Trick or Treat

Mother died in late August. I was still cleaning up her house in October. Sometimes I wonder how different my life might be today if I had just hired someone to clean out the mess and pack up that house for me.

It’s sober work for the only child of an only child to clear out a house, memories lifting from objects like choking dust. All the physical traces of bad memories in that house needed to be boxed and carted away. Or trashed. It felt so good throwing away things from my unhappy childhood. I wondered how mother had lived alone all those years after my father fled. I had only been four at the time. I never saw him again.

Mother never remarried. She taught elementary school when she was well.
I had spent more than half of the years of my childhood and adolescence bouncing around between the homes of various distant relations. These are the years I remember as years of thunder and lighting, years in which my mother crashed frequently and was hospitalized for her fragile mental state. I knew my second cousins better than I knew my own mother. If I speak the homely truth. When I fill out resumes, I joke that that I need an extra sheet of paper to list all the schools I attended. Somehow I managed to overcome my feelings of inadequacy, the feeling I was just some“waif girl,” and made a few goods friends wherever I went. I try to fight against this feeling of reticence that I know is my natural disposition, this tendency to withdraw. I hate to admit that I hold my mother in my mind as a counterexample. She was largely a hermit. I don’t want to end up like her.

Some family members try to blame mother’s mental illness on the “Trick or Treater.” Every year, on Trick or Treat night, a man would knock at the front door of our house, long after the candy-gathering had ended. He’d knock and sometimes ring the doorbell and then vanish into the night. Some people would say that she was hallucinating, that there was no such creep, but I knew he was real. I saw him. I’d only ever catch a glimpse of him. By the time I hit the porch light, he’d be out in the shadows of the hedgerow in our front yard or standing in the middle of the street, staring at the house. I would beg mother to call the police, but she always refused. It was harrowing. I rarely slept on that night each year. As I got older, on Trick or Treat night I would fall asleep clutching a butcher’s knife. Perhaps poor mother did the same.

I found mother’s diary under her pillow. I hadn’t known she had kept one. Then I found other diaries in a drawer with her lingerie. She hadn’t kept one every year but there were at least a dozen of them. I found myself going to the entries written around Halloween. They were deeply disturbing.

“Trick or Treat last night. Gave him her school photograph again this year,” mother had written in her severe penmanship. I saw the year on the entry and calculated that I had been twelve at the time. “Seemed to satisfy him,” she went on. “He lingered about twenty minutes in the yard.”

I felt the chill of violation. Had this woman given the creep that haunted our house a photograph of….me? My own mother. Feeding a predator who lurked around the house where I was sleeping?!

I looked at the other diary entries and every year she talked about giving “him” various tokens, usually my school photograph, but also mementos like drawings I had done or poems I had written. It was unbelievable. I had hated my mother at various times in my life, but not like I hated her now. I began to think it was a miracle that I had never been abducted by this man. And I began to wonder if I had ever really had a clue about how sick my mother actually was.

As I was reading these diaries, I heard the laughter of children in the street. I realized with a goddamn it must be Trick or Treat night in the borough. I made my way to the front door to make sure the porch light was off. I had no candy and I was in no mood. Then I wondered if he might actually still be alive. The old creep. I hadn’t checked the last diary. The one under the pillow. I took it in my hands and paged through to the entry that began “Trick or Treat.” This was just last year.

“What will he do next year, when I am gone?” she wrote in a scrawl. Her teacher’s penmanship had degenerated to chicken scratch. “This is the last time. I’m glad it’s over. Finally. I’m sorry. But what good is that word to anyone?”

I closed the front door of my mother’s house after one last glance at the dark street where jack-o’-lanterns glowed here and there before happy little houses. Where little monsters and superheroes, princesses and witches, robots and frog-faces, went giggling from one skeleton-decorated door to the next. I locked the door and pulled all the curtains in the living room. Then I lay down on the couch and drifted off to sleep. It just came over me, a depression. The diaries had taken me right down. I needed a reset. It was okay to lie down on the couch and just vanish. Nobody was expecting me anywhere. Nobody in the world.

The horrible knocking woke me. I had no idea what time it was, but knew it must be late night. I reached for my bag on the carpet next to the couch. I curled my fingers around the little SIG Sauer that I hated having to carry on me. I had the concealed carry permit. After living alone for a few years, I had one bad experience with a stalker and that was enough. That was when I acquired this pistol and went through the training to be sure I knew exactly how to use it.

