be fine.’ His voice changed to something Seth found unpleasant; there was a wheedling aspect to his tone and something sly about his smile. Of more concern, as they neared the shadowy living room, old Shafer began to make a sighing sound that seemed sexual, and his limping sped up so his head began to dramatically bob up and down next to Seth’s shoulder. Around his elbow the bony fingers tightened their grip.
At the mouth of the living room Seth thought he might be sick. In the far corner of the room he could see Mrs Shafer. She was on her knees, head down, with her great back towards them. Still covered in the dirty gown, she turned her face to them as they entered and then raised her broad buttocks. The slight movement seemed to push a fresh gust of putrefaction across the room and right down Seth’s throat.
Mr Shafer released Seth’s arm and began to excitedly stumble about the floor of the living room. Ungainly, he looked like the skeleton of a dead child taking its first unholy steps around a crypt; a child with one leg shorter than the other.
Mrs Shafer watched Seth closely; her tiny red eyes were fierce in their disapproval, but also expectant. ‘Are you capable of helping this dear man with his medication?’
Mr Shafer pranced on his bird legs to a cardboard box with Chinese writing on the side and a large inky stamp to show it had been through Customs. From out of the box his needle fingers pulled a length of rubber hose and an old glass syringe with large metal hoops for the injector’s fingers. He dropped them on the dirty floor and then rummaged in a second box. Polystyrene packaging spilled over the lid and fell about his gnarly feet. He pulled a jar out but the weight of the object seemed ready to pull him over and onto his face.
‘Why, help him!’ Mrs Shafer roared.
Seth broke from his appalled trance and moved to Mr Shafer’s aid. He took the glass jar from the old man. It was dusty and filled with a yellowy fluid. Preserved in the serum and crammed against the side of the glass, Seth could see a soft shape the colour of a kidney. When it moved and opened a little black eye he dropped the jar.
‘Be careful!’ Mrs Shafer screamed. Her husband fell to his knees and began scrabbling near Seth’s shoes, clawing at the glass container. A rubber tourniquet was already tied around one wasted thigh.
‘The treatment is more expensive than you could imagine, and we don’t have much left! Are you an idiot? Can’t you do anything right?’ Mrs Shafer demanded, her voice trembling with hysteria. ‘We pay your wages. This is not much to ask.’
Mr Shafer sat on the floor with the jar between his legs. Hastily, he stabbed at the metal lid with the end of the syringe. His head began to wobble from some kind of palsy, and either his face was screwed into a smile or the man was on the verge of tears.
Inside the jar, the small creature began to move in a series of contractions that appeared defensive. But the activity behind the smoky glass only served to excite Mr Shafer even more and he stabbed at the lid with a greater vigour. A strand of saliva hung from his chin and swung like a pendulum from the energy of his efforts. When his clumsy attack on the metal lid eventually created a puncture, something hissed from inside the jar. It could have been air escaping, but Seth thought it sounded like a tiny scream.
‘You’re hopeless,’ Mrs Shafer said to Seth with exasperation in her voice.
When Mr Shafer finally pushed the needle of his syringe deep inside the jar, Seth stood back and put his hand over his mouth. Yellow fluid sprouted from the metal lid and ran down the side of the glass. Seth wanted to believe what he then heard was a sudden wheeze of excitement from the old man, but he knew it had actually been a rasp of pain from the thing inside the jar.
Whatever fluid was then withdrawn into the syringe Mr Shafer wasted no time injecting into his groin. Seth looked away.
‘Is that good, darling?’ Mrs Shafer called out to her husband. ‘Is it working?’ And then added to Seth, ‘We ordered boys. They usually cheat us with girls. But these are definitely boys.’
‘I think it’s better,’ Mr Shafer mumbled, but seemed at once unsure and confused.
