GIVE CHASE

GIVE CHASE
by Brady Golden

The first time, he doesn’t think much of it. He’s new to the building, after all, and unused to its various sounds. It could have been someone else’s door he heard, or maybe not even a door at all. An hour later, when someone knocks again and runs off before he can answer it, he figures it out. Doorbell ditch. That’s what they used to call it when he was a kid—not that apartment 3D’s door has a bell. In the stairwell, coming from somewhere up above, he can hear scampering footsteps. Evan doesn’t have kids and doesn’t see that ever changing, but he has nieces, and he gets a kick out of them. They seem to like him too.

He steps out onto the landing and peers up the stairs. They spiral all the way up the center of the building. In his grouchiest old-man voice—Evan is thirty-six—he shouts, “Knock it off, you brats!” He listens for their giggles and is not disappointed. Pleased, he goes back inside and resumes the work of unpacking.

He’s good at it. He’s good at moving, and he ought to be. Oakland is his third new city in seven years. He has a few pieces of furniture that travel with him, a suitcase’s worth of clothes, and some cardboard boxes of necessities. It all fits easily into a rental utility van. It only takes him a couple days to set things up the way he likes them, where they will stay until the time comes to move again, either to a new apartment, or just as likely, to a new town entirely. There was a time when he went into each relocation expecting it to be his last, but he’s come to know himself better than that. The only thing Evan enjoys more than starting a new life is saying goodbye to an old one.

He devotes that first weekend to exploring the town. He rides public transportation everywhere he goes so there won’t be any surprises when it’s time to start work on Monday. He tries his local bar and finds it satisfactory. He plots a jogging route on his phone and tries it out, but finds it too congested with dog walkers and stroller-pushing nannies. It will take some refinement. When he gets back, the door to 3D is standing wide open.

It should have locked behind him on the way out. Did he not shut it firmly enough? He can think of no other explanation. He did his research. This is a low-crime neighborhood, and anyway, no one can get in from the street without a building key. Still, he remembers hearing it fasten behind him when he left, or thinks he does. Going inside when someone might be in there doesn’t seem safe. He considers asking a neighbor for help, but he hasn’t met any of them yet. That’s not the first impression he wants to make.

After some hesitation, he ventures in. Room by room, he checks the place. It doesn’t take long. There’s no one there. Everything is as it should be. He resolves to be more careful with the door in the future, then strips out of his running clothes and turns on the shower. At the bathroom counter, he squeezes out of a glob of toothpaste onto his toothbrush. When he puts it in his mouth, a bitter taste assaults him. He spits. A mass of thick white foam lands in the sink.

Soap. It’s soap. He stares at his toothbrush in disbelief. Someone squeezed all his Colgate out of its tube and replaced it with liquid soap. He finds himself looking around his bathroom for someone to jump out with a “Gotcha!” but there’s no one. He’s alone. This was just for him.

+++

Annie keeps calling, and he keeps ignoring the calls. Eventually, his guilt gets the better of him and he types a text message. Sorry for being incommunicado. Really busy unpacking and starting new job. Will call soon. He regrets it as soon as it’s sent. Little moments of weakness like this are no good for either of them. Keeping distance is the only way to get used to not being together. He knows that from experience.

He told her that the move was for work, but the truth is that his job can be done anywhere there’s a phone and an internet connection. The reason he’s stayed with the company for so long despite the monotony and the shortage of opportunities for career advancement is that they have offices all over the country, and they have no problem with employees transferring around. They are even willing to pitch in a bit for relocation assistance if a case for it can be made. After two and a half years in Portland, he’d gotten everything out of that city that he was going to, and he was starting to feel its smallness. He cares about Annie, but their relationship wasn’t going anywhere. If she really thought about it, she would come to the same conclusion.

He hears a something at his front door. Evan pockets his phone and goes to investigate. He stands at the end of the hall and watches the knob jiggle. The sound intensifies, culminating in a click. Slowly, the door begins to swing inward.

“Hey!” In his surprise, it’s the only word he can think of.

Whoever is on the other side lets go. Evan runs to the door and yanks it open in time to see two figures scrambling up the stairs—a boy and a girl, maybe eight or ten years old. They have the same rust-red hair, pale skin, and long, lean limbs. In the instant before they disappear around the corner, the girl flashes him a smile. Her tongue hangs out the side of her mouth, a wild, delirious expression.

