Come Through The Window

8

After about five seconds, which is about twice the time it normally takes a person to realize where they're at and remember what they were doing, he slowed down. "Shit. Shit Holy shit" He was breathing heavily, gasping deep breaths and hunched over at the corner of the tower. It's a wonder that in his maddened state he didn't run right into the supports and knock himself out for real. But he just stood there, bent over at the waist, then fell to his knees. With his back turned to us, he started rocking and wringing his hands and muttering to himself.

"Holy mother of fuck," said Vince. "What the hell did you see?" But Mike didn't answer. We approached him slowly, and as we drew near we could hear him quietly sobbing. In our macho world, that was normally a crime punishable by death, but at the time of course we didn't say a word. I reached out a hand to his shoulder. But as soon as I touched him, a touch so tentative and light that he shouldn't have even been able to feel it, he shrieked and jumped away, clanging his back into the corner of the tower. He pressed up hard against it, staring at us with a look of terror in his eyes so real you'd think we were demons from the pit of hell.

If ever in those few moments I thought that he was "putting on" to fuck with us, that look put all my doubts to rest. That and what happened afterwards of course.

None of us said anything, but after about ten minutes Mike had calmed down enough that Richard was able to coax him to his feet and lead him back to his house. As I had suspected, the temperature had fallen like crazy in just a few minutes and, just as I figured it would, the freezing cold drizzle started to fall. I told Vince I was just gonna go home and I'd see him tomorrow. We always spent the evenings and rainy days playing Mortal Kombat on our SNES, but he didn't object. I think he probably wanted some time alone to reflect on what horrible thing we had done to our friend, just like I did.