The Loft

From the Journal of James Sweeney:

 

January 19, 2009:

If I were to simply describe this place, you’d think I was setting up a horror story.

It’s dark, for one, on a lonely road. The house is old, warped, weathered. Inside the red door is a room with a cement floor, cobwebs, a rusting woodstove in the back. A fluorescent light flickers and jitters over an aquarium full of viscous death-smelling algae stew, barely moving in the draft that blows through and rattles the tarp tacked to the ceiling to block out the rain. Within the tank languishes an albino frog with angry red eyes. It looks dead, but jumps if you peer too closely. Directly over the tank, in a thick web encasing the flickering light, lurks a spider as big as a thumb, with a fat body and fangs long enough to be visible from the floor.

To get to the loft you must climb –of course– thirteen steps up a ladder attached to the wall with old iron hardware. If you push the door open, it scrapes across the floor grit a few inches, then resists as if there’s a body leaning against it.

Within the loft an iron hook hangs on one wall, and a baleful moose overwatches the space from a cheap tourist blanket pinned across the window. The mattress is stained. The bench is scorched on one waxy edge, as if a candle was left to burn down ages ago.

This is where I live. When I lie in bed, I can smell the frog’s death smell.

On the other side of the house, downstairs, is a darkened rec room with a pool table. A heavy chain is clasped around one leg, snakes around the floor, ends in a hasp intended for a large dog who is not in evidence. In the back are wood-lined booths with woodstoves and showerheads where locals sometimes pay five bucks to take saunas, hiding their sweating six-packs of beer under towels. Beyond the saunas, a shed opens to the outside, with wood stacked in precarious piles, a maul notched into a stump in the middle of the dirt floor.

My neighbor, Bill, lives in a room like mine, accessed through the corridor of sauna stalls. He looks like a soccer mom’s vision of an axe-murderer: burly, gray beard down his chest, gruffness, leather vest and all.

I can hear him through the walls laughing at cartoons.

 

January 20, 2009:

Today was a pretty good day. I woke up at the frozen buttcrack of dawn and built a fire, bleary-eyed and shave-needing, hair sprouting like aloe.

The frog’s tank has been cleaned — he’s cuter when he’s not ominously glaring at me through viscous muck.

I did some errands in town — picked up some coffee, signed up for a library card, tried to sell a painting at the gallery, checked for general delivery mail at the post office. No sign yet of the letter.

I returned to no one waiting for me in my bed and the fire gone out. Damn.

 

January 21, 2009:

“The Gang” (not my gang) is hanging out in the front room smoking pot. Funny me: I mentally rehearse how I would react if they offered me some. They don’t; neither are they secretive or subtle.

I built a new fire and made a dinner of ramen noodles (Oriental flavor!) with sliced hot dogs and frozen peas. Sounds kind of gross, but it’s a way to stretch your foodstamps.

So here I am, watching a small black and white TV that rolls when you bump it.

Wait!

Is there someone here? No, no, I guess it was a shadow, but I could’ve sworn I heard someone say, “this.”

 

Tomorrow is my birthday and I miss my Dad.

 

January 22, 2009:

Damn, I keep thinking I have a cat.

 

January 23, 2009:

The Duck of Depression is sitting on my chest, and he has managed to make the environment good for him.

Rain is fun, and I kinda like the plink-plonk-plip-plip of rain falling into numerous buckets and pots and cups and pitchers, but it’s not helping me overcome the feeling that life just sucks.

There was a drip runneling down one of my paintings (“L’Infer“) onto the bookshelf. Both painting and library books were slick-covered, so no damage done, but it made me mad.

If I can fight resistance enough, I am going to go to the county office to see what sort of assistance I qualify for. Mental health at the very least. But dammit, I do NOT want to perpetuate the poor/crazy artist myth.

But it’ll take time before I can work again. It’s just too much to ask of me right now.

I haven’t been this low since I was a teenager.

 

January 24, 2009:

I need to go to the printer and pick up the greeting cards I made with photos of snow and trees and rusting tractors. I am going to try to sell them at the touristy bookstore in town.

I can get through the fog for periods, but it is so persistent this time. It feels like the flu.

“What you resist persists,” right? How do I not resist this, when I know the end of the road is a suicidal ambush? I ain’t going back down that road.

This is why I need a professional listener, I guess.

 

January 25, 2009:

Damned rain. I woke up feeling good, wanted to paint. There is now no ROOM to paint that isn’t dripping. A fucking shack in the woods would be more secure.

I loved the place last night. It’s starting to feel homey. A nice nest or den. The change in outlook isn’t “because” of the rain, merely facilitated by it, I guess.

I read Diary by Chuck Palahniuk — It’s lovely and dreary and I’m sure Steph’d love it.

