Around him the leaves barely stirred even though he was buried deep enough in the foliage that anything more than a shallow breath would cause the branches to shudder. His breath was more than shallow; it was almost non-existent, his heart rate low enough that he wondered if his body heat would show on a thermograph.
He imagined such a thermograph, he saw the house in front of him as a fiery orange populated by three red smudges, one slightly larger, all moving to their respective bedrooms, and he saw himself in the back yard no more than a slightly lighter stain of colour than the background.
He waited and watched as shadows moved past the curtains and the ground floor lights were turned off. A few minutes later the light in the small upstairs window, the one to the girl’s room, was extinguished and still he waited. He knew he had about twenty minutes before the lights in the master bedroom went out and probably another twenty before they were fast asleep. He would wait an hour, and, in that hour, he would crouch almost invisibly in the foliage, smelling the flowers that surrounded him and thinking about his place in the world.
It had taken many years to understand what he needed to know, this was long before he found those who could teach him and longer still before the time he could adequately perform the tasks necessary. During that time, he waited and watched and became good at it.
Waiting was a skill, as was watching as was listening. They were, in the man’s view, the core of knowledge and the beginnings of wisdom. How could one become wise without such understanding? How can a person absorb the wisdom of those who came before without the skill of listening or the patience to wait for such wisdom?
A spider drifted in front of his eyes, it was nearly lighter than the air around it, it danced on its glistening thread as it spun down to land on the man’s cheek. He felt soft feather light legs scamper across his flesh, but he did not blink, he did not move. He would not react to the tiny creature because he was not really there; he would leave no footsteps and no signs of his passing.
He would be like the spider.
The light to the master bedroom went out and the house became a square of darkness against the tumbling clouds illuminated by the moonlight. He had sat in that moonlight for twenty minutes, though it had felt little more than two or three, and the next forty minutes, the families last, would feel like no more than five.
He could wait five minutes of his time; he had waited far longer.
His very first lesson had been of patience, his earliest memory was of this lesson. The room had been dark and cold, and things had skittered across the rough concrete, he had been nothing more than an inconvenience to these skittering things, no more important than the broken chair in the one corner or the mouldy dogs bowl in the other.
The first lesson had given him insight into his second lesson; the lesson where he understood his use as an object, and later as a tool. The years that followed hardened him into a tempered tool, a sharp and tough tool in which he took pride.
He remembered those early years and those people who were barely parents, he remembered the fear and the hate, but he no longer felt any of it; he no longer felt anything, except the need to continue his life mission and to get to the end of his road with that mission complete.
It was his teenage years when his mission begun to dawn on him, and it was his early adulthood when he sought out those who could make him the person he needed to be to succeed in it.
He let his eyes move over the house, then down to the garden that surrounded him; it was time.
The foliage hardly made a whisper as he passed through it, his footsteps barely bending the grass as he made his way to the side of the house and the old steel drainage pipe that ran all the way to the roof. He climbed it, hand over hand but using his feet to hold most of his weight until he reached the eaves. Two feet to his right was a bracket that held an aerial, he slid a foot onto it as close to the wall as he was able and used it to lever himself up onto the roof.
Slowly he made his way across the thirty-degree grade, across to a small brick outcropping that served the single attic window.
He reached it and paused. He didn’t need a flashlight, the moon was bright enough for him to clearly see the brittle wire, its plastic covering all but disintegrated that had pulled from the clips that once held it to the inside of the window frame.
The man ran his gloved finger across the putty that held the four by five-inch panes of glass that was closest to the wire and pressed gently, seeing the slight indentation his finger made. It wasn’t the putty that had softened, it was the wood, and it would take very little…
Movement, through the glass in the darkness. The man looked up from his examinations into the dusty interior, the unused room cluttered with old furniture and boxes filled with who-knew-what.
The man waited and watched; he was good at both.
He saw no rodent tracks in the dust across the bare wood floor, but that did not mean the movement was not a rodent. A bird had flown in through a broken vent perhaps. Whatever it was had not been a person, it had been far too small.
At first it seemed that the dust was undisturbed by neither man nor beast; but then he saw what might have been the narrow footprints of a woman’s naked foot and the curve of a chalk mark through the dust.
The man leaned forward and cupped his hands to get a better view and that was when he saw it. He couldn’t not see it. It rushed to him from the far side of the attic room, a white oval with streaming black hair and eyes like disused wells. Its mouth formed a perfect “O” as if to consume him.
