by Lucy Auburn
Alarmed, I rush to the open door—only to see Eve standing right outside my door, hair rumpled, still wearing her pajamas, looking tired and a little confused.
I blink, and she's holding a dagger slicked with blood, a cut on her arm dripping onto the hardwood. My eyes focus on the tiny pool forming, and I start to feel like I'm focusing past something, as if a pane of fog-coated glass is between me and my once best friend.
Then the vision returns to normalcy. No blood. No knife. Just Eve in her pajamas, twisting the ring on her finger around and around nervously, brows slightly furrowed at me.
"What'cha got there?" She motions towards the lamp I'm still awkwardly holding up in the air. "You look like a fright, Arizona. Have a bad dream?"
"I..." There's no fear or alarm in her voice. She doesn't sound like she heard the man in the hallway, much less like she fought him in combat with a knife in her hand. Eve is a finance sellout, not a killer. I must be seeing things after all the stress I've been through. "I guess it was a dream, yeah. Pretty realistic one too."
"That's understandable, after everything you've been through. What's the lamp for—slaying demons? 'Cause I gotta tell you, it cost like two thousand dollars. I'd love it if you put it down in one piece."
"Oh—right." I'd forgotten about the lamp, which I'm still tightly holding despite the fact that there's nothing and no one around to bash in the head with it. "Sorry, Eve. I make for a bad houseguest."
"Nah." She kisses my cheek and helps me plug the lamp back in and put its shade in place. "You're just a little jumpy. Most people don't stand in a room with a seasoned killer every day."
"Yeah," I joke, "you and me, we make quite a picture." Her shoulders briefly tense, only to relax a moment later. "I promise I won't kill you like I killed Jack."
"I'm not worried about that," she says swiftly, shooting a smile my way as she flips the lamp on. Weirdly, she's mostly using her left hand, even though the right is perfectly fine—and her dominant hand. "I wanted you to feel safe here. I thought that... well, I guess I thought wrong. But I'll make sure you don't, uh, have any nightmares again."
That seems like a weirdly specific thing to promise. "I don't think you can really control that one way or another, Eve."
"I'll do my best." She shoots me a grin, then leans up against the door frame. "Think you could settle down and sleep for the rest of the night? I paid good money for that memory foam mattress, you know. But if it doesn't lull you to dreamland, we can stay up until sunrise watching TV and drinking all the booze I've got."
"You'll drink me under the table. I haven't had a drop in years—prison'll do that to you. Shitty controlling boyfriends too." Eve chuckles, and I find my eyes drawn to her right hand again, which she's holding limply by her side. "I'm okay. You should go back to sleep. I don't want my stupid nightmare to be the reason why you're up all night."
"Sure?"
"Absolutely."
"Alright. Let me know if you change your mind. I'm a light sleeper, so I wake at anything."
Something inside me is saying that what's going on isn't quite right. It doesn't make sense that I hallucinated a whole man walking down the hallway. And that thing I saw... well, Eve was holding a knife.
Maybe this is my imagination, and reality is the attack. That calls to question how I don't know that I'm hallucinating right now, but thankfully for me, there's one way to prove that the man and the bloody knife were real.
Before Eve can leave the room, I step forward and reach out, towards her injured hand—but I hesitate. If I squeeze her hand and discover the injury hiding underneath some kind of hallucination, then that means Eve is lying to me right now.
As if to prove my insane theory wrong, Eve lifts her hand up to her face to brush a lock of red-orange hair behind her ear, seemingly not injured at all. My fingers meet empty air. She backs out of the doorway and closes the door behind her.
Shaking it all off, I decide a good, hot shower will clear my head and help me figure out what's going on around me. Eve's got a large tiled shower with one of those massive shower heads that rains down on you. As I turn the hot water on and steam fills the bathroom, I try to figure out what I've heard and seen.
The man was real. I didn't imagine that. His footsteps, his cursing—I heard it all. The leftover adrenaline in my blood reassures me that I really did almost fight for my life against a stranger.
But then Eve came.
And... something happened.
It's the something that I have to figure out. Maybe if I just talk to her, really press her, she'll tell the truth. She was never the type to lie or keep things from me before.
All I want is to be safe.
Stripping my clothes off, I turn towards the mirror and make a little hole in the steam so I can see my face. There's a clogged pore on my chin, one I'm desperate to pick even though I know it's bad for me. My stressed fingers are just itching to get it done with.
As I lean forward and press a finger to either side of the spot, something flickers in the mirror behind me. A man, ghostlike and nearly see-through, appears in the little circle I've made in the steam. He’s looking at me with urgency.
Adrenaline rises inside me, and I whirl around, ready to fight naked with nothing in my hands. For a moment I swear I see the man, meet his eyes and everything, and this strange sense that he’s not quite alive rises up inside me as if out of nowhere—but the instant I look at him he disappears, like he was never there at all.
Maybe I am going crazy.
Jack's family said that I was a nut job. They're probably right. I did kill their son and chop him up—it's the latter part that really gets people going.
This must be some kind of mental breakdown. They'll put me in an institution before much longer. I know just what the headlines will say: Crazed Killer Ellen Arizona Committed.