I waited and listened. Sitting bolt upright. I knew the door was locked. I found my cell phone with my other hand and dialed 911, but did not touch the phone icon and actually make the call. But I wanted it ready to connect. I heard my breathing. The old terror was back. It was like I was sixteen again, clutching that butcher knife. Only this pistol was much better than any knife.

What happened next might not make sense, if I don’t confess to you that I had been drinking. I don’t usually overindulge. But as I read mother’s diaries, I had sought out her liquor cabinet and had been drinking a somewhat rancid vodka, cranberry juice, club soda mix. The cranberry juice was probably months old, but mother had frozen it. And I figured the wicked alcohol content would just sterilize everything. I had sampled some of her other liqueurs too. I had needed something to counteract those diaries, to soften the blow.

So maybe this is why I went to the door, gun in hand, and opened it.

Maybe that. And the hatred of years for the fear this creature had inflicted upon me and my mother. A woman and a girl alone. What sort of lowlife does that? I opened the door and there he stood. His mask was a simulation of decaying flesh. His clothes were the clothes of the grave.

“How dare you?!” I screamed quietly.

He stared at me. He said nothing.

There was only the outer screen door between us. Mother had died before the change from summer to autumn, when glass would replace that simple mesh. That was all that was between us. That outer door had been locked when I first entered the house. It hardly felt like safety. I made sure he saw the gun trained on him. There was only one light on in my mother’s living room but it was enough for him to see what was in my hand. Yet he did not flee. He was tall. He stared at me from his black eyes. Why did he seem so sad suddenly? I felt waves of sadness coming from him.

“What do you want?” I rasped.

I looked at my phone. Something stopped me from completing the call to 911.

“She’s dead, you know, right? The house is being sold. The next owners might just kill you the first time you show up. You might want to think about that.”

Nothing.

“You must be an old man under that mask. Your wife and kids must be very proud of you. Do they know you stalk old women and young girls?”

Nothing.

He tried the front door then. He tried to open the outer door. I felt a hot rush of adrenaline. I don’t want to think I unlocked the door because I wanted to use that pistol. But once he stepped across that threshold, I would have the legal right to discharge that weapon. Perfect legal right. I can’t tell you why I opened it. But I did, to my own horror. And he stepped into my mother’s living room. He moved like an old man. An ancient man. But the mask had a few patches of dark hair up top, not white hair. My finger tightened on the trigger. I backed away as he advanced into the house. I kept at least ten feet between us at all times.

“What the hell do you want?” came out from between my gritted teeth.

He walked to a photograph hanging on the living room wall. It was a photograph of my father and mother in their youth. I was a baby in the photo. My father held me in it. He stared at it, his back to me. I didn’t lower the gun or my guard for a second.

He reached out and stroked the photograph.

Then he turned suddenly and walked toward the kitchen. I ran halfway up the stairs to the second floor to get out of his way. He passed by me without a word and entered the kitchen. I ran back down the stairs and backed away from the kitchen’s entrance way. I watched as he went to the open basement door and presumably descended the rickety wooden stairs, down into the darkness of that unfinished room. But I couldn’t see from where I stood. I never heard the steps creak as they always do. So I wondered if it was a ruse and if he was waiting on the top step.

That’s when I realized I didn’t have it in me to shoot the man, no matter how much he might have deserved it. That’s when I dialed 911.

The borough police were there in five minutes.

They searched the house and there was no one. I saw the one female officer examining the alcohol by the couch. They asked about my mother’s recent death. I began to see a conclusion, a totally wrong conclusion, forming in her eyes. She whispered to her young male compadre and they suggested I might want to vacate the house. At least for tonight. They asked if I had someone who could pick me up. They suggested that I not drive.

I thought about telling them the history of the Trick or Treat Man, but I realized there was no police record. I would sound even crazier. So I said nothing.

I started entering info into an app to arrange a ride out of there, figuring I would retrieve my car the next day. The younger cop said he wanted to do one last basement check, just to be sure. I told him there was definitely no means of entry or exit from down there. Only the kitchen door at the top of the stairs. He asked twice. I told him twice. Surely he could see that for himself? I asked them where the hell the guy could have gone and was met with two blank stares.  I told him I hadn’t been down there but one time since my mother had died, for the most cursory of inspections. My mother told me she only threw unwanted junk down there. She hated the basement and always warned me about what she called “the mold hazard.”  So I avoided that potentially toxic room. I heard the officer descend those treacherous stairs again. About five minutes later, he came running back up the stairs, breathing heavily.

