This is the Day

A psycho sexual thriller concerning Julia who is driven to the edge of madness by a stalker who haunts her waking hours..things reach an horrific climax during a Skype chat not easily forgotten...

The man (she presumed it was a man because of its height, build and dress, being tall, bulky and masculine) had been out there, she was sure, clad in his uniform of crumpled black fedora and long dark grey overcoat. He, or it, had been there for the last six nights, a phantasmal attendant, stood at the end of the lane in a pouch of darkness where the street light had expired a week ago. It was a quiet street composed of handsome detached properties in a semi-rural area safely out the reach of the dysfunctional tentacles of social housing. You didn’t get people mooching about and there was little low level crime. It was so out the way the couple of robberies that had happened over the half a decade Julia had lived there had been carefully targeted ones with well organised gangs from the city ransacking the wealthier inhabitants. So if you saw someone it was natural to be nervous, especially if you’d seen this one, the ‘man’, this thing at the end of the street.  Julia had seem him for the first time the last Sunday evening when it had gone dark and she was dragging the waste bins down the front path to leave on the pavement  for emptying the following morning. She had moved the bins in something of a fugue. Before the dull call of domestic duty Julia had masturbated for the first time since her husband Carl had gone back to Dubai three weeks ago, leaving her to share the house with their only child, her fifteen year old son Jason. She had been shocked by the sudden onset of sexual hunger. Julia enjoyed a good sex life with her husband but when he was away she threw her energies into work, the upkeep of the house and anything she had left over she spent at the gym.  Her friends had half jokingly bought her a selection of sex toys when Carl had first left for the Middle East which had embarrassed her despite the bottles of red wine she had sunk before receiving the gift. They said she was repressed and Julia guessed she was a little uptight.  She said it was like jail time, a deliberate attempt to wind down her sexual needs until Carl returned home. One of her friends, a nurse at a high security psychiatric hospital, laughed at this assertion and said that in jail people were hornier than ever and would do crazy things to get themselves off, you’d get tough guys sucking each other off, or sticking things up their arses and wanking off, just about anything to relieve the monotony and sexual dissatisfaction, and they’d go crazy with the knowledge of what they’d done.   She’d met a few referrals at the hospital like that. That Sunday afternoon, before the first sighting, she had been absently hoovering the upstairs landing and taking advantage of her son’s absence to try and restore a semblance of order to his room, when out of nowhere her head was full of images of her and this cute young guy she had sort of been flirting with at the gym, thoughts of them tasting each other, him being deep inside her. The guy had been her type, muscular and neat, and she put him in his late twenties.

 

Julia had been flattered by the attention but no more, and now he was in her head, driving hard into her from behind.  Then she had been on the marital bed, hand on her sex, desperate to bring herself off. She had also been overcome by a desperate exhibitionist need to strip off and look at her body in the mirror, performing for unseen cameras, slapping her arse and perking her tits up. After orgasm she was left confused and empty, hurrying to put her gym sweats on and get back to her chores to blank it all out. So it was out with the bins. And there he was.   Motionless, stood resolutely upright with his hands stuffed in his overcoat pockets. Just there. When Julia looked at him he just kind of disappeared from sight.  His presence, along with worries about her husband, had deeply unsettled her.  The worst thing about the man was his face, or the lack of it. The face was white and featureless, like he was wearing a waxen mask. You could just make the contours of his nose and cheeks but that was it.  No eyes, no mouth, no suggestion of humanity. Julia hadn’t told her son when he returned home from the cinema she didn’t want to sound crazy. To add to her unease when she was ready to leave for work the following morning Julia noticed there was a post it note on the doormat, which she presumed had been pushed through the letterbox by her spectral observer. On it scrawled in red crayon where the words ‘Come and see’. Monday to Friday she always arrived home from her job as a human resources manager at a sportswear company between six and eight in the evening, her arrival home dictated by the traffic and whether or not she’d been to the gym.  Every night he had been there.  Once she had seen him he was always gone.  As soon as Julia had registered his presence it was like he had never been there. On this seventh night she had not seen him for the simple fact she had not looked for him. Julia had kept her head down from the moment she turned the corner onto the street and stared at her feet once she had got out of the car and stumbled into the house. So here she was. Julia had tried to exhaust herself at the gym; to bleed her anxiety out on the treadmill so she wouldn’t need to sedate herself with alcohol but it hadn’t been enough. Aching and bones tired limbs.  She drank the bottle of red wine and took a Citalopram and only then did she shower. Julia had been prescribed the anti-depressant when her mother was eaten rapidly by throat cancer and had remained on the drug twelve months after her death in the hospice. Her mother had suffered a relatively quick but savage crossing through disease into extinction. Julia had watched as her mother had tortuously attempted to draw a final breath but ended up gagging on her tongue before death tired of the futility and took her.  After dressing quickly, Julia gingerly made her way back downstairs. She had asked her son to draw the living rooms curtains. Shut out the journey into night, close out the man. Jason was upstairs in his bedroom by himself playing video games at what, for Julia, was a reassuringly loud volume.  As much as Julia loved Jason if she was honest he wasn’t quite enough. She had wanted a larger family but a year or so after having Jason she had suffered a miscarriage and complications meant any further attempts to provide her son with a brother or sister were redundant. Julia tried to settle at the kitchen table and read a magazine about celebrity froth but she couldn’t relax sufficiently to do so. She was drawn to the curtains. Why sit in a state of disquiet when there may be nothing there? The man’s aimless vigil may have ended.  Come and see.

