by Tim Curran
The rumbling scrape he had heard had sounded like a piano or something else heavy being dragged across a floor. It had already stopped, so he couldn’t be sure if the noise had come from the apartment directly above his own, where Reyna and her “family” lived, or from another location upstairs.
On top of being startled from his dream, he had awakened with one of his headaches in place, having seemingly slipped in like an intruder while his defenses were down.
He looked at the time. Almost midnight. His clothes would have finished drying almost an hour ago. And him having to be up at six in the morning to prepare for work. Startling noises, nightmares, and a headache. He grumbled a string of assorted profanities and pulled himself up from the sofa. At least it was unlikely he’d be running into Reyna and James at this hour in the laundry room, and he embarked for it.
Franklin found his warm clothes all neatly folded and stacked high in his laundry basket. Feeling more irritated than grateful, he hoisted the basket against his belly and carried it up all the flights of stairs to his third-floor apartment. Having set it down, he unlocked his door, shoved the basket inside, then paused at his threshold to tilt his head a little and listen, like a dog that appears to hear the sound of a ghost its master cannot see.
He hadn’t heard another sound from upstairs, but just now he had seemed to feel a lingering echo of sound ploughed into the air like a scar.
He closed the door to 9C again and crossed to the other side of the hallway—to the metal door that led to the back stairs. The most direct route to the fourth and topmost floor of this unit of Trinity Village Apartments. He figured once he mounted the stairs he could crack the door a little and peek out, to satisfy the itch of curiosity. Though maybe curiosity was too benign a word for what he was feeling. It was more like a magnetic attraction, though there was nothing pleasurable in the sensation. If anything, his attraction to Reyna, up there, had quickly turned to an almost unaccountable repulsion. And yet, even now as his hand closed on the door handle she rose up in his mind’s eye, smiling as if to giggle in that way of hers, the total eclipse of her eyes beckoning like those of a siren.
Having hauled the back stairs door open, he found the stairwell to be completely unlit. Where it spiraled down to the lower stories it was like a gaping well with no discernible bottom. He could imagine the light being out on one floor, but on all of them? Perhaps a circuit breaker pertaining to this portion of the building had been tripped. He held the door open so it wouldn’t automatically close on its pneumatic cylinder, the light from behind him all that entered the shaft. He questioned whether it was worth feeling his way up in complete darkness to the next floor. Maybe he could wedge this door open, first?
Then, looking up, he noticed at last that it wasn’t just darkness that lay at the top of the stairs leading to the fourth floor. The steps came to an abrupt end at a solid ceiling, with no opening through which to enter the level above.
Franklin recalled then, from helping the apparently senile old woman locate her apartment, that on the fourth floor the exit to the back stairs had been situated in that little space around the corner, not aligned with the rest of the doors in this stairwell. So there had to be another flight of steps behind the top floor’s exit … but if so, where did they come out? And why build these steps here only to terminate at a ceiling? Either the building had been poorly designed or its owners had deviated from the original layout at some point. Then again, he hadn’t opened the metal door on the top floor. It could be that, in spite of being labeled EXIT, it didn’t open onto stairs at all.
In the four years he’d lived at Trinity Village, he’d never had occasion to go up to the fourth floor until he’d aided that woman, but he must have descended this back stairwell at least a couple of times, for some reason or another. Why couldn’t he recall if that were true? Was the increasing pain of his headache muddying his memory? If he had used it, he asked himself, wouldn’t he have previously noticed the anomalous staircase that dead-ended at the ceiling?
From beyond the black pool of the ceiling he heard a teased-out, complaining creak. It was more than the sound a foot would make depressing a weakened section of flooring. More like the straining sound the mast of a wooden ship would make as that vessel listed on the swells of an approaching storm. Only the building settling in the stillness of night? Nevertheless, when the creak had subsided he realized an electric shiver of gooseflesh had flowed down his arms, and his headache had ratcheted up a notch.
