Sneak Preview: "Trapdoor"
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—TWELVE RESIDENTS DREAMING—
Prologue: The First Life of Anacoy Marlin
1. Heirs of the Abyss
2. Trapdoor
TRAPDOOR
william pauley III
They said it was his eyes that’d get you.
Just one look at those blazing white irises and you were hooked, all defenses dropped. And it wasn’t just the women falling victim either. Men were disappearing too. They said his beauty was cosmic and wonderfully intense, unparalleled by any other living creature. It was the kind of beauty that could take you anywhere and get you anything.
But he chose to be there, stalking the hallways of the Eighth Block Tower, and the only thing he seemed to want were its residents.
Nine were missing in total, and all over the span of the last month or so. Last night, my best friend Kimmy Saunders never came home. I knew immediately something was wrong. She wasn’t the kind of person to run off without telling anyone, to willingly leave behind everything and everyone she’d ever loved. That just wasn’t Kimmy. And, true to my nature, I wasn’t about to sit idly by, hoping she’d one day return to shed light on her disappearance. No, I was a coil, wound tight and ready to spring. Armed with a taser and a pocketknife, I set out looking for answers.
I knocked on the door of every apartment inside the tower, asking for any information that would help me find my friend, with little to no luck. One resident, however, confirmed the beautiful man indeed was on the hunt last night. He said at first he heard a sharp and distinct whistling, coming from somewhere out in the communal hallway, a tune he didn’t recognize. He pushed his eye to the keyhole just in time to see the man pass by his door. He said he was tall and thin, with a face sculpted by the gods. He only got a quick glimpse of the man’s piercing white eyes, but it was enough to send a tremor of electricity straight through him. Despite his better judgment, he opened the door to follow the man, but by the time he made it out into the hall, he was nowhere to be found. He said he could still hear his song though, humming from within the walls.
“I would’ve followed him anywhere, to the ends of the earth,” the resident said. “I can’t explain it. It was like seeing God or something. All of sudden, nothing else in this world mattered to me but him.” He hung his head and cried into his hands. “Please don’t tell my wife.”
Although there was no clear connection between Kimmy and the beautiful man, something deep in my gut told me he was the one behind my friend’s disappearance. I tried to find out all I could about him, but just about the only thing anyone knew was that when he came around, people went missing.
Feeling defeated, I called my mom to let off a little steam. She said something in our conversation that really caught me off guard. “That Kimmy, she always seemed so lonely.” She did? We were best friends, and I never once got that vibe from her. I asked mom to elaborate and she just said, “You know, honey, you’re always hanging around somebody. Kimmy, though, I think all she had was you.”
It got me thinking. I put myself in her shoes. She wasn’t an outgoing personality type, so I know she wouldn’t have gone out to some bar or social event without some kind of buffer (namely, me). She could be secretive, but only when she was embarrassed by the thing she was keeping secret. So, by what method could she, a near recluse, potentially meet new people that would also be so embarrassing that she would’ve kept it a secret from me?
I pulled up the app store on my cell phone and did a quick search on dating apps, sorting them by popularity. I downloaded the top three, creating fake profiles so I could access information on other members. About twenty minutes into my investigation of the second app, I found it, Kimmy’s profile. The blood drained from my hands the second I saw her picture staring back at me. Suddenly I felt cold.
Had she been abducted by some creep on a dating app?
With no way of knowing the people she may have contacted—short of hacking into her account, that is—I thought it best to go through the dating profile of everyone within a ten-mile radius, as if I was using the app to meet someone myself. I was thinking surely I’d come across one or two creepers that put off a certain ‘desperate, lonely, possibly a killer’ vibe, but holy shit there were so fucking many! Way more than I ever would’ve guessed. I felt gross knowing all of those people lived within ten miles from my apartment.
I got so depressed, I nearly stopped searching. It seemed impossible to find a lead when every other profile looked more like a rap sheet than a dating resume, but I kept going, for Kimmy. I’m glad I did, too, because only a minute or so later I stumbled upon a profile picture that literally stopped my breath. It was a closeup of a man’s face. He was tan and thin, with high cheekbones and an impossible jaw line. He had thick, neatly trimmed eyebrows and hair like black fire. And those eyes…those cold, vacant eyes…even through the picture on my cell phone screen, pierced right through my soul, a direct line. I couldn’t breathe.
It had to be him, the beautiful man I kept hearing about.
I scrolled through the rest of his profile, but there was no other information except a name: Pike. That was it, just the name and the picture, but I suppose it was enough. So, I did what countless others had done before me, I swiped right, which invited him to like my profile. It was my only way of making progress on my search for Kimmy. My thinking was that he likely swiped right on every profile, maximizing his chances of creating a match, which then would allow him to contact his victims directly.
But I was no victim. I was the hunter of hunters. I’d be getting my friend back, come hell or high water. If it turned out to be too late to save her, then may god have mercy on his soul. I made a promise to myself, right then and there, that if he so much as put a scratch on my Kimmy, I’d cut out that psycho’s ghostly eyes and keep them in a jar on my bookshelf. I gripped the handle of the knife that was folded up inside my pocket.
Try me, asshole.
My phone vibrated. A direct message from Pike himself. “Meet?” That was all it said. Dude wasn’t even trying to play it cool. Kimmy fell for this? I sighed. It was all so depressing.
“Where?” I typed back.
“The Cliff. Hallway. Ten minutes.”
