Cleaving Souls

by Chauncey Rogers

  After a few minutes she turned away from the television, pulling the blanket up tight against her chin. In the background, the anchor spoke with a financial analyst about the impact of some merger—the perfect thing to fall asleep to. She let her mind slow, her consciousness drift.

  Then the hairs along the back of her neck prickled up like porcupine quills, and she felt that reeling confusion when one has toed the edge of sleep and then leapt suddenly back, unsure of whether or not they had actually succumbed to their exhaustion. But, uncertain of whether or not she had been asleep, one thing at least was certain: something was wrong. Her body’s primitive sense of danger sparked within her, driving adrenaline through her with each heartbeat. Then she realized what had changed: the television was quiet, the news anchors silent.

  She rolled over to face the screen.

  Its gaudy light still shone into the dark room. The news anchor still sat in his seat, finely dressed in shirt and tie, his hair slicked back with a little too much product. His shoulders rose and fell slightly as he breathed, and one of his fingers twitched atop the table. But he wasn’t speaking. He simply stared. He stared into the camera. He stared out of the television. He stared right at Kat.

  She held his gaze for a moment, studying him. His skin was pale beneath the studio lights, his eyebrows dark, his eyes darker still, and around them a glistening blackness, as if he’d been given two black eyes. Even in her semi-awake state, it struck Kat that this was wrong. The man’s thin lips were pressed into a flat line. After a moment, their corners turned up into a smile, and she knew.

  He was about to speak, was about to talk to her, to address her by name. Kat couldn’t let him. People on TV didn’t know who she was. They didn’t speak to her directly. If this one did now, it would signal a great change within Kat—an alteration of her psyche that she had to prevent. She pulled the remote up and switched off the television before the thin-lipped man with the dark eyes could say anything.

  She kept her hand up, the remote pointed at the TV. Then she finally let it fall and realized that she had been holding her breath. She gulped in air and felt the clammy coldness of sweat upon her brow. Then a shiver passed through her, and a new crop of goosebumps rose in its wake, sprouting all along her back and arms. She pulled the blanket ever tighter around her, squeezing it up around her neck.

  The doorbell chimed, and she jumped so hard inwardly, she feared that she may have damaged her heart.

  Then, timidly, she let her feet touch back down on the carpeted floor. With the blanket still around her, she walked to the door. Keeping far back and trying to steady her breathing, she peered through the peephole.

  The same view as before—the yard, the street, the neighbor’s yard and house.

  She stepped back from the door and turned.

  Geegee stood at the entrance to the hallway, watching her. As Kat saw her face, the dog let out a whine.

  “You’re right, Geegee. I’m calling the police.”

  Then she picked up her phone and dialed 9-1-1.

  10

  Her phone lay on the couch once more, waiting alongside her for the police to come. She hadn’t been sure what to tell them, other than that she thought she was being watched. They said they’d send a car around. That had been half an hour ago, and she knew that the police department in Peascombe wasn’t that busy.

  Geegee lay on the floor beside the couch, and Kat let one hand dangle over its edge to scratch between her ears. The dog suddenly shook her head and stood up, walking out of the front room and into the kitchen, where Kat could hear her padded feet and claws clicking over the linoleum floor.

  Her phone chimed. Before she picked it up, it chimed twice more. She flicked on the screen.

  i8t s 4rr t93nn

  I8t s 4r t93n

  I8ts 4r t9in

  Then the doorbell rang.

  Kat’s shaking hands dropped the phone to the ground. She grabbed the blanket and tried to wrap it around her, but she felt suddenly weak, her muscles unresponsive. It felt as if her frayed nerves had sent out so many floods of frightened energy, that now the trickle that controlled her fine motor skills wasn’t enough to sufficiently stimulate them. She got the blanket up and over her shoulders, partially by pulling it there with her hands, and partially by shrugging into it. As she finished, a hefty knock sounded at the door.

