Estimated reading time — 18 minutes

Growing up, my family used to joke that I slept so deeply even a brutal murder couldn’t wake me up. I now know that’s not true.

Screams echoed through my apartment from the unit below mine, five tortured voices piercing through the floor at such a volume I could only imagine those downstairs had gone deaf. I almost jumped out of the bed like a surprised cat leaping through the air, barely keeping myself on my feet as my sleepiness evaporated.

All while shrieks and wails erupted from beneath my feet. Several different voices crying out like someone was skinning them alive, then setting fire to their mutilated bodies. I scrambled for my cell phone charging on my nightstand, nearly dropping it twice before bringing it up just to be greeted by no bars and no internet.

And a low battery. The power had apparently gone out.

Still the screams continued, but a voice disappeared. Another dropped from the chorus, then more. Finally the last cut off until the loudest piercing cry of them all burst from below. Then came a thrashing that bombarded the walls and ceiling of the downstairs unit with thuds so heavy I half expected my floor to cave in. Yet even as run-down as my apartment complex was, it kept together.

I gave myself a bit to let my heart rate get back to something resembling normal, trying to work through the next steps in my head as I scrambled for a pair of shoes. What the Hell was that? Why did it happen at two in the morning?

Yet part of this felt all too familiar to me.

I gulped, getting my lanyard of keys around my neck as I scurried about the darkness in my pajamas, digging for something sturdy and heavy I could hold. I eventually found my dad’s old pipe wrench, worn and rusty but still a comfort in my hands. I pocketed my cell phone, letting my eyes adjust to what light snuck in past my venetian blinds. On the opposite side of the apartment complex was a nurse, probably woken up just like I had been. Maybe together we could…I didn’t know. But I couldn’t hide in my apartment this time. I slipped on a pair of shoes and moved to leave my apartment.

Darkness covered my door. Not a shadow that my phone could banish, but a glistening, black sheen that seemed to suck in the light and heat around it. The tremble returned to my hands as the darkness pooled in the center of my doorway, forming together into a glob of black goo that fell off and hit the carpet with a wet, thick thud.

The glob uncurled itself and stood up, taking on a shape far too familiar to me that made my stomach drop.

“It was your fault,” it hissed, raising a glistening finger at me. Every detail was the same as that day, from the various charity rubber bracelets on her wrists to the multilayered shirt and the hair tied back in a ponytail. But the eyes… those hadn’t been her eyes. Even as the rest of the thing took on her form, the eyes stayed glossy and black, like bottomless pools of darkness. “But you were too stupid. You’re just a worthless screw-up.”

“You can’t be here,” I choked out, my fingers tightening their grip.

“It was your fault!” she yelled as she leaped at me. I swung the wrench at the same time, smacking her at the waist and sending her to the side. Her entire body folded around the wrench before the force launched her; she didn’t weigh half as much as she should. Her body shattered my glass coffee table but she was on her feet like she hadn’t even noticed before leaping at me again. I was less ready this time, barely able to get my cumbersome weapon up to block her broken, jagged nails. The shards stuck within her body moved through it, traveling their way to her fingers as she continued to claw at me. I pushed her off me and backed away, glass crunching under my feet as she stared at me with a look of complete, utter betrayal.

“It was your fault!” She shrieked once more. I hit her over the head, caving in her entire skull and taking her to the ground, but her body grabbed me by my ankles and pulled my feet out from under me. My own head missed the edge of my recliner by inches, my thin shirt barely protecting me from the glass stuck in the carpet, a broken splinter of the wood frame nearly skewering my waist. I kept the wrench between us as she tried to rip it out of my hands, yelling at me. “You don’t deserve to live!” called out her broken voice from the gap in her neck, her head still smashed and mangled. She finally managed to yank my weapon out of my hands and readied her glass-covered fingers to grab for my throat.

But not before I took the skewer of wood and shoved it through her chest, piercing through the back like she was a balloon filled with sand. She froze in mid-air, gagging as her hands scrabbled for the wood before she finally slumped over onto me.

