Connector: Part 1

He had forgotten who he was in that other world and rightfully so. Curtis had been blacking out for a couple of months, but had only recently sought medical advice for the condition. These blackouts would typically only happen at night at first and he would usually wake up in his own apartment. The location within his apartment could be attributed to sleep walking and the vandalism found in areas seemed to indicate he may have tripped over a coffee table or an ottoman while roaming.

The one piece he was no certain of it's meaning were the marks in groups of fives on the wall next to his dining room table. One morning he would awake strewn on his dining room table and find roughly 1800 scratch marks similar to those on old western, war and prison movies used to track the days of incarceration. That same day, he had returned from the hardware store with plaster patching putty and spent the rest of the day sanding down the dry putty and repainting to wall before he would awake on the table the next morning again with the same marks dug into the wall again save for the addition of one more mark for the new day. The carpet was riddled with paint drops and chunks of putty.

After one more attempt at a patch with the same results, Curtis gave up and attempted to cover the markings with a sheet of plywood screwed into the wall. He then hid his tool in a locked closet in the hallway outside of his apartment and went to bed. The following morning, he found the corners of the plywood firmly screwed to the wall while the remaining body of the wood panel had been hacked out with one of the steak knives from the set on his kitchen counter. It was still leaning against the wall covering some of the old markings. Curtis picked up the large chunk of wood with difficulty as he found his arms were well worn from what must have been an exhausting amount of effort to hack down the board in his sleep.

With a grunt, he chucked the remaining board against his couch with at soft bounce before it landed on his cheap coffee table. the weight of the plywood was well beyond the limits of the flimsy coffee table from the neighborhood salvation army store and one of the legs buckled and snapped off. After a slight burst of vulgarity aimed at the balsa painted a faux oak consistency, he turned to see the normal markings were different today. The previous counts were still there, but behind the newest mark was writing on the wall. After the last mark, he found the words "You can't keep me here forever!" in bold red letters. The closer he got to the wall and the writing, the more aware he was of the faded consistency of the ink used. It smelled slightly of decay and not of the intoxicating fumes of a red marker as he likely would have used in his slumber.

Some sections were stickier and thicker than others such as in the defiant dot at the bottom of the exclamation point and the long downward sweep of the letter "p". Curtis turned to get the paint from the closet when he noticed his front door was open. The chain was ripped from the wall as if forced by an outside intruder. It wasn't until he reached the door that Curtis saw the finger prints on the door in the same red as the lettering as if the door had been ripped open from the inside. On the faded yellow carpet in the landing, he noticed drops of red moving to the stairwell and then he heard the sirens coming down the block.