PREMONITION, by Art Taylor

In the dream, you wander down an endless hallway in a loose nightgown, glancing in door after door, looking for something, looking out for something. Or someone. Your hand clutches a slip of paper, so tightly that your fingernails cut your palm, and on the paper, you can make out a string of blotted numbers.

With a start, you open your eyes and see the clock flash out the time, 2:43 a.m., but you don’t hesitate. You throw back the covers of your bed and scramble up to sit on your pillow, the nightgown bunching at your hips. You flick on the light, you grab the phone, you dial the numbers from your dream carefully, one digit at a time. You have indeed been clenching your fist in your sleep, a nail has broken, and the indentations in your palm shine fiery red—blood? No, no, just flecks of polish. Your breath, heavy and wild at the first ring, deepens with the second and the third. Just a dream, you think after the fourth ring has steadied your panting, and you start to hang up. After all, what should I say to…whoever answers? A nightmare—something terrible—worry, fear, panic.… Then: Overreaction. Stupidity. But before you can replace the receiver, you hear a scrambling on the other end of the line. With another glimpse at the clock—2:45—you ready your apology.

“Oh, help me, help me,” comes a weak voice, struggling and desperate. “Oh, please, whoever you are, wherever you are, he’s—” and the line goes dead.

A cold terror cuts up your spine. Your thoughts race frantically, but your body, for the moment, is paralyzed. Your hand trembles as you struggle to get a new dial tone, and you fumble twice before hitting the right keys.

“9-1-1, what’s your—”

“Oh, please help,” you cry. “I’ve had a nightmare and when I woke—”

With a start—

You wake.

The covers of the bed are still pulled tight against your chin. The lights of the room are still off. On your nightstand, the clock shows 1:28, and by the glowing redness of those numbers, you see the edges of your phone, the receiver still in place. Thin moonbeams pierce through the gap between your curtains, and your cat, curled into a ball at the end of your bed, stretches in the dappled glow. Something about her calms you. Your breath steadies. Your pulse slows. You glance around the rest of the room to see the reflection of the moonlight in the mirror over your dresser and, in the corner, the outline of your chair.

And suddenly your breath is gone again.

Someone’s sitting there—watching you. Waiting.

You see his pale arm in the moonlight, then the shadow of his other arm hanging motionless from a thin torso. Him.

You barely manage to keep yourself from crying out. You wonder if you can grab the baseball bat just on the other side of your nightstand. You wish you’d taken your father’s advice and gotten a gun. Then you remember the blouse you’d laid out for tomorrow. As your eyes focus, the wooziness of sleep finally falling away, you realize that’s all it is, hanging limp across the back of the chair.

Overreaction. Stupidity. Your nerves are just on edge. The nightmare, the darkness…and this night itself, of course. Halloween, for Christ’s sake. That parade of ghosts and ghouls darting door to door earlier in the evening had gotten to you. And nothing but horror movies on the TV before you went to bed. A chill wind has been rustling and scattering the leaves all night. And then there’s that moon looming above the oaks in the yard.

But you’d thought him.

And who was the him you thought might be sitting there watching you?

Your brother maybe? Drunk again, and stopping by after the bars just to chat, passing out in your chair? It’s happened before. Or your ex-boyfriend, still carrying the torch, persistent with his calls and emails and now pushing the boundaries a step too far? You’d always wondered if he’d made a duplicate key. Or were you thinking of…

Somewhere in the distance you hear laughter—more than one person. This laughter, you know, is real. But you can’t gauge the direction or the distance. Not yet.

Layers of darkness shroud the other side of the room, but you know the door of the closet and the door to the hallway stand closed. Easing back the edge of the covers, you reach up to turn on the lamp. Your cat wakes when the light floods the room. It blinks its eyes and stretches. You rise and, still gaining your balance, find your way across the carpet, picking up that baseball bat and pushing that white shirt down into a ball on the chair. Surely there’s nothing behind either door—you know this, the laughter wasn’t that close—but you go through the motions anyway. Which one to open first? You decide on the closet, raise the bat high, and with a deep breath, fling open the door.