I gagged and spat as she began to dissolve, whatever blackness making up her form trailing down my body and into my mouth before I rolled her off. I resisted the urge to gag as I got back up, shaking myself. “This isn’t really her,” I told myself as the shivers came back. Her black form lost its detail and cohesion, vanishing into the carpet without so much as a stain. “This isn’t really happening!” One truth, and one lie that did nothing to calm the trembling.

I moved to the door, looking through the peep-hole and spying nothing but the hallway. My apartment complex had seen better days and even now less than half the units were occupied, the entire building needing a lot of work to bring it up to code. I had stayed here for so long I could almost remember when it hadn’t been crumbling and falling apart. I’d never been able to bring myself to leave.

But now I had to. I’d find somewhere with a signal and call… the cops? A priest? A biohazard cleanup crew? I’d call all of them if that’s what it took. The walls of my apartment felt like they were closing in, each dark corner looking like it might start glistening and coalescing into some other awful shape from my past. But outside was… whatever had caused this.

I made my choice as I ripped open the door and stepped out into the hall, shutting it behind me.

I wracked my brain as I tried to recall my fellow tenants. Who lived below me? Those voices… it must have been those college kids. I met the whole group once: Matt and Seth lived in the unit but must have had their girlfriends Brittany and Dana over. I had heard two men and two women screaming.

Wait. Who had been the fifth voice?

A mystery for later. I had to get out of this building. I moved down the hall using the dim emergency lighting, trying my best to keep quiet as I made my way to the stairwell. I slipped in and chose every step down to minimize the echoes, then two flights later I hit the ground floor. One of the exits lay a few units to the right and I hurried over.

A giant glob of black goo held the doors shut, with a matching sheen covering every inch of the windows. I turned around, looking at the other connecting hallways. There had to be another way out. Maybe someone else still renting a ground unit could let me in and we could escape through the windows. Unless they were all like this? I darted back to the stairwell, standing in the doorway as I listened.

Another scream broke the dead air, quickly cut off. A muffled sound like someone yelling. Then footsteps. I tightened my grip on the wrench when a shape came out of the darkness of the stairwell to the basement, wrapping around my midsection and mouth and pulling me into the shadows.

I struggled in the tight grip before realizing the hands that gripped me were human. They trembled just like I did. “Quiet, Mart,” whispered my assailant. Jack, the nurse who lived on the other end of the ground floor. “If you want to live, don’t move a muscle.”

I obeyed and he released his grip, both of us standing in the depths with our eyes glued to the doorway. The footsteps grew closer and then slowed, turning into a stalking gait. I felt every last hair on my body stand up as the steps, no, stomps, reached the doorway.

Then I saw the source.

Even stooped over it nearly reached the ceiling, carried upright by the pads of some sort of massive wolf. Its entire dark body had once been covered in fur but was now a sea of scars and wounds, every last inch of ravaged flesh looking torn to pieces. Massive, swelling blisters of black fluid filled the skin that been spared. Two arms, far too long and far too thin for its size, nearly dragged against the floor with their massive claws, one of them holding something I couldn’t quite see past the rest of it. The hunch in its stooped back had been treated like some sort of sadistic pin cushion; it held seemingly every weapon humanity had ever imagined, from stone spear heads and a Roman gladius to meathooks and a rifle bayonet. None of it seemed to slow the horror down as it gazed down the hallway, long snout loaded with teeth that gave the face a permanent smile. Two black, glistening eyes like those of what had attacked me stared out from the sockets.

But what struck me most of all was the worst wound on its body. In its chest, where its heart should have been, was a massive, gaping crater. Muscles and organs lay inside, continuing to work like the body didn’t have a hole where a vital organ should be.

It stopped right before us, looking down the hall. I tried to think about what to do, a backup plan in case it looked our way and spotted us in the darkness, but I couldn’t tear any part of my focus away from it. I forgot about my weapon and my companion. In that moment I stopped being a human.

I was a rabbit before a fox. A mouse before a hawk. An insignificent insect an inch away from a toad that would snap me up in an instant and think nothing of it.

