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Summary
Summary
From Blumhouse Books, a haunting thriller about a troubled married couple whose vacation to Paris leads them into a nightmare.
"Dark and deeply disturbing. I'm still shuddering."--R.L. Stine
"An impressively compelling chiller... an ideal choice for late nights alone." -- CultureCrypt
Mark and Steph have a relatively happy family with their young daughter in sunny Cape Town until one day when armed men in balaclavas break in to their home. Left traumatized but physically unharmed, Mark and Steph are unable to return to normal and live in constant fear. When a friend suggests a restorative vacation abroad via a popular house swapping website, it sounds like the perfect plan. They find a genial, artistic couple with a charming apartment in Paris who would love to come to Cape Town. Mark and Steph can't resist the idyllic, light-strewn pictures, and the promise of a romantic getaway. But once they arrive in Paris, they quickly realize that nothing is as advertised. When their perfect holiday takes a violent turn, the cracks in their marriage grow ever wider and dark secrets from Mark's past begin to emerge.
Deftly weaving together two complex and compelling narrators, S. L. Grey builds an intimate and chilling novel of a disintegrating marriage in the wake of a very real trauma. The Apartment is a terrifying tour-de-force of horror, of psychological thrills, and of haunting suspense.
Author Notes
S. L. Grey is the pseudonym for Sarah Lotz, author of Day Four and The Three , for which she won the British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer, and Louis Greenberg, a writer and editor in South Africa.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Two boring characters lurch toward their fate in this listless contemporary horror novel from Grey (the writing team of Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg). Mark's shotgun marriage to trophy wife Steph, who's already haunted by the ghosts of Mark's failed first marriage, is further strained by a home invasion. A chance to reset by swapping their apartment in Cape Town, South Africa, for one in Paris, France, only makes matters worse. When Mark thinks, "I'm nothing but a cliché," he is sadly on the nose, as Grey doesn't give readers any reason to care about a whining sad sack who accidentally killed his daughter. Steph's jealousy and selfishness make her little better. The use of past-tense narration by Steph takes the mystery out of Mark's present-tense account, and the horror elements (a suicide, hallucinations) produce barely more than a yawn. The story is slow until the rush to a senseless final death and a buck-passing ending that disappoints instead of satisfying. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Mark and Steph weren't injured in the break-in robbery of their Cape Town apartment neither was their daughter, Hayden but the resulting trauma is rotting their relationship from the inside. On a whim, they decide to use an apartment-swap website to spend a week, just the two of them, in Paris. But apartment 3B isn't the cozy, charming getaway they were promised. It's cold and musty, lacking Wi-Fi, and dark from locked window shades, and the building is practically deserted. A credit-card issue basically traps them there, at which point Mark finds something in 3B's closet: buckets full of human hair. Grey, a pseudonym for Sarah Lotz (The Three, 2014) and Louis Greenberg, believably corners the couple in an unwinnable situation eerily familiar to anyone who's had a vacation go awry. The ante is viscerally upped every new day a creepy neighbor, an unnerving wax museum, an animal death, and visions of Mark's dead child from a previous marriage and, as with Grey's surreal The Mall (2014), the authors change the game halfway through to disorienting effect. Bonus: features the scariest haircut scene possibly ever.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"SUDDENLY IT ALL struck Misao as impossibly artificial." This epiphany comes to a middle-class Tokyo woman about halfway through Mariko Koike's unnerving novel THE GRAVEYARD APARTMENT (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, $25.99), after a scant three months of living in the title residence: a roomy eighth-floor flat that overlooks a temple, a burial ground and a crematory. (No wonder the price was so reasonable.) What seems to her artificial isn't the strange things that have been happening in the building - the sudden death of a pet bird, a mysterious cold wind in the basement, an elevator that stops working at the most inconvenient times - but the day-to-day life she lives with her husband, her small daughter and her dog, which goes on as if nothing were happening at all. "Everything Teppei and I do these days - no, really, everything the four of us do, including Tamao and even Cookie - somehow feels as if we're all acting in a play, she thought. A theater-of-the-absurd play about the daily routine of an utterly ordinary family living in a beautiful, sunny apartment, without a care or worry in the world. Just an average family, living in a perfectly normal building, playing their parts to the hilt. Except that something isn't quite right about this idyllic tableau...." The idea expressed here, that a glimpse of other worlds beyond (or beneath) our own can make our accepted reality look mighty peculiar, is a common one in horror fiction; Misao's interior monologue just states it a bit more baldly than usual. Because it's so on-the-nose, though, it started me thinking about how plot works in horror novels. The short story is