The Killer in My Walls

Lock the door.

The text lit up my phone at eleven at night. Two words from my boyfriend, and the sweat went cold on my back.

Then a second one.

There's someone in the house.

I live alone, at the far edge of a gated community where the nearest neighbor is a scream away and asleep by ten.

A man with an axe came for me that night. That part, you can understand. A dark house, a bright blade, a woman alone. People already know how to be afraid of that.

But the man with the axe was never the worst thing in that house.

The worst thing wore a face you'd trust. It was patient. It was already inside.

And it was human.

Chapter 1

Lock the door.

Two words from Mason, glowing on my phone at eleven at night, and the sweat came up cold across my back.

Downstairs, something shifted. A sound that didn't belong.

My heart slammed once, hard.

I live at the far edge of the community, in a big house my parents gave me for my twenty-fifth birthday, the last lot before the tree line. Gated. Cameras on every corner. Remote, but they keep it safe out here. Safe enough that I'd stopped double-checking the locks.

I went down the stairs fast anyway.

The front door was open.

Not wide. A finger's width, maybe two, cold air sliding through the gap and up my bare arms. I'd closed it. I knew I'd closed it. I stood there one second too long, then crossed the room, shoved it shut, and turned the bolt.

My phone chimed again.

There's someone in the house.

The air went out of me.

I backed into the downstairs bathroom and pulled the door to. The faucet was dripping. Slow, even. Tap. Tap. Tap. I couldn't have told you why that was the thing that crawled up my spine, but it was.

Here's the thing about me. I don't have people. I never saved the security office's number, never got a single neighbor's. Calling the police over two cryptic texts and a door I might have left open myself felt insane. Because I do that. I forget things, I'm careless in the small ways. It would be embarrassing.

And Mason. Mason sings in a bar most nights and lives for a good scare. He'll send you a photo of a "man outside your window" and howl laughing when you call back crying. This was probably him. Just him, bored between sets.

I let myself breathe.

Then a small sound. A click.

The house went black.

A beat. The lights snapped back on.

Somebody had touched the switch.

Somebody was inside.

The breath came apart in my chest. The bathroom door was frosted glass, everything past it just smears of shape and shadow. I sat down on the closed lid of the toilet because my legs stopped agreeing to hold me. I got my thumb over the emergency call.

Buzz.

Don't call the police.

Mason.

Buzz.

He'll kill you before they get here.

My fingers curled back off the screen.

Where are you, I typed. I'm scared. How do you know someone's in my house?

Sent. Nothing. I tried calling him and got nothing back, no ring at all, like the phone had been swallowed whole. Just those texts, arriving on their own in the dark.

Then I remembered. Weeks ago I'd taken a photo of the contact card taped up by the security office. No reason. I photograph things. It was still in my camera roll.

I called it.

Two rings, and a man's voice.

His name was Adrian. Thirty, give or take. One of those clean, easy faces you trust before you've decided to. He'd worked the community a year, always friendly, always the one who actually checked. I had never been so glad to hear another human being in my life.

"I'm on my way to you right now," he said. Calm. Certain. "Ms. Sable, listen to me. Whatever happens, do not leave that bathroom. Not for anything. I'm coming."

My heartbeat came down half a notch.

So I stayed there on the closed lid in the dark, and I watched the blur on the other side of the glass, and I did not blink.

Chapter 2

Then my stomach turned right over.

The axe.

Months ago I'd hidden one in the concealed cabinet by the front door. Just in case. A woman alone tells herself things like that, buys herself one small sharp comfort, and forgets about it.

If he'd found it, the comfort was his now.

I eased the bathroom door open. The house sat silent, not a sound in it. I checked left, checked right, crouched, and opened the cabinet with two fingers.

Empty.

My own axe, the one I'd bought to feel safe in my own home, was gone. He had it. The floor dropped out from under me.

Behind me, metal dragged across the tile. Slow. Deliberate.

I turned around.

A man stood there. Tall, still, a mask where his face should be. The axe hung from his hand and caught the light in one cold line.

Run.