 

Julia went into the living room and peered through the curtains at his spot at the end of the street.  He wasn’t there. Momentarily she experienced a feeling of liberation, her body lifted clear from the anxiety and fear, but it soon returned when she saw him in the front garden.  A hot burst of urine trickled down her thigh and she let out a muted cry. She went upstairs to shower again. The soundtrack to Black Ops 2 blaring across the landing was oddly comforting, the noise something of a constant when her son was home and she found it a normalising influence.  She knocked on his door. Are you alright Jason? Julia asks. He grunted in affirmation.

 

In the bathroom she strips again, embarrassed by her incontinence. Spooked she locked the bathroom door. Julia gets under the shower for the second time that evening. She runs it piping hot, enjoying the painful sensation of the heat, feeling it has cleansing properties. Julia had been told on a few occasions she’s a MILF and she’d always blushed and been secretly pleased by what she perceived to be a compliment. She’s tall and skinny with toned legs and good tits for her age, pert and relatively firm still.  Julia had always envied the girls with big bosoms she grew up with and felt herself flat chested but when she saw them now their tits were moribund appendages while her modest cleavage had up to now escaped gravity’s disdain. Julia enjoyed soaping up her body, again feeling like she was performing for an invisible audience of webcam voyeurs. The sex worm was in her head making her act delirious. It was like there was a home made gonzo porn video playing in her mind.  All shaky camera work and close up s**t. The guy at the gym and her husband both taking at the same time, one at each end and spectacular money shots. Julia climaxed quickly without touching herself there and bit her hand as she didn’t want her son to hear her ecstatic squeals.  Julia got out of the shower and grabbed a towel to dry her. As the steam cleared she saw a message written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror.

You’ll see!

She recognises the handwriting, the extravagant tail on the Y and the excessively looped Es.  Also, the shade of lipstick was familiar to her, one she wears often, salsa red. In a state approaching a trance she dresses and gets her cosmetic bag from the bedroom. Her lipstick is untouched. She writes underneath the message on the mirror.

You’ll see!

It is identical. That night she takes a bottle of brandy to bed.

