Her big picture windows fill my vision, and then—her. Chloe.
She’s upside down. Everything is upside down through the telescope.
Still, it lets me see through the big window and into her tidy living room, where she’s sitting on her couch, a computer resting in her lap. She stares at the screen, frowning a little, fingers skittering across the keyboard. Her hair is loose around her shoulders. Her legs bare.
I suck in my breath. Yes, the entire scene is upside down, so she looks a little like a spider hanging from a web. But it’s better than nothing. Certainly better than what I can see with my naked eye, even if my vision is superior to a human’s.
Chloe pauses her typing and looks up. I don’t know at what; it’s out of the range of my view. She tilts her head a little and goes back to her computer. And stays like that, for a while. I can’t tear my gaze away from her, though. There’s a comfort to it, and the magnification almost makes me feel like I’m with her, like we’re breathing the same air.
When she stands up, setting her laptop aside, my breath catches in my chest. She stretches, lifting her arms overhead,and her shirt rises enough to reveal a flash of her pale, soft belly. I bite down on my lip, shift my hips around. My cock is growing.
Chloe walks around the width of the sofa and then, to my excitement, stands in front of her window. She puts her hands on the glass and gazes outward, and I study her face, memorizing the lines of her cheekbones and the fullness of her lips. Even upside-down, magnified through glass and light, she’s so beautiful.
If I were another type of killer, the kind that leaves the flesh of their victims unblemished, maybe then I could share in the intimacy of her death. I could kiss her as she breathed her last breath and find some way to preserve her so she could stay with me in my cabin until the end of my very long and very unnatural life.
But I’m not that kind of killer. I rend and destroy. If I were to kill Chloe, she would be nothing but meat. The pleasure of her hot blood on my hands would be temporary. A single moment of ecstasy that would not be worth the annihilation of her beauty.
So I watch her, my breath ragged. I watch as she turns away from the window, as she settles back on the couch, as she takes a long drink from a water bottle.
That’s all I can do. Watch.
Oliver comesto visit me a few days after I pull out the telescope. Thankfully, he doesn’t time his visit while I’m watching Chloe, so I don’t have to explain myself to him. Instead, I smell him while I’m making my rounds. Although nearly all of my free time has been swallowed up by watching Chloe through the telescope, following her movements through the back half of her houseand along the pier, I do maintain that one crucial aspect of my routine. I save it for when she disappears from my view, though.
Normally, when Oliver visits during my patrols, I let him wait at the cabin. He knows not to go snuffling around in the woods. There are other dangerous things on this peninsula, rattlesnakes and black widow spiders chief among them. I don’t want to take the blame for their violence.
But today, when I sense him, I cut my rounds short and intercept him while he’s still on the trail to my cabin.
He yelps when I step into his path, then laughs. “You scared me,” he signs.
“Sorry,” I respond. I’m not sure what to say next. Should I ask about her? Or should I let him bring her up?
Fortunately, Oliver is usually the one to drive the conversation, and today’s no exception. “Sorry I haven’t been by in a few days.” He doesn’t elaborate, and I sense something from him, a kind of quiet fear. It’s always there when I haven’t seen him for a while, and I don’t know what it means. It’s certainly not like the fear I instill in humans, the fear I’m used to. When I tried to ask him about it once, he put his hands in his lap and didn’t move until I changed the subject.
“Got you some good pictures, though.” He takes off down the path toward my cabin, and I follow behind him. Once we’re there, he plops down on the porch swing, as usual, and pulls a new set of drawings out of his backpack and hands them to me. I flip through them, the way I always do. He brought me comic book characters this time, and some of them I even recognize from my own childhood, although I watch attentively while he explains who they are.
The only one that isn’t from a comic book is Chloe.
It’s not just her face but a sketch of her from the knees up, one hand on her hip, with her pretty features furrowed in concern.
I stop here. I can’t stop myself. The likeness is so good, and it’s nice to see her right side up. And the expression Oliver captured, with that faint trace of fear?—
My body heats.
When Oliver taps my knee, I nearly jump out of my skin. “That’s Chloe,” he signs.
My heart hammers. “Your friend?” I respond, afraid my face gives everything away. “Who can sign?” As if I didn’t immediately recognize her.
Oliver nods. “She said she came over here the other day, but she didn’t see you.”
Blood pulses in my temple. “I didn’t see her,” I lie, barely able to keep my hands from shaking. “I was probably on the other side of the peninsula.”
Oliver shrugs, unbothered. “That’s okay. She saw your gravestone, though, so she knows you’re a ghost. I think she’s scared of you.”
My blood sparks. “Did she say that?”
“No, I can just tell. I told her you were nice, but I guess she thinks ghosts are scary.” Oliver sets his hands down in his lap and looks out at the little patch of my front yard. The wind pushes his hair away from his eyes. “That’s why I think you should meet her.” He signs it without looking at me. “So she knows you’re real, and that you’re nice.”
Panic flares up in me. I see her, just for a moment, hanging upside down in my head the way she’s always hanging upside down in my telescope. And I wish Icouldmeet her. I wish I really were just the ghost Oliver thinks I am. But if Chloe is already frightened by the threat of me, then it’s hopeless. She almost certainly read about my previous killing moons.
