There’s Something in the Walls
By Samuel Brower
It all began shortly after the earthquake. When David Howell moved to California from the Midwest he knew there was always the possibility of such seismic happenings, but there was never really much fear. Not until he experienced a quake first hand. He’d lived in the little, six-story walk up for a dozen months before the event happened. It was your typical Southern California domicile, full of struggling actors and writers, and worse, folks who had already given up the struggle to attain their dreams and settled for being bitter, morose waiters, baristas, cabdrivers, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera…
The building was old, with a stucco exterior and a squat, square tombstone shape, that made it look a fair bit foreboding where it stood on San Horace Avenue. But the apartments were cheap, especially for the area, which is why David had chosen them. Their bargain, however, was their one and only positive quality. And the rest of the building’s descriptions beyond ‘cheap’ were the very reasons for the low rent. The wooden floors were so ancient they were nearly petrified, which would’ve actually been preferable, because the owners over the years seemed to have never had the wooden slats re-waxed or treated, and the tenants had to wear shoes at all hours if they wanted to keep their feet from becoming pin cushions for splinters. The pipes were rusted and leaky, and groaned whenever a sink spigot was turned on or a toilet flushed. The walls were cracked, the plaster so brittle that even a strong sneeze would cause chips of it to shake loose and patter to the splintered floorboards. But, in spite of these drawbacks, and due mostly to the presence of the many colorful residents and the fact that there was rarely ever a dull moment within the sun-bleached stucco walls of the Perkins Building, David had eventually come to think of his miniscule, one room efficiency as home.
The night of the earthquake David had gone to bed early. He’d finally gotten a meeting—which was set for the next morning—to pitch his screenplay, disproving what he’d come to believe in recent months, that his agent was a useless lump. Though it had taken Sandra almost an entire year to get this one, solitary meeting. David was too ecstatic to worry about that now, though. He was so excited, in fact, that he had needed to take an Ambien just to make sure he wasn’t up all night chewing his fingernails, and possibly the fingers beneath them, to nubs. And even with the chemical accompaniment, it had taken an hour for sleep to take him, anxiety still gnawing at his belly all the way until he finally drifted off.
David found no rest that night. Somewhere outside the endless darkness of his dreamless slumber, things began to rumble and shake. The sleep aid he’d taken urged David to ignore the ruckus, but eventually it squeezed its way into his awareness. David opened his eyes just as his dishes began to rattle in their cabinets in the kitchenette. The first thing he saw in the dim light making its way into his room from the streetlamps outside was a small crack begin to form in the ceiling above him, then meander off to the right in chaotic little zigzags. David squinted his eyes and raised his head from his pillow a few inches, trying to make sense of what was happening above him, the Ambien haze still too thick to think through.
Just then, a pounding on the door added itself to the rest of the din, and at that moment David finally knew what was going on.
“…A fuck…a fucking earthquake!” he shouted, and his arms and legs flailed together, fighting tangled bedclothes, effectively turning him into a turtle stuck on its back.
The pounding on the door continued, and soon frantic voices carried through the rice paper thin walls of the building. Shouts of alarm and a few outright screams of terror shot spikes of fear into David’s chest. After a moment more of struggling he finally freed himself from his bedsheet shackles and ran toward his apartment door. For reasons he even later wouldn’t understand, he grabbed the only lamp he’d purchased for his apartment on his way. The lamp’s cord soon reached its limit as he moved to the door, and the prongs on the other end were stuck in the wall outlet because it had been painted over so many times over the years that the slots had been narrowed to a hair’s width. David was completely unaware when the cord tore from the base of the lamp.
He reached his door, fumbled with the deadbolt until he was able to unlatch it, and threw the door open. On the other side, his fist still raised, stood Tommy Lambert, the crazy conspiracy theorist from apartment 5-B and David’s occasional drinking buddy, confidant, and friend. Tommy peered at David through binoculars-thick spectacles.
“There’s an earthquake, David,” Tommy said, sounding oddly more excited than afraid. He then looked down at David and winced. “Jesus, man, can you put some clothes on? Your dong is a’ dangle... What’s with the lamp?”
David looked down at himself and found Tommy’s observation to be correct. The building, of course, didn’t have any sort of air conditioning, and David had to sleep naked with an oscillating fan locked in position and pointed directly at him in order to keep from being miserable at night. David struggled to clear the cobwebs. He eventually decided he would cover his genitals with the lamp and back away from the door without turning around so he could grab his bathrobe, but before he had even completed the first step, Alice Collins—the petite and extremely cute waitress who lived in 5-C—hurried past in the hall behind Tommy. She glanced at David as she went, saw what state he was in, and quickly averted her gaze as a small squeak escaped her lips.
David had had a silent crush on Alice ever since the woman had moved into the building about six months prior. And now, in one swift moment, he had skipped flirting with her, skipped asking her out, skipped dating her, skipped a first kiss, and went directly to exposing his penis to her for the first time... This, above all else, finally dragged David out of the fog and fuzz filled prison he’d been trapped in inside his head. He turned and ran back into his apartment, grabbed his bathrobe from a hook on his bathroom door, and awkwardly put it on, having to switch the lamp from hand to hand as he donned it to get both arms in. Tommy was standing just inside the door to his apartment now, pumping his arm in a circle and shouting for David to hurry. The rumbling in the building had grown more violent, and David nearly tripped.
