Night One
Emily took the first hour long shower she had had in years, and it was glorious. He had always demanded that showers be kept prompt and, if anyone was in there for longer than five minutes the water-heater would be turned off.
But enough was enough she thought before getting out and wrapping her shoulder-length blonde hair in a towel. At first she looked around for a towel to wrap her body in, but gave up when she remembered the emptiness of her apartment. Instead she turned on her air-conditioner to an appropriate heat and switched on the kitchen stereo.
Sadness still brewed inside her, but that was fast becoming overwhelmed by the pop song blaring through her speakers. Her dancing became less forced and soon she was bopping happily along.
Then she heard something.
At first she dismissed it, thinking that it was impossible and went right on dancing.
But then she heard it again and she got a sinking feeling. There was nothing particularly sinister about the noise, Emily knew that as she turned down the stereo, other than the fact that she was supposed to be alone on this floor. But there was something about it that froze her to the core.
Thump thump thump.
It was coming from her room, or so she thought as she anxiously stepped toward it.
Thump thump thump.
She shuddered with each one, “I-I’m sorry! I didn’t know there was anyone up here!” she said apprehensively.
Thump thump thump!
“I’ll keep it down, I promise!” she said as she isolated the sound to just above her bed, it was coming from the room next door.
Silence.
Not so much as a breath came from the other side of the wall as Emily carefully placed her ear to it.
She waited for something, anything, an angry voice, a tap-tap-tapping in Morse-code. But there was nothing.
THUMP!
Emily shot back in terror as whatever was on the other side scuttled away.
Her heart was racing and she could feel tears forming in her eyes, but then she laughed.
“Rats.” she said, “Just rats, dumbass.”
Eventually she found her feet and started dancing around again, all but forgetting the thumping in the walls, right through her finding clothes, ordering Chinese and watching TV until 4AM.
It wasn’t until she was safe and snug in her bed, and she’d forgotten all about the thump thump thumping, that it returned, once more before eyes closed for the night.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Day Two
“So…” Emily said nervously as she approached the concierge desk where Aaron sat with his legs up on it, “I don’t have any neighbours, right?”
Aaron laughed, the joint in his mouth precariously jumping about in between his lips as he went to light it, “None that I know about. How come?” he asked before taking a long drag.
“I just… there was some banging on my wall and-”
“Three loud thumps?” he said after almost swallowing the joint.
Emily stood in silence, utterly perplexed as to how he could possibly know, “Did you hear it as well?”
After a few seconds of Aaron choking up a large amount of smoke he responded, “Yes. I mean no. I mean… I heard it a while ago, just before the tenants started to bail, and the next day I heard some of them talking about something called ‘the DD’.”
“The what?”
Aaron’s eyes shot open, “That’s exactly what I said!” he laughed, “All of them clammed up about it though…” he took another drag and sighed, “Then people started moving out, said they ‘felt a presence’, whatever that means.”
“Was that it?”
He winced, like talking about it caused him physical pain, “Weeell… There were a few incidents of ‘spontaneous prolapse’ among the tenants.”
“What!?” Emily shouted, “Was it something in the water? Or the air-conditioning? Oh God! Is there asbestos?”
Aaron regarded the panicked woman with curious fear for a while, her sudden change in attitude threw him off balance, “I… don’t think so? No-one’s tried to sue me yet!” he said with a laugh.
Aaron had never done well with conflict, instead he liked to quickly turn any situation he could into a joke and hopefully get the conflict-er to laugh.
This was not one of those times though, and he knew it, “But, for real though, everything’s up to spec. Mom’d kill me if I let the place get to the point where it poisoned people.”
Emily, who’d be subconsciously holding her breath, calmed down, “Ok…” she said and tried to build up a smile, “Sorry, I’m just a bit frazzled.”
Aaron shrugged, “That’s fine, I’d be havin’ trouble sleeping too if DD was bangin’ on my wall. But, honestly? I don’t think you have anything to worry about. The people who had ‘spontaneous prolapses’ didn’t talk much about what happened, it was their neighbours who had something to say.”
Emily wanted to snap about his annoying cryptic-ness, but she decided to give the half-baked landlord a pass, “What did they have to say?”
“They… Ah… I probably shouldn’t say…” he said nervously.
“Come on, maybe I can find out what DD is.” she said in an adventurous tone.
Aaron shot Emily a severe look and shook his head, “I’ll tell you, but only if you promise not to go looking for DD.” He waited until his tenant nodded before relaxing and continuing on, “Well, see, there were… noise complaints of an… amorous nature for the days up until they ‘SP’d’.”
“So what? Couples sometimes get freaky.” Emily said while trying to force the image of people ‘SPing’ from her mind.
