As Nick closed and bolted the heavy door, the hallway light disappeared, sending his railroad apartment into total darkness. He blindly crossed the rooms, maneuvering the coffee table by memory, to the single bedroom at the far end, toward the beacon of blood red digits on his wide alarm clock. 12:11. Halloween was over. Again.
He sat down on the foot of his bed and stared into the vacancy of his apartment. In the neutrality of his senses, his mind returned to Katie and he wondered what costume she dressed as this year. He remembered the year she dressed as the Bride of Frankenstein, and wore platform shoes to make herself taller. Even then, she was several inches shorter than he was at 5’10”. That was the year that he’d been The Joker, in spite of her asking him to be Frankenstein’s monster.
Then, as quickly, his mind raced in panic as he thought about the murders again. Was she okay? Of course she was okay. Three people had been killed in a neighborhood that housed tens of thousands. The odds of her being targeted were like a low level lottery, but the logic of statistical chance brought him no comfort against the grim reality of what had happened.
Then again, who knew what the hell HAD happened. The way the killings were openly discussed at Plum’s, where a hundred costumed drunks like himself were shouting, laughing, and creating rumors as to what happened, it was impossible to get to the truth. One person told Nick that the police had made no comments on specifics because it was an active investigation. But he had also overheard someone say that one of the girls had been found with no arms. Then Nick himself had repeated this latter fact to two of the people in his group, passing it off as if he'd read it in the paper. He thought about this and felt shitty about himself.
He bent down and began unlacing the large black boots. He'd paid $75 for them, just for the costume, thinking, at least now I've got a good pair of combat boots (in case I ever need them), but after a night in them, he knew he'd never wear them again. He removed one and his foot felt like it had entered a pool of water. Sweet relief. He removed the other and laid back in bed. He stared at the ceiling. His eyes adjusted to the darkness, and he made out the long crack from the window wall to the ceiling light.
“I wonder if it was the Earthquake,” Kate had said one morning. She was referring to the recent quake that had unexpectedly shaken the city. “I doubt it,” he'd replied. “The building’s just an old piece of shit.” “But was it there before?” she had asked. “I'm not sure, but it certainly could've been. It's probably been a decade since fresh plaster was put down. It's pretty self-involved for us to assume that this crack in the ceiling has any shared experience with us. It's just there, growing on its own. It has nothing to do with us.” She'd been hurt by his saying this. Looking back, he didn't know why he'd said it in the first place.
He sat himself up and stared out into the total darkness of his apartment, a black hole silhouette, except for the peephole in the front door. Then, gradually, his eyes adjusted to the molding of the door frame a little further in, which led to the bathroom. Then closer still, he began making out the details of the kitchen, when the living room came into astonishing detail, and his vision refocused on the coffee table, the poster for the original Alien on the wall, the couch along the right and the unmistakable shape of a person’s leg. He froze, feeling his heart painfully beat his ribs and wondered whether it was really a leg, in a dark boot in dark trousers. Was he seeing correctly in the dark? Only one other person had the key to his place, so either he was alone or it was her.
“Katie?” he asked softly.
The sofa creaked as the body stood up slowly. It stepped behind the coffee table and into the center of the room. The mask on the face was comical. The nose was bulbous and the lips were parted slightly to expose over-sized teeth. But Nick barely registered these details as he took in the height of the person that stood before him, seeming in the darkness to reach the ceiling.
(November 1, 2016)
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