1
When the aging apartment building finally collapsed, there were seven people, two families, still stuck on the upper floors. It took days of increasingly desperate and ultimately devastating recovery work to locate and retrieve their rotting remains from the rubble. In the years leading up to the collapse, the building had failed repeated safety inspections, and all of the required renovations to the structure had been ignored by the criminally negligent owner. Two days prior to its undoing, the building had finally been condemned by the city and a full evacuation of the premises had been ordered.
With the two remaining families still present in the topmost floor, the building suddenly began to creak and quake. Prior to the evacuation, the electrical system had been shutdown to stop the risk of a fire, rendering the elevator inoperable. This meant that the evacuating families would have to rely on the stairs. Outside, everyone had been accounted for, save for the two doomed families, and as the structure failed, it was immediately apparent that those remaining inside were now doomed. The seven tenants had been gathering a few belongings, believing they still had time. Hearing the cracks expand up the frame of the building, they desperately took their children by the hands and rushed into the stairwell just as the building began to shake and a terrible rumble rose from below. In seconds, the entire structure came down, crushing the seven family members in a tomb of cement, wire, and steel. Outside, those gathered watched in shocked horror as the old building folded in on itself and then collapsed, sucking the two families down into oblivion.
In the aftermath of the accident, the owner of the building was arrested and charged with negligent homicide, as well as a host of other charges, which seemed to satiate the public fervor for action. The relatives of the seven victims sued the city, which settled out of court for an undisclosed (rumored to be large) amount. And in a matter of months all that remained of the apartments was a large square patch of dirt denoting the footprint of the building.
The land ended up in a sort of legal limbo as several failed business deals came and went. One disaster after another seemed to befall the chain of contracts which had been drafted and then abandoned in the ensuing years.
The years turned into decades, and the once affluent part of town that hosted the assortment of high-end residential and shopping complexes had since devolved into an urban wasteland. All of the surrounding buildings were either demolished, or abandoned. What remained was an overgrown no man's land populated by a number of homeless people who took residence in the relative shelter provided by the dilapidated buildings.
Weeds and brush had fully overtaken the area over the years. Any crack in the pavement saw tufted pockets of tall grass and weeds muscling through. The area was home to a colony of rats and a parallel colony of feral cats who fed on the rodents. And yet despite it all, nothing ever grew in the debris riddled dirt of the building’s foundation. No weeds, no grass, nothing. Even the vermin steered clear of the accursed site. The homeless regulars also stayed well shy of the site, as decades of rumors had led to the common belief that the empty lot was under the influence of something supernatural.
2
Crazy Gray woke before the sunrise, his head still reeling from drink, as per usual. He labored to his feet, stumbled to the crumbling edge of the parking garage’s topmost level, and released an acrid stream of stinking booze piss into the cold morning air. Under his breath, he deeply exhaled and then kicked into his usual atonal, gravelly rendition of the same Frankie Valli tune he’d sung since he was a child. His mother would sing the song to him every morning before sending him off to school, and singing it now seemed to make him feel like maybe her spirit was still around out there, even though Gray really didn’t believe any of that stuff.
It was strange thinking back to those years now. Living in the harsh reality of the streets, he felt as if he had smuggled someone else’s memories into his jaded mind. His moment-to-moment existence had little room for nostalgia. The one exception he allowed was his reminiscence of his mother. In his mind he could still recollect the warmth of his mother’s breath as she kissed him goodbye each day. He could recall the pinching bite of the pine-scented cleaner she used on their hardwood floors. He could still hear the bus driver honking the horn to hurry him along. He wished he could go back and do it all again. But that life was over now, and he wasn’t going back.
Standing there in the abandoned garage, he felt the cold wind cut through the open floor with nothing to break its chill. He was constantly assaulted by the smell of trash and stale urine that permeated the entire area. All he could hear was a couple of bums arguing somewhere in the distance. But in his head, there was the faint echo of his silly little song—Frankie Valli’s falsetto ringing on and on.
There was a time when he was upwardly mobile, focused, driven hard into the promise of American largesse. He had made partner in the criminal law firm that hired him directly out of law school. His custom home was being built, his student loans were paid off, he drove a luxury car, and he was about to propose to his girlfriend. He had even picked out an absurdly expensive diamond ring. And then it all went to hell.
It was a Friday morning when he pulled into his firm’s lot and found a large number of black cars parked around the entrance to the office. A number of big stoic men in black suits were entering the office and exiting with boxes of files. He parked in his named spot, got out and headed up to scene. He was stopped by one of the black suited men, who eyed Gray with suspicion.
“Whoa, hold up there, buddy,” the man said in a deep monotone.
“I work in that building,” Gray told the man. “In the law office.”
“Yeah, well no one is going in there today,” the man said. “We are serving out a federal warrant and the office will be closed until further notice. Now move on.”
They were federal agents serving a warrant on his firm? This was not good. he called his buddy Paul, one of the longer term partners, who told Gray that the office was under investigation for some dirty dealings that supposedly involved some clients of the firm who worked in the national government.
“What the fuck?” Gray was stunned. “Did you know about this?”
