Mysterical-E

He Said, She Says

TRAPPED WITH A RAPIST

By Michael Bracken

The normally pleasant tinkling of the wind chimes outside my bedroom window had been irritating me ever since I’d climbed into bed. I tried pulling the covers over my head and I tried burying my head between two pillows, but nothing worked. Even though the worst of the storm had passed by early that morning, gusting winds continued to assault our town, rattling windows, peeling away loose shingles and sending them skittering across rain-sodden lawns, and causing empty garbage cans to rattle down empty streets until they finally came to rest against one parked car or another.

The wind chimes might not have irritated me so if I hadn’t been alone in the king-size bed. Gus had left the house just before midnight the previous night, his yellow rain slicker fastened tightly around his girth. The last I’d seen of him was the glitter of the reflective tape on the sleeve of his slicker as he waved to me just before backing the pickup truck down the drive to the street. I hadn’t heard from him since.

I tightly hugged one of Gus’s pillows, inhaling the lingering trace of his aftershave and the faint musky scent he’d left behind. He’d worn the same sickeningly sweet aftershave for eleven years, ever since I’d made the mistake of telling him how nice he smelled on our first date. He called it his lucky aftershave and I never disagreed.

Hugging the pillow reminded me of the previous night. The first threads of the storm had woven through our town shortly after dark, just as Gus and I were slipping into bed. I wore a short nightie and he--as usual--wore nothing but his sickeningly sweet aftershave. I laid with my back to him, hugging a pillow, as he wrapped his powerful arms around me. We spooned in the dark and listened to the wind chimes.

“The storm’s supposed to get pretty bad,” I finally said.

“It’ll be fine,” Gus said. His warm breath tickled my ear. “It’ll blow by in a day or so.”

I pushed back against my husband, molding my body to his. He kissed the back of my neck and then his hand slipped around to cup one of my breasts through the thin material of my nightie.

Lightning flashed outside the window and a few seconds later thunder crashed. The worst of the storm was still some distance away, but I needed my husband to comfort me. I pulled away, rolled onto my back and, as the wind chimes tinkled and the windows rattled, we made love. Before long I cried out his name, lightning lit up the house, thunder crashed, and the telephone rang.

That had ended our evening nearly twenty-four hours earlier and I lay in bed alone, wondering where he was and what he’d been doing since leaving the house.

Somewhere nearby a power station had been destroyed by the storm and the houses along our road hadn’t had electricity since early morning. The phones had gone out around noon. I had a portable radio--a boom box my nephew had left behind after his visit two weeks earlier--and I tuned in the news every hour. The news wasn’t good. A mobile home park had been destroyed, leaving hundreds homeless; a church roof had caved in during a Wednesday night prayer meeting, sending dozens to the hospital; part of a prison in the next county had collapsed, sending the authorities scrambling to account for the inmates as they moved them to higher ground. Luckily, no fatalities had been reported during the worst of the storm.

Above the incessant tinkling of the wind chimes, I heard a monotonous pounding. It had been going on for quite a while before I realized the sound wasn’t caused by the wind. I struggled out of bed, pulled on an old terrycloth robe I’d had for ages, and made my way carefully down the darkened stairs to the front door.

On my front porch, huddled against the driving wind, stood a man I’d never before seen.

“My car went off the road down there a ways,” he said, gesturing vaguely. “This is the first house I come to.”

“Come in, come in,” I urged. As soon as he’d stepped inside, I pushed the door closed against the wind.

“I din’ think anybody was home,” he said. “It was dark and all.”

I told him about the electricity, then said, “We won’t be able to call a tow truck for your car, either. Phones are dead, too.”

I couldn’t see his reaction to the news that he wasn’t much better off inside than he had been outside, but the stranger was quiet as he peeled off his jacket.

“Let me hang that up,” I suggested when it looked like he was about to throw it over the back of my couch. “It’ll dry better if I hang it up.”

I took it from his outstretched hand, my mind barely registering the crude tattoo etched into the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger. “I’d offer hot coffee, but--”

“Yeah,” he said. “No power.”

I grabbed a hanger from the hall closet and hooked his jacket over it. Then I walked into the downstairs bathroom and hung it over the shower curtain rod. I was startled when I turned around because he’d followed me into the tiny room.

“You here alone?” he asked.

Something about the way the stranger asked the question bothered me, so I said, “My husband will be back any minute.”

“He been gone long?”

“Not long,” I lied as I squeezed past my visitor and into the hall. I was uncomfortably conscious of the fact that all I had on was an old blue terry cloth robe and a red satin nightie my husband had given me on our eighth anniversary. I clutched the robe at the neck and tried to maintain a normal conversation. “You from this area?”

“Downstate,” he said. His voice had a deep rasp, like he’d damaged his vocal chords with too many cigarettes and too much whiskey.

“Been in this area long?”

“Two years,” he said.

I led him down the hall to the kitchen, where moonlight filtered through the trees and through the windows. It was probably the most brightly lit room in the house. “Plan to stay around here?”

“Not if I have a choice.” He opened the refrigerator without asking permission, rooted around in the darkness until he found half a roast and a lukewarm can of beer. He opened the beer and downed it in one long gulp. “Just you and the old man live here? No kids?”