the ideal form for horror because it can convey a quick, vivid impression of fear, without having to extend the action past the breaking point of the reader's credulity. "The successful ghost story," the great English writer Robert Aickman remarked, "is akin to poetry and seems to emerge from the same strata of the unconscious." All Aickman's horror fiction is short. For longer works like "The Graveyard Apartment," there's really only one basic plot available: A person (or a group of people) struggles to escape an impossible situation. And the mechanism that keeps the plot moving is, inevitably, denial of the sort Misao describes - the stubborn refusal (until it's too late!) to believe that what's happening is in fact happening. What's most effective about Koike's writing (the lively translation is by Deborah Boliver Boehm) is that she links the beleaguered family's reluctance to accept the direness of their circumstances to a kind of habit of denial, a longstanding determination to push unpleasantness away. Misao and her husband, Teppei, began their relationship while he was married to another woman, who committed suicide when she discovered their affair. They don't like to talk about it; they keep her memorial tablet in a little shrine in the back of a closet. In a sense, they've been living in a "theater-of-the-absurd play" for quite a while, dodging the ghosts of their past and doing battle with the monsters of cognitive dissonance. The malevolent forces closing in on them are more things not to face, and although Misao and Teppei are proficient at that, the added weight is crushing. Too many elephants, not enough rooms. Their expertise in denial doesn't serve them well here. But it sure keeps the plot humming along. There's an eerily similar dynamic at work in S. L. Grey's THE APARTMENT (Blumhouse/Anchor, paper, $15). Mark and Steph, South Africans who are also troubled by some bad history, do a bargain house-swap online with a Parisian couple and find themselves stuck with a musty apartment in Pigalle that looks as if it hasn't been inhabited in years. The building has just one other tenant; the windows won't open; there are odd, unaccountable sounds and large bags full of hair in the closet. When they call home, they learn that the people with whom they've swapped, the Petits, haven't turned up. The South Africans' credit card doesn't work, and they don't have enough cash for even a cheap hotel, so they're trapped. Much of the story, which is told in the alternating first-person narratives of Mark and Steph, consists of their attempts to extricate themselves from these creepy circumstances, both physically and psychologically. The physical side involves running around to banks and trying to marshal their dwindling financial resources. The psychological aspect - which is more interesting - has to do with the ways in which they adjust to their bizarre new reality, how they keep reassuring themselves, hopefully, that everything's going to be all right. (It really isn't.) It's clear that the authors - S. L. Grey is the collective pseudonym of Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg - are more interested in their characters' mental adjustments than they are in the mechanics of the spooky plot, and as a result their novel is both a little more penetrating and a little less suspenseful than "The Graveyard Apartment." They're good books, each in its different way an exploration of a marriage haunted by unspoken shame and guilt, but the demands of sustaining a novel-length narrative have the effect of attenuating their best qualities. They'd both be better off as short stories. That's not the case, exactly, with J. Lincoln Fenn's DEAD SOULS (Gallery Books, paper, $16), which is a wickedly entertaining take on the traditional selling-your-soul-to-the-Devil story. The vendor, and narrator, an Oakland marketing expert named Fiona Dunn, is witty enough to realize that the transaction she has made represents "just such a medieval idea," but she's also genuinely frantic to find a means of getting out of the deal, made during a drunken hookup with a smooth-talking guy who calls himself Scratch. Because this is California, there's a support group for similarly damned souls, and Fiona begins to get a notion of the kinds of favors the Devil requires of those who trade with him: mass murder, acts of terrorism - nothing that can be lived with by even the most skilled practitioners of denial. Fiona, though, clings to the belief that her marketing talents can help her persuade her soul's owner to revoke, or at least modify, their arrangement. She's a slick talker too, and she hopes she's a match for him: "We're in the same line of work, after all," she says. For most of the book, she's dashing frantically all over the Bay Area, cooking up get-out-of-hell schemes and trying to implement them and putting out the fires (not all of them metaphorical) that keep flaring up to impede her progress. This book has plot to burn. Fenn's problem, though, is that there's almost no way to resolve it satisfyingly. If the Prince of Darkness can't be defeated, then all the heroine's furious action is pointless. And if Fiona can outwit him and take her soul back, well, he certainly isn't much of a Devil, is he? Fenn, clever as she obviously is, can't quite figure out how to square this circle - the one reserved in hell for writers of ambitious horror novels, plotting and plotting into the endless night. Sebastià Alzamora's startling BLOOD CRIME (Soho, $25.95) avoids that fate by the simple, daring expedient of ignoring the supernatural-horror elements of its plot more or less