Thursday night in the city. It was too hot to sleep and too late to do anything else, unless of course, you had someone to do it with.
Franklin didn’t, so he spent his Thursdays in the safety of his own home, listening to his radio and watching the world grow old outside his apartment window. A hard day’s accounting would eventually take its toll and Franklin would retire promptly at 10:30 PM to toss and turn until the muted cacophony of the inner city lulled him into a fitful sleep.
This particular Thursday, for the first time since God and the weatherman knows when, the smog cleared enough to let the city folk see the night sky. The street lights drowned out most of the stars and the full moon took care of the rest. Franklin, for his part, slept unperturbed and dreamt whatever dreams CPA’s dream. The moonlight came streaming in the window and was promptly cut up into neat little squares and laid out in a pattern on the floor. It almost matched the pattern on the rug. Franklin would have liked that, had he noticed. In fact, he might have re-arranged the carpet so that moon and material matched perfectly. Perhaps he even dreamed in neat little squares.
A few hours later – call it midnight for dramatic effect — the moon’s squares and the carpet’s were in violent disagreement. The city had somehow managed to grow quieter and Franklin woke up.
The last, of itself, was of no great importance except that it wasn’t supposed to happen. Never before had Franklin awakened anytime before 6:15 AM without good reason.
Franklin began to look for the good reason.
The city wasn’t making enough noise to be the guilty party and the moon vehemently protested its innocence. He wasn’t hungry or thirsty. Not even a nightmare. (Franklin didn’t have nightmares.)
So what, he asked himself, would cause him to wake up six hours and (he checked his watch) fourteen minutes before his alarm clock said to? Franklin rolled over to examine his apartment.
For precisely the third time in Franklin’s methodical life, he felt fear. But here was no screaming rollercoaster or menacing bully, but a shadow. A man’s shadow at that, on his wall, in his apartment, right smack in the middle of his nap.
Franklin’s stomach moved, his heart pounded, his breathing became labored, and his palms began to sweat.
In short, Franklin was quite properly terrified.
Franklin, however, was not much concerned with the propriety of his terror. His mind and body frozen with fear, it was quite some time –and it felt even longer– before he could think about anything at all.
Long minutes crawled by and Franklin, bit by bit, regained control of his mind. With an admirable effort of will, he directed his attention to the apparition inhabiting the hallway twixt his kitchen and bedroom. The intruder’s shadow stood immobile on the wall. Franklin wondered how something like this could even happen to him. Dwelling on this, Franklin’s mind suddenly performed an amazing feat of mental gymnastics and arrived at the conclusion that it couldn’t. Either the shadow didn’t exist or it was not what it appeared to be.
Franklin looked at the shadow. It existed.
As you may have guessed, Franklin was a creature of habit. And, per his nightly routine, he had locked his front and only door twice to make sure. No one could have come through either of the two windows. Besides being several stories above the ground, one was barred and the other would have required that the intruder step approximately on Franklin’s stomach to enter the room.
The only other entrance, he thought almost bemusedly, was the air vent and that was rather too narrow for any “man” taller than 23 centimeters, by Franklin’s estimation.
Franklin looked at the shadow again, but not with fear. He studied it. A problem, he thought, a phenomenon without a cause. He had ruled out the intruder theory due to a lack of access routes. He laid out a mental map of the next room. No, there were no objects to account for the man-shaped shadow.
It was a possibility that the shadow’s cause could be a burglar that had hidden in the kitchen earlier in the evening and was prowling now. He quickly dismissed the thought as highly implausible. Besides, he had scrubbed the kitchen walls that afternoon, leaving no possible place for the shadow to hide. Franklin felt a slight irritation at even considering such an absurd thing.
Then, two thoughts occurred to Franklin almost simultaneously. First, when he had cleaned the kitchen he had moved all the furniture and appliances out from the walls for easier drying (“I think of everything.”) so things were not in their usual order. Secondly, the shadow had not moved.
So that was it. The shadow was no man, merely a collection of disorderly appliances. The shadow hadn’t moved because appliances couldn’t. He’d never seen the shadow before because the kitchen had never been so disorganized. (He made a mental note to correct that first thing in the morning.)
Franklin looked at the shadow again. Of course the shoulder would be the refrigerator. The back of the head was a mixing bowl, most likely. The nose was a trifle too square –probably a cookbook binder. The entire shadow shifted as he looked at it. This part was too rough, that angle wrong; all sorts of incongruities made themselves apparent.
Franklin felt a little silly, but relieved. Also annoyed –he had lost nearly twenty-six minute’s sleep over a harmless shadow. “Ah well,” he thought, “chalk it up to (his accountant’s mind’s clicked) twenty-six minutes to experience and cheap entertainment.” He closed his eyes.
The moon smiled.
Sometime later the city and Franklin both were still. The moon was wide awake though and was staring unashamedly into Franklin’s apartment. It had tired of arguing with the carpet and had found itself another plaything: A growing pool of thick, viscous liquid on the floor by Franklin’s bed, ringed by a silver band of moonlight on the rounded edge of its sticky surface. The pool was suddenly disturbed by the abrupt addition of another drop of the fluid dripping from the thin, surgically sharp, cut under Franklin’s chin.
It extended from his right ear to just under his left, taking care to cross all the major blood vessels in the neck. It was a fine gash. Franklin might have liked that. So precise, so thorough, so… professional. If only it hadn’t ruined his sheets beyond retrieval.
If the moon hadn’t been so busy playing with the pool, it might have noticed the uncanny and oppressive mantle of gloom that surrounds death. It might have noticed the way certain minute sounds seemed to stand out in the otherwise dead quiet. The steady drip, drip of the fluid on the carpet, the whisper of the warm breeze, and the sharp click of Franklin’s door closing. And perhaps, if the moon had been particularly attentive, the patter of footsteps down the corridor, echoing against the stillness of what was, after all, just another Thursday night in the city.
Mike Reeseman, 1980?