My legs went weak. Still, with the candlestick tight in my grasp, I kept walking downward. I didn’t know what I’d find, and I could hear my pulse pounding, but I knew I had just two options. One: Catch the intruder off guard and whack him on the head. Second, probably wiser: Reach the door and take off running. I could do it, I thought.
On the bottom step, I heard a whisper. It was coming from the basement, I was certain of it. A flash of lightning brightened the ground floor, and for a moment afterward, I saw gleams and shadows dancing on the walls. Then the thunder came, so loud it drowned out my frightened cry.
The door was just a few feet away now. I gathered my courage, even as a little voice inside me told me I was just hearing things. I knew this was the perfect setting for a panic attack, and those vaguesounds whose origin I couldn’t identify could easily be inside my head.
I kept walking. I was covered in sweat, and my toes almost slipped across the wooden floor.
I heard heavy steps hurrying up from the basement, and my hair stood on end as I realized my ears hadn’t deceived me. Someone was there, and they were right behind me. I looked at the door in desperation. It now seemed miles away.
I jumped just as the intruder entered the room. Instinctively, I raised the candlestick and brought it down as I screamed. It slipped from my hands and struck the wall.
“What the hell?” a hoarse, threatening voice shouted.
I screamed again, and the figure took a step back. Another lightning bolt lit up the room, and I managed to make out the man staring at me, his face surprised and confused. For a moment, I was speechless.
“You?” I shouted when my voice returned.
“You?” he hissed.
“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you… But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
—Haruki Murakami,Kafka on the Shore
10
You Broke My Heart
I was about to explode, with no idea when or how I would get over the fright. For a fraction of a second, I had seen myself dying at the hands of some psychopath. The police taking away my body. The headlines telling how I’d tried to defend myself with a wooden candlestick. Pathetic! My funeral full of strangers murmuring the usual clichés:How sad! She was so young! She had her whole life ahead of her! If only she’d had better aim!
I breathed in and out, trying to control the adrenaline that was shutting down my body. I pinched my arm, wondering if I was hallucinating. That was the only explanation.
Probably I had caught a cold from running so long in the rain. And now I had a fever, and I was actually still in bed, suffering an out-of-body experience, on the verge of death. That would explain why I was seeinghim—that loose end I needed to tie up.
Good Lord, thanks to him, I was trapped between the world of the living and the dead! Or perhaps I’d died and gone to Hell, because if that happened, I had no doubt he would be there.
I blinked, and when I recovered, I stared daggers into him. Him. Trey Holt.
“What are you doing here?”
As if emerging from a trance, he responded, “The real question is what are you doing here?”
“This is my sister’s house, and she lent it to me for a few days. What about you?”
“None of your business.”
“Excuse me?”
He picked the candlestick up off the floor and weighed it in his hand.
“Were you going to hit me with this?”
“You should be grateful I missed,” I murmured.
“You couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn,” he said, not even trying to hide his amusement. My blood was boiling, and it occurred to me that I still had time to hit him with something else, like maybe the table lamp there to my left. The temptation was enormous. I pointed to the door.
“Beat it.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
