He fumbled for the receiver over the arm of a sofa. “Hello?”

“Michael. It’s me.”

Rain was roaring outside; the groggy man hoisted himself out of it. “Emma?”

She explained with clinched breaths. “I’m calling you from my cell phone in my room.”

“Why?”

“I’m terrified to move,” she explained. “I think I hear my dress dummy moving under my bed.”

“You're hearing what?”

“Will you bring the pumpkin back here, please?” she pleaded.

Michael looked over at the dark jack-o-lantern outlined against the window curtains; a faint trace of vanilla still clung to the chilled air. “Of course,” he answered. “I’ll bring it.”

Click.

Punchy, the houseguest moved over to fetch the pumpkin and navigated the dark hallway; a pop of lightning placed door molding at his shoulder.

She called out from the half-seen bed. “Matches are in my purse on the dresser.”

Michael bumped the edge of the dresser to feel the strap of her bag. On setting the lantern down, he rummaged through Kleenex and lipstick dispensers in the bottom of the purse to locate a matchbook. A paper match was torn off and struck. The nearly spent candle resembled a cookie in the hollowed-out gourd, yet enough wick remained to rekindle a flame. On extinguishing the match, he turned back to see Emma shedding her covers. Candlelight pierced her gauzy negligee to reveal an unclad body underneath. She cinched the evocative folds at her chest and scrunched with delayed modesty; Michael averted his eyes while she scampered into a robe.

“I need you to help me move my mannequin upstairs to the attic,” she said.

“You’re moving it because of a bad dream?”

Her declaration was dour. “That movie scared me out of my wits.”

“Then you watched the film?”

“Half of it,” she admitted.

He was contrite. “I’m sorry I fell asleep.”

She gestured over the side of the mattress. “You’ll see it under the skirt.”

Michael got down on his knees to fish out a life-size nude mannequin from among the dust bunnies. It was made out of plaster, so had weight. The skittish woman was already moving toward her door with the jack-o-lantern tucked under her bosom. Turning on her flip-flops, he carried the cumbersome object out into the hallway, though managed a gentlemanly grip on the protruding anatomy. Emma stood at a wall where a purplish sari hung, and on reaching under it turned a doorknob to rouse a draft in a connecting passageway.

“Through here,” she explained, pulling away the fabric for him to pass under.

The door at his knee opened with a stutter and his guide circled in front of him. Fluttering light leapt up to set off a billowy, floor-to-ceiling maze of spider webs. They hung in veils over a narrow staircase that led straight up two floors to an attic door. Having failed more than one test of manhood that day, Michael was determined to suffer his fear of heights and spiders silently.

Emma, with chin dipped in candle smoke, queried him with female calculation. “Will you be able to manage by yourself?”

“Yes.”

“The door’s open at the top, I believe.”

The steps were thick with dust from where shoes had not darkened them in some time. The resident crackled up them fearlessly. Once on the landing, she turned back to light the way. The mover was less concerned about scraping the floor in this unused common area, so opted to drag rather than tote the heavy dummy. With each grunt and pop of plaster against a step, there was notch to mark his progress. He tried not to look down through the stair staves, but the shallow, steep-pitched steps and scrawny handrail made it feel like he was crawling edgewise up a knife blade. Once he reached Emma, she scooted down the banister and pushed open the apartment door; it moaned before sticking on wizen floorboards. He squeezed in through the gap to see his shadow climb a peeling wall as the pumpkin was set at his feet.

“I’m going back to bed,” she announced. “Will you bring the lantern to my room when you’re finished?”

“Don’t you need light to see your way back down?”

“Thank you,” came her trailing-away gratitude from the dark staircase.

