It’s a dark and stormy night, and the residents of the Castle Arms apartments are watching a scary movie. On the small, bulbous screens of their television sets, a killer stalks in scratchy chiaroscuro. A detective—handsome in that bland, leading man way—is explaining to a blonde-headed reporter. “They call him the Sandman, because he strangles people in their beds.”
“How do you know it’s a him?”
In room 2A, Katie Grant is celebrating her ninth birthday with two of her friends from fourth grade and she has cajoled her parents into letting them watch the horror movie on channel 7, which her parents finally relented to because it’s an old one, in black-and-white, how scary can it be?
Myra Grant works in the kitchen, washing the dishes left behind by the party, while Ernest sits in his recliner, with the paper up between him and the television, though he is paying more attention to the movie than he lets on. The girls are all gathered on the floor, their faces pressed close to the glowing screen, their lips and teeth stained blue from the frosting on the birthday cake.
The clink of the dishes makes a counterpoint to the film’s overwrought soundtrack. Periodically, Myra steps back from the sink and cranes her head so that she can see the movie. Now and then, the girls flinch away, then crowd closer. Now and then, Myra does, too.
Below the Grants’ apartment, in room 1A, a much smaller TV sits on a wooden crate in front of the ratty green chair that Ben Corman fished out of a dumpster. It’s the only piece of actual furniture in the room, though there’s a lamp with a similar provenance in the far corner.
Ben sits in the chair, which still smells a bit like old cabbage, and watches as the shadow of the killer climbs the stairs of a tenement building. Of course, the authorities in the film never see the killer, only showing up after his victims have been dispatched. (Ben, like the detective in the movie, thinks of the killer as a “him.”) The killer’s victims rarely see him, either, though he is a stark, angular shadow in their orbit.
Instead, the killer waits until his victims are asleep to make his presence known. Then, the sharp fingers steal stealthily toward the pale necks, and the audience at home is the only one who sees until those fingers close tight, and the victim’s eyes open wide. By then it is too late.
Of course, the movie is from the ‘40s, so all of the killer’s victims sleep alone. The Hays Code wouldn’t allow a man and a woman to share a bed, even if they were married.
Ben is the unpaid manager of the Castle Arms, a position he was thrust into by the fact that he is the unwelcome stepson of the property owner. This sometimes requires him to do basic handyman work around the building, for the purposes of which he keeps a metal toolbox near the door to 1A.
This toolbox contains the wrench and pair of pliers that were recently used to tighten a seal on the kitchen sink in room 2B, where Carol Linney is rinsing the strawberries that she’ll soon be eating in front of the TV. From where she stands, she can hear the strident organ music that symbolizes the stalking killer.
Carol’s roommate Barb is out for the night, which means that Carol can watch what she wants, for a change. If Barb were in, she would be playing music, or talking on the phone, or demanding that Carol change the channel every few minutes. Carol likes Barb, and knows that she couldn’t afford the room at the Arms without her, but she’s grateful for the peace and quiet tonight, and looking forward to seeing the rest of the movie.
Carol loves these old movies. She’s got a poster of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca on her bedroom wall. The horror ones aren’t her favorites—she prefers the films noir, with their hard-talking detectives and their glamorous and dangerous ladies—but tonight’s movie seems pretty close, even if she finds the idea of its killer disconcerting. Those metal hands (gloves?) with sharp fingers digging into the victims’ necks . . .
She catches herself half-closing her eyes, forcing herself to open them again and peer at the screen over her strawberries. Her spoon clinks against the bowl, and it makes a sound like the killer on the fire escape in the movie. She jumps, looking over her shoulder at the window and wondering if she locked it the last time she closed it. Or was Barb the last to close it? She can’t tell from here, and she refuses to admit that she’s too scared to cross the room and check, afraid that those metal hands will thrust themselves through the glass to clamp around her wrist.
The television in room 3B provides the only light in the bedroom besides what comes in past the rain from the streetlights outside. Jack Gallner and Marcie Lauren have it on and the volume up, but they aren’t really paying much attention. Instead, they’re using the sound of the TV to muffle their own sounds, as they move together beneath the blankets of Jack’s bed.
The second bedroom in 3B isn’t occupied by a bed. Instead, it’s Jack’s studio. Marcie doesn’t live here, though she jokes that she does, and she spends the night often enough that there’s a spare toothbrush in the bathroom, a pair of her running shoes by the front door, a drawer full of her clothes in the chest-of-drawers.
