Her partner came to the door when I rang the bell. I looked behind him, and saw her sitting by a window that looked down on the street below. She sat on a couch with her legs under her; she reminded me of a cat, entirely self-possessed, almost aloof. But there was a gentle smile on her face as she typed on her phone. Her straight, black hair was tucked behind her ear. There was something clean about her, like she probably smelled of soap and fresh laundry. She glanced up for a second, still smiling absently as she saw me, the rando at her door, and then went back to her typing.
Every now and then afterward, I’d think of what it must have been like to live her life, or to at least be a part of her life. I had come to that little town in Devon in some misguided attempt at a fresh start (as if my surroundings were the problem) and taken up a job at a small-fry local audit firm. When I moved into that studio, I knocked on each of my neighbors’ doors to ask them what internet provider they were using. But really, I just wanted to see the people I was living with and what the inside of their houses looked like.
I lost my job with an efficiency that comes with practice; from showing up to work a little late, to working at home more often, to not responding to client emails. When my manager called me in for a meeting to warn me, I felt sorry for him. I emailed my resignation fifteen minutes before I left for the day. Later, as I trudged up the stairs to my floor (the elevator was perpetually broken down) and reached my apartment, I looked at the door right next to mine, 1B, where she lived. I was seized with the urgent need to knock on her door, tell her I needed help; tell her that I felt as if my whole body was just one big cave with a scream trapped inside it and that maybe she couldn’t understand it but could she just please help? Of course, it was crazy, it was none of her business. I stood there for a long time, paralyzed, feeling like I was at some sort of crossroads, feeling that I could just knock, just say “Hey.” Eventually, I went back into my apartment.
It was raining heavily the night it happened. Since I’d stopped working, I was free to stay up all night trying to write my big novel, or my story, or my ideas, or just a fucking sentence that didn’t feel like a lie. That night, as usual, I had gotten tired of trying to squeeze words out and was sitting on the floor of my studio, scrolling through Reddit as I heard the rain drumming outside. I don’t know why, but I suddenly looked up from my laptop and at the window. There was an old woman standing on the pavement across the street. She was dressed in a pink cardigan, and a steel walking stick hung from her arm. Gusts of wind blew the rain across the street. I walked over to the window and peered down from behind the half-drawn curtain. She stood erect, her back straighter than any old person I’d ever seen and she stood with her palms together as if praying. Water dripped from her cheeks and I saw that, although she stood straight, her whole body was shivering. Even as I watched, she swayed and fell to the ground. She lay sprawled face down on the street. I watched as a dark pool spread around her head like a halo, the raindrops mixing with it. I knew I needed to go down, I needed to help this old woman. And yet, I felt unable to move. My hands hung limply by my sides. My legs locked and stuck firmly to the ground. My body was ossified, a dead thing with only my heart beating inside like a caged prisoner as I realized—I didn’t want to help this person. I didn’t care. I simply didn’t want to move. And with this realization a terror rose up within me, that echoing scream within my empty self, because I knew that to look away now, to not help, would truly damn me. Unwilling to help and unable to move, I wished wretchedly that I had not seen what I had just seen.
I don’t know what I would have done that night. How long I would have stood there. Whether I would have helped. Because then I saw her; the girl from 1B dashed across the street and knelt down beside the old lady. I remembered her window looked down on the street too. She had not been in the rain a minute and she was already drenched, her hair stuck to her face and the sleeves of her wool jumper were heavy with water. She had moved the lady onto her back, I wondered about the wisdom of moving someone with a head injury. She was looking up at the building and I moved a step back so she definitely couldn’t see me behind the curtain. I could see her mouth moving, trying to say something, she was trying to scream, get anyone’s attention but the rain and wind had now redoubled and she might as well have been miming. She was patting her pockets and then pulled out her phone. Then the old woman’s hand reached up and grabbed the girl by the throat.
