His Neighbor Todd

Joel woke up with the sun shining through his open blinds. He did not close them last night due to the rain. He loved being lulled to sleep by the sound of rain. 

He didn’t expect to be awoken by bright lights. The sun hadn’t risen all week. He was pretty sure that a hurricane or something was coming but he couldn’t be sure. He avoided the weather and the news. Nothing that can remind him of the bad things in this world. 

It was well past 10 am when he finally got off the bed to make coffee. He stretched out his arm and yawned as he waited for the coffeemaker to start. He leaned his back on the counter to breathe in the smell of his first day of freedom. 

Yesterday, he finally took his neighbor Todd’s advice and quit his boring job as assistant marketing director. Every minute was up for grabs. 

He poured himself coffee and grabbed his phone on his way back to his room. 

“Let’s talk road trip.” He sent the text to Todd then went to take a shower. 

His body was still dripping water when the phone started to ring. He wrapped himself up in a towel and rushed to it, hoping it was Todd. The man had been going on about a road trip for so long. Now that Joel was free, he couldn’t wait. 

It wasn’t Todd’s number that flashed on the screen, though. It was his ex, Rachel. Against his better judgement, he picked it up. 

“Hey I heard you quit your job,” she said before he could get a word in. 

He rolled his eyes. “How did you hear that? Let me guess, Tania went babbling her mouth again.” He opened his closet to find some jeans and a t-shirt. He settled for a black one with Coldplay written on it. The band was the first thing him and Todd bonded over when he first moved in three years ago.  

“She’s just worried about you,” Rachel said. “We all are. Are you sure about this?” 

“Yep.” The closet door closed with a low thud sound.  

“What are you going to do now?” She probed. 

“Not that it’s any of your business but I’m going on a road trip with my neighbor.” 

“The Clarkes? Seriously, I thought you hated them?”

“Who are the Clarkes? I’m talking about Todd,” he said. Something fell behind him. He turned to see a book on the floor. It was the one about the truth and myth of the paranormal world that Todd had told him about. He had come to know that the man was passionate about the subject so he humored him by purchasing the book as a present to him. 

“Who’s Todd?” Rachel asked. 

He balanced the phone on his shoulder as he pulled on his boots. 

“My neighbor, Todd. What do you mean who’s Todd? I’ve only been talking about him for the past three years.” 

There was a pause as he buckled his belt and attached his watch to his wrist. 

“Right,” she finally said. “That Todd.” 

Joel sighed in annoyance. Rachel had never liked Todd and she never took care to hide her feelings. It didn’t matter that they never actually met. She was a jealous person and Joel knew it. Todd had advised him to break ties with her but he didn’t have the heart yet. He wasn’t one to seek out uncomfortable conversations. He already did it once by breaking up with her. He wasn’t ready to do it by cutting her out of his life. 

“Anyway,” he said. “I got to go.” He hung up the phone with her mid protest. 

He’ll apologize later. Now, he had to go tell Todd the good news. They had to start packing and planning their road trip. 

He finished the last sip of coffee and dropped the dirty cup in the sink as he went to the kitchen to get some leftover pizza slices for Todd. The man was always hungry and gulped down anything and everything he was given. 

It was almost noon when he went knocking on his neighbor’s door. The excitement was almost bursting through him. He couldn’t wait to see all the dirty but joyous back-ways the country had to offer. Todd had made him drool about them for way too long. 

The locks clicked away and the door was pulled open. It wasn’t Todd who was staring at him, though. Instead of a crooked smile and shiny bald head, he was face to face with a man with fully bloomed beard and voluptuous brown hair. 

“You’re not Todd?” Joel said, bewildered. He looked around to see whether he had the wrong door. 

Apartment 310. Todd’s apartment. 

“Who are you?”The bearded man asked. Behind him, a child screamed and another one laughed. 

“My name’s Joel,” he hesitated to say. He looked back at the number. 310. The one right next to him. “I was looking for someone named Todd Jenkins. He lives here.” 

“Nope, nobody by that name here, buddy.”

He chuckled awkwardly. Did Todd move out without telling him? He tried to remember the last time they spoke. It wasn’t that long ago but he didn’t mention anything about moving away. 

“Maybe you got the wrong apartment.”

“Who’s that, honey?” A heavy woman appeared behind him. Her hair was colored red and she had brown smudges on her white blouse. 

“Hey Joel,” she smiled at him. “You’re finally accepting my invitation?”

