Neither of them could remember how long they’d been stuck in the apartment. The time since the Thing had appeared at their door felt confused and formless—polluted vapor seeping through clenched and urgent fingers. It could have been hours, or days.
When the Thing had first arrived, they had barely noticed it. It had announced itself only through quiet scratches, curved nails drifting across the thick wood. Mark thought that it was Claire who had noticed it first. Sitting at the dinner table, she had put down her fork and cocked her head to the side. Mark had just went right on chewing, glancing over her shoulder at the muted game on the TV.
He finally looked over when she hissed his name through gritted teeth. He had apologized, asked her to repeat what she said. He had mentally rolled his eyes, but listened. He had heard nothing, or at least pretended that he hadn’t, and went back to stealing glances at the TV. When the scratching had not repeated itself right away, Claire chalked it up to her imagination.
The faint sound of nails dragging on wood had continued on occasion for some time, so quiet that both of them had simply ignored it. Separately, they would catch themselves stopping in the middle of tasks, straining to validate that the sound existed at all outside of their minds. For the longest time, they had gone on as if nothing was wrong. It seemed so obvious now, but then, the scratching had persisted and life had gone on.
Mark sometimes wondered what would have happened if they had simply gone on feigning ignorance of the Thing’s activities. After all, it had not been until they had addressed it directly that it had begun its true raging. It was then that scratches and thuds and periodic hisses had become full-fledged blows and strikes against the front door of the apartment, accompanied by grotesque howls and grunts. It was then that it decided It wanted in.
Claire dismissed that idea when Mark brought it up at some point during their entrapment, after the initial shock and fear had subsided. It was always going to try and break Its way in. You can’t ignore something away. He argued that acknowledging the Thing had given It power. She countered that It would have driven them mad otherwise. People cannot live that way.
When the Thing had first started assaulting the front door, they were sure the door would splinter into a thousand bits and the creature would leap inside, wooden fragments clinging to its skin or fur. The door held, though. And why hadn’t the neighbors come to see what was happening or called the police? It was like they were stuck inside their own bubble, removed from the world. Their calls went on ringing and ringing, their shouting went unheeded. It appeared that they were on their own to deal with the Thing at their door.
So, Claire now sat on the couch, cup of tea in front of her. The rattling of the door and walls had subsided for the time being, but they could hear the clicking of nails on the old wooden floorboards in the hallway. Mark stood a few feet from the door.
“Mark, don’t. What if It hears you and starts up again?” He turned at the sound of her voice, eyes opened wide, palms up, a silent gesture of frustration. He put a finger to his lips, then crossed the remaining few feet to the door, quieting his steps with exaggerated tiptoe movements. He laid his palms against the door and leaned forward, closing his left eye and looking through the peephole with his right.
He could see across the hall to the neighbor’s door. The hallway looked deserted, until a dark shape crossed in front of the lens, temporarily blocking Mark’s view. He pulled back, his heart skipping and breath catching. He wanted to flee back to the relative safety of the couch, but he held his ground. He leaned forward and steeled himself for another look. Clear again, and quiet now as well. Mark waited. The sound of its footsteps drew closer, until Mark was sure It would pass in front of the door again. Nothing stalked past the peephole, but Mark began to hear a soft sound. It took him a second to recognize it has the Thing’s breathing. The light from the hallway was blocked out and Mark found himself staring directly into an eye, blood swirling where an iris should be. It stared as if It knew Mark was staring back. Its pupil dilated and expanded with each breath, the red of the iris becoming the corona of an alien eclipse, before expanding again into a circle of hellfire, a black pinprick at its center.
Mark screamed and fell backwards. He landed with a crash that rattled the floor of the tiny apartment. Claire jumped to her feet, alarmed, as the Thing threw itself against the door. The thick wood jumped in the frame and there came an audible crack, but still, the door held.
“Mark!”
Mark scuttled back towards Claire, then pulled himself to his feet.
“I’m fine,” he said, dusting off his pants, which were dustless. There was silence from Claire in response. He turned to find her seated again, eyes downcast to the floor. The Thing roared, with a cry that sounded now like a lamentation—the howl of a wolf mixed with a widow’s wail.
“You shouldn’t have looked. You never listen.”
“What the hell are we supposed to do? We should find out what we’re dealing with, or we’re never getting out of here. You do get that, right? Claire? We’re on our own. No one is coming for us, we need to figure this out ourselves.”
Claire looked on the verge of tears now, but she turned her face up towards him.
“What happened to ignoring It?” Spinning back towards the door, Mark grabbed a handful of hair at the side of his head and tugged.
“I don’t think there’s any putting it back in the box,” he whispered. The Thing slammed itself against the door and groaned, as if in agreement.
That evening—or perhaps the next, the hours bled together—the two sat on opposite sides of the couch. Neither had spoken since Mark had riled the creature, but Claire now broke the sullen, unspoken hostility.
