Apartment 108
(Sometimes They Look Just Like People.)
When Matty woke his body was curled into a ball and reverberations from a bad dream drifted on the edge of his consciousness. Images of a dried seabed flickered through his mind. The cracked earth with dead things littering it. As soon as the image came it dissolved into half-remembered impressions, and then those too evaporated into a distant sense of unease.
At first, Matty didn’t remember where he was, but he could still feel the unmistakable sensation of being watched. One moment he was drifting between reality and dreams, the next he was conscious of the eyes peering at him from the dark corners of the room. A trickle of recognition burst into a flood as Matty eased down the covers, revealing more of the room around him. He saw the door leading out into the rest of the apartment. It was slightly ajar, and he struggled to remember if he had closed it entirely before he fell asleep the night before.
He could see the edges of dawn creeping into the room through the curtained window. The cheap fabric was not enough to cut out all the light, but it was enough to stop someone looking in from outside. So, he knew the eyes he felt on him must have been from someone in the room.
Was it his mother? There had been a time when he had often opened his eyes to see her sitting in the chair in front of his desk, patiently waiting for him to wake. No, it wasn’t her. He was certain of it. She would not be lurking in the darkness. She would never do anything to scare him, and he was scared. His heartbeat was so hard he could feel it. It was so violent that he wondered if it would harm him. He was certain that whoever had entered the room could hear it. They must be able to, he could barely hear anything over the fast thud that had invaded his ears.
He pulled the covers down a little more and saw the figure at the foot of his bed. The dim light that entered through the covered window was not enough to fully illuminate the figure but enough to discern its rough shape.
It was a small figure, wearing something that obscured its neck and shoulders. It was either that or it had no neck and shoulders at all. What Matty could see over the edge of the bed was conical in shape It was as if a traffic cone had sprouted arms and legs. The image was a comical one, but what he saw was not. Nothing should be in his room. His mother was meticulous about security, she checked windows and doors religiously before she went to bed.
Matty wondered if he should speak or remain still and quiet. He opted for the latter. He hoped that in the darkness the figure would not be able to see he had woken.
He should roll out of bed and run for the door.
“Matty?” The voice was soft and quiet, the figure moved slightly and Matty’s body tensed in a prelude to flight or fight.
“Matty?” The voice called again in a subdued whisper. Was it calling to him? Or checking that he was asleep? A stirring of familiarity was beginning to form in Matty’s mind. The cloud of sleep was clearing, and the remnants of the nightmare were separating from the waking world.
“Charlie?” Matty ventured. His reply was tentative, but immediately the tension in the room lifted. The figure moved forward, and his eyes began deciphering the figure in the gloom.
The girl’s long hair fell over her shoulders, obscuring her shape. But it was Charlie from Apartment 105. Matty sat up, glancing guiltily at the partially open door. Charlie’s presence in his room struck him with a completely different fear.
“How’d you get in here?” He whispered. She had drawn close enough now that he could see it was her, and his fear now was directed at what his mother would say if she found them both in here in the middle of the night.
“I have to show you something.” She said.
“Can’t it wait?” The response was an automatic one. He was awake and would no longer be able to sleep. He glanced nervously at the door. His mother would not wake if they were quiet, but leaving the apartment meant going past her door.
“No,” Charlie said. It was a firm ‘no,’ there was no argument against it. It was the ‘no’ of someone willing to stand their ground until they got exactly what they wanted.
Matty dressed only after insisting that Charlie turn her back and promise not to look. Even then he kept his eye on her. A pair of jeans, a t-shirt and tennis shoes later Matty was creeping past his mother’s bedroom door, Charlie a few silent steps behind him. The front door was easy to unlock. A key was not needed to unlock it from the inside. So all that Matty needed to do was reach up to twist the latch and ease the door open. They slipped through and slid the door closed behind them. The latch fell back into place with a loud click.
“Close our eyes.” She said, and without a word he did. He did it with the unspoken trust that only the young or the truly foolish possess.
He felt her hand grasp his own and then tug him forward. Charlie’s feet barely made a sound on the hard floor as she pulled him behind her. They didn’t run for long, and when she stopped, he collided with her and felt her hand slide over his face, covering his eyes. He didn’t think of how afraid his mother might be to wake up and find him gone. It didn’t occur to him that he wouldn’t get into the apartment without waking her. He had felt Charlie run, and he followed her by instinct alone.