“C’mon, man, the whole place is likely to come down!” Tommy shouted above the din, then, as he often did, he began to ramble. “Mrs. Perkins assured me the structure was sound when I moved in, but you know how these waspy land owners are. She’d likely be just as happy to get a big insurance payout while we’re all dead in the rubble as she would to keep collecting our tiny rent checks every month for the rest of what little life she has left. Hell, happier even. You know she—”
A crash from the kitchenette cut Tommy off, dishes shattered and plaster fell. David turned toward the noise and found that his cabinets had shaken loose from their moorings in the wall and were now laying in ruin on the floor. He waved off this loss of dinnerware and ran back to Tommy and the door, then, in a flash, he remembered his laptop computer, and more importantly the screenplay that was saved to its hard drive. He had backup copies, of course, but this did not occur to him at the moment. David thrust the lamp into Tommy’s arms.
“Here, hold this,” he shouted, then spun on his heel and ran back into his room. He reached the futon that doubled as his couch and his bed, got down on his hands and knees, and reached underneath.
“Hurry the fuck up, man!” Tommy shouted.
A resounding crack came from above, and David was near crushed by a large chunk of plaster that fell on his back. He looked up to see that the small crack that had appeared above his couch/bed was now more like a gaping chasm. Just then his searching fingers found his laptop bag and he yanked it out and immediately rushed back to the door. The floor beneath his feet roiled
like ocean waves, and as he stumbled, he caught one of the building’s famous splinters in the ball of his foot. David sucked in air through clenched teeth and half limped, half hopped the rest of the way to the door.
“Here,” Tommy said, handing the lamp back over.
David slung the shoulder strap of the laptop bag over his head, took the lamp in his arms like a swaddled baby, and followed Tommy down the hall to the stairwell.
“Holy shit, dude,” Tommy said, glancing back over his shoulder. “You’re leaving bloody footprints.”
“Caught a splinter,” David said. “Hurry, let’s go.”
Tommy gave a knowing nod. All of the residents of the Perkins Building had dealt with the cruel floors within. The pair reached the stairwell and started down. At each floor’s landing they were joined by other residents in the hasty exodus.
On the third floor landing, Tommy looked down at David’s foot. “Jesus, you’re gonna’ need a doctor. Looks like you hit an artery. There was less blood in the Zapruder film.”
David ignored this. His friend and neighbor, like most conspiracy theorists, was a notorious exaggerator. When they finally reached the bottom floor, they found a large number of eager-to-flee residents corralled in front of the two narrow doorways leading outside. Tommy shouted profanities at them and compared them to sheep. David nudged him, quietly urging him to knock it off. In the new commotion of the bottlenecks at the exits, no one seemed to notice that the earthquake had ended, and the building no longer shook.
. . .
Fifteen minutes after the earthquake had stopped quaking, most of the Perkins Building’s residents were still gathered on San Horace Avenue, waiting and wondering what to do next. Living in California, they had all heard what you were supposed to do in an earthquake—stay indoors, find a doorway or sturdy piece of furniture to hide under, and wait for the tremors to end. But, living in the dilapidated Perkins Building as they did, they had all seemed to decide to face the risks outside rather than trust Mrs. Perkins’s word that the building’s structure was sound.
David stood at the edge of the street facing the building in his bathrobe, his laptop bag slung over his shoulder, the lamp cradled in his arms, and his foot leaking blood onto the pavement. But he didn’t care about any of that. He didn’t even care about his ruined apartment or that he’d have to buy new dishes. The only thing occupying his mind at that moment was whether the meeting tomorrow would be cancelled. The meeting he had waited so long for. His one chance to finally get his screenplay, A Whisper in the Wind, in front of a producer’s eyes.
The horror-romance screenplay was David’s pride and glory. He loved it like a child, and when one considered how long it had taken to create, shape, polish, and finally complete, one could understand why David looked at it like it was his offspring. Because, in a way, it was. And make no mistake, David wasn’t one of these hopeless, no-talent pipe-dreamers like so many of the residents at the Perkins Building. No, he was good at what he did, and he knew it. His short stories had appeared in reputable magazines, one of them having even earned an award. And A Whisper in the Wind was the best thing he’d ever written, far better even, than his award winning story, and he knew that with absolute surety. But it was a screenplay…and screenplays were harder to get in front of the right people. With a short story you simply gathered a list of magazines that printed the genre of your story and emailed what you’d written right to them. Within a couple of weeks, the rejections would start coming in, but eventually some editor or another would feel that the story was a good fit and send an acceptance letter. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. That wasn’t every writer’s experience, of course, but David was a damned good writer, so that was his experience.
With a screenplay, if you wanted to get any attention, you needed an agent. So, David had moved out west shortly after completing Whisper, and had acquired an agent based on his short story credentials and his award, and then had gotten by for an entire year by selling more short stories and doing freelance writing jobs. These accomplishments alone would’ve made scores of LA “writers” envious, but they didn’t satisfy David’s ambitions. He wanted more.
