Knife Fight: And Other Struggles by David Nickle

Author:David Nickle [Nickle, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Horror, Short Stories (Single Author), Fantasy, Dark Fantasy
ISBN: 9781504064293
Google: rx78DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2020-11-23T11:00:00+00:00

I could leave. I could stay. I could do the thing that I came to do.

I put on my parka, a pair of boots. I fished around in back of the china cabinet until I found the latch, and opened it, and from there pulled out the little Russian automatic pistol that Scott favoured, and a clip of ammunition. The kitchen, where I found an LED wind-up flashlight. Then I went upstairs one more time, to look at Scott, make sure I wasn’t tricking myself with ball-point perspective, then as fast as I could to the front door, and into the street.

It was tough going. A week ago there’d been a heavy snowfall, and then it had been cold since, so the road was rutted and icy. And uphill, around and around, in a gentle and exhausting slope. It took me until the noon-hour to reach Sandhurst Circle.

I nearly turned back. The whole street was choked with high drifts of snow, rising in places to the tops of first-storey windows. There was, simply, no path to or from #12. I couldn’t see how I could make it to the front doors, which were buried in snow up to the handles. But I thought: I could do the thing that I came to do. And: there’s no one now. Forever.

I pushed through the snow, nearly fell as I climbed over and through the drift to the door. Pulled aside the knocker, and spent some time recalling the access code before entering it. The doors swung inward, and the snow fell inside along with me.

There: the same vestibule. Dark, but for what light filtered in through snow-covered windows.

No one was vacuuming. The house was icy cold. But there was the sound of running water. A burst pipe? That’s what I thought too.

I might have stood there again, for hours, guessing at where the sound came from, losing myself in the rhythm of this place. I might have just fled. But finally, I was done with guessing, done with fleeing, just so far. My thumb found the switch on the flashlight, and soon the three blue LEDs cast a circle on the floor ahead of me. I thought only a minute about looking upstairs first—and thought about Marisse—and thought: No. And so I stepped through an archway, wallpaper peeling from it in wide strips. From there, I passed through a high living room, floorboards creaking underfoot. At one time, this room had been used for conferences; there was a long table in here, and at one end a projector with a bay for a laptop computer. Chairs everywhere.

“Mr. Nu,” I shouted. “What are you up to?”

The water—perhaps just a tap left on in one of the bathrooms? No. I passed into a wide, short hallway, made to look grander with art-deco wall sconces that would send light to the ceiling and back. Through the archway beyond, one might expect a kitchen, but over the decades I had become savvy to the architecture of the subdivision, and didn’t get my hopes up.

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