Elizabeth Rossi (11) | STAFF REPORTER
Deadbolts, check. Door chains, check. Peephole covered, check.
The buzz of a rerun Tuesday night sitcom filled the dank living room with a cyclical laugh track. In the dingy kitchen, painted by the acidic yellowed bulb of the ceiling light was a kettle upon the stove. The gaseous flames, indigo and abstract, licked wildly as they sparked beneath the griddle but hardly bathed the iron in heat, seemingly taking their time with the matter. Pinned against the decoloured wallpaper, its peels having curled forward from age, stood the grandfather clock, rigid and familiar. It’d been a week since the last incident when their security cameras had stopped working. Then the time before that, their garage doors had opened while they were away at work.
Windows locked, check. Security bars, check. Curtains drawn closed, check.
The police hadn’t been of any help during their panicked nightly calls, crumpled in paranoia and convinced that someone was behind these acts but “accident” is what the cops called it when their mail went missing; more like stolen. Lack of evidence to form any sort of basis past a verbal recounting is what they’d secondly said. It was a small town after all and nothing ever happened outside of the occasional car crash or robbery. Even if there was a morsel of tangible proof, doubt simmered in place of assurance that the cops would have done anything more except open a subsidiary file under the first they’d made.
The homeowner stood before the heating kettle, contemplative. Perhaps they were wondering if this was truly all just a trick and some nasty group of kids down the street were toying with them.
Ding.
Motion detected at your back door.
Eyes dragged down, the phone’s blue light snowed over the slow halt in breathing on their face, lower lip trembling and movements stilling. Maybe it was a squirrel or passing insect, a thought most would have but this was like clockwork. Clockwork similar to the oh so often power outages that tore through the safe hum of the house.
Ding.
The sound was insistent, perverse and unmistakably purposeful in its wordless message just as the stolen mail was, replaced by polaroids of their home nestled within tactful, blank envelopes; I’m here.
The kettle began its hissing, white foam sizzling from its mouth and the homeowner remained paralyzed, a cascade of nerves roaring through their skin and leaving goosebumps in their wake.
Motion detected at your front door.
But they knew a doorstepper was snuggly pressed beneath the knob of each door, every window hatch carefully locked. They both knew; the home owner and the stranger outside.
Past tense actually; the stranger who had been outside moments earlier. The stranger that had taken their time, noted the person’s usual routine from the skeleton of their evening to the very essence of each rhythm, nestled between the bones.
Their television reruns. The tea left stewing for an hour too many. The staccato of the resident’s breaths, fast asleep.
For 23 days, they offered diminutive gifts ranging from picked locks to missing clothes, patient in letting the message of each intentional rearrangement stain the security of the four walls called home. Painstakingly, agonizingly patient. Now, on the 24th day, their soon-to-be friend’s wait had paid off thanks not only the lack of legal intervention, but also the forgotten fact that locks only keep people out, not those already inside.
The lights died. The kettle wailed. The floorboards croaked.
Ding.
Motion detected at your [^%^8ERROR%44].