Another scream broke the silence, nearly making us jump and catching the attention of the horror. It turned in the hall, barely able to do so from its size, thankfully turning so it didn’t look down the stairwell. I could now see that it carried one of my downstairs neighbors… or at least what was left of Dominic. The beast dragged his torn-apart body by an arm, his legs long gone, a frozen look of horror on his face.

The monster’s chest heaved repeatedly, working through the pain of the innumerable wounds plaguing it until an ear-splitting roar erupted from its jaws. I resisted the urge to scream, risking the noise of moving my arms to cover my ears. The beast threw Dominic’s body down the hall and brought its claws to its face, scraping more of its flesh as it swayed back and forth. Its blisters swelled and grew, making the horror stagger before it brought its claws against them and ripped at its body. It tore them off and sent them flying around the hall as its roar morphed into a scream. One hit a wall where we could see it, the fluid coalescing into a glob that I knew all too well. It and the others melted into the surfaces they had hit, penetrating into more apartment units.

I had heard that wailing scream before.

At last it stepped away, returning down the hallway in pursuit of a human shriek coming from another apartment unit. Its slow stomps regained their faster pace and soon I could no longer hear it. Silence fell.

“Before you ask, I have no idea what the Hell’s going on,” said Jack. “This is not how I expected things to go after returning from a late shift. Power goes out the moment I get in and then a crapton of screams come out. My cat bails the moment the door is open and before I can get myself together I see that thing ripping Dominic apart.”

Dominic didn’t deserve that. “You got nothing?” I asked.

“I don’t exactly encounter giant torture demons on the floor all that often,” said Jack, moving a turned-off flashlight to his other hand so he could pull a vape pen from his pocket and take a drag. I couldn’t fault him. “Or whatever those globs are. Hell if I know what’s up with those.”

My thoughts returned to the black, glistening thing I had fought in my apartment. Some sort of growth from this monster? Yet its appearance and everything it spoke… There had to be more.

“Tell me,” I said. “The first screams you heard. What did they sound like?”

“Sounded like those college kids and their girlfriends,” he said, stroking his goatee. “Past that it’s just been a couple people here and there. Plus that… thing.” I could tell he’d be in a far worse state if it wasn’t for the pen in his hand. He offered it to me but I declined, even if it might help.

“Hopefully that thing stays on the ground floor,” I said. “Let’s go up a level.”

He nodded and we walked up the stairwell, keeping our steps light and doing everything we could to not make noise. That monster didn’t seem to possess supernatural sight or hearing but Dominic made an excellent display of why we didn’t want to get caught. We darted out onto the floor above and made our way down the other side of the hall.

As we passed the intersection I looked down the other hall and froze. Another glistening black shape, this one clearing six feet, dressed in torn jeans with work boots and a massive beer gut. “Open this damn door!” It growled. “You ignored me all these years and let me drink myself to death! This is your fault!” He seethed. “You knew I was hurting after mom died! Open!” Still no action from the other side of that door, so he pressed himself against it, his form seeping through the wood.

Jack nudged me. “Keep moving, man,” he said.

I nodded and we resumed. “What did… yours look like?” I asked.

His forehead creased, his mouth open for a bit before he regained his composure. “A woman I passed in the Tenderloin when I took that trip to see the Dead,” he said. “I didn’t stop to help. I wasn’t in the right state of mind for it, but by the time I was back she was gone. All her stuff was still there, though, what hadn’t been stolen.”

I nodded. “I saw something similar,” I said. “Someone from back when I first moved in here.” How long had it been since then?

A scream from the apartment we had watched shattered the air. “I really hope these kids kept notes,” said Jack as we at last reached it. The door had been ripped off its hinges and thrown against the wall, the frame broken as something had burst from within. “Yeah, I think they had something to do with it, Mart.”

We moved in, taking in what remained of their apartment. Four ripped-apart bodies thrown around the living room, limbs torn off like pulling the leg from a roasted chicken, blood everywhere. Dozens of candles scattered around, one spared from the destruction and still burning. I gagged from the everything of that room and stepped out in the hallway again to compose myself before turning back around.