I found myself bursting out of my apartment and hurtling down the stairway. I ran across the dark foyer from the stairway to the building entrance, seized the door and wrenched it open. I stepped out onto the street. There was no one there. The ground was slick with rain and the building awnings were dripping, but the rain had stopped and so had the wind. I shivered, I had just sandals on and no jacket. I turned back to face my building; the entrance was just an unassuming black door with a small glass panel. It was dark inside since the foyer was unlit, but then light sliced across the panel. The door to the stairway was open. By the light, I could see the girl, her hand on the doorknob. I felt disoriented - I had not run into her while coming outside and there was no place in that tiny foyer for her to have gone unnoticed as I had crossed it. I opened the door and she turned towards me. She stood unmoving, drenched from head to foot. Her face was pale and her eyes wide in an empty stare. I wanted to ask her if she was okay but I couldn’t open my mouth.
She blinked. Suddenly, she was looking at me and I took a step back. Some instinct wanted me to immediately flee the woman who was staring at me now. But then she began to shiver and her gaze broke. She stumbled and fled up the stairs. The door slowly swung shut behind her, leaving me in darkness. I walked back out to the pavement.
I looked down the street and I could see the old lady walking under the light of the street lamps, pottering along with her walking cane. She reached the end of the lane and then she turned her head. She was looking at me. She smiled and ice crept into my heart. I turned around and walked back into the building. I blinked several times to rid myself of the image of her dark, glistening teeth.
The door to room 1B was shut. I wondered whether I should knock even as I let myself back into my flat, and curled up in my bed. It's easy of course to convince yourself back into normalcy; you tell yourself it was a misunderstanding or a trick of the light. The real trick of the light is how the lightbulbs in your house can make you feel that life makes sense; that you didn’t see what you saw. I went headlong back to my life such as it was. I slept late into the afternoon, woke up, ordered Turkish Take Out, had that with a cup of instant coffee, and spent the next several hours reading. I read a mixture of classics, paperback thrillers, and weird stuff; Dostoevsky, Dickens, Garcia-Marquez, and Poe, Sydney Sheldon and James Patterson, Baker, King, Aickman, and Gaiman. I had a reputation as a reader among people who knew me, but my secret was that I hadn’t read in years. Reading a book was like dissecting a body; each word made sense, each sentence made sense, but it was dead in my mind and I didn’t know why. But now I read like a fiend, and sometimes I even wept at the end of a sentence. Somehow the books were alive again, full of color and fire, or perhaps I was living inside the stories now. I would read until around 3 A.M and by then my body would be sore from lying in the same position and I’d get up and walk around my flat. Then I’d invariably start feeling trapped inside that box and I’d have a wank to calm myself down.
I’d wank in the bathroom, hiding in my own house. Ever since that night, I’d made sure to keep the curtains drawn over the window when it got dark. I wondered sometimes if something happened that night that ended up helping me read again. Late one night, I’d felt a strange stillness as I lay reading. I realized I’d been trying to read the same sentence for a while now; my heart hammering fast in my chest. I stopped reading but I wouldn’t look up from my book. I felt the presence of someone standing outside my door, a dark presence just waiting. Even as I tried to convince myself I was being stupid I realized that the line of light that showed under the door was obstructed by something. I felt cold fear run down my legs. My breathing sounded too loud in my head. I don’t know how long I lay there staring at the shadow under the door. It slid away suddenly and I could see the light from the corridor outside unobstructed again. I still did not move. In that silence, I thought I heard the soft click of a door being carefully shut.
Eventually my heart slowed, the feeling came back into my legs, I flexed my toes. But I did not get up. I did not think any further. I went back to reading the book I was holding as if my sanity depended on it and when I finally did look up, there was yellow sunlight in the room, the birds were chirping, my eyes were burning and the sound of the door clicking shut seemed faint and unreal.
The walls aren’t very thick and I could hear my neighbors’ goings-on if they were loud enough. Sometimes I heard weekend whoops and jeers and music from the girls in 1C. Whenever I went downstairs to get my takeout, I could hear the soap operas emanating loudly from 1D. I never got to hear much from 1B, even though they shared a wall with my flat. Just the occasional and indistinct snatches of conversation humming through the wall, her voice gentle, almost melodious, his dry and low. It was a surprise then, one night, to hear what sounded like fighting. I could hear a voice, “Stay away.”
“Don’t fucking touch me.”
I could hear him hum soothingly in response.
