The empty beer bottle hit the bottom of the stairs. Its shattering defined the outer edge of an event, as did the distant scream of a child. Unaware he had been asleep, Michael glanced at the flashing twelve on his clock. He tried to close his eyes again, but light from the open doorway caught in his lashes like splinters.
The lamp downstairs was trying to come back on.
The Daedalus Monet painting, now residing against the baseboard in the hall floor, was fixed in the intermittent pulses of illumination. The resident threw off his covers with newfound sobriety just when the living room lamp again surrendered to darkness.
He crept over to the doorway and discovered, to his dismay, glass shards underfoot. The unfastened attic door was creaking from a cold draft above, leading him to guess a gust from the open skylight shot down to knock the picture off the wall. He braved the second staircase and turned on his studio light. A punch of chilled air greeted him with more lamentable news. Loose schematics—drawings unknown to him—blew over the floor. The found suitcase had toppled from the edge of the worktable to unleash a whirlwind of ashes and papers. Michael hurriedly closed the skylight and examined the spilled contents. Charred pieces of old canvases were black with soot and readily crumbled in his hands. What remained together of a twine-bound stack of blueprints were tumbled from the lid compartment of the case. Given the original occupant of the house was a professor of design at the college, it was likely works of his, though why such documents of historical value to the school should be so casually mislaid was strange. Being too sleepy to deal with the mess, the tenant brushed off the bundle and put it back in the suitcase; the loose pages could wait until morning. A handful of cinders was heaped into the lower compartment in advance of fastening the lid, and the action unearthed a piece of unscorched paper materially different from the schematics. The handwriting was nevertheless the same:
Here sleeps Sublimity. The Eternal-Feminine. –Daedalus Monet
The peculiar proclamation was replaced with everything else and the lid clasped shut. The make-do urn was interred in an out-of-the-way corner of the studio before heading back to the door. On switching off the studio light, the anxious man glanced down the multiplying stairs to see the fickle lamplight once again flickering in the living room.
A faint voice accompanied it. “Hello…?”
The speaker was probably out in the courtyard, but this deduction notwithstanding, no temptation was strong enough to send the resident back downstairs to fuss with the lamp. He promptly returned to the bedroom. More out of fright than a precaution against sleepwalking, the chair was propped against the closed door and Michael crawled back into bed; the attitude of his body in the still-warm sheets made him feel like he never left the comfort of them.
Why would the prior resident keep remains of old paintings in a suitcase? he wondered.
His narrowing gaze stayed fixed to the slit under the door, where more light from downstairs danced. The irksome lamp eventually succumbed to the defect in its connection, and after a while this welcomed development reinforced the impression that whatever spirits had been afoot in the house were settled in for the night. The continuing silence eased him back to the edge of sleep, and the surrounding shadows, hesitant at first, began to drift in and out of his failing eyes. Soon there was nothing to stop his descent…
Nothing except the elusive image on the TV set.
An idle thought occurred to him: a correlation between what had pursued him in his earlier dream and what was buried in the television’s snow. Michael turned on the bed to escape the specter, not wanting one bad dream to provide the spine for another. A rattle of the loose glass doorknob pulled him cringing up on the mattress, but what might have been a bump of fingers was most certainly another mischievous draft. Convinced the wind succeeded in prying open the studio skylight again, the man was determined to sink back into his semblance of sleep. Slow tumbling snowflakes, like hot white ash, continued to burrow deeper into the soft matter of his brain until, at last, something in his subconscious broke free: The image of a cocked mousetrap was now emblazoned in his mind as a picture on the television screen…
SNAP!
The loud cracking sound drew Michael back to the threshold of consciousness. A mousetrap under the bed had tripped.
Clickety-clack! Clickety-clack! Clickety-clack!
The pitiful creature’s agony was insufferable to endure.
Clickety-clack! Clickety-clack! Clickety-clack!
There appeared to be no end to the horrid torment as trap and mouse flipped and flopped over the floorboards.
