I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that rent isn’t cheap these days. So, when my dad called me a few weeks ago and offered to pay for an apartment for myself and my boyfriend I didn’t hesitate to say yes. At the time, I wasn’t thinking about how I hadn’t really been close to my dad ever since I left home after high school. Both of us have always been very introverted and private people so his offer didn’t really raise any red flags, and the thought of being able to live somewhere and not worry as much about money was a dream come true.
He explained to me that he was referring to a specific apartment in a large building that was located in my hometown. He didn’t really give me much more details other than that my boyfriend and I would have free reign of the place, except he’d be by once a week or so to take care of business in the area. I didn’t really press him on what he meant by that, but he mentioned that he did some favors for the owners of the building. Moving back also wasn’t really a huge deal since Sam (my boyfriend) and I both worked from home.
The few weeks after we moved in were amazing. We invited friends over and partied, we used the money I was saving on rent to get some nice new furniture for the place, and overall we were very happy. My dad would come by every few nights, maybe occasionally crash on the couch, but he would be gone by morning so I didn’t really have a lot of time to talk with him. He’d sometimes bring these black duffle bags with him which I assumed were just his luggage.
One evening, he came in a bit earlier and asked if Sam and I could help him out with something. We agreed, and he handed each of us one of the black duffle bags to carry as he led us to follow him out the door.
The three of us walked down the long hallways of the apartment building, deeper into the core of the structure. I hadn’t come down this way before, as our unit was very close to the elevator and I hadn’t had any reason to go exploring, but this part of the building gave me chills. We followed him down a tangle of halls, and I could hear a strange undercurrent of low noise growing under the sterile silence and sound of our footsteps. At the end of the hall, we opened the door to a dark stairwell and walked up the concrete steps to the sixth floor.
My dad took out a key from a side pocket of the black duffle bag he was holding, and unlocked the sixth floor door. This part of the building seemed cold and completely empty, the darkness punctuated by yellowed ceiling lights that only barely lit the way to the next dim pool of illumination. The weird grinding noises had grown louder, sounding like the moaning of desperate machines behind the walls.
After going a bit further, he stopped the two of us as we approached a door. The door had what appeared to be a rock jutting out of the center of it. It was full of small holes like a pumice stone, and dark red like something volcanic. He told us to open the bags. We did, and saw that they contained dozens of square plastic containers of chemicals.
I started to ask him what they all were, but he ignored my question and handed me a large metal tool. It was dark and pointed like a chisel, with a handle on the back like a shovel. As he bent down and started opening the chemicals, he told me to start striking at the rock.
The metal handles of the chisel were cold in my hands. I gripped them tightly as I pulled back and brought it down on the stone that was projecting out of the door. As I brought it down, the noise that had been building rose into a distant wail. My dad was telling Sam which bottles to open, and he was following his instructions as they both started to pour different clear fluids onto the stone. I felt it beginning to soften under my blows, and small chunks of it begin to break off.
I could feel the noise start to rise louder all around us, and at the same time I thought I began to hear the sound of someone banging at the door. In between the frantic pouring of different chemicals, I tried to ask my dad what was going on, if I was doing this correctly, anything that would explain this situation, but he adamantly refused to do anything but keep us focused on the task at hand.
With a final wet strike, the rock shattered and fell to the ground in pieces, leaving behind nothing but a dark stain on the door. As the noises subsided around us, the pieces of the rock started to rapidly dissolve into the pool of chemicals below and seep into the hallway carpet.
My dad took out one final small bottle and opened it, pouring its contents on the door frame and letting the clear liquid drip down the face of the door. With that, we packed up the empty bottles into the duffle bags and walked back down the maze of hallways to our apartment, locking the door to the sixth floor behind us. I wanted to ask so many questions, but I was just honestly too stunned and relieved to say anything. He dropped off the duffle bags in a closet in the apartment and left.