Then that voice again, indistinct but definitely not gentle. I wasn’t sure it was even her. I couldn’t focus on anything I read that night. I was surprised by how agitated I felt when I heard them fight. After that, fights between the two of them became more common and I just put my headphones on to block it out. In particular to block out that voice; it was distorted, as if someone had put on her voice the way a wolf puts on sheep’s clothing. The image of her standing by the stairway with empty eyes kept flashing across my mind. And then she way she had looked after— I would shake my head to dispel those images and turn the volume up on my music.
One afternoon, the doorbell rang, somewhat startling me. I was not expecting visitors and was in no condition to meet them. I had an absurd idea that my ex-manager had found my address. It turned out to be the girl’s partner. He stood at the door rather awkwardly, scratching his head, and said, “Hey man.”
“Hey,” I repeated
“You remember me from—"
“Yeah…internet’s going good.”
“Good. Great. Yeah,” he was looking at the ground and rubbing his arm as if he was cold, then he suddenly looked up at me and said, “Listen this is embarrassing but um…can I just chill at your place for like a bit? I um, I just wanna be nearby.” He inclined his head towards 1B.
“Why aren’t you there?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t think she wants me there right now. But I don’t want to leave her alone either…” His eyes were wide as if willing me to understand. Of course, I understood, I moved aside to let him enter.
“Thanks a bunch, mate. Really…” He said as he came inside.
“You want some coffee?” I asked him.
“Nah.”
I directed him to the one chair in the house next to my study table and sat on the floor opposite the window.
He sat stiffly on the chair, saw me sitting on the floor and then said “Okay fuck that I’m not sitting on this”
He sat down next to me with his back against the wall and his knees up.
“I don’t really expect visitors,” I said
“That’s okay man,” he said.
For all my agitation over their fights I was still curious. I had spent so much time wondering what it would be like to be near her, to share her life, and now her boyfriend was sitting next to me. Sitting in my room he looked smaller, somehow closer to my life, it made it easy to ask him, “Is she okay?”
He snorted. “What do you think?”
I was taken aback by his bluntness. I stuttered, “I mean… I don’t know. Just that we’ve been neighbors for a while and this seems new. Or, maybe it’s really old and I’m just hearing it now?”
“Hah.” He grinned at that. It was a frightfully mirthless grin. “You’re a smart man. But no, this is new. I’ve known her a while, mate, and this is new.”
“Oh.”
He was sitting with his head between his knees and both his hands clasped in front of him as if in prayer. There was a long pause and then he spoke slowly, each word heavy. “I know her, and something is wrong with her right now.”
I sat next to him in silence as he admitted this to himself on the floor of a stranger’s flat.
The next words came out in a rush, “Something happened to her and she won’t tell me what. She isn’t acting herself. She is in pain. I know she is in pain. And it's doing things to her. I keep asking her to go to the doctor but she won’t and I can’t force her.”
“Doing things to her?” My voice sounded hoarse.
He did not seem to hear me. He sat looking at the ground and his boyish face now seemed sulky and scared. I stared out the window at the clouds moving past the roof of the building opposite, but they seemed to disappear as the memories flooded into my mind. I felt my breathing rise. Something else had stared at me through the girl’s eyes in the foyer that night; some inhuman, malevolent presence. The same insane and vicious presence which grinned with glistening shark-like teeth from behind the face of that old woman. I clenched my fists tight, and slowly breathed in and out, trying to keep the room in front of me, trying not to be pulled back into that night.
“You okay there?” the guy said.
He was looking at me with a light frown on his face, and then turned and shook his head. “I’m sorry, man. I didn’t mean to dump all that on you”
I swallowed and shook my head.
“No, no. It’s okay. I just… get headaches”
“I better be getting back anyway. Better go check.”
As he got to his feet his shirt pulled up and I saw three black marks down his side. They were black, almost like dirt splattered across his skin, but I knew they were bruises.
“Listen, dude,” I managed to blurt out.
“Yeah?”
“She needs help.”
“I know.”
“No, I mean…”
I suddenly went dumb, my mind completely blank.
“Yeah?” he said sharply.
“She needs help,” I repeated stupidly.
He sighed. “This isn’t her. She’s a good person, you know? Not just, like, nice. I mean good. She’s a helper.”
