It Knows Where You Live (17 page)

“Oh. Right.” She stepped back, wobbling. “It’s like that, is it? You don’t even want to fuck me. You haven’t touched me in over a month. Am I that ugly to you now?” She listed from side to side, fractionally, like a galleon on choppy seas.

“Yes,” he said, and turned away, headed for the door, and entered the living room. “Yes, you are.”

She cried for an hour but he refused to leave the room and go to her. Then, finally realising he was not going to budge, she stormed upstairs and slammed the bedroom door. He heard her talking—on the phone, to one of her friends. What were their names again, Joanne and Gracie? He’d never heard of them; before today, Katie had never mentioned them to him.

After another hour she went quiet. She had probably talked, or cried, herself to sleep. It was dark in the living room; the night bloomed outside the window. The streetlights seemed weaker than usual; their light was insubstantial, and it barely made a circle around their concrete bases.

Macmillan realised he’d been sitting there for over two hours, doing nothing, feeling nothing, just listening. He got up and grabbed the DVD from the mantelpiece, opened the case, slipped the disc into the player. He walked backwards to the sofa, his eyes on the screen, and prepared for yet another viewing.

This time the actress in the final murder scene
was
Katie. There could be no doubt. It was not someone who resembled her, or looked exactly like her: it was her. It was his wife. He barely paused to wonder how this could be the case, how the woman’s appearance could alter so subtly with each successive viewing of the film. He accepted it fully; it was part of the magic of home cinema.

He watched in quiet awe as the man in the leather mask throttled his wife. Her bulging eyes. The red line across her pale throat. The way her hands grabbed at his arms, futile, making no impact. Her open mouth, the silent scream. This time it took her longer to die—that was another slight change, another variation on the theme of her demise. It had taken longer each time; this time it took over twenty minutes. He checked his watch. It was fascinating.

A movement caught his eye, and he glanced up at the window. He’d neglected to shut the curtains. The man in the leather mask stood there, looking in. The streetlights had dimmed to a point where they looked like etchings on the glass. The whole image was a painting, a DVD illustration or a cinema lobby poster.

Beware the darkness. It is watching. It knows where you live...

In silence, he stood and approached the front door. The figure moved with him, on the other side of the glass, the wall, and then the door. He could see its dark outline, waiting, just waiting to be let inside. He reached out slowly, savouring the moment, and turned the key in the lock—it was there, the key; why would it have been anywhere else?

He opened the door and took two steps back, one step to the side. The man in the black leather mask ghosted inside, dragging a light mist behind him like a wedding trail. He turned his head and glanced at Macmillan, walking slowly past him towards the other door, and the kitchen, the stairs beyond. His eyes were black, like stones, and the skin around them was as yellow as old parchment paper.

Macmillan followed the man out of the room. He left the front door open. There was no point in closing it, no reason to lock or bar the entrance when whatever had been coming was already here, and inside with him.

It knew where he lived. It had always known.

He walked up the stairs, staring at the broad back of the man. He wore black clothes—not dark, but black. A knee-length coat, black leather gloves, black leather shoes. Macmillan watched as the man turned the corner into the master bedroom, and then he followed.

When he entered the room the man was sitting on the bed. One of the dresser drawers was open and the man was twisting one of Katie’s silk stockings around his gloved hands. He stared at Macmillan, his hard black eyes cold and unblinking.

Macmillan walked to the corner, near the wardrobe with the full-length mirror, and stood there, mentally rehearsing his small yet vital role.

The man continued to stare at him, awaiting instructions. The stocking was knotted around his fists, pulled taut between them.

“Do it,” said Macmillan, relishing the scripted words as they emerged from his mouth. This felt like the culmination of a series of events and the beginning of something else. Perhaps, he thought, there will be a sequel—maybe this is even the first instalment in a franchise.

The audience held their breath. They were a single entity, a mass of living, staring, hungry eyes watching unseen from the other side of the fourth wall.

The man on the bed nodded once. He slid across the mattress, and then straddled Katie. She snorted, twitched, but did not wake. She was drunk; she could probably sleep through a tornado. Her eyes opened but she could not see—it was an impulse, a sleep-action. Nothing more.

The man wound the stocking tightly around her throat, and then tugged. His thick arms tensed, his broad back hunched over as he pressed his weight against his struggling victim.

When the man was finished he stood up and moved away from the bed. Katie’s body looked like a mistake, a messy little error. Her eyes bulged from her slackened features; her skin was the colour of moonlight. Macmillan looked down at his hands, clad in the black leather driving gloves she’d given him for his last birthday. He clenched his fists. The leather creaked. Or did it? Was this just a sound effect, a post production edit?

Reaching up to touch his face, he felt only leather. But that was natural, of course: he was wearing gloves. He smiled, but his skin felt tight, encased.

Turning, he approached the full-length mirror, knowing what he would see even before he reached it.

OTHER MONSTERS ...

TROG BOY RAN

Niles Reedman, stalker extraordinaire, was well and truly pissed off by the time he got home.
 

It was a feeling he had grown accustomed to, had even begun to enjoy, over the past three months. In fact by now he could barely even remember a time when he wasn’t pissed off, and this new familiarity towards the feeling had begun, in a strange way, to offer him comfort. If he stopped to think about it, he would probably hate himself even more than he did already—so he barely thought about it at all, and simply went through the motions of his existence like a broken machine stuck in a sequence of dull, repetitive movements.

He lurched through the front door and into the hall, slamming the door behind him. The sound was satisfying, but only for a moment. Heading towards the stairs, he threw his keys onto the small shelf near the door, and then climbed up to the first floor. He was hungry but couldn’t be bothered to prepare food. The fridge was empty anyway—there wasn’t even any beer left in there, so getting drunk was also out of the question.