“So, we find a way out.” Mark looked up from his book at her.
“How?”
“Maybe we could distract it somehow, make a run for it?” They both considered the proposal for a moment, but conjured images of decidedly undistracted needle-like teeth sinking into their flesh.
Mark stood from the couch, tossing his book onto the cushion behind him. He crossed the living room to the window on the far side of the apartment, opposite the door. He unlatched the lock and pushed the rectangular window outwards. It only swung out about halfway on its rusted hinges, but enough that he could lean his body out the opening to look at the four-story drop below.
“We climb out then. Like an old movie. We’ll tie the bed sheets together and we’ll climb down and get the fuck out of this place.”
They both considered this proposal in silence as well. Images of shattered legs and dashed skulls came to mind, but faced with the alternative imagined fate, it seemed acceptable.
They raided the storage trunk at the foot of the bed for all of the sheets and tied them end to end. Unsure of the strength of the knots, Mark extracted some duct tape from a cobwebbed corner of the front closet. He wound the tape around the knots, then in spirals around the stretched sheets. When he was finished, Claire guided one end through the open window and let it fall. Mark felt a weak tug against his grip on the other end as it finished its descent, short of the ground.
“How far do we have left?” he asked her. Claire poked her head out of the window to get a view.
“Too far.”
They stripped the bed and gauged the tensile strength of a few articles of their clothing for the final few feet. Once these were added to the length of improvised rope, they laid it spiraled around the living room. Claire eyed it, dubiously.
“Think it will hold?”
Mark frowned at the question.
“We’ll put the end with the clothes out the window, so it’s near the bottom.”
“That didn’t answer my question.”
Mark just shrugged and tied the end of the rope, a white top sheet, around the dormant radiator beneath the window. After knotting it, he seized the sheet and pulled against it, arms straining as the entirety of his weight leaned backwards. The fabric held fast.
“Best we’re going to do, I think,” he said. He leaned out of the window and peered to the pavement below. The window looked out onto a narrow alleyway, which itself led out onto the street. With the sun setting outside, long shadows had crept into the alley. Puddles of black lapped into corners and beneath dumpsters. The furthest reaches of the passageway behind the building were completely obscured as the failing light backed slowly toward the street.
“I’ll climb down first.” When Claire did not answer, Mark stepped away from the window and took her hand. “Claire, it’s going to be alright. We’ll get out of here, together.” She nodded, but by her expression, she remained unconvinced.
Mark looked down at the rope, still taut in his hands. He shrugged, then nodded. He climbed up onto the windowsill and turned around in a tiny pirouette so he was facing the inside of the apartment again. He hooked one leg out the window, then the other, so that his stomach rested on the frame of the window. He flashed a grim smile.
“Be careful, babe.” He started down into the gathering gloom.
Claire watched as he made his way, hand over hand, down the rope. She eyed the fabric, pulled tight against the sill. When he was halfway down, she hopped up on the sill herself and hung partially out the window.
The shadows continued to lengthen in the alley below. The dark puddles had become towering two-dimensional obelisks, blanketing most of the ground below. Only a few thin strands of light found their way into the gloom. Mark was an indistinct shape, swaying 20 feet off the ground.
Claire decided he was low enough and began to swing herself out the same way Mark had done. No sooner had she put her full weight on the rope and start her descent, did she hear Mark begin to scream.
“Go back up!”
Claire wrenched her neck to try and catch a glimpse of Mark but the rope began to swing violently. She kicked her feet against the old brick of the apartment building for purchase and tried to pull herself back up and into the window. With the weight of both herself and Mark, the rope was stretched tight against the bottom edge of the sill, and she could not slide her hand between the wall and rope to get the leverage she needed to get back inside. She heard Mark scream again, terror in his voice. As desperately as she had wanted out, Claire now wanted back inside the relative safety of the apartment. She released her grip on the rope with her right hand and snatched at the sill, just managing to catch the lip. With a savage grunt, she dragged herself back in through the window, landing with a crash on the polished wooden floor.
She lay there, breathing hard, relief cascading through her veins like a tide in sync with her pulse. Mark’s shouts seemed far away, but they were insistent. She sat up, then pulled herself to the window ledge and peered down.
Mark was now about a third of the way back up the rope. He dragged himself hand over hand up towards the window, his progress slow. She could see his right leg dangling limp as he labored. Beneath him, the alleyway was now in complete darkness. As he swayed, the shadows seemed to dance beneath him, tracking the small circles of his orbit.
