The Flat: A Novel of Supernatural Horror

by Jack Douglas

  She stared at the framed documents and wondered briefly what life would have been like if Craig hadn’t quit the law. If they had married right away and stayed in New York.

  She closed that box and moved onto the next. Books. Dozens of trade and mass market paperbacks. Yellowed and musty and dog-eared. She didn’t know why he kept them, what purpose they served. He had read them all and admitted that he would never read them again— there were too many books, he said, and life was too short. So why did he keep these around?

  “What are you looking for?” he asked. She shrugged. “Nothing in particular. Anything we might be able to use, I guess.”

  She pushed aside a box marked Craig’s hardcovers, the lone box he had packed, and found one of hers. She split the tape—pfffffffffftttttt— and peeked inside. Clothes, shoes, a small jewelry box, a photo album, important papers, but no phone.

  The next large box contained more of his things. Manuscripts and research materials, notes and magazines, a set of binoculars and a microcassette recorder.

  “Let me see that,” he said, pointing. “Hand it over.”

  She pushed herself up off the floor and again she felt achy, as though she had been working out all week and her muscles were sore. She handed Craig the microcassette recorder. Then she sat back down and went to work on the next box.

  Craig was playing around with the buttons, rewinding the tape. “Testing. One. Two. Three,” he said. “Testing. One. Two. Three.”

  She slit the packing tape with her nail. This time she brightened. Inside this box were her diplomas, her cookbooks, her hats and scarves, and somewhere within she knew she would find her cell phone. She vividly recalled packing her cell phone with these very things.

  “Testing. One. Two. Three,” echoed Craig’s voice from the recorder. “Testing. One. Two. Three.”

  She fished out the accessories, books and framed photos, and set them all on the floor around her. Then she dug deeper, using her fingers to feel around. Strangely, her fingers felt arthritic. It was the very sensation her grandmother described in the years before she died—a dull, achy pain and substantial stiffness in her joints. After a few minutes of fishing, Amy finally felt the phone in her hand and gasped as she pulled it free.

  The LG cell phone was broken into two pieces, the top snapped off from the bottom, hanging together now by a thin piece of film. Her small hope that the device would somehow work in Europe, work in the Alfama, work in this very flat—at least the European equivalent of 911, whatever that was—had been dashed.

  She glanced over at Craig. The bastard was typing again. Had he seen it? No, she didn’t think he had seen her pull out the phone. She gave it some thought and then jumped up, ignoring the pain that shot up her legs.

  “Craig!” She held up her cell, holding it together so that he couldn’t see that it was in pieces. “Great news! I got a text message from my mom last night. I’ve got no cell service now but the text says she’ll be here today, sometime this afternoon. She knows where we are.” She forced a big, bright smile. “We’re going to be all right!”

  He stared at her, his eyes narrowed, his mouth ajar. “That’s great, Amy. I can’t believe the text went through.” He grinned back at her. “Verizon said we wouldn’t have any kind of service here. Hell, I didn’t even bring my phone.” He got up from his chair, walked to the window and pressed his head against the pane. He stood there some time then said, “First thing I’m going to do is go next door and kick our neighbor’s ass from here to Barcelona.”

  She stuffed the cell back into the box and took a tentative step toward him. “You’re really convinced it’s him?”

  “I’d bet my life on it.”

  What if it was the neighbor? she thought. What then? Would they ever get out? Was this maniac on the other side of the wall willing to let them die? Willing to essentially murder them, to entomb them in this horrid space until they dried up? For what? For banging on the damned wall a few times?

  If it was the neighbor, then there had to be others. Surely someone would hear them if they were to scream as loud as they could against the door. If they were to stand by and guard the peephole, then surely they would eventually see someone out in the hall.

  Their flat was at the end of the corridor, so no one lived on the other side of the living room wall. But there was an apartment directly across from them. They could see it through the peephole. Maybe someone lived there.