After the toothpaste incident, Evan thought about calling his landlord and maybe even the police. Breaking into his apartment was a big escalation from doorbell ditch. He decided against it, though, at least for the time being. The mystery of exactly how they managed to get in was a little too interesting, the prospect of catching the pranksters himself a little too fun. He doesn’t know what game these kids are playing, but he’s in it now, and it makes him giddy.

He follows them up past the fourth floor, then the fifth. He reaches the sixth-floor landing in time to see a door swing shut. Apartment 6B. He takes a moment to catch his breath before knocking. A man answers, blinking as though startled by a camera flash. Evan introduces himself and puts out his hand. Wordlessly, the man takes it. Behind him, the apartment is too dim for Evan to make out much. The lights are off, and every curtain must be drawn shut. A smell is emanating from inside, something familiar that he can’t quite place. There is no sign of the kids. Are they hiding?

“Listen, I hate to bother you, but I was hoping I could talk to your kids,” Evan says.

“My kids.”

“I live in the building. I’m in 3D, downstairs. This is a little strange to say, but your son and daughter have decided to entertain themselves by—I guess pranking me is the way to put it. They’ve been knocking on my door and running away. And just now I caught them trying to sneak into my apartment. Which I’m pretty sure they’ve done before, by the way. I’m not sure if they got their hands on a key, or…”

The man is dressed in a loose white shirt unbuttoned to the chest and faded jeans two sizes too big. He’s short and stocky, with blond curly hair grown long. He has a day of stubble on his face, pale bristles that stand out against his ruddy complexion. There’s little in the way of familial resemblance to the kids Evan glimpsed on the stairs. If anything, he realizes, this guy looks an awful lot like him. The man’s expression is blank, unreadable. The possibility begins to dawn on Evan that this might be the wrong apartment, that this man might not having anything to do with the pair of pranksters. He’s about to say so, but the man doesn’t give him a chance.

“So you came up here hoping I would, what, discipline them?”

“What? No! Not at all. I love kids. It’s not a big deal. They’re just playing games. But coming into my apartment… It’s a bit extreme, you know?”

“Leave those kids alone.”

“Hey, I’m trying to get them to leave me alone.”

“I don’t know what your story is, Evan from 3D, but you’d better stay from them. Stay away from all of us. Don’t bother me again.” He looks Evan up and down, then steps back inside, shutting the door behind him. Evan doesn’t consider knocking a second time.

On his way back downstairs, he realizes what the smell coming out of the apartment reminded him of. When he was thirteen, his mother convinced his father to take him along on his annual hunting trip to the Hiawatha National Forest. She’d thought it would be a good way for the two of them to get to know each other better. In the weeks leading up to the trip, Evan’s head had buzzed with anticipation, filled with action-movie images of armed-to-the-teeth warriors crashing through underbrush in pursuit of elusive quarry. At the sporting goods store, his mom had outfitted him with an all-camouflage hunter’s wardrobe, and he’d flown to Michigan eager for adventure. He never found it. The forest was everything a kid who had never been out of the suburbs could have hoped, but hunting had nothing to do with that. As his dad explained, it was about silence, about keeping still. They hid in their blind for hours at a time, waiting for the elk to come to them. Crouched beside his dad, sweating through his fatigues, he felt like the world around him was made of glass, and that the slightest movement or noise could cause everything to shatter. They killed nothing on that trip, and his dad never invited him back.

The damp, mulchy smell coming from inside the apartment was the same as Hiawatha, like there was a whole birch grove growing in there.

+++

An entire roll of toilet paper rammed down his toilet, causing it to overflow. His furniture overturned. The drawers removed room his dresser and his clothes emptied onto the floor.

There is no schedule to their visits. They come three days in a row, then not again for the rest of the week, then twice in one day. Usually, they wait for him to be out of his apartment, but sometimes they come while he’s there. He hears them messing with his door, but when he goes to investigate they’re already gone. Looking out onto the landing, heart thumping like a tennis ball in a dryer, he listens for any sign of them. He can imagine them crouched somewhere close by, straining to hold in their laughter. His body screams at him to go after them, to catch those little bastards, but what exactly would he do then?

