by Ryan Casey
Just silence.
And the sound of the front door creaking on its hinges.
Hayden swallowed a whisky-tasting lump and turned around to face his bedroom door. He didn’t like that he couldn’t hear anything outside. He didn’t like that Terry, his landlord, had suddenly stopped begging to come inside.
Terry had a key to his house.
The three people that were savaging that poor bald man in the street. They must’ve hurt Terry. They must be some kind of weird new terrorist. If so, terrorists were definitely getting stranger by the year.
The subtle sounds of the hold music from the emergency services line lingered in Hayden’s mind and reinforced his opinion of just how bizarre a situation this was.
Murder in the streets of Smileston.
Brutality in the streets of Smileston.
Someone inside his flat.
He swallowed another lump in his throat and looked around his bedroom for something he could use as a weapon. He didn’t want to hurt anyone. Shit—he wasn’t sure he could. He’d never been in a proper fight all his life. He left the fights to his parents, who did their fair share of scrapping when Annabelle died eleven years ago. Just something that Clarice—his kid sister, who was anything but a kid now at twenty—and he had been forced to put up with.
Just a part of the grieving process.
He scanned his room. CD rack? Bullshit—this wasn’t Shaun of the Dead. Blue Yamaha Pacifica guitar? Fuck. He struggled holding that heavy load at the best of times, let alone cracking it over someone’s skull.
He took a few sharp breaths and steadied himself as his front door continued to rattle on its hinges. He could hear the upstairs door creaking that led from his lounge, down the stairs in the entrance hall and outside the flat, a sure sign that a breeze was drifting inside.
He forced his jelly-like legs to move out of the bedroom. His stomach tingled, like a thousand bolts of electricity were crashing through his system. He was being ridiculous. He just had to get downstairs, shut the door, and wait for someone else to report the crime that had taken place on the street outside.
Get downstairs. Lock the front door. Bury his head in the sand.
But someone had opened the front door. And that was a problem.
He stepped into his lounge. He could hear the front door rattling in the breeze. He listened for a sign of footsteps or the presence of other life, but he didn’t hear a thing. Which was a good thing, sure. But it also made him uncertain.
Flashbacks of that man being brutalised in the street.
Sickness creeping through his body.
He still hadn’t properly processed it yet. Still hadn’t wrapped his head around what he’d seen.
He put his phone down on the glass table beside the Bose SoundLink speaker, which was a heavy little thing that had fallen and broken his toe a year ago. He fumbled for the handle of the kitchen door. He kept his eyes on the doorway to the stairs. He didn’t want to miss a trick. If the murdered man in the street had been complacent in any way, then he’d more than paid for it. And that was something Hayden wasn’t going to risk happening to him.
He grabbed the handle and lowered it, slowly. Damned handle needed some WD40 on it. Always creaked and always needed a good shove.
He lowered it. Held his breath. Prayed it didn’t squeak …
And then he heard the thump at the bottom of the stairs.
He let go of the handle. It was an automatic reaction more than anything. Because the thump he’d heard was a sound he’d recognised from the many times Terry had been round angrily seeking rent.
The door slamming shut.
Hayden scratched his chest. “Fuck.” He moved on to scratching the back of his neck, then listened some more for a noise outside the door. The door wasn’t rattling on its hinges anymore. The upstairs door wasn’t shaking, either.
Which meant that the front door had shut in the wind.
Or it meant that someone had shut the front door.
Hayden thought about shouting to see if Terry was downstairs but he didn’t want to draw any unnecessary attention to himself. He tried to listen, but all he could hear was the sound of his pulse racing in his skull. He stood still. Stood frozen, like ice atop a puddle just waiting to be cracked.
He had to check downstairs. He had to see that Terry—or those nutters on the street—weren’t in his house.
He walked towards the door, keeping his tired, heavy eyes wide and focused. His hands shook—his entire body shook.
Just had to check downstairs.
Lock the door.
Bury his head in the sand and wait for someone else to deal with the man in the road. It was better to leave the cleanup to someone else. Better to leave the aftermath of whatever had happened out on the street for someone else to deal with.
He grabbed the rusty bronze handle of the white door that led into the hallway of stairs. Cleared his throat. Inhaled in through the nose, then out through the mouth, which did absolutely jack all to calm him down.
And then he lowered the handle.
Pulled the door open.
Stood in silence.
Hayden wasn’t sure how long he stood there staring at the brown blind that hung over the hallway window. All he knew was that he definitely didn’t hear another sound. Which either meant there was nobody in his flat, or that somebody was standing silently around the corner.
A prickling sensation that electrified Hayden’s neck convinced him of the latter, just like that voice in the back of every child’s mind told them there was a monster hiding under the bed no matter how illogical and irrational it actually was.
Only there was nothing irrational about what Hayden had seen on the street.
That was very, very real.
He swallowed and dampened his dry throat. He couldn’t stand here all day. He had to look. He had to just peek around the stairway on the left and make sure the house was all clear. And if it were, he’d just go downstairs and lock the front door. Go back upstairs and try the police again.
If it wasn’t clear, well … that was a whole different matter.
