Part 1: The Set-Up
Piece One
A clap of thunder, the sky alight, and the air is moist and warm through her bedroom window. Half the covers lie on the floor and the ruffled hem of her nightgown is up around her hips. She sighs quietly in her sleep, twitching gently.
A sudden gust of wind, the window slams shut, and she jerks awake with a startled cry. She clutches at the mattress for a moment, chest heaving, eyes wide in the dark, before bringing a hand to her chest and listening to the night.
The rain patters against the window in a steady drumroll that isn't really individual sounds anymore, but one long hiss.
A car passes, the fan overhead whirrs busily, her father snores down the hall. And something else. She leans forward onto her knees, closer to the one window that's still open, her messy braid swinging over her shoulder with the motion. A low rumbling, but not a plane or an idling truck.
She frowns, slips out of bed. Her nightgown falls back around her ankles and she hums softly to herself, a winding little nonsense tune, as she pads across her bedroom and down the stairs. The tune doesn't echo in the stairwell, instead falling mutely into the dark, accompanied only by the whisper of her feet against the floor and her hand trailing against the wall.
She stands in front of the door, her humming fading as she concentrates on the sounds just outside her house. That rumbling, louder now, and running footsteps. A small cursing mumble. She nods, stepping forward definitively. She throws the lock and catches up the brass cane from beside the door in one motion, swings open the door and steps through it in the next.
The wind rips her nightgown around her legs as she stands on her doorstep, rain soaking through her. An annoyingly familiar kind of high-pitched electronic whine is echoing off the houses and the footsteps are skidding to a stop, sliding in the rain. She can just see the dark shape of a man through the sheeting rain, holding something up in front of his face.
The rumbling is echoing through her bare feet and there's a dark shape standing in front of the man and it might be the rain or it might be something else, but she can't quite make out what it looks like. It moves closer to him and he takes a startled half-step back, fidgeting with the thing in his hands.
She blinks rain out of her eyes and when she can see again, only the man stands in the street before her house. Something dark and glistening washes down the storm drain in great sweeps of rainwater, but it may just be the pavement. She lets the cane fall down through her hand to touch the ground, startled.
The ting of metal against concrete echoes against the house across the way and he looks up at her. She freezes, all pale against the night, and suddenly feels very cold.
Then he turns away, leaving only the impression of a fleeting grin of white teeth in the dark.