Inside (A Short Story)

 This is a short story I wrote last week, and it has been published on Smashwords, and you can download it there for free. I would issue an advisory for reader discretion due to violence.

INSIDE
By Mike Wright


Gregory Chandler always kept the door locked. Period. On the hulking solid-wood door was a vast array of assorted locks and mechanisms. Three different deadbolts were safely secured, and were followed by three bolt and chain locks, a couple of padlocks and a crossbar for some occasions.

He looked over his beautiful locked door while sipping on a glass of water. The water was out of a bottle, but he ran it through his Brita just to be sure that it was really pure. The cool, crisp, clean water ran through his teeth as he savored the feeling on the liquid pouring down his throat.

Fresh.

He moved away from his door, the padded slippers on his feet shielded between him and the sterile tile floor, and he looked at his windows in the living room. Barred on the inside and the outside. The shining padlocks that he changed every three months were tightly secured. Nothing was getting in that way.

He had run a similar inspection on the entire lower floor, and he was about to retire to bed. After the exhausting day he had, bed sounded like pure bliss. That and the novel he had purchased that afternoon, perhaps he would read a few pages of that before he shut down for the night.

With a quick glance at his kitchen window, just being sure that it was still locked; he clicked off the light and began to walk toward the stairs.


The watch on his arm said it was about ten-thirty. He supposed he was retiring kind of early, but it didn’t matter. Gregory needed to sleep.

He counted the stairs as he went up, stopping at seventeen before he reached the top floor. A quick look around told him that he was safe inside. That was of the utmost importance. He was perfectly safe.

His mother had told him that he was a little strange, being so secure all of the time, but he saw nothing strange about it at all. Anyone who just walked around with his or her doors partially locked—or not locked at all—had to be insane. Didn’t they see all of the dangerous people out there? Have they any idea? Goodness, it was a dangerous world, and Gregory intended to be perfectly safe in it, thank you very much.

When he was a child his mother hadn’t been so safe, and it had cost them dearly. Very dearly, he didn’t intend to let that happen ever again.

He checked the window in the upstairs bathroom just to be certain it was locked.

Gregory walked back out of the bathroom and moved for his bedroom at the end of the hall. The lamp he had left on a few moments ago before making his final rounds still shone brightly through, welcoming him to the paradise of sleep. How he desperately needed it.

He had also left the television on before he left, and it was playing on one of the religious networks. He had left it on there because it was talking, but he could really care less. Religion was stupid in his opinion. He was perfectly fine just as he was, he didn’t need some “inner cleansing” all he needed to do was protect his outside. Forget being born-again, all he needed was to keep all of the pollutants and poisons out of his body and he would be perfectly fine. He planned to live forever. His mother may have needed that stuff but he didn’t. It was all a crock for a bunch of fat guys to make more money anyway.

With a click of the remote the screen went black and Gregory downed the rest of his water. The glass was set neatly on the table by the door so it would be available to him if he needed it in the night.

He set the remote on another table that was on the other end of a comfortable reading chair and moved for his bed, taking the small paperback with him. He had only made it a chapter or two in and was considering moving forward in it by just a few more pages.
He set the novel down on the pillow next to his on the queen-sized bed and kicked his slippers off in front of him on the floor. The padded soles landed solidly and he used his toes to guide them so they were perfectly in line.

Gregory peeled back the comforter and then pulled back the sheets, they parted for him just perfectly and he smoothed the lines together and began to climb in….

…and heard a crash in the house.

His heart stopped.

Someone was inside?

He looked around him for a moment, desperate for a weapon, but stopped. What was he thinking?

“Something must have just fallen over.” He said to nobody but himself. “That stupid lamp that’s always wobbling.”

That had to be all it was. That had to be.

Gregory moved for the door to check it out, surely it was that stupid lamp. He just had to stand it back up and go back to bed. The light switch by the wall met his fingertips and the bright light filled the hallway.

He moved for the stairs and looked down, sure enough there was the pesky lamp tipped over and on the floor, the light bulb was a pile of glass splinters.

“Great.”

He started down the stairs when a shadow shot down the hallway on the lower floor.

His heart skipped.

Oh, boy, he thought, someone is in the house.

He carefully backed up the stairs, trying to avoid the slight squeak of the step behind him. The last thing he wanted was for the guy to know where he was. That would prove disastrous.

Okay, okay. Think.

He moved back another step and went for the closet in the hallway, there had to be something in there. He should get to a phone, but he didn’t keep those on the second floor, they were too noisy.

