ted klein

by Unknown

  It occurred to him, as he gazed idly into the mirror, that this was an unusual position to find himself in. Indeed, he had probably not assumed this particular position, foot planted firmly on this particular spot, facing the mirror at this particular angle, in all the thirty years he’d lived in the apartment.

  He paused for a moment, puzzled. Something didn’t look quite right. There was something odd about the reflection in the mirror.

  As he always did except in the chilliest weather, he had left the bathroom door half open; otherwise the airless little room became too steamy, and the dampness was bad for the paint. Even now, the mirror was slightly fogged, but he could still see himself in it. Behind him he could see the open doorway and, beyond it, the hall, most of it dark now because of the advancing night and, in contrast to the brightly lit bathroom, all the darker; he was not the sort of man to waste electricity by leaving lights burning in other rooms.

  Directly outside the doorway, however, a portion of the hall was illuminated by the light spilling from the bathroom. And in this parallelogram of light, the hall looked... different.

  While his fingers resumed their search for the razor, he studied the view in the mirror. Seen from this unfamiliar angle, the hall looked somehow wider. In truth it was barely wide enough for even a skinny man like Nat Crumley to walk through without brushing against the sides, especially since he’d fitted a small shallow bookcase against one of the walls. Now, outside the doorway, the hall appeared almost cavernous; and where once the bookshelves had displayed a ragged collection of cartoon books, crossword puzzle books, and other cheap paperbacks, now the shelves had taken on a more substantial look—at least the narrow section that was visible—and seemed to support more substantial-looking books of uniform size and uniform dark binding; or so they appeared, however indistinctly, in the mirror.

  And it was the mirror, no doubt, that was the source of this illusion. His brain clung to that certainty, even as his eyes noticed something else. Above the bookshelves, in the circumscribed area of light, he could make out the bottom corner of a painting that had been hanging in the hall for the past thirty years. It was a painting he knew well, one that he’d completed as a boy of twelve, a paint-by-numbers picture of ducks sitting placidly in a pond. It was the first such painting he’d ever gotten right; he knew every furry cattail, every cloud. He remembered how, in his awkward fingers, his paintbrush had strayed outside the lines on several earlier attempts—a picture of sailboats, one of the Alps, another of Old Mexico—and how he’d torn up the paintings in a rage.

  Yet tonight, unless his eyes were deceiving him, the painting looked larger than he’d remembered. And though most of the scene lay in shadow, it appeared to him as if the little duck pond had been replaced by something darker, and that the crabbed, meticulous style of his youth had given way to one looser, cruder, and more disordered.

  Had the painting, the books, really changed? No, it simply did not compute. “There ain’t no such animal,” he heard himself say, unconsciously quoting what the New Jersey farmer had said upon seeing a camel for the first time.

  Yielding, nonetheless, to a certain curiosity, he was about to look over his shoulder to examine the doorway directly—a maneuver that, in his present position, would have meant twisting his head and upper body to an uncomfortable degree while keeping his feet planted where they were—but at that moment his fingers encountered the plastic handle of the razor. Reflexively he shut the medicine-cabinet door and withdrew back into the shower, closing the curtain again.

  As he lathered his face and stood shaving—ordinary bath soap, he believed, was as good as shaving cream and far more economical—he tried to make sense of what he’d seen. He’d been the victim of an optical illusion, a trick of the shadows, a freak of perspective; of this he was sure. Blame it on the unfamiliar angle of the mirror, or on the steam from the shower that, even now, was rising in clouds around him.

  The other possibility, of course, was that, just beyond the shower curtain, something very weird had just happened. It was a possibility so far removed from his normal experience that he hardly knew how to get a grip on it.

  Finished shaving, Crumley placed the razor back in its usual spot on the rim of the tub. He reached once again for the soap, but a tiny worm of uncertainty now gnawed at him: What if, out there, the world had somehow changed? What if he was, in effect, an unwilling traveler, lost and far from home?

