Ever have a really bad headache? The kind that lasts for days and won't let you see straight? The kind that won't let you read anything more involved than the back of a cereal box and that keeps you from sleeping soundly? No? Good for you. Up until five days before, I could have said the same thing. Clean bill of health, apart from an old knee injury that only bothers me a few times per year.

But five days before all hell broke loose, I started having these really weird nightmares. One of them was the same every night. I was in my room, but it wasn't like I remembered it. The walls were all bloody and rusty, with cobwebs everywhere. And I had a headache, too, really bad, even worse than the one I had during the day. The doors were sealed shut, and the windows were stuck, too. Some of the pictures on the walls were different, and I didn't recognize some of the stuff in the apartment. But thinking about it now, those things were mine…the TV, the radio, all of that, but I didn't recognize them in the dream. It wasn't as if somebody else was living in my apartment, or even as if I was in somebody else's place. It was like I was somebody else.

Before I go further, I should probably tell you about my apartment, since it plays a big part in the story. My place has a pretty simple layout. When you go in the front door, the kitchen is to the left, separated from the front area by a little L-shaped counter. There's a refrigerator, a sink, and a stove, and cabinets, the usual kitchen stuff. On the right is the door to the laundry room, which has a washer, dryer and some shelves for storage where I keep boxes and tools and things. I don't go in there much except to do the laundry. If you walk up to the edge of the kitchen counter, you're facing the front room, which has the TV, the bookshelf, and a couch and chairs and tables, and two windows opposite the door. On the right is the hallway, which ends with a bathroom on the right and my bedroom on the left. The bathroom is a sink, a shower with a tub (not a stall shower), a toilet, and some shelves, and the bedroom is…a bedroom, but also with a desk and chair and chest of drawers. I spend most of my time at home between the desk, the bed and the front room couch. Simple enough. It's all I need, and I was happy there.

In my dream, all of the doors but the bedroom door were shut and sealed…so much that the edges were hard to see, and the baseboard extended all the way across them, like they were melting into the wall. Even the front door. There was no way out. What there was was a strange growth on the opposite wall, above the cabinet by the couch. It was a series of bumps that looked a lot like a face. Its mouth was open, but I couldn't tell if it was yelling or screaming or yawning. I remember spending a while just looking at it, trying to figure out if it was real. It almost seemed to move a couple of times, but I think it was just a trick of the light.

Then, after I'd started back down the hall, I heard an unfamiliar noise behind me. It was a growling, or maybe a roar, with a squishing thrown in. I turned around to see somebody crawling out of my wall. No, really. Out of the wall, right where the face-shaped bumps had been. It was a guy in a long, ragged, dark sweater, with no hair and…well, I didn't know how to describe it at the time, but he looked like a ghost. Not the sheet-over-the-head Halloween kind of ghost…he looked like someone who had been dead for a while. His skin was white and papery and flaking off of him like dried fish. He was pulling himself through the wall, and when he got far enough through he flopped to the floor and started crawling toward me.

I tried to back away, but I tripped over my own feet and fell hard. The closer he got, the worse my head hurt, and the redder my vision got. Before I could get up, he knocked over one of the kitchen stools, onto my chest, and crawled on top of it, pinning me down. I was nearly blind from the pain by then, and he was all that I could see. He bent over me, leering at me, and I could smell the death on him…

…and then I would wake up. There were other nightmares, long, involved ones, but I don't remember them in much detail, not right now. They've been coming back to me, piece by piece, but I don't have them back yet, not really. Not enough to talk about here, anyway. Just that one. It was the same thing every night...no matter what, it would always end up the same way.

That was the least of my concerns after a while, though. Not everything in the nightmare was just in my head. The front door and windows really wouldn't open, and the TV and phone were really dead. I had no way of getting out of my place. I'd tried everything I could think of. I even threw a chair at the window, but it just bounced back at me. Nothing worked. It got to the point where every time I heard somebody walk by the front door, I'd pound on it and scream at the top of my lungs to let me out...or I would have if I'd had any voice left. After a day or two, I really didn't. It was as if they couldn't hear me, as if I was stuck in my own little universe in there.

