The Man in the Curtain (Part III)
The previous installment can be found here:
The night took on a regular cadence as Sarah sank into the Andersons’ couch, wine in hand. Hours slipped by uneventfully as she scrolled through her phone and passively eyed the television. It was nearly midnight, after two tall pours of wine and far too much scrolling through photos, that the first noise came.
Drip. Drip.
Drip.
She paused, inclining her ear, unsure if she was actually hearing it or imagining it. It came again.
Drip.
Likely the faucet in the kitchen, she must have not turned the handle all the way. But she know that wasn’t right. It wasn’t a steady sound, not mechanical. It was wilder than that. And the drops sounded thicker than a few drips off a leaky faucet.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
It was louder. Sarah sat up. From her position on the couch she could see into the open kitchen and the darker hallway beyond, which opened onto the foyer before continuing down into blackness towards Annie’s room. There was nothing there, at least nothing she could see.
It’s the sink. Grow up, already.
Sarah pushed herself from off the couch. Her legs felt like rubber noodles.
Grow up!
She shook out her limbs, one by one, in an attempt to shed the anxious little bugs that were crawling up her skin. It was just the sink. She was letting the weird quirks of an eight year old go to her head. It’s just the sink.
On legs that still weren’t quite steady, she made her way to the kitchen. The wine bottle was still on the counter, the corkscrew next to it. The sink, with its fancy curved faucet, sat in the center of the marble platform. Sarah approached it warily, as if it were a cornered animal that may bite if she moved too quickly.
The handle was depressed, off. The basin was dry.
Drip.
She gasped. Before she had even realized it, Sarah had spun towards the sound, towards what her body instinctually told her was danger. Why, when startled, would instinct force you to face a threat, she could never say, but she was now staring down a dim hallway.
She didn’t see anything — rather, she didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. The chandelier hung in the foyer, illuminating a waist-high oak table topped with tulips. Beyond that little island of light was Annie’s hallway. She could not make out any shapes there. It was too dark.
“Annie?” She was whispering, perhaps because the lump in her throat still hadn’t gone back down. Sarah could not make out any shapes in the hallway, but, as she knew all too well, the little girl had a knack for sleepwalking. Maybe she had peed the bed or spilled some water on herself or something and was now stumbling around.
“Annie,” Sarah said again, sliding her bottom across the marble countertop in an attempt to keep as much distance between herself and that hallway as possible. “Annie, is that you?”
Drip. Drip.
It was definitely coming from the hallway. Sarah squinted against the light of the chandelier. Was there a shadow there, darker than the hall around it? She couldn’t tell. The moonlight that pooled through the window had crawled higher up the wall, but besides that little illuminated patch, all was black.
“Annie? Annie, you need to go back to bed, okay? You shouldn’t be u—”
Her throat snipped off the words. Like a stain through cloth, the girl emerged from the shadowed well of the hallway into the patch of moonlight. It painted her already pale complexion a shade whiter. She stared at Sarah with colorless eyes, pupil-less, pearls set in alabaster. With placid grace, she lifted up her arms and now Sarah saw the source of that dripping noise. A dead rabbit, mutilated, lay across Annie’s palms.
“You lied,” said the little girl, her terrible sightless eyes never leaving Sarah’s. “But he still wants you to play with us.”
To be continued…