👺 Monsters in the Tenement

by Emma Burnett 

The eye appeared in the ceiling just after the thunderstorm. It wasn’t there, then suddenly it was staring down at me and Jaz, sleeping in bed. Well, he was sleeping; I was lying awake because thunderstorms give me the heebie jeebies. 

The eyeball was larger than a normal eye, maybe as long as my hand, and it stared down at us occasionally blinking. It seemed like it was waiting for something.

I was half-tempted to wave, but instead, I prodded Jaz who muttered that thunderstorms were nothing to be worried about, and to go to sleep.

I disagreed about the storms, but I was pretty tired since it was super late, and it had been a long day. Maybe I was imagining the eyeball because of stress or tiredness or something. So I clicked off my phone and pulled the duvet over my head and fell asleep trying not to think about where the eye’s body was.

Jaz didn’t get too worked up about the eye in the ceiling.

“It’ll go away when it’s ready,” he said. “At least it didn’t ruin the paint job.”

Jaz is real chill like that.

But we did stop being intimate in the bedroom. The eye didn’t follow us anywhere else in the apartment, so we migrated our relations to the other rooms because it seemed polite.

We were pretty new to the building and I hadn’t met many people yet, but Ms. Chavez directly below us in 2B told me—while I was collecting the mail from the letter boxes—she suddenly got a bit of a squishy floor in her living room. It appeared all of a sudden. She didn’t like walking on it and was wondering whether she should put in a little bridge to go over it.

“Right in the middle of the living room,” she said. “It’s dangerous. I could fall and crack my skull.”

I offered to come look, not that I thought I’d be much help. But I knew she liked the look of me because she said so, and she liked having us in the building. Said it made her feel progressive.

“Of course, mijo. With those biceps, you could just carry me across it.”

She led the way slowly to her apartment. The floor of her living room was rippled, and undulating, and gelatinous. Like jelly left in the fridge too long. I stepped onto it carefully but not much happened besides a little twitch.

I told her about the eye on the ceiling in our bedroom, how it slowly blinked sometimes, and looked like it was waiting for something.

“As long as you boys cover it up when you get down to business, I guess it’s not doing any harm,” she shrugged. “At least it didn’t hurt the floorboards around it.”

Ms. Chavez and I went to talk to the super. He said other people had complained about weird things showing up in their apartments, but not everyone. 

“Is not my job, cleaning out eyeballs and shit. I gotta do pipes, get ridda roaches, whatever. I don’t get no money for cleaning out wall monsters. You wan’ it gone, you call the landlord.” He didn’t have any body parts in his basement apartment, not that we knew about anyway.

Ms. Chavez decided to call an all-building meeting to find out what was going on in the other apartments. She gave me fliers to stick under people’s doors and most people turned up in her apartment the next evening.

The Pozzis from 4E had teeth—just some teeth sticking out around their bathroom mirror.

Julia in 1A had an antenna that waved around lazily, hanging from the wall in the hallway. It didn’t like being touched.

Dani and her kid—across the hall from us—had a sort of hole that Julia from 1A thought might be an ear canal.

A few people who had nothing complained it wasn’t fair. They wanted body parts that didn’t destroy paint too. Free decoration and all that. The kids all tried bouncing on Ms. C’s floor and complained they didn’t have a trampoline in their living rooms.

Jaz played Tetris on his phone while we talked options. Eventually he said we should just leave all the bits alone. He’s the kinda guy who doesn’t like it when people touch him uninvited.

There was a short storm that evening and the eye blinked rapidly, and it rolled around kinda agitated when the thunder got close. I knew this because I was awake while the thunder rumbled and the sky flashed.

I waved goodnight to the eye after the storm passed and I think it blinked goodnight back.

The Pozzis from 4E sold the story to the Daily News of the World for a four figure sum, which we all thought was a creepster move until the Daily News offered to pay each of us a few hundred bucks to come in and take photos. We all said sure because no one says no to some extra cash, and no one made any more nasty comments to Mr. Pozzi from 4E. At least, not to his face.

Jaz scowled and said maybe the thing didn’t want to be photographed, but only the ear canal apartment could ask, and they didn’t seem like the kind of people who had the time to go down to the mouth apartment to hear the answer.

Ms. Chavez used her money to get a muscly local guy to put in a little deck over the ripples in her living room. She put the sofa on top of it. Said it was a nice change, being up high.

There was another storm two days later and I knew because I was awake, but so was everyone else in the building. It wasn’t a normal storm, not just some rumbles and rain. It was like an earthquake and no one could sleep, not even Jaz.

My cell phone rang and I picked it up. Ms. Chavez said, “Look outta the front window, mijo, because you ain’t never gonna see this sorta thing again. I got a good view from my living room deck.”

I grabbed Jaz’s hand and pulled him to the window. There was a cloud or maybe a great big jelly mound that was just chilling out there—all lit up and flashing—right in front of our building. It was a kind of monster, like something from a fairy tale or comic book, like an overgrown, house-sized slug, but with eyeballs, and a great big mouth; and it was laughing. That stopped Jaz’s grumbling about being awake so late.

“Found you!” the jelly slugmonster bellowed in a voice like thunder. “You’re in there, I know you are! Come out!”

There was another round of little booms and the building shook, shuddering the pictures on our walls. Luckily, they didn’t fall, which was good because cleaning broken glass is a pain.

Then suddenly there was a big pop and a smaller slugmonster was slithering or maybe slugging down the building’s front stairs, giggling. The rumbling got less intense the further away it got and its giggles stopped making the windows rattle.

“That was the best hiding place ever! I fooled you for so long!” The little slugmonster crowed in its childish slugmonster voice. “Now it’s your turn to hide!”

The big papa slugmonster laughed and it felt like there was another earthquake. “Ok, honeybean, but not here. Let’s go try down south in a rainforest. It’ll be super tricky there, bet you’ll never find me!”

Then they disappeared.

 Ms. C and I were chatting by the mailboxes. She was annoyed about having spent her money from the Daily News on the elevated flooring in her living room. 

“Maybe I can get my daughter to say it’s a special design or something. She’s an architect, you know? Could make me famous.”

I told her how pleased Jaz had been to move back into the bedroom. The sofa wasn’t so good for his back. She nodded, said she always did her dirty business in the bedroom because of her hips.

A group of people appeared at the front door and pushed into the narrow entrance hall, all pink faces and big hats. Me and Ms. C stood with our backs to the second door, mail clutched in our hands, staring down these out-of-town beasts.

“Hey, man,” the biggest dude said, waving a flyer at me. “Can you buzz us through? We got tickets to see the slugmonster exhibit in 4E.”