The Man Through the Floor

By Connor

From dawn to dusk, day after day, the man through the floor is building something.
The pounding of industrial machinery rattles the floorboards beneath the threadbare carpet, and the cockroaches scuttling across the floor bounce and vibrate like organic pinballs. Tiny insect larvae and fungi and bacteria and mould grow in the carpet and when you get really close, so close you can see the boards beneath the rotting pile, there seems to be a total apocalypse, on a minor scale…the tiny microcosm of life under my feet being gradually shaken out of existence, rattled to bits, suffering a slow and jarring disintegration.
My ear to the floor of my tiny apartment hears the shrieking and twisting of metal, the hissing and sparking of forges and blowtorches. When I walk past his door the acrid reek of coal and sulfur burns my nostrils. He lives next to Mustafa. Knowing Mustafa they’re probably in cahoots, up to their eyeballs in something unspeakably foul and sinister. The noise started just after he moved in, not that I saw him do that; nobody has ever seen him, not even the superintendent of our building, and I know because I’ve asked.
The superintendent is a short, lumpy creature with one eye. (His other one is a distant memory behind a thick layer of twisted skin and scar tissue; rusted half-inch surgical staples hold the skin together, stretched tight as a drum across the gaping hole beneath.) If he owns a t-shirt, he obviously does not consider it a necessity. He is always bare-chested, yellow skin warped around countless rolls of putrid fat, liver spots and cigarette burns forming a fetid dot-to-dot across his body. His lips are fat and grey. He never leaves his squalid office, but sits in an ancient wheelchair and watches game shows.
Several days after the raucous noise of the construction started in the apartment below mine, I went to ask him about it. I took the stairs, because the last poor fool who took the elevator wound up dead, a dripping pancake of liquid flesh on the bottom of the elevator shaft. (The super says he’ll fix it…one day.) I walked to a jagged hole cut in the wall amidst ancient stains; dirt, grease, miscellaneous filth. Through this hole floated the sound of frantic human yelling, the screaming of the dumb and doomed, from a television locked into a game show channel at volume eleven. He sat there in his office, his eye glued to the flickering screen. The hole was the service window of his office. I knocked on the wall; plaster dust fell in kaleidoscopic eddies from the ceiling. He grunted unintelligibly, his gaze never leaving the television, which was older than him. I cleared my throat.
”There’s a heinous noise coming from 4B.”
His enthusiasm was underwhelming to say the least. His eye remained fixed on the TV.
”The bastard’s building something, and it sounds like there’s an entire construction team in there.”
The eye, its yellowed sclera shot through with a million inflamed blood vessels, rolled slowly toward me, then back toward the screen.
I banged on the wall, hard enough to knock dust all over myself, like industrial-strength dandruff.
”Pay attention, you fiend! You’d better tell me what he’s up to in there. Don’t you give a damn? The structural integrity of this fine building could be at stake!”
Finally his head twisted in my direction. His speech came as a flat electronic tone through the little circular amplifier jammed into a messy hole in his throat; his lips never moved.
”I thought I evicted you, asshole.”
I pulled my dressing-gown more tightly around my pale and lumpen body. Some primitive inner combat instinct, a leftover from the caveman days perhaps, told me that this verbal exchange had just taken a turn for the worse as far as my case was concerned. After some rapid-fire mental calculations, a small voice in my head reminded me timidly that I hadn’t paid my rent in almost…sweet Jesus, it was getting close to a decade. I have a pile of ancient eviction notices piling up on the floor in my laundry. When I get enough I’m planning to build a little fort out of them.
I felt it was time for a different strategy. “When did he move in?” The apartment had been vacant and in a state of spectacular disrepair last time I had checked. I like to keep an eye on things. Last time I let my guard down, Mustafa almost broke into my apartment and made off with my whitegoods. Not that he came right out and declared his intention to do so. It was the malevolent look in his bovine brown eyes. I can read him like a book.
