Part of me twisted up terribly, preparing for imminent violence. Two, then, were upstairs. Were there more downstairs? I couldn’t hear anything…
A hushed whisper reached my ears, coming from somewhere in the hallway - right outside the door of the room I cowered in.
Ten seconds passed. Thirty. A minute. Two minutes, at least - then five. Staring into the void, I hovered at the edge of sheer panic for an eternity. What the hell were they doing? Were they just standing there in the hallway? Or were they searching the rooms, not making any noise? I had the terrible premonition that, if I made a single sound, no matter how slight, they would suddenly rush me from some unexpected direction with violent and mindless glee -
I almost didn’t register it at first. Not the moment it happened. I felt a vibration in my clenched hand, but I couldn’t quite fathom it immediately - between my desperate fingers, the phone rang loudly, practically screaming, filling the house with abrupt noise.
It was that same number, misdialing me a third time - signing my death warrant.
“The fuck was that?” a threatening voice asked, two rooms down.
I dropped the phone, leaving it to ring on the carpet, and bolted away from the window. Face up, the phone’s dim light peeled back just enough of the darkness to fill the room with imminent danger - but with no closet and no furniture, I had nowhere to go… the unopened moving boxes filling the room offered no safety.
More than one set of footsteps rushed down the hall, the heavy falls filled with violent urgency.
“It’s just a phone,” one said, a few feet away from me.
“Yeah?” an angry voice asked. “What’s it doin’ on the floor here?”
“Who knows, maybe he’s lazy. I watched his routine for weeks. He ain’t home.”
A deadly click sounded, and I stopped breathing. A flashlight beam swept across the room, blinding me. I kept my eyes open, unwilling to close them for fear of the two men hearing my eyelids slam shut.
Finally, the phone stopped ringing, going dark with an abrupt wave of silence.
“Right,” the angry one said after a moment. “Computer’s up here somewhere. We’ll get that television downstairs next.”
The two men walked back into the hall, moving within an inch of me for the second time. Taking a cue from the invisible watcher I’d imagined outside my office door, I’d bolted for the hallway itself - not to run down the stairs, which would have creaked and given me away; not down the hall, where I would have run into the two men - no, I’d slid right up against the wall right outside the door, hidden in the angling curtain of blackness afforded by the flashlight’s roving beam. As they’d entered and exited the room, curving around me, they’d literally brushed past, clothing touching clothing - but whichever one it had been, he hadn’t noticed.
I could still smell sweat and cigarettes. The foul odor lingered in front of my face.
Without so much as moving my head, I strained my eyes to watch the silhouettes and flashlight beam move down the hall. My will to stay motionless gave out, and I slid back into the room as best I could, just as the beam swept back down the hall - an idle glance back that might have gotten me killed, had they done it a moment earlier.
There was nothing left to do but wait. Eternity, infinity, endless raging fear and torment - it drained me until I was nothing but a shell, listening to my house being ransacked, no longer even energetic enough to fear being discovered. I was alone, drained, and at my wit’s end - and death might have almost been a welcome relief.
Twenty minutes, they told me later. It was only twenty minutes.
The utility repairman was kind enough to come the next day. Once he fixed the box in the yard, I kept everything fully lit, attempting to work despite boundless nervousness and twitch reactions to every little sound in the house. Every so often, I tried to smooth out a new scuff on my nearly-stolen computer monitor - it never worked, but it felt vaguely therapeutic.
The phone rang again just about twilight; I stared at it in muted horror, my entire body filled with the animal urge to flee, but simultaneously paralyzed by the prior night’s trauma. Somewhere between those two urges, compromise led me to answer the new number.
“Hey, just calling to check up on you,” a calming, familiar voice greeted me. I’d gone down to the station with the officers, filling out a statement. The policemen had laughed at first, hearing the tale of my misdials, but they respectfully grew quiet when they realized that I was serious.
“Thanks…” I replied, calming down. A creak sounded on the stairs - I jumped, but then shook my head.
“Yep, not every day something like this happens around here,” the Sergeant said. “You’re new to town, I know, I just don’t want you worried this’ll ever happen again.”
“Oh, I’m not afraid,” I lied. “Thanks for your concern.”
“Yep. Oh, we figured out how he had your number. He had a part time with the movers you used. Probably used the job to scope out folks to rob. And you, with that big house, living alone… probably seemed like an easy target.”
The first voice on the misdial - the memory finally clicked into place. I blinked, feeling strangely violated by the realization… that man… he’d answered when I’d called the moving company, seeking their services. He’d been in my house, cataloguing my possessions, eyeing them for later theft…
“Yep,” the Sergeant said again, and I heard him lean back in his creaky leather chair. “Just be happy you had that lucky call. Damndest thing I’ve ever heard. Someone’s lookin’ out for you. These same guys killed a farmer out your way two, three months ago. Went to rob him, but the guy was home. Now we know it was them, they’re going away for sure.”
My blood ran cold.
“Thanks Sergeant, that makes me feel better,” I lied. Why the hell did he have to tell me that?
“Sure. Gotta get back to work now, you take care.”
I hung up the phone with a shiver.
My eyes traveled to that spot outside my office door, where the angled lamplight still carved that sheer black plane, similar to the one that had hidden me from a roving flashlight and saved my life. I had the strangest notion, again, that someone was standing there in the pitch - unseen - watching me. The sensation of presence, of being watched, grew thicker - anticipatory - almost tangible, as if the invisible observer might suddenly step forward out of the darkness and into reality -
“Thanks,” I blurted - a single word, a sincere message, spoken before I even realized I was thinking it.
The feeling vanished.
Tilting the lamp, I angled the dark curtain back - but there was nobody there.
Motivated by questing emotion, without verbal thought, I walked down the hall to the room overlooking the backyard. I moved through the darkness unafraid, my target already memorized despite my best attempts at forgetting. Near the window where I’d peered out and seen the men breaking in, I opened a box I’d left sealed for far too long. The object in question was at the top; I brought it back to my office and set it up on the desk - her picture, facing me. Her face was as bright and cheery as ever, her life still vibrant in frozen sunlight.
I smiled for the first time in several weeks. Living alone? Maybe not so much…
*****
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