Through the Patio
Door by
Philip Roberts
Bradley Wolanski stepped out into the early
afternoon and took in a mouthful of fresh air. Nine hours of work loomed ahead.
Two years hadn’t allowed him to get fully acquainted with working evenings, and
standing in the middle of a largely empty apartment complex accentuated his
sense of isolation the hours produced. The lack of rush hour traffic was his
only consolation.
Before walking towards his car he paused,
feeling something off, and realized the patio blinds to his right were open.
He’d lived above the much older Randolph Dease for years, but rarely saw the
retired recluse. Now he stepped closer to the open blinds, a bit apprehensive
about peering in the apartment yet unable to help himself all the same. He had
to squint against the glare of the sunlight on the glass to see the old man
lying back in a recliner, his eyes closed, mouth agape.
An early afternoon nap, Bradley thought,
but the man’s skin looked too pale, and the longer he stared, the more he
noticed the flies buzzing around the body. The man isn’t asleep, Bradley
thought, and stepped back.
He primarily turned from the window and
started across the parking lot towards the office in order to see if Randolph
were truly dead or merely sick, but had to admit as well the determination
already taking hold to call out of work for the night. He figured discovering
the dead body of a neighbor to be a worthy enough excuse.
He hadn’t spoken to the complex’s owner at
any great length since moving in. Other than a hello when dropping off the
rent, they were strangers. Beatrice turned from her computer as soon as Bradley
entered the office.
“There’s a problem,” he told her, and
explained what he had seen.
The portly woman nodded and hefted herself
from the seat. “Never really did speak with the man much,” she said as they
walked back towards Bradley’s building with a ring of keys in Beatrice’s hand.
“I didn’t either,” Bradley said if only to
contribute something.
They both paused in front of the patio for
Beatrice to see Randolph reclined back before continuing on into the building.
He felt sorry for the older man. To be
found by two strangers felt like a terrible way to end a life.
Even though Bradley had no legitimate
reason to be there anymore, Beatrice made no complaints about him following her
into the apartment. He nearly bumped into her when she stopped abruptly.
They both walked slowly inside, their own
footsteps echoing lightly in the empty apartment, no carpet, wallpaper,
furniture, or dead body to be seen. The place looked like no one had lived
there for years, except no dust or dirt had piled up.
Beatrice marched in silence up to the
closed patio door and reached for the handle, but it wouldn’t budge. Bradley
ignored her, studying the apartment, catching sight of a symbol carved into the
wood on the inside of the door. He ran his fingers over the circular shape with
lines and dots jutting out from it.
“It’s welded,” Beatrice said in
astonishment, drawing Bradley up to the door and the melted metal permanently
attaching it to the frame. She pulled herself up and turned to Bradley. “He
welded the damn thing shut.”
But Bradley looked at the glass door itself,
and staring hard enough, he could see the same symbol from the door scratched
into the glass.
He broke away and started back for the
front door with Beatrice behind him. “I’m looking outside again,” he said.
They left the apartment door open on their
way out. They both stood before the glass door and the furnished apartment.
More insects buzzed around the body, crawling in and out of the gaping mouth,
over the closed eyelids. They looked beyond the body to the back of the
apartment and the wall that had apparently been splashed in black paint. It
didn’t even look like there was a back wall to the room; just empty space where
the room ended.
“We should do something,” Bradley said,
stunned.
“Do what?”
They walked back into the building and
stopped within the empty apartment. Bradley stood in the middle of the room and
closed his eyes while Beatrice went through the other rooms. He tried to expand
his senses, to hear or smell something wrong, but the room felt like any other,
or he had no way of detecting whatever was different about it.
“The cops?” Beatrice said, standing in the
door to the bedroom.
Bradley opened his eyes and glanced over at
her. “Ok. What are you going to tell them?”
“An old man died. Seems good enough to me.”
“They won’t get here very fast though, will
they? I mean, if you just tell them he died of old age.”
“Do we need them here fast?”
Bradley stared at the welded patio door,
then back at the far wall where he’d seen nothing but darkness devouring the
room. “I don’t know.”
She pulled out her cell phone but didn’t
dial, holding it and biting her lower lip. Beatrice started for the front door
and Bradley followed for no reason other than he didn’t know what else to do.
