Unhinged

by Reed, Rick R. ;

Today, there were two hand-addressed envelopes waiting just for me, Stephen Embert, the “bachelor” in 2A, 1437 Sherwin Avenue, Chicago, IL, 60626. The first envelope I could see was from my friend and party-thrower extraordinaire Tabby Tyler, probably the most flamboyant queen on the north side of the city, but Lord, did that man know how to throw a party. From the size and shape of the envelope, I figured it would contain an invitation to yet another of his fabulous themed soirees. And, I have to admit, the card stood out—screaming bright pink in a sea of white and buff.

  Normally, I would have torn this envelope open with a lot of excitement, right there in the lobby, dying to know what Tabby had in store for me this time. His last themed party had been a tribute to Sex and the City, with guests being exhorted to come dressed in drag as one of the glamorous New York City gal pals or—if one was too butch or too intimidated at the thought of donning high heels and bling—one of their men. There had been a lot of Mr. Bigs that night. In the end, though, it hadn’t really mattered how one came dressed to the party because everyone there ended up naked, in the shadowy world of Tabby’s playroom, which sported a very sturdy leather sling suspended from the mirrored ceiling, a king-size bed, and lots of plush carpeting, ripe for inducing the most glorious of rug burns.

  Tabby’s parties always seemed to end up turning into orgies. Maybe that’s why the guest lists never included any women.

  But today, the other envelope was the one that gave me pause, because it was so mysterious.

  It was a simple, buff-colored envelope, the size that would contain a birthday card. I didn’t recognize the handwriting, which was kind of feminine and looping. Whomever had penned it even dotted the “i” in Sherwin and Chicago with tiny hearts. I say “whomever” because there was no return address.

  This one couldn’t wait. I had to open it right then.

  I worked my finger into a loose edge and tore open the top of the envelope. I was right—there was a card inside. But it wasn’t a birthday card. At least I don’t think so. I pulled the card out and stared at it.

  People always say, in books, things like “a chill ran up his spine,” but I’ve always questioned that. While of course I have had occasion to experience fear and even terror in my thirty-two years, I have never actually felt a chill “creep” up my spine, let alone run its “icy fingers” up and down it.

  Until today.

  The front of the card was a simple black-and-white photograph of a long curving black feather on a dark background. Most likely, this was an ostrich plume. So why did something so innocuous give me the creeps? Why was my first thought that this was an image pulled from a nightmare? Maybe because it was just weird. There was nothing printed on the front and the photo—so simple—seemed somehow foreboding. If it didn’t sound melodramatic, I’d say it seemed like a warning.

  Its starkness was eerie. I fought an urge to just drop the card on the floor and run upstairs, leaving it there for someone else to find. The feather—pardon me for my flight of fancy—did indeed look threatening. Don’t ask me why. I imagined that if I did leave it on the floor it would be waiting right outside my apartment next time I opened my door.

  The color, the shadows…I don’t know, they seemed to add up to death.

  I know, I know. That sounds over-the-top, but did I mention that it wasn’t until I actually opened the card that I felt that shiver of fear run up my spine? The one that I had hitherto never experienced?

  Written on the inside of the card, in the same, feminine hand that the envelope bore were five simple words:

  I’ve been inside your house.

  It was a simple sentence, almost homespun, but it struck a chord of terror deep within me. It made my heart race. It caused me to look behind me. My hands trembled, just a little bit. And a queasy nausea rose in my gut.

  I stared down at the plain sentence. Like the feather, there was something ominous in its simplicity, a veiled threat. Why would someone go to the trouble of sending me a card simply to say they’d been inside my house?

  I glanced down at the envelope again, just to make sure my eyes hadn’t deceived me, hoping against hope that this bizarre missive had been stuck in my mailbox by mistake, perhaps it had been intended for one of my many faceless neighbors, for whom a picture of a black feather would conjure up some rapturous memory—or something like that.

  But no. The card was for me. There was no getting around it.