”Last week.” The head had again twisted toward the television set. At least I was getting speech out of the bloated sack of tar and rotting flesh.
”Who is he?”
”Fucked if I know.”
”You’ve never seen him?”
”He leaves cash on my desk to pay the bills. He moved in in the middle of the night. He ain’t been or gone that I’ve seen since he got ‘ere.”
A secret identity. Like Batman. My new nemesis would be an interesting quarry.
I expected the infernal racket to cease after a few days, but it is not so. The sound starts every morning and cuts off abruptly every night like clockwork. I begin to wonder if anyone else can even hear it; nobody seems to have any complaints.
I find my thoughts turning again and again to the enigma through the floor. It would certainly seem that he is making all that racket by himself; you can’t really smuggle twenty construction workers into and out of the building every morning and night. The more I devote my mind to answering questions, the more answerless questions seem to accumulate. I forgot to shave this morning, Rubbing the wiry stubble on my cheek I stare absently out the window into the dreary light of day, sipping my strong black coffee. My restless mind finds it impossible to focus on the inane circus of daytime TV. I switch off the set and frown.
Wandering the corridors aimlessly, my imagination roams further, trying to piece together a jigsaw puzzle with all but two or three of the pieces missing. The pounding and grinding of the construction follows my listless gait down the long grimy hallways, numbers of peeling paint on an endless parade of identical plywood doors. Sometimes louder, sometimes softer, ever-present, all-pervasive.
The ubiquitous rats seem bothered by the sound now I look closely – gazing over my cup of coffee with my roaring thoughts traveling round and round, they periodically stop and shake their heads in frantic spasms as they skitter back and forth around my slippered feet as we roam the corridors together. I come to my senses and tell myself to stop imagining things. Now the rat’s activity seems normal. They ignore my shuffling feet as they go their way and I go mine.
I walk the building in absent circles until I’m lost and my coffee is gone. Trudging on, every corridor is the same, every dead and dingy and flickering light bulb, every grimy wall, every door emanating the same canned laughter and rattling of TV gunfire. I have no answers, only an ever-multiplying array of questions.
I walk until I find myself again, and refill my coffee. Through the floor, the noise grinds on. The pounding feels like it’s drawing my teeth from my gums like some terrible inexorable gravity; the finest cracks and flaws crawling in spidery fingers across my eardrums as it smashes them toward a final explosion into silence.
Something, I think, must surely be done.

I steal down in the dead of the night and scramble clumsily through the wall-hole and into the super’s office. The decaying meat-wad is asleep in front of the television, snoring like an ill-tempered chainsaw. Opening the battered filing cabinet stealthily, I paw through the folders carefully, my little pocket torch clamped between my teeth. I have photocopies of all the tenant’s files in my apartment, along with dossiers on each one, compilations of every piece of information I could dig up. Criminal records, medical histories, fetishes, vices, habits, quirks. So it was easy to spot the only new one – a Rupert C. Bostaph. I sneered – not an easy thing to do with a torch in your mouth. That was a pseudonym if ever I heard one.
I painstakingly assemble a dossier on Rupert C. Bostaph. My computer tells me that a Rupert Bostaph used to have a real estate firm in Portugal. That suggests money, education; either that or it was a front for some despicable organized criminal activity. Either way, what is he doing in a slum in the toxic-waste region of the city? Could it be a different Rupert Bostaph? The website of the defunct firm lists his wife as his business partner. Her maiden name was Nash. Another search yields a divorce certificate for a Rupert Charles Bostaph and a Heather Nash. It seems that after the divorce his ex-wife moved to a different country, I couldn’t find where. And Bostaph emigrated here. I have found him. This is my man. Rupert Charles Bostaph.
