by S. T. Joshi
They had decided to meet at the brownstone after Tom got off from work, but he was running late, as always—one of her pet peeves. Even so, she was excited to see the interior after Tom had described it and the area, which was not only near a small greenbelt, but was convenient to most amenities and even had its own parking space—a rarity. It was the sixth place that they had been to in the past month, but something about it felt better than the others, which were in parts of the city that made her nervous. And it was reasonably close to both of their jobs.
“Wow! I do love the hardwoods,” she said, nonchalantly caressing a newly painted wall. The smell of the paint lingered in the air, subtly merging with a trace of cleaning solutions. “How many bedrooms again?”
“Two. Two bedrooms, one-and-a-half baths, galley kitchen. Gas stoves, for the chef in you!” the agent replied, smoothing his tie and turning on the light in the hallway to the master bedroom. “Great place, great services, restaurants nearby… An outstanding value for this part of the city, near the school—”
“We don’t have any. I mean, no children.” She felt strange saying it aloud. “I decided we weren’t having any.”
“Hello! Sorry I’m late,” Tom said, rushing into the open front door.
“Oh, no worries! We were just starting,” the agent said. “I was running through some of the details.”
“Did you mention the previous owners?” Tom asked, walking over to where they stood in the hall near the bedroom. “Pretty interesting story…”
The agent gave a tight smile. “I did mention that they disappeared—”
“That’s not all, though.”
“No. No, that’s not all; I was going to get to that.” The agent looked down.
She felt the tension in the room elevate. “Get to what?” she asked, an edge in her voice. She dreaded this; she hoped it was nothing stupid. Sometimes Tom did things that just got all over her nerves: dumb ideas, poor choices, crazy notions. If he had not been such a hard worker, she would have found someone else a long time ago. He had even given her another shot when he caught her with her ex-boyfriend, which was more than she would have done. As her mother and brother told her, someone with her intelligence, her looks could get any guy they wanted, so why settle? Maybe guilt… maybe pride… She felt as though something big were going to happen for her one day, and then she could really get on with her life. She deserved better, and she knew that, but he was here, and had never screwed up so bad as to warrant the door. Yet.
“Oh, it’s nothing, really—”
“Well, actually, it’s a very cool story,” Tom interrupted, as was his habit. “It was an older couple, and they were rumored to have mob connections—”
“That,” the agent interjected, “is purely speculative; don’t let that—”
“Right, right—pure speculation. Regardless,” Tom continued, his hands flailing as he spoke. “So they were this older mob couple who had been the owners here for, like, nearly twenty years; so anyway, they were vacationing in Prague, having a good time, and then BAM!” Tom whacked his hands together dramatically. “They’re dragged kicking and screaming across the Charles Bridge, to Prague Castle, and never seen again.”
The room went quiet. The agent sighed loudly. “While it’s true that they did not return, no one knows that they were ‘dragged away.’ They were filmmakers and were doing some research on a recently discovered medieval-era dig near an abandoned city in the Czech Republic. Additionally, they had relatives in Europe, and it’s believed that the couple just decided to stay there. Besides, no one’s even certain that they left the country, or even the city! I mean, there’s no record of them staying in Prague, just some plane ticket purchases. They can’t verify who even used the tickets, or if they were used. The trail went cold after that, and they left no itinerary beyond going to the Czech Republic.”
“That’s not what I read online, though,” Tom replied. “I read that they had some real money, and were in some deep shit with the Feds, the whole ‘researching-the-ossuary’ thing was a ruse; they were really trying to buy fake identities. I also read it was related to some kinky sex stuff—young girls, live sex shows, crap like that. No one ever heard from them again. That’s why this place went on the market: no one can reach ’em; it’s like they never existed. I read they were troublemakers in the building, too—tried to get a longtime resident evicted so they could take his unit over and expand into it. I think the whole episode adds to the charm of the place, really.”
