Uncanny Tales of Crush and Pound 13

  **********

  Outside of the field office of the DAM in Baltimore, a taxi cab let Crush and Pound out, and they handed the driver two twenties. They had turned the rental car at the BWI airport terminal in order to get the final receipt processed for reimbursement, and they had picked up the cab to bring them to the office building.

  “So much for dinner,” Crush mumbled as he looked at his empty wallet and felt his stomach grumble. The cab drove away with a puff of black exhaust that stunk up the air, and the headlights shrank as they burned through the night air. “I hope my stash of tuna is safe in the drawer of my cubicle.”

  “I don’t think anyone would touch your tuna,” Pound said with a frown as if he had bitten into a rotten apple. Crush’s ears perked up tensely. “No offense, pal, but you could use some variety in the meal department.”

  “I am a creature of habit,” Crush answered matter-of-factly.

  “Yeah, creature is right,” Pound replied and lightly punched the cat-man in the arm with his fist.

  The dark outside was suffocating, and when they reached the bottom of the stairs leading to the entrance of the building, they both looked up to see the windows were black and the lights were off in the DAM office in particular. Normally, there would have been one or two cubicle lights left on somewhere inside, but not tonight. Tonight, all of the lights were turned off, and the feeling in the late autumn night air was ominous as a cold wind whipped through the naked hardwood trees in the courtyard.

  “You may have been right about coming here first?” Pound said as the reflection of the streetlamps reflected across his pupils. Crush held out his arm with his elbow chest high to block Pound.

  “Stay here,” Crush ordered, and he began to climb the steps to the front door.

  “Hey! I don’t have a cell phone if you get into trouble,” Pound called out, and the echo reverberated against the glass of the windows.

  “Don’t worry. I will be back,” he replied as he opened the unlocked building door. Crush thought it strange that security would leave the front door unlocked that way after dark, but it did allow him easy access, so he let that worry go. They shared the building with many tenants, federally employed mostly, but there were a few legal and investigative teams that had garnered a place in the arrangement. What bothered him the most was that there were no lights on in any of the other offices in that building, and though he could see fairly well in the dark, he understood that any normal person would have struggled to find their way around inside. It was possible that there was a power outage, but if the electricity were truly out in the area, the outdoor lights would have been darkened, and that was not the case. This led him to believe that someone had purposely turned out all of the lights throughout the building, and such a thing would have required a coordinated effort by all of the building’s tenants. That, too, was not a likely scenario since, no matter the size of a group, small or large, there was always one person in the group who would adamantly disagree with the others.

  There was one other notion that he could contemplate for the lights being out, and it was that someone was baiting him for a trap. If that were the case, they would stand a good chance of catching him because he was going to be responsible and report into the field office. Crush was never one to shy away from his duty, and he chose to take the stairs to the upper level where the DAM offices were located. He was glad that he did because he learned something important about the power outage. He saw the warm red glow of the exit signs which were posted on the inside of the stairwell, and this bit of information let him know that even if the power had been turned off to the building, the emergency power was still in place. In the dim crimson light, he sensed that he was alone, and as he climbed the stairs to the next floor, a fear of what he might find in the office began to take hold and set up camp inside his mind. When he reached the floor where the DAM resided, he crouched down low against the metal door, and with his hand over his head, he pulled down the handle to release the latch. He backed his body toward the corner where the hinges held the door to the frame, and he eased the door open with one arm. The large heavy door creaked open like a casket, and he held the stairwell exposed with that one arm while he kept his body behind the metal frame. He angled his head sideways and peeked down the hallway where the entrance to the office could be found, being careful not to make himself too large of a target for a possible shooter, and he scanned the surroundings closely for any movements or errant sounds. After a few moments which seemed like hours had passed, Crush leaned his body forward into the passageway, and he crept on his hands and knees to the office door. He knew that the door would not be locked because no one in the DAM ever used the deadbolt that had been added twenty some odd years before. The key had been lost on a mission, and since the bolt itself had a tendency to stick in the summer with the humidity, no one ever considered the key worth replacing. Knowing this, he withdrew a thin plastic knife that he had picked up at a convenience store along the trip from North Carolina, and he carefully peeled back the plastic wrapper which covered it. He gently inserted it in between the lock and the door frame, and he wiggled it enough to force it between the mechanism and the frame and release it. He then pushed lightly inward, and the door squeaked open forty-five degrees and hung up on what he thought was a misplaced doorstop. The room, like everywhere else, was dark, and the interior of the room felt damp and cold. Rather than turn the light on first, Crush peeked through the crack behind the front door, and he saw a man’s shoe lodged in the gap. Crush’s heart raced as he pondered the possibilities, but he kept perfect control of his faculties as he waited to see if the foot moved at all. After taking in a few calming breaths of his own and seeing no movement, Crush stepped through the doorway and into the darkened office space, paying careful attention to keep the door between himself and whoever was on the other side. A foreboding prickle raced up his spine, and Crush stepped back out of the office and into the darkened hallway. He had learned over the years to pay attention to his intuition, and he scanned the rest of the office from his vantage point in the hallway. Everything seemed light gray inside where there should have been black, which was just a minor difference from what he would have expected, and yet he could not help but wonder what the source of the paler gray light which emanated from the darkness within was.