Joel stared at her, perplexed. He had never seen this woman before yet she was smiling at him like she had known him since forever. 

“You know this guy?” The bearded man grumbled. 

“Yeah that’s our neighbor. Apartment 311, right? I’ve only been inviting his lonely self to dinner since he moved in three years ago.”

“I’ve never seen you before, I’m sorry,” Joel told her. “I just need to talk to Todd for a second so, can you let him know I’m here?” He showed the plate of cold pizzas. “I’ve got good news.”

“Who?” Her eyebrows furrowed for half a second then she burst out with a throaty laugh. “Todd Jenkins, that’s very funny Joel. It’s not even Halloween yet and here you are with your ghost stories.” 

“What ghost stories?” Both men asked. 

“Todd Jenkins,” she said it like the name was in itself a full fleshed story with no further details needed. She stepped a little further away from the open door and lowered her voice. “The guy who was killed in here 10 years ago?”

“Oh yeah,” the bearded man laughed. “That's a good laugh, buddy but we don’t scare this easily.” 

A child screamed inside of the apartment. “Happy early halloween, Joel.” They were both still laughing when the door closed behind them

Joel stayed rooted for a minute before walking back to his apartment. He unlocked his phone and called Todd. 

“The number you’ve call has been disconnected,” came the robotic voice. 

Joel stared at his phone. That couldn’t be right. He had just talked to Todd on the phone last...week...month. He couldn’t remember. 

He checked his messages. There stood the one he sent this morning with a red warning sign next to it. It wasn’t sent.

He opened the conversation file to look back at the last time Todd texted him. There weren’t any received text from the number. He kept scrolling up but there wasn’t any answer from Todd. 

One of the pizza slices slid on the floor, by his foot. He cursed as he picked it up. He called the number again but received the same automated answer. 

He felt himself growing angrier and more frustrated by the second. He took a bite out of the remaining pizza slice to calm himself down. He opened his Facebook messenger app to text Todd. Sliding back through conversations from half a decade ago, he couldn’t find Todd’s name. 

“Idiot,” he said to himself when he remembered not friending his neighbor on any social media. 

Better late than never, he thought as he searched for Todd Jenkins on the Facebook app. Two pages came up - one was based in Australia and the other based in the US had no post since 2009. He tried the first one but none of the pictures resembled his neighbor. 

The other one had the right face on the profile picture. It was filled with posts about Coldplay, minecraft, and guitars. There was a picture of Todd in front of the apartment building dated twelve years ago. 

None of it made sense. Todd didn’t strike him as someone who would simply stop posting online, certainly not for a whole decade. 

He locked himself in his apartment and called Rachel. 

“Look who’s back?” she quirked. 

“Did Todd tell you he was moving out?” His hands were clammy from hair gel. He rubbed them on his jeans to no avail. “I went to his apartment today and there were other people there.”

“Uhhh...what are you talking about, Joel?” She let out an uneasy laugh. 

“Todd...Todd Jenkins. I went to talk to him but there were those people at his apartment who told me that he died ten years ago. The weird thing is that I checked his Facebook but the last post was also a decade ago.” Something cold snatched his arm. He quickly pulled it away and stumbled back, knocking a lamp off the table. He groaned when he saw the glass pieces sprawled on the floor. “Maybe he’s on twitter now. I never thought about it.”

She remained quiet for a few seconds. “That joke stopped being funny a while ago. Let the dead guy rest in peace, Joel. You’ve been obsessed with that murder since you first moved in. I was only okay with it because the rent was so cheap.”

“What are you talking about?” He shouted. He felt the glass scrunch under his boots. “How can he be dead? We went to a concert together last week.” 

“Joel, are you sure you’re okay? Maybe I should come over.” 

“I don’t need you to come over. I need someone to tell me where Todd is.”

He hung up the call. 

“This can’t be right.” He stood in the middle of his apartment. Someone’s breath was hitting the back of his neck. He felt eyes staring at him. He turned around but there was no one there. 

He grabbed another cup of coffee from the kitchen to calm his nerves. He jumped and drop the full cup on the tiles when the fridge groaned with new ice. 

“This place is giving me the creeps,” he said to himself. Without a second thought, he grabbed his keys and left. 

His first stop was at a café five minutes from his apartment. Him and Todd had met there on multiple occasions. Todd loved the sugar cookies there. 

“Can I get two sugar cookies?” He asked the cashier. 

“Oh we don’t sell sugar cookies anymore,” the young woman told him. 

“Since when?”

