Make A Deal With The Devil

 Friday night at 12:00 AM I had gotten into my car to drive to my friend Martin’s apartment. It was late to be visiting, I knew that, but I also knew that Martin didn’t go to bed until 3:00 AM on nights where we didn’t have class the next day, so I didn’t worry too much. I hadn’t seen Martin in quite some time, which was very uncharacteristic of him. The first day he was absent from class I had just figured he was sick or something. I wasn’t too concerned with it. But, then he didn’t come in for a whole week. Even when he would still be recovering from an illness, he normally wouldn’t skip class. Not to mention the fact that I couldn’t recall any sicknesses that lasted full force for more than a week, but what did I know?     I had tried to call him multiple times now, but whenever I did, it always went to voicemail. This also hadn’t been concerning the first couple of times. I knew Martin would often disconnect his phone from the wall so he didn’t have to pay so much on his phone bill (I don’t know if that really helped, but I always humored him with it.) Nevertheless, even if he did this, he would always call me at least once every two days to talk or whatever, sometimes more. I live in a neighborhood relatively close to his apartment, but not close enough that we would want to be wasting gas constantly to visit each other, and I wasn’t much of a walker, so phone calls were important to us.     But…he hadn’t been answering his phone…and it had been more than a week now. I knew I shouldn’t worry about him; he always told me not to do that, but I couldn’t help it. I think it’s just…what I do. For a while, Martin had been acting…really weird, in contrast to his normal, subdued behavior, that is. Lately, he’d seemed really distant toward a lot of people, even me. I could tell he hadn’t been sleeping well because he always came into class with these huge bags under his eyes, and he normally didn’t have those. I tried to ask him about them, but when I did he became really irritated and said he didn’t want to talk about it. At the time, I didn’t want to press it and make him angrier; him being angry at me at all was almost too much for me to handle. 

     So I let it go, for a while at least. His strange mannerisms became a bit harder to ignore when he suddenly started insisting that I not come over to his apartment. He always loved hanging out with me, but one day, he just sort of…stopped. I had thought it was my fault at first; I had thought I had done something to make him upset, but I couldn’t think of anything, and he wouldn’t talk to me about it. We’d converse in class and on the phone at night, and he’d come over to my parent’s house to hang out, but I would never go there. Even if I were to bring it up, he would immediately shut me down and insist that his apartment was way too messy for the both of us to be in, as if he was embarrassed about it or something. But I knew he didn’t care about that. I had been over there when there were so many clothes and half-empty pizza boxes on the floor that you could barely see the carpet. Why was he suddenly so bothered by the thought of me seeing his apartment dirty? I really didn't have an answer for that. The only thing I could figure was that he was lying, and that wasn’t the real reason he didn’t want me coming over, but how was I supposed to know the real reason when he wouldn’t tell me? So, I was forced to believe him.     I didn’t want to invade his privacy, this is why I hadn’t tried to come over sooner. I was even a bit hesitant leaving my house that night because I didn’t want him to be angry at me for doing something he had blatantly told me not to do. But I was running out of options. He wouldn’t answer his phone, I hadn’t seen him in a week; I just needed to know he was okay.

    I gripped the steering wheel hard as rain pounded down onto my windshield, making it a bit difficult to see the road in front of me. I reached over and turned the crank that made my wipers move faster. The music playing on the radio was doing little to help my racing thoughts. I recalled he’d also been muttering things under his breath and chewing at pieces of his hair a lot, especially when we would see each other. Many of the nervous ticks I knew he suffered from were beginning to actively show themselves in the past month or so. I knew Martin suffered from paranoia and anxiety some of the time, but it wasn’t ever something that he’d let show. He was embarrassed by it. I understood the feeling. He always thought that he needed to be the person whom people went to whenever they were upset. He was the listener, the helper, not the victim. Some of the time I feel like that crushed him, not feeling like he could talk to people about his problems. I can’t imagine not feeling comfortable enough to vent about things. I had no doubt that this was part of the reason for his strange behavior. He must have been suffering from these things more than usual lately, and I hadn’t even thought to try and help.     My face twists painfully as I grab the steering wheel harder. No, I couldn’t have known about this. Martin was being secretive about what exactly had been bothering him. He was cutting himself off so he didn’t have to talk to anyone. He’d done this before, and for a while I’d been none the wiser. But I was helping now, and I wasn’t gonna let this continue. I kept telling myself this, but surprisingly it didn’t do much to help ease my mind.     I turned right into his apartment complex’s parking lot. A few cars were scattered here and there. The building was mostly being rented out to students studying at our college, so most of the occupants I suspected were out partying right about now. I spotted Martin’s green Vauxhall Viva and pulled into the spot next to it. Stepping out of my car, I used my hands to shield my head from the rain, unsuccessfully. I didn’t bother to lock the doors, not that I had anything worth stealing inside of it anyway. If people wanted to take the box of Kleenex in the back seat, they were more than welcome to. I started toward the stairway leading up to the second floor, slightly picking up my pace as I felt water seep into my shoe through the hole worn into the bottom.