  Wearily, I started toward the stairs. Somehow, the odd card and its message had sapped the good mood I had begun my hours off work with, and I knew it would eat at me all evening. Who would send this to me?

  Why?

  “Hey, stranger! You’re looking good today!”

  I froze at the bottom of the stairs. I knew that voice—my neighbor Tom Horton, with the same name as the fast-food chain, was standing right behind me. The last thing I needed right now was Tom. Flattering as it was, the guy had a completely unreciprocated crush on me and had ever since I had moved in nearly a year ago. Sure, I had gone out with him once, but the chemistry, the magic, whatever-you-want-to-call-it, just wasn’t there. I don’t know, there was something odd about him, the things he talked about. I mean, he was fascinated with things like true crime books and serial killers, and at one point during our date, he mentioned he had psychic abilities.

  “What are you talking about?” I had snickered, thinking of Patricia Arquette in that TV show, Medium.

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s kinda vague. I just get a sense about people—a little above and beyond what I think you might normally know just from meeting them.” He shook his head, and I think he could see he was weirding me out. “It’s nothing. My grandma had the same thing.” He blushed. “Forget it.”

  It wasn’t that he was a bad-looking guy either—medium build, trim, with poker-straight sandy brown-blond hair that fell over his forehead, stopping just short of a pair of amazing, wide-spaced green eyes with lashes too long for a man.

  I don’t know. There was just something about him that was too eager to please; it almost made me want to puke. I like guys who have a little vinegar mixed in with the sugar, if you know what I mean.

  Since we were the only two souls in the apartment building vestibule, I couldn’t very well pretend I hadn’t heard him and simply trudge on up the stairs and into my apartment without some sort of acknowledgment. That’s what I wanted to do, no use denying it, but I wasn’t raised that way. I might be a lot of things, but rude is not one of them.

  So I turned and gave what I thought was a charming, good-to-see-you grin. “Tom! I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “Snuck up on you. You looked pretty engrossed in your mail.” He moved closer to peer over my shoulder. I slid the card between some bills.

  I debated on whether I should tell him about my creep-inducing card, since it certainly was news—at least in my life. But then I would have to talk to Tom even more and I didn’t want to encourage him. Besides, I wanted to get upstairs and open Tabby’s invitation. Maybe news of another ribald party would help break the dark spell the “feather” card had cast.

  “Yeah. Engrossed in the ComEd bill. It seems to get higher every month.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Well, gotta run! Have a nice night.” I hurried up the stairs, feeling I had left poor Tom with unformed words on his lips. Words like “What are you doing this weekend?” or “Want to grab a beer at Big Chicks later?”

  Words I wanted to avoid. As I said, nice guy…but not for me.

  Once inside my apartment, I immediately sensed something was wrong. Yes, Cora, my spoiled Boston terrier, greeted me at the door as she always did, jumping up and down, begging shamelessly for a kiss and a pat on the head. To look at Cora, you would assume everything was right with the world.

  Yet today—in spite of Cora’s zeal at my homecoming—seemed to be all about being ominous, about vague portents and feelings I just couldn’t quite put my finger on.

  After I had given Cora the attenti
on she demanded, along with her dinner, the dog retreated to her spot on the living room sofa, where her energy rapidly deflated like a popped balloon. Cora was eight years old, no spring chicken in the dog world.

  Would it make any sense to you if I said that there was an echo of someone being in my apartment? An almost sixth-sense kind of thing where you know someone has been there while you’ve been gone? No? Well, that’s how I felt shortly after I returned home. It made me even forget about opening Tabby’s card.

  Someone had been there. There was a strange feeling—things were unsettled where usually they were settled. It was as if the very particles of dust in the apartment had been re-arranged.

  Okay, okay, so I’m starting to sound like a lunatic. Forget I ever mentioned anything about odd portents and dust being disturbed. Maybe some hard evidence will convince you that I had a right to feel uneasy, afraid, curious.

