Dead Man Upstairs

I was eighteen when my sister Julie got married. She asked if I could stay in her apartment while she and her then-husband Bob went on their honeymoon. My answer? Heck, yes!

At the time, I was a freshman at Ohio State and living at home with my parents and three brothers. Who wouldn’t want to stay in a free apartment for a week? It would be like, I don’t know, my own honeymoon!

—   —   —

I am elated! I call my friend Sparky immediately and ask if she wants to stay with me in Julie’s apartment for a week.

“Of course,” is her immediate reply.

—   —   —

As it turns out, with school during the day and bar-hopping at night, Sparky and I spend very little time in the apartment. (Though we are only eighteen and not legally allowed to drink in Ohio, we know that if we go to campus bars really early – like before 6:30 pm – they don’t card you at the door. Apparently, bouncers are hired for shifts that start later.)

It’s Friday, close to the last night of our mini vacation. Sparky and I invite our friends over to show off our digs and have a beer. Because all of our girlfriends arrived in one car, they all leave at the same time, just after midnight.

Julie’s apartment is located on the northside of Columbus, in a neighborhood we are unfamiliar with. We suspect that, because the apartment is so close to Northland Mall, that the area has a fair amount of crime. Additionally, her apartment is on the ground floor, which is half underground. When you enter the building, you have to descend several steps – though not a full flight – to get to her place.

Spark and I are talking and drinking as we clean up the beer cans, bottles and other trash. We’ve finally straightened up the main room. We take our beers and collapse on the couch.

BOOM!

Spark and I freeze. What the hell was that?!

The noise is so alarmingly loud it actually shakes the room. We know the noise. Without a doubt, it’s the sound of a dead body falling to the floor in the apartment above us.

Now, it’s true that Sparky and I both enjoy reading suspense novels, so perhaps we have darker imaginations than others and we’re more suspicious of unusual noises. But I’m reasonably certain that we both intuitively know what a body falling on the floor above us sounds like. Now, whether the body is dead or not, we don’t know. I don’t think we want to know.

We’re both silent, staring wild-eyed at each other for a full minute. Neither of us breathing.

“What should we do?” I ask.

“I don’t know. Should we call the police?”

Though I know the sound was made by a body falling, I’m not convinced enough to call the police and report a crime. Maybe someone fell off a ladder. Maybe a piece of furniture fell over.

“I don’t know Julie’s address,” I answer.

Another minute passes. “We better check the time in case there was a murder, so we can tell the police what time we heard the noise,” I say.

I hurry to the bedroom and read the clock on the nightstand. It’s 2:00 am.

No one’s on a ladder or moving furniture at 2:00 am.

Our nightmarish thoughts are interrupted by three loud bangs on our door. My heart, already beating at a rate five times faster than normal, practically shoots out of my chest.

We both blast off the love seat and stretch our mouths open in silent screams.

Spark and I both know it’s the murderer from upstairs. The noise and the pounding at the door have to be related. If they know we’re here, they also know we’re witnesses to a murder. Without a doubt, I’m certain that they’ve come downstairs to kill us too.

But do they know we’re here? Could they hear us earlier, when our friends were here? Maybe they heard us after everyone else left – Sparky does have a high-pitched voice and she talks pretty loudly. Maybe they’ve been outside and seen the lights on in this apartment.

It doesn’t matter. We have to make them believe that no one is home.

I signal to Sparky to turn off the lamp in the corner of the room and I rush quietly toward the kitchen to turn off the ceiling light. The apartment is close to pitch black now so I move very slowly, careful to make my way back to the love seat without knocking anything over.

Now that the apartment is dark, we can clearly see a thin ribbon of light beneath the apartment door, coming from the hallway outside. The ribbon is interrupted by the feet of whoever is standing on the other side.

For as much noise there is in my brain right now, the apartment remains eerily silent.

A minute passes in terrified silence until another round of heart-stopping door-pounding begins. Shit!

Both of us realize that we’re standing directly in front of the apartment door. Maybe the apartment isn’t as dark as we think. And maybe the murderer can somehow use the peephole in reverse and see us. We quickly move five feet to our left and crouch down. For some reason, being closer to the floor feels safer.

Again, the pounding stops. Sparky and I sit on the floor, huddled together against the love seat.

Neither of us consider opening the door. We’ve both seen enough horror movies to know that it wouldn’t end well. We’d both be slaughtered into minced meat before we even had the chain lock disengaged.

I’ve got to pee. I don’t know how much more tension I can take. My heart is beating so hard and fast I know Sparky can probably hear it.

“Do you want to sneak over there and look through the peephole?” I ask in a whisper.

“No.”

“What if someone is dying and they need us to call an ambulance?”

Sparky has already thought about this. She replies, “They would have gone to the apartment across the hall or to the one on either side of them. Why would they come all the way downstairs?

“No,” Spark continues. “They know that we know there’s a dead body up there.”

Boom! Boom! Boom! A third set of pounding explodes into the confines of the small apartment.

My mind is playing “shit, shit, shit, shit, shit” on a continuous loop.

“Why do they keep knocking?” Sparky whimpers. “And why don’t they say anything? Even if they know we’re here and we’re awake, if we don’t answer the door after the second set of knocks, why would we answer the door after a third set?”

I can’t answer her questions. I don’t know. Unless they’re trying to wear us down, exasperate us into finally opening the door so they can murder us.

“Why don’t we both crawl over there and look in the peephole. I don’t think they’d be able to tell we were on the other side of the door.” I propose this hoping against hope that the knocking has finally stopped and whoever had been gracing the other side of the door has left the building.

“Not me,” Sparky says in a hushed but firm tone. “It’s your sister’s apartment.” Oh, so even though she and I are both guests in my sister’s apartment, it’s my responsibility to slay the bad guys?

I make a big production of getting on all fours to begin my trek to the door. I move very slowly in order to delay my impending demise.

Then I stop. Why is it important to know who is knocking at the door? It’s probably best to just ignore it. Maybe whoever it is knows Julie and they pound on her door at odd hours of the night all the time. In the morning, we’ll check for blood stains seeping through the ceiling. We’ll see if anything is amiss outside our door. See if any cops have flooded the parking lot. Watch the news to see if there are any reports of a murder happening on the northside of Columbus. We’re not detectives, after all. We should leave it to the professionals. If they get killed, it will be in the line of duty. They’ll be heroes. Their families will receive death benefits. If I get killed, I’m just SOL, shit out of luck.

A full two minutes pass as I rationalize my aborted investigation.

And there’s still no more knocking.

I don’t move. I’m still perched, ready to go on all fours. Sparky remains sitting against the couch. What a pair.

After five minutes, I feel my way in the dark, along the floor, back to the loveseat. I sit on the floor next to Sparky.

I desperately have to pee now. No sooner do I sit down that I get back on my hands and knees again and crawl to the bathroom.

When I leave the bathroom, Sparky is waiting for me in the hallway. She’s standing so I don’t bother to crouch down again. Besides, you wouldn’t be able to see us if you were standing in the doorway of the apartment.

We feel our way to the bedroom. We both know that neither of us is going to be able to sleep tonight. And we both recognize that even though Julie isn’t expected back for two more days, this will be our last night here.