The May Featured Writer is Philip Roberts
Please feel free to email Philip at: philip.michael.roberts@gmail.com
PROPER PAYMENTS
by Philip Roberts
No other complex in the city could match either the price or squalor of Roy’s apartments. The people who streamed through his door had arms riddled with both tattoos and crusted over scars. They were gamblers, prostitutes, thieves, or the poor souls who had their lives ripped out from under them.
Roy assumed the man stepping through the door with a three-year-old boy by his side fit the last category. The man wrinkled his nose at a stink he clearly wasn’t accustomed to, forehead slick from lack of air conditioning and nervous tension. Though Roy himself was used to poverty, he still recognized the cost of the rumpled suit the man wore as well as the remains of a manicure.
“I need a one-bedroom apartment,” the man said.
“What’s your name?” Roy asked.
“Quinn Hadley,” he answered, the answer a little too jittery, nervously rehearsed. Fine then, Roy thought, and slid the form over for Quinn to fill out. As he did Roy hefted his bulk from the seat and searched through his files for the rest of the forms, eyeing the boy as he did. The child stared curiously around the room, aware, even at such a young age, of how beneath him this room was. Roy didn’t like the way the eyes lingered on him, on his balding head, bulging gut, and stained clothing.
Hunched low, he pretended he didn’t hear the boy lean in close to his father, whisper, “That man smells,” only to be hushed immediately.
“Here are the rest of them,” Roy said and set the forms down. “Need down payment and first month’s rent upfront. When are you moving in?”
“Tonight, if possible,” Quinn said.
“Sure.”
Roy watched the elegant print Quinn put down on the forms, and tried to figure out just what Mr. Hadley was running from.
*****
Empty wrappers, crushed beer cans, and yellowed tissues surrounded the glowing computer Roy leaned close to. Quinn Hadley had died two years prior from a heart attack at the age of seventy-two. The wealthy man had been a CEO of a company Roy had never heard of, but he didn’t care about the dead Mr. Hadley. He stared instead at the photos of Hadley standing next to a slightly younger image of the man who had passed through Roy’s door just four hours earlier.
“Not much for fake names, eh?” he laughed to himself. Charles Ortner had worked for Quinn, according to the information Roy could find, not that there was very much. By most standards Charles appeared to be quite a wealthy man, but that didn’t mean he was a famous man, and the only information Roy could find about him came from a business article detailing Charles’s rise to CEO after Quinn died.
He left his computer and his cluttered apartment, trudging through the dark parking lot towards the C building where Charles had taken up residence. Inside the laundry room he locked the door and pulled open a hidden panel in the wall leading to a space between the apartments.
Climbing up the ladder hadn’t been easy in his youth, and certainly wasn’t pleasant after ten years and fifty additional pounds, but he made his way as silently as he could to the platform next to number C6. He pulled loose a panel and stared into the dimly lit apartment, just barely able to see through the wallpaper. He’d originally used this little secret to spy on the prettier prostitutes and their clients, until age had made the effort too much to bother with.
Charles’s son slept calmly in a sleeping bag while Charles himself sat hunched before his laptop on the only table in the room.
Roy didn’t bother looking at the man himself, attention instead on the walls covered with chalk. Charles had done up the whole room, symbols everywhere, most like Egyptian hieroglyphs to Roy, though he didn’t think they literally were.
For over an hour the man worked before finally shutting the computer down and stretching out across the floor. Roy waited until he slept to put the panel back and climb down. “Some kind of crazy,” he whispered on his way back to his apartment.
*****
He didn’t ignore the wealthy man, no matter how crazy he appeared to be. Charles rarely left his apartment, and Roy never saw the boy leave. For over a week Roy spent the majority of his time within the walls watching the boy pace and complain while Charles remained on his computer, some times touching up the markings, always nervous.
Everything about the man looked worn out and defeated, his efforts like a dying man clinging to a life that was already over, but Roy couldn’t pull himself away. His own research on the company Charles was supposedly still a CEO for implied nothing but wealth, yet without any actual sign of it, Roy didn’t feel like acting.
He had to admit as well an odd chill that ran through him each time he got close to that apartment and pulled loose the panel, his hair prickling and his nerves on edge. He wrote it off as nothing but the weird glyphs, though he didn’t know why they would affect him so severely.
But finally the moment came, and Roy overhead the conversation he had been waiting for.
“I know I haven’t been around,” Charles said as he paced the room with his cell phone; his son perched along the wall, occupied with a game. “I’ve been doing as much as I can from here, but I need you to do something for me. I want a million freed up and put in my account by tomorrow. I’m going to…I won’t be here for much longer. Just a few more days and I should be finished with this. Can you do that for me? Yeah, okay, good. No, I’ll talk to you later. Call me when you’re done.”
Roy climbed slowly down the ladder with a smile on his face.
*****
Bennett Mcree had led a long and assorted life, or so Roy had been told, until the man’s various bad habits had placed him in Roy’s territory. Though Bennett’s gut had grown considerably in the three years since Roy first rented the man a room, he still had plenty of muscle from his days as a boxer.
