I whipped around and grasped the knob, giving it a hard turn.
It opened. The door actually opened.
I shoved Cat out into the stairwell and collapsed onto the concrete landing, a billowing wave of smoke following us out. The two of us hacked and spit, but within seconds we'd taken in enough air to fuel a hasty escape.
“W-what happened?” Cat managed to ask between deep coughs.
I was still wondering that myself. “It was Evelyn,” I replied, tripping down a few steps and wrenching my ankle. “She showed up just then, unlocked the door and distracted that... that thing.” Evelyn had turned up when we needed her most, giving us an out; she'd materialized one last time to protect us from the monstrosity she'd summoned.
We hit the fourth floor landing, where the door to my old apartment sat closed. From behind it I saw the flickers of a growing flame, spied evidence of smoke escaping the seam underneath. And behind that door, too, I heard the loud, droning moan. It was much louder now, and from the inside of apartment 10 I could make out rapid footfalls.
The thing was in my old apartment, and was coming to the door.
We weren't out of the woods yet.
Tripping down the next flight, we heard the same thing behind the door of apartment 9, and again behind the door of apartment 8, once we reached the second-floor landing. A loud and terrible drone issued from each and every studio in the building. The evil spirit had taken to the building like a mold, had incorporated itself into it at every level so that it could move freely. The stairwell erupted with the sounds of foreign feet above us, and an upward glance through the railings revealed for an instant the warped, pasty limbs of our pursuer.
We barreled out into the commons area and kept on going till we burst out the front door of the building. It was clear even from the outside that the place was burning, and a wreath of smoke had developed around the roof of building 3 which blocked out the sun and drenched the surrounding land in hazy shadow.
From one of the windows in the upper stories, I saw a cloud of smoke erupting forcefully. In that same window, I glimpsed a naked human form, limbs sagging like spent candles. It wore an approximation of my mother's face in what looked like a drooping, softened Halloween mask, and as the two of us fled down the quiet street, I saw it reach out with a single, misshapen hand. Its head tilting abnormally to one side, I thought I heard it speak to me.
“How is Melanie Mouse doing today?”
It wasn't until we'd reached the shops downtown that I stopped to fully catch my breath. Crashing onto a public bench with Cat, our faces covered in sweat and flecks of soot, I brought my palms to my ears. It was a long while before the hellish droning noise no longer echoed in them.
23
The story hit the next day's news. Both Cat and I read it with great interest in the Moorlake Register the following morning. We'd skipped our first classes of the day and she'd spent the night in my dorm room, sleeping on a futon.
Building 3 of the Lamplight complex had burned completely. The writer noted that there'd been no one living in the building at the time, and that investigators believed it was possibly arson, or else an accident caused by a squatter. Future articles in the local paper would later go on to make brief mention of the complex, and for months I followed them closely, passing them onto Cat through emails and texts. The entire complex ended up shuttered, and was eventually slated for demolition in spring of the following year.
Had it worked? Had burning the building down and getting it condemned been enough to break the ties that bound that terrible spirit to the earthly plane? Cat didn't have the answer to that, and neither did I. All we could do was hope it'd been enough. We'd done our best, and had at least ensured that no one could live there anymore and be preyed upon by it.
Annie and Julia had heard about the fire, and both reached out to me with some variation on, “Whoa, isn't that a crazy coincidence?”
I played dumb and never told them the truth about what I'd experienced while living there, or about what Cat and I had tried to do.
Cat and I kept in touch after that. The Lamplight incident brought us closer together, and we made a point of going out for coffee once every few weeks to catch up. When we did meet, we seldom spoke of the apartment, of the terrible thing we encountered inside of it, and would instead talk about commonplace things, like our class schedules.
After that bump in the road, my semester went well. I completed my courses, aced my mid-term exams with flying colors and, after returning to my dad's house for winter vacation, I signed up for the last of my nursing courses and began the spring semester. My hours in the classroom were fewer, and I was assigned to do clinical work at the nearby Moorlake Health Center, where Cat had stayed during her hospitalization.
Months passed. Memories faded. I'd sometimes dream of the Lamplight complex, would have nightmares about that pale-faced, waxy entity reaching out to me from the shadows, but as time went on they became easier to dismiss. Though the events in that building would always haunt me to some capacity, I learned how to deal with the experience emotionally and eventually got past the trauma.
I was a few credits short of graduation by the end of that academic year. I'd already received job offers, and would have work at most any hospital in the area upon graduation. Needless to say, my dad was rather pleased. Throughout the school year he'd urged me to slow down, to take things easy, but when I found myself at the very cusp of a bachelor's degree, he couldn't help but beam with pride.