Saturday morning, when Julia is normally free of the tyranny of the seven o’clock alarm waking up her smart phone.  However she didn’t wake up this morning because she had spent the night watching the whites of her eyes turn red. She had planned to meet her friend in town to go shopping and have lunch, maybe also a couple of drinks.  Julia was going to be forty soon but so many things were puzzling her head the milestone held no dread for her. Well, not much considering. Anyway, she’d kept her figure and still looked good.  She needed her roots doing though. Jason was clunking about, getting his rugby gear together for his match that morning. He was a loose forward of some promise, fast and strong and good at unloading the ball in the tackle. Jason knocked on the bedroom door.  Will she give him a lift as his friend’s dad has cried off.  Normally Julia would have assented but groaned inwardly at the thought of losing a languorous morning but this day she is glad of the distraction. Julia got up and dressed quickly, putting her peroxide blonde hair into a bun and pouring herself into a leisure suit. She’d get dressed properly later. Are you Skyping dad later? asked Jason in the car. Yes, said Julia. About tea time. I’m going into town after the match so I’ll have tea out I’ll be back about six, Jason told her. Alone in the car Julia thought about her husband. Carl is working on a building project in Abu Dhabi.  It’s meant to be the thing that will make them financially secure but he is always complaining about hidden costs and how they’re trying to rip him off. They’ll still do alright out of it though, should get them through the recession. Last time she spoke to him he seemed troubled and depressed, weary of banging heads with recalcitrant contractors , tardy suppliers and sluggish builders.  The project was due for completion in a fortnight but he reckons it will be at least a month.  She has begged him to come home.  When she spoke to him Julia always told him she misses his company and the sex and feels lonely and how she is grateful for Jason’s company, and how he’s a good boy, tall and handsome like his father. Carl had worked away before. He did a stint in Iraq that paid for the nice house in a desirable location. The experience changed him though. Julia felt she was now married to a posthumous version of her husband’s former self.

 

Returning to the house after dropping Jason off, she looked down the street before going into the house. The man was not there. She flopped on the couch with a cup of coffee and watched a soap opera on the huge plasma screen television that was Carl’s rapture. Julia felt like cancelling her meeting with her friend, she feels wiped out and tranquilised by the cumulative effects of the brandy and insomnia.  Browsing idly through a tabloid newspaper she felt herself finally drifting into sleep when the door bell rang.  She felt a little disquiet but the daylight saved her from full blown fear.  At the front door was a crumpled man who somehow managed to look old and ageless at the same time, dragging his leg behind him, like it was dislocated at the joint. He looked desiccated and seedy. She didn’t want him in the house. His left eye was milky while the right one was bulging out the socket. He was a regular sideshow grotesque, hair flattened down with spittle, skin grey and mottled, his shrunken frame hiding  in a faded blue tracksuit.

“Is Carl home?” The man’s voice was hesitant and reedy and fed through ill fitting dentures.

“No he’s working away,” said Julia like an automaton. She wanted to tell the old man to go away or challenge his temerity for turning up unannounced but felt as if she was frozen into playing a part, reciting her lines by rote.

“Dubai,” she added, not knowing why.

“Oh,” says the man.

“What’s your name? I’m speaking to him later, I can pass a message on.”

The man ignored the offer, his protuberant eyeball regarding her balefully.

“How do you know him?” pressed Julia.

“We did a job together once, years ago. He’s a good man your Carl, you know. One of the best project managers. Good at correcting things.”

Yielding to a coughing fit that made his abject body shudder, the man finally succeeded in depositing a globule of phlegm on the path. Composing himself, and oblivious to Julia’s evident revulsion, he spoke in an affected manner.

“I’ve been asked to submit a tender for a very special job. I wanted Carl on board.”

“Well he’ll be out there another month probably. He came home for a few days last month but he’s staying out there now till it’s all signed off.”

The wretched creature looked incapable of anything never mind a building project. Let me know your contact details, said Julia. I’ll let Carl know.

“We did a job together it made him. That was a very special job, ” digressed the man.

“What was it?”

The man  laughed. “Before your time love. Before your time. It was good but it’s good its over. Anyway, I better be off.”

The man gave a half hearted wave and started to scrape his legs down the path. Julia felt she should say something but didn’t know what.

 “I was the man who made things happen then…I’m just the caretaker now…” said the man, out of nowhere.

“The  caretaker?”

“Well, if I’m honest that’s all I’ve really been.”

“Won’t you come in?” She wanted him to explain himself.

“I’d love to but I’ve other visits to make…”

“Why don’t you call back in a few weeks or so?”

“I’ll see…” said the man.

A wave of depression washed over her as she watched him scuttle down the path. Julia wanted to call out and confront him, to make him explicate himself  but her head was full of white noise and her chest was tight and she couldn’t breathe.  She watched absently as he made his way to the street lamp where the man had stood every night for the last week. When he was under it he turned to smile at her. Light headed Julia could see nothing but blackness for a moment like the sun was blocked out or something and when she could see alright again the old man was gone.  I’ll see.

