“I’m at every party, Bradley,” he said.
Mansfield grinned. “Oh, I know.” He dismissed Jake entirely—no surprise there—as he turned to the Doorway Man. His voice dropped to a stage-whisper. “I wanted to say thanks again, by the way.”
“I just hope the girl didn’t press charges.”
A muscle twitched in one of Mansfield’s chiseled cheeks. He glanced at Jake—oh, there you are—and offered a distracted smile. “Have fun, Jakey-boy.” He walked away, not quite running.
“Prick,” Jake muttered. The Mansfield from earlier said, You see, Jakey-boy, Nick and I have this bet with Andrew and Chris and I think they’re gonna try and sabotage you. I don’t want to see that happen.
Jake looked down at the glass in his hand. A basic tumbler, but it looked thick and felt heavy. He’d always had good aim. Maybe he could break the fucking thing over Mansfield’s head from here.
Feminine laughter erupted across the room. Mansfield stood with a woman, leaning close, free hand on her upper arm and saying something into her ear. She had bouncy, gleaming chestnut hair, the kind you wanted to bury your hands and forget yourself in. Her shimmering cocktail dress was cut low back and front, and the globes of her breasts pressed out against the scant material—still decent, but heart-stopping all the same.
And she was laughing at something Mansfield said. As he watched, Mansfield led her out of the main room.
Jake’s face fought a grimace and lost.
He turned back to the Doorway Man, but TDM—as Jake was sure Mansfield called him—was studying his shoes. No help there.
Why not just leave? an interior voice asked. He knew Mansfield had brought him to the party—packed with city council members, bankers, brokers, and at least one state senator—to show him off. Oh, look, the Sharks over at Spurlock, Preston & Long have another plaything. What are the terms this time, Brad m’boy? See if the son of a bitch will make it out of SP&L’s probo period? Oh my.
Mansfield’s my ride, he thought. He glanced into his tumbler again. A bar had been set up near the kitchen, complete with a bartender, but that would mean having to walk amongst the powerful people, feel them looking at him.
Jake slumped in his seat. “Those must be the most interesting shoes in the world,” he said to the Doorway Man.
The Doorway Man looked up slowly, his wet, puffy eyes staring through him. Had this guy been crying?
“You don’t belong here,” he said again.
“You already said that.”
“No, you’re different. These people have connections and deals and cronies and things. You don’t.” He sounded relieved. “You’re an outsider, too.”
Jake grunted and sank deeper into his seat.
“Bradley brought you here,” the Doorway Man said.
Jake didn’t respond.
“Another one of his bets?”
Jake looked away. “Who was the girl?”
The Doorway Man shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Someone from work, I think. You know about that.”
Jake did. The Sharks—Mansfield, Chris White, and Andrew Schwarz—swooped in on any female above a certain bra-cup size and below a certain dress-size. Those that gave in to their advances inevitably quit.
You wanted to be friends with them, an interior voice reminded.
Jake’s face hardened. He was naive, but that didn’t cut it in the self-loathing department. He’d wanted to succeed. He’d wanted to make it.
“Why they call you the Doorway Man?” he asked.
He shrugged again. “I open the way to things. I didn’t come up with it.”
“What’s your real one?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
He looked at the Doorway Man’s glassy-yet-focused eyes. “Drugs?”
The Doorway Man looked at him for a moment, then reached into his sports jacket and pulled something out.
In the center of his palm was a teal geltab, the kind you might take if you had a cold.
“Doorways,” he said.
“I’m not a druggie.”
The Doorway Man’s eyes cut to Jake’s empty tumbler. “Sure.” He looked back at Jake. “This isn’t a drug, Jake. It’s a way out. You’ll feel better than ever.”
He thought about the hours left, the people glancing, the unlimited scotch that wouldn’t help.
“Fuck it,” he said, snatching the geltab and dry-swallowing it.
The Doorway Man smiled. It burned in the center of the man’s gaunt face.
Jake awoke face down in his apartment.
