Sleuth.

The Creature.

The Man opens his front door, finally revealing the inside of the beast

My eyes never leave him. Not when he shrugs his coat off his shoulders and hangs it on the freestanding coat rack. Not when he tells me to turn around so he can pull my coat off for me. I'd rather feel the punctured skin of my chest spread wider with my arching shoulders than give him permission to touch me. I watch him as he pulls the pearly string to click the tabletop light on, illuminating the immediate area. The mirror above the foyer table catches the fragmented light and throws it upon is face. He meets my eyes in the reflection revealing an expression full of many thinly veiled things: spite, revulsion, pity. And  something else softer.

Without dropping my gaze, he lifts a fist. I feel my shoulders tense. Then his pointer finger crooks out, arching towards the ceiling to form a vaguely less threatening gesture. Up. He turns on his heels to ascend the stairs, much to their protest. They groan loudly under his weight, creaking and clicking. I take note of the fact that he hasn't turned any other light on. Heavy curtains of shadows crowd the corners. A thin ribbon of light flits down the stairs, leaping from step to step. 

Up, creaking and clicking.

It's darker here, a single long hallway with three doors branching off. The Man is nowhere to be found, as expected. He plots the end to his currently non confrontational demeanor. From beneath the second door comes the ribbon of light; it must be the room I see from my bedroom window, the room where the light never turns off. My heart hammers in my chest as my legs push me forward almost on their own accord.

There are many things in the room but none of them are the Man. The desk to the right is littered with papers. Rising from the masses are two desktop computers. One seems to be running a sort of audio surveillance software while the other displays live video feed of many areas I recognize: the stop sign, the street between our houses, the mailbox, the dirt path behind my house, my front door and front porch, my bathroom window. The wall above the desk is covered in photos. Too many of Emery Wilmer's mutilated body, even more of the girl with the purple hair. Her face sags to one side, her skin melting and her eyeballs protruding from her eye sockets. However the majority of the pictures are of a different girl, one even more familiar. She has pale skin, shoulder length auburn hair, dull grey eyes. She looks out the window, she opens the front door, she lets the cat out. She pulls her sheer curtains shut. She changes in her bedroom. She runs from the freshly bloodied stop sign.

I tuck an auburn strand behind my ear.

Positioned in front of the window is an odd contraption that very much resembles a telescope , one end very narrow and the other widening to hold a bulbous magnifying glass. I press my eye to the narrow end. The image reflected in to my retina is one of my own bedroom, the telescope trained on my window across the street. For some reason the view is unshielded by my curtain. 

Elaborate.

The  door slams shut behind me. Instead of whipping around, I straighten slowly, my eyes trained on the window. There, I can catch the faint outlines of the Man's reflection behind mine. Perhaps I should have felt scared, maybe I should have sprinted from the house. But instead I feel a smile spread across my lips, the satisfaction of knowing my suspicions were correct; he's been on to me.

I can smell his fear.

"I know what you are."  He whispers. His voice is steady, calculating, as if he's hoping I'll deny it.

"And are you going to kill me?" I ask him.

Now his breath becomes shaky, the first visible signs of fear begin to manifest. I turn now, slowly, my hands limp at my sides. The Man holds my knife, but his fingers can't quite seem to keep it steady. "I was hoping I was wrong. The more I watched you—the more I knew you," his voice becomes tight and his eyes shine with moisture. "The more I hoped it could be anybody else. Anybody else... " he trails
His untimely hint of affection catches me off guard. However I am re grounded  as soon as he readjusts his grip on the knife.

"Where do you go every night?" I inquire innocently. "Are you feeding them information about me? Their little bird."

He doesn't say anything.

"You're a bird," I tell him. "A pawn. It's sad, really."

"You've killed people. Alice, Evan, Jordan, and those two men tonight."

I'm impressed he's figured out which ones were me and which ones were copycats; I suppose his surveillance efforts were good for something. The tingling in my spine has returned.  "They forced my hand."

A tear escapes from the outer corner of his eye. "As you've forced mine."
Without further warning The Man lunges at me. I move to catch his wrist but he moves just out of my reach, his knife clipping my skin. He knows me; he is careful not to make direct contact. I leap at him, planting a kick into his chest. His body goes tumbling backwards, hitting the wall before he slides to the floor. I thrust my fist out, a clean, powerful blow. However he rolls to the side and my fist instead makes splinters of the plaster. The Man's legs wrap around my neck, pinning me against the hardwood floor; he's suffocating me. I feel my lungs weakening and the color rushing to my face as my mouth gapes for a breath that will not come. Dark spots dance across my vision.

I close my palms around his calf. He screams louder than the others screamed, perhaps because he is more aware of himself. His skin bubbles and melts beneath my touch, my veins pulsing blue as they transfer the pain to him. The Man tugs free and my aching trachea gasps for air. He makes a feeble effort to stand, but his leg is no longer capable of supporting his weight. Pieces of cartilage peek out from beneath the syrupy flesh. He scrambles away from me, his fingers desperately grappling for my knife. In a moment of desperation he flings it at me with a grunt. The dull blade embeds itself in my left shoulder; I hear myself scream before I bite my tongue to stifle the sound.

I'm unable to anything about the sound that escapes my mouth when I wrench the knife from my shoulder. It drips with my blood, the scarlet drops slithering their way towards the floor. Drip, Drip, Drip. I step lazily towards him; he won't be going anywhere.  My droplets slip from the tip of the blade to his chest. He groans as boils and blisters blossom in it's wake. I pause, fascinated. Not even I have seen what direct contact with my blood does to a human.

His chest heaves, his breaths labored at the blisters spread.

"You did this." I whisper in his ear, my lips just barely kissing his skin. His eyes close at my touch.

Then I plunge the bloody knife in to his chest. My blood melts his skin like acid, his skin dripping on the to hardwood floor. I'm tempted to look away but I don't. His breaths halt, the pink fleshy skin of his lungs exposed. That's how I leave him.

The ringer opens the front door just wide enough for her shoulders to slink through, closing the door too quickly, careful not to let the dark entrails of the Man's house seep out. In her hand, she holds a stack of photos, smudged and bloody. Leaves crunch beneath her left foot, a branch snaps beneath her right, she looks both ways at the end of his drive.   She'll wash his blood from her hair and shut her sheer curtains tight.