The First Floor
(Both were edged with cruelty.)
The first thing Natalie felt when she saw little Charlie sweep into the room was fear. The little girl moved so fast that she appeared to float, the skirt of her black dress billowing as her tiny legs drove her forward. Her pretty face was the essence of concern, and as her eyes locked with Natalie’s the older woman felt the concern travel to her like a bolt of electricity.
Natalie’s instinct kicked in immediately. It was a sudden and sickening certainty that Matthew was in trouble. The effect was so sudden that the short-haired girl from the second floor who wanted to be a model appeared to fade into the background.
Natalie was halfway across the newly empty lobby before the fact occurred to her, it was a fleeting realisation, one that was easily thrown aside by the growing fear for her son.
Charlie’s hand was bitterly cold, but Natalie didn’t notice. The woman felt suddenly cold, the fear had leached the blood from her extremities, making them leaden and unwieldy.
Charlie led her through the corridor and then to the left, and Natalie heard Lucas uttering frightened and frightening words that could only be to her son. “Dear Lord Matthew, what has happened? What has happened?”
Lucas’s apartment was smaller than hers, but the layout was similar. Natalie swept through the tiny kitchen and was into the small living space with a few steps.
Lucas was cradling Matty’s head in his hand. The boy had collapsed into a heap beside a writing desk, papers fluttered around him like hell confetti.
Her reaction was instant, born out of fear and love, and if she had taken a moment to think rather than react to the scene things may have turned out very differently.
Later this thought would haunt her.
“What the Hell are you doing?” She screamed and swung her foot in an arc placed more by luck than skill into Lucas’ chest. The man flailed backwards, his head colliding with the edge of the two-seat sofa.
Charlie was shouting as she moved between the two adults. Her tiny hands raised as if to ward off another blow. The sight of the girl made Natalie pause. Her eyes were wide in fear and shock at the situation unfolding around her. Her head was turned slightly to the side like a girl expecting a blow she could never evade. Natalie froze, the idea that she had caused such fear in the girl shook her.
The memory came in a rush, and though it was over in a moment of real time every action and reaction was played out with disturbing accuracy.
As the vase arced through the air Natalie knew that it was meant for the TV. She knew he would never harm his son, and she knew that it was nothing more than a lapse of judgment that had put the boy in danger. His father was a better man than he had ever believed, and for many years she had cried over her attempts to draw him out of his self-loathing.
Eventually, her heart hardened, and she laboured under the growing certainty that, accident or not, something bad would happen if she allowed her son to remain in the same home as his father.
As the vase hit the screen her decision was made, and nothing her husband or son could say would alter her course. The man’s growing and unpredictable anger was an infection that no medication could tame, and though she had promised to stand by his side through sickness and health, she knew that she could not tread through the darkness she knew he would eventually step.
She had Matty in her arms and she ran. The memory was as real as the reality in front of her. Lucas lay sprawled and confused, Charlie stood over him as his protector. Natalie held Matty’s body limply against hers as she ran into the corridor, she turned left and focused her eyes on its end, where the locked door to her apartment awaited her.
She passed the archway to the lobby, the residents were all gone now, but the room was not empty. There was a shadow there. It was tall. It was broad. It was familiar.
Natalie felt her legs almost give underneath her. Her body recognised the figure before her eyes did. Her lips formed a name, but the breath would not come to speak it.
There was a moment of stillness as if the world was taking a breath, and then the figure stepped forward and Natalie saw two things simultaneously.
The face, and the knife.
Both were edged with cruelty. Both were the familiar twisted into something horrific. She had lain beside that man. She had shared her body with him, and the person they had created now laid limply in her arms.
But it wasn’t him.
It couldn’t be.
Then he took another step, and her paralysis broke. She ran, the adrenaline spilling into her bloodstream turning the weight of her son into smoke. Her right hand slipped into the small pocket at the waistband of her skirt for the key to her apartment. She reached her door and pulled the key free. She looked up, and he was on her heels. Her thumb slipped; the key dropped to the floor.
It all happened at once. It was a fumble of moments. Natalie was caught between memory and nightmare. He was almost on her now. The key shone on the floor, but it would take moments, and she didn’t have moments, he had only a second, perhaps two.