 

January 26, 2009:

I swear to god I’m gonna write a movie about this place. The Butcher family (that’s their real name. Pete, after whom this place is named, has only one leg) have a fascinating little enterprise. I don’t know who would come here as a customer. It creeps me the fuck out. Though tonight was the first night I actually got spooked.

I’m in my room, see, and the fire downstairs knocks off a couple of deep pops, and it sounds a little like someone knocking on the door. I know it’s not, but I have to pee so I decide I might as well go down and check it out.

At the bottom of the ladder I look out the window — and just for a second, blink-ghost, I see a man peering in the window, something in his hand.

This time I decide to let “nothing there” win out.

I check on the fire and leave my little cement-floor lobby and head into the main room. Dark. Usually they leave a light on.

The hall light is on, though, and I can just find my way down the back passage past the sauna closest to the bathroom. I hear running water.

I go to the bathroom and something is floating in the toilet water that looks like a brown meatball-sized lump of twined worms.

I pray it is a hunk of chewing tobacco.

Pause.

I pray I wasn’t the last to use the bathroom.

I resist the urge to aim for it, flush, then head back to my room, But I stop where I hear the running water.

It’s coming from one of the saunas. Someone has left the shower on.

Hey, I can be the good Sam. I lean into the dark doorway and reach for the light switch. It is on the other wall. Okay, okay, I find it, pull the chain.

Nothing.

(As I type, someone nearby has cranked up his stereo. It is a car, or pickup truck it sounds like, speeding away, like someone just left here.)

The layout of the saunas plays a part in this. From the hall you can see numbered doors down each side, in pairs. On the right (as you face the back of the place) are 11 and 12, 13 and 14, 15 and 16.

You know, I’ve never counted, but I think some numbers must be missing.

(Peter S. Beagle’s Folk of the Air just fell off my shelf. Nothing is moving, vibrating or jiggling — unless you count the snores coming from the other side of this wall.)

Inside the doorway is a narrow room with a mirror, a bench and some hooks. The light is a bare bulb centered over the mirror with a pull chain. At the back of the room is another door. Each pair of rooms leads to one sauna, presumably so boys and girls can change separately.

Usually, most of the doors are left half-open and the lights are off. Customers pay and are assigned a numbered room. Out-of-order rooms are simply never assigned, I suppose. The residents shower in #11, where the shower works but the sauna stove and slatted floor are missing and we stand on the bare, drained cement floor.

All of which I explain so you can understand why, on finding the light out, I go to the next door, which is closed, open it, and try that light.

It is also out.

The connecting door is open, but all I can see is blackness, and the sound of running water hitting the floor beyond.

I take a deep breath, hold it, step inside, and suddenly I know I cannot go into that dark room and find the faucet and turn it off, or even try to find the sauna light switch. Before I exhale I am back in the hall.

The room is – of course – number thirteen.

I grab some firewood from the pile and try not to hurry back to my side of the building and up the ladder.

There is a lot of this place I haven’t seen yet. It’s creepy when it’s dark and lonely.

But there’s snoring, so someone’s alive here.

I hope.

 

January 27, 2009:

Bearded Bill told me of another denizen of this place: Pete. Not the Pete, another one.

Pete lives in the room directly beneath my loft, a padlocked, windowless room I had thought was a storage closet.

Pete hasn’t been seen in months.

 

January 28, 2009:

This place … wow. I really want to get a camera and record this place for a horror game or a short film. Right now my ideas are not gelling, but when (if) they start manifesting in the world again, this is high on the list.

In the meantime, I am writing as much down as I can, in case all I get to keep are memories.

 

January 29, 2009:

I discovered the dog kennel last night — a door from the woodshed leads into a large, empty area with straw on the floor, and a low doorway like a cartoon mousehole leads out to a chickenwire dirt-and-dogshit enclosure. The walls are cobbled together from scraps of wood, doors, and corrugated metal. The door doesn’t latch, but has a lock hasp. I can imagine keeping people in there.

If I had a night-vision camera, I would take the tour out to the dog kennel, have a lock on the door and open the it on camera, POV. Once inside I would pan across the room and finally discover two naked humans hunched over something puddled in a corner, who would turn their luminous eyes suddenly toward the camera before we cut to black.

 

January 30, 2009:

It’s raining, so the roof is dripping again — and bonus! This morning there was more dog crap on the floor.

Missing Pete was apparently a drunk and had a few O.U.I. convictions — maybe he’s in jail! Bearded Bill says they’re about ready to cut the lock on his room. I want to watch!

 

January 31, 2009:

I suppose I should introduce the dogs. They belong to Big Pete (as opposed to Missing Pete) and when he’s in the hospital — which is more and more frequently lately — they come and stay here, and Bearded Bill takes care of them, feeding them their special diet and taking them out.

