by Saul, Jonas
The door to my room opened. The driver of the Pathfinder steps in.
“What are you doing here?” my wife asks.
It’s too late. He’s here. He’ll grill me for the hour and then throw me out the window. My déjà vu only covers what’ll happen in an hour, not what gets me there.
I lean back onto my bed and say, “I’ll tell you how I knew.”
I feel my wife gasp. The man steps closer to my bed. He has a weapon in his hand.
“Start talking,” is all he says.
“It’s déjà vu.”
I have to convince him I can see the future. If I can do that, then I will tell him that I see him dead in one hour and the only way to escape it is to leave within five minutes before the police get here.
He lifts his gun and shoots my wife.
I have never felt the way I feel when I see the look on her face. Then she falls to the hospital floor below the side of my bed.
“I don’t care how you figured it out. I came here to kill you and your wife. After that, I will throw you out the window. It’ll look like a murder suicide.”
In all this, I cannot believe my brain is still working. “Wait,” I gasp. “If you shoot me and then throw me, they’ll know.”
“I’ll wound you so you won’t try to escape, but not bad enough to kill you. Like this.” He raised his weapon and fired.
A bullet tore into my side. I scream. He’s on me in a flash, covering my mouth, muffling my voice.
“It’ll look like you killed her, tried to shoot yourself, and then tossed yourself out the window when you failed.”
My hospital door opens and then closes. No one enters.
He turned to look at the door, and then down at the floor where my wife had fallen.
“Shit!”
He releases his grip on my face and runs. I know, immediately: my wife got away. He hits the door and slips out.
An alarm sounds throughout the floor.
I’m bleeding. Losing consciousness.
I sure hope my wife makes it. For both our sakes.
I’m out.
Don't Shoot
The knocking came again.
Jim Bower sat in his empty basement apartment and listened to the knocking in the walls. It was impossible for anyone to be behind the wall. The knocking, the noises, and the talking at all hours of the night, permeated through the wall of his apartment. The noises drove Jim to obsess over who tormented him and how they were doing it. He wanted to learn their methods. Maybe whatever was alive in the walls was evil. Or maybe they were kind and would want a companion. He just needed to figure out how to get in there.
Jim stood to his full height of six foot, three inches and removed the oversized headphones from his ears. No sound emitted from them. He wore the headphones to keep sounds out. But the knocking always seemed to get in.
“Go away,” he shouted at the wall. “Go away or I’ll come in after you.”
The wall knocked again. He placed the headphones on his ears to remove the noise, but they were soundproof. The knocking still got in.
“Stop it. Don’t come back. Don’t stay here. Don’t shoot.”
A sense of peace and comfort always pervaded him when he said don’t shoot. It’d been his axiom since he was a child. Those words had kept him alive.
Someone whispered.
“No. No whispering.” He grabbed the headphones. “La, la, la, la, la, la …” he chanted, in a quest to silence the voices.
He stopped to listen. When he heard nothing, he picked up the hammer that sat on the floor by his foot. The table beside him had magazines and books scattered on its surface. With a sweep of his arm they all fell to the floor but he barely heard them land as his headphones were doing their job.
Jim dropped the head of the hammer onto the table, tapping it in rhythm. He maintained a tempo that soothed him.
The clock on the wall said it was 4:44am. They always came in the middle of the night.
When was the last time I ate?
He couldn’t remember.
“Don’t shoot,” he whispered to the empty basement.
The wall always looked so innocent. He walked over to the wall that had turned his life into a living hell. The hammer swung in his hand like he was practicing with a baton.
Staples held up a poster of Rita Hayworth. Out of respect for a book Jim read many years ago, he’d chosen it to conceal his digging. At the bottom of the poster he’d affixed a small clip so when it was lifted out of the way it would clamp onto a hook at the top.
His phone rang. He turned around.
“I don’t have a phone.”
The ringing stopped.
Jim lifted Rita and clipped her into place. The hole was magnificent. He loved the hole he was boring into the ground. Screw what the landlord thought. He needed the hole. Whoever kept knocking on the walls in the middle of the night was in there somewhere. He’d dig until he found them. He needed to get back to work. Being a member of society was fun. It felt good to buy things. They wouldn’t put him back in the Amy Greg Asylum if he performed well in the community.
If only he could get rid of the whispering and the knocking, then he’d be okay.
His favorite World War II era, RAF Aviator goggles sat dangling from around his neck. He eased them up to cover his eyes. The hammer smacking into bits of concrete and rock maintained a muffled existence to his headphone covered ears. He shuffled the excess dirt to the floor of the apartment where he’d sweep it into a pile and remove it on garbage day.