“No kids,” I told him. Not because we hadn’t tried, though. Gus and I had wanted children since before we’d even married, but we’d waited until he felt secure in his job before we made a concerted effort. After two years of dedicated effort, a doctor told us Gus had a low sperm count.

“Whatsa matter? Old man can’t get it up?”

“Excuse me,” I told him, “but that’s none of your business.”

The stranger rooted through the drawers until he found a carving knife and began hacking at the leftover roast. As he chewed on the tough meat, he said, “Pretty lady like you, I wouldn’t have no trouble with my equipment.”

I clutched my robe tighter and didn’t respond. His comments were beginning to bother me.

He motioned with the tip of the carving knife. “Sit a spell.”

“I--”

“Sit!”

I sat.

He noticed my nephew’s boom box sitting on the end of the counter. “Batteries work in that thing?”

I nodded.

He found the right knob and switched the radio on.

“--convicted on three counts of rape and suspected in a double homicide, he may be armed and is considered dangerous. Authorities say--”

He snapped off the radio and smiled. Then he finished the beer and belched. “Any more beer?”

Gus always kept a couple of six packs in the garage just in case some of his friends dropped by after one of their weekend softball games, but I didn’t tell my visitor. “There might be another can in the fridge,” I suggested.

He turned his back on me and opened the refrigerator door again. I thought about jumping up and hitting him with something while he wasn’t looking. I thought about bolting from the kitchen and locking myself in the bathroom. I thought about escaping from the house and running across the field to the Hansens’ place nearly a mile away. I thought about all those things, but I did nothing.

“I never introduced myself,” I said nervously. “My name’s Mary. What’s yours?”

“Mine don’t matter,” he said over his shoulder. Then he finally found another can of beer and he closed the refrigerator door. He drank this beer more slowly than he did the first.

Silhouetted against the window, he seemed about Gus’s size, but without the potbelly Gus had developed over the years. Gus blamed my good cooking for the extra weight he carried and I didn’t argue with him about it.

My visitor tossed his empty beer can in the sink. Then he looked at me. Then was a glimmer in his eye that may just have been a reflection of the moonlight, but I felt a shiver run down my spine.

“Yeah, my equipment’ll work just fine,” my visitor said to himself as he examined me. Then he took one step toward me and I cowered in my seat. He reached out and grabbed my robe, pulling me up, out of the chair. He pulled me to him and covered my lips with his, forcing his tongue inside my mouth. He smelled of sweat and tasted of beer, and I gagged.

I pushed away from him and my robe tore. I ran from the kitchen before he could react, and he stumbled after me in the dark. I knew my own house and hurried up the stairs to the bedroom. I slammed the door behind me and then wished I’d gone to the garage instead.

The damn wind chime outside the bedroom window taunted me with its incessant tinkling, masking the sound of his footsteps. I pulled the shade off the lamp by the bed, and pulled the plug from the wall. I held the lamp over my head and stood by the bedroom door.

By then I realized that my visitor was the escaped convict mentioned on the radio. I didn’t hear him until he kicked open the bedroom door and it slammed against the wall. I swung the lamp down at his head, but he blocked it with his arm, knocking it from my grasp.

I kicked at him, my bare feet ineffective against his legs. He grabbed me and half-carried me, half-threw me across my bed. He knelt on the bed with one knee between my legs, and he used the knife to cut away the remains of my robe and cut open the front of my nightie.

I screamed then, longer and louder than I’ve ever screamed in my life.

“Scream, bitch,” he said. “Ain’t nobody can hear you.”

I screamed again and again until I grew horse. He unfastened his pants and was about to cover me when I smelled the sweetest smell on the face of the earth.

Gus grabbed him by the back of the neck and lifted my assailant off of me. Then he planted one work-hardened fist in the guy’s face.

The escaped convict slashed at my husband with the knife, hacking at nothing but air as Gus managed to avoid the blade. Then my husband stepped forward again and placed another fist in my assailant’s face.

They fought for fifteen minutes or an hour, I don’t know, but finally Gus had him pinned to the floor and we used the cord from the lamp to bind the convict’s wrists together behind his back. Then we locked him in a closet until phone service resumed early the next morning and we were able to contact the police.

Gus and I haven’t really spoken about that night since, but it was nearly three months before I felt capable of physical intimacy. Gus never rushed me, nor suggested we do anything differently. He held me when I needed holding, kissed me when I needed kissing, and, when I was ready, made love to me slowly, sweetly, and carefully.

Afterward, I looked up into his eyes and knew I had married the right man. Then I pushed him onto his back, straddled him, and rode him until we were both too tired to continue. After that, our lives began to return to normal.

The community awarded Gus for his 24-hour stint at the destroyed mobile home park, we each have our own cell phone, and I bought him a ten-year supply of what I once thought was the most sickeningly sweet aftershave on the face of the earth.

But now I call it our lucky aftershave.

Author Bio

Although he is the author of 11 books—including the private eye novel All White Girls—Michael Bracken is better known as the author of almost 900 short stories published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Espionage, Flesh & Blood: Guilty as Sin, Hardboiled, Hot Blood: Strange Bedfellows, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Out of the Gutter, and many other publications.

Bracken has edited five crime fiction anthologies, including the three-volume Fedora series, and has served as vice president of the Private Eye Writers of America and three terms as vice president of the Mystery Writers of America’s Southwest chapter.

Learn more at www.CrimeFictionWriter.com.