A man’s voice, thin, querulous, and confused, asked who’s there? It could feel someone there. Who was it, what did it want?

William Fitzgerald said nothing, but seethed internally. He waited actively.

The voice pleaded. Listen to me, it said. Please listen to me. There’s no way out of here, there’s nothing outside of here, there’s only this house. Foote broke through the windows… he smashed them with his body, he threw himself again and again and again against them until they shattered and the glass went into his body and the blood was everywhere and outside the windows there was nothing, there was only the other side of the room, do you hear me, are you still there? There’s no escape from this house, there’s nothing out there.

The voice sobbed, raged, swore, begged, mumbled, until William Fitzgerald’s legs ached from standing poised to take another step. He put his leg down silently. He put his hands in his pockets. The voice ran itself hoarse, then there was silence for an endless stretch of time that William Fitzgerald guessed was really about six minutes. Soft snoring began, and William Fitzgerald softfooted his way toward the noise. He touched the sleeping body lightly with his hands, until he found the head, the chest, the throat, then he put his knee firmly between the chin and the sternum and pressed all his weight against the body. The body flailed and thrashed and clawed at William Fitzgerald, but then it lay still. He counted slowly to three hundred then stood up and put his fingers against the throat. There was no pulse.

He fumbled his way through darkness, catching his clothes again and again when he brushed against the uneven, unseen walls. He swore to himself, without speaking, running expletives and blasphemies through his mind. He learned not to lift his feet, not to put them down firmly, to slow and brush clean the floor before him, after three nails ran into his shoes and punctured the sole of his right foot. It was perhaps twenty minutes of unrelieved blackness before the tunnel came to an end. A difference in the air told him that he stood on the edge of a large room. The hammerer was a few yards away, he thought.

William Fitzgerald entertained no thoughts of companionship, of camraderie, of community, of brotherhood in the face of adversity. He moved silent through the blinded room, gumshoes quiet on the wooden floor, tensed against a creaking board, fingers curled for violence, blood high in his face. He thought of the body posed in the quiet room, of the wood under its fingernails, the blood that had pooled for days in the skin like wax that wasn’t rotting. The hammering stopped, and he froze, one foot firmly down, one foot half suspended, and waited patiently, and thought of nothing, of nothing.

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.

Room, kitchen, room, and all of the windows were nailed shut, and all were boarded over or painted black, and the sound of hammering came through the walls. He dumped one of the rusted pots out on the dead man and smashed a blacked out window with it. The window did not break; the pot bounced back and wrenched his shoulder. He hurled the pot at the window and went into the kitchen. Table, country sink, cabinet; in the cabinet were more pots, dozens of them, all rusted and splotched. He turned on the cold tap in the sink — it was a metal wheel — dark and stinking water poured out. The sink slowly filled with water. It did not drain. The hammering stopped.

William Fitzgerald was angry. He wanted both coffee and scotch indiscriminately, he wanted his freedom, he wanted most destruction. The doors in the rooms led nowhere, led only from one to the other, so he began searching the walls, slowly, painstakingly, tap tap tap with his knuckles. He listened for echoes, hollow spots, denser portions of wall; he felt for changes in texture, differences in paint; he listened for a response. He found a closet hidden in the kitchen, behind the cabinet, filled with cobwebs and pieces of wood. A bat lay dead underneath all the wood, corpse half-grown into the floor, mouth open and sunken.

The hammering started again, arrhythmic, distant, mad.

He found himself on a bare mattress in a mildewed room. Plaster from the ceiling lay thick upon him, white and leprous, blotching his suit, coating his face. Little clumps of it fell from his eyes as he blinked in the dim light. He sat up and an avalanche rolled down his shoulders. The mattress, a twin, lay upon the floor, a stained and stale-smelling mattress with loose buttons that were pressing uncomfortably into William Fitzgerald’s legs. Another mattress, equally stained and abused, was against the filthy wall, a man spread neatly upon it. The man had broken fingers that had been crudely bandaged. He was not breathing. William Fitzgerald pushed a finger into the dark skin of the man’s cheek and found it cold and waxy. The mark of his finger didn’t fade when he took his hand away.

Pans dotted the orange floor, filled with rusty water that smelled like blood, each beneath an irregular stain on the ceiling. More crumbled plaster coated some of the pans. The beams of the roof peered through the ceiling, dark wood, gnawed and scratched, the scratches too long and regular for rats’ claws. William Fitzgerald looked at the hands of the dead man. Wood beneath the fingernails. Nails had been driven into the walls seemingly at random, mad industry, into the frames of the boarded over windows, into the jambs of the sliding doors, in ragged fairy circles around the bare bulbs. He left the room, and found himself in a kitchen, left the kitchen through a different door and found himself in the room. From far away he could hear the sound of hammering, hammering, hammering.