The Woman Who Made Me Feel Strange

by Anna Ferrara

  “Hey!”

  We both turned and saw a man in a business suit running towards us. He had a gun! One of those men in Room 103!

  He fired and got me right in the arm. The impact pushed me backwards and made me yelp. My arm began to burn like it was on fire and I saw blood coming out of the new hole in my jacket. Fuck! The odd-coloured woman ripped out a gun from under her jacket and fired back.

  She got the man right in the middle of the forehead with just one shot. He tumbled to the ground but seven more men in business suits appeared right behind him in that moment and started shooting at her and me.

  Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Why didn’t any of those people think murder or wounding other people was bad? Another bullet hit me in the same arm and that burning sensation I had been feeling intensified. Adrenaline propelled through my muscles and I just knew I had to get away. From all of them! Fast! I flung myself into the manhole and grabbed the sides of its slimy moss-covered ladder just in the nick of time. I slid down like a fireman would.

  “Lane, wait!” the odd-coloured woman shouted. Shooting continued from above.

  You can’t trust anyone, Paul said. Right, Paul. Right again. I landed knee deep in stinky sludge and dashed right into the protective blanket of darkness.

  Once my eyes adjusted to the lack of light, I realised the sewers weren’t as dark as I remembered them to be. The hour of day had something to do with it. Long beams of cold, white sunlight streamed down from above through grills, showcasing the slime on the walls in gory detail. It was still spooky of course but somehow now felt safer than the world above where guns and other people ran rampant.

  I looked out for the specific pieces of graffiti Paul once pointed out. ‘Opportunities are everywhere’ was one of them. I chose the tunnel on the left when I saw it and prayed it would lead me to ‘Not your damn robot!’, ‘Guys Like Us Got Nothing To Look Forward To’ and ‘ExiSTencE iS fLAWed’ eventually.

  Good thing Paul made me focus then. The underground was like a maze, I realised, with a zillion possible turns. I could tell it would be hard for the odd-coloured woman or any of those suited men, if still alive, to figure out which turns I had taken. One wrong turn and they would be somewhere else, far, far away. All the same, I moved as quietly as I could. Better to be safe, Paul would say.

  I waded like an alligator would towards its prey, with my hand over the two burning, damp holes in my jacket. The liquid around my calves smelled like a mix of shit and detergent but I didn’t mind the stench this time. It no longer bothered me.

  Overhead, the city rumbled on, unconcerned. I thought it sounded like a whole different universe now. A universe I no longer belonged to.

  A man in a ratty singlet, with a beard that went all the way down to his chest, shoved a kitchen knife in front of my face the moment I popped my head through Paul’s fallout bunker’s open circular door.

  “Get the fuck away from me!” he shouted as if I were the one brandishing a knife at his face. His teeth were mostly black and there was a prominent patch of dirt in the middle of his sweat-covered forehead.

  I put both hands up at once, partly to show how harmless I was and partly to shield myself in case he tried anything violent. “I’m just looking for a friend,” I said. “She told me to meet her here. I’m not looking for trouble.”

  The man noticed the holes and blood on my sleeve and gave me a look that was both suspicious and disgusted, as if I were the one with black teeth and a body that hadn’t been washed in weeks. “Nobody’s meeting nobody here!” he shouted. “This is my place now. Step in and I will kill you!”

  I nodded and backed away quickly. After what I had seen on the way over, I didn’t doubt the authenticity of his words one bit. “Could you at least tell me if she came by?”

  “Yes. She didn’t!”

  With great effort, and with a riot of creaks and whines coming from the door, the bearded man shut the circular door in my face. The sewers became ten times darker after that.

  I put my arms down and sighed. Now what? Where would Paul go if not here? Canada? Some place enjoyable? Some place nobody else knew about?

