The Flat: A Novel of Supernatural Horror

by Jack Douglas

  He’d opened Danny’s mouth, the November rain rapping at his windows nearly as hard as it had the night before. Danny’s mouth was lined with silver fillings, drilled into yellowed teeth, lodged into bright red gums. A smell overflowed from deep in Danny’s mouth, but it wasn’t his breath, because there was no breath. Just that putrid smell. The breath of the dead.

  Pinching Danny’s nose, Craig lowered his mouth, creating a tight seal over Danny’s lips. Just like smoking out of a bong, he thought. Craig breathed into his best friend, glanced at Danny’s chest, watching it rise and fall.

  Craig then moved to Danny’s chest and started the compressions. Counted one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. He looked at Danny’s face. A reddish brown ooze flowed like syrup from Danny’s nostrils, down his cheeks and onto the rug.

  “Fuck!” Craig shouted.

  Then the same ooze began sluicing out of Danny’s mouth. Over his lips, down his chin, covering his neck all the way down to his shirt.

  That was when Craig lifted his head toward the ceiling and screamed. Now, he opened Amy’s mouth. It looked nothing like Danny’s. No silver fillings, no yellowed teeth, no bright red gums. Only the same putrid breath, but no breath, because there was none. The breath of the dead.

  He pinched her nose.

  He sealed her mouth with his, creating a vacuum. He breathed in as forcefully as he could. He watched her chest rise, and he breathed in again.

  He started to cry, tiny salty beads forming in the corners of his eyes, dropping down his cheeks and making homes on his lips. He licked them away and breathed into her again.

  Then he placed his hands on her chest, the way he’d done with Danny. Only he used less force this time, so as not to break her ribs. He pressed down and counted.

  One two three four five six

  He watched her face, frightened that he might find the same ooze that escaped Danny’s nose and mouth right about this time in the procedure.

  He went back to her mouth and sealed it again with his. He breathed into her.

  He performed CPR for three more minutes, moving from mouth to chest, chest to mouth, panicking every moment along the way, before finally she began to breathe on her own. Just barely, but at least she was breathing.

  Her eyelids fluttered and finally her pupils peeped out and focused on him. She coughed, hacked like a lifetime smoker. Her voice was little more than a crackle when she finally spoke.

  “Whahapp?”

  “Shh,” he whispered. “You’re going to be all right. You just got shocked a bit. You hit a live wire, but you’re going to be fine.”

  She closed her eyes. Her breathing was slow and weary. Craig thought she might leave him again, might fall unconscious and die right here in his arms. Leave him for good.

  Then her lips parted. “Still wanna marry me?” she rasped.

  He smiled and smoothed back her hair. Kissed her gently on those dry, cracked lips.

  “I wanna marry the hell out of you,” he whispered in her ear.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Break on through...

  The sweat poured off him as he swung with the bedpost at the laths, each contact causing a painful reverberation that started at the fingers, traveled up the wrists into the forearms and biceps, and finally exploded as it reached his shoulders and neck. Saliva hung from his lips, and he tried with his tongue to suck it back in, to swallow, each success causing a raw burn that caused him to choke, the ache sliding down his throat and flooding his lungs, each cough like a punch to the chest.

  Break on through...

  Amy lay on the bed a few feet away, her lips as blue as the ocean, her eyes fixed on a stain on the ceiling. When he said her name she didn’t turn. When he told her he loved her she mumbled something about a recipe she’d lost at their apartment back in Battery Park. A few times Craig stopped what he was doing, set down the bedpost and went to her side. Her skin was cold and clammy, her pulse rapid but weak. Her breathing was shallow. When she started murmuring something about cereal and seashells, Craig knew she had gone into shock.

  So he stood and went back to work on the laths.

  Break on through to the other side, yeah...

