Doors and Windows

It was a cold and stormy night. Well, windy. Kinda rainy too. Let’s say it was a rainy night. I guess it wasn’t that stormy. I mean, there was no lightning. Or thunder for that matter. I don’t even know why I said it was stormy. So, it was a cold and windy and rainy night. Hell, the night just sucked.

I was stuck in a sorry excuse for a studio. A dorm room, really. A reddish brown rug covered everything but the bathroom, which had reddish brown tile. The cream colored walls were barren. That was mostly my fault since I didn’t hang anything to make them less barren. Idiot college students wailed like retarded banshees somewhere in the vicinity. Continuously. Even when I was in college, I never really understood why college students wailed like retarded banshees. Even when I had had too much to drink, I didn’t wail or grunt or make loud noises. Instead, I lain in girls’ beds – without the girls – hugging whatever stuffed animals they happened to have in their beds. I’m pretty sure there’s a picture of me hugging a rather worn pink monkey. But that was before Facebook. It was mostly before the internet, actually. And thankfully.

I sat at the white desk typing on my laptop – much like I’m doing now – when I heard a knock at the cheap faux wood door. Mind you, I had never received a knock at said door. Ever. In fact, I had never told anyone where I lived. I thought about being scared but it didn’t resonate. Instead, I walked up to the door and looked through a peephole I hadn’t know existed the other seven thousand times I’d used the door to enter and exit the room. It was pitch black.

‘I knew you’d try to use the peephole,’ I heard from the other side of the door. The voice was a baritone, or so Mr. DiBartolo – my sixth grade music teacher – would have noticed. Bart, as we liked to call him, had a thing for the Beach Boys’ Kokomo. It seemed strange to me.

‘No shit Sherlock,’ I replied.

‘Let me in,’ he said, ‘or you’ll be sorry.’

‘Matt, is that you?’

‘How’d you know?’

‘You’re such an idiot. Go away.’

‘Aw, c’mon man. I just need to borrow a buck.’

‘Night, Matt.’

‘I’ll break this God damn door down,’ he screamed.

‘Go ahead, Matt,’ I spoke nonchalantly.

Matt pounded on the door a few times before some of my neighbors came out and, by the sounds of it, started throwing things at him.

‘Aw, c’mon guys, just a buck.’

The Doppler effect of his voice made me sigh in relief. He’d pounded at others’ doors but never mine. I wasn’t certain whether I should be annoyed or oddly honored. In the end, I was just happy he’d gone away.

A few minutes later, there came another knock on my door.

‘Matt, go away. People will just start throwing things again.’

‘Ain’t Matt,’ I heard a deeper voice say.

I walked up to the door and peered through the peephole. I didn’t see anyone.

‘You think I’m gonna stand in front o’ that peephole? Lemme in.’

‘All you crazies are out tonight. Go the hell away.’

‘Son, you ain’t want my kinda crazy.’

‘You’re right. Go the hell away.’ I walked back to my desk. I assumed he had left. Until there came from behind me a mind-numbing explosion. Something flew past my right ear and smashed through the lone window. I turned to see the faux door laying in splinters on the reddish brown carpet. In the doorway stood a non-descript middle aged black man in garb that seemed to indicate he was homeless.

‘I tol’ ya. You comin with me, son.’

‘The hell I am.’

‘You ain’t got no powers. Yo brother tol’ me so. You jes a sad ol’ normal human like I used to be. Ain’t nothing you can do if I got ya cornered.’

‘You shouldn’t underestimate the people in my family. They’ve had plenty of practice dealing with freaks like you.’ He stood and put his hands in his pockets. His right hand hit three consecutive buttons on his cell phone. He had learned to type the code without looking.

‘I ain’t had no problems with yo older sis. She melted in my hands like butter. Les jes say yo bro was happy to have her back at home.’

The family had split after their house was destroyed and his father was killed. It hadn’t been easy to shake his brother’s goons, but they had each managed. Or so he had thought.

‘You gonna make this difficult, Daniel, or you gonna come quietly?’

‘I’ll most likely make it difficult.’

The goon made his move, but not before Daniel had vanished, seemingly into thin air. A moment later, the cops arrived in response to the 911 call. The black man jumped through the window and landed perfectly after a three-story fall. He dashed into the night, unsure what he was going to tell his boss.