I looked across the obliterated apartment, clinging to my wrench like a child would a teddy bear as monsters lurked in his closet. My eyes fell on Seth’s decapitated head, eyes wide and staring at nothing. I spotted his body nearby. “Kids these days,” I said. “Probably wouldn’t write it down. There’s no way they planned for this to happen.”

“So we’re screwed?” asked Jack. He looked at me, then followed my eyes to both parts of Seth. “Okay, no.”

“If I scream doing this, you can knock me out,” I said, grimacing and shutting my eyes as I moved my hand toward Seth’s blood-soaked body. I did my best to stifle a groan as I reached into his pockets, my fingers closing around his cell phone. I pulled it free and tried the screen. I had no idea what his code could be, but he had it set up for facial recognition and… well, he wasn’t in a state to object. I again fought the urge to vomit as I angled the phone at his face, thankfully rewarded for my efforts.

I rooted through his texts, spotting it all. Plans to try out something they had watched online. Saying they could do it as part of their group paper on local occult rituals. In this case, it was something called the “Koschei the Deathless Ritual.” Seth had been excited about it in case something actually did happen, Matt thought it was just a stupid online trend. Brittany and Dana went along but insisted they do the ritual someplace safe instead of where the video stated would cause the maximum effect. The internet was still out but Seth had thought to download the video.

“Hey guys, how’s it going?” called out the host, thanking his viewers before beginning. The video played out like some scary short story, describing a ritual to summon a demon that would terrorize the participants and make them confront their greatest guilt. The demon would actually be a human soul, someone caught in eternal torture for their transgressions, and they would be only be freed once they had made everyone in the house feel their pain. The building would be cut off from the outside world until the ritual ended.

“Just seems like silly campfire stuff,” said Jack. “Why the Hell is it a giant werewolf-looking thing?”

“The video says ‘house,’” I said, running it over in my head. “Idiots didn’t think it would treat the entire complex as a house for the ritual.” As the host kept on, none of it sounded like what was now stalking our halls. He mentioned the demon being unkillable, caught between life and death because of a vital organ missing from its body. He confirmed this organ must be destroyed to kill it and end the ritual, as the manifests of guilt couldn’t surive without the demon. However, the demon he described sounded like two people could pummel it to a pulp with bats.

Then came the line.

“Make sure you research the history of your location first,” said the host. “If you perform the ritual in a place haunted by death, such as an abandoned insane asylum or prison, it will summon the soul that caused the most torment there. He or she will be empowered by every victim taken and may be too much for even a large group to handle.”

Oh, fuck.

A lot more four-letter words followed as my eyes widened, so many memories running through my head from my early days in this complex. The police. The air that had fallen on everyone living here. The urging from my friends and family to move out, yet me still rooted in place. Trapped by my thoughts.

“Mart, what’s going on?” asked Jack, grabbing me by the shoulder and squeezing, catching my attention. “Breathe, man. Slow and deep.” I obeyed, trying to center myself. That was all in the past. I had done nothing wrong. I hadn’t been involved at all. A short time later my heart slowed down, Jack nodding and releasing me.

“Those kids had no idea,” I said. “Most people probably forgot at this point.” I shuddered. “But there’s a reason this place is so cheap. Why so few people stay and why the owners have been letting it crumble.”

“Who died here?”

I braced myself. “There used to be a unit in the basement,” I said. “Sealed off now. It used to belong to a man who’d been here even longer than I have. Gunnar.” I locked eyes with Jack. “He was a serial killer. He’d lure girls back to his apartment. I don’t think I need to tell you what happened next.” Dread fell on me. “Someone noticed him bringing home one of the girls and called the cops on him. They found him surrounded by what remained of his victims with a massive hole in his chest from a shotgun blast.”

“And that’s the thing we have stalking our halls?” said Jack, a tremble making its way into his voice even through the resin of courage he’d been dragging. “Wait. Video’s still going. Did he say where the Hell that organ is?”