  I glanced down at Cora. “You see anybody in here today, stinker? Somebody that didn’t belong?” Cora cocked her head at me, as though she was really trying to understand what I was asking. But if she had seen anyone unusual in our shared home, she was keeping it to herself.

  The first thing I noticed was that a pile of books I had stacked on the coffee table had been moved. This stack was always there. It was my David Sedaris collection and contained every book he had ever written, each one personally signed by Mr. Sedaris himself. Since we’re being brutally honest here, I did not have them on my coffee table because I wanted easy access to them. I had read them all already—several times. I had them there to impress people—both for my taste and appreciation of wit and for the fact that I had stood close enough to Mr. Sedaris to get his John Hancock, more than once.

  Today, the David Sedaris tomes were no longer stacked. They were carefully arranged in a row across the glass surface of my coffee table. It looked very neat and deliberate.

  And I was positive I had not done it.

  Again that question poked at me with a long, jagged fingernail: why? Why would someone take the time and trouble to come into my apartment and rearrange the books on my coffee table?

  It hit me—there had to be more. What else had been disrupted? Could something worse have happened?

  Now, my apartment is a small one-bedroom consisting of living room, dining room, kitchen, bath, and bedroom. It didn’t take me long to make a complete circuit of the place, wondering things like if I had left the shower curtain open or closed when I left that morning, had I forgotten to put the peanut butter away or had someone set it out on the counter to taunt me, had that apple in the fruit bowl always been turned upside down?

  Now I was getting paranoid.

  The paranoia ended when I hit my bedroom. My dear mother, God rest her soul, back in Ohio, had always taught me to make my bed each and every morning. No matter what the rest of the place looked like—dishes in the sink, crumbs on the rug, dust on the furniture—I always took a couple minutes before heading out in the morning to pull up my comforter, fluff the pillows, cover them with their shams, and smooth the whole affair out with my hand.

  The bed was unmade. The covers were thrown back, the pillows were pushed down as if a head, or more than one head, had recently lain upon them. I wanted to do the gibbering thing with my voice—you know, when you’re so terrified you can’t form words, you can only gibber, whatever the hell that is. But I held my tongue. Wish I could say the same for my heart, which was hammering away in my chest like it was ready to burst.

  That same heart just about stopped when it saw the worst thing. No, the unmade bed was not the worst thing.

  There was a used condom lying in the middle of my sheets. I could see it there, coiled like a little snake, its receptacle tip filled with a milky white substance.

  Here’s the part where you say “ick,” but I couldn’t help myself. I picked up the offending rubber and sniffed it.

  That wasn’t come in there, pumpkin, it was hand cream. The very same hand cream I kept on the nightstand next to the bed for—well, never mind what I use it for! Let’s just go with the idea that I use it to soften my weary, dried-out hands.

  But thoughts about hand cream, condoms, books, and unmade beds all flew out of my head at the prospect of knowing with absolute certainty that someone had, indeed, been inside my house.

  I sat down in the little ladder-back chair across from my bed to collect myself, to allow my thumping heart to return to its regular rhythm. Besides, I didn’t think I could bear to sit on, or even get near, the bed right then. That piece of furniture—with all its connotations of sex, comfort, love, dreams—had been violated. I wasn’t even sure I could sleep in it that night, at least not without first washing the sheets.

  I stayed in the chair for a long time, watching the colors between my mini blinds shift from blue to lavender to finally a deep navy. Two questions resonated over and over—who and why?

  Finally, I decided I couldn’t sit there in fear all night and got up to make myself some dinner.

  The fear dissipated as I set to chopping vegetables and draining a block of tofu for a stir-fry. It was replaced by a sense of unease and another almost of melancholy.

  It seemed that someone had set out very deliberately to frighten me and that equated to someone setting out to hurt me.

  I’m not the best person in the world, nor am I the worst. I’ve done my share of sinning, especially in the promiscuity area, but I have always made it my business to be kind to other people and to avoid harming them whenever I could.