  She stepped to the door, hoping that it would be the promised police officer. When she looked through the peephole, she saw an Indian man in a navy-blue police officer’s uniform, and sighed in relief before unbolting the door. Then she gripped the handle, hesitated, and ended up only opening the doorway a little over a foot.

  “Yes?”

  The officer stood a little back from the door, leaning slightly with a hand casually floating on his waist.

  “We got a call at the station that somebody at this residence wanted a car to stop by. Know anything about that, Ma’am?”

  “Yes, I’m the one who called,” she said, gripping the edge of the door.

  “What’s your name, Ma’am?”

  “Katherine Harris.”

  “Ms. Harris, my name is Sergeant Syed, and I’ll do what I can. Can you tell me anything about why you called me here?”

  “Yes. I feel....” She felt stupid now, talking to this man on her porch. Stupid, but still afraid. How did she talk to him about this without sounding like she’d lost her mind? “I feel like I’m being watched.”

  He nodded, his lips pursed, then said, “Anything else? Any occasion for you to feel that way? Have you seen someone around the house or something—anything suspicious?”

  She nodded. “Somebody rang my doorbell a few times, but then when I looked there was no one there. And I’ve been getting strange texts on my phone, and I don’t know who they’re from.”

  “How many times have people rang the doorbell?”

  “Three?” It sounded like a question as it came from her lips, and the look of doubt in his face only increased her own insecurity. “Maybe just two. I don’t remember for sure.”

  “And nobody was there?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay. When was the last time this happened?”

  “Just before I called the station,” she said. “About thirty minutes ago.”

  “And how long before that?”

  She thought for a moment, then slowly shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “All right,” he said, scratching something onto his notepad before looking back up at her. “And what about these texts? You don’t think that they could be reaching you by accident?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “They don’t really make sense. But they just come in randomly.”

  “Would you mind showing me one?”

  “Sure,” Kat said. “Just one minute.” She pushed the door closed, then looked back at her phone on the couch. She quietly clicked the lock into place before crossing the room to retrieve her phone, then returned to the door, pulled the deadbolt back, and reopened it. “I got a few just before you arrived,” she said.

  He waited as she turned her phone screen on and navigated to her text message inbox.

  They were gone.

  She flipped through, searching down and then scrolling back up and refreshing. Still, they didn’t appear.

  “When you find them,” Sergeant Syed said, “if it’s alright, you could just hand me the phone.”

  She refreshed her messages again, then looked up. “I don’t know where they are,” she said. “They were here just a minute ago. They disappeared. They did this before, too, when my husband was home. They just disappeared.”

  Sergeant Syed sniffed. “Ma’am, if you find them again, let me know. Was there anything besides these text messages that has you concerned?”

  “Yes. Yesterday...or no...it was earlier today, I think.... Anyways, I was walking home, and there was a big van. White or gray—I don’t remember which. And it was just parked on the side of the road. There was this guy in the va
n, and he was asking me for directions, but then was saying that he couldn’t hear me, and wanted me to come closer to the van so he could hear me better. I just pointed the directions to him, and he drove off. But then, I saw that he had turned around on another street, and it was like he was watching where I went after that. Or maybe following me.”

  “A big van?” Sergeant Syed said. “Do you recall any other details about it?”

  “Yeah. It was gray, I think. I’m pretty sure it was gray. And it had words on the side, like for a service business. It was....” She screwed up her eyebrows and searched through her brain, but all she could recall was Sammy’s Serial Killing Service, and she knew it wasn’t that. “I don’t remember,” she finally admitted. “But they were right on the side. The big name for the business, on the side of a gray van. And the guy who drove it was white. A white guy, who was balding, and looked older.”

  “Older? Like, sixties?”

  “No, not that old. Probably like mid fifties? I don’t know for sure. I didn’t get a good look at him from across the street.”

