The 21st Floor

3. Ding-Dong-Ditch

I don’t know if it was because I was so shaky leaving my place, and honestly I felt like I was about to go play a round of ding-dong-ditch with death, but the hallway felt… bigger. Everything was exactly in the right place, and it didn’t take any longer. Not according to my watch anyway, it didn’t take any longer, but there was a brief moment where it seemed to stretch on forever. More space is crammed into the available area than should be possible, or perhaps that was just what it's like to feel incredibly small. Maybe this was a bad idea, I thought before immediately scoffing. No, I reassured myself, and a bad idea would be to go back to the apartment and try to spend literally the rest of your life without finding out what's up there. There isn’t even supposed to be an up there, I reminded myself. The button was still there. The tiny little engraved 21 taunts me with its very existence. I needed better impulse control.

“We are not going back to the apartment,” I told myself harshly, and jabbed at it somewhat viciously. It blinked like all the others. Lighting up, and making the bling noise as it did so. The doors closed, and started to crawl upward. One floor, two floors, three floors, four floors,

DING!

The doors opened and I think that the only reason I left the elevator was because I stumbled out in surprise. I don’t know how to describe what I felt when I tripped into the dark space other than abject dread. There wasn’t a hallway as such, more a small waiting room. It matched my hallway, just like I thought that they would. Dark floorboards, green carpets, pot-plants by the door, paintings on the walls… someone had trashed it. Someone had smashed the place up so well that there was an abject rushing sound ringing in my ears as I looked around swallowing nervously. The plants had been ripped from the pots, and dirt was strewn everywhere. Gouges were in the walls, looking for all the world like claw marks, and the whole place gave off the sort of vibe you get in an old 80’s horror movie right before the slutty girl dies. I swallowed around the lump in my throat. The door was partially open and it sat crookedly. One of the golden hinges mangles and is torn off. Hanging on by a single screw. Goosebumps crawl over my skin, and the floor groans and squeaks as I cross it.

It seems to take an eternity to cross the small space, and I can barely breathe as I do so. The shaky sound echoes through the room, and I think that I may actually pass out. It still didn’t occur to me to leave. Maybe it wasn’t so bad on the inside? It was just an abandoned apartment after all. What could I possibly find up here that will be able to give me a good reason for how scared I am? Turns out you can jinx yourself with only your thoughts. I didn’t open the door. I was worried that it might fall off. Instead, I slipped through the crack in the door and baulked.

“Somebody has issues,” I whispered to myself. Mostly to avoid having to do anything with these big, overwhelming feelings that were currently doing their best to rip me apart like some kind of goddamn tornado. The inside was worse off than the outside. I sort of just stood there and stared for a moment, attempting to process. You walked into what I assume was supposed to be a living room. It didn’t look like one anymore. Everything was broken. The walls might have been some kind of blue or grey colour once, but they were dirty and stained. Spattered with reddish brown scratches, and looking like there had been a lion who had tried to claw its way out of there. Everything had been thrown. Everything. The couch had been tipped over at an angle that made it look like it had been thrown. The wooden coffee table was reduced to splinters, someone had ripped the light out from the ceiling, and there were shards everywhere. Glass, porcelain, both. I couldn’t tell, but there was so much of it that it shimmered like a sea of broken glass. There was a long skinny speaker almost as tall as I was… it was impaled in the wall. The curtain rod was half where it was supposed to be, and half on the floor. The shredded remnants hanging valiantly from it, but I couldn’t tell you what colour they were supposed to be. Hopefully multicolor, I thought optimistically. The only thing that seemed odd was… there was no food anywhere. Someone had done this on purpose. Someone had done their level best to destroy this place as thoroughly as possible, so why not scatter garbage everywhere. Why not empty the fridge all over the place and leave it for someone else to clean up? Unless it wasn’t spite? There was rubbish, but there wasn’t a single bit of food wrapper, or leftover, or anything organic to throw out. My brain fixated on it for some unknown reason, and I did my best to ignore it. It’s not like it could be relevant anyway.