The blade swung through the air to her right and the Eastern Stairwell door clicked open. Natalie pushed away from the apartment door, stumbled under the swinging blade, and fell towards the stairwell door. Her shoulder smashed against it, sending it swinging into the stairwell wall. It boomed against it, the bare concrete throwing the sound back at her like an assault. Her eyes fixed on the steps leading upwards, her feet following.
Ryan’s eyes were open, but his mind slept. In it, he remembered. In the earliest of these memories, he spoke to people whom others could not see, and he gained a reputation for being strange with the other children.
Ryan never minded this; he knew there was something strange about hearing a word without seeing a person. His father was short-tempered when the subject was raised, so Ryan stopped raising it. At first, this was easy, it wasn’t as if he and his father spoke often anyway, but as he grew older the task became more troublesome, and the strange looks from his peers became more cutting.
Ryan presumed this was where the anger began to take shape, which was not unusual. For once he had started to bond with some of the boys around him. They had similar issues with anger, though the causes were quite different from his own, and through this bonding, Ryan learned that with anger came something he had never experienced before.
Belonging.
Thirteen steps took Natalie to the second floor, thirteen steps in two groups of five separated by three. She counted them as she ran up them. It was a nervous habit she had developed in her youth. Five steps, turn right, three more turn right, and then the final five. To her left was the door to the second floor, the aspiring model would live behind the door at the far end of the corridor.
Natalie grabbed the handle leading to the second-floor corridor and yanked it open. The corridor beyond it was a dark pit, Natalie ran into it blindly. It was a world of grey, and it took time for her eyes to adjust. The lights above were sporadically lit, one at the end of the hall flickered like a searchlight blinking onto a soul lost at sea, Natalie aimed for it. Behind her, the door to the stairwell opened, and her silent pursuer stepped back into the chase.
She was light on her feet, and her adrenalin had steeled her against weariness, but the man who followed was a machine.
Natalie was halfway along the corridor when she heard the door behind her fly open. It sounded like a muffled gunshot, and something about it set Natalie even further into panic. It was not the sharp sound she would have expected. It was a sound made by something dampened by rot.
She collided with the model’s door, hitting it with her elbow as she twisted the handle. The door immediately came open and a stench of rotten wood drifted from the open apartment. Inside was a shell. The only sign of anyone ever having been there was a couch that no longer had cushions.
Natalie turned and ran back the way she had come, towards her pursuer. To the left was the lift and a little further on the door to the western stairwell, she slammed the heel of her hand into its button but allowed her momentum to carry her to the stairwell door.
Ryan and his new companions formed a pact. The arrangement didn’t have rules or any deep-rooted allegiance to uphold. It was simpler than that. They had a pact not to care, and this was maintained by the use of drugs, drink and music others would grimace too.
No one thought of themselves as among friends, those who visited whatever shell of a building they had selected for their meeting places knew that they were united by indifference. Ryan didn’t care about their pain, and they didn’t care about his. It was an honest arrangement that served the common goal of drowning the day with excess.
For a while, he belonged to shared indifference. Faces would change, or they wouldn’t, and sometimes he would fight with them and sometimes kiss them. He was dispassionate either way. They were actions to be performed that took the moment away, nothing more.
Then one evening he was the brunt of the aggression, and he woke on a hospital bed with cables taped to his body.
That was when he met Natalie.
The tip of the blade sliced through the arm of her blouse. The edge of the knife carried a drop of blood in an arc. The blood, no more than that needed to dot an ‘i’, separated from its glistening vehicle, and tumbled through the air.
Natalie clamped her teeth together, the cut was glancing and had not done any real damage, but it burned as though a lit torch was pressed to her skin.
Her back collided with the wall, and it gave slightly under her meagre weight. She covered Matty’s head with her hand and ducked under the knife as it swooped towards her once more.
The stairwell door was too far away, so she stepped back and turned towards the elevator doors, still cruelly closed against her escape.
She stumbled back towards the door to the model’s apartment. There was no safety to be found there, but it was preferable to the tip of a blade.
A deep moan emanated from the elevator doors, and they parted and then froze inches apart. They were a cruel parody of escape, a sick tease of her greatest desire. The man ignored it, stepping by the doors as if he was unaware of them, then when his back was to them they shuddered and opened enough for its occupant to escape its confines.
Lucas reached through and grabbed the man as he passed the opening doors, pulling his shoulder back. The knife arced again, this time in Lucas’ direction, and Natalie saw its tips slice through her would-be saviour’s cheek.
