The railings ahead signalled the boundary between the relentless green of The Park and his life. The gate rusted open on old hinges and he was exposed from the cloying greenhouse, the relentless heat suffocating him. His skin was alive and crawled incessantly. His clothes stuck to him.
Through. Out. Whatever was following him left far behind in the green-hued gloom. To stalk and skulk back, back the way the had come. Back to the teeth of The Flats. He didn’t care for them. He didn’t care for the way they had appeared to be less than human, for the supernatural way they moved. He didn’t care for their feral nature, nor the way they made him feel. Less than they. Less than human.
The pavement was empty, the road devoid of cars. He tried to think, to remember when he had left his apartment. The sun was low. Lower than it had been. She had visited him in the morning, and just gone noon he was at the courts next to The Flats. His long had it taken him to arrive here? The sun wasn’t quite down behind his building but it soon would be, the shadow sit cast long fingers of night, a hand outstretched, ready to close around him, hold him there in the dark until morning when it would release him. Perhaps. If he had the will to be released.
She was right of course. The good Doctor Fleet. It really was that simple. Just move from point A to point B. If he reached point B and things weren’t all as they should be. Then he moved to point C. A straight line.
He hadn’t meant what he said, yet at the time he thought that he had. Her disappointment in him was clear to see. She expected more from him. Hell, he expected more from him. There were factors however, that he could not deny. To even get himself to point A would require more effort than he thought he had. Everything was so tiring. He was so tired. So damn tired. Now, physically tired. The strenuous excursion into the park had emptied his tank. If the younger him could have caught a glimpse of this shell, this husk, that he would become, then perhaps it wouldn’t bother. Perhaps it would lie in the road, in the wreckage and the oil, and wonder if it would just close it’s eyes and not open them again.
Close his eyes as he listened to the wind in the trees. Open them and stare skyward, the flawless blue punctuated by the swaying green of the trees. The endless ocean behind the intangible.
Beyond the green.
Beyond the road. The vast empty expanse. No crossing here, low kerbs, manageable in his chair with minimal effort, particularly compared with what he had just endured. Long before The Park. The door was slim and up two steps yet well rehearsed he was able to take himself from his chair and up to the top, an arm hooked over the railing beside the door, keeping his body up and leaning down for the chair. Lightweight and manageable, he was able to bring it up tot eh door.
Key in and then swallowed by the gloom of the entrance. Taken inside and far from the sun, the relentless heat, his skin prickling in the sudden too cool air.
He wheeled silently past the door of Apartment One and Apartment Two. Pausing only briefly outside Apartment Two. The sounds coming from in faintly audible but audible nonetheless.
One was empty, and had been before he had moved in. The agency had mumbled something about damp, about algae. From outside the windows were impenetrable, thick and dark; Sightless eyes. The door was taped and labelled closed. No entry. The crude drawing of a prone man. The sigh was Death to those who entered. Adam wondered what from. If the building was structurally unsound, then it would mean that he could not live there, and no one else could. It could not be rented out, particularly as the warning was in the ground floor. It could not be that. He had seen nothing in the entrance, in his apartment, on the exterior brickwork to indicate anything that could hint at danger of a collapse. Just a warning then. Nothing more. To keep squatters out. To keep kids out. Drug users. Pushers. Pimps. To stop it being used as a den for the unsavoury, it was only across the Park from the Flats after all. It wouldn’t take too much for it’s use to be hijacked. Once something undesirable took root in your foundations it creeped it’s way through and up. It clung to the walls and slowly smothered the life out of the building.
Apartment Two was occupied by a man Adam only knew as Fletch, as that was all that was on the buzzer for his apartment and all that adorned his door. He did not know if it was a first name nor a surname and had never seen a single sight of the man. He heard him however. Moving around, every time he passed his door (which, by his own admission was very infrequently these days, particularly over the past few weeks). Moving around just behind the door. A shuffle. A body moving delicately, trying to remain undetected. He was watching. Watching whoever was passing. Adam remained in front of the door and looked up to the small peephole. He felt the gaze upon him. An unseen eye. It burned his skin like the sun. Not curious. Hostile. The hostility was what burned.
He opened his mouth to speak. Unsure why and unsure what he would say. Two words came out.
“Hello Fletch.”
Was that an inhalation? There? Beyond the door? Someone reacted. Something reacted.
Light from behind the peephole. A fraction. Only a fraction. Something moved away. Now back.
The hairs rose on Adam’s arms, his throat clicked. Dry. A lightness in his head.
He leaned back in his chair. Something in his nose. Wetness across his lips. His tongue darted out. The metallic taste was familiar yet not unwelcome. Pinching the bridge of his nose he leaned forward and pushed his chair slowly with his other hand until he was too much of an angle to reach the elevator. He swapped hands, letting a few drops of blood briefly fall from his nose on to his beige trousers. Another stain, darker than some but not all. He watched the droplets bleed in to the fabric. He should probably wash these.
Straightening up he stopped in front of the dimpled grey doors of the elevator. Button pressed he head the motor flare into life and it descended.
I still feel watched.
Undeniable. He fancied that he heard a door opening.
Or closing.
He couldn’t turn, nor lift his head. Not unless he wanted the geyser in his nose to spray blood across the floor and the remaining clean areas of his trousers.
He’s behind me. He’s standing in the corridor and he’s watching me.