“Uh, we’re going to need to call this in,” he said, grimly.

“Call what in?” the other cop grimaced.

“There’s a note down there.” He looked at me with the strangest expression on his face. “Was your mother named Angeline?”

I nodded.

Over the next few days, my mother’s house was heavily trafficked. The borough police were soon joined by state police. And then the forensic specialists and excavators came. And God only knows who else.

And that’s how I learned my father never ran away at all.

The Older Girl

She woke and the first thought was the joyful thought. It was her birthday! She ran barefoot down the hallway and then sprinted down the stairs, barely touching the railing, her knees turned shock absorbers to the punishing jolts. When she reached the destination of her mad flight, the dining room, she was both pleased and confused.

Here was a birthday cake set upon the table. Here was the pink icing in arabesques and lovely green leaves. Here was her name, spelled out in sweet sugars she couldn’t wait to taste. And here were the candles placed so carefully in the cake. She counted them. Sixteen candles.

Silly mom. What sort of a joke was this?

Sarah looked up into the heavy mirror suspended by chains on the wall, grandma’s gift, the mirror from Sicily, the strange one. She saw her mother’s back reflected there as she walked out the front door. Before she could call out to her, the door had closed on the sunshine of a beautiful day.

Why was she leaving? Didn’t she want to make her guess where her presents were hidden, their usual fun ritual? Didn’t she want to play the “Warmer and Colder” game?

Then she wondered why the dining room was dark. Why had her mother not lit the room? She felt a vague worry. Maybe something was wrong with Grandma! That could explain everything. Maybe that’s why she had to leave.

Sarah drew closer to the mirror. She looked into it. “Nine years old,” she thought. “It’s my birthday and I’m nine years old today.”

Then she glanced down at the credenza below the mirror. Resting on one of its corners was a sheaf of papers thick as a telephone book. She stared at the top page. There was her school photograph beneath the large word MISSING.

And next to the photograph of her, the one she recognized, the face she saw when she looked in grandma’s mirror, was a picture of another girl, one she almost recognized.

She read the words above the photograph of the older girl, the one she felt, somehow, she should know: “Age Progressed From Age 8 to 16.”

And then everything began to feel terribly wrong. She knew if she tried really hard to remember, everything would make sense. But something told her not to remember.

“I’m Sarah and I’m nine years old today,” she told herself.

But a voice in her head whispered, “Cold.”

“I’ll just wait for mother to get back and she’ll explain everything to me.”

“Colder,” the voice in her head whispered.

Sarah realized it was her own voice she was hearing, correcting her. Playing the birthday game.

“Everything is going to be fine!” she promised herself.

“Colder,” said other-Sarah in her head.

“I’m feeling a chill now. I’m so cold. Nobody should feel this way on their birthday. I feel like I’ll never be warm ever again!”

“Warmer,” said the other voice in her head.

The White Cat

An old man began seeing a white cat in the mirrors throughout his apartment. He had collected antique mirrors for most of his adult life, so there were plenty of opportunities for sightings in every room.

The man owned no pets. Often in these antique mirrors the cat could be seen cleaning itself or perched on a windowsill enjoying a view of the city. The old man would swing around and look, but of course there was no cat on the windowsill, no cat daintily licking its paw as in the mirror.

One day, the man awoke and looked at a large bureau mirror across the room and saw a white paw protruding from its surface. “Get away!” he yelled, and the paw retreated. He saw the image of the cat fleeing into the backwards recesses of the mirror. It hid behind the reflection of his bed, although there was no cat behind his bed itself. He had checked.

The man began worrying that he had suffered a stroke, but the medical tests he underwent all came back negative. He was in good health, despite his age.

He visited a psychic who told him that the cat was a harbinger of death. He asked if this meant his death. She said she did not know. She urged him to paint the surface of all the mirrors with black paint. She explained that if the cat did indeed come over to “our side,” it would mean death.

The man defaced all his mirrors, ruefully. He sealed them with black paint. And then he covered them with sheets. He realized he was ruining a valuable collection, and his apartment looked ridiculous to him, but the seer had told him that it was his only option. She explained that he could not simply discard the mirrors. That would be too dangerous.