 

Julia went inside and gently closed the front door behind her and pressed her back tight against it. She was like that for what seemed a long time. When she finally managed to compelled herself to move Julia went straight to the spare room where Carl kept his tools and a random assortment of building materials. He always had cigarettes stashed somewhere. Julia’s instinct proved correct, half a pack of Benson and Hedges in his blue work overalls. She hadn’t smoked for almost two years, apart from a relapse of about a fortnight when her mother died. The breaking of her abstinence seemed trivial to her, when her mind was apparently becoming unglued, making all the memories that preserved her sense of self and held her life together become disconnected. At the kitchen table she smoked four cigarettes in quick succession and finishes off the brandy she had begun the night before.  Queasy and exhausted, she sent her friend an apologetic text canceling their arrangement. She is sorry it is all so short notice and blames a migraine. Please don’t ring I’m going to bed I’ll text you later. Julia finally slept deeply on the living room couch.

 

Jason arrived home earlier than he expected. He’d been stood up by a girl but she was a bit of a skank and he had not been too bothered. A little stoned, he’s stocked up for an evening on his Xbox 360 with a bag full of crisps, chocolate and diet coke. Jason had eaten a pizza before getting the bus home so he’s not really hungry just got the munchies. He was alarmed to find his mother passed out on the couch in late afternoon gloom with the living room shrouded in smoke. After turning the lights on he shakes her awake. Bleary eyed and disorientated Julia sits up on the couch.  Jason is shocked by her demeanor and the fact she has been smoking and drinking. Feeling dehydrated and with a throbbing head, Julia asked her son to get her a bottle of water and some pain killers.  She washed the ibuprofen tablets down and tried to think of a cover story. Just a one off. Things had come to a head. Worrying about dad. Pressures at work.  Only a couple of drinks and f**s but she was knocked straight out she was so tired. Jason was feeling a little paranoid off the weed he had smoked earlier so he accepted the explanation and fled to his room.  In the kitchen Julia drinks a pint of water and freshens up. She could hear the soundtrack to the shooter game Jason was playing and knew he would be ensconced in his room for the evening. Carl had even made his son’s bedroom en suite so his son didn’t even have to venture across the landing to use the main bathroom. Julia knew her son smoked weed and had a few beers every Saturday afternoon at his friend’s house but she willfully disregarded this as this was his only vice she had detected so far and compared to the horror stories she heard off her friends with children of a similar age he was practically monastic. Also, the weed seemed to make him insular and compelled him to stay at home on a Saturday night, not out in town binge drinking or fighting like some of his contemporaries, so it seemed a worthwhile compromise. Julia seated herself and plugged the laptop in. It had just gone four o’clock. Now it was time to Skype her husband. Carl had sent her an e-mail yesterday stipulating she call him at 20:15, his time. It had struck her as oddly pedantic, normally Carl was more relaxed, happy for her to ring any time in the early evening, yet he had stressed the time three times in his message: It must be 20:15. And in the twenty four hour clock as well.  Normally he would just say call me between 6 and 8 yet here he was terse and exact in his instruction. Yet so much about her husband now puzzled her. Julia clutched her forehead. Her head was still creased from the effects of the brandy and cigarettes but she actually craved more, the thought of speaking to her husband filling her with a sense of foreboding, but she genuinely feared she would vomit if she indulged further so she stuck to a cup of espresso to fortify herself ahead of the call.  It was nearly a quarter past four, so allowing for the four hour time difference it would be nearly time. 20:15. Julia clicked on the Skype logo on the bottom toolbar.

 