  I got the feeling Paul did once talk about a place nobody else knew about but, for the life of me, couldn’t remember where that place was or when she talked about it.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck, I thought, when my arm began to feel thoroughly numb. I really should have paid more attention to Paul before. And maybe I should also have taken that fortune cookie’s message more seriously. Had I been serious about eating more Chinese food, had I followed those boxes of takeout when they left with Paul, had I refused to meet Arden Villeneuve at any of those non-Chinese eating places, I never would have ended up as depressed and injured and confused as I was now, right? I would have been healthy. That fortune cookie had been stating the truth, I decided.

  Question was, had Arden Villeneuve?

  Chapter 20

  Date Unknown

  The answer came to me in a dream many hours later. I dreamt of Paul and I back in Room 103, seated at the tin can table—whole again, with its plate of glass intact—by the floor-to-ceiling industrial window. We each had a plate of burger and fries in front of us. I was smoking and she was leaning over and saying...

  “I found out about a secret apartment at the library you were at. On the fourth floor. Behind a door with a ‘no entry’ sign. A piece of history yet all she cared about was.”

  In my dream, I told her I wasn’t interested. Not in that. I was more interested in knowing the truth about my uncle’s and parents’ deaths.

  “Oh, that’s easy,” she said. She waved her hand like a magician trying to entertain children and Room 103 morphed into Uncle Tim and Aunt Mary’s kitchen the instant her arm came down. Paul evaporated and vanished from sight.

  I felt dread at once. Not surprising because I always felt dread in that house, even before there had been a dead body on the kitchen floor, but in my dream, my sense of dread was more intense. Likely because there was a dead body on the kitchen floor.

  It was Uncle Tim or at least it used to be. He had become a dead burly redneck soaking in a pool of his own blood and looked a little like a piece of rotten meat swimming in gravy. His face, with a huge bloody gash on his forehead, was contorted in horror. Aunt Mary was right behind him, staring down and screaming as if she had encountered a very large and menacing rat. Her lung capacity was unreal; she never once paused to take a breath. She eventually turned to me while still screaming and pointed a fat, dirty index finger right at me. Rage and hate were rich in her eyes. She began to look as if she were trying to kill me with her high-pitched scream.

  I turned and ran out the kitchen as fast as my legs could go but stopped running when I noticed the living room around me.

  It wasn’t Aunt Mary’s living room I was in. It was my parents’. And there they were on the couch, dead and stiff, with their mouths wide open. The small flat screen TV in front of them was on. The enthusiastic morning news presenter on it wouldn’t stop smiling and talking about nothing important at all.

  “Paul!” I found myself shouting, almost as loudly as Aunt Mary had been screaming. “Paul!!! Help me!!!!!”

  Paul materialised in front of me with a bucket-sized box of Chinese takeout in her hands. It looked very heavy but she smiled as she effortlessly threw its contents—brown, mucky shit water—right at my face.

  I woke up with shit water really on my face, with shit water up to my armpits. I found myself being pushed around by the force of shit water rushing past my body and could feel myself rubbing slime off the sewer walls with my back.

  What the fuck? I didn’t remember setting myself down in the middle of shit water. I remembered having picked the highest and driest platform to sit down on. It had been safe before. So safe I even found myself drifting into sleep; the safest place to sleep in the sewers, I thought.

  Clearly, more often than not, I thought wrong.

  Many more hours later, I cli
mbed out of the very same manhole I jumped into hours earlier. It wasn’t ideal—I knew there was the risk of aggressive, gun-toting individuals jumping me the moment I emerged—but I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t know any other way out of the sewers and I could feel myself dying of hunger and thirst. Thankfully, the manhole remained uncovered and there seemed to be nobody around when I emerged.

  A very good thing because I was almost as blind as a mole after all those hours in darkness. My eyes took longer than usual to adjust so my face stayed scrunched in a perpetual squint as I stumbled through the now familiar alleyway while holding on to the sides of buildings for support.

  When I finally could see properly again, I noticed no sign of a crime scene. Where had all the shot bodies gone? The man with the bullet hole in his forehead? He looked very much dead the last time I saw him. Where did he go?