Two weeks into digging and the hole was big enough for him to crawl in and be covered when the poster of Rita Hayworth dropped into place. He knew buried power lines and gas lines were close by, but since he was digging slowly and with the claw of a hammer, he felt he’d have ample warning before puncturing one.
An hour passed in a daze. Another pile of dirt. Another few feet gained.
The knocking started again.
Someone was at his door. He lifted the headphones off and listened.
“I know you’re in there,” someone yelled. “Open up!”
My landlord.
If he stayed quiet long enough, the landlord would go away. To himself, under his breath, he whispered, “Don’t shoot.”
Another knock. “Come on. I need the rent money. You’re a week late.” He knocked again. “Come on Jim, I know you lost your job. Let’s talk about it or I will have to call your brother. You know how he likes to keep tabs on you.”
Yeah, and makes me do stupid things like eat and shower, Jim thought. No way. If you come through that door I won’t let you leave. I’ve got a hammer.
“I heard you in there banging something. I know you’re home.”
“Go away,” he whispered.
Waiting was hard, but he did it. Eventually, Owen the landlord, stopped knocking. Owen wasn’t his real name, but Jim couldn’t remember names very well, so Owen it was. People called Jim names all his life so it was only fair if he called people by names he liked. Others seemed to like the names they chose for him because they laughed and had fun with it.
Jim chuckled to himself a little to see how it felt after calling the landlord Owen, but he couldn’t see the humor.
He felt the urge to pee and allowed it freedom. The wetness coursed through his ragged, torn jeans. It didn’t matter. Anytime now he would find peace. As soon as he figured out how they did it, he would do it too. People made themselves invisible all the time. The books called them entities or ghosts and the only way to become invisible and move with just a thought was to die first, but Jim had an idea that he could do it without dying. The answer was buried in the wall.
The people were in the wall somewhere. They would tell him how to do it. The people who visited him in the night and whispered horrible things. The things they told him to do were scary, but he’d do it if they would explain how to be invisible. They were alive. They made noise. They traveled around. So Jim concluded they weren’t dead.
; That was how he would do it. He knew he didn’t have to die to make this happen. Just keep digging. He’d find them or go crazy trying.
He tossed the hammer onto the fresh pile of dirt and dug with his hands. The process was slower but a lot quieter.
The smell was bad in the hole. He knew it had to be him because he hadn’t changed his clothes for quite a few days and he hadn’t used a toilet or the shower in that time and yet his body still voided itself. Nothing else mattered though. He’d deal with the smell as it was mixed with the richness of the moist soil.
The ground softened. His energy waned. The earth moved around him.
Jim slowed his pace until he stopped and looked back into his basement apartment. Dim light entered through the closed blinds in the small window near the ceiling. It seemed to brighten a little, beckoning him. He refused its call by unhooking Rita Hayworth and letting the poster fall into place, covering him in where he lay on the bed of dirt.
He rested his head back, closed his eyes from behind the goggles and whispered, “Don’t shoot,” before falling into a deep sleep, riddled with nightmares of death.
#
Knocking woke him up.
He raised his head and wondered why it was so dark. The headphones were snug around his ears. Whoever was knocking had to be excessively loud for him to be awakened by it.
He squinted his eyes, held his hands over the headphones and whispered, “Go away, go away, go away …”
His bladder released, the warmth comforting him. Today had to be the day. He would find the people in the wall. He had to. The landlord would use his key soon. Or he’d call Jim’s brother. Someone would enter his apartment soon and he would not be able to explain the mess.
Someone shouted, but the headphones muffled it enough that he wasn’t able to discern what they said.
He rolled his head back and forth, trying to free himself of the noises. He paused and listened. The noises were gone. He exposed his right ear but heard nothing.
Without lifting the poster for light, he flipped his body around and continued digging. With each handful of dirt he tossed behind him, it was one more closer to being able to transcend this place. Maybe he could be the haunter instead of the haunted.
His mother’s voice told him everything was okay. When he looked up, all he saw was brown dirt.
“No mom, it’s not okay,” he said and kept removing dirt, bit by bit. Then his father’s voice beckoned him to stop digging. Jim continued. Hours later, he hit a wall.
The houses on his block were built in the early 1900’s. They were tall and statuesque, covered in faded brick and weathered roofs. On his street in downtown Toronto, each house had a small front yard and a tiny backyard that led onto an alleyway. The houses themselves were only a walkway apart. Jim always wondered how the bricklayers got up so high in between the houses to lay their bricks when they were so close.
He looked at the poster that hung over the opening and mentally measured how deep the hole went. It looked eight feet long. He laid his whole six-feet-three-inch frame out and still couldn’t touch the poster with his toes.
