Water, out of sync with what was on the terrace, gushed from a sink in a bathroom. A length of loosened rope snaked around the bedposts and down over a mattress half in the floor. The intruder stumbled backwards, toppling a waste can at his calf. Wet, wadded-up newspaper flopped out to scatter dozens of used condoms, like slithering baitworms, over the low-pile rug. Snatches of a headline blurred in the onion-skinned layers of paper, and conveyed something jagged. Popping rain flicked at his pants cuffs to urge him down the metal stairs outside, though once in his car he could only sulk. Light from the blue neon moon dribbled down his windshield like a molested iris, prompting him to linger over the half-turned ignition key.

It was a tortured bit of melodrama on his part: his leaving her that morning when it was clear she did not want him to leave. In truth, she could be forgiven for construing his absence as a form of punishment, or abandonment, or both. A bigger man, a man with less pride, would have stuck it out with her in her hour of need. But it was a weaker man who did not act, and it was a foolish man who left her to seek solace in another man’s arms. He was a thirty-six year-old smarting over a younger woman in a way that was as predictable as it was pitiful. His conflict was more nuanced than it had been in his twenties, but it was made no more reasonable.

Amber, shielded by an umbrella, soon descended the steps with the suitcase. Behind the wheel of a Lexus, she intuited her way off the splashing lot; Michael followed in her wake. The road forward captured his frayed nerves. Rain fell in staggered sheets like rows of sharks’ teeth. Leafless trees were blasted down to their roots in the savagery, and mist-like smoke, thrown up in the thrashing, ringed the road. His gaze stayed fixed on Amber’s unblinking taillights, and as the rain closed like a cloak around his car, he observed her from a hunter’s blind, toying with what had passed for confession between prostitute and client.

Michael was desensitized to his feelings most of the time, and it was only when these feelings were rarified or intense he could contemplate them as distinct things. When it came to women, he either had too much emotion or too little. As a matter of course, this required an academic understanding of his emotions. He not only needed to “understand” what he felt, but also how to process the emotional expectations of others when his feelings were inadequate to illuminate a vested interest in an outcome. This made him duty-bound to the idea of fidelity in principle, though mostly absentee in spirit.

Orange flares emerged ahead, and then the flashing light of a service truck on the shoulder. A billboard for Peek-a-boo Putt-Putt had fallen in the squall to bring down phone lines. Workmen were using a winch to hoist the obstruction and clear the highway, which allowed Amber to squeeze through the bottleneck before him. When he reached the place where the old and new highway forked, he had no idea whether she turned toward Stonesthrow or back toward Chicago.

Despite the sudden onset of the storm, the rain mostly subsided once Michael crossed back into town. He parked his car at the house, but did not go inside. A thornier drizzle pushed him up the block. Toothy jack-o-lanterns poked out from porches on either side of the glistening street to stitch together tumbled-down yards and buckled sidewalks. Runoff made shadows pitch and yaw under his feet, as if puddles of bluish-brown pigment were being blown away over rough paper. The scene was reminiscent of a Charles Burchfield’s watercolor, where ghostly houses moan with loose shutters, and every window is a haunted eye looked out of in loneliness. Halfway to top of a hill, he paused on hearing sloshing behind him. The incline put whatever he was trying to see below his line-of-sight, although his sense was of a skulking dog weaving in and out of shrubbery. With higher elevation, Michael spied the glint of a wet rope strung taunt between trees. It was being used in a bizarre pulley configuration, and was reminiscent of the workers’ winch. He could not say who was pulling on it, or what it was tied to, but the sound on the dragging end was of something disobligingly heavy.

He kept to his walk.

The anxious man soon arrived at his destination. He hurried to past a dark bay window, yet pulled up on glimpsing someone through open drapes. The woman of the house was seated in a chair, though not facing him but another window. She perhaps waited on the return of her unfaithful husband. Without compunction, Michael stepped to the side of the residence less exposed to the street. Divots from Emma’s mismatched heels were still turned up in the soft earth around the rear door where they made their dramatic exit. Steps shot up from the weedy threshold into utter blackness, but the stranglehold was no deterrent in him dashing up to the door at the top. Face to face with a studio he had only passed through in haste, Michael probed for a light switch. His impulse was to trash the place, but on seeing Seth Bowles’ canvases arise in the glow, he was caught off-guard in his reaction. The paintings were strangely covered in coats of crystalline black paint. They reminded him of the work of the minimalist abstract artist, Ad Reinhardt, though without the subtle differentiations in shading. The trespasser was flummoxed, for he could not connect the boilerplate abstracts in front of him to the artist who painted the nude portrait downstairs. A pink and green Japanese screen set off a corner; an unlatched lockbox, filled with unmarked videocassettes, lay under a camcorder and tripod behind it.