Jack is a commercial artist. Not a “real artist,” as he told Marcie disparagingly on their second date. But Marcie loves his art, maybe more than she loves him, and she likes the idea that the same hands that caress her breasts are the ones that painted the stark, glamorous women in their almost geometric outfits that she has seen in magazines and on billboards.
Those are the hands she’s thinking of, and not the metal ones of the killer that are now lurching nearer and nearer to the screen, as though they are about to reach out of the television itself and into the staticky darkness of the bedroom of 3B.
Until a few months ago, Clarence Jacobin lived in 3A with his wife and young son. Now, they live in Cleveland, with her mother, and Clarence lives here with a bottle in his hand more often than not.
He’s been a janitor at a school down the road for nearly twenty years, and earlier today the superintendent told him that his job was in jeopardy if he didn’t cut back on the drinking. She slipped him an AA card, but Clarence left it in the gutter. He knows places like that. Church basements with metal folding chairs arranged in a circle, lit by sad, flickering fluorescent lights.
Ten years ago, he forced himself through that abjection for Henrietta. Now she’s gone, and he can’t imagine himself ever going back there again. Instead, he sits in the ruins of his old life, trash and takeout boxes gradually accruing around him to mask the reminders of what he’s lost, and he drinks in front of the television as a killer stalks pretty white women in a fake city.
Sometimes, the screen in front of him blurs, and the bottle threatens to slip from his hand, so it isn’t any wonder that he doesn’t notice when the shadows on the screen grow too long, seeming to spill out across the dirty carpet of his room.
Across the hall from 1A, Betsy Chatham sits in her cushioned rocker with her fluffy gray cat Percival on her lap and listens to the rain. She has the television on, the wood-sided one that her daughter insisted on buying years ago, but she has the sound turned all the way down. She never liked the sound of these machines—tinny and strange, mechanical. She would rather listen to the rain.
Her eyes are closed and she could be asleep except that her hand moves to stroke Percival’s fur now and again, a motion that is almost mechanical itself. Yet in a way she is still watching the movie, as the light from the screen flickers against the thin skin of her eyelids, and makes shadows move and dance on the rods and cones there.
Betsy’s eyes aren’t what they used to be, anyway. If they were open and looking at the television, she wouldn’t see anything much clearer than what she sees here, on the shadow screen of her own closed eyelids. Not without the thick glasses on the table next to her, atop the magazines about needlepoint and cats.
She doesn’t need the glasses, though. Doesn’t need to have her eyes open. Doesn’t even need to be awake. She’s lived a long time, and she knows when something is getting close. Knows a cold hand when it settles on her shoulder.
The Castle Arms is tucked onto a street corner and shaped a bit like an iron, wider at the end that faces the street, narrower at the back. Apartments A and B on its three floors are all on either side of that wide end, while apartment C occupies the back, away from the street and facing onto dumpsters and an alley.
Apartments A and B are all two bedroom on each floor, but apartment C is only one. It is, however, not much smaller than the other apartments, meaning that its main room is bigger than theirs, open and airy and eating up much of the floor space that the second bedroom would otherwise occupy.
Casey Flores loves her apartment at the back of the first floor. She may not have much a view, but the big windows let in plenty of sun, when it isn’t raining, and she can set her plants out in window boxes when the weather is nice.
She wouldn’t normally have the television on, but tonight she needs the company. Earlier, she got off the phone with her brother, who told her that their father was going into hospice. “You should come see him,” Eugene said, but Casey shook her head, even though Eugene was a city away, his voice traveling by magic down miles of cables to the receiver in her hand.
“You know he wouldn’t want to see me,” she said.
“To hell with him,” Eugene said. “You should come for you. You’ll regret it if you don’t.”
Sitting in her room, her back to the television, watching the light and shadow dance across the leaves of her plants, she wonders if he was right. She thinks about the last time she saw her father. He hadn’t been sick then. Had been all thunder and fury as he threw her out. “I had two sons,” she remembers him shouting. “I guess now I only have one.”
Normally a perceptive person, alert to her surroundings, her apartment is the one place where Casey feels like she can let her guard down. Here, there are only her plants, and she understands what they need, tending them carefully, each one a little different. What’s more, tonight she is distracted with memories and thoughts of her father, unlikely to notice the quiet crackle of the air, the raising of the hairs on her arms and the nape of her neck, the slight smell of ozone that precedes a lightning strike.
Room 2C sits empty and dark. There is no television here.
At a glance, an onlooker might assume that apartment 3C is as empty as the room below. There are bits of paper here and there, twitching and fluttering in a sourceless draft, but the only furnishing is a single small TV, throwing its light against the bare walls of the empty main room. In the darkness, the television becomes a projector, its images mirror-cast, the figures in them moving in jittery flashes.
