Apartment 408
(It Was Bound by Its Belief in Flesh.)
When he was sold the book he was told blood was important. The man handing over the carefully wrapped parcel refused to release it until Lucas had acknowledged what had been said to him.
Blood is important, the man had said, enunciating each word carefully.
Lucas had replied that he understood but the book remained suspended between them. The seller nodded earnestly. Lucas nodded back, and the book was released. It was heavier than he had anticipated considering its slim size and the sudden release of the burden surprised him. He slipped the book into the satchel he had brought as the seller counted the money.
The little bookstore was on a New York City back street. He had weaved through a small camp of homeless people to get there, and he wondered as he left if any of the people he passed had any idea of how much the book he held had cost.
The journey home was long, but there was no sightseeing for Lucas and no distractions. He had travelled directly to the airport and back home. He was on the aircraft far longer than he was in the city. The time on the flight home was well spent. He read what he understood from the book, carefully turning the tissue paper pages while seeing his fingers clearly behind the text. It reminded him of his old bible, double columns of text, brittle paper, and content that held as much meaning between the words as in the words themselves.
It was a little under two years but it felt like long ago. This was before he had again set eyes on the Gatehouse Apartments, and before the plan had begun to form in his mind. He now suspected that he knew all along what he had intended to do, far back before the book, when he was still trying to piece together what had happened to him as a child. Back when he was a child in the home, unwanted by foster parents, waking from dreams filled with blood and screams. He knew now that he had always dreamt of The Gatehouse Apartments, the moment he had seen the building again the realisation hit him.
All along he had known, but whatever barrier his mind had erected between his past and present would not allow him to understand all he knew.
Back before the book, there was another book, this one written in a tiny feminine script. This one had cost him nothing except the ability to have peaceful nights. It had been presented to him when he had turned eighteen and the trust fund had been released to him, along with all the horrors that had been denied to him.
Lucas read from the book, the old book in the old language. He studied it nightly, and sometimes on days he could spare from the work on the building. In a way, this was the real work on the building. Repairing the plumbing and rewiring the lights was one kind of maintenance, but the book – and what it provided – was the real maintenance the building required.
He had taken the book along with the tools he required up to apartment 408, the furthest apartment from anyone, the only place he felt comfortable that he would not interfere with anything that didn’t require his interference. It was the best place for such work, the furthest apartment from the elevator, its door beside the eastern stairwell whose doors would never open regardless of the work he put into repairing them. Now that the boy was roaming through the building he would have to be more careful, but it was unavoidable. Lucas remembered what it was like to be a boy, and he knew that if he had fussed over the dangers of the upper floors to keep the boy from them, it would certainly have the opposite effect. Matthew seemed like a good child, but curiosity was a factor in all boys regardless of their temperament.
On the fourth floor, the wind cut through as if there were no walls. Outside was darkness, the lights from the city revealed in brief moments as the plastic curtain fluttered. On the northern side of the building, some of the windows had been removed to make way for replacements. The old frames had rotted completely through, and Lucas thought it prudent to remove them in case they tore free in the wind and were sent crashing down to the ground below. The plastic sheeting that covered the open wounds in the wall shifted in the current of air. He had secured them with batons of wood, but here and there the wind had torn the sheeting, letting in a stream of chilly air.
Lucas opened the old book by candlelight, the spine cracked, and the thin pages fell open at a section marked with a thin strip of cotton he used as a bookmark. He could find a more recent printing, but he was afraid that any changes in the text would be too far-reaching in his studies. The smallest change could result in the largest alterations in what would transpire from its use.
He made notes, mouthed the words, and then broke those words into sounds so they were in a format he thought he could pronounce. When he spoke the words, he did in whispers, concentrating on how they sounded and not what they meant.
He was distant from any residents, but he did not know what might transpire if one of them was caught in the influence of the ritual. That was if he could muster the courage. Lucas had tried this before, but the warnings he had heard ran through his head.
Blood was important.
It was a factor that Lucas thought he had covered.
Thought, but did not know.
Books had dominated his life. The book that brought with it his faith, the book he had bought, and the book that was bequeathed to him. The first two were an instructional manual, of a sort, and the second a historical record, a diary. Of those two, the manuals were the easiest to decipher. Their words could be learned, their context was consistent, and all it took was the time to put everything in its rightful place.