She looked at Tom, who was smiling, then to the agent, who busied himself nervously eyeing his notes. Finally she asked: “Interesting. Anything else I should know about?”
Then, distantly at first, there was the melancholy sound of a musical instrument—perhaps a French horn or some comparable type of brass—which was soon joined by two, possibly three others of a similar character, forming a mildly dissonant chord that drifted spectrally through the air, building in harmonic complexity, swelling in resonance throughout the room. After a couple of minutes, the playing stopped, the last few phrases of the tune reverberating throughout the unit.
Tom: “Wow! What the hell was that? I’ve never heard anything like it!”
The agent attempted another smile, but his confidence seemed shaken. “That-that’s Mr. Trinity, the next-door tenant. He’s harmless, a recluse…”
ARECLUSE, CERTAINLY, THOUGH IN OTHER WAYS HE was the perfect neighbor: He never complained, never bothered anybody, never had anyone over. Tom drove the bargain hard, and they bought the place, in part because he was so intrigued with Mr. Trinity and the unusual history of the apartment. Tom had always been open to new experiences and enjoyed challenges. It was part of the reason she stayed with him, she realized in retrospect; he had been a musician as well, and even attempted, for a while, to engage their elusive neighbor—knocking on his door, leaving notes, and so on, to no avail. Mr. Golding in particular had warned her husband that his entreaties would be pointless, that Trinity would not be receptive at all, but it was Tom’s nature to try, to reach out to others.
So long as anyone could recall, the cryptic Mr. Trinity had been a staple in the building; even old man Jenkins, the superintendent before he died last year, said that Trinity had been a fixture well before he moved in, some thirty years prior. No one in Mr. Jenkins’s estimation had set foot in Trinity’s place, spoken with him, or even seen his face in all that time. They only knew his name was ‘Mr. Ghrâbøel Trinity,’ that he practiced playing his horn day and night, and that he left his unit without fail in the evenings for several hours, every day of the year.
After Tom’s death, she realized many things, but of course, they were all too late. She was too sad to concern herself with Mr. Trinity and his peculiar habits, but once she was living alone again and the fog of her depression began to lift, she found her curiosity and interest gradually piqued by his odd ways as she so obliquely experienced them.
Then something remarkable occurred: She got a piece of his mail in her box by accident, his name and apartment number clearly scrawled on the front; there was no return address. She stared at it for several minutes. It was the first tangible thing of his that she had ever touched.
She could not resist taking it to her flat.
Once safely in the confines of her home, with Trinity’s portentous serenade happening just a few feet beyond the wall, she debated what to do. It might seem awkward to give the letter back now that she had taken it, and she knew he would not answer the door in any case. After an hour of agonizing consideration, she found herself hastily tearing open the water-stained, yellowing envelope, though she knew it was wrong.
Inside, there was a three-page document. The paper was crumbling and smelled of smoke, and the handwritten script was shaky, penned in some alien language, with angular, densely accented letters, and very long words, which were apparently to be read from the right side of the page to the left, and from top to bottom. It resembled no other language she had ever seen, not even her mother’s native
Russian, and certainly not the Hebrew she had been taught as a child.
Along the bottom third of the pages were several meticulously rendered drawings, but they were smeared, and it was difficult to discern just what exactly they were about. The images looked to be either diagrams, sketches of bizarre plants and animals, or of something else altogether—perhaps a few of each. Curiously, sections of the message were broken up by what appeared to be a form of musical notation, but not of any type she was familiar with, and nothing she could identify with the help of Tom’s old reference books. Even searching the Internet and poring through the stacks at the main library turned up nothing remotely like the notation, illustrations, or language that the missive was encoded in. She filed it away, afraid of what would happen if she threw it out or attempted to give it to him.
