Paul pulls up his shirt, looks down. There’s something in there, all right. There’s something poking up from under the skin. And then, as if a zipper ran from his ribs down past his navel, he opens up. But there’s no blood, no guts spilling all over the place. His belly opens up like a doctor’s bag.
Paul looks at the gaping hole in his body and waits.
What come up first are fingers. Dirty fingers with chipped nails. Two hands grasp the edges of his stomach. Something— someone—is pulling itself out.
Holy shit, I’m having a baby, Paul thinks.
Now there’s the top of a person’s head. It’s Kenneth Hoffman. Once his head clears Paul’s stomach, he looks at Paul and grins. He’s saying something, but Paul can’t make out what it is.
It turns out he’s not saying actual words. He’s making a sound. The same sound, over and over again.
Chit chit chit. Chit chit.
Paul reaches down, puts his hands over Kenneth’s face. He doesn’t know whether to push Kenneth back inside himself, or try to drag out the rest of him. He feels Kenneth nibbling at his fingers.
Chit chit chit. Chit chit.
Paul opened his eyes. He was breathing in short, rapid gasps. He touched his hand to his chest and found it wet. He’d broken out in a cold sweat. He craned his neck around to look at the clock radio glaring dimly at him from the bedside table.
3:06 A.M.
He didn’t want to close his eyes and return to that nightmare. Slowly, so as not to disturb Charlotte next to him, he swung his legs out of the bed and onto the floor.
He decided to take a leak.
As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he looked at Charlotte. She was sleeping with her back to him, head on the pillow, hand slipped beneath it. He could just barely make out her body slowly rising and falling with each breath.
Dressed only in a pair of boxers, he padded silently across the floor to the bathroom and closed the door. The plug-in night-light glowed dimly.
He lifted the toilet seat, drained his bladder, cringed as he flushed, hoping the noise wouldn’t be too disruptive. He rinsed his hands at the sink and dried them, waiting for the toilet tank to refill before opening the door.
The tank refilled, and silence again descended.
As his fingers touched the doorknob, he heard it.
Chit chit. Chit chit chit.
He held his breath.
I am not dreaming. I am awake. I am absolutely, positively, awake.
It was the same sound from the other night. A typing sound.
He waited for it to recur, but there was nothing. Slowly, he turned the knob, opened the door, and took a step out into the hallway. He froze, held his breath once again.
Still nothing.
All he could hear was the distant sound of the waves of Long Island Sound lolling into the beach, and Charlotte’s soft breathing. Could something else have made a noise that sounded like keys striking the cylinder? Something electrical? Water dripping somewhere in the house? Maybe—
Chit chit.
A small chill ran the length of Paul’s spine. He wanted to wake Charlotte. He wanted her to hear this, too. But waking her would also create a commotion. Whoever was fooling around with that typewriter—and clearly it was not Josh, who was miles away in Manhattan, but it had to be somebody—was going to stop once they heard talking on the floor above.
Paul wanted to catch whoever it was in the act.
No, wait. He should call the police.
Right. Great plan. Hello, officer? Could you send someone right over? Someone’s typing in my house.
Paul reached the top of the stairs, then tiptoed down, one soft step at a time. When the house was rebuilt after Sandy, a new staircase had gone in, and there wasn’t a single squeak in the entire flight.
As he reached the second step from the bottom, he heard it again.
Chit chit. Chit chit chit.
He looked across the kitchen to the closed door of his study. There was no light bleeding out from below it. Just like the other night. How was someone supposed to mess around with that Underwood in total darkness?
A miniflashlight. Sure. Whoever was in there wasn’t going to want to attract attention by turning on the lights.
Yeah, like that made sense. They were already attracting attention with the typing.
Paul moved barefoot across the floor. As he closed the distance between himself and the door, he wondered whether he needed some kind of weapon. As he sidled past the kitchen island, he carefully extracted a long wooden spoon from a piece of pottery filled with kitchen utensils.
He had a pretty good idea how ridiculous he looked, but the spoon would have to do. You went into battle with what was at hand.
Paul reached the door, gripped the handle. With one swift motion, he turned and pushed.
“Surprise!” he shouted, reaching with his other hand to flick the light switch up.
And just as it was when he thought Josh had been fooling around in here, the room was empty.
The typewriter sat where it had been since Charlotte bought it for him, seemingly untouched. No paper rolled into it.
Paul stood there, blinked several times. “What the fuck,” he said to himself. He scanned the room, as if someone could hide in a place that wasn’t any bigger than a closet.
Suddenly, struck by an idea, he ran to the steps that led down to the front door. Someone could be making a run for it. Quietly, for sure, but did anything else make sense?
Paul ran his hand along the wall, hunting for the switch. He flipped it up, illuminating the stairs and the door at the bottom.
There was no one there. From where he stood, he could see the dead bolt on the door turned to the locked position.
In his rush, his left foot slipped over the top step and dropped to the next, throwing him off balance. He canted to the right, reaching frantically for the railing to break his fall, but missing it altogether. His butt hit the top step, then bumped down two more, hard, before he came to a shuddering stop.
“Fuck!” he shouted. He suddenly hurt in more places than he could count. Butt, thigh, foot, arm.
Pride.
Upstairs, Charlotte shouted. “Paul! Paul!”
Wincing, he yelled back, “Down here!” He grabbed his right elbow, ran his hand over it delicately. “Jesus!”
He heard running on the upper floor, then thumping down the stairs. “Where are you?”
Charlotte sounded panicked.
“Down here,” he said, struggling to his feet. His boxers had slid halfway down his ass, and he gave them a tug up, hoping to preserve what little dignity he had left. She arrived in the kitchen, her white nightgown swirling around her like a heroine in a romance novel.
“What’s happened? Did you fall? Are you okay? What’s going on?”
Instead of telling her, Paul wondered whether there was something worse than nightmares and memory loss.
Going batshit crazy.
Fifteen
The sun wasn’t even up, and her dad was at it already.
Anna White, dressed in an oversize T-shirt that hung to her knees, was awakened not by her alarm but by the sound of the rowing machine. She tossed back the covers and padded down the hall to her father’s room. She gently pushed open the door. Frank, in his pajamas, was stroking away on the machine, watching the cartoon channel.
“Dad,” she said softly, “it’s five-thirty.”
Anna believed the cartoons put her father into a kind of trance, keeping him from any awareness of how long he had been on the machine. She was convinced he was going to have a heart attack at this rate.
He either didn’t hear her, or had chosen to ignore her. He laughed as Daffy Duck took a shotgun blast to the face, spinning his bill to the other side of his head.
“Dad,” Anna said, stepping forward, putting a hand on his upper arm. She was amazed at how hard it felt. Her father’s head jerked in her direction.
“What?”
“You should go back to bed. It’s too early to be up. It’s sure too early to be up doing this.”
“This one’s not over.”
The remote was on the floor. She knelt down to reach it, hit the POWER button. The screen went black.
“Why’d you do that?”
“Dad, please. Go back to bed.”
“Not tired. Gotta take a whiz,” he said, getting off the machine and walking down the hall. Anna sat on the edge of his bed, waiting for him to return. He wandered back in after a couple of minutes, a dark coaster-size stain on the crotch of his pajama pants.