The Veranda

You only hear about haunted houses. Blockbuster horror movies take place in large Victorian houses or creepy cabins in the middle of nowhere. Everybody knows that. Nobody’s ever been willed an apartment in some lower middle-class neighborhood by a mysterious aunt. Rich families with old secrets don’t hire nannies to watch peculiar children in apartment buildings. That’s not the kind of setting an audience wants to look at for two hours; it’s just not good story telling. Besides, a proper haunted location needed to be old, or built on top of something old, not just tossed up where the K-Mart used to be.

That’s what the former residents of The Veranda thought a year ago, at any rate. The five of them were seated on the patio of a café across the street. Demolition was scheduled to begin today. They’d believe it when they saw it.

Strangers passing by might assume they were friends, but they’d be wrong. It wasn’t that they didn’t like each other. Under different circumstances, several of them would have become quite close. In at least one alternate universe, Mike and Eddie would have gotten married. But they hadn’t been fortunate enough to land in any of those realities. In this reality, the only thing they had in common was their desire to witness the end of The Veranda. The purpose of the gathering could be considered a wake, but “wake” implied some sense of fondness as everyone prepared to say goodbye to a loved one. No, this gathering was far more akin to bearing witness to the execution of a serial killer. They would have The Veranda know it had finally lost.

“You think they’ll get it done?” Petra asked.

“If they don’t, I’m going to give selling my soul to the devil a shot so I can have him do it.” Mike said.

Eddie laughed, “Sis, please, we in the South. According to them, you and I done made our bed with the devil, and he ain’t nowhere to be found.”

“We tried everything. We literally tried setting that bitch on fire and couldn’t get it to ignite. My money says it won’t happen.” Elizabeth said.

“True, but we didn’t have a wrecking ball, either.” Sean said

The group fell back into silence as they watched the crews arrive to the demolition site. The waitress came around to take their orders.

“What is the largest size of alcoholic beverage you sell? And I don’t mean some schooner of beer or any of that bullshit. I’m talking, what is the most obnoxiously large, novelty, group, trashcan punch you’d throw together for sorority girls celebrating the whole house’s 21^st birthday, and are there free refills?” Eddie asked.

“Sir, it’s 8 in the morning, the bar tender doesn’t start his shift until 11.” She said.

“Don’t throw shade on my sunny morning, darling. There’s some suburban soccer mom’s sitting over there in athleisure wear without pit stains, which means you sell some sort of alcohol or else they wouldn’t be here,” he replied.

Unimpressed, she said, “we have bottomless mimosas, but you’ll each have to order a meal, and after your 4^th drink you’ll have to order something else.”

Eddie sniffed, “Hardly bottomless. All right then, Little Miss Independent, we’ll all have the breakfast special of the day and the mimosas, please. And you should probably send someone out for more champagne. I assure you, you don’t have enough on hand.”

Petra tried to wave down the waitress as she was leaving, “Eddie, what if I didn’t want whatever the special is?”

He shrugged his shoulders, “oh, Honey, this isn’t breakfast. This is New Year’s Eve! And we’re gonna watch the ball drop right into the heart of that evil monster.”

The Veranda was brand new when they each signed their lease. It had been advertised as “ultra-modern with a touch of Old Hollywood charm.” A single tower of glimmering white façade and sparkling windows, decorated with minimalist art accented with Art Nouveau frames and fixtures; it would have been described as “confused” if it hadn’t cost so much per lease. Chosen as part of a larger city project to reinvigorate the economy, it was meant to be the primary draw for young professionals with young professional spending habits. Gentrification, Sean had called it with derision, though it didn’t stop him from grabbing a corner penthouse.

Petra never understood the gentrification criticism. She’d grown up in this town, unlike the other four, and it needed all the help it could get. It had surprised her the proposal had even passed. Backwater, small town xenophobia had kept them afraid of outside business and economic growth, while superstition had kept them insisting science was of the devil. It was a sore spot for Petra that superstition had been their savior.

 The people of the town had immediately blamed the “outsider” developers. “Never woulda happened if we’d have just left well enough alone,” they all muttered. Even the official incident report listed “…unconventional construction techniques and failure to adhere to appropriate local standards…” as the cause. It was amazing how easily everyone had accepted the report. No one seemed to question how a gas that was heavier than air managed to fill a 10-story building fast enough to kill all but five of the residents. No one cared that they couldn’t find a source for the amount of the gas it would have taken. The report even explained that the only reason the five of them had survived was the location of Sean’s penthouse apartment, despite the loss of the rest of the floor. It was easier to believe the impossible than the unknown. Maybe it was for the best. Declaring the building unsafe from the foundation up had made it easier for the city to seize the property and have it demolished.

The waitress arrived with the food and mimosas. They ate mostly in silence, intently watching the activity of the demolition team. Elizabeth noted that the inner team was in full hazmat gear. It was unnecessary. There was no mysterious gas leaking from the foundation to put them in danger. Even if the real danger was still present, the suits wouldn’t save them. A hastily drawn pentagram of salt shouldn’t have saved the five of them, either, but here they were. It was illogical, but none of them had left their houses without a container of salt since.

