Alex Bledsoe - Wisp of a Thing

“…don’t like to do any of the things I like to…”

Finally he heard a door slam, and then silence.

It was the first time since Anna’s death he’d been moved to write about anything other than her death. He worked on the tune a bit more, barely touching the strings, until the combination of alcohol and headache finally won out. He quietly went to his room, wrote down the lyrics, and slept.

This time, a smell woke him.

A fetid odor filled his room. It reminded him of the old junior high bathrooms that were never really cleaned and thus constantly smelled of urine, feces, and sweat. This odor was similar, although he also caught whiffs of dirt, like a freshly turned garden.

He sat up and winced at the fresh pain around his stitches. Except for the moonlight outside the open window, the room was dark. The blowing curtains made shadows across the floor. He remained very still as his eyes adjusted, and listened for the slightest sound.

Then, despite the silence, he had the very definite sense that someone else was in the room.

Had Tiffany come back to knife him in his sleep? He imagined her on tiptoes, like a cartoon elephant sneaking up on him. But there was no place for anyone her size to hide.

“Hello?” he said, his voice raspy from sleep. There was no response.

He considered turning on the lamp, but decided against it, since it would blind him as well as any intruder. He carefully slid out of bed. He wore only his boxers, and when his bare feet hit the cold wooden floor, it creaked under his weight. As he crept to the door, the night chill raised bumps on his skin.

He stopped. Wait a minute, he thought. Chill? I didn’t open the window. In fact, he was certain he’d closed it before he went to bed, so he wouldn’t be awakened again by the strange cry.

The first real moment of panic struck, and he stood with his back against the locked door for a long time, waiting for anything in the room to move. But nothing did, and by then, the smell had almost vanished.

At last he felt along the wall for the light switch. In the sudden illumination, he saw every detail of the lace-encrusted room, nothing odd or out of place. No furtive figures dashed for cover. He was just about to chide himself for his excessive imagination when he noticed something shiny and wet on the floor.

He knelt beside it. The spot of mud was in the shape of a small, bare human foot. He spotted another one closer to the bed, then saw a whole trail of them, half-dry and rapidly disappearing, that led from his bedside to the floor beneath the open window.

“What the hell?” he said softly to himself.

He leaned out and looked down at the wall below his window. An agile person could climb the gutter drain and then get access to his room. But who would want to?

His fingers slid into something wet. On the windowsill was the muddy outline of a hand. He put his own down next to it; the print was smaller, but the fingers were long and slender, reaching past his own, almost like some kind of monkey. He envisioned a half-simian gargoyle creature perched on the sill, watching him with big, night-vision eyes, like a giant lemur.

And the print seemed to have six fingers.

The smell was almost gone now, as were the prints. Soon they’d be only amorphous patches of dried mud. He couldn’t tell anybody, because there’d be no proof. And what if this was all just some weird hallucination brought on by the whack to his head?

“You’re losing it, Rob,” he told himself. He closed and locked the window, turned off the light, and went back to bed. He was asleep again almost instantly.

The next morning Rob managed a shower, enduring the agony as he washed the blood, Vaseline, spiderwebs, and pine needles from his hair. Luckily, the scab around the stitches held. He opened the window and let the cool air and bright sunshine flood into the room, dispelling the night’s heebie-jeebies. As he expected, the muddy prints on the sill were now indistinct patches of dried dirt that blew away in the morning breeze.

He got dressed and went downstairs to the Catamount Corner’s dining room. A heavyset man with a goatee and glasses, his eyes red from sleeplessness, sat alone at one of the three tables. Rob assumed he was the male voice he’d heard from the porch. He had the general cast of the Tufas—dark hair, dusky skin, and big white teeth—but the qualities weren’t so obvious as they were in the locals. A road map lay open on the table in front of him, and he was comparing it to notes on an iPad. They nodded at each other as Rob got coffee and sat at the table closest to the door.

Rob opened his notebook to the lyrics he’d scrawled the previous night. They seemed awfully trite in the clear light of morning, but they might work as a start. With a little tweaking…

A tall redhead entered the room, glanced at Rob, and smiled. She sat down opposite the goatee guy.

“Sleep well?” the man asked sarcastically.

“Like a baby,” the woman said, deliberately blithe.

“I bet,” he snorted. “Look, if we’re just going to fight all—”

“We’re only going to fight if you start it.”

“Can I finish my sentence?”

“Sure.” She waved her hand dismissively.

“I was saying, if we’re just going to fight all day, maybe I should go do the cemeteries alone. You can do whatever you want.”

“Oh, yeah, lots to do here.”

He rubbed his eyes. “If I don’t go check these last couple of graveyards, then I’ll always wonder about them. It would be stupid to leave without doing it. I’ll do it as fast as I can, and you can, I don’t know, read a book or something.”

“Fine. Next year I pick the vacation. And no more of this idiotic grave-robbing.”

“It’s grave- rubbing. And it’s for our kids, too, if we ever have any.”

“Our kids won’t care who’s buried in what little town. They probably won’t even care where we’re buried. I think it’s a little morbid, anyway.” She stood. “I’m going up to the room. You do what you want.” She gave Rob another smile as she passed his table; she was long and athletic and clearly aware of her effect on men.

When she’d gone, Rob realized her husband was glaring at him. “That’s my wife you’re drooling over.”

Rob shrugged apologetically; he had been staring. “Sorry. Didn’t mean anything by it. She’s just pretty to look at.”

The other man nodded sadly. “Yeah. I’m sorry, we’ve just been fighting nonstop for a week now. It seems like everything I do or say just pisses her off, and—” He stopped. “Well, you’re not interested in our problems, I’m sure. How’d you get the shiner?”

“One of the local Southern belles rang my bell yesterday.” Rob turned to show his stitches.

“Ow. A girl did that?”

“She was bigger than me.”

“I hope so.” The man reached across the empty table between them and offered his hand. “Terry Kizer.”

“Rob Quillen.” Kizer’s grip was soft, his hands a bit pudgy. “Nice to meet you.”

“Likewise.” He looked more closely. “Have we met before?”

“Don’t think so.”

“You sure look familiar.”

“Hey, let me ask you something,” Rob said, glad to change the subject. “Did you see anyone strange around this place last night?”

“Strange how?”

“Somebody sneaking around, being nosy.”

“No. Although my wife said she thought somebody was watching her undress last night, through the window.” His eyes narrowed. “It wasn’t you, was it?”