Clickety-clack! Clickety-clack! Clickety-clack!
Then—with lightning speed—the noise intensified.
CLICKETY-CLACK! CLICKETY-CLACK! CLICKETY-CLACK!
The rodent was abruptly huge—as big as a man—and tumbling violently against the bed frame and springs!
CLICKETY-CLACK! CLICKETY-CLACK! CLICKETY-CLACK!
Paralyzed, Michael's breathing was excruciatingly thin, not even deep enough for a cry…
Click.
The sleeper gazed up in a cold sweat to find the noisy camcorder rewound and shut itself off. He reached over, quaking to the core, and switched on the lamp. After a few tense seconds he assured himself it had only been another terrifying nightmare. He climbed to his feet to stir the oxygen in his brain, and then, with trepidation, peeked out his bedroom door. The hallway was dark; no breeze was coming off the second flight of stairs. He mustered courage to venture back downstairs and unplug the sofa lamp. With no wish to provoke his ghosts beyond this he scampered back to the bedroom and prudently returned the chair to the door. A quick check under the bed skirt revealed the mousetrap had indeed tripped—though with no mouse in its teeth. This put him in the closet running his fingers over the nail heads of the mirrored panel. The secret door he sealed that morning was secure, although this did not preclude another way in or out of the room. The trembling man glanced at his reflection in the murky glass, but it was too much like staring out a lit window—too much like soliciting a returned gaze. Inexplicably, he placed an ear against the wood frame, as to hear what he had no will to see. The timbers in the hidden corridor sighed heavily with another faint voice.
“Hello…?”
Michael backed away with a shudder. Something was in the house—something capable of throwing a voice and making it sound deceptively far away. Maybe it was a creature that did not understand its utterance beyond an act of mimicry, beyond the gull of a snare. Wanting to scare off what he could not reason with, he pressed his lips to the mirror and began growling in a low, animal way, as though the childish defense would wake him. “Gr-r-r-r…! Gr-r-r-r…!” He could not blink his eyes—could not even see himself for the wide, unblinking stare in the glass. Placing his fingers over his sockets, and then over his groaning mouth, there was no telling if he was touching his face or the features of a frightful mask. Was he simply witnessing something on the other side of the door that read his thoughts and acted them out?
“I am asleep,” he mumbled aloud, yet did not see his mouth move. “I am asleep,” he said again to the wide, unblinking stare.
Exposed, vulnerable—Michael was too long seen in the light. The bed lamp was turned off and he dove back under the covers. A darker silence laid siege to the house in absence of the camcorder’s purr. Daybreak could have been no more than an hour away, but there was no evidence of it in the window curtains. The sky over his fitful bed was black and shallow, and his fear shrank down to the size of a child to share his pillow.
“Hello…?” the voice called from somewhere.
He was dreaming. He was still dreaming…
More thready light, like a flashlight, appeared under the doorjamb. “Hello...? Are you in there...?” The words muffled against the door face with a push. “Hello…?”
The spindly shadow of the wedged chair did not scoot with the shove but eerily levitated to the ceiling, where it spidered like ink over the bed. Michael dared not look at the outline, for he already knew someone was in the room with him—someone sitting in the chair. Flailing, he reached for the lamp on his nightstand; the light clicked on just before the lamp spun off the table with a crash. The cracked face of a woman swallowed the ceiling! Her black eyes billowed to catch the dying-away filament in the bulb…
“G I V E M E T H E C H I L D !”
The scorching words ejected him violently from the bed, leaving him looking at the clock—not the bed lamp—in the floor beside him; it was still flashing twelve. A blinding light now flooded the room, as if the giant uncovered the house in a flash.
A dark figure standing in the bedroom doorway spoke. “I need you downstairs.”
Michael squinted up in the glare of full daylight. The dislodged chair was now pushed against the wall. He gasped to understand it. “Wha…?”
The policeman was insistent. “Hello, Mr. West, I need you downstairs.”
PART II: Chapter Eight/ Back/ Contents Page
Copyright © 2007 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.