There was a door plastered over in the quiet room with the orange carpet, and his knuckles tapped it out, rap-rap, against the white and stained paint. It was a small door, child sized, just larger than William Fitzgerald. The light in the room had taken on a bright, metallic quality that made trails and ghost images when he moved his head or his eyes too quickly. The plaster of the wall was rotten where water had soaked into it. He pulled a great chunk free from the wall and cast it onto the body on the mattress. A black space yawned behind the wall; foul smelling air blew from the air and stirred the disordered hairs that clung to William Fitzgerald’s head.

It took him twenty minutes of swearing labour to pull enough plaster from the doorway to squeeze through. He kicked the corpse before he left the apartment, sobriety making him more than ordinarily spiteful and irritable. A long passageway ran beyond the wall, twisted and covered in bent and rusted nails. William Fitzgerald picked his way carefully through them, feeling his way ahead as the light from the quiet room behind him faded. The nailing grew louder.