Perplexed and unsettled almost to the point of disorientation, he let the door close and turned to gaze down the third floor’s hallway toward the door to the front stairs at its far end. A moment later he was moving in that direction, like a drunken man trudging foggily in search of his way back home.
This stairwell was fully lit, and he crept up its steps quietly, as though he were a spy stealing up on an enemy encampment.
The fourth-floor hallway stretched out before him like a tunnel, as if he held the cardboard tube from a roll of paper towels to his eye like a child’s pretend telescope. As he started forward, something odd about the corridor finally registered. The doors on its right side appeared to be spaced at least twice as far apart from each other as were the doors on the left side of the hallway, although he knew there would be five apartments behind either wall. He paused to turn and read the number on the door nearest to him on the right. 4D. He glanced behind him at 2D.
Once again he advanced along the corridor. At its terminus, on the left was the door to 9D. Reyna’s place. Opposite that: the bend in the hallway, from this angle filled with shadow like the opening to a little cave.
After 4D there was only one more door before the sharp turn of the corner. It was 6D. No, there was no mistaking that the blank spaces between the doors on the right stretched much wider than those of the opposing wall. How could he have not noticed this the first time he’d been up here? Too distracted by helping the old woman with her cart?
Franklin reached the end of the hallway, and briefly regarded the closed and silent door labeled 9D before turning his full attention to the bend in the hallway, which he recognized deep inside was the source of the magnetic pull that had impelled him.
As if it had been holding off for him to face it directly, crouched back in the shadows of the corner space waiting to spring out at him like a jack-in-the-box, that same stench that was something like burnt fish but in the end wholly indescribable assailed him with the force of collision. He leaned forward, belly seizing, and rasped out a long, dry retch. His headache rocketed in enormity, and a ball of silently sizzling purple-black light materialized in front of his eyes.
Nevertheless, he couldn’t take his gaze off the narrow side hallway that lay before him.
Three doors lined its right-hand side: the doors to apartments 8D and 10D followed by the metal door labeled EXIT. Part of his mind protested that he was certain the last time there had only been two doors in this wall … that 8D had been the last of the doors before the bend…but he was unable to grapple with that thought directly. What gripped his attention more forcefully than the unknown stink or the mystery of the doors or the seething purplish light superimposed over his vision was the physical properties of the hallway itself. Not just its ceiling but the walls themselves now appeared to be constructed out of a confluence of angles so unlikely, perhaps even so impossible, that it pained his mind to view them let alone attempt to contemplate them. It was as though the dark matter of the universe, no man-made material bound by terrestrial law, had been utilized in fashioning this space before him. Angles that were folded and pleated, colliding yet intersecting, tortured and broken and brilliantly mended all wrong…not only in defiance of geometry but in perversion of it.
And somehow, those three prosaic doors still stood amid the chaos of converging planes. But the hallway no longer appeared to end after the last metal door. No … it seemed to go on and on, funneling toward or from a blackness infinite and absolute. And the purple blob of l
ight did not, in fact, float as an illusion within his eyes. It hovered outside of him, apart from him, there at the threshold of the black void beyond the door marked EXIT.
He heard a soft thumping, and a weak voice—the voice of an elderly woman—crying out, “Help me! Help me!” As near as a door away. As remote as another dimension away.
“The doors are almost open now, Franklin,” said someone behind him. The voice was gentle and familiar. His mother’s?
“Right, almost open,” James repeated, also behind him.
“Add your voice to ours,” Reyna went on. Her tone became exultant. “It’s time!”
Franklin spun away without looking back at her, almost blinded by his headache anyway, only peripherally aware that Reyna and James were dressed in their freshly laundered black hooded robes. Having wrenched himself free of the magnetic grip, he surged away from it mind and body, racing wildly back down the fourth floor’s hallway. He was whimpering, his throat seared raw by his one dry heave. Reyna seemed to be calling after him but he couldn’t hear her over his pounding footfalls … or maybe his mind wouldn’t hear her. Maybe he was blocking her the way he had walled up the memories of his childhood all these years, as the deprogrammer had directed him to do.