completely and concentrating instead on the real-life horrors of its historical setting: Barcelona in 1936, at the outset of Spain's devastating civil war. The city is under the control of the Federación Anárquica Ibérica, the FAI, a violent anarchist faction. "And," an overwhelmed police detective muses, "there must have been few cities in the world now where killing came as easily as in Barcelona." The story begins, however, with the monologue of an anonymous vampire, who introduces himself with a casual blasphemy: "Often, when I am overcome by thirst, I put myself in mind of the Holy Spirit." He explains that he, like the Holy Spirit, is "classed among those whose existence is inconceivable to men," and then, warming to his subject, goes even further. "The word most frequently employed to label what I am is monster" he writes, "and it does not trouble me to put it down in black and white. The Holy Spirit is also a monster. God is a monster. And it is a well-known fact that He infused monstrosity into all of creation." There's an apologia pro vita sua for you. Soon after, the garrulous blood-sucking theologian drains a few victims, but his thirst remains largely quiescent for the rest of the book. His philosophizing does not. Although Alzamora follows many different human characters as they go about their often murderous business, the thoughtful vampire periodically interrupts the action with aphoristic commentary. "Fear is the acid of the soul," he announces, "it corrodes without distinction children's dreams and men's desires." And this: "We monsters are not part of this world, but we exist and intervene in it, making our way among men, fashioning ourselves through them. Inside them." By the end of this eventful but consciously open-ended story, you realize that the vampire doesn't really need to draw any more blood for this to be a horror novel. All he has to do is be a metaphor, to hover over the gruesome action like a malign Holy Spirit, watching men who have become monsters and feeling that he has had some part in that - that he has conferred on them his terrible form of grace. "Blood Crime" (beautifully translated from the Catalan by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent) has a sort of concentrated power that's rare in horror novels. It's akin to poetry. In his superb new novel THE FISHERMAN (Word Horde, paper, $16.99), John Langan also manages to sustain the focused effect of a short story or a poem over the course of a long horror narrative, and it's an especially remarkable feat because this is a novel that goes back and forth in time, alternates lengthy stretches of calm with extended passages of vigorous and complex action, and features a very, very large monster. Like Robert Aickman, Langan is a short story writer by inclination; "The Fisherman" is only his second novel, and this one took him over a dozen years to finish. The story is about a Hudson Valley man named Abe who takes up fishing after the death of his wife; eventually he begins fishing with a co-worker named Dan, whose family was killed in a car accident for which he feels responsible. At a certain point, Dan mentions a place called Dutchman's Creek, which doesn't seem to appear on any of the standard maps and which nobody they know has ever fished. On their way, they stop at a diner - it's upstate New York, so you have to - and hear, in great detail, a frightening local legend about the place, from the time, early in the 20 th century, when the Ashokan Reservoir was being constructed. The tale involves a magician, reanimation and a huge mythic beast, but the men go on to Dutchman's Creek anyway. Abe, who narrates, tells himself, as characters in horror stories do, that it can't be true; Dan may have other reasons for forging ahead. "The Fisherman" is unusually dense with ideas and images, and, with the tale heard in the diner taking up the middle third of the book, it's oddly constructed. But there's a beauty in its ungainliness. Langan writes elegant prose, and the novel's rolling, unpredictable flow has a distinctive rhythm, the rise and fall of its characters' real grief. These fishermen are restless men, immobilized but never truly at peace. Again and again, they cast their lines in the hope of catching something, anything, that will restore them to who they were. Abe characterizes himself as "desperate for any chance to recover what I'd lost, no matter what I had to look past to do so," and you feel that sad urgency on every page of his strange and terrifying and impossible story. Langan's novel wears its heart on its sleeve. In Brian Evenson's science-fiction horror novella THE WARREN (Tom Doherty/ Tor, paper, $11.99), the organ on display is a brain, specifically that of a character called X, who lives in some sort of underground facility with, often, only a computer monitor to talk to. He has a lot of time to think, and the big question for him is whether or not he is actually a person - and if so, in what sense? The monitor isn't helpful on this subject. X's brain, it seems, has been programmed with other people's memories, as a way of preserving them against the likelihood of extinction. As the story begins, he wonders first if anyone else is still alive, and then whether any "material" remains to serve as a repository for the thoughts and memories - the notional self - currently housed inside him. Otherwise he might be the last of his kind. Whatever kind that is. X's brain turns out to be a wonderful setting for a haunted-house story, because all sorts of diverse spirits are slithering around in there and playing tricks on him. "Parts of me," he says, "know