There was a knock at the door.
The time was four minutes past two o’clock.
A.M.
Someone was knocking at his door.
Adam tried to ignore it. To banish it to the background. To use what he had learned earlier at the gallery to compartmentalise the sound. To push it from his consciousness where it was keeping him from a well deserved rest. He had returned home a little after half past one, after moving his way slowly down his hallway, avoiding the trail of muddy prints that lead from the elevator to the front door of his neighbour. It simultaneously surprised and did not surprise him. After all, had he not sen Denys with mud on his boots and trousers before? With dirt lodged firmly under his large bitten fingernails? His mind raced at what Denys had been doing in apartment one, until he reached his front door, and he realised that he was top exhausted to actually care. Let him file it under shit to deal with tomorrow if that meant that he could climb into bed and sleep for seven days straight.
Except he wasn’t going to sleep. Because someone was ringing the fucking doorbell now.
“Denys I swear to god if that’s you…” he moaned inwardly as he pulled his main chair over to his bedside, pushing the lightweight one out of the way. It had served it’s purpose, but wasn’t exactly comfortable. His prosthetics were still sticking out of the back like a discarded shop mannikin, and he was in no rush to put them on again. His legs still burned and that pain in his joints was such that he had to swallow a handful of painkillers before it even began to abate. He seated himself in his chair as he pushed his way through the detritus of his bedroom. The previous evenings clothes were discarded and strewn across the floor to mingle with all the other garments he had neglected to pick up. The laundry room was in the basement, along with a lot of his items he hadn’t taken out of boxes since he had moved in. He hadn’t been down there in weeks, and was fast running out of things to wear. Not that it mattered, seeing as how he was in no rush o go back outside again. If Iris Fleet wanted a follow up appointment in the future she would have to come to him again. This time, he thought, she would have more to moan about than a lack of clean crockery. That’s if he let her get a word in. He had his own bones to pick, and he supposed that she wouldn’t care for it very -
Iris was here. Sitting in his living room. The sodium arc of streetlight through ivy enshrouded windows picked her familiar form, her features. She was looking at him from the sofa and grinning.
No. Not grinning. The flesh around her mouth had been eaten away.
She stood, reaching out for him. The flesh of her arms had gone, leaving skeletal fingers like winter branches.
“I have shome bonesh for you to pick…” she drooled in a voice like the opening of an old tomb.
The doorbell rang again and she was gone. The windows clear from ivy
not quite, there, in the corner of the window behind the couch, right there, see how it grows
and the midday sun filling the space with warmth and light.
Adam blinked.
Was it not night? He hadn’t yet rested. He hadn’t slept.
How many pills did I take?
What did I take?
He would need to check the box. Medication he had left over from before? Confusing it with pain relief? Had it knocked him out cold?
He yawned and stretched. Tired. So fucking tired. He hadn’t slept. He would have known if he had slept. Well. He wouldn’t be so fucking tired.
A staccato frenzy of knocking.
“Jesus,” he moaned, then adding, louder: “Coming Denys, just give me a minute! Please!”
He glanced at what he had on. Boxers and the t-shirt he had worn under his shirt the previous evening. It would just have to fucking do. What did it matter anyway. It was only his bloody neighbour.
Adam rolled across to the front door. No time like the present to ask what the hell he had been doing in apartment one. He glanced to the small shelf in the alcove. Where he had placed the jar full of clear amber liquid Denys had passed him previously. What he had been informed was honey. The contents had become darker, more opaque. There seemed to be something darker inside it it, suspended in the centre, but he couldn’t make it out. He went to pick it up for closer inspection when the bell was rung again, startling him due to it’s proximity.
He opened the door, the words already forming in his mouth.
“Denys it’s bloody two -”
“Mr Campion?” The tall thin man stooped low in the hall, towering above Adam in his chair. Thin of face and pale, Adam immediately placed him in his later seventies or early eighties. He was wearing a brown paisley patterned shirt open at the collar, displaying a thatch of wiry grey hair below folds of pale skin. Suit trousers at least one size too small, exposing naked ankles over tan brogues. There was a shot plump woman next to him, Adam guessing around fifty - not much older than him - expect her face was caked in pale make-up, so generously applied that Adam could see the texture of it in the fee moments he took her in. She had narrow eyes and full pouting lips pressed together in a petulant bow. She was dressed like she was getting ready for her own funeral. I the nineteen sixties. The stench of dried flowers filled his nostrils.
“I’m not interested, sorry.” Adam said, pushing himself back with one hand and drawing the door closed with the other. “It’s not a particularly convenient time and I’m also an atheist so I’m afraid you’d have your work cut out anyway. Thank you.” An almost continuous monologue as he pushed himself back, the door naturally shining to a close.
The woman stepped forward with a surprising speed and jammed one large spade like hand between the door and the frame, gripping the latter, stopping the former from closing.
The man laughed, a stale wind over a barren plain.
“May we come in?” His tone ventured that he wasn’t asking.
