Do you see him?
He’s in the parking lot now, creeping slowly. Watch how his eyes dart nervously from window to window, peering around corners. Watching for movement of any kind. Surely you would have missed him if I were not here to point him out to you; it's a dark night, and the only light comes from a streetlight across the way and the thin sliver of the moon that watches, like a squinted eye, from the sky above. Regardless, he would have been difficult to spot, for he is a man who certainly wishes not to be seen.
Watch how he hugs the base of the walls as he walks; it’s almost as if he were more of a shade or shadow than a man such as you or me. His feet are careful. Well placed. He cautiously rolls them, toe to heel, making the least amount of noise possible. It’s as if he emulates the feral cats that lurk our city’s streets: his shoulders hunched, careful to distribute weight evenly on the broad soles of his feet, each step meticulously avoiding shards of broken glass and gravel that crunch loudly underfoot.
Surely you must see him by now! Even I, with my poor eyesight, can see him.
By this point, he’s crossed the full length of the parking lot, and is slinking alongside the main pathway that leads to the center of the apartments, carefully treading on patches of green grass that yield silently underfoot.
Suddenly he stops.
His hands slide over the cool stucco walls that encircle the patio of an apartment across the way. Once his hands find a solid grip, the man pulls himself up gracefully, hoisting himself up onto the six-foot wall. He pauses for a brief moment, crouched atop the wall like a gargoyle, and at seems as if he were merely a fluid extension of the wall itself.
It seems as if he’s done this before, does it not?
And what of the innocent apartment beneath this shadowy man? The crooked brass letters fixed firmly to the door read 127, an apartment that is, without a doubt, virtually identical to the apartment in which we now reside: a similar moderately furnished bedroom; the same grimy, poorly lit bathroom complete with leaking faucets and patches of mildew that creep slowly up the walls like reaching hands; the same patio, surrounded by the same stucco wall (which, instead of serving as a means of privacy and protection for the resident of Apartment 127 as it was intended, now serves as a perch for our dark intruder).
You want to cry out, don’t you? You want to yell to this sinister character that you’ve spotted him; to scream that you’re going to call the police, no, that you’ve already called the police and that they’re going to be here any second.
No. Let us watch for a moment instead. Calling the police would serve little purpose; this is a dangerous city. Broken shards of glass call out in the streets like diamonds. Streets you don't use after the streetlamps come on, paved with dirty syringes and fragments of bone and used condoms and dried spatters of blood. Everyone's learned to sleep through gunshots that pop in the dark spaces of the night. Everyone knows someone that died here. Even the police stay away. The screams here go unheard, or ignored.
And with a slight push forward, Jeremy dropped silently onto the patio of Apartment 127.
His eyes studied the arcadia door in front of him. He peered through the dirty glass into the dark apartment, searching for any signs of movement. As he waited, he removed a cigarette from his jacket pocket, careful to light it purposefully and quietly and to hide the burning tip with the palm of his hand. The cigarette itself was a brand he was unfamiliar with: a Benson & Hedges he’d stolen from Ms. Vivian Relf (the resident of Apartment 322) three weeks prior.
Minutes passed.
Satisfied that no one was home, Jeremy advanced closer to the door. From one of his pockets he pulled a thin strip of metal, which he then proceeded to slide between the door and the doorframe just beneath the latch. His rough hands pressed upward slowly, applying more and more pressure, until he heard the quiet crack of the latch springing free of its hinge.
He slid the arcadia door open and stepped inside.
Jeremy did not consider it “breaking and entering”; to him, the phrase seemed dirty and crude.
Rather, he preferred to think of it as “house-sitting” or “visiting without an invitation”. Very rarely did he steal anything from the houses and apartments he visited…except for alcohol, cigarettes, and pornography; but these were all dangerous vices, and in Jeremy’s mind, he was doing their owners a favor by removing them.
During his visits Jeremy overturned furniture and emptied cabinets, spilling their contents onto the floor. He urinated on bedroom carpets. Once he even spray-painted someone's pet iguana.
Upon returning home, the resident would realize that their innocent home had been broken into by a common criminal, at which point the tenant usually took great care to replace locks, install bars on the windows, and generally transform their previously innocent home into an impenetrable fortress. In this way, Jeremy considered his visits a great service to the apartment’s proper residents; none of their valuables (save for alcohol, cigarettes, and pornography) had been stolen, and for the simple cost of a few new locks on the doors, a great change had been made: their home was now safe from real criminals.
Or at least this is what Jeremy told himself.
According to the stack of mail sitting next to the front door, Apartment 127 belonged to J. Thomas Weatherman, but Jeremy had never, in fact, actually seen the man entering of leaving his apartment. He’d been attracted to 127 by the simple handwritten sign on the door that read
No solicitors
Day sleeper…please do not ring bell!
A day sleeper suggested some sort of night job, which provided the perfect opportunity for Jeremy’s nighttime intrusion.
For days he'd watched 127. He observed a silver Honda Civic parked in 127’s designated space during the day, and subsequently observed the absence of that same Honda Civic at night.
And yet, he never actually saw this J. Thomas Weatherman himself. And so, Jeremy set forth, wandering throughout Weatherman’s apartment, hoping to assemble some sort of picture of the man based upon his belongings.
