The Money Is Still There

The door slammed in my face, the backdraft tickling the hairs in my beard. It was over, conclusively, Liz’s patience finally having run its course. My heart was broken, shattered; it was all I could do to stop myself from knocking again. I shouldered the small bag of my remaining things that she’d handed me (toiletries mostly) and walked down the driveway.

At the end, my feet found the concrete sidewalk and instinctively turned me toward the bus stop. Along the way, phantoms of past memories played in front of my eyes. Holding her hand, her smiling at me, her lips silently mouthing the words I longed to hear again. My chest lurched, the sword in my heart twisting slightly.

In my agony, I barely felt my toes kick something. I looked down and saw a little black book skittering across the concrete. A slight breeze fluttered its pages, giving me a glimpse of the writing that filled each page from top to bottom. Sniffling, I knelt down to pick it up.

The book was bound in dirty black leather, its front cover cracked and bleached from exposure. I flipped through the pages, half looking at what was written on them, until the last page caught my full attention. On it, written in a harried hand, were eight words.

The money is still there. All of it.

I read that line a thousand times, enamored. When the bus pulled up to the stop with a hiss of air brakes, I closed the book and slid it into my bag. Looking around like a thief, I walked to the curb, paid my fare, and went home.

With the slide of a battered key, my apartment door swung open to my lonely place of dying. The neighbors were fighting again, the sounds of their screaming match barely muffled by the walls. I sighed, looking at the dim interior, my bag sliding from my shoulder to my waiting hand. I hated it here. More than any memory in my darkest thoughts, this place was testament to my failures.

Sighing again, I walked inside, shutting the door behind me. I tossed my bag onto my stained couch on the way to the fridge and I heard it bounce off, landing on the floor. I paid it no mind. Heartache is a thirsty business, only slaked by something fizzy with hops.

Emotional bandage in hand, I went back to the couch, finding the bag where it landed. The zipper was undone, the contents vomited out across the floor. The little black book rested on top of the detritus, like it had rode the wave out. Plopping myself down, I picked it up and felt my skin crawl at the touch of its cover. My mind instantly associated it with the feel of something rotten, like touching roadkill. I sipped my beer to shake the thought away while I leafed through the book’s contents.

It was a journal, but the author never gave his name. The pages detailed plans and escape tactics for a series of robberies, complete with blueprints of each target. Last minute notes were scrawled hastily in the margins. At the end of each plan, an orderly column of five initials and a dollar amount.

The empty bottles on my side table grew in number until my eyes were hazy, but still I read on, fascinated by the amount of detail in each heist. They ranged from the simple act of holding up a convenience store to the intricate plans for a high stakes bank robbery. The individual cuts got larger with each success, with the final tally showing twenty thousand dollars each.

Abruptly, the heist plans stopped. In the next series of entries the author described being watched, followed, and attacked, his spidery writing increasingly hard to decipher as the fear grew. Finally he decided to dump his cut to avoid his pursuers, describing the location where he hid the money but never fully revealing it. My drunken eyes scoured all these details, and after an hour of increasingly inebriated scrutinizing (also known as a full case of beer eliminated as I sat reading), I saw something that caught my eye. I knew where the loot was.

I called out of work the next day, giving my boss the excuse of having caught a stomach bug, and took the city bus to the location I thought I recognized. The word I saw in the journal was “Bibb”, and within an hour I stood looking into in the overgrown lot of the old Bibb Mill.

A leaning chain link fence surrounded the perimeter, which was a shaky climb after I’d tossed my bag to the other side. Brushing my hands, I picked my bag up on my way to the double front doors of the mill. Once a bright red, it had faded over the decades to a pinkish hue. The doors were secured by a long chain, fuzzy with rust, with a fat padlock connecting the two ends tightly. Three swings from the framing hammer inside my bag was all it took to break it loose.

Once inside, it took me until dusk to find the money, which was hidden in a locker within what used to be a common area for the mill employees. Now it was just leaning lockers and piles of sodden drywall that had fallen from the ceiling above. Inside, hidden within a garbage bag slick with years of mold and grime, I found twenty banded stacks of twenty dollar bills. My hands shook as I inspected them one by one, flipping through each, the sound of the money bringing a smile to my lips for the first time in weeks.

When I made it back home I stacked the money on my kitchen table and simply looked at it, my madman’s smile stretching from ear to ear. I resisted every urge to send Liz a text, a picture, or even call, thinking it best to keep this to myself for the moment. This didn’t stop my brain from buzzing with possibilities, however, and I couldn’t help but wonder what exactly to do with my newfound wealth. A new car? Clothes? Bills? All were prime candidates for a well deserved spending spree.