things that other parts do not, and sometimes I both know a thing and do not know it, or part of me knows something is true and another part knows it is not true, and there is nothing to allow me to negotiate between the two." This brain is treacherous. At one point X says, "I am not the only part of me doing this," and later, more ominously, "I am working against myself." He can fall asleep as himself (he thinks) and wake up as someone else, or several someones else. His struggle to find his way in this mental labyrinth is all the plot Evenson needs to spin a suspenseful, darkly comic tale. "Je est un autre" ("I is another") Rimbaud said. We've all felt like that from time to time, but poor X feels it, multiplied, at every moment of his conscious life. "The Warren" is chilling because X's situation is not only impossible but truly, inherently irresolvable. It ends as all horror stories should, with a question mark. TERRENCE RAFFERTY, the author of "The Thing Happens: Ten Years of Writing About the Movies," is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
Guardian Review
The End of the Day by Claire North, The Book of Bera by Suzie Wilde, From Darkest Skies by Sam Peters, The Apartment by SL Grey, Cold Welcome by Elizabeth Moon Claire North, the pseudonym of Catherine Webb, has earned a reputation for tackling serious subjects with a lightness of touch, enviable readability and an assured narrative control. The End of the Day (Orbit, [pound]16.99) is her most ambitious novel, taking on a plethora of major issues and offering hope. Charlie is the Harbinger of Death -- whose office is based, prosaically, in Milton Keynes -- and he travels the world meeting those about to be visited or merely brushed by Death, and observing events and cultures about to pass from existence. His fellow Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Pestilence, War and Famine, are normal men and women like Charlie who also jet around on business. It's a surreal, whimsical conceit that allows North to examine bigotry, global warming, humanity's propensity for violence -- and the big one, the meaning of life and death. Every one of the short 110 chapters is shaped with philosophical panache. In The Book of Bera (Unbound, [pound]16.99), Suzie Wilde heaps misfortune after catastrophe on the shoulders of her young protagonist, the eponymous Bera, and then catalogues her efforts to understand and overcome her lot. Bera is blessed -- or cursed -- with "sight", the ability to see into the future, control the forces of nature and ward off evil spirits. She lost her mother when young, and loses her best friend; her father then weds her against her will to another clan. The setting is not that of some generic feudal/pastoral fantasy, but a lovingly detailed Norse land that Wilde brings to startling life along with the minutiae of Viking culture. As Bera grows with the knowledge of her gift, she foresees disaster ahead for her new clan, and is torn between the need to save her people and the desire to avenge the slaughter of her childhood friend. The first volume of the Sea Paths series, this is an impressive debut. We have been here many times before: the detective mourning his/her partner/colleague is tasked with solving the crime of his/her death and coming to terms with his/her grief. But From Darkest Skies (Gollancz, [pound]14.99) by Sam Peters is different. After Alysha Rause is murdered on the planet Magenta, her husband, secret agent Keon Rause, travels there to investigate her death -- with a copy of his wife as an AI in his head. What follows is a complex noir thriller as Rause tracks down a serial killer in a beautifully depicted alien world and learns more about Alysha and her enigmatic "copy" than he ever thought possible. Peters' second novel is not only a gripping SF crime thriller but a moving investigation into the limitations and capabilities of artificial intelligence. After suffering a break-in at their Cape Town apartment, Mark and Stephanie decide to house-swap with a couple in Paris as a way of getting away from it all and, in Mark's case, fleeing the horrors of his past. In The Apartment (Pan, [pound]7.99), SL Grey -- the pseudonym of Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg -- sets up an interesting premise and introduces, little by little, elements of inevitable horror. The apartment turns out to be not quite the chic pad they'd hoped for -- it's more of a squat in a decrepit building inhabited by one other resident, a mad artist. It might even be haunted. The story is told in first-person chapters alternating between Mark and Stephanie, allowing the authors to play with narrator reliability and to examine the fracture lines in the husband and wife relationship. Despite some unconvincing character motivation, The Apartment is afast-paced, page-turning chiller that gallops towards its ambiguous climax. Elizabeth Moon's Cold Welcome (Orbit, [pound]8.99) marks the start of a new series following the gutsy and resourceful Ky Vatta, protagonist of the previous Vatta's War books. Now a victorious admiral of the interstellar Space Defence Force, she returns to her homeworld of Slotter Key expecting a hero's welcome. Instead, her shuttle is sabotaged and she and her peacekeeping force are stranded in the icy wastes of the planet's north pole. What follows is a tensely told story of survival against the odds, as Vatta battles against the natural elements, a quarry that wants her dead and a traitor in her midst. Nebula award-winning Moon excels at depicting an independent leader of men and women who is open to doubt and soul-searching. - Eric Brown.
