Good Neighbors Read Free Page B

place another. He just floats toward her menacingly.
    Kat grabs her purse to her chest, as if it were some sort of talisman, a shield against the night, and she tries to weave around him, to get past him and into her apartment.
    And suddenly everything is bright. And loud.
    She can see every detail of everything. The pores in the man’s skin, large and filled with dirty oil, several blackheads littering his nose. The smudge on his jeans shaped like one of the midwestern states whose names she can never remember and the color of a coffee stain. The flecks of rust on the blade on the knife in his hand standing out like freckles. She can hear the sound of a radio playing somewhere. Muffled talking. A car engine dies three blocks away. She can see a spider on the front door of her garden apartment, building a web in the top left corner. She can hear the bathwater running inside, behind the spider and the front door, filling the tub with warm water into which she’ll soon be able to slide.
    But that’s not real, is it? That last thing isn’t real. Not yet. And it won’t ever be real if she doesn’t get to her apartment.
    The man with the knife redirects himself and continues toward her.
    But Kat is past him now, in the street, adrenaline coursing through her veins, and she’s unzipping her purse, trying to find her keys. A lipstick flies from the purse’s open mouth as she fishes inside; it clatters to the street, rolls for a while, and stops. She hears the foot of her attacker crunch atop it with one of his brown leather construction boots. So he must be walking, he must be human, despite the way he seemed to be gliding. Ghosts don’t have stained jeans and greasy pores and blackheads, do they? Ghosts don’t wear brown construction boots. Ghosts don’t need knives. A pink compact leaps out after her lipstick, hits the ground, and Kat thinks she can hear the mirror inside shatter.
    Seven years bad luck, she thinks insanely. I’ll be thirtyfive then.
    But now she can feel the keys in her right hand and she’s at the front door and she’s shuffling through the keys, trying desperately to find the right one, and she’s covered in sweat even though the night is cold, and there it is, the right one, the correct key, and she shoves it into the doorknob and turns the knob and pushes the door and the door swings open, come in, Kat, welcome home, and she takes a step toward her living room, toward the safe darkness of her living room, inviting like a womb, like a mother’s open arms, and soon she’ll be able to close the door on the dangerous world and sink into the warm water of her bathtub and forget any of this ever happened.
    Except a cruel fist grabs a handful of her hair and stops her. And that hand drags her away from the front door, leaving it there, open, keys hanging from the doorknob.
    I just wanted an effing bath, she thinks.
    And then the hand that’s not holding her by the hair rises into the night air above her. That hand is holding a knife, a large kitchen knife with flecks of rust littering its blade.
    The knife seems frozen in air a moment. Kat can see it in the corner of her eye.
    ‘Please,’ she says.
    And that’s all she says before the knife is hammered down, just behind her collarbone, and there is the grinding sound of metal against bone, and a wet sound, a nauseating liquid moan, and then those sounds are drowned out by the sound of someone screaming – someone screaming loud.
    And then the knife is pulled out of the new opening it made in Kat, and she hears a sound like a sword being unsheathed in an Errol Flynn movie. It doesn’t seem real. And then warm liquid begins to flow down her back.
    She smells copper.
    And then another scream fills the air.
    I wonder who that is, Kat thinks. Poor thing.

4
    Patrick wakes to the sound of an alarm clock ringing and though he doesn’t know what he was dreaming of seconds earlier he’s sure it wasn’t any good because he’s got a feeling in his head