Heat

Slowly, she reached out one arm and felt at the side of the bed. Her fingers touched damp terrycloth, and she withdrew to the safety of the bed as though burned.

‘Okay, so I got drunk and dreamed it. I got drunk, and I took a shower, but I did dream it.’

Daria sat up, dislodging Grendel, who mewled at her belligerently. She slid her feet onto the floor, biting her lip with the effort at keeping silent, and stood up.

She had no idea what to do next. Should she go downstairs and make good and sure she had hallucinated the creepy cop-guy, knowing she would feel silly the whole time? She was naked. If she put clothes on first, wasn’t that a subconscious admission that she knew there would be someone downstairs?

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she told herself, trying for ster

Daria inched across the floor and silently eased her panty drawer open. She took a pair at random and pulled them on, her ears straining futilely to try and hear something beyond the closed bedroom door.

Grendel was watching her with feline fascination. When she crawled into a t-shirt (Merry Christmas! Seventh A

“Shut up!” Daria hissed, her heart cramping with completely unreasonable terror. She grabbed the cat around his ample middle and shoved him into her closet, then leaned against the door, trying to listen past his indignant pawing.

Nothing. What did she expect?

Daria moved toward the bedroom door, her heart thumping louder with every step she took. She was giving herself the heebie-jeebies, she knew, and she was doing it all for nothing, but that was fine. She’d laugh herself sick later. Right now…right now, she just had to be sure.

It took her a whole year to turn the doorknob quietly enough to open it. She cracked the door ajar and peeked into the hallway.

Nothing. Just the hallway and the stairs.

The TV was on. Law & Order was playing.

Daria’s stomach tried to swallow itself, and she had to hang on to the door with both hands to stay on her feet. She couldn’t feel any part of her body. She was a ghost.

‘You’re completely freaking out over nothing,’ she insisted silently. ‘You went out this morning. You got drunk. No, you don’t remember getting drunk, but you did. You came home and got all sappy over Dan and you watched Law & Order the way some other flaky chick would wear his old sweater. It’s only still on now because it’s always on, that show is the fucking vampire of basic cable and it is constantly walking the earth, you know that. You got drunk, that’s the important thing. You got drunk and you watched Law & Order and you took a shower and you went to bed and had a scary dream. You don’t even need to go downstairs to prove it.’

Except she did.

Leaving the monster-proof safety of her room felt like stepping out of a suit of armor. She felt horribly pink and exposed. Just why she should feel pink was a bizarre sort of mystery to her, but she did. It was an awful, clammy color pink, too.

‘See? Drunk! Sober people do not have thoughts like this!’

Step by silent, trembling step, Daria made it to the head of the stairs.

Her bills were still on the floor in the foyer. The TV was still on. Everything was horribly, horribly wrong.

She found herself keenly wishing she had a weapon in her hands. She could go back into her room and get the table lamp, but that was about it, and that only thing it was likely to break if she hit someone with it was itself. If this were the movies, she’d have a halberd collection or something mounted helpfully in the hallway, or she’d be a ninja who knew how to kill a man with a hard-boiled egg. God damn the movies!

She began to descend, agonizing over each step, trying to remember if she had ever noticed a squeak on the stairs, trying to think of what she should do when she got down to the foyer. Should she grab a knife from the kitchen and search the rest of the house? Should she call 911 and risk exposing her case of the megrims to the public eye? Should she split and run half-naked along the eighteen mile strip of road into the nearest town and call 911 from there? She kind of had the feeling that if she did that, she’d better by-God be sure there was someone in the house first or she was going to end up back in mandatory therapy and probably a rubber room besides.

The sound on the TV suddenly muted, and Daria stopped, shock-white and shivering, her hands pressed to her mouth. That was it. That removed all doubt. There really was someone in her house.

Whoever it was got up from the couch. She heard the heavy tread of his footsteps on the carpet and then the awful click as he stepped off onto the hardwood floors. Her mind spat up an image of the feet she’d dreamed—three thick toes and black, hooked talons.

Her nerve snapped. Daria heard a long, silvery scream rip out of her and even in her frozen state of terror, she thought it was a very Hollywood scream. Her brain seemed to be watching, bemused, as the rest of her flew down the remaining stairs and crashed into the door. She yanked at the knob half a dozen times before slapping the deadbolt free. She yanked another half a dozen times before registering the door still wasn’t opening. She looked up in dumb disbelief at the slat of wood nailed over the top of the jamb.