The weird thing is that when Carl looms into shot, all craggy and dirty, the image looks HD quality, all high resolution, something she didn’t think her aging lap top was capable of transmitting (Jason was always exhorting her to upgrade to an Ultrabook). He is gaunt and tanned with his shaven black hair flecked with grey, wearing a white t-shirt and it appears he is coated in sand. The time in the bottom right hand corner of the screen reads 16:15. Dead on, thinks Julia. Carl is smoking, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth and he seems hollowed out like something has annihilated him inside.  He is peering intently into the webcam, freaking her out.  Carl’s big blue eyes are faded and convey an inner agony. She once so loved his blue eyes, but their lustre was another thing lost to the past.  They were growing old, deteriorating physically and mentally, ghosts of their former selves.  A pair of walking derelict houses, vacant lots.   He pushes back in his chair and she gets a partial sight of the room he’s in. It is tiny and has walls painted a milky white. There is a green door facing the webcam. Normally when she spoke to him he was in his apartment which seemed light and airy and had pale blue walls.  Julia is appalled by how she looks when she sees herself in the top right hand corner of the screen. No make up, her face puffy and aged, hair scraped back in a desultory manner.  The high resolution has exposed them both. Carl looks like he is trying to move his jaw and get a few words out but it is beyond him. It is a bathetic spectacle, like he’s had a stroke or a brain injury. They stare blankly at each other for what seems to Julia a lengthy period of time. She looks at the time. 16:21. Julia apologises for how she looks.

“Well, you will look rough,” says Carl, raising a half bottle of vodka to his lips. He’d told her before they turned a blind eye to boozing so long as they did it out of sight and kept it amongst the infidels. Julia is desperate to unload on him but seeing him so troubled makes her reluctant to do so. Jesus, he looks like any bad news would give him a heart attack. Where is he?

“This is the site office. Been a long day….all clay and smokeless fire….”

Julia wants to tell him about the man, about her fear she is going crazy and how horny she is and she can’t stop thinking about the young guy at the gym screwing her and finishing off on her tits. It’d kill him she thinks. Looking at him she knows already he will never come home. 

“You’ve been….you’ve been,” starts Carl, waving a cigarette at the webcam.

“What…” beseeches Julia.

“You’ve been….”

The HD effect is unsettling Julia.  It is like she’s watching a Blu Ray, accentuating the unreality. Visually stripped bare the pair of them, middle aged and fucked.  There’s a knock on the green door.  Carl puts his head in his hands and lets the cigarette drop from his lips. The knocking is fast and hard.

“Aren’t you going to answer it,” asks Julia, her head suddenly full of insect noises. She notices her image is unmoving.

Carl stands up and walks to the middle of the room. Julia can now see he is wearing blue jeans and is barefoot. Carl stands staring at the door with his back to the webcam. Julia’s image has now vanished from in front of her.

 “The green door Carl”?” says Julia, not knowing why. She feels like someone is speaking through her, using her like a corporeal wind up doll. The knocking has now slowed down, a heavy rap now and then.

“Aren’t you answering it?” rasped Julia.

“I don’t need to. The door is wide open…”

He turns and walks back to the table and stares blankly at her. The knocking stops.

“It’s been open a few years….”

Then the HD goes and its back to usual Skype interaction, the image pixilated and choppy, fragmented and out of synch. Carl’s drawl is ahead of the slow twitches of his pupating representation. .

“You’ve been seen out with someone, ” spits Carl with a trace of contempt. It takes the image a good few seconds to catch up with the words.

“Who? Tell me what’s been said.” Julia demands.

“Someone.”

“Whose been speaking to you?” demands Julia, hurt and defensive, but also feeling a little guilty because she’d been day dreaming about the gym guy’s dick being in her mouth and p***y.

“In here,” says Carl, tapping his forehead with his index fingers.  The images are now clear and in perfect synchronicity with the audio and the Skype feed is coherent. He sits back and drains the bottle of vodka, then turns suddenly and hurls it at the wall. It is the speed and violence of his action which upsets Julia more than the sharp crack of the glass shattering on contact with the wall.  Carl lights another cigarette and gazes idly at her. The bottle smashing triggers something in Julia and she tells him everything in a juddering eruption of words and hand gestures.

“Well, you would have a visit,” says Carl.

“What do you mean? Tell me….”

“Hidden inside the womb you know, that’s what they said out there…”

“Carl, stop talking in f*****g stupid riddles and tell me. What’s going on, what’s happening….” Julia is galvanized by his cryptic offering, furious and demanding. Carl was a model of taciturn masculinity, albeit with a thoughtful and sensitive side that she had found irresistible. He loved his boxing and rugby and had simple and unpretentious tastes and a pragmatic outlook on life, he was certainly not the type to spout elliptical rubbish. She feels normalized briefly, shocked by her own use of profane language and the intensity of her response which cut through her nausea and enervation. Carl shrugs indifferently.