  We’re not going to die here, he thought. Wasn’t that what they all said aloud in the movies? He reached into the wall and snatched out some filthy old woven cotton insulation. He hesitated before yanking out some exposed copper wires. No shock, just the thin metal slicing open the fingers he had left on his right hand. He barely felt the pain.

  The laths on the other side of the opening proved easier. He took the bedpost to them, swinging it like a baseball bat. The laths instantly splintered into pieces, falling like pins at his feet. Craig felt a strange raw excitement, as though he had just taken a long thick line of cocaine up each nostril. It burned like mad but felt good. Exhilarating.

  We’re not going to die here, he thought again.

  The plaster on the adjoining flat’s wall was the final obstacle. Had he wanted to, he could have taken ten steps back and run right through it like a freight train. But no, he wouldn’t do that. He would break it apart piece by piece with his hands instead, tear into it like a lion into a zebra. He’d eat the fucking wall if it came to that, rip it apart with his incisors.

  He was so hungry.

  (“It’s a tapeworm!”)

  “It’s not a tapeworm,” he said.

  (“It’s a tapeworm!”)

  “It’s not a tapeworm!”

  (“It’s a tapeworm! Dr. Post will have to go into your stomach and cut it out.”)

  “It’s not a fucking tapeworm, you stupid cunt!”

  Craig suddenly lunged forward and started clawing at the plaster, ripping into it with his fingernails, blood dripping down his forearms and onto his feet. It wasn’t a fucking tapeworm, not then and not now. He was hungry because he hadn’t had anything to eat. He was a kid, just a damn kid, and he was hungry and needed nourishment; some crackers or a cupcake or some shit. Anything. He didn’t have a tapeworm. Dr. Post didn’t have to cut his gut open and dig it out. He was fucking normal, just a normal little boy who wanted some food and a goddamn puppy or a kitten and some time away from that fucking store.

  He shot his head into the plaster and it cracked, blood now dripping from his forehead into his eyes, stinging them, making him blind. But he kept tearing at that wall, because this was now his fucking cage, just like that goddamn sports memorabilia store had been, and everything he ever wanted was right on the other side. Friends and food and fun, good times, and Dr. Post with his motherfucking knife. And he would take the knife from him and slit Post’s throat and then plunge it into his mother’s stomach, searching for a tapeworm. He would dig and dig and dig and slice and slice and slice. He would tell her he found it, but then, no, sorry Ma, my bad, that’s just part of your intestine or something. I wouldn’t know, I’m not a doctor and I never will be, I just work in a sports store. Why don’t you wear this Mets hat I stole while I try again…

  Break on through... Break on through...

  Break on through to the other side, yeah...

  Xavier is getting thinner; his pants no longer stay around his waist. He holds his pants up with his hands as he paces around the flat, light- headed. The fires are getting closer, surrounding him. He chokes from the smoke even with the window closed.

  Xavier has gotten to talking to himself, light conversations at first, then about the future he wanted, about the past he should have escaped. Here in the flat, there is only the present. And the present, Xavier thinks, is the worst of all.

  Xavier believes his mother must be dead, crushed in the rubble, burned in the fires, or swallowed by the waves that washed ashore. Serves her right for abandoning her boy. He wonders now how he could have ever thought he loved her.

  He finds candles in the closet and matches to light them, so that the night will not be so damn dark. But the candles give off an eerie glow, form more shadows, and remind him that the fires are close by,
that soon the flames will be coming to get him.

  How could his mother be so cruel?

  How could she have left Xavier alone all those nights?

  How could his father have left his son behind with this bitch of a woman?

  To Xavier, none of it makes any sense. Why couldn’t men and women get along with one another, even after they married and decided to spend their lives together, even after they created offspring?

  If only Xavier’s mother and father remained together; yes, then Xavier’s mother would have never started drinking, she would not have gone down to the pier to be with rough men, she would not have spent nights with these men, leaving Xavier all alone, and most importantly she would have been home the night before the tremors, would have been home that very morning with Xavier and Xavier’s father, and the three of them could have escaped together. Then Xavier would not be here alone, trapped, starving, dying of thirst, waiting for the fires to reach him.