  “And if there is a man and not a mannequin on the other side of the door, why doesn’t he show himself when he knows that I have seen him?” Crush carefully considered the possibilities, and he concentrated on where and when he might have experienced an event like this before. Old memories began to tumble from some higher shelf in his mind, and they began to spill out on the open floor of his awareness. There may be a reason for these bizarre events, and he may now wish that he had brought Pound and a couple of sturdy oak trees with him when it was all over. He looked back inside again at the gray for patterns, and it did seem to him that there was a pattern of a sort in the darkness. He kept perfectly still as the shoe remained hatefully lodged in the crease of the doorway, and he thought that he sensed a drumming of movement, almost with a feathery grace along the gray pattern.

  Then it came to him. He knew where he had seen this before! He caught his breath, and at that instant, from behind the stopped door on the inside of the office, the faint sound of a cell phone vibrating against wood resonated out into the hallway on the first ring. His heart went up into his throat as adrenaline pumped into his body, and Crush quickly leaned his face down to the floor where he could look between the gap of air separating the floor from the bottom of the door. To his surprise, an LED lit up and a flip-type cell phone vibrated on the floor on the other side of the door with the second ring. He extended his claws from his fingertips, and he reached his fingers beneath the stopped door until his knuckles were not allowed to go any further. His fingers felt the vibration of the tiny offset motor which spun inside the plastic case on the third ring, and he swept it toward the gap of th
e door, only to find that the gap was too small for the phone to fit beneath the door. That was the last ring; the caller had hung up. Crush swore a few choice words in his mind, and being high on the drunkenness of adrenaline, he crept back into the room and around the door on his hands and knees. He dared not look up at the man or mannequin that hung on the backside of the coat hanger on the door, and so with one hand, he leaned sideways and fumbled past one of the man’s dangling shoes to reach the cell phone that lay between the sturdy polished shoes, shining even in the dark. Shoes of a federal employee if he had ever seen them before, and Crush was entranced for a moment with the desire to look up, to see the face that connected with the shined shoes and the polyester pants. The yearning to know who this was almost overpowered him as he whiffed the dank, musty stench that hovered in the air, and if it had not been for the sudden vibration of the voicemail message indicator, Crush may have ventured a look. As it was, the last vibration shook the door with a horribly loud echo throughout the office foyer, and Crush snatched the phone and backed out of the room in time to see the gray pattern in the office bounce with sporadic movement in the dark. Crush sprang to his feet and pulled the door closed with a slam. He then lost no time sprinting across the short hallway to the stairs where he bolted down the steps two-at-a-time until he reached the floor where the front entrance was located. With the cell phone still in his hand, he vaulted out the front door and into the fluorescent light of the front steps and walkway. He had never felt so happy to see the bare naked limbs of the old oaks that stood out on the front courtyard as he did then.

  Chapter 2

  *

  Crush and Pound