Hinges

At thirteen minutes to four on the morning of Wednesday, October 17th 1985, Tommy Graham’s alarm clock passed away in its sleep. Seemingly unaware of his bereavement, Tommy slept doggedly past the hour of eight with the guiltless conscience of one who knows, somewhere deep inside, that he has an excuse to be late.

Blearily cracking his eyelids, Tommy had no idea where or who he was at first. Five long seconds of reorientation later, Tommy sat up, seizing his deceased alarm clock in both trembling hands. The corpse hung there, its arms rigid. He shook it desperately, for some reason feeling wholly betrayed. But the clock was beyond resuscitation, its stiff, agonised limbs indicating time of death. Tommy laid it reverently to rest, mind awhirl. He grabbed his wristwatch from the bedside table; old faithful’s inscrutable digital display showed 9:27am. With a panicked squawk, Tommy leapt for the bedroom door.

Seven minutes later, tie half-knotted, Tommy hopped into the living room, pulling on a shoe as he negotiated the cluttered floor. Managing to get to the flat’s front door without serious injury, he reached for the handle, pulling on his jacket. As he did so, the door rattled on its hinges, and he took an involuntary step backwards.

“Who is it?” he called, thinking, probably the postman. There was no answer – blinking, he reached for the handle and opened the door, peering out into the hallway and towards the stairs. There was no one there. From somewhere further down the stairwell, a dog barked once. Tommy turned back into the flat, snatching his car keys from the table by the door.

In that moment, the door leapt out of his hand, swinging hard against the wall to the left, the handle cracking loudly against the paintwork. He blinked in surprise and, turning back, reached again for the handle. And the door neatly reversed direction, seeming to blur on its hinges, to slam with a horrible wet snapping sound on his right arm.

Tommy gasped once, and with more strength than he’d ever known he possessed yanked the door off his arm with one hand, spinning to collapse in a boneless heap back inside the flat. Once again, the door vibrated on its hinges, the latch rattling. Then it closed, slowly, steadily, with a final grimly taut click.

***

Tommy Graham lay on the cluttered floor of his flat and gasped for air. His whole body ached as if he’d just finished a workout, and sweat soaked his clothes. He dully willed his throat to open, and air rushed back into his tortured lungs, leaving again as a ragged sob, the movement of his chest causing a sympathetic movement of bone against shredded muscle against bone in his pulverised arm.

The abrupt localisation of agony returned his senses to him, and full recollection overwhelmed him. He was dragging himself back almost before he realised it, cradling the shattered mess of his arm as he back-pedalled into the side of his favourite armchair. While the throbbing had numbed him past coherent thought, the nauseating grinding pain awakened in his crushed limb seemed to sharpen every sense. He could feel every rounded edge of the cushioned armchair against his spine, hear every rattling breath hiss from him like the piston sound of an old laboured engine. He could see the dark stain spreading remorselessly from within his jacket sleeve, a cloud of red turning the grey cloth black. He could smell the sweat that soaked his hair and shirt, taste the tang of it on his tongue along with a deeper copper.

And he could feel the naked hostility radiating from the Door in front of him, blasting his face like the hot, stinking breath of a caged animal.

How long he sat there, gasping great lungfuls of air, holding the Door’s stare – paralysed – he couldn’t guess. All at once, he could blink again, and realised that the raw emotion beating at him had ceased. It was as if the Door’s attention was now elsewhere… as if, reining in its rage, it brooded on its failure, the terrible gaze focused inward.

Not for one moment did Tommy doubt the truth of what he was experiencing – no reasonable explanation intruded, no rationalisations of open windows and gusts of wind disturbed his epiphany. He was, despite (perhaps because of) the sickening pain, more alert and rational than he could ever remember being before, and he knew that the Door wanted him dead. The murderous stare that had pinned him down as surely as a monstrous paw could mean only that. He could still feel a pulsing beat in the air between them, a single repetitive bass note of feral intensity.

The pain was far worse now, the shock receding, his crashed system coming back online with a stutter and a squeal of raw data. It wasn’t confined to his arm. Everything was magnified: the ache in his body combined with the sting of salt water trickling from his eyes, the throbbing headache meshed inextricably with the nausea. Even the relatively minor discomfort from the rapidly drying sweat on every inch of skin spoke to him at a volume that he couldn’t ignore.

What lent horror to this catalogue of physical sensation was the understanding that this injury was bad. He had broken his arm once before, and it had felt nothing like this. Instinctively, without even a cursory examination, he knew that his arm was shattered, the bone pulverised and splintered through muscle and tendon. For some reason, the fact that he was right-handed was the last straw. He’d never be able to sign his name again. Loss and impotent despair clawed at his gut and he whimpered, the tears flowing freely now. He liked his signature. He’d spent most of his teenage years – his entire adolescence – perfecting it. It was an extension of him. How would anyone know who he was now?