His landlady insists that no one, child or otherwise, lives in apartment 6B, that the unit is unrented. The only reason he can think that she would lie is to avoid any inter-tenant conflict. She does at least agree to change his lock. As the locksmith is working on his door, Evan points out some faint scratches in the knob’s metal.

“Does that look like someone’s been picking my lock?” he asks.

The locksmith frowns and tilts his head, examining the markings. “More like someone trying to get their key in the lock after he’s had too much to drink.” He arches an eyebrow at Evan.

That night, while Evan is asleep, someone comes into 3B and unplugs the refrigerator. He doesn’t notice until the next evening, when the food has already started to spoil. He sits cross-legged on the kitchen floor while he takes out each perishable item, sniffs at it, and either returns it to its shelf or drops it into the garbage. The damage isn’t terrible. His yogurt and milk are done for, and a head of lettuce he just bought has gone limp, but things could be worse. Replacing what’s ruined will run him thirty bucks or so. Not the most expensive of mischief. But how did they get in? He’d settled on his theory that they’d gotten their hands on a mislaid key, and he liked it, certainly more than the possibility that a couple of kids knew their way around a set of lockpicks. But it’s a different lock now. How?

His phone buzzes in his pocket. Distracted, he forgets to check the caller ID before he answers.

“Look who’s alive,” Annie says.

“It’s good to hear from you.”

“What are you doing right now?’

He unwraps a pack of sliced turkey breast, takes one look at it, and chucks it into the garbage. “Nothing interesting.”

“You never called back,” she says.

“Yes I did. A couple days ago. I left a message. Didn’t you get it?”

He winces at the obviousness of the lie. He’s no good at this kind of thing—at deception, at heartlessness. It’s so much better to let these things settle themselves on their own.

“What’s going on, Evan?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are we done?”

“Is that what you want?” he says.

“I want you to tell me what you want.”

This could be his moment. She brought it up. She’s giving him permission to end things, flat-out asking him to. It is what he wants, the final break from Portland so he can go all-in on Oakland. But then what? If he brings down the axe, what will his night hold beyond sniffing sour dairy on the floor of an empty apartment? And where will that leave Annie? She has feelings for him. She’s never done anything to deserve getting her heart stepped on. She needs to be the one to do the stepping. He owes her that.

“I—I want to make this work.”

“Good,” she breathes. “That’s what I want, too. But I can’t be the only one putting in the effort. I need you to call me. I need to know what’s going on in your life if I’m going to be a part of it.”

“I’m not good on the phone.”

“That’s no excuse. You have to try.”

“I will,” he says. “I’ll do better. I promise.”

+++

A group of people from the office meet for drinks most evenings. They’re younger than him by several years, mostly administrative assistants and interns, fresh out of school or still in it, but he insinuates himself into their ranks. They know every drinking spot within a mile of the office and all the specials and happy hours. One night, he and a twenty-four-year-old marketing assistant named Lisa stay late at a Mexican bar after everyone else has left and end up kissing by the bathrooms. They take a train back to his neighborhood and make out in a rear-facing seat, ignoring the scowls of the other passengers.

They arrive at the station near Evan’s place late at night. The newsstand and coffee shop are closed, and the crowds have cleared out, but a few stragglers still mill about on the platform. With their arms around each other, Evan and Lisa make their way towards the exit. Two margaritas and three beers have left him lightheaded, so he doesn’t notice the man shuffling towards him until they’re on top of each other. Their shoulders hit, knocking Evan sideways. The man keeps walking, either oblivious to or unfazed by the collision. Evan’s about to shout after him, but he stops himself.

He recognizes the man, or thinks he does. The stocky frame. The shaggy pile of blond curls. Even the clothes are the same, but filthy now, and starting to fray. It’s the man from apartment 6B.

When Evan doesn’t say anything, Lisa, takes up the call. “Excuse you, fucko!”

Evan tenses. The man doesn’t react. A moment later, he turns a corner and his gone.

It occurs to Evan that he has no idea what might be waiting for him back at his apartment. His walls could be covered in crayon scribbles. His pillows could be sliced open, their feather innards yanked out. His dishwasher could be belching bubbles all over the kitchen floor. How would he explain any of that to Lisa? How quickly would the entire office hear all about it?

He slides his arm off her waist. “Listen, I don’t know if this is such a good idea.”

