Lover In The Shadows

Apparently she’d gone out, roaming in the night with that blood-speckled knife in her hand, returning to lock herself in behind her bolted doors and windows.

Or someone had come in.

And vanished, leaving her locked in?

Not possible.

Molly looked away from the knife. She understood she was going to have to do something. She wished she knew what.

Deep inside her, the fine edge of control was popping, shredding in audible snaps. She wouldn’t survive finding herself another time curled up on the floor. She knew that as well as she knew anything.

Turning back to the sink, she turned the water on more slowly this time and splashed her face and scrubbed her hands yet again while she sorted through her terror-blasted thoughts. Numb, scarcely aware of what she was doing, she lathered her hands over and over, soaping and scrubbing her nails, her palms, between her fingers, as she tried to reason through what had happened. Step by step, using logic to distance herself from the edge of the chasm, she considered the possibilities.

Thought was a barricade against the fears nibbling at the edge of her consciousness.

She could call the police. As much as she loathed the idea of seeing them in her house again, she probably should call them. But if she did, they’d think she was crazy.

Maybe she was. But she’d always heard if you thought you were crazy, you probably weren’t. Right now she wasn’t sure where that theory left her, aside from giving some perverse comfort. The police would do one of two things—either ignore her or laugh at her.

She couldn’t blame them. What, after all, was there for them to check out? Her knife? Her blood in its handle?

Her outstretched fingers shivered as she looked at them.

Of course it was her blood.

Unthinkable if it were not.

Frantically she searched her hands, looking for scratches on one hand, pressing the water-pruned skin, stretching it, looking between her fingers.

She sagged against the sink when she found the deep cut at the base of her right thumb. A gouge into the flesh. She touched it, felt the flap of skin. Obscene.

In her shock at finding herself once more on the kitchen floor, she hadn’t felt the dull throb of the gash in her hand. Hadn’t felt anything. Until now. As if she’d turned on a switch, her whole body ached.

Maybe she had been sleepwalking.

Drying her hands against her pajama bottoms and rubbing so hard against her leg she had to bite her lips against the pain, Molly tested that idea. The pain, real in its viciousness at the bottom of her thumb, was so alarming that she panicked to think she’d been sleepwalking, wandering upstairs, downstairs, all around the town…

“Stop it.” Her voice was startling in the quiet of the orderly kitchen, the single sound in all that humming silence.

She wouldn’t let herself lose control.

Molly took ten deep breaths. “Okay,” she said when she’d finished. Needing the reality of a human voice, even her own, she continued, “Okay. No one came in. Fact. Nobody could have.” Thinking, she shook her head slowly, and wet strands of hair slid across her chin. “Not past all those locks. And out? Leaving everything locked behind? Only a ghost, maybe. And there’s no such thing as ghosts. No such thing as the Bermuda Triangle.”

In spite of her weak attempt at humor, she shuddered again in the dim morning. She would have found greater comfort if she could forget all the people who did believe in the Triangle and ghosts. In the uncertain light of these moments between night and dawn, the idea of ghosts fluttering through her home wasn’t something she could cope with. Not after everything else. Ghosts who slipped through locked doors and windows. No, much better a real, tangible explanation for what was happening to her, no matter how terrifying.

That left sleepwalking.

But she didn’t have a history of sleepwalking.

She no longer dreamed.

Her breath came in wheezes. On TV she’d seen a report about the behavior people were capable of while in the grip of unconscious sleep.

The reporter had interviewed a woman who “woke up” over and over in her kitchen, eating, making sandwiches. Other people discovered themselves eating cigarette butts as if they were food. Nocturnal bingeing. People did strange things in the nighttime hours.

Murder, even.

A man had, supposedly, walked out of his house, driven to a relative’s home, strolled in and murdered the family.

While he was asleep.

Sleepwalking.

Madness.

Molly touched the wound on her hand.

Her blood.

She rubbed the spot over and over, trying not to think about alternatives.

Her blood.

He’d been watching her for a long time. Prowling around her house, moving silently along the gallery, watching her during the long nights. Now, he moved closer. It was time.

The small smack against the kitchen door shot Molly upright, her hands over her mouth.

A second smack. Purposeful.

She edged to the door. Worse to stay listening to that muffled sound and not know what it was.

If she wanted to keep her sanity, she had no choice.

Holding the shutter carefully so that she could look out onto the gallery, Molly saw only darkness.

Again the sound came, lower, from the floor.

Staring through the window, Molly saw a shimmer of motion, a flick of dark against dark. Something was out there.

Eyes were gleaming up at her.

Real eyes, not metallic reflections of her own fear-glazed self. A stray cat. Real. Nothing to make her hide behind locked doors jiggling with imagined fears.

Drawn to the reality of the cat, she carefully released the bolts. Damp air rushed in as she held on to the screen door and looked down at the cat staring back at her with unblinking gold eyes.

Large, with powerful muscles along his flanks and shoulders and a broad head with a bumpy, hooked nose, he was the most beautiful animal she’d ever seen. Rain-wet, his black coat was shiny and sleek.

“Hey, puss,” she whispered, looking down the length of the gallery. Off to her left she thought she saw movement, but it was only a mourning dove winging off into the rain, disturbed by the rattle of the opening door.