  It was a childish fear, and not a terribly real one, but he couldn’t resist, just for a moment, sliding back the shower curtain from the opposite end, the end farthest from the faucets. Gripping the towel rack and leaning outward, hair dripping onto the bathroom rug, he peered through the steam at the medicine-cabinet mirror—and, to his relief, was able to make out the dark familiar hallway, a cozy place of crossword puzzle books and paddling ducks.

  He closed the curtain and stepped back beneath the shower, his mind once more at ease, but already playing with a new idea. What if that bigger hallway, with its darker books and cruder art, was just as real as the one he knew lay outside the door; but what if it could only be glimpsed from the other end of the tub?

  It would be a little thing, he realized, the smallest of inconsistencies—and yet momentous. You stuck your head out of one end of the shower and you were one place; you peered out of the other end and you were somewhere else. Somewhere very similar, maybe, but different enough to set the universe on its ear.

  And that’s just what it would do; that’s all it would take to shred the laws of logic. A Cheerio rising slowly out of your cereal bowl was as monstrous an affront to the known universe as a flying saucer twice as big as Texas.

  Idly he wondered, if such a thing were true, who’d be the most appropriate one to call. A friend? A physicist? The Enquirer? The police?

  Impulsively he drew back the curtain from the end by the showerhead—letting in, as he did so, a wave of cold air—and stood looking out at the world. The mirror, by now, was too fogged to reveal anything, and the hall outside, from where he stood, was lost in shadow. Carefully he turned the showerhead to avoid wetting the floor; then, holding on to the sink to keep his balance, his back to the doorway, he stepped out of the tub and onto the bathroom rug.

  Even before he had the chance to turn around, he heard the ringing of the telephone. It came from his bedroom, a few feet down the hall. For a second it occurred to him that perhaps the sound was a touch deeper than the sound his phone normally made; but then, he was so prone to losing his temper, smashing telephones, and having to buy new ones—all of them flimsy plastic affairs—that he was hard-pressed to remember exactly what the latest phone sounded like.

  At the second ring, all thought fled. After the third, he knew, his current phone machine would answer (unless he’d smashed that one as well; he couldn’t remember), at which point, many a caller—who knows, maybe even Estelle Gitlitz—might well hang up. Crumley had trained himself to get to the phone before that third ring.

  Galvanized into action, he snatched a towel from the rack, and, with the shower still running, he hurried down the darkened hall into his bedroom. That this room—the main room in the apartment, comprising living room and dining room as well—seemed a few steps farther away than usual was not something he had much time to notice; nor did he so much as glance at the picture on the wall.

  The bedroom was dark, but his hand found the phone as it commenced its third ring. He picked it up before the sound had died.

  “Hello?”

  From the other end came the rumble of traffic. Someone was calling from a pay phone on the street, or maybe from the subway.

  “Hi,” shouted a woman’s voice, above the din. “This is Marcy Wykoff. We’re running a little late.”

  “Who’d you say it was?” asked Crumley. He knew no Marcy Wykoff.

  “I can barely hear you,” she shouted. “Brad and I took a wrong turn up one of your winding country roads—”

  “Are you sure you’ve got the right nu
mber?”

  “—but it’s okay, we’re back on the highway now.”

  As if to prove the veracity of what she said, her words were drowned out by the thunder of what sounded like the Cannonball Express. By the time it had passed, to be replaced by a series of blasts on the sort of horn he associated with little English sports cars, the woman was saying:

  “—following your map, so we should be there in half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes. Oops, Brad’s honking, gotta go. Bye.”

  He stood there dripping in the darkness, the towel in one hand, the dead phone in the other. The floor felt cold beneath his feet; wasn’t there supposed to be a rug here? The phone felt too heavy in his hand. In the sudden silence, he found himself gazing at the window across the room. The sun had set, and the first few stars were beginning to appear.