One afternoon shortly after that, the man woke from a nap to see the white cat curled up at the foot of his bed, fast asleep. He screamed, but it was a muffled sort of cry and he felt his heart seize at that moment. His head fell back upon his pillow for the last time.

As the man was being zipped into a black body bag, his upstairs neighbor, a redhead actress of twenty-four, poked her head in his open apartment door. She was holding a white cat against her breast. A breeze played through the white sheer curtains of the living room. These wraiths were lifting and falling in the dead man’s open window.

“Sorry. She comes down the fire escape sometimes. I’m afraid she’s a bit of a nosy parker. I think she liked him. He seemed a nice old man. If a bit odd.”

Angela tsk-tsked the cat in her arms as she walked upstairs, saying a little prayer for the dead man under her breath.

When she got inside her apartment, she released the cat, who jumped up on her bed at the same time she sat down there. She felt a strange little sense of loss, although she had never known the man. She shuddered when she thought about the mirrors in his apartment, how they had all been painted black. Who knows what happens in the minds of the aged, the lonely. She looked across the room at a mirror hanging on her wall and saw her white cat lying behind her on the bed, already curled up, eyes squinted shut. But she also saw another white cat. It was sitting on the bed next to her pet. It was not interested in her cat. This reflected cat was making eye contact with Angela via the mirror. The young woman spun her head around fast at the jolt of that intense stare. But, of course, there was only one cat there.

Night Suntan

There is a place back behind the old Lochiel Hotel where some disused railroad tracks have been rusting away for over a century in an overgrowth of wild trees and scrub.

If you stand there for an hour or so in the middle of the night, even the darkest night, in the morning you will find you have a suntan.

Or rather, you will find in the morning that you have what looks like a suntan. It may be a slight reddishness, but it will be noticeable.

It doesn’t matter what clothes you wear. It doesn’t matter whether or not the moon is shining, whether it is summer or winter.

You just have to stand back there, behind the Lochiel Hotel, in the right place. The place where it happened.

You see, that is where two trains collided in the middle of the night, over a century ago. One train was filled with sleeping passengers. And the other was filled with freight. When they collided, one train poured its steam into the other one, the sleeper train, and roasted alive the people in there. The victims of the train wreck looked like hot dogs which had been boiled.

If you bring an old radio back there and listen through the static on the A.M. side, you can sometimes hear voices from the accident. There is one man’s frantic voice which keeps crying out, “Tell Alice! Tell Alice!”

Five of the victims from the wreck were never identified and are buried in a cemetery nearby. It is believed that the “Alice” voice people hear on A.M. radio is the voice of one of the men buried there, a young man who never made it home, still trying to find a way to explain to his wife or girlfriend what happened to him over a century ago.

Stop Me, Oh Oh Oh Stop Me, Stop Me If You Think That You've Heard This One Before

Gary was driving home from a Friday night poker game with old friends which beer and b.s., mostly b.s. of the sports variety, had prolonged into the wee small hours.

He wasn’t drunk, but he was tired and tapped out and saw by his dash that it was after 2 a.m. This was just as he was driving along the seemingly endless expanse of the large Elysian Fields cemetery.

As he looked away from the digital clock and back to the road, a young woman in white came rushing out of the darkness of the cemetery and ran right in front of his car. Barefoot, no less. And in a long gown. Gary swerved and hollered the expletive-laced name of a messiah at her.

His car braked to a stop less than fifteen feet from the woman, whom he could see now was more of a girl. She was standing stock-still, facing directly away from Gary’s Hyundai. He thought about blowing his horn, but he figured something was wrong with the girl. Seriously wrong. Maybe something horrible had just happened to her. Maybe she was the victim of an assault or worse. She certainly appeared to be in an altered state. She was holding a small bouquet of flowers upside down in her right hand. He watched as she tossed it off towards the cemetery bushes without even looking that direction.

“Are you alright? I’m sorry, but you just came out of nowhere. You know?”

He was talking loudly out the driver’s side window, hoping she could hear him.

The night was very still, so she had.

“I know,” the girl said. She still wouldn’t turn to face him. It unnerved him.

“Listen, I would normally offer to make a call for you, if you need a ride. You’re probably not going to believe this, but I don’t have my phone on me. I can offer you a ride if you need one, but I understand if that’s not something you’d be comfortable with. I mean with a stranger out here in the middle of nowhere…”

But before he could finish his sentence, she shocked him by turning and walking directly to his driver’s side window. She leaned her arm there, her slender white arm, and smiled with little trace of fear. A big smile on a small, pretty face.

