She stared at him with huge, expressionless eyes as he drew closer. Christian had come out with the intention of telling whoever it was to shut up, so that peace could return to the building, but one look at Tanya was enough to make him forget about his intentions. He climbed to the top of the stairs and sat down beside her.
“What’s wrong?” he asked quietly. He wanted to put his arm around her, to comfort her, but he didn’t dare to. Tanya swallowed and wiped a few tears from her face, but she said nothing.
“Why are you sitting in the stairwell, crying, at half past twelve in the night?” His voice sounded a bit reproachful. At last Tanya seemed to calm down a little.
“I have to sleep outside tonight.”
“What?” he asked in surprise, almost too loudly.
“I can’t sleep in my bed because Kyle has a visitor.”
“I don’t understand! You’ll have to explain it to me,” said Christian slowly. Tanya bent her head closer to him and began whispering in a broken voice, making it hard for Christian to understand what she was saying.
“I’m not allowed to sleep in my own bed because Kyle doesn’t want me to be there when he starts crying.” He wanted to interrupt her, but she continued to speak.
“It doesn’t happen often, but I hid away once. The other woman came, and she went into Kyle's room. I watched through the keyhole: it’s very small, but I could see what they were doing. They lay on top of each other and Kyle cried. I could also see that.” She lowered her head even more. “I can’t tell you what they did. I can’t. I’m not allowed to. Then, suddenly, they both began to shout, and it was so late, and so dark, that I also began to scream, and then they found me.”
Christian’s throat was dry and he found it hard to swallow. Tanya’s story was confusing, but he had a rough idea of what had happened in Kyle’s bedroom. The light went out again, but Tanya was too upset to notice. In complete darkness, she continued:
“They came to my room right away. I don’t know how long they yelled at me. I don’t even know what they said anymore. But suddenly, everything hurt, and I went to sleep very quickly. I slept for a very long time, and when I woke up, I suddenly had this. Do you see?”
Christian couldn’t see anything because it was too dark in the stairwell. But on this floor, the light switch had a pilot lamp in it, so he could find it easily enough. He didn’t even have to stand up to turn it on. Even before all of the relays between there and the ground floor had kicked in, he could see what Tanya had wanted to show him.
She had lifted her nightgown a bit, revealing a terrible scar on her hip, which ran several inches upwards. He almost shouted out in surprise. Instead, he clapped his hand over his mouth in shock.
“My God! That’s terrible! What happened? Did they hit you?” he asked, horrified. Now he dared to stroke her back gently. Tanya didn’t answer immediately, preferring to stare at the stairs thoughtfully.
“I can’t remember,” she whispered finally.
“Who is the other woman?” he asked.
Again, she paused, as she struggled to formulate her answer from the limited selection of words or prepared sentences she had a command of.
“I’m not allowed to say.”
“Not even me?” he held his breath in anticipation.
“No.”
After a brief pause, in which Christian processed what he had just heard, he declared: “You can’t stay here.” He didn’t know himself, whether he meant the apartment, the building or her exile in the stairwell. Tanya said nothing.
“I’m going to ring Kyle’s bell and ask him to let you go back to your own bed.” Tanya’s head jerked into an upright position.
“No! Don’t do that! Please! Kyle will hurt me.” He looked at her in disbelief. “Please let me come to you,” she begged.
“No, that wouldn’t work. My girlfriend is here.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?” Tanya asked inquisitively. She was a bit disappointed. “I’ll sleep on the couch and nobody will even know I’m there.” He thought about it for a moment, then he changed the subject entirely:
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen,” she said.
Finally, Christian said regretfully: “I can’t take you to my apartment.”
Tanya seemed to accept that he wasn’t going to take her into his apartment, but she looked sad. He stroked her hair gently. “We’ll find a solution,” he said. “I’m quite sure about that. But that won’t happen tonight.”
With these words, he stood up and started down the creaky stairs. When he reached his floor, he looked up and called softly: “Good night.”
She was sitting with her head in her hands, and she didn’t look at him. She was crying again.
“We’ll find a solution,” he said to himself, but he had no idea what that solution was going to be.
Just as he reached his door, he noticed a wisp of smoke coming up from somewhere below him. As he went forward, to see who it was, the light went out again. But he could see the glowing of a cigarette in the darkness.
He found the light switch and turned the light on again. Now he could see Paul Flakers standing outside his apartment door with a cigarette in his hand. At first, he thought he was mistaken, then he realized that Flakers was signaling to him to come down. Christian was surprised. There seemed to be more activity in this building at night than there was during the day. Taking care not to make too much noise, Christian went down the stairs.
Chapter 18
“Good evening,” Flakers said. Christian greeted him back. “Is she sitting up there again? Little freak!” Flakers laughed mockingly. It had been a rhetorical question, and Christian regarded the other man with disgust. “Come in for a bit,” Flakers said.
“Thank you,” Christian replied, “but if my girlfriend wakes up and finds that I’m not there, she might just call the police.”