Kirkus Review
A South African couple seeks respite from their troubled lives by taking a romantic vacation to Paris that quickly becomes the stuff of nightmares.After masked men break into Mark and Stephs Cape Town home, they both begin to suffer from paranoia and insomnia despite the fact that neither they nor their daughter was physically injured. Though they're strapped for cash, they find a website that facilitates house swaps and agree to trade a week in South Africa for a week in Paris, hoping that this time away will soothe their anxieties. But from the very beginning of the trip, nothing goes as expected: the Paris couple never shows up in Cape Town, and the apartment in Paris is like the set of a horror movie, complete with a creepy neighbor who utters cryptic warnings like You be careful here. It is not for living. When she throws herself out a window, Mark and Steph have had enough and return home. But Mark has been infected by the darkness and continues to have supernatural visions of a dead girl. Steph has to protect herself and her daughter as Marks behavior becomes more and more sinister. There are moments of true scariness that emerge from a sustained, deep-seated sense of discomfort, and the novel is very visual, providing cinematic descriptions such as just for an instant, a skittering, shadowy thing, flat and blank-faced and multi-limbed, darted for me like a trapdoor spider lunging for a fly. Grey's (The Mall, 2014, etc.) characters are not deeply developed, but they dont have to be. Chills and thrills enough to attract and please fans of supernatural horror. This one will keep you up all night. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In the aftermath of a home invasion, married South Africans Mark and Steph decide to leave their toddler with Steph's parents and do a house swap with a Parisian couple. This is a chance for a real honeymoon, as there has been tension between the pair. But from the first moment in the unexpectedly dank, dirty Paris apartment, the trip is doomed. Mark begins seeing things that aren't there and hearing the sound of a child crying, and the French couple never show up in Cape Town. Even after they return home, something dark has infected Mark and Steph's lives. The fracture lines in both protagonists are apparent from the first page, which will have readers biting their nails as they nervously await for whatever will tip one or both of them over the edge. VERDICT This creepy read from veteran horror writer Sarah Lotz (The Three), here writing under the pseudonym Grey, will make you hesitate before planning your next vacation. [This title is copublished with Blumhouse Books, the imprint of horror movie studio Blumhouse Productions; film optioned by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment.-Ed.]-MM © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 Mark The wine's gone to my head, I realize, as I sway into the kitchen to get another bottle. I'm at that perfect stage of tipsy when I feel padded and warm, forgetful. Carla's belting out her trademark laugh--that Wiccan cackle that's hearty enough to scare ghosts into corners. And somewhere, softly, tentatively, under Carla's vital bray, Steph is laughing too, a sound I haven't heard for weeks. Since. Trying to ignore the clot of history under the bottom shelf of the narrow pantry, I grab another bag of chips and reverse out into the kitchen again. Carla's date brought an expensive red wine tonight, telling me as he pressed it into my hand that we shouldn't drink it this evening, that we should save it for an occasion, but I'm sure it will go down just fine now. I open the chips and cram a handful into my mouth, then reach for the bottle on the overloaded counter, just as the new motion-activated floodlight in the backyard flicks on. Glancing up, I misjudge my grasp, and the bottle skittles down, smashing into a clutter of dirty glasses and sending a shatter of knives and forks wheeling off the plate on top of the pile. For just a second the racket is too much; as it crescendoes and settles, the shards and cutlery landing on my feet and the floor around me, I'm unable to move my eyes from the window, staring into the light, as if a floodlight will keep the monsters away. But it's more than a second, really, a lot more, because when the floodlight finally flicks off after revealing nothing, there's silence around me until I hear someone shifting in the kitchen doorway behind me. "Mark?" Steph's voice. "You okay, honey?" I shake myself out of it. "Yes. Sorry, I just . . . dropped something." Steph approaches me, treading with her bare feet across the hazardous floor. "Don't," I say. "You'll cut yourself." She ignores me, tiptoes to my side, and