The first thing he noticed was the smell. Upon examining the kitchen, he found three swollen garbage bags (one of which was leaking some sort of putrid liquid onto the linoleum tile beneath). The kitchen itself was otherwise tidy, yet devoid of food, save for takeout boxes and a row of frozen pizzas lined up in the freezer.
The kitchen of a bachelor, Jeremy thought to himself.
He also noted the absence of both bottles of alcohol and packs of cigarettes, which disappointed him greatly. He continued his search.
With no small level of contempt, Jeremy noted that not only did J. Thomas Weatherman possess two copies of the bible, but also an absurdly large wooden crucifix which hung on the wall above his dining room table. He cursed under his breath, bemoaning the dumb, stupid fucking luck that had led him to break into the home of a Christian bachelor.
Jeremy removed the crucifix from the wall and dropped it into a garbage can.
And just when Jeremy was loosing interest in 127, in its stacks of yellowed paperback mystery novels and its cheap Ikea coffee table, its unlabeled videocassettes and makeshift plywood bookshelves, just when Jeremy was about to abandon the apartment of J. Thomas Weatherman, the Civic-driving God-loving bachelor, entirely, he noticed the bedroom door.
And he was curious.
As Jeremy stepped into Weatherman’s bedroom, the smell that he’d previously attributed to the kitchen garbage seemed to intensify. The air grew thick and hot. He tried flicking the light switch near the door, but the room remained shrouded in darkness, but his eyes slowly began to adjust to the gloom.
The room was sparse and somewhat disappointing. Through the darkness he was able to make out the broad outline of a bed, and then a lamp, and then the contrast of another crucifix against the stark white wall of the bedroom.
Jeremy sighed. It was like spying on a goddamn monk.
But as his eyes became more and more adjusted, Jeremy noticed something else.
Instead of the usual cheap sliding doors that Jeremy had come to expect from this sort of apartment (the type of doors that usually lead to walk-in closets) there was some very large and very dark set into the wall. Using the small flame of his Zippo lighter, Jeremy looked closer.
It was a huge door, stretching from the floor to the ceiling, and it was very much out of place. Something custom made. It was made from a dark, sturdy looking wood, with broad metal hinges stretching from side to side. The left side of the door was lined with a series of sliding deadbolts that held the door firmly in place.
The smell was even stronger now. Enough to make Jeremy cover his mouth.
And yet, he was curious.
He slid the locks back, one by one.
It seems that our shadowy trespasser had disappeared, does it not?
It’s been twenty or so minutes since he disappeared over the wall, and although I have not been watching as intently as you have been, I dare say that I have not heard or seen any manner of movement from 127 for quite some time. In this ungodly hour of the night, nothing seems to be moving at all: not a car has entered nor exited the apartment; even the road is quiet and desolate.
Except for the gray sedan that's pulling into the parking lot now.
Jeremy slid the door open, and a wave of sickly heat swam over him. The smell intensified and became a swarming cloud of gnats, swimming thickly around his head while trying to penetrate entry into his mouth, nose, and eyes.
This was not right. Every part of his body screamed for him to run: his insides churning, knotting up in his chest; his heart pounding like the taut beat of a snare drum; the thin film of grimy sweat coursing from every pore of his body.
And yet…he was still curious.
Hesitantly, he let the flickering light of the Zippo shine upon what was inside.
It was a woman. Or rather, what used to be a woman. Laid back and twisted, her body contorted on some sort of chair, ankles and wrists bound with wraps of silver wire. The walls were painted with peeling, blistering layers of her black blood; her belly, cut from top to bottom like an eviscerated fish, her insides unraveled and churning with maggots in a neat pile on the floor, hunks of bloated meat and bruised snakes of sausage; her cloudy eyes, open, staring at him; her mouth frozen and contorted into some kind of horrible silent scream and her tongue, Jesus Christ, her black, swollen tongue hung from the corner of her open jaw.
Jeremy reeled, staggering. Trembling. Trying to speak. Unfocused, a low moan rising from the back of his throat. The tracks of tears running from the corners of his eyes. He vomited.
J. Thomas Weatherman, the solitary bachelor.
The faithful, practicing Christian.
The butcher of women.
Suddenly Jeremy’s ears perked, whipping his head quickly around towards the source of the noise as his feet staggered, unsteady beneath him.
It was the sound of the front door being unlocked.
Jeremy lurched quickly around the room, panicking, his hand pressed tightly over his lips to stifle the screams that died to escape his lips. He dove beneath Weatherman’s bed, pushing his small body as far into the corner as it would go.
He could hear footsteps clicking on the linoleum kitchen floor.
Jeremy felt his own hot urine stream down his thighs, soaking the carpet.
From beneath the bed his trembling eyes watched the bedroom brighten as Weatherman opened the bedroom door.
And just as Weatherman noticed the broad wooden door that Jeremy had carelessly left open, and as Weatherman detected the warm puddle of vomit left soaking into the carpet before him, Jeremy closed his eyes and began to pray.
You heard it, did you not? The muffled scream that echoed from inside 127?
Yes. I heard it too. I've heard similar screams before.
I told you. This is a bad city, and this neighborhood is even worse: a place where calling the police is a waste of time, because none of them will come here after the streetlamps come on. It's a neighborhood where screams go unheard. Or ignored.
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