The Voice on the Intercom

The buzzing that dragged Mark from sleep was loud and insistent, like an insect flying around far too close to his ear. The noise came in pulses, punctuated by silences that grew fewer and briefer the longer he lay there letting sleep fall away from him.

It was several long minutes of hoping the damned bug would just land and bite him already before Mark realized what he was actually hearing. He rolled over and, with the press of a button, checked the soft glow of the clock on his phone.

Who the hell would be at my door at quarter to five in the morning?

Mark somehow managed to peel himself off the mattress, and stumbled towards the front door of his apartment, foregoing the lights in favour of bouncing from doorframe to wall to sofa in the dark. His door buzzer was shouting Morse code at him by the time he found the front hall and the elusive intercom button.

“Yeah?” Lingering sleep and blossoming annoyance rendered Mark incapable of anything more than a single syllable.

“Northwest Telecom.” The response, made subaquatic by the antique intercom system in Mark’s building, was spoken in such a way that said those two words should be sufficient to explain everything. They did not.

“And?”

“And we’re here to install your T1 line.”

Aha. A simple misunderstanding, along with maybe a mix-up on the time. This was why Mark insisted on military time at work.

“I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong apartment, buddy. Sorry.”

Mark got halfway across his darkened living room on his way back to bed before his buzzer started up again, loud and long. An angry finger silenced it once more.

“What?”

“We’re here to install a T1 line in your unit, sir, if you could buzz us in, please.”

“Like I said, you must have the wrong place. I didn’t schedule any work with you, and I definitely didn’t book it for five in the morning.”

This elicited a pause, a pregnant hiss of static as the telecom guy downstairs apparently looked something up.

“Dr. Mark Bernier?”

Mark was thrown? How does he know my name? His last name was in the directory in the lobby, certainly, but he didn’t think his first name was, and he knew for a fact that there was no mention of his PhD anywhere to be found in the lobby’s little touchscreen list.

“Yes?”

“Billing address is an office near the university campus?”

This brought Mark fully awake, his heart suddenly racing within his chest. He had all of his bills forwarded to the office, but nobody except his personal assistant knew that.

Mark was beyond annoyed now, bordering on furious. He chose his response carefully.

“I don’t know how you know that, and I don’t care. I’m perfectly happy with the cable I have, and even if I weren’t, I wouldn’t book an upgrade installation for what I consider to be the middle of the night. If someone claiming to be me has contacted you and done so, they’re screwing with you. I, however, am done screwing with you, so I’m going back to bed now. You can either piss off and leave me alone, or I can call the police and get them to come and tell you to piss off and leave me alone. Your choice.”

Mark hadn’t even turned away from the intercom panel before it began screaming at him once more. Almost reflexively, his finger leapt to the call button, more to silence the shrill noise as quickly as possible than out of any desire to continue his conversation with the cable guy downstairs.

“Listen, buddy, I–”

“No, you listen, friend. You think I don’t know what time it is? I’m not up this early to catch the sunrise. I’ve got a work order down here for this address, and I don’t appreciate being jerked around by somebody who can’t remember they booked us. You want to come down here and have a look at the paperwork, be my guest, but we are going to get in there to do this install. You don’t want to let us in, we can start buzzing your neighbours, see which one of them wants to let us in so we can start banging on your door.”

Mark hesitated. His first instinct was to call the cops, like he’d threatened to. But maybe he should go down and check this paperwork – if this was somehow a misunderstanding that could be cleared up without involving the police, perhaps that would be best. He couldn’t imagine any officer dispatched to deal with this situation being overly impressed, even if the cable company was in the wrong.

“You said you’ve got some paperwork I can see?”

“I’m looking at a work order in my hand as we speak.”

Mark considered this a moment longer before making up his mind.

“Can I get your name, Mr. Northwest Telecom? And your supervisor’s name?”

The voice from the lobby seemed a little taken aback, if only momentarily.

“My name? Uh, my name’s Nick, and my boss is Jim. But–”

“OK Nick, I’m going to come down and have a look at that work order now, and then I’m going to get Jim’s phone number from you, because I’ve decided he’s the first person I’m going to get out of bed this morning over this mess.”

Mark released the intercom button without waiting for a response, threw on some sweats, and then grabbed his keys and his phone and started downstairs before the little speaker beside his door could yell at him again.

The stairs were Mark’s least favourite part of his building – too many for him to ever make it up to his sixth floor apartment without getting winded, but too few to justify the undoubtedly enormous expense of somehow retrofitting the aging building with an elevator. The six flights of stairs did, however, give Mark a little time to formulate a rough plan of attack, to stoke his indignation back up, to–

All of it disappeared in a flash of confusion when Mark reached the building’s lobby and found the glass-box vestibule completely empty. Maybe he’s gone back out to his truck?

Mark pushed through the double sets of glass doors, out into the balmy early morning, and took in the empty horseshoe driveway that ran up to the wide strip of sidewalk at the front of the building. He stepped onto the pavement, into the faintest whisper of a breeze, and peered down the street into the pre-dawn gloom.

Nothing. No cable guy, no cable truck, not even any solitary cabs with particularly early fares, or particularly late ones. Where the fuck is this guy?

“OK, very funny. So you’re not from Northwest. Are you a former patient of mine or something? If you're in some kind of trouble, you need to talk about something, you should really get in touch with my office.” Silence, save for a lone cricket somewhere, a fragment of premature birdsong, a fleeting shriek of some distant siren. A block or two over, a garbage truck rattled and banged its way through its route. “I guess I’ll just head back upstairs then. The next buzz gets ignored while I call the police.”

Mark turned and started back towards the door of the building, stepping up onto the sidewalk again, and then the world burst into searing pain as something struck him in the back of the head.

The blow nearly knocked Mark out, and left him on his hands and knees, dizzy and nauseous and struggling to remain conscious. His vision began to darken at the edges, blurring and fading, until the toes of a pair of sneakers stepped into his limited field of view and gave him something to focus on. He tried to speak to the shoes – were they Chuck Taylors? – but he couldn’t seem to arrange the words in his head, much less make them come out of his mouth.

Mark clutched at the black high tops, trying with little success to pull himself up the denim that hung down over them. The voice from the intercom floated down, hazy and indistinct in a different way than before.

“Sorry I didn’t make an appointment to lie on your couch, doc, but this is an emergency.”

A length of pipe, one end ever so slightly bent and bloodied, dropped to the pavement next to the Chuck Taylors. The sound it made, high and clear like a bell, seemed completely alien in the quiet of the night.

“You see, I’m having these irresistible urges to kill someone.”