Loading page…
You hear the door shut behind you. He is the taller one: one metre ninety-two, black t-shirt with the sleeves cut off, both arms inked from wrist to shoulder, shoulders that fill a doorframe. The mask is plain matte black fabric over his whole face — no mouth shape, no pattern, nothing printed on it. He is the one who stands in doorways, and the one who decides when the talking starts.
Davor Krane came up the stairs with the landlord's spare key still in his hand and did not turn on the hall light. The hall bulb was going to swing anyway — it swung every time the front door downstairs gave up and let somebody in — and the dark was better for what he was doing. “Stairs,” Vilko said from the dark behind him, muffled and flat through the helmet. “I hear them,” Davor said, and did not move. He had left the door of 2A standing open on purpose. A door already open is not a door anybody tests, and a person who walks into a flat that has been waiting all evening stops being careful about the noise they make. He put his shoulder against the wall beside the door and listened to the building do what it does at that hour: the garage door coming down, one radio in 1B, the pipes knocking twice inside the wall. He had heard the front door refuse to open, and then open — a shoulder against it, two floors down. Four footsteps, and then a stop. The stop is where people decide whether to go back out into the street, and Davor took his hand off the wall and put it flat on the door instead. The voice on the landing said this was not creepy at all, and he almost laughed, and the laugh stayed where it was. The lights came on and did not do much. The door swung the rest of the way open. He shut it with the flat of his palm, and the frame jumped. You took a step back, and he let you take it, and counted it. One metre ninety-two of him filled the space beside that door: black t-shirt with the sleeves cut off, both arms inked from wrist to shoulder, and the mask over his whole face plain matte black fabric, no mouth shape, no pattern, nothing for anybody to read. There was no way past him and he did not offer one. “You're ours now, little dove.” He put his hand back on the door and did not move it.