The Flat: A Novel of Supernatural Horror

by Jack Douglas

(“It’s a tumor.)

  Craig scratched at the door with his own fingernails but made a much different sound.

  (“Or an aneurism.)

  Craig tapped toward the bottom of the door.

  (“With an aneurism you go like that!”) If only, Craig thought.

  He pressed his right ear against the door again and thought he heard a low hiss, like steam seeping through a pipe. Then click.

  Craig’s heart skipped a beat, and he grabbed with his right hand at his chest, the severed finger still stinging like a bitch.

  Click click.

  “Danny?” Craig whispered.

  Craig sat and pushed his back up against the door. “Is that you on the other side of this door, Danny-boy?”

  Scratching. Click click.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” Craig said, grinning in the darkness.

  There was an awful smell wafting under the bedroom door. The shit and vomit from the bathroom, sure, but something worse now on top of it all. Craig gagged. Held a forearm over his nose and mouth.

  Craig chuckled, nearly dry-heaved. “No showers in Hell, eh, buddy?”

  Click clickclickclickclick.

  Danny was moving around on the other side of the door, his bones grinding with his joints to make that hideous noise.

  “Is this about our night in November?” Craig said, irritated now. “Is that what all this shit is about?”

  There was no reply and Craig hadn’t expected any. Danny was never one to talk things out.

  “Because if it is,” Craig said, “I’m the one who should be scaring the shit out of you. I should have dug up your fucking bones and tossed your skull to the bottom of the nearest Port-a-Potty, you cocksucker.”

  Scraping at the door. Craig startled but stayed put.

  “It was your fucking H,” Craig suddenly shouted. “It could’ve killed me, too. Could’ve taken me down right alongside you, you selfish shit. And you knew it. You knew how fucking pure it was. You lied to me and said you got it from someone you knew down in Philly. But you didn’t, did you, you fuck? You got it from Suede’s boy, after Suede warned us both to stay away from the shit!”

  Craig twisted his torso and punched the door with his left fist. “How could you, you son of bitch? Do you know how I felt when I woke up next to you on the fucking couch and you didn’t? You know the kind of blame and guilt that rained down on me, even though you were the one who did it? Bastard. I took down just as much powder as you did. It was a flip of the coin that I’m still alive! And now you’re pulling this shit?”

  Craig’s heart raced not from fear now, but out of anger. Danny had brought the heroin to his Battery Park apartment. He’d brought the crack. The Jack. Danny owned that night. It was Danny’s idea not to spike the vein, to sniff the H as though it were cocaine when they never before had. When they had no idea how much they were taking in after all that whiskey and crack. It was Danny’s fucking fault he was dead. And Craig had mourned the sick fuck long enough. He and Amy didn’t deserve this. They deserved to fucking live.

  “The cops came, ya know?” Craig said quietly. “A half dozen of them, standing in my kitchen, asking me questions. Me having to run to the toilet to puke every ten minutes. My pupils the size of saucers. You fucking killed yourself, and I could’ve gone down for it.”

  Craig laid his head back against the door and flashed back to that rainy November day. He’d missed a court appearance and two client meetings back at his office on Broadway. It was after that day that his practice started to collapse and he decided he couldn’t deal with the stress of being a lawyer in Manhattan any longer.

  “It took years for me to get back on my feet,” he told Danny through the door. “Things were just starting to come together. That’s why Amy and I came here to Portugal, to put all that shit behind us.”

  Craig tried to imagine the cover art for his memoir. Something he’d now never see.

  Scratching, scraping at the foot of the door. The clicks louder, more persistent, as though Danny were trying to break free.

  Craig sobbed and rested his head back against the door. Thought of Amy and the world they had intended to create together once they returned to the States. How could one night destroy three fucking lives? he thought.

  As he drifted off, his head on the door, Craig thought he could hear Danny’s voice. It was a hissing, gargling sound that Danny’s body might have made that wet November morning on the throw rug that covered Craig’s hardwood floor. It seemed to repeat over and over and over and over again—three clipped syllables in the melodic rhythm of a heartbeat.

  “Itsnotme itsnotme itsnotme itsnotme itsnotme itsnotme itsnotme itsnotme its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me its not me

  “Its notme. “Its not me. “Its not me. “It’s not me.”

  Craig pressed his palms tight against his ears.

  If it’s not you, he thought, then who or what in the fuck is it?

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Amy awoke in a darkness so complete she was sure she had gone blind. She called Craig’s name but her voice was so weak the sound barely traveled past her lips. She felt so old—ancient, as though she had aged decades in just the past few days. She knew it wasn’t long till the end.

  With all the energy she could muster, she lifted her torso from the couch and slowly swung her legs over the side. Her head was woozy. She couldn’t remember how she had come to rest back in the living room. The last she recalled was lying electrocuted on the bedroom floor, Craig whispering in her ear, something about marrying the hell out of her.