“Splinter?” a voice asked, pulling David from his reverie.
Alice Collins stood in front of him, looking down at the pool of blood surrounding his foot. David froze for a moment, then sputtered out a vaguely affirmative string of syllables.
“Looks bad,” Alice said, crouching a little and squinting her eyes.
“Yeah, I haven’t even looked to see if it’s still in there,” David said. “Must’ve been a big one.”
Alice nodded, then a small smirk crept onto her lips. “Speaking of big ones,” she said with a little giggle, “I’m sorry about before. When I looked into your apartment I was just seeing if you were okay, I didn’t expect you to be naked.”
David’s mouth dropped open. He hardly believed what he’d just heard. Alice looked at him with a big, goofy grin, and when he didn’t respond in any way, her cheeks went red.
“Sorry!” she said. “That was just one of my completely inappropriate jokes… I mean… Not about it being big, that wasn’t the joke…Just saying it at all was the joke… Not that it’s not big, I didn’t get a really good look, but from what I could tell it seemed to be a nice…you know, a nice… a nice size…”
Alice clapped a hand over her mouth to stop herself from going any further. She had spoken faster and faster as she went through her apology, and her cheeks had darkened to an almost purple hue. She parted her fingers and spoke between them, “I’m going to back away slowly now. Please forget everything I just said.”
She began to retreat. David still stood speechless, watching her go. His mind screamed for action, but he was frozen in awkward carbonite. He had wanted to talk to Alice for so long, and now he finally had the chance, and he was letting it slip away. He fought through his anxiety and held up a finger, then squeaked out a, “wait!”
Alice, still facing him, stopped, took her hand away from her mouth, and waited.
“Um…Ambien,” David said.
Alice waited for more, but nothing else came, so she tilted her head sideways, a confused expression on her face.
“I took an Ambien earlier,” David added. Once the first sentence was out, the rest followed easier. “To be able to sleep. If you’d have made that joke a few hours from now, I’m sure I would’ve gotten it and laughed… Right now, well, I’m surprised I’m even standing.”
David took a step toward Alice, came down on his injured foot, and stumbled. Alice rushed forward to help. David fumbled with the lamp in his hands, as his tripped-up forward momentum had caused his laptop bag to swing forward and fall off his shoulder. Alice arrived at his side just in time for the lamp to hit the ground at her feet and shatter into a thousand pieces.
“Myyy god…” Tommy’s voice spoke from beside them.
David turned toward Tommy and found his friend eating peanuts from a bag he must’ve had stowed away in his pocket. He’d been watching the exchange the entire time, eating a snack and all, like he was in a movie theatre.
“This is just a study in awkward romance,” Tommy said, a slight, intrigued grin on his face.
“Shut up,” David said.
“No, I’m serious.” The conspiracy theorist—who had either been born without the filter most people have between their brain and mouth, or had lost it in some accident before David had met him—held up a thin finger and pointed it back and forth between David and Alice. “I lost my virginity at the age of thirty-one to a sixty-year-old prostitute with a glass eye. I have not known the embrace of a woman since that time, and even to me, this little exchange was cringe-worthy.”
“Tommy, I’m serious,” David said. “Shut up.”
Tommy grinned again, shrugged a little, and threw another peanut into his mouth. “All right, all right, just making an observation.” He turned and ambled away, chuckling.
David looked at Alice again. She had a half smile on her
face as she watched Tommy walk away, seemingly unsure if he was trying to be funny, or just accidentally being funny. Her eyes then shifted back to David.
“Is that guy for real?” she asked. “I’ve wondered that every time I’ve talked to him since the moment I moved in.”
“I’m afraid so,” David said. “Though his sense of reality is a bit skewed, so maybe I should say the jury’s still out on that one.”
Alice laughed. It was a wonderful sound, and made David smile. She looked up at the apartment building.
“Well, it looks like she’s going to stay standing,” Alice said. “I have tweezers and a first aid kit in my apartment, do you want to come up and let me fix your foot?”
“I wouldn’t want to impose,” David said.
“I don’t mind. What are neighbors for?”
“All right, yeah, that would be great. Thanks.”
Alice took hold of David’s elbow and guided him around the broken glass of the lamp at their feet.
“Sorry about your lamp, by the way,” she said.
“It’s okay. It was actually broken before I dropped it. The cord must’ve ripped out.”
“Why’d you rescue it from the earthquake then?”
“I have no idea.”
Alice giggled. “Chalk it up to the Ambien?”
“Definitely.”
They passed Tommy on their way back to the building, and he began to follow them.
“You all aren’t going back in there, are you?” he asked with a hint of concern in his voice. “The whole place could come crashing down at any second.”
“Just ignore him,” David whispered to Alice.
“I always do,” she whispered back.
They laughed and Tommy stopped following. He shouted after them, “All right, don’t listen to me, but you won’t be laughing when they pull your lifeless corpses out of the rubble!”
This only made the pair laugh harder, and soon Alice was helping David hobble up the stairs to the fifth floor.
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