I pulled my white service van into a parking spot in front of the run-down old office building and threw it into park with an exasperated grunt. It was nearly eleven o’clock at night, and my day should have been over six hours ago. But we were short-handed and there was work that needed to be done, or so I’ve been told.
I stepped out of the van and onto the wet pavement. Thankfully, it had stopped raining a while earlier, but now everything in this part of the city just smelled like wet dog and mildew.
I looked at my tablet and double-checked the address to make sure I was at the right spot; this building looked abandoned to me.
“Dispatch, this is Becker,” I said into the two-way radio I grabbed from my belt. “Do you copy?”
A moment later, the smoke-graveled voice of Dan Young, my supervisor, crackled through the speaker. “Hey, Becker, this is dispatch,” he said.
I was a little surprised to hear his voice. I couldn’t remember the last time he worked dispatch. Jillian must have had to cut her shift short for some reason, but I didn’t bother to ask. I was just interested in getting this call done and getting my ass home.
I looked up at the darkened brick building and then back down to the tablet. “Yeah, I need you to confirm an address for me. I’m standing in front of 52 North Avenue, but I’m not sure this is the right place. It damn-near looks abandoned.”
I could hear the muted surprise on Dan’s face through the radio. “52 North Avenue? That’s the old Jefferson Heights building. Haven’t heard from them in a while. Stand by.”
I looked at the radio in my hand and then back up to the rain-slicked building, the yellow glow of the sodium vapor streetlight casting a sickly illumination across its surface. The sidewalk passed in front of the handful of concrete steps leading up to the glass double-doors of the entrance. An equally weak light flickered from within, struggling to survive another night.
The Jefferson Heights building – I hadn’t known the name until Dan mentioned it, but something about it tickled some distant memory in the back of my sleep-deprived mind. It seemed like it should have been familiar to me for some reason, like I had read something about it once.
A moment later, Dan’s voice came through the radio again. “Uh, that’s confirmed, Becker. One of the offices on the top floor complained of power issues in the freight elevator earlier today and needs it checked out.”
I sighed. “Roger that, dispatch. Becker out.” I hung the radio back on my belt and pulled my tool bag from the van’s slider, slinging it over my shoulder. I made sure to lock the van before I headed up the sidewalk. In this neighborhood, who knows what I’d come back to find if I left it open, and they’d probably take it out of my paycheck if anything went missing. Definitely not something I needed right now, especially with Sarah out of work taking care of our new little girl.
I climbed the low steps to the front doors and pulled on the handle. The door rattled against its locked deadbolt, and I cursed under my breath. Rapping my knuckles loudly on the door, I looked up at the sky as I felt the first few raindrops hit the back of my neck.
“Isn’t this just fucking great,” I said aloud, certain I was about to get soaked, along with my tablet and tools. At least my cell phone would be okay – it was almost out of juice, so I left it on the center console of the van on its charger.
As if the clouds had heard my grumbling, the few drops turned to a drizzle, and I knocked again, louder this time, on the glass.
Just as I was ready to turn around and head back to the van, an old man dressed in a wrinkled security outfit rounded the corner inside the building, waving a hand at me to hold on as he made it way toward me, pulling a light jacket on.
He reached the door and opened it just as the rain began again in earnest, narrowly missing me as I ducked inside. The door swung closed on its pneumatic return, latching again with a loud mechanical clank.
“You the maintenance man?” he asked, eyeing me over with age-yellowed eyes from beneath bushy white eyebrows.
I bit back a smartass comment and just ducked my head in a quick nod, lifting my tool bag as if it were some sort of badge. Who the hell else would I be?
“Facilities technician,” I corrected him. “We received a call from one of your tenants, uh…” I looked down at the tablet, trying to find the name of the business who had reported the problem.
