Apartment 16 by Adam Nevill

Author:Adam Nevill
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Horror - General, Horror, Horror & Ghost Stories, Fiction
ISBN: 9780330514965
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2010-08-15T07:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

At 3 a.m. Seth let himself into apartment sixteen. And until twenty past the hour, stood still.

The moment he flicked the lights on, shards of a recent nightmare fell out of his memory: the black and white marble tiles, the long reddish walls of the hallway, the ancient doors, the large rectangular paintings arranged in perfect symmetry, and all lit up by the dirty light struggling to escape from the discoloured glass of the shades. Yes, he had been here before. It was like a prolonged sense of déjà vu and it defied all the rules in life he’d taken for granted.

But one significant detail was different. In the dream, the paintings had been uncovered. Now, they were concealed by long sheets of aged cloth. Seth closed the front door behind him. Wincing, he dropped the steel key ring from his damaged hand into the pocket of his trousers.

Something had drawn his attention to this place. Something that moved within as he passed the front door. Something that had called out to him through the house phone and implanted visions in his sleeping mind. Something that had followed him home.

His troubles had intensified right after the first disturbance in this flat. What he had put down to depression and sleep deprivation and isolation could be attributed to this place. He felt it.

Impossible, but confirmed. Right here and right now.

And it was inevitable he would come in here. He had been summoned.

He shuddered. It felt like shock, seeing this. But the circling of his frantic thoughts ceased. For the first time in so long, his mind was clear of everything but a terror that escalated into awe. A feeling so acute he could barely draw breath.

Into the hallway he walked slowly, on unsteady feet, unable to postpone any longer this rendezvous with a place that had been empty for half a century.

All of the interior doors off the hallway were closed, and he recoiled at the thought of opening the middle door on the left-hand side, the door leading into the place where the definition of walls, floor and ceiling had been worn away by a freezing infinity of darkness, where things he had mistaken for paintings suddenly moved. At first around him, and then all over him. The sensation had come out of the dream with him, still clinging.

Pausing by the first painting in the hallway, Seth willed himself to lift the dusty muslin from the picture frame. It was the size of a large window. With trembling fingers he unhooked the fabric from the bottom corner of the heavy frame. He tried to raise it slowly. But as he disturbed the bottom of the sheet, so loosely wrapped about the frame, it dropped with a heavy sweep and landed on the floor with a whump.

Like a blow to the gut, the impact of the thing depicted in oil paint hit him immediately. This shock swiftly turned into nausea and disorientation, as if the contorted thing in the suit and tie was transmitting its torment directly into his own body.

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