Alaska

I moved into the apartment complex a few years ago. I got a job at a bar in the middle-of-nowhere, Alaska. I guess I just wanted to go somewhere different. Someplace completely different from my hometown, a sunny Los Angeles County suburb, where I’d been living on my parents’ couch and alternating between substitute teaching and bartending for years. The bar was called the Old Historic Tavern, a wooden building whose state of borderline disrepair lived up to its name. 

The apartment building I lived in was somehow enormous, and it seemed everyone in town who didn’t own a house lived in this apartment building. It stood on the edge of town right by the water, away from the rest of the town which was inland about a 5-10 minute drive. I don’t believe it was originally built as an apartment building. It looked more like a converted mansion. 

A few weeks before I was set to fly out there, I found this place on Craigslist. It was ultra-cheap, shockingly so. Most people would have immediately thought it must have been a scam, and while the thought crossed my mind, I was willing to risk the $300 payment I made without even seeing the place in order to secure such a cheap place. The apartment was huge, with four bedrooms converted into a hostel-like living arrangement. I would be sharing the master bedroom with 9 other people, both men and women. I didn’t tell anyone about where I was going to live. I knew they’d tell me not to, to just find a normal apartment or at least a room of my own. I’d be making enough money to afford it, and I had some money saved up from the years of rent-free living at my parents. But I didn’t want to have to explain that something more than the insanely cheap rent drew me to this place. I couldn’t even explain what it was. It just felt right that I would live there, like something new and interesting might happen if I did. 

Of all my roommates, I got along best with Maria. She was beautiful with long dark hair, and always wore the coolest vintage dresses. I often borrowed them from her for work at the tavern. The strangest thing about the apartment complex is that it felt like an apartment building in Brooklyn, full of young, cool hipster types. It seemed completely out of place, even absurd, for a small town in Alaska. Then there were the twins, Tom and Preston. They were identical twins and were almost always together, but couldn’t have been more different in personality.

Tom was exceptionally friendly and warm. He was the impetus behind many of the household traditions, such as Thursday movie nights and Sunday dinners. He worked as a teacher at the tiny local school, teaching fourth and fifth grade all together in one room. Preston, on the other hand, I could never find out much about. He seemed to orbit his brother like the moon the earth, never leaving his side. Like the moon, there was a side of him that was shrouded in darkness. He rarely talked, and seemed like the odd one out at every group hangout. He didn’t seem to work. He was always at the apartment, doing absolutely nothing but waiting for his brother to come home. 

 Tom was also a regular at the tavern, which he asked me not to tell Preston. He never drank to excess, though, so I imagined it wasn’t because of a drinking problem. He’d usually order food and maybe a beer or two at most, and take a long time to eat and drink. Once I got to know him a little better I ventured to ask him why his time at the tavern had to be kept secret from his twin, the person with whom he was closest in the world. He sighed and said that he needed at least one place that was just for him, where he could wind down away from his brother. 

“There’s more to it than that, but I don’t want to get into it,” Tom said. “He thinks I work a couple hours later than I do. Just keep it between us that I come here at all.”

“Don’t worry,” I assured him. “A bartender is bound by an oath as sacred as a priest’s.” 

One night I came back home late from work to find the household in the middle of a panic. They were talking frantically, then suddenly went silent the moment I walked in. It smelled like someone had taken a bath in melted pennies. I tried to ask what happened. Everyone insisted that everything was fine. 

I woke up in the middle of the night and found myself in a cabin that looked just like one I had stayed in once with my family as a kid. I looked around for anyone else and found that I was completely alone. Two televisions sat in the living room, and on them played the same short clip of two young children in a wheelbarrow holding a pair of human skulls, laughing hysterically. I woke up with a jolt back into reality. I rarely had false awakening dreams, but when I did they freaked me out more than anything else. It’s not that anything in particular is wrong so much as that a mysterious source of suspense builds up, there’s something wrong in the air itself. Only that feeling didn’t go away when I woke up for real. 

I got up to get some water, and found Tom shaking in his sleep with such force that he almost looked possessed. It felt cruel not to, but I didn’t dare to wake him. 

For the next few months I tried to pretend that nothing happened. Since that strange night, Preston had disappeared. Tom said he went to stay with their parents in Canada. It all seemed odd, but I didn’t want to rock the boat. I started applying to jobs back in LA.

On a Saturday morning, I went out for a walk and to get coffee. Once again I got that odd feeling, that sense of suspense in the air, like in a false-awakening dream. I read that there are two types of false-awakening dreams, one in which a person just goes about the activities of daily life, makes breakfast, drinks a cup of coffee, maybe goes to the bathroom. The other kind is called a type two false-awakening. The dreamer wakes up into a world in which everything is similar, but there’s a sense of all-encompassing foreboding. Something is just off. Psychologists have even speculated that people get this vague, general feeling of offness before they go insane. I felt this more strongly than I ever have. 

And when I walked back into the apartment, I was met with screams. I smelled that copper smell again, but this time I saw the blood flowing from a stab wound in Maria’s arm.

“Run,” she screamed, “It’s too late for us! Run and don’t look back!” 

“He escaped!” screamed Tom. “Oh god! Run!” 

As I ran, I saw Preston in my peripheral vision. He had stumps for arms and legs, yet moved with astonishing speed. His mouth was covered in blood. 

I ran as fast as I could. I didn’t look back. I ran until I reached the tavern and screamed that I needed a ride out of town, now. A man in a suit and a big hat sat at the bar. Somehow he sensed the real urgency and knew exactly where to go. We ran to his car and drove until we reached a mountain. At the base of the mountain was a door. We went through the door and down and down and down winding paths leading deep into the earth, and drove for what seemed like an hour until we reached the bottom, whereupon there was a lake. Around the lake were demons, multi-headed blue demons, red demons made of fire. The demons laughed hysterically. 

“You think this is just a dream, don’t you?” they cackled.