Michael took a minute to pull away cobwebs from his clothes. The switch in the bathroom yielded no additional light, and the faucet at the sink gurgled before a brief punch of aerated, rusty water shot out; the toilet was also bone-dry. Rain on the tar shingles could not muffle the rising sound of music and laughter coming from the only window. He ventured over to the sill and found a party in progress next door. All the drapes in the house were wide open, and costumed revelers in view posed and pawed in a manner consistent with liberal alcohol consumption. A splat of water flicked his shirt collar as he stood there. The low light painted everything over him in broad shadow, including a growing water spot on the ceiling; dribbles on the mannequin’s clavicle confirmed the steady drip. A chivalrous shove pushed the standing figure out of striking distance, and placed the party-gawker back at the window ledge. Slicing wind just then pushed between the two houses to scour the neighbors’ windows, and it was like lifting a curtain. Michael could not account for the impression he was being watch, but his eyes were drawn instinctively to a third floor window directly across from him and deep into the shifting darkness of a room. It was difficult to tell at first, but after a second or two he was certain he was looking at a woman in a sequined mermaid costume wearing a scuba mask. He could not tell if she was in an efficiency apartment, or if she was some partier who had strayed into an uninhabited part of the neighboring house. She tapped her foggy pane before drawing a little, squiggly heart with her finger. Fat drops of condensation trickled down to the sill as Michael's captive gaze traveled up…

The young woman was performing mock fellatio on her snorkel.

He meant to blink, but the exhibitionist pressed her full, uncovered breasts into the window in a dare; her nipples spread like pancake batter under the glass. She instantly ebbed away with another burst of rain, but then reappeared in her sliver of window light with the rally of more wind. A pulsing vein in Michael’s forehead throbbed against his own cold pane, for he could not believe what he was witnessing. With downy legs spread-eagle over the front of a wooden chair flushed to a door, the woman—now completely nude—was masturbating with him in her sights. Caught in intermediate flashes of lightning, her dark lips drifted over her dune-of-a-face as she articulated long vowels and prickly consonants; but the only thing heard was the faint voice of a man. The voyeur looked away from the unfettered performance on detecting jerky movement below him. Several masked merrymakers were at a window pointing up and laughing at him; he shriveled. The wind again changed direction, and the nebulous woman in his peripheral vision wriggled orgasmically with more dribbles down her window. Before he could look back, her arms and legs contorted in a inhuman way to send her scampering out of her seat and up onto the door face and dark wall! Michael swayed into a back step, but did not make contact with the floor…

It was not the woman he saw moving out of the corner of his eye, but a spider.

The yelping man began clawing at his hair—frantic to remove any cobwebs still clinging to his head. A large spider abruptly scurried away at his shoe, leaving him to rocket backwards over the pumpkin. Nothing more of the woman could be seen for the torrential rain, so without delay he retrieved his limping light from the floor and headed back to the stairwell. The shadow of the banister rail unfurled below him like a snake, and knots of toes were employed to probe the murk for steps. On reconnecting with the ground floor apartment, he crept up to Emma’s bedroom doorway to find her turned away sleeping on her bed. The pumpkin was placed on her dresser, and he returned to the front room. His head found the hard arm of the couch somewhere under his pillow, but it did little to blunt his sudden wakeful thoughts.

The downpour ebbed and flowed over his body, and somewhere in the ebbing bits of plaster could be heard tumbling down inside the dry wall; Michael roused to rejoin his prescient thoughts. The room was still buttoned down under the storm, but his impression was one of movement overhead. It left him to fall behind. Another scuff arose closer the surface of his consciousness. A piece of furniture was being dragged for some inconceivable distance in the attic apartment. He stirred out of the backend of it, yet seconds or minutes later.

“Michael. Wake up.”

Emma was bending over him, fragrant in shadow. His rasp stabbed at the cloth belt of her robe. “Something wrong?”

She whispered close. “Someone’s in the house. I think I here them upstairs.”

“The mannequin?” he ventured torpidly.

“Mannequin…?” she repeated.

“The one you called me to move.”

“Michael,” she quietly explained. “How can I call you? The ringer on my phone is turned off.”

He sat up on the sofa, confused.