“I knew something was going on, yeah, but I had no idea it was this big. needless to say, the office is finished and we are out of a job. And also, don’t be surprised if they come to you asking questions. It’s going to be rough going for a while. Buckle in,” Paul said.
“Fucking hell,” Gray said.
“Fucking hell, indeed.”
On his way back home, he stopped at the liquor store and picked up a 3 liter plastic bottle of bottom shelf vodka and some orange juice. Might as well start pinching now, he thought. At the register he ditched the juice, deciding to go commando. When he reached his condo he was surprised to see that not only was his girlfriend’s car in the drive, there was a bright red Ferrari parked in his spot. He parked at the curb, grabbed his things, and headed inside. As soon as he was inside the home he heard sound coming from the bedroom in the back of the house. As he carefully approached the bedroom he heard Janet moaning and screaming “Yes, yes, right there, right there, don’t stop,” over and over. His stomach sank. He felt like he was falling into a giant pit. He flung the door open and there was Janet on her back, her legs splayed wide, knees pulled up to her ears, while a young, muscular, tanned blonde man was pumping away inside of her like a construction worker. His tight little white ass digging into Janet like a jackhammer.
As he stepped into the musky nightmare, Janet’s eyes met his at the the exactly moment of her climax, and she stared directly at him as her acrylic nails tore into the impossible orange flesh of her mount. Seething inside with rage and brimming with betrayal, he took a step towards the nightmarish sight. But before taking another step something in him just flipped like a switch and he pivoted and simply turned around, closing the door behind him. He got back into his car and drove away.
She called him later that evening and when he saw her name, he silenced his phone. she left a voicemail telling him she had moved out and not to contact her anymore, but that she was keeping the ring. When he returned to the condo, her things were indeed gone, as were a number of his own things, such as the TV and the High-end HIFI system he’d bought himself to celebrate his now useless promotion.
He sat on his modern, modular couch and cried like a child, cried for the first time in his adult life. And then he started drinking.
And he never stopped drinking.
He drank so much he was blacked out on his bathroom floor through the hour of a scheduled interview at another prestigious law firm. he drank through several more. He burned through his savings, forcing him to sell the condo. He destroyed his car by driving it into a wall (a stunt of which he had no recollection). And he spent several days over Christmas sleeping off a bender which ended with his being arrested for trying to force himself on a woman he’d met at a bar (another stunt that drew blanks in his sodden memory).
Within the year he was living in a broken down van he’d bought with his remaining $500 cash. It was nothing more than a rusted-out box with a filthy mattress and a running collection of plastic bottom-shelf vodka bottles.
One day the police came and took the van to an impound lot, so the man took to sleeping under overpasses and behind retail strip centers, eating trash, panhandling for cash, and drinking almost all of it away.
By the time he had taken up residence in the abandoned and unfinished building next to the dirt lot, he was barely 100 lbs., had matted hair, was filthy, and looked two to three times his thirty five years. he had acquired the street name Crazy Gray, thanks to his notorious drunken antics, as well as the prematurely gray hue that was overtaking his knotted mane by the day.
He always found it odd that no one else ever stayed in the same garage in which he’d made camp. For whatever reason, people were scared to set foot inside the place. Gray never bothered to ask why, happy to have a place to himself, free of random beatings and police raids. he wasn’t a believer in the supernatural, but if he was being honest with himself, there was an odd but perceptible sense of unease that he felt whenever he was in the garage. But he was usually so drunk he didn’t notice.
He most noticed the odd sense of threat whenever he got up to pee, or whatever hour he eventually awoke from his drunken slumber. There was a certain feeling—nagging, almost—always hanging around in the background of his muddled mind. Something about that lot bothered him. It was undeniable, and no amount of drink made it go away. So one day, he broke down and asked someone about it.
He was standing in line at the closest shelter—they served free lunches on Tuesdays—and he brought the subject up with a chatty older man standing behind him in line. The man had obviously lived on the streets for a long time, and he was bound to know as much as anyone about what was what in their debased little part of town.
Crazy Gray started off with a little chit chat about other spots around town that served free food, shelters with available beds, trying to soften up the old man. Once they were engaged in conversation, Gray slowly pushed their talk towards the subject of the lot. And right away the old man bristled, his body stiffening, and he quickly lowered his voice to almost a whisper.
“Watch yo-seff Gray, I tell you right now, that place ain’t nooo good. You bess be stayin’ away from that place for yo own good. Don’t nothin’ good come from that old lot. You know what happened there, don’t you?”
“I don’t,” Gray said, his own voice barely audible now.
“Thass the old Williams Tower, the place that fell down, takin’ them families with it. You heard of it?”
“I have,” Gray said. “But what’s the problem with it? And don’t tell me it’s haunted or some shit. Even I’m not crazy enough to believe that.”
“Not haunted, brother, it’s mo’ like it’s cursed. A doorway, man. A bridge from someplace real bad to here. Nothing stay’ there for long, and ain’t no one goes near it no more. Too much pain. Thass a dead place. How you gon’ sleep in that place and not feel it? You surely is crazy, Gray.”
