by David Wood
He stared at the screen. Read the last line.
I stared at the screen. Read the last line.
“What the fuck?”
As he said it, “What the fuck?” appeared on the screen. He touched his right eye.
I touched my right eye.
Tugged at his hair.
Tugged at my hair.
“What the fuck is going on?” I shouted. “Am I losing my fucking mind!”
He leapt to his feet and ran toward the front door, screaming “Let me the fuck out of here!”
He pounded on the door with his fists, kicked at it with his feet. All the pent up rage he had harbored over the past three decades were taken out on that door. He fought it until he could fight no more, until he was sure bones in his hands and feet were broken beyond repair.
Finally, he slumped to the floor.
“It’s over,” he said, his head hanging in defeat. “It’s fucking over.” The pulse was thumping in his ear.
(It’s a tumor.)
Maybe the tumor was driving him insane. Didn’t they affect certain parts of the brain?
(Or an aneurism.)
No, it had to be a tumor, because (With an aneurism you go like that!) He had to end this once and for all.
Craig turned and scanned the living room for sharp objects. If he’d had his choice, he would have chosen pills, but Amy had days ago flushed all his Vicodin down the toilet. There was no gun in the flat. He didn’t know how to make a noose. He couldn’t jump out the fucking window. He had to slit his wrists. But with what?
His mind flashed on the ice pick.
Craig pushed himself to his feet and hobbled toward the kitchen. As he passed the computer he looked down at the new cherry screensaver. It read:
read on
He wanted to ignore the fucking computer but something almost physical pulled him to his knees. He waved away the screensaver and his manuscript—not fucking mine!—stared back at him once more.
A new chapter titled The Letters suddenly appeared.
The Letters
I stepped into the kitchen, trying to divert my eyes from Amy’s body. She was food; that fact was not lost on me. A woman’s place is in the kitchen. She had always prepared my meals, and now that she no longer could, I would eat her if I had to. But I had already made the final decision on my own fate.
(Well, maybe just a few more bites.)
No, I’d leave the body alone. My sole reason for being in the kitchen was to locate the ice pick. I had to stay on task, find it and then finish this.
(But you got everything you wanted, Craig. Amy’s not going anywhere.
You’ve got food and shelter...)
No.
(Not to mention one hell of a book.)
The ice pick was sitting where I’d last left it on the counter. I grabbed it, trying to keep my eyes glued to the ceiling.
That was when I first noticed the vent.
The prose stopped there. Craig lifted himself again to his feet. He picked up the laptop to use as a light source and moved into the kitchen, careful to avoid staring at Amy’s body. He reached for the ice pick, his eyes now fixed on the vent in the ceiling.
What was the manuscript trying to tell him?
“Fuck it,” he said. He put the laptop on the counter with the screen angled up, . Then he placed the ice pick between his teeth, bit down hard, and used what little strength he had left to push himself up onto the kitchen counter, his hands and feet roaring in opposition.
The blood on his soles made the counter slippery. He grabbed hold of the top of the cabinets for purchase, then slid his way toward the end of the counter, in the direction of the vent.
It was too small to climb through. He’d already known that.
Then what the fuck am I doing up here?
He removed the ice pick from between his teeth. Using the pick as a crowbar, he went to work on removing the vent. Dust fell onto his face and he coughed, blood spraying from between his lips. After six
difficult minutes he had removed one side from the ceiling.
One side was enough.
A half dozen envelopes slipped through the opening. They fell like snow, some coming to rest on the counter, others fluttering to the blood-soaked linoleum floor.
The envelopes were letter-sized, stamped but not postmarked, deliverable to an address in the continental United States. The writing was poor but it was a zip code Craig immediately recognized, an area not far from where he had attended law school—the ironbound district of Newark in northern New Jersey--an area populated with thousands of Portuguese immigrants.
Craig also recognized the return address, the address to the flat here in Lisbon. The sender’s name was written as A. Dias Silva.
Amaro Dias Silva? Our landlord.
Back in the living room, Craig set the bloody letters on the floor in front of him and the laptop screen and sat down. They were clearly old letters, had been sitting in that grate for some time. Years. Decades, maybe.
On the back of each envelope was a number, one through six. Craig chose number one and opened the seal on the back. He removed a single piece of paper from the envelope and studied it, not entirely surprised to find it was written in English.
6 January 1975 Dear Carlito,
Fatima and I have arrived in Lisboa, and I am afraid little has changed. She remains distant and unhappy. The flat we let is a disappointment, and our calls and letters to our landlord have gone unanswered to this day. But I see all this as a challenge Fatima and I must overcome, and I hope that she will come to see our situation in the same way.
I miss you, brother. Please write to me when you can.
Sincerely yours, Amaro
Craig swallowed hard, ulcers now lining the tissue of his mouth and throat, summoning a pain he had never known before. What he was experiencing wasn’t quite deja vu, but it was close. He flashed on the original email he had sent to Amaro when he and Amy first arrived at the flat, then on the words he had read in his own manuscript. The words were so similar to those of Amaro’s in this letter to his brother.
