Kthaahthikha

The street was dark by dint of a broken lamp. Marianne slid from the car and kneed the door shut, a hand flying to her pocket a moment later as she wondered if she’d locked the keys inside. The keys were in her other hand.

She walked along the footpath towards the convenience store. The cars to her side all belonged to the members of the rugby club across the road, and it was of them that Marianne thought as the cold air nipped at her ankles and occupied space after occupied space fell behind her, the shop growing up ahead.

Along the way came a figure, hard to discern amongst the bands of darkness between the squares cast by the convenience store windows. It was a woman’s body wrapped in a dark coat, walking with stiff, brisk strides, head pointed towards the concrete and boots clicking as she did.

Marianne past by her, entered the shop and purchased three litres of full cream milk, a light rye loaf and an apple. Leaving the shop, she noted the woman in the dark coat across the street, making her way across the grass of the oval and by the club house where a jukebox played. She wondered at the curious feeling it gave her. The sky was a faint purple-grey wash from the light pollution that hovered overhead like mosquito-netting against the stars. Her car started after a few groaning turns and she passed through the narrow, shadowed streets with the stray light of milk-bar signs running over her windscreen and the heater taking far too long to heat.

The cat seemed anxious. It paced back and forth and scratched at the couch and meowed at its bowl despite numerous refills. Marianne picked the thing up to silence it, the cat lying with its head upon her shoulder, wriggling silently but steadily until its mistress put it down and it ran away into the lounge room. The sounds of claws pricking at hound’s-tooth fabric followed after it like a motorboat’s wash.

It was too late for a proper dinner. She ate a tin of cold beans and went to bed. She awoke some time later when her alarm went off. It was still dark, her light was on, and a woman in a dark coat and hat was seated at Marianne’s desk, a sheet of paper before her on which she appeared to have been doodling.

“What the fuck!?” Marianne cried, or rather would have cried; her mouth had been sealed with a strip of tape run several times around her head. The short fan of her honey-blonde hair was fused firmly to the back of her neck. As she came to realise her predicament, Marianne rose up in frenzy, restricted only by tape which fixed her arms in something resembling a crucifix position against the crossbeam of the wooden bed head. The woman in the dark coat unplugged the alarm clock and pulled the chair around until she faced Marianne. The captive stared into two eyes above a kerchief, glimmering slightly in the light from the 90 watt bulb.

“Hello,” said the woman in the dark coat. By some absurd quirk of logic, Marianne wondered why she kept her hat on inside. “I don’t feel very comfortable with conversations, so I’ve taped your mouth shut to avoid any awkwardness. It’ll also help when you start screaming – I know you’re screaming now, but you probably won’t stop.”

The intruder stooped and took a black attaché case from under the desk. It was polished cherry – the desk, not the case – and a present from a late aunt.

The woman in the dark coat and hat had laid a plastic sheet on the desktop. Seeing her place the attaché case on the sheet, Marianne realised that her own bed had been remade with translucent plastic. She couldn’t see the floor, but she could here her captor’s feet squeak on the rubber as she rose.

‘How the hell did this happen,’ she thought, or something like that. ‘Who the fuck is this woman. Fuck fuck fuck.” Her thoughts were mostly incoherent. What little reserve she had kept drained away when the clasps of the case snapped open, and out came a long length of gleaming silver to slip through air and flesh like a deep sea fish. The woman in the dark coat’s eyes retreated, swallowed up by the shadow cast from her hat until only a deep pool of darkness swam beneath the brim and yawned wide like the space between worlds.

The light vanished. Marianne’s eyes adjusted to show a series of grey patches sketching the outlines for bookshelves, chairs and murderers. Her captor’s profile leapt into amber life as the desk lamp came on, and then her inky silhouette began to grow and grow until it engulfed Marianne’s vision, and all the world was darkness except for a single length of silver than swam through her like a shark.