    The rain took a toll on my hair, making it stick to my face. I didn’t care all that much; I was used to it doing that, and I barely thought Martin would mind. I arrived in front of his apartment door and knocked on it a couple times before figuring he wasn’t gonna answer. It was a good thing he’d loaned me his only spare key for emergencies. I was at the point where I considered this situation an emergency, and I reached into my pocket to grab it, only to find that Martin’s door wasn’t locked in the first place. It stood slightly ajar, so slightly that you would only notice it was open if you were standing a couple inches from it.

    That…made me even more worried. I didn’t like the implications of Martin’s front door being left open, and I quickly stuffed the key back into my pocket and pushed the door forward. After a couple millimeters, it halted, as if something heavy was blocking it from the other side. I furrowed my brow and shook my head, confused. Putting my entire weight up against the side of the door, I pushed again, managing to get it to budge just enough so that I could slip inside.     Things smelled stale in the living room of his apartment. I could make out the scent of rotten fruit coming from somewhere close. I figured his kitchen was the culprit, as it was only a few short steps away. The flat was almost completely black; all of the lights had been turned off. I stumbled around in the darkness for a while, noting that while I walked, I was kicking what sounded like cans out of the way. Were there soda cans on the floor, and what heavy object had been blocking the door? I smacked my hand against the wall next to the doorframe where I knew the light switch was. I felt it almost immediately and flipped it up, but the lights didn’t come on.     “Really…?” I muttered to myself, more troubled than annoyed, while flipping the light switch up and down a couple more times without much success. Had Martin forgot to pay the electricity bill or something? I sighed and reached back into my pocket for the small flashlight I carried around with me that was clipped to my novelty keychain. Convenient that I just so happened to have it on me at this very moment. I pressed the button on the side before I even took it out of my pocket, and once it was out, it illuminated the room perfectly.

    A chill went down my spine as my vision adjusted to the light. From the state I saw the living room in, I could tell immediately that something was wrong (not that I hadn’t been subtly thinking that all this time; this had only confirmed my suspicions.)     The place looked like it had been completely ransacked. Cans and various other garbage littered the floor. Half of it appeared to be food waste, as if someone had been eating in the living room and decided to just throw their trash onto the ground. I looked to my left. Wallpaper on the walls of the lefthand side of the living room had been ripped, giving the illusion that someone had torn it down. The cushions meant for the couch laid a good five feet away from it and had been partially unzipped so some of the stuffing inside was popping out. Martin’s television wasn’t on top of his entertainment center. I looked to my right. Martin’s dining room table, one that he had been using even though it was plastic and meant for the outdoors, was flipped upside down and missing one of its legs. The two chairs that used to stand on either side of it were absent. I uncovered one of them laying folded up in the kitchen. The other one was nowhere to be found. Piles of paper were scattered near the kitchen’s tile floor. From what I could see, each piece had something written on it.     I took a few more steps farther into the room. What…was this? What happened, why did Martin’s place look like this?    “Martin?” I called out into the darkness of the apartment. No answer. I sighed and watched my feet as I turned around, absently kicking more cans out of the way. As I looked up I finally caught a glimpse of what had been blocking the front door when I had initially tried to come in.     It was the TV, sitting up against the doorframe, its screen completely busted as if someone had smashed it in with a baseball bat. Pieces of glass from the screen were scattered around it, and I jumped back instinctively when I realized I was very close to stepping on them. I had no idea why it had been used to block the door. It hadn’t been very effective. It was almost as if someone didn’t want people getting inside of here, but also hadn’t cared enough to grab an object that would have posed a significant problem for someone trying to open the door. Had…Martin blocked it like this?

