Rain fell on the cement-and-brick stairs at the front door of the dark house. It's whispered song echoed across the street for the man in the midnight traveling cloak. He stood out in the small hamlet, an anachronism in a velvet top hat -- or he would have, were it daytime. He stood next to a street light made to look like a gas lamp as out-of-time as he was. Its electric bulb flickered as he touched the lamppost absently. It was as fake, as fraudulent, as everything else in the village.
The man's face was hidden in the heavy shadows of his hat. Maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe something about the face itself made it hard to make out. Maybe the face was hideous, grotesque to a point that the eyes overlooked it, that the mind denied its existence. Maybe there was something even more strange about the man himself; maybe there was no face at all.
The man's dark silhouette changed shape as he lifted a cane as midnight as his cloak and as glistening as the wet street. A swift motion and a tinkling of broken glass later, the light was out, and the man was gone to all perception.
Ariana shivered. Had the man seen her? She had been staring from one of the dark house's third-storey windows, trying her damnedest not to breathe. Now she found she couldn't move at all. She stared wide-eyed into the darkness the man had once -- maybe still -- occupied. She strained for any hint of the tap of a cane or a footstep, but all she could hear was the rain.
Whatever idiot had designed these street lights had also placed them too far apart for even one to burn out (or to be shattered, for that matter). If only there had been lightning, then maybe Ariana would be able to see through the inky blackness. As if to prove her point, a single, solitary flash of static electricity jumped from one cloud to another. She leaned forward, pressing her hand against the glass, and saw the space next to the lamppost completely unoccupied, but perhaps that was a dark shape moving away, a block down the empty, one-a.m. street. Perhaps...
"Look who's finally up," Emily said, smiling from behind a bowl of cereal as large as Ariana's head. Ariana smiled a weak smile and glanced at a clock. Eleven thirty.
"At least I'm up before noon," she said, shoving an unruly bunch of brunette hair behind her ear. "Trouble getting to sleep last night," she explained. "There was a..." She stopped.
"A what, now?" Emily asked.
"I... Don't remember. Must've been a dream. I thought-- I thought there was someone, something, watching the house, last night."
"Sounds like a dream," Emily said, but her voice held a note of concern, a note of sympathy. She looked worried. "Come here, hon," she said, pulling a chair away from the small table and removing a stack of magazines from it. Ariana sat down, rested her elbow on the cluttered table, and propped her cheek on her hand. The lock of hair had escaped her ear, again, and Emily pushed it back for her. She brushed Ariana's cheek softly, perhaps more slowly than was necessary, before she pulled her hand back.
"You used to have dreams, didn't you, Ari?" Emily asked her. "When you first moved here, I mean." Her concern was plain on her face, and Ariana, named for some great-grandmother, somewhere, felt a little guilty for bringing it up. Emily had feelings for Ariana, and it would be so easy a thing to reciprocate them. Ariana missed closeness. She missed relationship. She ached to be held.
"Yeah," she said, sitting up and looking at her hands, trying to clear her head. "Those were just dreams, though. Normal nightmares." She looked into Emily's eyes and tried not to blink. "This was almost real." A small part of Ariana wondered how much longer she could continue denying the way she felt about Em, but the rest of her buried that part. "The man..." she thought aloud. "The man had a hat... and a cloak... He had a cane!" she said, her eyes wide, excited with memory. "He--" she broke off. "The street light!"
Ariana jumped and bolted for the door, hurtling Henri, the thin, grey cat which seemed to belong to the entire household, on the way. Emily followed her out, apologizing to Henri on the way. He looked at her unblinking, disinterested, as she went.
Ariana was already headed back to the house when Emily reached the open front door. She held her hands tightly together before her, as if she had caught a firefly and wanted to show it to whoever would look.
"See?" she said, excitement and fear jockying for control within her. "He broke the lamp," she told Em. Ariana opened her hands, and Emily saw a small, yellow-white shard of glass resting there. "It was real," Ariana whispered, and something deep inside Emily worried for her friend's sanity.
[Looks like it'll be longer than I'd hoped for...]
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