“That’s just the thing,” Aaron almost shouted, “they weren’t couples. These were single women, all of them, from 21 to 55, and all of them got really loud; louder and louder until I had to issue warnings. It was like they were competing. But, after I gave out the warnings, they stopped, all of them.” He stopped and returned to his joint.
“And? They got threatened with eviction, I’d stop too-”
“It didn’t end there though,” he said like he’d never stopped talking, “like clockwork, three nights from the night they stopped, they ‘SP’d’. All of them. Not just them though, almost all of my custodial staff who’d been in any of the women’s rooms got hit as well. I had the place checked for anything and everything that could cause something like that but, as I said, they’re all clean. Well… as clean as you keep ‘em.”
Emily wanted to get more out of him, but she was late for work and he was clearly on a bit of a roll with his ‘bake-fest’. She sighed as Aaron’s eyes drifted off toward something on the roof and left the building for a very unproductive and distracted day of work.
Night Two
Emily tossed and turned in her bed that night, the DD haunting her thoughts. ‘Is it a ghost?’ she thought, ‘Or just faulty pipes and a cult of overeager women?’
She wanted to let it be, ignore whatever it was that resided within the building. But she could not.
Without much thought she found herself outside her apartment door and sneaking down the hall.
She felt like a detective from those books she loved to read, but thought that the ‘Investigation of the Spontaneous Prolapser’ wouldn’t get her on many bestsellers lists.
She was fast closing in on her prey, the door that could be DD’s. ‘Was he some kind of Brazilian love-making squatter extraordinaire?’ she pondered.
Her thoughts were abruptly stopped as the door to the apartment slowly swung open and the light inside clicked on.
Emily froze in place, her heart in her throat as she heard creaking footsteps from inside the apartment. She’d tell Aaron in the morning she told herself, now was the time to leave. The amateur detective, satisfied that she’d solved the case, spun to leave but paused when she saw it.
‘A trick,’ she thought, ‘just tired eyes.’ but, even after her most laborious of eye rubs and forced blinks, the thing would not disappear.
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‘The light’s making it look bigger than it is.’ she thought as she crept toward the source of the shadow; a wide open door that she saw as an open invitation.
The shadow of a highly athletic figure flexed and stretched, making the at least fifteen inch and fully erect thing between his legs shake up and down almost wildly.
Emily pushed her back up against the wall next to the door and desperately tried to convince herself that what she was about to do was not out of some perversion, but simply curiosity. She continued to watch the shadow and thought ‘Maybe this is enough?’ but then the shadow turned and looked out of the door.
She panicked as the shadow angrily thumped over to the doorway, and she began sliding against the wall toward her room. But she knew she wasn’t going to make it, she was going to be caught and forced to move out. She’d end up being one of those people that she’d seen on the news; she could see the headlines flashing across her eyes, ‘Peeping Tia Caught Red-Handed, Prowling the Streets for Fresh Man-Meat’.
But she wasn’t caught, no; as the shadow reached the door and went to round the corner it simply vanished. No puff of smoke or anything like that, just one minute there and the next gone.
Emily wanted to sigh with relief, to accept that her eyes really had been tricking her, to be grateful that she’d dodged homelessness and those creep-lists, but she was far from comfortable. Not with the idea that she may be crazy, not anything like that that she could so easily label. There was unease within her, not unlike the first time she’d seen a mugging.
Something inside her wanted to press on though; the light had been left on after all. Against all logic and reason she restarted her creep toward the room and, once she was sure the room was empty, stepped inside.
The apartment was not unlike hers, with the exception of furniture, but something about it was innately unnatural. Maybe it had something to do with the faint green glow emanating from where the bedroom sat.
Normally Emily would’ve cut and run, stepping into a detective/sci-fi/horror story wasn’t exactly what she called ‘fun’. But something about the glow was drawing her, calling to her almost.
She stepped into the room, expecting to see ghouls or aliens, but instead saw something rather astounding; a long and beautiful oak box. The glowing had disappeared, but it was obvious to Emily that the source was most definitely the box, she didn’t care though. It was the single most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.
The woman wasn’t sure how it had happened, but somehow she’d arrived back in her room with the box sitting on her lap. She took no mind of the apparent teleportation and opened the green velvet inlayed box and…
“Woah…” she whispered as she came to behold the sight. Twenty inches long and three inches wide, the purple ‘device’ shocked and aroused her, though that had never really been her sort of thing.
There was something about it that mesmerized her though, something that made her utter “DilDozer…” as the word appeared along the side of the veiny beast in incredibly well detailed cursive.
She trembled at the thought of it being inside her and then stopped herself, “What?” she said aloud, “Don’t be ridiculous. The anatomy alone wouldn’t allow-”
Suddenly she was back under its spell. It wanted her, and she it.
“Hmm… Maybe just a few inches?”