Page 39 of Wrong Mail

Not on. Just for half a second, the house glows amber, the fridge shuddering awake, and in that stutter of light I see him whole. The dark hoodie. His hands loose at his sides. The terrible calm. He isn't startled. He was waiting for the room to have me in it.

Then the light dies again, the dark comes down, and he moves.

I turn and run.

I get four steps.

There's another one.

He comes up out of the dark ahead of me, between me and the front of the house. He's bigger than the first. His forearm catches me across the chest. My feet go out from under me and I hit the floor on my shoulder. The pain is white and instant. My breath vanishes.

I try to scream, but there isn't any air in me to do it.

Somebody's hands are on my ankle, dragging me.

"No!" The scream comes out, torn and raw.

The floor is cold. There's grit under my cheek, tracked through the house from the renovation for six months. Nobody has ever swept it all up. I claw at the boards. My fingers scrape over dust and grit and find nothing to hold. I'm being pulled down the hall toward the gutted rooms at the back of the house where no one ever goes. I think, with total clarity, they're going to take me in there.

Then the lights fail completely, and the world is black.

Thunder comes down on the house like something falling.

Then, somewhere a long way off, on my bad side where sound barely reaches me, a voice cuts through.

"MALLORY."

What happens next comes apart even as it's happening. There's no sequence to it. Only pieces, and the pieces don't join.

The hands leave my ankle.

There's a shout, and it isn't a word.

There's a noise like a table going over. Something crashes in the dark. Then I hear footsteps, more than one pair, heavy and fast.

I'm crawling backward with my ruined shoulder screaming and my hands slipping on the floor.

Then a lot of glass breaks somewhere, and I know it's the terrace doors.

Thunder comes again, and the rain doubles with it. Someone is shouting, over and over, and I can't make out the words. It comes from the wrong side. Everything else does too. I have one ear in this world and the storm has taken it.

I’m still on the floor in the dark, listening to men fight over the top of me, and I can't tell who is who.

Something goes down the deck steps.

That much I do have. It's the one piece that's mine, the only one I'd swear to. Somebody goes down those steps in a way no one ever should. It's heavy, wrong. A tumbling sound over wood, then a thud on the flagstones below. And it stops.

Then it's just the drum of rain.

There are footsteps coming across the kitchen toward me. I couldn't run now if I wanted to.

A hand touches me in the dark, and every part of me recoils from it at once.

"Mallory. Mallory."

There's a light in my face. A phone, held low. Behind it, a shape crouches over me in the dark.

I go for his eyes with both hands.