I have a home. I just don’t own it. But it’s mine, and I work to keep it. Every city has its fair share of abandoned buildings to squat in, but usually, you gotta deal with either cops or shitty neighbors. The States High Rise has neither. Police stay away, so do the locals. As a stranger from out of town, I stumbled across the place on my first night in the city and thought it a little strange that a 28-story tower block had been left to rot. Every window black. Every light in the courtyard smashed. No cars in the lot. No booth for a guard. Not even barbed wire on the fence. Barely half-a-mile from a playground filled with shouting drunken teenagers, but none of them strayed in the direction of Annedale. No fires or music or bottles hurtling through the air. It was silent.
Inside, I found that the lobby had been torn to shit. Double doors ripped open and left that way for what looked like years. Easy access for the curious, but I was the only one there. Most of the first story had collapsed. Waterlogged ceiling tiles turned to mulch by shitty British weather. I know water is invasive, but it had practically fucking colonized the place so bad algae was growing up the walls. Even the elevator shaft was flooded. My own reflection looking back at me as I peered through brackish water and caught a glimpse of the old rusted carriage just a few feet below. I couldn’t help but think about standing on top of it, waist high, and reaching down to pull open the emergency hatch. Only natural to wonder what was down there. Little metal box soaking in pitch black water for years and years. I thought about pressing the button, calling it up and seeing the elevator rise in spite of all logic. An image I still think of from time to time.
Meanwhile, the empty shaft loomed above, cables whistling in the wind. I’ve learned not to linger by it. If you look up, you’ll sometimes see something ducking out of the way, pulling its head through the doors before you get a good look. It finds it awfully funny, even tries to make a game out of it, like peekaboo. Play too much, though, and it starts to pop up elsewhere. Any open door becomes an invitation. Sent more than a few people running for their lives in the middle of the night, but bad news for them. That thing is more than free to leave this place if it’s part of a game.
He bit his lip and hesitated for a second or two, as if he was actually contemplating it.
“Not a bad suggestion actually, but no, too difficult to reach. And I don’t just mean dark as in the absence of light. I mean dark like under the bed. Dark like that one chip in a wall that leads to a hollow space between the bricks and as a child you can’t help but wonder what lives there. Somewhere that just inexplicably feels… like it’s not got as much of God’s attention on it as everywhere else.”
I thought about this for a second. His words were vague but damn if I didn’t know what he meant.
“A corner?” I asked. “Has to be an acute corner?”
He nodded.
“I think I know the place,” I said, and he smiled like a real creep.
I took him to a flat on the eighth floor. It was rundown like everywhere else but there was still enough of its old furniture lying around. You can pull open random drawers in there and still see the cutlery people once used. There’s even an old analogue TV on an old stand. You can perch on what’s left of the sofa and stare at that TV and get the feeling you knew the people who lived there once. Run your thumb over the dials on the toaster, the handle of the fridge, or the yellowing plastic of a light switch, and feel an aching loss that creeps up on you out of nowhere.
Look up and you’ll see that the light fixture has been torn out of the ceiling, like someone had tried swinging from it.
Not a big place, by the way. Three rooms. A bedroom with a double bed all rumpled up. A living room slash kitchen. And a tiny little spare room that looked like it once would have been used for storage, or a washing machine maybe, if you were single and childless. A slither of space, a triangle carved out of whatever room was left over when other more important walls had been put up. That sofa I mentioned, the TV, they were all placed so whoever was sat down could always keep an eye on that room and its contents.
You see they’d put a cot inside and it’s still there, bluebottle flies circling overhead. You can’t see inside the cot, not unless you went in and actually pulled the blankets out but it’s been decades and no one has managed it yet. It’s dark behind those old blankets, a heavy shadow that dissuades a closer look, like there’s something in there no one needs to see and it’s spent a long time sat there eating what little light there was. Even with a window in that room, daylight doesn’t really filter down.
“Perfect,” the businessman said when he saw it. He gazed around the flat one detail at a time, his head pausing for a moment and a smile creeping across his face as he laid his eyes on the broken light fixture. And the cot, the sight of it, the flies that still circled above faded Winnie the Pooh blankets, it made the breath catch in his throat.
“Oh this is… yes this is good,” he told me. “Dark like under the bed. You’ve earned that money. I could have had a dozen men sweep this place and they wouldn’t have understood the brief as well as you have.”
“Thank you,” I replied even if that wasn’t really how I felt.
Quietly the man sat down and began to unpack his leather satchel. No pentagrams to be found, although he did unpack seven strange-looking candles. He caught me looking at them and smiled.
“Home-made,” he said. “Each one shaped by my hands. I’m not a good artist, but it’s the effort that counts. Took forever to rend the wax. Of course that was the easy part. The hard part was getting the fat to make it. Did you know there can be a surprisingly high level of security around a hospital’s medical waste department?”
“I didn’t,” I replied as he took out some flimsy bits of wood and a few small nails. He oh so carefully began to nail the splinters of wood together into what looked like random shapes.
“Oh well,” he sighed after a few quiet moments, his fingers nimbly gripping the tiny hammer as he tapped away. Already he’d put together at least six of the strange little wooden polygons, and with each new one I felt a strange sensation. “Would you like to stay and watch?” he asked.
“Absolutely not,” I answered.
He stopped tapping and smiled once more.
“Oh you’re clever,” he said. “That’s the correct answer, by the way. And if I’m to respect it, I should inform you that now is the safest time to leave.”
I made my way to the exit just as he lit the first candles, but not before I looked towards the cot. In that dim light, I thought I saw something curled up in the shadows behind the faded Winnie the Pooh blankets.
That cot has sat in that room for decades and I think the secret of what lies within it is one that I am better off not knowing. I don’t really know what was worse, you know? Staying or going. But you know what they say? When in doubt, always choose the option that means you don’t need to spend the night in the place with the wooden pentagons.