“Bridgeton Accounting,” he supplied, looking at me with tired eyes. “Aside from that ambulance-chaser on the tenth floor, they’re the only tenants left, and I haven’t seen anyone from the shyster’s office in a few weeks.” He moved past me and pushed the front door open again, peering around at the rainy evening. “Hell of a night,” he said, and then nodded past me down the poorly lit hallway. “Door to the basement is the last one on the left. It’s not locked.” He zipped his jacket up to his chin and popped the collar up around his ears.
“Wait,” I said, confused. “You’re leaving?”
“Yep,” he replied. “I was only waiting around for you to get here – was hoping you’d get here sooner, so I could get home to the missus at a decent hour, but I guess that’s not gonna happen. Just make sure the door shuts behind you; it’ll lock on its own. There’s nobody left in the building – all gone home for the weekend, so if you hear someone, feel free to call the cops. Or don’t. I’m off duty – not my concern until Monday.” And with that, he shuffled out into the rain and down the steps, heading towards an old chevy parked at the curb that had seen better days.
Okay then. I guess I’m on my own.
I headed down the hall towards the door he had indicated, passing several identical, unnumbered doors along the way. The floor was a faux-stone linoleum that looked to have been in-style before I was born and was covered in decades of scuffs and grime, lit by the harsh and flickering light of a few fluorescents along the way.
I hated working in these old brownstone buildings. They were usually neglected and in some state of disrepair out here in this section of the city. You could count on seeing a rat or two along the way and didn’t dare put your hands anywhere you didn’t visually inspect for critters first. On top of that, they were filled with exposed electrical wires, rot, mold – hell, maybe even asbestos, for all I knew.
The tarnished brass door handle, covered with generations of scratches and scars, turned easily in my hand, though the door didn’t budge. It wasn’t uncommon for these doors to swell in their frames, especially when we’ve had a lot of rain, which we had. With a grunt, I threw my shoulder into it, and it gave up its grip with a harsh scream that seemed to echo through the empty halls of the building, swinging open to reveal a narrow set of concrete steps leading downward into the darkness. I grabbed the heavy black Maglite from my tool bag and pressed the rubber switch, the powerful beam abruptly chasing away the darkness and exposing the paint-peeled walls of the stairwell.
The air that wafted up from the darkened basement was musty and damp, and the surface of the steps glistened with moisture in the bright beam of my flashlight. Unsurprisingly, whatever handrail had once been affixed to the wall was long-gone, leaving small craters in the brick walls where the bolts had once secured it.
I found the light switch right inside of the door, flipping it on and off a few times without any result. Hitching my tool bag on my shoulder, I took the steps as carefully as I could, thankful for the grip my rubber-soled work boots provided. Before long, and without managing to slip and break my neck on the concrete steps, I reached the basement floor. The door behind me was a small rectangle of dim light that felt farther away than it should have been, and I shone my flashlight around the room I’d reached.
It was large – probably thirty feet square – and piled with moldering boxes and discarded office furniture stacked against the walls. More cardboard boxes sagged in precarious stacks in the center of the room, eagerly soaking up the thin sheen of water that glazed the bare concrete floor.
To my right, I found another light switch and flipped it experimentally. To my surprise, a string of incandescent bulbs flared to life and lit the abyssal darkness that surrounded me with a yellow tint, casting harsh shadows of the stacked detritus filling the room. I could hear the constant dripping of water echoing from somewhere to my right, though it sounded like it was some distance away, and thought I heard the skittering of stealthy little paws moving among the boxes to my left, much closer.
Rats. Fucking perfect.
I’d seen plenty of them over the years, some as big as a housecat. And mean. These city rats weren’t afraid of anything and wouldn’t hesitate to bite if you unknowingly got too close. I knew a guy when I was younger that got bit by a rat and contracted something called Rat Bite Fever. A few days later, he started feeling like he’d come down with a nasty flu, and within two weeks we were at his funeral.
Can you believe that? Twenty-eight years old and dead from a goddamn rat bite.
Not me. I keep heavy leather gloves in my tool bag if I need to reach anywhere or move anything in places like this and if I see any of the furry little bastards eyeballing me, we’re going to play a game of “punt the rodent”.
