The Flat: A Novel of Supernatural Horror

by Jack Douglas

  He’d gotten off the couch, tried to stand and immediately felt dizzy. He’d steadied himself and moved purposefully toward the bedroom, where the fado was mixing with her screams and the sounds of objects smacking against the walls, of drawers opening and closing on their own.

  He burned his hand on the doorknob again then quickly removed his shirt. The door opened as it did before and he was hit again by a vicious blast of searing heat.

  Amy was on the floor, a handful of her hair standing straight up, pointing toward the ceiling as though it were being pulled, as though some invisible line were yanking it up. She was screaming. Even in the faint light spilling in from the kitchen he could see there were red marks all across her face and neck.

  He moved forward but was immediately thrown back by a powerful shot to the chest.

  He struck the floor, the brunt of this fall taken by his back. He then felt a kick and instantly attempted to protect his head.

  The phone was ringing.

  The bathroom door rattled in its frame as though someone were inside trying to escape.

  Craig thrashed about, eyes squeezed tight.

  Finally he felt a pair of warm hands on him, not delivering the vicious blows he’d been taking but instead soothing and caressing his bruised and battered face and neck. He stopped fighting.

  Amy’s voice was hoarse, her breathing labored. She smelled of body odor and her breath stunk of dead fish.

  “Get us out of here,” she begged him. “Please, Craig, get us out.”

  He pulled her down on top of him and squeezed her with all his might.

  “I will,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. “I will, baby. I promise.”

  Now, as he lay next to her on the mattress, he wished he had never said it. It was just one more goddamn promise he knew he couldn’t keep.

  “Chega!” she suddenly shouted in her sleep. “Pare com isso. Va-se embora.”

  He set his hand on her back. Her top was drenched with sweat. Her body was warm, burning even. Her hair was soaking wet. He pulled his hand away.

  The pulse pounded in his ear.

  (It’s a tumor.)

  (Or an aneurism.)

  (With an aneurism you go like that!)

  ...if the starvation doesn’t get me first, he thought. No, not the starvation. Amy said we’d die of thirst. Of dehydration.

  His head ached, so did his neck. His stomach grumbled, felt nauseous. The palm of his right hand stung from the burns. The gash on his forehead throbbed but no longer really hurt. He closed his eyes. Tried to regulate his breathing. His nose felt stuffed up from the heat.

  He tried to concentrate, to focus on finding a way to get out of the flat. This was their fourth night in Lisbon, their third night trapped.

  Is that right?

  His mind was all over the place. It was becoming more and more difficult to think straight. How long had they been without water? How long without food?

  Doesn’t matter. All that matters now is getting out.

  “Craig, please,” she said. “Stop it.”

  He turned toward her, rested his hand on her arm. “Stop what, sweetie?”

  “Stop touching me there.”

  He lay silent. She didn’t sound as she normally did in her sleep. She came across as clear, alert, awake.

  “Babe?” he said. “What?”

  “I haven’t put my hands on anything other than your arm and back.” She rolled toward him. Her eyes were wide open, her cracked lips parted, showing her teeth. She suddenly sprung to her knees on the mattress, placed a hand between her legs. Her breathing was loud and fast.

  “I felt you,” she said. “I felt someone.”

  He sat up too, rested a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay, doll. It’s all right. Lay back down. I’ll keep watch over you. You have to get some sleep.”

  She buried her face in her hands. “Get some sleep? How? And why? So that we’re well rested when this fucking flat finally kills us?”

  “No,” he said, searching the darkness, gently petting her sweaty head. “You need to get some sleep...” He took a deep breath. “Because we’re getting the hell out of here tomorrow.”

  #

  It took her some time but eventually she went back to sleep. Craig stayed awake, staring up at the ceiling. Thinking of how he was going to come through for her, how he was going to get them out of the flat.

  The stench from the bathroom was growing worse in the heat, so bad that he began to breathe through the mouth all the time.