  Her bones ached and she couldn’t rise to her feet, so she dropped to the floor. Both her wrists cracked on impact and she feared at least one of them was broken. But she was able to crawl in the direction of the bedroom door.

  In the pitch black, still unsure whether she could see, she moved like a slug across the carpet until she touched something that felt like flesh. She wrapped her fingers slowly around it and found that it was a foot. Craig’s cold foot. She gasped, her first thought being that Craig was dead. That he died sometime during the day while she slept.

  Then she heard him stir.

  “Craig?” she rasped, moving her hand up his leg. “Craig, are you all right?”

  Amy crawled forward until she reached the door. She propped herself up against it next to Craig and listened to the musical sound of his breathing.

  “Amy,” he whispered. “Yeah. Yeah, it’s me.”

  He sighed. “I must have fallen asleep.”

  “It’s all right.” She pressed her back up against the door, a surge of anxiety racing through her. She hesitated, afraid to ask, frightened at what his response might be. Finally, she steeled herself, looked in his direction though she still could not see. “Did you get through?”

  Seconds passed in silence. “Get through to who?”

  Something like anger rose in her throat but she waited a few moments to calm herself before speaking again. She no longer had the energy for anger. “I mean, did you get through the wall? Into the flat next door.”

  She heard him take a deep weary breath. “Well?” she prompted. “Did you?” Another long pause. “Yeah.”

  Her fingers tingled and she experienced a jolt, what felt like an aftershock of her electrocution in the bedroom.

  “And?” she said. “And what?”

  She clenched her jaw. “And what was in there?”

  He offered up one of his long dramatic sighs. The s
igh sounded so much louder here in the dark, almost as though it were flowing through speakers. “You don’t want to know.”

  Amy sunk lower against the door, all hope she had gained when she discovered Craig alive now lost. “We can’t get out?”

  “Not that way.”

  Craig turned and curled himself into the corner. Amy shook him but he didn’t respond.

  Let him sleep, she thought.

  Painfully, she rose to her knees. Crawled in the darkness back in the direction of the living room, hoping to knock into the table that held Craig’s computer.

  As she crawled, she tried to imagine what Craig saw. Images of her own ruined body that she’d seen through the peephole flooded her mind. She pushed them away, focused on the pain in her knees and elbows, the headache, the fire in her shrinking stomach. It will all be over soon, she kept reminding herself. Not long now. Not long now.

  Amy tried to decide if she was afraid of dying. No, not afraid of dying, she determined, but afraid of all she was leaving behind. Her future. Their future. Children with Craig. First words. New homes and cars. Family reunions. She would never have a chance to say goodbye to anyone. To tell her mom and dad and brother she loved them. To give her nine-month-old niece Mischa one last kiss on one of her pudgy little cheeks.

  But she did take some small comfort in the fact that her last moments would be with Craig. One way or the other, her one and only true love in this world would be by her side as she perished.

  They had experienced a rough few years, most of their problems her fault. She simply could not believe this was the price they would both have to pay for her stupidity. If only she stayed with him in Hawaii. If only she had explained to her mother how much she loved him. If only…

  She felt a wall in front of her and used it to pull herself up. The joints in her knees cracked. Her fingers flitted over the window sill and quickly she lifted her hand higher to feel the coolness of the window pane. Why is there no light spilling in from outside? she thought. She managed to stand. Stared into the blackness. And immediately she began to see, not what stood outside, but rather the inside of the flat, all of it reflected back to her like a mirror.

  Slowly, like a download on a dial-up computer, her own image appeared dead center in the window. As she lifted her eyes, her reflection did, too. But her hair was much darker than when she’d last seen it, her eyes now blacker than coal. Her face was haggard as she turned to one side. Then to the other.

  She shuddered. Because that was when she first saw the burns.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  With Craig still asleep, curled up in a corner against the bedroom door, Amy turned from her reflection—not mine!—in the window and moved toward the table. She sat and opened Craig’s computer in the blackness. Immediately the screen glowed.

  Everything was blurry and she could barely see the keys. She moved the mouse with the palm of her hand, gliding it over Craig’s virtual folders. She paused a short while over Libations & Infatuations, then shook her dizzy head and moved on to Letters from Lisbon. She double-clicked on the folder, which opened to several documents, most reading “notes” along with a date. She ran the cursor over a file marked “First and Final Draft” and double-clicked again.

  The Word document opened.

  She had lived with Craig long enough to know his writing habits. So she knew right off the bat to change the weird-looking font from Greek Courier to Times New Roman. The program performed the action and the words on the page snapped into legibility as if by magic.

  Letters from Lisbon

  a memoir

  By Craig Devlin

  She stared at the screen, her eyes burning as though she had just opened them in the sea. A memoir? But she was sure Craig was writing a novel. A fictional story set in Portugal. Hell, that was the entire reason for this trip.

  Maybe he used the same title page from Libations & Infatuations and forgot to change “memoir” to “novel,” she thought. But Craig was so anal; that would be strange.

  She scrolled down to the first chapter, titled Arrivals.