Nonsense. Perhaps. Or not. His heart beat in his brain, clogging his thoughts and blocking out all other external sound apart from the great machine that worked it’s way towards him through dark verticality. Not groaned and protested. He wondered if it had been maintained, if it had been serviced. He fancied not. He couldn’t recall if it ever had. Not in his time here. Not then and not ever.it would day and it would break, he just oped that it didn’t occur with him inside.
Then again, did it matter if it did? Closer he walked.
Fletch.
Closer.
Adam fancied hearing old limbs, bones like brittle wood. The rustling of old skin. Peeling off in waves. Ivory ivy. Dark matter.
He had never seen him. He reminded himself of that. He could very well be a young man. In any stage off life. A business man, a home worker. A stock trader. Freelancer, like Adam.
Except he wasn’t. It wasn’t.
Closer.
Hark, was that a breath? Below the mechanisms that descended towards him?
Hark, was that a breath? Through old lungs as a moth trapped in a paper lantern?
All the while his head ached but he would not be denied the sight of what approached him. Nothing new, now, to be stalked unseen. It had happened moments before and it happened now. The feral and now the slow onset of
an interloper
no neighbour nor shambling shade of the undead
only me myself and I, here to ask if I am ascending or descending if I climb or fall away from the wall and wither and die
he didn’t know what.
Did it matter?
So little seemed to matter. His life. Past, present and future. Someone else’s novel. It didn’t matter. Who was here to read it? He didn’t even wish to read it himself. He already knew the ending.
A chime and the doors opened. A thousand moths flew out towards him only they didn’t exist behind his own fevered vision. The pressure in his head casting a thousand black stars into the the small space. Empty save for the overhead light illuminating the red walls and bidding him entry into a space reminiscent of one of the chambers of his own heart. The red deep and clotted. Dead circulation. A dead chamber. He could see it because his head was raised. His eyes open. To hell with the blood. It had stopped if it hadn’t slowed and to hell with it.
Hands free, gripping his rims. The left hand sliding, slick with his fluids. Gripping tighter and pushing forward now and turning, facing the corridor, nothing but a rectangle of sunlight, the view from within an open grave. He was just awaiting the first fistful of earth. He almost braced himself as the doors shut. He saw nothing else. No ghost of a notion nor interloper in the dark. Not him. Not Fletch. Not the man who stooped behind him, with or without claw like hands - the branches of a dead tree reaching to caress the scalp on a frozen winter’s night.
Empty. Yet as the elevator closed out the day and sent him ascending, he fancied he heard the whisper of a closing door and the soft click of a latch.
He slept or he remained awake but nonetheless the time fell beneath him until the doors slid open and bid him welcome to the third floor, and Apartment Six.
Sliding past five and the sound of something heavy against the door he knocked and waited.
Shit. What’s her name?
It was on the door. Handwritten and laminated, water in from somewhere, the text running, the letters descending, losing semblance of shape.
D & Y IVANOV
Yana Ivanov.
Mrs Ivanov?
“Mrs Ivanov?” He said, knocking the door once. Twice. Again. A door bell. He pressed it, it rang inside. A doorbell wasn’t right. Superfluous in a building with a buzzer system on the front entrance but nonetheless he pressed the button. An old fashioned bell, not electronic. No artificial sound from inside, a hammer on metal. Shrill and demanding attention. He rang again, the timbre deeper. Again. Deeper. Fainter. The sound travelling further to reach him, as though the bell was steadily being taken away from him. Down somewhere. Doesn’t to where the sound echoes and carried in deep cavernous spaces.
The door swung open. A thin woman in her fifties, not much older than Adam, standing here. Beads of sweat on her brow, less than on his. Her pupils were dilated, her thin lips set, her jaw out. Her neck was sinewy, tendons and veins. A simple flora dress, arms like birds legs. She held something under a blanket. Adam fancied it moved when he spoke, the words taking a long time to form in his throat, no follow up planned save for this:
“I’m Adam, your neighbour. Down the hall?” He pointed, like the statement needed physical punctuation. She glanced at his arm then glanced at him. “We’ve never met.” He added. She knew that as well as he did. She looked at him, her face betraying nothing. The thing beneath the old blanket moved again. Small and furtive. The blanket shifted enough, he thought he saw a glimpse of -
“Yes,” she said. “Now, met.” She nodded, but more to herself than him.
“I just wanted to see if you were okay? I heard -”
“You scream.”
“Sorry?”
“You.” She pointed a finger towards him as the thing settled and re-settled in the crook of her other arm. “Denys. He say. You scream. He heard and go see. You fine? Good?”
“Yes I’m…okay. Thank you. But I heard - “
She nodded once more and shut the door, leaving him facing the blank wood and the hand scribed text that ran down before him.
“Yeah. I’m fine. Good.” He said, exhaling slowly and turning his chair to face his door. He frowned. It was wide open, and he could see the sun beyond. Another open grave. Another burial. Except this time he wasn’t going to ascend from it. He would move towards it.
He would enter, and perhaps be reborn. Or he would remain o the tarmac with the remains of his life and stare up at the sky until the sun set. This sun was before him and welcomed him towards it.
Crossing his threshold, he caught the door and slammed it shut, wheeling his chair towards his bedroom, his intention to undress and crawl into bed, in whatever fashion it took him.
“I’m fucking fine.” He said to himself, as something was scraped beyond the wall.
“Good.”
He crawled into his bed.
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