The diary was something else. It had been written by his mother documenting all the cruelties she had suffered in the final year of her life. Nothing else remained of her and her daughter, Lucas’ sister, and there was nothing he could use to decipher the diary’s full meaning. He slid open the diary now, it was fat with bookmarks and slips of paper where Lucas had added context where he could. He leafed through the pages until he came to a well-read page that had been discoloured by use. He read it. He had read it a hundred times, but read through it again anyway.
It detailed what she had seen in the weeks before the end, the ritual, the preparations, and what she had witnessed in its aftermath.
Much of it made little sense, some of it returned to him sometimes when he slept. There were half-glimpsed images in the darkened corners that she tried to document. She had seen things in the candlelight but could not find any earthly words to express what she had seen.
When he had first read the diary, he had thought she had gone insane, but then his dreams began to speak to him. They retold the childhood memories he had always discounted as nothing more than nightmares, which had drawn him back to the start, the place where it all began.
The Gatehouse Apartments.
That day was a revelation. The diary had told him the city, and the rough location. It described parts of the building. A comment here and there built a gradual picture, and all it required was time and foot leather to find the place.
As it turned out it didn’t even really require that.
Lucas had almost walked directly there from the train station. It was as if something guided him. He didn’t recognise any landmarks, and there was little deliberation on what route he should take, he just walked until the huge gravestone could be seen in the distance. He had walked until he had stood in its massive shadow and standing there, he knew what he had to do.
He had sold everything except the books and the clothes on his back. Then he had liquidised anything left to him from his mother’s side of the family. It hadn’t been enough, but then a stroke of luck presented itself – Providence from on high – when a group that had its interest in the building offered a deal, and the deal was struck.
Lucas had nothing now but for the clothes on his back, his books, and partial ownership of the place where all his horrors were born, but that was all he needed.
He knew he was procrastinating. The journey down memory lane was comforting, but not constructive. The room was too cold and dark to stand here forever reminiscing about things he would have preferred never to experience. It was nothing more than a form of self-harm.
Yes, he was a nobleman trying to perform noble deeds. He told himself this with a sarcastic lilt to the words. There was little noble about any of what transpired in this building. He was not being noble; he was doing no more than trying to finish what his blood had started.
He was burying the demons his father had raised, as well as the demon his father had become in the process.
The wind pulled at the plastic sheeting that covered the open frames of the windows. It pushed up sawdust from the floor. Here and there it pushed a ripple through a pool of water from the still leaking roof. The wind touched Lucas. Its touch was as cold as his memory. He shivered. The candles he had lit flickered. The flames warred against nature for a few moments, then won, and Lucas began reciting the words he had practised so earnestly.
To do this alone was considered foolish. Lucas knew this, but he had no choice. He was alone in this fight. He had always been alone. His family had become the stains of his life. Their bodies are buried, and forgotten by everyone. Lucas didn’t even know where their graves were.
He didn’t think of it, and instead pressed on.
The ritual would take a little more than an hour. It was something akin to a house blessing. Something reminiscent of an exorcism, but something else entirely still. The words had come from the ancient book. It was spoken in words long dead to most in the world. But some still recognised their meaning.
A moan cut through the room. At first, Lucas thought it was the wind, but the flames didn’t flicker. The sound rose. It was a drumbeat of pain.
Lucas continued his recitation. He kept his voice even and resisted the urge to raise it over the sound that had entered the room. He reached the end and began again without pause. His resolve was stronger now, and the words clearer. Now he knew something was listening.
The moan rose in volume. The sawdust shuddered. It bounced on the bare floor. The puddles rippled in ever larger concentric circles. Lucas could feel it through the soles of his shoes. His calves trembled. The moan moved around him, distinctly moving from his left to his right before pushing out in front of him. The sound dulled, and Lucas thought he heard it echo. Then he knew where the sound was located.
The kitchen unit had been removed, leaving the pipes bare. One pipe, four inches in diameter, trembled with the sound. The grey plastic pipe reached out from a hole in the floorboards like a dead hand reaching for life. Then something emerged from it. At first, Lucas thought it was the tail of a large rodent. It swayed back and forth slightly. The sound died. Lucas almost lost his place in his recitation, stumbling over the words. The swaying thing was hypnotic. It drew him in. Then the thing bent at an angle. No, two angles, and Lucas realised what it was.
