MirrorMirror

12 / The Deletion

Judging by the smell, Cassidy expected the intruder to be female.

It was perfume, not aftershave. Judging by the gender, he expected her to be Elise. Judging, again, by the smell, there were doubts.

If not her, then who? He needed to find out. It must be whoever was leaving the messages. Why else would they be in his house? Listening out for sounds of movement, and for steps seven and nine, he repeated his search of the other night. They wouldn't escape again.

The ground floor was empty, so she had to be upstairs, perhaps replacing the batteries in the mirror. The smell pervaded every room, its strength remaining constant throughout. Surely it would be more prominent closer to her.

Oh, wait...

He'd placed air fresheners around the house. The type that puffed out an aroma at regular intervals. He never knew how to interpret the strange concoctions the manufacturers combined. Lavender and cedarwood? Egg white and shrimp cocktail? They were all the same to him. He'd choose one and hope for the best. When he put them in place, he generally turned them onto their fastest frequency to oust any unpleasant odours hanging around in dark corners. After a week or so, he'd reduce the speed to keep the fragrances even, and extend the life of the canisters.

He'd been out and just returned, so the scent would seem stronger. It was natural. Nothing sinister about it.

He smiled at one of the units as he passed it.

"You almost had me there," he told it.

In response, the air freshener squirted out a shot of ketchup and seaweed. Cass automatically breathed in.

And it was nothing like the smell pervading his house.

For fuck's sake! What was going on? Why couldn't he just be left alone? There'd be much better people out there to harass. More important than him. More interesting! He was a nobody. Well, maybe not that. He did have a relatively good opinion of himself, though it veered far from being arrogance. Cass thought he was OK. A nice guy with fairly decent morals. Nothing special and nothing too mediocre. He was an everyman, and he was fine with that. His aspirations didn't extend to great wealth or stature. He just wanted to be happy and survive. To live contentedly and, hopefully, have someone who loved him as he loved them.

Drama was a fact of life. It gravitated to some people, circling them like space debris around a planet, making it the centre of their universe. Drama was the shrapnel of life. If you moved the wrong way, it would cut deeply, leaving scars that might never heal.

Cassidy wished he didn't have any drama in his life, but Life tended to throw it up in the air, sand in the face of Humanity. It was unavoidable and reached into all your nooks and crannies, making you intensely uncomfortable and unable to remove all traces. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. He had tried with Elise, but she saw relationships as a way to have someone be there when times were good and to take the shit when they weren't.

He had a job he liked. Not necessarily a career. Not close to a vocation. It paid the bills, though, and left some in the pot. It didn't depress him. When he woke in the mornings, he didn't dread getting out of bed because it meant he'd be one step closer to getting to work. He had a house he'd soon come to call home.

He'd been single before. More than once, particularly when he was younger. There'd been periods where he was without a girlfriend. It wasn't something he minded at all, though he preferred to not be. He liked to share. Life, laughs and love. Perhaps it was a cliché and, if so, he didn't mind that either.

So, drama could go fuck itself, except it was prone to fuck him instead.

He was wallowing. His break up, combined with the mysteries his house presented him, was stressing him more than he wanted to admit. His ability to compartmentalise was clearly suffering as a result.