  She turned her head toward the bedroom to a sound and Craig did the same. It was the fado music again, battling its way through the far wall. Another sad, soulful tune accompanied by Portuguese lyrics about either love or death or longing or loss.

  “You see?” Craig said. “He’s taunting us.”

  It was maybe more frightening if it was the neighbor and not Craig. The enemy you know is better than the one you don’t….Craig at least she could make a plea to. Craig she could beg. Craig would at least be dying of thirst alongside her; if he were suffering badly enough he could change his mind, even decide that he wanted to live.

  “That son of a bitch,” Craig said.

  If indeed it wasn’t Craig then they would need some outside help. Either from Amaro or his associate, from the authorities or someone else, someone in the alley, someone in the hallway, someone that might be able to see them through their window or hear them screaming for help.

  She jumped.

  There was a loud knocking, a pounding sound coming now from the front door.

  She looked over at Craig. He beamed at her.

  “Answer it,” he said excitedly. “Your mother! That’s gotta be her.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Amy’s high-pitched scream filled the room as she frantically backed away from the door.

  Craig rushed to her, took her into his arms. Felt her body shaking against his, convulsing in his grip. “What?” he shouted over her shrieking. “What is it? What did you see?”

  She buried her face in his chest. When she spoke her words were muffled by his shirt. “...the peephole,” she said, her voice cracking. “I saw...I saw...” She was shaking harder now, her face burning hot against his bare arms. The fado music traveled unabated from the bedroom. The knocking had ceased. “I saw...” she said again. “It was...” Crying hysterically now. “Craig, it was...me.”

  “You?” he said. “Amy, you’re...”

  “No!” she screamed. “I swear. It was me. I was naked and my body was all burnt and bloody and my face was...It was melting and my head was shaking, almost spinning, back and forth so fast it made me dizzy. And then she—and then I—started climbing up the wall in the hallway like some kind of spider... Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my...”

  “Calm down, calm down. He , rocked her gently, shaking now a bit himself. “Take it easy, Amy. Take it easy.” He stared over her shoulder at the door. “You haven’t eaten anything, sweetie. You haven’t eaten a goddamn thing in what, three days? You’re hungry. In fact, you’re starving, baby. And you’re under a tremendous amount of stress. You’re hallucinating. That’s all.”

  “Craig, I saw myself,” she cried. “Plain as day.”

  “I believe you. But that’s exactly what a hallucination is.”

  He felt her shaking her head against his chest. He looked toward the door again. “Let me take a peek,” he said, gently peeling her off him. “I’ll see if there’s anything out there.”

  Slowly he made his way toward the door. He was anxious, more anxious than he should have been considering he knew she was hallucinating, knew he would find nothing unusual on the other side of the door. Unless, of course, their neighbor was going high-tech, projecting freakish images on the far hallway wall.

  But when he placed his eye against the peephole, Craig saw nothing but the grim hall.

  “The hallway’s empty, sweetheart,” he called over his shoulder. “There’s nothing and no one out there.”

  “Then who or what knocked?” Her voice was no calmer than before.

  Craig
checked the peephole again. “It had to be our friend next door. The bastard is playing games with us.”

  Amy sunk to her knees before him on the floor. “I’m so scared.”

  He lowered himself on his haunches and held her again. “Don’t be. This will all be over soon. Your mother will get here, she’ll get us help, she’ll get us out. Then we’ll go right to the authorities and get this guy locked up.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, weeping still.

  “Don’t know what, dear?”

  “I don’t know if my mother is coming.”

  He placed his fingers beneath her quivering chin and lifted her face up to meet his. “Of course she’s coming. She sent you a text message.”

  Amy shut her eyes, shook her head. “She didn’t. I made it up.” “Made it up?”

  “I thought it was you,” she cried. “I thought you were keeping me here. I thought maybe if you thought she was coming you would let me go.” She started shaking violently again.