At first, I didn't mind. It's funny…I actually welcomed it, in a way. The phone still worked for the first couple of days, so I left Frank a message asking him to look at the door and had a nice day in…well, apart from the headache. After that, though…

What are the five stages of grief? I don't remember how that's supposed to work. Ends up at acceptance, right? In this case, "acceptance" was more like "dead tired". After a couple of days, I knew the nightmares were coming every night. Not only was I tired because of being unable to get back to sleep after the nightmares, I was having trouble getting to sleep in the first place. I think I slept about two or three hours those last few nights. I'd given up trying to get out after a few days, so there wasn't much to do but stare at the walls. I'd also run out of food on the last day…nothing was left but an old bottle of wine and a single brown plastic bottle of chocolate milk, neither of which would keep me going for long (although the bottle of wine was definitely beckoning by then).

So that's how I'd been living up to the start of the main event. Don't get me wrong, though…that's a quick summary, but those were some of the longest days of my life. There was nothing to do after a while but think, and as much as I used to wish I had more time to do just that, by the last morning I'd thought myself into a hell of a mess. Nothing made sense any more, and the more I tried to figure things out, the more confused I got. I knew that somebody was behind all of it – had to be – but I couldn't come up with a single reason why.

Finally, late in the evening of the fourth day, I just gave up trying completely. Whatever was going to happen…was going to happen. Bring it on, I thought. One way or another. End this.

Day five dawned bright and overcast. By "dawned", I mean that I woke up sometime in late morning. I'm a night person, and left to my own devices I go to bed very late and get up very late…and that morning, I was groggier than I could remember being in a long time. Still, I managed to remember to try the phone, like I did every morning. Hope springs eternal, I guess. There was no dial tone, no static, not even an off-the-hook beep. Nothing at all. Same as the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that…

Then, it rang. It rang! I was still groggy, and I almost twisted my knee hurrying back for it...then, I nearly dropped the receiver when I got it to my ear.

"Help…me…"

It was a woman's voice, a young woman's, with a slight lilt to it. Were other people somehow able to call in when I couldn't call out? Who'd be calling me, anyway? Nobody ever called me except about work. Maybe there was something wrong with the wiring…a broken wire, or something. I lifted up the phone to have a look, in case something had wiggled loose.

No, the plug looks OK...

Something was flapping around just out of the corner of my eye. It was the phone cord, cut cleanly after about a foot or so, dangling limply. I stared at it dumbly for a second or two. Then, the line went dead.

You know, every time something happens, I end up with more questions than answers. That had become my mantra over the last few days. I was too damn tired to panic, or to worry about how that cord managed to get cut, or how the call had gone through on a disconnected phone in the first place. I just put the phone back down and sat there for a moment, trying to push the headache back down to a manageable level. I tried this every morning, too, but with no luck. This morning, however, it was different…maybe the ringing of the phone had worked something loose. Or something. The headache actually receded a little bit this time.

The windows were still stuck, of course. Everything outside looked just the same, though…same last-gasp-of-summer heat, I guessed. Well, as long as the air conditioning didn't give out, I'd be OK. Thermally, anyway.

There was a flash of color off to the right. A young woman was wandering back and forth by the entrance to the subway station on the corner. She was dressed in a low-cut red top and what looked like a short striped skirt, with her dark hair up. Looked as though she was waiting for someone. She meandered for several seconds, then tossed her head and walked down the steps into the subway. Well, at that time of year, it wasn't unusual to see women wearing skimpy clothing, with the heat and the humidity that we get in Ashfield. Anyway, she was gone now.