I spend numerous hours a day looking through the knothole in the floor just inside the door of my apartment, peering into the hallway below, clutching a cup of coffee. I see Mustafa come and go from work. Other tenants shuffle back and forth. His door never opens. I sip my coffee. It is cold and sour…didn’t I just make this cup? He does not have any friends. Nobody comes to see him. Rubbing my jaw, I discover that I have forgotten to shave again. Years ago I discovered the ancient switchboard in the basement and realized that I could listen in on the tenant’s conversations, with nothing more sophisticated than a pair of pliers, a length of copper wire and a set of headphones. I spent countless hours in the darkened basement, sweating with anticipation in the dark, finding out the most intimate details of the lives of the people in my building. My pen scratched furiously away in the flickering candlelight, feverishly writing down names and numbers and addresses and conversations and facts…
And now I check the wire for 4B, and find that his telephone is not connected. He has no contact with the outside world. He never receives any mail. He never leaves the apartment.
My days and nights grow longer and longer. I spend so many hours eagerly watching through the knothole, waiting for him to reveal himself. What is he doing? Why is he such an enigma? What is he building inside his apartment? This question dogs me the most, keeps me lying awake in my squalid bed until the first grey light of dawn creeps through the cracked and filthy windowpane. What is he building?
Time loses cohesion and drifts by in a swirling cloud. My fatigue is sending the crawling patter of insect legs all over my body, giving me an occasional random muscle spasm. One eye droops most of the way closed. My long vigils at the knothole give my imagination plenty of room to spread its insidious wings, exploring the infinite possibilities of the situation. The scant facts are cross-indexed with my increasingly wild hypotheses in every conceivable combination, turning him into everything from CIA agent to Elvis Presley to green-skinned space alien and everything in between. My intricate web of surveillance on all the other tenants slowly breaks down until there is only Rupert Charles Bostaph in my mind’s malevolent eye.
My feeble muscles begin to cramp up from lying on the floor; in time I develop a pained limp and drag my left foot like a wounded animal. My sentry post at the knothole becomes a 24-hour pursuit. Shadows flicker and change in the corner of my vision and my head snaps around to confront the beasts lurking there, to see nothing. My eyes play magic tricks with the light and invent shadow creatures to keep me company. Some days I can hear a dull buzz between my ears, like a blowfly plugged into a bass amplifier – a droning hum, a sludgy roar almost out of earshot. Like an old man settling into an armchair, a soft headache of slowly grinding pressure settles inside my skull.

I haven’t slept in days. Perhaps it has been weeks. Exhaustion twists and blurs the fabric of time. I snap awake, my head on the floorboards, and I’ve been lying with my eye to the knothole again, for an hour, a day. I wake without knowing I was asleep. The noise through the floor follows me from my endless days into my dreams; dreams of faceless men behind wooden doors, the blazing maw of infernal forges, the pounding of steel and the creaking of heavy wheels, grinding slowly around, driving ancient steam engines toward one final terrible purpose…
I wake up again. How long have I been asleep? The pale sunlight makes my eyes ache deep in their sockets; my hair is a rat’s nest, my bones ache to the marrow. Lurching to my feet, the blood rushes to my head and I sway woozily, steadying myself against a doorframe. It must be about noon. I stumble to my door, wrench it open, run into the hall and go crashing haphazardly down the stairs, my slippers flapping madly.
I skid to a grinding halt in front of his door, gasping for breath, battling sleep’s lingering inertia. I raise my fist and bring it down three times. Three hollow booms reverberate down the dingy hallway.
And there is silence.
Like clockwork, the noise abruptly cuts off. The building stops. On the other side of the worn plywood door, all is deathly still.
I stand dumbfounded; my sleep-fogged brain struggling to process what has just happened, what to do next. Coming to a decision, I shout and my voice is hoarse and strained.
“KEEP THAT RACKET DOWN, YOU FILTHY BASTARD! Some of us…are trying…to SLEEP!”
No sound, no movement, no response, no satisfaction.
My brain stalls again, ticking over desperately.