  It was several seconds before he registered exactly what he was looking at. He was looking at the sky. The night sky. Complete with stars.

  But the sky was not visible from this window—at least it hadn’t been until this moment. Except for a narrow strip at the top, it was blocked by other buildings.

  Now, however, the only things blocking the sky were—he swallowed hard—trees.

  Where the hell was he? Breathless with panic, he dropped the phone and looked wildly around the darkened room. His fingers found a switch; there was a quick scurrying sound, and the room was flooded with light, revealing ancient-looking paneled walls, a high ceiling, a foot-worn plank floor, shelves of books, a rumpled bed.

  This was not his room.

  The realization hit him with the force of a nightmare, one of those nightmares in which we find ourselves wandering naked through a classroom or a cocktail party. Suddenly feeling very vulnerable, he wrapped the towel around his pale midriff.

  The first thing that occurred to him, though it made no sense at all, was that somehow, crazily, he had wandered into someone else’s apartment in the same building, someone who wasn’t home right now; that he had taken a shower in someone else’s bathroom; and that he must get back to his own apartment at all costs.

  What do you do when you step out of the shower and find yourself in someone else’s home? You step back in the shower. It was crazy, all right—as senseless as a horse or a child running back into a burning building—but at the moment, its fairy-tale logic appealed to him. I’ll just dash back into the shower, he told himself. (The shower was still going; he could hear it down the hall.) Once I’m back under the hot water, I’ll be safe. All this will be gone; all will be well again...

  He had replaced the phone (beside an answering machine that definitely wasn’t his) and was about to sneak back into the hall to the bathroom when, above the sound of the water, he heard the slamming of a door—a heavier, more solid door than had ever existed in a studio apartment. The thud of footfalls and the scrape of metal echoed through the corridor.

  The sound was unmistakable; panic seized his heart like a fist. Someone huge and clumsy was dragging something up a stone staircase.

  Yes, staircase. There was no sense kidding himself: this was no apartment. He wasn’t even in the city. He was in an unknown house, he didn’t know where; and at this very moment, its occupant was coming up the stairs.

  He stood in the doorway, trembling with indecision. He could step into the hall right now and greet whoever was approaching; he could acknowledge he was trespassing, admit that he was lost, and throw himself upon the other’s mercy. Maybe that was what he ought to do. At least, that way, there was a chance that maybe they could talk this whole thing over...

  But maybe he didn’t have to give himself up; maybe he could get away with it. Maybe he could hide right here in this room, wait for the right moment, and somehow escape—flee the house or slip back into the shower—without ever being discovered.

  It was a gamble either way, presenting risks beyond calculation. He could step out into the hall and take the consequences, or he could hide right here and pray that maybe, just maybe, he’d get off scot-free.

  The only problem with hiding was that, if he was caught—discovered here in someone else’s bedroom, dressed only in a towel, and sopping wet—the consequences would be much, much worse.

  The footsteps came closer. They sounded huge.

  He hid.

  As he squeezed himself behind the open bedroom door, he realized, with dismay, that he should have remembered to turn off the light. Anyone entering the darkened hall would notice it immediately.

  But it was already too late to turn it off; that, too, would be noticed. And anyway, the switch itself was on the opposite wall; there was no way he could reach it and remain concealed.

  Down the hall, the footsteps paused. Several seconds passed; then the silence was broken by what sounded like the opening of a door. The steps resumed, but softer now, and then seemed to recede, as if the occupant of the house had disappeared into another room. From somewhere came the muffled clank of metal.

  Crumley waited, listening. Whoever was out there remained nearby, but busy with other things—at least for the moment. He felt chilled to the bone, standing here half-naked with a puddle of cold water growing at his feet; he was shivering, as much from cold as from fear. But maybe, if he hid here long enough and kept silent, the person out there would go away.