  I couldn’t think of a single answer and honestly didn’t care enough at that point. I was too desperately hungry and thirsty. I knew I had to find a way to get food and water into my body so I searched a dumpster.

  A box of discarded cupcakes, some cans of unopened Coke, a few boxes of Chinese takeout with scraps at the bottom and a recently expired box of cereal saved me.

  They all tasted way better than Madame Pokerface’s exorbitantly priced Fantastic Day tea set ever did, in my opinion.

  I made it through the doors of The Brooklyn Public Library just ten minutes before it closed for the day. The first thing that got my attention, as I walked into the refreshing, air-conditioned compound, was the way everyone walking out looked at me. They all brought their hands over their noses and turned their faces into scowls. They eyed me from head to toe and edged as far away from me as they could possibly get.

  For the first time since getting out of the sewers, I noticed the stench coming from my body. I realised I smelled like excrement gone sour and soon noticed I looked quite like it as well. My previously white singlet was now coloured with a mix of brown and yellowish stains. My jacket had holes and my jeans were clearly damp and muddy. My skin, where exposed, was also crusted with mud, or should I say, what I think was probably mud.

  Unfortunately, there was nothing else I could do but keep my head high. I ignored the eyes on me, climbed the stairs to the fourth floor—the non-fiction section—and went in search of a door with a ‘no entry’ sign on its front.

  “Excuse me,” a male voice said the moment I stepped onto the landing of the fourth floor. “You can’t be here.”

  I turned and saw a big-sized, youngish-looking security guard—possibly just out of college—looking right at me. He had both his hands on his hips, a mammoth of a belly and a stern face with patchy-red cheeks over the dollop of fat where his neck should have been. There were many objects on the belt around his hips but the one he seemed to be thrusting forward most—possibly on purpose, for me to see—was the holster which held a revolver.

  Great. Not again. I smiled at him with the calm of a seasoned criminal. “Can’t I?” I asked, in the most docile manner I could muster. “Isn’t the library... public? Free for all?”

  “Well, it is,” he said, somewhat breathlessly, as if he had some chronic issues with his lungs—asthma or something. “But you’re not... dressed appropriately.”

  “Oh! Okay. I see. I guess I’ll just have to get a move on then.” I pointed my thumb back towards the stairs but darted forward at top speed instead.

  “Hey! Stop!”

  Goes without saying, I didn’t. The bookshelves on the fourth floor were scattered in a non-linear, over-lapping, maze-like fashion—for reasons likely more aesthetic than functional—so I figured I could zigzag across the entire floor without being seen or caught. Most of the time, at least. I jumped behind the first row of bookshelves I came upon and scanned my surroundings for doors with ‘no entry’ signs on them.

  There were no such doors. Only doors for staff, gents, ladies, storage. The usual stuff. No ‘no entry’ on any of them.

  “Ma’am, you need to leave,” the guard shouted. I could hear him breaking into a jog and panting in the quiet of the library. All the other patrons were already either at the check out counters on the first floor or out the doors so it was really just me and him up on the fourth.

  I shot around the maze of bookshelves as quickly as my tired legs could move and looked around like a soldier on the offence.

  There! Nondescript white door with a ‘No Entry’ sign. Three o’clock. Only fifty feet away.

  “We’re closed, ma’am! Everyone needs to leave!” the guard shouted again. I could hear him panting as if he had been running for his life for hours. Clearly, he wasn’t physically fit enough for the job and it occurred to me then that he might have been hired simply because he looked menacing and not because he could harm anyone or guard anything.

  I realised I could dodge him much faster than he could get to me and be much quieter while at it too. All without that much effort on my part. I thought it ridiculous that I was actually able to do so so easily.

  “Why don’t you just come back tomorrow morning?” he yelled eventually. He stopped between some bookshelves and began heaving really dramatically as he looked all around. “On somebody else’s shift, for God’s sake.” he added, in a much lower voice.