He went into the bathroom and urinated in the dark. He was aware some of his piss was splashing onto the toilet seat, but again the thought bothered him very little. He’d stopped cleaning the place two weeks after Abby had left, when it became apparent she was not coming back. The accumulation of filth didn’t bother him, so why should he make the effort to do anything about it?

He flushed the toilet and crossed the landing to the spare room, turning on the light with the slap of a hand as he entered. He glanced at the radio alarm clock next to the single guest bed; it was 3 a.m.
 

He had sat in the car outside Abby’s flat for four hours, waiting for her to return from wherever she was, and had finally given up when he realised she was probably spending the night at a friend’s place. Possibly a male friend—perhaps even the guy he’d seen her meet for lunch a few days ago, when he’d followed her around town at a discreet distance, watching her shop for a new stereo.

He sat at his desk and turned on the laptop. It took some minutes to boot up, but he spent the time thinking of Abby, and picturing her on her back with that guy grunting between her legs. He was tall and dark—clichéd good looks—and Niles would bet he was a better lover, a more attentive boyfriend than he’d ever been.

Shit. None of this got any easier.

He stared at the screen, and when it came to life his hands twitched automatically towards the keyboard. He logged on and opened the internet browser. It had become something of a habit to check his emails before going to bed.

He entered his user name and password and watched as the homepage flared into existence. There were no new messages in his inbox. Since Abby had left him it seemed like everyone else was also slowly turning their back on him; even his cyber-friends—the ones who knew him only from blocks of text on a screen—were also deserting him.

Shaking his head, Niles opened another browser window and logged onto Facebook. He spent half an hour looking at other people’s old school photographs, reading their bland status updates, and generally searching for something to make him feel better about his situation. The plan usually worked, allowing him a sense of
Schadenfreude
from the fact that someone else was sadder, weaker, or more depressed than him, but tonight (well, this morning actually, given the early hour) nothing seemed to work.

There was time for one last hopeful look at the emails before signing off and going to bed. He closed down Facebook and maximised the other window on the screen. Again, his inbox was empty (just who was he expecting to email him at this hour, anyway?) but the menu down the left hand side of the screen showed he had a single message in his junk folder, where any message considered by the programme as possible spam was automatically stored.

Niles moved the cursor across the screen and hit on the junk folder. The screen flickered, sticking for a moment, and then showed him the contents of the folder: a single message sat in the box, as if taunting him.
You have no real friends left
, it said.
Nobody wants you but us, the gremlins of the web
.

“Jesus,” he whispered, feeling lower than ever.

The title of the email was absurd, almost surreal, as was usual with these viral messages. Niles looked at it, trying to imagine what it might possibly mean, and then stopped because none of them meant anything anyway. It was probably an ad for a revolutionary penile enlargement system, illegal medications, or some Nigerian Prince offering him two million US dollars if he agreed to launder it first through his UK bank account.

Niles moved the cursor over the email. The all-upper-case title seemed to call to him: TROG BOY RAN.

“Fucking weird,” he said, aware that lately he’d been talking to himself more than was strictly healthy.

On impulse, he clicked on the title and opened the email. He knew he was risking a Trojan or a virus, but he didn’t care. He didn’t care about much these days.

The message was blank: there were no words inside, just that silly title in the subject heading. Niles thought about the known scams: fictional foreign lottery wins, free cars and cash from “Honda,” the fucking Nigerian Princes and their supposed fortunes...but this didn’t seem to be one of those.

Out of pique more than anything else—and as an obscure way of getting back at Abby whose reasoning he still failed to understand—he typed out a reply: “Fuck you.” Then, without thinking, he hit send, closed down the machine, and crawled into the spare bed (some nights he simply couldn’t face the master bedroom and the double bed he and Abby had once shared), taking succour from this small, inconsequential triumph.

Sleep didn’t come easy—it never did these days. His mind hummed and buzzed with plans and counter plans, most of which pertained to the on-going surveillance of his ex-girlfriend...he knew it was wrong, of course he did; but he couldn’t stop himself.
 

At last daybreak slunk towards him like some great lethargic beast, offering little by way of diversion. Only a few months ago he and Abby might have made love upon waking, enjoyed a leisurely breakfast in bed, and then concocted some sort of plan for the day—Saturday was always special, a day when they could do things together. Now Niles just lay there on his back, looking up at the ceiling, wondering if he could be bothered to shave today, or if he should continue to put it off. The beard was making him look creepy, but the idea filled him with a perverse glee. Yeah; it appealed to him right now that he looked scary.

Finally he got out of bed and went into the bathroom. He didn’t shave after all, but he did take a long, hot shower, amazing himself that he still had the ability to cry. The tears mixed with the water on his face, so he pretended it hadn’t happened. When he got out of the shower, he avoided the mirror as he dried himself. Then he put on his dressing gown and went downstairs for coffee.

He thought about breakfast—he really did—but even that made him feel profoundly nauseous. The weight was falling off him; he was actually skinny for the first time since his teens. Abby had always complained about his love handles, and tried to cajole him into going on a diet or joining a gym. Ironically, she would have loved his new slim-line look. Apart from the creepy beard, of course; in truth, the beard would probably make her a bit nervous.

He watched the morning football pre-match build-up on the sports channel, and then grew bored. Yawning, he stood and headed back upstairs, to the spare room. It was 10 a.m. now; and for the second time in only a few hours, Niles accessed his email account...and once again the inbox was empty. He was just about to close it down when he spotted the junk message count. He could barely believe it, and actually had to examine the figure twice. According to the little number alongside the folder title, the junk folder contained 600,000 messages.

He read it again, just to make sure; perhaps his eyes were playing tricks on him, just like his mind had started to. But no, the number was the same. Apparently he had 600,000 junk emails held within his account.