A week after moving into Apartment 13, 56 River View, Daniel Randall was looking for a way to get out. To begin with, Danny had been happy with the discovery. It was on the ground floor and close to the entrance on a quiet road. Though his windows looked out onto the street, a wide band of grass separated him from it and a raised platform of hedgerow nearly blocked out passers-by. Considering its location, no more than ten minutes from the city centre, he thought he could not have done better.
He had thought the structure sound, but within a few days he realised that it was mostly an illusion. He could hear music from upstairs. Not the tune, just the beat. The ceiling had filtered out any meaning and only allowed the repetition through. He spent most of that day staring up at the ceiling, and it was then that he saw the faint lines running across it at regular intervals. When he checked, he realised that the ceiling was six plaster boards screwed to the joists without even the barest skim of plaster to give them the illusion of uniformity. Someone had layered featureless wallpaper over the top and had given this a rough paint. He grabbed a wooden chair from the kitchen and tapped the ceiling. He noticed a slight bowing in two distinct spots and realised this was where the boards overlapped and were not secured to any joist.
As the following days passed, he did not deliberately look for faults in the apartment. He just became more attentive to them. He noticed that he could hear people in the corridor outside more clearly in some places than others. The bathroom wall gave slightly if he pushed on it. All the light switches were slightly proud of the walls and looking closely he could see a gap between the walls and the plates. The more he saw, the more he actively began to look, and the more he looked, the more he saw.
Daniel lived alone, and though that fact initially caused him some concern – both because of rent, and old-fashioned loneliness – he now found his solitude to be a blessing. At least he could live rough for a few months until another apartment presented itself. If he cohabited, he believed it would have been far more difficult juggling a distressed housemate alongside the structural issues.
Despite his desire to move out, he still managed to move in. Boxes he never intended to unpack found themselves unpacked, and he purchased the necessities he needed, thinking they would be used wherever he lived, so it didn’t matter when he purchased them.
Though the structural problems were becoming more apparent to him, he found he was also getting used to them. It didn’t matter if the plates surrounding the light switches were a little proud, they still worked, and the ceiling was secure enough, so who cared if it wasn’t finished very well, or at all. Once some furniture had been moved in, a great many of the issues he had initially seen became masked by the accumulation of things that came with life. Danny became used to hearing the upstairs neighbour’s music, and he found the people walking by in the corridor comforting. They became a company of sorts.
Living in Apartment 13 slowly became normal, and slowly he ceased looking for somewhere else to live, and after a few months he wondered what he was so concerned about to begin with. How much work would it be to fix the light switches to his satisfaction, he thought. He wasn’t one of those men who was handy with tools, but he had his computer, and anything could be learned online. So, he set himself to fixing those wrongs he could easily fix. He began with the light switches. He waited for a bright, sunny day and then carefully isolated the power before taking each face plate off and inspecting its innards.
It took him most of the day but by the time night had fallen, and the lights were needed once more, he had managed to make each one fit flush to the surrounding wall. It may not have been a big job by a DIY enthusiast standard, but Danny felt proud of himself for his achievement. Bolstered by this, he decided to work his way through the simpler issues the Apartment had presented to him, until only two remained. The ceiling, which he quickly deemed to be out of his skill set, despite how broad it had got, and the loose panel in the bathroom.
So, it would be the bathroom. But it was late, and Danny was tired.
It was almost ten when he woke the next morning. The muscles of his forearms burned with the exertion from the previous day. On the pad of his right hand was a cut where a sliver of metal had sliced it clean. The wound was bloodless, and the surrounding flesh was white.
Danny washed and dropped two Shredded Wheat into a bowl and added a splash of milk. He sat and ate, thinking about the job at hand. His arms ached and the cut burned, but he felt good about it. The previous day he had taken something imperfect, and he had made it perfect, and today he planned to do the same. He sipped from his coffee cup and demolished the rest of his Shredded Wheat before slipping the bowl into the sink.