My eyes moved past the precariously leaning stack of cardboard boxes to my left and spotted the large steel utilities junction box. I walked over and pulled open the door and was now faced with four long banks of breakers, including the huge main breaker at the top, which looked like something out of a Frankenstein movie.
I shone my flashlight at the faded handwritten labels on the inside of the panel door, scanning them for anything that might refer to the freight elevator, but it all looked like general office circuits for each of the tenant spaces.
I stepped back from the panel and looked to my right and left, trying to spot another breaker panel that might provide power to the elevator.
Nothing. Hell.
I grabbed the radio from my belt and keyed it up. “Hey dispatch, this is Becker. You there?”
A couple moments passed before the crackled response came, the radio signal distorted by the building above me.
“This is dispatch. Go ahead,” said Dan. He sounded like I’d just woken him up from a nap.
“Yeah, I’m down here in the basement of 52 North Ave. I’m at the utilities box, but I don’t see anything for the freight elevator and there are no other panels that I can see. Any ideas?” I asked.
“Hang on a sec,” he replied.
While I awaited his response, I continued shining my flashlight along the walls and behind the furniture and stacks of boxes. With my luck, the panel I needed was going to be buried behind one of them. If that was the case, Dan was going to need to get a crew down here to clear it first; I sure as hell wasn’t going to try moving all this crap myself. I didn’t get paid enough for that.
It was a couple minutes before he called me back.
“Okay,” he said, and I could hear the shuffling of papers as he spoke. “It looks like it’s your lucky day, Becker. The freight elevator was part of the original building construction before they refitted the building for offices. The panel you’re looking at was put in when they converted it from a residential building back in the eighties.”
“So, what does that mean? Where is the panel for the elevator?” I asked, starting to get a little irritated. I had hoped this was going to be a simple in-and-out job, but I was starting to get the sinking feeling that it was about to get more involved. I considered running back out to the van to call Sarah and let her know I was going to be even later than expected, but she was probably already asleep.
“You’re going to love this,” he said. “The original plans show the mains routed into a sub-basement on the northern wall.”
I frowned. “A sub-basement? Are you shitting me?”
“Nope, sorry. If you’re looking at the electrical panel in front of you, there should be a door about ten feet to your left. That’ll lead you down another staircase and to a long hallway. Follow that and it should drop you right at the panel.”
I cursed under my breath and moved around a couple stacks of boxes, warily shining the flashlight into the dark spaces where shadows blocked the light from the overhead bulbs. I was just about to tell Dan that I couldn’t see anything when my light flashed across a riveted steel door set into the concrete wall. The heavy patina of rust across its surface and exposed hinges told me it had likely been forgotten about a long time ago.
Hell.
“Yeah, I see it,” I said into the radio. “Thanks, Dan.”
“No problem. Hey, Becker, be careful down there. I don’t like the thought of one of my guys working down there all alone, but since we’re short-handed right now, I don’t have a lot of choice.” It was the closest thing to an apology Dan Young was likely to offer up, but I appreciated the sentiment.
“Roger that. I’ll radio you when I’m done,” I replied, hooking the radio back on my belt and squeezing through the stacks.
The door to the sub-basement was an antique – it had that heavy industrial look from the early twentieth century and I wondered if I’d even be able to get it open. A lever on the left side was attached to a heavy steel bolt, securing the door, and looking like something off a World War II battleship. I grabbed it with both hands and put my weight into it. For a moment, nothing happened, but then, with an ear-splitting screech of rusted metal, it clanked heavily back, pulling the cross-bolt from its slot.
Another solid tug, and the door swung open, revealing an even narrower staircase beyond, this one looking like it was cut from the bedrock that the building was built on. I could see small rivulets of water running down the stairs from the basement and wondered how deep the water was in the sub-basement. I searched around with my flashlight for a light switch in vain before resigning myself to my task and carefully descending the steep rock-hewn steps. I ran one hand along the wall to help balance myself but yanked it away when I felt something hard scurry away from under my fingers.
