Moon glinting through the shutters,
they sway softly in the midnight wind...
I gathered up my folders, sweeping them
into my case, my eyes droop, and through my half-closed
eyes, it looks like a cascade of color...
Shutting the lights, the only ones still
on in the entire station... Swiftly passing
through the hallways, the silence eerie and ghostly.
That was when the loud tapping and banging ensued...
Echoing, echoing in the silence, like the butcher's meat cleaver
on the block, shattering the eerie quiet...
I catiously edged around the corner, and at once grimaced and relaxed,
when I saw a wild-looking woman at the door. The look on her face,
allowed me to surmise that the night just got longer.
I poured another cup of coffee and offered it to her,
she shook her head, so I took it for myself.
I gingerly held the steaming cup in
my cold hands, and drank the coffee,
the dark liquid pouring down like
the night coming in at dusk.
The heady scent of it, inflaming my senses,
keeping me awake... I once again endeavored to
understand what this witness was saying,
but her abrasive nature was leaving a dusty and dehydrated taste in my mouth...
She had heard a noise, like a unearthly inhuman shriek, like Death's shriek of
victory as it caught another person... And then a shuffling and creaking sound,
continuing even after she was leaving...
I succumbed to the women's wishes,
and ushered her out. As I left the quiet and
the darkness was oppressing...
I decided that if this woman was right,
it wouldn't do to show up in my
noisy old car, with it's gears clanking and engine groaning,
to the house of a man who was possibly a killer...
I made a quick inventory of my belongings,
deciding which I could afford to carry, and which could stay in the car.
In the end, I just took my firearm, and detective badge...
I tried simulating how I would go about confronting the
suspect, as I set out toward the location the woman,
had told me... I knew the place, a few blocks down. More than enough
time for me to figure something out. I hoped this was actaully worth it, because
I was cold, hungry, and tired...
I rubbed my hands, my breath frosting out in front of me,
and walked off into the darkness.
The door was of a mahogany finish,
with a large brass knocker. The design: a lion
roaring, with the actual ring in it's gaping jaws.
The door was answered by a young man,
clad in only a dark bathrobe.
I took a tour of his abode, my search meticulous, and
careful, far from cursory...
There was an odd manner about the chap.
and I derived something must be wrong...
However until I could corroborate my witness's story,
I couldn't allow my opinions to take root. That was when
he led me into the old man's chamber, who was supposedly away
on a trip whose existence I was starting to doubt.
He pulled up some chairs, and we chatted
about nonsense, and plesantries,
but we both felt the electrifying tension
in the room, both of us watching each other's
reactions to the senseless words we uttered,
both of us staring at each other, the stare of a killer, meeting
my smiling face, the facial expression carefully crafted to conceal
the hardness beneath...
But gradually his careful countenance started to slip,
his grip on sanity started to slip... I could see the madness
and rage in his eyes, until with a cry, like the cry of a wounded cat,
he flung his chair across the room
and tore up the floarboards with his bare hands,
and his dark deed was unveiled. The
gruesome body of the old
man, frozen in it's death throes, rigid and cold...
I slammed him against the wall, and cuffed him, meanwhile
the blood from his savaged hands, the skin torn while ripping up the floorboards
drummed on the floor, with a slow relentless ticking...
This a story modeled after Edgar Allan Poe's "The Telltale Heart",
portrayed from the detective's point of view...