looks out at the nothing in the dark yard. "Did you see something?" she asks softly. "Someone?" "It must have been a cat." "You sure you're okay?" she says, squeezing my arm. "I'm fine," I say. But I'm embarrassed by my reaction, so I grab the wine and guide Steph between the shards back through to the dining room, as if she needs my guidance. But the truth is, right now, next to this firm, strong young woman, I feel blind and vulnerable. "Let's drink this while we still can." Steph glances at me. "Sounds rather ominous." "I meant--while we can still appreciate it." "Yes, you should really leave it for a better time." I've forgotten the name of Carla's latest "friend," who's standing at the music dock, putting in his phone and choosing some smooth, cynical track. "You'll miss that famous chocolate on the palate." "Famous chocolate?" Carla says from her place at the table, artfully pretending that she hasn't heard the disaster in the kitchen. "You mean notorious? That Duiwelsfontein is a tricksy wine for hipster dilettantes. No offense, Damon darling." "None taken, Carla pumpkin." I sit down and watch Damon as he sidles back to the table, wondering what's between him and Carla. Does he know he's the latest in Carla's long series of toy boys? What does she get from him? What does he get from her? He must be twenty-five years younger than she is, but then--I pull myself up and remember--I'm twenty-three years older than Steph. I forget that every day. I don't feel forty-seven; I don't feel middle-aged. I can't allow myself to imagine how she sees me--paunchy, floppy, pathetic, damaged, failed, washed-up, some sort of freakish fetish. Steph's standing behind me, rubbing my shoulders, and now she leans over, and her hair, fragrant from some herbal shampoo and the spice of the supper, falls across my face and saves me from that line of inquiry. "Just going to run upstairs and check on Hayden," she says. "I'm sure she's fine. The monitor's right here. We would have heard." "Just checking." "Sure. Okay. Thanks." "If Carla laughing hasn't woken her, nothing will," Damon chips in at Steph's back, as if he's ever seen our daughter, as if he knows her. Carla smiles and rolls her eyes. I still don't get it. I take a gulp of the wine--it doesn't taste anything like chocolate--and listen to the lazy drawl of the singer as I concentrate on getting that soft buzz back. "How're you doing?" Carla asks me. "I mean, really." I shrug and sigh, then glance at Damon. "Don't worry, I know," he says. "And I'm really sorry. Same thing happened to my brother." Steph comes back in, tips me a look saying that Hayden's fine. "Stop it, Damon," Carla says as Steph sits back down, but Damon blunders on. "This country's fucked, I'm telling you. It's different in other places, you know. People want to steal something, they don't feel the need to torture and--" "Look," I say, "I don't want to talk about it." "But you don't have to shush him on my account, Carla," Steph adds. "I'm a big girl." "Yes," I tell Carla. "In fact, Steph's handling it brilliantly." Better than I am, I don't admit as I put my hand on Steph's thigh under the table and she grips my fingers. "Ag, I'm sorry," Damon says huffily. "It's none of my business." "It's okay. It's just that, you know . . ." "I'm just trying to say that I understand," he says. "This sort of shit happens to so many people here. It's just wrong." "Yes. Yes, it is." "Now, Damon darling, if you could kindly shut your empathetic trap for a moment while my friend speaks." "I'll go outside for a smoke. Help me keep my mouth closed." He stands up and heads to the front door while I repress the urge to tell him not to go out, to leave us all safely locked inside. From her place at the head of the table, Carla nudges her bare toes into my shin, then runs them down to my ankle. I'm not sure what it means. I have to presume it's in lieu of a small hug or a pat on the shoulder that she doesn't feel like getting up for. I have to presume that, because Carla and I haven't been physical since forever. At my side, Steph's noticed nothing. "Does he mind you talking to him like that?" I ask Carla. She shrugs. "He'll survive. He should learn some manners." "I don't get you," I say. She ignores this. "Are you seeing a therapist at least?" "Me?" I say. "Both of you. All of you. This sort of trauma lodges in little ones too. You could send Hayden for art therapy." "We couldn't afford it," Steph says, "even if we thought it would help." "But the police offered some trauma counseling, didn't they?" "Yes," I say. Yes, they did. The day after the attack we dutifully showered and got into the cheap new clothes I'd bought for us at the supermarket and headed to the Woodstock police