The Stories of the Wild One (continued)

He could stake it out himself, but wondered how he would handle it when his father appeared.

I can’t . . . just . . .

John could not hold onto the mental image of himself firing his weapon at his father, even with the taser’s non-lethal force. He could see trying to reason with him, to try to convince his father to turn himself in . . . to try to understand.

Choking back a lump, surprised at how his hand trembled, John reached for his radio. As his fingers brushed its controls, he froze at a sudden sound. He listened, trying to hear past the ambient noise of the air conditioner.

The garage?

He frowned, scowling. If it was that damned cat again, he was going to . . .

He stiffened. The noise came again. Quick and sharp, it was too brief for him to easily identify its location.

Inside the house?

Silently, he lifted his hand away from the radio. With slow, cautious steps, he headed toward the door. His hand moved to rest on his taser, ready to draw it in an instant. His other hand reached out slowly for the door handle. He gripped it, turning it slowly, trying to not have it make a sound.

Its soft click as the lock disengaged seemed loud in the small room. The door opened smoothly; its hinges did not make even the faint squeak that he feared.

John peered through the opening, half-expecting for something to leap into view in the narrow space. Nothing did, but he still did not relax. Something had made that sound.

He moved back into the short hallway, turning his head to survey his surroundings in all directions, even toward the ceiling. He felt belated foolishness at that, but pushed it away.

What was going to jump down at him from there? Some kind of alien?

I watched way too many of those movies with Dad . . .

The area was empty. John stood there, listening carefully, waiting for the sound to return. After several moments, when it did not, he took a few cautious steps forward. The carpet yielded almost soundlessly beneath his boots, but the floorboards underneath creaked just slightly.

He moved back toward the stairs, peering downward to see whether he could catch sight of someone—or something. His mind had still not completely dismissed the image of a rampaging xenomorph from his thoughts. He saw nothing, and began moving slowly down the stairs.

Every time one of them creaked above the sound of a soft whisper, he paused, waiting to see whether it stirred up any other sounds from elsewhere in the house. It did not, nor did the sound he had originally heard return. He began to feel rather foolish.

This place must settle a lot . . .

John headed down the stairs. For some reason, he paused on the first step on turned back to look toward his father’s bedroom. He had been so intent on searching his father’s office that he had not bothered to check that room—either for the presence of his father or for additional evidence.

“Damn it,” John whispered, quietly scolding himself. Get your head in the game here.

His mouth tightened into a frown. That sound he had heard had definitely come from somewhere downstairs.

Or had it?

For some reason, he left it had. That did not mean, he realized, that it actually had.

He glanced back down toward the lower floor.

What the hell is going on here?

The house was not haunted; he was sure of that. Not only did he not believe in such things, but it had never seemed so before now. In fact, it did not feel like a haunted house—and that was good enough for him.

After hesitating for another moment, he turned back and headed for his father’s bedroom. Cautiously, he opened the door wider, his eyes darting from side to side and then looking deeper into the room.

He stood there in the doorway, puzzled, but feeling more relaxed. The bedroom was almost exactly how he had expected to find it. The bed was carefully made. No dirty clothes were dumped in small piles on the floor. Everything was as carefully kept and tidy as it had always been. John saw no sign in this room, at least anything that was obvious to him, that his father had become unhinged.

His eyes turned toward the closet door. Other than for the bathroom, and the one leading back into the hallway, it was the only other door within this room. It anything was hidden in this room, it would be in there. Despite it feeling like a total cliché, John knew that he would need to check it out anyway. If he did not, he knew that it would nag at him until he did.

Crossing the room, his gaze sweeping its interior for anything that seemed unusual, he reached the closet in only a few long strides. He studied the door’s handle for a moment, feeling unexpectedly reluctantly to touch it. He shook the feeling off, silently chiding himself for imagining that it might be laced with snake venom or something.

Where did I hear about that?

It was an unlikely scenario, but he recognized it as a sign of just how highly strung he saw. He turned the handle, releasing it immediately, despite his silent rationalizations that his fears were, probably, unfounded.

A light flickered on from the ceiling, casting a pale, gray-white glow across the interior of the closet. Its angle from above him created sharp-edged shadows in the small space, creating an eerie, almost surreal environment. John looked around quickly, checking for anything that appeared to be immediately unusual or out of place. Nothing did.

His father’s shirts were all hung neatly, arranged by color and then by style: t-shirts, polo shirts, dress shirts, and so on. A half dozen pairs of shoes were aligned in a single row along one wall. On the shelves above, boxes and small crates of various sizes were stacked in careful order. John guessed that there was probably some kind of logical arrangement to those as well.

As his gaze passed across them, John wondered whether he should check through them all, looking for additional clues to his father’s suddenly unexplainable behavior. Something in his gut told him that he would he find nothing.

Or is it that I don’t want to find anything else . . . ?

John stepped back toward the closet doorway, performing one last survey of its interior.

I’ll leave for the police, he decided. If it comes to that.

He backed the rest of the way out of the closet and closed the door. He turned, his eyes scanning the interior of the bedroom again. As far as he could tell, there was nothing to be found there either.