It’s All My Fault
Wax Poetic: A True Halloween Tale
By Duane Scott Cerny
The following occurred several years ago near an apartment where I once lived. Perhaps a mere dozen stories tall, my neighboring building offered eight studio apartments per floor. Over the decades, time and rental wear and tear would take its toll, and by the early 1970s new owners had cleaned up the old girl, painting her decorative facade like the belle of a ball to which she was never invited.
Lilly, a young professional, moves in later that decade. She has chosen a front, street-facing studio with jutting three-bay windows, the light filtering through tree top views of the ever-changing streetscape below. Later, she will recall sitting at night inside those triptych windows and feeling transported to another time. The white window moldings were then a rich brown oak, the cars and people she saw below were seemingly from the ‘20s, the era of the building’s construction.
One evening while relaxing in her favorite chair and after a particularly difficult work week, she hears a tiny thud. The sound requires a near silent city moment to be heard. After a minute or so comes another light thud. The sound comes from behind her and as she jerks around, the creak in her chair matches her own inner eek.
Lilly’s dash to the light switch floods the space and she scans the small room as if she were an Upper East Side building inspector. But nothing. Lilly’s mind flashes to mice, but the sound is not the nervous scratching scramble of those unwelcome pests. No, this is a thud.
She stands silently near her chair, windows closed and pauses for the street to quiet. She waits ─ unsure of what, who, or something. And then comes another thump, this time echoing down from an obvious height.
To Lilly’s ears, the sound is that of a constant drip, and suddenly the explanation seems all too obvious. From the very middle of the carpeted room she notices a stain, a blemish no more than the size of a half dollar. She slowly looks up, half expecting to find a crack in her ceiling. Instead, it looks as if a thickened water is filling the cut glass saucer shade of her ‘20s ceiling light, the ooze trickling off the fixture’s bottom finial and to the carpet below.
Her fear quickly turns to anger as her call to the building’s super is answered by his machine. Lilly’s gaze returns to the stain, it’s size unchanged. She throws down an old towel, gives it a rub with the toe of her shoe ─ the apartment’s stagnant smell explained and resolved with the opening of a window.
The next morning the super stands atop an old wooden ladder and mumbles, “Eats not vater. Eats some ting else!” He holds a bucket to the side of the glass shade and slowly pours what Lilly would later refer to as “a waxy goo” into a metal pail. He wipes the shade’s interior with a rag from his back pocket, then pulls his face away. “Zeet stinks! Must be upstairs lady. Leak in her apartment. I be back.”
Another day passes. Lilly opens another window, the cold, late fall air cleansing the smell, then sits wrapped in a blanket, fuming at the situation. The super no longer answers her questions. Her phone calls to the management company are equally unhelpful.
Slowly the ceiling fixture begins to refill with the translucent fluid. The super returns, only to resolve the matter by draining the contents into the same bucket. However, this time he wears a mask and skips wiping the shade. And the smell, though somewhat diminished, seems to have seeped into Lilly herself.
Further management calls will go unanswered, and the super continues to ghost her. Now the stain on her carpet grows wider and rounder, the odor stronger each passing day. Frustrated, Lilly ventures upstairs multiple times to confront her neighbor but there is never an answer at the door. Only that same sickly scent.
This slow-motion ceiling flood will continue for weeks, culminating in one particularly disastrous incident: While Lilly attempts to empty the shade’s liquid by use of an unwieldy broom and her own bucket, sans ladder, the shade tilts and the “goo” pours down like candlewax, covering Lilly’s hair, her clothing, the inside of her slippers. She gags, retching as she runs to the shower where she stays under the hot water’s salvation for nearly an hour.
Shockingly, the following day the police are at her door. Did she know her upstairs neighbor? How long had this leak been occurring? Why hadn’t she called the police earlier?
“I don’t understand!” Lilly fumes, half angry, half terrified. “What type of leak would cause this?”
“Well,” the policeman stammers, “your neighbor, she um, she um, melted. The coroner will determine time of death, but she probably died many months ago, perhaps even years. And not to be disrespectful, but there’s little of her left.”
Lilly falls back into her chair. “All that … that waxy goo was my neighbor’s … remains?”
“Liquified remains,” corrects the officer. “Management believes your neighbor was registered for direct deposit and auto bill pay. So long as the electricity bill was current, the melting continued.”
Lilly flashes back to the little thuds, the drips, and the liquid terror of their contents. An odor she has inhaled, the slime that has drenched her, a sick slickness that even a dozen showers can’t erase.
Yes, the horror arrived in her neighbor’s form, coming to visit one slow, waxy drip at a time.
Follow on Substack! Duane Scott Cerny takes the blame for most everything in his monthly satirical column, It’s All My Fault. Best-selling author of Selling Dead People’s Things and Vintage Confidential, he is the co-owner of Chicago’s Broadway Antique Market. Send queries/podcast invites to ThanklessGreetings@yahoo.com.