The letter brought a certain level excitement to her life, an excitement that had been missing for a long time from her monochrome, increasingly sedate existence; it proved his humanness in a way, and made her feel connected to the outside world again, instead of focusing only on herself, instead of perpetually looking inward. It was then that she began to catch herself noting the timings of Mr. Trinity’s comings-and-goings, strangely comforted by the wistful, glum sonorities of his unearthly music. One morning, for the first time in years, she looked into the mirror and noticed her reflection as she got ready. Brushing her hair, she seemed to have more presence, more color… Her eyes had a glint of light; her skin was still smooth, still tight for a person her age. Even her frame was more at ease, relaxed, and her weight was good—she had retained a nice figure through all that had happened by exercising, walking everywhere. She smiled for the first time she could remember, and felt a renewed sense of interest—of purpose—in the world.
Over dinner in the evenings, she began to muse that perhaps Mr. Trinity was a professional musician. Her ruminations about his secretive life became increasingly intricate, increasingly detailed, even as her dreams became less interesting, even forgettable. His being a performing musician would certainly explain his continual practicing, his daily excursions into the outside world. Maybe he’s playing gigs… or filling in on recording sessions uptown.
One day, she vowed to gather up the courage to pay Mr. Trinity a proper visit, perhaps take him a neighborly offering of homemade brownies. Perhaps her feminine wiles could forge some connection between them…
3.
RETURNING HOME FROM THE SHELTER ON A MOONLESS December night, head pounding from a cold she sensed was dragging her immune system down, she noticed something unusual as she crested the stairs to her landing: Mr. Trinity’s door was open. Just a crack, but enough to see into his dark, dark unit.
She froze in place. The lights on the landing lowered for an instant as a sudden cold gust whistled through the silent hallway, causing Mr. Trinity’s front door to move ever so slightly. She looked around; as she pulled her shawl closed about her throat, she found the yarn scratchy, stiff against her skin. Her throat clicked tightly when she swallowed.
Maybe… maybe there’s a problem.
She took a short, tentative step forward, heels clicking on the scuffed wooden causeway, unconsciously pulling her purse tighter against her tired body. Suddenly, her vision was narrowed exclusively to the gap between Mr. Trinity’s gently wavering door and the shabby doorframe. Her hands felt clammy, her legs heavy; her heart thudded mechanically, unevenly.
After a pause, she stepped closer once more.
“Hello?” Her voice was small, tinny, her mouth dry. The wind whipped outside the building. The lights dimmed, then flared before settling again. Without realizing it, she had walked over and was now at his doorway. She raised her fist to knock, noting that her hand was not only shaking, but that the sixty-year-old skin was slack, dotted with age spots, more wrinkled than she had ever noticed or recalled.
“Hello?” she called out again, louder, and rapped on the dingy wooden door.
No answer.
“Hello? Mr. Trinity? Is everything OK?” The door opened slightly wider as she knocked. Inside, no lights were on; indeed, the black painted walls seemed to pull the light from the landing into the apartment, extinguishing, deadening the weak hallway illumination like a black hole snuffing the energy from a dying star.
“Mr. Trinity? Is everything all right? It’s your neighbor.”
She stepped into the unit, her shoes clacking on the hardwood of the small foyer. There was a sudden chill in the air, causing her breath to fog, and a sharp smell that she could not quite identify: a top note of copper… a hint of mold… and some other, musky, undertone.
The inside of the place was quite dark. She squinted her eyes, straining against the inky blackness. From what little she was able to see, the layout was completely different from her own residence, and larger; the windows of this corner unit were completely blacked out as well. She stepped forward again, again. With one more step, the feeble outside light fell quickly away; as she moved into the depths of the too-quiet abode, all illumination was smothered by the deep, permeating blackness within.
“Hello? Mr. Trin—” Her balance shifted abruptly, and she lost her foothold after stepping on something soft. Before she could react, she was on all fours, hitting the floor hard, her hands braced against something cool, moist…
A body!
Repulsed, she gently felt around—screaming out when it unexpectedly moved… and answered her scream with one of its own.