I flashed the light up and flinched in revulsion as a cockroach nearly the size of my hand flicked away into the darkness. Without thinking, I wiped my hand on my pants as I continued down the staircase, listening to the constant dripping of water and distant skittering sounds below. A couple of times, I thought I heard the high-pitched squeaking of rodents, but I couldn’t be sure.
The smell is what really started making me have second thoughts about continuing; that musty smell of age and damp rot was pervasive, filling my lungs with every breath, but now there was something else just below that. Like an undercurrent of something. Something wrong.
I wondered for a brief moment about the possibility of some dangerous chemicals having been stored down here, but it didn’t really have a chemical smell to it. It was more… organic, if that was the word.
I reached the bottom of the stairs, and my foot sank with a sickening wet sound into a half-inch of something that I hoped like hell was mud. Deciding it was probably better if I didn’t focus too much on it, I kept my Maglite sweeping around in front of me, surveying this new area.
Like Dan had said, I was in some sort of wide hallway, probably twelve feet in width and with a low ceiling that ended just a foot above my head. It felt claustrophobic and the foul smell that arose from my every step smelled like decaying swamp, somehow making it feel even more confining and uncomfortable.
The walls were of the same brown stone construction as the rest of the building, but the mortar between them had decayed and eroded over the years and the bricks had collapsed in a few places, exposing unexpected voids behind them as I passed.
I tried not to think about how far below ground I was at this point.
I tried not to think about the fact that I was alone underneath this decrepit and nearly abandoned building in the middle of the night.
I tried not to think about it, but the more I tried, the more my thoughts focused on it.
I forced myself to move forward, placing one foot in front of the other and telling myself that I was almost done here. All I needed to do was to check out the electrical panel and then I could get out of this sub-basement. If the problem wasn’t at the breaker panel, it would likely be in the elevator itself, and that was something we needed to call a different crew for; my company wasn’t licensed for that sort of work.
I was half-tempted to just turn around now and tell Dan that everything was fine at the breaker panel, but I couldn’t risk him finding out and canning me. I had a wife and baby depending on me; it was time to man up and get the job done.
The quick sound of movement snapped my attention to the darkness behind me, and I spun around, flashing the bright white beam of light back the way I had come. For a brief moment, I thought I had seen a blur of motion back near where the staircase exited, but I realized it was probably just the reflection of my flashlight off the seeping walls and muck-covered floor.
Still, my heart pounded, and my chest heaved like I’d just run a mile. I could hear my breath echoing along the corridor, mixing with the ever-present dripping of water and the quieter scurrying of what I believed to be either bats, rats, or some other nasty little pest hiding from the light and living in the darkness afforded by the sub-basement of the former Jefferson Heights building.
I turned back to my task, moving with a renewed determination to be done with this job and be back out into the open air and rain of the city above me.
Jefferson Heights. That feeling of familiarity came again as I continued along the hallway, noticing more of the breaches in the walls where the bricks had collapsed over the years. None were more than a couple feet in diameter, but they gave me an uncomfortable feeling as I passed them and I tried to keep my eyes from wandering to their black depths, focusing only on the tunnel ahead.
I felt like I should know it, but it was such a generic name for a twentieth century inner-city residential building that it could have just been no more than that. Still, I felt sure that I’d heard the name somewhere.
A minute later, the hallway deposited me into a small room littered with piles of unrecognizable rubbish strewn about in the sludge of the floor. My flashlight beam reflected brightly off the slimy mold-covered bricks here and that smell of decay and rot which had been only an undercurrent previously now took the front seat, threatening to overpower my normally iron-clad gut. It was more than just organic decomposition, there was an unpleasant sweet smell to it, and it hung thick in the air.
Regardless, directly ahead was the target of my search – a large, rusted fuse box was mounted to the wall directly ahead, just as Dan had promised. I approached and shone my light upon it, hating the way the rest of the world around me fell into blackness as I did so. I wished I had thought to bring my portable lantern, but who would have thought I’d be way the fuck down here in this place?
