Darkest Place

by Jaye Ford

  When she’d finished reading, he raised his eyebrows at her. She nodded that she understood. He wrote again.

  Along the north and south walls, where the ends of the beams butt up against the brickwork, there’s no way for the air to escape. A metal chute was attached underneath the rows of timber to collect air from the apartments. The holes you saw from the ladder are the ends of the chute where the air empties into the void.

  Carly took a couple of seconds to think about airflow and access. ‘So there would be vents opening from the apartments into the pre-fab chutes?’

  A nod.

  ‘Big? Small?’

  Same as all the other vents probably.

  Carly tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, a bigger, uglier picture forming in her mind. ‘If someone has worked out how to get into the ceiling tunnels, they’ve got access to apartments on the east and west walls. If they’ve crawled around more than one tunnel, they’ve been in the void. Which means they’ve seen those holes.’ She paused, thinking about the hand- and footholds that led to the pre-fabricated chutes. ‘I’m wondering how many other apartments they can get to.’

  That’s a lot of crawling around.

  ‘Yes. It would be a bizarre way to spend your time. So is climbing into a woman’s loft while she sleeps.’

  Understanding and apprehension were in Nate’s eyes as they met hers. The arrival of his dinner tray interrupted their silent exchange.

  ‘I thought about telling Howard,’ Carly said when they were alone again. ‘But it might be him. It might be anyone. It might be more than one person. There might be a team crawling around up there.’

  Nate lifted the lid on his dinner, made a face at the soup and reached for his notepad.

  Tell the police.

  ‘They think I’m nuts.’

  Show them the photos.

  ‘That will convince them I’m nuts. It’s just pictures of ladders and vents and creepy tunnels. The climbing gear is mine so, if anything, it’ll look like I’m peering into people’s apartments and trying to blame someone else. They’ll probably charge me with trespass or stalking as they drive me to the psychiatric unit.’

  Nate tipped his head, reluctant agreement. Don’t go home.

  ‘Believe me, I don’t want to, but I can’t couch-surf forever. And,’ she held her hands out, palms up, ‘I need to know what’s going on up there.’

  Stay out of the ceiling.

  She didn’t say anything. Yes, it was dangerous up there but it wasn’t just her now – and it wasn’t his decision.

  I’ll be out in a day or two.

  She frowned. He could barely sit up without help. Did he think he could do more than Carly in that condition? ‘You can’t walk. You’re having surgery soon. You’re not going to be able to do anything.’

  It was the wrong thing to say to the man who’d tried to protect her, and the sharp, pained look on his face made her want to take it back. She ran a hand over her hair, wanting to give him something. ‘Can I sleep in your apartment?’ It wasn’t a solution, just somewhere she could think about her options.

  Too close to your apartment. Dakota? Christina? Brooke?

  ‘I’ve run out of stories to explain what’s going on.’ And she didn’t want to try out the real story until it made some sense.

  Bec?

  She lived an hour out of town, and what story would cover her need to stay at Nate’s sister’s house? ‘If I screw your vent cover back on, he won’t be able to get into your apartment. He won’t know I’m there. If he crawls by, he’ll only know I’m not in my own loft.’

  He watched her a moment. Indecision, frustration, concern.

  Carly lifted the lid on his soup again. ‘You need to eat something. Come on, I’ll help you.’ She picked up his spoon.

  You are not feeding me!

  ‘I’ll swap you then – your key for the spoon.’

  Brooke phoned as Carly was walking to her car. ‘I’ve spoken to Dakota and Christina and heard all about your fall and Nate. I’ve cooked a beef casserole and it’s ready whenever you can get here.’ Her voice was firm, determined to help.

  Carly felt like a link in a chain, a nice chain to be looped in – and she wasn’t ready to be on her own in Nate’s apartment yet. ‘You’re brilliant. I’m on my way.’

  Brooke showed Carly in, handed her a glass of wine and ordered her to sit. ‘The rice is almost done, have something to eat while we wait.’ She pushed crackers and a bowl of dip across the kitchen counter. ‘Do you want to talk or are you sick of explaining it?’

