by Ryan Notch
So maybe he did know where he was. There was a musician who lived in the building named Pat. He’d only bumped into the guy once or twice, he didn’t seem like he liked to interact with the other tenants. But Jack had occasionally heard people complain about the noise. Pat lived in the garden level (the fancy apartment word for basement), and with Jack on the second floor and opposite side of the building he never heard any of it.
Which brought up a few questions. The obvious ones being why had he spent the night in Pat’s apartment, and where was Pat?
He didn’t wear a watch, so without making any sudden moves to disturb his newfound equilibrium, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. 4:48pm. That couldn’t be right...except maybe it was. It would mean he’d slept all through the night and most of the next day.
Just the thing to clear up a good concussion, he thought to himself sarcastically. I wonder how long Terra slept.
The thought was followed by an almost audible mental bang. He hadn’t even considered Terra since waking up. He was immediately filled with a wave of worry and shame. The shame at having failed to protect her was so powerful that he was almost glad she wasn’t here right now to look at him with disappointment. He pushed himself to his feet quickly, in an effort to somehow flee from the feeling. Pain shot through him from more sources than he was immediately able to keep track of. He had to grab the back of a chair to hold himself when his right leg gave out under him. He squeezed his eyes shut with the effort of not throwing up all over the floor.
Seth worked him over better than he’d ever been worked over in his life, and that included the time he was hit by a car as a child.
The fucker should be in jail, he thought. In fact I guess I can make that happen.
Jack realized that it was long past time to get the police involved. He opened his cell phone, and dialed 911. He thought mentally about what he was say to them, and tried to make sure he remembered his address. After a few moments of thinking though, he noticed the call wasn’t going through. A glance at the face of the phone gave him the answer. No bars, no service.
“Of course...” he said to himself, his voice coming out a croak. It seemed obvious the cell phone wouldn’t work after all he’d been through. On second thought, however, it didn’t seem obvious at all. It wasn’t like Seth could just cut the phone lines or knock over a cell tower. Maybe that prick Collin knew how to block cell phone signals somehow, being a physicist or whatever he felt so smug about being.
Maybe the fucking things just broken, he thought ruefully.
So that left a list of actions that needed to be taken immediately.
Find Terra.
Find a phone (he wondered with concern whether they actually did live in an age where there wasn’t a single hardwired phone in the building).
Find a way out of the building. Fuck the guarded front door, assuming it was still guarded.
Most urgently, find some water. Because he was beginning to realize he was more thirsty than he had ever been in his life. His throat was burning and his mouth was gummy with dried blood. And he absolutely, positively, was not going to drink out of the faucet.
The list didn’t have to be accomplished in any particular order. He didn’t need to find Terra before leaving if he was just going to go across the street and ask someone to call the police for him. In fact, now that he thought about it, that was the only reasonable thing to do. Wandering the halls might very well mean his death. But if he went out the window, he could sneak through the courtyard. At either end were doors that lined up with the two building exits, he’d only have to cross a few feet of hallway to sneak out the back door.
He walked over to the window, his right leg causing him a painful but not incapacitating limp. He opened the shade, covering his eyes against what he knew from a history of hangovers would be a very painful amount of light. The window pane was high set and small, a result of being just at ground level. The glass itself was a milky brown, obviously not cleaned in the tenants entire history. Jack lifted the latch and tried to slide it open, but it wouldn’t budge.
He pushed harder, jerking and struggling with it. His weakened arms were soon shaking with the effort. He angrily wondered if he had been rendered a complete invalid by exhaustion and dehydration, or if the fucking thing was just sealed with years of paint and dirt. He picked up an ash tray from the table, dumping out the ashes (feeling slightly guilty for making a mess, but figuring that the tenants weren’t even allowed to smoke in the building anyway). He stopped just short from crashing it to think things through.
It occurred to him that he hadn’t even searched the apartment fully yet. Not only might there be a phone in the other room, there might actually be the tenant Pat. As he hobbled over to the bedroom, he found on the walls more of the concentric circles he’d seen around the intercom. Some of them were centered on strange bulges in the walls, as if something was pushing in from the other side. He found the bedroom to be filled with instruments but no people. Most of the instruments were electronic, synthesizers. But it looked like someone had been working on them, mixing in crazy circuits and wires and even what might be auto parts. Some were at the point where you couldn’t even tell what they used to be. Some were getting to the point where they looked almost organic. If Jack hadn’t been in a hurry, he would have turned one on to hear what it sounded like.
He checked the bathroom next. He turned on the light, but the florescent only flickered partly on. He caught his reflection in the mirror. He couldn’t see himself clearly, as the mirror was covered with writing. It looked like musical notes, but he was pretty sure some of the notes were made up. In the flickering dim light he thought he looked like a cross between a raccoon and the elephant man. It disturbed him somewhat that this creature with two black eyes, one swollen shut, and a split lip was what was left of Mr. Charming. And yet, he had to admit, he still felt worse than he looked.