He held his breath. Edged closer to the opening at the top of the stairs. Counted down from three and tried the deep breath trick again, no matter how bollocks it had proven to be so far.
Three.
Two.
One.
Hayden used the power of positive thought and positive imagery to convince himself that there’d be nothing at the foot of his staircase.
But positive imagery did nothing to quash the reality.
His landlord, Terry, was standing at the foot of the stairs.
He was bleeding all over his prized cream carpet from a gaping wound on the right of his neck.
And he was looking right at Hayden with vacant, grey eyes.
Dead eyes.
Four
“Terry? Are … are you okay?”
Hayden stared down the darkened stairway at his landlord. His neck looked like it had been opened up in some kind of accident. Blood was splattered across his greying skin. The thin greying hair on top of his head, which he usually gelled with such pride, was patchy and scruffy. It looked like somebody had pulled chunks of it out.
Or bitten chunks of it out.
Terry didn’t respond to Hayden’s call. He just stayed completely still at the foot of the staircase. Blood dripped down from the gaping wound on his neck, the sound of it tapping against the carpet like a leaky pipe. The smell of blood was more intense than Hayden had ever known—usually, when he had a nosebleed, which he was quite susceptible to due to his dust allergies, that metallic tang lingered at the back of his throat for days.
But a nosebleed was never so intense that he could actually smell the blood.
Not like right now.
Hayden tried to keep his cool. The silence between him and Terry went on, but eventually Hayden had to speak. “Terry, I … you’re hurt. You need to get to a hospital. You need to …”
Ha
yden remembered the voice message on the emergency services line and it gave him the shudders. Surely, that message couldn’t stay on for too long? There would be people all over the country trying to get through. Accidents, emergencies, chaos.
But what he’d seen outside. The bald man being butchered in the road.
There was something distinctly wrong about it.
Something distinctly “horror movie.”
“Terry, would you—”
Hayden didn’t finish speaking to Terry because Terry tumbled forward and collapsed at the foot of the stairs.
He let out a gasp right from the pit of his throat. Blood pooled out of his neck where he’d fallen, stained the carpet. Outside, the silence was broken by the sounds of sirens somewhere in the distance. That reassured Hayden somewhat. The emergency services must be running, still.
But it didn’t make him feel any easier about Terry, or why he was in his flat spilling blood all over the carpet.
Hayden took in a few quivery breaths. He couldn’t just leave Terry down there to bleed out. He had to check he was okay. He might’ve been a bit of a nob of a landlord, but at least he hadn’t evicted Hayden. A thousand landlords would’ve done that deed.
So Hayden took a few steps down the stairs.
Listened to the creakiness of the carpeted wood underneath his bare feet.
Smelled the blood getting more and more intense.
When he reached the sixth step—Terry was flat out with his face on the fourth—Hayden swore he heard Terry blubber.
He crouched down. There was blood pooling not just from Terry’s neck, but from a wound in the back of his head. Hayden couldn’t understand what could cause this kind of wound. The deep marks in Terry’s skull looked like … like bite marks.
A flash sparked up in Hayden’s mind of the trio of cannibals in the street.
Had they attacked Terry, too? Had they—
His thoughts were interrupted when he felt Terry’s hand wrap around his left arm.
Hayden tried to pull back, but the first thing he realised was just how strong Terry was. His grip was impossibly tight for a man with his kind of wounds. He was pulling Hayden closer to him with unbelievable force, so much so that Hayden’s shoulder felt like it was going to pop out of its socket.
Hayden pulled back, but Terry’s grip got tighter, his dirty long fingernails digging into Hayden’s skin.
Hayden’s heart raced. “Terry! Get off! I—I’m trying to help.” He kept on pulling. He didn’t want to hurt Terry, but Terry’s fingers weren’t getting any looser.
So he pulled back his left leg and kicked the top of Terry’s head.
He heard something split, and he felt Terry’s grip on his arm loosen. He scrambled up the stairs while he had the chance, short of breath. “Fuck. Fuck.” He felt crazy. Terry was just scared. Just afraid. And he’d fucking kicked him. What kind of a psychopath was he?
And then Terry lifted his head.
The muscle and skin at the side of his neck split apart, and blood sprayed out over the cream walls that Terry had insisted were “strictly no-Blu Tac zones” when Hayden had first moved in.
He pushed himself up so that he was on his feet and he looked at Hayden with those vacant, dead eyes.
And then he let out a guttural sound from the back of his throat—like the sound you made when you had a cold and were trying to clear the phlegm—and he clambered up the stairs towards Hayden.
His head wobbled from side to side, the muscles on the left side of his neck the only thing keeping it on his shoulders.
Hayden stumbled back up the stairs. He couldn’t figure out what the hell was wrong with Terry. And he knew he was wounded, but there was something wrong about this. Hayden was no doctor, but he was pretty certain no person should be able to survive that kind of wound, let alone climb stairs with one.
“Terry. I … Please. We need to get you an ambulance. You—you need to stay still.”
But Terry just kept on coming, as Hayden reached the top of the stairs. He kept on gasping from the bottom of his throat. Blood dribbled down his chin and covered his leather biker jacket.
