The December 2009 Selected Story is by Byran Medof
Feel free to email Bryan at: brymed78@yahoo.com
OUTSIDE HER BEDROOM WINDOW
by Bryan Medof
Linda had just gotten home from work. It was late, slowly approaching midnight, and she was exhausted. Not so much because of her job, which certainly had its tedious moments, but she was simply depressed. Some people overeat, some drink; but for Linda, she slept.
She had broken up with her boyfriend, Kent Johnson, two weeks before. It had just about killed her when she had found out that he had cheated on her. And with Stephanie Baxter! Linda felt that Stephanie was the biggest slut in the world. What a slap in the face.
And now things were getting worse. Linda found herself becoming afraid of being alone. Simply walking inside her front door to confront an empty house made her palms sweat and sent shudders through her body. What was going on? She had looked up her symptoms on the internet at work and came across the word autophobia. Did she have that syndrome? Was she losing her mind as well as her boyfriend?
The house Linda lived in was small. The size was a tad bigger than a standard studio apartment. She had been renting it for almost a year for only $465 a month plus utilities, not too bad of a price for California rent nowadays. She didn’t have a phone because she couldn’t afford the phone service; well, technically she could, but chose not to so she could save more money. All her other friends didn’t even own land lines anymore, they all had cell phones, but not Linda. No cell phone, no regular phone, and the only internet she had access to was at her workplace. She was indeed living in a technological dark-age.
This night, after grabbing a glass of water from the kitchen, Linda walked into her bedroom and turned on the small picture-tube television set. It had been in her parents’ garage since the mid 1980s. She slipped into her nightgown and got into bed, pulling the covers up to her neck. The only light in the room was the soft glow of the television. She yawned and begun flipping through the channels, she didn’t have any fancy luxuries like satellite, or cable; just the plain basic channels from ancient rabbit-ears, and as usual, not one damn thing was worth while watching. She left it on the Late Night Show after tiring of channel surfing.
Her eyes were getting heavy. She tried everything she could to keep them open. She had to stop sleeping all the time. She needed to knock off all this weird behavior.
As she momentarily dozed off, the drinking glass leaned forward and the water spilled onto her thigh and bed sheeting. She jumped up as soon as the cold water soaked through her thick, flannel nightgown.
“Damn it!” she shouted. The empty house did not reply.
She set the now-empty glass onto the nightstand table next to her bed and as she began ringing out the water from her gown, the power suddenly went off, killing the television. Linda quickly looked at the dark spot where her television would be, her eyes still saw a faded white glow, like an exposure from a camera flash.
She quickly got back into bed despite the coldness of the water-spot. Just great! she thought in a state between anger and fear. The horrible silence was quite disturbing to her; ever since she broke up with her boyfriend, she had been sleeping with the television on, and now her anxiety went off the charts. The only sound she could hear was her own labored breathing.
It was dark. So dark.
And she was alone.
She wanted to get out of bed and change into a different nightgown, but she didn’t, she couldn’t, she felt paralyzed. Her legs seemed to have only enough strength to move deeper down into the bed and under the covers until she was completely laying flat. The wetness on the bed and her nightgown had gotten warm from her body heat, and she could handle it so as long as she didn’t move and allow a trace of the night air to cool the wet warmth.
A deep anxiety crept into her mind as she stared into the darkness. Her eyes had slowly begun to adjust to the dark and she could make out only the edges of things. She remembered that when she was a child, she would look around her dark room at night and see shadows of objects like jackets hanging on chairs, that in the darkness, resembled hunched, distorted old men creeping towards her. At night, nothing was really what it appeared to be.
There were monsters, hideous, grotesque monsters. She had once read that the human brain tends to make sense of everything, even shapes and patterns. Trying to organize chaos into coherent order; trying to always connect the dots. Although she knew that fearsome things were simply jackets hanging over chairs, her brain fed her the visual information of monsters, like the ones she watched on The Outer Limits series and those cheesy 1950’s B movies that were always full of offensive creatures. Even when looking at her slightly opened closet, it too seemed to be full of nasty monsters lurking inside . . . waiting for her.
Now, even at the age of twenty-eight, things were worse, even more so pathetic because she was an adult. All of her childhood friends had outgrown their childish fears of monsters and had come to the realization that the true monsters in the world lurked within the hearts of mankind.
Linda closed her eyes, concentrating on her breathing. She rested her hands over her breasts; slightly feeling her heart beat against her palm. Her mind told her that the solution was to sleep. Sleep was an escape from her depression, from her fears of being alone, from the pain of what was her life. She could feel herself beginning to fall asleep, slowly tuning out of this reality . . .