“Lindaria Cleavon.”

She whirled, flattening herself against the door in a pointless attempt to push her molecules right through it and out the other side. He was there, he was coming for her, his horrible clawed hand stretched out before him. She shrieked again, grabbed the coat rack from the corner and threw it, coats and all, right at him.

He caught it, stumbling back with an expression of surprise that would have been fu

She tore through the kitchen in a frenzy, ripping up drawers in disbelief and staring at the total lack of knives, forks, corkscrews, spoons or anything that could be used as a weapon. Her dishes were gone from the cupboards. There were no cans of cat food or jars of spaghetti sauce. There was nothing! There was nothing!

He was coming down the hall.

Daria seized a box of crackers and a handful of Tupperware and threw them, still screaming, peppering his face and chest with the only ammunition she could find. He stumbled back a pace, slapping at pudding cups and sandwich baggies full of cereal, and Daria raced around the cooking island, through the dining room, and back out into the hall behind him.

He bellowed her name at a volume that could rattle walls, and then he was ru

She reached the laundry room door, slipped and fell through it, then slammed it shut and crawled to the back door. She was still trying to scream, but her voice was gone; her breath shuddered in and out of her in whistling gusts.

The back door was boarded shut. Not just nailed, either, but screwed into place. She tugged at the boards, sobbing, and managed only to get splinters in both hands. The windows were barred. Why hadn’t she climbed out her bedroom window? There were no bars on the second story windows. The worst that could have happened was her falling and breaking her neck, and that was lots better than this.

Daria put her back against the door, looking in tearful desperation at anything she could use for a weapon. The room, like the kitchen, had been picked clean of everything sharp, heavy, or remotely dangerous. She grabbed an empty paint can off the work shelf and held it out before her like a cross, shaking violently.

The door to the hallway was still closed.

Daria stood there, the empty paint can heavy at the end of her arm, and finally managed one wobbly step forward. And another. And a third. She reached out across miles of distance and touched the doorknob.

Silence.

She tried to turn it.

It wouldn’t budge. He was gripping the other side.

Daria sprang back and banged into the washing machine. She threw her paint can at the closed door and then slid down to the floor and huddled there.

Nothing moved. The door remained shut.

Daria picked up a sock that had somehow missed the hamper and hugged it to her chest.

The doorknob began to turn.

Daria tried to push even tighter against the washing machine, but the laws of physics prevented her. She twisted the sock in her hands and shivered.

The door swept open and the man peered in at her. Fury made his golden eyes smolder, but he did not fly at her. He glanced down at the empty paint can, nudged it aside with his foot, and then took a step towards her.

She threw the sock at him with a despairing howl and then clapped both hands to her mouth and waited for death.

He looked at the sock. He looked at her. He looked skyward. And then he looked at her again. “Do you know who I am?” he asked. His voice had the prick of irritation but he was keeping calm.

She didn’t want to know, but her brain provided the information anyway. She nodded, tears streaming over her fingers and splashing onto her chest. When he only waited, she pried her hands a little apart and whispered, “Tagen Pahnee.”

Something in the hard set of his shoulders relaxed slightly, but he still looked pretty pissed at her. He took one step forward and stopped again. “What else do you remember?”

She remembered him holding her hair while she was sick in the sink. The thought seemed to curdle somewhere inside her; her shivering body began to go slack, not with relief, but in defeat. “You’re not going to hurt me,” she sobbed, not believing a word of it.

“No. I am not going to hurt you.” He regarded her with a bitter intensity and took another step toward her. “And you are not going to throw things at me.”

“Okay, I won’t.” She looked up at him through a shimmer of tears. “Now please go away, okay?”

“No.” He took the last step, and then reached down and took her arm. He brought her inexorably to her feet and glared down at her, his claws still strong on her bicep. “I need your help,” he said, stressing the word ‘need’. “And I am staying until I have it.”

“No!” she moaned, and tried to pull away from him. In a moment of pure absurdity, she heard herself add, “I’ll call the cops!”

“I have the phone,” he countered, his eyes narrowing. He let go of her and watched as she inched away from him and hugged the dryer. “Do I need to tie you before you stand still?” he demanded.

She looked at him, her lip quivering. She shook her head.