“How about this? You move over and let me drive. I’d be much less afraid that way.”

“I’m not so sure about that. You seem to be missing your shoes. Where did you come from, anyway? Is that a prom dress? It seems an odd time of year for….”

“Do we have a deal?” She was still smiling.

Gary reluctantly slid over and she opened the door and took the wheel.

“I’ve never driven one like this. All these new-fangled doodads!”

But already she had them in motion, headlights picking out their way down that long street otherwise deserted. Everyone in the small town had found their beds already.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I have to ask: you haven’t been drinking, I hope?” Gary realized it was a slightly ironic question to pose.

“No, Buzz and Joey were the ones drinking. Drinking like hogs. I told them to slow down. That punch bowl stunk to high heaven. But they don’t listen to anyone but each other. Egging each other on like idiots!”

“Where exactly are we going?”

“Why, of course, I’m going home.”

“It isn’t far?”

“No, not far at all. You’re very kind to help me out.”

By now, she had already taken some dozen turns and they were in a part of town with no streetlights. Gary was not familiar with these rural areas at all. He began to wonder if this might not be a set-up. Was there some guy waiting with a gun out in the countryside to roll him where no one would even hear his cries for help? And the one time he didn’t bring his phone. He slipped his wallet under his seat surreptitiously. She didn’t seem to notice.

“I’m gonna need to use my g.p.s. to get back out of here. I don’t know all these backroads. I can see we’re getting higher. Could you do me a favor and keep a few feet more to the right of that barrier? That looks like a hell of a drop off.”

“What the heck is g.p.s.?” she laughed. “You know, it was just terrible what happened to Joey and Buzz. Some say they deserved it. But did the others?”

“What happened to them?”

“They went off the cliff on River View Road. They were picking up pieces of them in the ravine for days. Them and all their passengers. That car was just crammed with kids who had come from the dance.”

She shook her head, crying then.

“I’m so sorry,” he commiserated. “Listen, you seem pretty upset. Why don’t you pull over and we can switch seats.”

She began to accelerate then. It really scared Gary.

“No point,” she said. “We’re almost home.”

“What do you mean we’re almost home?” Gary asked. “And you’ve gotta slow down, this road is getting narrower and narrower. Where the hell are we, anyway?”

And then the headlights picked out an old street sign that read “River View Road.”

The car was going about seventy at that point and he began to scream at her to stop the car, hit the brakes, this isn’t funny at all.

But she was laughing now through her tears.

As the car left the road and Gary felt his stomach, his ass, everything, try to float, the girl turned to him and said, “This is the part where you hope, but it doesn’t come true.”

Fiction

Single


1.

Julia had begun taking long walks in the evening. She would take a turn through a sprawling, attractive cemetery near the apartment complex where she had recently taken up temporary residence for work. The large acreage of this necropolis probably exceeded a mile square. There was no way to see the entirety of the burial grounds at once, since the terrain was so varied, unless one cheated and counted aerial views. A surprisingly large number of narrow roads crisscrossed the graveyard’s hills and dales. The little avenues and culs-de-sac all had their own names and weathered street signs. Julia found it a charming place to walk, this city of the quietest citizens.

She had once joked with a co-worker that cemeteries were her Prozac. She liked the way the wild birds serenaded the peaceful dead, even if they did, immediately afterwards, despoil the dignity of their monuments with those paint-bombs dropped from beneath their tail feathers.

One spring evening, Julia was out on one of her regular roundabouts, walking in that zone between the newer burials and the truly old parts of the cemetery that included some rough-hewn settler graves. She found herself drawn, for some indiscernible reason, to the grave of a dead youth. Julia would occasionally read some of the tombstones closest to the path. She realized how little could be gleaned of the lives of those that lay hidden beneath six feet of worm’s playground, a full fathom of earth. 

His was a low, brown stone. Nothing ornate or special. He had died just over a century ago. That was the period when the town had just begun finding its way, industrializing and coming to national prominence (a position which it had later lost through the vagaries of economy and history). This poor unfortunate had died at the age of fifteen or sixteen, depending on whether he had reached his birthday before his death day in that long ago year. The tombstone didn’t specify.

Julia felt a twinge for him. To have died without having known any of the major joys of life! Had he loved? Or, rather, had he thought he had loved? And why was his grave isolated? Usually, when a child dies, the parents later join him or her. Perhaps they had moved away to another city or another state? It just made the young man’s grave seem all the more forlorn.