The man recoiled as the thing soundlessly hit the window, his feet sliding out from under him, the slick tile allowing him no purchase as he tumbled backwards over the edge of the roof and into the empty dark space where gravity had him in its grasp.
The man plummeted thirty feet to the ground below, his last sight that of a full moon that looked like a face or a face that looked like the full moon.
George woke and immediately he knew something was wrong, the pale green of the bedside clock read one-thirty and he was far too alert for it to be anything other than a primordial response to danger. George trusted his instincts and his instincts told him that something was very wrong.
He didn’t move, instead he listened and heard the familiar creaks of the settling house, its pipes cooling and its floorboards resting after the use of the day. He kept half an eye on the bedside clock and watched the minutes’ tick by without incident.
It was nothing, a part of him thought.
Check anyway, another part of him answered.
Quietly he rose, glancing over to his wife who was still sleeping with hair, greying now in stylish streaks that looked – to him – like highlights, fanned over the pink pillowcase in what looked like an unusually realistic add for shampoo.
He left her to sleep and slipped from the room.
He turned right and crept down the hallway to his daughter’s room, listening a moment at the door before peering inside.
Kirsty was not in her bed but had left it in disarray. She was either in the bathroom or kitchen, probably the kitchen as she always seemed either to be eating or on the verge of doing so.
George silently closed the door and turned towards the stairs, intending to check on his daughter when he heard a noise, something from above that was muffled but alien. George had lived in the house for enough years to know it’s every creak and murmur. He knew the sound the stairs made when someone walked up them and could tell it from the sound they made when someone walked down them. The difference was subtle, so subtle his wife would look at him strangely when he told her he could tell the difference; but it was true, he could. So, he knew the sound from above came from something not of the house, and nothing that should have been in it.
He turned and moved past the door to his bedroom and to the door opposite the family bathroom; he turned the handle and slowly pulled it open.
George had raised two children, Kirsty – his youngest – and Michael who was now starting a family of his own; so, George knew patience. The door swung inward at an agonising pace, but he knew that any faster would have sent a screech of rusted hinges through the house, waking his two girls and alerting anyone who might be upstairs creeping around.
The door was wide enough for him to slip through, so he did.
The bare wooden steps curved upward into an attic lit from the tiny window, the light was barely enough to navigate by, but George would manage. He crept up the steps until his head was at the level of the dust that covered the bare boards.
Shadows fell through the window from outside. At first George thought it was a bird landing on the small window ledge as it flickered by, but then a face appeared at the window and George found himself rooted to the spot.
The face was unmasked and at first glance appeared young. It was the face of someone well-groomed and handsome, it was the face of someone you would not expect to be forcing entry in the dead of night. It was the face of a socialite day trader or the face of a businessman, it was not the face of a burglar; and this is what stabbed fear into George.
He feared this was no burglar.
He feared that this intruder had darker aims.
George looked around the dusty floor for something to use as a weapon but didn’t get that far. In the far corner, opposite to the small window was a glint of something, a shadow of something else. It was a hint of movement rather than actual movement, but it drew his eye.
If his eyes had not been accustomed to the darkness, he would not have even seen it, and even so it was difficult to decipher. A curl of darkness wrapped around a shard of light and both curled into an oval that hung in the air like a Chinese lantern. The air was silent and still, reality holding its breath alongside George as something formed under the oval, then around it as features begun to darken in the oval of light. The “O” of a shocked mouth and the bulk of wild eyes formed blank dark holes in the murky white.
Then movement as it begun to drift, then the dark body beneath the oval pushed back as it gained speed, tendrils of what may have been hair spilling out into the gloom around it.
It rushed the window and the figure outside recoiled in fright then disappeared with a clatter of feet on tile. George heard the man fall, a wet thud of a body breaking on the concrete below, but his attention was caught by the drifting figure that peered through the window before turning to face him. It bobbed in the air, drifting back to the centre of the room, it dark eyes and oval mouth peering at George.
The man stood transfixed. He trusted his instincts and his instincts told him not to move; but from below a scream raked across his senses, a woman’s scream that raised more fear in him than the apparition before him, so he turned, and he ran.
Haley woke to an empty bed, the mattress under her hand still warm but the air above it cool where the sheets had been pulled aside.