“And some of the people around here wouldn’t like that at all!” Suddenly his voice sounded quite different. “It won’t take long.” He dropped his cigarette butt onto the wooden floor and ground it out with his foot.
“If you didn’t want to talk to me, why did you come down?” Christian followed him into his apartment reluctantly, without saying a word.
“Sit down,” he said, pointing at the couch.
The apartment looked just the same as it had the last time he’d been there. It looked dark, even though the light was on. Christian felt as though he was sitting in an unfinished building without windows or electricity, in which the only light was coming from a weak construction lamp that drew its current from a generator that was situated some distance away. A radio was playing somewhere, but although it wasn’t properly set on the station, he thought he could hear a song, the name of which he couldn’t remember.
“Would you like a drink?” Flakers indicated a bottle without a label, that contained a clear liquid. It could have been schnapps or some other high-percentage distillate. What did his neighbor want from him in the middle of the night? Whatever it was, Flakers showed no signs of haste. Instead, he drained his half-full glass, all at once, poured himself another glass, and one for Christian, and lit another cigarette. He was obviously drunk, judging by the way his hand shook when he poured the drinks. But he was still in control of his articulation. Suddenly he bent forward.
“I really don’t know why you’re still living here. What’s keeping you here? You’ve already had several encounters with our bad spirit.”
“You mean with Derek Dagger? The news seems to have done the rounds.”
“Exactly. You don’t belong here. You should never have come here.” It sounded like he was speaking about the laws of nature. “Do you know why Tanya Benton sits at the top of the stairs crying all night long?”
“Yes, she told me. Some woman comes and sleeps with her brother, and she has to stay outside until they’re finished, even if it takes the whole night.”
“That’s right,” Flakers said. “But why do they throw her out?
Just because her brother wants to have sex once a month?” Christian shrugged. Flakers leaned back in his chair and took a long draw on his cigarette.
“This building is hiding something that I can’t tell you about. We are all guilty. Everyone in this house, except Tanya, perhaps, and you.” He took another draw. “But the longer you stay, the guiltier you will become. I heard what you said to Tanya. She asked if she could spend the night in your apartment and you said no. That’s how quick you can make yourself guilty.” The radio was playing an unbearable mix of static crackling, baroque and golden oldies and Christian asked himself how his neighbor could tolerate such a racket.
“I don’t have to listen to this,” Christian said. The older man’s theatrical statements annoyed him more and more. And besides, he was so tired that he could hardly keep his eyes open anymore. “Especially not at 1am. I’m not going to move out. And how can you expect me to take a grown woman into my flat at night while my girlfriend is waiting for me in my bed? And besides, it’s disrespectful to refer to her as a freak.”
“She’s not right in her head,” Flakers replied calmly, as though that were justification enough.
“I realize that she is handicapped, but that’s no reason to insult her.” Flakers didn’t seem particularly interested in Christian’s answer. He was staring at the wall and seemed to be having a conversation with himself.
“You have made yourself guilty too,” he repeated.
“Stop with all this secrecy.” Christian was annoyed. “Either you give me a plausible reason why I shouldn’t stay here any longer, or I’ll go back to my apartment right now. But I’m not going to move out, no matter what.”
Flakers obviously had no intention of explaining anything to him. Instead, he looked at him with an amused expression on his face. The longer he stared, the stronger Christian’s impression, that he was staring at the face of a corpse, became. He got up and went to the door. Flakers stayed where he was.
“Turn off the light when you go,” he called. Christian turned off the light, leaving Flakers in absolute darkness – a darkness that was only interrupted by the glowing of his cigarette. Before he closed the door, he heard Flakers say: “You can also become guilty by failing to help someone in need.” Christian froze, trying to figure out what Flakers had meant, but he was too tired, and he’d had enough puzzling experiences for one day.
“Good night,” he said, closing the door behind him. When he got to his floor, he glanced up at the floor above him, and made out the shapeless form of the wretched girl cowering on the top step.
He opened the door and locked it behind him as soon as he was inside. He went back to bed, and as he settled down beside Caroline she asked sleepily: “Where have you been?”
“In the bathroom,” he answered simply.
“Okay,” she said and went back to sleep. A short time later, Christian also fell into a deep sleep.
Chapter 19
The next night, Christian began to have problems sleeping. He went to bed later and later, sometimes sitting in front of the television until 5am, with the result that he only got out of bed at 4pm. But there was never a day that he didn’t go to bed at all. Usually, tiredness got the better of him at about 5 in the morning, even though he’d been wide awake just a few minutes before. Then, he went straight to bed and fell asleep right away.
His conversation with Flakers occupied his mind a lot more than he wanted to admit, on those long, lonely nights. He didn’t consider obliging the request, that he move out of the building. What bothered him was more the older man’s threat that he was making himself guilty of something, as Flakers himself had apparently done. Could he become guilty of something he didn’t know anything about? He asked himself a more pointed question. Had he already made himself guilty of something?
The only thing he could think of, was that he hadn’t allowed Tanya to spend the night in his apartment. He kept asking himself why he had rejected her, and the more he thought about it, the more it bothered him.
