The concrete is cold, bitter like ice. I can feel it drawing the warmth from my flesh. Its stoic presence is just a tiny part of the place I know will become my tomb. My impending demise has brought to my mind the stories I read in my youth, and I know I am sounding much like them. The similarity makes me smile, but I know that if someone were to see me, they would mistake it for a grimace.
Lovecraft wrote of hideous old gods waiting to regain control of our world. I read those tales with fevered breath, turning pages with unsteady hands. Now, when I think of them, I laugh. We should wish that which awaited us was so kind. The sick madness they promise paled when I glimpsed past the curtain and into the world beyond.
I read of the building on the edge of the town. We all read of it, though we may not have known it. Various tales were told of the place, though the address was never mentioned. We failed to connect each location to the next. I counted twelve stories, some of which I’ll place within the pages of this notebook, the others I cannot find though I know they exist. It was only with the fifth tale that I realised, and from that point on, I clipped those articles and kept them safe.
The first was the story of the painting. It didn’t name the building, but a little research led me there. The painting was one of a child. A little girl of perhaps six years of age. I saw it with my own eyes. She appeared the very image of youthful innocence. Her smile was disarming, and the artistry was skilled enough that I would understand why a collector’s eye might fall upon it.
Thirteen collectors, thirteen tales of darkness. One man purchased the painting and with it, he purchased sleepless nights. He returned it to the small second-hand shop from which it had been purchased when his daughter, a child no older than the girl in the painting, was found staring into the picture. She would not blink and began to cry as the pain in her drying eyes overwhelmed her.
Each tale connected to the painting was more unsettling than the last. A woman whose palms cracked as if they were the lips of a man denied water for weeks. The blood flowed without end, stitches ripping free of flesh that seemed no more than that of a decayed thing. Another woman woke to find her hands wrapped around her child’s throat. The little boy’s screams had torn her from a dream of terror.
The painting was not the only sickening thing that had drawn me to the building. A man’s curiosity may draw him to dark places, but it’s the madness it breeds within him that keeps him there.
Another article, this one mere days later. An apartment in the building was being renovated and a wall had been torn down. In the cavity between that room and the next bodies had been found. Thankfully not those of human beings, but still they were unsettling enough. There were rats in the walls, dead ones in their hundreds. Packed in there as if some inhuman mind had thought of them as insulation against the frigid cold.
The article was accompanied by a picture, its raw black and white unable to mask the frightful scene. A woman who lived in the apartment next door had complained about the noises for months, but no one had listened.
Then there was the tale of the phones and the noises they made. I read this a week later. It was constructed as a humorous story for a slow news day. A tale to poke fun at superstitious people with credulous minds. The whispers people heard were minimised to electrical feedback, the shrieks no more than speaker faults.
When I spoke to the repairman, I discovered he had left the building shaken.
He said they sounded like whispers, but when he found what he thought was the fault he heard someone on the line scream in fear. He swore that the last words he heard were of a small child begging him not to send them away. Then the line went dead, but the sounds did not cease. They became unbound by the electrical cables as if the repairman had not closed a fault but opened a doorway.
And each of these tales I had collected with curious glee. I reread them thinking myself so clever in the connections I found. My imagination ran with each story. It may have begun with the painting; it had been purchased from a house clearance. It had been from the seventh apartment on the ground floor. It had been a massacre. The little girl who had been the subject of the painting had been found half hidden under the bed in her room. The look on her face was that of frozen terror.
The animals had been drawn to the building’s decay.
The screams were the anguish of those who had been caught in its web.
The building was a hot spot.
I was beguiled by the thought of it.
I hastily gathered the tools for my investigation: a camera, a recorder, a notebook, and the other tools of my trade.
I now write by the light of my phone. The camera’s light grew dim, and now it no longer works. The battery of the digital recorder drained dry within minutes, and the remainder of my tools just served to remind me that something was here with me that I could not see.
Oh, I lie.
I can see it, though barely.
It watches me write.
When I stepped into the Eastern stairwell, I felt eternity press down on me as the door clicked closed. The building was four storeys in height, six including attic and basement. Each door I tried returned the same response. The handle would turn but the door would not open. I could see the corridor beyond through wire-reinforced glass that was far too thick for me to break. My knuckles are torn and bleeding through my efforts. I see the residents walk along the corridor, but they may as well have been apparitions for all the good my screams had. Once a strangely dressed young boy stared directly into my eyes with fascinated fear. I struck the glass hard enough to feel something in my hand snap,
Five doors fixed fast into their surrounds. Five doors that bear the marks of my beatings. Five doors decorated by patches of my blood painted out in the shape of my own hands.
Only one door remains.
Down beneath me in the darkness of the cellar.
I sit huddled in the corner of the first-floor stairwell. My phone battery labours under my use. It began fully charged but now I know I only have moments. I wish I had never allowed my curiosity to overcome my fear. I wish I had heeded that voice inside that had tried to remind me of my limitations.
Something chatters in the gloom. The stairwell leading down is mostly clouded in darkness, but I think I see something move. I know it watches me. I cannot see it clearly, but I know.
I can feel those eyes.
They feel hungry.
I will leave my notebook here, as I try the last door, and I pray this will not be my last message.