Shaking his head in panic, Craig flung the first letter aside and quickly moved on to the second envelope. He removed a single page dated 9 January 1975, and began reading.
Their situation, Amaro wrote, had become intolerable. Amaro had finally reached their landlord Otavio by telephone. Otavio assured him he would have someone over that morning to fix the plumbing and the electricity, but no one ever showed.
Fatima was at her end, Amaro wrote. She had just stormed out of the flat to get some air. Part of Amaro feared she would never return. Yet part of him hoped she wouldn’t.
The first letter to Carlito’s brother had not yet been sent. Amaro wrote he simply didn’t have the energy to travel to the post office to place the envelope in the mail. He was hungry. He and Fatima had little money and were surviving on scraps. The job he was promised had fallen through.
Craig set the letter down.
Otavio? Where had Craig heard that name before? Not from Amy but from that little fucker in the tavern. He thought back.
“...the assassinato-suicidio.”
(The murder-suicide. “At our building?” Craig had asked.
The small man nodded. “Otavio and his wife Isadora,” he’d said softly. “They lived there one week before he went maluco.”
“Mad?”
The small man leaned in toward them. “When they found Isadora,” he said, “she was in sixty-seven pieces. And still that wasn’t all of her. The rest of her, they found in Otavio’s stomach.”)
The little fucker in the tavern. Was he the key to all this? The small dark man with fish breath and nine fing...
Craig stared down the lengths of his bloodied arms. Both of his hands were trembling. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them, refusing now to look past his wrists. Finally he did, examining each hand, studying each of his
Nine fingers.
Craig reached for the third envelope and
slit it open, the edge of the single page slicing his thumb. Shit. Fresh blood smeared across the words on the page dated the thirteenth of January, 1975.
Fatima has been unfaithful, the letter began. The night she’d stormed out of the flat she never came home. The following day Amaro dragged it out of her. She had spent the night downstairs with some bastard she knew growing up in Coimbra.
I do not know what to do, Amaro wrote. Right now she closed herself up in the bedroom, just as Mother used to do to our father. I am sick in the heart, brother. And I feel I am quickly going sick in the head.
Craig’s stomach jumped. He vaguely remembered accusing Amy of fucking some bastardo downstairs, but now he couldn’t for the life of him recall why. It didn’t make any goddamn sense.
Unless Craig hadn’t been speaking to Amy, but rather to this Fatima, to Amaro’s wife.
Unless Craig hadn’t been speaking at all.
Was it possible that Amaro had been speaking through him?
Trying to draw a deep breath, Craig tossed this letter aside and moved onto number four, dated only the following day later.
Something is very wrong, Amaro wrote to his brother. He and Fatima were trapped in the flat. Fatima believed Amaro had somehow sealed them in; Amaro insisted the landlord Otavio was at fault.
They had run out of food. Amaro had not been so hungry since he was a child, since his mother locked him in the bathroom for days for dirtying his new pair of pants.
The plumbing remained unfixed and they had no water. The telephone was broken.
As Amaro wrote this, Fatima was screaming from the bedroom.
The letter concluded with a series of jagged, barely legible words: I must go see what she wants from me, the crazy bitch.
Craig took a deep breath. Tried to comprehend. According to these letters, more than forty years ago, Amaro Dias Silva and his wife Fatima were trapped in this very flat, left with no food or water, with no means of communicating with the outside world.
“How?” Craig shouted, his voice echoing throughout the room. He set the letter down and moved on to the next.
January 1975 Brother,
Our situation is incredibly dire. I am afraid I may never see you again. I cannot adequately explain what is happening. Fatima has changed. My beloved wife is now someone else entirely. I, too, feel very strange. It’s the hunger, yes, and the cabin fever from being trapped in this awful flat. But it is something else, too. Something unnatural. I do not know what else to say. I feel as though the Devil himself is in me.
Please, Carlito, wake me from this horror. Tell me, Brother. Convince me I am not in Hell.
Fogo
Craig slowly lifted the sixth and last envelope. Opened it. Three full sheets of paper fluttered out.
January 1975
I cannot allow this puta to get away with destroying my life. Last night we had a terrible fight and I struck her in the face. This after she tried to lock me from my own bedroom. She slammed the door so hard she severed one of my fingers, the cunt. I realize now there is no escape. No help is coming. We will die here in this flat.
Craig scanned down the page.
I have discovered a set of journals belonging to the previous tenant, who is none other than our current “landlord,” Otavio Caldeira. Otavio went maluco in this very hole. He and his wife Isadora too were trapped. And, Brother, he ate her dead flesh in order to live...
Craig glanced toward the open closet where the black metal lockbox sat, holding Otavio’s journals. They were written in Portuguese, but it was no matter. Craig would no longer need to read them. Amaro had. And Amaro had translated everything germane in this final letter to his brother Carlito.
In 1943, Otavio and Isadora had also stepped through this “door.” Thirty-two years before Amaro Dias Silva and his wife Fatima. From the writings in his journal it was clear that Otavio and Isadora were a troubled couple, a pair seeking a geographic solution to their marital problems. They hadn’t traveled far, only from Lagos in southern Portugal. Otavio had hoped it was enough to give their relationship a fresh start.
