The Flat: A Novel of Supernatural Horror

by Jack Douglas

  He stared at the computer. Muttered, “What the hell?”

  “Goodbye” “Goodbye” “Goodbye”

  Finally the computer fell silent. He slapped the laptop shut and crossed to the front door. He locked it and peeked out the peephole.

  It had gone dark in the hall. He couldn’t see a goddamn thing.

  Chapter Eleven

  Amy slipped into the bedroom and closed the door. Goddamn it. She had one of those hangovers that got worse instead of better as the day wore on. She had a pounding headache and needed to take a couple of Advil. She went back into her suitcase where she left it sitting atop the dresser. She pored through the compartment that held her toiletries and fished out the bottle of ibuprofen.

  She couldn’t win. He was mad at her for not picking something up for him at the grocery. Amy, of course, didn’t say anything about his not offering to go. The entire exercise would have been useless. He depended on her to do everything. To buy his food, to launder his clothes, to drive him here and there as though he were an invalid. Jesus, why couldn’t he do anything for himself?

  She untwisted the childproof cap and dropped two pills into her hand. She stared at them. They weren’t Advil. They were large, white, oval-shaped. They were Vicodin.

  Son of a bitch. Craig had promised her that he was done popping prescription pills. Assured her that he hadn’t taken a single one in ten months. If that were true, what in the hell were these doing in her suitcase? That fucking liar.

  She squeezed them in her hand, wondered where he was getting them from now. Back when he practiced law he used to procure them from his injured clients. By the time he turned in his card to the state bar he had stockpiled a two-year supply. But even that was long gone. She had seen him finish them off in Hawaii. She’d witnessed him withdraw. And she’d endured his constant whining, his begging her to help him out, to talk to some of the doctors at the hospital where she worked. To ask one of them to write a prescription. After a few weeks she’d finally convinced him that was out of the question. She wasn’t about to get fired and maybe even arrested so that he could continue gobbling pain pills. And that was when he started nagging her to have her remaining wisdom teeth pulled out. Two of her wisdom teeth had been extracted a couple of weeks before she met him. And just before their second date as she got ready to go out, he’d pilfered a couple painkillers from her medicine cabinet. She had thought it was funny at the time. But her friends didn’t. And her friends had been right.

  Craig’s drug use had been far more than just recreational; it was a way of life. And he and his friend Danny were into more than just pills. More than just painkillers and amphetamines and tranquilizers. They were into hardcore drugs. Not just the club drugs that everyone under thirty seemed to be doing on Friday and Saturday nights in the city. Not just ecstasy and ketamine and GHB. They were into heavy-duty hallucinogens like mushrooms and LSD. They were doing coke, lots of it. And not just coke but crack. She didn’t know about the heroin until later. Much later. After she’d already agreed to move in with him.

  After what happened though, what occurred in his Battery Park apartment, he promised her he would lay off the hard stuff. He continued taking pain pills and smoked a little weed. But the club drugs-- the coke and crack, and of course the heroin--all vanished from their lives. And that had been enough for her until the Vicodin started becoming a problem.

  He promised me, she thought, clenching the pills in her hand. She almost started to cry.

  Instead she placed the pills back into the bottle. There were about twenty of them. Not a single Advil, nothing she could take for her headache. She gritted her teeth.

  Not only had he tossed out her ibuprofen but he had planted these narcotics in her luggage. What if airport security had discovered them in an x-ray? What if they had pulled her off the plane and demanded she produce a valid prescription? What if she had been arrested for his drugs?

  Now he was tapping on the bedroom door.

  He could never give her ten minutes’ privacy. In three years she hadn’t had any personal space. They had to do everything together. Eat together, read together, watch television together. And of course, they always watched his shows. Reality television was out. No Real World, no Top Chef, no Real Housewives. Only news and politics, re-runs of old sitcoms like Seinfeld and Friends. He controlled their movie-watching too. He didn’t let her touch or even see their Netflix queue. It’ll be a surprise, he’d say. Surprise, surprise. Another two hour documentary on global warming or the genocide in Darfur.