He bounded off the hardwood floor, looking everywhere at once. The windows to his left showed the first rays of sun breaking the horizon.
He ran a hand through his hair. How had he gotten home? What had happened last night? He remembered taking that pill and then … nothing. His suit, while wrinkled, wasn’t stained. He checked his pockets and found his keys and wallet. He swallowed.
No crummy aftertaste associated with a night drinking. No hangover, no aching muscles.
“I feel great,” he said, wonderingly, as if to confirm it to himself.
He thought of Mansfield, of the bet. The crushing despair, the gnawing self-loathing, was gone. Who cared about them? They didn’t matter. In the end, only he did.
After a shower and what turned out to be a completely unneeded cup of coffee, he went to the office and lost himself in a frenzy of work that, at certain points, should’ve made his computer catch fire. He dug into his team’s various accounts, jumping from project to project as new ideas struck him. He’d never known such energy, such creativity, and, apparently, neither had his Project Manager, who wanted to present Jake’s ideas to the Board and the clients at the end of the week.
He didn’t think about Mansfield or the bet. It didn’t matter; Mansfield didn’t matter. Only he did. He was the master of his destiny and he wasn’t going to let go of the reins.
This lasted three days.
His body was a throbbing ache on the fourth morning. His brain felt like the anvil a blacksmith used to beat metal. His stomach was shriveled and abused.
He stared at the red glowing numbers of his nightstand clock—ten to seven—and thought from the depths of his agony, I’ll call off.
And then he remembered today was the team meeting and groaned. Missing a team meeting was enough to be fired.
What the hell did that guy give me? he thought. Was the Doorway Man—what a stupid name—part of the bet? Was this the sabotage Mansfield had mentioned?
You bastard, Jake thought. Had there ever been so much pain in the world?
Mansfield was waiting in Jake’s cubicle and his face configured itself into an expression of shock and concern when Jake arrived. “Jesus! What happened?”
“Your fuckin Doorway Man,” he said, wincing as each word exploded a mortar shell in his head. He dropped into his desk chair. “What’s his name? I need something to fix this.”
Mansfield frowned. “I have his number,” he said slowly.
Jake leaned forward like a striking snake. “Give it to me.”
Mansfield was looking him over—like a better studying a race horse, Jake thought. “No.”
“No?”
Mansfield tilted his head in the direction of the glass conference rooms. “Because you’ll call him now and miss your meeting.”
“Like you care, Bradley.”
“About you, not really,” Mansfield admitted. “About the bet very much.” He stepped into the doorway. “You’ll get the number after the meeting. Don’t be late.”
Jake debated going after him. Who am I kidding? he thought. A child would crush me at this point.
Somehow he got through the meeting without crying and screaming and even made himself nod humbly when Bernstein singled him out for particular praise. He counted the seconds with the pounding in his head.
After, he darted back to his cubicle, wanting to dump the files on his desk and go hunt down Mansfield.
But Mansfield had already been there. Propped betw
een the keys on his computer keyboard was a pink MESSAGE slip. On the back, in Mansfield’s cramped, anal writing, was TDM: 814-555-6106. Beneath that, Mansfield had written: Good luck, Jakey-boy.
He was already pulling his smartphone from his pocket as he headed for the lobby.
The bar was called Uptown Downs. Its interior was a dingy hole; neon beer signs and the lights of the back bar were the only illumination.
“You held out longer than I thought,” the Doorway Man said, sitting across from Jake at a cocktail table.
“Gimme what I came here for,” Jake said. He could barely see. The pain produced pulsing red blossoms in front of his eyes, like soft blinkers.
The Doorway Man shrugged and dropped a small Baggie onto the cocktail table. Within was a single geltab.
Jake snatched it up, then paused. “This isn’t going to fuck me up even more, is it? I want to be normal.”
The Doorway Man didn’t answer for a moment. His face was nearly lost in the red blossoms and gloom. When he spoke, his voice had become thick and a little shaky. “You won’t f-feel like that, anymore.”