Lucas raised his hand, and Natalie saw something glint under the flickering light. At first, she thought it was another knife, but then she saw it, and complete confusion took her.
It was a crucifix the tiny figure on it formed in silver.
Lucas spoke. The words were alien to her. It was a song without rhythm, poetry in a foreign tongue, as the crucifix was placed against Ryan’s cheek.
The scream from within the man was the bellowing of something huge. A jungle beast wrapped in jeans and a t-shirt. A monster in human form. The knife tumbled from Ryan’s hand, and instinctively Natalie snatched it up.
Ryan pulled back, his hands moving to the crucifix that was no less than a weapon in Lucas’ hands. The men clawed at each other. Lucas spoke his subdued poetry, while Ryan uttered guttural inhuman snarls.
The men tumbled along the corridor, back towards the western stairwell. Natalie checked her son, then herself. Matty was unharmed, but her upper arm leaked a steady stream of thick blood.
She was about to choose between the elevator and the stairwell when the eastern stairwell door crashed open, almost colliding with Natalie’s face.
Penny had slipped her jacket back on and then she ran. She could hear the screams of the Tall Lady already diminishing to a whimper, and though she had not been able to see the damage she had caused the woman, she knew it was bad.
She might have even killed her.
Penny did not feel bad for the woman. She suspected that was what had been intended for herself.
She did not pick a direction to run in. She could see the road they had taken to get to the mansion and knew that led to the apartment block. The road curved to the right as they approached, giving her a moment of indecision about whether she should follow it or take a more direct route through the wood surrounding the mansion. It was only a moment, then she decided.
Speed was essential. So, she aimed for the wood and ran under its canopy of darkness.
The moonlight barely lit her way. The trees were phantoms, and the undergrowth reached up to grasp her legs as she ran. Here and there a panicked animal would rush from her path, and usually, these noises alone would have made her nervous, but tonight greater fears possessed her.
It was quicker than she had anticipated. Before long she began to see ghostly images between the trees. Diffused lights came from the road that surrounded the property. The pinpricks of light peeked out between the trees, and only one place was still doused in darkness.
The apartment block still blocked out the world around the estate. It was a solid four-storey slab of black against the night sky. Penny angled towards the road to her left and burst from the foliage moments later.
She felt it immediately as she stepped onto the grounds. It was as though a veil had been lowered over her. It was a subtle pressure as if her limbs pushed through something yielding but resistant.
The glass doorway to the lobby was open, and as she passed, she thought the glass was slightly twisted in its aluminium frame. The temperature inside was bitterly cold. Her breath made wisps of steam as she breathed. It was silent.
Until it wasn’t.
The scream came from the corridor. It was the high-pitched shriek of a startled woman. It was not of fright. It didn’t have that broken sound that fright produced, but it was on the edge of it. Penny chased it, following it to a corridor that ran the length of the building. She ran in just as the door at the far end slammed closed. Moments later she was at it, but it was locked.
She turned, there was an elevator near the entrance, but as she ran to it the door closed and she was left with only one option. Beside the elevator was another set of stairs. This time the door opened and she took them two at a time. The screams increased in volume, and when her shoulder collided with the door it catapulted open, almost striking a woman who was making her way along the corridor.
Penny saw Ryan grappling with a man, and she was about to engage with him, uncertain whether she intended to help the man or Ryan subdue him when she saw the knife out of the corner of her eye.
The woman was larger than Penny, but then everyone seemed larger than Penny. In her hand, she held the curved blade that Penny had seen in the video footage in the cellars, but over her shoulder, she held a small boy who appeared to be unconscious.
Penny had only a second to decide. Ryan appeared unarmed, the knife now in the woman’s hands, but he also seemed to be in pain. She dove for the grappling men, leaping on the back of the stranger and dragging his arms free. Ryan fell backwards, and Penny glimpsed the weapon that the man held in his hand.
A crucifix, Penny’s mind reeled, and in her moment of distraction, the man shrugged her off. Ryan ran to the door next to her, and Penny heard his feet as they slammed into the concrete steps.
A moment later the man followed, and Penny could see him disappearing up the stairwell towards the floor above. She shifted, about to climb to her feet when the blade flashed in her eye-line, the point protruding in her direction.
“Don’t you move!” The woman said, and Penny could tell by the look in her eyes that she should not test her, so she pushed slowly against the wall and raised her hands. Even caught in the current madness Penny knew better than to tackle a woman holding a child.