Stupid, stupid! I’m such an idiot!

It had made sense at the time. Nobody ever got inside. He was safe inside, what did he need a phone upstairs for?

How did this guy get inside? The doors were all locked; there was no way that he could have gotten in. He had just checked the locks; there was no way for that man to get inside!

Gregory opened the closet and grabbed the hammer out of the toolbox that sat on the shelf, lying open. Primitive, but it would do the job. If this ended out to be a fight, then at least Gregory wasn’t completely unarmed.

He moved back for the stairs, cursing himself for not having a phone on the second floor, and hoping desperately that the man was not armed. Thought he doubted it.

He stepped down a couple steps and stopped, listening, watching the light of the hallway reflect on the stack of shards that used to be a light bulb. Nothing.

Gregory shifted the hammer in his grasp and slipped down three more steps, only twelve left, and listened again. Nothing.

The last twelve steps he downed in a blur and swung around as soon as his soles hit the tile, raising the hammer high, ready to strike…

…. but there was nothing there.

Great.

He looked around, glanced in the living room. Still didn’t see him.

There was a quick flash in the hallway and he knew that he saw something move in there. He barreled after it, his heart beating at warp speed. He skidded to a stop and swung around, just as before, ready to take out whatever would be waiting for him to discover that yet again there was nobody there to unleash the blows of his hammer onto. Where the devil was he?

Gregory slowly crept into the kitchen, his hammer raised again, the wooden handle was warm and slippery with his sweat.

The kitchen was dark, just as he’d left it, the coffee maker blinking, the timer on it set for the next morning. The pans were hung on their rack; the counters were spotless as usual. The man had not snuck around him into the kitchen.

He glanced behind him and moved forward into the kitchen a little, trying to see if the man had crouched behind the island counter. Nothing. Again.

Gregory moved slowly around the island and exited the kitchen carefully, looking in all directions for the intruder, still baffled that the man had somehow made it inside. Nobody made it inside.

He looked at the lamp again, and noticed that the pile of shards was no longer as organized as it had been; it was shifted off to one side…moved.

Gotcha.

He bolted for the stairs and swung around to see the shadow disappear around the wall. Gregory ran up the stairs after him.

How did the man move so quietly? It was impossible that he had not heard him!
He tightened his grip on the hammer.

Nobody gets inside.

He the seventeen stairs were behind him in an instant and he turned to the hallway. “Get out here!” Why was he yelling?

The hallway was empty. There was nobody there.

“Get out here!”

The bathroom door moved slightly.

Bingo.

Gregory burst into the bathroom with his shoulder, sending the door flying into the wall, the doorknob making a fresh hole in the drywall. He felt the throb begin in his shoulder, but he ignored it and instead was fixed on taking down his intruder.

But the bathroom was empty.

What?

He turned to the shower and opened the curtain, greeted by only half-filled shampoo bottles. Nothing more.

Gregory lowered the hammer to his side and slowly turned around, not before glancing at the bathroom window, making sure that it was locked.
He came nose to nose with the shadow.

“Ahh!” He swung the hammer and the sink shattered, sending bits all over the place. He had missed. How had he missed?

The shadow stared at him, and smiled. Gregory watched it reach out to him, and he cowered from its grasp, and the shadow grinned wider. It then used its other hand to reach for it’s hood that stayed firm over its eyes and nose, and it slowly began to draw back its cowl.

Gregory watching in horror, and the hand reached out farther and grabbed him by the neck, pulling him closer, the clawed hand dug into his jugular, he found it hard to breath and impossible to scream.

The cowl was pulled back, the grinning face plainly visible, looking at him. Gregory lost the ability to think when he saw the face. He felt his hand swing the hammer again into the mirror, and the mirror smash into hundreds of pieces, but it didn’t’ stop the shadow, it only kept pulling him closer—closer to it’s face.

He stared at the face and in unbelief, watched as the shadow raised a hand with a shard of the mirror grasped tightly. Then he felt the shard become lodged in his chest, embedded quickly and violently.

Air began to leave him, his lungs were filling with blood, and he knew that. He was dying quickly, his heart was beating harder and harder, he was sweating profusely. It was all over. In all of that he remained in stunned silence.

The last thoughts he had were of the face, and how the face of the shadow—of his murderer—was his own.

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” – Jeremiah 17:9 (King James Version of the Bible)

“For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders,” – Mark 7:21 (King James Version of the Bible)