“If you tell me who the fuck you are.” Adam’s vice hardened. He had dealt with witnesses before, but they were never normally so forceful. Despite the fact these two looked like a couple, their aggressiveness and forthright manner seemed to suggest they were nothing of the sort.
“Please,” the man reached into his front shirt pocket and produced a pale yellow business card, the same colour as his stained fingers.
MARINGIAN AGENCY
“The agency? You could have just said.” Adam felt his gorge rising. He was nearly three months late. This was why he hadn’t received a letter, phone call or email. They obviously liked to do things personally.
“We just did,” the woman replied bluntly.
“Right.” Adam replied, thinking of how to follow before deciding that silence was probably the best option. Best not put your foot in it. He nearly laughed aloud at that. If you stopped to think about it, a lot of puns and expressions involved walking, or legs or feet. It also turned out that he had begun to use humour internally at rather odd times.
“May we come in?”
“No, I have rights as a tenant.” Adam said. He thought that was true, but as he’d never bothered to actually read the contract he had signed before taking on the apartment, he was ’t actually sure. For all he knew he had put his name to an agreement where the agency could send round a clown twice a week to defecate in the middle of his living room, and there would be nothing he could do about it. “Besides,” he added, “I’m sure this won’t take long. I know I’m behind. I’ll pay what I owe. I’m just about to pick up a contract for work and I’ll be able to settle the arrears in full.” He hoped he sounded more convincing than he thought he did.
The woman rolled her eyes and the man smiled thinly before leaning down to Adam not unlike Denys had done, as though speaking to a child. Many people did it, whether consciously or not, and that played no small part to his increasing intolerance of others he was sure.
“You are late Mr Campion. You have…arrears.”
“Yes and I’ll pay them. Soon. I promise.” Adam decided to adopt a different tone, hoping it would curry some favour, or sympathy. “I’ve not been well, I’ve been struggling a lot recently because of…” He cast his eyes down at his chair. “I’m sorry. I really am trying. I’ll make sure it’s paid.”
The man then did something that made the inner part of Adam simultaneously recoil and shudder inside. He stretched out one long yellowed hand, and placed it on Adam’s head, before doing the inconceivable.
He ruffled Adam’s hair.
“Okay,” he grinned, his teeth were like rusting iron on a grey beach. “There’s a good boy. I shall pass this on.”
He leaned upright again and the woman removed her hand from the frame, letting go of the door where she had been holding it two thirds open. As it swung shut, both unwelcome visitors began to turn and walk away. Saying nothing more to Adam.
Adam held the door slightly ajar as he watched them go. They paused outside Denys and Yana’s apartment, looking down at the floor. He heard the woman tut slightly, and the man mumble something incoherent before they both continued on their way.
The door shut.
Adam exhaled. Unaware he had held his breath. Something else that was becoming common.
He moved back into the living room, decanting himself on to the couch and letting the sun wash over him, revelling in it’s warmth.
I’m fucked.
A hell of his own making. Perhaps.
I’m really fucked.
He sat there in the silence, wondering just what he was going to do. He had no work. He had no commissions. He had told his last prospect of a pay check to go and fuck herself. Would she even pick up if he called her? Where the hell was his phone even? He thought back to where he last saw it and found he couldn’t remember. He didn’t have the energy to go looking for it. Not just now. He was far too exhausted. There was this other one however, the old handset that he had taken the call from -
FUCK!
Had he just forgotten?
He grabbed hold of it, flipping it open and relieved to see it had some residual charge left. He went to the address book, looking for Amber’s number.
There was nothing there. Just one contact.
D
That was no good. He needed to call her. Why hadn’t she called back? He looked at the call history. Nothing. No missed calls. No texts, no notifications. He had called her from this aged thing. She would have called him back on it, even if the number was different.
Of course. He could look at calls made and dial that number again.
There. One number. Just a string of digits, no name, as it wasn’t in his contacts.
He dialled it, waiting an age for the connection.
Click.
“Amber? Hello? Are you there? It’s Adam.”
Silence. A low hiss on the line. He thought he could hear something far off.
Laughter?
“Amber! Please! It’s Adam are you there>? Say something if you’re there!”
A child’s laughter?
The hiss faded. Silence. It sounded like a dead line. He pulled the phone away and checked. He was still connected.
“Amber for fuck’s sake it’s about -”
No mistaking what followed. Almost imperceptible at first. A low growl. Guttural and almost binary. It increased in volume.
Click.
Silence.
This time he had been disconnected.
He dialled again. No connection. Again. No connection.
In anger he threw the phone across the room. It slid into his bedroom. Into the darkness.
Head in his hands. He wondered just what the hell he should do now.
The card was on the floor. He must have dropped it when he had come in. He had never opened it. For want for something to do, he picked it up. A few residual motes of glitter fell. Inside it was blank, save for the two words that had been scrawled in an alien script. Two words, then a single letter.
FINISH IT
D
He sat back as the light from outside faded into darkness.
Scratch
Something moved against the glass. Moved across the glass. The window behind him.
It began to flood back to him.
He slept.
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