She gives him a puzzled half-smile. “Are you kidding?”

“We work together. I wouldn’t want to make things weird at the office. Plus, I’m a lot older than you…”

He offers to call her an Uber, but she gets on the next train instead. There are no after-work after that.

+++

“I hate doing this on a voice message, but since you never pick up… And that’s sort of the problem.”

With his phone held to his ear, Evan is moving too slowly for the other commuters. They try to step around him, but the morning rush is too dense. The corridor that runs from the turnstiles to the train platform creates a bottleneck. Without room to navigate, people jostle one another, and him especially. He’s earning plenty of angry glances.

“I’ve never done the long-distance thing before. I always thought it was a bad idea. But you seemed to think we could make it work. I guess I thought if you thought so—if you wanted it to work—maybe it could.”

Benches stand against the walls of the corridor. He checks each one. Homeless people sleep on them sometimes, but now they’re empty. Maybe they like to clear out during rush hour, or maybe the police chase them off in the morning. At the end of the corridor, Evan turns around and starts to make his way back toward the entrance. Going against the flow of traffic causes even more confusion.

“But I don’t think you do want it to work. If you did, you’d be making an effort. I know you’ve got a lot going on with the move and the new job and everything, but how long does a phone call take? A text message? It’s not okay to treat me this way.”

He spots him then, just outside the coffee shop. A line runs out the door, blocking Evan’s view, which explains why he didn’t see him before. The man is on the ground sitting against the wall with his legs spread out in front of him. People step over him without a glance. He has no cardboard sign, no cup for spare change.

“So I’m done. Or—look, if you want to call me, if you want to talk about this… I miss you so much. It’s been really hard not having you here. So if you want to call—but you won’t. I feel like an idiot even saying it. Of course you won’t. So I’m—”

He cuts off the message and slips his phone into his pocket. The man doesn’t notice Evan’s approach until he’s standing over him. His stubble has grown into a patchy beard. A layer of grime blackens his face and hands. There’s no recognition in his eyes when he looks up.

“I know you,” Evan says.

“You don’t know shit.”

“I live in your building. Your kids—”

“Do I look like I have a goddamn building?”

“What happened to you?” Evan says.

The man glares at him, his lips drawn tight. “They threw me out.”

Evan shakes his head, not understanding. “Threw you out of your apartment? Who did?”

“Who said anything about an apartment?” the man says. “They didn’t want me anymore. I guess they found someone new to play with.”

“Who did?”

“You know who.”

“They’re just kids.”

The man struggles to come up off the ground, but his legs go out from under him and he falls back down. A few passersby glance towards the commotion, but no one stops. “That’s why you don’t deserve them. You’re too blind to see what they are. Too stuck.“

“So what are they?”

The man barks a laugh. “You ever see a bunch of puppies trying to play with an old, tired dog? They’ll nip at it and dance around it, and it’ll just like still, all dead-eyed, acting like they’re not even there. But they’ll keep barking and biting away until it’s had enough. And when that happens, it’s like a light goes on. When that old dog finally goes after them, it’s not an old dog anymore.”

“I…don’t want to play.”

“Good! Tell them that! Tell them you don’t want them. Tell them I’m here. I have other games I can show them. New games. Make them take me back. I belong with them, in the night forest.”

Over the loudspeaker, an automated voice announces the arrival of the next train. The station rumbles as it pulls in.

“I have to go,” Evan says.

“I warned you before, keep away from them! They’re not for you. Stay down, old dog. Stay down, or I’ll put you down.”

With the combined noise of the crowd, the train, and the loudspeaker, Evan can’t tell if the man is still shouting after him as he steps into the flow of traffic and follows it to the platform. He doesn’t look back to check.

+++

He wakes to the sound of rustling in his kitchen. Without turning on the lights, he steps out of bed, and, on bare feet, pads down the hall. It doesn’t occur to him for even a second that this could be a burglary or a home invasion, anything dangerous. It’s them. The kids. Never mind that it must be two o’clock in the morning. Whatever is going on up in 6B, there are clearly no rules, no order. These kids are running wild. Now they’re here, and when he catches them—

The train of thought squirms away, too frantic to be followed. He is going to catch them. He’s got nothing on but a pair of boxer-briefs, and he realizes he’s grinning.

