P. Frank Winslow leaned back from his laptop and rubbed his eyes. This self-publishing shit was a lot more involved than he’d thought.
But then, he hadn’t really been thinking when he’d threatened to publish Dark Apocalypse on his own. He’d been pissed and wanted to shove their lawsuit threats back in their faces. Like he was going to let some glorified Elk’s club dictate what he could write about. Were they kidding?
Last night, a corner of his mind had seen himself uploading the Word doc, clicking a PUBLISH button, and voila!—Dark Apocalypse would go on sale under his Phillip F. Winter pseudonym. He hadn’t considered the small matter of a cover.
So he’d spent much of the morning searching for an appropriate piece of art and then working it through a cover creator. Those wasted hours were wreaking havoc with his Daily Duty.
He stared at the result on his screen and hated it. He couldn’t imagine buying a book with a cover like that, so why should he think anyone else would? Was he actually going to have to pay someone good money to create a cover for him? Frankie hated that even more.
Take a break. That was it: Get up, stroll around a bit, then come back with fresh ideas.
Trouble was, his fourth-floor one-bedroom walkup didn’t afford much strolling space. The front room doubled as living room and office, furnished with his laptop on the desk, a couch, and a TV. And bookshelves, of course, mostly stocked with copies of his titles.
He made a circuit of the room, then stepped into his little eat-in kitchen and put some water on to boil. A cup of tea would be good about now. From the kitchen he wandered to the sparsely furnished bedroom but stopped inside the door as a breeze wafted against his face.
Where was that coming from? He kept his windows closed pretty much all year round. He checked them now—yep, both locked up tight. But still that faint breeze. It seemed to be coming from the rear corner, behind the nightstand.
Years ago, when his mother had downsized, he’d moved his old bedroom furniture from Harrisburg to NYC. The bed was a twin and plenty big enough for him, but the furniture was heavy maple. He’d damn near given himself a hernia moving it all in here, and now he risked one again as he grunted and groaned to angle the nightstand out from the wall for a look.
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
A section of the floor, maybe three feet in length, appeared to have separated from the side wall. Just a few inches, but if he angled his head right, he could see into the apartment below.
This wasn’t good. In fact, this could be very bad. The building dated from the late 1940s, which made it like three-quarters of a century old. It just might be coming apart. He didn’t want to be here if it decided to come crashing down.
He understood how he’d missed the gap, hidden away as it was on the floor behind the nightstand. But it opened into the ceiling of the apartment below. How had anyone missed that?
He decided to go check.
He didn’t know his neighbors much beyond a non-committal nod in the hallways. Didn’t really want to. Not because he didn’t like them or anything, but he wasn’t looking for friends here. He had a few writer friends around the city and they’d get together now and again for drinks and dinner and to bitch about the industry. But truth was he’d actively avoided making friends in the building. He had to bang out a minimum of 2K words every day—what he called his Daily Duty—to keep the royalties flowing and pay the rent.
Frankie took the graffiti-bedizened stairway down to the third floor. Apartment 3F was directly below his own 4F. He knocked and waited while he assumed he was being checked out through the peep hole. Then he knocked again.
Finally, a tentative “Who’s there?” from the other side.
“Hey, there. I live above you. I think we share some structural damage. Mind if I come in and take a look?”
The door opened and a familiar wrinkled black face peeked out. He recognized her but her name was a blank space in his mind. He’d helped her carry her groceries up the stairs more than a few times.
“I know you,” she said in her Jamaican accent. “You that writer mon.”
He bowed. “One and the same, ma’am. Look, I won’t be a minute but I’d just like to check out your ceiling.”
She hesitated, then swung the door open. “I guess I can trust you.”
“Seriously”—what the hell was her name?—“I’ll be just a sec.”
The rooms of her apartment were laid out exactly like his but hers were richly redolent of cooking spices. Jerk chicken, maybe? His mouth watered as he hurried through the front room to the bedroom where—
He stared in shock. The ceiling was perfect.
“Whassa mattah?” she said, coming up behind him.
He stepped closer for a better look. A few minor cracks in the plaster, sure, but no three-inch gap. No gap at all.
How could this be? Was he in the wrong apartment?
He took a mental picture of the bottles and hairbands and such on the dresser right under the spot where the gap should be, then mumbled a lame excuse and hurried upstairs.
Back in his apartment he made a beeline for his bedroom and dragged the nightstand a little farther from the wall—just enough for him to squeeze in behind it for a better look below. Good thing he was skinny. He knelt and craned his neck, but as he leaned on the edge he felt it soften—not crumble but soften and—
“Oh, Christ!”
—he tumbled through.
He managed to swing his legs under him and land partially on his feet in a crouch, then plopped onto his butt, damaging nothing beyond his pride. As he straightened he looked around and saw a king-size bed and a dresser against the wall, but its top was bare and made of a different wood from the old Jamaican woman’s. He’d landed in someone else’s apartment.
Whose then? Not some trigger-happy drug dealer with an AK-47, he hoped. Best to announce himself to avoid surprises. That gap in the corner of the ceiling showed where he’d come through. He could explain everything.
“Hello?” he called, moving toward the door. “Hello?”
No reply, so he peeked out into the short hall leading to the front room. Empty. And the front room looked empty too.
