There's Something in the Walls Read online

  A groan shook the walls again and the plaster in the ceiling started to crack. David decided it was time to leave. He spun and ran to the plastic gas canisters, grabbed one in each hand, and used his foot to open the door. David stuck his head out into the hall, using the edge of the doorway to shield his body. The floorboards were cracked open, revealing darkness below them, but for the moment the slithery grabbers seemed to have gone away.

  David prepared to run for the stairwell. He checked over his shoulder to make sure nothing was coming out of the wall that had become Tommy’s tomb. A glint of metal caught his eye on the floor. A Zippo lighter. Tommy had placed it with the canisters of gas. David had missed it before. He set down one of the cans and grabbed the lighter. Another groan came from the walls, and the giant patch of slime began to tremble and ooze. The middle part, where he’d cut Tommy out, opened up. David didn’t wait around to see what was coming from the new opening there. He shoved the zippo into his pants pocket, picked up the gas can, and hurried into the hall. He could hear slithery whipping sounds behind him.

  In the hall, David jumped fully over the split floorboards. He landed roughly on the other side and sprinted for the stairwell, fuel sloshing in the containers. It was strange. He seemed to have beaten the effects the slime had had on him. An errant memory of a scene in a movie he’d seen recently came to him. The narrator talked about how Quaaludes were originally intended to be a sleep aid, but someone eventually realized that if you fought the sleepiness it induced for a little while, the pills would give the user a high that was similar to the effects of a barbiturate. Essentially, if the user avoided the original effect, they were rewarded with something else. That’s how David felt now. He’d broken through the venomous slime’s front line, and now, on the other side, it no longer made him fell heavy, lethargic, or tired. Now he felt nothing. He’d been made fearless.

  David reached the stairwell just as something wrapped around his ankle and squeezed. He nearly fell, but had slowed his forward momentum enough before reaching the stairs that he was able to keep himself upright. He looked down at his ankle. A tentacle was wrapped around the space just above his shoe. It wound itself tighter and tighter. He knew he should feel pain, so tightly it was wrapped, but he didn’t. His body was numb to painful sensations, it seemed. The other end of the tentacle trailed off down the hall and disappeared into the newly made hole in the floorboards. It started to draw back into the hole, and David knew that the creature’s intention was to drag him along. He planted his trapped foot firmly on the ground and with the other he stomped as hard as he could on the appendage. It flattened under his foot but it didn’t let go. David stomped again, then again, hard. As he did, some of the fuel in one of the gas cans sloshed out and splashed onto the tentacle. He felt it loosen then, and he lifted his foot from the ground and moved it in fast circles, unwinding the thing. Once freed, he continued his escape down the stairwell.

  David met no opposition on the stairs and made it to the bottom floor in only a few short seconds. He peered around the edge of the doorway into the lobby. It was empty. He saw no holes on the walls or floor. No slime either. The basement. He needed to find the basement. If Tommy was right, this thing had a body, a body with vital organs that could be burned and destroyed, killing the thing. The problem was, Tommy hadn’t even known the building had a basement. And neither had David. So how did he get there? Which door? David looked around the lobby. It only had the front door, the back door, and the doorway to the stairwell. One wall was covered in a grid of small metal mailboxes. The opposite wall had a few corkboards nailed up. Nothing else. Was it on the outside of the building? Like an old storm cellar entrance. David didn’t think he’d ever seen anything like that.

  The lights began to flicker and the building seemed to vibrate around him. Plaster fell from the walls in the stairwell. David was running out of time. He looked around the lobby again, furiously trying to find a way to get below. The overhead lights gave a final flicker and then went out. All was quiet for a moment, and then the center of the lobby floor exploded outward with such force that splinters sliced David’s face and neck. Writhing appendages burst from the new hole in the floor and whipped around, seeking. David ducked fully behind the edge of the stairwell doorway. As he spun behind it, he noticed something in his peripheral vision. A rug near the lobby’s back door. It was out of place. He was sure of it. It usually rested in the far corner, but someone had pulled it aside. A trap door! It must’ve been covering a trap door that led to the basement.

  Peeking around the edge of the doorway, David looked toward the corner where the rug usually was. With the lights still off in the lobby it was hard to see, but he was almost sure there was a space in the corner that looked darker than the floorboards around it. He ducked back, closed his eyes, and took three measured, deep breaths. Then he leapt out from the stairwell and ran full speed to the corner where he hoped he’d find a trap door. The whipcord tentacles took notice and zipped at David like arrows. He ducked low, trying to make as small a target as possible as he ran. Something tore across David’s back, and he knew he’d been slashed by razor teeth, but again he felt no pain.

  He reached the corner without being grabbed or impeded, and sure enough found what he’d been looking for. An old trapdoor with rusted hinges was set into the floor. David set both gas canisters to the side of the trap door, grabbed a metal hoop set opposite the hinges, and yanked. The door wouldn’t budge. He stole a glance at the hole in the center of the floor. The appendages were gone. He must’ve gotten outside their range. David grasped the ring with both hands and set his feet wide, planting them firmly on either side of the trap door. He pulled with all his might, screaming with the effort. Something cracked, and at first David thought it was his spine, but then he saw that the edges of the trap door were spackled with black sludge that had dried. The thing in the basement must’ve tried to seal it shut after whoever had removed the rug had found the door. Was it Tommy? Had Tommy found the way in before returning to his room to retrieve his supplies where he was ultimately caught and eaten?