I wandered down the hall. Nothing much new out front...TV dead, windows still wouldn't open…same magazine on the table…yeah, same old same old. Oh well. My stomach didn't feel empty, but I knew that it should, that I should be beyond ravenous by now, and all I had was that chocolate milk and a single bottle of cheap white wine. The wine had been calling to me, like I said, and I figured that perhaps a little bit might take the edge off. Not like I had anything better to do.

As I turned to the kitchen, my eye caught something out of the ordinary by the door. I must have blinked a couple of times before I realized that it wasn't a dream or a delusion or anything. There was a web of heavy metal chains crisscrossing my door. Several lengths of chain were threaded through thick metal loops nailed haphazardly to the door, and to the wall around it. Plain square brass key-locks held the chains tightly in place. The door had been firmly stuck before, but now it really wasn't going anywhere…and neither was I. Whoever had done this wanted to make sure of that.

Whoever had done this…there's gotta be somebody in here. There was no question about that. But where could he (or she) hide? Nowhere. My apartment isn't that big, and I don't have a lot of furniture or other large objects in it. It would take about thirty seconds to search the place top to bottom for anything as big as a human, and there was no way that somebody could move around without being heard. Certainly, there was no way that all of these chains and locks could be mounted on my front door in the middle of the night without me hearing it, ten or twelve feet away in bed and sleeping rarely if at all. So it was impossible. But then, it was also impossible that a heavy upholstered chair should bounce back off of ordinary window glass, as it had on the second day, so "impossible" hadn't been a sticking point for me for a while now.

Then, red letters appeared just below the peephole, and "impossible" shifted over to "possible, and definitely happening".

Dont go out!
Walter

Walter? Who's Walter? I didn't know anybody named Walter…

The chains were cold under my fingers, and very, very real. I pulled and tugged a little, but they were too tightly fastened to move. Whoever was behind this had done a thorough job of it. The chains and locks looked old, like they'd been in somebody's garage for years, but they were strong and in good shape. I wasn't going to be able to get through these any time soon.

Something crashed in the hallway outside, so I put my eye to the peephole. There was my next-door neighbor, Eileen, who had lived in 303 since before I moved in. I didn't know Eileen, just nodded and smiled in the hallway, but she struck me as a nice person, kinda quiet, and pretty in an unobtrusive way. Really, a very girl-next-door type, which was exactly what she was to me. The girl next door. She had a paper bag from the grocery store down the street in her arm and was picking things up off of the floor. Guess she'd spilled some stuff out of the bag. She was muttering to herself, and I smiled a little as I heard her cursing mildly under her breath. A nice person, maybe, but not too squeaky clean.

It had been a while since I'd seen anybody through the peephole, and I admit that I drank in the sight of her, creepy as it sounds. As she stooped and lifted, I wondered why she'd been passing my door, anyway. Her apartment was closer to the stairs than mine, and the hallway led only to 301. The guy in 301…well, he's not the kind that gets dates readily. Or friends, I'd guess. Then again, neither am I. So why...

She stiffened suddenly, and stood up, as if she'd heard something. I listened, but I hadn't heard anything, either. Then, she was staring straight at my door with a weird look on her face.

"Oh man," she said, and her shoulders dropped just a little. "Hope my luck changes before the party."

She headed back to her room, still muttering under her breath. Guess she had plans for the evening. Wish I had. Plans that didn't involve me sitting in my apartment staring at the walls, anyway…

…and after she had passed out of sight, I turned my eyes back to see something strange on the hallway wall. The wall was usually a plain, dingy off-white color, but now it had…handprints on it. Not as if somebody had been standing there, leaning against the wall, though. The prints were deliberate, like a prehistoric rock painting or something. They were different sizes, lined up neatly in rows. I took a moment to count them. There were fifteen of them…and as I stared at them, I realized that they were a dark red color, like the color of old blood, almost the same color as the writing on my door.

Those definitely weren't there the last time I looked. What kind of sick joke is this?

They unnerved me more than they should have. No reason to keep staring at them, anyway.