But he had felt it. And hearing about the lot out loud made him realize how strong those feelings had been. He had already noticed that when he was in the garage next to the lot he never felt quite right. At first he attributed it to being so isolated, since none of the other street people ever went near the place. Once the old man laid it out for him, though, it all came together in sickening clarity. They stayed away from the place because they’d felt it too. His stubborn ass had simply done his best to ignore it. But now it had finally gotten to him.
Gray wanted to talk more, had so many questions, but they had reached the end of the line, and someone in a stained white coat handed him a Styrofoam bowl and ladled a thin vegetable soup into it, splashing some on his hand. The old man saw someone he knew and told Gray to be careful and then headed off, own soup in hand, to reach his friend.
3
That night, with a sense of foreboding, Gray returned to his spot in the abandoned garage. He peered down to the empty, fallow lot, and while nothing looked any different than it had before, he felt acutely uneasy.
A bridge from someplace real bad . . .
He told himself that he was just letting the old man get to him, that it was all a slice of street lore told by a bunch of superstitious bums. But he couldn’t deny it anymore. Something very wrong was happening down there, no matter how forgettably banal it appeared. That night, to deal with his apprehension about the vacant lot, Gray downed an entire bottle of vodka and passed out cold.
it was some time before sunrise when Gray awoke, sitting upright, his head swimming in alcohol. He was still very drunk, and he felt a thick web of confusion clotting his mind. He gradually remembered that he had been dreaming of being trapped, as if beneath a tremendous weight. He was completely immobile. Panic rushed through him like a flash flood, and he realized that he was struggling to breathe. With each labored intake of breath he would take soil into his mouth. To his horror, it dawned on him that he had somehow been buried alive. Knowing that he would soon run out of oxygen he began to scream for help. Gasping between screams, he was taking more soil into his mouth, soil he almost swallowed. And then he thought he heard a sound somewhere above him.
He stopped gasping for air and turned his head as much as he could manage. It was a baby’s cry. No, that wasn’t quite it. more than one baby. Yes, babies wailing in a horrible and shrill cascade of horror.
He began to feel lightheaded, and in a matter of a minute or so, he was about to lose consciousness and die in this closed grave. And then it occurred to him that he could no longer hear the babies crying. And just as he faded into nothingness the earth above him began to shift. he could feel the soil perceptibly shifting just above him now. Suddenly something burst through the soil and bumped against his chest. He realized that it was a hand, because there were now fingers gripping his shirt. With a firm grasp, the hand began to pull the man from the earth with absurd strength.
He started to see light breaking through the soil shifting as he was pulled up and out from his grave.
It was when his face finally broke through that he saw the horrible visage of the thing that pulled him from the earth.
It was a woman, or it had been a woman, because now it was more of a desiccated and withered husk of a person. The flesh was drawn, greyed and shriveled. The eyes were still in the sockets, but they had long since lost any signs of life. They lulled in their sockets like pale grapes. The mouth of the thing hung impossibly open, dirt, rocks and insects pouring from its terrible, gaping maw. The thing was naked, its rag-like clothing almost entirely rotted away, and her dead, flaccid breasts hung from her chest, empty, dried out, and gruesome. In her other hand she held a baby. But like the woman, the baby had been dead for a very long time. The last thing he saw before he woke up was the thing clutching the dead baby to her sagged parchment-like breast. The baby made disgusting raspy sucking sounds, as if there was any point to its efforts. And then he saw another of the things clutching another dessicated shell of a child pointlessly suckling at its wrinkled bag of parchment. And behind them both, more of the horrible, withered husks, belching noxious gas and dust into the air, while dirt and insects fell from their gaping maws. Gray started to scream.
4
Bolt upright on his bed of sweat and grease soaked broken down boxes and newspaper pages, Gary was wrought with terror at the unyielding believability of that horrid dream. Usually when he awoke after heavy drink it was to pee over the open edge of the abandoned building’s frame, and then, bladder empty, he would pass back out. This night brought nothing but terror.
Gray believed without a doubt that the people who died in that collapse were still here somehow. Still here, but horribly changed. He also believed with great and terrible clarity that they were hungry. And worst of all, he knew they were coming for him.
The vodka came up like an acrid fountain, spewing from his mouth in rank spurts, spilling on his clothes, the smell bringing it all up. And he remained on his knees, dry heaving into the air while he pissed his pants for the first time in decades.
He had to get out of there. Now.
5
He stood as fast as he could, which wasn’t fast at all, and almost lost his balance anyway. Remaining unsteady on his feet, he didn’t even consider grabbing anything. He just wanted out. Pathetically, Gray wobbled down the twisting ramp of the garage in something closer to falling than walking. It took about five minutes in his state to make it down the garage. As he made the final turn his toe caught the concrete pillar to his right, and he overstepped, trying to right himself. There was a loud crack that echoed through the garage as his tibia snapped like a wet branch wrapped in a towel. Lying on the ground in agonizing, eye tearing pain, he shrunk in horror as the blurry sight of several dark, withered figures shambled towards him. His eyes were blurred from the pain, but he could still see that the way they moved was unnatural. And he knew immediately what they were and what they wanted. And then the babies began to cry.
Love it man, great story! Really enjoyed it!