#
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 locked 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.
“Don’t shoot,” he whispered.
To avoid sweating into his eyes he put his aviator goggles back on.
“Okay, things are bad, but I can handle this. At least now he can’t call my brother and there will be no more knocking.”
It took three trips to the hole in the wall. Every piece of the landlord was lined along the tunnel. The garbage bag had been pushed in first and now it rested at the deepest part. The only evidence in the apartment was the blood on the dirty carpet. Jim figured over the next couple of days it would turn a darker color and no one would ever know what it was.
He climbed into the hole and dropped the poster behind him. Alone again, no knocking and no noises of any kind, he began to rock back and forth in place, trying to think about what would come next. The future wasn’t something he’d considered. Tomorrow showed up and he lived it. Then the next day. Then the next. But he had done things. Bad things. He was sure of it.
The asylum might take him back. He hated being there. They said he had delusions and hallucinations. They said he was having schizophrenic episodes. He suffered from a schizoaffective disorder where he would have a bunch of episodes. He was told the were depressive and manic episodes, but they were wrong. He wasn’t depressive or manic. He just heard people talking. He saw things that weren’t there.
Bits of dirt crumbled down beside him as he rocked harder. He felt dizzy as the intensity increased. He rocked so fast his back and shoulder were smacking each side of the little cavern. There was a shift in the dirt. For a moment he felt disoriented. He tried to shake the dirt loose from his goggles but it remained. He tasted dirt in his mouth.
He struggled to get loose but couldn’t. He closed his eyes and surrendered.
#
When he opened his eyes the noises were back. A violence formed inside him. The landlord was easy. Whoever stood at his apartment door was going to pay.
He edged toward the poster, flipped it out of his way and dropped to the floor.
His mouth hung open. He watched as his brother, a man in a suit and two uniformed cops milled around the apartment. None of them seemed to notice him. There were no wisps of air, no subtle hints of a presence. These people were actually standing in his basement apartment like the landlord had. He removed his headphones and let them fall to the floor.
“Can you tell us what would have caused this?” the man in a suit asked Jim’s brother.
“Maybe an episode of some kind? I don’t know. I didn’t expect it. I would’ve come more often if I had. He seemed to be getting along quite well.”
His brother lifted a Kleenex and blew his nose.
“Do you think something set him off? What did he sound like when you last talked to him?”
“That was about two weeks ago. I came over for a beer. He said
don’t shoot
a few times. That was usually an indicator he was about to experience an episode but he had done so well over the last few months that I thought we were past those things.”
The suit looked up from his pad, a frown on his face. “
Don’t shoot
? What does that mean?”
“When I was ten-years-old and little Jimmy was eight, our house got robbed. My dad and I were out at a ball game. Jimmy had the flu so he stayed home with our mom. When we got home, the front door was open. My dad told me to wait in the car. He found my mother shot to death. He couldn’t find little Jimmy. My brother was missing for five full days. Then, you’d never guess where we found him.”
“No, I probably wouldn’t. Tell me.”
“We found him in the basement, under the stairs. He’d removed a panel to hide in. It probably saved his life. For those five days he’d only used his hands to dig …” Jim’s brother stopped and grabbed another Kleenex to wipe his nose.
“Dig?”
Jim stood there watching this exchange as rapt in hearing his brother tell it as the officer was.
“Yeah, he was digging into the wall, trying to get out of the house. He kept saying,
don’t shoot, don’t shoot
, over and over. We found out later that the guy who robbed the house had given my eight-year-old brother a pistol and told him it wasn’t loaded. He had him aim it at mom and pull the trigger for pretend. The guy whispered something into mom’s ear and then mom said to go ahead and play the game. According to Jimmy, the gun went off and half of mom’s face went with it. Little Jimmy was never the same after that. When things would become overwhelming for him, he’d chant,
don’t shoot
.”
The suit lowered his notepad and stared at Jim’s brother. “That’s some story. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. That was over thirty years ago.”
Jim’s brother walked over to the television and bent down. He came up with the broken frame and the picture of the three of them after their mother’s death.
Someone knocked and stepped into the apartment.
“Are you the landlord?” the suit asked.
“Yeah, my name’s Mike. What a fucking mess. This is going to take me weeks to clean and how am I going to fix that wall? Shit!”
The landlord’s alive? His name’s Mike? What the hell’s happening?
“Where’s your sensitivity?” his brother asked.
Mike looked over. “Ah, shit. Didn’t see you there. Sorry.”
One of the uniformed cops yanked on Rita and pulled the poster down.