  Still tapping.

  “What?” she called through the door.

  He didn’t answer, just kept tapping. Playing his stupid little childish games. He did it all the time. Called out her name, made her come running for no reason. Snuck up behind her, pulled down her pants. And laughed out loud as though it were the funniest thing in the world.

  “Jackass,” she said. She stood up and opened the door.

  He had already run away. She poked her head around the corner and saw him standing with his head pressed against the living room window. She sighed and slammed the door.

  Her head felt as though it were going to explode. She snatched up the Advil bottle and considered taking a Vicodin. But no, she didn’t even like taking narcotic painkillers when they had been prescribed to her after oral surgery. She wasn’t about to start taking them now. Not for a goddamn hangover. The headache would pass or she would go back out and buy some aspirin.

  She took the bottle into the bathroom and untwisted the cap. Throw out my Advil, I’ll toss out your Vicodin, she thought. She lifted the lid on the toilet. A wave of nausea washed over her. She turned the bottle upside down and watched the large white pills drop into the water, each of them landing with a plop before descending slowly toward the drain. She twisted the cap back onto the now-empty bottle and flushed.

  She imagined the pills screaming as they spiraled toward the drain. Imagined all the sewer-dwelling animals—the rats and various vermin—getting high on the potent drug as it dissolved into their water. She turned to leave, but as she did she felt something rise in her throat and into her mouth—an acrid liquid that began spilling over her lips.

  She spun back around to the toilet and emptied her mouth. There was no food, only bile. A yellow-green fluid that continued flooding over her tongue. She expelled as much as she could but remained nauseous. Her face was flush and her forehead dripped with sweat. She vomited again. And again. A string of saliva hung from her lower lip like a broken cobweb.

  That’s what you get for drinking on an empty stomach, she thought. No, that’s what I get for coming with Craig to this hellhole in the first place, she corrected herself.

  Then she hurled into the toilet again.

  Finally she stood, her knees sore from the bathroom tiles, weak and wobbly. She heard Craig rapping again on the bedroom door.

  She looked into the cracked and cloudy mirror above the sink and studied her reflection. She appeared older than her thirty-three years for the first time she could remember. Her nose was red and swollen. The rest of her face was as pale as paste, except for under the eyes, where the flesh was puffy and a putrid black and blue. She turned on the water and splashed some onto her face.

  Craig was still tapping on the bedroom door. She cursed him and tried flushing the toilet.

  Chapter Twelve

  Down in the alley the dog tread lightly along the cobblestones as though it were painful to walk. He moved from end to end, wagging his skinny tail and sniffing for food. He did not look up and he made no sound, just paced back and forth like an expectant father.

  Craig heard the toilet flush and felt the sudden urge to urinate. He tore himself from the window and started toward the bathroom. When he heard Amy vomit he stopped dead in his tracks and waited.

  He hated when she drank; even hated when he drank these days. He felt she shouldn’t need to now that they were together. He didn’t. When she drank you got one of two Amys. The carefree
, fun-at-all-costs Amy, or the angry, I’m-taking-no-shit-tonight Amy. More often than not you got the latter. And the next morning, well, you steered as far clear of the hungover Amy as you did any of them.

  She had gone to Alcoholics Anonymous once. Not because she was an alcoholic, mind you, but because she liked playing the victim. She drank too much, needed AA. Liked sitting around in a circle telling stories with strangers. Had an eating disorder, too—anorexia or bulimia, take your pick—and needed treatment. Anything short of a suicide attempt to garner attention. Like when she went crying to her mother and dipshit brother, yapping about how he had hit her. Now that was attention.

  And then she wondered why he wanted nothing to do with her family.

  True or not, they had believed her, took her word over his. And when last he’d seen her mother in New York, boy oh boy, did she rub it in. Had the gall to start talking about Hawaii—how gorgeous it was. How relaxing her day there with Amy had been. And how happy, how so fucking happy, she was to have her daughter back home.