The glass under my feet went crunch as I walked further into the room, and the noise was so loud I had to fight the urge to jump out of my skin with every step. I know that I love horror movies, but I didn’t think I actually wanted to be in one. Apparently so, because while every intelligent bone in my body was telling me that this was not a safe place to be, and that I needed to leave as soon as possible, I was still determined to stay just a little bit longer. It’s just… it’s just, look, it’s been a hot minute since anything this exciting has happened to me, and yes, I’m aware that it’s a creepy trashed old apartment, but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t, deep down, having more fun that I have had in a longer time than was probably healthy.

When I finally reached the window, I didn’t touch it. It was broken, obviously. It had been beaten and battered within an inch of its life. Thick cracks running like some kind of map of a couple hundred spiderwebs that you were looking at from really far away. Have you ever seen the double-pane safety glass that they use in schools? The shatter proof ones that break, but don’t leave a mess or a draft? This was a great big square one of those, and someone had tried so hard to put something through it that you couldn’t actually see what was on the other side anymore. My guess was that something was the TV, or at least I thought it was a TV. It looked like one of those boxy things with the VHS player underneath that they used in health classes. The video was from the seventies, and so was their information. It still shouldn't have been standing, the window had been beat-up so badly that the spiderweb cracks were overlapping enough. It probably should have been literal dust.

Speaking of spiderwebs, there were plenty of those too, and their inhabitants. It was a good thing I wasn’t afraid of spiders. I was more afraid of the unsettling chill in the air, and the watched feeling that was settling into my bones. The spiders probably ate all the other bugs, and now I was noticing just how many of the crawly suckers were running around. I was starting to be really glad that there were lots of spiders. The air seemed to hum, or maybe whistle, like wind creeping in through crevices. I stood there for a moment longer, and looked at the window again.

“If I didn’t know any better,” I murmured slowly to myself, “I’d say someone became something, and that something tried really hard to get out.” My whole body seemed heavier the second the words left my mouth.

“You know,” a male voice replied, “You’re really very clever. Hello, by the way.” My head jerked suddenly to the source of the noise, and if I had been holding anything I would have dropped it. Time seemed to slow as I looked, the space between one heartbeat and the next stretching on for a ridiculously long period of time. It was like I had been dumped into icy cold water, and I was most certainly going to drown. Frankly, I didn’t appreciate the pessimism. My brain was refusing to translate for my eyes. There were colours and shapes, and shadows. I should have known what I was looking at, but it was like… I was protecting myself. At that one moment, I was more scared than I had ever been, and honestly, what I meant to say was hello. Instead I ran. Time seemed to speed back up, as I tore out of there careless of the mess, and thoughtless of absolutely everything but my sudden need to not be here. “Hey,” they shouted as I left, “Hey!”

I didn’t look back, knocking the door out of the way. It swung dangerously but I was already sprinting into an elevator that was somehow already waiting for me. The doors were already open. I darted in, and hurriedly pressed the button. Refusing to take my eyes off the button for my floor, and stabbing at it repeatedly. There’s a great big crashing thud, and a pained angry roar, but the doors slide shut. My legs gave out, and my knees hit the floor. I shake, and pant for breath. Trying to figure out what I had run so fast from. I came up blank every time, and I really didn’t have that long to think about it. The second the doors opened again I was off like a shot. Almost materialising at my door, and hurriedly locking it behind me. I didn’t stop there, rushing through the apartment so fast and so panicked that it blurred around me. I kept going until I tore open the door to my bedroom, and raced in. Diving under the bed, I curled up to make myself as small as possible.

“What the f**k?” I whimpered in a terrified daze, the shaking still had not subsided and I could hear my breathing in the small space around me. The wall is plastered firmly to my back, and I don’t know what possessed me to hide there exactly, or what I was running from, but some kind of childish instinct had me hiding under that bed until the ache disappeared from my chest, and I could finally breathe easily. Longer than that even, because when all my muscles unclenched I flopped onto my back and stared at the slats. What on earth had that been? Lunacy, or… toxic mould, or something along those lines. I could figure out for the life of me what had made me run. I really had just been intending to say hello.