The Seance in Apartment 10

by Ambrose Ibsen

  The Seance in Apartment 10

  Ambrose Ibsen

  Copyright © 2017 by Ambrose Ibsen

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses and events are the product of the author's imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Thank You For Reading!

  1

  LAMPLIGHT APARTMENTS-- 3636 MELROSE STREET

  STUDIO APARTMENTS

  SHORT-TERM LEASES

  MOVE-IN SPECIAL-- $99 DEPOSIT MOVES YOU IN

  $200/MONTH, WATER AND TRASH INCLUDED

  CALL 419-555-1820 FOR A TOUR.

  * * *

  That'd been the ad, featured in the classified section of the Moorlake Register, that'd first introduced me to the Lamplight apartment complex. They were little thought of in town, three five-story buildings situated on the fringe of campus where the scenery became more cornfield than anything. While the more recent constructions closer to the university were prettier and boasted a number of amenities, this complex had seen better days, and would offer nothing but the bare essentials. A quick drive-by made that apparent right away. But it didn't matter to me. Heading into my third year at college, I wanted to escape the crowded dorms and find a space that was all my own.

  And so, already having announced my intention to take a summer course, I called up my dad and let him know I'd found a place. He agreed to come up for a tour, and a short while later he signed on a three month lease for me.

  Not that he was completely on board, mind you.

  Like I said before, the building had its share of warts. It'd been put up in the early 70's and was really showing its age, inside and out. The exterior was a smooth brick rendered grey for the weathering of countless seasons. The parking lot, cramped and sloping, looked like the kind that sometimes flooded in heavy rain, and the white lines demarcating the spaces were so faded as to be nearly invisible.

  But that wasn't enough to turn me away, despite my dad's grumblings that this was a “damned rental trap”.

  We met the landlord one afternoon, a quiet, sallow man named Sheldon who looked to have a few years on my dad and whose thinning grey hair, left to flourish in greasy tendrils, had been combed over to one side to cover a conspicuous bald spot. He rifled through his pockets for a long time as we approached the front door to building 3, and when he finally found the keyring he sought, he held open the door for us with a nervous, yellow smile.

  “Right this way,” he said as we passed into the thinly carpeted lobby. The first floor was a commons area, featuring four dull, metal mailboxes in one corner and a door that led to a dark stairway in the other, with precious little in between. The carpet was worn so thin in places that you could see the concrete floors beneath, and the sign outside the stairwell door, which should have read “STAIRS”, read only “STRS” for the pilfering of its vowels.

  “Charming,” my dad uttered as Sheldon shouldered open the stairway door and led us up. The day was warm, and he took to wiping off his brow with the handkerchief he always kept folded in his back pocket. “What's the process for the termination of a lease?” he asked the landlord. Catching a sharp gaze from me, he added, with a grin, “You know, just in case things don't work out.”

  Sheldon paused mid-flight and looked back at us. His gaunt, pallid features glowed eerily in the low light. Up above, on some higher level, there was a light fixture, but down here, in the stretch leading up from the ground level, there was only natural light to go by. The day was overcast and as a result the concrete stairwell was lent a frail, rather insufficient light.

  “Are there any more lights in this stairwell?” I asked, trying to distract from my father's insistent questioning. “Seems like it would be hard to find your way after dark.”

  “Of course, yes,” came the landlord's reply. He motioned to a bulb in the corner behind me, which was off. “We try to conserve electricity in the building wherever possible. There's a switch at the bottom of the stairs which turns on additional lights, should you need them.” Pulling his thin lips into a smile, Sheldon then tried to assuage my father's doubts about the building. “Well, should it come to that, then it would be a simple thing to dissolve the lease. The deposit, in such a case, becomes nonrefundable, of course.” He hesitated, then turned and restarted his ascent. “Most of the tenants living in this complex are very happy with it, and some have even lived here for many years.”

  My father, hands in his pockets, shrugged. “So, how many people live in this particular building right now, then?” His glasses dropped down against the bridge of his nose, and he gave the landlord a harsh look. The kind of look he might've used while scolding me as a child.

  Sheldon paused again, this time on the landing to the second floor's apartment. “W-well, at present, only one person is living here.” He then stammered, “I-I've had a lot of vacancies lately. Some students moved out just a week back, and I've only just gotten the rooms squared away for rental. M-miss... Tori, was it?” He turned to look at me, something imploring in his gaze, “I don't suppose you're planning on taking summer courses at the university, are you? If so, then this is the perfect place. Close enough to take the shuttle to campus and very, very quiet so that you can get your studies done in peace.”

  I nudged my dad in the arm and joined Sheldon as he climbed on to the third, then fourth floor. My dad dragged behind, stopping now and then to look at certain cracks in the walls where the light was good, or rolling his eyes at the landlord's banter. He'd made the drive from Dayton, more than two hours away, to take this tour with me, and was more than a little underwhelmed.