Finally my temper boils over; I’m consumed by weariness and frustration. My fists hammer furiously at the door, shaking it in the frame, splintering little cracks into the surface.
“ANSWER ME! OPEN THIS DOOR! WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON IN THERE? ANSWER ME, DAMN YOU!!!”
For what seems an eternity I batter mercilessly, screaming obscenities like some spastic meth-addicted derelict, my dressing gown flying wildly around my body like a matador’s cloth.
Finally my feeble energies are expended and I pitch, gasping, into the wall. I slide down and sit on the floor with an abrupt bump, panting hard.
Mustafa stands there, staring wide-eyed, clutching a brown paper bag crammed with groceries. He is trembling slightly, and he has that stupid fucking hat on.
Leaping to my feet, my dressing gown flies around me in a furry whirlwind. With a single sweeping blow I knock the bag of groceries to the floor. Eggs splatter on the floorboards, cans and oranges roll away. I stomp up to him, backing him up until he stands petrified with his back against the wall.
I am breathing hard, angry, like a bull. I can’t think of anything to say next, so I spin on my heel and march back upstairs, leaving him a quivering wreck with his groceries all over the floor, sinking to the ground and shivering dismally under the dirty light of one flickering light bulb.

Less than ten minutes later the noise starts again. I am already asleep and dreaming, and as always it follows me into the ether.

I wake up. It is the middle of the day, I am on my couch, and something is terribly wrong. I feel that months must have passed, but I lost track of time so long ago I cannot be sure. I feel like some integral part of me is missing and I look frantically over myself, feeling that a limb or an organ must surely have been pilfered (by that rat-bastard Mustafa more than likely) but I am physically whole, even though my body shakes and is battered by waves of gooseflesh and chilling cold.
I feel like I have lost something, like I’ve had some terrible psychic lobotomy, and some glaring inconsistency of reality stares me in the face as I gaze around the room, searching desperately for the source of my discomfort.
And finally it hits me, like the kick from a shotgun, like the expanding shockwave of a sonic boom, like a no-nonsense uppercut to the crotch.
It is the middle of the day.
And I cannot hear the sound through the floor.
I stand up, cautiously, the deafening silence filling my every movement with a heavy trepidation. Everything is deathly silent but the dull roar of driving rain hammering against the windows of the building. As usual the insidious droplets of water spread through the decaying bricks and masonry, softly filling the darkened crevices between walls and floors, running out and around the warped sheets of plaster to finally fall with a demure plunk into one of the many buckets I have stationed around the apartment. The echoing choir of tiny splashes resounds through my home as I edge toward my front door.
Out in the hallway I begin to shuffle laboriously toward the stairs. The same droplets fall from the ceiling, slowly saturating the carpet, landing in my thinning hair and running down my neck. Walking past the doors of other tenants, I hear them shuffling about in their own squalid abodes, guffawing at their televisions, cursing their pets. I start limping down the stairs.
When he sees me coming, Mustafa quickens his pace, eyes downcast, and shuffles quickly to his apartment. He slams the door behind him. I come to a stop at the door of 4B, gazing warily about. Now that things have come to this I am unsure of how to proceed. It seems that whatever he was building, it has finally reached completion. That may make him dangerous…even more dangerous than before.
I slowly twist my head and put my ear to the door. I can hear nothing from within but the same cacophony of dripping that is now ringing throughout the rest of the building. The only light in the hallway comes from a distant window at the other end of the corridor, thin and grey and watery. It casts everything into stark relief, grey light and deep shadow. It thickens the silence from beyond the door.
I raise my fist, slowly, and bring it down – one, two, three times.
And from the other side comes nothing.