It was not the response Mrs Shafer wanted. Her face coloured and her great body began to shake under the kimono. ‘I said to you we should never have swapped brands.’ Then she turned her outraged face to Seth as if for his support in an argument. ‘He will not listen to me. Spending a fortune on this rubbish. It has to come all the way from China. Romania was closer, and from their stock at least we got results!’
Mr Shafer looked dejected and more tired than ever. ‘I didn’t like the last company. I told you. They were crooks.’
‘Everyone is a crook!’ she screamed. ‘And now what is to become of me? You’ve known for months this is my time.’
Mr Shafer lifted his skull and grinned at Seth. ‘He can do it.’
This seemed to placate his wife. ‘Well, don’t just stand there,’ she said to Seth.
‘What?’ he said.
Mr Shafer shook his head. ‘Another idiot. Not a bright man, are you?’
‘You could get a monkey to sit behind that desk downstairs,’ his wife added. They both laughed together, enjoying their first moment of agreement in what seemed like a long time.
Mr Shafer stood up and pressed a coin into Seth’s hand. ‘Here. This might help.’ Seth opened his hand. There was a ten-pence piece in his palm.
‘Now you see,’ Mrs Shafer said. ‘That’s what it takes. How did I guess? This is a service we have already paid for. You have no right to expect a tip.’
Seth tried to pull away from Mr Shafer. ‘What are you doing?’ The old man’s fingers had suddenly become busy as knitting needles about Seth’s belt buckle.
‘Please. No. I don’t want to.’
‘It’s not like it’s much to ask. Do you think Stephen would be pleased to hear about this?’ Mrs Shafer said from the corner.
Seth swatted Mr Shafer’s insistent fingers away from his crotch. His attentions seized by what Mrs Shafer did next, he took a step away. ‘Oh God, no.’ In the corner, she’d pushed her abdomen higher in the air and drew the kimono slowly from her rear in a parody of seductiveness. Revealed for the moment Seth could bear to look at it was a wet slit with grey lips and pinkish insides, opened in the middle of her hirsute backside.
‘Well?’ she then shrieked at him.
‘Be careful, Seth!’ a voice called from behind.
The hooded boy stood in the doorway of the living room.
‘Who is he?’ Mrs Shafer screamed, pulling her great skirt down and mercifully concealing the fleshy eye.
‘What is the meaning of this?’ Mr Shafer asked Seth. His eyes had become squinty and his mouth stretched into a mean suture.
‘But what can I do?’ Seth asked the hooded boy. His words quivered and his jaw started to tremble.
‘You got to do ’em. They deserve it.’
‘Call Stephen!’ Mrs Shafer screeched at her husband.
‘I intend to,’ her husband replied, and staggered across to a phone on top of a stack of medical catalogues.
‘How?’ Seth asked the hooded boy. Never had he felt so weak and useless. ‘I can’t.’
‘You have to. They had it comin’ a long time. They knows it.’
Seth gritted his teeth and felt the comforting glow of anger replace his panic and fear. Soon, a great molten power coursed through his every limb. Mrs Shafer could sense it. ‘Hurry, dear,’ she said to her husband. ‘I think he’s unstable.’
The old man groaned under the weight of the handset. He squinted at the keypad and one of his fingers hovered above the buttons. Seth walked across to him and seized the phone. The old man held on. ‘How dare you?’ he said. And then, ‘Let go or you’ll be very sorry.’ Seth pushed him away.
Immediately, the old man collapsed on the dirty carpet and began to moan. The phone fell after him, down and into the petrified deformity of bone and parchment skin to crack against his skull.
‘Now you’ve done it!’ Mrs Shafer shouted, before she began to scream. The noise was hideous and deafening.
Seth looked at the hooded boy. Who nodded.
Seizing the brass stem of a lamp stand from behind the wreckage of a dozen cardboard boxes, Seth pulled the whole thing free of the floor and wall. The electric cord snapped from the base and left the plug in the socket. He strode towards the corner of the living room where the bulk that was Mrs Shafer trembled. She stopped her screaming to ask him, ‘Have you lost your mind?’
