The painter kept upstairs for the remainder of the morning, since he perceived these rooms were less subject to surveillance and disruption. A casual inspection was conducted of each upstairs window, along with their logistics of ledges and gutters; the milksop and acrophobic mustered no courage to scurry down a drainpipe as a route for escape. From these windows, it was easily believed that the rest of the world dissolved in the unrelenting fog.
The flashlight was still in the drawer, but staring at it intermittently, or even continuously, did not change its (or his) disturbed ontological state.
Noise soon intruded on this isolation, and at first the hearer thought it was window shutters banging in daylight, but any gale strong enough to jar them would dissipate fog.
Concentrated study out his bedroom window uncovered the presence of an idling vehicle on the rural road. No headlights were detected, which was unusual given the possibility that another vehicle, no matter how rare an occasion for it, should come along and collide with the first. Still, with the hum of a motor established, the searcher pieced together a scenario by which the situation was explained: A lineman occupied a hissing hydraulic lift, and floated above scraggly trees along the roadside, of which one was presumed to be the business end of a telephone pole.
The captive knocked repeatedly on the window to draw the worker’s attention to the house. He was unlikely seen for the brume, but his desperate action succeeded in halting repairs.
The fellow in the crow’s nest did not gesture or call out, but remained a motionless outline beneath the misty veil. No doubt he looked in the summoner’s direction—and for too long without acknowledgement. When he finally stirred from his new occupation, it was nothing done by his person. The driver inside the service truck steered toward the house. This was a clumsy, unexpected maneuver, and as the vehicle brushed the hedge line, the workman remained hanging in midair like a predatory insect bent on the second floor windows.
Slowly features emerged. The airborne coworker wore an alarming—even ghoulish—expression. It was impossible that the house’s inhabitant was spotted in his dim, morose room, but before the cage swung over the eave, Liam cautiously withdrew to the darker hallway.
Talking (more like screaming) swept along the clapboards outside, and then a shadow blighted the bedroom window. Palms were heard squeaking on glass, and then scraping fingernails. Lastly fists pounded this thin barrier, and a deep-throated voice rose to loosen the panes further.
The summoner of these frightening actions did not believe their intent was to free him. Indeed, he felt like a prisoner of Dracula’s castle, one who had been pleading with indifferent casket makers in the count’s employ to no avail.
He retreated to a hall closet, and in his shock listened to the truck and its occupants lap the house slowly, with the object of visiting their terror on every upstairs window.
If the tormented man thought this racket was dying away, his hope was dashed when footsteps—rapid ones—were heard overhead! Had this crazed fellow leapt from his carrier onto the rooftop? Was he now searching for a way into the house?
Loud and then softer steps sounded; and this stomping back and forth lengthened with each enactment. Bizarrely, the marauder was pictured to travel a greater latitudinal distance than what the sprawling roof provided. More to a maniacal program, the pitch of said roof was too steep for anything less capable than a mountain goat to traverse it.
Intervals of silence grew longer, and like relief between horrible spasms of pain, they proved their own cure.
When equanimity was at last restored, Liam poked his head into the hallway—a figure stirred in one of the armoire’s mirrored panels!
A hard swallow became a cough in his throat, but he was certain he saw someone of slight stature disappeared into a doorway.
The captive waited on approaching steps, but none came. After more minutes of indecision, he braved the hallway, and then the doorway where the figure disappeared. It was one of the rooms missing most of its floorboards. Only darkness of a winter’s day was admitted into the ruin. Surely what he saw was his own cowering reflection in the opposite doorway.
These armoire cabinet doors were among the few things in the house that would not stay put. Removing one of his large paint brushes from his satchel, Liam threaded it through the door pulls as a make-do fastener.
Meanwhile, the truck was never heard to rejoin the road. Nor was it discovered, where the fog was now penetrable, to lurk in the boscage south, east, or west of the property. A northern prospect was unavailable, but Liam was soon at ease inspecting the upstairs windows.
Discolored greasepaint covered the outside pane glass, indicating how the gruesomeness of his flying specter owed to a liberal application of theatrical makeup. Its semi-opaqueness reminded him of his saline eye ointment.
The loss of noonday naps were the one part of the painter’s damaged sleep not subject to recovery. However, fatigue compelled him to lie upon the bed. It was all but impossible for him to lose full consciousness in daylight, yet something of this nature sometimes occurred where many minutes would lapse by his small computation, or he would feel relaxed on rising in a way that suggested a nap. Consciousness and unconsciousness circled one another for an interval, but this was less like dead leaves being pulled along in a whorl than two fierce scorpions sizing each other up on a patch of hard ground. On this occasion, a dip in his perceptual faculties happened, with the break favoring unconsciousness and a reset.
