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The door was still open.

Thomas Azaria lived on the sixth floor of the Apollyon Gardens building, a solidly middle-class apartment complex. He had been there for close to a year now, although if pressed, he would have confessed that he really knew none of his neighbors. Certainly not by name. He saw them, naturally, during the comings and goings of day-to-day life. They exchanged friendly greetings and idle small talk. For the most part, though, the residents of the Apollyon, Thomas included, kept to themselves.

If asked, Thomas would have sworn the unit next to his had been empty. He hadn’t seen or heard any signs of life during all his time there. Then, one morning, as he was leaving for work, he noticed that the door was open. He didn’t think much of it at first. Someone was moving in, finally. Or perhaps there were people living there all this time and he just hadn’t noticed. He wouldn’t have put it past himself. He stole a quick glance as he made his way to the stairs but saw nothing in terms of activity.

When he came home later that day, the door was still open. Maybe they were airing out the place—who knows how long it had been closed up.

That turned out to be the pattern for much of the week: Thomas would leave for work, find the door to the neighboring unit wide open; come back from work, find the door open still. He never saw anyone inside. Thomas was beginning to think that the tenants, or whoever, left the door open by accident. Most of the units on his floor had security gates (it had been a rough neighborhood once), and this one was no different. Thomas tried it one afternoon, but found it locked.

He thought of asking the other neighbors if they knew what the deal was with the place—if they knew anyone living there or moving in and had any way of contacting them. But then he thought that if they did, they would have done so already.

Another week passed by. Thomas had stopped giving it much thought. Then, late one night, while taking out the trash, he passed by the place. The door was open.

The apartment looked fine during the day. Its layout was a mirror image of Thomas’s unit, with the kitchen to the immediate right of the entrance rather than to the left. The place looked nicer than his. The cheap linoleum floor had been replaced by chic gray tiles. The kitchen appeared to have been renovated, boasting a sleek, modern look that contrasted sharply against the seventies vibes of most other units. The marble countertop was covered with appliances, still in their boxes. A washer and dryer set sat next to the kitchen, as well as an air conditioning unit. They were wrapped in plastic, still. Beyond the kitchen was the living room, with nothing in it except a couch curiously pushed up against the rolling glass doors that opened out to a small balcony. The windows had no curtains, so the apartment was flooded with sunlight. It looked nice—certainly better than Thomas’s own modest unit.

It was different at night. Thomas could not see into the apartment at all, which he found odd. The balcony, like his own, faced the parking lot, and surely light from the lampposts should seep into the apartment—but no. There was only darkness. It felt, Thomas thought—ludicrously—palpable. As if the absence of light had weight. It made Thomas feel uncomfortable. He stopped peering into the apartment whenever he stepped out at night.

Another week. Thomas had texted the building’s supervisor at one point, but he never got a reply. He was almost used to it by now, never really thinking about the apartment and the open door until he went outside and noticed it again.

One evening, his friend Malcolm came over to visit.

“What’s up with the apartment next door?” Malcolm asked after they had a couple of beers. “It’s dark as shit.”

Thomas told him what he knew, which, he admitted, wasn’t much.

“It’s kind of creepy as hell.”

Thomas agreed that it was.

“Maybe something happened and no one noticed,” Malcolm went on. “You’d be surprised how much I hear about that at work.”

Malcolm worked at an emergency call center, which made him both empathetic and deeply cynical.

“Let’s check it out,” he said after a while.

Thomas did not want to check it out, but his friend was already up and opening his front door. He was about to explain that all they could really do was peer inside since the gate was shut, but when he walked out, he found Malcolm holding it open.

“You never tried the gate?”

Thomas said that he did, and could have sworn it was locked, but maybe he was mistaken. Thomas said they shouldn’t go in anyway. If something did in fact happen, they could be contaminating whatever kind of scene was inside. Plus, they would be breaking and entering.

“Entering, yes,” Malcolm said. “I’m not planning on breaking anything.”

Thomas said his friend should know better, working where he does.

“Listen,” Malcolm said, “if something did indeed happen and we helped, we’d be kind of heroes, wouldn’t we?”

Thomas said nothing.

“At the very least, we could have a story to tell,” Malcolm continued.

Thomas rolled his eyes.

“Fine,” Malcolm said. “You be chickenshit and stay out here. I’ll be right back.”