  We paused on the fourth floor, Sheldon out of breath. Flicking through the keys on his ring, the landlord eventually singled out the right one and, in the dim yellow light issuing from a cobweb-choked sconce on the wall, he sank it into the deadbolt. The lock gave with a click and he pushed open the door to reveal a dark, dust-scented apartment.

  The place, apartment 10, was small.

  Like, really small.

  It was my first time in a studio apartment, and in a lot of ways it reminded me of the dorms I'd lived in for the past two years. There was a big room that would serve as my living space and bedroom, along with a tiny kitchen stuffed around the corner. The stove in it was fit for a dollhouse, smaller than any I'd ever seen, and the fridge was impossibly narrow. Across from this kitchen was a bathroom, filled with a toilet, shower stall and sink.

  That was it.

  If the outside of the building
had looked dated and worn-out, then the inside of the apartment appeared positively ancient. Everything from the thick, knobby carpet, down to the scraped-up wooden cabinets in the kitchen, were straight out of a distant decade, barely fit for use in the present day. Hell, even the dorms hadn't been so run down as this, and those had been lived in by rowdy kids for nine months out of every year.

  But still, it wasn't enough to turn me off.

  Ugly and rundown though it looked, I was enamored.

  Standing in the middle of the main room, I could already envision how it would go. I could fit a futon against the back wall, which would fold out into a full-sized bed and make better use of the space. The built-in shelves set into the wall between the main room and kitchen could house my textbooks and trinkets. A small desk and task chair could go beside the apartment's sole window, a wide, double-paned thing I could cover with pretty floral-print curtains. There was room enough on the walls for a couple of posters, and perhaps I could convince my dad to let me bring one of the TVs from our house so that I could set it across from my bed. Beyond that, there was still room enough for a nightstand, a dresser for my clothes, and maybe a coffee table.

  When we'd toured and re-toured the tiny space several times, my father's frown intensifying with each and every pass, he asked the landlord if we could have a few minutes to discuss it in private. With a nod, Sheldon bowed out of the room and headed for the first-floor commons area. When his footsteps had faded, the first word out of my dad's mouth was, “Seriously?”

  “What?” I asked. “It's perfect. A little small, but I don't need much space.” I combed a hand through my hair and pulled the sweaty neckline of my T-shirt away from my skin.

  He cocked his head to the side, beefy arms crossed. His brow was furrowed and the corners of his mouth were hung in a way I recognized. A refusal was imminent. “Look, I know that living on campus sucks, and that you want to get a place of your own. I know what that's like. But this place? It's a dump. Hell, it's probably being held together with wads of chewed gum. I swear, the minute the ink dries on the lease, you're going to start finding serious problems with everything. That's always how it happens. And just walking through here, I can see some warning signs. Only one other person lives in this building, Victoria. Isn't that a red flag to you?”

  Usually, everyone called me Tori. Only my dad ever used my full name, and to hear it made me bristle a bit. “We just came in at a good time. Lots of vacancies because everyone moved out. That just means it'll be quieter—better for studying, just like he said.” I walked over to one of the kitchen cabinets and opened it. “It's not that bad,” I said, the hinge making a grave squeak as I pulled it open.

  My dad, a carpenter who'd spent years working on houses all over Ohio, sighed and motioned at the kitchen. “Darling, there isn't even enough room in there for a microwave! I mean, why don't we look around, find some other places?”

  “But this place is so cheap!” I countered.

  “Why don't you let me worry about that?” He smirked. “You know, I lived in some really crappy places when I was your age. Awful little hostels with all kinds of issues. Bugs, mold, you name it. I've seen it all. I know you're excited about setting off on your own, but you're not thinking this through, kiddo. I don't want you to have to rough it like I did. You know what it's like to wake up covered in bedbug bites? To find your walls covered in mold because your landlord refuses to patch up a leak in the roof? Trust me, you don't want this.”

  “I dunno, dad. You really think this place is crawling with bugs?”

  Through the door, Sheldon's nervous voice struck out against the silence. “There's n-never been a problem in any of my buildings with bugs. I have them sprayed every six months just in case, but if you're worried about pests, rest easy.”

  Dad cursed under his breath. “The hell's he doing out there, listening in?” Looking back into the bathroom, he put out the light and joined me in the living room. “I dunno, sweetie. It's cheap, sure, but you get what you pay for. Don't you want to check out a few other places first? Maybe closer to the campus?”