There was nothing else in my head. I was through the door and out and slamming it behind me before I decided to move. The blade bit into the security door with a sound I felt in my teeth.

I screamed for help. Out here the houses sit far apart, and it was past eleven, and half my neighbors are old and had been asleep for hours. No lights came on.

Behind me, the door I'd slammed swung slowly open.

Something strange happens at the worst moment. You go quiet inside. I did. I picked a direction and ran for the security office.

A hand closed on my shoulder from behind.

The scream came out before I turned, and then I was looking at Adrian.

He caught me by the arms and held me up. I pointed back the way I'd come, shaking too hard to speak. At the man. At the axe.

Nothing. Empty path. Empty dark.

"Ms. Sable." His hands were steady on me. "Are you all right?"

I couldn't get air. My face had gone the kind of white you can feel. And the worst of it, worse than the mask, worse than the blade, was that the man was simply gone.

The tears came anyway, the shaky aftermath kind.

"He might still be in my house," I managed.

Adrian squeezed my shoulder. "It's okay. I've got a taser on me." He drew it as we went, jaw tight, and put himself between me and the dark.

I keyed in the code. The door swung in. There was a gouge sunk deep into it, right where the axe had landed.

The house is big. Too big. Standing in the doorway, I hated every square foot I'd moved into alone. It took a long time. The living room. Every room upstairs. We opened every door and every closet, past the vent grilles sitting flush and unremarkable in the walls.

Nobody.

"There's no one else here, Ms. Sable," he said quietly.

It wasn't possible. Nobody vanishes that fast. I didn't believe it, and I couldn't prove it, and those two things sat in my chest and pressed down.

He read my face. "If it would help you feel better, I can pull up the camera feed."

"I'll come with you." I was already nodding.

We'd almost reached the door when my phone went off in my hand.

Mason: Don't go outside.

I stopped.

Adrian looked back at me. "Ms. Sable?"

I made my mouth curve into something like a smile. "Would you check the cameras for me? I think I'll stay in."

He nodded, and then he was gone, around the corner, and I was alone again in a house someone had just walked out of.

Chapter 3

I changed the door code, threw the bolt, and went back up to my bedroom.

I called Mason.

Somewhere close, a phone started buzzing.

Under the bed.

Cold went up me from the soles of my feet to my scalp. We'd checked everywhere, Adrian and me. Every room, every door. Every place but one.

Under the bed. The gap down there was exactly deep enough to hold a person.

I locked my hand around my phone, pulled one breath in, and bent down fast.

No one. Just a phone, face-down on the floor, lighting up and shaking with my call.

Mason's phone.

I dragged it out. And the math arrived all at once, the way ice water finds every part of you.

If Mason's phone was under my bed, then who had been texting me?

I checked the last message. Five minutes ago. Right when I'd been standing at the door, about to walk out with Adrian to check the cameras.

Which meant whoever sent it was still in my house.

Every text I'd read in that boyfriend's voice, every warning I'd trusted with my life, had come from the man with the axe. Lock the door. Someone's in the house. Don't call the police. Don't go outside.

He'd been talking me into staying. And I'd stayed.

I was already moving. I hit the bedroom door, grabbed the handle, shoved it down.

Behind me, the wardrobe swung open.

Just at the edge of my eye: the mask. The axe, throwing off its cold little shine.

It came down past the side of my face. I felt the wind of it on my cheek.

I threw myself down the stairs.

His footsteps came after me, not fast, not slow. A man who already knows how it ends, taking his time with the mouse.

He stopped in the middle of the living room and turned his head, side to side, trying to work out where I'd gone.

I was under the sofa, breath held so tight my ribs ached. From my phone, I set off the speaker in the bedroom upstairs. On purpose. Somewhere else for him to look.

It chimed awake, bright and cheerful into the dark.

"Hi there. How can I help you?"

His head snapped up toward the sound.

That was the whole plan, and it bought me one second, and I spent it.

I came out from under the sofa low and fast and drove my elbow up between his legs with everything I had.

He folded with a grunt. The axe hit the floor.