  ‘Maybe we could talk about something else.’ Carly glanced around, saw two oversized computer screens on a messy desk, mismatched couches and a large print of the warehouse atrium. Nothing like Carly’s sparse collection of furniture, but she still felt the deja vu. ‘I didn’t realise your apartment was the same layout as mine.’ She lifted her eyes to the loft. Where was her ceiling vent?

  ‘Talia and I used to laugh about that. Same apartments, different style. She was organised, I’m clutter-city. Oh, here,’ Brooke stepped away to the fridge, pulled a photo from under a magnet. ‘This is Talia.’

  It was a snapshot of a woman holding a cello. Late twenties, mass of tight, dark curls that fell past her shoulders, pale skin and plump cheeks that were dented with dimples from a smile. Her feet below the instrument were bare, legs either side of it in faded jeans with frayed hems. Possibly she looked sophisticated and gifted when she was performing but here she looked casual and a little cheeky. It made Carly wish she’d had a chance to meet her.

  ‘It was taken in your living room,’ Brooke said.

  Carly picked up the snap, saw the shadow of the French windows on the four sheets of music stuck to the wall behind Talia. It must have been before she lined the plasterboard with her pages. ‘I found her name written in dust under the manhole cover in the ensuite,’ Carly said.

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Her name and a date. It felt like a message, only I didn’t know what it meant.’

  ‘What was the date?’

  ‘Fourteenth of November. Last summer.’

  Brooke’s eyes slid up and away. ‘Oh. Only a month before the accident.’

  ‘Any idea why she was up there?’

  She shook her head. ‘Why were you?’

  ‘Just taking a look.’

  ‘Maybe that’s what Talia was doing. Did you write your name too?’

  ‘No.’ But maybe she should have. Maybe it meant something that Talia had. A record that she’d been there? ‘Would you mind if I used your bathroom?’

  ‘No, go ahead.’

  ‘Actually, two birds, one stone: would you mind if I used your ensuite? I’m having problems with my shower screen, maybe you’ve got the same one.’

  ‘Go for your life. Want to check the manhole while you’re there?’

  Carly laughed as she climbed the stairs, no intention of using the ensuite, thinking about what Talia had left in the apartment – holes in the wall, her name on the manhole cover and … the nightlight. Carly had found it in the half bath, she’d assumed whoever had packed up Talia’s apartment had decided she didn’t need it. But why did she have it in the first place? For the same reason Carly was using it?

  Carly pulled the torch from her pocket as she headed for the wardrobe, took a step inside and aimed the beam up. The vent was there, shrouded in darkness. Moving the glow around Brooke’s shelves, she saw short and long hanging space, shoes and boots. Nothing Carly remembered seeing from above, but it looked different from this angle.

  Over beef casserole, Carly considered telling Brooke about what she’d found and what she suspected, but she didn’t know anything for sure – and why freak her out with stories of intruders in her ceiling and questions about Talia if Carly was wrong?

  A full, white moon hung above the atrium as Carly walked back to her apartment, its ghostly glow flooding the huge, hollow centre of the warehouse. She stopped at the turn in the zigzag stairs and ran her ga
ze around the layers of apartments and corridors.

  Who knew about the hidden spaces in between? About the vents that looked into people’s lives?

  The third floor was a little below her, Brooke’s door closed now. Carly counted eight others in the row – she’d crawled across all of them today, peered into five, opening the hatches and inspecting their belongings. Over on the left lived the woman with the shoe collection. What size was she? Maybe Carly could borrow a pair. A smile flickered on her lips, then she remembered the man in her loft and her face dropped.

  How did he do it without waking people?

