Apartment Seven Read Online Free PDF

features. I couldn’t even be sure if it was a boy or a girl. Regardless, the figure stood watching me, or at least facing in my direction, still and lifeless as the sculptures adorning the church walls and ledges, vestiges of dour angels and crouching demons alike, gazing down over humanity with soulless eyes of stone. From height alone I knew the child could not have been more than perhaps eight or nine years old, so what was someone that age doing out alone after dark? I watched awhile longer, waiting to see if an adult emerged from the church to join the child on the steps, but no one came.
    Instead, a hideous noise cut the night, the growling rumble of machinery. Grinding and scraping, metal screeching and wheels turning, it sounded as if a giant elevator was slowly descending from the heavens directly overhead. Within seconds it became a deafening roar I was sure would split my skull in two, but just as I brought my hands to my temples, the sound ceased.
    My head began to spin, and I was suddenly extremely drowsy. Afraid I’d fall asleep or pass out right there on the bench, I struggled to my feet and paced about until the sensation left me.
    In the interim, the figure in red had descended the church steps and was standing on the curb across the street, head bowed so I couldn’t make out any specific features. I took a step closer.
    The child turned and ran.
    Without thinking, I followed, doing my best to keep up even when the kid disappeared around the backside of the church and I found myself sprinting through a large cemetery. Quite a ways ahead of me, the red sweatshirt glided through the flurries and darkness like a mirage, maneuvering around and between the headstones with startling familiarity. It wasn’t until I was deep into the graveyard that I questioned my actions. What the hell was I doing? Why was I chasing after this child?
    Before I could answer, my foot clipped one of the headstones and I fell forward, crashing to the ground in a heap. I rolled over onto my back and lay there a moment, watching the snowflakes descend upon me from the black sky. I rolled over and fell back against the side of a nearby tomb. I collapsed, panting on the cold hard ground. I wiped at my eyes and looked in the area I’d last seen the child, but there was no longer any trace of the red sweatshirt. The cemetery had been built on the side of a large hill, and beyond its gates and iron spike fence sat a row of old tenements and a small park. No sign of the child down on the street either. A granite angel stood guard in front of a crypt to my right, staring at me with sadly benevolent, questioning eyes.
    The snow flurries gradually tapered off before stopping completely, and it was then that I saw the child in the red hood come wandering out from the sea of graves. Head still bowed, the child moved to within a few feet of me and slowly extended a tiny hand.
    I reached out and took the little hand in mine. It was cold as ice.
    As the child stepped closer, I saw that it was a little boy. But as he raised his head and the hood shifted to reveal a pale face streaked with grime, I realized this was no child at all. It was an adult, a grown man with shocking, incomplete and only vaguely human features twisted into a grimace of longing, grief, and finally, rage. With his smudge of a nose, grotesquely spherical mouth and black sunken eyes, he looked as if he’d never fully formed in the womb. And yet, despite my terror, somewhere in that deficient face, I saw traces of myself.
    When his grip suddenly tightened, clamping down with impossible power, I was afraid he might crush my hand. I tried to pull free but couldn’t. Pushing myself against the wall of the tomb and thrashing my legs about as the monstrosity let loose a feral growl and drooled a thick string of spittle, I heard screams split the night— my screams—as darkness crashed, pulling me deeper into night and all the madness that resided there. But I was not alone with