The Seance in Apartment 10

by Ambrose Ibsen

  But never outside my building. Building number 3 was a no-man's land, and even as my dad and I had moved in, carrying things up and down the stairs, we'd seen and heard no one in the building. That was probably to be expected, since only two of its four units were occupied, but even so the silence felt a bit isolating to me.

  Giving me a tight hug and demanding regular calls, my dad went on his way. “And if this place gives you any problems, let me know right away. I'll come up here and have a talk with the landlord, OK?” he added as he left. “And I'll try not to rub it in!”

  “Sure, dad. Drive safe.” I closed the door behind him and locked the bolt. The sounds of his footsteps melted away and I watched as his pick-up truck left the lot a short while later.

  I was alone in my apartment for the first time. It was a strange feeling.

  Maybe you know what it's like, to strike out on your own and move to someplace unfamiliar. There's a definite excitement to it, no doubt, but there's a profound nervousness, too. When you're first living on your own, you never really know what you can expect, and your new surroundings reveal themselves to you very slowly. To really know a place, it isn't enough to pay it a quick visit, to do a brief walk-through. No, to learn the language of a place, to become well and familiar with its quirks and flaws, you have to live in it for a while.

  The newness of my surroundings was almost paralyzing to me. There was no one living on the floor above me, nor the floor below. I was isolated in a way I had never been during my previous years in college. Hell, even living at home my father had always been close-by, and we'd had many noisy neighbors next to the house.

  But not here.

  The Lamplight complex was a special kind of quiet, and I knew right then that it was going to take me some getting used to. Before long I found myself sitting on the edge of the black futon, wringing my hands and trying to decide how the remainder of my day would go.

  The freedom was jarring.

  3

  I spent some time in the first floor commons area, attempting to get my mailbox open. Sheldon had given me a little brass key that corresponded to mailbox 10, the teeny kind that would be all too easy to lose in the bottom of a purse, but even as I turned the key in its ancient lock, I could barely get the little metal door to open. The outside of it was warped, the edges having been bent by mail thieves or impatient tenants and then bent back into place a hundred times. Once I managed to wrench it open, I found there was only a thin layer of dust inside.

  Heading out after the rain, I walked the circumference of the building, where I took in the sight of the fire escape. Getting onto it from the window in my apartment would have been quite the challenge, and the railings appeared flimsy and rusted. Probably this feature wasn't up to code, and the whole thing appeared very hastily-installed. In the event of a fire, it wasn't going to save anyone. Looking up into the windows of the other units in building 3, I sensed no movement, no signs of occupancy. Just darkness. The window of the second floor unit was blocked by sun-bleached mini blinds. I wasn't sure who lived there, and in my brief time at the complex I hadn't so much as heard a peep coming from their apartment.

  The grounds were overgrown, and in between pockets of tall grass there existed little ponds of standing water about which there circulated gnats and mosquitos in hungry clouds. The summer had been a humid one, and I was hard-pressed to recall a day since the end of the semester that hadn't been rainy or at least cloudy. I hadn't even walked over to building 2 when my T-shirt began clinging uncomfortably to my underarms and chest.

  There were a few cars in the parking lot, none of them particularly nice. One, a rusted out Caprice Classic, had a mismatched, two-tone exterior of grey and red. None of the cars looked like they'd moved in a long while, and the closer I got to them, the more I doubted that they could even all run. A Ford Taurus in dusty Galapagos green sat at the very edge of the lot, its tires rather flat. It reminded me of the car my grandfather had driven years ago.

  I went back up to my room, a sweaty mess, and decided to try out the shower. The water heater, it turned out, was pretty weak and could only produce about five minutes' worth of warm water. Scrubbing down very quickly and then splashing myself clean with hand-fulls of the cold stuff, I hopped out and toweled off. Not a minute out of the bathroom the vaporous air started to get to me, made my brown hair cling to the tops of my bare shoulders even after I'd dried it. I considered chopping off the bulk of it in a pixie cut to get me through the miserable summer.