‘I hope so.’ He brought the heavy base of the lamp down against her upturned face.
‘Oh,’ she said, in a daze after the thunk of antique walnut and metal against her tiny features. Then she sat up and tried to regain her dignity. She wiped a strand of bloodied hair from off her forehead and pouted her lips as if to apply lipstick.
Seth brought the lamp down even harder. Like wielding a pickaxe, every muscle and tendon in his back and arms went into the second blow.
‘That’s it,’ the hooded boy said from behind, his words partly obscuring the crunch of skull.
Seth laughed to prevent himself from falling to his knees and weeping. Mrs Shafer stopped talking but her lips still moved. He brought the lamp stand down again and again and again against her face, hoping the great body would stop trembling under the kimono. It didn’t seem ready to stop so he slammed the base of the lamp into her abdomen. After the second strike against her distended belly he heard something tear under the kimono and her entire body appeared to soften and finally relax.
‘My wife. My wife. My wife,’ Mr Shafer cried out in a weak voice from the floor, where he lay tangled in his own disability.
‘Don’t feel sorry for him,’ the hooded boy advised Seth. ‘They’ll all feel sorry for themselves at the end, but they had this comin’.’
Seth nodded in agreement and walked across the carpet to finish Mr Shafer off. Under his feet something squelched. It was fluid seeping from under Mrs Shafer’s kimono.
‘It’s not that hard once you start,’ Seth said in amazement to the hooded boy. ‘You just lose your temper and go all hot.’
‘That’s right.’
‘But what amazes me most is that they’re nothing. In the end, they mean nothing.’
The hooded boy nodded excitedly.
Seth brought the lamp stand down into the middle of Mr Shafer’s body. It was as if a giant metal foot had trodden upon dry twigs on a forest floor.
‘There’s another fing you need to see tonight, Seth. I’s been told to show you,’ the hooded boy said.
‘No, please. Not in here.’ Seth stood outside apartment sixteen. The teak veneer shone like gold, and from beneath the heavy door a reddish glow dispersed across the green carpet of the landing. From within the flat he sensed a resolution to a journey that filled his body with panic. And with it came the far-off sound of something he’d heard before but could not place. Voices. Swirling about. Rotating, but going backwards like a record. Faint, like the sound of crying children inside a distant house, heard on a winter’s afternoon, just as the sun is dying into dark clouds. Forlorn. And fast becoming a much bigger chorus. Inside the apartment but elsewhere. Above him.
His body rigid with fear, he tried to step away, but the door just moved closer.
‘You have to,’ the hooded boy said. ‘He wants to show you all them other ones, them down there that can’t get out. They’s all waiting. He’s got it open just for you, mate.’
Twisting and pushing his limbs against the heavy thickness of air that swelled against his back and threatened to topple him forward, Seth tried to resist. He knew instinctively that if he were to cross the threshold of this place something terrible would happen. He would be forced to confront something that could stop his heart with a bang.
And then they were standing in a red hallway on the other side of the door he never saw open. Side by side. Him and the boy that smelled of burnt flesh, of exhausted gunpowder and singed cardboard. A smell that filled his nostrils and seared the back of his throat. Made it difficult to breathe, while the circling sound of the chattering crowd moved closer like a playground full of terror. It was coming from further down the reddish hallway, as if a room behind one of these heavy doors contained a whirlpooling violence of air in which so many people were caught up and dragged backwards, around and around, until they were too dizzy to do anything but scream.
Already he could sense himself falling a long way down if he opened the wrong door. So far down into that sound and at such great speed.
The boy stood behind him. ‘Go on, Seth.’
The hooded presence pushed Seth forward. His legs were numb, his feet beset by pins and needles. His jaw seized up and he struggled to breathe. But down the hallway and across the black and white squares of marble he went. Beneath the old glass lamps that threw out the dirty light that never reached the ceiling which he couldn’t see, and that was too dim to illumine much of the reddish walls. Ox-blood red around the big pictures in the gilt frames. Heavy gold frames, acting like the frames of windows beyond which existence had stopped while the void moved.