The napper rose from the pillow with pinging in his ears—had the telephone on the table rang in the moment before? He pressed his alarm into the grey corners of the room, and then, with greater critical faculty, into the hallway. His paintbrush still bridged the cabinet door pulls and had not been jostled; but this, he feared, was an action taken by him too late—
Perhaps the cloud wall along the western exposure had thinned to windowpane transparency, but the detail was seen as clearly as if it were a silver serving spoon lying in the middle of the floor: One of the rear oak legs on the armoire was split clean through where it had been pushed with considerable force from behind. The other rear leg was not fractured, yet had detached from its fastening screws on the underside. Though the sturdy item of furniture had not budged appreciably from its spot, it had been shoved hard enough to allow an enterpriser to slip through the door behind it.
A cold draft stirred in this now exposed stairwell; and the area was as Liam pictured from Howard’s last visit. Only a pane-less window in the turret could supply this draft. And no one much larger than a child could gain access to the house through this small opening.
If someone else was now in the house, they kept to themselves; Liam fidgeted in anticipation of a pounce that did not come. He picked up the desk phone handset, and could not attribute his spontaneous act to anything other than nervous terror:
A dial tone was heard.
It was easy to believe that the landline, seen fastened to an eave outside his window, vanished without thought into the white void. Though the fog continued to lessen over short distances, it was slower releasing the vaster landscape. No bird or wind murmured in its fields, and against this muffled effect, there was nothing to gauge the length of the cable, or to see to what it was coupled.
The repairman doubtless shared in this development, and perhaps he penetrated the house to complete his repair. Regardless, Liam did not pass on an opportunity to call and enlist the help of his friend.
The phone rang three times. When an answering machine picked up, the caller could not remember if Howard owned such a device. Accepting this as a fact, would the eccentric default to a factory setting by sending out a prerecorded announcement? Liam did not think his friend so mundane as this and hung up without leaving a message.
Conviction about his decision was short-lived. The second time he called, a response was composed while the announcement played. The pause allowed for him to speak was not as silent as one might reasonably expect. Static filled his ear, so he raised his voice to be heard over it.
“Howard, come to Tazewell Manor as soon as you can.”
The message was thought sufficiently ambiguous, though not so unexcited to be shrugged off as lacking urgency.
Within fifteen minutes, the phone rang. The promptness of the response pleased Liam until he remembered that he left no return number. Sudden indecision meant the summons went unanswered, but the ringer would not stop ringing. Seeking its cessation, the receiver was lifted from the base to terminate the connection and set aside on the table.
Static continued to spill from the handset’s speaker. It was inescapable, and was not the exact static experienced while recording his message. The pulse was neither random nor suggestive of a pattern—and the longer it persisted, the less it behaved like crackling electricity. It was as if someone’s fingernail was inside the telephone’s earpiece scratching at the underside of its cover. Should this sort of thing be heard in the dead of the night, one would be alerted to the presence of a mouse gnawing at a headboard post.
Plopping the receiver back on its hook did not end the disturbance. Disconnecting the power cord from the wall plate was also ineffective. The faint noise was now at large in the room. Rustling curtains on a wall opposite the window did not flush his pest into the open, but a hole, where before there had been a gash, was uncovered in the wall. If he indeed occupied another house, here was more evidence to support it.
Liam reached into the hole, momentarily forgetting about the possible burrow of a fanged rodent, yet knew his hand traverse a span no less than the thickness of wall into, what was certain to be, another room. This idea was ludicrous since only a prospect of cottonwood trees lay beyond the north exterior wall. Was this the backside of an exterior utility closet? This hole bore an uncanny resemblance in size and shape to the hole made the previous day downstairs.
The continuing noise, and these other considerations, forced the inhabitant to abandon his modicum of comfort for the hallway. The bedroom door was shut behind him, and passing it from time to time revealed a worsening situation. Scratching confined to its interior had moved to the door face.
Liam had failed to remove the flashlight from the night table’s drawer before quitting the bedroom, and with each passing hour that it remained inaccessible, its materiality faded into a jumbled background with everything else.
Nothing more came of the clawing, and after two hours of silence, the listener suspected that his imagination had inflated its significance. The house was drafty, and on testing several upstairs doors, all rattled in their fittings. Liam compared this knocking to what had issued from his bedroom door, and the comparison was thought similar. The fact that this problematic door no longer made a sound indicated that either prevailing air currents had changed directions or his opportune invader no longer chose to bump the door. Either way, he did not reenter the room.
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