Lobby
(Gatehouse Is Like That. We Check In But Never Check Out.)
Natalie Fisher saw it all as a blur and did not know how to react. She nodded a greeting to Barb and Bart as they entered the lobby. They sat where they always were, Bart with his fishing magazine, and Barb with her unread book. Then someone else shouted a greeting and Lucas introduced them, and it was here that things became strange.
Natalie couldn’t make them out in the gloom.
The lobby lights were insufficient, she had noticed this the first time she had entered the building. The first time she met Barb and Bart, it took her a moment or two to pick them out of the darkness.
It was the same with the newcomer. She had the impression of a person, but couldn’t make them out, leaving her with a police sketch of their appearance.
“This is Chaz Holder, from next door to you, in 106,” Lucas said affectionately. “He’s the one who always plays those awful martial arts movies.”
She heard what she thought was speech. She could not hear the words but felt the impression of them. It was a little like hearing something through water or having an ear infection that affected hearing.
She felt his hand shake her own. It felt like putting her hand through the mist created by opening a refrigerator on a hot day.
“Hiya,” the voice popped in, the water drained, “nice to meet you.”
“Wonderful to meet you too,” she replied.
Chaz Holder was a tall black man with skin like tanned leather. His eyes gleamed with childish glee, and Natalie could imagine him with a tub of popcorn and a bad movie in front of him.
Natalie smiled. It was genuine, and her initial unease had slipped away. Perhaps the stress of the move had taken more of a toll than she had believed. She had not been around people in some time, and it was possible that she had become a little overwhelmed.
“There,” Lucas pointed, leaning close to her, “by the door? That’s Poppy and Nikita from 201, sat beside them is Andrew Nash who is next to them in 202.”
It was darker at the far end of the room, the windows leading out into the world lit by the orange streetlamp, but the light had to filter through the foliage of a tree. What Natalie saw was three silhouettes. One slightly larger, and another with a large mane of hair through which the light shone.
Natalie waved and the smaller figure waved back.
Lucas was still standing close, he turned to look around the dimly lit room and gently collided with her. He smelt of soap that had a minty, medicinal fragrance.
“I can’t see Bobby,” he looked into her eyes briefly, “which is probably for the best. He’s our bad apple from 206.”
“Bad apple?” She asked.
“He’s not dangerous, I’d keep Matty away from him though. I don’t think he’d do anything bad, but like they say, you can turn your back on a man, but you can’t from a drug.”
“He’s an addict?”
“Yeah, but he’s scared of Chaz, and Chaz has told him that if he causes any trouble he’ll kick his butt,” Lucas smiled, “Bobby isn’t a bad lad, he’s just lost.”
“Aren’t we all?”
Lucas’ smile faltered, then came back, it was a flickering fluorescent of hope that made Natalie feel a little like a moth.
“Yeah, we are.”
Natalie looked around the room. The figures nearest the window were still in shadow, but she could see Chaz sitting beside Bart on the arm of the sofa. He was pointing to something in the other man’s magazine. Bart shook his head and pointed to something else. Across from them, Natalie saw Gail, Charlie’s mother, and they shared an uncertain smile of recognition.
“They care about each other,” Natalie said.
“No one else does,” replied Lucas, and Natalie was a little surprised at the venom in his voice. “Gatehouse is like that. We check in but never check out.”
He twitched and his sombre expression pulled into a smile.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean…”
“That’s okay. I understand,” Natalie replied, trying to reassure the man. “Have you lived here long?”
Lucas looked at her with an expression she found hard to read. It may have been a natural distrust, or his tendency to expect ridicule that stayed on his tongue. Whatever it was it was certainly an expression of deadly seriousness.
“I’ve been gone for a long time but, yes, I grew up here.”
“So, you have family here?”
Across from where they sat Chaz bellowed laughter, Bart smiling broadly at his humour. The laugh sounded strangely hollow as if they were in a cave.
“No,” Lucas said, “my family have been gone a long time.”
“They’ve,” she paused unsure if she should say it, then plunged on, “they’ve passed away?”
“Yep, my mother and sister went to meet Jesus when I was still a kid.”
“And your dad?”
“Oh,” he smiled coldly, “he’s in Hell for sure.”
“Sounds like another bad apple.”
“He was an orchard full.”
One of the shadows at the far end of the room laughed. It was a delicate sound, like a wind chime in the breeze. Natalie looked over and saw the mass of hair tossed back as its owner leaned back in her seat.
“As long as you fell far from that tree Lucas,” she answered turning back in time to see a look of pain flickered across his face.
The expression stung her. She hadn’t intended to hurt the man; she had just put no barriers between her thoughts and lips. It was a common problem and had sparked many an argument.