Claire squinted at those shadows as Mark struggled upwards. The darkness beneath him swirled back and forth with his movements, the entire floor of the alley an inky ballet. As she watched, a black shape seemed to split off from the main mass, and leapt, snapping, at Mark’s heels. He let out a choked sob and brought his knees up to his chest as the shape emerged and rose towards him, cresting like a wave. She saw a lupine snout with gnashing teeth, then a huge gnarled claw that was closer to a human hand than a paw, tipped with scythe-length talons, swiping at Mark’s ascent. The talons caught the makeshift rope just beneath his feet, shredding it to tattered ribbons, before the shape subsided back into the alley floor. When the Thing that had been at their door landed, the shadows embraced it. Only the red from its eyes gleamed out from the darkness.
Claire pulled her gaze away and braced her feet against the windowsill, gripping the rope. She began to pull, adrenaline inducing a ringing in her ears that drowned out most of Mark’s screams. She had nearly 12 feet of rope piled by her feet by the time he finally reached the window, gripping the sill. He could not get himself over the lip, so Claire grabbed him beneath the arms and hauled him inside. They tumbled to the floor together in a heap. Neither moved, just gulped in air, lungs burning.
When they had recovered, Claire helped Mark to the couch. The wounds on his right leg left a trail of blood from the window across the living room, and began to stain against the gray material of the sofa cushion. Claire pinched the edges of the torn fabric of Mark’s pant leg and stripped it back. The muscles and flesh of his leg had fared no better than the jeans he wore. Deep, clean wounds, like those made from a razor, spiraled from the ankle halfway up the calf. On the front side of his leg, she could see shin-bone in the valleys of the serrations. From the devastating aesthetics of the injury, Claire expected more blood. Mark figured there was plenty enough.
A day later—although the sun seemed to have set and risen twice in that span—the blood had been scrubbed, but dark reminders had stained themselves in wood and cloth. Mark, hobbled by his injury, lay on the couch. He had barely said a word since he had gotten back inside. He just sat and glared at the door, where the click of the thing’s claws could be heard periodically as it passed by. Claire had just sat beside him crocheting, brow knitted in concentration. She had re-dressed the bandages once, brought him food and water and helped him hop to the bathroom. But she had kept his silence with him; the quiet had given her thoughts room to wander. She put her yarn on the table.
“We have to talk about this.” He raised an eyebrow at her, the sudden sound pulling back the hood of his silent shroud.
“Why? I’m sick of talking about it.”
“We can’t live like this, Mark. I can’t live like this.” He shifted and averted his eyes from hers.
“What are we supposed to do? It will kill us if we leave.” He gestured towards his leg, the blood again beginning to seep through to the surface of the gauze.
“Maybe. Maybe not, though. If I can make it to the elevator, or into the stairwell. Wait until it paces to the end of the hall, make a break for it.”
Mark started at this suggestion, raising himself up to a sitting position.
“You can’t be serious? We decided we can’t. And just look at what it did to me.”
“Look around us, Mark. This isn’t a life, it’s a prison. It’s worth the risk.”
“No. We can figure this out together.”
“We tried together, and we couldn’t get past that Thing. I’ve made up my mind. I’m sorry.”
He shook his head, tears welling up in his eyes. “Please. Don’t do this. Claire, we don’t know what will happen. At least here, we’re safe. And who knows, something might change. The world has to go back to the way it was before. Just. . . just wait.”
She edged close to him on the couch and ran her fingers through his hair, clasping the back of his neck. She drew him to her and kissed him, as the first tear ran in a rivulet down his cheek. Her smile was gentle as she drew back and stood.
“If I leave this place, we both might have some kind of shot. But if I stay here, we’ve no chance. I need to go now. Goodbye, Mark.”
She crossed the room, diverting to the bedroom for moment and emerging with a backpack. She had not been idle. She had planned, and the sight of the bag was a twist of a knife in Mark’s chest. He tried to go after her, but buckled onto the floor halfway to the door. When she reached it herself, she pressed her ear to the wood and listened.
“Claire!” Mark whispered, urgent, but not willing to risk anything louder. She turned back towards him after another few seconds. As he began to crawl the rest of the way to the door, she raised a hand to him, turned the deadbolt and swung the door open. Without pausing to look down the hallway, she broke to the left at a full sprint.
Mark made it to the door a few seconds later, soon enough to catch the door before it closed and to see a hulking blur of teeth and hair go flying past. He watched the Thing race down the hallway, howling, then groaning. As it passed beneath each fluorescent light, the bulbs exploded into showers of glass, darkening the passage. It gained on Claire quickly. She would not make it to the stairwell.
Mark pulled himself to his feet and leaned against the doorframe.
“Hey! Over here!”
At the sound of his voice, the Thing slid to a halt. It stood in the dim light, features obscured, but red eyes blazing. It stared at him, then swung its head back towards Claire, who had now almost made it to the end of the hall. She wrenched open the stairwell door as she reached it, but peered back over her shoulder. When she paused, the Thing regarded them both in turn. For just a moment, as it stood between them, it looked somehow content—as if the Thing was right where it had wanted to be all along.
Then the door swung shut with a click, and Claire was gone.
