Apartment 16

Forty-three

Stephen paced the cramped living room, the hems of his uniform trousers whisking past Janet’s inert toes where they protruded from beneath the tartan blanket draped over her lap.

‘And now there’s no sign of Seth at all. I’d guess they took all of him. Amazing, isn’t it? That things like that can actually happen. I mean, I checked the tapes this morning before I erased them and did a switch. He never left the building. You can see him going out of reception to the lift on camera three, with that girl, Apryl, and then nothing. He never came back down. Imagine that, dear. He never came back down.

‘But he’s not in flat sixteen either. I checked every inch of it. Empty. What must have come in folded itself all away again. Took what it wanted and then just melted away without a trace. The police want to see Seth. But they’ll have a bloody job finding him.’ Stephen laughed, but there was no humour in the sound that came out of him.

He sat down on the sofa, the material worn shiny by the anxious occupation of his buttocks over the last ten years. ‘The girl left here in an ambulance. And she wasn’t a pretty sight.’ He took a swig from the whisky bottle in his large hand and winced through the after-burn in his throat, before pointing the sloshing bottle at his silent, motionless wife, who merely watched him with her quick eyes. ‘Now I’d guess that things didn’t go to plan, dear. I knew the moment her boyfriend, or whoever that chap was, got me up in the middle of the night. No, dear. I’d hazard a guess things didn’t go to plan up there last night.’

And then he was just about to ask his mute wife if she could smell that. that terrible stench of something both burned and rotten. But stopped himself when he saw the little figure appear just beyond the radius of the standing lamp’s glow, in the tiny hallway before the front door.

It stood still, and made no sign that it would fully enter the living room, for which they were both grateful. Considering the miasma that preceded its appearance, the head porter expected the uncovered head to still be steaming.

Stephen stood up and swallowed. Janet started a frantic keening sound from behind her sternum. She began to rock back and forth in her wheelchair parked by the window, using what few muscles in her abdomen still functioned after the last of the three strokes she had suffered in succession, shutting down ninety per cent of her nervous system the night she’d ventured into apartment sixteen and encountered her dead son for the first time.

‘Jesus.’ Stephen took a step back from the grinning apparition. ‘Jesus Christ.’

‘You wish,’ the blackened head said.

There was no hood encasing its face any more. It looked like the hood had been completely torn away from the coat. As had one sleeve, along with the arm that had been inside it. From within the socket, something dark glistened. The rest of the parka was blackened and smeared with long, ugly stains, as if wet hands had wiped their palms down the outside of the garment while seeking purchase. But the worst part, the feature that made Stephen whimper out loud and drop the bottle of whisky, was the head from which the voice issued.

The whites of its eyes and the gleaming little teeth in its pained grin made the tar-black ruin of the surrounding flesh all the worse for the contrast. ‘I’s come with some news, like.’

‘We don’t want any. Not any more. Nothing from you.’ Stephen swallowed and wanted desperately to remove his stare from the tottering mess in the doorway. ‘It’s over. Finished, you hear? I’ve done what was asked of me.’

‘Nah-ah. Fings have changed, like.’

‘Not for me. We had a deal.’

‘Is all fucked up, innit. Unless you can get that tart back here, and put her in that room with them fings, you’s going nowhere. But I don’t fink she’ll be wanting to see that place again. Do you?’

Stephen shook his head slowly, as the full impact of his dead son’s words sank in.

‘You’s gonna be all right, like. No one knows you have anyfing to do wiv it. But someone’s got to keep all them markin’s on the walls, like. And under the floorboards. Else, who is gonna do it for us?’

‘No. No more. You have Seth. We had a deal.’

The crispy dark skull grinned. ‘Seth’s outta the picture now. All’s we got is you.’

Stephen dropped to his knees, his hands clenched together in entreaty. ‘Tell him. Tell that thing. No more.’

‘Go and tell him yourself. In the darkness. Where I just been, like.’ The child looked at where its arm had once been, and then down its stained coat, and chuckled. ‘You’s going nowhere, Dad. You’s gonna stay here and look after Mum. Happy families, like.’