  He swallowed hard then hugged her. He started weeping himself. “How could you think it was me?” he said. “How did you think I could do that to you?”

  She opened her red and moist eyes. Her nose was still swollen but not quite as much as the day before. “I don’t know. I just know you love me so much. So much. I just figured you would do anything you could to keep me here.”

  He inhaled deeply. “But I wouldn’t imprison you, Amy. I want you to be happy more than anything. I want you to be with me, yes, but I need you to want to be with me. And I sure as hell wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize your life.”

  “But...” she said, her lower lip quivering. “But the credit cards...”

  Craig nodded and looked away. “I’m sorry. I found them when we got back to the flat that night. They were in my carry-on. I must have taken them out of my wallet and slipped them into a compartment, so I wouldn’t have to carry around that bulky leather case in my back pocket during the seven-hour flight. The gypsies who lifted my wallet got nothing but my driver’s license and my old attorney ID. I should have told you. But I knew what you would think. That’s why I tossed the cards up there on top of the cabinets. I apologize, Amy. It was stupid. Beyond stupid.”

  She fell into his arms again. He held her, rocked her back and forth on the living room floor as the fado music serenaded them.

  He tried to think of ways he could calm her. But in his ear the pulse started beating again. Regardless of whether they were rescued, whether their twisted next door neighbor came to his senses and let them out, for Craig, at least, time was short. Even if he survived this captivity, the pulsing was insistent. The pulsing was clear. He wouldn’t survive long after they got out.

  (It’s a tumor.)

  He had to write while he still had the time.

  (Or an aneurism.)

  He gave her one last squeeze and rose to his knees. Then he stood up. He had some sixty thousand words left to write. And he didn’t know how much time he had left. Because with an aneurism you never really knew.

  (With an aneurism you go like that!)

  Chapter Twenty

  By evening Amy had calmed down some. Once the fado music had finally stopped, she rested in the living room on the couch while Craig tapped away on his laptop. She didn’t like that he was working, didn’t at all understand how he was even able to work, but in the end the familiar sound of his fingers dancing along the keyboard actually had a tranquilizing effect and allowed her to sleep.

  A few minutes ago Craig had woken her and said he was off to lie down on the bed. Said he spent the last half hour going through the flat’s drawers and closets and he was exhausted. She asked and he had showed her what he had found.

  It wasn’t much. In the bedroom he had discovered some spare blankets and sheets, a few paper-thin pillows. Some clothes, mostly women’s dresses but a few men’s shirts and pairs of pants. All old and ragged, outdated. Nothing else of any consequence. In the hall closet off the living room he’d had more success. There he found a small black and white television set. Attached to it were a pair of rabbit ears and a dusty VCR. Probably one of the first ever made, he’d said.

  He had also found a radio, a Victrola and a cassette player, though he had yet to try any of them out. In addition, he had discovered a black metal lockbox. Using the icepick from the kitchen he had been able to pry the lockbox open. Inside were four old black spiral notebooks, each filled from cover to cover with what looked like a male’s neat handwriting. They appeared to be journals. Written, of course, in Portuguese.

  In short, Craig had found nothing that could in any way help them escape, short of cannibalizing the electronics in order to MacGyver them into a working two-way radio, but he was a writer, not an electrical engineer.

  The rumbling in Amy’s stomach returned again. It was the same dreaded sound her stomach had made almost daily in high school while she was on her perpetual diet. She hated that sound, was embarrassed by it even now.

  She also needed a bathroom, and not just to pee. She had been holding her breath against the stench of vomit in the toilet and urinating in the shower up until this point. But what she had to do now—what she’d had to do since yesterday afternoon—she couldn’t do in the shower. She doubled over on the couch and willed herself to hold it in. She was a dietitian; she’d studied this stuff. She knew precisely what would happen. She would hold it until the urge left her and then she would become constipated.

