A Real Head-Turner

It took him six blocks to realize he was being followed.

He was an office worker in the city. He spent his days sitting down, hunched over stacks of paperwork in a cramped cubicle, and rarely did he have the energy to exercise once he returned home for the day. In an attempt to combat his sedentary lifestyle, he enjoyed parking his car a few streets away from his building.

It had been a brutal Friday; he arrived at the office at nine in the morning and did not complete his tasks until 10:30 at night. After sitting for so many hours on end, he chose to maximize his steps by zig-zagging through the streets. He took a left, another left, a right, and then another right, and it was thanks to those unnecessary turns that he noticed a woman trailing him. She stayed half a block behind him, and although he only caught a brief glimpse of her when he made a turn, he could tell that there was something off about her. She walked at a brisk pace, as though she had somewhere urgent to be, but why would she take such a strange route if she were in a hurry?

He was too tired for whatever this was. If he turned around and made eye contact, he’d be inviting something—a conversation, a request for spare change, some stranger’s problem becoming his problem. And so he kept his eyes forward and his pace steady, and he let her stay a shadow in the corner of his vision, hoping that if he ignored her hard enough, she’d take the hint and find someone else to bother.

Once he arrived at his car, she sped up significantly, calling out to him in a soft, shaky voice.

“Um … excuse me?”

With a sigh, he finally turned his head.

The woman, who looked fairly young, stepped tentatively into the glow of the streetlight. She wore several long coats, all layered atop one another, but her thin hands and hollow cheeks betrayed her bulky silhouette. She had a scarf around her neck and a thick hat atop her head, and he remembered finding it odd that she wore so much clothing on such a warm night.

“Could you help me out? Please?” She continued walking towards him as she spoke. In fact, she did not stop until she was practically leaning against his passenger’s side door. He watched her carefully from the other side of his car, his hand poised on the driver’s side door handle.

“Are you alright?”

The woman shook her head fervently. “No, no I’m not alright at all. I need help getting home. I can’t walk any more.”

“Bus stop’s a few blocks back the way we came,” he offered. Clearly, she was looking for a ride, but he was none too keen on letting a perfect stranger into his car. She shook her head again, even more violently, and began to round the car, closing the distance between them.

“I can’t take the bus. It’s not safe.”

“Why not? You need money?”

“No, it’s not that. I’m being followed.”

He looked behind her at the dark street from which she’d come. He didn’t see anyone else.

“Uh, okay … Are you gonna call the cops or?”

A flash of anger crossed her face.

“You think I haven’t tried that?” she snapped, then seemed to catch herself, her voice dropping back into something more pleading. “For months I’ve called them, months, and they always say the same thing: there’s nothing they can do, because I can’t prove any of it. I can’t prove he was even there.”

“Who’s ‘he’?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen him. Not really, not his face, so I guess I don’t even really know it’s a him. But he’s close. I’ll come home and my furniture’s moved, just an inch, just enough that I know, and the cops say maybe I forgot, maybe I bumped it myself. And then I’ll wake up and things about me are different. My hair. There was a whole piece of it just gone one morning, right at the back, like someone took scissors to it while I slept. Sometimes the clothes I go to bed in aren’t the clothes I wake up in, I don’t remember anything, and nobody believes that either. They say I probably did it and forgot. Sleepwalking, or stress, or—” She shook her head, hard, like she was trying to physically dislodge the thought. “I didn’t do it. I know what I did and didn’t do.”

He said nothing, mostly because he had no idea what to say. Either the woman in front of him was in the grip of some kind of psychosis, or she was actually being stalked by someone skilled enough to break into a locked house, night after night, and rearrange her life down to the clothes on her body without ever once waking her up. Either way, he had nothing useful to offer her, and this was far more than he’d signed up for simply walking to his car.

“Jesus, lady, I don’t know what you think I can do about this that the cops can’t,” he said, pulling open his car door. The woman took another step closer, her eyes growing even wider.

“Wait! All I need is a ride home! I need to get out of here. Please, you have to help!”