His eyes were vacant, grey … but ever so slightly bloodshot.
Hayden grabbed the handle to the lounge as Terry picked up the pace. He looked so mad at him, and all Hayden could think he was mad at was the fact that he still hadn’t paid his rent.
“Terry, you … you need to snap out of it. Please. You need to …”
But Terry just kept on coming.
So Hayden wasn’t taking any more chances.
He pulled down the handle of the lounge door and threw himself inside.
When he got into the lounge, he froze. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know whether to call an ambulance, call the police. He didn’t know what to do about Terry—whether to try and talk him round or lock him in the hallway.
He saw his phone on the corner of the glass table next to the brown suede sofa.
He had to call someone. Anyone.
He started to run towards the glass table when he felt something grab his right ankle.
The fall to the floor felt like it happened in slow motion. He knew he should’ve shut the lounge door, but he was panicking. He didn’t know what he was dealing with, what he was up against.
He hit the edge of the sofa with a smack that backed up his friend Alan’s claim that the cushions were “hard and uncomfy as fuck.” He felt tingling spread across his face, tasted blood from biting his tongue.
And then he felt a sharp pain around his right ankle.
A sharp pain that felt like … biting.
He looked around and he saw Terry sinking his teeth into his Achilles.
Adrenaline took over.
He thought back to the street outside. Thought back to those three people brutalising that poor man.
He couldn’t let that happen to him.
He couldn’t allow it.
So he reached past his phone, grabbed the Bose SoundLink speaker, and he swung its cold metal surface into the side of Terry’s head.
Terry’s jaws slackened as Hayden swung and swung the speaker at him. He felt anger coursing through his body with every thunk of the speaker against Terry’s skull. But Terry was still holding on, so he swung harder, harder, harder, until eventually he heard something crack like an egg, and then he swung even harder as warm blood covered his hands and Terry’s skull caved in and his hands went loose.
Hayden only stopped swinging when he was absolutely sure Terry had gone silent.
But when he stopped, the Bose speaker dropped from his hand.
Nausea welled up inside.
Terry was lying on his floor, his head beaten to a bloody pulp. His blood covered the cream carpet, covered Hayden’s speaker, covered Hayden’s hands.
Hayden’s teeth rattled together. He blinked. Squeezed his eyes shut, which he realised were crying.
He prayed this was all some kind of dream. Some kind of nightmare.
But when he opened his eyes, his landlord’s body was still there.
He’d killed Terry.
He was a murderer.
Five
Hayden wasn’t sure how long he sat staring at the blood pooling out of his landlord’s caved-in head.
He leaned back against the sofa. He held his fists tightly together. He could feel Terry’s blood crusting between his palms, so much so that he was certain he’d never be able to wash it away. It had gone quiet outside. The only sound was Hayden’s shaky breaths and his racing heart.
Otherwise, nothing but silence.
He tried to think about what to do, the next step to take, but every time he got close to thinking up anything rational, he felt sickness in his stomach as the memory of what he’d done split through his skull and into his thoughts.
Terry had tried to bite his ankle.
He’d grabbed his Bose SoundLink speaker.
He’d smacked it over Terry’s head so hard, so many times, that it caved in.
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He’d murdered Terry.
He was a killer.
He took a glance at Terry’s head. Looking didn’t help the nausea one bit. Not only had his head dented like a crushed Coke can, but the wound on his neck was even more prominent, even more gaping.
He held back the welling sickness and wondered what the hell had happened to Terry. He looked like he’d been attacked, and he’d collapsed at the bottom of the stairs. But where had he got his sudden burst of life from? Why had he attacked Hayden? Why had he tried to bite his ankle?
Hayden diverted his attention to his right ankle. He pulled it out of the pool of Terry’s blood and took a look at it. There were a few red teeth marks on the inside. They were bruising a purple colour. But it didn’t look like they’d pierced his flesh.
Maybe it was through watching way too many zombie movies, but Hayden couldn’t help but feel slightly relieved about the lack of a deep bite wound.
A sudden urgency welled up in his chest. He had to try the police. He’d killed Terry, but it was only in an act of self-defence. Terry had broken into his home and attacked him …
But no. Terry was his landlord. He had every right to be on this property. And Hayden knew how it looked—a landlord storming in and demanding unpaid rent only to receive a fucking metal lump of a speaker to his head.
The police were off bounds. He was fucked.
He reached for the edge of the sofa and lifted himself up. His knees were shaky, and he felt a million times worse than he had with just a mere hangover. He thought about all his options. The police were out of bounds, for now at least. He could try Mum. Or his sister, Clarice. But what did he say to them? “Sorry, I’ve just brained my fucking landlord, please help me out here”?
No. This was his problem. He didn’t want to weigh his family down. He didn’t want to give them another crisis to resolve. Another drama to cause them even more misery than they’d been forced to suffer.
But fuck … he needed them right now.
He lowered himself over Terry. The intense smell of metallic blood wafted into his face. That smell would linger with him for the rest of his damned life. Every time he had a nosebleed from this point on, he’d be reminded of what had happened to Terry.