Turning back to the mirror, I open my mouth and scream—then cover the sound with both of my hands, terrified.
A phrase has appeared in the steam on the glass, written with a large finger, droplets of steam rolling down from the letters like blood dripping from an open wound.
LEAVE HERE NOW
Chapter 6
Who am I to disobey?
Normally I'm not one to do what I'm told. I hid short shorts in my high school locker so my mom couldn't make me change into something more modest before school. I mouthed off to Jack so much that he tried to slap the mouth off me, and when I'd finally had enough of his bullshit and remembered who I was before him, I took a knife and ended him. Obedience is a trait I swore I wouldn't allow myself to indulge as I stood over his dead body and tried to figure out what to do with it.
But I've never been bossed around by a mysterious phrase on a steamy mirror before. It seems to me that if the universe goes to all this effort, you do what it says. Especially because I'm starting to think I have some kind of target on my back, and if I don't get out of here soon, Eve will suffer because of me. Just like, as I'm starting to believe, Mom and Herb suffered because of me. There must be a reason why I'm being followed around and threatened.
So I take the world's fastest shower, towel off in front of the cursed mirror, throw all my things in my bag—there aren't many of them—and head out. At first I figure I won't say goodbye, but then I think of how generous it was of Eve to offer her place after not seeing me for years, and I stop to scribble a note.
I have to go. Sorry. Thanks for the bed. It's been good to catch up.
The words seem inadequate, but they'll have to do. Outside Eve's doors, the world is still dark, the sun nowhere to be seen. I pull my hoodie on to chase away the night chill and head out on foot towards a destination across town, because I have nowhere else to go, and I want answers.
Maybe I'll find them in the house where my mother was murdered.
It takes a long time to cross town on foot. The sun is rising, its rays warming the suburban streets that sprawl before me, as I make it to Herb's house. There's still caution tape warning peo
ple off the property, but no sign of the cops yet. Hopefully that means they haven't done anything with any of the evidence around the house; if there are footprints from the killer, I want to see them.
Not that I know what I'll do with any evidence I find. It's not like I majored in anything related to criminal investigation or forensic sciences. I know how to put a wig on an actress and which side of the stage to stand on, not what distinguishes one footprint from another.
Heading towards the backyard, I check to make sure no one is watching me and slip through the unlocked gate. Herb was always a trusting man; half the time when I came home from college to visit my mom at his house, the front door wouldn't even be locked. He never really believed that the world was out to harm him, and up until the other day he was right. Boring, steady, middle-of-the-road men like Herb aren't the normal targets of home invasions.
My throat tenses with something like grief at the memory of him, but just like when it comes to Mom, no tears spill out of my eyes. I'm permanently broken, incapable of true emotion—and no doubt my biological father, Vincent Arizona, is to blame.
Pacing around the house, I come to the window the killer jumped through, still open as it was the night Mom died. Staring down at the garden that leads from the window to the fence, which he had to have climbed over, I see no tracks. There are little markers with numbers on them that sit by the window and on the fence, right where a part of the wood has been kicked through, but not a single shoe print was left behind on the soft dirt.
Impossible. Everything leaves footprints. Even men who turn into fog when you try to grab them. But it's as if he jumped through the window, shapeshifted into a cloud, floated to the fence, and ripped it in his hands as he leapt over.
That makes no sense, though. If he can turn into fog—an impossibility—he could have just floated away on the wind, never to be found again. The thought of that is so ridiculous that I snort aloud, shaking it out of my mind.
Pacing carefully around the backyard, leaping over the narrow garden so I don't leave tracks behind myself, I find no other yellow evidence markers left behind by the forensics team. No wonder the police didn't want me to come back to the garage apartment, or clear this scene at all; they must be convinced there's evidence hiding somewhere that they just haven't found yet. But something tells me that a killer who slides effortlessly out of your grasp and disappears into the night doesn't leave a single fingerprint behind.
He's gone.
And there's nothing I can do to track him down. Even if I did, I don't know what I intend to do when I find him—stab him to death like Jack maybe, or tie him up and call the cops. The thought is ridiculous; I'm a theater major who killed her abusive boyfriend, not a vigilante or some kind of action hero.
The sound of a van pulling up to the curb gets my attention. It must be the forensics team, back to comb over the crime scene again. Heading towards the back gate, I slip out before they can find me here, unsure where I'm going next but certain there are no answers for me here.
Somehow I wind up back at the only place that I can think of that's safe: the shelter. It's the place I called right after I miscarried, the safe haven I almost went to before I convinced myself that I could handle Jack, and everything went pear-shaped from there.
A plain brick building set back from the curb, just one block away from the church that runs it, the women's shelter is a place for the abused who have nowhere else to go. As I stare at its front doors and the security desk just behind them, I realize with a sinking heart that I can't go here.
For one thing, I don't belong. No one is abusing me anymore—not really.
Most importantly, though, I have no idea if the men who have been popping up everywhere I go will follow me through those doors too. I can't put the safety of the women and children inside at risk just because I want a hot meal and a roof over my head.