At that last word, she lunged forward, reaching out to grab his hand in a crushing grip. In the brief moment before he yanked his hand away, he was struck by how her pupils were so dilated that he could not even make out the color of her irises.

“Hey,” he said, shoving her back. “If you need to get home so bad, then take the bus. Take an Uber. Rent one of those fucking scooters for all I care! It’s not my problem.”

He lowered himself into his car, locking the driver’s side door as soon as he pulled it shut. She watched in disbelief, standing stock-still in the middle of the street. As he drove away, he watched her motionless shape get smaller and smaller in his rear-view mirror. She never took her eyes off of his car.

The remainder of his evening was uneventful. He made dinner, showered, watched some television, and tried to forget about the woman. Though she had not seemed inherently dangerous, the encounter had shaken him, and the fact that he lived alone did not help to soothe his nerves. He felt justified in his decision to not give her a ride, but knew that there was more he could have done. He considered calling the police to file a report, though the woman had seemed adamant that they wouldn’t be able to help.

Oh well, he thought as he collapsed into bed. He had never felt unsafe in the city. He was sure that the woman would be alright.

In the morning, he awoke to birdsong and warm sunlight streaming in through his windows. He smiled as he stretched, enjoying the tranquility. His mind filled with ideas of how best to spend his Saturday, but before he could make any plans, he noticed two things. The first was a strange smell. It was a difficult scent for his sleep-addled brain to identify—dirt, maybe, or some kind of mold. All he knew was that it was unpleasant. The second was a tickling sensation on the back of his neck, like someone was running a feather across his skin. He rolled over in bed to investigate, and for a moment, he could not comprehend the sight that awaited him.

There was a person lying beside him, face-down with their arms tucked under their torso. They appeared fairly petite, although since they were mostly under the covers, it was hard to tell where exactly their body ended. Long, brown hair fanned out in all directions, covering the sides of the person’s face, their neck, and their upper back. The slivers of skin he could see through the blanket of hair were so pale that they were almost white.

Once he realized that he was not in fact dreaming, he shot out of bed, tripping over his own feet in his desperate scramble to the other end of the room. How long had that person been lying beside him? How had they gotten into his home in the first place? The thought of a stranger creeping into his house in the middle of the night and getting into bed with him made him feel sick, but he had no time to dwell. He had to call the police. His gaze drifted to where his phone lay charging atop the small bedside table tucked between the wall and the stranger.

He was a large man, but still he was reluctant to get any closer to the stranger without something with which to defend himself. His legs shook as he rose from the spot on the floor upon which he’d stumbled. There was a tightness in his chest and a pressure behind his eyes like his head had been stuffed full of cotton. He felt hungover despite not having drunk anything the night before, and his left cheek stung as if he’d been struck across the face.

Exiting the room, he staggered into the kitchen to grab a knife from the cutlery block. He leaned heavily into the countertop, the cool sensation of the tile under his palms grounding him, allowing him to catch his breath. Glancing down, he saw that the skin on the backs of his hands was crossed with thin, angry scratches he had no memory of receiving, with more trailing up his forearms and disappearing beneath his sleeves. He did not doubt who had marred him.

He thought of the person in his bed and wondered if they were truly asleep, as he had initially assumed. Maybe they were just pretending to sleep so that they could surprise him once he got close enough. He imagined them smiling into the pillow, listening to the sound of his encroaching footsteps, waiting for the right moment to strike.

But before he had the chance to grasp the steak knife, a thud from down the hall made him jump. Skin crawling, he abandoned the notion of heroically charging back into his bedroom to confront the intruder and instead made his way towards his front door. His neighbor’s phone worked just as well as his own. He would call the police from the safety of her house.

He crossed his front lawn, the grass damp and cold against his bare feet. Dressed in the sweatpants and T-shirt he’d slept in, he made his way up his neighbor’s porch steps and knocked fervently against her door. An uneasy sensation prickled over the back of his neck as he waited. He glanced over his shoulder at his own house more than once, half expecting to see a curtain shift or a shadow pass behind one of the windows, but everything looked exactly as he’d left it: quiet, ordinary, undisturbed. He knocked again, then once again.

