The one who knocks

".......Some good friends screaming, let me out......"
Bowie crooned and Freddie screamed in Armin's ears as he lay on his rooftop, staring into the full moon, it's bright and beautiful face filled with pits, like a teenage girl marred with acne. The night was cloudless and the sky was splattered with star, as if a mad painter had stabbed into a canvas with a needle sharp rapier. The wind blew softly, jazzing through the leaves of the forest, crawlin through the well tamed grass that led up to Armin's little house.

Armin got up, and stretched like a cat, groaning as his muscles contracted and bones popped. He looked blearly at the few dim lights still shining in the village over the creek. It had been an year since he moved onto this secluded mountain of Muchuchishi. Armin was young, not even twenty. Yet his hair were more grey than black, and more often than not he woke up with a irritating pain in his back and a dull, pulsing headache. It was one of the reasons he had left the city after the loss of his family. He preffered the silence and sometimes, music.

Stumbling and dragging his bum leg, Armin reached for his stick which was propped against the short wall of his roof. Grasping onto it for dear life, he walked down the stairs into the drawing room below. The lower floor had no windows, a drawing room, a bathroom and two other rooms and a kitchen, none of which had any doors. The kitchen had a couple of utensils, and the "bedroom" was only recognizable by the lonely mattress lying on the floor. There was a fridge in the kitchen, from which Armin popped open a soda, and sat down on the floor to drink it. Only one left, he thought. The shopkeeper's boy was supposed to drop more by today, but he hadn't come, for some reason. He took a sip, and then tilted his head back, resting it on the cold, plastered wall and sighed. Life, it seemed, was on a path of slow but inevitable decay.

A couple of years ago, he would've never have thought that he would be living like a hermit in the middle of nowhere right at the time he was supposed to be going to college. He still had those moments of passion, when the young man inside him reared his head and screamed at the decrepit and dead state of his body and mind, demanded to feel the rush of adrenaline again, of friends and fun and purpose. Sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he could look at himself, chained and screaming. Then the moment passed, the spark in his eyes faded back to the dumb serenity of a cow, mooing its life away.

Armin was voilently shaken from his reverie as someone hammered at his front door. As if on cue, his hand started shaking and his heart started thumping in his chest, his intestines turned into lead. A myriad of thoughts, each more ridiculous than the past, paraded through his head. "Who could it be? Maybe someone has come to rob me, seeing the lonely house far from all humanity. No, no. That's ridiculous. Everyone at the village knows I have nothing, and no stranger is stupid enough to come out into this loneliness at this time of night-"
"Er, hello? I can hear you. Are you talking to yourself?", a muffled and vaguely cheery voice called from outside. Armin realized that he had been talking out loud, and at once rushed towards the door, tripping and falling face first on the floor in his hurry to open the door. The rough floor was not merciful, he found out as blood flowed out of his cut lip. Cursing everything and nothing, he got up and made it to the door. His head was hurting and the inexplicable anger in his body made him forget he was a cripple. He pulled the door open with all his might, and nearly unhinged his arm as he had forgotten to unlock it first. There were tears in his eyes. He leaned forward, and rested his head on the door, breathing raggedly. Then, slowly, deliberately, he straightened and unlocked the door, pulling it open.

"IT'S ME!!!", the short, bouncy little man shouted. The spit flying from his mouth hit Armin squarely in the eyeball, and he recoiled, rubbing his eye. By the time he opened his eyes, there was no one infront of him. "Jesus-" Armin exclaimed, as the man imitated a Indian warcry behind him near his ear, and then proceeded to laugh as if it was the funniest thing in the world. "Never gets old, does it?" He hopped away to the refrigator and opened it, bending over and making a show of sticking his butt out as hummed, browsing through the sparsely inhabited interior. Looking past the man's heft prosterior, Armin could see a perfectly round, cleanshaven face. Now that he had a chance to look properly, he noticed the man was wearing purple trousers and coat with a bright, colorful shirt, full of more types of flowers than Armin could name. In one hand was a bowler, and the other hand a little showman's stick. Simply said, a purple Charlie Chaplin.