  So as much as the home invasion and the card frightened me, they upset me because it meant that there was someone out there who must not like me very much and wanted to see me suffer.

  Either that or there was someone out there who was completely psycho.

  And he—or she—had been inside my house.

  Cora entered the kitchen. She looked up at me with her big, buggy brown eyes and cocked her head. She needed to go outside.

  Chapter 2

  The story gets worse. I had managed to relatively unwind after dinner, although I kept one ear cocked for odd noises like the doorknob jiggling or fingernails scratching at my windowpane, even though I lived on the third floor. The kitchen window, anyway, was just off a landing so my “fingernails on glass” paranoia was not totally unfounded.

  But I heard nothing but the sound of my TV, which I was using on this night to catch up on half a season of recorded episodes of Modern Family. It helped to have something to make me laugh.

  At bedtime, I seriously considered taking the sofa, but then thought I was letting my intruder win if I avoided my own, very comfortable bed. So I went to my hall closet, pulled down fresh linens, and remade the bed, even though I had just done the same only three days ago.

  When I crawled in between the sheets, it was after eleven and I was surprised at how tired I was. I guess it had a lot to do with the stress I had felt on coming home. Stress, tension, and fear can take a lot out of a guy.

  I fell immediately asleep.

  It wasn’t until the middle of the night that I awakened once more. What woke me was a sudden presence weighing down the opposite side of the bed.

  It was Cora. Amazingly spry for an eight-year-old girl, she had hopped up on my bed and was now sitting at the edge of it, ears at the alert, a low growl humming in her throat. Her little, smashed-in face was pointed toward the living room.

  “What is it, girl?” I whispered in the dark.

  Something clattered to the floor in the other room, and I realized that Cora and I were not alone.

  But I was still half asleep and had the courage a foggy head afforded. I got up from the bed and made the second tour of the night of my small apartment.

  The kitchen was chilly.

  That was because the back window—the one that led to the landing—was open. The cool night air blew in.

  I shivered, looking quickly and nervously over my shoulder, but there was no one there.

  I was just about to the leave the kitc
hen when I noticed—once again—something amiss.

  I have a little butcher block in the kitchen, next to the afore-mentioned window. It’s about waist-high and bore the scars of lots and lots of chopping, dicing, mincing, and—when I was feeling fancy—chiffonading.

  Tonight the butcher block was not empty, as it usually was when it wasn’t covered with fruits, nuts, or vegetables for chopping. Tonight it had something on it.

  And that something took my breath away.

  Near the butcher block, on my kitchen counter, I have a lovely Wusthoff knife block. I take my cooking seriously and learned the hard way that it’s not a razor-sharp knife that can get you into trouble, it’s the dull ones. I kept my knives sharp enough to cut a sheet of paper in mid-air.

  Now, one of those knives—the biggest of the lot—my chef’s knife, had been removed by person or persons unknown and laid out on my butcher block.

  Why?

  I didn’t want to ponder that question as I stood naked and shivering in the doorway between my kitchen and dining room.

  Why else would someone set out a knife? I doubt very much that my intruder had any plans to dice vegetables.

  I hurried over to the window and closed it. My hand froze just above the knife. My intention had been to return it to its family in the block, but then I thought better of it. I was positive I had not left the knife out earlier.

  I certainly had never opened the kitchen window. The night had gotten chilly, in spite of the Indian summer day.

  I turned the lock above the window.

  “Sort of like locking the barn after the horse has escaped, isn’t it?” I said to myself.

  Okay, this had gone too far for a mere prank. Someone had not only been inside my house, someone had also thought about taking a knife in hand and doing God knows what with it.

  I returned to my bedroom, feeling absurd in my current nude state, and threw on a pair of boxer shorts and a T-shirt. Cora had curled up next to my pillow on the warm spot I had abandoned, obviously feeling I was dealing successfully with the matter at hand.