The void. Absorbing his stare. Pulling it from his body, leaving the rest of his face behind. Tugging it towards the flat darkness of the pictures. Paintings of an absence that made him feel both cold and afraid of heights at the same time, as if he could fall through into it.
But if he stared long enough at the darkness inside any of the frames, things could be seen. Ever so faintly, emerging like pale fish from still, lightless and forgotten waters.
Here and there he began to think he could see things moving quickly. A flash of grey bone. A smudge of face looking back over a shoulder. Teeth yellow and chattery. Then gone. Or was it just a trick of the faint light that distorted any real sense of shape among the swirls of paint?
But as he passed the largest rectangular frame he was sure he saw the wet brick walls of a shaft descending away from the picture frame. And within the tunnel the pallid silhouette of something turned and scurried away, but backwards.
Gradually, as he passed more of the large, dark backgrounds in the picture frames, new shapes emerged and took more definite form. And the paintings began to resemble distant unlit rooms. Inside them he caught sight of things huddled and twisted. The faces were covered or turned away from the light. Other frames issued impressions of fleshy presences, whose mottled skin was like discarded clothing, empty of the rigidity supplied by muscle and bone but still moving. Moving against thin pins that nailed the flayed opacity to walls stained with rust or rot.
And then he too was moving forward. Pushed onward against his will, flitting past the occupants of so many dark rooms within the frames he passed. Wanting to look straight ahead, or at his feet, at anything but the terrible walls and what hung upon them, he wrestled with his neck to stop his head whipping from side to side. But he still caught glimpses of things at the edge of his vision, or up ahead in other picture frames, as his eyes stubbornly refused to obey his will. He clenched his jaw to stop himself screaming at the tangled things, gnawed to the bone. The torn things. Fragments of fleshiness ripped like cloth. Sometimes a smudged whitish face, caught in the act of a scream, hung in space. Until, on either side of the walls, a terrible momentum gathered. As if a call had gone out and summoned the subjects of the portraits to gather for an audience.
Dim faces, transformed by animal features, soon pressed outward from the darkness. Limbs dangled with an increasing frequency. All obscured by the poor light as if a full revelation would be too much of a shock, even in a dream. But the women still tried to show him their dirty teeth. And the men, tied in knots, revealed a rapture of pain so great it made their shrieking faces turn blue and disintegrate around the edges.
And then he was inside another room off the middle of the corridor where the swirling sound was at its loudest. He had to cover his eyes and crouch down, to make himself small, where he shivered against the cold air that swooped about his body. Air that carried a hundred voices all telling a frantic story.
Against the wall. Against the wall. Smash it against the wall.
I can’t. I won’t. He said he’d come back. Wait here. I know it’s cold, but wait here, love.
Stamp on it. Break it.
Seth peeked through his fingers, terrified but compelled to see who was speaking and shouting and screaming all about him.
Bleached faces groaned but kept their eyes closed. They rose and faded on the dark walls.
I coughed it up. Coughed up my heart.
Was that an ape? The thing with the hair around the mouth?
I fink he’s coming. Fink he’s coming down. There’ll be hell to pay now.
Could an old woman have such teeth?
Excuse me. Please. Excuse me. I think I fell down.
He saw three baby-things with big heads and doll bodies hanging against some wet bricks in a sewer.
Are you all asleep? I’m sorry, but are you all asleep? I need the doctor. But the door is locked. I’m sorry to wake you, but they turned all the lights off.
The walls were paint. The ceilings were paint. It was still wet. Reddish but dark, like blood or moist rust.
He turned to look at a black beak that said, Blood. It’s in the blood, but it vanished and he watched hind legs kick away into the liquid shadows.
Oh Jesus Christ.
There were no angles where the walls ended and the ceiling began. What had been a room was now just a space.
