Short Fiction: The Last Tenant
Content warnings: body horror, nudity, tenant rights
The first sign of it was the sound that came from the vent.
I suspected the bathroom fan, though I couldn’t prove it — but what else could it be? As soon as I flicked on the light switch and stepped inside the room, I’d hear that nasty rattle start. It was a gritty, wheezing groan, close to what I imagined you would get if you forced a jet engine to inhale six feet of grave dirt.
I tried to drown out the sound whenever I needed to take care of something in there. Quick showers with my phone blaring whatever song had last wormed its way into my skull. Running tap water the whole time I brushed my teeth or took a shit, blending the monotonous droning of my tooth brush and the gentle shhhh of the water.
Trying the super was futile, but I did it anyway. The missives were as varied as the means I used to deliver them. I would call. I would knock. I would send long, overly deferential text messages with detailed descriptions of the awful sound punctuated by a plea for assistance.
“I’m worried it will lead to mold damage,” I’d scribble on a note already marked with my apartment number before jamming the message between the door and the threshold of the super’s apartment.
“I don’t want to lose the deposit,” I said through the door once, my voice choked with all the financial angst I could muster, hoping most of it would carry through four inches of tortured wood.
When that failed, I tried to call on something deeper — some buried need for the world to make sense, to adhere to some tidy logic I’d still yet to spot any evidence of after years spent searching for it. If it’s in me, I thought, maybe it’s in him.
“Please,” I implored. “I just want to make sure that everything is working okay. I just want to make sure the vent is doing its job.”
That one I sent over text. He didn’t have the courtesy to turn on his read receipts.
After weeks spent sending intermittent distress signals, I gave up. I decided to let the fan and the awful sound it made win.
I took long, hot showers that I spent staring at the grate in the ceiling that I thought — that I knew — was the source of the noise I dreaded. I ran the water so hot for so long that when I finally opened the bathroom door, the fire alarm would bleat in a panic, convinced the steam from my shower was smoke heralding a blaze that would engulf me and the other tenants.
Some part of me hoped that what I was doing would deal a mortal blow to what was clearly a diseased machine. I hoped that by overworking that damned fan, I would put it out of its misery. I wanted it to die. I wanted to kill it and let entropy and mycology win.
I imagined the bathroom converted into a leopard-spotted jungle of fungus, mold of all varieties staining the grout and blackening the eggshell-colored walls.
It was a silly fantasy, of course. Nothing I could do would change that place in any way that mattered. Paint it, repaint it, rip out the mouldings and the tile and start over — it had been there before me and it would be there after, when I eventually decided against renewing my lease and abandoned the apartment to some new tenant better equipped to wait out my super’s indifference.
I wanted another opinion. I wanted someone to tell me if they thought there was anything unusual about the sound, if they thought I was being unreasonable. (“I hope I’m not being unreasonable,” I’d say in every message to the super, in the hope that repeating it would make it true.)
But not many people came through my apartment then. Sometimes a coworker from my old work would text me, asking how the job hunt was going and offering to stop by, but I knew the outreach wasn’t sincere. They were being polite. My exit wasn’t acrimonious but it wasn’t like it was particularly pleasant. You can pretend layoffs aren't targeted but it’s harder when one of the departments caught up in them consists of exactly one employee.
My apartment was one long hallway in the basement of my building and a few rooms branching off of it; when I wasn’t in my bedroom, I was in that hallway, which didn’t have a light. I started leaving the bathroom light on and the door open to compensate for the darkness. That meant more of the noise, of course, but I had grown used to it. It became my metronome, the shh-shh-shh! and rattle a constant reminder of where I was, what time it was, how much time I’d been there.
I stopped bothering with the other lights in my apartment: the overhead lights, the reading light, the sunlamp my mother had insisted would be good for my mood. I kept the bathroom door open and the light switch flicked on. Some part of me still hoped the constant overwork would kill the thing in my ceiling, but it seemed to handle it fine. The constant rattling breathing didn’t seem any more labored than it had been before.
I started falling asleep to the lullaby from my bathroom, hypnotized by the humble buzzing of the light positioned above the cabinet hanging over my sink. I would close my eyes and feel the light in front of them; I’d open them and the light would be there. The whole time, I was wrapped in the blanket of the sound, of the shh!-shh!-Shh! from the ceiling.
I don’t remember when I stopped going outside. It seemed unnecessary. I had the light and the sound and that was enough. But I think that meant I had stopped looking for work. It’s hard to recall. But I must’ve run out of money. It’s the only reason I have for why they cut the power. I was startled when I woke up to the darkness. I couldn’t understand what was happening. I knew I hadn’t touched the switch; I was certain that the light should be on because I could still hear the fan struggling to exhale.
Some new understanding slid into place as I lay there in the dark.
I don’t remember grabbing the screwdriver. I felt my fingers wrap around it, and I felt myself tracing my fingers along the wall toward the bathroom, depending on the tortured hum to guide me. Some part of me remembered I’d need light and held my phone limply at my side. I didn’t remember to turn it on until I got into the bathroom and left it face-down on the floor to illuminate the ceiling.
The screwdriver turned once, twice, three times, and the first screw was out. It plinked against the porcelain of the toilet I balanced on and then rolled to a stop on the floor. Something warm and sticky dripped out of the vent and landed on the bare skin of my chest. Somewhere, distantly, I recognized that I was naked.
I kept driving the screwdriver up into the vent and twisting it until I heard another mechanical tink. The third screw came out without a sound. More of that hot liquid dripped into my face as I stood under the vent, considering what to do. I didn’t bother with the last screw. I dug my fingernails into the gap between the vent and the ceiling and I tugged.
It came loose, and I lost my footing in a deluge of fluid the temperature of a fevered human body.
The world somersaulted once, then twice, and then my vision went dark. When it cleared up again, I was staring at the ceiling.
The light cast ugly shadows on a reddish-purple mass that ballooned outward and suctioned back into place in time with my own shallow breathing. The whole thing was slick with a dark fluid, and the spasms of the fleshy mass flicked more of it onto my face. My naked body was drenched in the viscous mucus. My flesh was warm with it, and somehow, I found that comforting.
I heard a mournful sound from the hallway and recognized the noise belonged to my smoke alarm, but there was something wrong with it. I tried to lift myself off the ground and realized one of my collarbones protruded from my chest at the wrong angle. I ignored the pain and used the other arm to lift myself off of the ground.
I don’t remember dragging a step ladder into the hallway. I do remember the wet squelch the tissue beneath the fire alarm made when I used my screwdriver to pry it out of place. Blood wept from a gash I’d made in the bruise-colored flesh there. I caressed the tear and shut my eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. The mouth I had uncovered bleated again, quieter this time. I kept massaging the tissue and whispering, and eventually the bleating died down to nothing. Once it was done, I shut my eyes tighter and I listened for the sound I had come to love.
For the first time, the thing in my bathroom seemed to breathe with ease.
It was a struggle to lift myself into the ventilation with only one good arm. But I had help. And it’s quiet up here. Peaceful. The only sounds I hear now are the muffled ones from below, made by the tenant who replaced me.
I hope I get to meet them soon.