However, only hours after the couple had moved in, the flat itself began to change. Its brightly colored walls dimmed, its carpets faded. Stains appeared out of nowhere on the freshly painted ceiling.
Otavio and Isadora tried to escape immediately. They didn’t know what possessed the property, and they didn’t care to stick around to find out. But they couldn’t leave. Like Craig and Amy, like Amaro and Fatima, they were captives. Locked in the flat without food or water, with no ability to communicate with the outside world.
Amaro, in his letter to his brother Carlito, said the writing in Otavio’s journals showed the man’s rapid descent into madness. But Otavio became obsessed and apparently made constructive use of his short time in the flat. He knocked holes through the walls and found balled-up pieces of blood-smeared papers that seemed to tell a similar story about a similar couple who lived in the flat in 1901.
Those scraps Otavio discovered referred to others, to other couples, troubled couples, who had gone through a series of similar events. The noise, the transformations, the captivity.
Fado, Otavio concluded from reading these pages, had traveled through these walls since its inception in the 1820s, lulling the flat’s tenants to their doom.
The story of the flat was a hellish loop. But when had it all started? Otavio, consumed and savagely mad, needed to know. So he searched every inch of his third-floor prison, checked inside every wall. Tore up the carpets in the living room and bedroom. Pried the tiles off the bathroom walls and floor.
Otavio finally discovered the answer by peeling up the ancient linoleum in the kitchen. There he found papers that alluded to the earthquake of 1755.
The papers held the simple drawings of an eleven-year-old boy. A boy named Xavier, who told his story on the reverse sides of his pictures. “I am alone,” the boy had scribbled in Portuguese, “as this city comes crumbling down around me. My mother has abandoned me. I will die here on my own.”
Otavio became convinced he had discovered the genesis of this loop. It arose from the rage of an abandoned eleven-year-old boy who had perished alone in one of Western Europe’s worst earthquakes.
In the end, following eight days of hell on earth, Otavio took a knife to his wife Isadora. He killed her quickly, then slowly carved her into a meal he hoped would last him till he gathered the courage to take his own life.
These letters may never reach you, Carlito. But if they do, please know I did everything I could to keep from going mad. But I can stand no more. Not from Fatima, not from this flat.
I am about to kill the bitch. And then burn this hellish home in the fire that it deserves.
Amaro
Before Craig even set the page down, he smelled the smoke and spun his head, searching for the flames. The air was suddenly thick with heat. His eyes teared but he found no fire, no thick black clouds clutching for his throat.
Still, he began to choke. To retch. On hands and knees he crawled, trying to keep low, heading in no particular direction whatsoever.
Then the telephone began ringing in the bedroom. His one last chance.
Painfully Craig rose to his feet and lumbered toward the bedroom door, his legs threatening to give out with each motion. He refused to let them, lurching on, moving with purpose in the direction of the ringing phone. This time he didn’t touch the burning handle, just crashed through, splintering the wood and knocking the door from its hinges. The phone sat alone in the center of the otherwise empty room. The furniture had vanished, the bed, the dresser, the bookcase, the night stands. The wall he and Amy had torn down with forks and knives, oven racks and bedposts, had been entirely resurrected, had somehow on its own risen up from the floor.
Craig blinked away the shock and dove for the phone. Lifted the receiver in his left hand and held it to his ear.
“Hello, hello,” he rasped into the mouthpiece.
“Senhor...” The voice faded in
and out. It was as though the man were high on a mountain, speaking through a walkie talkie. “...policia.”
“Yes,” Craig cried. “Si, si. Help. Socorro! Ajude-me!”
The voice on the other end paused, and Craig immediately thought all was lost. Then the voice returned with a newfound clarity. In fact, the man seemed to recognize that Craig’s primary language was English. “Okay, Senhor,” the voice said calmly. “Tell me where you are at.”
But Craig all of a sudden couldn’t speak English at all. He thought the words Call an ambulance! Call the fire department! But they flowed through his lips in Portuguese. “Chame a ambulancia! Chameos bombeiros!”
“Okay, senhor,” the voice said again. Still level, still calm. “Give me your address.”
Craig had to think. The address escaped his mind. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
It wouldn’t come to him. Where am I?
“Senhor?”
Craig panicked, the heat bearing down on him, the invisible smoke now choking him all to hell.
“Senhor?”
Finally Craig pictured the return address on the envelopes of the letters written but never sent by Amaro. That was it, there it was, clear as if Craig still had the envelopes in front of him. He rattled off the address in English. Then followed with the directions, “Third floor! Three-oh-six! Opposite end of the lift!”
There was another long pause on the other end of the line. Breathlessly, Craig waited.
“Senhor?” the voice finally said. “I have the address you have given me.” Another long period of hesitation, as the unseen blaze melted the room’s four walls. “But, Senhor,” the man finally continued, “there is no lift in that building.”