The Boogeyman P2

A bang echoes from down the hall, maybe in the kitchen. I jump back from the door.

The door is firmly locked.

Surely the maintenance people have normal working house and wouldn’t just break into the place…right?

My hand hovers over the doorknob. This is crazy. Just open the door and prove your brain is overreacting. I woke up during my later REM cycles, my brain is still in dream mode. The noise isn’t real. Just open the door.

The knob clicks as I twist and turn. I squint at the noise and pull the door open. The hallway is dim, only alight by the office window’s broken blinds cutting stripes of moonlight across the doorway. The end of the narrow hall is dark.

That’s when my heart kicks up a notch.

The kitchen has a tiny window above the sink. The window is an odd size, too small for blinds so there’s a curtain rod hung above it. The dorm kitchen faced inside so there was no need for curtains.

Meaning… The end of the hall should be catching all of that light from the window. The end of the narrow hall is dark; even as my eyes adjust, it stays stubbornly so. I see the walls but the turn for the kitchen is lost to darkness. I keep my eyes on it, the animal cowering in my brain tells me to, knowing I’ll lose it otherwise.

The darkness doesn’t move and neither do I. My shoulders shake with every inhale and tense with every exhale, stale musky air circulating in my lungs not helping calm my mind down.

My research into dreams has confirmed your brain cannot be trusted after waking in the middle of the night—the adrenaline from waking and the inability to see—makes many things seem dreamlike.

The being at the end of the hall is not real.

I am just dreaming, or lucid dreaming, since I remember waking up and getting out of bed. I can close my eyes and it will not move.

I CAN close my eyes. I chew my lip and blink. The darkness remains the same.

I sigh in relief. “I need to by a hall light or something,” I whisper, marking it in my shopping list.

I cross the hall and turn on the bathroom light and close the door. The toilet flushes with no issue, despite lack of use, and the faucet water warms smoothly. I half-thought the plumbing would be ruined from the price of the place. The realtor seemed nice but she was making a sale—it’s her job to be nice, to relate to potential buyers. She did leave her card, so maybe I’ll give her a call and see why the other tenants left, if she’ll tell me.

I search for a hand towel, right I barely unpacked yesterday, and I wipe my wet hands on my pyjama pants. The door creaks as I open it, I lift my hand to flick the light off. I am a half-step between the bathroom and the hallway and I feel an exhale on my cheek.

My hand shakes. My breath catches in my throat and I choke down saliva. In my periphery, I can see her.

Her breath continues to push itself on my cheek and it smells rank, wrong, and old. My eyes do not stray in her direction, worried of what her reaction will be, so I can’t tell if the smell is from her mouth or the spots of decay on her skin. The spots vary in size, albeit blurry and out of focus, and colour. Some are oozing dark viscous liquid while others just stretch her skin. Her mouth hangs open as she pants air.

Is she what my brain wanted to keep my eyes on. No, that’s stupid. There was NOTHING there. The hall was just dark, there was nothing—her mouth cracks open wider.

I see her jaw shake in effort to form words. Tears form at the corners of my eyes in the effort to hold them open and away.

The bathroom door closes and I slide down it. My ear is pressed to the wood and I hear a shuffle of her moving to stand in front of the door. Her socked feet poke under the door and scratch my thigh. I hold my breath and lock each part of my body half propped on the door and half leaning into the sink. Finger nails drag along the paint on the other side.

The nails drag from the top to the handle. Knuckles rock and I feel the rumble of it at my temple. The handle rattles and clicks open. I rise from my knees ready to leverage my weight back into it when words reach me. Her nose and lips are visible and they move. They move and nothing makes it out of her mouth but gurgles. Her hand grips the door and makes more room for herself, from my position I make eye contact with her in the mirror.

I thought she would smile but I hear her moving her tongue around her mouth, eventually, she moves the hand from the door into her mouth and holds her tongue down.

Released, words finally break through, though a little muffled, “You … run, girl. It is coming.”

My shoulders tremble as this woman holds my eyes in the mirror with such conviction. I want to believe this is a joke, some prank a friend would pull on me but everyone I know I left in another country.