There, the figure of the killer burns like a black sun, like the afterimage on your eye following a flashbulb, like the shapes that are all that is left of someone burned away by an atomic bomb.
If the people in the other rooms were asked what the killer looks like, they would all give different answers. Here, in this room, its image cast onto the wall, the killer is all wrong. The raincoat wrapped around it made up of planes and angles; its arms metal rectangles; its hands a jagged collection of sharp pyramids.
Katie Grant screams the first time we see the killer’s face. Her father crumples his newspaper in a spasmodic grip, her mother drops a plate which shatters in the kitchen, the sound seemingly caught in the suddenly still air.
Later, Katie can’t tell her parents what she saw, and the other girls say that they weren’t looking. A wide-brimmed hat. Glasses big as goggles that hid most of the face, eyes burning behind them like filaments in a lightbulb. Years later, when she is living in a dorm room in another town, Katie will be raped by a boy she thought she loved. Partway through the experience, something inside her will break, and she will stop struggling and instead lay limp and inert in the semi-darkness until he finishes. As she does, those burning filament eyes are what she will see.
Carol hears the little girl across the hall scream, and it startles her so badly that she drops her strawberries, which skitter and roll across the floor, leaving little blood-fleck trails behind them as they go.
Cursing quietly to herself, she bends down, righting the bowl and crawling along, picking up bits of strawberry and trying to remember what concoction of vinegar and dish soap her mother used to clean impossible stains from the carpet. She doesn’t think the little red rosettes of strawberry juice will ever come out, and she’s already imagining explaining to Barb how she screwed up their damage deposit because she got scared by a stupid old movie.
Her shoulder thuds against the TV as she gets too close, and she can feel the static of the screen buzzing along the hairs of her neck and scalp. Then she feels a hand close on her shoulder. Something as hard as iron, so cold it burns. She tries to scream, but her voice is frozen by that icy hand.
In five years, Carol will be living in Chicago when she is the passenger in a car accident that leaves her in a coma until her parents finally pull the plug. As she lays there alone in the dark, she will feel that cold hand on her shoulder.
The thump of the bowl of strawberries hitting the floor above her doesn’t wake Betsy Chatham because she has died in her sleep. It will be two days before Ben finds her body when he hears her cats squalling behind the door. He will bang on it, leave for a while, and then return to bang on it some more before he finally uses his master key. Contrary to the stories you always hear, her cats will not have touched her.
The doctor who signs her death certificate writes natural causes, and no autopsy is ever performed. She was an old woman living alone in a locked apartment. No reason to suspect foul play. However, the EMT in the ambulance that arrives after Ben calls 911 will notice livid marks around her neck, as though strong fingers had been there surprisingly recently.
Two floors up, Jack Gallner has left Marcie in his bed to go to the bathroom. On the way, he thinks he hears a sound from his studio. He puts his hand on the doorknob. The metal feels strangely cold under his grip, and he hesitates. In the other room, a woman is screaming, but he knows that it’s just the TV.
He opens the door to the studio just as a streak of lightning splits the stormy sky outside. In that flashbulb of illumination, his easel looks, for a moment, like a figure standing there in the middle of the room. It reminds him of the killer from the movie. All odd angles.
As the light departs and darkness rushes in to fill the space, Jack thinks about the ring that he has stashed in his sock drawer in the bedroom. He plans to propose to Marcie on their anniversary in two weeks’ time. He knows that she will say yes, and he can practically picture the little ranch house that they will buy in the suburbs. But he also knows, with the same burning clarity that the lightning bolt recently lent the room, that she will never love him the way he loves her, even if they stay together for the rest of their lives. He wonders if that will always be enough, as he shuts the door behind him.
In the other room, Marcie feels a chill and pulls the disheveled blankets up to cover first her breasts, then her collar, until she is just peering over them at the TV. The killer there has done its work and is slinking away now, moving down a fire escape not unlike the one outside their window. Did she just hear the fire escape stretch and groan, or was it merely the storm? She hopes that Jack will be back soon.
The bottle thumps to the carpet as it slips from Clarence’s hand. Clarence doesn’t notice, any more than he notices the figures moving in the light from the TV. Instead, he is dreaming of a noose made of electrical cord that’s hanging from the metal support beams of the boiler room at the school. In his dream, the noose casts a shadow that is long, angular . . . familiar.