She moved over to the window table where the pumpkin still sat and relit the candle.

“Turn on the light,” he told her.

She looked back, singed in silhouette. “If someone’s in the house, we have to be careful.” The spent match was dropped in an ashtray. “There’s mud in the hall,” she added urgently, “and footprints leading up to my bedroom door.”

“Those are probably my prints from when we came in…”

“It’s him,” she interrupted. “The creep from the mound.”

Michael glanced over at the front door. “But I’m a light sleeper. A prowler would have to walk by me on the couch.”

“He came in through the upstairs apartment.”

“Oh?”

She pulled the terrycloth robe tighter around her, shuddering. “The door at the end of my hallway is open.”

He stood up and joined her in the exaggerated shadows. “That may have been me, too.”

“What?”

“I’m a sleepwalker,” he confessed. “I may have been up in your attic.”

“But how would you know about the hidden door?”

Having no good answer, Michael grabbed the jack-o-lantern off the table, mindful not to jostle the precarious flame. “I should check it out.”

Emma trembled at the thought. “It might be dangerous.”

The light lunged ahead of him as he turned toward the hall. “If it was me up there, I will know soon enough.”

The jittery resident stepped aside to watch her guest walk down to the fluttering sari. With pumpkin clutched to his chest, he ducked under the drapery and into the corridor. No dusty tracks, plaster marks, or cobwebs were on the stairs this time, though, strangely, a set of wet footprints led down from the top. With ersatz bravery, he followed the current of air. His foot arrested the creaking attic door, and on peeking past it he found no mannequin against the window. A growing water puddle was on the floor, yet there was no water spot on the ceiling. Baffled, Michael returned to the window ledge to look down on a neighboring party. He could not say it was the same house, or even the same party. The draft continued to chase his candlelight with a cold thumb, so he set the pumpkin on the floor to note the direction of the yielding flame. The disturbed shadows on the wall revealed the torn edge of a papered-over doorframe across from him, as well as a socket depression from where a doorknob had been removed. Punching a hole in the latter, the door readily gave with a crack of brittle paper and puff of dried paste, and on finally being liberated the draft jumped out of a second stairwell to pounce harder on the candle. Michael peered down the steps of a private entrance thick with cobwebs.

The directions were surely jumbled in his mind. The spider webs he had supposed to be on the central staircase were here, instead. He did not recall the puddle being on the floor earlier, but the wet prints he crossed over were conceivably his. Did he leave the house and return this way with soaking feet? Was he, in fact, still sleepwalking?

Michael looked down the second set of stairs in search of more wet tracks, but the light was too poor to see. With the blackness in the well threatening to devour the room behind him, he resealed the passageway and returned the way he came.

Emma was still standing in her hallway. “No one up there?”

“No one,” he mumbled.

“Maybe it was you I heard in the hallway, then.”

“Maybe.”

“The candle’s almost gone,” she observed, “and I want to keep an eye on you.” She moved to her bed and turned down the comforter. “Besides,” she added quietly, “I’m too scared to sleep by myself now.”

Michael stayed in the doorway; the floor creaked under his feet with unintended graveness.

“Put the jack-o-lantern on the dresser,” she said.

He complied with misgiving. “I may still sleepwalk.”

Emma was already dragging a chair over to the door with a plan. On wedging its top slat under the glass doorknob, she explained, “If you move the chair, it will wake me.” She circled confidently back to the bed to take off her housecoat; the sheer silk of her nightgown sifted down over her bare doughy skin like a dusting of white flour. She did not cover herself this time, but squared her body with his on the other side of the room.

Averting his eyes, Michael noted the mannequin’s red-nailed finger poking out from under the bed skirt, but it hardly convinced him he was awake.

“Come,” she commanded, patting the bed before crawling into it.

The guest leaned in the direction of her thump. When his knee grazed the edge of the mattress, he followed her under the cover without further prompting to face the door.

“What are you thinking?” she whispered behind him.