  How do we get out? He imagined being locked in an actual prison, having others to help him plan his escape. A connected inmate, maybe. Or a dirty screw on the take. Wrong direction. He was trapped in a flat and all he had was Amy.

  He had been locked in a basement before, something he really didn’t want to think about. Not because of his fits of claustrophobia, but because of the bugs. And he didn’t escape then. He had to wait until his mother finally let him out.

  As he contemplated their escape, the room suddenly became cooler.

  The suffocating heat vanished and he could see his breath.

  A clicking sounded from the doorway. He sprung up on the mattress and waited for his eyes to readjust.

  At first he saw nothing. Then… something. Something tall and slim. In the blackness he squinted, leaned forward, trying to catch a glimpse without leaving the relative safety of the bed.

  The form moved. Only slightly. Forward, haltingly, clicking as it went.

  Craig slid backwards on the mattress until his shoulders pushed up against the headboard. Up and down his arms rose tiny bumps of gooseflesh. He looked toward the outline of light around the bathroom door and considered leaving the bed, opening it, letting the light in.

  But he didn’t want to leave the bed. Didn’t really want to see (who) what was there. But again it moved toward him, the clicking now resembling the cracking of bones, mimicking the sound his pinky finger made when it snapped, when he’d dislocated his kneecap, when he’d tried to resuscitate Danny using CPR and instead broke three of his ribs.

  A terrible smell came off of this bitch, worse than anything in the room before. Worse than the vomit and shit leaking out of the bathroom, worse than the sheets and his soiled shorts still lying in the shower. Worse, he decided, than anything he had ever smelled before.

  Amy lay still and silent. Sleeping like

  (“The dead don’t whisper. They scream.”)

  The shadow moved closer, and Craig could make out the shape. A long lean figure. Like the cab driver they had found the other night, the irksome son of a bitch who had driven them back to the Alfama.

  (“Deed dey grub yer cuck?”)

  The red rose in him, pushing aside some of the fear. Craig’s hands balled into fists, his teeth bared.

  (“I bet they grabbed your cock. That’s what they do, these gypsy girls.”) Craig slid his feet under him, ready to launch himself, toward it, away from it, he didn’t yet know. All he knew was he wanted to be ready to move, to spring himself to his feet, to leap in any direction, depending on whatever or whoever this might be.

  The figure moved slowly, so goddamn slowly, toward the bed.

  Click. Click.

  Click. Click. Click.

  Craig held his breath, the stench growing so foul he needed to vomit, to expel the last bit of bile from his otherwise empty stomach.

  Then he thought, The fucking thing’s just one long shadow. There’s nothing, there’s no one there. I’m fucking hallucinating. Losing it. It’s just another trick in my head. Another goddamn mindfuck!

  But then he saw its face. Gray and thin and dead. The flesh sagging off the cheekbones, the eyes a pale yellow, in the corners a gruesome red. Its mouth fell open; he could smell the stench of its breath. Its teeth were rotten. Its tongue was black and swollen. Its lips were gone, the gums exposed. Its nose was missing and its hair was long and thin and filthy, while writhing tendrils of some kind slithered out of its ears and nose and neck.<
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  Click.

  Click. Click. Click.

  Click.

  “Oh my God,” Craig said. Then he reached for Amy. Her body was still drenched with sweat. He jostled her, poked her, prodded her, screamed for her to wake up.

  Click. Click. Click.

  Aside from that sound, the room was silent. He suddenly found himself missing the fado, crying as the clicks came closer, unsure what to do or which way to run.

  “What the fuck do you want from me,” he screamed, pushing back against the headboard. The figure only moved forward, now standing at the foot of the bed, its long thin neck slanting—click click, click click— its rotted eyes staring, though they had to be unseeing in any conventional sense, at Amy and Craig.

  She lay unmoving and for a long moment Craig feared she was dead.