He grabbed the bag of tools where it had left it the night before and stood in the door and surveyed the bathroom. The offending loose panel sat between the washbasin and the shower stall. A slim wedge of darkness peeped out from the loosened panel edge. Near the floor, the panel stood out from the wall by an inch and as he walked towards it, he could clearly see it shudder.
The panel ran the height of the wall and was the width of a door. Danny crouched down on the tile floor and unzipped his tool bag. From inside, he retrieved a claw hammer, and after a moment’s consideration also took out a roll of masking tape, still sealed in its plastic wrapper. He rose to his feet and left the room, returning minutes later with a dog-eared copy of Empire Film magazine. He tore the cover in two and began taping the paper to the edge of the wall panel with the masking tape. Adding strips until the edge of the panel was protected all along its height.
Danny picked up the claw hammer and slipped its rear edge into the gap near the floor. With the hammer’s head pressed against the torn copy of Empire, Danny levered the loose panel outward. The panel bent, the wedge of darkness widening until the adhesive that held it near the hammer came free. Danny slid the hammer a little higher and eased the board out more.
Slowly Danny moved along the height of the board, the gap at its base widening from an inch to three, from three to five. Near the ceiling the panel twisted, the silicone sealant across its top peeling free. With a final crack of broken adhesive, the remaining board came loose, levering outward like a door. Cracked adhesive rained down like dust around Danny as he pulled the panel free and leaned it against the opposing wall. What it revealed was not what Danny expected.
From what he had seen online during his research, he had thought the panels were glued to batons that had been mounted to the wall. He had expected to see bare brick, a roughly plastered wall.
He did not see this.
Instead, he saw a gap behind the panelling. It was almost wide enough for a man to walk down, and when he ducked under one of the batons of wood on which the panel was secured, he could clearly see the joists above, and the floorboards to the overhead apartment. Daddy sat on his heels, hunched under the framework of the inner wall. His fingers brushed over the rough wood. For a moment, the thoughts had abandoned his mind.
He didn’t understand it.
He ducked under the wooden beam and slipped into what he thought of as a crawlspace, though the term described something far removed from what he had found. Danny looked right and saw the bare brick of the outside wall, opposite he saw a robust wooden framework, similar to the one supporting the panels on his side, and to his left a darkened channel between the two walls.
Danny took it, walking slowly in the darkness, his shoulder at an angle in the narrow space. He held his left hand out to the wall of his bathroom, feeling the smooth panels as they slipped by. A few seconds later he felt the slight indentation caused by two panels joined side-by-side, a few seconds more and his hand felt a corner veering away from him.
Danny stopped walking, he could still see, but only just, that he was at a T-junction. He considered the layout of the apartment block and thought the left would lead towards his front door, and the right towards his neighbours, but it was too dark to walk either way. He turned his head and edged back towards the rectangle of light that would lead back into his apartment.
It seemed too bright when he arrived there. The white panelling of the bathroom reflected the light from the hallway and bleached the detail of the room before his eyes adjusted. He waited a moment and then made his way into the small kitchen, a few moments later he found what he was looking for and returned to the hold in the wall.
The flashlight was a small LED light that was narrow, but bright. Danny ran the light over the inner walls, noting the pipes that came out of the back of his shower unit and sink, and the cables that led from power outlets and snaked up the wall. When he played the light over the opposing wall, he saw the same configuration in reverse and concluded the wall to be the back of his neighbour’s bathroom. He swung the light to his left and began to edge along what he thought of as the crawlspace.
He came to the T-junction and took a right, placing him – he thought – between the outside corridor and the open plan kitchen that would look out over his neighbour’s living room. The little corridor should stop there, he thought, where the door to his neighbour’s apartment was located.
But instead of a dead-end, Danny discovered something else entirely. He was confused. Even as a child he was a not particularly imaginative boy, he had no hobbies and didn’t even watch movies. His days consisted of the necessary, nothing more, and they were forgettable because of it. So, when he was presented with something out of the ordinary, he either went with it with no thought, or it stopped him in his tracks.
This one stopped him in his tracks.
It wasn’t the fact that he had found a ladder where a blank wall should have been, it wasn’t the circular hole in the floor and ceiling through which each end disappeared. It was the construction of the ladder itself that bothered him.