  Xavier rests on his knees near the candles and prays, prays that his father never left, that his mother never drank, that all three of them lived in this flat together forever and ever.

  “Vivimos aqui,” he cries out again and again, his small voice echoing off the walls of the tiny flat.

  But Xavier had always been surrounded by a hatred he could not comprehend. His mother hated his father. His father must have hated his mother. Xavier’s mother hated her own mother and hated Xavier’s father’s mother, too.

  They were family, they were all supposed to love each other, care for one another, weren’t they? None of this made any sense to him. Husbands and wives were meant to adore each other. Parents were meant to cherish their children. Then why all this hate?

  Xavier is dying. His skin hangs loosely from his bones. He is angry. So angry. So angry and so helpless. There is no one, of course, to take this anger out on, so he takes it out on himself. Punishes himself. Holds his hand over the flame of the candle until his flesh is seared. At times he bangs his head against the bedroom wall until he feels dizzy and loses consciousness.

  He draws pictures of all this, writes his story on the back of his pages, his words now barely legible. He thinks of all the horrible things he would do to his mother if she were here. Thinks of all the magnificent, terrible things he would do to his father.

  They were incapable of love? Didn’t want to get along? Well, then Xavier would lock them together in this flat and let them fight it out. Let them tear each other limb from limb. He’d let them starve, waste away from thirst just like him.

  Given the chance, Xavier would just sit back in the flat and let them both go mad.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  At dusk on the sixth day, Craig stood by the window and watched the dog, lying on its side, breathing shallowly, the skin and fur atop its ribs barely rising and falling at all. Craig tapped the glass and the dog’s eyes fluttered briefly toward the window before dropping back lifelessly onto the cobblestone. It was only a matter of time before the dog wouldn’t move its eyes at all.

  In the flat the electricity was out entirely. Once night smothered dusk there would be no light in the flat at all, save for the glow of Craig’s laptop computer. The laptop’s battery had about three hours of juice left in it; not nearly enough time for Craig to complete his novel.

  In a few hours all would be lost.

  Craig left the window and walked toward the couch, where Amy lay, eyes closed, her pulse weak and growing weaker by the hour. He had dragged her body out of the bedroom that morning, then closed the bedroom door once and for all, never again to step inside and be left within the grasp of the flat next door. He hadn’t told Amy what he saw once he finally broke on through.

  And he now vowed that he never would.

  Craig knelt at Amy’s side, ran his hand up her long cold arm and felt only bone. For a moment his mind flashed on Tabasco sauce, on dripping a few ounces along her forearm… This meat’s not that fresh, baby, it might need a little help, just some Tabasco ought to do it…and taking a bite. Imagined what her cool flesh would taste like. A sudden hope rose in him and remained for a few thrilling moments, then passed. Alas, there was no Tabasco sauce in the flat. No doubt if there had been any they would have long consumed it by now, anyway, greedily guzzling the bottle down for the sustenance it provided even as it burned and burned and burned….

  “You’d want me to eat you if it came to that, wouldn’t you, baby?” he whispered in Amy’s ear. “You’d want me to devour your body so that I could live.”

  She didn’t hear him, or if she did, she made no response.

  If he were going to do it, now would be the time, before she died, before she wore the ghastly pallor of a corpse. She looked bad enough now as it was. But at least it was still Amy. At least he knew the meat was fresh.

  “Would you scream if I just took a small taste?” he asked her. “Would you even feel it? Would you miss the flesh when you woke up?” Again, no reply. Only the slow, ugly breathing, in and out, in and out,

  mocking Craig’s own inability to escape consciousness.

  Maybe just a bite.

  Craig had recently read about a criminal case in Canada, in which a pig farmer slaughtered dozens of women and hung their bodies on the meat hooks where the pig carcasses usually hung. During the trial it was revealed that many of the women were fed to the farmer’s regular customers, none of whom noticed the difference between human and pig. Maybe he seasoned the meat a little, Craig, thought, but the difference between pig flesh and human flesh was negligible.