Suddenly a feeling of eerie calm descends over me, drowning out the feeble confusion infused in my exhausted mind. I am no longer in control; I feel my body seemingly move of its own volition, manipulated by some guiding force. I turn and stalk three doors down to a small cabinet hanging crookedly against the wall. Gazing down, I see my fist wrap itself in the folds of my dressing gown. With a detached sort of fascination I see it piston forward, shattering the glass front of the cabinet. I feel a blazing spike of pain travel up my forearm, then a hot searing sensation as glass fragments bisect my robe and slice open my fingers. I watch warm blood drip to the floor, create a spreading stain like crimson ink on the dressing gown, and all of this is so far away, I might be watching it on television.
From somewhere an apocalyptic alarm begins ringing, an ear-splitting bell which screams with urgency but cannot reach the calm place that I have gone. On the ceiling, ancient nozzles begin to spray water in a driving torrent, soaking the corridor. The alarm bell shrieks. Distantly I hear tenants crying out in confusion and fear as I reach through the tinkling fragments of glass and grab the heavy red fire axe from its mountings, my lacerated hand dripping.
My ears begin to ache dully from the roar of the bell. I am soaked to the bone. Water drips through the matted clumps of hair on my head, drips off my eyebrows, runs into my sodden clothes. My bare feet make squishing noises, create tiny bubbles in the saturated carpet as I walk back to the door of 4B, unable to concentrate on my bleeding hand, the screaming alarm, the water spraying down hard enough to raise bruises on bare skin. Doors all along the hallway open. Tenants begin running frantically from their homes, clutching pets, television sets, precious trinkets, suitcases, photo albums. They see me walking along as if hypnotized, bleeding profusely and clutching an axe across my chest, and run screaming in the other direction. Like looking at the sidewalk from a skyscraper, they are no more than ants to me, remote, mute, inconsequential.
I stagger to the door of 4B and turn to face it as Mustafa runs past me in a blind panic. I raise the axe above my head with both my feeble arms, and even now, on the verge of this act of violence, I cannot seem to put myself back in touch with what I am seeing; the axe in my hands, the alarm that pounds seemingly between the ears, the torrential spray from above. Water is up to my bare ankles. And I swing the axe mindlessly, not feeling my atrophied muscles singing and screaming as they heft the heavy axe again and again, not feeling my lungs burn from within as my body struggles for oxygen. My vision blurs as my eyes fill with water. I arm it away, leaving a bloody swathe dripping across my face, and swing the axe. Splinters fly from the plywood door. The head of the axe punches deeply into the door, buckling it inward. I swing the axe until there is a resounding crack and a large portion of wood simply collapses inward, the top half of the door falling, unsupported, of its own weight, hitting my head and knocking the axe to the floor. I go sprawling into the shin-high water, gasping. The exodus of the other tenants seems complete. It is only me, the screeching alarm and the water. My hand releases a swirling ribbon of blood into the stream. Ignoring it, I climb to my feet, my sodden clothes weighing tons, hanging thickly from my body.
I kick in the remaining half of 4B’s door and water flows greedily in to the apartment. The axe lies forgotten under the rising water in the hallway. Stumbling inside, I see the layout is identical to mine. I walk in to the next room, a lunging tide of water preceding my sloshing feet, and find nothing. The scarred walls speak of heavy activity and the floor is littered with scrap metal, discarded tools, pieces of wiring, unrecognizable fragments left over from some great construction. The other rooms are empty. I stagger and spin in disbelief, looking for some sign of habitation, some clue as to what could have transpired here, where he could have gone. There is nothing. He has escaped with his infernal machine. I stagger sideways as a wave of dizziness hits me suddenly. My bleeding hand gushes mindlessly into the water. I try to walk from the apartment, to get away, but the blood loss nibbles away at my consciousness, and my weak legs give way and I fall to my knees, gasping desperately. The water is as high in here as it is out in the hallway, now. How could this have happened? How could he have slipped through my fingers without a trace? Who was he? What was he building? An infinite number of questions chase me, spinning like water going down a plughole, follow me as I fall heavily into the water and spiral off into oblivion: silent, obsidian, all-encompassing.