It was a finger. Appearing nothing more than a bone covered in tissue-thin skin, but Lucas knew it was not even that. It was the sewer apparition. His words had drawn it to him. It had wriggled its way through the pipes from the ground floor. It had traversed the labyrinthine network as if it were a physical thing, it was bound by its belief in the flesh, caught in the only world it knew.
It emerged. First, an eye popped out of the pipe, looking like a flower on a stalk before Lucas realised that the apparition’s skull had been crushed into the shape of the tube. The eye bulged, close to popping free of its spongy flesh. A cheek followed it. The teeth were next, they clicked against the plastic edge of the pipe.
Ping, ping, ping.
Lucas wanted to count them, but he continued to speak instead. It was temptation, it was what it wanted.
Thirty pings as the teeth popped free. The chin was next. Then the head was whole. It pulled and stretched against the tubing that had kept it prisoner. The pipe looked like an impossibly long neck, its grey close to the deathly pallor of the flesh pushing from it. The head danced atop it as it struggled one shoulder out into the freezing air.
Still, Lucas read the words.
One arm was now free. It was as skinny as a snake. Its long fingers scraped against the floorboards. It was the sound he heard when mice ran against the skirting board. Its other shoulder wormed its way free, its elbow, and then its hand. From the waist up it swayed, the plastic pipe bent under the strain of it. It now looked like a particularly disturbed children’s drawing of a mermaid.
It latched its milky eyes on Lucas’ face.
Its skin looked pale even lit by candlelight. Around its eyes and lips were patches of ice blue. The teeth in its crooked mouth were uneven. Some poked directly outwards at right angles from the others. It was insubstantial as if made of foam.
But their eyes. They were as real as Lucas’ own. They were piercing. Malevolent. Accusatory.
Lucas stepped closer, and the apparition recoiled slightly. The words were rolling from him now. He was no longer thinking of the pronunciation, and no longer referencing the book he held before him. The words were emanating from elsewhere now. From God’s lips to the apparition’s ears. Lucas is nothing more than a conduit to The Word.
He stepped closer and the apparition’s arms snapped out. Its fingers cut the air inches from Lucas’ face. They were long fingers made longer still because of their reed-thin bones.
They weren’t bones. They were nothing. The thing just thought they were bones. Lucas brushed the hands aside. The contact with them made him shudder. They were cold beyond his imagination. Their cold comes not from the absence of heat, but the absence of life itself.
Lucas still spoke the words. It may have been his fifth rendition of them by now, it may have been his fiftieth, he could no longer tell. He reached into his pocket and slipped from it the only weapon he knew how to use.
The silver cross had been his mother’s. It had been delivered to him hung on its chain wedged at the first chapter of Joshua. He raised it as he spoke. The apparition recoiled again. It swayed. Its cloudy eyes caught in confusion amid its anguish and rage.
Lucas thought he understood.
He pressed the silver cross to the apparition’s forehead, and something exploded within his mind. He was unaware that something had pushed him back with enough force to drive the air from his lungs. He didn’t know that he was gasping for air on the dusty floor as the fireworks erupted in his mind.
Lights coalesced into images, the 35mm of the mind.
When he awoke, he was sprawled across the worn warped wood of the kitchen floor. There was little left to indicate it was a kitchen except for the pipes that would feed the kitchen taps, or the white pipe through which the wastewater would flow.
Lucas didn’t move, but from where he was, he could see the pipe was now just a pipe. The candles were still lit, and he could see the book he had been reading from lay pages down a few feet from his hand.
The apparition was gone now, banished, released, Lucas didn’t know which. He lay there and thought about that for a few moments. No elation came with his actions. What he had seen in the mental movie it had provided for him dampened any thoughts of victory.
Whatever it had been, a part of it – at least – had once been human. It had been a man. It had been led to a room somewhere in this building, and it had been slaughtered and then fed, piece by piece, down the waste pipe and into the sewers. Then the Gatehouse Apartments had worked its dark work on it. It’s torture not over even in death. The man had become spirit, and the spirit had become apparition.
Lucas didn’t know if he had done God’s work, he only knew that this work had been completed, but there was still more to be done.