Another officer was just then coming down the stairs carrying another bag. Detective Pincher, seeking to divert the painter’s gaze, dramatically stood up and walked around the table, lifting his cape like Béla Lugosi to block the view. “Are you a writer, Mr. Louden-West?” he asked.

Michael squirmed as the officer smashed his fingers into the paper. He assumed the police detective was referring to his journal on the table, which he had brought in from the car. “Well…” he hemmed.

“Fiction?”

“It started as fiction. But now it’s a memoir… mostly.”

“It usually works the other way round,” Pincher observed. “When an artist turns to writing his autobiography, it is usually to canonize himself.” The man promptly plopped a gloved thumb down on the tabletop with a menacing scowl and squashed what appeared to be a flea. He said nothing of it on withdrawing his hand. “First impressions being what they are, Mr. Louden-West, I would gather, going by your conservative dress and manner, and by the furnished décor in this house you assumed more than brought with you, that you are something of an imposter.”

The bewildered painter looked up, wincing as his finger was pricked for blood. The officer taking the sample got up to clear away his stuff, though the inspector continued to loom.

“One more thing, sir,” the detective continued. A videocassette was produced from beneath the flowing cloak and set on the table with a tap. “Is this tape connected to the video equipment in your upstairs closet?”

Not knowing the contents of the videocassette, Michael turned pale. He explained, “I filmed myself sleeping last night to see if I was sleepwalking.”

“I see.” The inspector stood the black tape box up on its end. “Then you would have no objections about us borrowing this?”

The painter’s nod went wobbly.

The dark detective’s friendlier tone took on a sudden note of severity. “We are not taking you into custody at this time, Mr. Louden-West. Our concern here, given what you have told us about your sleepwalking, is you cannot account for your movements last night. I am giving you the benefit of a doubt until a preponderance of evidence leads me to think otherwise.” Picking up the tape, he circled the table with stiff formality, adding, “I do, however, have one last request to make of you: that you not leave town without telling us.”

Michael said nothing to this point.

“We are about finished, as it is,” the detective said with a grin. “I bide you good evening, sir. Good evening.”

He stepped briskly into the next room with his cape fluttering behind him, prompting the officers in the kitchen to follow fast at his heels. When the tenant craned his head to peek into the next room, the inspector was nowhere to be seen. Several policemen were wandering around preparing to leave, but the caped man had vanished like Houdini. Within mere seconds all the officers and their equipment were gathered up and gone. Michael got up to close the front door, half-expecting to see some straggler making for it in a dash, but the house was completely empty. He ran upstairs to find the bedroom still intact. If the police went through his wastebaskets, then they had punctiliously replaced the contents as they found them. With that thought, he opened the medicine cabinet.

His sleeping pills were still there.

Michael gravitated up to his studio to sulk. This part of the house, like the bedroom, initially showed no evidence of disruption. Yet on glancing at the shelf where the mysterious suitcase had been laid, he was dumbfounded to find it gone. All the stray schematics in the floor were likewise missing. It seemed improbable the police would seize the suitcase and its contents as evidence of anything; and doubly improbable they would simply take them after the detective made such a point of asking to borrow the videotape.

The painter was necessarily upset by the detective’s intrusion. Pincher’s unsolicited critique of his work was especially galling. It was in these rare moments when someone bothered to have an opinion of his art Michael rose to its defense.

His latest painted monster was based on a reclining female torso. The right arm bowed outward along the ribcage to reveal a large dark eye in the gap. The crack at the buttocks opened to expose a snarling mouth running all the way down to the shoulder blades. Nestled in the black, purplish lips was the flayed female body that gave the creature its form. Muscles glistened in glazes of perylene red and manganese blue, and taken together they made the carcass resemble a bloated tongue cradled between large, wet teeth.

The painting was unusually illustrative for the usually abstruse artist. It tied into a recurrent oral fixation in his dreams, where, like glue in his mouth or crumbling teeth in his gums, he could neither ingest nor articulate a desire. Generally his representations of the female body were more totemistic assemblage than whole individuals, which left some women in art school to initially label him as a misogynist. This painting would also be open to that unimaginative charge, but Michael’s aims truly originated from a different impulse. For him, perception was something he was constantly trying to tear through in his tumultuous work, though it was the female body, most particularly, that stood between him and his goal. As symbol or object, it kept him shackled to the representational world of things: to the very realm that gave expression to all his anxieties and phobias. He could only just endure to paint it flying apart at the seams.

After about forty minutes of pacing and venting a defense of his work, Michael turned to his studio door to leave. In his haste he almost missed a piece of paper stuck behind a utility cabinet. It appeared to be a stray schematic from the suitcase, and was at least proof he had not invented seeing them in a dream. He went over to un-snag the drawing and examined it carefully. To his surprise, it was a diagram of a box similar to the one in the hall painting. He had no idea whether the blueprint was the inspiration for the artwork, or whether the box had actually been built, but the schematic provided no clear purpose for the contraption. Cryptic instructions, however, hinted at some practical use:

To restart, reset breaker.

The coincidence of the black box showing up on a random drawing only highlighted the painting’s continuing enigma, as well as the enigma of its creator.

Just then, creaking on the dark steps outside the studio sent Michael hurriedly to the wall plate. He switched on the light for the landing, but knew the disturbance was too soft to be the tread of a man. Needing distraction, the jumpy resident was of the mind to go on campus and find out more about his haunted house’s architect. He passed quickly through the kitchen on his way to the backdoor, though faltered at the refrigerator. At first he thought it was joke, but the words I Love You were written in pencil in the lower left hand corner of Brae’s drawing. They surely were not there when Pincher brought up the sketch earlier in conversation. (The inquisitive detective would have doubtless mentioned it.) The uneven characters were exaggerated on the upstroke, as if the person making them strained on tiptoe to maintain contact with the paper. Equally unnerving, the fine lines appeared to have been made with a hard-tipped pencil—not unlike the H2 pencil from his journal sitting on the kitchen table. Was it possible someone else was still in the house? Was it possible someone could hide well enough in some secret place to evade detection, even by the police?

The anxious man spoke his hope aloud. “Brae…? Are you here?”

The dark house beyond the kitchen did not answer.

Michael grabbed his jacket and set off for campus.