  David pulled harder, and more cracking sounds came from the edges of the trap door. And then, all at once, it gave and David yanked it open. He fell on his ass, then scrambled to his feet and looked down into the basement. What little light that came into the lobby from outside didn’t reach down there. It was pitch black. David felt heat radiating from the basement and a smell that reminded him of a raw sewage plant he used to pass on his way to work back in Michigan. He’d found it. He’d found the creature’s vulnerability. But what now? He had no flashlight. How could he fight what he could not see? He considered for a moment just upending one of the gas cans and pouring its contents into the basement, then dropping the other one in full, lighting the zippo lighter, and dropping it down to set the fuel ablaze. But what if the lighter went out before it reached the gas? What if the creature had some way to put the fire out before the second can ignited? No. He couldn’t risk that. He’d have to go down there and make sure the job was completed. And if he died in the process? Well, he’d just have to be sure to take the monster with him.

  A ladder led from the trapdoor down into the basement. David pushed the handles of the gas canisters together so he could hold them both at once. This made the weight of them awkward and very hard to hold on to, but he’d have to manage. He lowered his legs into the basement, grasped the top rung of the ladder with his free hand, and started down. The ladder was covered with more slime, and he nearly fell twice before finally reaching the bottom. He could see nothing. David crouched down and tried to get his bearings. The heat down here was almost unbearable and sweat began to drip into his eyes. David set the gas cans on the floor then took the zippo lighter from his pocket. He opened it, lit it.

  An orb of orange light now illuminated the area around him. David looked around the underground room. The walls, the floor, the ceiling, everything was covered in shining black ooze. In the corner nearest David there was ano
ther of the pulsating black eggs. Whoever had opened the trap door had made it down here, and they had paid the ultimate price for their troubles. In front of the oval sac David saw a wig with curling locks. Mrs. Perkins’s wig… When Tommy sent the electrician away, she must’ve tried to come down here to check things out for herself. David tried to imagine the eighty-something year old woman climbing down the ladder and almost laughed. He would never understand the false confidence of the lifelong rich.

  Something began to glow near the opposite wall. David turned away from the sac that was slowly digesting Mrs. Perkins and held his lighter up higher. The new light was a small circle high in the other end of the room. A bioluminescent, green glow that nearly mesmerized him. David thought of the anglerfish and its glowing lure, and became wary. He closed the zippo, putting out its flame, then stooped, picked up a gas can, and moved slowly toward the glowing orb. The creature groaned, and, this close to the source, it was like he’d stuck his head into a freighter ship’s air horn. The sound rattled David’s teeth. He started to pour gas onto the floor, shaking the can to release its contents all the more quickly.

  The groaning continued, and beneath that, the sound of a thousand snakes slithering around in a pool of oil. The tentacles, David knew. The creature would be drawing them all out of the walls above and into the basement to defend itself. He was running out of time. The first can was empty, and David’s feet splashed in the petrol as he went back and grabbed the other can. He then turned it upside down and threw it at the glowing orb. Tentacles snatched it right out of the air, and the glowing orb grew brighter. David could see it now. He could see all of the creature. The cement floor of the basement was split open, making a gash into the earth below that was ten feet wide and almost twice as long. Coming out of it was what looked like a giant, black heart, complete with ventricles and arteries that thinned out and attached to the walls, the floor, and the ceiling around it. Many of these offshoots ended after only a few feet and were open on the ends. Black slime oozed from the openings. One appendage grew directly out of the top of the thing, and was tipped in the glowing ball that now lit the room an eerie green.

  The creature pulsed, its tentacles still gripping the gas can. Then it began to shake, which rumbled the room around it. Mouthed whipcords shot at David’s face, but they were slow and he ducked away. The fumes of the gas on the floor stung his eyes, and he had a thought The pool of fuel had run all the way over to the creature, and was touching it. He remembered how gasoline had splashed the tentacle around his ankle earlier, and how it had soon after let him go. He grinned. Perhaps the outer membrane of the thing was absorbing the gasoline, and the creature was being poisoned. Was that the reason it had taken so long for it to strike at him? Was that the reason it still held the full gas canister in its appendages?

  David didn’t know for sure, but he also didn’t really care. He had been given a window of opportunity, and he wouldn’t waste it. He went back to the ladder, then took the zippo back out of his pocket. He lit it, bent, and touched it to the pool of gasoline, then wrenched at the rungs of the ladder and pulled himself up as the fuel ignited the basement below. There was a rush of air as oxygen was sucked into the basement through the trapdoor to feed the flames, but David fought against it and made it out.

