Escaped

Diallo was stopped on his way to his apartment by a fighting couple in the hallway. His place was just a few doors down but just out of his reach with this raging double ball of fire in his way it was next to impossible to get there without literally getting in the middle. Diallo couldn’t even step foot near them to ease his way by them before the lady of the relationship made a lunge at her boyfriend, locking her hands around his neck and backing him against the wall as she tried to strangle him. Diallo wanted to stop her and to help the poor man but his feet were stuck to the floor and he was in such shock that he couldn't scream at her or call for help. He just watched this crazy woman strangle a man, watching him go limp and watched his body stop struggling against her and against the lack of oxygen. Diallo’s heart ran fast in his chest from fear as he watched someone's heart beat for the last time and another person's heart thump with rage and the adrenaline of taking someone's life. 

The anger drained from her eyes as she realized what she did. Her eyes studied her hands in regret when she removed them from around his neck, letting his body fall at her feet like a lifeless dummy and her eyes turned to Diallo. She looked scared of herself but her fear turned to determination when her eyes really locked on Diallo and started to approach him. A pit formed in Diallo’s stomach as her raging stare chased him down their hallway causing him to sprint until he was able to curb a corner and frantically knock on someone's door.

“Open the door!” Diallo shouted frantically “Please, I don’t want to die!” The adrenaline made his blood feel cold and he could feel tears threatening to appear in the corners of his eyes as he pleaded to the mystery person on the other side of the door. 

“What? What’s going on?” The door had opened when Diallo was looking down the hallway to make sure the murderous woman wasn’t near but she was right there in front of him and he panicked, pushing the person living in the apartment he knocked on back in as he rushed in too. He shut the door and pressed his back against it and locked it. 

“Call 9-1-1, right now.” Diallo begged the woman he just shoved

“Why? What is wrong with you?” 

“She just killed someone, I watched her! I watched a murder happen!” he started nervously pacing around this girls apartment as he processed what he just witnessed. 

He tried to stop her from leaving the apartment but she was gone before he could grab her arm. 

` “There’s nothing here” She sounded irritated and confused. 

“His body is right… there?” His body was gone, and so was she. “No, no that doesn’t make sense, he was right there and she was chasing me down the hallway!” Diallo sounded like a mad man, and by the way this poor girl was looking at him, he felt like one. 

“Yeah, sure he was” she said, mumbling ‘wacko’ under her breath as she bypassed him to go back to her apartment. She shut it loudly, maybe it was the nerves or maybe it was how it echoed in the hallway but the bang caused Diallo to jump and bring his arms up to cover his head in a protective manner. 

He couldn’t have just imagined it, there was no way that it was just a hallucination. Watching the event unfold felt so real, and he felt like he was going to die when she chased him. It felt like a nightmare come true, one that was so lucid and vivid and would stick with him for weeks on end. It did in fact stick with him, actually. He couldn’t walk down the hallway without wanting to sprint as fast as he could to his door to get into the safety of his own home. Every thud, every creak, every loud neighbor struck him with fear and forced him to freeze like a deer in headlights. He couldn’t even sleep through the night without waking up at least once because his brain played the event in the form of a dream. 

This was one of those nights and Diallo couldn’t handle it anymore. He hadn’t slept soundly in weeks and the stress would surely kill him if the lady didn’t so he got out of bed in the early morning hours and left his apartment in nothing but a tank top, pajama pants and no shoes to bang on the door of his murderous neighbors apartment and a confused woman answered the door. 

“Diallo? What the fuck are you doing?” she knew his name, he was sure to be next on her list because she knew his name. He told her his name when she first moved in a few months ago but in his panic riddled mind, he didn’t remember. He only shared a few conversations with this woman outside before the incident. They weren’t exactly best friends or anything. 

“I know what you did.” The confusion on her face grew which simultaneously scared and pissed Diallo off “Don’t give me that face, you killed your boyfriend in this hallway a few weeks ago! His body was right there!” He pointed behind him across the hallway from her front door at where he knew the boyfriends body laid limp and slumped over like a sack of potatoes. 

"I didn’t kill anyone, and I have no idea what you’re on about. Adam is on a business trip that he left for last week” 

"No! I saw you strangle him to death!” People started to come out of their apartments and stare at the scene. Diallo sounded crazy and he probably looked crazy too. 

”Diallo, sugar, maybe you should go back to bed. I think you’re mixing up a nightmare with reality.” It was the wife of the older couple that lived a few doors down from the exit. She was trying to talk him down like a scared and misunderstanding child. 

”But I saw her” he sounded pathetic, he didn’t understand why no one believed him. 

”I saw Adam leave for the airport last week, we traded goodbyes” she gently placed her hand on his back and slowly maneuvered him to walk back to his apartment. 

”Really?” he didn’t believe it but he had no other choice to. 