Yes!
One more try: “Hello?”
Again, no answer. He had the place to himself. Okay. Not a good idea to exit by the door—someone might see him and think he was up to no good. Best to go back the way he’d arrived.
In the bedroom he dragged the dresser—luckily it didn’t weigh much—under the opening, then placed a chair atop it. Now all he had to do was stretch and haul himself back into his own place. As soon as he was home, he’d get on the line to the property manager.
He pushed his head and chest above the floor line and was straining to lever the rest of himself up when he heard a sound in his living room. He froze and listened.
His apartment door had just opened, and now it closed. Softly.
He opened his mouth to call out but then shut it. He’d locked the door—a reflex when you lived in a place like this—which meant the intruder either had a key or had picked the lock. Frankie had never given a key to anyone.
Shit. Someone was boosting his place.
What would Jake Fixx do?
Well, fuck that. His recurring character—written under his own name—was an ex SEAL who could take down multiple attackers with ease. And what was he? A sedentary writer with atrophied muscles who hadn’t worked out since his teens.
He’d wait it out and hope he wasn’t discovered.
But the big question was why—why would anyone break into his place? He had no valuables beyond his laptop, which wasn’t particularly high end anyway. And even if that were stolen, all his work was backed up in Dropbox. So who—?
Wait. The Septimus folks? Could it be?
He’d been thinking of them as some sort of stuck-up BPOE group, but at the meeting last night the two honchos there had said the Octogon Brotherhood in Frankie’s book was too much like Septimus for comfort. The Octogon had come to him in one of his dreams—utterly ruthless, eliminating anyone who got in its way like the average Joe would swat a fly. And those Septimus honchos had made it very clear they did not want Dark Apocalypse published.
Had they sent someone to make sure that didn’t happen? Ever?
This was the kind of stuff he wrote about. Fiction. It didn’t happen in real life—at least not to him.
Frankie held his breath as the intruder stomped into his bedroom. He watched the guy’s Nikes through the one-inch gap between the rug and the bottom of the nightstand. Saw him get down on his hands and knees and check under the bed.
Please don’t look back here! Please, don’t look back here!
He didn’t. Frankie released his breath when the guy stormed out of the room.
What to do? He couldn’t stay here, balancing on a chair set atop a dresser. His best bet was to—
Out in the front room, the intruder started to talk to someone. Were there two of them?
“Hey, it’s Belgiovene. I’m in the guy’s apartment but he’s not around…yeah, his laptop’s here, open and running, so I don’t think he’ll be out long.”
Sounded like he was on a phone.
“Well, in a way this works out better. I’ll lock his door just like he left it and be waiting for him when he wanders back in…right, won’t know what hit him…and yeah-yeah, I know: Take the laptop.” A pause, then a muttered, “Fuck you, Drexler. This ain’t my first rodeo.”
The realization that this guy was here to either kill him or beat the crap out of him almost tumbled Frankie off the chair. Time to retreat. Bending his shaky knees and praying he didn’t lose his balance, he lowered himself to the dresser and then to the floor.
Okay. No heroics. Call the cops and report a thief or a home invader or whatever in his apartment. He pulled out his phone, punched in 9-1-1, and waited. When no one answered, he repeated. Then he noticed No Service on the screen. How could that be? The only place in this city with no service was a deep basement or a subway tunnel without a repeater.
He stepped into the kitchen and grabbed the wall phone there but got no dial tone. And what the fuck—a rotary phone?
Had to find a spot with a signal.
He hurried out to the hall but stopped when he reached it. None of this looked familiar. And the number on the apartment door said 11-M. No way. He’d come down to the third floor, right below his own place.
Feeling like reality was slipping away, he hit the stairs and stopped again. What happened to all the graffiti? The stairwell had been coated with bullshit tags. This one was clean—totally clean.
Shaky now, he hurried up to the next floor—supposed to be the fourth but the door was labeled 12.
What’s going on?
He peeked down the hall. His was the fifth door down and it stood open. In fact, all the apartment doors were open.
And then the silence hit him. He realized he hadn’t heard a human voice or a single note of music since he’d left 11-M. That just didn’t happen in his building. Some asshole was always blasting rap or salsa or something equally obnoxious behind one of the doors.
Where is everybody?
Frankie crept down the hall and peeked into his own place.
Except it wasn’t his place. The furniture wasn’t the same, the walls were a different color, no work desk, no laptop, no bookshelves, and…and the emptiness was palpable. The whole building felt deserted.
He stepped to the nearest window where he looked out on a city he’d never seen before. He didn’t know where he was but that wasn’t the Lower East Side out there. Nothing on the skyline looked familiar. And worse—nothing was moving—empty streets, empty sidewalks. The place looked like a ghost town.
“Shit!”
Before he knew it he was fleeing along the hall and down the stairs and back to 11-M. He’d take his chances with Belgiovene or whatever he called himself. At least he’d be back in New York, not this…this empty movie set.
He charged into the bedroom and began to climb onto the dresser when he noticed that the ceiling was intact. No gap. Not even a crack. Sealed up as if nothing had ever been wrong.
Frankie kneeled on the chair and pounded on the ceiling where the gap had been.
“No! NO!”