Six months after the man had moved in, and two months after he had missed his first rent check, Roy had come to him with an offer. Bennett helps Roy evict the undesirables and Roy lets Bennett stay free of charge.
The six foot two Bennett opened on the second knock and eyed Roy with a look of almost joy. “Got another?” Bennett asked, always pleased, Roy had realized, to prove he could still take a guy down.
“Not quite. Can I come in?”
Roy stepped into Bennett’s much cleaner apartment, mainly cluttered with weights and other remnants of the man’s past. “I’ve got a proposal I thought you might be interested in. Good money, but this isn’t legal, so if you say no, I’ll be on my way.”
But Roy knew Bennett, and knew the man would lean back, say, “Tell me about it.”
“Got a guy I rented a room to a few weeks back. Rich one: CEO. Came here with his boy, and I just know he’s running from someone. Probably doing some deals on the side and one went belly up, who knows, but I do know he just freed up a million for quick access to but he won’t be here for much longer.”
“So what are you thinking?”
“Guy came here to hide, that much is certain, won’t want others knowing where he is.”
“Blackmail him then?”
“He’ll bolt. He doesn’t leave often, but when he does, I want you to get in that apartment and take his kid.”
“Kidnapping?”
“Sure. Just hide him in the shed in the back of the lot in the trees. Haven’t used the shed in years, no one would know about it, and he isn’t going to go to the cops, because it might get out, alert people about him.”
“We getting the full million?”
“Nah, too much. Leave a note asking for fifty thousand or so; it’ll be some nice change for us but nothing to him. He’ll pay it fast to get things over with. So you willing to do this?”
“What are the odds of this coming back around to bite us in the ass?”
“Trust me on this. I don’t plan on getting caught.”
“Okay then, I’m in.”
*****
He gave it two days just to make sure the money had gone through before he called Bennett and told him to head over. Charles was rarely gone for less than an hour, and the man didn’t return while Roy watched Bennett use the key Roy had given him to slip into the apartment and walk out with the unconscious boy in his arms.
Roy didn’t even mind doing it during the day when prying eyes might see Bennett with the kid. Roy had too much dirt on most his tenants to concern himself with them. People in his part of the city knew how to look the other way.
He sat out on his second floor balcony with a cold beer, swatting away the mosquitoes, and watching as Charles’s car pulled to a stop at around four in the afternoon. The man got out with two grocery bags in his arms, trudged up his stairs, fumbled with the bags to get his key out, and walked into his apartment. Roy leaned forward with his arms on the guardrails, smiling, waiting for it, and sure enough Charles rushed from the apartment, heading right where Roy knew he would head.
He saw Roy on the balcony before he reached the office door, and Roy had never seen a face so pale before. “I need to talk to you,” he shouted up.
“Oh sure, be right down,” Roy said.
He took his time moving down the stairs into the office, finishing off his beer as he went. The second he unlocked the office door Charles came bursting in. “My son is gone,” he said.
Roy feigned concerned. “Shit, really? Door busted?”
“No, but it wouldn’t need to unlock a,” he began, faltered. “No the door wasn’t broken.”
“Sorry to say, but the locks around here are piss poor. Don’t have the funds to upgrade them. If you want I can call the cops.”
“That’s not…I need to find him as soon as possible. I was only gone an hour. It must’ve…what if it was someone in the complex, or someone near by. Did you see anything?”
Roy held up his hands, tried to act as apologetic as he could. “Look, I make my money by staying out of these people’s business, okay? I’ll have to tell you the same thing I tell all the others coming to me: go to the cops. I can’t help you.”
“I’ll pay you,” Charles said.
Roy hid his smile. “I appreciate it, but like I said-”
“I’m dead serious. Name the price and it’s yours, but we need to do something now.”
“Look, the second I get involved with people’s business, when my tenants see that, I risk them turning against me here.”
“A hundred thousand.” Charles’s eyes narrowed, anger blotting away the white from his face. “Please,” he said.
Roy sighed, ran his fingers through the remains of his hair, mentally throwing Bennett beneath the wheels. “Okay, deal. Look, I didn’t see your boy, but I did see a tenant of mine hanging around the back of the complex about a half hour ago near a shed I never use anymore. Don’t know any reason why he’d be back there, and the guy has a bad history with kids. Lot of people here have problems.”
“We need to get there right away.”
Charles was already out the door, hurrying down the parking lot before Roy called out. “Use the car, it’ll be faster.”
He got in and started the engine, Charles in the car a second later, urging him to hurry, and the fear in the man’s eyes, the near hysteria triggered a deep concern in Roy, but he ignored it. The man just wasn’t used to life’s horrors.
They sped through the complex and came to a screeching halt near the back lot, Charles already out of the car, hurrying across the grass towards the shack while Roy hurried as fast as he could behind him.
