The Fourth Floor

When you have lived as many places as I, some places you begin to forget. However there are some places that haunt my memory and remain impossible to drive from my mind.

Warm autumn sunlight would shimmered through the trees and cast harsh geometric shadows on the narrow back alleys of old Philadelphia. There always was a sort of spookiness to those old streets. It sometimes felt as if the three hundred year old ghosts from when the city was fresh and turbulent could still slip out from the cracks of the cobblestones and walk amongst the living. There were many nights I could recall laying awake in my one bedroom flat, listening to what I swore was the sound of horse hooves pulling a carriage up Fitzwater in the dead of night. I’d try to rationalize, I was just imagining it, but it gave me chills all the same. When my boyfriend was away, which he was very often, I would call my friends back North and talk as long as they let me before facing the long nights alone.

There was something strange about that place, our apartment on the corner of Front and Fitzwater. I can hardly remember anything good about it, but I will never forget everything bad. It was like a nightmare brought to life. The years I spent there, I don’t think I’ve ever slept so little. It’s no surprise in hindsight why I could never keep my eyes open in class, after making the 45 minute walk to my University, after my bike was stolen from the narrow hallway on the bottom floor. Funny, I had just gone up for lunch and locked the door, yet when I returned to grab my bike and head back to class, my bike had simply vanished. But that’s not even the strangest thing that happened there.

One day, my boyfriend and I were sitting upstairs, the entire third, or “top” floor was our apartment, when we heard a loud crash. The whole building shook. We heard people shouting. Next we heard an angry knock on our door. Our downstairs neighbor raced up the stairs and was shouting about how his ceiling had collapsed and how it must somehow be our fault. The whole thing collapsed, yet our apartment was fine. It turned out there wasn’t even a leak. This was never explained and we all went on as if it never happened.

And yet even this was not what bugged me. Not this, or the time the garbage truck also miraculously exploded on Fitzwater, sending trash spraying everywhere up and down the narrow street. No, it wasn’t the horse hooves and the sound of heels clicking against the cobblestones when the dimly lit street was clearly deserted between midnight and four am. It wasn’t the fact that my cat would constantly stand on my dresser at night when I was alone and claw, meowing desperately at the ceiling. There was something worse about that place, something completely inexplicable.

One night before my bike was stolen, I was riding home late after classes and work had finished, it was dark, but not late enough for the streets to be entirely empty. I turned the corner to our apartment and saw a woman. She was well dressed, in a pencil skirt and heels. She clutched her purse and walked in my direction until she reached the corner of Front and Fitzwater. In the narrow opening where the sidewalk breaks and the two streets meet the woman suddenly stopped. When she resumed walking she did not continue in a straight path in my direction as she had been doing only a moment before. Instead she did the most bizarre circle. She spun about two or three times, it’s hard to recall because it all happened so quickly. Then she abruptly collapsed.

I jumped off my bike and let it crash to the ground, rushing over to check on her. It seemed likely, at the angle she had fallen that she could have hit the back of her head on the sidewalk.

“Oh my God, are you okay?” I asked as I knelt down and reached for her arm. She was clearly dazed and brought one of her hands to her head.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.” She said as I helped her back to her feet.

“Do you need me to call someone? Call for help, or sit down? I live just upstairs.” I insisted. The woman wouldn’t look at me, she shook her head and steadied herself on my arm for a moment, fixed her hair and smoothed her skirt.

“No, no I’m fine… Just don’t tell my husband.” She said and kept walking as if I hadn’t been standing there at all. I was shaken. More shaken than she seemed to be. I slowly retrieved my bike and walked to the front door of my apartment building and reached for my keys, occasionally glancing back to check if the woman was still on her feet, but soon she was nowhere to be seen.

“Fuck.” I realized then that I had left my keys in my apartment. Another unfortunate reality of living in that strange place was how it was entirely possible to lock yourself out with your keys still inside. My boyfriend was out of town again, he was in the Coast Guard so he wasn’t going to be returning soon and I needed to figure out some way back into my place. Old building that it was, I realized I could climb the fire escape and break into my own window, which I had left unlocked… That is if I could reach it. Luckily I had some classmates that lived pretty close so I grabbed my phone and started making my way down the list of possibly available people, preferably boys, who could help me break into my own apartment.

“Hey Dambly! You free? Here’s the thing, I may have locked myself out of my apartment and need your help. I’ll buy you a beer, or several.” Fortunately my friend agreed and I sat on the front step for 15 minutes or so until he arrived. It took a little convincing but after awhile he laced his fingers together and allowed me to step on them, hoisting me up until I could reach the edge of the fire escape and pull myself onto the first floor platform. Thankfully our neighbors also rarely seemed to be home and no one noticed a stranger standing outside their window. I scurried up the ladder as quickly as I could, and went to push the window open, then I stopped.

“What the fuck.” I whispered to myself. Why hadn’t I noticed it before? I was always under the impression that we lived on the top floor, after all, it was the top floor. The stairs stopped at our apartment, and yet there I was, face to face with a fourth floor. I stared at the boarded up window at the top of the fire escape for a moment, completely dumbfounded. Then I popped open my window, slid in, grabbed my keys and rushed downstairs to show my friend my discovery.

“What the fuck?” He repeated as we stared slack jawed at the now clearly visible extra floor that no one seemed to have noticed until that very moment. We circled the building, there was absolutely no way in, except for the one boarded up window at the top of the fire escape. Soon after we both slid back out the window and climbed the ladder to further inspect this mystery floor. Foolishly we made attempts to pry at the wood to get a peek inside until we started rousing suspicion from people passing by on the street below. Not wanting to risk having the cops called on us for a break and enter we decided to resume the search for stairs inside.

Nothing. There was no evidence of any way to reach this mystery floor. The walls were solid, painted brick, and there were no marks on the ceiling indicating a dropdown staircase leading to an attic. Completely baffled we gave up and grabbed those promised beers, then sat discussing why on earth there was an entire floor above us that no one could access. Needless to say it did not make me sleep any better. I now understood why my cat sat on my dresser and meowed at the ceiling, it turned out that many of those noises I had been hearing were not coming from Fitzwater at all, they were coming from the fourth floor. Creeking, clicking, scratching, clopping. I slept with headphones in or the phone to my ear as often as I could.

Eventually I moved and all the noises stopped. But nights go by and I am still haunted by the mystery of it all. Where was the staircase? Why was it boarded up? And most importantly, who or what was up there? Sadly I don’t think I will ever know, gladly I have slept much better since.