  Once showered, I opened the window a little more and sat down on the futon, enjoying a cold can of soda. Fanning myself with an old magazine, I switched on the television and flipped through the three channels available to me without cable. Eventually, I settled on a public access talkshow and drifted off into a nap.

  What can I say? I like to live on the wild side.

  The day wore on. Feeling a bit stir-crazy, I decided to call up some friends and share the news. “Well, it's official. I'm living in my own place.”

  That was when all the talk about a “housewarming party” began.

  Mind you, I wasn't totally on board with the idea, and I did my best to discourage it. But my friends would hear nothing of that. I had an apartment in Moorlake now, and that meant they had a place to visit me that wasn't my dad's house.

  And a place to party.

  It'd been Julia who'd brought it up first. “Totally, it'll be a great time, Tori” she said. “We can have a few drinks, play some games, whatever. I want to see this new place of yours.”

  “I don't think you get it,” I replied, “this place is small. Infinitesimal. I've got a futon and some floorspace; hardly enough room for entertaining. And who the heck am I going to invite at such short notice? Everyone lives outside of Moorlake. You should see things around here; it's a total dead zone right now that classes are out.”

  “Nah,” continued Julia, disregarding my hesitance. “Annie lives in Toledo. It's not far. I'll give her a call and we'll see if we can't both head down to Moorlake. I'll bring a sleeping bag, even. And wine. Lots of wine.”

  It was hard to argue with the prospect of free wine. I was a few months shy of twenty-one, but all of my friends were of drinking age, which meant that the only time I could cut loose and imbibe was when they were buying. “I dunno, Julia... It's pretty boring here. And a little dreary. I don't even have air conditioning.”

  “So, it'll be like camping,” she pressed. “That's cool with me. Let me see what Annie's up to and I'll get back to you.”

  Later that day both Julia and Annie called me back, saying that they'd drop by on Saturday afternoon for a day of drinking and gossip. The two of them had been friends of mine since Freshman year. We'd met in an entry-level math class and had hit it off almost immediately. The two of them had lived next to each other last semester, and I'd spent no little time hanging out at their dorm when things at mine grew to be too unbearable. Julia and Annie both came from pretty affluent families and could afford to live in Dorchester Hall, the nicest residence building on campus. We're talking private rooms, bathrooms and central air.

  Julia was an athletic redhead, played basketball for the university team, and was looking to earn a degree in social work. Annie, on the other hand, was Julia's polar opposite. A bit heavyset, with dyed black hair, she was a bookish type with an interest in Japanese cartoons and video games. Then there was me; quiet and usually antisocial. How it was that the three of us ever hit it off is a mystery, but in those first two years of school I never met kinder and more interesting friends.

  There was going to be a fourth member to our little get together, a last-minute addition insisted on by Annie. She wanted to bring her friend Cat Meyers along and I couldn't find it in myself to say no. Cat and I were barely acquainted; I'd known her from one of my science lectures Freshman year, and she was something of a weirdo. Tall and pale, with short brown hair and big eyes, she and I had never been close. We'd been forced to team up for a project in that class and
had performed well enough as a duo, but since then I'd mostly forgotten about her. Annie, though, had met her during some extracurricular and apparently the two had become fast friends. Both lived close to each other in Toledo, and Annie begged me to let her bring Cat along. Space was at a premium, but not wanting to rock the boat, I agreed.

  When the date was set, I spent the remainder of my day discovering more of the apartment's faults. One of the burners on the stove didn't work; something I discovered while trying to boil water for tea. While washing some dishes, I learned that the kitchen tap didn't behave itself, and that the faucet would drip endlessly no matter how hard I turned the knob. In the bathroom, the toilet would sometimes flow and murmur long after being flushed, and my second shower proved every bit as quick and cool as the first.