Julia felt herself standing there beaming love at the poor waif. She stood there alone on a spring evening in a cemetery on the outskirts of a town largely new to her (she had relocated as a high-level trainer in the banking industry) and pined for a boy who had been dead for over a century. She giggled at herself. How could she not laugh at her own silly pathos. But she did try to speak to the dead boy. She did not speak aloud. She spoke in her mind the name she had read on the tombstone, asked Reginald if he could hear her. She “told” him a few facts about herself and wondered at what sort of person he might have been. What were his likes, dislikes? Would he care to tell her?

Then she shook her head at herself and moved on.

2.

Julia had not expected her initial attempt at “conversation” with the dead youth to turn into any sort of ritual.

But she surprised herself by making a regular stop at his tombstone every time she took a turn through the cemetery. And this was at least five times a week, sometimes six.

She found herself looking forward to telling the lost boy about her day at work, the particulars of her life and history. She didn’t spend long at his grave, maybe five or sometimes ten minutes. And she would still ask him questions about his own life. She had new questions every time.

“I have been single too long,” she said aloud one day as she walked away from the young man’s grave, after giving the stone a caress.

She had caressed the tombstone as if it had been a young man’s cheek.

3.

It was in the third week of Julia’s visits to Reginald’s grave that the young woman had her first shock.

As she sauntered towards his modest monument one unseasonably warm evening in mid-spring, she saw the flower. A purple iris! It was tall and perfectly formed. Right there on the boy’s grave. Alive as anything.

“I must be seeing things.” Julia found herself speaking aloud, although she was the only one in the cemetery, as far as she knew or could see.

She sped up and dropped to her knees on the young man’s grave. She wanted to examine the colorful flags of the gorgeous flower more closely. Such a display of purples! Tyrian and wine petals and some lighter lavendar blushes all composed a flower so splendid she thought of stealing it. She really wanted to take the thing home. But she would not harm its growing. You don’t rip magic out at the root.

“Surely someone planted this here?” she thought. But the weird thing about it was, she noted, that the ground had not been disturbed. The iris had not been transplanted. The flower had not been growing there the previous evening. About that shocking fact, Julia had no doubt.

Julia had seen no other irises blooming yet, purple or otherwise. And she walked for miles each evening. Don’t they not appear later in spring or, more properly, in early summer? She tried to remember.

But had she not told Reginald last week that it was her favorite flower?

The purple iris.

Yes.

A good partner listens.

3.

It was in the fourth week that Julia told Reginald the saddest stories of her life. It was their month anniversary, so she figured it was safe to broach those things now, the poisons of life which had made the flower wilt.

He seemed to take it well. Certainly, he did not run away.

As Julia was talking to him, sometimes in her mind, but more and more now aloud, she noticed a shape in the grass before the grave.

She could see there was the shape of a body that had lain there. On the bed of the grave. The grass, now long and luxuriant from the rampant growth of spring rains, appeared to have been pressed down. Julia stared and realized it looked like the figure of a young man.

Maybe the wind did this, she thought.

The wind must have done this, she reassured herself.

But she went to the form and lay down within it. Like an embrace.

It was so warm and comfortable that she wanted to fall asleep there.

4.

In the second month, Julia began to feel the first stirrings of fear.

She had begun seeing a figure in the distance when she was on her evening walks. It was clearly a young man who was stalking her. She changed the direction of her walks but he always appeared. He kept back many blocks when she was in the city and sometimes she would see him behind trees when she was walking in the suburbs. Julia carried mace and a screech alarm and often held her cell phone tightly in her hand, at the ready. She could never make out his features. But she knew it was no coincidence. It was always the same figure. He had to be stalking her.

All she knew is that he had dark hair and was not very tall. Maybe five feet six or seven at most. Slender. He always seemed to be dressed in grey clothing. She thought it appeared to be professional attire, perhaps even a suit. (So strange on a teenager! For he did appear to be a teenager.) But her shadower was always so far away and dodgy. He was always so quick to hide. She didn’t feel that he was physically all that intimidating, for she knew how to defend herself. And he seemed more of a boy than a man, her shadower. But it was disquieting and disturbing to her. One read and heard more and more of savage attacks on adults by children. 

