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Of course he’s found us. Of course he knows we’re here! Once he saw the front stairs, he must have figured out we came down that way from the kids’ rooms.
The despair cracked over her head, trickling down through her brain.
So it’s over, it’s all over. It’ll begin now. You’ve failed them.
“I see you! Time to stop playing this little game.” Again the childlike warble of the man’s voice, all this just for fun, all this to amuse, was so incongruous with the misery of her reality that she squeezed her nails into her palms until the half-moons dug deep enough to hurt.
This is real. You are here. Breathe. You need to get ready. You’ll have to wedge yourself between the bricks and the hidden door. That will make it almost impossible for him to open. And he’s big. He won’t be able to get in easily even if he destroys the panel. Keep him out as long as you can. Kick him in the head. That’s it, that’s all that’s left. And if he gets in—scratch his eyes out.
But she couldn’t move. Couldn’t make herself unhook the children from her robe, couldn’t force herself to risk revealing where they were hiding. Not until she was sure they were lost.
The man’s voice was soft and round, as though he were talking to a beloved dog. “I don’t want to hurt anyone. Of course not! It’s just that a little birdie told me you had a safe, that’s all. Just want you to open that safe, give me a little money, and I’ll be on my way. Okey-dokey?”
Although she desperately wanted this to be true,just money, here you go and bye-bye, up popped the memory of a long-ago coworker who had been robbed.
“We woke up and our laptops were taken,” the coworker told the group that gathered to hear the story. “Wallets, even prescription pain pills gone. The scariest thing, though, was they stole our phones, his and mine, both plugged in right next to where we were sleeping, on our nightstands.”
Yes, they could all see it. The objects lifted from beside the sleepingfaces, pulled away from dreaming breaths. Just that close. Just that vulnerable.
The coworker had nervously twirled her long hair around a finger, said, “The police told us it was good we didn’t wake up. The police said when a homeowner wakes up, that’s when you get trouble. Burglars want to take things in the easiest way possible. They don’t want witnesses. Imagine? Imagine if we’d woken up?” Faces had gone blank with that imagining. That vision of violence. “In a way,” the coworker said weakly, “we were lucky.”
He must know we’ve seen him. No way he just wants money. If that’s all he wanted, he’d be hiding his face. He wouldn’t have a weapon ready. And he probably saw the safe upstairs. It’s not like it’s well hidden. He’s using that as an excuse.
Liar.
“Little ones?” the man sounded plaintive, even lonely. “Won’t you come out? I’m not a bad guy. I just need some help. I’m not as lucky as you. My mommy never looked out for me. Just want your mama to help me with some money and then I’ll go.”
The words shot through her body with an electric hum. The man knew her husband wasn’t there—he was speaking only to her and the children. But the children’s bodies relaxed slightly. She imagined their feeling the same hope she had fought, thinking this wasn’t a monster after all. Just someone who would leave if he got what he wanted.
“Shhh,” she whispered close to one ear, then another.
Next came the familiar squeak of the old lounge chair in the corner, its springs complaining of the man’s enormous weight as he sat down. After a long pause, he said sullenly, “I don’t like it here anymore. This place crawls when it’s empty. Every room has too many doors, and all the stairs are uneven. There are voices, noises, and no one’s there.” He waited a moment, then added loudly, “I just want to get what I’m owed and leave.”
After a long, silent pause, she was only barely able to hear the man say almost wistfully, “This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. It should all be happening.”
Another wheeze and crack from the chair—the man getting up. Light creaks penetrated the wall as he walked back and forth across the room.
“You don’t want me to bring out the bad guy, do you?” She could almost see him giving a showy tilt of his head, an overexaggerated shrug, the way she did when she explained to the children the consequences of their actions.You don’t want a time-out, do you?
“If I have to, I can bring out the bad guy. I don’t want to, but you just aren’t listening.” The man sounded acutely regretful, as though this were a thing beyond him, the inevitable result of their noncompliance.
As her children trembled and buried their whimpers against her, etching deep through her mind came the thought,He’s very good at scaring children.
She pulled her son and daughter closer as if it were possible to comfort them in advance of whatever he might say next. She waited, straining to hear through the quiet. He took so long to speak again that time pulled around and over her like a wet sheet, dragging and catching on every creak, every groan of wood and brick, collecting awful anticipation and snagging on the illogical hope that he had left.
At last, so close to their wall and so loud it made the children startle like fawns against her body, he called out, “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
His voice had ticked down an octave and rasped with impatience. Its sound was so changed, so otherworldly and full of taunting malice, that she had to shake off the sudden conviction that a different person entirely was speaking.
“Don’t you want to come out, little piglet? Away from that dirty old sow?”
Her fear forced something simultaneously solid and soft, the size of a pea, from her stomach into the back of her throat. She swallowed it back down and tasted bile.
Please, please let them stay quiet.
She lightly rubbed the children’s shaking bodies with her shaking hands. She tried to protect them from this new strangeness by muffling the barbed-toothed horror of that voice, embracing them so that each had an ear pressed to her side, each had her arm over their other ear.
“Stuck-up old pig,” scratched the curled tinfoil of this new voice. “Just like all the rest. Don’t see what’s right in front of you. Think nothing watches you from dark corners. A strong man watches from a corner. He sees everything. The tender little piglet. The old spotted sow walking on two legs.”
