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You need a bathroom.
How ridiculous. How urgent. Hold it. Like you have a choice?
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
Dust sifted down on them from between the stair treads.
Don’t sneeze.
BOOM. BOOM.
She saw his sneakers through the vent cover.
His feet were so large on the shallow stairs he had to walk sideways down them, like an elderly man descending a steep hill. The sneakers were yellowed and lightly fissured. She saw a faint Union Jack on the side. Drooping grayed laces.
The light could be a good thing. Blind him again. Even if he noticed that vent, even if he peered through it, it would be hard for him to see anything.
BOOM. BOOM.
She kept her arms around the children as gently as she could, rubbing their backs with hands so quaky each felt like its own separate animal. With the light she could see the children trembling, tight and fearful. She leaned close to one ear, then another, and whispered below sound.
“Shhhhh…”
BOOM.
The man was down the stairs. She saw bits of him hatched and fragmented through the vent. Dark pants. A dark shirt. Pale skin. The back of his head, dirty blond and messy.
Again there was a clawing somewhere deep in her brain, a whiff of something familiar in his immense size, his shape, the sense that the man was someone she’d known long ago. It was the same feeling she got when she saw someone across the street whose face she recognized but couldn’t place.
Where’s his coat?
She pictured him taking off a jacket, hanging it neatly above the snow boots he’d changed out of. So polite.
He faced away from the vent, toward the old double doors on the front of the house. There was a lump in his back pocket.
The weapon?
Bright pink, rectangular.
Your phone. He has your phone in his pocket.
She rubbed her mouth, her lips, to try to make it feel more real.
At least you saw it. At least you know. Because what if you made a run for it, tried to get to your phone, only to be cornered in the bedroom, no escape, no way to phone anyone?
Cold comfort.
He stood still. He was probably noticing that the double doors were locked and bolted from the inside. Dead doors, unused due totheir obvious impracticality given the larger entry at the back in the modern addition. The man pulled the thick iron bolt with a loudchunk. Fiddled with the ancient latch. Swore in a quiet whisper so normal and human it disoriented her.
She knew the problem, of course. The house was full of different antique latches, each irritating in its own way. These particular doors were fastened together with a latch locked by a little iron bar that hung on a nail. It was always frustrating to deal with, that bar loose on that nail, because if you didn’t keep holding the bar up with one hand while lifting the latch with the other, the bar would fall, swing down on its little nail, and interrupt the lift of the latch so you couldn’t open the doors.
The man gave a loud grunt of annoyance before figuring it out and swinging the doors open. The freezing air whooshed through the vent and hit them in the hidden place, the shock of it making the children startle and shiver.
He leaned out into the storm as flakes swirled around him. Then he straightened and closed the doors.
Click, went the latch.Clunk, went the bolt.
Her index finger tore rapid and rough at the cuticle of her thumb, and her stomach twisted sickeningly.