George was gone so she listened, expecting to hear the bathroom light being switched off or the vibration of the water rushing through the pipes as the toilet was flushed, but heard neither. For a while she lay in silence.
Perhaps she dozed but when she looked at the clock it read one-forty-two, she thought it was closer to half past when she had woken, and still she had heard no sound.
The room was bathed in the pale blue light from the moon, the curtain moved slightly under the force of the breeze that always found its way through the closed window but otherwise there was no movement.
She called George’s name.
There was no answer.
She called again.
Perhaps he had gone downstairs to get a drink, in a moment she would probably hear him walking up those stairs, the step close to the top making that sound she always thought sounded like a frog being stepped on.
She listened; she heard no frogs; so, she climbed from the bed.
George’s dressing gown was draped over the rocking chair that had followed them from their first home, a flat they had shared as teenagers, right through to their current home; she reached for it and the world went momentarily black.
Something large fell past the window, blocking out the light from the moon and plunging the room into darkness.
A moment later there was a sickening crunch that sounded like nothing less than a body hitting something hard. Haley had never heard such a thing in her life, but it was unmistakable, there wasn’t a sound like it, and she raised her hands to her ears to block it out even as the sound faded to nothing.
She screamed George’s name, her throat immediate raw with the power of it though the noise sounded muffled to her through her own hands. She didn’t hear the thudding of feet, but she felt them rumbling through the house and she knew they came from above.
She didn’t have time to wonder if she should be afraid because when the bedroom door was flung open George stood there, his face ashen in the moonlight. Haley looked up at him and realised she had fallen to the floor. Gently he pulled her hands from her ears, and she saw his lips moving before she heard his words.
“An intruder.” He said, and she didn’t need to hear any more.
It may have been an hour later, or it may have been minutes; the time between the phone call and the arrival of the police was pulled so out of shape that the seconds became unrecognisable as they waited through them.
George sat in his slippers and pyjamas while Haley boiled water.
Some part of her was convinced the police would be in dire need of tea on their arrival, and though it seemed unlikely to George he couldn’t offer a reasonable explanation for his position when Haley maintained that nearly everyone liked tea. Which was true; and it was better than thinking of what was lay in their garden bleeding into the azaleas.
So, when she offered him a cup, he gladly took it.
The couple sat in silence.
George saw the apparition in his mind’s eye but the memory of it was already becoming disjointed. Had he seen legs? He could not remember. Had there been arms? He was unsure of this as well. The more he thought on it the less certain he became, and it did not take long before her believed the whole incident was nothing more than a trick of the light magnified by his own fright. He would not tell anyone, he decided, it wasn’t necessary to tell anyone; the intruder slipped and fell.
Haley thought of the
A minute filled with hours later lights began to decorate the windows and a knock came at the door. George rose from his seat and his bones felt very old with flesh surrounding them that was no longer up to the task; and he made his way to the door.
Kirsty was back in her room when she heard the knocking at the front door. She heard the heavy footsteps and listened to the muffled voices from the kitchen below. Silently she swung the black robe over her head and slid he white ritual death mask into its hiding place. She selected unassuming clothes that brought out her youth rather than anything that would accentuate age; and then she dressed.
There were times when the illusion of youth was useful.
She studied herself in the oval full-length mirror and petitioned a prayer to Damballa with an offering of a thimble of rum which she left on the floor before her reflection. She practised her sweetest smile and went downstairs to shed a crocodile tear or two.
If everything went as she knew it should, they would soon be alone once more. The garden would be cleared, and she would once again be in her room with her books, her makings, and her prayers to the Petro Loa.
As the bodies busied themselves around her, as those in blue asked their questions and her parents answered them looking so young, so vulnerable in their naked distress; while Kirsty thought of the man and the look on his face as it had changed.
From her dark corner she had seen the glint of cruel anticipation change to one of unbelieving terror as she had moved towards him, her own face hidden by the death mask and her body a tool of the Petro Loa. She had seen him slip and had willed his fall, as surely as if she had reached through the glass and pushed. She had heard the rush of air and the thud of flesh on concrete and the beat of her song to the dark Gods rose in crescendo.
The police would move on, no one shedding a tear for a man who would creep under cover of darkness into places he had no right to be; and Kirsty would resume her ministrations, and seek her wisdom, and learn; and grow; and woe-betide any man who would seek to disturb her.
Kirsty stifled a smile; wisdom accrued payment, and tonight it had been paid in full.