Finding Anabelle Glass

3rd November 2014

It was the next morning and Anabelle Glass still hadn’t returned home. Heston Chadwick knew this because the slam of her door hadn’t woken him up. That, and he had been making frequent trips to the fisheye lens fixed into his apartment door.

The corridor outside Heston’s apartment wasn’t something he particularly liked to look at. Its reddish rug, of which one could only slightly see from the looking glass, was fraying and dirtied from a thousand footsteps. Its walls were timelessly damaged – did they used to be cream? Grey? White? They were now mottled with age and misuse, edged with green mould, dirtied with fingerprints and layers and layers of picked-off wallpaper. The view from the looking glass had one redeeming feature, and that was the apartment door straight opposite Heston’s: The Home of Anabelle Glass.

It was closed more often than not, empty more often than not. In fact, Heston had never actually seen anyone but Anabelle Glass enter or leave her apartment – but when she did, he paid attention. What he knew of her apartment, what he knew of life beyond his own apartment and that small sliver of hallway, was recorded into one of Heston’s many notepads. This particular notepad was a teal one, decorated with small house martins and the long spindly branches they perched on. It was one of three house martin notebooks Heston owned and the only one which had been used as of yet. On its cover, Heston had penned:

Beyond Apartment 5a

And inside the booklet only a few pages had been used.

Heston wasn’t one for wasting ink or paper. Or thoughts. His apartment reflected that, with its mountains of old television magazines, boxes of cat litter for the cat he no longer had and empty mason jars. The mason jars in particular looked small and sad, sitting in their cupboard, waiting for Mrs Lewis – who would never return for them – to come and pick them up and fill them once again with a rich lemon curd or a ‘marmalade with a twist’. She’d leave them outside his door once a week on Tuesdays, until she didn’t.

The bronze-rimmed clock beside the door – one of many strategically placed timepieces to grace the walls of the apartment –told Heston it was thirty eight minutes past ten. And no Anabelle Glass. This worried him for several reasons, reasons he then decided to write into the house martin book:

Reasons to be concerned over Anabelle Glass’s mysterious disappearance:

1. It is midmorning.

2. Her phone has rung and has not been answered.

3. It is a weekday and on weekdays Anabelle has to go to work (aside: workplace still unknown).

Heston set down his pen and notebook and checked his wristwatch. It was an ancient thing that worked less than it broke and trapped his arm hairs inside its strap sometimes. Mid-morning meant that he could make the switch from Rooibos to English Breakfast tea, switching cups and teaspoons. This wasn’t wasteful, because Heston would return to these cups once it was mid-afternoon.

The door across the hall remained shut and the corridor stayed empty.

Several hours later, Heston heard footsteps down the corridor. He left his book where it was and moved to the looking glass. House martin booklet left shirt pocket, where he’d kept it, thinking that yes, I may need this later and pen was poised.

A large man, muscled in places muscles didn’t usually reside, and with hair cut so close to his scalp it was a wonder his skin hadn’t been nicked in the process, strode into view. The man paused outside Anabelle Glass’s door and from the other side of the looking glass, Heston’s throat went dry.

This man was a complete stranger. In all of Heston’s many notebooks, particularly in his house martin collection, there had never been mention of this huge, almost-bald man. His hands were raised to door level and he was standing at a slight angle – serendipitous for Heston’s viewpoint – and began to work at Anabelle Glass’s lock. Those thick fingers looked like they shouldn’t have been able to do anything nimble, let alone jiggle some sort of lock-picking tools in such a manner as to open her door – but open it they did.

Heston watched as the huge man stepped into the room, dwarfing the doorframe comically. Then, for many long moments, Heston was left to watch the closed door, as though the worn paint and scratch marks on it could tell him what was going on behind it. Faint noises travelled across the floors and to Heston’s ears: the man moving heavily about her apartment and the scraping of furniture. A pang of jealousy had Heston clutching his pen a little tighter – this man, this intruder, was seeing the inside of the apartment Heston had been preoccupied with for years. Where Heston had barely made it past the front door in his findings, this man had barged his way in and was seeing what Heston had imagined seeing for so long.

Not for the first time, Heston hated that he couldn’t leave Apartment 5a.

Three minutes and thirty two seconds passed before the man returned. He had a thick wad of files in his hands, a determination in his eyes and lines etched into his forehead. As he came through the door Heston could see his face perfectly, but only looked for a moment before trying to see past the huge body and into the elusive Apartment 5b. A wasted attempt: the only thing visible was shadow-work and the ghostly shapes of furniture.

The man shut the door behind him, the action making the muscles in his biceps coil like a snake moving underneath his skin, and stilled on his feet. He was looking at Heston’s door, now. Heston’s apartment. Throat thick with something unnameable, blocked by a tongue too big for it and teeth that didn’t feel quite right, Heston held his breath and his skin broke out in shivers whilst being far too hot at the same time – the hairs on every single body part were standing on end. Breathing? Fast. Too fast. It was eerie: did this intruder know Heston was watching? How could he? He couldn’t – but he watched Heston’s door for several long moments before moving back down the corridor the way he’d originally come.

Within the walls of Apartment 5a, Heston slid to the floor and clutched at his corduroy trousers, trying to calm himself. He lifted a hand in front of his face and couldn’t keep it from shaking. It was quiet, save the ticking of many clocks and the uneven, ragged breathing of the man on the floor.