He could feel her hipbone sinking beneath them in the mattress, but the hole would never be deep enough to drain away his inhibitions. “I can only fall asleep on my right side,” he said.

She turned away; her soft voice echoed off the wall on her side of the bed. “Goodnight.”

He thought to say goodnight, but left it too late.

The candlelight soon snuck away to the footboard, and then, in plunging over it, was gone. He wanted to believe they had dropped back down into slumber together, but the rods in his eyes were less sluggish, less resigned to follow the settling shadows into incoherency.

Emma’s breath was hot on his face. “What are you thinking?”

She looked back from the divide, though he found only vacuity in the gaze, like he could see straight into the back of her head. He knew a pair of eyes in sockets lay in his line of sight, though in such concentrated exchanges he could never locate them. They were, for all intents and purposes, hidden in the room.

“What are you thinking?” she asked again.

The question tightened like a garrote around his neck, raising the shallow silence between them to a deafening pitch. “That I’m on my left side,” he answered.

Her hand enfolded his; she rephrased. “What we’re you thinking when you were spying on me?”

Michael reopened his eyes, thinking them already open. He was under the impression he had been facing Emma on the bed, but he was still turned to the door. Lightning in the curtains revealed a different configuration of shadows in the room. The chair had slid down the door face to land flat on the floor. Equally unsettling, his face still tingled from a keen gaze, and his curled fingers, possessed with the thought of a grip, dipped into the ominous black current around the bed. He sat up to lean cautiously into Emma's shadow. She was now turned into his back, though he could not tell if her eyes were open or shut. Bedding worked like a counterweight against his body, but once on his feet, the certain stare followed him to the door. The chair was righted and he cast a glance back at the bed. If Emma was awake and watching him move the chair, wouldn’t she speak up? She had asked him a question he had not answered, yet in searching her dark face he could unearth no clue as to how to reply. Crawling back into bed, he confronted her half-stamped expression from his pillow; yet knew her eyes—her staring eyes—were not in front of him.

Lightning instantly flashed over the bed to reveal Emma was fast asleep.

Something was already congealed in the vitreous of his eye, only it was a slamming trapdoor he was late to see. With double-jointed limbs arrayed around her in a way that pushed straight down into his innermost fear, the grinning mannequin was planted on the ceiling over the bed. Her bulbous, dangling breasts—like unblinking decoy eyes on an insect’s back—were fixed on his every bat of eyelash. A plop of moisture dropped to strike his hip. The unexpected warmth of it loosened his abdominal muscles in the manner of a prey animal surrendering to a predator’s jaws. A flecked lasso of yellow-green began to trickle down from her spider’s lair—at first yielding like a contour of skin before spreading in a fire over his body. His slackening arm floated up to escape the incineration—the drowning…

Emma groaned with the nudge.

The next clap of lightning was inevitable, though an insufferable eternity in coming; a table lamp shot on across from him.

Emma squinted at him crustily from under her covers. “What’s the matter?”

Only the motionless blades of a ceiling fan pinned him to the mattress. He was etched in the acid glare. “The roof is leaking,” he whimpered.

A hard look turned up a dripping ring of discolored plaster around the base of the fan. The resident retreated under her housecoat. “But it’s hardly raining outside now!” Seeing his state, she dropped to her feet and came around to his side of the bed; Michael clambered up the skyscraping line of her into a soberer orientation.

Emma’s words were crisp in the bedding. “I don’t think it penetrated the mattress liner.” She unlatched the fitted sheet and turned back with a bundle in her arms to speak plainly. “You need to get out of those wet things.”

Michael looked down at his pants with mortification.

“Now would be good,” she said.

He fetched about nervously. “Maybe I should go home.”

She reproached him. “Don’t be silly, Michael. I need to put your clothes in the dryer. Take them off in the bathroom if you’re so modest.”

He squeaked, “Do you have anything I can put on?”

She assuaged his panic from the hall. “I have some flannel pajamas.”