Honorable mention
by Nancy Skiba
Katie looked around the hillside beach view house one last time. Her stained glass lamps, paintings, cook books, potted plants and the rest of her clothing were packed in her white Rover in the driveway. It was good timing. Jared was at his job site at his latest renovation project. She didn’t need another unpleasant scene. It was over. She was relieved as she drove away.
The Victorian mansion in South Redondo was an oddity. As peculiar a curiosity as the belongings and its former owner, her uncle Seaghan O’Doyle, the magician. It was beautiful yet somehow forbidding. He had been an odd, mysterious sibling of her mother’s. Long separated from the family, he passed away a while back, and surprisingly had left the home to Katie, a niece he had only met as a child. One of the provisions in his will was that she live in the home for a year.
It would take that long to sort through all of his strange memorabilia.
As she brought her things into the home she had the sense of not being alone. The interior was dark. Dark wood, dark floors, dark Oriental rugs, mahogany antiques everywhere.
And tall paintings of Uncle Seaghan in his various magician poses, all peering down at her. There were bronzed figures of ravens and Egyptian cats, cartouches, magical paraphernalia of all kinds. Closets filled with costumes. And many shelves of books on the occult, magical arts, secret societies, clairvoyance, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Katie ran a bath, and sank into the soothing aromatic herbal water, lighting a scented candle and sipping some Chardonnay. To new beginnings. She thought of the old song lyric……”when a lovely flame dies, smoke gets in your eyes….” And how.
Katie carried her wine glass as she walked around the house in her cuddly robe. She wandered into her uncle’s study. A huge antique desk and chair, more magician’s collectibles. Celtic art. An old gramophone. An old family album was on a shelf with pictures of relatives in Ireland. Old homes, farms. Uncle Seaghan as a lad, and later as a young man with his arm around her mother Rose, and as a man in a severe black suit, standing with a little girl looking very very sad.
It was a cemetery. There was a picture of her mother’s headstone. She set the album aside, and looked around the room. There was an antique cabinet about five feet high, with a beveled glass door. It was locked. She yawned. She’d have to find the key but for now was tired and went upstairs to bed. There was a full moon. The only sound outside was the ocean’s rolling roar.
An antique grandfather clock ticked somewhere in the parlor. The cabinet door softly clicked open. Inside the cabinet stood the small figure of a man, perhaps three and a half feet tall, dressed in dark pants and an old-style jacket and a flat cap. He appeared lifelike, with ginger hair curling from beneath the cap. His rough features were Gaelic.
A black Dodge Ram pickup was making its way down the hill. The pickup inched along, the driver looking toward the house and the white Rover. The driver parked halfway down the block, got out and walked quietly toward the Rover.
He was visible in the moonlight, a handsome man of 35, muscular, with a determined look on his face. Looking around, he pulled a folding knife from his belt, and deftly jabbed the tires on the Rover. The man was Jared, Katie’s ex-fiancé, and for him it was not over. The tires had not satisfied his anger.
The little man in the cabinet opened his eyes.
Jared quietly made his way to the side of the house and peered in through the windows and found them to be locked. He walked around to the back of the Victorian, until he reached the garden outside the study. As he reached for the window pane, his light jacket opened and a larger knife was visible in a sheath on his belt.
The little man’s eyes moved toward the sound.
Jared inserted the knife into the window jamb. But the lock held. He looked up toward the bedrooms.
The cabinet was now empty. The little man was not in sight.
Jared was outside, looking in the beveled glass front door. There was murder in his eyes. The little man stood in the darkness to the side of the door, unseen. Finally Jared, frustrated, left but not before he stomped on the flower bed for good measure. He moved quickly toward his truck, and got in.
The door of the Victorian was open a crick. The little man was standing under the shadow of a tree, watching as Jared started the engine and slowly rolled past the manse. He began walking after the truck. Then began jogging after it. The truck stopped at a stop sign, and continued left toward the hills.
The little man followed, unnoticed. He continued following the truck up the hilly twisting roads all the way to its own driveway. He stood in the darkness as Jared went into his hillside home. The little man watched him through the window, on the dark side of the house. He watched Jared throw framed photographs in a trash basket, breaking the glass. Jared carried the basket outside and dumped it in a recycle bin at the curb, then went back inside.
The little man peered at the broken picture frames — pictures of Jared with Katie.
He stared after Jared as he went back inside. In a few minutes the lights were turned off. The little man waited.
Jared was asleep in his bed. The house was silent. Suddenly he awoke, at the sound of running water. He picked up a baseball bat on the way and headed toward the bathroom, where the tub was filling up. There was no one in sight. He turned off the tap. A moment later, he heard the television, but when he crept toward the den, it turned off. He looked around nervously and waited. He heard the microwave in the kitchen go on. He went to look. The microwave dinged. He saw no one. He opened the microwave door, and found nothing inside. There was a soft rapping at the front door. He peeked out through the peephole. No one. He pulled the door open and looked around the porch and front yard and into the street. He heard a scratching sound.
The little man was walking around the pickup, scratching the paint with a shard of the broken picture frame glass. Jared raised the baseball bat and rushed after him. When he got to the other side of the truck, the man had vanished. He stood there in astonishment, looking at the damage. He turned in time to see the little man rush back into the house. Jared ran after him. He switched on the lights. No sign of the little man. He heard a singsong voice from his bedroom. The voice was speaking Gaelic. As he stepped into the room, the little man leapt down from the top of a dresser and clung to Jared’s back. He tried to shake him off. But it was useless. The little man was strong. He held Jared tightly, and would not let go. Jared dropped the baseball bat, and tried to pull the man off him. He tripped and fell, and the little man was on top of him again. Jared saw the wicked shard of glass in the man’s leathery hand.
Neighbors thought they heard a moaning sound in the night but went back to sleep. One of Jared’s crew came by when he did not show up at the work site, and saw the evidence of what had been a terrible struggle, and a futile one.
That morning, Katie went outside and got in her Rover, and left for work. Her tires were fine and the paint of the Rover as perfect as it had been the day before.
The cabinet door was closed now. The little man was back in his place, still and life-like as before, eyes closed.There was the slightest of a smile on his lips. B