“Sorry,” she said, and she felt her arm twitch, wanting to touch his shoulder in solidarity. “I’m going to introduce myself to the girls. What were their names?”
“Poppy and Nikita, Poppy has the short hair. Andrew is sat with them.” Lucas answered, and though she couldn’t hear any recrimination in his voice, she felt it from him.
Natalie rose and touched his shoulder as she passed him. As he looked up at her the dim lights reflected in his eyes and they shone. There was no anger in those eyes, only muted pain, and it took some effort to pull her eyes away from them.
Lucas watched her as she left him and felt deflated by the act. No one could have been more surprised than he was at his reaction to Natalie Fisher. She was a laundry list of things he liked, and another list of things he found interesting.
“What are you looking at?”
Lucas tore his eyes from the woman and turned to the person who had spoken to him. He knew before he looked that it was Matthew. He was the only young boy in the building, and even if there had been multiple Lucas would have easily recognised the disapproval in the boy’s voice.
“Not a what, a who,” Lucas replied, surprising himself with the firmness in his voice, and was a little pleased with the sudden look of uncertainty in Matthew’s eyes. Lucas’ sudden retort had taken the wind out of the young boy’s sails. For a moment he floundered, and instead of replying he held out a small batch of folded papers.
Lucas took them without thinking and began to speak as he unfolded them.
“So, what do we have here…”
His words died in his throat, and his eyes darted back and forth between the papers and Matty so rapidly that it would have been comical if they were both not so deadly serious.
Lucas recognised them instantly.
His mother’s handwriting was instantly recognisable, but the language would have been nothing but arcane scrawls to anyone who had not studied it.
In his mind’s eye, he could see where the pages belonged in the battered diary that was left to him. Some pages began halfway through a sentence, while others showed no words and were filled with intricate renderings of symbols and signs.
He could see the ritual design for the first time. He had extrapolated what it must have been, retrofitting his studies on what was needed into what he thought might have happened. He thought he had a good idea of what had been done, but here it was. There was no guessing, no estimating, it was all here in faded black and discoloured white. Whatever doors had been opened or errors made were recorded for his appraisal.
Matty watched him, and though Lucas could see the boy’s eyes on him he could not rip his eyes away from the pages. He studied one, then carefully turned it over to see the reverse side before moving on to the next. When he was done, he returned to the first and began the process again.
The boy thought Lucas had become so absorbed in those papers he had forgotten about the world around him. He carefully read the small writing, then examined the drawings until he finished before doing it all again. It was as if he was trying to commit every line of writing and crease of paper to memory, and when he finally remembered Matty’s presence he was momentarily shocked by it.
“I…” Lucas said, and then his words dried up in his throat.
Matty glanced over to Charlie, who watched from the other side of the room. She sat beside her mother, who fussed over her almost as if she were a doll.
“I have something I have to do,” Lucas said as he stood.
Matty watched him leave. He turned left in the corridor that led towards his apartment and slipped out of sight.
Matty watched him leave. Lucas turned left in the corridor that led towards his apartment and slipped out of sight, leaving the boy dumbfounded.
Matty hadn’t known what to expect when he passed the pages onto the man, but he had expected something more than what he had received. Matty would have asked about the pages or where he had gotten them. A whole litany of whys and wheres would have spilt from his lips, but Lucas hadn’t seemed to care.
Had Matty expected Lucas to be pleased with him?
Perhaps Matty liked Lucas more than he was admitting to himself. This idea ran through his mind in a barely formed whisper, fleeting. It was a grown-up thought that belonged to someone older than his years. But Matty had seen more of the world than many had by his age, and he often discovered things about the world that would be alien to his peers.
If he had any.
He let his eyes wander over the room. It was dimly lit, and some corners had been plunged into darkness. Near the windows bleached shadows moved against the darkness outside. He recognised the shape of his mother standing with another woman with short hair. The other woman was laughing. Matty felt a sudden rush of cold air, and Charlie was beside him.
“What were those papers?” He asked.
“You’ll have to ask him.” She replied.
“Tell my mother where I am,” Matty said, and as he turned, he heard her whisper.
“Remind him of me.”
But when Matty turned back to her Charlie had already left his side.
Lucas had barely started his studies when the knock at the door interrupted them, he waited until the visitor had knocked three times before he decided to greet them, and he was not surprised that it was the boy who met him at the door.
Matty didn’t ask if he could come in, he just walked under the arm Lucas rested against the door surrounding without a word.
Lucas would have been irritated, but his mind was elsewhere.