I rewound a bit. “This organ can be found where the demon had met his or her end as a human,” said the host. We looked at each other and nodded. I dropped the phone and we darted back out to the stairwell, reaching it in just a few steps.

But not before another one of those black shapes, guilt given form, looked right at us. Another woman locked eyes with me. “You bastard,” she spat. “It’s your fault I’m like this!” A roar erupted from the other edge of the apartment complex, one floor down, and followed by stomps that shook the entire building as the demon Koschei charged up to meet us.

“Run!” I yelled right before we hurled ourselves down the stairwell, taking the steps five at a time to get as much distance between us and the deathless monster barreling toward our last location. At each stairwell another bit of guilt stood and damned us, reaching out with glistening fingers, each one a woman cursing me and damning me to the same punishment that our pursuer had endured. One tried to block our way but I managed to knock her down with a well-placed swing, not stopping to finish her off as we at last reached the basement.

Normally just a place for laundry, storage and garages, but now where once had been a bare concrete wall lay a massive, gaping hole, the inside of the chamber littered with rubble and debris. Everything within had been torn out, leaving a slab of cold, bare floor. The walls to the bathroom, kitchen and bedroom had been brought down, making the entire sealed unit a single empty chamber. Empty save for a dusty kitchen table in the back with a lone object placed upon it.

We darted in, Jack risking his flashlight in the pitch blackness as we converged on the table. Plopped in the center lay a heart, dead and gray, oddly mundane given the horror it had once belonged to. I didn’t hesitate for one second and brought the wrench down on the heart, cracking the table in half from the blow.

Dead silence. Then a chorus of accusations echoed down the nearby stairwell, followed by an ear-piercing shriek and footsteps growing ever closer. The heart lay on the floor, not so much as squeezed as if mocking us.

“The Hell, man?” said Jack. “You hit that thing dead on!”

I brought the wrench down on it again, but it felt like I had swung it against a steel beam. The heart endured the blows without any sign I had damaged it. It was just as indestructible as the body. I grabbed it, expecting a stomach-churning slick texture but instead feeling cold stone or metal under my fingers. “T-T-this has to be it!” I stammered. “What else could it be?”

The footsteps hit the basement floor, pace slowing, every hair on my body again sticking up. Our feet moved on their own, trying to keep us as far back in the chamber as possible. No point. We were trapped. I once again turned into an insect before a toad, trying to hide in a crack while the predator readied its tongue to grab me.

I pushed my wrench toward Jack, who accepted it. “What’re you doing, Mart?” he asked.

“This thing brings up your greatest guilt,” I said, taking a step forward, moving my hands behind my back. “And I might know how to make it live again.”

“You aren’t beating this thing with the power of friendship and forgiveness,” he said.

My upcoming response died in my throat as the demon stepped in front of the entrance to its lair. Its methodical steps faltered for a second as it stumbled, catching itself on the wall with a massive claw and bringing itself upright. It raised itself as high as it could, looming over us with its permanent smile of gleaming fangs. Fangs now covered in blood. It swayed back and forth as it entered, its far too long arms moving like pendulums as it huffed and heaved before letting out another colossal shriek. It tore at itself again, ripping off two more globs from its blisters and throwing them at the walls. The black, pulsating masses sliding down to the floor and as they did, faces formed on them. Faces I recognized.

“You.”

“This is your fault.”

“How could you do this?”

“You coward!”

“Why did I have to die instead of you?”

“You shouldn’t have died,” I choked out, closing my eyes as I stepped forward. Koschei stood there, looking down at me, its mere presence making it a constant battle to avoid curling up into a ball and crying. “None of you should have. Part of me knew something was off with you the first month I moved into this rathole, Gunnar.”

That overwhelming aura lessened, letting me open my eyes to look up at the monster. It had taken a step back, its looming stance shrinking as it heard someone call it by its true name. “I had thought it was weird you kept having all these girls over, girls I never saw leaving. But I had just moved here for my first job after college, an hour away from everyone I knew. You’d been the first to talk to me. You helped me get my couch upstairs. I told myself they’d all just left while I was sleeping or at work. I didn’t care about your tastes in women.”