To his left, at head height, four women turned about on their hands and knees. All of their joints were in the wrong places. Teeth and hair grew in clumps from out of the grey and pink flesh of their bodies.
Hello? Is somebody there? Who are you? Please help me.
In between a procession of bluish bony things that dragged themselves through the darkness in a circle, round and round at the edge of the room, up near where the ceiling should have been, following each other’s paralysed legs and useless hooves, and beyond the chitter-chattery teeth, clacking like the muzzles of wooden horses, was an intense blackness. It moved. Seethed.
Seth screamed and a terribly thin figure rushed at him on all fours, its wisps of hair wild in the freezing wind, but then suddenly fell away, or was yanked backwards, so that something else, inside a sackcloth bag, could struggle forward on its elbows, its eyeholes stitched shut, hissing and desperate to reach him but blind and unable to locate him.
Am I awake? Please. Can you tell me, am I awake?
Everything in here was suspended in a freezing ether. An eternity of living oil in which so many things drowned and resurfaced before being sucked back down again. The room had transformed into a terrible broth of liquid and gas in which these things were all stuck and barely aware of each other. Some crawled blindly and bumped into others they then challenged or screamed at, insane with fear. Others hung silent, or were pinned fast against the darkness momentarily, before fading back into the void once again. The roar of the wind was the roar of tens of thousands of voices. Vertigo tried to turn Seth’s stomach inside out when he realized he was but a pinprick in a seething that stretched forever.
He covered his eyes. Stood up and started to stagger about. To feel for the door he’d slipped through. There was no door. He had to peek between his fingers again, but it was so dark now he couldn’t even see his feet. And things were brushing against him in the moving air. Something like a tongue lapped between his fingers. A dry, bristly face pushed into his stomach. Was it speaking or gnawing? Thin fingers touched then pressed against his face. The tips were cold but urgent in their examination as if suddenly surprised to find him here in the darkness. A hand grabbed his thigh and squeezed. A woman screamed. A hide of scabs brushed the back of one hand. An awful sexual panting erupted behind him and he sensed the feverish motion of something wet and raw directed at him in the darkness.
Seth staggered towards where the walls had once been. He’d taken no more than a few steps when the temperature plummeted. His body froze. Shivering with a violence that made it hard to breathe, and even with his eyes closed, he sensed that he stood near the edge of a precipice. The floor of the room had become nothing but a small platform in a bottomless night. A darkness overcrowded with suffering and confusion and madness. And it was all crawling onto the platform with him as though the room were a solitary life raft in a freezing black sea.
He fell to the ground and clung to the floor, while the deformed and fragmented subjects of what he had mistaken for paintings in the hallway clambered over him.
It was the phone ringing that pulled him out of sleep with a cry. It was a strangled sound that suddenly disintegrated into an anguished sobbing, a noise he had never heard himself make before. And as the bright yellow light of the reception area burned into his wide eyes, and the solidity of the leather chair pressed against his back, his sobbing turned into panting.
Tears dried on his face. He coughed to clear his throat of mucus. His hands gripped the arms of the chair until they became bloodless, as if they were still obeying some command designed to prevent him from falling from a great height.
Seth looked about him, the sudden shock of consciousness sobering him from terror. The familiar world of security monitors, clipboards and ringing house phones reassembled around him and chased the vestiges of suffocating darkness out of his mind. The nightmare drained away, as, mercifully, did his waking notion that all he had just witnessed had been real.
He was ill. Really ill. He must be.
Someone wanted him. On the phone. Jesus, how long had it been ringing? What time was it? He swung about in his chair and yanked the receiver from the switchboard.
He cleared his throat and quickly and instinctively spoke into the phone. ‘Seth speaking.’
Bad line. But someone was speaking inside the crackles and static. ‘In here,’ he thought they said. Or was it ‘Down here’? It was a man’s voice, but not one he recognized. He looked at the switchboard. The red light was flashing for flat number sixteen.
Recalling bits of the dream, Seth dropped the phone.