Then, taking out his phone and turning on the flashlight, Malcolm stepped into the dark. As he crossed the threshold, his shoulder bumped on the door, which bounced off the wall and began to slowly swing close. It stopped just short of doing so, remaining slightly ajar, allowing Thomas to see only the tiniest sliver of the deepening gloom. Thomas was left alone. He began to sweat. Thomas was not a superstitious man, but he was an anxious one, and their tendencies often overlapped.

At first, he could hear Malcolm rummaging around. He had yelled that he tried the light switches, but the power seemed to be off. He said he was going deeper into the apartment. Then Thomas couldn’t hear him anymore. Thomas stood there for a long time—too long, he decided. These units weren’t large to begin with. They only had three rooms each, for God’s sake. Thomas began to yell out his friend’s name when the door swung back open and Malcolm stepped out.

The color had drained out of him; that was the first thing Thomas thought. His skin had taken on an ashen, pallid tone. He was staring straight ahead, his eyes welling up. He was shaking, and seemed to be mumbling something but couldn’t get the words out. It was only when Thomas grabbed him by the shoulders that Malcolm seemed to come out of his daze. “We need to call someone,” he said simply. And so they did.

They hauled out the body at around midnight. It had decomposed past the point of having discernible features. When asked by the police, Thomas couldn’t confirm who it had been. He didn’t really know any of his neighbors. Thomas felt the officer judging him for that, a little. But they canvassed the rest of the floor, and none of the other residents could say anything about anyone who lived in that particular apartment. The residents of the Apollyon kept to themselves.

The police and emergency personnel left, eventually. They took Malcolm, who was not under arrest, they assured Thomas, but they needed a formal statement from him down at the station.

It was only after everyone left that Thomas realized that, even though they had put up some police tape, they had left the door wide open. Inside, it was still entirely dark.

A couple of days later, Thomas received a call from Malcolm. They hadn’t talked since that night, but he sounded shaken, still, over the phone.

“I need to tell you something,” Malcolm said, his voice trembling. “There wasn’t just one body in that apartment.”

Thomas did not understand.

“I saw three people, Tom,” Malcolm went on. “God, it looked like a family. I think there was a child, even.”

Thomas said nothing, only listened to the sound of his friend’s wet, heavy breathing.

“Why didn’t they take out the other bodies, Tom?”

Thomas suggested that his friend was in shock.

“I know what I saw, man! You don’t forget shit like that! I won’t forget some shit like that. Not anytime soon.”

Thomas didn’t know what to say. Malcolm hung up on him.

Later that day, he called the number in the card one of the officers had left him. He passed along what Malcolm had told him.

“Your friend is in shock, Mr. Azaria,” the officer told him. “There was just the body there. There was nothing else in that apartment.”

Thomas said his friend seemed adamant.

“He would,” the officer said, simply.

Thomas asked if they were able to identify the body.

“They’re working on that,” the officer began. “Don’t think it’s any neighbor you know, though, so don’t worry about that. We talked to the building administration, and there’s nobody living in that apartment. We’re thinking someone noticed it had been left open and just started squatting there. Junkie, most likely. Not usual for buildings like yours, but it happens.”

Thomas said that was awful.

“What I find really weird,” the officer continued, “is that not one of you thoughtful neighbors ever complained about the smell. State of that body, it must have been rotting for a good long while. You never smelled nothing?”

Thomas admitted that he never smelled nothing.

“Like I said, weird,” said the officer. “Just a lot of bad vibes from that place. The whole building felt creepy, actually.”

Thomas mentioned that it was an old building, but the man only grunted in reply. He thanked the officer for his time.

Shortly after that, Malcolm disappeared. The same rude cop from the card called Thomas and asked if he had seen or heard from Malcolm lately. When Thomas said that he hadn’t, the cop told him that Malcolm hadn’t shown up at his work in a week, that his family had no idea where he was and were worried, that if you learn anything you give us a call. Thomas said of course.

The next morning, when he was leaving for work, he noticed that the police tape had been broken. He looked inside the apartment, but everything seemed normal. The emergency responders had seemingly left everything the way it was. He didn’t like imagining what the rest of the apartment must have looked like.

Thomas did not go in. He would not go in. The residents of the Apollyon kept to themselves.