There was something white stuck under the door. It was a white piece of paper, folded and slightly crumpled, with words written in a childlike scrawl.

Mom, why doesn't u Wake up?

Huh. It wouldn't have fallen out of Eileen's grocery bag and slid under the door; it would have taken some effort to force the note through the narrow crack. Maybe it was from the person who'd chained up the place…this Walter guy. But why wouldn't he have left it in a more obvious place, like the kitchen counter or something? Anyway, the handwriting didn't match the mental image I had of somebody who could put up those chains. No kid could have done that. It didn't make sense.

As I leaned back against the chains, reading the note and wondering where it had come from (and feeling the sharp edges of the locks poking me through my shirt), I saw that there was something else stuck behind the bookshelf by my window. One of the shelves had an annoying habit of falling off of its supports every now and then, so my first thought was that it had slipped again and dumped some stuff into the bookshelf. Wouldn't have been the first time. Then, I saw that all the shelves were still in place, and that the thing was wedged behind the whole bookshelf, not just stuck in a corner. Somebody had placed it there. Two guesses who.

The paper was heavy and old. It crackled in my fingers.

Through the Ritual of the Holy Assumption, he built a world.
It exists in a space separate from the world of our Lord.
More accurately, it is within, yet without the Lord's world.
Unlike the world of our Lord, it is a world in extreme flux.
Unexpected doors or walls, moving floors, odd creatures, a world only he can control...
Anyone swallowed up by that world will live there for eternity, undying.
They will haunt that realm as a spirit.
How can our Lord forgive such an abomination...?

I didn't remember having any books like this. I read historical biographies, books about photography, random magazines, odd stuff off of the bargain tables at the local bookstores, and the occasional mystery novel (a guilty pleasure), but weird religious writings were not my thing. This was a piece of just such a book, though, and it was dirty and worn as if it had been through hell and back for decades. Parts of it were completely illegible.

...It is important to travel lightly in that world.
He who carries too heavy a burden will regret it...

The legible part stopped there. Whatever, I thought. Didn't really apply to me anyway. None of it did. There weren't any weird doors or walls or anything here. The only unexpected things, apart from the chains, weren't things that were there that weren't supposed to be, if that makes any sense…it was things that weren't there that should be. I should have cable TV, a working phone, and windows and doors that would open, and a clear head as well, but none of those were present any more. As for too heavy a burden…I didn't even have my wallet on me. So this was nonsense for now.

I ended up sitting on my old storage chest, leaning against the wall. The chest was vintage and wooden, about the size of a footlocker, and had served as storage and seating for me since I was little. It looked deceptively small, but held a lot of stuff when it had to. When I was in college, I'd kept my whole life in it, and all I had to do to move out of my dorm room at the end of each year was throw everything into it and roll it down the hallway. Nowadays, I kept my photography supplies in it, but even then it was rarely more than half full. But as I bent forward to stand up, I heard something shift inside the chest, and the thought entered my mind that maybe whoever was doing all of this had somehow managed to hide in there. It was the one place big enough to hold a (small) person that I hadn't looked in. Remember, I wasn't thinking too clearly by this point, so I'd forgotten to look during that thirty-second search I mentioned earlier. So, I cracked it open and peered inside…and found nothing but the usual bottles and boxes and stuff.

Of course there's nobody in there. Get a grip, Townshend. You're alone in here. Don't delude yourself into thinking you're not.

I lowered the lid and ran my fingers over the old wood for a moment, lost in thought…and nearly jumped out of my skin when a loud crash echoed down the hallway. I stood frozen for a second or two before I realized that the sound had come from the bathroom, and that the secondary smaller noises had probably been the bottles by the sink falling to the floor and breaking. Maybe the mirror had fallen off of the wall over the sink or something. Great, just what I needed. A bathroom full of tiny shards of broken glass…and seven years of bad luck from a broken mirror. Not that I was superstitious or anything, but still…I'd have to be careful in there. I'm a details person (you have to be, in my job), and I knew I'd have to inspect everything to see what had changed and what, if anything, I could do about it. The last thing I needed then was for some small problem, like a leaking water pipe, to be overlooked and have a chance to grow into a big problem. Every little thing might be important, you know.