She recoiled, a hot stream of acid jetting from her gut to her mouth. Then another person, unseen in the impenetrable gloom, screamed out right beside her. And a third joined, followed by a fourth… Soon there was a horrific chorale of moaning, tortured shrieks filling the pervasive darkness. Her mind flashed on the old couple that used to own her unit: Were they in here? Tortured for years by Mr. Trinity for trying to have him evicted? Or maybe they were all in a sick partnership… some twisted sex thing as the rumors had reported.
She leapt up, disoriented, nauseous, and ran. As she hit a wall, the wind was knocked out of her; she felt along its length, at last coming to a closed door, her head pounding in time to her pulse. Behind her, the horrific groaning and thrashing continued, growing in pitch and volume, voices subsiding and joining at different intervals, adding to the density of the cold, thin air as she tried to catch her breath. I’ve gone the wrong way, I’ve gone deeper into this madhouse!
She turned the doorknob and pushed the door open—
dazzled by a staggering, limitless panorama
of vertigo-inducing deep space quintessence:
A primeval, impossibly expanding canopy of twinkling stars,
spiraling galaxies, and flowering nebulae
receding into the void in all directions…
Teetering on the threshold of the doorway,
she loses her footing, and is rapidly falling—
end over sickening end
through the weightlessness of non-life and non-death,
of animate and inanimate,
the terrible, swarming chorus
slowly replaced by a cavernous, otherworldly thrumming
that pushes all rational thought from her mind…
stunned into insensibility
at the self-organizing chaos of oblivion.
Reflexively, she reaches out—
the saliva on her tongue beginning to sizzle
from the vacuum of space; lungs burning
from a lack of oxygen; brain dying of hypoxia—
and tries to control her wildly spinning body.
She clutches at where the wall used to be,
her eyes closing as consciousness withers
from her mental horizon…
for a second, a pinpoint of light blooms
in the center of her diminishing awareness,
and she finds a solace she has not known
since before Tom’s death—
When she opened her eyes again, she was lying in a poorly lit hallway that stretched to
a vanishing point in the distance. She took a deep breath, eyes watering, and coughed hard, her body drained, aching. Her clothes were torn, damp, and adhered snugly to her stinging skin; her handbag was gone. She touched her face, surprised at how cold it was, even numb in spots; she could barely control the trembling of her hands, which were stiff, tight, frigid. Getting to her feet, she tried to walk, but the floor was uneven, deceptively pitched. As she watched, the corridor hypnotically transmogrified into a vast wasteland of twisted, verdant flora covering prehistoric edifices boasting sinuous, Gaudí-esque forms juxtaposed against jagged monuments—temples?—composed of sheer, geometrically impossible gold-leafed angles. Populated by weird, nonhuman figures—some winged, others not—in disturbing tableaux, the whole site gave the impression of a vanished empire steeped in ostensibly frenzied torment, or perhaps some inscrutable, obscene ecstasy. The bizarre relics, starkly inscribed with oddly familiar, abstract runes and imagery, reminded her of something, and she was overwhelmed with a sudden and profound sadness. She felt trapped, forgotten—lost in her own private German Expressionist film, her own hellish version of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Of course—Mr. Trinity’s letter… That was where she had seen the unusual characters, the plants and creatures, the odd depictions adorning the exterior of the buildings.
At that moment, an ethereal sound—haunting, musical, and also disconcertingly familiar—coasted gradually into her perception across the desolate scene, and she found herself inextricably drawn into this blasted landscape. Was this the ossuary that the couple was researching? Maybe this is hell—or maybe it’s something else… She stepped forward—
She spun around, looking for the source of the garbled exclamation, confused.
<
The eerie music that she heard earlier was mounting, growing louder. The ruins began to dim as she watched, slowly fading into an absolute darkness, just as its grotesque, frozen inhabitants began to stir into hideous life. Abruptly, the strange music ended.