And then she heard it.
Outside her bedroom window, a quick and loud snap from a branch shattered the silence and startled her, throwing her back into coherent awareness with such an incredible thrust that her heart literally skipped a beat. All the fear and anxiety in her body seemed to have quickly congregated into a lump in her throat, restricting her ability to breathe.
Wide-eyed and stiff, she tried to listen to see if she really did hear something, but she heard nothing more. She took a deep breath in relief, brushing it off as a fragment of her over-sensitive imagination; or maybe it was just a squirrel getting comfortable in one of the bushes or even as simple as the wind blowing against the plastic window blinds.
That is the sane response to my fears, she thought. Use logic. Use reason.
As her heart calmed down, she closed her eyes again, taking long, deep breaths, focusing on the rhythmic sound of her breathing, imagining her breaths being the ocean’s waves crashing to shore. The warm sensation of the sun against her face and the—
“Nooooo . . .”
What was that? It had been barely audible, but just enough for Linda to snap out of her illusionary pleasant state; it sounded like either a woman or a child’s voice. She didn’t notice that she was digging her nails into the palm of her hands as she had them both in tight fists. Then the sound of a muffled cry came from outside the window behind her bed. That wasn’t a fragment of her imagination.
She tried to prop herself up, but the squeak of the bed quickly stopped her from moving any further, the sound of everything seemed greatly amplified. Linda carefully scooted up to the window, she thought about pushing her fingers between the blinds, but that may be to obvious if there is a monster outside, but she knew she had to do something. It had sounded like it could very well be an injured person who is in need of medical attention and she didn’t think she could live with herself if the person in trouble died only because she was too afraid to help. As Linda tried to peek through the blinds, a deep scruffy voice boomed: “Shut up!”
Now that jolted her back from the window, and jolted her heart out of her chest.
Oh God please help me, there’s a man trying to harm someone outside! she thought, and now fully realizing that she was trembling, that even her teeth were clattering as if a wave of coldness had taken over her body; but instead of coldness, it was the trepidation of fear.
What to do, what could she do? She couldn’t call the police, no phone service. Why oh why hadn’t she considered the possibilities of emergencies when she had scorned buying a cell phone? She knew she couldn’t fight back; she only weighed one-hundred and twenty-five pounds, besides, she was too frightened to even get out of bed much less do anything heroic.
Linda was now crying silently, still listing to this poor woman’s own crying and torturous moaning outside the bedroom window, no doubt from the immense pain being inflected upon her. A cloud of helplessness surrounded Linda, and she was angry at herself for being so weak.
She knew she had to do something, anything, but what?
I have to act, she told herself. I have to, I have to, I have to.
As Linda’s mind raced, a quick and sharp jolting scream sent her from thinking and into action. She quickly grabbed her slippers and shoved them onto her feet and darted off to her front door. She threw it open, and then stopped.
What lay in wait outside her front door? How could she face the dark and undefined night all by herself? She was alone. She was all alone, and that was even more frightening than hearing someone being attacked.
Stop it! she frantically told herself. Do it! Go outside into the night! I refuse to be a helpless fool. I can do this.
She told herself that the man attacking the woman was in the back of her house. He wouldn’t, couldn’t, see the front of her house. So she took the plunge. She threw herself out her front door and ran faster than she had ever ran before in her life. She ran into the night, into the terrors of the unknown.
Racing across the lawn, her flannel nightgown whipping in the breeze, Linda reached the porch of the large front house owned by her landlords. She ran up the cement steps and to their front door pounding and banging the side of her palms against their door.
“Open up, oh please! Open up, please, please!”
The porch light turned on and Mr. Spencer pushed aside the drapery and looked out the side-door window. After opening the door, Linda ran into his arms.
“Linda! What’s wrong? What happened?” Mr. Spencer asked.
She told him, “Lock the door!”
He obediently did as she demanded. Mrs. Spencer walked out of her bedroom wearing a dark purple robe and bunny-slippers. She still had curlers in her freshly dyed amber hair.
“What's going on?”
“We have to call the police!” Linda cried. “I heard something outside my bedroom window. I think someone is being attacked; we have to call right now!”
“All right now, just calm down,” Mr. Spencer said as he picked up the telephone to call the police.
His wife led Linda to the sofa. “Please honey, sit down, try to relax.”
Linda sat down submissively and Mrs. Spencer draped a thin blanket over her shoulders. She sat next to Linda and gently patted her back to comfort her.
*******
After a police officer arrived, he checked the back apartment-like houses, but found no signs of anything out of the ordinary. Behind her bedroom window were just bamboo trees, bushes and gravel, with a cemented brick fence only four feet away, not really giving much room for what Linda described. There was nothing whatsoever left behind that could be considered as evidence.