They stood before the patio door, the afternoon sunlight on the back of their
necks, birds calling out to each other in the trees, and the faint roar of city
traffic just beyond the parking lot. In front of them they watched the mass of
insects swarming around Randolph’s decaying body and the abyss stretching closer.
If he stared long enough Bradley could see the bulges in Randolph’s flesh, like
something moving beneath the surface, trying to find a way to get out.
“I don’t think we have time,” Bradley said.
“What do you think happens when the
darkness reaches the window?” Beatrice asked.
He didn’t need to answer. He wanted to tell
her to call the police now, to tell them a madman was there, to get over as
fast as possible, but something else in him thought it wouldn’t do any good. He
just wanted the responsibility to be on someone else’s shoulders. Let them try
to figure out what felt like something far beyond him, but he suspected calling
the police would only waste time they didn’t have.
You’re a manager, he thought, so figure out
what you need to do. Beatrice did before he had a chance to.
“I have an axe in the tool shed,” she said
to him. “I think we need to break the glass.”
“Okay, you get it and I’ll break this thing
open,” he said, a tinge of envy that she had come up with a course of action
before him, while feeling foolish that he even cared.
She left him alone to lean in closer to the
glass. The insects came from the darkness, thousands of them now, the walls
crawling with them, the air a mist of moving specs. Randolph was covered, only
a few patches of raw flesh visible, but none of the insects touched the glass
itself.
He jumped as the axe was shoved towards
him, Beatrice’s gaze locked on the growing chaos inside the apartment. “Are you
going to or am I?” she asked when Bradley hesitated to take the weapon.
His left eye twitched as he grabbed it from
her. He rather liked the pettiness of the anger, something concrete and sane
for him to latch onto, dispelling most self-doubt and allowing him to pull the
heavy blade back and slam it into the glass.
Cracks crawled outward from the point of
impact, and he swore he saw a rush of movement from Randolph’s corpse, as if
whatever was trapped within it understood the assault.
The next swing sent more cracks spider
webbing outward, made the glass tremble, and the third swing shattered a giant
hole inward.
The oppressive sound of buzzing insects
filled the air as all of them flew towards the hole, towards Bradley, and made
him bring up his hands to protect his face, but as soon as they passed through
the hole they evaporated in a haze of smoke. A swift inhale doubled Bradley
over with a fit of coughs, his eyes wet and stinging from the acrid remains of
the bugs.
From within the apartment he heard the
thick sound of the darkness crawling forward, swarming across the corpse, as if
trying to pull it away before Bradley could reach it. He let go of any concept
of reality and stepped through into the apartment, hands up to protect him from
the smoke. Once inside he felt the insects crawling across his flesh, felt
pinpricks of pain everywhere, and the first hint of true fear and madness
clawed at his mind.
Rather than flee from it he delved forward
and brought up the axe. The blade struck Randolph’s body with a wet thud, and
he felt more than heard what seemed like a roar of disappointment, of anger.
The darkness pulled back to the far wall
and took all of the insects with it, until it pulled into a dark circle, and
then vanished completely. All that remained was a familiar symbol painted in
black along the wall.
In front of him Bradley stared down at
Randolph’s remains, the skin all but eaten off the body, revealing glistening
muscle and patches of bone. Starting at just below the neck the chest had split
partially open, allowing Bradley to see the hollow cavity inside where organs
should’ve been. The blade of the axe was still embedded in the mid-section.
To his right the apartment door cracked
opened and Beatrice stepped inside, the keys clenched tightly in her hand.
Bradley glanced behind him at the shattered patio door and saw the welded metal
frame along the edge.
“It’s over?” Beatrice asked.
“I guess.”
Bradley looked at his exposed arms and the
sores swelling up, but they weren’t as bad as he’d feared, though something in
him grasped that he couldn’t even fathom how bad they might get. He took up a
seat along the wall and stared at Randolph’s remains.
“There’s books over here,” Beatrice said,
knelt down along the far wall beneath the painted symbol. “I wonder what he was
doing.”
“I have no idea.”
She stood up and walked over to him, eyeing
Randolph’s remains. “Guess we stopped him.”
“Looks like it.”
“Call the cops?”
Bradley shrugged. “Why not?”
While Beatrice stepped back out into the
day and called the police Bradley brought up his own phone and told his boss he
wasn’t going to be into work that night.
THE END
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