Her hand left him and he heard a door open, she led him forward a few steps and then he heard the door closed behind him.
“You can look now.” She said, and again he did so without comment.
Much of the room was hidden in darkness, but from what Matty could see it was an unliveable mess of torn plaster and warped floorboards. The carpet peaked as the twisted wood pressed against it. The wall between the living area and the bedroom was completely gone, it looked as though the room had been partially demolished. Pictures were still hung on the walls, and furniture was still where they had been left. A chair sat in the middle of the hallway; its seat twisted as the wood had warped over the years.
“Geez,” Matty exclaimed, looking around him. “Someone did a job on this place didn’t they!”
Charlie looked at him a moment. The long black dress she always seemed to wear swayed in a draft from one of the gaps in the floor. Strands of her hair were lifted by it and Matty remembered that he had told her he liked it. He felt the blush burning his cheeks. At least he hadn’t told her that she was pretty. Her gaze lingered on him longer than was comfortable. It was as if she was trying to decide on something, and he was about to ask her what it was when she turned suddenly and pointed towards the decimated bedroom.
“In there.” She said. “Under the bed.”
Matty walked past her, through the open doorway. The bed was nothing more than twisted metal. The bed springs were bare, and the material covering them had long since rotted to nothing. He could see the threadbare carpet beneath it.
“There’s a secret there.” She said. “Right there, the carpet.”
Matty reached down and pulled at the rotten floor covering, it tore, the threads of it bunching and ripping. Underneath he could feel the boards move. He pressed his thumb against one curved board and levered it up.
Underneath he found a gap, a pit of darkness.
“Reach inside.” She said, but Matty hesitated. The darkness was more complete than anything he had ever seen. He knew he would place his hand in that darkness, and it would disappear. It would be eaten up by it, and whatever it contained.
“Please, Matty.” She moved closer, and he felt the palm of her hand rest on his forearm. Her hand pushed his arm downward. He didn’t resist. Slowly his hand examined the darkness, disappearing within it. It was like plunging his hand into icy water. He reached in deeper, and his fingertip brushed something that felt like desiccated skin. He wanted to draw his hand back, but one thing stopped him. It wasn’t Charlie’s hand guiding his own, it was the need her saw in her eyes.
He clutched at the thing he felt in the darkness, grasping it between his index and middle fingers. He drew it from its hiding place, carefully, slowly. It made the sound of rustling leaves as it brushed against the floorboard edge.
“It’s just paper.” Matty held it in his hand, a small, confused smile stretched across his face. It was just paper. It was a collection of handwritten notes that had been folded in half. Matty went as if to unfold them, but Charlie shook her head. She slipped her hand over his, holding it closed. Gently Matty removed it, unfolding the slips of paper.
He could not see it clearly in the darkness, and he wasn’t certain that seeing it in a brighter light would have helped him understand what was written there. The writing was small, in places falling into that joined-up writing he had not yet mastered, and some of the words were far too long for him to break down and pronounce, much less understand. There were little drawings, three of them. They were circles with lines drawn across them. No, they weren’t lines, they were arrows.
As his eyes adjusted, he could make out other markings, these more faded but still legible, and his curious mind began to piece things together. Matty didn’t know what the markings meant, but he did recognise something in them.
He slowly turned the paper around until he looked at it upside down, then abruptly stood and walked back into the hallway, holding the paper as if navigating by map.
The drawing was of the main living room. He could make out the doorways surrounding the first of the circles, and he knew that his hunch had been correct, the paper was a map. He folded it and slid it into his pocket, then grabbed the carpet and pulled.
The fibres tore, but Matty had to lean into it to rip enough of a hole in the rotten cloth to expose the floorboards underneath. He didn’t need much of a view, he just needed it in the right place.
The markings were still etched into the floor as if burned there. Matty could see an arc that he knew was just the edge of a large circle, two lines meeting on its edge.
Charlie stood near the bedroom door watching him. Her hands were clasped before her. He didn’t know the meaning of the word “demure,” but if someone had explained it to him, he would have thought of her at that moment.
“What does it mean?” He asked, and she immediately shook her head. The black hair she denied ever combing flew in a mass of waves. She looked like a doll being shaken by a little girl.
