This explains why I became a reporter and not a firefighter
, she thought as she felt the dull ache of the pain in her muscles.
Emily summoned her energy again and drew the ax back up above her head, holding it there for a second, she sucked in as big a gulp of air as she could before exhaling it in a scream that was half frustration and half anger. The ax plummeted down, scoring a direct hit on the lock, dislodging it from the receiver and sending it whistling towards her, missing her head by mere inches.
"Jesus Christ," Emily exclaimed as she turned to follow the trajectory of the six-inch piece of metal as it clattered to the floor behind her after rebounding off the opposite wall. When she turned back, the remainder of the lock lay on the floor too.
The door to the apartment was now ajar.
The line of work Emily was in had long ago taught her to trust her gut instinct. For some unknown, subconscious reason, she hesitated at the threshold of the apartment, the flat of her left hand resting against the door, her right hand clenched so tightly around the shaft of the ax she could feel her nails digging into the flesh of her palm. Something did not feel right, she realized. She couldn't put a finger on it, but she had a definite sense of
offness
about what she was hearing. From the dark apartment beyond the door the wail of the child sounded again, louder now she was so close, breaking through her indecision.
Wagghhhhh!!!
A scene from the movie
The Shining
—the one where an insane Jack Nicholson chops down the door to his kid’s room with an ax—leapt unbidden into her mind, sending a shudder of unease down her spine, but she dismissed it as just nerves.
"Here's Emily," she croaked as she pushed open the door and stepped into the apartment.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
The stench of ammonia hit Emily the second she eased the apartment door open wide enough for her to slip inside. It filled her nostrils and seared the back of her throat, instantly triggering her gag reflex. She spent a full minute trying not to throw-up before she could move any further into the apartment.
The smell was not what she had expected, it wasn't the bittersweet stench of putrefaction, this was more like a hundred cats had spent a week peeing freely in the apartment and then sealed the place up for another week.
Waves of heat rolled out through the open door. Emily felt beads of moisture condense against her skin. What had the kid’s parents been keeping in here? Were they running a meth lab or something?
How had the kid survived so long breathing this air?
If she had a towel or a rag on hand, Emily would have soaked it in water and used it to filter the cloying, ammonia-laden air. She was tempted to use the blanket but decided against it. Instead, she untucked her tee-shirt from her jeans and pulled it up until it covered her nose and mouth, keeping it place with one hand. It wasn't perfect, she knew, but it should help keep some of that vomit inducing stench at bay. Gritting her teeth against the smell, Emily stepped into the apartment’s entranceway.
It was dark inside but she quickly found the light switch and snapped it on. The overhead lights revealed an empty corridor with just a single painting on the right wall for decoration. The humidity in the apartment was almost as overwhelming as the smell of ammonia. Within seconds of her entering, she was soaked through with sweat and moisture from the air.
"Hello?" she called out, lowering her hand from her mouth and instantly regretted it. She sucked in a huge gulp of fetid air and she felt the chemical burn as it scorched the roof of her mouth and back of her throat. Emily tried to resist but the stink and stinging irritation was just too much this time. She vomited onto the white shag-pile carpet. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and quickly brought the tee-shirt back up to her mouth. The ammonia was biting at her eyes now, raising tears that blurred her vision so badly she had to wipe them away every couple of seconds with the baby blanket. She wouldn't be able to handle this for very long without passing out, going totally blind or choking on her own vomit. She needed to find the kid as quickly as possible and get them both out of there. She had to move fast.
The apartment was the next model up from Emily’s. It had the same basic layout but came with an additional bedroom. She knew the kid’s parents would have put the child in the smaller second bedroom, so she made her way to it, pushing the door open while fumbling for the light switch. She flicked the switch and revealed what was definitely a nursery. A cute crib sat against the right wall, and suspended from the ceiling above it was a child's mobile. Large pink plastic animals hung from the main frame of the toy;
lions and tigers and bears. Oh my!
White wallpaper, decorated with colorful flowers and butterflies, covered the room’s walls. Across from the door, she could see a changing station and a high-back chair where the parents could sit and spend some quality time with their kid. Emily walked over to the crib and pulled back the expensive looking wool blanket. There was no child hidden beneath it.
As if sensing her presence, Emily heard the child’s wail echo into the room. Instead of immediately rushing towards the source of the cry, Emily stopped mid-step. Her gut was trying to tell her something that her brain did not want to hear;
something is not right here
, it screamed at her, and this time she listened to its advice.
Waggghhhhrrrrrgh!
The cry came again, more insistent and, Emily noted, now that she was so much closer to the source, she could hear an odd trill to it that made it seem far more complicated than the simple cry of a child. It almost reminded her of the tones she’d hear when she was forced to use an old-fashioned dial-up modem to connect to the Internet. The sound was, what was the word? Mechanical? Yes, that was close enough. Now she could hear it clearly, without the layers of flooring and walls to filter it, the cry sounded less like a child.
Of course, it could just be her imagination and the strange edge to the cry she heard was just the result of the kid being stuck in this toxic room for so long, but Emily had the sudden overwhelming urge to quietly leave the apartment and never come back.
As strongly as her instincts might be telling her to leave, she couldn't do that, she had to find out what was making that noise.
There was more caution in her step as she exited the child’s bedroom and began creeping toward the master bedroom directly across the corridor. She nudged the door open with the tip of her shoe and cautiously reached inside for the light switch. She poked her head in and quickly scanned the room: a king size bed, neatly made and waiting for sleepers who would never lay their heads down on the pillows again. A bookcase filled with paperbacks, a dresser and a tallboy, but no sign of the apartment’s tenants.