“I’m sorry,” he says expressionlessly.

“Just come home…forget the money….I can’t…I can’t take it anymore…I need you here…” says Julia.

“We’ll see.”

“See about what?”

“I am so sorry….”

“For what?”

“We’ll see.”

Carl starts to choke on his words and wipes tears from his eyes.

“Jason will be alright you know …everyone ends up haunted by something.”

Then the image of Carl freezes completely yet the door swings open behind him affording a glimpse of a dark corridor. Julia walks over to the work top and pours herself a glass of red wine and lights a cigarette, white noise in the background. It’s the last one in the packet. 

 

When she returns the Skype feed looks like a third generation VHS tape, the picture wavy and in need of tracking, brown and white blotches dancing across the screen.  Carl is sat back in the chair holding the shattered neck of the vodka bottle he’d just broken. It is like a glass dagger. Carl sticks it in his neck puncturing his right carotid artery. The wound is wide open and Carl looks shocked at it all, like he can’t believe what he has done. The blood has sprayed the webcam, like someone had trained a shower head of the stuff onto the monitor. At first it seems like a joke in the poorest taste, she half expects a reveal to a box of tricks, but his reaction and the pig noises he is making trying to breath while choking on his own blood convinces her of its verisimilitude. We’ll see.  He leans forward to kiss the screen. Blood now veils the monitor. 16.38. That awful wheezing noise again, as he tries to inhale through the open flap in his neck, Carl reduced to an out of tune flesh harmonica, all bled out.  Blood now obscures the display. Julia presses her lips against the screen tenderly, full of a love that transcends the horror of it all, and then tries to scream but it won’t come. The laptop logs itself off and she hears the jaunty Microsoft sign off tune. She’s suddenly creased by what feels like the worst migraine ever and her head is filled with the sound of Carl’s dying porcine whisper, a hoarse exhalation that grows in intensity till she feels her skull is going to crack but it takes her mind off the s**t she’s just seen. Julia stumbles towards the kitchen door. There’s a message written on the white door for her in medium size lettering and it has been freshly applied. It reads ‘She sees.’ Julia touches the letters and presses her face against the door. The substance used to convey the message has a smell and texture redolent of menstrual blood. Julia now is beyond words, of human comprehension, of any sense of normality, in a place beyond the use of language to communicate the quotidian with her mind no longer able to respond to the stimuli of the outside world. She was now somewhere different, hung up in chains of nerves, marked with blood, calm to the point of indifference and stumbling amongst the bones that live.

 

Julia lets herself go, surrenders her grasp on what perceives to be her sanity and realises she is undergoing a blessed deliverance.  She feels cool and clear inside. Julia walks into the living room which has already been consumed by the winter darkness. The plasma television is on, showing a foetus in a jar smiling at her, then it cuts to her mother being prepared on a morticians slab followed by a shock edit to the guy from the gym screwing the hole in Carl’s neck post mortem. She is not touched by the mash up. Julia crosses herself, closes her eyes and waits. She sees. When Julia feels a presence behind her she opens her eyes and turns. The man is there, he is a man she can now see, with a face like a boiled egg. He is wearing brown leather gloves, which he plunges into his blank countenance. When it is parted Julia can see multitudes and is granted the knowledge that she is legion.  And then she is free and finally it comes. Jason is distracted from his killstreak by a valediction of glacial laughter.

Author's Note

This story was originally longer with more back story on the husband but I felt it made the story to easy to interpret as being dictated by supernatural elements. I've left it more open for readers to interpret it their own way but it needs redrafting so may include it if the story is not greeted with total disinterest.

Reviews

[A. H. Pinley]

Well it surely sounds like Julia has went insane. Maybe the web cam conversation with her husband didn't really take place as you stated. Maybe he's still alive, but in Julia's mind she has killed him. I wish there was more dialog. What is it with a strange man wearing a fedora and trench coat? Too often that seems to be the case. Good story of a woman that vacates reality.

[Ron Safari]

Hi, thanks for the review. Maybe I have left it too ambiguous. I may post the longer version where there are more clues to who the guy in the hat is and Julia is no longer just another lonely woman who vacates reality...