There’s A Metal Door In My Apartment’s Laundry Room And I Think There’s Something Evil Lurking Around It
By Jack Follman
There are lots of kinds of bad people in this world. There are some that may have been born good but turned evil due to circumstance. There are some simply born bad and then there are the worst, most inexcusable of all… those that don’t take their clothes out of communal washers and dryers after their cycle is finished.
I was in the midst of dealing with one of these evil beings when I noticed something in the laundry room of my apartment building I should have noticed long before I did… a thick metal door tucked down the end of a dusty hallway next to where the dryers rested. A modern structure of strength out of place in the ancient bowels of my 20s-era apartment building, the door looked like the only thing in the entire room which hadn’t been decomposing since the 70s.
With the laundry lingerer’s abandoned clothes now resting on top of the dryer and my stuff getting tumbled in hot air for the high price of $1.25, I tip toed through the harsh light of the basement hallway towards the steely door. This was not usually the kind of thing I would do, but the extra glass of pinot grigio I downed with my otherwise boring dinner melted my usual fears into curiosity.
The cold door right in front me, I stared at the unmarked steel for a few moments before I slowly pulled my hand back and brought it down into a harder knock than I had planned. I stood cold for a few moments, near shivering until…
A knock answered back on the other side.
The sprint from the basement laundry room back to the safety of my studio apartment three stories up harkened me back to my days of high school track and field. It had been more than a decade since I moved so swiftly and my lungs felt it. I laid with my back pressed hard against the inside of my apartment door and fumbled with the twisty lock in the door handle next to my head.
It took a few more seconds of sucking in oxygen, but my guilt eventually started to outweigh my fear.
Why the fuck did I knock on that door?
That first question was quickly outweighed by another question.
What do I do now?
I couldn’t help but wonder if I was just going crazy. Maybe I imagined the knock back? Maybe I was just drunk. Maybe I shouldn’t have smoked weed on my way home from work.
Now I was digging myself a hole of insecurity to lie down and toil in and it led to me deciding not to tell anyone about what happened. Instead, I was going to go back down to the laundry room tomorrow, with a sober mind, during daylight hours and knock again.
The walk down to the laundry room was treacherous, even when you weren’t carrying a heavy load of dirty laundry. The door rested about 20 feet up from the ground level of the laundry and the only way down was a rickety set of tight stairs made of soggy wood that seemed like they could collapse at any moment.
I was glad to discover no one was doing their laundry when I descended the stairs and found my footing on the dusty cement floor. On the ground floor, the knocking door stared over at me from the end of the narrow hallway on the other end of the room. My brain momentarily created the sound of a cackling clown laugh coming from the door the way it would in some kind of horribly cheesy cheap horror movie that would have scared me as a child and it almost made me laugh.
I tried to walk towards the door the way I would have before the knock back last night, as if I wasn’t nearly petrified with fear, but I couldn’t quite pull it off. It may have been bright and sunny outside, but I forgot the laundry room was a windowless pit which was perpetually lit with the faded yellow lighting of a few dull bulbs laced with spider webs.
I made it to the end of the hallway and stared at the steel door just like I had the night before. I pulled through the last of my fears and pounded my fist against the metal.
I waited there in silence for a good minute and felt sane for the first time in a quite a few hours. Maybe I had just misheard or imagined the whole thing the night before? I thought about running away in joy, but worried about someone coming down to do their laundry seeing me so I walked off like a normal human being.
I shuffled just about to the end of the little hallway when I heard something slide out from underneath the door behind me. I swiftly turned around to see a piece of paper resting at the foot of the door.
My lungs froze. I stared at the piece of paper resting there on the dirty floor. I gave one hard blink to try and reset my brain and confirm I was really seeing what I saw. It was definitely there.
I slowly moved back towards the door with my hands readied as fists in front of me. I had never thrown a true punch in my life, but I was ready to at least attempt something should I need to.
The door was now just a few feet away and I could see the marks of the dark ink upon the downside of the paper which rested nearly at my feet. I knelt down shivering like a cold lap dog and flipped the paper over to reveal to words written in sloppy black marker.
HELP ME
My brain panicked. I searched for something to write back with. The best I could find was a small jagged pebble on the floor.
I scribbled the pebble on the piece of paper until it made the faint, dirty outline of letters and wrote back:
WHAT CAN I DO?
I slid the piece of paper back under the door and jumped up out of my squat.
Someone was standing right behind me.
I was suddenly face-to-face with another 30ish woman, her frizzy, mane of unkempt hair nearly tickling my nose. I let out a quick, tight scream right in her face and she nearly dropped her heavy basket of laundry.