   Even more confused now, I turned back around and stumbled across the room toward Martin’s bulletin board, making sure not to step on anything lying on the floor.     “Martin??” I call out again, slightly louder this time. No answer. If Martin was here (and I knew he was here, his car was still parked in the lot outside,) why wasn’t he answering me? Was he asleep? How could he sleep when his apartment looked like this?

    I needed to find him. If he was anywhere, he had to be in his room, which was down the hall to the left of me. I turned and started toward it, my stride fast and wider than normal. The uneasy feeling deep in my chest was getting worse by the moment. The door to the room was shut. I reached over and grabbed the knob with a shaking hand before turning it. It gave way easily with a long, drawn out creak that made my hair stand on end. When I swung open the door, a waft of air from the inside blew into my face.     The air from that room smelled like nothing I had ever experienced before. Stale and horrible and rotten. I let out a grunt of shock, leaning as far away from the room as I could while immediately having to suppress my urge to vomit. To this day, I still haven’t found the right words to describe how truly terrible it was. All I knew for sure in that moment is that it was the smell of something decaying. I didn’t want to have to enter the room after that, but I hardly had a choice. I let out another disgusted moan as my stomach twisted, threatening to empty its contents once again, before pulling the edge of my sweater over my nose to help filter the smell out. It didn’t do much for me in the long run. I pointed my flashlight into the room and pressed forward, taking a couple steps inside. My heart was pounding out of my chest. Where was Martin?

    I quickly shuffled backwards to check the light switch in this room as well. Similarly to the one in the living room, it too didn’t turn the lights on. It looked as though the power was out for the entire apartment and had been for a while. I swiveled back around to observe the overall state of the room. It was just as messy as the rest of the flat, possibly even more so. The sheets on Martin’s bed were left in a crumbled heap at the edge of it and I noticed that his bedside lamp had been supposedly smashed against the headboard. I took a few steps toward the mess, noticing that something made a crunching sound under my feet as a moved, which caused me to jump. I felt uneasy; this noise was the only thing I had heard in the entire house since I had entered. It was stiflingly quiet.

    I peered over to the far right wall of the room, a section of it that had been eerily dark this entire time. Laying scattered all over the floor were various crumbled sheets of notebook paper. I paused for a minute, surveying the mess before I noticed that some of these papers had been tacked up to the wall along with a couple Polaroid photos. I walked over to the them slowly, once again making sure to avoid any random items that had been thrown onto the floor. Once I had managed to make my way over to them I leaned forward, squinting at each the photos. They had been stapled to the wall. They didn’t seem to be of anything in particular; most of them were blurred out and stretched, as if they had been taken while in motion. I couldn’t make sense out of any of them.

    I leaned back and scrunched up my neck so my sweater would stay over my nose and reached down to grab one of the sheets of paper from the floor. I sloppily unfolded it in my hand and let my eyes dart over the surface. The paper was covered top to bottom with strange, seemingly unrelated words that had been written in chicken scratch. I could just barely make out what they were supposed to say, but I could tell that this was Martin’s handwriting. I remember seeing words like “breathing” and “splitting,” repeated multiple times throughout the message; it was as if it had been written while Martin was having some kind of panic attack. As my stomach sank, I let it go, watching it slowly fall back down to the carpet before I heard a noise behind me.

    My heart skipped a beat as I quickly whirled around, shining my flashlight sporadically  throughout the room. I felt my legs lock in place as I tried to find what had made the sound, but everything looked exactly the same as it had when I entered. After a few more seconds I heard the noise again, coming from the right side of the room. It was just barely noticeable this time and sounded similarly to a creak, like something was being put under pressure. I looked over, my eyebrows furrowing. The only thing I figured could have made that sound was the door on Martin’s closet, which I noted had been left slightly ajar. I pointed my flashlight toward it and just stood there in silence for what seemed like a long time. For whatever reason, as I stared at it the pit in my stomach became larger. Especially after not being able to find Martin anywhere else in the house, I was becoming increasingly more curious, but at the same time something deep in my mind was telling me that I should not go and open that door. Something felt off about it, but I didn’t know what.

