The lights flashed.
Now he was an older man, squat, wearing a white vest, with hair sprouting from his ears.
“Or this?”
The lights flashed.
Now he was the teen boy who’d leapt out at me in the village. Small and untrusting.
“Or this?”
The lights flashed again and now he was just a silhouette, lights flashing around him, music pounding through my skull.
I held my hands over my ears. That same ringing came to me again. I was trapped. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.
Fight him! Steal back the hammer! Smash his skull! Make him pay!
Then I thought about what Rowan had said up on the hills.
“The only way to win when you’re seeing red is to walk away,” he’d said. “Doesn’t matter what anyone thinks of you or how angry they made you or how stupid or weak you think you look. Walk away.”
“You’re right. I don’t know you,” I shouted over the music, eyeing the dark outline of the hammer in his hand carefully, “but I think I know enough.”
I forced myself to look at the flashing lights in the empty room behind him.
“You always played music late at night. But I never saw anyone coming over. I never heard any talking like you get at parties.”
He hit the hammer against the wall again. I felt it move through the air in front of my face. The noise was horrendous.
“I don’t know what life you had. Whether you worked or you didn’t. Whether you were drunk or sober. But I know you were alone.”
His hand froze. The music stopped. I lowered my arms from around my head
“You were awake and alone in the early hours of the morning. My gran once said that’s called the wolf hour. I don’t know who came up with that, but that’s when your mood is at its lowest. It’s when people have their worst thoughts.”
I wasn’t speaking very loudly, but every word boomed through that empty, dark space.
“Maybe I’m wrong.” I reached into my pocket and found the spool of thread. “But if I’m not, it would make sense that someone would want to make a noise at that hour. To drown out the thoughts, to bring some life back into the night, hell, just to tell the world you’re still here.”
The lights behind him flashed slower and slower, cutting our outlines into shadows along the walls. I wound the thread around my finger.
“It was never about me. You didn’t even know I existed.”
I pulled the thread tight.
The light stopped flashing. All was still and quiet. That loud kind of quiet you get after a long period of noise. Like your ears can’t quite trust the silence.
The gaunt figure stood frozen in front of me, hammer still raised. I waited for the drop. Because by now I had learned there is always a drop.
A squeal of feedback burst through the air behind him. A piercing pain shot through my head. The lights blared bright white. The man disintegrated in the flare.
I flinched back, tumbling over my own feet.
The walls crumbled around me, raining cement dust and old iron railings.
I fell onto a dark wooden floor.
And then the axe fell beside me with a dull clang.
