Heavenly Shades

      Charlotte Stein

      I can hear the prickle of a needle on vinyl from all the way up here, but this time I don’t flinch. My heart doesn’t try to scramble out of my chest. Instead, I just let myself float here, in the tepid water now filling my bathtub. I drift, like an island of perfectly slick, pale flesh.

      While downstairs the music cycles up. First the violins, looping along one after the other. Then that crushed-velvet voice, pouring out of the record player and all the way up to me. Heavenly shades of night are falling, the singer croons, as I let my hand flow back and forth in the water. It’s twilight time, the song continues, and then I know for certain.

      He is here.

      It’s like his calling card, I suppose. The cue for him to enter stage right. That shushing beat starts, and after it come his footsteps on the stairs. Heavy and slumberous, somehow, even though he is neither.

      He’s as quick as a snake and barely past six foot, body like a whip. Face like one, too. If I hadn’t seen underneath his clothes I’d think he was a pointed finger, muscle-less and mean. But I know different, now. I didn’t want to, but I do anyway.

      And I suppose that’s the way of things, with him.

      I don’t want to get out of the bathtub and put on the nightgown he gave me for such special occasions. I don’t want to wait for him in my bedroom, as pretty and clean as a picture.

      But I do it anyway. In fact, I do more than that. I dry my hair, and brush it out into one long spill down my back. And then finally I look in the mirror, as I always do, and try to think what makes my face the one. What made him look at me and think: It’s her I’ll do this to. Not sunny Kelli Fisher, from number thirty-six. Not Mrs Levine, who’s still lovely and lissom and not half as plain as me. My face is like a blank slate, empty of anything that could move a man to madness. My eyes are like stones, my mouth is a barely there imprint.

      And yet he comes to me all the same. He’s there when I pad across the hall and enter my entirely alien bedroom. It used to be a place of comfort in here; everything in it used to be familiar to me. But now it looks like the funhouse version of that space, shadows striping things at odd angles. Pictures hung where they shouldn’t be. The full moon barely penetrating into the room, even though I know that shouldn’t be the case. I know its light should be more than this weak little blurred thing that creeps over my carpet and scarcely touches my toes.

      It’s like he drives it away somehow.

      It’s like he drives my will away, too.

      ‘Come and dance with me, my little bird, my little one in particular,’ he says, and I think of those words over and over, as I force my feet over the carpet to him. My one in particular, he always says, because I’m special, I’m so special.

      So why is it that I sob against his shoulder the minute he takes me in his arms?

      Because I do. I make a sound like something dying and let myself sag into him, that strange wired strength in him holding me up, even as I try to sink down to the floor. I suspect he could hold me up if I was as heavy as twenty bags of concrete. I suspect he could lead me around like this, boneless and doll-like, if I fought with all of my might.

      I fought the first time, after all. All the way back then, when I had only suspected. He’d come over to borrow a cup of sugar, and I’d thought to myself, half-giddily: If he really is some kind of creature of the night, he won’t be able to come into the house – so don’t invite him in.

      And I hadn’t. Instead, I’d just tentatively passed the cup over the high holy threshold, waiting for him to reach forward and take it. And then, when he had, I’d done the worst possible thing I could have. The thing that caused all of this, the thing that made it be so.

      I’d pulled the cup back at the last second, and watched him press his fingers to the invisible barrier blocking his way, as though it were a pane of glass.

      It was too late for me then; I understand that now. He knew that I knew, from that moment on, and from that moment on my only job was to evade him – and I did. I raced the daylight home every day after it happened, but there’s always more twilight. There’s always more night waiting to descend on me at just the wrong moment, and it had descended even faster after he put that hole in my gas line.

      Because he’s clever, you see. He’s not like the ones you see in movies, who creak out of their coffins and hypnotise you in nightclubs. He has to use his wiles, rather than some set of hoary old mystical clichés. He has to rely on a serial killer’s tricks to snare his prey.

      And he snared me well. I walked all the way home from the middle of nowhere, knowing what he’d done. Knowing, but unable to do anything about it. The darkness had fallen so fast, and I simply wasn’t capable of running the five miles home.

      Even if I had, I wouldn’t have made it in time. I didn’t make it in time.

      And so here we are, dancing to the music I hear no matter where I am or what I’m doing. In the supermarket, trembling and near bloodless from the night before. Always tired now, always so weak, my mind drifting to the sound of that slowly dripping song, and his face. His eyes, like burned syrup.

      ‘Please,’ I say. ‘Please.’

      But I’m praying to the wrong God. This one has hair like a raven’s wing and hands as cold as stones at the bottom of an icy river, and when I beg him to give me my life back he just murmurs shhhh, shhhh, in a way that should be soothing.

      And it almost is. Everything he does is almost soothing,