He thought about splashing some water on his face, but decided that absolutely anything was better than touching tentacle soaked water. He did realize, belatedly, that he had to piss like a racehorse. He couldn’t tell for sure in the dim light, but he thought there actually might be blood in his urine. He didn’t remember any particularly horrific blows to his kidneys, but he was pretty confident the beating hadn’t stopped the moment he’d lost consciousness. He thought again about Terra, about how utterly weak he must have looked in front of her.
As Jack walked back to the living room he thought back on it, remembering it in a frenetic haze. He wasn’t exactly in terrible shape. He worked out to keep fit, and he’d been in fights before. He’d really thought there wasn’t a person in the world outside of professional boxing circles that he couldn’t fight without getting at least a few good blows in. Thinking back though, he didn’t think a baseball bat and pepper spray would have been enough to stop that guy.
He picked up the ashtray and, turning away to protect his eyes, threw it at the window. As it bounced off and landed with a loud thud on the wood floor, he merely looked at it with annoyance. He tried again, harder. And again after that. Finally in a rage he grabbed a chair (nearly doubling over from the pain in his ribs when he did so) and slammed it into the thin glass. It too bounced off ineffectually.
Must be some kind of security glass to protect from burglars, he thought.
He went to the kitchen with something very definitive in mind. As he neared the hanging intercom he noticed again the strange sounds coming from it. In fact he thought it was strange he had stopped noticing it for so long. It wasn’t quite white noise, because there was a kind of complication to it. An almost sort of spinning harmony when you really listened. A dark noise. One you could almost lose yourself in, except after listening to it in his concussion dreams for the past eighteen hours or so he was sick of it. He grabbed the intercom and ripped it out from the hanging wires, taking a fair amount of drywall with it.
Sorry Pat, he thought. Send me the bill.
The interior o
f the intercom seemed to have another strange device on it, reminiscent of the synthesizers in the other room. Amidst a mass of seemingly pointless wires and metal pipes, it had two dials on it. Jack turned the one on the left and found it was volume, muting the ever present sounds pouring from the speaker.
It was immense relief, and he found his head clearing immediately.
He didn’t have to look thought a lot of drawers to find what he was looking for, the large screwdriver that had opened the intercom in the first place. He took it over to the window and stabbed it with both hands right into the center of it. The glass splintered, but the screwdriver didn’t go quite through. After several more jabs, he began to realize there was something very odd about this glass. He stood on a chair and got closer to it.
When he looked really close at the stab points he saw something he couldn’t explain. The screwdriver had gone threw the glass, but some kind of brown mesh had stopped it. The mesh wasn’t on the outside of the glass, it was actually woven through the glass. It was the source of the milky brown color. He jabbed at it but it was incredibly tough, like steel. He wondered at the tentacles, which were the exact same color, and wished he had a magnifying glass to confirm or deny the terrible suspicion forming in his head.
He went to the kitchen and grabbed a knife to try sawing at the stuff where he had made little holes in the glass. It had a little give when he sawed with all his strength, but so little that he thought it would take several hours to get through. That’s assuming it didn’t grow back...
OK, so upstairs first. His own apartment, or Terra’s. Find another phone. Looked like he was going to have to brave the hallway after all. He took one last look at the sun, wished it wasn’t setting. Not that the sun made the interior of the brownstone any brighter, but just because he felt things would be worse somehow at night in this place.
He found an even bigger knife in the kitchen and placed it awkwardly in his belt. Part of him wanted to see Seth cringe at the sight of it, but part of him suspected it wouldn’t go down like that. He searched the fridge for bottled water, but true to form the musicians fridge contained nothing but sour milk and a half empty bottle of beer. Which Jack drank greedily, ignoring the stinging in his lip. He searched the cabinets and found only a can of corn, which being desperate he opened and drank the water out of. He thought about eating the corn to keep his strength up, but his nausea suggested otherwise.
So armed and first checking the peephole as best he could, he quietly opened the door and went out into the hallway.
The hallway had an odd feel to it, very quiet and yet filled with a nervous energy. As if things were happening just out of hearing. It wasn’t very different from the feeling he got from the place at midnight on a Friday night, except more threatening somehow. There was a humidity to the place as well, like the reptile cages at the zoo. There were bulges along the walls, like the ones inside Pat’s apartment.
The apartment door immediately next over from Pat’s was ajar. He briefly thought of checking there first, moving methodically one apartment at a time. Just the idea of it made him want to sit down and rest, something which he didn’t dare do for fear of not being able to get up and moving again. Using the wall as support, he limped towards the stairway on the opposite side of the building from the front door, hoping by that tactic to better avoid the asshole Seth. The dying light shone through the windows in the stairway, too high to reach. They had that brown tinge as well. He thought even if he could reach them it wouldn’t do him much good.