Michael did another turn around the room, finally pushing into the hallway to slide along the banister. He could see nothing of the recalled painting from downstairs, though glimpsed the chair where the woman had been sitting at the window. The intruder froze, thinking the resident was aware of his presence in the house; but her walking cane was still downstairs on the handrail. He turned to face the room where Emma had spirited him away from the party. A keyhole gleamed that, seconds earlier, was not visible. It seemed impossible that the housebound woman, without her crane, retreated upstairs to hide. Michael eased backward, waiting for the door to fly open. Instead, a phone rang. But only once. No audible response to the call was heard from the hallway, though, in glancing across at a dark table, an extension presented an opportunity to eavesdrop. The curious prowler lifted the phone to his ear, stumbling into a hushed conversation between a man and a woman.

“It’s getting hard to hide the fact that you’ve made a complete recovery,” the male voice explained.

“But I still need therapy,” she cooed, “I still need your visits.”

There was a pause. “As the number of my visits has increased, it is clear you need them less and less. Your husband is bound to get suspicious. I could lose my license.”

“No one knows what we do in this empty house,” she insisted. “We can open all the blinds and turn on all the lights. Scream our heads off.”

“Are you sure of that?” he asked pointedly. “Are you sure we’re alone?”

“No one can hear us!” she yelled. “No one can see us!”

Michael placed his hand over the earpiece, listening intently for the woman’s cry somewhere in the house.

There was only silence.

He quietly set the receiver on the hook.

Unhurried, he returned to the studio to pass one painting he earlier missed; a red velvet cloth had concealed it from detection. The fabric was lifted with anticipation, and to his amazement he unearthed a meticulously rendered portrait of a beautiful woman. The fellow painter’s admiration was short-lived, however, for in realizing it was Seth’s wife as a young woman, he picked up a utility knife from a worktable and slashed the canvas to pieces. Still seething—and indifferent to his desecration—, the home invader fell back through the narrow escape and down the stairs. He punched the door at the bottom and stomped out into a quadrille of dead leaves.

A distraught Michael cut the shortest path back home and passed between houses to enter the Quadrangle. He did not intend to do so, but found himself coming upon Brae’s bedroom window. Police had removed the cut wire screen, but the eerie opaqueness of the dusted pane held him a second longer. More leaves danced behind him, though more like footsteps and a cold stare peering over his shoulder.

On stepping into his house, the grind of the camcorder was heard from the bottom of the stairs; it was inadvertently left on. A loud splat greeted him at the bedroom doorway. The lamp was flipped on to reveal a dark water spot spreading outward from the ceiling light fixture; a second bigger spot was on the bedspread.

He stared up with wan expression. “How can this be? How can I be asleep?”

As he waited for the second shoe to drop, giving floorboards in the attic groaned from the vicinity of the leak; the oscillating pitch was consistent with shifting weight. The confounded man rushed out into the hallway and, against sounder judgment, flew up the second flight of stairs. Rainwater from the open skylight formed puddles between peaks of paint on his glass palette, but there was nothing in the floor. No less anxious about it, he returned to the bedroom. Both pieces of the sleeping tablet were still lying on the basin in the bathroom where he left them.

“The antihistamine,” he mumbled. “The antacid…” These were the triggers.

Neither knife blade nor marble had dropped on account of him precipitously extinguishing the candle on the nightstand, so the wick was promptly lit to restart the clock, and the lamp switched off. In the transition from bulb to flame, tallow shadows were sluggish slipping into unfamiliar grooves. The snapping flame directed his attention to a notepad on the same table, where a line of handwritten text relayed:

Without you, I am nothing.

Michael, sensing movement above him, raised his sights. What was assumed to be a water spot on the ceiling was now a shadow, one somehow being cast from below by the candle. Yet the diffused form—resembling the foreshortened silhouette of a man—undulated out of time with the flame. Cringing, the painter picked up on a second shadow between the bedposts at the footboard. When he dared to look, the ghastly reflection of Jacques Cretier stared back at him from the dresser mirror. The grey dwarf creaked at the end of a rope tied to the ceiling light; urine dribbled down briefs slouching at his knees to splatter on the spread.

“J-Jesus!” Michael stuttered, swinging out to strike the lampshade. He backed into the tripod and man and contraption fell banging to the floor. “Goddamn it!” he cried.

Jacques was no longer in the mirror. The shadow was no longer on the ceiling. The note, however, was still beside the lamp, though the writing was surely not his. Wisped ringlets of hot vanilla off the candle were late bringing the ceramic plate to his attention.

Both marble and razorblade were now lying in it.