  Flames had burned at his back, and he thought for a moment that his tee shirt had caught fire and was still burning. He didn’t let that stop him. He rushed to the back door, opened it, and ran out of the building. Then, in the yard beyond, he dropped to the ground and rolled until he was sure he was not on fire. After that, he lay there on the ground for a while, staring up at the night sky. Beneath him, the ground shook just as vigorously as it had during the earthquake that had woken him so many nights ago. He looked at the Perkins Building. It was all aflame now, and starting to collapse. He watched it until it had burned to the ground, mourning the people who were surely still inside, and hoping against hope that the creature had already killed them, and that he was not a murderer.

  . . .

  Eight months passed from the night the Perkins Building burned down. David sat at a small desk in his room in the basement of his mother’s house in a little suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The room he’d grown up in, upstairs, was now his mother’s sewing room. David looked at the computer screen, the only light in the room, and for the thousandth time he Googled the words “Perkins Building, Fire, California.” He read through the results, most of which he’d already seen, and then came upon a new one. David clicked the little blue link, which read, “Thomas Lambert Confirmed as Sole Arsonist in Perkins Building Fire.” David shook his head.

  The investigators had had very little to go on. When the building burned and consequently collapsed, much of its remnants fell into a sink hole that had opened beneath the building after the earthquake. The sink hole was so deep, the investigators said, that it was impossible to recover any physical evidence from the scene. But, after retrieving video from the gas station where Tommy had purchased the fuel and filled his gas canisters, and then a subsequent search of his internet history at the local library where he did much of his research, the investigators had come to the conclusion that Tommy had set the fire that killed most of the residents of the Perkins Building, and that he had acted alone.

  David sat back in his chair, then pushed his hair—which had been left uncut for eight months now—out of his face. He rolled his chair on its wheeled base over to a small refrigerator in the corner and took out another beer. He opened it and took a long drink. Alcohol had helped him cope in the time since the fire. That’s how David thought about it all now, just as “the fire,” and nothing else. The alcohol helped him keep that fallacy alive in his head. When you were always either drunk or hungover, it was easy to lie to yourself.

  David looked at the screen again, and again he thought about reaching out to Tommy’s mother and sister, the only people his friend had left behind, to let them know that Tommy was not an arsonist or a murderer. That, if anything, the man was a hero. But he couldn’t do that. So far he had stayed under the radar. It was something he didn’t really understand. The list of confirmed dead in the Perkins Building fire did not, thus far, contain David’s name.

  He wasn’t sure if Mrs. Perkins’s paperwork regarding her residents had for some reason not contained his name, or if the investigators were just going off some other source of information. David had done all his business through a PO Box and his California driver’s license had still listed the address of an Extended Stay America he’d lived in for a couple weeks when he’d first arrived in LA. No one seemed to know that David had lived at the Perkins Building, and therefore no one knew that he was present the night of the fire. Calling Tommy’s mother was a bad idea, even though it was the right thing to do. If the woman told anyone about him, he may have to go answer questions, and that was something David absolutely would not do. He would not relive that night, not even to clear Tommy’s name.

  The bottle of beer was cold in David’s hand. He pressed it to his forehead and closed his eyes. He could hear his mother walking around upstairs. David prayed she wouldn’t come down to see him. He wasn’t in the mood to hear her complain about how much weight he’d lost, or that he was drinking too much, or that he needed to get out and meet someone. When David had first come back from LA, but before his hair and beard had grown out, his mother had even tried to set him up on dates with women from the office she worked at. David wouldn’t hear of it. After…after the night of the fire, he no longer had any interest in women. The thought of sex sickened him. He looked at it like any other bodily function now, no different than defecating. His mother had eventually given up on that front, but had persisted a while longer in trying to convince David to come to church with her on Sundays. This too was out of the question for David. Belief in a god was easy for animals at the top of the food chain. For David, who had almost become prey, who had watched others he loved become prey…

  And what was love, really? H
ad he really loved Tommy? The man was a friend, sure, but did he love him like a brother? It was doubtful. David had no brothers. And Alice? David didn’t believe in love at first sight anymore. His feelings for Alice had simply been lust. After that, when he’d been with her, he was only under the influence of an outside force, one that was using his hormones against him to make him an easier target. But David didn’t think of that anymore. He only knew that love wasn’t real. That he was just an animal like every other human.

  David pictured Alice’s face and her smile… Something seemed to push on his heart, causing real pain there. Love at first sight didn’t exist, he told himself again. Real life didn’t happen that way. Real life was a shit show, that’s why David had become so interested in fiction in the first place, because it was how he wanted the world to be. In his stories he could create a world that was fair, where the good guy always won. But David didn’t write fiction anymore. He didn’t write at all.

  His mother’s footsteps could be heard upstairs again, and she seemed to be walking to the front door. He could hear her voice for a moment, speaking to someone. He hadn’t heard the doorbell. She must have noticed whoever had come calling before they got a chance to ring. After a moment her voice halted. Then, to his dread, she opened the door to the basement and descended the stairs. A knock came to his door.

  “Yeah, mom?” David said.

  “David?” his mother replied. “Can I come in? There’s a delivery for you. A package. It’s from California.”