The Man in the Curtain (Part II)
Part I can be found here:
Something about the girl’s smile made Sarah’s stomach go all prickly. There was nothing overtly wicked or sinister to it — it was wide and missing a few teeth, a child’s smile — but something was just off with it, false. A facsimile, to borrow a word from her English Lit course.
In fact, the word applied to everything in the Anderson’s home. It was ornately decorated and lavishly furnished, all the doors were real and led to corresponding rooms, there were no secret tunnels or passageways to Sarah’s knowledge, yet it all seemed unnatural, not lived in. Like it was staged for an open house.
The money was real enough, though, and that kept her coming back, to watch over the world’s creepiest child and field her even creepier questions. Two more nights. At least now you can afford therapy.
“Did he ask you to play with us?” Annie asked again in that flat voice of hers. Her eyes were dull beads above milkwhite cheeks.
“Listen, Annie, you need to go to sleep, okay? And I need you to stay asleep tonight. In this bed. Got that?”
“He’s very shy,” Annie replied, ignoring Sarah’s questions and carrying on her own conversation, as she did. Sarah was not having it.
“Annie! It’s bedtime. I’m leaving now, go to sleep. Goodnight.”
“He doesn’t talk to everyone. I don’t think he’s rude, just shy. He likes to play. Didn’t he ask you to play with us?”
“Yes, okay?!” Sarah snapped. Her patience for this had expired and she just wanted Annie to sleep so she could drink a glass of the Anderson’s nice wine, watch television and grind out the rest of this week so she could take her cash and leave this little girl and her weird, freaky obsession with invisible men far, far behind her. “He asked me to play with you. I said yes. We’ll play tomorrow, when it’s not bedtime. Does that work for you?”
“Good,” Annie answered. She smiled and then closed her eyes, that doll’s head of her’s sinking deeper into the pillow, filled with whatever bizarre thoughts she had buzzing about up there. “He has the best games.”
“Great,” said Sarah, shaking her head as she walked to the door. “Go to sleep.” She flipped the light and closed the door quietly.
The hallway outside Annie’s room was long and narrow, lit on one end by the distant chandelier of the foyer and descending into shadow on the other, which led into another wing of the Anderson’s estate. There was a large window, lined with billowing drapes that hung from an iron rod high overhead, between the girl’s room and the foyer. Moonlight pooled through it now, painting a relief of the windowframe against the slant of floor and wall.
Sarah had walked past that window every night over the past week. Since that first evening, she had dreaded doing it each and every time. The “man in the curtain” lived there. Well, obviously, he didn’t. It was just a window and they were just drapes. But to Annie, it was the home of her strange, hidden friend. Sarah had come across the little girl whispering into those curtains more than once, catching some hushed snippet of conversation that made no sense, words that sounded strange from a child’s tongue.
Two more nights.
Sarah hurried down the hallway. When she reached the window, she hesitated for a moment, then picked up her pace. She made a little skip-hop around the moonlight, avoiding it as if she were playing the-floor-is-lava. There was no thought to do it, she just did it. Almost instinctual. She kept her head down, as if looking at the drapes would somehow conjure up some spirit or ghoul or whatever stupid, beastly thing that lived only in imagination. Still, her eye caught the drapery in periphery, dark and folded. There was a familiar shape to them, wasn’t there?
And then she was past. Her skin felt less cold, her heart took up its regular rhythm once more and a quiet shame crept over her for how stupid and childish she had let herself become. She made her way towards the front of the Anderson’s home, where the lights were bright and there was wine and comfortable things and sanity.
Behind her, the drapes shifted against the moonlight silently.
To be continued…