The demon regained some of its composure, making it again a struggle to keep from bolting, but I held firm, gripping onto my last hope. Around it walked more of those living bits of my guilt, the women and girls I had seen taken back to his dungeon. “But I think I knew. I just didn’t want to admit it. I kept hoping you’d get caught when you tried to take one home, or I’d be so cowardly as to tell myself someone else in a closer unit would hear you and turn you in.”

A final black form moved in. The girl with the rubber bracelets. The last one before I had finally worked up the nerve to call the police. “That guilt’s kept me trapped here all these years like I owed it to them,” I choked out, stepping toward the demon. Koschei. Gunnar. “But that did nothing for them. I should have left and tried to do better somewhere else. Stop the next murderer if I found one.”

The monster reached forward and grabbed me with both hands, raising me up to eye level. I moved my arms over its grip, keeping them free. “Marrrr-tiin,” the horror gurgled from its shredded throat. For all the countless scars, gaping wounds, signs of every bit of torture that could be inflicted on a living being, it carried no scent at all. Nothing beyond the stench of the blood from its victims. “Yooouuu callled themmm?” A chorus of accusations grew from the watching women.

“E-Even if I d-dragged my feet, I still s-stopped you,” I stammered, my hands shaking. “And now… I-I’m…” I couldn’t keep talking as that malevolent aura fell on me again. The massive claws started to tighten as the fiend readied to rip me in half, but before it could I shoved my hand forward and stuffed the cold heart back into the demon’s gaping chest.

Its claws froze, the audience silent. I broke away from its gaze and stared at its chest, where the organs wrapped themselves to connect with the heart. It started beating as if it had always been there, returning that piece of life back to the body.

A body that had been denied a second death because of its absence.

The demon and the man that became it shrieked and wailed in pain, throwing me hard against one of the bare walls as it staggered back, all of its constant wounds catching up to it. Every cut, every lesion, every gaping hole bled, its dark body turning a deep red as it howled, clawing at its chest to try and rip out its heart again. But now it was too late. It fell to its knees as it struggled, the audience of its victims losing their form and melting into puddles of darkness that sank through the floor.

All while the horror continued to rip at its own body. It tore itself to shreds in its desperate attempt to save itself, but already its flailing slowed. It let out a final screech that tapered off, the dark pools of its eyes flowing out of the sockets like water before it at last collapsed forward.

Darkness soon came for me as well, the last thing I saw being Jack rushing toward me, the monster’s presence no longer trapping him.

* * * * *

A harsh smell woke me up, the back of my head feeling like someone had taken a sledgehammer to it. Lights overhead. Something soft underneath me. A gray tabby cat sleeping on my stomach and purring its little heart out.

I groaned as I looked around, recognizing Jack’s living room as I lay on his couch. He must have dragged me to his apartment. He stood nearby, tapping away at his phone, but turned to face me. “Oh, thank God,” he said. “How’s your head? Lights too bright?”

“This is worse than the one time you made me that mixer,” I groaned, wincing as I rubbed the back of my head. “But the light doesn’t bother me. I remember where I live and my phone number.”

“That’s good,” he said. “You’re gonna want your wits. Cops took one look at that thing in the basement and called for someone higher up the food chain. They’re gonna have a lot of questions.”

I nodded, even that motion hurting me. I placed a hand on the cat and gave it a pet. “How many dead?”

“Not as many as you’d think,” he said. “I think we got it before the other shadow people things could kill most of the tenants.” He sighed, looking downward. “Too late for a lot of them, though.”

I sighed as well, focusing on the sensation of the cat’s warm fur. “I think I’m finally gonna move out of here,” I said. “If the FBI or whoever lets me.”

“For the best,” he agreed. “But for now…” He offered me his pen.

I accepted it and took a drag before handing it back to him. “But for now, I need to write this down somewhere.” Even if I hadn’t saved everyone, the least I could do was ensure I never forgot.

Credit: Justin Arthur