They’re old and a little cranky, but sweet enough. Intimidating when their dander is up, though. It took a few visits before they stopped barking at me in their big dawg I’m-gonna-eat-you barks from the dark under the pool table whenever I came down in the night to use the bathroom or collect more firewood.

They obviously must be the denizens of the night kennel, and the ones that crapped on my foyer floor last night. (Bearded Bill told me, “They usually crap in the saunas.”)

The blond one is named Lady. I don’t remember the dark one’s name (I don’t remember the other humans’ names, either, which is why I haven’t really mentioned them). They both have a lot of snow on their muzzles. The Lady keeps a stuffed animal that looks like a dead squirrel in the dark outside the bathroom door at midnight.

 

February 1, 2009:

Still filing stuff away: rumors that Missing Pete was a gambler; someone shot a teenaged girl in the woods, officially a hunting accident; a strange dog that sometimes stays at the sauna; distinctive sound of a dog’s chain collar in a dark room when the dog lifts its head to look at you.

 

February 2, 2009:

There is a thump beneath me, and my lights go dark. The TV whines to silence and dims. The refrigerator chugs off.

It is quiet, though the fire downstairs is still popping and hissing, metabolizing damp pine into fine dry ash and resinous smoke.

The power to my loft comes from an extension cord running out the door and downstairs, presumably to an outlet in the cobwebby dark behind the chest freezer (just last night I heard the owner’s son, Will, telling someone there were two deer heads in the freezer. I assume it was some sort of joke, but I haven’t dared to look). Maybe some confluence of automated machinery kicked off a breaker: refrigerator, freezer, chimney fan. Hell, the same circuit might serve the next room, where I have heard the tell-tale beep-beep-BEEP of Bearded Bill’s microwave.

It is also easy for me to imagine someone yanking the plug, or simply switching the breaker off from the panel in the hall downstairs, mistaking it for the sauna circuit or the now-unused circuit for the hot tubs.

But there was that THUMP. There should be no one directly below me. That room has been empty for months, padlocked shut, and there are no windows.

How anyone could ever have lived in that room is beyond me. It’s no bigger than the sauna rooms, and must be dark and dank as a root cellar.

Well, wondering won’t bring the light. My toylike hand-crank flashlight lives on the ledge by the door, and I find it by touch and head down the ladder before winding it up and switching it on.

I can feel the heat from the wood stove, but a chill draft blows across my bare ankles. My robe is warm, but the soft moccasins that protect my feet do little to keep the cold cement from leeching warmth out of my soles. The bluish beam of my flashlight reveals the room in quick sketches: a thin child’s blanket of faded blue and inverted sheep hanging, sagging across one window; the round rust spot on the stovetop where the kettle usually sits; the pile of bachelor dishes half-in the sink; the barrel of woodscraps for the fire; the scratched, red-painted door to the outside, its square of glass reflecting a hectic image of my own face back at me, looking more like my dead father’s every day.

I follow the orange extension cord from the doorway, down the wall, behind the sink, and I see I was wrong: its terminus is inside the empty room below mine.

I peer through the connecting doorway into the main body of the building: the front room is dark, save for a faint cherry glow from the barrel stove. Nor is this unusual, this late, long after the few paltry paying customers have gone home and whatever cleanup and maintenance the owners actually do has been done, the breakers are shut off and the residents are left to their own devices.

I pad through and into the hallway. The doorways to the sauna rooms are rectangles of darkness within the darkness, more sensed than seen. Heat and chill war to mediate in the hallway as the sauna stoves tick to coolness and the drafty house seeks to match the winter outside.

The breaker box hides behind a pipe in a corner of the hallway. I only discovered it after happening through on the way to the bathroom as  Bearded Bill was switching off for the night. I have no idea which switch is my own, but it likely is one of the ones in the “off” position, right?

My flashlight wavers and dims. As I crank it up again, the shadows crawl across the ceiling, casting themselves.

I check the breaker box. None of the breakers is switched.

This hallway should not be dark. The front room should not be dark. And my loft should not be dark.

A blackout, then? From where I am standing, the wide, plate glass window of the front room is a pure black mirror. No lights shine from across the road, but I know there are none to shine: directly across from us is a tendril of dark forest.

It is still quiet: none of my neighbors is moving about, no muffled radio speaks into the darkness.

Well, if I walk right up to the window, press my face to the glass and peer to the left, I should be able to see if the lights are on at Alpine Court, a collection of identical senior homes just up the hill.

I am suddenly sure I am going to trip and fall in the dark, and I keep my light low, scanning the floor as I approach the window.

I almost scream as the light reveals something glistening wetly on the floor, just under the pool table, but it is only the stuffed toy that Pete’s old dog, Lady, gnaws on. It looks like the corpse of a small animal.