  The ringing of the phone pierced the silence, the sound reverberating in Craig’s chest. At first he sat frozen, unable to move. Then he pushed himself, scrambled over Amy and reached for the end table next to the bed.

  The shadow moved with him, faster yet haltingly, around the side of the bed.

  Click Click

  clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick.

  Craig reached for the receiver just as the figure extended its hand.

  In a panic, Craig swiped the handset from the cradle and put it to his pulsing ear.

  The voice on the other end was low and ugly.

  But sure as fuck it was Danny’s. “What do ya say we chase the dragon, Craig?”

  Xavier draws a picture of his mother. He doesn’t mean for her to look angry in the picture but she does. Her eyebrows point inward, and her mouth is set in a snarl. It is how she looks when Xavier doesn’t do exactly as he is told.

  Sweat drips from Xavier’s head onto the picture and he tries to wipe it away, but he only smears the lead. It’s hot in the flat, hotter than he can ever remember. His shirt is drenched, soaked to the skin. The heat must be from the nearby fires.

  Xavier wonders whether the fires will reach him. They are getting closer. He knows that from looking out the window.

  Next to his angry mother, Xavier draws a man. This makes her happier, so he replaces her snarl with a smile. Only it doesn’t look like a smile because of the snarl underneath. Now it just looks as though Xavier’s mother is yelling at him.

  She does that often. But better that than when she lifts her hands. On the man, Xavier draws a frown. Maybe the man is his father.

  He is unhappy and that is why he leaves Xavier and his mother behind. Xavier’s mother must have made his father unhappy. Yes, he left them, and that must be why.

  That is also why Xavier is alone now. Because his family split apart. Xavier picks up the piece of paper and rips it in half, leaving his father on one side, his mother on the other. Then he crumples both sides up because neither his father nor his mother are around. Not now, not when Xavier most needs them.

  The boy is lonely and it hurts, feels as though a dagger has pierced his empty gut. If only his mother had been nice to his father, his father would have stayed. Then they would have been home together the morning of the quake.

  Then Xavier would not be in this alone.

  But he is alone, and certain that every other tenant has fled the building never to return. He is alone with the noises and shadows at night, alone while the building continues to shake from aftershocks and the smoke continues to rise. And the fire is coming for him. He feels it in his bones.

  Xavier rises to his feet and runs at the front door, slams into it with his shoulder, but is only knocked back to the floor. His face is glowing red; he can feel the heat in his cheeks. He gets to his feet again and moves toward the window. He looks for the dog but is sure that the dog is now dead and buried somewhere under the rubble.

  He screams for help but knows no one can hear him. If he opens the window the smoke will come in. The smoke will throttle him by the neck and strangle him.

  The window must always remain closed.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “Welcome!”

  Craig lifted his head from the table then slowly raised the lid of each eye. The laptop had been doing that all night. Coming to life, welcoming him, then as soon as he moved for the keyboard bellowing, “Goodbye!” He had finally moved them out of the bedroom where most of the activity seemed to be taking place. Where Amy had been smacked around and he had gone a few rounds with the weighty wooden bookcase. Where the temperature seemed to be rising at an even faster rate. And where, of course, he’d encountered that...

  (Click clickclick click)

  ... fucking thing.

  He had started writing while Amy slept on the couch, but he’d felt irritable and exhausted, been sweating and short of breath. His vision was blurred. He had lost much of his desire to write and felt depressed, so he’d put his head on the table and fallen asleep.

  He went to the window where the first light of morning was now beginning to spill in. The dog lay curled up in a corner, partly hidden by the shadows. Craig tried opening the window yet again.

  How could he figure a way out if he couldn’t even think straight?

  He moved toward the kitchen, having to rub out sharp cramps in his calf muscles as he went. When he hit the linoleum he pulled himself out of the fly on his boxers and headed toward the sink. He looked up at the bleak kitchen light and began to pee.

  His urine was the color of copper. “You’re dehydrating.”