A fresh explosion in Jake’s head and he didn’t bother debating the issue. He fumbled the geltab out with shaking fingers. God, anything to be better than this, he thought and dry-swallowed the pill.
It was like waking up after a heavy bout of oversleeping. He reached up to rub his eyes—
—and felt the tension of taut leather against his wrists.
Jake’s eyes flew open.
He was strapped to the metal frame of a bed, wide leather belts cinched to his ankles and wrists, in the corner of a narrow cement room. His shirt was unbuttoned.
The Doorway Man sat next to the bed, his eyes black sockets, a battery-powered lantern highlighting his jaw and cheekbones.
“What the hell are you doing?” Jake screamed. “Let me UP!”
The Doorway Man didn’t move.
Jake pulled and yanked, but it was no good. A cold sweat beaded his brow. “What are you doing? People know who I am! They know I know you! You can’t do this!”
“You’re wrong,” the Doorway Man said. “People may know you, but you aren’t known. There’s a difference. You have no family here. No friends. I knew it as soon as I met you.” He gestured at Jake. “I’m sorry about this—about tricking you in the first place. I needed time to check you out and make sure I’d see you again.” He sighed and it was watery. “But you and me … really, there’s not much difference between us, except clothes and careers. We’re both outsiders.”
“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?”
The Doorway Man sighed. “I don’t want to do it this way, but I have no choice. All the others killed themselves. Did it make them do it?” He shook his head. “I have to pass it on. That’s the only way out. I learned how and, God, the time and agony it took me to learn that. This has been going on for centuries—millennia. The information was there, it just took forever to find. Then, meeting the right person …” He drifted off.
Jake licked his lips. “Doorway Man or whatever the fuck your real name is—listen. Listen to me. Whatever you’re doing, you can stop. You can back out.” A pleading edge crept into his voice. “You don’t have to do this!”
The Doorway Man took off his sports jacket. The baggy T-shirt beneath just made him seem gaunter—the arms coming out of the short sleeves looked like a stick-figure’s.
“A word of advice,” he said. “When it’s all over and it’s talking to you, do whatever idea pops in your head. Doing that will make your life so much easier. It’s how I’ve been able to make it for so long. Trust me on this, Jake.”
Before Jake could ask him what that meant, the Doorway Man cleared his throat and began to speak.
It was a guttural, phlegmy grunt, not English. The “words”—if that was what they were—seemed to form in his chest and come out of his mouth like an echo. It sounded as if he spoke in almost all consonants.
“Ftgan-ntone,” the Doorway Man grunted and, in the lantern light, his face grew red. Tears spilled down his cheeks, dripping off his jaw. One of his hands hovered, long fingers splayed, over Jake’s bare chest. Jake tried burrowing into the springs of the bedframe.
The Doorway Man’s mouth writhed. “G-gnafst-fgyn-r’yell-f-f-f—”
His hand curled into a quivering fist. Jake wanted to close his eyes but couldn’t.
“F-f-f-f—” the Doorway Man struggled.
Jake’s lips peeled back from his teeth.
“FORE!” The Doorway Man shrieked, his echoey voice rebounding off the cement walls, and brought his fist down onto Jake’s chest.
And it slipped in.
Jake winced, but then his eyes opened wide as a strange mixture of hot and cold, not pain, spread through his chest. He raised his head and saw the Doorway Man’s hand inside his chest, as if the lunatic were no more tangible than a ghost, buried up to the wrist in the space just below his nipples and just above where the bottom of Jake’s ribcage was.
Jake looked from the Doorway Man’s hand to the man’s face and saw a rictus of effort and pain warring across those gaunt features.
What the— he started to think and then the pain came. It was a white-hot explosion of hurt, rocketing up and down every nerve-ending in his being, so bright and awful he saw it behind his eyes. This made the pain from earlier seem like a minor sting. In this agony, Jake Reznic forgot who he was, what he was, where he was, and darkness consumed him.
