“No. I’d want you to come.”
Anna’s eyebrows went up. “Oh.”
“I don’t know if I could come back here and give you an accurate account of what happened. Having you there to observe could be helpful.”
Anna appeared to be considering it. “I don’t normally do house calls.”
Paul grinned. “You mean, Big House calls.”
When Paul went out to his car, he could not find his keys. Anna said if she found them, she’d let him know. He called Charlotte, who picked him up at Anna’s, drove him home, and unlocked the door. Once he had his spare keys, Charlotte drove him back to Anna’s so he could retrieve his Subaru.
That night, over dinner, he told Charlotte about what had happened at Anna’s before his session had started.
“Some people,” he observed, “are even more fucked-up than I am.”
They killed off a bottle of chardonnay while watching a movie. At least, part of one. Halfway through, Charlotte ran her hand up the inside of Paul’s thigh and said, “Is this movie boring or what?”
“It is now,” he said.
When they turned the lights out shortly after eleven, Paul thought, Things are getting better.
And then, at six minutes past three, it happened again.
Chit chit. Chit chit chit. Chit. Chit chit.
Fourteen
Before the sounds of the Underwood reached him, Paul had been dreaming.
In the dream, he has a stomachache. He’s on the bed, writhing, clutching his belly. It feels as though something is moving around in there. Something alive. It’s like that Alien movie, where the creature bursts out of John Hurt’s chest as the crew of the Nostromo eat lunch.
Paul pulls up his shirt, looks down. There’s something in there, all right. There’s something poking up from under the skin. And then, as if a zipper ran from his ribs down past his navel, he opens up. But there’s no blood, no guts spilling all over the place. His belly opens up like a doctor’s bag.
Paul looks at the gaping hole in his body and waits.
What come up first are fingers. Dirty fingers with chipped nails. Two hands grasp the edges of his stomach. Something — someone — is pulling itself out.
Holy shit, I’m having a baby, Paul thinks.
Now there’s the top of a person’s head. It’s Kenneth Hoffman. Once his head clears Paul’s stomach, he looks at Paul and grins. He’s saying something, but Paul can’t make out what it is.
It turns out he’s not saying actual words. He’s making a sound. The same sound, over and over again.
Chit chit chit. Chit chit.
Paul reaches down, puts his hands over Kenneth’s face. He doesn’t know whether to push Kenneth back inside himself, or try to drag out the rest of him. He feels Kenneth nibbling at his fingers.
Chit chit chit. Chit chit.
Paul opened his eyes. He was breathing in short, rapid gasps. He touched his hand to his chest and found it wet. He’d broken out in a cold sweat. He craned his neck around to look at the clock radio glaring dimly at him from the bedside table.
3:06 A.M.
He didn’t want to close his eyes and return to that nightmare. Slowly, so as not to disturb Charlotte next to him, he swung his legs out of the bed and onto the floor.
He decided to take a leak.
As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he looked at Charlotte. She was sleeping with her back to him, head on the pillow, hand slipped beneath it. He could just barely make out her body slowly rising and falling with each breath.
Dressed only in a pair of boxers, he padded silently across the floor to the bathroom and closed the door. The plug-in night-light glowed dimly.
He lifted the toilet seat, drained his bladder, cringed as he flushed, hoping the noise wouldn’t be too disruptive. He rinsed his hands at the sink and dried them, waiting for the toilet tank to refill before opening the door.
The tank refilled, and silence again descended.
As his fingers touched the doorknob, he heard it.
Chit chit. Chit chit chit.
He held his breath.
I am not dreaming. I am awake. I am absolutely, positively, awake.
It was the same sound from the other night. A typing sound.
He waited for it to recur, but there was nothing. Slowly, he turned the knob, opened the door, and took a step out into the hallway. He froze, held his breath once again.
Still nothing.
All he could hear was the distant sound of the waves of Long Island Sound lolling into the beach, and Charlotte’s soft breathing. Could something else have made a noise that sounded like keys striking the cylinder? Something electrical? Water dripping somewhere in the house? Maybe—
Chit chit.
A small chill ran the length of Paul’s spine. He wanted to wake Charlotte. He wanted her to hear this, too. But waking her would also create a commotion. Whoever was fooling around with that typewriter — and clearly it was not Josh, who was miles away in Manhattan, but it had to be somebody — was going to stop once they heard talking on the floor above.
Paul wanted to catch whoever it was in the act.
No, wait. He should call the police.
Right. Great plan. Hello, officer? Could you send someone right over? Someone’s typing in my house.
Paul reached the top of the stairs, then tiptoed down, one soft step at a time. When the house was rebuilt after Sandy, a new staircase had gone in, and there wasn’t a single squeak in the entire flight.
As he reached the second step from the bottom, he heard it again.
Chit chit. Chit chit chit.
He looked across the kitchen to the closed door of his study. There was no light bleeding out from below it. Just like the other night. How was someone supposed to mess around with that Underwood in total darkness?
A miniflashlight. Sure. Whoever was in there wasn’t going to want to attract attention by turning on the lights.
Yeah, like that made sense. They were already attracting attention with the typing.
Paul moved barefoot across the floor. As he closed the distance between himself and the door, he wondered whether he needed some kind of weapon. As he sidled past the kitchen island, he carefully extracted a long wooden spoon from a piece of pottery filled with kitchen utensils.
He had a pretty good idea how ridiculous he looked, but the spoon would have to do. You went into battle with what was at hand.
Paul reached the door, gripped the handle. With one swift motion, he turned and pushed.
“Surprise!” he shouted, reaching with his other hand to flick the light switch up.
And just as it was when he thought Josh had been fooling around in here, the room was empty.
The typewriter sat where it had been since Charlotte bought it for him, seemingly untouched. No paper rolled into it.
Paul stood there, blinked several times. “What the fuck,” he said to himself. He scanned the room, as if someone could hide in a place that wasn’t any bigger than a closet.
Suddenly, struck by an idea, he ran to the steps that led down to the front door. Someone could be making a run for it. Quietly, for sure, but did anything else make sense?
Paul ran his hand along the wall, hunting for the switch. He flipped it up, illuminating the stairs and the door at the bottom.
There was no one there. From where he stood, he could see the dead bolt on the door turned to the locked position.
In his rush, his left foot slipped over the top step and dropped to the next, throwing him off balance. He canted to the right, reaching frantically for the railing to break his fall, but missing it altogether. His butt hit the top step, then bumped down two more, hard, before he came to a shuddering stop.