Apartment 239

Chapter Two

With barely a graze of his hand, the door slowly opened wide with a screech. Now, this often happened in the summer, which typically lasted from March until mid-November. During the cold of winter, however, Abe usually had to throw his shoulder into the door to open it.

Knowing this did little to ease Abe's nerves. The place was cool, bordering on frigid. Nothing unusual yet. The faint giggle of a child drifted to his ears.

Come on, guys," Abe said, throwing up his hands. "Do we have to play this?" Abe turned to close the door, only to see a spindly figure in the doorway with translucent flesh and a thin dusting of long, unkempt hair. The being opened its mouth wide, gaping and shrieking.

Abe fell to the ground and screamed. The door slammed, and the figure dropped to the ground, doubled over and laughing. Abe pulled himself up and watched the figure blur and return to a familiar form.

Still tall, but now clad in an old NBA jersey, the name on the back long washed away, the figure appeared as a normal, albeit translucent, person. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but admit it," he said. "I got ya!"

"Fuck off, Michael," Abe said.

Michael was pale, his hair eternally bleached at the tips. Michael, like Abe's other roomies, was dead. A woman stepped into the living room through the wall. She appeared to be in her early thirties, wearing a matching grey pantsuit and cropped hair, a trail of blood on her lip. "Hey, can you keep it down? I'm trying to watch. My. Stories."

"No, you're not," Michael said. "You're watching the couple in 237 wail on each other."

"Yes, exactly!" she said, throwing her hands in the air. "Shirley just smashed Kyle's cell so he can't call the cops. We're definitely going to some dark places tonight, so keep it down."

Abe gave a half-hearted wave and sat back down on the floor. "Hello, Diane."

"We'll talk later," she said through clenched teeth.

"Good to see you, too," Abe said as she faded once more into the wall.

The first time Abe met his roommates, he was unpacking a box of plates in the kitchen. The apartment was cluttered with boxes, but actually felt homier than it did now. Currently, the place offered visitors a prison-like, or possibly asylum-esque, aesthetic, with a single living room poster advertising the town's annual Ice Cream Social and Civil War Reenactment, a faded blue couch covered in hair from the previous owner's cat and a TV sitting atop an entertainment center with peeling wood grain contact paper.

A tingling sensation traveled the length of his spine, like an insect racing along his backbone as Abe put down the plate he'd just unwrapped from newspaper. He glanced to his right, where he saw a young woman with long dark hair and deep-set laugh lines. It was Kaitlin. Thinking back, Abe wasn't sure he ever heard her laugh. Maybe chuckle once, a light snicker or two–typically at Abe's expense–but no laughter.

She wasn't taking a horrible form or trying to scare him, but between the translucent quality of her skin and the depression in the back of her head forever pooling with blood, Abe felt true fear in the form of something warm running down his leg.

Actually, Abe did hear Kaitlin laugh once.

Although not sure how long he spent on the floor screaming while Michael, Diane, and Kaitlin stood over him, he still remembered pieces of their conversation. Michael was thrilled someone could finally see them. Diane lamented that this someone was an overweight man in his mid-thirties with the scream of a twelve-year-old girl, while Kaitlin simply waved her hands around and yelled "Ghoooosts! We're ghooooossssts!"

Since then Abe had become harder, but not impossible, to scare.

"Your heart slow down yet?" Michael asked.