The door to the fuse panel was hanging askew on its one remaining hinge, threatening to depart completely at the slightest touch. I had no intention of touching it, though. I could see immediately the problem affecting the freight elevator – the bundle of electrical wires leading from the top of the fuse box had been stripped of their protective insulation long ago, and between the inescapable moisture and whatever unfortunate insects or rodents had decided to use the exposed wires as a jungle-gym, the fresh black scarring of the parted copper and the wall behind it indicated what must have been a pretty spectacular short-circuit.
Police baffled by continued spate of Jefferson Heights disappearances.
The memory flashed into my mind abruptly and without warning, something from a television show I had watched months ago. Now I recalled the show – it was some sort of sensationalistic bullshit about various unexplained disappearances around the world and included the Jefferson Heights building. The entire show was very heavily slanted from a paranormal angle, even though there hadn’t been any real evidence to support it. I did recall that the facts were accurate, however, and something like two dozen people had gone missing from this place over a six-month period in the late 70s. There had been more disappearances since then, but none in such a compressed period of time.
I pulled the radio from my belt.
“Dispatch, this is Becker. You there, Dan?” I didn’t like the way my voice echoed along the dark hallway. For some reason, it seemed too loud, and I suddenly felt very vulnerable, very alone.
I waited a long moment for his response but heard nothing.
Screw this. I didn’t need to stand down here any longer. Even if I wanted to, there was nothing I could do to fix the problem tonight. There was a lot of work to be done to make the circuit safe and functional again.
I turned the light back in the direction I came and began making my way back toward the staircase. With every step, I had the unshakeable feeling that something was behind me, following me in the inky dark shadows of this sub-basement.
I approached one of the breaches in the wall and hesitated. I could almost sense something nearby. Something out of place, wrong.
Halting my step, I forced myself to depress the button on the flashlight, plunging myself into the unimaginable and stifling darkness. My ears strained to hear the slightest movement, and for a long moment there was nothing.
But then I heard it. The sound of chitinous movement upon stone, incredibly fast in their erratic bursts of motion and then perfectly silent.
Close.
I turned the flashlight to where I knew the hole in the brick would be and flicked it back to life. In that moment of sudden illumination, an uncontrolled, primal scream fought to erupt from my constricted vocal cords as I laid eyes on the impossible horror before me, already halfway through the breach.
It looked to be a massive, malformed cockroach, easily three feet long and with whiplike antennae waving searchingly towards me. Its head was obscenely large and its eyes pale and multifaceted, flicking back and forth in random spasms of motion. The carapace of its wings, folded like translucent screens over its segmented body, bore the unmistakable shape of a human face – a young woman from what I could see.
The thing halted its movement as soon as the light hit it, except for the ever-searching movements of its antennae. I could see the barbed hairs of its legs twitch and undulate, and for a brief and horrifying moment, its wings unfolded, hitting the edges of the brick before refolding again.
I didn’t understand what I was seeing, but when I heard the sounds behind me, I knew this thing wasn’t alone. Springing forward, I spun around and shone the powerful LED light down the corridor. The walls seemed to move under the harsh illumination, but I quickly realized that it wasn’t the walls moving, but rather the hundreds of monstrous cockroaches that had emerged from the holes in the brick walls and were now silently watching me.
The smell that had been so cloying before was now overwhelming, and I staggered backwards, keeping the flashlight ahead of me as if it were some sort of weapon.
The faces.
The faces of so many people were somehow patterned on the folded wings of each of them, some duplicated many times and others seemingly unique. I wondered if these were the faces of those who had gone missing over the years.
I wondered how such a thing could even be possible.
Jefferson Heights was forced to convert to a commercial space when so many residents had gone missing without a trace, but even afterwards there had been reports of workers disappearing as well over the years.
So, the businesses began moving out, one by one. Until now there were only two left.