Emily turned her back on the room and made her way down the corridor, heading in the direction of the kitchen and living room areas. The curtains were drawn closed filling the living room with gloom. With every step Emily took she felt the temperature increase and the cloying smell of ammonia become stronger, until it was almost unbearable. Even though the area was dark, Emily had a sense of
something
moving in the living room and she froze, the hairs on the back of her neck bristling like spines on a porcupine.
A sense of panic had crept almost unnoticed up her spine and, as she moved unsteadily through the apartment, it had begun knocking on the back of her skull like a hammer, yelling at her to get the fuck out of there, pronto. But her journalistic inquisitiveness and her overwhelming need to rescue the child overrode her sense of self-preservation—
again
, she thought—so Emily began blindly running her hand along the wall looking for the switch that would turn on the living room’s overhead lights. The wall’s surface was sticky with something that Emily didn't even want to think about at that moment, it felt like someone had sneezed big-time. She wasn't sure which was worse; the stink and the wave of heat or the idea that she'd just put her hand in a huge pile of snot. Neither was terribly appealing she thought just as her fingers found the wall-switch and filled the room with light.
It took just a second or two for her eyes to adjust to the brightness but when she finally stopped squinting Emily started screaming.
It seemed as though she had turned on a light that shone directly into the center of a nightmare. In the middle of the room, covering what had probably been the family couch was something that looked as though it had crawled right out of the deepest, darkest corners of hell.
What she was looking at was the source of both the cat-piss smell and the apartment’s incredible humidity. That much Emily’s brain was able to process, but it stalled when it tried to make sense of what her eyes were relaying to it.
There
was
a child, or at least she supposed that it must have been a child at some point, and the parents were with it. The three had merged into a single mass of fat and tissue that hung from the ceiling in the far corner of the living room. The bottom half of the child's body had disappeared, subsumed into the pulsating bulk of the mass, but its torso and one hand were still free. The hand moved feebly back and forth, almost as though it was waving a friendly
Hello
! to its new playmate. But that was impossible too, because Emily knew the child couldn’t see her; it had no eyes after all, they were gone, replaced by empty black sockets. It was from the kid's mouth that the eerie ululation was emanating. As she stood transfixed, its mouth opened wide and the bone chilling sound of its cry spilled out, filling her ears.
Wagggghhhhhhhh
!!
The parents were barely recognizable within the pulsating bulk. If it hadn't been for a disconnected foot with a man's shoe still attached to it that lay a few feet (
pardon the pun
, she thought) from whatever
this
thing was, and an obviously female arm that dangled limply from one flank, Emily would not have known what the damn thing was made of.
And that would have been fine by her
.
Thick gobs of red
stuff
moved over the skin of the mass, pulling pieces of the main body with them and then moving them to other parts, almost as if it was putting together some kind of puzzle. As she watched the bizarre rearrangement, her mind just a single step from insanity at the utter horror before her, a large globule of the red substance left the body and reached out for the severed man's foot. It deftly surrounded it, shoe and all, and began moving it back to the main body; just like she'd seen ants transport leaves and other dead bugs back to their nest.
This was utter madness, she realized. What she was seeing simply could not exist, it was impossible, so she must be dreaming. But, as she continued to watch in horrified amazement as the foot was dragged back to the main mass, the child's head began a gradual clockwise rotation until it had moved through 180-degrees. The eyeless sockets now stared at her from where the kid's chin should have been, the mouth opened wide and let out a long piercing ululation that resonated off the apartment walls and cut through her skull with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel.
Wagghghhghgggggggg
!
Emily's courage finally gave in. She exhaled a piercing scream and ran for the door.
*
*
*
Emily exploded from the apartment.
Her normal cognitive processes had been superseded by a blind animal survival instinct of the most primitive kind; instincts most humans had not felt since their caveman ancestors first began exploring their new world.
Her feet slid out from under her as she hit the corridor and she went down hard, knocking the air from her lungs, but she was up in a heartbeat, arms flailing as she sprinted towards the stairwell. She took the stairs down to her floor three steps at a time, her feet working on autopilot. Somehow, miraculously, she did not stumble or trip.
Emily kicked open the door leading from the stairwell onto her corridor so hard it slammed back against its hinges, the aluminum handle taking a chunk out of the interior wall. Still sprinting towards her apartment, Emily found the door keys in her jeans and pulled them free. She tried three times to slot the key into the lock but her right hand was shaking so violently and the key seemed so massive by comparison to the tiny receiver she had to steady it with her left hand. Finally, the key found its mark and the door opened. She leapt inside, slamming the door shut behind her with a
boom
that echoed throughout the entire apartment complex. She fumbled the security chain into place, quickly followed by the thumb-lock and then she sprinted down the hallway.
Emily’s mind did not register any of those events because all it was concerned with was the dreadful baby-thing that lived in apartment number twenty-six on floor eighteen. Caught in a processing loop as it tried to assimilate exactly what this latest assault on her sanity was, her mind refused to do anything but force her feet to move.
When Emily’s brain finally returned control of her body, she found herself standing in her bedroom, leaning rigidly against the door. Her first thought was:
how the fuck did I get here
? Her next was that she needed to change her underwear and jeans because, apparently, for some reason she just couldn't fathom, she had wet herself.
With control of her mind and body now returned to her, the full, terrible truth came flooding back to Emily. She understood why she was bracing her bedroom door closed. She knew why she had peed herself. It was because the thing upstairs should not,
could
not, exist.
And yet, it did.
Her eyes drifted to the bedroom’s ceiling. That
thing
was up there, just feet above her head.