I remembered her kneeling on the pavement in the rain, hair matted to her cheeks. She is a helper; I knew that the first time I saw her. I wanted to help her. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t open my mouth and tell him. Maybe I didn’t know how to tell him. I’d end up sounding like a lunatic. He might even think I was harassing her. Or maybe it was something else that stopped me. Something deep inside me that refused to move, to speak, to help, or ask for help. Something that refused to live.
“Sorry to have yelled,” the guy said.
I realized I’d been staring at him in silence. I uttered something vaguely reassuring and polite as he left. Then I collapsed into bed and tried to sleep, to forget that ancient, grasping hand.
I spent the next few days in bed with a fever. In that state, my mind bubbled with grotesque images of the girl: her face underwater, mouth open in a mute scream, black insects bubbling out of her mouth and swarming around her head. Her wrists opened up and bleeding darkly, the blood suddenly retreating back into her body like a video on reverse. I slept intermittently; I could not remember my dreams but I would wake up sweating, my blood still cold with fear. Despite that, the days were uneventful. The shouting next door seemed to have calmed down if not stopped. After a week, my fever finally broke and I was able to sleep peacefully again.
One night, I was going downstairs to get my food from the Deliveroo rider when I opened the door to the stairway and found her standing on the landing.
“Oh hey,” I blurted out, startled.
She didn’t say anything. She was wearing a wrinkled denim jacket and her hair was straggly and unwashed. The clean girl I’d seen that day on the couch, that self-possessed gentle aura, had vanished.
I felt embarrassed about running into her and gave her a brief nod, which she did not respond to either, before going down the stairs to the foyer. The stairway door handle had a large steel plate on which I caught a glimpse of her reflection. Something about it made me look back as I entered the foyer. She was standing at precisely the same spot on the landing, and I noticed that her arm was rigid by her side, her fist clenched tight.
I grabbed my food from the rider and, as I walked back across the dark foyer, I felt a sharp pang in my stomach. I didn’t want to run into her on the landing. But she wasn’t there. She was standing on the stairs to the second floor. I was reminded of those insects that dart a sudden inch or so forward after prolonged stillness. She was halfway up the stairs. I couldn’t see her face but I thought she was looking upwards. I found myself wondering if she’d stopped because she’d heard me coming but tried to dismiss this as nonsense. She stood stiff and hunched like a child trying to ignore someone. She was halfway up the stairs but her arm trailed behind her, resting on, or rather, grasping the railing. Her hand looked deformed, like she was wearing an ugly purple glove. But it was her hand, shrivelled and lined with wrinkles. I took another step and I could see she was looking up and her head was shaking slightly, ever so slowly, from side to side.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
My voice sounded thin and brittle in the space between us, and I had the sudden sensation that I had not spoken at all. I had only thought those words. But I couldn’t speak again. Maybe she was mentally unwell. Maybe she needed help. I wished desperately someone would walk in on us.
When I closed the door to my flat it was as if a noise, that had been going on for so long I’d forgotten about it, had suddenly stopped. I put my Styrofoam box of kebab and fries on the kitchen counter. I wondered where her partner was. I realized I didn’t even know for sure if he lived with her. I exhaled deeply and then turned around and stood with my hand on the doorknob. I remembered that blank stare, the bruises on her partner’s body. I closed my eyes and tried to remember that girl I’d seen so long ago, sitting and smiling on her phone. I twisted the doorknob open and then slowly, fighting every cell in my body, crept outside to the stairway door and pushed it open. She wasn’t on the stairs. She must have gone back to her apartment. I was filled with a treacherous relief. I went over to 1B. I didn’t ring the bell, I just listened. I heard nothing and then I tried the door. It was locked. And then finally I punched the doorbell. I waited, but nothing. I turned and walked back to the stairway, my heart thrumming like it was the vocal cord to an inner scream. I slowly climbed up and checked each floor: second, third. There was no sign of her. Maybe she had made her way to the ground floor and was on the street somewhere? I climbed up the last flight of stairs to the roof. I opened the door and stepped outside. It was chilly and dark, the rooftop crisscrossed by a few pipes and wires.