“How—”

The face disappears and the door closes, her footsteps continue down the hall and I hear another door shut and the front door lock click.

I don’t dare to open the door and check she left, I fall onto the door and cry. All the emotions from moving without familiarity or routine and finding a shitty haunted apartment with no one to tell about it, and not to mention the creepy warning, I fall apart.

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I wake in the morning hunched against the door with the light blinding me. I groan as I pick myself up from the floor and look into the mirror. I jump, expecting to see her again. but find my eyes slightly swollen. I turn on the faucet and dredge my face.

It helps.

My hand holds the door handle and I stare at it for five minutes before my brain gives the okay to open it. I brace for something—at the end of the hall or the women again—as my eyes fall tot he end of the hallway.

Nothing, no darkness, but light from the kitchen window crawling the floor and wall. Sunlight washes away any fears I might’ve had about lingering presences. I unpacked and the maintenance people checked the water pressure, the heating, fixed the windows all before lunch, and then they left. I sat on my kitchen counter, mowing down a pot of mac and cheese, and waited.

The sun fell and I still waited. My phone buzzed at 4:30 reminding me that tomorrow was garbage pick-up for my neighbourhood. The floor creaked in the hall and I knew she was back.

Present day—a month later

I remember the woman from that night, she came more and more as the days past with the same messages. Some times she would hover over my face and whisper the words into my ear. As the month past though, she almost became suppressed by other presences—more people would filter in with more transparency, looking more ghostly than ghastly—they all warned me. Some were not limited to the apartment either, I thought I could evade them at my advisor’s office or working at the library for my thesis, but they followed me.

I know whatever is coming will appear tonight after supper. Not matter where I am, it will be there. I texted the realtor a while ago, after the first visit, and she mentioned that the previous owners sold the place really cheap to the current one; though she never told me why. I tried googling news articles about the address but nothing showed up, it is a smaller place and it’s south of the city proper so I didn’t expect much but to have nothing, not even in the records about it being built, scared me more.

What’s worse is no one visited for the last week. Nothing but quiet sounds of upstairs neighbours and the opening and closing of car doors outside. Did I dream it all? Were they telling the truth? And now my nightmares have spiked. Disembodied hands, fingers, legs chasing me around and around as I am caught in the loop of my apartment, no escape.

Nightmares are fascinating, they border on dreams but use the sensory memories to hurt and scare. I’ve kept readings and media to lighter topics, refusing to even run my eyes over horror titles, even with that my brain is hyper-focused on the dark and dreary and grotesque. The pills helped for a while, just cutting off the synapses before they could spin the nightmares. Just relieve can be addictive, dangerous. I tried upping my doses before my brain refused to work with them. I can’t sleep anymore, not with the pills or the oils or the powders or the drinks and sleepy time teas. My mind wants to dream and I want to sleep. So I ignored my fear and slept and dreamt.

Images of blood spurting out of holes in the wall, my body being chopped up, my fingernails being ripped off from scraping at locked doors, my teeth falling out and swallowing them, insects pouring and squirming from underneath my skin as I flay layer after layer off trying to get them out.

A week of increasingly disturbing scenes to act out until my mind cuts the strings and releases me into the waking world. “My research has suffered, I’ve pushed the deadline to next month, so I really need this to work,” I plead.

Her face stays neutral, maybe a bit tighter at my earlier outburst, and her fingers type out my response into the computer’s text-box: suffers from lack sleep; if only. “I wouldn’t recommend another drug, if the heavy lifters aren’t successful, and judging by your current state. With cases like these we normally suggest therapy, sleep or otherwise, for three weeks.”

Saliva pools in my mouth at the thought. “I don’t have three weeks.” I stare intently at her eyes knowing if I don’t I’ll see it out of the corner of my eye. Lingering. I’m cutting it too close.

“Well there isn’t much I can provide you without any information.”

I laugh, “Of course, always wanting the story.” I can’t tell her I’m haunted, “I’m… I’ve developed hallucinations.”

“From the list of medication you gave, it’s no wonder. There is supposed to be withdrawal periods between those drugs to ween off side effects.”