  She tried to take her mind off of it. Tried to think of something pleasant. Christmas at her parents’ house in Pawling when she and her brother were children racing down the stairs for first shot at the presents under the tree. The Cabbage Patch dolls and Milton Bradley board games and thousand-piece puzzles for her, the G.I. Joe action figures and Topps baseball cards and Atari video games for him. But the pleasant memories wouldn’t last. Every memory she conjured was swiftly replaced by the image of herself, naked and ruined in the hallway, that she had seen through the peephole. Was that really a hallucination?

  She stood. Her legs seemed to be feeling worse every hour. They could barely hold her up anymore. She stumbled back toward the boxes and gently set herself down on the floor.

  Most of the boxes were open by now. Only a few remained sealed. None of them really served any purpose anymore but she wanted to keep herself busy. Wanted to keep her mind off of her hunger, off of her sharpening stomach pains. Off of the fact that she could hardly walk anymore.

  She slit a seal on one of the boxes with her fingernails. Inside were some of Craig’s clothes, those that didn’t fit in his suitcase. A couple of sweaters and sweatshirts but mostly cheap ringer tee shirts and torn denim jeans. That was what he wore these days. No more Louis Vuitton suits with expensive silk ties. No more cashmere overcoats and Kenneth Cole shoes. Craig said he wasn’t interested in “things” anymore. Craig the fierce trial lawyer had basically become a communist.

  All right, maybe that wasn’t fair. But he certainly didn’t want the life they had originally envisioned together. Didn’t want the Jag or the mansion in an elite northern New Jersey suburb. Wasn’t interested in country clubs or posh restaurants, any of the things her mother had so desired for her. The big wedding. The summer house in the Hamptons or even down the shore.

  She thought about it. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. Maybe her mother had it all wrong, at least when it came to what was important in life. Really, what was the sense in wanting more, more, more?

  Amy pushed the box aside and pulled forward another. It was the box marked Craig’s hardcovers. She slit the seal and opened it. Reached in and pulled out the top three books, all classics. She looked inside. Picked out the next three books. Beneath what was left of the pile she saw something shiny. She dug out more books and set them next to her on the floor.

  At the bottom of the box was a small but heavy metal case. A lockbox similar except in color to the one Craig had found in the flat. She grabbed hold of its handle with both hands and yanked it out.<
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  She placed the beige lockbox on the floor between her legs and looked around. Listened for Craig. Then she pushed herself up and went into the kitchen, retrieved the icepick from the wooden drawer and brought it with her back into the living room. She lowered herself onto the carpet again.

  It took all of eight minutes but she pried it open. At first she had tried to inflict as little damage as possible. She was worried Craig would have one of his shit fits. Then she measured his reaction against the reality of her situation—their situation—and thought, what the hell. She finally went to work on the lockbox like she meant it. Now the lockbox, when closed, looked as though it had a mouth. A mouth with some very ugly, sharp fangs for teeth.

  In the lockbox were eight unmarked videocassette tapes, two stacks, each of them four cassettes high. She sighed. She had been hoping to find his journals.

  It was odd though that he would be carrying around videocassettes in the age of DVDs and streaming video. In the three years she had been with him, they had never once popped a movie or anything else into the VCR. In fact, she couldn’t remember if they had even owned a VCR in Hawaii.

  She looked toward the open closet door. But we have one now, she thought.

  This wasn’t like her, not like her at all. She always respected people’s privacy, especially Craig’s. And she greatly valued her own. She always made her personal phone calls from her private office at work or from her car, and she usually went for a walk when Craig made his. She had been indignant when she caught him going through her emails and reading her journals. Hell, she didn’t even like when he hung around the bedroom while she dressed.

  But something about these videotapes compelled her to stick one in the VCR.

  It took her less than a minute to set things up. The television and VCR were already connected to each other and only had to be moved out of the closet and plugged in. She made sure the volume was muted then turned on the power. The screen turned from black to snowy white then she pushed the tape into the recorder and pressed the play button.