The painter kept upstairs for the remainder of the morning, since he perceived these rooms were less subject to surveillance. Upstairs windows were examined, but the milksop (and acrophobic) mustered no courage to scurry down a drainpipe as a route for escape. It was easily believed that the rest of the world dissolved in the unrelenting fog beyond these ledges.
The flashlight was still in the drawer, but staring at it intermittently, or even continuously, did not change its (or his) disturbed ontological state.
Noise soon intruded on this isolation, and at first the hearer thought it window shutters banging in daylight, but any gale strong enough to jar them would dissipate fog.
Concentrated study out his bedroom window uncovered the presence of an idling vehicle on the rural road. No headlights were detected, which was unusual given the possibility that another vehicle, no matter how rare an occasion for it, should come along and collide with the first. Still, with the hum of a motor established, the searcher pieced together a scenario by which the situation was explained: A lineman occupied a hissing hydraulic lift, and floated above scraggly trees, of which one was presumed to be the business end of a telephone pole.
The captive knocked repeatedly on the window to draw the worker’s attention to the house. He was unlikely seen for the brume, but his desperate action succeeded in halting repairs.
The fellow in the crow’s nest did not gesture or call out, but remained a motionless outline beneath the misty veil. No doubt he looked in the summoner’s direction—and for too long without acknowledgement. When he finally stirred from his new occupation, it was nothing done by his person. The driver inside the service truck steered toward the house. This was a clumsy, unexpected maneuver, and as the vehicle brushed the hedge line, the workman remained hanging in midair like a predatory insect bent on the second floor windows.
Slowly features emerged. The airborne coworker wore an alarming—even ghoulish—expression. It was impossible that the house’s inhabitant was spotted in his dim, morose room, but before the cage swung over the eave, Liam withdrew to the darker hallway.
Talking (more like screaming) swept along the clapboards outside, and then a shadow blighted the bedroom window. Palms were heard squeaking on glass—and then scraping fingernails. Fists lastly pounded these thin panes!
The summoner of these dreadful actions felt like a prisoner of Dracula’s castle, one who had been pleading with indifferent casket makers in the count’s employ to no avail.
He retreated to a hall closet, and in his shock listened to the truck and its occupants lap the house slowly, with the object of visiting their terror on every upstairs window.
If the tormented man believed this racket was dying away, his hope was dashed when footsteps—rapid ones—were heard overhead! Had this crazed fellow leapt from his carrier onto the rooftop? Was he now searching for a way into the house?
Loud and then softer steps sounded—and this stomping back and forth lengthened with each enactment. Bizarrely, the marauder was pictured to travel a greater latitudinal distance than what the sprawling roof provided. More to a maniacal program, the pitch of said roof was too steep for anything less capable than a mountain goat to traverse it.
Intervals of silence grew longer, and like relief between horrible spasms of pain, they proved their own cure.
Liam poked his head into the hallway, and saw where the door behind the armoire was ajar. He could not recall if this was the way it was left, or if his invader had penetrated the house through the busted turret window. Were this latter scenario the case, the man would need to be slight of built to come this way.
Each upstairs doorway was approached cautiously, but only light of a winter’s day was admitted into these ruins.
His attention turned back to the formidable cabinet, yet here again he could not claim it was undisturbed. Its mirrored panel doors were among the few things in the house that would not stay put. Removing one of his large paint brushes from his satchel, its door pulls were threaded to fasten them.
Meanwhile, the truck was never heard to rejoin the road. Nor was it discovered, where the fog was now penetrable, to lurk in the boscage south, east, or west of the property. A northern prospect was unavailable, but Liam was soon at ease inspecting the upstairs windows.
Discolored greasepaint covered the outside pane glass, indicating how the gruesomeness of his flying specter owed to a liberal application of theatrical makeup.
Fatigue compelled him to lie on the bed. Consciousness and unconsciousness circled one another for an interval, like dead leaves being pulled along in a whorl.
The napper arose from the pillow with pinging in his ears—had the telephone on the table rang in the moment before? He pressed his alarm into the grey corners of the room before reexamining the hallway. His paintbrush no longer bridged the cabinet door pulls, but lay in the middle of the hall—
Liam fidgeted in anticipation of a pounce that did not come. He picked up the desk phone handset, and could not attribute his spontaneous act to anything other than nervous terror:
A dial tone was heard.
It was easy to believe that the landline, seen fastened to an eave outside his window, vanished without thought into the white void. No bird or wind murmured in its fields, and against this muffled effect, there was nothing to gauge the length of the cable, or to see to what it was coupled.
The flying repairman doubtless shared in this development. Regardless, Liam did not pass on an opportunity to call and enlist the help of his friend.
The phone rang three times. When an answering machine picked up, the caller could not recall if Howard owned such a device. Accepting this as a fact, would the eccentric default to a factory setting by sending out a prerecorded announcement? Liam did not think his friend so mundane as this and hung up without leaving a message.
Conviction about his decision was short-lived. The second time he called, a response was composed while the announcement played. The pause allowed for him to speak was not as silent as one might reasonably expect. Static filled his ear, so he raised his voice to be heard over it.
“Howard, come to Tazewell Manor as soon as you can.”
The message was sufficiently ambiguous, but not so unexcited to be shrugged off as lacking urgency.
Within fifteen minutes, the phone rang. The promptness of the response pleased Liam until he remembered that he left no return number. Sudden indecision meant the summons went unanswered, but the ringer would not stop ringing. Seeking its cessation, the receiver was lifted from the base to terminate the connection and set aside on the table.
Static continued to spill from the handset’s speaker. The pulse was neither random nor suggestive of a pattern—and the longer it persisted, the less it behaved like crackling electricity. It was as if someone’s fingernail was inside the telephone’s earpiece scratching at the underside of its cover. Plopping the receiver back on its hook did not end the disturbance. Disconnecting the power cord from the wall plate was also ineffective. The faint noise was now at large in the room.
Was this a gnawing rodent?
Rustling curtains did not flush his pest into the open. However, the hole in the bedroom wall, forgotten until that moment, was uncovered. Was this the source of the sound? Was this another instance of Liam hearing an earlier version of himself excavating the hole downstairs? The opening may have acted as an intercom to amplify his transgression.
The continuing noise forced the inhabitant to abandon his modicum of comfort for the hallway. The bedroom door was shut behind him, and passing it from time to time revealed a worsening situation. Scratching confined to its interior had moved to the door face.
Liam had failed to remove the flashlight from the night table’s drawer before quitting the bedroom, and with each passing hour that it remained inaccessible, its materiality faded into a jumbled background with everything else.
Nothing more came of the clawing, and after two hours of silence, the listener suspected he had inflated its significance. The house was drafty, and on testing several upstairs doors, all rattled in their fittings. Perhaps a mouse was responsible for the sound in the bedroom wall, and the door disturbance owed to the wind. The fact that this problematic door no longer made a noise indicated that either prevailing air currents had changed, or his opportune invader no longer chose to taunt him. Either way, he did not reenter the room.
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