Once he had gone, I immediately turned to my invisible man- what had Vincent called him? Marshall Friess? "Strange bedfellows when you're dying, eh?" I said to Marshall. I washed the coffee mugs out in the sink, and went to bed.
That night, I dreamt of a hallway, and stairs at the end of it, leading to a door. A watery voice whispered something in my ear, and I walked forward, my movements sluggish. When I reached the top of the stairs, the voice garbled something else not quite i telligible, but my dream-self understood, and my hand was forced forward toward the doorknob. When my fingers touched the doorknob, however, it suddenly glowed red, the metal burning hot to the touch, and I woke up with a yelp.
I quickly brought my fingers to my face, and in the gloom, I could see that my fingertips were red, steam coming from them in the cold of my bedroom (the heating never worked at Moorside). I quickly got up and ran them under the cold tap.
I was standing there, the tap running, when I remembered the events of the previous night, and the panic hit me. I quickly went to the front door and checked to see if it was locked, which it was. I then raced to my bedroom window and stared out, but couldn't see him. I sat down, and wondered what on earth was wrong with me. In through my bedroom window had swept something, someone who had been watching me for at least one night prior. I had known this and I had welcomed him in. I had made him a warm drink and listened like a doting housewife as he told me his intention to record me dying. That wasn't normal.
I hadn't been scared when he was here, but I was scared now. My heart pounded even though I was just sitting still, and every breath rattled quickly and painfully as I remembered his white eyes and his face, my God, his face. Scared again, but this was a game that I had played many times before. The trick is to convince your body that nothing is wrong. The trick is to concentrate on your breaths, and maybe one place on your body- a fingertip, perhaps (my fingertips, still burning). You put all your energy into these two things and sit perfectly still. Even if it's not the most comfortable position, you shouldn't move once you've begun, and you should think about nothing, try to still your thoughts, and eventually, the fear will subside.
I got to my feet after my panic attack had subsided, going past Marshall and into my bedroom, where I stared at my corkboard. I took a deep breath, and turned him to fiction to re-capture the calmness I had felt last night. I made him into a story. 'Vincent' I wrote on a scrap of paper, and then added 'Vulture'. 'Vincent Vulture', that seemed apt. I stuck the note right in the centre of the corkboard, and the story began.
I had a note section on the cork-board titled 'What is he?' with strands connecting to the bullet-pointed: 'snuff-movie maker, cameraman, mildly psychic'. I was still unconvinced that he wasn't death, so added 'possible grim-reaper, shadow monster man' and pinned it up. Then there was the 'what does he want?' section- 'Film my suicide for my ghost to watch (?)' I wrote. I added a separate note 'has filmed in the past quote 'many times'- old woman on bus'. I paused, trying to remember what had been written on the tapes from his bag. It had been a house fire, and then what? The name Isabelle? Despite my better judgement, I did a quick internet search for house fires concerning people named Isabelle, and turned up nothing, but I scrawled the name down anyway and added it to the board.
I added a note (with a shudder) that read 'Has been following me for a few days at least, filmed me sleeping'. I underlined 'mildly psychic' and added a note reading: 'can see invisible man (Marshall Friess)'.
"Maybe he'll come for you too, eventually," I said to Marshall.
I wrote a few notes pertaining to what little information he had given me about the selling and trading of the snuff films he made, and then sat back to survey my handiwork, feeling like an insane person. I glanced at 'He is the flea', still pinned up in the corner. What on earth had I been going on about when I wrote that? It was dangerously close to the 'What is he?' section. What should I have done next? What would I have done if he wasn't a character in my story?
Would I have called the police? The idea seemed laughable for more reasons than one. The most obvious, of course, that the police weren't in the habit of tracking ghouls or phantoms. People from 'backstage', as he had put it. The second reason was that I was distrustful of the police as a rule, and knew the local officers weren't too quick to respond to calls from Moorside.
Once, a few years back (I was in my second year of university at the time), two Moorside tenants had gone through a rough break up- very public, with a lot of screaming matches in the courtyard. After the fact, he had broken into her flat, kicking the door in. He had smashed every single dish and glass she owned, every plate. He had turned her fridge and freezer off at the wall so that all of her food went bad or was on its way to ruin. He had emptied a bottle of vodka onto her bed and onto her textbooks, and then ripped open a bag of flour and poured this all over the carpets. For good measure, he had also put his foot through the oven door, smashing the glass. She had called the police, but they didn't arrest him. They merely gave him a 'stern talking to'. She was keen to press charges and inquired as to why the matter wasn't escalated further. The responding office had scoffed and if I remember correctly, he had referred to the incident as a 'student squabble', and said that it wasn't their business. The landlord, when she called them to explain about the damages, was at least more proactive: her ex-boyfriend had been evicted within the week.
Still, she had worried that he would come back and try to break in again, or make trouble for her. Her friends had rallied the rest of the Moorside tenants, myself included, who were already aware of what had gone on between them. A few of us had even been into her ruined flat, stinking of vodka, the floor a minefield of wet flour and broken glass. Even men who had been friends of his agreed that he had gone too far. The consensus was that if he came back, we were not to let him in. If we saw him in the hallways, we were to assume he was there without permission and, well, beat him up, I guess. We all kept a weathered eye out.
On the night that he came home, little under a month after his eviction, he barely made it to the main door before the courtyard was all of a sudden flooded with people he only knew in passing. They swore at him, shoved him, told him to piss off or else they'd kill him. He was so overwhelmed by the mob that he ran off, and his ex-girlfriend watched the whole thing from her third story window, also overwhelmed. Her tears of fright at the initial warning ("He's back, he's right outside,") had become tears of gratitude at the sheer amount of people that supported her, and that had her back. This was Moorside infamy. No one who had lived there back then was still here, save for me, but even the newer tenants knew the story, God knows how. Therefore, the rule at Moorside was to keep the police out of things unless absolutely necessary, and to solve most problems 'in house', so to speak.
But then, I knew I couldn't solve the problem 'in house'. Rallying the other tenants to my aid would require a social connection to them that I no longer had. I had spoken to none of my neighbours for years. I'm sure they thought I was some sort of ghost whenever they would see me leave my flat at odd hours of the night to dash to the corner shop and back. So, the thought of knocking on doors and asking for help with- what exactly? A home intruder? No, I had let him in. A stalker, then? A monster? A boogeyman? Should I tell them to ready their crucifixes and holy water? The whole thing was laughable. I was the ghost of Moorside myself, so this was to be settled in a more private 'in house' setting- ghost to ghost, as it were. Monster to monster. It also now occurs to me, that I didn't ask for help because it called to mind the unpredictability that I was so scared of. It was the outside world, with its frills and strangers, that made me scared. My comfort, my Moorside, my reprieve and my mould and my invisble man- Vincent fell into that category. Things that I could hate, that could make me uncomfortable, but couldn't scare me fully because the alternative, the real world, terrified my infinitely more.
Darkness was gaining fast. I focused on my corkboard. Music began playing from somewhere inside the building.