Ben hears the Grant girl’s scream from the room above, but he thinks it’s just the TV, where a woman is shrieking after catching sight of the killer in a canted hallway.
Nonetheless, it is enough to stir him from his seat. He stands, stretches, feels the vertebrae in his back rearranging slightly. He considers fetching himself a beer from the refrigerator, and is still poised there, between chair and kitchen, when he hears the sound from out in the hall.
It’s the same sound that Casey hears, the one that pulls her away from the sight of the rain on the windows, from the wash of the TV’s glow against her flowers. It’s a sound like ripping fabric, sharp and harsh and strange. She doesn’t know what it could be and so she goes to her door.
The sight that greets her through the peephole is unfamiliar. Not the short hallway that runs along the bottom floor of the Castle Arms, but a different hallway. Longer, more bereft of details. It is cast in grayscale, the many doors which open off it nothing more than oblongs of darkness. At the far end, a window is lit by a streak of lightning.
She feels dizzy and, before she even realizes she is doing it, she has thrown open the door, desperate, somehow, to replace the hallway viewed through the peephole with the one that she knows will be outside.
At first, relief tickles her veins, for the hallway is indeed the plain, dingy one she knows so well. The consolation is short lived, however. Something is still very wrong. A shadow stands in the middle of the hall, between her door and the doors to apartments 1A and 1B. The figure is tall and stick-thin. Too tall, too thin. It is all angles. Even the raincoat that flaps around it is like a collage of broken glass.
At that moment, Ben steps out into the hall. He, too, sees the shadow and, beyond it, the Casey girl from room 1C. He has only talked to her a few times, but she seems nice. He sees her putting her flowers out sometimes, watering them, talking to them.
Now, she looks terrified. As scared as Ben himself feels, looking into the shadow. “Light,” she manages to say, croaking the word out around a swelling knot in her throat, one that feels like two iron hands clamped around her windpipe.
It takes a beat for Ben to realize what she said, another for him to act. He ducks back into the door of 1A and for a horrible, lurching second, Casey thinks that he has abandoned her, but then he’s back with a flashlight that he fished from the metal toolbox just inside the door, casting its beam on the figure in the hallway, which retreats before the illumination, like when the monster crouched in your bedroom turns back into a pile of clothes when you switch on the bedside lamp.
In room 2A, the girls have finally quieted enough to sleep, all piled together in Katie’s bed with an army of stuffed animals. For now, their dreams are of school and fairgrounds and have nothing to do with the angular arms of the killer reaching, reaching, reaching toward them.
Having gotten the girls to bed, Myra and Ernest are sitting in the living room together, holding hands while the TV murmurs a late news program. They feel closer than they have in longer than either can remember, but neither one knows why. Tonight, they will make love for the first time in months.
In room 1B, the fluffy gray cat Percival sits on Betsy Chatham’s lap, though she has stopped petting him, her hand still and slowly growing cold. He will remain there until the storm clears just before dawn.
In room 2B, Carol Linney has turned off the TV and is sitting on her bed, her knees pulled up to her chest as she stares at the Casablanca poster on her wall. She spent some time trying to scrub the strawberry stains from the carpet before giving up, and now she sits, thinking. She’s decided to go back to school. She’ll apply at the University of Chicago, like she always wanted to. She’ll tell Barb in the morning.
Above her, in room 3B, Jack and Marcie have fallen asleep in each other’s arms. The TV is still on but the sound is turned down, washing the couple in a fluctuating glow like light reflected off the ocean.
In two weeks, Jack will propose to Marcie at the restaurant where they had their first date. She will say yes. Within two years, Jack will have taken a job as a graphic designer at an ad firm, and they will have moved to the suburbs, where they will discover that Marcie is unable to have children.
They will stay married until Jack dies at fifty-seven. On that night, he will walk out of their bedroom and into his office at the back of their small ranch house. There, he will see a familiar shape silhouetted against the sliding glass door onto the patio. “Sandman,” will be his last word before he stumbles to his knees clutching his chest. Marcie will find him a half-hour later when she gets up to pee, but by then it will be too late.
Clarence Jacobin sleeps in his chair in room 3A. When he wakes in the morning, he will go to the school and cut down the noose made of electrical wire that he hung in the boiler room. Then, he will ask the superintendent to give him that AA card again.
Ben and Casey sit on her couch, talking until long into the night. They are still there when the storm passes and the sun comes up, still talking.
In room 3C, the small TV on the floor shuts off. Now, the room is dark. There is no one left to watch.
It’s a dark and stormy night, and the residents of the Castle Arms apartments have finished watching a scary movie.