    I swallowed the lump in my throat and closed my eyes tightly. It was just a closet; what exactly did I think I was gonna see in there? I knew if I wanted to find Martin, I had to check it. Whether or not I felt confident, it was hardly my choice to make. I let the breath I had been holding hiss out between my teeth and walked forward. The closer I got to it, the more I noticed the putrid smell that had been permeating around the room. I wanted to get this over with. I ignored the tight feeling in my chest and reached over to grab the sliding closet door, hesitating for only a split second before thrusting it to the side with a grunt.     The first thing I saw even before I shined my flashlight into the closet was the silhouette of something large and bulbous. The smell was almost unbearable now and I reeled back in disgust, gagging instinctively. I covered my nose and mouth with the palm of my hand and swung the flashlight up toward the closet so I could see what was hanging in front of me. I screamed when I was met with the face of a bloated, discolored man looking back at me. I stumbled backwards and tripped on a bottle, causing me to fall over onto my tailbone. The flashlight fell with a clatter a couple inches beside me, still pointed at the closet. It illuminated the hanging figure’s feet, which were just as purple and pale as the rest of the body was.

    I gritted my teeth and let out a horrified moan as I scratched desperately at the carpet below me, attempting to scurry away from the open wardrobe. My back hit Martin’s bed a couple seconds afterward, making a loud ‘thump.’

    “O-oh…” My voice quivered as I tried to grab the flashlight from the ground. It took a couple times, but eventually I found it and shined the light back up at the top of the closet. I felt my whole body shrivel up when I saw the man’s face again.

    Inside of the closet was a barely recognizable, badly decaying corpse that hung from one of the wardrobe’s highest hooks. The entire body had swelled to double its original size, and the skin on its face looked like leather, yellow and bruised and discolored, a sickening mix of blue and purple.  A belt had been wrapped tightly around the person’s neck as if it had been used to hang whoever this was.

    My eyes flickered back and forth as my mouth hung open in disbelief. Surveying the corpse closer, I eventually noticed its clothing: a black sweatshirt with various shapes sewn onto it. And its hair…It was green and curly and looked as though it was about to fall out. What…the fuck? I felt a lump develop in the back of my throat as a sickening revelation hit me like a freight train.             Oh, god….this figure, this…this body…

    It was Martin. I was looking at the rotting, lifeless body of my friend, Martin Aubrey. I remembered this exact outfit. It looked as though it was being uncomfortably stretched over his stomach. And the hair…it…it had to be him. I didn’t know anyone else with that haircut, and even if I did, why would they be in his apartment?

    I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head. No…no, this…this wasn’t right…I couldn’t be seeing this correctly. There was no way Martin had hung himself, absolutely no way. He…he was too happy, he wouldn’t do this. So, he had been in a rut, that wouldn’t have made him do this, right? It had just been a little hiccup, he was…feeling under the weather, that’s all. I brought my hands up to my forehead and hit them against it hard, trying to clear my mind. I was hallucinating, I was too tired, something had to be wrong here. Martin wasn’t dead, he wasn’t in front me dead, something was wrong and when I opened my eyes again it would be fixed, surely.           I took a few seconds before I swallowed hard, opened my eyes, and looked back into the closet. The same, mangled body stared back at me. My face twisted into an even more horrified expression when I realized this was actually happening. I held the flashlight close to my chest, clutching it with both hands as it shined toward the ground. I couldn’t stand looking at his face anymore. He looked so…deformed….He hardly resembled himself. How long had he been in here? I focused my gaze on the ground below him. The kitchen chair that had been missing when I entered the house laid on its side under his feet. A chair, kicked over onto its side…he really had done it. I was in shock. Martin had hung himself.

    My stomach rumbled loudly, a clear sign I was about to vomit. I pursed my lips and clambered up to my feet as fast as I could, determined to get away from this room before it happened, but it was already too late. I had only taken a couple steps before I clutched by abdomen and bumbled forward, emptying the contents of my stomach onto the carpet. I finished within a minute and looked back up, my head spinning. I needed….to get help. I needed to get help, the police or something! If Martin’s lights weren’t working because he hadn’t been paying his bills, then it was pretty likely that his phone line had been cut as well. I had to find a working phone so I could get help, but all the sudden I found that my feet wouldn’t move.

    My friend was dead. That phrase kept repeating itself in my mind.

    Martin was dead…that’s why he hadn’t been answering his phone. That’s why he hadn’t shown up to class in a week. It was all starting to make sense. No wonder he cut himself off from me, he was planning his own suicide!

    A whimper escaped me as I finally managed to unhinge my own feet from the floor. I lumbered toward Martin’s bedroom door, my pace quickening with every passing second. I was too overwhelmed to notice my teeth grinding together, or the tears that were rolling down my face.

    “Oh God, n-no!” My voice hiccuped in my throat when I threw open the front door.