But at least it was only a kettle. Not a person in pain after all. The only one in danger was him. For a moment, this even relieved him. Take a breath. But then his body shook all over, the legs and arms clanging in their chains. All this was for him? He was surprised to be alive. The burning kettle wailed a wet threat: his current condition would not last.
His mouth opened then, and he called out hoarsely. It was a woman’s name, but you wouldn’t know it. A slurred sound, that’s all it was.
He tried a second time. “Em?”
If he’d been a boy, he would have called for his mother. Since he was a man, he called to his wife.
“Emma?” he tried again, but who could hear him over the kettle? He barely heard himself. And after that third try, a spasm of pain shot up from his left foot, through his thigh, and into the small of his back. So bad it made him twist, which teased the bike lock, and in retaliation it choked him backward again. This time it was the back of his head, not his neck, that glanced against the steam pipe. It burned right through his short hair, but he controlled himself this time. He didn’t lurch too far forward, so he was spared another squeeze around the throat. He panted in the kitchen. Out of breath and out of ideas.
“Brian,” he whispered.
Emma and Brian. His family. He forgot his chains, his pains, the instruments of violence scattered across the room. Where was his family? Were they safe? Despite the months of distance between Apollo and Emma, in this moment he drew her back to his heart, as close as his son, instantly. She’d gone out that morning. She’d left her keys. He’d locked her out. At least she wasn’t here then. But that left only him and Brian. Now the kettle’s screeching seemed like the voice of his newer fear. Not for himself but for the boy.
And just then, he heard the creak of the floorboards in the next room.
From his chair, in the corner, he could look out of the kitchen and see the back room. Its off-white door was shut. Good as his word, he’d paid the super to hang the door in Brian’s room, and now he couldn’t regret the improvement more. If they hadn’t hung the fucking door, he wouldn’t have to sit here looking at it, nauseous with fear. If the door hadn’t been there, at least he could have seen who was in the back room rather than waiting for the monster to be revealed. Unlike pain, the ache of anticipation gets so deep inside you, it can’t be soothed by adrenaline or shock. It’s a torture to the nervous system. As he watched the door of the back room, his nerves were being shocked in wave after wave.
The door creaked as it swung back. The kettle insisted that it not be ignored. The left side of his face almost seemed to burn from the high-pitched screeching. A figure stood in the doorway.
Apollo felt a child’s terror, overwhelming and immense.
The back room was completely dark even though he could see, through the kitchen window, that it was light out. A sunny day. This was happening under pleasant skies. The blackout curtains were down in Brian’s room. They were meant to keep the room as dark as a cave. And they did. But now that darkness hid the person stepping out, and whatever he had done inside it.
“Just…” he groaned.
Just what? What sentence was he trying to shape? Just leave? Just let me free? No. Just let my son go. That’s what he was trying to say. And even he was surprised to realize those were the words he meant. Surprised because a person never really knows how he or she will react at those worst moments, do they? Each of us hopes to be brave, to be kind, to be heroic. But how often do we get the chance to find out which it’ll be? But in this moment the thing he was willing to beg for was the life of his son. He would’ve done it for Emma, too.
The bottom of the teakettle must’ve been scorched black by the high flame by now. The water inside nearly as hot as the surface of the sun. Let this attacker pour it over his scalp, let his skin bubble and burst, let his eyes melt right out of his skull. Okay, okay. He would scream and die. All right. But put Brian out in the hall first. At least then he’d have a chance of being found by a neighbor, of being safe. Maybe Emma had even taken a seat out there, perched in the hallway right now. Give Brian to her, and do whatever you want with me.
The floorboards in the little hallway between the back room and kitchen creaked just as loudly as the ones in the back room had done. It was an old apartment. Every board was brittle. Now they creaked and popped, here and there, as the figure stomped into view.
Smaller than expected. Short and thin.
How had this little man overpowered him? Apollo wondered. There was a throb in his stomach. He couldn’t even remember how this guy had gotten into the apartment. They had a security gate over the window in Brian’s room. They were on the fourth floor. Too high to scale the side of the building and slip in through an unguarded window. Too low to drop down from the roof on the sixth floor. Maybe this was the man who’d been sending pictures to Emma. If he could send her pictures then snatch them away, maybe slipping into a locked apartment proved no trouble at all. Oh God, Apollo was willing to believe Emma now. Much too late. Much too late.
The stranger, this creature, brought along something else. A low noise. Even in his chair Apollo could make the sound out through the noise of the teakettle’s trill. Grumbling. Mumbling. The monster was talking to itself. He couldn’t understand the words, but the bass of the voice rumbled, something seismic about it. He felt it below his feet.
The monster’s hair was long and hung over its face. The locks were ratty and dry. It slumped as it moved forward, which only made it seem more ghoulish. It stepped into the kitchen, brushed past him. So close. Only inches. He shot forward. The chair underneath him rose, and its legs banged against the floor. Despite the chains around his shins, the ones around his wrists, he would’ve crashed into this little man, this thug, with so much force that it would’ve gone through the fridge.
But that bike lock wasn’t playing.
Apollo lurched forward like that and choked himself so badly that he almost passed out. Not so surprising. He’d been close to unconsciousness moments ago. Maybe he’d been floating up and down, from the depths to the shallows, for much longer than he realized. Maybe he and this monster had gone back and forth like this a few times already. The claw hammer on the counter, the carving knife on the windowsill. Maybe he’d been stabbed and bludgeoned already and just couldn’t see his body well enough to tell from this angle. Maybe the kitchen floor right beneath him had already been restained by his lost blood. The stabbing chills throughout his body made it impossible to distinguish between a cut and a crack and a mortal wound.
Meanwhile his home invader didn’t even seem to notice him. Walked right past the grown man choking in the corner, went to the oven, and finally turned off the flame. The teakettle yelped for another few seconds. The water bubbled inside the little cauldron.
But why didn’t that make the screaming stop?