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The rain hammered relentlessly on the shingled roofs, a steady noise dull and distant as the gray world. Through the streaks on the glass, the blur of evening, and two sets of curtains in two seperate windows, he watched the shape in the other room.
The silhouette was not large, was, in fact, slight and of the suggestion of a woman. He assumed it was a woman; the rosy curtains in her window opposite his were indicative of this. He had never seen her, whether entering or exiting her building.
A car rumbled along the street, its headlights sweeping gold and shadow across the naked walls of his room. In the silence of the sudden light, deep gouges across the bolted door became stark in contrast to the scuffed wood. Wounds to the walls turned to bruises; the newest one by his shoulder gaping black.
He peeled back the lower right corner of his curtains, catching another furtive glimpse as her silhouette stooped to retrieve something from her floor. Ideas as to what it could be sprang instantly to his mind, chasing each other in circles as the woman wandered out of view.
He imagined that she was dark. She would have rich, bronzed skin, so different from his own, like that of the family who had lived in her house two owners ago. Her hair would be long, and black, cascading like waves down her back and across her shoulders.
He brought an ashen finger to his cracked lips, picking at the dead skin as he waited for her to return. Below him, in some other part of the house, voices and the sound of doors opening and closing filtered up to of his room. He considered climbing down from the tiny bedframe and streaching out flat against the stained floor, pressing a mangled ear to it in hopes of sating curiosity. Whatever went on in the rest of the house and with the family who lived below never concerned him. He saw them in the yard from time to time, from his little window: Working with the soil, planting flowers, wandering in and out of his line of sight across the grass.
Erik took great care never to meet them. It was only in the dead hours of the night that he ever left his attic, only when nescessity forced him out through the pinched window and down the side of the house to steal supplies from their refrigerator and cupboards. Water and plumbing were of no concern; his mother had made sure to install a toilet and sink so that greater messes were not produced.
Problems would only occur in one of two events, the first an almost inevitable eventuality. Either someday someone would happen upon him in the act of theft, or else someone might decide to break down the wall sealing off the back room of the attic.
The last time his mother had spoken to him she had been dying of cancer. This, like everything else, was certainly his fault. Erik had sat just on the other side of the bolted door, listening as she explained that she was shutting him away for good behind a wall, and then was going to put up some lovely wallpaper so that no one would ever think to tare it down, to break through to the other side and find his body. He had sucked his thumb and watched the light slowly fade from the crack at the base of the door, and from the gouges his feet had kicked in the wood.
There were more voices from below. Erik reflected wryly that in the interveining years, perhaps she had inadvertantly done him a favor. He was safe. No one could find him; no one knew he even existed.
He turned back to the window, hoping for another glance of the silhouette. In his mind a bizzare kind of camraderie existed between them, almost as if the woman he had never seen was his special secret, his . . . his. . . .
He did not have a word for it. He had seen men and women below, on the strip of grass in the sideyard of his mother's house, and in the backyard of the house opposite. An occasional glimpse from the far end of the tiny window revealed the sidewalk, and the few pairs of women and men who found close company with the other as they walked. Once, years before the silhouette had moved into the opposite house, he had seen its former owners together in the seclusion of a room, enacting the most complex and disturbing form of. . . .
Somehow fighting was not the correct way of describing it, exactly, although despite searching his memory there seemed no better word for it. They did not seem angry.
A flash of movement caught his attention, and Erik felt his heart pound wildly. He turned back to the other window, then felt the distorted fleash across his face streach taunt in rage. The silhouette behind the rosy curtains was not her silhouette.
His sunken eyes narrowed as he surveyed the newcommer, a shadow both taller and sturdier than the slender original. When realization dawned that the form was male, Erik flung the edge of his curtain shut in fury.
How dare she? How dare she? She was his, his own, his shadow, and no one else's. Erik paced back and forth, skeletal feet tracing well-worn paths on the floor. He whirled, then snatched up the edge of his curtain enough to see the slender shadow step back into the glow. He watched her put a hand on the back of the man's shoulder, guiding him out of view and away from the window.
In fury he dug his fingers into his scarred face, leaving burning streaks. Who was that? Why was there a man in her room? The questions twisted around each other, coiled serpants in the growing dark. Streetlights had come on, hateful light where night should have rested, omnipotent. Erik paced, teeth bared as he struggled to suppress himself, to remain silent least he risk alerting the family beneith to his presence.
Who was that man? The scene returned to him again, unbidden, the image of one man, one woman moulding into each other. He flew to the window, heedless of whether his bare feet created noise, and flung back the curtain for another look.
Her window was empty. The vacant, rosy glow seemed to mock him, and he waited restlessly for her silhouette to reappear. To reappear alone. Just for him.
As the minutes streached long, he dragged his nails down the wood beside the window. The rain began to lessen, and it occured to him that, standing as he was, his hideous face was entirely visable to anyone below.
In desperation he continued to wait, letting the curtain fall back slowly, very slowly. One more minute turned to five, and when it became obvious that the woman would not reappear he carefully relaxed his fingers. The black curtains rustled to a close, obscuring the outside world.
Erik stood deathly still, listening to the rain and, to a lesser degree, the pounding of his own heart. For a long while the world narrowed, tunneled deeper until all that remained of eternity was the hollow sound of his shallow breathing. He crawled to the end of the tiny bed and knelt at its foot, gnawing at his arm to stop the wail rising in the back of his throat. She was gone, gone away from him, and he had not felt so abandoned since his mother's death.
Cursing himself and his world in the sealed room of the attic, Erik twisted onto his back. His eyes traced the rivulets on the window, and the idea to destroy the man his Silhouette had found began to fester. Somehow, somehow, if only there were no one else, perhaps the woman in the window . . . she might. . . .
He pushed a thumb into his mouth, uncertain as to what it was he wanted. A shadow thrown against a window, forevermore a candle in the night, a beacon of a sort. He sucked his thumb idly, a lifeline to the world as hatred died and was replaced by a well of misery.