No one jumps out. Of course.

And there’s no one hiding in the hallway either.

And as you work your way through the house—checking behind the shower curtain and in the hot water heater closet, in the laundry room and the second bedroom—you began to ease your grip on the bat. The front door is still bolted shut, and the second latch remains in place. The door to the patio is locked, and when you glance through vertical blinds, you find the plastic chairs and table as empty as always in that same moonlight.

And there, just beyond, you find the source of the laughter: the dregs of your neighbor’s Halloween party, the one he’d invited you to—a courtesy, you know (an invitation you’d just as courteously declined). A keg sits in the center of his deck, and he’s got his feet propped up on it, leaning back on his own plastic chair. Only two others with him, at least two that you can see—two men, one dressed as a pirate, the other a gangster. You see the latter’s tommy gun resting on the railing. Wind chimes clink and jingle, a murmur of conversation, more laughter—just a little too loud, after just a little too much to drink. You know how those parties go. Your neighbor himself is in some sort of skeleton costume, a black outfit with white bones, faintly glowing. The thin bones of his forearm rest motionless on the arm of his chair.

And then you see that he’s seen you. That he’s looking your way.

Quickly, you pull the blinds tight again, press your hands against them to keep them from swinging, look down at what you’re wearing—just that thin nightgown, barely hanging to your knees.

The conversation out there, the laughter that you’d heard, stops.

You wait. You don’t hear anything more from over there, nothing but those wind chimes, and that same rustle of leaves through the small yard that separates your house from his…because he’s just told them to keep it down, right?…because you’ve told him to keep it down before. More than once. The houses aren’t so far apart, and the noise carries, and you’ve tried to smile each time you’ve explained this to him and tried to accept his own smile as genuine, even though you’ve felt his impatience, those little hints of disdain. Entitlement, arrogance. Something cold in those eyes, too—something you saw the very first time you met him, when he asked if you were seeing anyone, asked why you weren’t, asked if there was any chance.… Something cold in those eyes when you’d politely declined his interest, something lifeless there.

Those same eyes that just caught you looking at him through the blinds.

You wait. You hear nothing.

When you peek through the window again, the pirate and the gangster have disappeared. The skeleton sits alone, openly staring at your house now. As you watch, he tips back his beer, almost like he’s sending a toast your way.

You shut the blinds quickly.

You promise yourself not to dare another look.

When you return to your room, you lay the bat beside you on the bed. It is exactly 2:01 when you pull the covers up to your chin, 2:04 when you look down to find your cat curling up once more into a ball at your feet, and by 2:15 you’ve successfully resisted the urge to call someone. And who would you call anyway? That brother of yours, long since deep in his Halloween drink and helpless himself? That ex-boyfriend, a mistake in the first place and one you don’t need to compound? Your father, asleep himself, and two states away?

Overreaction.… Stupidity. Of course.

And Halloween, you think again. The spirit of the season. Just something in the air.

But you find yourself unable to sleep. The wind has picked up now, you can hear it in the swish and whisper of those leaves, and in those wind chimes, too, like change in a stranger’s pocket. The refrigerator has never seemed to hum so loudly, and the ice falling into its bin sounds like glass breaking somewhere close by. Something in the hallway creaks. You tell yourself it’s always made that sound.

But the worst of it isn’t the noise at all. It’s the clock’s calm measure of minutes and the waiting silence of the phone.

You watch them both without blinking, fearful despite yourself of what might happen just before the time comes and the phone rings.

Because the phone number in the dream had, of course, been your own.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Art Taylor’s fiction has appeared in anthologies including Chesapeake Crimes: This Job Is Murder and The Crooked Road, Volume 3, and in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. “When Duty Calls,” his story for the previous Chesapeake Crimes anthology, won him a third Derringer Award and was a finalist for the Agatha and the Macavity. “The Care and Feeding of Houseplants” (EQMM) won the Agatha in 2014. An assistant professor at George Mason University, he reviews crime fiction for the Washington Post. www.arttaylorwriter.com.