station. The cops were surprisingly polite and sympathetic, despite the fact that we stood out like aliens in the middle of that miserable mass of broken-headed men and ripped women who cluttered the reception area waiting for attention. We were shown through to a small office down a long corridor. Out of the window and across a courtyard I could see the holding cells, the slatted windows draped with fragments of torn cloth, the walls peeling and cracking like the very building was boiling with spite, being reduced to toxic sludge from the inside. The station's trauma counselor was lovely and warm and enthusiastic, one of those people who just won't be worn down by the onslaught of horrible reality, giving us all the time we wanted. While Hayden piled blocks on the carpet, I wished I'd brought hand sanitizer, and while the counselor talked Steph through a meditative energy-clearing visualization technique, I stared into the dingy little shower cubicle and at the plastic caddy of toys and dolls ready for the next case. I couldn't pull my eyes away, despite how the image sent a cold sweat prickling over my forehead. "I got the feeling they had worse traumas to worry about than some middle-class family being burgled." "Jesus, Mark. You need to value yourself more." "Value myself? Why?" Steph says nothing, turning the stem of her wineglass with those restless fingers. Now Carla leans across me, jangling showily, and places her hand on Steph's arm. "You two should get away. Go somewhere for a break. It will make things better--I know it will." "Where to?" Steph says. "Somewhere exotic. Bali. Thailand. Or romantic. Barcelona, the Greek islands . . . Paris." "Ooh, Paris!" Steph just about squeals. "God, Mark, wouldn't that be brilliant?" "With a two-year-old? Super-romantic." Carla looks down at the table. "I could offer to . . . Nah, I couldn't. I wouldn't want to inflict my nonexistent maternal instincts on the child." "We couldn't afford it anyway. Christ, we can't even afford to repair Steph's car." Steph sighs and nods. "I suppose," she says, and that momentary flicker of light going out in her eyes kills a little bit of me. She deserves what she wants. She deserves better . . . than me, than what I can provide. Which is basically nothing. Everything I briefly had is spent. "We'll come up with a plan," Carla says. "It has to happen. You two need--" When the screaming starts, I'm up and halfway across the room before I even register what it is I'm hearing. It's a car alarm outside, just a car alarm, but my muscles have bypassed my thinking brain, and before I can talk myself down, I've whipped open the front door, eyes wide and scanning the half dark of the street, ears tuned for any scuffle. It's Damon's cigarette smoke that finally brings me back to myself. "Jeez, Mark. Are you okay?" "I . . . yes, just checking on that alarm." Which has bleeped off already, the guy from number 17 starting up and driving away. I shout something reassuring through to Steph. "You're on edge, hey?" Damon says, holding out his cigarette pack. I take one, knowing it will probably just wire me even more. I don't smoke; it makes me feel sick, but maybe nausea would help me concentrate on something other than the goddamn invisible monsters. He holds up his lighter and I get the cigarette started, then blow out into the wind, feeling the hot breeze from the mountain in my hair and behind my ears. "Has it ever happened to you?" "No, thank God, but I guess I'm just waiting my turn. It's happened to so many people I know. It messes you up, hey?" I nod, exhaling slowly. The counselor at the police station recommended replacing negative energy trapped inside with healing air, breathing the toxic fear out. I'm scared to let go of my fear; it has a purpose: it keeps me ready. When we stub out in the dead planter and go back inside, Steph's saying, "I've always wanted to see the Musée d'Orsay, but we don't have enough money. Simple as that." "For what?" Damon asks, catching the tail end of the conversation. "Carla thinks it's a good idea for us to go on an overseas holiday, that it will heal our trauma," I say. "But we've got no cash." "What about a house swap?" he says. "My mates and I did it last year. There's a website. You go to someone's house and they come to yours. We went to this great house in Boston and they came to our place--they loved it. You don't pay a cent for accommodation. You can eat cheaply if you try, so it costs you nothing." "But having strangers in your house?" I say. "What if they trash the place, steal all your stuff?" "The people on the site are all registered and there's feedback and testimonials. Like, the American couple who came here have done eight house swaps before