“I don’t know.” She said, and Matty knew she was telling the truth. The words she uttered contained too much pained confusion for it to be anything else but the truth.
“But there are things here Matty.” She said, no less honestly. “This building is filled with them. I see them. Sometimes they look just like people, but sometimes like something from a scary dream.”
Matty couldn’t believe her, but he couldn’t accept that she was lying either. It was the first time he wanted to hug someone other than his mother. He resisted the urge until he saw tears glisten in the corners of her eyes, and then he did. He would not remember walking across the room to her and he would not remember putting his arms around the girl, but he would remember her cool skin and trembling body for the rest of his life.
His heart was racing, his body trembling with what she had told him. He glanced around the room as he held her. The shadows oozed manage. Half-heard sounds drew his attention to empty spaces. It was as if the room was suddenly bursting with life that he was only aware of when his eyes were averted.
“Can you see something now?” He asked. He didn’t want an answer but could not stop the question.
“No.” She replied, but the word did not comfort him for long. “Not here, never in this room. I think something in this room even scares those things.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know.” She replied after a moment’s thought. “But you can feel it can’t you?” And Matty realised that he could. “There’s something in here that’s dangerous, and you must be careful. It has something to do with those notes, but I don’t know what.” She pushed away from him, but he was reluctant to release her. He felt his arms had a mind of their own and they did not want to let her go. Inside he felt like a pot boiling over, his stomach rolling as if he felt sick, but he didn’t.
“Close your eyes.” And he did, and when she instructed him to open them, he was back in his room. He didn’t know how she had gotten past the latched door, but he didn’t care. He was too relieved to be home. He turned on the table lamp that sat on the bedside table beside his favourite Voltron comic and unfolded the paper. He examined it but even in the bright light, it made no more sense.
“What do I do with this?” He asked. Charlie was stood at the foot of the bed; in the same place he had seen her earlier. The light through the window was brighter than it had been, and he could see her face. She looked confused by the question as if she had not thought that far ahead. Her eyes still looked heavy with tears, and Matty knew she had no idea.
As the dawn rose the room was bathed in a pink light and Matty read what he understood of the note, then slipped it back into his pocket. As he did Charlie began to speak. At first, her words were halting and disjointed, but they slowly grew in fluency until they spilt out like a waterfall.
Matty didn’t understand a lot of it, there were things that he thought Charlie didn’t understand either. Actions by adults that would be a mystery to the children who witnessed them. She spoke of moments of anger between her mother and father, and her impressions of the day he had left the family home. She remembered very little of that outside of her fear and sadness.
Through it all Matty listened. He was good at listening. It was a skill he had learned from his need to be silent. It had always been better to be quiet. When you were quiet people forgot you were there and knowing how to listen always gave you an early warning. This taught him to listen and be careful with his speech.
Charlie was a mix of things he had never seen before. She was tough and could beat the crap out of him on the arcade machine in the foyer, but what he saw in front of him now was delicate. She was taller than him, but right now she seemed so small. She had not moved from where she stood, but her head had lowered, and her hair had fallen in front of her eyes like a veil. Matty guessed it was easier for her that way, but it made him sad that he could not see her eyes.
As her monologue petered out Matty took over, his words as hesitant as hers had been. He understood he told her, because his father had been broken too. Matty had always known something was wrong, but only when the world exploded on that final night just how broken everything had become.
The sun was lighting the room through the thin curtain by the time they had exhausted themselves of their memories. Charlie said she needed to get back before her mother woke, and Matty was watching her walk away when the elevator down the hallway opened and his mother stepped from it.
She held a basket of clothes in her arms and a scowl on her face that briefly softened when she saw him at the door, but it was too late, Matty already knew something was wrong. He stepped aside and closed the door behind her.
“What a day Matty.” She said, and her voice carried with it a bone-deep weariness.
“What’s wrong, mum?”
She placed the laundry on the countertop and leaned there for a moment.
“You know the old lady from 101?”
Matty nodded.
“Well, she’s arranged a date for me later today.” She looked at him with such a pained expression that Matty knew she was the second girl he intended to hug today. So, he did, and as his mother grumbled about peer pressure and fitting in Matty touched the pieces of paper still held in his pocket; wondering what he should do with them.