The muttering came first; a sinuous choir of barely audible voices in the center of his head. This unseen choir seemed to be speaking in all consonants.
And then the pain came, galvanizing, beginning in his chest and ripping open every muscle, bone, and nerve.
Jake, already shrieking, bounded up from his prone position and, blindly, bounced against a cinderblock wall, hugging his chest. It felt like he was being chewed from the inside out. Red and white pulsed in front of his eyes. In the background of his mind—empty except for this pain—the muttering went on and on, riding the tsunami of agony.
And, just as quickly, stopped.
Jake collapsed, panting, his body filmed with grimy sweat.
After epochs of time, he opened his eyes.
He lay on the floor of a narrow alley; a thin strip of autumnal sunshine blasted above and in front of him. The cement was slimy.
Slowly, like an old man, he got to his feet. In the emptiness of his shocked mind, like the whisper of a ghost, the Doorway Man said, It doesn’t kill you, y’know.
With a gasp, it all flooded back. He yanked his shirt up, rubbing the clear, blameless spot on his chest. His fingertips left commas of grime.
It was a dream, he thought. A hallucination.
But the pain. The pain, so big and huge it was like some Pagan God coming to Earth and possessing him. And what about the muttering in his head?
His rational mind struggled to come up with an explanation and couldn’t.
He shuffled to the mouth of the alley and looked around. The avenue before him was barren aside from a few old cars, a few stripped vehicles, and a smattering of homeless. He saw storefronts with boarded-up windows.
He looked up, to his right, and just barely saw the tips of skyscrapers. He looked left and the avenue narrowed and ended at warehouse gates, with the river beyond.
“How the hell did he get me here?” he said, completely unaware he’d spoken aloud.
Does it matter? an interior voice asked coldly.
He started walking towards downtown. A few of the homeless glanced his way, but not for long. Nothing of interest. In his dirty clothes and bleeding face, he could’ve passed for them.
As he walked, he felt his pockets for the comforting bulges of his wallet, keys, and phone. All were there and he pulled the phone out—God knew how long he’d been out cold.
He stared at the cracked screen of his smartphone. “Son of a bitch.”
Least of your concerns, the interior voice said. What about the pain?
> He swallowed what felt like a doorknob in his throat.
From then on, he existed in a kind of limbo within the confines of his apartment, which he barely remembered reaching. He might’ve been there two days, or two weeks. Time degenerated into the random bouts of crushing pain and muttering, alien voices. The move-ments of the sun meant little; the television was a quacking box of light. His smartphone was crushed and useless; a broken lifeline. He slept little and ate less; he wasn’t hungry and although he was exhausted, he couldn’t do more than doze.
He considered suicide, but what stopped him wasn’t a fear of death, but the realization that nothing was a sure enough way of killing himself. He didn’t own a gun and his apartment wasn’t high enough off the ground. He could cut his wrists, hang himself, or stick his head in an oven, but the possibility of screwing up was so much higher.
Jake sobbed uncontrollably at times, but stopped being aware of it by the third bout of agony.
He stopped thinking about work, about Mansfield, about the life he’d been building before the Doorway Man. Thinking had become incredibly hard and, when he could think, all he could focus on was what was happening to him and what the Doorway Man said.
Whatever this was, it was old—millennia old, if that bastard was to be believed—and he was the latest of a long line to suffer.
He wondered how it might be changing him; his mind obsessively replayed the memory of the Doorway Man putting his fist into Jake’s chest like that of a ghost.
What had that man done to him? Who was he? Where had he gone? These questions and a million more circled his mind like vultures, but he knew of nothing to feed them. The Doorway Man hadn’t told Jake his real name and Jake began to associate a talismanic significance to that. Names were power, or so said the fantasy novels he’d read as a kid. If Jake knew the Doorway Man’s real name, Jake could find him.
And he had to. There was no other way out.
It took him a moment to associate the electronic buzzing with the callbox beside his apartment door.
Bones are Made to be Broken Page 10