None of them recalled much after Petra drew the salt lines. They all came too on the same day in the hospital, with no idea how they’d gotten there. Officials from the local and federal investigations came to see them not long after they woke. They were sensitive to their conditions and tried to break the news of the hundreds of deaths at The Veranda gently. They needn’t have bothered. The group knew. The authorities were obviously curious how they’d been the only five survivors, but since they still didn’t have an official cause of death, it wasn’t as if they could accuse them of suspicious involvement. The group didn’t even have to rehearse answers. None of them had seen or heard anything unusual that night. Unusual for The Veranda, at any rate.

It wasn’t like the investigators would have believed them, either. Several of the group had tried telling people. They’d told the management who said that new buildings made weird noises when they were settling. They’d called the gas company about the sulfur smell, and nothing had been found using their meters. When they all five began having the same dreams, they even consulted a priest. He recommended they repent and show up for Mass on Sunday. Petra’s grandmother was the only person who seemed to think they weren’t losing their minds. She listened while they described the dreams of earthquakes, the slamming doors, the patches of cold air that took their breath away with fear, and the peculiar way the tenants all began watching them through cracked front doors as they walked down the hall. She didn’t offer an explanation for what they were experiencing. The old woman had simply stood from the table, grabbed a large container of salt, and told them that they had to move immediately, but to go nowhere without salt until they could leave. “A circle will protect you from most evil, but the five points of the star will save your life from the worst,” she’d said, as she ushered them out of her home and onto her porch.

They were more confused than ever as they’d returned to The Veranda that night. For a year they’d thought they were going crazy, and the ominous message of the grandmother did nothing to alleviate that worry. So lost in their own thoughts were they that they didn’t notice the strange way the doorman stared at them. Or how there was no one in the lobby like usual. Or on the elevators. It wasn’t until the elevator door opened on Elizabeth’s floor that they stopped in their tracks. Every resident of the floor was standing in their open doorway, staring at them. Elizabeth refused to get off the elevator. They decided to try Sean’s floor next, with the same scene awaiting them. It took no conversation to agree that they didn’t need to give the next floor a try.

Instead, they tried to go back down to the lobby, knowing they all wanted to be anywhere but in that building for one second longer. As the doors to the elevator opened, they could see a group of residents and the doorman blocking the exit. They ran. They tried the fire exits. They wouldn’t open. Mike threw a chair at a window leading to the courtyard. Eddie had tried a multi-tool knife with a windshield punch. They couldn’t make a dent in any surface leading to the outside world. They ran to the gym, piled up anything flammable near a smoke detector, and set it on fire hoping the modern fire alarms would send the fire department. But the smoke detectors weren’t working. And they all watched as the pile of equipment burned to embers without so much as scorching the floor underneath. So, they ran one last time. They ran the stairs to the very top where Sean’s apartment was locked off from the rest of the building. Even the fire escape required his access card to enter the floor. They’d hoped it would give them enough time. Enough time for what, they couldn’t say.

Once inside, they’d locked the door and stared at it. They were trapped, and it was beginning to dawn on them they’d been herded like sheep. That’s when the noise began. Wind whistled down the halls as if it were being sucked out by a vacuum. Thousands of whispers filled their ears, hissing words they could not understand. They felt the building shaking. The room felt as if all the air was being sucked out and they struggled to catch their breath. And suddenly Petra had realized this was the dream. The dream they’d all been having for months was coming true before their eyes. She had shouted to the others to follow her and run to the large window in the living room, pulling out her grandmother’s salt. She’d been pissed and in disbelief that she was about to use an old wives’ tale in her final attempt to survive whatever the hell was happening. She drew the five-pointed star around them to save their lives. And then they’d all woken up in the hospital. Survivors of the worst environmental apartment disaster in history.

Now it was The Veranda’s turn. They saw the crews signaling, warning lights were turned on, and announcements were made to clear the immediate grounds of the building. A low rumble of machinery could be heard as they were moved into place. The group held its breath. Waiting for the demolition was like having the oxygen removed from the apartment all over again. Then, suddenly, there was running. The crews were in a panic and fleeing the site. The rumbling no longer sounded like machinery. It was the earth, the very foundation the beast stood upon. The Veranda shuddered. It began shaking at a frequency which seemed to blur the image before them. And then it collapsed, disappearing into a cloud of dust.

“Mother of God…” Sean whispered.

“I haven’t had nearly enough mimosas for this shit,” Eddie said.

 Petra screamed. She yelled and cursed as she jumped the rail of the patio. Again, she was running. The rest of the group followed. What else could they do? They had to see for themselves. They ran past the demolition crews who made no attempt to turn them around, stopping when they came to the cordoned off perimeter of where the demolition was supposed to have taken place. It was gone. Completely. Not even a pebble from the front gardens remained. All that could be seen was a cavern where The Veranda had once stood.

“Are you kidding me?” Elizabeth said.

“We’re below sea level,” Mike said, “the ocean is half a mile south of us. There can’t be a giant sink hole here, it’s sand, all sand, and water! A whole building doesn’t just vanish into a physics defying cavern!”

“Well, we obviously ain’t dealing with physics anymore, Sis. That evil bitch won. It destroyed itself rather than give us the pleasure,” Eddie said.

“But where on Earth did it go?” Sean asked.

Petra took a deep breath, catching the faint hint of sulfur as the dust settled, and sighed. “I’m guessing back to where it came from.”

“Now what?” Elizabeth asked.

Petra continued staring into the cavern, “I have no idea.”