Feeling himself being swamped by a wave of pure panic, Tommy gritted his teeth and manoeuvred himself upwards and backwards to sag into the armchair. He forced himself to breathe slower, deeper. He needed to focus. The connection between him and the Door was still a tangible presence in the room, a subsonic rumble terrifyingly like a long, slow heartbeat. He knew that the attack had been no momentary aberration, no whim. Even if the wild bestiality of the pulse between them had not confirmed it, still he would have known. With twenty-twenty hindsight, he could recall the moment before the assault when he had reached for the handle, a moment a lifetime away where all he had had to concern himself was explaining his lateness to an unimpressed manager. The Door had rattled on its hinges, and he had thought that there was someone on the other side.

No. That berserk quiver was simply anticipation – a psychotic tremor of the killing hand. The Door had been planning, scheming. It had been waiting for him all night with only one intent carved upon its hard wooden heart. And he had been late. No wonder it had almost betrayed itself with that flicker of excitement.

In the ordinary, cold light of day, Tommy Graham would have chuckled at this notion. It might not even have been worthy of that – just a shake of the head, a roll of the eyes. But confronted with the Door’s primal heartbeat, Tommy knew. He shucked civilised rationalisation, digging up the superstitions buried deep at the core of his spirit, the grim fight-or-flight recognition of prey for predator at the base of his brain. He knew, as a child knows. The monster was there, and it would not let him leave his home alive.

And from that childhood place, something else emerged. The imperative that had allowed the survival of his species in older, more savage days returned to prominence within him, bringing with it an adrenaline rush like a tidal wave. He felt charged, the hairs on his arms standing on end. Sensing the change in Tommy, the Door’s attention returned, and it rattled slowly, a deep sub-vocal snarl of oppressive animal rage. And, teeth bared, Tommy Graham snarled back.

He pushed himself to his feet. The movement – so many movements, like untangling a puppet – brought fresh spasms of empty agony from what used to be his right arm, and fresh tears with them. Skin a waxy grey, he staggered back aimlessly into the wall and leaned against it gratefully as his overloaded nervous system calmed itself once more. The Door was still rattling malevolently on its hinges, and Tommy could feel his bravado, spiritual and chemical, beginning to drain away. For a moment he wildly considered attack. Destroy the monster, kill the object of his fear. He could find something, anything, to hurt it as he had been hurt.

But he was forced to dismiss the idea. Hurt it with what? With one arm and a kitchen knife? Even if he could get close enough, he wouldn’t even make a dent, perhaps only a scratch. The fear rose sharply in his throat like bile, and he thought, insanely, about unscrewing the hinges. How could it hurt him without muscles to flex? But no. Again, with one hand, there was no way in the world he could move fast enough; the Door wouldn’t let him get within three feet. Besides… to be there at the centre of its strength, its pivotal place of power… For a long moment his throat closed up again, and fresh sweat soaked his forehead.

No. Attack was suicide, and so not an option. Alone and injured, he was no match for the beast. He needed help – but where could he turn? He didn’t have that many friends, and who but a close friend would believe him? He squeezed his eyes tight shut, trying to force his thoughts into an orderly queue. Who would believe him? Only one person came to mind.

Decided, he levered himself from the wall with a conscious effort, stumbling away towards the bedroom. The horrible, pulsing beat from the Door did not diminish in intensity as he retreated – the sound echoed in his head and vibrated in his chest. The heartbeat tolled like a bell in the back of his mind, and scarlet flowers blossomed on the threadbare carpet behind him.

Tommy collapsed onto his bed, the strain of even this little journey proving too much for him to take. It was only a rising sense of panic, induced by the continuing ominous presence of the Door’s pulse beat, that compelled him to reach across for the telephone and dial. On the other end, the phone rang again and again, monotonous and dull, until the click and whirr of an answering machine broke the cycle. Tommy ground his teeth in frustration, the tears springing back to his eyes as the familiar, reassuring baritone recited the formula. He was so overcome that he almost missed the beep – collecting himself, he spoke huskily.

“Dad, it’s Tom…” Here he really broke down, and it was a few more seconds before be could continue. “…Dad, I really need your… I’m in… oh, God…” he choked out, emotion swelling his tongue and throat, desperate to get the message across. He suddenly, frantically, became aware that the tape could run out at any moment, and blurted hoarsely, “Please, oh God get me out of here Dad, I can’t…” and the beeps cut him off in mid-plea. The effort had exhausted him. Dropping the receiver back onto the cradle, he fell backwards onto the bed in a daze.

***

Tommy came to with a jerk, sitting halfway up, a cry forming on his lips. His arm was a swollen mess of black, crusty blood and he felt weak and dizzy. Wildly, he looked about him – the sheets were red on the entire right side of the bed, the sight of the sheer abundance of gore like a punch to the gut. Horrorstruck, he pushed and pummelled himself to his feet and, standing there swaying, realised what had happened. He had fainted. Had he not been woken by a fevered spasm of fear he would have bled to death in his sleep and never known it.

His arm, strangely, hardly hurt at all now: it only throbbed. All of the pain was concentrated in his right shoulder, the product of the feedback of shredded nerves. Even moving his head hurt, web-like patterns of stabbing pain radiating from the abused joint and muscle. The arm itself felt three times the size it should – he didn’t dare raise his wrist to check his watch, for fear of finding out the full extent of the damage, and so had no way of knowing how long he had been unconscious.