When he turned to the boy, he saw that he was glancing through the bookcase, his brow furrowed with the complicated words that were etched into the dusty spines. Lucas watched him for a moment. The boy would raise his hand to trace the words, and his lips would move to enunciate them in silence. He then left the bookcase and moved to the desk. He glanced over to Lucas, who was still standing by the open door then pushed the loose diary pages around the table, placing them in neat rows.
“I’m supposed to ask you what these are.” He said.
Lucas hovered by the door. Behind him, he could hear the nearby chatter of the people assembled in the lobby. He pushed the door open the whole way and took a few steps closer to Matty.
“They’re just what they look like Matty,” he replied, “torn-out pages of a diary.”
“I tried writing a diary once. It wasn’t anything like this.”
“It was written by someone who was having a strange life.”
“Yeah,” Matty picked up one of the pages. On it was a pentagram, tiny notes were written around it, denoting where candles should be put. “Goats blood,” he glanced up, “does that say human blood there?”
“I think so.”
“Strange life,” Matty said, “yeah.”
Lucas moved from foot to foot. He looked like someone about to make for the door, but he was trying to decide on his next course of action. Flight or fight in motion, but there was another option.
He moved over to the bookcase and slipped his mother’s diary from its place on the top shelf. He opened it and placed it on the desk beside the pages that had been torn from it. Matty touched it gently, as if uncertain, then he turned it slightly and leaned closer to read its contents.
“My father was not a good man Matty, and sometimes I wonder about my mother too. She stayed with him, even when it was obvious things would end badly.”
Lucas paused, contemplating his use of the word ‘badly’. If ever there was an understatement that required elaboration, he had just made it.
“Before he killed her, she had collected everything she had experienced into that notebook, but by the time I had gotten hold of it pages were missing.”
“These pages?”
“Yeah, those pages.”
“So, who had ‘em?”
Lucas blinked, his eyelids fluttering as if he had short-circuited, in his haste to read them the enormity of that question had not occurred to him. He had been too consumed with holding them in his hands and filling the gaps in his knowledge that had eluded him for so many years.
“Yes, who had them,” Lucas repeated, “where did you find them?”
“Charlie gave them to me.”
“Who is Charlie? What does he look like?”
“Charlie’s a girl,” Matty said slowly, “she lives in 106.”
Lucas’ eyelid fluttered again rapidly, his brain reeling.
“No one lives in 106 Matty, it’s empty,” Lucas said, but the words came out slowly as if he was thinking of something else. “It’s always been empty.”
Always, even when he was a child.
Matty pointed towards the door, and Lucas glanced in the same direction, then back at the boy. What happened next was a cascade. Matty’s face fell slack in surprise, then bunched in confusion. The rapid fluctuation of emotions almost made Lucas laugh, but then the boy’s face twisted in fear, and he pulled back from something only he could see.
“He can’t see you,” Matty whispered.
“No, he can’t,” Charlie replied, her eyes filling with tears. “He’s been here a long time, and he’s never seen us.”
Matty stepped back and collided with the edge of the desk. The loose diary pages shifted, and one fluttered down to the carpet.
“Are you…” Matty couldn’t say the last word, but Charlie nodded.
“I’m dead,” she said, “they found my body halfway under my bed. They thought I was trying to escape, but I wasn’t. I was hiding those.”
She pointed towards the loose papers.
Matty’s eyes moved back to Lucas, who stood there staring blankly as if he were a marionette with its wires cut. His jaw moved slightly as though he were trying to speak but could not quite muster the power within himself.
“Why? What are on those pages?”
“I had to hide them, Matty, I couldn’t let anyone do what Father was trying to do. Whatever place he was trying to get to, something leaked out from there, something sick and scary. He knows.” She pointed at Lucas, who was oblivious to her attention. “At first I thought he was trying to open the door too, but he’s trying to close it.”
“You’re…?” Again, Matty couldn’t say it. The word would make it real, and there was no way any of this could be real.
“Yes, I’ve been trying to make him hear me,” she said, “I had almost given up. You couldn’t understand how happy I was that you could see me.”
“The old couple can see you, they can all see you.” Matty heard his voice slide up an octave, his breath came in short gasps. He took another step away from the girl and saw rejection contort her features.
“Of course, they can see us Matty,” She took a step closer and took his hand in her own, “but you don’t see it do you? You, your mother, and my brother are the only living people in Gatehouse Apartments.”
It was then that Matty’s legs failed beneath him. Charlie reached for him, Lucas moving a moment later. As Matty fell he realised that it was obvious to him now. They had the same eyes and a similar jawline. Matty imagined that as children they would have looked like twins.
But Charlie is my age, he thought, but as the world went black he knew that he couldn’t have been further from the truth.