Flakers had told him very clearly that he should move out, and the quicker the better. But hadn’t his challenge practically ensured that Christian would do anything but move out? Because if he moved out, he would be guilty of not helping someone who was in trouble. He found himself in a vicious cycle: either he could move out, and live with the burden of having looked the other way when his help was needed, as was the case with Tanya, or could he stay and wait until someone needed his help again.
He decided to stay put, because he couldn’t afford to move. He would simply avoid the other residents and their strange behavior. But that didn’t last long.
Chapter 20
After nothing unusual had happened for a while, Christian bumped into Eileen Evans again. He hadn’t seen her for about two months, and thought she had perhaps moved out without him knowing. They met at the main door, and after checking to see that nobody was watching, she whispered: “Do you want to come to my apartment for a coffee?”
Christian was surprised, but the fact that he agreed immediately surprised him even more. They went to her apartment without speaking.
“I haven’t seen you for ages,” said Christian. He sat on a leather arm chair in her living room, with a mug of coffee in his hand.
“I’ve been away. I have been with my parents for the last two months. I went there shortly after I came out of hospital.”
“Do your parents know what you do, and why you were in hospital?” he asked.
“No, they don’t. They only know that I was raped, but that’s all. If they knew what I do for a living, they wouldn’t want anything to do with me anymore.” She took a big mouthful from her mug and stared out the window.
“That’s the worst! They took such good care of me. There will probably be a court case too, and I’ll have to testify. And I’m so afraid!”
“Are you still working?” Christian asked carefully. Eileen laughed.
“No, not at the moment.” She turned back to the window and to drank from her mug again.
“That guy nearly killed me,” she said, more to herself than to Christian, who barely heard her words. “Luckily, I still have a friend in the building. The police told me that you had called them.”
“What about the others?” he asked quickly.
“The others?” her sarcasm was obvious. “They don’t consider me to be worth knowing. Sleeping with a whore is one thing, but living under the same roof as a whore is another story. There are some people in this building, who would have been happier if I had died!”
“Dagger?”
“Perhaps,” she answered, but her tone left no room for doubt. “Nobody else is prepared to help me. Who could? Kyle Benton and his roommate?”
“You mean his sister?” Christian cut in. Eileen stared at him with a look of disbelief.
“His sister?” she asked, amused, then she continued. “The Klines, who are afraid of everything, a professional choleric like Derek Dagger, the doubtful Paul?”
“Tell me about Paul,” he said. He told her about his late-night meeting with the janitor. She didn’t seem surprised. Apparently, it was no surprise to his neighbors, that Tanya sometimes spent the night on the stairs.
“Why don’t you let her sleep in your apartment?” Christian asked.
“I want to avoid problems. And besides, you must have noticed how she threw herself at you.” Eileen shrugged her shoulders and poured another cup of coffee. She looked very sad. “I’ve seen you with your girlfriend a few times,” Eileen said, deliberately changing the subject. Christian nodded. “What’s her name?”
“Caroline.” Eileen’s eyes widened.
“How many girlfriends did you have before her?” She looked at him relaxed, with her chin on her hand. Christian leant back and thought about it. When he told her, Eileen said: “And none of them were the right one? Until now, either they have left you or you have left them.” He looked her straight in the eye and she didn’t look away.
“And what about yo
u?” She waved her hand.
“I’m not the type for a relationship.” But Christian had the feeling that she simply didn’t want to answer the question. He finished his coffee and put his mug on the table.
“Would you like to sleep with me?” she asked suddenly. Christian crossed his arms across his chest and pretended that he hadn’t understood the question. “What?” Eileen asked impatiently.
“Eileen! You know that I have a girlfriend.”
“And? I’m just a whore. Many men do it. You don’t have to feel awkward.”
“Please … why would you ask me something like that?”
“I won’t charge you. Sleep with me. I really need to feel close to somebody right now.”
“I’m sorry Eileen,” he said. He stood up and left the apartment.
“You miserable loser!” she yelled, as the door closed behind him. “You can’t tell me that your little slut can satisfy you!” Christian unlocked his door slowly. His hands were shaking. “Answer me, you loser!” Eileen yelled into the hallway. Christian hoped that nobody in the house would link him to the yelled insults. “Christian Shaffner! I’m talking to you,” she yelled, even louder. Now everyone in the building knew that he was the cause of the upheaval. At least, that was what they would think.
After he had closed his door behind him, Christian sat down on a kitchen chair. Eileen was still yelling insults in the hallway. Then she had another idea. She went back into her apartment, and began banging on the wall adjoining his apartment with both fists. By now, Christian was sitting in his living room. He couldn’t budge from the sofa. Finally, the screaming became quieter and finally died away completely after what felt like an eternity to Christian.
Half an hour later, someone rang his bell. He saw Eileen through the peephole, and took a deep breath. Had she heard him coming to the door? He looked through the peephole again, then he ripped the door open so violently, that he even surprised himself.
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