At first, he didn’t recognise it at all.
A single piece of gleaming metal ran from the centre of the hole like a pole from a fire station. From each side it had sprouted spikes like regular spaced thorns that ran its entire length. The thorns of metal were thickest where they met the pole and tapered off to ends that looked capable of piercing flesh. The metal itself was a gleaming chrome that looked polished, and the rungs seemed too close together. If Danny used the ladder, he would have to take at least three rungs at a time to be comfortable. What bothered him about the ladder the most was that it had a handmade quality to it. Not handmade as if it had been cut from tubing and welded together, but handmade as if it had been stretched and pulled and folded into shape by many small hands.
He stepped closer and it was then that he realised that he couldn’t use it even if he had dared. The hole in the floor was far too small, probably no more than the width of his waist, and Danny Randall could never be thought of as a stout man.
It was at that point that Danny realised something about himself, he realised that he did have an imagination, he must have one, because he realised that the bubbly sensation in his belly was a symptom of fear, and it was hard to become fearful of the unknown without an imagination.
Danny shined the touch down the hole, the shadow of the strange ladder making angry slashes across its uneven sides. He leaned closer. The concrete had been cut away in irregular chunks, here and there were gouges as if someone had cut the pit with a fork.
It looked like claw marks. Tiny, tiny claw marks.
Danny backed away from the pit, shining the touch this way and that. His shoulders collided with the walls. The heavy beams that supported them sent thick shadows across the confined space. He looked closer and saw they too had scratches on them. The concrete floor had them too, little marks that looked like shapes made in the snow by a clawed animal.
The torch angled upwards, not at the ceiling, but towards it, and Danny caught the glint of something in the darkness. A flicker of light. A reflection?
He backed away a little quicker.
The reflection came from the hole in the ceiling, near where the ladder was.
Within two minutes he was back in the relative comfort of his bathroom, manhandling the wall panel back into place. He had not thought ahead, so he had nothing to secure it closed, not a nail, not even so much as a strip of double-sided tape. He placed the bag of tools at its base and ran through to the living room to find something heavy to put against it. He found nothing, so he moved through to the tiny kitchen. Here he grabbed a couple of large, bladed knives and ran back into the bathroom.
He jammed one knife under the panel, and another one in the gap where it met its neighbour. When he drove the blade through the gap he thought, for the briefest moment, that something squealed behind the panel. He stopped and placed his ear next to its smooth surface, trying desperately to control his panicked breathing. His arms ached and each breath was accompanied by a tightness around his chest. All he could hear was his own frantic heartbeat, it drowned out everything else. Even it sounded on the edge of panic.
He stood there for some time, ear pressed hard against the unyielding surface, his feet cold against the tile. He heard nothing else from the crawlspace, and as he willed his heart to slow and his breathing to come under his control again, he wondered what he had really seen.
It was the ceiling, he reasoned, and it could have been anything in there that had glinted under the flashlight beam. It may have been a gap somewhere revealing the flickering of a TV screen. It may have been the housing to a light that had not been properly sealed. Nothing had been finished in his own apartment, so the rest of the building was probably in much the same state. The light could have been anything, or nothing, it may have been his own imagination.
Imagination. Danny pondered the word. He had never thought of himself as having much of an imagination. What was the use of one? Thinking fanciful things would never put food on his table, not unless he was some professional fantasist, and what kind of professional liar would want to tell stories for a living? Not Daniel Randall, that’s for sure.
Danny stepped back from the panel. His ear felt tender, his eardrum ached. His breath came in short gasps, and his chest felt constrained with rope. He looked at the knife thrust through the gap under the panel and felt foolish.
Surely it was nothing more than a trick of the light?
But what about the ladder?
Danny leaned against the shower wall, sliding down it to sit on the cold tile.
His head swam, as if he were on the edge of drunkenness.
Fixing a few light sockets does not make you a builder, he told himself, what do I know about building? Perhaps that was the core of a concrete pillar. They didn’t finish anything else on the building so who knows what else is half done in the place? Maybe it was nothing of the sort, perhaps it was merely waste pipes that he had misidentified in the cramped darkness.