In the kitchen, the trash can lies on its side, its contents fanned out from its opening in a V. Used coffee filters, orange peels, crumpled paper towels. One of the children stands on the far side of the room, backlit by a window so he can’t tell which one it is. The other is crouched beside the garbage can, rooting through its contents. Frozen, they both stare at him. Their eyes shine with an orange light. He knows that it must be their mussed hair that he’s seeing, but in the low light, the points sticking up off the tops of their heads look a hell of a lot like ears, like an animal’s ears.

They charge at him. Evan steps out of the way. The first one—the girl, he thinks—brushes against him as she passes. In that second of contact, he registers the bristle of fur against his skin. Her brother follows on her heels. They run out the front door.

“You’re not getting away from me!” The volume of his voice surprises him. He hadn’t meant to say that out loud, much less shout it.

He rushes after them, out of his apartment and up the stairs. He can’t see them, but he can hear the machinegun rhythm of their feet. He’s gaining. He reaches the sixth floor in time to see them disappear into 6B. As they cross the threshold, the shadows inside swallow them. They leave the door open behind them, an open invitation.

He stops short, and at first he cannot figure out why. He’s panting from the chase. They’re getting away. A alarm is going off inside his head. There’s something wrong here. He tries to ignore it, to keep going, but he cannot.

There’s that Hiawatha smell again. The air here is different, cooler. There’s a significant drop in the pressure, the way it feels when he steps off a packed-to-bursting train at the end of the day and is finally able to move freely. In the darkness, he can’t make out much, just the hinted shapes of potted plants and hanging ferns. There are so many of them. He thinks his eyes must be tricking him. If 6B’s layout matches that of his own apartment, the hallway should only extend ten feet from the entrance before ending in a T, with the kitchen on one side and the living room on the other. Some of those leaves and branches floating in the gloom look to be a lot farther away than that.

He can’t push away the thought that apartment 6B is big, impossibly big, any more than he can push away the tension building in his muscles, the eagerness to move, to flex, to run.

Two pairs of luminous, sunset-colored eyes regard him from beyond the threshold, daring him to pursue. And why not? If he passes through that door, how far could he go?

He remembers the last time he stood on this landing, the first time he met the man he mistook for the children’s father, and he realizes that he knows exactly how far—filthy, angry, and confused on the floor of a train station. He doesn’t know what lies past the door to 6B, but he’s seen what lies past that. Without even being aware of it, Evan has been inching towards the door. He stops himself. It takes more effort than it should. He retreats backward a step, then another. The eyes move towards the door, closing the gap between them.

Something in 6B lets out a querulous chirrup.

He turns and hurries back down to the third floor. Just outside his own apartment, he casts one last glance behind him. They’re there, crouched on the stairs, gripping the bannister’s supports like the bars of a jail cell. They peer at him through the gaps. Just children. Just a pair of red-headed children.

He shuts the door and leans against it, feeling the coolness of the wood against his back. His hallway is narrow and low-ceilinged. As he makes his way down it, he reaches out with both hands to touch the walls. He wants to trust their solidity. He tries to.

In his bedroom, he sits on the edge of his bed and picks his phone up off the night table. He dials Annie’s number, aware how late it is to be calling. It rings and rings. If she doesn’t answer, he doesn’t know what he’ll do. Float away? Fall into the darkness of the night forest? It’s up there, two stories above him.

“Hello?” Her voice is rough with sleep.

Before he can say anything, a shape appears in his bathroom doorway. It comes at him, so fast that Evan can hardly make it out—shaggy blond hair, a red face twisted with anger, a knife from Evan’s own kitchen. There’s a ragged scream, and the shape is upon him, stabbing furiously. Down the hall, the door to 3D flies open. A chorus of animal calls pours through. The blade pierces Evan’s shoulder, his chest, his eye. He starts to gag on the blood filling his mouth and throat. The man is still yelling. All these sounds are faint compared to Annie’s voice. She cries his name over and over again as the walls of his apartment close in around him, fall away.

Fiction © Copyright Brady Golden
Image by tookapic from Pixabay

Brady Golden lives in Oakland, California, with his wife, crossword constructor Juliana Tringali Golden, and their two children. Recently, his work has appeared in the anthologies Horror Library 7, Nightscript 5, and New Fears. On Twitter, he is @bradiation.