That night, Sam and I talked about what happened, but I really couldn’t explain anything. My dad had worked as a neuroscience researcher for most of his life, and as a professor at a local college for a few years as well, but ever since I went to college I started living my own life and only really talked to my family during the holidays. Obviously, he had never mentioned anything about whatever this was to me.
There was nothing I knew about my dad that would explain any of this.
I sent my dad some texts asking him to explain what was going on, and he replied that it was “something that he had to do to maintain the building”. I tried to ask further, but he just dodged my questions.
A few days later, I got a call from my dad. He sounded a bit out of breath and rushed, and said he would be out of town for a few days, but something had come up and he needed us to do that same ritual to another door that night. At first I protested, but he promised me that if we could just take care of this, he’d explain everything when he got back. He gave me the unit number of the apartment and told me how to get there, then hung up.
Reluctantly, I told Sam what my dad had told me. He wasn’t keen on doing it either, but he agreed. We got out the black duffle bags and started to make our way to the sixth floor.
We walked in uneasy silence. Once we had ascended the steps to the sixth floor, I found the key in the side pocket of the duffle bag I was carrying. I looked at it as closely as I could in the dim stairwell light. It was a dull and strangely ornate brass key. It didn’t really match the modern building at all, but it fit the lock perfectly, and we went through to the sixth floor proper and made our way to the unit.
Along the way, we passed by other doors that also had dark stains on them. How many other doors had my dad done this ritual on? And who had been helping him before us? I tried to ponder these questions, but my mind was consumed with the thrumming, groaning noise that surrounded us. It was already louder than last time.
We turned a corner and saw the door we were looking for. The sickly dark red stone protruded from it, lit by a lone yellow light fixture. Past it, the hallway was entirely dark. We approached the door and got to work, opening the duffle bags and unpacking the containers and the chisel.
This door was different from the last. It was metal and painted gray, and had a small square window with reinforced glass. It looked like something out of a hospital. Nevertheless, we wasted no time. I raised the chisel up in both hands and brought it down hard on the stone. The clink of metal against rock was accompanied by a shudder in the air, and a chill wind blew down the hallway. We both stopped for a moment and stared down into the dark hall, but saw nothing.
I told Sam to start pouring the chemicals, and he reluctantly cracked the plastic seals on the bottles and began to follow the same steps my dad had shown him. I struck the rock over and over as Sam poured bottles of liquid over the rock, but the rock wasn’t yielding. Sam seemed to be hesitating, having trouble remembering what order the different chemicals were supposed to be poured in. I told him to just guess, as the groaning and grinding sounds around us grew louder.
As I pulled back the chisel to strike the rock again, my eye caught the shape of something in the window. I looked past the metal lattice in the glass and saw a strange form in the darkness beyond.
It was unmistakably human, but it was withered and desiccated. It was like an exhumed corpse, with strands of white hair on its misshapen, eyeless head. It didn’t move, but seeing it scared me enough that I stopped for a moment.
Another gust of wind swept down the hallway, more forceful this time as the noise around us grew louder. Sam started to pour more chemicals onto the rock as I stuck it furiously, keeping one eye on the corpse in the window. Then it began to move.
It pulled an arm back and started to bang on the door. I dropped the tool in fear as I saw the black shape of it turn to us. The wind blew through me, chilling me to my core. I looked into Sam’s eyes and told him to run.
We left the bags there and dashed down the halls, nearly forgetting the way back to the stairwell in our panic. The noise didn’t quiet down until we had run all the way down to the ground floor. I nearly jumped down an entire flight trying to get away as fast as I could.
We opened the first floor door into the building’s garage and ran to my car. And that’s where we are now, in my car in the parking lot of a Denny’s about a mile away from the apartment building. Neither of us can stop shaking and my dad isn’t picking up his phone. I honestly don’t know what to do now. I don’t know if I can go back to the building, but something is eating at me. I left the key in the side pocket of the duffle bag. And I didn’t lock the door to the sixth floor behind me.