I Met a Man Who Wasn't There
Chapter 1
Two in the morning. Jarrod was tired from writing since dinner ended. He dragged himself out the library after putting the lights out there, then put the lights out in the living room and the foyer. He climbed the stairs to go to bed, and saw him there.
In the darkened hallway, between him and his bedroom, a figure. The shadow of someone standing there, a man but neither of his brothers. "Who are you? What do you want?"
The man did not answer, and he did not move.
"Answer me. Who are you and what do you want?"
"It's only you," the man said.
"What?" Jarrod asked.
The man took slow steps toward him. "It's only you," he repeated, and then Jarrod saw who it was.
He saw himself.
"What - ?" Jarrod said, in a low whisper, and he stepped back and nearly fell down the stairs. He grabbed the banister to get stable.
And then Jarrod felt a dreadful chill. The man came closer and then seemed to move into him, and Jarrod shivered as a cold blast of air shot right through him.
And then the man was gone. Jarrod looked all around, in the hall, back down the stairs, into the darkened foyer. No one was there. Jarrod couldn't let go of the banister. He didn't know why. He just couldn't move.
What was that? Jarrod couldn't think. He couldn't understand what had just happened. He looked at himself, touched his face, to make sure he was awake and not sleepwalking. He was awake. Something had just happened. Something that was not a dream.
He hadn't been drinking for the last five hours, and he'd had a sandwich only an hour ago. None of this was imaginary. None of this was because he was drunk or low on blood sugar. Something had just happened. Something that was real.
Jarrod started down the hall toward the wc. He could hardly pick up his feet, they were so heavy. His head was swimming. What had just happened? If he wasn't drunk, if his blood sugar wasn't low, if he wasn't asleep – what had just happened?
He went to the wc and cleaned up, sloppily. He made it to his room, went inside and closed the door behind him. He was so cold he was shivering. He could hardly change out of his clothes and into his bedclothes and once he was in bed he couldn't wait to close his eyes. He didn't want to see that there was someone else in the room with him. But even though he was tired, he couldn't sleep. He was on high alert. His eyes were closed, but he was listening, listening for anything and everything.
Nothing happened. He fell asleep and didn't realize he was asleep until suddenly sunlight was coming in the window. He sat up on the edge of the bed.
Jarrod was convinced now that it had all been a dream. But he was still shaking. He got himself to the wc, cleaned up and shaved, then dressed and went downstairs.
"Well, I was about to go after you," Victoria said as she met him in the foyer. "Everyone's had breakfast and gone on their way."
"I'm sorry," Jarrod said. "I was up late working and overslept."
Victoria looked at him oddly. "Are you all right?
"Yes, I'm fine," Jarrod said.
"You don't look like yourself."
Her choice of words made Jarrod flinch. "What?"
"You don't look well."
"Mother, don't fuss, I'm fine, but I do need to eat," Jarrod said. "I'll go see what Silas has in the kitchen."
Jarrod went into the kitchen, and Victoria just watched him go. She wasn't inclined to hover, but he looked – he looked like he'd seen a ghost.
Silas was cleaning up in the kitchen, but gave Jarrod a smile. "Good morning, Mr. Jarrod. I have some food in the warmer for you."
"Thank you, Silas," Jarrod said.
Jarrod sat at the kitchen table, and Silas brought him a cup of coffee. When Silas returned with a plate of eggs and ham, Jarrod was drinking the coffee. He held the cup in both hands, tight. Silas noticed. "You feeling under the weather this morning, Mr. Jarrod?" he asked.
"No, I just didn't get enough sleep," Jarrod said.
"I saw you working awful late. You best not do that again tonight."
"You're right there, Silas," Jarrod said. The coffee tasted good. The eggs and ham tasted better. But what happened the night before still bothered him. He still couldn't make sense of it. He looked over at Silas, so calm and businesslike as he went about his morning routine. Silas was always like that. Very little frightened that man. "Silas," Jarrod said, "have you ever run into anyone in this house you – " He had trouble figuring out the rest of the sentence. "You didn't expect to see?"
Silas asked, "What exactly do you mean, Mr. Jarrod?"
Jarrod hesitated. This was a bad idea, talking to Silas about it, but it was hardly something he could talk to his mother about. "I saw someone last night, in the hall."
Silas's eyes grew wide. "You saw somebody? In the house?"
"Not exactly somebody, Silas," Jarrod said, and took a deep breath, and lied, a little bit. "I thought I saw someone familiar in the hall upstairs, about two o'clock this morning."
"Oh," Silas said. Understanding dawned. "You weren't expecting this person so you think you saw a spirit."
Jarrod was amazed that Silas seemed relieved about it. "Sort of," Jarrod said.
"Shadows do funny things in this house, Mr. Jarrod, it's so big."
Jarrod hesitated to say what he said next. "Have any of those shadows ever talked to you, Silas?"
Now Silas's face screwed up a little. "Not exactly, Mr. Jarrod. They made sounds. But you were pretty tired last night. You probably saw a shadow and if you thought it talked to you, it was probably the wind."
Jarrod thought Silas may have had something there. "Has that happened to you?"
"Once or twice," Silas admitted. "Never in the daytime, only when the house is dark and quiet. Shadows and wind."
Jarrod sighed. "You're probably right, Silas. And since I was overtired, I probably let my imagination run away with me."
Silas chuckled. "That can happen, Mr. Jarrod."
"Do me a favor, would you? Don't mention this to anyone else. It's a little embarrassing."
Silas laughed again. "Not a word, Mr. Jarrod. More coffee?"
"Please."
XXXXXXX
It was another late night with the brief he was working on. "Brief" was definitely a misnomer in this case, because the thing was going to be over fifty pages long when he was done with it. Jarrod nibbled on a sandwich and drank milk as he worked, so he was certain his blood sugar was fine, but his fatigue started to roll over him at about midnight. He was not happy with what he was writing after that.
He took the next hour to look over what he had written. Parts of it were fine, but parts were not what he wanted them to be. If you were going to put something this long in front of a court, you'd better make the language easy on the brain, or you'd never make your point understood. And there were places Jarrod felt like the language was not easy to follow. For now, he just marked them, resolving to come back in the morning and begin again at the beginning. Maybe if he cleaned up what he'd already written, the rest would begin to flow better. Right now, the brief was like water backed up against a big dam.
Jarrod put the lights out and headed upstairs, but he wouldn't kid himself. He was nervous, looking ahead carefully for any sign of his spectral visitor from the night before. Shadows and wind, that's what Silas had said. Jarrod kept repeating the words to himself as he climbed. When he got to the top of the stairs, he stopped and looked down the hall toward the bedrooms and the wc. The lights were low in the hall, leaving several dark areas between them, but so far, nothing in the darkness was moving. Jarrod tried to sense a breeze, but there wasn't any, not so far. No shadows, no wind. Jarrod swallowed and began to move toward the wc.
One of the shadows moved.