As if on cue, my stomach rumbles. I have forty bucks in my wallet, courtesy of Herb the day I got out of prison. Sighing, I decide that I'll make it last by heading to a diner a few blocks away that serves cheap coffee and unlimited refills. They should let me camp inside for a while at one of the booths, as long as I buy a bagel or two.
On the walk over, I reflect on the fact that I'm basically homeless now. Herb's house is going to go to his son, and I doubt he had the chance to put me in the will before he was murdered. Mom owned very little besides the clothes on her back and the furniture her parents gave her when she and my dad were newlyweds.
I was never married to Jack, so I didn't get anything when he died, and his family loathes me for obvious reasons, so they weren't exactly willing to hand over the half of the money in his bank account that belonged to me. The whole time we were together I deposited my paychecks into his account because he said he was the one who was good with money, and now I have nothing to show for any of my work.
Maybe Herb's son Bernard will take pity on me and let me stay in the garage apartment long enough to get back up on my feet. Unfortunately for me, I don't have his cell phone, so I'll have to wait to see him at Herb's funeral, which will probably happen this Saturday at the church he and Mom went to.
I'm about half a block away from the diner when I feel a presence behind me, like fingers crawling up my shoulder blades and dancing across my scalp. Slowing my steps, I listen to the sound of the footsteps behind me, soft and nearly impossible to hear above the chaos of the street all around us. It takes focus to zero in on them and get more information.
A heavy tread. Wide, large feet. No other footsteps nearby; he's alone. When I speed up, he matches his pace to mine, and I confirm what my instincts told me.
I'm being followed by a strange man.
The diner is visible in the distance. All I have to do is cross the street one more time and I'll be there. Near the crosswalk, a dog sits patiently by a bike rack, leash tied to the metal bars. The light is green for go; by the time I make it there, it won't be safe anymore.
I create plans for dodging the man. Maybe I should go inside a business, head to the restroom, and look for a way out the back. But I don't know this area well enough to know if I'll be able to escape out a window in the ladies' room like people are always doing in movies. I could dash across the street, jaywalking, and hope that I don't get hit, but the traffic isn’t timed right. He’d be able to follow soon after.
Unfortunately it looks like neither plan will work. The light changes, and the flow of cars crossing the street is so packed that I'd only be risking my own safety if I tried to cross with them.
I want nothing more than a little peace and safety. I think I deserve that, after everything I went through with Jack and the trial, and now losing Mom.
Looking towards my left, the man just visible in the corner of my eye, I search for a way out. There's a dry cleaning business, a bridal boutique, and in between them two wide heavy doors that look like they were carved centuries ago, sticking out like a sore thumb between the two businesses.
The doors are curved at the top and wide enough for six men to go through shoulder-to-shoulder. Carved reliefs cover their surface, but from this distance I can't make out the figures. Wrought iron scrollwork covers both doors and meets in the middle where the latch is, swooping in curved lines of what looks like poison ivy, little flowers poking out here and there, their shapes too distant for me to see.
From edge to edge, top to bottom, the doors glow with otherworldly light. They seem to beckon to me. They want nothing more than to be opened. I tremble inside, wanting to open them—and afraid of what might be on the other side, because nothing makes me this desperate, commands me to obey so thoroughly.
I blink, and the doors are gone. I'm standing at the curb near the crosswalk. Fast-moving traffic cuts me off from the diner; across the street to my left, a dry cleaning business and a bridal boutique have nothing but an old electronics store between them.
There are no curved doors. No carved reliefs. No wrought iron scrollwork. And certainly no otherworld
ly light.
Ellen Arizona, you're fucking insane.
I'm so wrapped up in figuring out the vanishing doors that I almost forget about the man following me. Then I hear footsteps drawing near, and his hand drops onto my right shoulder, sending tension and adrenaline coursing through me.
"You're a tough nut to crack," he says in a low, rumbling voice. I peer at him over my shoulder, tense all over like a deer frozen in the road, and see only lithe muscles, dark tattoo sleeves, and a long braid of jet black hair. "I thought for a second I was going to lose you."
Clearing my throat, I dare to ask, "What do you want?"
A sharp smile in a handsome face. He has two scars: one that slashes across his brow, and a second in the corner of his mouth, bisecting deep golden skin.
"Come with me and I'll tell you everything."
My eyes dart back to the diner just across the road. I swallow, the heavy fear inside me replaced in a sudden rush of impossibly sharp anger. Part of me, the part that took over when I killed Jack, the side that wanted to bash the intruder's brains across the wall last night, is alive and desperate to kill. She wants me to put my hands around this man's throat and squeeze the life out of him.
Fat chance. I'm basically half his size. But when I look down the road, I see a break in the traffic. Beside me, the leashed dog whimpers, and I get an idea.
It requires being as fast as humanly possible.
Thankfully I did a lot of exercise during my ten months in prison. There's not a whole lot else you can do unless you like watching soap operas or sleeping on a two inch thick mattress.
Whirling out of his strong grip, I bend down and unclip the dog's leash. Then I race out into the street, cars honking as they stream past. Behind me, I hear a growl and a shout of alarm, and know that the dog is taking care of the guy for me. He's on my side—I freed him, after all.