Next to his feet lay the alarm clock, dead in the night and no one to mark its passing. Though weakened, dizzy, the image caused the panicked indecision to fade almost immediately, replaced by a shaky resolve. That would not be him lying down there.

He knew the instant that he staggered from the bedroom that the situation had not changed. The throbbing in his arm merged with the Door’s impatient animal pulse the minute he stepped back into the living room. But this time Tommy had a purpose. He half ran, half stumbled to the window, and with his good hand managed to lever the sash up. He leaned out a little – no one around, and he was three floors up. His vision blurred, and he leaned on the sill to steady himself. He didn’t have much time. He had to get out and get help now, while he could still stand.

He found spare sheets in the laundry hamper behind the television, and began tying them together. The process took what seemed forever, Tommy using one hand and his teeth to tie the cloth as tight as possible. He was down to using pillow cases before he was satisfied that the rope was long enough – he didn’t have the wherewithal to strip the wet red sheets from the bed and feel his fingers and lips slick on the knots.

Throughout, the deep feral bass from the monster in the corner continued unchallenged, blending with every ache and tremor in his overused body, to complement each vibration.

The rope finished, Tommy stood swaying once more, the jungle pulse pounding in time with the veins in his forehead. For a moment, drunk from loss of blood, he imagined himself elsewhere. The canopy of a primeval forest closed over him, claustrophobic , close. Hidden terrors crawled and whispered around him, nature’s wildest creation focused, bent on the destruction of the civilised intruder, like some vast alien immune system. He closed his eyes.

Coming back to himself, he was vaguely horrified to find that he had fallen to his knees, leaning back against the television, the rope dangling from his hand. He manoeuvred his protesting body to its feet, more unsteady than ever. His hand was shaking so much with fear and fatigue that that it was torture to tie one of of a sheet to the radiator piping.

Reasonably secure, he gathered the rest of the rope and dragged it to the window. By the escape route, with the breeze blowing in, he had hoped that the heartbeat from across the room would be fainter, and that he might be a little revived. But the horrible pulse actually seemed louder, each beat sending his weary eyelids blinking with its impact. He dropped the mass of knotted sheets out of the window, noting with a faraway satisfaction that it reached very nearly to the ground.

Tommy took great gulps of air, standing there staring at the outside, and hope rose unbidden in his chest. He would live. He would live, and he would see his father again, and he would change things – his job, his car, his life, his everything. There was still so much to do, to see. So much to become. And he had all the time in the world.

As he slung one leg over the sill, he stared back into the flat at the Door, an open challenge in his eyes. The heavy, snarling beat of the monster’s heart throbbed between them. He wanted to say something. Something pithy, even witty, to make the thing howl with rage at being cheated. Something someone might say in a movie, something triumphant. But his brain wouldn’t summon up anything except banality, and even that rasped and died in his throat.

Still, it understood. He watched in a brutalised satisfaction as the Door rattled once more on its hinges, the bass beat pounding in the air and in his head. There was something of the caged tiger in its terrifying hostility – he knew safety was now assured, but the feeling of security didn’t make it down to the pit of his stomach or the marrow of his bones. Still, Tommy exulted, as the fury beat upon his face and the maddening pulse grew louder and louder and still louder in both ears…

With a detached fancy, in that moment Tommy heard two heartbeats, synchronous and foul in their bestial rage. And in that separate moment, Tommy wondered at the rattling of the Door, and whether it was frustration that motivated it, or…

He looked up, as a roar filled his head, a roar of primal malice bordering on insanity. And with a fierce, violent speed, the Window came down upon his upturned face like the wrath of God, striking his brow just above the nose, carrying his head with it in its mad plunge.

Caught between the force of the monster and the sun-hardened wood of the windowsill, Tommy Graham’s skull burst like an overripe orange, its juices spraying the wall. The Window reversed its downward movement like a coiling snake, jerking back down and up and down and up again, and again, and again, pounding the unrecognisable shape beneath it, buckling slightly as it did so, the glass cracking diagonally across it. At last the weight of the headless trunk pulled the body off the sill, and the Window slowed, then ceased its blunt guillotine action, jagged and broken now, splintered with bone, painted with blood.

***

In the aftermath of the violence, the twin heartbeats began to fade. The mad fury ceased, petering out gradually from a howl to a hum, and then to silence. The silence continued. Once, twice and again the telephone in the bedroom chirped, called for attention.

Always, the silence returned. The room was still, dappled with the falling shadows of an approaching autumn evening. The twisted figure lying by the television seemed more ridiculous than grotesque, as shade did kindnesses to the awful things that had been done to it, and darkened the deep red of the gore to a rich, burnished brown. And still the silence.

Then, activity. Footsteps in the hall outside. A rustling, muffled and hollow. A tentative knock. A worried, baritone voice. And a key scraping in the lock.

“Tommy?”

And deep in the heart of the jungle, a heavy, throbbing pulse began.