“The only side-effects are lack of sleep.”

She raises her eyebrows, “Are you sure?”

“The…hallucinations started before the medication.”

She stops typing, “Really? They didn’t change at all?” She turns toward me, forgoing the computer screen to look at me.

“The hallucinations stopped, now I just have nightmares.” Please be enough.

She taps her chin in thought. “Nightmares aren’t uncommon during withdrawal, mostly a sudden build up of suppressing the REM cycle. See it controls dreams, but also—”

“sleep, yeah I know.”

“but nightmares are uncomfortable but not life threatening.” She finishes as there is a knock at the door.

A shorter man appears in the doorway and says, “It’s half-past five, almost closing time.” He closes the door and I jump.

“I gotta go.” I collect my coat and step down from the examination table.

She reaches out and takes a hold of my wrist, which burns. I look at her and her expression turns serene. “It’s time.”

The scent of burning hair hits my nose with such a force, I stumble backward and watch the doctor burst into flames and scream. The fire spreads from her hair into her coat and then scrubs until I have to look away. I keep my eyes squeezed shut and shoulder the door open. The shorter man from before bumps into me and his eyes have melted down his face like cracked eggs. I bend to vomit but he grips my shoulders so it slips from my lips unto my jacket then to the floor. “Don’t resist it.”

“You’re not real.” Please don’t be real.

“Please don’t be real.”

I push him and he falls with a laugh. I run to the reception desk but the receptionist isn’t there so I grab the phone and am meant with the dial tone. I click the receiver but still gives me the same tone. Okay, okay. I pull out my phone and tap the screen, it remains black. I charged it this morning, maybe I turned it off? I hold the button and nothing happens. It’s dead.

The man’s laughter picks back up and I try the door to leave. It’s locked. I rattle it in the frame and it doesn’t budge. The laughter gets closer, almost at the front. I rip the phone from the desk, cords and all dangling, and throw it at the glass. It hits but doesn’t shatter, okay. I pick it back up from the floor and smash it repeatedly into the glass, I hear it crack and then give way into spidery shapes for me to step over.

The first step I take out of the clinic something shifts. All noise ceases, even the laughter, suddenly there is no glass to step over. I am back home. Not at the apartment, but my home. Cutlery clinks and plates lightly thud on the tablecloth, the dark green one with stains, as my parents quietly set the table. My aunt carries over a bowl of mashed potatoes and a buttery scent is wafted toward me. I can almost taste it.

In the back of my mind, I know my hands have gone cold, but I take a seat across from my dad and he smiles at me. My mom brings over a glass of juice for me and pats my head as she sits down. “This was Christmas three years ago, isn’t it?”

My dad shakes his head, “no silly, it’s Christmas now.” My mom nods and says, “remember you came home early and we picked you up at the airport?”

The memory floods to the surface of my mind, right. “I forgot.”

My dad chuckles and takes my hand, “that’s okay pumpkin, you’ve been working hard lately, haven’t you.”

I scratch at my forehead, again the memory floats up, “Right, I’m trying to finish my thesis.”

“wow you must really be out of it, you handed that in yesterday.” My aunt places the last of the food on the table and wiggles her eyebrows at me. Sweet meats and vegetables surround me, I take a whiff and for a moment, I can smell something burning.

“Did I?” I frown, my legs feel heavy, “It’s funny, I remember going to the clinic a few moments ago.”

My mom frowns, “You told us about how scary that was, to think the arsonist chose your clinic to light ablaze.” She shudders. I look down to my wrist and see raw and bruised lines encircling both. I gasp.

My dad pulls my chin back up and smiles again. “It’s all a dream, sweetie. Nothing to worry about.” His smile and the warmth of the food brush my panic aside. I glance back down and the marks are gone.

“A dream.”

“You should take a nap after dinner, and maybe it’'ll clear some of the fog.” His voice gets deeper and I swear his eyes become more sunken but like the marks, I blink and it’s gone.

My mom piles food on our plates and sets about eating her own, I scoop some potatoes and beans into my mouth, it tastes—like ash—delicious. “I think I will.”