Each curve of the stairway he had the feeling he was just about to bump into someone he’d wish he hadn’t. Not just Seth, he had a feeling he didn’t want to run into anyone in the whole building. Even though they could help him, even though they’d have a cell phone. Like walking lost through a bad neighborhood when you don’t want to see anyone even though they could give you directions. Or maybe it was more like being one of his small mammalian ancestors in a forest full of angry giant reptiles. He actually shivered at the thought.
Calm down Jack, you’re getting yourself worked up, he told himself. But there really was something creepy about those bulges in the walls. The way they had appeared just in the time he had slept, as if they had come from his nightmares. It wouldn’t take much to pull at the plaster to see what was pushing from the other side. Somehow the idea didn’t seem that appealing.
He noticed as he moved past the first floor that it was dark, the lights all being out. He didn’t stop to investigate and the second floor arrived without incident. Despite his shivers, sweat stood out on his brow from the pain of climbing the stairs. His ribs were relaying very clear messages to lie down and stop moving about. He wished they’d shut up.
He limped along the hall towards his apartment, some light shining from behind but most of it coming from the fluorescents above. As he approached his apartment he reached for his keys, not wanting to spend any more time in the hall than he had to. He realized with a jolt they weren’t in his pocket. Either they had fallen out in the fight, or else someone had taken them. If it was the second, then someone could be waiting in his apartment for him. He debated whether to pull out the knife in his waistband or leave it for a surprise attack. He decided for a moment on the latter, as he passed Terra’s apartment.
He stopped, saw that her door was also ajar. He was frozen in indecision. It didn’t really make sense to go to his apartment first, it wasn’t like he had a gun in there he could grab. He thought about calling her name, but then figured that would only announce his presence to whatever had left the door open, which almost certainly wasn’t her. He obviously had to go in, but was paralyzed with fear of opening the door to find her dead on the floor. Or worse, being raped by Seth. And if she was, what was he supposed to do about it except fail her again?
“Fuck this,” he said to himself in a near inaudible whisper. Rage pushed doubt aside and he pulled the knife into his right hand, supporting himself against the doorjamb with his left. He pushed the door open quickly but quietly.
At first he didn’t see anyone, the lights were off in the apartment. He decided whatever surprise advantage he might have had was ruined by the light spilling in from the hallway, and so reached for the switch next to the door. The rest of the room lit up, leaving him dazzled enough that for a few split seconds his adrenaline fed mind made up a few shapes of enemy’s in the corners. He walked in cautiously as he could with his limp, trying to see everywhere at once. However he was completely distracted by the water cooler off to his left in the kitchen. The plastic tank had been slashed, its precious contents spilled to the floor. He moaned aloud at its loss, his thirst-swollen tongue sticking in his mouth.
He thought about checking the fridge but decided to secure the rest of the apartment first, starting with the bedroom. The short hall leading to the bedroom was poorly lit, the light itself seemingly burned out when he tried the switch. As he limped down the short hall he paused for a moment in fear. The bedroom door was closed, making it impossible for him to see inside from the distance he would have preferred. But he thought he heard something from in there. A faint rustle maybe. Maybe. It might have been his imagination.
He edged his way towards it. Past the bathroom, past the closet. Only a second later he realized his error in not securing the rooms as he went. He realized the mistake with instinct rather than thought as it jumped out of the bathroom behind him and grabbed his arm.
Not it he realized. Her. It was Terra, pulling him completely off balance towards his bad leg. He almost fell on her as she yanked him into the bathroom, seeing her clearly just in time for her to shut the bathroom door and plunge them both into darkness, locking it behind her. A moment later she turned on the light, Jack still holding onto her arm for support.
The expression on Terra’s face reflected a flood of emotions. Relief and happiness at seeing Jack, terror and alertness at the same time from something he couldn’t tell. He couldn’t be sure of his own expression, but he thought it might in
clude a bemused grin. She was definitely beat up, but not as bad as he’d feared. She had a vaguely hand shaped bruise on her left cheek and a swollen nose. There was some dried blood on her ear and her hair was a mess, but other than that she looked pretty good.
“Jack,” she said, clearly excited but for some reason talking in a whisper. “I was so worried...”
She hugged him tight, a move which hurt him so much he involuntarily made a little squeaking sound. Then she took his face in her hands and kissed him full on the lips. An open mouthed kiss, not a friend kiss. It hurt too, stinging his split lip. It lasted for just a moment, but when she pulled away it left him speechless. Breathless.
She left her hands on his face and for a second he thought she would kiss him again. Maybe was even hoping for it. Instead she let him go and suddenly her expression was all pressing business.
“Where were you,” she whispered. “I thought you were dead, I couldn’t find you and had to stop looking...”
“I was in that musician Pat’s apartment. Don’t know how I got there,” he found himself whispering too, and was beginning to feel silly about it. “Why are we whispering?”
“Because it’s out there.”
A chill ran down Jack’s spine. It? Who was it? Seth? If so, even at a whisper they were talking WAY too loud. Of course if it was Seth, the bathroom door was about as much protection as those paper ones the Japanese used in the movies. But if not Seth, what?