  Still, those faults weren't enough to break the spell for me. I'd known the apartment wasn't perfect when I'd moved in, and rather than complain, I chose instead to embrace its flaws. By early evening, the weather had cooled by a decent margin so that the breeze coming in through the open window was pleasant.

  Running out of things to do in the apartment and feeling restless, I changed into a tank top and shorts and threw on my sandals for a walk downtown. Melrose Street was probably two miles away from campus, buried behind a meandering collection of neighborhoods. Keeping to the sidewalks, I marched downtown, earbuds in my ears, and stopped into a local cafe for an iced coffee.

  The cafe, usually bustling during the school year, was totally empty, save for the tired-looking barista. He talked me up almost obnoxiously, like we were on a desert island and I was the first person he'd seen in months, before finally surrendering my drink.

  The streets outside were barren except in those areas where the odd townie wandered. I wasn't used to seeing downtown Moorlake this way. There was a certain discomfort to the desolation; it felt like everyone but me had packed up and gone in anticipation of some great disaster. Walking down the main stretch with coffee in hand, listening to the smacking of my sandals against the pavement, I looked up and down the street for signs of other pedestrians, coming up empty each and every time. Many of the kitschy shops along the way featured truncated hours due to the lack of traffic, meaning that there was nowhere for me to explore.

  It was a proper ghost town.

  Feeling hungry, I started the long walk back home. Night was coming and the clouds were gathering, choking out the last remnants of the sun. Quickening my step, I made it back to my building before the rain restarted and trudged up to the fourth floor. I planned to whip up some quick dinner and do some reading, but as I arrived at the landing outside my room, I stopped suddenly.

  The door to my apartment was open.

  4

  I'd locked it.

  I'd definitely, definitely locked it.

  When it comes to locking doors, I'm anal about it. You get to be fastidious about things like that after living in dorms, where lowlifes have a habit of sneaking into unlocked rooms and rummaging through your things.

  But for some reason, my door wasn't locked. It was sitting ajar.

  There were no signs of forced entry, and a timid, breathless tour of the apartment some minutes later didn't reveal any intruder. Thank God.

  Upon further inspection, nothing was missing, either. Not that I have anything worth stealing...

  I turned my attention to the doorknob. I gave it a twist, played around with the deadbolt and tried to figure out how it'd opened of its own accord. Possibly I hadn't secured it very well and it'd fallen open sometime during my walk. I'd left the window in my apartment open; had there been a particularly strong gust of wind while I was out, capable of pushing open a door? If there had been, I hadn't felt it while out walking...

  My evening was dominated by questions regarding the door. I bolted and re-bolted it, waited out on the stairs to see if it would fall open again, but it never did. Whatever had happened, I told myself, had been a fluke. I hadn't turned the key far enough, leaving the door partially unlocked. That was all.

  I whipped up a quick dinner of scrambled eggs and toast and then spread out the futon, reading a paperback till my eyes got too heavy to track the pages.

  Sleeping in the new apartment wasn't quite as easy as I'd hoped it would be.

  Though small and sparsely furnished, the studio took on a completely different shape after dark. The corners of the room, already unfamiliar to me, grew heavy with shadow and took on an added depth. The kitchen and bathroom, especially, were packed in darkness so that I couldn't help myself to a potty break or a late-night glass of water without stubbing my toes against the edges of walls or the bottoms of cupboards.

  The mattress on the futon was a thin one; just thick enough to keep the metal springs beneath it from sinking into my back. I tend to change sleep positions throughout the night, and every time I did so on this thing I found myself awakened by the lurching and squealing of flimsy metal parts. These sounds were amplified in the stillness of my little room, hanging in the night air and inciting me to look out from beneath my sheet blearily in search of the commotion's source.

  Invariably, I'd look to the door.

  Somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, between dreams and reality, I would study that door, once or twice in the night, and feel somehow certain that there was someone standing outside it, in the stairwell. There was never so much as a knock, or the sound of a footstep on the concrete stairs outside, and I never witnessed the knob being tried. Nothing like that. It was just a feeling, borne of the same confidence that informs a sleepwalker's steps. A sort of firm, nocturnal knowledge.

  Dark and quiet are both musts for good sleep, however my unit seemed altogether too dark and too quiet for me to rest in for very long. Ordinarily I was quick to fall asleep, but even with heavy eyes and a tired mind, I still required almost an hour's tossing and turning to drift off in the studio. And even then, as I said, awakenings were frequent, and I would lie awake listening only to the sounds of the wind outside and the beat of my pulse. The edges of my window were glazed in moonlight, but for this particular building in the Lamplight complex, there never seemed to be quite enough of it to go around, and darkness largely painted my walls and floor.

  Morning saw me rise a groggy mess, and I didn't feel quite like myself till I'd shotgunned a lukewarm cup of instant coffee and stood in the icy shower for a spell. I told myself that it was going to be like this for a little while, that I was going to have to get used to sleeping in this room, but as the nights passed I began to wonder if crappy sleep wasn't my new normal.

  Things leading up to the housewarming party were pretty uneventful, mainly because I spent the bulk of my time looking forward to the housewarming party. Yeah, things were going to be cramped, and it would probably turn into a lame, drunken mess, but the thought of spending time with my friends in the flesh, rather than on the phone, made me very happy.

  I talked to my dad once or twice in that stretch of days; hid the tiredness in my voice and went on and on about how great the new apartment was. He took my gloating in stride and was just happy that I was adjusting well. “No bugs, huh? What about the shower? Does it work well?”

  “It gets cold a little fast,” I admitted.

  He promised to take a peek at the water heater on his next visit.

  For being a young, free woman in her own place, things really were dull for me. I'd already burned through the books I'd packed, had read my magazines cover to cover and had done more mindless scrolling through social media than I cared to admit. Walks downtown felt pointless, what with the total dearth of people in Moorlake. Later in the season, maybe, things would pick up, but for now I would have to entertain myself.

  There was a small public library, as well as chain restaurants and big-box stores to wander. But the real fun—the only fun—came from the local shops. The almost mile-long drag of downtown featured a bunch of unique stores and family-run restaurants that proved far more interesting to me than walking laps at Wal-Mart. There we
re nightclubs there, too, but most of them didn't even open over the summer, and were shuttered like ice cream shops in winter. The Corner Grille, an old-fashioned diner that dealt only in cash, a record store that was stocked wall-to-wall with CDs and vinyl, and an old craft store were among my favorites, and on those days when I set out early enough, I was able to wander each.

  Saturday didn't exactly sneak up on me. I was so excited to see my friends that I had more trouble than usual falling asleep, and when the sun came up I was out of bed, showering and straightening out the tiny apartment in anticipation of my guests. I made a quick run to the grocery store and tapped into my checking account—filled with a few hundred bucks I'd earned through a tutoring gig the last semester—and bought some snacks. Broke though I was, I thought it important to be a good hostess.

  It was about one in the afternoon when they finally made it, walking out of Julia's Honda Civic and lugging overnight bags up the sloping parking lot.

  “Welcome!” I said, standing proudly outside the front entrance.

  They were happy to see me; of that I never had the least doubt.

  But the looks on their faces as they studied the outside of the apartment complex weren't quite so cheery. Annie and Julia took the sight of the building in silently for a minute, seeming to hesitate as they drew up to the door. It was only Annie's weirdo friend, Cat, who didn't seem to mind the look of the place.

  “It's, uh...” Annie was searching for something nice to say, but came up short. “I didn't even know this place existed. It's really out of the way, you know?” She'd dyed her hair again; it was jet black, but her bangs were painted in fiery pink. Her plump cheeks were red for the day's heat and the strap of the bag she carried had left a sweat mark against the grey shoulder of her My Chemical Romance T-shirt.