My heart was racing, but I was as ready as I’d ever be. I agreed to meet with him, then spent the next few minutes just staring at Pike’s profile picture, thinking I could somehow trick my mind into becoming immune to the magnetism of his eyes. Those white rings blazed from the screen so intensely that all the other details of his face faded into darkness. Eventually, his eyes were all I could see. I felt like they were pushing into me, like a branding iron, scorching my flesh and claiming me as property. I could hardly look away, but somehow I managed to turn off my screen and break the tension. That’s when I really started to panic. I was just like the others. I was in over my head. I wouldn’t be able to think clearly. Not with those eyes staring at me…
I considered turning back. It wasn’t too late. But I just couldn’t do it. I had to be brave, for Kimmy, and hell, for all the others that had fallen into his trap as well. There was a chance I could save them all. I had to come up with a plan, and fast.
Now where was the goddamn duct tape?
After making quite a mess in my kitchen, I finally located it and slid the roll down over my left forearm, then took a look at the time. Two minutes.
Panic surged.
I thought if perhaps I went over all the necessary steps to launch my attack before he launched his, then it might serve in putting my mind at ease. If I’d learned anything in life, it was that anxiety was conquered through baby steps. So, in my head, I repeated: left hand taser, right hand knife, tape the son of a bitch up.
After around four or five cycles, I felt I was ready to step out into the hallway. I took a deep breath and opened the door, still repeating the steps inside my head.
Left hand taser, right hand knife, tape the son of a bitch up. Left hand taser, right hand knife, tape the son of a bitch up—He was standing at the end of the hallway, near the stairwell, a mystical thing suspended against the peeling yellow wallpaper. I saw him, before he saw me—Left hand taser, right hand knife, tape the son of a bitch up—I tried my best to step carefully, to creep up on him, to catch him off guard—Left hand taser, right hand knife, tape the son of a bitch up—Once I was about ten feet away from him, something triggered his senses and he turned his head towards me—Left hand taser, right hand knife—Then there they were, those unblinking buckshot eyes, boring holes right through me—Tape the son of a bitch up—But no matter how many steps I took towards him, he was always out of reach—Left hand taser, right hand—Those eyes, those vacant fucking eyes…
That’s when I fell, just like all the others, down through the trapdoor.
I never saw it coming.
I had no idea how far I fell down the chute, but it seemed like I was falling forever. I had to shut my eyes for all the debris that was stirring up. Tiny granules, the consistency of sand or dirt, covered the bottom of the chute and bounced around me in a cloud of dust as I slid over them. Initially, I thought I was the one pushing them along, but once I finally reached the end of the chute, I realized what was happening.
Salt was pouring down on me from somewhere far above. There was so much of it, that the entire end of the chute was clogged. As much as I tried, I couldn’t push through any farther. I soon found myself buried inside it. In a panic, I beat against the steel walls and shouted for help, hoping that someone, somewhere would hear me.
But nothing, no one.
The salt continued to rain down from above, mercilessly, until at last my screams were silenced by it. My legs were stone, my arms pinned. I became trapped inside a sarcophagus of salt.
It would’ve been my fate too, had it not been for the salt giving way at my feet only minutes later, carved out by two plastic snow shovels. The walls of salt surrounding me all at once softened and slid away from my body, then hands twisted around my ankles and pulled me clear from the chute, until finally I was sitting on a heap of salt on the floor of some unknown space, looking my dear Kimmy right in the eye.
Her face and arms and even her clothes looked several tints lighter, as her entire body was covered in layers of dusty salt, but I recognized her immediately, and she recognized me too. We threw our arms around one another and spun amongst those salt heaps in pure elation, but the moment was short-lived. We were still trapped.
I looked around the room and there were eight others shoveling salt, and not a single one paid us any attention. They remained focused on their work, as if they were just cogs in some perpetual motion machine. That’s when Kimmy handed me a shovel and said she’d explain everything as we worked. At first I was confused, but I nodded in agreement and mirrored her every move. We slid our shovels under the pile of salt that had collected there at the bottom of the chute, then emptied them onto the end of a conveyor belt that ran through the center of the room. We repeated this process six times before enough salt had been cleared for Kimmy to start with her explanation.
She said the salt never stopped. It came down the chute and piled up on the floor at the exact rate in which they were able to shovel it away. No progress was ever made. They were only able to work fast enough to keep from going under. She said they didn’t know where the salt came from, but that she had an idea of why it was there.
“There’s a room on the other side of that wall there,” she said, emptying another round of salt onto the conveyor. “It’s full of smoke. Sometimes you can see it leaking into this room through that tiny opening, right where this conveyor belt feeds through.”
I looked down at the belt, watching as it carried her salt pile through the center of the room, straight into an opening that was only six inches wider than the belt itself. The pile of salt was much too large to fit through, so once it reached the opening, the excess of it just vibrated there against the wall, settling evenly across the belt until at last it had dwindled enough that the entire pile sifted itself through.
“If you look through that opening long enough, you’ll see some strange things,” she continued. “It’s mostly just dark and full of smoke, but every now and then a flame will spark and you can catch a glimpse of the thing living there on the other side of that wall.”
“Living?” I asked, confused at how something could be living inside a room full of smoke. “You’re saying something is alive in there?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes my eyes play tricks on me. You know, the smoke, the salt—they can distort things, for sure, but I swear I saw a body in there once. Looked human. It was lying on some table or something, it suddenly sparked with fire, which was how I could see it, and it was moving. Not much, but it was definitely moving, breathing. The last time I looked, I thought I saw more than one…”
“Kimmy, humans can’t live inside a room of smoke. They wouldn’t be able to breathe.” I felt like an asshole saying it, as it seemed to be common knowledge, but I just had to mention it at the chance that perhaps it hadn’t crossed her mind. “And you say it was on fire?”
“I’m just telling you what I saw,” she said, biting her bottom lip, something she always did when she was embarrassed. “You know how it is in the tower. Things are just different here.”
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