I chuckle, as one does when one recovers from a mindless startle, and lean across a planter of dead cactus to peer up the road at the Alpine Court — or is it a Terrace?

Is that a glow, or is it just reflecting my flashlight?

And quick as thought there is a face, right up against the glass, pale in circles where the skin is pressed against the window, eyes bulging, nose flattened, mouth open and reaching, as if trying to take a chunk from my face through the glass.

And a momentless moment and I am three steps back, the flashlight is on the floor, aimed right at Lady’s toy, and the glass is once again empty.

“Holy shit.”

And I see I have managed to get a cactus spine lodged in the flesh of my right palm, under the thumb. It doesn’t hurt much, and it’ll have to wait until I have some light to be dealt with.

I avoid asking myself any questions, and bend to retrieve the flashlight, whose beam is already fading again.

I hear dripping water. One of the showers must be dribbling. Was it running before? It is –of course – sauna number thirteen. I’m sure as hell not going to investigate now.

The toy on the floor looks bloody.

I pick up the flashlight with my left hand, and gingerly crank it up again. In the renewed light I see that I was mistaken, partly at least, and the furry object is not a stuffed animal glistening with dog slobber. It’s a dead animal, a squirrel, maybe, or a vole. It has been mangled into a fairly nondescript furry, bloody lump.

I step back again.

There is more water running, from the other side of the hall this time. If there’s a plumbing problem, I am not going to be the one to handle it.

Light. First order of business is light.

There must be candles or something  —this is Maine, after all— and power does go out once or twice every winter. A little more light and maybe I can take out the spine in my hand and figure out just how local this darkness is.

Well, the fire is going okay. That’s light, right? I circle the pool table, panning the flashlight across the floor, mindful of finding more gobbets of dead animals, and open the door to the barrel stove. Immediately a warm, orange glow spreads across the room, and I feel a little better.

The spine in my hand announces itself when I run my fingers through my hair, a gesture of thoughtfulness inherited from my father.

A puff of smoke escapes the stove and rises around me, acrid. They’ve been burning trash again. I swing the door shut and wind up the flashlight. I guess I should flip the breakers anyway. Must keep in motion, or I might ask myself what I saw out the window.

The circuit breakers’ switches are loud, chunk, chunk, off-on, off-on, and nothing lights up.

I wonder about my neighbors: are they all asleep? No one else has come down to check on the power.

I switch off the flashlight and stand in the middle of the hallway, facing the front room, trying to see any other light outside, but I am not going to press my face to the window again to find out.

After a moment I can see a faint glow outside: just starlight. No street lights, no neighbors, not even a passing car.

I hear that thump again, from the room beneath the loft. Missing Pete’s room.

Oh, what the hell. I am already wound up with adrenaline, and I should probably check it out, and quick, while my underlying faith that everything will come out logically and sanely in the end still holds.

I turn the flashlight back on first, though.

The padlock hangs open, unlocked. Someone has been in the room after all, but the door can’t be opened from the inside: the lock is still through the hasp.

I take the padlock off and put it in the pocket of my robe. Following the footsteps of a million horror movie victims, I open the door.

The door opens toward me, and I have to step back as it swings wide, not creaking but rather SIGHING across the floor, revealing nothing but more darkness.

I aim the light into the room and see a patch of bare cement, a corner of unfinished chipboard wall, and, as I swing the flashlight beam around, a dark wardrobe and a bed that at first glance is somehow complicated. I steady the beam and see it is a hospital bed, raised high, the bars up on both sides, a white sheet draped across a lumpy pile of something, its edges brushing the floor. A pair of old-man slippers point neatly at me from underneath.

I hear a thump again, and it is coming from the right, in a dark corner by the doorway, and the beam swings on its own toward the sound and I see there is a refrigerator there.

I think, I didn’t get a refrigerator in my room.

It is off-white, rust spots eating away at the bottom edge.

I hear myself panting like a runner as I reach for the door handle. The flashlight dims, and I crank it up again before I open the door.

In the brief moment before my attention shifts to the interior of the refrigerator, I notice a drop of blood on my hand, small, where the cactus spine was still planted.

Inside the refrigerator is darkness.

 

?????????????

It takes me.

………………………..

/missing/

………………………..

 

March 12, 2011:

I swear it was yesterday, but the officer says it has been over two years. The police picked me up, wandering naked along Route 118. They are taking me to Morningside as soon as they can get a car for me. My skin is covered with a scratched alphabet and half-healed bites.

I do not remember what was in that refrigerator.

I guess this is my statement. The nice officer has brought me some hot cocoa.

 

 

[Note: I actually lived in this loft, and the entire story up until the end is 100% true.]