  It started about three and a half hours into the flight. It was a painless sensation, a heavy rhythmic thumping like a heartbeat through a stethoscope. A throbbing in my right ear. At first I ignored it, dismissed it as a trick of the altitude, a minor disturbance resulting from a change in air pressure. It started to dull then faded altogether. But minutes later it returned as loud and unremitting as ever. I pinched my nose and swallowed hard. Stretched my jaw in a yawn but it had no effect. My ears seemed to pop. But the pulsating continued.

  Mouth agape, Amy perused the paragraph below, her stomach tightening with every sentence she read.

  ...Amy slept like the dead...

  He was writing about their flight over from Newark.

  Another four hours and we would touch down in Lisbon, claim our luggage, hop a taxi and travel through the city to our flat.

  She read the following paragraph twice, focusing on a single word each time.

  One year in Portugal, which would serve as the setting for my next book, a memoir tentatively titled Letters from Lisbon. A love story, a love tragedy I hoped would set the literary world afire...

  “Memoir?” she said aloud, her own voice chilling her to the bone. “Fucking memoir?”

  She glanced up at the paragraph again.

  ...a love tragedy...

  “What the hell was he planning?”

  #

  Still sitting pressed up against the bedroom door, Craig slowly opened his eyes. There was a faint glow coming from the living room and he wondered why. Had he left the fucking computer running? How long now before the battery died?

  He tried to push himself up but couldn’t. There was no strength left in him. He was weaker than he had ever been in his life, as though he had just woken from a general anesthetic.

  Forget the battery, he mused. How long now before I die?

  (You mean, how long before you kill Amy and then take your own life.)

  He pressed his ear against the door. From the flat next door he could hear the fado. He could feel the heat sealed up in the bedroom. Bile began rising in his throat. Then it was in his mouth and he tried to swallow it down. Instead the bile spilled over his bottom lip, dripped down his chin and onto his bare chest. He touched it, smeared it with his hand.

  Not bile, he thought as he glimpsed the sample on the fingers of his left hand. The glow from the computer was just bright enough for him to see that the liquid wasn’t pastel yellow or neon green. It was a deep, dark red.

  Not bile, but blood.

  #

  Amy scrolled down, chewing her bottom lip all the while. Chapter Two was titled The Taxi.

  Chapter Three was titled The Flat.

  Faster now: Chapter Four , The Tavern. Five, The Gypsies. Her stomach churned as she read and then reread the following paragraph.

  And then one of their hands was fondling my crotch, slowly stroking me through my pants. A scarf slithered across my eyes; a warm tongue, the length of my lips. Whispers in the ear, followed by sensuous licks.

  “The Gypsies,” she said, and then she was reading about their reluctant return to the Alfama in the cab.

  “We have to go back to the flat,” I said.

  And before Amy could mouth her objection, I leaned forward and told the driver there was a change in plans. I gave him our address in the Alfama.

  Tears welled up in her eyes, but she continued to scroll down. Chapter Six was simply titled Fado. Chapter Seven, The Pulse. She read more about the fucking thumping in his ear, the research he did on the Internet. She read how he thought he had a tumor.

  (Or an aneurism.)

  She began shaking, trembling as she witnessed on the page Craig’s slow, painful descent into madness.

  (With an aneurism you go like that!)

  Heart in her throat, she continued scrolling. Chapter Eight was The Dog.

  Carefully, she read about his kitten Duke, about how hi
s mother snatched the poor animal and banished it from their home. How Craig, oh poor Craig, found the kitten’s body six days later on Market Street, less than a mile from their home.

  His skull was crushed down the middle, his eyes pouring out from either side. His furry white belly was split open, his insides scattered around him on the street.

  “Oh Jesus fucking Christ,” she mumbled, moving on to Chapter Nine. The Movers. She read about his incident on the lift, his years stuck in that godawful sports memorabilia store…

  #

  “Oh Jesus fucking Christ,” Craig heard.

  Amy’s voice. The sound was coming from the living room. She was awake. Alive.

  (Playing on your computer.)

  She couldn’t be, he thought. She knew better than that. Knew better than to use his laptop without his permission. Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time the cunt had defied him. Wouldn’t be the first time she had broken a promise or lied. Now she was doing it again, playing around on his computer, wasting the battery, maybe even snooping around in his folders.

  (Maybe even reading your manuscript!)

  “Holy shit,” he muttered, scrambling to his feet, pushing away the pain and exhaustion.

  “Amy!” he cried.

  #

  Her head shot up at the sound of his voice. Then she saw Craig’s form rounding the corner and she froze, her fingertips hovering above the mouse. Blood dripped from his lips, down his chest.

  And for the first time since she’d met him, he looked as though he could kill her.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  In the faint light given off by the laptop computer, Craig saw Amy’s face. Saw the sexy, cool fear in her eyes. And it made him hard. He clenched his fists as he strode across the living room toward the table. She didn’t move. Trembled but otherwise stayed as still as a Roman statue.