Oddly enough, she did not report her stalker to the police or anyone else. She felt she would sound like a madwoman. Surely, she would have to wait for some sort of true interaction. So she didn’t tell anyone. Who was there to tell, anyway? Julia led a solitary existence and had drifted away from virtually everyone who was not a professional contact. Her parents were dead and she had no siblings. Her friends had married and moved on. She didn’t even have a pet. The apartment complex where she lived didn’t allow them. Her work kept her very busy. She was as disciplined as any general in an overseas war zone. And perhaps as lonely.

5.

One evening in early summer, Julia found herself trapped in a teaching seminar because some of the company’s newest employees had arrived a few hours late due to a missed connection on the East Coast.

She decided not to take her evening walk. Though the days were growing longer, she did not want to risk being outside when darkness fell. And by the time she reached her apartment, the sun was sinking fast.

After arriving home, she went into her bedroom to change out of her stiff business suit and saw immediately that her bedclothes had been disturbed. She fumbled for her phone and made the 911 call within seconds of the observation. The operator stayed on the line with her while Julia checked her entire dwelling, against the advice of the dispatcher actually, who had wanted her to vacate the apartment immediately and wait for police to arrive. But she searched her dwelling, mace in hand. And there was no intruder.

While she had been on the phone with the 911 dispatcher, she had  pulled back the covers of her bed and saw what appeared to be a retained impression, the outline of a body which had recently lain there. Julia reached out, almost reluctantly, and touched it. It was still warm. She said nothing of this to the dispatcher. She couldn't quite explain to herself in her head why she had remained silent on this discovery.

Nothing had been stolen or moved about. The windows and doors were locked. Still, Julia did not feel abashed. Her key had turned in the lock. She hadn’t left open any window or door, any means of entrance to the dwelling. Someone had been there. There was the distinct possibility an employee of the apartment complex who held a key had entered the dwelling. There could be a stalker in the employ of the complex, she thought. A maintenance man or someone who was showing the apartments to prospective renters. 

She called the apartment manager’s office, but it was after hours. Nevertheless, her alarmed voice mail resulted in a callback within the half hour. Mrs. Garrity assured Julia that she would check the surveillance system the next day, as soon as she got into the office, and let her know immediately whether anyone could be seen on the recording entering her apartment. The older woman was grave, respectful, and to the degree she could manage, reassuring.

Julia did not sleep well that night. She had a chair propped against the front door of the apartment and her cell phone lying under the palm of her hand below her pillow.

Mrs Garrity, true to her word, called Julia even before the worried young woman had left for work the next morning. The apartment manager had come into work early to review the surveillance recordings. She confirmed that no one could possibly have entered Julia’s apartment by the front door. While she didn’t have a camera watching Julia’s front door, she did have one trained on the stairwells which any intruder would have needed to access to reach Julia’s hallway. And a window breach was clearly impossible since all the windows were locked when Julia arrived home. Julia’s balcony faced the front of the building and a ridiculously tall ladder would have been required to enter the apartment in that manner, in plain sight of countless people. There was no other means of access to Julia’s apartment.

The only conclusion was that no one had entered Julia’s apartment.

She was perfectly safe.

“Thank you,” Julia had said.

And had stared at her bed.

6.

Julia was standing on an old iron truss bridge that dated to Reginald’s day.

The dark river below was so pretty. Was it always this pretty in the middle of the night?

“But why am I barefoot?” Julia wondered. She was staring at her naked feet. Where had her shoes gone?

She had started taking night walks. She realized, by now, that it was easier for him to follow her at night. In the daytime, it was only fleeting glimpses.

In the middle of the night, he would sometimes stand for a long time under a streetlight, letting her stare right at him. She could get close enough now to see that he had a beautiful face. Seraphic. Pale skin and the nobility of an aquiline nose. She thought his eyes might be blue or green, but that was pure fantasy at this point. She had never gotten close enough to know that. At least not yet.

She stood on the bridge and looked down into the moving blackness. She found the sound of the tiny river waves comforting. That odd sort of little chuckling they do.

Night river sounds. Darkness telling other darkness little jokes.

If she climbed over this little bit of barrier, so easy to do, she would have more choices. Once there, if she stepped forward only one foot more, into the unsupporting air, it might all be easier. The distance might close just like that.

It was possible, after all. Wasn’t it?

She looked back towards where the bridge met the land. He was standing there. Smiling now.

“But what about the age difference?” she beamed at him.

He smiled even brighter.

“We are all the same age here,” was the answer he had beamed back.