He threw open the door to the front stairwell and thundered down its steps, the sound reverberating hollowly in the shaft formed of cinderblocks. One of his rubber flip-flops folded under his foot at one point and he almost tripped, almost pitched forward down the stairs, but fortunately he had hold of the handrail. Down one flight, then plummeting down the next, wheezing through his burned throat, waiting to hear the door at the uppermost landing squeal open and footsteps coming in pursuit, but so far there was nothing but his own noisy descent.
He had to get out of this building before the contamination spread further. Before it closed around him like a trap, and there were no doors but the doors that Reyna’s family conjured.
As he descended, multiple tears began to open in the walls of the fortress the deprogrammer had helped him erect in his mind decades earlier. He remembered now, cloudily, how the deprogrammer had taught him to visualize the building of this structure, then once it was built had taught him not to be aware of its existence, like a desert stronghold lost under the sand dunes. Yet the breaches opening and widening in it now weren’t so much random rips or cracks as portals unfolding open in complex ways like the flaps of a paper fortune-teller. As he envisioned the unburied memory fortress, against his will, he saw horrible purple-lighted faces outside these new openings, staring in at him. If faces they could be called. Each alien visage more horribly incomprehensible than the last. He could visualize these faces because his mother had instructed him even more indelibly than the deprogrammer. She had shown him these faces in books.
Still, even as these images welled up vividly from the depths of his unconscious, with the last dregs of his self-control he managed to keep his feet moving rapidly under him. As if he might actually be able to flee from himself.
In his blind panic, plunging down one staircase after another, he didn’t realize he had gone beyond the ground floor with its front entrance to the building until he found himself in the hallway outside the laundry room. Rather than backtrack, he decided in an instant to follow through with his momentum, and he lunged through the laundry room’s doorway.
At the end of the room was that little corner, and around its ninety-degree angle the fire exit door that locked from the outside, but which residents liked to prop open so they could stand out by the side of Unit 3 smoking while they waited for their clothing to wash or dry.
Franklin bolted across the room, skidded to a stop in front of the corner where the metal door stenciled EXIT should have been but wasn’t, and straightened up frozen in place as if he had been pinned by the purple beacon of light that shone on him. That unearthly glow was rushing toward him through an infinitely long black tunnel, like the light on the face of an approaching train. Its onrushing wind blasted his face, as did the terrible stench driven before it.
Franklin opened his mouth wide and screamed, screamed, riveted there as the wind and stench strengthened and the purple-black light hurtled closer and closer. His screams, though, seemingly on their own morphed into the shouted words of a chant in a language other than English.
His mother had taught him these words from a book, long ago. He had never forgotten them.
TICK TOCK
Don Webb
If any humans had lived on in any meaningful way past the Night, John Cardenas’ life trajectory would be seen as ironic. John failed out of the University of Texas twenty years ago. He has worked as an exterminator, apartment-leasing agent, vending-machine stocker and product demonstrator, and for the last four years for Eye-in-the-Sky. If you listened to late-night AM radio or to certain podcasts you’ve heard of Eye-in-the-Sky. If you visited their webpage with its bright purple eye above the pyramid design floating atop a silver saucer and read the free newsfeed, you would be up to date on excavations of giant skeletons, proof that we are living in a computer simulation, or the Big Foot love commune in Arkansas. Of course, for a few dollars more, you could subscribe and find out the REAL TRUTH THAT THE GOVERNMENT DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW. Mainly this was about the plan to take away your guns, the tax on the Internet, and what really goes on in Area 51. This lively feed of the wacky, the scary and the plain untrue was largely John’s work. He got to work from his North Austin apartment, he had a poker game once a week with five friends (of assorted races and sexes), and he had a newer car. He had benefits. It was a great job. Heck, he had basically done this job for free years before there was even an Internet. He had run a BBS called Shaved Truths that people with early PCs and external modems would call up to read paranormal news. Getting to be a “reporter” for Eye-in-the-Sky was the answer to a prayer. Not that John prayed. He had evidence that “god” was a meme created by the Babylonian elite to subjugate the masses. But for all of John’s friends, it was a great fit.