She shrugged. “Before my time.” She turned her head to address the next customer. 

“But I’ve had them here last week,” he said loudly. 

Both the customer and the cashier shied away from him.

“Sorry, sir,” the cashier said. “Maybe it’s another store.”

Joel rubbed the back of his neck. “Maybe.” He left without another word. 

In the sky, thunder growled but there were no clouds. The sun stood still in the center. Joel felt cold sweat drip down his back. 

Something was up. He was being pranked. 

That was the only possible answer - he was being pranked and they were all in it. 

He took a deep breath and sat on an empty bench next to the bus stop by his apartment building. The people walked by him, going through their lives. No one seemed to notice him. No one walked to him or pointed at a camera. 

Thunder was still grumbling over his head. An old man with a cane sat by him to wait for the bus. The man said something but Joel didn’t hear. His mind was thinking back through all of his memories - mostly the ones he shared with his neighbor. 

The man had come to chill on his couch so many times. There were so many secrets spilled. Joel had trusted him more than any normal neighbor. Their relationship had tipped on the side of friendship and confident a while ago. 

As he recalled his memories, he couldn’t think of one moment spent at Todd’s apartment. Todd had never met his other friends. Did he have a job? 

Yes...he worked at the...his mind went blank. He couldn’t remember any important details about Todd. No talks of family or friends. 

Joel rose up his feet fast. His mind was spiraling out of control. Of course Todd had family and friends. Of course he wasn’t dead. 

It was all a prank. 

He just needed one little footprint to derail it all. Whoever the mastermind was, they couldn’t have erased a whole decade of someone’s life with no trace. 

With new determination, he made his way to the library by foot. Something was online and he was going to find it. 

The library was nearly empty. The librarian barely glanced at him when he walked in. He made himself comfortable in a back corner computer and began his research. The first page of Google didn’t make any sense. All he could find on his neighbor were his name in articles about an unsolved murder in his apartment building about a decade ago. Nothing recent. 

Joel felt his head pound the more he clicked on useless pages. None of them were accurate. They couldn’t be. 

After pages of online newspapers and blogs, he felt himself giving up. Perhaps it was all true. 

But how could it be? How could anyone explain him seeing and talking to a dead person? How could he remember so vividly sharing beers with said person? 

Eventually, he found mentions of a funeral and burial. He wrote down the address of the cemetery and left the library. 

There was no way that tombstone was going to be there. No one was foolish enough to prepare such an elaborate prank. 

If it was a prank. 

The cemetery wasn’t far from the library. It took him only ten minutes on the bus.

Standing with the cemetery in view, fear braced him. His body was melting under the jacket. He took it off but nothing changed. He felt another breeze creep across his skin. The eyes were on him again. He turned around but no one was looking at him. 

He held his breath as he carefully searched each tombstone. There were so many of them. He was ready to go home and call his friends to tell them that it had unraveled their plans when his eyes felt on what he didn’t want to find. 

Todd Jenkins - 1987-2009

His breathing hiked up. His heart pounded in his ears. His eyes blurred. 

This must be wrong. He was imagining things. 

He pinched himself. This was all a dream. What else could this have been?

He stared at the gray slob of rock. The engraved name danced around him. His hands shook as he reached out to touch it and was surprised by the hot and hard feel of it. He picked up the bouquet of dried flowers laid by it. The stems pickled his fingers. 

It was real. It was all real. 

Dejected and scared, he went back to the bus and to his apartment. He was tired. He was seeing things. 

He took the steps of the building by two. He was ready to end this horrible nightmare. 

His apartment was dark and cold when he got there. Had he been gone for so long?

“I heard you were looking for me.”

Joel jumped back at the voice. His back hit the door, the knob digging in his side. He saw his breath came out in puffs in front of him. 

His throat went dry when he saw Todd Jenkins stand in front of him. His heart did a jolt of relief at the sight. 

He was right. It was a prank. 

He laughed and took a step closer but stopped. Todd stood in front of him, unsmiling. Had his skin always been this pale?

The uneasiness crept again and Joel’s heartbeat picked up. This time, fear was floating through him. 

The Todd standing in front of him was different. His eyes were dark. Black goo dripped from his lips. In the center of his forehead there was a small bullet  hole, leaking blood. 

“Ready for that road trip now, Joel.” Todd smiled, showing decayed teeth. 

In a second, he disappeared and reappeared in front of Joel. The smell of rotten flesh almost knocked him out. 

“I’ve been waiting a long time for this.”