and all the previous owners rated them as guests. They have a track record, so you know you can trust them." Steph smiles. "Hmm, sounds interesting. Hey, Mark?" And it's then that I can see her hopes getting raised by this guy. The kindest thing I can do is nip it in the bud. "We won't pay a cent," I say. "Apart from the small matter of airfares and visas and transport and entry fees and hundred-rand coffees and God knows what else we'd have to cough up for in Paris." I watch in dismay as Steph's face registers her punctured enthusiasm. It's something I do well--dull the eagerness of young people--I do it every day at the college; it's one of my few marketable skills. She nods in deflated agreement and I wish I hadn't said anything. I always underestimate the full force of my depressive cynicism. I forget that she's young, that she has some spirit in her. I should be more careful with her. "But it does sound interesting," I add lamely. "The most feasible idea we've heard so far." I try to raise that smile again, but it's all too late. Later, I wake up standing in the hallway, my heart hammering in my throat and my left leg jittering, my phone clutched in my hand. The time on the green display of the alarm console reads 2:18. The Alsatian next door is barking and I swear I hear a thump--another thump?--on our side of the dividing wall between the properties. I should look out of the study window to check if there's anything--anyone--in the alley, but the alarm is armed, the passive transponder scanning that room. I don't want to disarm the system--they may be waiting for me to do just that--so I'm stuck standing in the hallway in the middle of the house, turning slowly so the floorboards don't creak too much and wake Hayden, listening and staring around me, as if I've got supersonic hearing, as if I'm Superman with X-ray vision. I'm not; I'm immobile and impotent. If there is someone down the side alley, the beams will set off the alarm, I tell myself. We're okay, I tell myself. The dog settles down, and I don't hear anything else, the outside beams don't trip, so I finally go back up to bed. Steph's lying on her back, staring at the ceiling in a resigned way. I remain standing on the carpet next to the bed. "I should really bypass the study, but it'd be easy for them to get in there through the leaded window." "Yes, better leave it armed." "But then I can't see outside." "The beams would pick up anything." "I suppose." I put my phone back on the nightstand. "You've got to love our midnight conversations. Our sweet nothings." She doesn't say anything, certainly doesn't laugh, but why should she? I glance at the red numbers on our bedside clock. "Try to get some sleep. It's too early to give up." "What about you?" I don't tell her that I think one of us should always stay awake, in case they come back, that I shouldn't have fallen asleep in the first place. That wouldn't be helpful. "I'll just decompress a bit, join you in a little while." "I hate this place sometimes, you know." "I know." "Can't you even consider the trip? Don't you think it would be nice?" "It just doesn't seem possible. It's a luxury we can't afford." Steph sits up, her pillows rubbing against the headboard, making a low groan. "I'm thinking it's not a luxury; I'm thinking that it's a necessity. I think it would help. You particularly." "Me?" "Yes, you." Now she laughs, but it's a dry laugh. "I reckon getting away would give you some perspective, some peace. Who knows? It might even make you happy." I'm not comfortable getting into this discussion while I stand above her like some authority, so I sit at the foot of the bed, facing away from her, looking at a piece of her through the dresser mirror. "Even if we could pay for it, I wouldn't want it to be because you think I'm ailing. I don't want to be some hospital case, forcing you to make sacrifices, spending money we don't have just so that I feel better, so that I don't have a mental breakdown. I'm not going to. I'm fine. I'm managing." Steph doesn't even bother to agree or disagree with my self-diagnosis; she knows me too well. "I've been thinking a lot and I'm sure Hayden would be fine. She's been sleeping much better. Carla says you can rent pushchairs and everything. Kids in Paris all go around in prams. Imagine strolling through the parks like a French family." I know it would never work, but I watch her dreamy, unguarded smile in the mirror and remember this time not to burst her bubble. The trip's not going to happen--it's just a fantasy, one that's getting her to smile again--so I may as well indulge her. Excerpted from The Apartment by S. L. Grey, Louis Greenberg, Sarah Lotz All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.