Finally, the door creaked open. His neighbor stood in the entryway, hair mussed from sleep, a cardigan thrown haphazardly over what looked like pajamas, one arm still working its way through the sleeve. She blinked at him, confused, clearly having dressed in a hurry. Upon recognizing her caller, she mustered a tired smile, though it faded quickly.

“Oh!” She said, drawing a hand up to her face to point at her cheek. “Are you alright? What happened?”

Looking at his neighbor’s hand, he mirrored her pose, and when his fingertips brushed the warm skin of his face, he was disturbed to find a circle of divots in his cheek.

“Do you have a mirror?”

She said that she did. Clearly perturbed but also eager to help, she disappeared for a moment, then returned with a small mirror in her outstretched hand. He took it from her and surveyed his face in the glass.

Upon his cheek was the unmistakable imprint of a human bitemark.

His jaw dropped. He lowered the mirror, meeting his neighbor’s astonished gaze as she fidgeted with the hem of her cardigan.

“Gosh, do you want me to … call someone?”

He was inclined to say yes. The words were right there, ready to spill out, but something made him pause before they could. He thought it through as clearly as his sluggish mind would allow. He had woken up covered in bite and scratch marks—wounds that plausibly could have been laid upon him in self defense. He had no memory of any of it, not one second of the night before, and he had shown up on his neighbor’s doorstep, disheveled and unsteady and slurring his words, looking for all the world like a man coming down off of something. If the woman in his bed was not sleeping but incapacitated or worse, he would not be reporting an intruder to the police, but instead handing them a suspect.

“No, that’s alright,” he mumbled, before he could second-guess his decision.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, you see, I … I’m sorry; I forgot what I came over for. I had a crazy night.”

“I see,” his neighbor said, practically wincing at his words. She turned her head, looking at the house next door. “Oh, do you have company right now?”

He looked towards his house just in time to see a smiling face duck beneath his living room window and out of view.

A fresh wave of nausea rolled over him. Muttering some unconvincing excuse, he lurched back down the porch steps before she could respond, making his way back home as his neighbor watched from her doorway. He crossed the lawn again, faster this time, and let himself back into his house.

He had been drugged. What else could have happened? The woman from last night had followed him home, had done something to him while he was sleeping, and then had climbed into bed with him. Why or how, he could not possibly fathom.

But he could make her talk. If she was on her feet, walking around his house and peering out of his windows, then she could tell him why she had done what she did.

Anger at the violation of his home, of his person, rose above his fear. He was a large man—even with that strange, sluggishness coursing through his limbs, he had no doubt that he could take the thin intruder in his room. He returned to the kitchen, procured the large steak knife, and readied himself for the confrontation.

Each step he took towards his bedroom did more to shake his resolve than the last. There was someone in there, he was sure of it—he felt the same sense of wrongness one gets when they know they’re being watched. Or followed. Once he made it to the end of the hallway, he readied himself for a fight, and peered around the corner.

His closet door was open, as was his window. But far more unsettling than the yawning emptiness of his closet and the curtains billowing in the breeze was the fact that the figure was still in his bed. She had not moved an inch since he ran. She had not moved an inch this entire time, he was certain of it.

But who, then, had been at the window?

Walking to the edge of the bed, he reached out his free hand and, grasping a pale, bony shoulder, turned the figure’s torso onto their back.

The head did not follow.

He had not been sharing his bed with a stranger, but rather, with a decapitated corpse.

It’s been hours now, and he has yet to work up the nerve to turn the head face-up. He doesn’t know what to do, who to call. His story is completely outlandish; he doubts the police will believe that he had no part in the murder of the person in his bed, especially after his neighbor spotted him with scratches on his hands and a bitemark in his cheek. He can think of no one to turn to, no one who could help without condemning him to either a prison cell or an insane asylum. Somehow, he has to fix this. He has to, whether that means disposing of the body himself or catching a murderer who seems to have disappeared into thin air.

At present, he has only a single clue—a message carved neatly into the clavicle of the victim, reading:

your problem now

Credit: 11velociraptors

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