(Excerpt)
The back stairway was narrow and in need of new paint. Jasper carefully balanced the two trash bags and a flashlight while turning his body slightly to navigate the stairs, feeling much like a giant on a pair of rickety wooden stilts. When he reached the bottom and located the dumpster, he placed the trash bags on the ground and used his free hand to raise the lid.
A rat jumped out and bit his hand, right on the tip of his left index finger, causing him to shriek and drop both the lid and the flashlight. He drew his hand to his chest convulsively, panicked at the sudden attack. The flashlight fell to the ground and threw its beam into the dark maw of the access tunnel that lay a few feet away from the dumpsters. The rat scampered into the tunnel, its backside illuminated for a short while and then disappearing beyond the range of light.
“You fucking piece of shit,” Jasper muttered, feeling his lips draw back in a grimace of frustration. So the place did have rats. He felt burdened with the task of relaying that information to Ethan, of casting a pall over his enthusiasm for the new apartment. Damn. Well hopefully the landlord would take care of it in a reasonable fashion – like actually fumigating the place properly, despite the expense and momentary discomfort. In the first apartment Jasper lived in after college, his landlord had “taken care of” their rat problem by leaving poison pellets around the place so the rats took them back to their holes and ended up dying – and rotting – within the walls.
From out of the tunnel there came a sound, a very small but distinct vibration like air being sucked back into a jagged little mouth. Jasper started and picked up the flashlight, approaching the entrance and shining the beam along the concrete walls.
“Hello?” he called, thinking maybe a transient had snuck in. The sound could have been human, but it was hard to tell. He just hoped it didn’t come from a rat. It didn’t sound like a rat, at least not one that he would like to meet.
He stopped.
What he saw didn’t quite register at first. Then it made that sound again, only a bit more pronounced (or maybe he just happened to be closer), a bit more urgent. And as it did, a tiny pulse of pale bluish light accompanied.
He was looking at a door in the left-hand wall, an ordinary wooden door with a large metal padlock attached to a fastening hinge just above the handle. The sound, and the pulsing light, were issuing from the padlock. And during each pulse, just enough light crept out of the keyhole for him to see that a face had been fashioned upon its surface, with an open mouth that fit around the keyhole.
His feet began to move forward, although he willed them not to, and his heartbeat became an insistent, petulant fist within his chest, trying to push him back. He felt a grimace come over his face spreading his lips back toward his ears and stretching his face into a grotesque clown mask. His hand reached out, proffering his bloody finger to the puckered little keyhole mouth. A sharp, numbing cold shot through his whole hand from the point of contact, the edges of the hole grasping his fingertip and searing the flesh while sucking out the blood.
Then the padlock opened and dropped to the floor. He staggered back, a burst of pain from his finger exploding upward through his arm as if a long needle had been inserted under the flesh all the way to the shoulder. He dropped the flashlight again and it rolled away for several feet, back toward the door. The door from which now issued a creaking groan, the fastening hinge shifting outward and snapping off, the handle turning slowly. When it stopped, the door swung open.
Beyond the threshold lay an indiscernible room, thick with shadows. It seemed to have an earthen floor in the area closest to the doorway, but farther in he could see a shimmering, shifting surface like that of a massive puddle. He picked up the flashlight and shone it into the room, madly searching every which way and feeling a gnawing sensation of sick fear, a broken and scattered torment that told him in a thousand voices to run. And beneath that lay a series of invisible hooks, piercing every voice like captive fish and reeling him in with unbreakable compulsion. He stepped over the threshold, illuminating the puddle in the middle of the room; the water stirred restlessly, and then the surface broke and a figure emerged. It wore a dark, ragged cloak with a hood pulled over its face and sleeves that mostly covered its hands – except for the fingertips, which ended in sharp, bone-white claws.
On the far wall hung a man-size crucifix, adorned with black and rotting bones.
Jasper whirled around to see the door slam shut. He gasped and began shaking violently, panic taking over. He swung the flashlight back toward the interior of the room and caught sight of the figure hovering above the puddle, arms reaching up to pull the hood back from its face. He steadied the beam upon it and felt his blood turn to ice.
The creature opened its eyes, and stared back at Jasper with an ageless, pitiless hunger. He felt an invisible stake being rooted through his stomach and out his guts to the floor, withering all the flesh around it and sapping the strength from his limbs. Strangely enough he held the flashlight beam still as the creature drew back mummified lips from rotted teeth and extended its arms outward, claws clicking and slashing as it glided through the space between them.
He finally found the breath to call out, but managed nothing more than a frail moan. The creature’s claws dug into his face and tore across his cheeks, the skin flying away like leaves raked across a lawn. And then came the teeth.