I remembered the security guard’s words, “Aside from that ambulance-chaser on the tenth floor, they’re the only tenants left, and I haven’t seen anyone from the shyster’s office in a few weeks.”
What the hell?
I had been retreating the whole time, with that nightmare carpet approaching with every step, just waiting for me to shift the beam of my flashlight away from them, when I know they would swarm over me.
I almost cried out when my foot met with the bottom step of the staircase and I stumbled, fumbling frantically to avoid dropping my flashlight. I could nearly imagine what it would feel like when they came. When they flooded over me with their sharp claws and tearing mandibles. Would I become another face on the wings of the next generation of these aberrations? How could something like this even exist?
But who knew what sorts of things could evolve down here in the damp depths beneath the city streets? Where all our waste and runoff filtered down to the miles upon miles of forgotten utility tunnels, abandoned subway lines, and sewer drains that ran beneath our feet. How long had these things been evolving and mutating? How many thousands of generations would it take produce such grotesque creatures, so far removed from the ancestors that incited little more than revulsion before they were crushed into a slimy mess under a shoe or rolled newspaper?
Keeping the flashlight upon the glistening brown-black forms of the horrific cockroaches, I chanced a glance over my shoulder and saw the open doorway at the top of the steps, tantalizingly close, yet seemingly miles away. I couldn’t keep retreating like this – sooner or later I’d take a misstep and fall, perhaps dropping the flashlight in the process.
Then it would be over.
I could hear the sounds from all over the corridor now and tried not to imagine the living blanket of chitin that covered the walls and ceiling, antennae never ceasing in their searching, reaching.
The things began to grow bolder as I backed up the steps, daring to come closer with each sudden chaotic burst of motion. They climbed over each other, their carapaces making a terrible sliding sound as they did so. That sickly-sweet smell filled the stairwell, gagging me.
Finally, as my calves were beginning to cramp up from the unorthodox backward retreat up the steps, my outstretched hand touched the cold steel of the basement door, and I gasped aloud with relief. Still, the things were there, barely ten feet away, sizing me up with those alien eyes and waiting for the moment the light faltered.
I stepped backward into the basement and reached out blindly to grasp the heavy steel door edge. As I did so, I realized that the moment I began to close the door, its bulk would blot out the light from the Maglite, and in that shadow, I’d be overwhelmed and devoured.
I wasn’t sure why the bright white LED kept them at bay, but I wasn’t too interested in questioning the only thing that was keeping me from being overrun. Still, I couldn’t stand here all day, and the cockroaches seemed to be getting less inhibited by the light as the minutes wore on. How long until one leapt at me? When that happened, the light would go out.
If I was getting out of here, it had to be now.
With a great wordless cry, I lunged forward and threw the flashlight end-over-end into the cockroach-lined stairwell, and for a brief moment, they recoiled as one mass from the unexpected motion and the sudden chaos of the spinning flashlight.
But that’s all I needed. I used every bit of my strength to heave the heavy steel door shut with a resounding clang, throwing the lever and bolt in one motion. Instantly, I could hear their exoskeletal bodies clicking against the rusty steel and hundreds of scratching feet climbing over the inside of it, searching for some little gap they could exploit.
I didn’t wait around. In my mind, I was already thinking about the fact that these things must have been able to move freely throughout this entire building, and I had no way of knowing if they were even now stalking up behind me, waiting patiently in the shadowed areas cast by the stacks of forgotten furniture and rotting cardboard boxes.
Without another moment’s thought, I fled with every bit of speed I could muster through the stacks of discarded and forgotten debris and up the next staircase, bursting out into the ground floor hallway with the flickering fluorescent lights. I did my best speed walking impression as I got the hell out of the building, through the rain, and back into my van.
I called Dan later that night and told him all about it. I didn’t think there was any way in hell he’d believe me, but Dan’s been around long enough to know that weird shit happens on this side of town. I think some part of him believed me enough. He dropped the Jefferson Heights contract the following week.
He also advised them to hire some exterminators to deal with their roach problems.
Dan’s got a funny sense of humor like that.