  He hadn’t realised I was right behind him, simply waiting for the perfect chance to dart over to the nondescript white door on his right.

  The moment he turned and walked down the aisle on the left, I made a dash for the door, thankful for the soft carpet that cushioned away the sound of my feet.

  The silver ball of a handle on the door wasn’t locked and turned easily, to my relief.

  I slipped in and shut the nondescript white door behind me so quietly, I didn’t even hear a peep myself.

  I found no secret apartment behind the door, only a rust-covered black spiral staircase nestled tightly within four severely-peeling cream walls. Just the sort of staircase a person would climb if they wanted a look into the world of the dead and sinister.

  I gulped but put my feet on the staircase’s rusty rungs anyway. I knew I needed to find Paul—that was most important. There were people more terrifying than the supernatural out there in the world. Only with Paul would I ever be safe. Only with Paul had I ever been safe.

  The rusty staircase groaned and made a ton of noise each time I put my weight down, as if reminding me I was most definitely uninvited, but I persisted in making my way up.

  I really, really needed to find Paul. Really, really needed to.

  “Paul?” I whispered when I got to the very top and saw a secret apartment around me at last. “Are you here?”

  Nobody replied. The secret apartment was smaller than I imagined it would be and looked way more haunted than I ever imagined possible. There was no furniture anywhere; the wooden floorboards under my shoes looked like they were rotting and every last one of its windows had been boarded up. The apartment’s wallpaper—once colourful, I think—was now brownish with water stains in some parts and bloated like water-filled seaweed in others. The ceiling was peeling like the walls around the staircase had been, except it was also falling all over the floor like giant pieces of dandruff. Fixtures of a kitchenette remained—an island counter, built-in cabinets and a kitchen sink—but all were too cracked, too rusted, and too dirt-covered to ever be used again. There were two closed doors at the far end of the secret apartment. The sort of doors that likely had demons hidden behind them.

  I didn’t dare go any further. “Paul?” I whispered. “It’s me, Lane.”

  I got no answer but below me, something swung open.

  “Ma’am, you can’t be in here! This is private property! I’m going to have to call the police if you won’t leave!”

  Fuck, how did he know? Saw me in security cameras or something? I looked around for a place to hide and quickly realised there was none. The secret apartment was too bare; I would be seen no matter where I ducked. The demon-hiding door
s at the far end were my only hope.

  The staircase below groaned again, way louder than it did when I was on it.

  I jumped on my toes and ran towards the demon-hiding doors as quickly as I could.

  The door on the right opened into a small bathroom with stained tiles, mouldy dated toilet fixtures and a really foul smell. I could see no place to hide in there so I quickly went for the door on the left. I swung it open, stepped right in and I saw—

  —Paul, seated on a picnic mat in the middle of a bare space that might have once been a bedroom. The window behind her was wide open—wooden boards similar to the ones over the windows outside lay carelessly tossed on the floor some distance away—so there was air, light and sounds of life from the outside in the room. She had the two backpacks I recognised, empty Chinese takeout boxes, snacks, mineral water bottles, cigarette butts, cigarettes and papers all around her, and a pen in her hand. She stared at me, then behind me and began looking quite horrified.

  Two heavy thuds landed outside, on the wooden floorboards I had been standing on just seconds earlier. I turned towards the sound and felt the floorboards under my shoes vibrate as well.

  “The hell? Ma’am? Where are you?”

  I turned back to Paul and was surprised to see her and everything that had been on the floor around her just seconds ago gone. Instead, she was right behind me with her back flat against the wall separating the empty room from the rest of the secret apartment, with the two familiar backpacks hanging on her shoulders. She glared at me and looked incredibly pissed.

  I put my back against the same wall right away. “Sorry,” I whispered. For not believing when you said Arden Villeneuve didn’t love me, for all the things I said about you and for this.