  “Hmmm,” Syed said, pulling out a notepad and scribbling on it. “Okay, well, I’m afraid that there isn’t too much that I can do specifically about this, but here’s what I’ll do: I’ll keep swinging by, and I’ll stay around in this area, okay? You call into the station if anything else happens. And if you need somebody to come by again, we’ll be close. Alright?”

  “I— Are you sure that somebody shouldn’t, like, stick around here, just for a little while?”

  “I’m sorry, Ma’am,” Syed said, tucking the notepad away, “but I can’t promise anything like that. If I have any downtime, I’ll park out front and watch for anything suspicious. And I’ll keep my eyes open for any van lingering in the area that fits your description. But unless something else happens, I’m afraid that’s all I can do. Okay?”

  She nodded, said goodbye, then closed and locked the door.

  11

  Time seemed to be slowing down. Kat had left the couch to sit on the floor beside Geegee, who she clung to with one arm while she used the other to support her copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting. She’d found that reading it helped. Recently, however, it seemed she couldn’t make it through any of the book’s material. She would read a paragraph—or part of a paragraph, or maybe even an entire page—and then glance up at the clock. The hands seemed almost to have been waving for her attention until she gave it to them, and then they stood still. She would go back to reading, trying to focus on where she had been before, but almost always picking a random place to begin again, only to see the hands start to wave at her again, stealing away her attention.

  Geegee whined beneath her hand, and Kat realized that she had been gripping the dog’s fur harder than she had meant to. She released Geegee, and the dog squirmed out from beneath her arm and then ran into the kitchen. Kat watched her go, stealing a glance at the clock again once the dog had disappeared. She couldn’t make sense of the clock now, her brain was in such a deep and suffocating fuzz.

  But she could make sense of one thing: the TV was still watching her.

  She didn’t know how, and she didn’t know what it meant, but she knew that she couldn’t simply keep on ignoring it—its black screen staring at her like a giant eye. The other thing that she knew was that she couldn’t tell Sergeant Syed or anyone else about it, either. People who were watched by TVs didn’t get to stay in their moldy old houses. They had to go other places, away from cuddly dogs and nice husbands.

  She dropped the book and clutched at the blanket with trembling fingers. She’d let the television set sit there, with its cyclops gaze upon her, for long enough. Minutes? Hours? Too long. It was time to act. Afraid of what she was doing, of what she was admitting to, Kat got to her feet, her knees shaking beneath her. With a cry of fright, she flung the blanket at the television, lidding the gigantic eye with a sheet of red and gray flannel. Then she froze, waiting to see if it would react.

  The flannel blanket didn’t move. The television didn’t budge, and only a tiny portion of the screen still managed to peer out from behind the blanket, a bottom corner that hadn’t been covered. Carefully, Kat crept forwards, then gingerly pulled the edges of the blanket securely over the rest of the TV before stepping back to offer a small, hesitant smile. Then it faded.

  “No,” she said aloud. “That—this.... This won’t do. This is no good. We....” Then she nodded vigorously at a thought, seized the television set with both hands, and spun it on its stand, until it had pivoted to face the wall. Then she stood back and grinned. “Ha! Now... Now you can’t see me. Won’t be quite as easy to watch me with the wall in your....”

  She pulled a clenched fist up to her chest suddenly, twisting to look behind her with animal-wide eyes, full of fright.

  Her phone had chimed an incoming message. She looked towards the kitchen for Geegee, but the dog paid her no heed—she was too busy scratching at the barricade. Kat looked back to the phone as another message came in, ringing her phone with its arrival.

  Kat stepped towards the phone carefully, nearly tiptoeing, as if afraid to alarm it.

  She reached out and picked the phone up with cold fingers, then turned on the screen.

  Its gwR 2wrm

  Its hwR txr..

  Kat shrieked, flinging the phone away from her as though it were a large spider. It hit the wall and then clattered to the floor behind the couch.

  In the kitchen, Geegee continued clawing at the armchair.