  That’s when Craig decided on the setting for his next book. That’s when he started planning this trip to Portugal. Oh sure, Lisbon would make a fine setting for his novel, but Europe had the added benefit of taking Amy away from her mother, of eradicating once again that cancerous element. And besides, even after Amy took him back when he returned to New York, he still felt as though he had lost, felt as though her mother had won. Craig didn’t like to lose, not in the courtroom, and certainly not to some odious old bitch that thought he was good for nothing. Sure, Portugal wasn’t Hawaii, but her mother would still have to cross a damned ocean to get to them.

  When the retching stopped, when Craig finally heard Amy rustling around in the bedroom again, he started toward the bathroom to use the toilet. She stopped him at the bedroom door.

  “Where are you going?” she said. “Bathroom.”

  “Don’t. The toilet won’t flush.”

  He took a step forward. “Well, let me see if I can’t fix it.” She blocked him. “There’s no plunger. I looked.”

  “I have to take a piss.” He tried to sidestep her. She sighed and took hold of his arm. “I threw up.”

  “I know,” he said, gently pulling away from her. “I heard you.”

  He stepped past her into the bedroom and opened the bathroom door. The stench hit him like a slap to the face. He gagged, nearly vomited himself. He held his breath, breathing through his mouth. He stared down at the yellow-green bile stagnating in the toilet and wondered what the hell he could do.

  He had to pee, really had to go. In fact, he had been pissing a hell of a lot lately. Used to be he could go all day and not pee twice. Just once in the morning and he’d be good. Now it was all the time. Even during the night. He would have to get up out of bed two, three times. Sometimes four. And the urge would be so great that he’d panic.

  Amy, of course, told him not to worry about it. Pointed out that since he had stopped drinking he had been drinking a lot more. Coke Zero, blue Gatorade, a can or two of Red Bull a day, and ten or twelve bottles of Fiji water—three of those while reading in bed just before going to sleep.

  But Craig wasn’t buying it. He knew there was something wrong with his prostate. Only he didn’t have health insurance, and anyway, he was frightened as hell to actually have a doctor check it out. To tell him that his prostate was dangerously enlarged. Or worse yet, that it was cancerous.

  But regardless of the cause, right now he’d have to hold it in. He turned, found Amy standing behind him.

  “I told you,” she said. “We can’t fix it without a plunger.”

  “Well, what plugged it up in the first place? I heard you flush it five minutes ago.”

  Her eyes swept over the sink and Craig followed them. Atop the sink Craig saw the Advil bottle. He lifted and shook it, untwisted the cap. Then he swallowed hard.

  “What did you do with them?” he said. “What did I do with what?”

  “You know what.” “The Advil?” “The Vicodin.”

  She hesitated. “Why was there Vicodin in there?”

  He took a deep breath. “Just answer the question, Amy.”

  She folded her arms across her chest and looked away from him. “I did the same thing with your Vicodin that you did with my Advil,” she said. Her tone was low yet defiant. “I tossed them away.”

  “In the toilet?” “Yes.”

  “You flushed them?” “Yes.”

  He squeezed the plastic bottle in his hand, felt the color creep across his cheeks. “What Advil?” he said finally. “This was my bottle from my medicine cabinet back in New York. I never touched yours.”

  She stared at it. “That bottle was in my luggage,” she said.

  “You packed everything, Amy. Not me. I put the bottle with my toothbrush, my mouthwash, my razor, my shaving cream. That bottle had been empty for months. I never threw out any Advil. Certainly not yours.”

  She took a step backward and parted her lips the way she did when she was backed into a corner, when she couldn’t come up with anything to say. “Well, then, I made a mistake.”

  “You’re damn right you made a mistake. Those Vicodin cost me five bucks apiece, and I need them in order to write. They lift me up just enough to stay focused.”

  Amy exhaled. “You’re the one who asked me to pack your shit. You should have done it yourself.” She turned to walk away.

  He followed her. “What does that have to do with any thing?”

  She stopped and spun around, had the nerve to point her finger at him. “What are you doing with Vicodin anyway? You said you were done popping pills. You promised.”