I had it in my hands before it stopped ringing on the tile, and I lunged up for the mask, because I wanted to see it, I wanted a face, I wanted to know

His boot caught me square in the chest.

My head cracked against the floor. The room smeared. Through the blur I watched him stagger upright and out, one hand still braced between his legs.

It was a while before I could breathe again and push myself up.

There was a split at my hairline, warm and slick under my fingers when I touched it. Blood. I didn't wipe it away. The fear was louder than the hurt.

That was when the lights died.

The dark closed over everything. Just the small sound of my own breathing left in it.

The power was out.

I dug my nails into my palm and told myself the rules. Do not scream. Do not fall apart. Not now.

My heart was going so hard it hurt. Adrian. Call Adrian.

I got the phone out of my pocket. My thumb found the screen.

A hand shot out of the dark behind me and tore it from my fingers.

And I couldn't see a thing. I turned in the black, blind, whipping my head at nothing, at everything, at a room I could no longer see.

Chapter 4

A phone rang behind me.

The call picked up on its own, and Mason's voice came through, thin and close.

"Wrennie? Somebody stole my phone. I'm calling from a stranger's."

All he got back was the sound of me trying to breathe.

"Wrennie? What's wrong? Why aren't you saying anything?" Something in his voice pitched up. He knew.

"Call the police." It ripped out of me. "Mason, call the police"

The line went dead. Someone had ended the call.

Cold air moved toward me and I threw myself sideways away from it. Blind, I found the bathroom by feel and got the lock turned.

Outside, nothing. Dead quiet. Not even a footstep.

He wasn't trying to come in.

I couldn't understand it. If he wanted in, it would take him nothing. Had he grown a conscience out there in the dark? Decided to let me go?

Even I almost laughed at that.

Then a shape appeared on the other side of the frosted glass.

I could see it because it was red. A deep, arterial red, burning against all that black. It stood there and did not move.

Every pore on my body went cold.

The masked man? Why would he be in red now? Whose was it? Not mine. It didn't come from any closet of mine. I don't own a single thing that color.

He stood outside the glass like something propped up to look human, and he watched me, and he didn't move at all.

Then the front door beeped. Code accepted.

Unlocked.

Mason? My heart flew up into my throat.

"Ms. Sable?"

Adrian.

I didn't feel one ounce of relief. "Adrian, the killer's right outside the bathroom!"

A pause. Then, carefully: "Ms. Sable. Do you mean the red coat hanging out here in the hall?"

I went still.

What. The red figure was a coat.

I opened the door half-believing, and there it was. A red coat, one I'd never seen before, hung over the handle of the storage cabinet. In the dark, from the floor, it really did look like a person standing there, waiting.

Adrian had a flashlight out, crouched at the breaker box.

"Your main breaker tripped." He threw the switch and the living room came back to light.

I looked at that clean, easy face of his and asked, slowly, "How did you know my door code?"

He shifted, uneasy. "Please don't take it the wrong way. Your boyfriend called me. Mason. He said you might be in danger and gave me the code." A beat. "He's on his way here now."

So it was Mason. With Adrian standing there, the knot in my chest loosened.

I looked the coat over. It was big, sized for someone much larger than me, and worn soft with age.

It was the collar that turned my stomach. A wide stain soaked into it, dark red, dried the color old blood dries.

Chapter 5

I was sure it wasn't mine. But something about the coat sat wrong with me, familiar in a way I couldn't reach. Like I'd seen it somewhere before.

My head was strung too tight to place it.

"This coat isn't mine," I said, and made myself breathe.

Adrian's brow creased. "Ms. Sable, I went back through your camera feed on purpose. No one came in. No one left."

I grabbed his sleeve. "He never went out. He was under the bed the whole time." My eyes were jumping around and I couldn't stop them. "He's still in the house. I saw him. He had a mask on, a horrible one, and he took my phone."

"Ms. Sable, it's all right. I'll call your phone right now." He took out his own and dialed my number.

A ringtone started up. Familiar. And coming from outside the house.

I opened the door.

My phone was lying on the walkway, out by the entrance, quiet and neat, exactly where no one had put it.

I crouched and picked it up