Bricks

****

The sound of shattering glass and a crash woke me up. The noise was right by my ear. I jumped out of bed and looked around in the darkness.

Everything was quiet.

I turned on the light. The clock read 4:30 a.m. Outside, it was pitch black. I couldn’t see the reflection of the room in the window. That’s when it hit me—the window was broken. Sure enough, shards lay on the floor. “How?” I asked myself, but in the next second, a brick flew through the window and slammed into the wall half a meter from my head. I jumped to the side and looked around, realizing it was already the second one: the first, which had broken the window, lay in the center of the room; the second near the wall.

Of course, our neighborhood wasn’t the quietest, and we had our share of hoodlums… But all that seemed trivial compared to the fact that I lived on the seventh floor.

A third brick flew through the window at an angle. I stepped back toward the side wall. It passed right in front of my nose. There was no time to be scared, only a fleeting thought: *“Now it’s closer.”*

Without thinking, I left the room and headed to the phone in the kitchen. While I was calling the police, two more stones flew through the same window. Both ricocheted off the door into the hallway. Both bounced off walls in my direction.

As I examined the latest bricks in the hallway, another one ricocheted off a wall and hit me in the stomach. Its speed wasn’t too high, so I caught my breath before the next one came and moved out of its path.

The neighbors arrived. The noise had already woken up the whole building. Everyone gathered in my hallway and, after a short argument, started watching bricks fly around the apartment. Now they were ricocheting two or three times before reaching the hallway. It was unsettling.

In a lull between the bricks, I ran to lock the bedroom door. A brick immediately hit it. A second one hit the wall nearby. A third smashed the chandelier in the room. The crashing continued for a while. The neighbors openly stared at my apartment and at me.

Suddenly, everything stopped. The bricks’ clamor ceased. After waiting about ten minutes, I decided to peek into the room.

I cracked the door just a little—and at that moment, something hit me right in the forehead.

When I came to, the police were already in the apartment. An ice pack rested on my forehead, and underneath it was a huge bump; my face was covered in scratches. Witnesses said that a whole brick couldn’t have passed through the small gap in the door, but it had flown so fast it shattered into tiny pieces, sending a stream of shards through the crack. The officers walked calmly in my room; piles of bricks lay on the floor. All was quiet.

I thought it was over, but as soon as I got close to my room, three bricks shot through with a roar. One hit the shoulder of a police officer standing in the doorway, clearing him from the path. Two others flew down the hallway toward me. I managed to shield myself with my arms; the bricks left a couple of painful bruises.

The officers ran outside to look for the vandals, promising to call for backup.

I sat in the kitchen. The others, realizing the bricks were targeting only me, boldly went to the window. After a while, I heard shouts of surprise. Neighbors ran up, loudly discussing the scene: apparently, beyond the broken window, there was nothing of our neighborhood. It was completely dark, even though it was getting light outside. Everyone talked about it—except me. My head was splitting. There was clattering and swearing. Some local kids had thrown a brick at the balcony window, getting scolded, but that window, too, became a black void.

And from it, a brick immediately flew in a straight line to the kitchen. Luckily, it didn’t hit me—it struck the neighbor upstairs instead.

After a while, the police returned—about eight of them. Everyone peered out the windows, excitedly discussing the phenomenon. They looked at me with sympathy.

An ambulance arrived. The doctors examined me. Along with the ambulance came some other people. The police tried to drive them away, but they showed some documents and ended up dismissing the officers themselves.

While I was being carried to the ambulance, these people cleared everyone out of the apartment and hung iron grates on both terrifying windows.

They took me to the hospital. The doctors diagnosed a concussion.

I don’t know how long I slept—apparently, a long time. When I came to, I saw one of the strange people from before in my hospital room. He said he was from an organization dealing with this kind of hellish phenomena and questioned me extensively. I tried to answer as accurately as possible. When the questioning ended, he said they would take my windows. He pulled a canister from his pocket. I wanted to do something, but I was too weak. With a swift, confident motion, he sprayed some gas in my face…

More than two months had passed since the hooligans had broken into my home, beaten me up, wrecked my apartment, and shattered all the windows. The building now had brand-new windows, courtesy of a window company doing free replacements for vandalism victims as a form of advertising. I had more or less recovered and was looking forward to a pleasant weekend.

I was awakened by a terrible crash and the sound of breaking glass. Turning on the light, I searched for the source. One of the new windows was broken, and a brick lay on the floor.