That night, the noises began. They were subtle at first: some light knocking on his door;  distant clanging of metal gates slamming against the walls; faint, muffled tapping on the living room wall. The susurrus of whispers whenever he got in the shower, silenced as soon as the water was turned off, were the worst.

Thomas was not a superstitious man. He had a logical explanation for every single sound: inconsiderate neighbors, weird acoustics, ancient plumbing. But the noises were constant and their intensity ever-increasing. His sleep became fitful, and his dreams were full of dread.

He was asleep when he heard the scream. Distant, at first, and then, as if tearing right through the walls, so terrifyingly close.

The scream joined the chaotic crescendo that had accompanied him these last few days. The knocking the clanging the tapping the whispering the screaming the screaming the screaming

 

It was his friend, he knew. It was Malcolm, yelling for him.

Thomas, not knowing what to do, simply sat in bed and cried.

The door was open—of course it was. The gate swung easily outward—of course it did. The darkness inside remained absolute.

Thomas stepped in. The gloom did, in fact, have weight. It settled upon his shoulders like a pair of hands, urging him forward.

Thomas, eventually, began to see. He was in the hallway, but it was nothing like his own This one seemed to belong to another place, to another era: rococo wallpaper covered the corridor; sconces fashioned out of brass with twisting, elegant flourishes adorned the walls; the floor was made of dark, fine wood. Everything would have screamed old-world class if it wasn’t for the deep layers of grime blanketing everything.

Thomas passed by rooms, too many to count. There were things inside the rooms. This room was reclaimed by nature, a massive oak tree had shoved its branch through one of the windows, splintered wood, dead leaves and shattered glass carpeting the floor. This room was full of mirrors, which reflected shadows and nothing else. This room’s walls were covered in indecipherable scrawls, symbols and runes drawn in deep, dark stains. This room was full of festering food, congested with a million flies.

This room was full of bones.

This room was the master bedroom. After what seemed like an eternity, Thomas finally reached the end of the hall. In sharp contrast to the other rooms, this one was bare and dull and gray. At one end, there was a vanity, covered with cobwebs and dust. At the other end, there was a bed.

There were three bodies on top of the bed. They were more bone than flesh; what little skin remained was putrid and parched and peeling.

Thomas breathed a sigh of relief. “Oh, good,” he said. “I thought something terrible had happened.”

One of the corpses, with evident effort, moved its head. It spoke, through cracked lips and rotten, broken teeth, in a woman’s voice.

“Whyever would you think that?”

“The apartment was open, and my friend Malcolm thought something was wrong, so he came in the other day,” Thomas said. “He found a body.”

The female corpse laughed. Her tall companion beside her cracked a terrible smile. “Malcolm seems to have stumbled upon our dear friend Heward! We had a party the other night, and I am afraid old Hewie drank a bit too much.”

The other body spoke, its voice like the cracking of knuckles—a male. “Hew could never hold his liquor.”

They all laughed.

“Speaking of,” Thomas said, wiping a tear away. “Do you know where he is? Malcolm?”

The male corpse replied, “He’s been staying here. In one of the rooms you passed.”

Thomas remembered a room full of bones. “Oh that’s right,” he said. “Silly me.”

“We are so glad you are here with us, Thomas,” the female corpse said. “As it happens, we are throwing another little bash tonight. We would dearly love it if you stayed.”

“That would be nice,” Thomas said. “Sure.”

He felt tiny fingers wrap around his hand. He glanced down. The small child was looking up at him. Only one of her eyes remained; streaks of aqueous humor and pus ran down her other cheek. “We are so happy to have you, Thomas,” she rasped through shredded vocal cords.

“Thank you,” Thomas said.

The child led him back toward the front of the apartment. Gone was any semblance of the modern—instead, there was a huge hall, lavishly decorated. A grand table sat in the middle, a veritable feast spread out across it. A bevy of guests surrounded the banquet, raising their glasses and cheering as Thomas and his hosts walked in. Everyone was there, in all their rank, rotting splendor. Thomas felt relieved to see his friend Malcolm amidst the crowd, and he couldn’t help but smile.

“Oh, Thomas,” one of his hosts said above the din of celebration and merriment. “Could you be a dear and close the door for us? We wouldn’t want the chill to creep in.”

Thomas closed the door.

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Halloween 2024
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