  12

  Kat sat on the couch, listening. Outside, crickets chirped. They sang their night-songs with gusto, as if part of the great conspiracy that was wrapping itself around Kat in her tiny home. The indifference of the police, Alex’s company calling him away, her isolation, her phone’s betrayal, the TV spying on her... and now the crickets, too. They sang—oh yes, how they sang—a cheerfully droning dirge in memoriam of the soon-to-be-late Katherine Harris, found brutally murdered in her living room, while the police were “in the neighborhood.” And she was pregnant, too, with her firstborn.

  So sad, really. Just such a sad thing.

  Her face twitched in irritation. Those crickets could sing if they wanted, too, but she could still hear past them. They could try and make an audio fog to mask the footsteps of an approaching killer, but she still had the pistol, and if some sicko wanted to come in and have his demented way, she would trade blows for bullets until one of them was dead.

  She wrapped her hand around the pistol’s bumpy grip and held it close against her chest. There was someone out there. When they would come into the house, and where, she didn’t know. But even over the crickets, she could hear them. Somebody treading in the backyard, pushing down the dew-slicked grass with each step. And, every now and again, calling out softly from beyond the kitchen window.

  “Here Kitty, Kitty, Kitty.”

  The crickets would chirp as if nothing was wrong. They’d sing merrily in the throes of the summer night, casting their music into the damp Illinois air. But out there with them stalked somebody who quietly called, “Here Kitty, Kitty, Kitty.”

  Kat tightened her grip on the pistol’s handle, her knuckles turning as white as her pallid cheeks beneath her dark-rimmed eyes. A tear tracked its way through the dark ring of exhaustion that circled her left eye, then snaked its way down over her pale cheek and stopped at the top of her lip. Slowly, her tongue came out and licked the salty tear away.

  It was night time, wasn’t it?

  She couldn’t tell. Sometimes crickets sang during the day, didn’t they? She knew that she could open a curtain and know for certain—that she could peer outside, just for a fraction of a second, and get her bearings again on what time it was, but she also knew that she just couldn’t make herself do that. If she did, the Here Kitty-Kitty-Kitty-Caller would be standing there, waiting. And she didn’t think that she could handle that sight.

  Kat didn’t check the clock. She’d taken it down from the living room wall
long ago and stuffed it in a kitchen drawer, beneath the monogrammed oven mitts. It hadn’t been making sense anymore, anyway. AM? PM? Sometimes it had ticked backwards, too. Useless. And it had stared at her, aghast, until she’d had enough of its judgmental looks and buried it in the kitchen drawer.

  She wanted to look outside now, just to see if it was day or night, but whenever she thought she might take a small peek around one of the heavy curtains, she would hear the lurker say, “Here Kitty, Kitty, Kitty.” And she knew that none of her neighbors owned a pet cat.

  She sniffled noisily and held the pistol closer, tighter, waiting for when whoever it was came into her house. They would get what was coming.

  13

  Kat awoke to the sound of her own screams. She jerked forwards, her body lifting off the wall and the pistol falling from her hands. She grabbed it with trembling fingers and then wiped a forearm across her face. It was slick with tears, sweat, and snot. She’d been sitting on the floor with her back against the wall when she’d fallen asleep, and then, apparently, had been weeping in her sleep.

  Her eyes felt sore, and her vision blurred unless she made a conscious effort to focus. She looked around the room, aware that her jaw shook and head trembled on her neck.

  The books had been thrown down from one of the shelves and scattered across the floor. She did that? A bit of the stuffing from the armchair in the kitchen had been torn out and lay on the floor. Something stank, too. Her? When had she last showered? What day was it?

  Then she remembered the calls from outside her window, and the sound of footsteps among the chirping crickets. The crickets were quiet now, and she could hear no call of “Here Kitty, Kitty, Kitty.” She listened for the sounds of someone prowling, imagined for a second that she could hear someone breathing down the hall, then shook her head and tried again.