Before they’d reached the structure Roy heard the child shrieking in fear and pain, wondered how well he had really known Bennett. “He wouldn’t,” Roy whispered, pulled out the loaded gun he’d only brought for show, meant to scare Bennett and impress Charles with a shot at the ceiling if it were needed.
The feeling washed over him, ten times as intense as whatever he had felt when standing beside the apartment wall, the air thick with it. Charles pulled open the door and hurried through, his scream driving Roy faster, until he ran into the shed and froze right inside the door, reality itself no where to be found in that small room.
Along the wall he saw Bennett’s remains, the muscular chest torn open, head ripped to the side and hanging limply against his right shoulder, dead eyes bulging out and his mouth agape. The boy was held to a table in the center of the room by what looked like intestines, his face covered in blood, voice growing hoarse from his shrill cries.
The creature looming above him turned towards the two intruders. Its head was like a mound of flesh at the top of the chest, no eyes visible, and only a thin slit of skin that might’ve been a mouth. The thick arms that stretched from its sides looked more like solid bone than skin, and it had four almost human looking legs sprouted out at the base of the torso. Charles attempted to charge at it, his scream incoherent, and an object Roy couldn’t place in the man’s outstretched hands.
It swung out a long arm lined with sharp protrusions that tore into Charles’s chest and sent him crashing into the wall. Roy brought up his gun with a blank face and fired. The bullets caught the creature’s attention, tore wet holes through the chest, an entire clip unloaded into it before it could lunge across the room towards Roy.
What looked like flesh fingers reached out of holes at the end of the boney arms to grab hold of Roy and slam him into the wall, but he sensed the damage he’d done, the will to live strong enough to make him pull out his pocket knife and jab it upward into the things mid-section. As soon as the grip loosened Roy stabbed again, carved the blade through what looked to be the face, and it lurched away from him, leaving a trail of sludge in its wake.
The flesh holding the boy down sucked back into the creature’s body as it collapsed to the floor, melted into the wood, nothing left but thick black liquid once it had vanished completely. Roy stared dumbly at the oozing mass while Charles hurried to his boy and grabbed hold of him.
“We need to get out of here,” Charles said.
Roy mindlessly complied, eyeing Bennett’s remains as he allowed Charles to lead him out the door and back into the real world.
*****
“You saved him,” Charles said, all three of them in his apartment covered in writing. His son slept along the far wall. Charles had washed the blood clean to find no cuts, all of it from Bennett, they concluded. Roy had watched the scene in silence, just as he sat staring at Charles without a word. “If you hadn’t helped me find him in time they would’ve taken him. A hundred thousand isn’t enough. You can have as much money as you want for what you did.”
“What happened,” Roy said from his seat on the floor along the wall, hands limply in his lap, blood still drying on his arms from where the creature had torn into him.
“A man I once respected sold me out, or my son, that is. When he died they came to collect, but even they had rules, I was told, and my friend had partially broken them by offering my son as his own. They said they’d give me a year, and if I could stop them from getting my son in that time, he’d be free. They called it an amusing game. These symbols,” he said, gestured towards the walls, “can keep them out for a little while, but eventually they falter, and can never protect that location again. I’ve spent the past year running everywhere I could, until I was finally led here to wait out the final few weeks. By tomorrow it’ll be over and my son will be free.”
“Glad…I could help,” Roy said with a strained smile. “So, you said something about money,” he added, feeling his sense of reality returning, his old habits shoving aside the insanity from just an hour prior.
“Any amount, but I have to warn you, I don’t think you understand what you’ve done. These…the things I was dealing with won’t be pleased that they didn’t win. They can’t touch me or my son anymore, that was the deal, but there was nothing about you.”
“What exactly can they do to me?”
“I’m not sure,” Charles said, but his eyes said another story, and Roy had a feeling they could do plenty of awful things. He pulled himself up and tried to tell himself he didn’t believe any of it, no matter what he’d seen and shot.
“I need to get back. Think things through and all.”
Charles rose along with Roy, opened the door for him. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow, give you all the material I have. And I just want to thank you again for all the help you gave me.” He reached out his hand for a shake. Roy took it without any enthusiasm. This is what you get for doing people favors, he thought to himself as the door closed behind him.
The sun sank into the horizon. Roy stepped into his dim apartment and looked around at the mess, at the darker hallway leading back into his bedroom. He squinted into the darkness; saw a tunnel stretching out into oblivion and the image of a tall, gangly form walking down it towards him, its hands rubbing along the walls, its breath sending a wave of hot air towards Roy.
A flip of a light switch showed only his hallway towards the bedroom. “You didn’t just see that,” he told himself, but he didn’t honestly believe it.
Philip lives in Nashua, New Hampshire and holds a degree in Creative Writing with a minor in Film from the University of Kansas. As a beginner in the publishing world, he’s a member of both the Horror Writer’s Association and the New England Horror Writer’s Association, and has had numerous short stories published in a variety of publications, such as the Beneath the Surface anthology, Midnight Echo, and The Absent Willow Review. More information on his works can be found at www.philipmroberts.com.