”Yes, really. Now why don’t you go back to bed and we can talk in the morning over coffee, does that sound good?” Diallo nodded in response and was guided back to bed by this sweet and patient lady. He was tucked in like a child and given a small kiss on the forehead for comfort before Mrs. Blake left him alone until morning. It was hard for Diallo to get back to sleep but once he started to doze off then he eased into a hazy sleep. 

Waking up left him feeling tired. He met up with Mr. and Mrs. Blake to enjoy coffee and talk about what's going on. 

”Have you been having issues with seeing things recently, Diallo?” Mr. Blake asked. 

”No, not that I'm aware of. But I swear I saw her hurt him!” 

”Alright, no need to get all worked up. Do you have any family history of hallucinations? Have you been sleeping well lately?” They thought he was crazy! He wasn’t crazy, he knew what he saw. 

”I’m not crazy. Thank you for inviting me over but I think I’m going to leave.” Diallo got up and set his mug down. He ignored their protests to continue the conversation as he left their apartment. He wasn’t crazy. He knew he wasn’t. But the next week when Adam came home and said hello to him in the hallways, he froze in this tract and reached out to touch him and he was real. A real physical person.  

As the days progressed, every time he saw Adam something weird happened. First it was him being killed by his girlfriend, then it was watching him fall down the stairs and lying dead at the landing but being gone when Diallo comes back with someone else. He’s watched the same man die over and over again but disappearing when he leaves for a second. He thought of seeking some help, thinking he was having consistent morbid hallucinations, feeling like he needed to otherwise he was going to do something that he was going to regret. He didn’t know what he was going to do but he had a gut feeling. 

All of it went out the window when he had another hallucination, but he didn’t leave. He stayed and stared at Adam’s body one day. He didn’t leave to get help or to set his stuff down to try and help Adam. He just stood there like a curious and confused child, staring at Adam’s hanging body in the stairwell of the apartment building. His eyes watched as Adam’s chest moved, taking small shallow breaths and if he looked closer, he could see Adam’s eyes twitching behind his eyelids. 

Just then Mr. Blake arrived in the stairwell behind Diallo and let out a startled yell, repeating the words ‘He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s really dead this time.’ 

”Diallo why are you just standing there boy? Go get him help!” He shouted, shoving Diallo forward a few inches

”He’s breathing” Diallo said calmly “He isn’t dead, look at his chest” he lifted his hand to point at Adam’s chest to show Mr. Blake that he was indeed breathing. Adam lifted his head that was slumped forward and started laughing as if this traumatic event was funny to him. He called his girlfriend in and she came in from the door at the bottom of the stairwell with confusion on her face, and it only grew when she saw me standing a few flights of stairs above her. She climbed the stairs and helped him down. The rope was tied around his waist and around his shoulders under his armpits underneath his shirt with the rope around his neck not being tight enough to even leave the slightest hint of a bruise. 

”Henry’s out here and Diallo blew my cover, I couldn’t keep a straight face” Adam was still laughing as he talked and Diallo could feel the anger and upset bubbling up inside of him. Adam thought this was some comical joke while Diallo considered a psychological evaluation. 

”What the fuck is wrong with you?” Diallo shouted, his voice echoed in the nearly empty stairwell, only their little group being the ones occupying it. “You made me think I was crazy for months and now you’re laughing? What do you have to gain from this? Why did you start doing this?” Diallo never felt more betrayed in his life. He treated them with nothing but dignity and respect, not even muttering one bad thing about them until the first incident and this is how they act. 

”Relax man, it was just a joke.” he was re-buttoning his shirt and putting his coat back on, treating it like just another Tuesday. Diallo felt like he was going to be physically sick at the thought of this man thinking that it was socially acceptable to do something like this. His girlfriend too!

”A joke? Really? Do you know how much research I’ve done to see if i’m actually insane?” Diallo started to approach Adam on the stairwell, matching his steps as Adam backed into a corner. “You made me think I was seeing things!” his stress of Adam’s well being melted away and instead his body went cold with rage. His mind went cloudy and he wasn’t thinking when he grabbed Adam by the hair, or when he pulled him off his feet and got on top of him to keep him down on his stomach, not even when he readjusted his fistful of Adams hair and started to smash his face into the ground over and over again. He was unable to stop himself even with Mr. Blake and Adam’s girlfriend trying to pull him off. Adam’s body didn’t disappear when his girlfriend ran to get help and came back, instead Adam’s essence of life oozed out of him and pooled in front of his face as his body stopped resisting like the first time he watched him die. When he was finally pulled off of his body, he could really see what he’d done. Adams forehead was caved in so when it rested on the ground it was perfectly flush. Blood was all over his face and the floor, even under Diallo’s fingernails because he dug them into Adam’s scalp as he brutalized him. His chest was heaving with sharp and heavy breaths as his adrenaline slowly faded from his body but even as his mind began to clear, he still didn’t regret what he did. He didn’t like it but he accepted it. He accepted it even as he was in cuffs, and when he was standing trail, even as he spent the next 22 years in prison.  He felt like a weight had been lifted and that he was finally free of their torment that drove him mad. He felt like he'd escaped.