  He stared out at his new surroundings, which struck him, in his present predicament, as dangerously, almost obscenely, well lit. From where he stood, he could see an edge of rumpled bed and a section of expensive-looking bookcase—less than half the room, but enough to know that its occupant was a very different sort of person than he was. He felt a flash of anger at the bed, and perhaps a touch of envy; he’d never left his bed unmade, even as a boy, and had always been sure to put hospital corners on the blankets.

  He scanned the contents of the bookcase. Instead of the familiar shelf of well-thumbed self-help books, biographies, and medieval histories that occupied one wall in his own room, the volumes here, most of them in dust jackets, looked newer; and judging from what he was able to read on their spines, they appeared to concern themselves with just a single subject: crime and criminals.

  Or rather, one criminal. He noted a few of the titles: The Count Jugula Murders. The Jugula File. The Mind of Count Jugula by Colin Wilson. Down for the Count by Ann Rule. Jugula Exposed by someone named Von Goeler.

  Weird.

  And even weirder: All in a row in the center of one shelf, resplendent in their glossy dust jackets, stood nine hardcover editions of something written by the man himself, Confessions of a Serial Killer by Count Jugula.

  Why in the world would anyone want so many copies of the same book?

  The bottom shelf, he suddenly noticed, held a mass of lurid red paperbacks bearing the very same title, piled horizontally. There must have been more than a dozen in all—more than enough for even the most avid collector. Why, Crumley wondered, would someone buy so many?

  His eye was caught by light reflected from something mounted on the wall just beyond his head. He turned and saw that it was an inscribed photograph, carefully framed, of a plump Oriental woman; he recognized her, after a moment, as a newscaster he’d seen interviewing celebrities on network TV. Standing on tiptoe to cut down the glare, he read the inscription: To Count Jugula—Thanks for a fascinating afternoon!

  It dawned on him what those multiple copies of Confessions of a Serial Killer were. Author’s copies.

  A clank of metal echoed up the hall, followed by the sound of footsteps. Crumley’s eyes widened; the steps were growing louder. He heard the floorboards creak as the occupant of the house— someone large and heavy, from the sound of him—drew closer to where he was hiding.

  The worst thing, he reasoned, with someone of that size, would be to jump out at him... No, the worst thing would be to do nothing. He should step into the hall right now; he should identify himself. It would go worse for him if he was discovered in here.

  But he was paralyzed; his legs would not move. He stood frozen to the sp
ot, watching with horror as a small stream of water from the puddle at his feet advanced slowly beneath the bedroom door.

  Just beyond it, at the open doorway, the footsteps paused. Crumley, straining to listen, thought he heard the sound of breathing. Breathing softly; perhaps intentionally so. Not the thin, piercing sound of one who breathes through his nose, but the deeper sound of breathing through the mouth. Two long breaths. Three.

  Then, with a hollow scrape of metal, the steps moved slowly on, advancing farther up the hall toward the bathroom.

  Until this moment, above all thoughts of escape, Crumley had clung to a half-mad hope of dashing back into the safety of the shower. Now, however, with the author of Confessions of a Serial Killer headed in the very same direction, all such notions fled. The trick, he saw now, would be to get out of the damned house without getting caught.

  And this would be the perfect chance.

  Slipping around the door, Crumley peered warily into the hall. Outlined in the light streaming from the open bathroom doorway stood a wide, square-shouldered figure, partially enveloped by clouds of steam rising into the darkness. One hand held what looked like a barrel or a garbage can. Facing the light, with his broad back turned to Crumley, the man appeared to be staring inside the little room, toward the shower.

  Just as Crumley made his move, he noticed something else, something he wished he hadn’t. On the wall opposite the bathroom hung the painting he’d glimpsed in the mirror. He could see it in its entirety now, illuminated by the bathroom light; and just as he’d feared, it depicted nothing resembling a duck pond. From what he could make out, the subject was more a sort of anatomical study—a human hand, large, burly, and imperfectly rendered, holding by the hair a woman’s severed head.