The woman, who I was pretty sure I had seen around the building a few times, softly grabbed hold of my shoulders and looked me right in the eye.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I shook, looked down at the floor. “Uh, I, guess, so, yeah,” I mumbled and looked back at her soft face that looked aged beyond its years.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
I froze for a few moments without any idea of what I should say. Should I tell her what was happening with the door? Would she believe me?
“Uh, uh, I dropped some quarters and they rolled over there underneath the door. Was trying to get them back,” I said nervously.
I could tell by the look on the woman’s face she didn’t believe me in the least. She gave me the look I imagine I give to homeless people when they ask me for change – kind of a half-smile, half-cringe topped with a furrow of the brow.
“I might have an extra or two if you need them. I’m Bea, by the way.”
All I could think about was how Bea was a bizarre name for a woman who seemed like she was in her 30s to have when I shook her hand and tried to act like I wasn’t still engrossed in what was going on back by the door.
“Carly,” I introduced myself back to her and shot a glance over my shoulder to see a new piece of paper resting just at the foot of the door.
I resisted the urge to immediately go back down to the laundry room and investigate the new piece of paper for about an hour before I caved and headed back down, hoping Bea had finished her load.
The young woman with the old name wasn’t in the laundry room when I went back down, but I could hear her wet laundry tumbling around in one of the dryers. I slipped past the rattle and hum of the laundry machines and headed to the door where the piece of paper was still resting.
I shot a look behind me towards the heart of the laundry room before I scooped up the piece of paper. No one there to my relief. I let out a deep exhale before I saw what was written on the piece of paper, a url:
I couldn’t get back to my apartment to punch in the URL fast enough and I wasn’t the least bit disappointed when I loaded up the site into my browser.
I was presented with a black and white image of an older woman lying on a dirty mattress in a dark and dusty room smoking a cigarette while watching a tiny TV. I put my hand to my mouth and stared at the screen in the cold silence of my studio apartment.
The live image I was seeing was assuredly the woman who was trapped behind that door in the basement. I had an initial urge to report what I was seeing to the police, but was quickly distracted by something else on the screen of my computer – little thumbnails of other cams.
One particular thumbnail grabbed my interest. It looked like an all too familiar scene.
I clicked on it on it and confirmed my fear.
The site took me to a live image of the inside of my apartment with me looking at my computer, my back to the screen.
Fear, disgust, and powerlessness overwhelmed me all at once. I felt the stinging eyes of a thousand creeps staring at the back of my head, but I knew I had to move and move quickly. The door to my apartment which was only about 10 feet from my seat suddenly felt as if it was a mile away.
I heard footsteps approach the outside of my apartment door and suddenly the second-story window behind my computer seemed like a better option than trying to make it out the door. I didn’t have much time. I could hear someone trying the handle to my door. I heard a key slide into the lock and I threw open my window, but I couldn’t move fast enough, the door was opening and I looked to see the woman who I had seen in the laundry room, Bea, hustling into my apartment.
“Wait,” Bea called out to me as I tried to pry the screen off my window. “It’s not what it seems.”
I didn’t wait to hear what the stranger with the old name was trying to say to me, I took a nail file and slashed open the screen as fast as I could. I frantically pulled away the fabric of the screen as Bea started to descend on me with all the warmth in her eyes vanished and gone.
Bea was a short arm’s length away from me when I finally ripped the screen open enough to where I could dive out the window with reckless abandon. I was just out the window when she said something that would haunt me during my brief trip from the window frame to the cold, hard ground.
“It doesn’t matter, you’re screwed anyway!”
Then everything went black.
I awoke in the darkness to a tumbling sound. I must have been knocked out on my fall from the window. Not a surprise, it was a fall of more than 15 feet and I jumped out head first.
Feeling what I assumed were the effects of a concussion, everything in my world seemed hazy. I couldn’t seem to focus on anything for more than a few sparse seconds. Plus, the room was pitch black and at least one of my contacts lenses must have fallen out some time between my jump and now. My head hurt, my eyes hurt, pretty much everything hurt, I could barely crawl upon what felt like a lumpy mattress beneath me.
It took a few minutes of painful acclimation, but my senses slowly started to come back to me in the dark and there were three things which became very clear.
The steady tumbling sound I could hear was a dryer tossing around clothes…
The warm smell tickling my nose was warming clean clothes…
The only thing I could see in the pitch black room was a steadily blinking little red light and it belonged to a video camera.