The Smear

(Location Sense: the second-floor apartment where I lived with my college girlfriend, though it’s bigger inside and there’s a bedroom where there should only be a closet.)

We tromp up the stairs, our radios and nightsticks clanking on the railings. I glance down at myself, eyes flicking over the sidearm, the crisp black buttons, the little brass nameplate on my chest reading “Kim”. My partner, imposing as I am lithe, towering as I am small, reaches the door first and pounds it with his fist. “Police! Open up!”

I take a breath, Domestic disturbance calls are always a crap shoot – might be the kids playing too loud, or a 300-pound drunk with a shotgun, or anything in between.

The little girl answers the door and lets us in. She seems healthy and unbruised, but she is silent and sullen. She backs up against a wall and looks at the floor. Her face – it’s blank, no emotion at all. Like the thousand yard stare of broken men, who’ve seen it all and never quite got back from wherever they found it.

Walking in the room we can feel that something WRONG. Lights are on but it’s dim in here, oppressive and dank, like after a fire. It’s an unnatural feeling, like there are too many shadows, like something is creeping behind you, approaching just out of your field of vision. It chills me.

From the bedroom off to the right, we can hear the mother. She’s ranting and raving and screaming like a woman possessed. Is it English? Or something else? Could be anything. Can’t tell if she’s gonna need handcuffs, or a straightjacket, or a long rest to get whatever she’s on out of her system.

[Persona shift]. Kim stays in the front room to try to talk to the girl. I give her a smile and she just stares back with those dark, dead eyes. I head over to the bedroom where the growling and shrieking are coming from. I feel a chill run down my spine as I reach for the knob. There ain’t much that can slow me down, but this place is creepy.

She’s hunched over, hair a tangled bird’s nest, clothes filthy and torn. Mumbling and clawing at herself, and the walls. This is bad. It ain’t right. There’s too many shadows in here. Something is off….and there it is.

A smudge, a stain on the wall. A dark little smear, like a slug or a piece of food. I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s the problem. It’s the what in “what the hell is going on here?” But it isn’t catchable. When I walk over to it, it isn’t there anymore. It’s moved to another wall, or it’s just a little gouge in the paint and the smear has moved to another place. Every time I get near it, or reach out my hand to touch it, it’s gone.