He wondered about the dirt above him. Why hadn’t it caved in? He hadn’t rigged anything for support to keep it from falling down, yet it hadn’t.
Voices whispered again. He clenched his teeth and grabbed the headphones, pushing them hard on his ears. The voices wouldn’t stop. Most were indecipherable. A scrambling of people telling him to do unspeakable things.
He edged toward the poster, moved it out of the way and then hopped down to the floor of his apartment.
“Hello?” he asked.
He pushed his eye goggles down around his neck and lifted the headphones off his ears.
Wisps of air moved by the kitchen in the shape of people. Another wisp beside him. He thought he saw the apartment door sitting open but when he looked directly at it, it was closed.
He had a sparsely furnished apartment with a small kitchen table which lay broken on the floor. There was one chair, a single cushioned seat for the television and a mattress for a bed. His brother had wanted to help, but Jim had insisted on doing it alone. The job at the warehouse would pay enough. Doing it on his own was part of the terms for being released from the Amy Greg Asylum.
The voices and knocking were always just there and he had come to accept them. He wouldn’t do their bidding even though he wanted to at times. They always came from the wall. But now that he had dug an eight foot hole into the wall, the voices were in his apartment. Maybe he had opened a portal of some kind.
Whatever he’d done, it was worse.
“Get out!” he shouted. “Don’t shoot!”
The air moved two feet in front of him. He swung an arm at the air. He moved back fast until he hit the wall beside his television. A picture of him, his brother and his father connected with his right shoulder and fell, smashing the glass frame when it hit the floor. He looked down at it. That was one of his favorite pictures because it was the first one of the three of them after their mother was shot and killed.
Anger welled up inside of him, so deep he felt it bristle with his sanity. He turned back to the beings in his apartment and growled, his breath seething in and out of his clenched teeth. In rising tones he yelled, “Get out. Get out. GET OUT!”
But they didn’t listen. He heard one of them clearly ask who was shouting. They pretended he wasn’t here, but they knew he was.
He felt his chances of being one of them slip away as he gripped onto a tenuous sanity that had ebbed years before.
As if to discount him, to show he meant nothing, they all disappeared at once.
Someone knocked on the door.
“I know you’re in there. It’s Owen. You know, your landlord. You’re over a week late on the rent. Your apartment smells to high heaven too. I am calling your brother if you don’t open this door, Jim. Let me in.”
He knocked again.
Jim walked over to the hole, lifted the poster and retrieved the hammer. With it held firmly in his right hand, he unlocked the apartment door.
“Come in,” he said.
Jim held the hammer slightly behind his right leg. One last look confirmed the entities had retreated to wherever they lived.
Owen stepped in.
“Oh, man. What have you been doing?” he asked and raised the neckline of his sweater over his nose to breathe through. “Oh, Jim, what has happened to you? What have you done? Where did all that dirt come from and what happened to your pants?”
So many questions, Jim thought. Only one answer.
“Don’t shoot,” Jim said.
“What’re you talking about, don’t shoot? I’m not shooting anything—”
The hammer’s claw end embedded in Owen’s skull directly above the right eye, cutting off his words. Owen tried to push him away as Jim attempted to remove the hammer for another blow but the tool was stuck in bone. He shoved the landlord hard and then yanked with both hands on the wooden handle of the hammer, pulling it free along with a gush of blood.
Owen stumbled until his back hit the wall. Jim was on him in seconds with another hammer blow to the top of Owen’s skull. This time, without knowing it, he had turned the hammer around. The business end connected above the center hairline, crushing the skull bone in and permanently denting the landlord’s head.
As he slid down the wall to the dirty carpet on the floor, Owen did an epileptic seizure dance that made Jim smile because the noises were silent in that moment. He lifted the hammer again and waited. Did he need to strike? Was the landlord gone?
He waited more.
“Don’t shoot.” He was sure Owen couldn’t hear him anymore.
Owen’s body slowed, then stopped. Jim looked at Owen’s chest and saw it wasn’t moving. He lowered the hammer. The movements in the air had stopped. All whispering had ceased. He couldn’t see or hear a thing.
Jim dropped the hammer and walked into the small kitchen where he grabbed a large chopping knife. He closed and lo
cked the apartment door and started to undress the corpse. When he was finished, he placed all the clothes in a garbage bag and tossed the bag over by the wall under the hole.
With the knife in hand he began the grueling task of cutting his landlord. It took him a full hour to dismember the man into manageable pieces that would fit into a recess of the wall.
Was this really happening? he asked himself. Did I really kill someone? Am I supposed to feel bad?
Questions. Always questions. There was only one answer.
