Free The Apartment by S L Grey Page B

say, “Do you know the Petits well?”
    “Excusez?”
    “The people who live in apartment 3B. Where we are?”
    “No. No
petits,
” she says.
    I don’t know if it’s my pronunciation or she simply doesn’t get what I’m asking, but for the umpteenth time today, I have the frustrating feeling that I’m talking without a tongue. “Never mind,” I say. “Thanks.”
    I turn to the lobby door, but she says behind me, with absolute clarity, “There are no children here. Here is not for living.”
    I get moving, now picking up my pace, feeling that repeated phrase chasing me as I go; I am running up the stairs now, despite the ache in my foot, like a little child trying to outrun the darkness in a nighttime corridor. Back to the safety of home, of familiarity. I’m feeling chilled to the bone, to the soul, and right now I need Steph to soothe me.
    But when I get to our floor, the landing is dark and the door shut. I pat my pocket once and then remember: I didn’t take the keys with me. I knock on the door, my knuckles hurting against its heaviness. If Steph’s in the bathroom, she’ll never hear me knocking. But then I remember the thumping that woke us up earlier. I hammer the door until I feel a satisfying reverberation in the frame.
    “Steph,” I call. “Steph.”
    And now, behind me, the madwoman is coming up the stairs in the darkness, rounding onto our landing with her shopping bag on her arm. I turn my phone light half in her direction and notice her accusing glance as she clumps doggedly on into the blackness above. “You must not be here,” she intones into the darkness as she goes, her words trailing toward me like ink in molasses. “There is nothing good here.”
    I’m not sure what she’s talking about, and I’m too exhausted to try to figure it out. My phone light times out and I let it, slumping against the door. If Steph is in the apartment, she will have heard me; if she decided to slip out while I was down in that storeroom, there’s nothing for it but to wait for her to return. Now that I’ve stopped the noise and turned off the phone’s light, it’s pretty peaceful in the darkness. I’ve quickly become used to the building’s clanks and groans and the sound of faraway music seeping through it like a distant memory.
    I close my eyes and there’s no difference in what I can see, but my lids are heavy and I let my chin slump to my chest, allowing the stillness to swaddle me. I’m just nodding off when the door behind me disappears and I tumble backward into a glare of light, looking up at Steph’s bare legs.
    Another day, it would be funny, but she just steps over me and away, tightening the small bath towel around herself. “You’re back,” she says. “What were you doing out there? You were ages.”
    “Nothing.” I roll myself over and haul myself up, my joints crackling and my muscles pulling.
    I stand up and limp to the bedroom doorway, despondently aroused as I watch Steph get dressed in her most shapeless sweater. In my fantasy, she’d have dropped that towel and pushed me onto the bed and we’d be making love in Romantic Paris.
    “This place really sucks,” I say.
    She sits at the end of the bed, looking tired. “What’s the matter, Mark? Why are you acting so weird? Please talk to me.”
    I want to brush her off with another “Nothing,” but I can see she’s genuinely worried about me. I owe her something, so I try to tell her the truth. “There was just some hair in the bedroom closet. I was chucking it out.”
    She’s incredulous. “
Hair?
You mean like wigs and stuff?”
    “No. Cut hair. Like the trimmings you’d find on the floor in a barber’s. Buckets of it.”
    “Hang on, so the closet was full of cut hair as well as a dead mouse?” she says, and for a second I don’t know what she’s talking about because I’ve forgotten my lie.
    “Uh-huh. A mouse and hair.” It sounds ridiculous.
    “So why didn’t you tell me about this hair when you