The explanation he offered about his doubts felt poor. Somewhere in the back of his mind he didn’t believe them, but there was just enough plausibility there for him to edge the encounter aside. With the panel back in place and the crawlspace hidden he could grasp at normalcy and try to minimise the strangeness, but there’s no way he could dismiss it.
He wondered if the corner of the panel had been forced out by something trying to get in, and he had just finished the job it had started.
Danny heard nothing from the other side of the wall.
He did not hear something moving in the darkness.
No, he told himself, there is nothing in there.
He pushed to his feet and made his way back through the living room into the small kitchen. He held out his hand as he had done earlier, his fingers – then his palm – pressing to the wall. This time it was not due to a lack of sight, but a lack of strength. He needed to lie down, everything hurt. His breathing would not settle, his chest continued to feel tight. He reached the kitchen and fumbled for a drinking glass. His eyes kept moving back to the direction of the bathroom, its door a little out of his field of vision. He tried to concentrate on holding the glass under the tap, but his hand shook. The edge of the glass struck the chrome of the tap, sounding like a bell being rung, so Danny dropped the glass into the sink without drawing water.
Danny watched the glass roll across the base of the sink. It reached its edge and then rolled back to its middle where it rocked back and forth. His body swayed in unison. He tasted iron on the back of his tongue and grimaced. The tightness in his chest increased in tune to his heartbeat.
There was no music playing from upstairs, no people talking in the corridor. Danny had not realised it, but it had been quiet all morning. Even when he was between the walls, he had heard nothing. No movement from overhead, no clattering of pans from the neighbour’s kitchen, no dripping shower water. Nothing.
His eyes moved to the windows that offered a view of the road outside. He could not see the road through the hedge that surrounded the property. Though his vision was still blurred, Danny saw no movement.
But I wouldn’t, he reasoned, unless a bus or a truck drove by, cars would be hidden by the hedgerow.
It was logical but he didn’t believe a word of it.
A sudden wracking pain pierced his chest and his guts squirmed as if trying to abandon a sinking ship. He pressed the heel of his right hand over his heart.
No matter how he tried to cut it, something was very wrong.
Danny staggered forward so he could see into the bathroom. Everything appeared as he had left it. He paused. Was the knife more at an angle? Perhaps it was driven slightly less deep into the gap?
The pain eclipsing all else, Danny stumbled into the living room. From here he had an unobstructed view of both the bathroom and the world outside. For a moment he just stood there, swaying, not making a sound. The world outside had become unnaturally silent. He could not make a sound if he tried, the air would not stay in his lungs. The pain drove it out. His head swam, and his vision throbbed. Dark, light. Dark, light. A part of him knew what was happening to him, but it could convince the rest of him of it. His brain became muddled with proposal and counter proposal. It’s all just imagination, it insisted. You’re afraid, it countered. Back and forth, true, and false, fear and realisation. Light, dark. Light, dark. Though it all not a person passed his apartment door, not a car sped by on the street outside. Not a voice called, not a horn blared. His eardrums drummed with silence, his frantic heartbeat its only companion.
The minutes rolled by, and the world was a dead, silent grave around him.
The drumming of his heartbeat became an explosive boom in his ears.
The new pain was sudden. A thrust of fire in the veins of his left arm, he clutched at it.
His eyes were suddenly filled with tears of anguish.
He was sure the corner of the bathroom wall panel was protruding slightly.
He heard a rush of what sounded like water, it came from his left.
He turned towards it, but his vision darkened.
Somewhere he heard a thump, followed by a feeling of heat in his chest.
The ground beneath him shifted, twisting. His head hit the wooden floor, his scalp splitting. A dribble of blood ran from the wound, but it suddenly ceased. Blood no longer reached his head because his heart had already stopped.
Daniel Randall lay, his body almost, but not quite, dead. He stared out over the carpet and through the window to the hedges and blue sky, and the last thing he saw was the top of a red double-decker bus as it drove by.