“You've done an amazing job, Victoria,” he told me one afternoon, after meeting me for lunch. “Your mother would be so proud, too.”
Where usually my dad's mentions of mom would make me uncomfortable, I smiled. The happenings in the Lamplight complex had taught me that there's a world beyond our own. Though I'd never actually made contact with her, I believed, truly, that my mother was up there, in some form, watching me. And with any luck, I was making her proud.
I walked back to the dorm. It was a few days before the end of the semester, and most students were done with their finals. It was a warm, summery day—the first sunny afternoon in days, after a weeklong stretch of showers. I'd just sold off the semester's textbooks at the campus trade-in and was going to ask my roommate, Sarah, out to lunch. I still had money on my university meal plan that needed used up, and there were only days left to do it.
Dorm life with Sarah had proven pleasant. Over the course of the year we'd become close friends. She and I had similar tastes in music and movies, and the two of us had a clear understanding of how best to share a small space. We never stepped on each other's toes and we were respectful of the other's things. We'd talked about the possibility of moving in together, of sharing an off-campus apartment in the fall. She had a part-time job and parents who could help her with rent. By that time, I hoped to have a paid position at a local hospital so that living expenses wouldn't be a problem. We were still only in the planning phase, but the idea of moving in with a friend was exciting.
And, of course, we'd be sure to select someplace nicer than the Lamplight had been.
I went into the building through a side door, walked down the long hall and rummaged around in my pocket for my keys. Arriving at our room, I unlocked the door and stepped inside. Sarah was sitting on her bed, back to the door, when I walked in. “Hey, what's up?” I asked. “You hungry? Wanna get lunch?”
Sarah stood up, yawning. Her short, blonde hair was kind of messy. She looked like she hadn't hardly done a thing all day. “Sure, sounds good. You buying?” she asked with a grin.
I set my bag down. “Sure am. I have to use this meal plan money, stat, otherwise it's gone for good.” Thumbing at my phone, I asked, “What've you been up to today?”
She shrugged. “My last final was yesterday, so I slept in. I did go out for a bit, though. I ran by the store.”
“For what?” I asked.
Sarah motioned to the bed, where she'd been sitting only a moment ago. Donning a sheepish smile
, she smoothed out the bedspread a bit. “You'll probably say it's dumb... I, uh, I saw this documentary recently. It was about the supernatural, right?”
I arched a brow. “Uh-huh?” Striding towards her bed, I suddenly stopped in my tracks. “W-where did you get that?”
My roommate bent down and picked the Ouija board off of her bed. “It was on sale! I'd gone for a quick snack run and they had a bunch of these marked down near the toy section. I couldn't pass it up! In the documentary, some ghost hunters used one just like this to try and speak to the dead. It's pretty freaky stuff. I don't think it's real or anything, but I wanted to play with one and see for myself.”
I nearly dropped my phone. Taking a step back, color draining from my face, I shot her a dire look. “P-put it away, please.”
Sarah chuckled like she wasn't sure whether I was kidding. I wasn't one to raise a fuss about most things, so my reaction to the board must have seemed awfully out of character. “What's wrong?” she asked. Placing the board back onto her bed, Sarah plopped the planchette on top and wandered over to the closet in search of a new outfit. “You OK, Tori?”
I swallowed hard. “Get rid of that thing, please. Put it away. I don't want to see it.” I couldn't take my eyes off of the board. It was a simple, cardboard version. Cheap. Unthreatening. But still, the sight of it made my heart race.
Sarah put on a clean shirt and shrugged. “OK, sure. I'm sorry. I... I didn't know you had a thing about Ouija boards.”
“I don't have a good history with those sorts of things,” I replied. “I'm not really comfortable around them.”
Sarah accosted me with a curious look, but ultimately shrugged it off, pulling on a pair of jeans. While she had her back turned, I sensed a furtive movement in the direction of the bed. The subtle sound of plastic gliding over cardboard reached my ears, and I watched as the triangular planchette swiveled across the board of its own accord.
The planchette had moved so that it was pointing directly at me, from across the room.
I doubted that Sarah had heard it, that she'd notice the change in its position, but it took everything I had not to run from the room.
Cat had told me once that those of us who experiment with the occult are marked in some way, become more open to the influence of the supernatural as a result. “To some degree, we'll always have eyes watching us from the other side. The good and the bad.” Blanching, I backed up towards the door.
Whose eyes were focused on me just then?
It was impossible to say.
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The Seance in Apartment 10 Page 15