I could make out the silhouette of a structure on the roof, possibly the cold-water tank. I walked to the water tank, every step sounding incredibly loud in my ear. I stopped in front of it. The air around the tank felt colder and I could only see it by the glow of the streetlights below. It was a white plastic cistern about six feet in length and four feet deep with brass pipes snaking out of it. It was braced on a metal framework lifting it above the roof so that the plastic wall of the tank was level with my face and the top of the tank a foot above me. I didn’t even have to put my ear to it. I could hear a wild scraping inside of the tank. A lone thought passed through my head: Its killing her. There was a twisted piece of black plastic glistening on the floor to the side of the framework. It was the lid to the water tank.
I stood uselessly, staring at the tank as precious seconds passed. Then I took a shaky breath and placed an unwieldy foot on the framework. I pressed my hand on the surface of the tank to brace myself. I felt the hard surface of the plastic, cold from the night. Pale fingers emerged through the side of the tank as if it were mere liquid and grasped my hand. At that point, I sometimes try to tell myself I must have fainted, or dissociated, but maybe what happened next just happened. I felt like my hand was detached from myself and yet I could still feel what it felt: I could feel the fierce grip of those fingers, how cold and clammy they were and yet somehow, underneath, feverishly warm. I did not know when I closed my eyes, or if I did, but I heard her voice in the darkness. It was raspy and choked as if those vocal cords had been damaged, but it was undeniably her voice. “Don’t leave me.”
There was a metallic rustling in her throat. And I heard a whimpering I realized was my own. I didn’t know I could sound like that.
“You don’t have to do anything,” she said. Even here, at this moment, she was the one soothing me. “Just don’t leave.”
I made an assenting noise.
“Thank you,” she said. She sounded farther away. I could hear that metallic sound more clearly now. It was a voice, cold and filthy as a sewer grate, whispering unintelligibly. All at once, the voice began shrieking. It was not human, neither animal, only cold, spiteful, and full of black hatred. It was an utterly lonely sound. Abruptly, the voice cut off and I could hear only the desperate scratching and scrabbling inside the tank.
It wasn’t killing her, then. She was killing it. I wanted to tell her I was sorry, that I was the one who should have taken her place, that in a way I was already dead so it didn’t matter anyway. A hundred other maudlin, self-pitying things went through my head as the woman fought to drown the darkness inside that plastic coffin. I don’t know how long it went on. After a while, the noises subsided, but every now and then another bout of thuds and scratching would begin, water sloshing rapidly. I could still feel the cold fingers on my hand though I did not dare open my eyes and look. I merely slumped against the metal frame, allowing it to bear my weight. Sometime later I felt something stroke my face and that startled my eyes open. But there was nothing there. There was no noise from the tank. My hand was not on the tank anymore, it was resting on my cheek. I stepped back, feeling the soreness in my cold and stiff muscles. I realized I could see the roof and the water tank clearly now in all their banality; the grey light of dawn was breaking through the night.
It was nearly a week before people started complaining about the water. I was surprised it took so long. And then I saw her on the news and there were crowds outside. People were interviewing her family and her partner and the neighbors, they even tried to interview me. The police asked me a few questions, but not many. It was quickly ruled a suicide. Her partner admitted she had been behaving erratically and had thrown him out. Inside her house, they found bowls of stagnant water with larvae hatching and uncoiling on their surface, and several knives with blades rusted and stained with old blood. There was a conversation on mental health issues of course, because someone had to be pretty determined to try and die inside that narrow space. People were asking what would cause a lovely young woman—a top student, a loving and beloved daughter and partner, a volunteer, a helper—to make such a decision. When they found her, she was crouched on her knees under the water, with one of her hands clutching the bottom of the tank to hold herself down. Even after a week, her fingers maintained their grip. They didn’t know that she had tried to help one rainy night. That sometimes helping means putting yourself in danger. They didn’t know that. But she knew that. I know that she knew that. I was with her at the end and she wasn’t surprised. She was tired and so immensely sad and lonely but she wasn’t bitter. None of them knew that.
That day, after it was all over, I came back downstairs and collapsed into bed, exhaustion taking me into a dreamless sleep before I could cry. I woke up to find my hand gripping my throat, the veins standing out on it as it tried to kill me. Slowly, slowly I eased it open. I held it up in front of me. It was still rigid and claw-like; and for a moment it looked ancient and wrinkled. Then it relaxed and smoothened into my own hand. It was fitting. I have never been able to sleep too deeply since, else I wake in the death grip of my own hand.