Man, I was such a tool back then...

As soon as I opened the door, I knew that the bottles weren't to blame. They were still right where they were supposed to be, as were the ones in the shower. The long glass shelf under the mirror had fallen on the right, though, and the right side of the mirror was missing, but the rest of the mirror was still on the wall. The whole side of the countertop was gone, shattered into pieces on the floor, and the towel bar was also in pieces. Right where the towel bar had been was an enormous round hole in the wall. It was a few feet across and very deep and black, and was at least several feet long. I stepped carefully around the tile debris on the floor (which had just barely missed the toilet, thank God…another few inches to the right and I would have had a helluva flooding problem, probably) and peered in. I couldn't see the other end.

"Is somebody in there?" I called down the hole, but all that came out was a wobbly whisper.

Pull it together, Townshend! Think! It looks as though whoever did this tunneled in from the other side…the only stuff on the floor came from your walls, not from inside this rock and dirt...

…rock and dirt? This is the third floor of an apartment building, not the Gulag. There isn't any rock and dirt up here. Hell, down that way should be Room 301's bathroom or something, not yards and yards of gray dirt…

Whatever. There seemed to be no immediate danger from the hole. It was as if the wall had been blasted into the room from the other side…that must have been what took out the counter and the mirror and the shelf. I couldn't see what was at the other end, if anything. It should have been 301, of course, but then there were a lot of things that should have been that weren't, so that was meaningless. For example, that bent metal pipe that was partly blocking the end of the hole should have been spewing hot or cold water all over the place, but it just sat there.

There was nobody in the hole…so who had done this? Was…was it somebody trying to get into my apartment? I had no idea why anybody would want to, or why they would be doing it the hard way, through a wall. But whoever had done this had managed to blow through the wall. If so, then he (or she) was probably hiding in my apartment. Where? Nobody behind the shower curtain, and nobody had come down the hallway, so he'd have to be…in the bedroom, maybe? Trying to…to do what? Why?

Then the obvious thought finally penetrated my fuzzy brain. If I was at one end of the hole, and there was something at the other end…then I might be able to use the tunnel to get to that other end. Out of my apartment. To…well, whatever was on the other side. Whatever it was. God only knew what the guy in 301 had been doing in there. Dropping in on him unannounced hadn't been on my list of things to do in this lifetime, but it seemed like my only option right now. And, it would get me the hell away from whoever was trying to…

But what if it's just a dead end? Then you're stuck deep at the end of a narrow dark tunnel, and you're a sitting duck for whatever that person wants to…

Maybe. But it's a risk I'm going to have to take.

The tunnel looked just wide enough to climb through, but I'd have to move that piece of pipe first. A brief tug showed that it was still attached at the top end. I wrapped both hands around it, put my foot against the wall for leverage, gritted my teeth, and pulled. Next thing I knew, I was flying backwards and nearly braining myself on the edge of the tub as the pipe popped easily out of the wall and fell on top of me with a rattle and a clank. It was completely dry inside…and hadn't been fastened in there very sturdily at all. A probable casualty of the hole. But, it felt cold and heavy and good in my hands, and it occurred to me that if the guy in 301 gave me any trouble, it might not be a bad idea to have a little something handy to help drive my point home. Verbally! I didn't plan on actually using the thing. I took a deep breath, tucked the pipe into a belt loop, and pulled myself into the hole.

The hole itself stretched before me, a lot longer than I'd anticipated. There were sharp little rocks poking out of the walls here and there, and I had to be careful to not rip out the knees of my jeans just crawling through. The dirt smelled old and musty, and as I moved through it bit by bit, I found myself having a little trouble breathing. But, it didn't go on forever, and as I approached the other side the light grew and grew until it blinded me…