  I'd made up my mind. If pressed I wouldn't have been able to express just what it was that drew me to the old building, to the tiny little room with its antiquated fixtures and appliances. Even now, I can't really explain it. Maybe it was the overwhelming quiet. Out here, against the cornfields, I seldom heard a car pass, and the noise pollution that poured off of campus couldn't reach me. Then there was the matter of price; a room in the Lamplight complex was a good hundred dollars or more cheaper each month than at any of the nearby competitors. My dad wanted to act like it wasn't a problem, but I knew better.

  In recent years he'd had difficulty finding regular work and had faced considerable financial troubles. It'd all started more than two years ago, when I'd been set to start school and my mom had come down with an aggressive case of breast cancer. She died a month before I left for college, but he'd still bankrupted himself to pay for her fruitless treatments. He'd never recovered from the blow, emotionally or financially, and honestly I felt like a freeloader asking him to pay my rent. If I was going to ask this of him, then I was determined to choose the cheapest option possible. The only reason I really felt the need to stay in Moorlake over the summer was to take an extra course and finish up my degree a bit faster. My scholarship would cover the class, but I wasn't able to remain in my dorm over the summer months. It was apartment or bust.

  “I really like it,” I insisted. “It's quiet, dad. Close enough to campus for me to attend class, too. Sure, it could be prettier, but I'm not so worried about that. Some nice curtains, a bed and the place will really start coming together.”

  Even my father only had so much fight in him, and he decided to give in. “All right, you win. If this is really what you want--”

  “It is,” I interjected.

  “Then, I guess we'll sign. Come on, let's go see what the lease looks like.”

  My dad hadn't opened the door fully before Sheldon was pulling a few folded pages out of his back pocket. “I've brought the lease with me if you're ready to have a look,” said the man, palming his thinning hair and smoothing it over. “The terms, you'll find, are very agreeable.”

  The rest, as they say, is history. My dad signed the 3-month lease that would keep me housed through the summer, and a check for 99 bucks was cut for the landlord.

  It was a week later, when we'd had a chance to pick up a few cheap essentials, that my dad and I returned, on a misty afternoon, to move in.

  That was how I came to live in apartment 10.

  2

  Summer classes wouldn't start for two weeks. I'd signed up already for the third year course I planned to take, “Concepts of Pathophysiology”, and reserved the necessary texts at the campus bookstore shortly after moving into my unit at the Lamplight complex. My nursing degree was coming along nicely, and I hoped that by getting this course out of the way in the summer, that I'd manage to lighten my load during the fall semester and pick up a part-time job.

  It was a warm, wet Wednesday morning that I moved in. Dad loaded my stuff into the bed of his truck, a beat-up Chevy, and covered it with a tarp to keep it out of the rain. Except for the futon, the rest of it had come from my bedroom back home in Dayton, and once we'd gotten the bulk of it moved in, I took to decorating. Though drab, the little studio took on a homier character once I'd put up some wall art—posters from concerts I'd been to—and some curtains. A cheap shower curtain featuring a world map spruced up the dinky bathroom while a couple of country-themed hand towels and potholders brought some much-needed color to the kitchen. We stopped by the nearby grocery store and stocked up on enough staples to get me through the first few weeks and then dragged all of the furniture around the room several times until I was pleased with its placement.

  When the job was done, my dad leaned against the dresser, an old black thing I'd salvaged from a neighbor's curb, and grinned. “Well, it looks better than it did when we first visited, at
least.”

  I was a good deal more pleased with the final result than he was, and walked through it with the kind of overblown pride that comes naturally from renting one's first place. “Thanks, dad. I love it. This is going to be great! I can't believe this place is really mine. Not having to share a bathroom... a bedroom with anyone else is bliss. I wish I'd done this sooner.”

  The room was warm. I'd opened the stubborn window just a crack to let some fresh air in, but the humidity was brutal. Something that wasn't included in the cheap little studio? Air conditioning.

  “I'll bring you a fan or something next time I come to visit,” offered my dad, making his way to the door. “You know, mom would be proud, seeing you like this. All grown up, living on your own. She'd have loved it.” He smiled, eyes growing distant for a moment. “She was a lot like you, in that regard. She didn't care about how a place looked; she just wanted to have her own space. The first few places we lived in together were bonafide hell-holes,” he chuckled.

  I tensed at the mention of my mother. Whenever my dad got sentimental, he'd often invoke her in this way, and for whatever reason it never failed to make me uncomfortable. My mother and I had been very close, and there was a part of me, probably, that still hadn't moved on from the loss, even two years later.

  “Yeah,” I offered quietly, peering out the window into the rain-soaked parking lot. The view from my room wasn't anything to write home about; there was the edge of the lot to be seen, and across the street there were some houses where townies tended to their lawns. The grass outside the complex was patchy, but where it did grow it was getting long. Sometimes, outside the other two buildings, I'd catch people squatting under the front awning, enjoying a smoke.