At that moment, another officer came down the stairs carrying a third bag.

Detective Pincher, seeking to divert the painter’s attention, dramatically stood up, walked around the table, and lifted his cape like Béla Lugosi. His question lunged at the man. “Are you a writer, sir?”

Michael squirmed while the officer smashed his fingers into the paper. He assumed the police detective was referring to his journal on the table, which he 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 generally to canonize himself.” The man abruptly plopped a gloved thumb down on the tabletop with a 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, you strike me as something of an imposter.”

“An imposter?”

“I do not say this to be accusatory, sir, only to highlight the difficulty you present me as a case study.” He looked around at the sparsely furnished room. “I cannot connect you to the décor. Indeed, I cannot see you being easily domesticated in any setting.”

“I inherited this place,” Michael volunteered. “The furniture came with the house.”

“Ah!” Pincher exclaimed.

The painter winced when his finger was pricked for blood. The officer taking the sample cleared away his materials, though the inspector continued to loom.

“One more thing,” the detective announced. 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.”

The inspector stood the black tape box up on end. “Then you will 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 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 grinned weakly before gesticulating. “I bid 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 for a view into the next room, the inspector was nowhere to be seen. Several policemen were wandering around preparing to leave, but the theatrical man had vanished like Houdini. Within seconds all the officers and their equipment were gathered up and gone. Michael got up to close the front door, half-expecting to see a 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 punctiliously replaced the contents as they found them. With that thought, he opened the medicine cabinet.

His unmarked sleeping pills were untouched.

Michael gravitated up to his studio to sulk. This part of the house, like the bedroom, initially showed no evidence of disruption. Yet on peering at the shelf where the mysterious suitcase had lain, he was dumbfounded to find it removed; 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 a point of asking to borrow the videotape.

The painter was necessarily upset by the 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 fragmented female torso, and its presentation might conceivably alarm anyone inclined to be suspicious of the painter’s character. As depicted, the right arm of the torso bowed outward along the ribcage to reveal a large disembodied eye in the gap. Torn skin at the crease of the buttocks opened to expose a snarling mouth running down to the shoulder blades, where, nestled in black, purplish lips, a flayed body 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 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 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 proof he did not invent 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 highlighted the painting’s continuing enigma, as well as the enigma of its creator.

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 a joke, but the words I Love You were written in pencil in the lower left hand corner of Brae’s drawing. Had the painter failed to notice the inscription? Had the inquisitive detective failed to mention it? Both possibilities seemed unlikely. The uneven letters 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 were 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 from 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.