  Her voice startled him. It was a low throaty rasp, the same sound she’d made last winter when she came down with a bad case of laryngitis. He stared down into the sink and nodded. “How are you feeling?”

  His throat burned as he spoke, his own voice resembling hers. She didn’t respond, only stood there blinking at him. Her pupils had eaten up most of her irises so that she looked like she was ridiculously high, as though she were rolling on a half dozen hits of ecstasy.

  “I have an idea,” he said. “But it’s going to require some strength.

  More than I think either of us has right now.” Her head tilted toward the icebox.

  “I already checked that last night,” he said. “It’s all gone. Melted.” She lowered her head. “That’s all we had.”

  “What about paper? We’ve got plenty of that.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s nondigestible. No nutritional value. It’ll make you feel full but it won’t give you any calories or energy.”

  He put his hand on his stomach. Now that she said it he realized he already felt full. He was weak but he felt no hunger whatsoever.

  “You’ve lost your appetite,” she said, as though she were reading his mind.

  He nodded. “How’d you know?”

  “I’ve lost mine, too. It’s another symptom of dehydration.”

  For the first time since his agent sold Libations he thought of suicide, of ending it all with a knife along the wrists or a bedsheet around the neck, something, anything to keep from dying of thirst, from being overcome by the heat, from having his organs shut down one by one and being helpless to stop it. If he had to die he at least wanted to take the easy way out, to control it.

  “What was your idea?” she said.

  Should he kill her first? It would be cruel, he thought, to leave her here to die in the flat alone, to kill himself without so much as saying goodbye. It would be cruel, too, to kill himself in front of her, to make her deal with a dead body in the final hours or days of her own life. Cruel to make a pact, to let her in any way know what was coming when her death could be quick and fairly painless, when it could be delivered without any notice, without warning, so that she wouldn’t experience any further fear, any further suffering. But how should he do it?

  “What was your idea?” she repeated “Forget it.”

  He stepped past her and out of the kitchen, much different ideas now flooding his mind. He could get them out of the flat
after all. Not in the way Amy thought, not in the way he had originally intended. But at least he could end the waiting, the unknowing. At least he could end the pain.

  “Tell me,” she said, following him. “You said you had an idea, I want to hear it.”

  A pillow, maybe. That was humane. But he wasn’t sure he had the strength. What if she fought him off, clawed his eyes out or kicked him in the nuts?

  “Just tell me.”

  The television. He could unplug it, hit her on the fucking head. That would put her right out. Then, if she were still breathing, he could finish the job any way he’d like. But did he even have the strength to lift the goddamn thing high enough to crack her skull with it?

  He rounded the corner and stepped into the bedroom. “Craig,” she said, still on his heels. “Craig.”

  He could take her in his arms, comfort her, then toss her on the bare mattress and break her neck. That wouldn’t take much strength. Her bones had to be brittle by now, and anyway, how hard was it to break a human neck? Couldn’t be that difficult; it was just that not enough people tried.

  “It can’t hurt to just tell me,” she said. “Maybe it’ll give me another idea.”

  He cracked open the bathroom door, breathed in the thick horrible stench.

  “Please, Craig.”

  He could grab her by the hair, hold down her head, drown her in the toilet. Have her bob for his fucking Vicodin. Yeah, that kind of turned him on. Had a certain poetic justice to it. That was something he could definitely get on board with.

  He turned and brushed past her out of the bathroom. “You’re scaring me.”

  He could spin around and punch her in the mouth right now. Knock her down and just beat her to death. Maybe drive her nose up into her brain.

  He reached for the lamp, hefted it up and felt its weight.

  “I’ve got it,” she said.

  He looked at her, trying to hide his disappointment.

  “I know what we can eat.”

  Grudgingly, he set down the lamp. “You do? What, you’ve been saving a bag of candy corns in your luggage?”

  She was staring down at her feet. For a moment, Craig pictured himself sawing them off.