During the police officer’s inspection, Mr. Spencer had replaced the fuse from the fuse box, allowing electricity to be restored inside Linda's tiny house.
The police officer walked up to Linda and her landlords. “There’s nothing more I can do. I’ve searched the premises thoroughly. If there was anyone out there, they’re gone now.”
Linda, still shaken, gave a false smile. She felt embarrassed, as if everyone thought she was crazy or something. Maybe she was.
She watched the officer get into his police car and backed out of the driveway. Mrs. Spencer reached for Linda’s hands. “If you hear anything else, honey, please come back and let us know, and we’ll call the police again, if need be,” she told Linda.
“Thank you, Mrs. Spencer,” Linda said with sincerity, and then looked at Mr. Spencer. “I’m sorry for disturbing you two tonight.”
“That’s quite all right, Linda, but everything is fine now,” he said as he gave her a pat on her shoulder. “If there’s anything else you need, just let us know. Don’t worry about disturbing us.”
“Thanks. Could you . . . maybe walk me back to my house?”
Mr. Spencer gave a warm smile. “Of course,” he said as he laid his hand on the small of Linda’s back.
Mr. Spencer turned to his wife. “I’ll be back in a moment, honey.” Mrs. Spencer smiled and strolled back into her house as her husband accompanied Linda back to her place.
At Linda’s door, Mr. Spencer looked at her house then back at her. “Well, try to get some sleep.”
Linda managed a weak, embarrassed smile at the thought of someone telling her to sleep, something she had been doing too much of lately. “Thank you,” she said as she turned the doorknob. “Good night.”
“Good night. Oh, I hope you don’t mind me saying so, but I really think you ought to invest in some sort of phone or something.”
Linda sighed, “Yeah, I guess I should.”
“All right, Linda,” Mr. Spencer said, “have a good night.”
Linda walked into her house and locked the deadbolt immediately after shutting the door. She took a deep breath and noticed the faint glow of the television set flickering from her bedroom. She could tell by the sound that Late Night with Jimmy Fallon was on. Reaching the television, she turned it off.
Without anyone on the TV to keep her company, Linda was alone.
She went through her bedroom and paused for a moment as she peeked through the blinds of her bedroom window. Though she was sure she had heard what she heard, at least now it was over.
I’m so selfish! Linda thought as she wondered what did happen to that person in pain, and then fear replaced her guilt when she thought about the monster inflecting that pain.
Linda felt the thigh area on her flannel nightgown and realized that the wet spot had finally dried completely. So she didn’t bother to change. She got into bed, covered up and closed her eyes.
As a few moments passed, a muffled cry permeated her bedroom. Only this time, the sound was not coming from outside, but from inside the house. Oh dear God, was something inside? Had the monsters finally come out of her closet? Had the jackets on the chairs risen from their crouched position to stand upright, raising their jacket arms to release clawed fingers newly emerging from the previously empty sleeves?
Slowly, Linda sank deeper into her bed, frightened out of her mind, frantically listening to the sounds. They seemed to come from her bathroom. Her mind was crystal clear, her adrenaline rushed, and she could hear her heart thudding in her ears. Why, oh why, hadn’t she asked to spend the night with the Spencers? If she had done that, she wouldn’t be alone now!
But was she really alone? She could hear the sounds from the bathroom.
No, she thought frantically, I’m not alone. Someone is in my house.
Linda wanted to scream, but nothing came out. She wanted to move, run away and get help, but her body lay under the covers, as still as a statue, that restrictive paralysis overwhelming her once again. Now, shuddering beyond control, her heart pounding like a jackhammer, she saw a shadow in the mirror with her peripheral vision.
Something had crept out of the bathroom. The intruder was in her bedroom!
Suddenly Linda remembered that the electricity had been restored in her house. She pulled herself up from the bedcovers enough to reach to her nightstand. Linda turned on the lamp.
And the image she saw was that of her ex-boyfriend’s face emerging from out of the shadows, his smile wicked and frightening. His eyes were steady and intense like a predator, locking onto its prey.
In his arms was the body of a woman. It was Stephanie Baxter, lying bloody and lifeless in his arms. He opened his arms and let her fall, tumbling lifelessly to the floor.
Kent spoke. “I had to choose. I love you Linda; tell me you love me too.”
Bryan Medof lives in Riverside, California and when he isn't writing, he is teaching piano and music theory. He hopes to expand his writing career. He has always been fascinated with the human condition; in fact people in the real world frighten him more than the unseen, which has led to his long-time interest in forensic psychology.