  “First of all,” he said, “my taking a single Vicodin a day doesn’t affect you. Secondly, that’s not the issue here. The issue is you taking my pills and flushing them down the toilet. The issue is you clogging up the toilet and then vomiting in it so that it stinks to high hell and no one can so much as take a piss.”

  A wall of moisture formed across her eyes. “It couldn’t have been the pills,” she said, her voice shaking. “They dissolve.”

  She stepped past him back into the bedroom and slammed the door. How the hell had he been so stupid? He should have packed the goddamn pills himself. He just never dreamed she’d have any reason to look into the bottle. She had her own fucking Advil; what did she need with his?

  Now she knew he was still taking Vicodin. Probably knew he had been taking them all along. Knew that he’d been spending the few bucks he made writing on the web buying narcotic pain pills, instead of helping with the goddamn groceries and paying her back all that money she’d put out for him for rent.

  Worse still, he had barked at her. Yelled at her for tossing his pills and clogging up the toilet. If she wasn’t leaving before (Of course, she was. She’s been plotting to leave all along.) then surely she was leaving now.

  And now he would have to deal with withdrawal. Not only Amy withdrawal but Vicodin withdrawal, too. And some of the symptoms were just as bad. It would wreak havoc on his stomach, cause him nausea and diarrhea. And thanks to Amy, he had nowhere to puke and shit. He would get headaches and neck aches and various other aches and pains throughout his body. He would sweat (“Get the fuck over here! I’ve got the blow dryer!”) and worst of all, he would fall back into his funk and probably wouldn’t be able to write.

  He stepped into the kitchen and unzipped his fly. Looked down and saw a roach scurry across the floor, crawling beneath one of the warped wooden cabinets.

  He caught his breath. How did people stand having those gruesome fucking things running around the house? The only time he had ever seen one in his own home was in Hawaii, where you didn’t have to be dirty to have a problem. They were everywhere in the islands, and big, too. They thrived in the tropics. Of course, he couldn’t bear to go near them. Couldn’t even get close enough to kill one. In fact, in three years he hadn’t touched a single bug. Amy had killed them all.

  What would I do without her?

/>   He shrugged the question off and pulled out his penis. Then he urinated into the sink.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Amy lay in bed reading the same page over and over again. She couldn’t concentrate. And this was one of the rare books she actually got to choose herself. Ordinarily, Craig chose her books for her. He wanted her to read books that he had already read himself so that they could “discuss” them. Because he was constantly accusing her of not having anything to say. Of not having any common interests. Of not trying to find common ground.

  Talk to me, he’d say. Talk to me. He had no idea how much she hated those three words. She was quiet. And what was wrong with that? He’d tell her she was the only person he had to speak to, the only person he saw each day. Well, that wasn’t her fault. She’d never told him to quit the law or to work from home. To shut himself off from his colleagues and friends. To bury himself in the apartment all day every day. What right did he have to guilt her into speaking to him?

  She tried again, her eyes following her finger down the page. It was no use. Her mind was racing. She rested the book open on her chest.

  She heard Craig in the kitchen, opening and closing the cabinets, creating a bit of a ruckus. Heard boxes hitting the counter, cans clinking together, some hitting the linoleum and rolling along the floor. What the hell was he doing out there?

  She tried to pay it no mind. She picked up her book and started reading again. Got through one paragraph, then another. Made it to the end of the page and started the next. Then she heard Craig moving across the living room. He was carrying something. Sounded like a garbage bag full of soda cans. The front door creaked open then slammed closed.

  She sat up in bed and looked over at the phone. She still hadn’t called her mother. She realized now she had been putting it off because she wasn’t quite sure what to tell her. She knew her mother would beg her to come home. And she was afraid she would cave. She didn’t want to leave him again just because of her mom. If she left, she wanted her decision to be her own. And she didn’t want to regret it this time around. If this was going to happen, it had to be a clean break. But it was difficult. Complicated. She knew what was at stake. That there would be no going back. That this time their split would be final. The front door opened again, moaning like a cat in heat. It closed and she heard Craig heading back to the kitchen. Heard him rustling around again.