I got up from the table and went to the fridge, intending to drink on my plans, when my cell phone chirped in my pocket. Pulling it out, the caller ID declared the number to be unknown, a tricky little bit of business bill collectors use to get you to answer. Why not, I thought to myself, I can finally tell them I’ll pay them. I pushed the talk button and put the phone to my ear.

“Hello?”

There was nothing from the other end, not even a whisper, so I looked at the phone screen to make sure it was connected. When I put the phone back to my ear, a raspy voice simply said, “Put it back,” before the line disconnected.

I looked at the phone for a long moment before tossing it on top of the table. That feeling I had when I touched the book washed over me. Roadkill. Rotten things. My body shivered impulsively, and I turned to look at my twenty thousand reasons for happiness to break that feeling.

When the knock on my door came, I jumped so hard that I think the soles of my sneakers came off of the kitchen floor. Whoever was at my door was pounding on it, shaking the door so hard that the frame quivered. They were still assaulting the pressboard wood when I reached to answer, heavy blows that I felt through the metal of the doorknob. I turned the knob and yanked the door open quickly, ready to give whoever it was a good piece of my mind.

The hall was empty.

The hairs on my arms stood straight up, goose flesh prickling my arms. I stepped out into the hall, looking up and down both ends. There was nobody in sight, just the fluorescent bulbs of one of the ceiling lights buzzing like a dying insect. I stepped backward into my apartment, shutting and locking the door with shaking fingers.

When I turned back to the kitchen, there was a man standing over the piles of money, looking down on them as though mesmerized. He was dressed in a long black trench coat with a hood pulled over his head, his arms hanging limply at his sides. Wisps of steam, or smoke, drifted up from his shoulders to pool on the ceiling.

The pounding came from the other side of the door again and I jumped, blinking. The smoke from the man’s shoulders was still pooled on the ceiling, dissipating, but the figure was gone. Fear turned to anger and I went through my apartment like a crazed whirlwind, tearing through each room, looking for whoever it was that came into my house to look down on my money.

“It’s mine!” I yelled to the empty apartment. “I found it and you can’t have it!”

I ran back to the front door in a flurry of dirty clothes, kicked up and out of my bedroom into the living room. I stepped out into the hall again, to the sound of the dying light’s buzzing, and screamed at the top of my lungs, “It’s MINE!”

The buzzing reached a crescendo, catching my attention. When I looked, I saw the man from my kitchen standing beneath it, head down, face masked in shadow from the hood over his head. The man raised his head to look at me. I got a clear image of his burned, mangled face before the light blinked out, bathing the area in pitch black dark.

Heavy footsteps echoed off of the walls toward me, the ceiling lights buzzing, then blinking out one by one in my direction.

Terrified, I dashed back inside, slamming and locking the door. The footsteps grew louder, shaking the walls themselves. I backed away slowly, hearing those steps get closer, tinkling the plates in my cabinets, until they were right outside my door. Then they stopped. I continued backing away, my legs like jelly beneath me, until I hit what I thought was one of the walls of my kitchen. The hand that fell on my shoulder was charred, smoking, the skin cracked and oozing like a barbecued ham.

“No,” the voice rasped in my ear, “it’s not.”

The hand clenched on my shirt, whipping me around. The shadow of the hood obscured his face but I could see his teeth, gums burned to the roots, moving as he spoke to me. My gorge rose in my throat from the scent of burnt putrefaction that came off of him in waves. Another ruined hand seized my shoulder, keeping me from collapsing in terror.

“Put. It. Back.”

I screamed, closing my eyes and screeching until my vocal cords felt like they were shredding. I felt the hands release me and my knees buckled, depositing me in a heap at the man’s feet. I pushed myself backward, crawling away as quickly as I could, still screaming.

When I opened my eyes, janitor locker yawned at me in the half light, the money spilling from the grimy trash bag. The stack of bills I thumbed through lay on the floor of the mill’s common area. My heart hammering in my chest, I threw the money back into the trash bag and slammed the locker shut on my way out. I flew over the fence, hitting the ground running, and didn’t stop until I got home. The book I burned in my kitchen sink, dousing the flames with water from the tap when the fire had done its work. I didn’t sleep for three days, and only when I passed out from exhaustion did I finally get some troubled rest.

But the money is still there.

All of it.