  Carly had woken. She’d called the police. Anne Long had told her that other residents had reported intruders, sometimes more than once. Had he stopped visiting them or got better at not waking them? He’d called Carly his best. Maybe he didn’t get so close to the others. Or maybe she was a light sleeper. Or …

  None of it made sense. Her theories screamed of psychosis and invented worlds with bad men in secret tunnels. There were special wards for people with those kinds of fantasies. And yet … she angled her eyes to where she’d emerged from the equipment room. The tunnels existed and bad things had happened. To her. Maybe to Brooke and Talia. How many others?

  Two weeks ago, she’d stood in the foyer with her neighbours on a bad day. Elizabeth had died getting out of her bed. The official version was that she’d tripped and hit her head, perhaps a little unsteady from new painkillers. Elizabeth had a loft but she’d slept in a bedroom off the living space. Did it matter? If you could get into a loft, you had access to a whole apartment. Maybe Elizabeth was groggy – and maybe she was scared. Scared and groggy. Scrambling out of bed, terrified of what was in the room with her.

  Carly ran her eyes around the corridors until she found Elizabeth’s door on the first floor. She’d lived in the centre of the north wall. There was a pre-fab ventilation chute that ran along that wall. With vents that opened into the apartments.

  And now Carly needed to see it for herself.

  44

  It was almost 10 pm but it didn’t matter – it was always night in the ceiling. The only thing that mattered was that it wasn’t close to three thirty. That was when he came. And Carly didn’t want to be in the tunnels if he was roaming around tonight.

  She ran the rope through the carabiner and belay device, dropped her legs into the void and found the ladder with her feet. It had been cold outside when she returned from the hospital and the wind had picked up since then, but the ventilation shaft felt the same as before: mild temperature, the updraught a whisper across her face. The difference was that a hot, pressing need to know was overriding her fear as she made the long climb down to the pre-fab chute above the first floor.

  Getting to it from the ladder was the first problem. The chute was on the wall behind her, there were hand- and footholds along the adjacent brickwork to reach it, but it involved a big sideways step over a long drop. It reminded her that the access was designed for maintenance workers using regulation safety gear who worked with a buddy in case of accidents.

  ‘Don’t think too hard about it,’ she told herself as she reached out.

  Her arm was at full stretch before she felt the cool metal of the handhold in her palm. She stuck out a shoe, found the step and hung for a second, spread across the corner like an insect. Don’t think about it. She pushed off her back foot too hard and slammed the bricks, hitting a knee, roughing up her cheek, the smell of dust and cement filling her nose.

  ‘Okay, breathe. You made it.’

  The next two along the straight wall were easy. At the mouth of the hole she ducked her head to shine the light into the chute. It was an endless, square metal tube. Like something from a movie, space stations and spies, Aliens versus Mission Impossible. The kind of thing you watched with a hand over your face thinking, No way would I get in that.

  Well, she was here now.

  Climbing in was easier than it looked and sitting at the lip, the back of her head pressed to the roof, she unhooked the rope, tied it to the rung outside, turned onto her hands and knees and crawled.

  Carly knew the apartments along here were two- and three-bedrooms, but she had no idea how they were configured or how many vents to count before she got to Elizabeth’s wardrobe. It was a minute of slow progress before she reached the first one.

  Nate was wrong, the vent wasn’t the same as the others and it didn’t look into the apartment below. It was in the top of the pre-fab chute, opening into the ceiling cavity above – and it was just a large, rectangular hole covered in a grating of a wide-weave wire. Sticky with grime, the cover was riveted to the metal chute and didn’t budge when Carly pushed.

  ‘Maybe I’m the only idiot to do this.’

  She crawled past three more vents, inspecting each, telling herself to keep going, less and less convinced she should. The next one changed her mind. When she slipped her fingers through the grating, the cover lifted straight up, separating from the chute.

  Carly sat up, her head and shoulders rising through the hole into the space above. Shining the torch around, she saw another tunnel with beam walls and insulation padding. There was brickwork, too, where the big beams butted the north wall. Ahead of her, she could see a hole in the insulation where it had been cut around a vent.