  Of course it is, Craig thought. Meat is meat.

  He pinched the flesh just above Amy’s elbow between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. Her arm jerked, although just barely, but it meant she continued to have at least some sensation in her arm.

  He ground his teeth. “I could sit here and play with you all evening, baby,” he whispered to her. “But it’s a busy, busy day, and I’m a busy, busy bee. I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  Craig turned back to the window, took one last look downstairs at the dog. From what he could see, the canine had ceased breathing. It lay motionless on the cobblestone like roadkill in the street, like a certain little black and white kitten all those years ago in Elmwood Park. Dead as dead could be.

  Craig placed his hand on the pane of the window. Choking back a flood of unwelcomed emotion, he called, “Adeus, Duke.” Then he turned and sat in front of his laptop at the table.

  “Welcome!”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’ve got a tumor!”

  “Or an aneurism.” Craig chuckled and snapped the thumb and forefinger on his left hand. “With an aneurism you go like that!”

  Craig minimized his email and pulled up his manuscript. He scrolled down from the title page and watched the Greek letters roll like the credits of a made-for-TV movie. He flashed briefly on a memory of he and Amy on the couch in their condo in Waikiki, his arm around her, her head snuggling against his shoulder as they watched the flat panel TV, as they scanned the credits of one of Craig’s favorite movies.

  “Someday your name is going to be rolling across the screen,” she’d said to him. “‘Based on the novel by Craig Devlin.’”

  “Based on the novel by Craig Devlin,” he now said to himself. It still sounded so sweet.

  A few feet away the ancient television popped on. Craig glanced over to see that the set was still plugged in. Not that it really mattered to him anymore.

  On the screen was a snowy local television station, the female anchor a dark-skinned Latin dream with black hair and even blacker eyes. She spoke in Portuguese as she completed a story about the war in Afghanistan, then she moved onto local news and suddenly began speaking in perfect English.

  “The two American tourists who perished last week in a taxi here in Lisbon have finally been identified as Amy Berdan and Craig Devlin, of New York City. Devlin was the author of a memoir slated to be released...” Craig watched a still photo of the alley where
Amy had nearly broken her nose. There in the dead center of the alley were two autos that had hit each other head on. One of them was their taxi. Only now it looked more like an accordion, the hood crumpled, the windows smashed out. An arm hung loosely from the back seat of the cab. The cobblestones below it were an abstract painting of blood and gore.

  Craig shook his head, tuned it out, and started pecking away at the keyboard. He had less than three hours to complete his manuscript. There was no time to lose.

  #

  A couple of thousand words later, the dusk had diminished and the flat was completely dark. Craig had turned down the power on his laptop to conserve the battery. He was stalled, uncertain where to take the manuscript from here. Two-thirds of the way done, but he didn’t quite have an ending in mind.

  Writers always screw up the ending, he thought.

  A scratching noise disrupted the perfect silence, a sound like the clawing of a cat, like the sound Duke made when he ran his tiny kitten nails along the arm of the couch. Duke? Craig swallowed hard and thought, No. It sounds like something much larger than a cat.

  On the couch, Amy remained unconscious. He stepped toward her, gave her a kiss on the mouth, his teeth maybe lingering a little too long around her lower lip. Maybe pulling a bit too hard at her flesh.

  She tasted like salt water taffy flavored with sweat. The kind he bought on the Seaside Heights boardwalk all those years ago.

  He let go.

  In the darkness, he stepped past the small television, giving it a quick gentle kick with his bare foot. Then he stood by the closed bedroom door and listened to the scratching.

  Something was inside, trying to get out.

  Craig lowered himself on his haunches and pressed his right ear against the door. The clawing blended with the thump thump thump in his ear, forming something that sounded almost like music.