He got out of bed about nine-thirty in the morning. He checked the Eye-in-the-Sky Facebook page, making quips at last night’s posters. He read some of the better paranormal pages like Church of Mabus and Shaver Tron and shared their cooler stories. Then about ten, after his bowl of Applejacks, he began the day’s “research.” He looked at Fortean sites and occult sites and conspiracy sites. He checked Google News every hour. If he found something about the government it went into the paid feed; other stuff went into the free feed. He had lunch at one—always a large vanilla milkshake and a Spicy McChicken sandwich from the McDonalds three blocks away. He took a multi-vitamin and 2000 units of Vitamin D. At three he checked Facebook, tweeted some stories that he put on the site, and took a little nap. At six he wrote up whatever was interesting to him. He read books on cognition, world history, media theory, the occult, and the history of UFO sightings. He also read the classic paranormal writers—Fort, John Keel, Amos Carter, Pauwels and Steiger. He could handle dry academic stuff and mix it well with speculation from the ’50s and ’60s. On Sundays he called his mom in Flapjack, TX (English), and his grandmother in Mexico City (Spanish). He had a stable and uninteresting life despite the contents of his mind and his odd niche profession. Yet, without the aid of ancient texts, special training, or unusual genetics … he was one of the few hundred humans, whom in their own quirky ways, Opened the Gate.
John hosted the poker night at his apartment every other Thursday. On nights when he didn’t he drove or walked about fifteen blocks to Don Bowen’s small stucco home in the St. Johns’ neighborhood. In the summer he walked. Don operated a small used bookstore out of his home, called Libby’s Used Books. It used to belong to a man named Libby and be in a strip mall. It was one of the few used paperback stores in business. Don also rented out his garage apartment. He had inherited the house from his mom, and his expenses were low. He was John’s supplier of old paranormal paperbacks. One night as John drove there, he had a funny scare. John was waiting at a light at th
e corner of two major streets, his car next to a large concrete storm drain. A piece of shiny Mylar (possibly from a balloon) blew into the drain. The silver caught the light from John’s headlights. Flash! And it startled him. He almost jumped. He drove on to the poker game and expounded on the incident.
“It scared me because I never look down and to the right when I’m driving. I mean I have driven past that storm drain almost every day for eight or nine years. I never see it—especially if the street’s dry and there is no rain going on. The drain could be the entrance to the world of Richard Shaver’s deros, or the Xibalba of my Mayan ancestors.”
John had decided he was Mayan in 2012. He didn’t look very Mayan. Just a plump thirty-five-year-old Mexican-American with a thrift-store aesthetic.
“Or,” said Don, “A storm drain.”
“The point,” John continued, “Is that the real unknown could be right under our noses and we would never know. Maybe we shouldn’t be watching the skies or looking for government conspiracies. Maybe we should be looking at storm drains.”
Phillip Blassingame, another poker player, said, “That would make your website a lot less fun—‘The Daily Storm Drain Watch’—today a black and white tomcat was seen entering the drain about midnight. Is it a dero spy?”
“That’s not what I mean,” said John, “I don’t mean that the drain is the entrance to another world. I think fear might be. A sudden flash of fear instead of the invisibility of the storm drain. You ever read about how the Aztec shamans couldn’t see Cortez’s ships?”
Mary Machworter shook her head.
“Supposedly,” said John, “Back me up Don, supposedly as the ships sailed up to Mexico, the shamans knew something was up, but they literally couldn’t see the ships because they had no scanning pattern for them. When the ships arrived with their cargo of white men and horses, for god’s sake, they still couldn’t quite make them out. “