  Climbing carefully from the chute, Carly lunged her way over. It was rectangular-grid variety, clean, and it dropped down with a snick. The doors of the wardrobe below were closed, the shelves were empty. Elizabeth had had neighbours on both sides, a couple of her nieces had packed up her clothes and personal belongings last week. Which meant she was looking into Elizabeth’s apartment. And Elizabeth had died stumbling from her bed.

  He’d been here too.

  Realisation made Carly reel back from the vent with such force that she toppled onto the insulation pad, catching her thigh on a cross-timber, ripping a hole in her leggings.

  ‘You fucking arsehole.’

  Her voice was loud with anger, possibly loud enough to carry into the apartments below. She didn’t care. She wanted to storm about, stamp her feet, throw something. She had to settle for kicking the timber wall.

  She should go, she told herself. Take photos, get back to Nate’s, write it all down, make a record of where she’d been and what she’d found. Lock herself in before it got too late, in case the bastard from her loft decided to climb into the ceiling tonight.

  But she just sat on the timber beside the vent above Elizabeth’s wardrobe. The apartment was empty, Elizabeth’s memories were gone, the woman Carly had known for only a few weeks was ash in a jar somewhere – it didn’t make sense for Carly to feel close to her here but she did. And she dropped her head in her hands and let the tears roll through the dust on her cheeks. For the friend she’d lost, for the thought of what might have happened the night she died. For the weight of what Carly knew now and the absence of anyone to tell.

  Life is a long time, Elizabeth had told Carly.

  Long enough to move on again? Because Carly couldn’t stay in the warehouse. Not now. Not when the police thought she was making it up. She could board up her vent, warn Brooke and Christina, maybe knock on doors and try to explain about the man in the ceiling to the other residents she thought were vulnerable. But she couldn’t stay.

  You need to dream bigger if you’re going to get there. Elizabeth had meant Paris, but Carly’s dream had been here. In this warehouse, with these people, friends it had taken her a long time to find.

  ‘And now this is screwed up too.’

  It wasn’t Carly’s fault this time but that was no consolation. Carly knew what was going on, that made it her responsibility.

  She tipped her head against the timber at her back, rubbed her leg where the leggings had ripped. Go home, she told herself. Work it out there. Maybe he’d turn up and she could restrain him, knock him out, call the police and prove he existed.

  ‘They’d probably arrest me for assault.’

  As she pushed to a cr
ouch on the cross-timber, her heel slipped from the edge, something sharp scraping a heel.

  ‘Ow.’

  Reaching down to the flap of skin that had torn, she noticed blood was already between her fingers. She angled the torch on her forehead, saw more blood on her palm, checked the hole in her leggings and uncovered a scratch on her thigh that was oozing crimson. Great, one nail sticking out and she’d found it twice. Thinking about rust and tetanus shots, she slid her hand between the insulation and the cross-timber and found something that was definitely not a nail.

  She couldn’t angle her head torch to see what it was in the shadows, so she switched on the small torch and blinked at the glint of metal visible in its glare, understanding what she was looking at but not why it was there.

  It was a latch. The kind you might see on the front of a toolbox. She must have caught her tights and heel on the clip. But … it was a latch in a ceiling.

  She flipped it up and a tiny crack showed in the timber. She pushed a fingernail into it, but something further along was holding it down. Dragging the insulation away, she found a matching latch. Flicked it up and pulled.

  Carly’s jaw dropped as the entire top of the cross-timber lifted like a long, thin lid, tipping up and back on tiny hinges.

  It was a box. Handcrafted and divided into sections. She stared at it for long seconds, trying to make sense of it. Lots of sections and the sections held … packs of cards? She picked one set at random.

  Not playing cards. Square and white on one side. She turned them over and a hot surge of adrenaline made her head spin and her vision darken. She squeezed her eyes, pulled in a breath, hoping her brain had misread what she’d seen.

  It was a photo. Glossy, overexposed, weird angle. The kind of shot that was produced on the spot by a Polaroid camera. Of a bed, a person asleep under sheets, which were pulled and bunched under the chin. Carly knew the white hair and lined face. She was sitting above her apartment.