Walter Albright died on an early Friday morning. Since he lived alone, the exact cause of death couldn’t be determined, or for that matter, the time. The coroner’s report cited Hypoxia/complications from C.O.P.D. - T.O.D. between 2AM & 4AM.
Nobody was particularly sad, or even surprised. Walter was a gruff old man. His skin was white, but blotched with the stains of time. Although he was once 5’9”, since the kyphosis started in ‘98, his hunchback dropped him down to about 5’6”.
He often kept to himself, with the exception of the occasional dirty look he would give to anyone unfortunate enough to make eye contact with him at the supermarket, park, or if he happened to be sitting out on his stoop. The only way people really knew anything about him was through his books. Walter’s prolific writing career started almost 50 years ago. He had written 13 novels, published 41 short stories, and often had Op-Ed pieces published in the local paper, usually criticizing the neighborhood and how it was, “Going to hell.” His work mostly consisted of fantasy and horror novels. Ghosts, witchcraft, cults, he’d written about it all.
It was a cold winter morning, and the only thing that alerted anyone to Walter’s final predicament was his Life Alert bracelet informing a monitoring operator that his body had fallen. The discovery of an old dead man lying on the floor, just a few steps from his bathroom, was nothing that the two Nassau County EMT’s who put him onto the gurney hadn’t seen many times before. Walter Albright was 86 years old. He had no children, was never married, and would in three days, be just another name on another headstone at Saint Charles Cemetery.
Chris Montgomery was also a writer, and he had a deadline. A word he hated more than his soon to be ex-wife Lisa’s new favorite word: divorce.
A deadline meant that whatever crap he was currently slaving away at, was probably already late to his agent, Jake Brice. The said “crap” was almost always something he would be so repulsed by, that he himself couldn’t even stomach the sight of it.
Chris had been trying (with little success) to support himself as a writer for longer than he cared to admit. He considered himself an ideas man, but just couldn’t figure out a way to get the words to flow. Ideas are one thing, ideas are easy. Anyone can come up with a basic idea, and if you thought hard enough, it’s not a particularly challenging task. It’s getting the story to feel real, and be a worthy journey for the reader. Writing required time, and patience; and that was just one of the many qualities Chris Montgomery lacked.
He was currently unemployed, relying solely on the money of both Lisa’s fairly lucrative job in banking, and the monetary support they often got from her very rich father, Vito “The Pizza King” Mizzelli. Despite the money, Chris hated his soon to be ex-father-in-law as much as the word deadline, which was fine, since the feeling was mutual.
Lisa was able to tolerate the rift that Chris (or “The Loser” as Vito referred to him) created in her family, combined with his lack of employment and years of alcohol abuse, but the miscarriage was finally enough to make her pack up and leave.
Chris was a good looking (not movie star quality, but still nice on the eyes) 32-year-old, soon to be new bachelor. But his struggles (some would call it laziness) made him bitter, standoffish, and worst of all, among the 11% of men between 30 & 40 suffering with ED.
That final fact getting out to the general public worried him more than anything else, and was the biggest hit to his stupid male ego. His little “problem” was a nugget of information that he considered far more detrimental to his social status, than if the whole world knew the circumstances of how his wife lost their child.
Walter’s neighbors, both out of obligation (after all he had lived on the block almost half a century) and curiosity (wondering what the property value would be on the old house) had decided to hold a small memorial service in honor of Walter’s memory.
Chris didn’t know Walter much outside of being the grumpy old neighbor, and Chris didn’t care to know him. He enjoyed the idea of staying in their two separate worlds. Although, ironically, the only neighbor who did have any sort of relationship with Walter, was Lisa.
A house full of mourners was not the place anyone really wanted to be. But in defense of the late Walter Albright, this was usually the case for anyone who had passed on, even someone you enjoyed being around. Since Chris definitely did not like Walter, him being there would be nothing short of a waste of his time. But, then realizing that he would be the last person Walter would want at his memorial service, Chris decided to pop in and “pay his respects”.
As he walked up to the house, he also thought to himself, Maybe I’ll get stuck sitting with some idiot who doesn’t know when to shut up, and they’d give me some material I could use for my story.
His house was small, but reasonably well kept. The only non-resident of the neighborhood in attendance was Albright’s agent, a woman named Veronica Sangre, who fake cried her way through the story of how she spoke to Walter the night before he died, and how excited she was to read his next novel. She said Walter wouldn’t let anyone, not even her, see his work until it was finished.
After a while, Chris realized that nobody really cared about Walter any more or less than he did. The height of the evening was when Mrs. Salesian, the old widowed cat-lady (because what street is complete without one of those?), mistakenly said that she gave the Jehovah’s Witness who knocked on her door the usual BJ instead of what everyone assumed through their laughter was meant to be BS, in one of her many incoherent stories.
That one moment was the only sort of “inspiration” Chris had that night. He thought briefly about a group of people all sitting together laughing, when something happened to break up the fun. Perhaps the food had been poisoned, or a car crashes through the living room wall, or maybe even a terrorists nuke detonates in the street.
Perhaps it was the Scotch, which he helped himself to shortly after arriving, or Chris getting too deep into his own head with thoughts of death (either by nuclear explosion, car crash, or rat poison in the pasta). Whatever caused it, all he knew in that moment was, he needed to piss.
He excused himself, but in a room of sixteen people talking over each other, he doubted, or honestly even cared, if anyone heard him.
He made his way through the small, dusty old ranch. No pictures on any of the walls, just a creepy painting of a crying clown, and an old picture of a small boy in a cowboy costume, which Chris assumed was Walter as a kid.
The bathroom had a green tile floor, a dirty pink plush rug, and an old fan that flicked on with the light switch, rattling away like when someone shakes an empty can of silly string. There was a ‘zap’ with every flicker of the light, each one making Chris clench up and cause a quick break in his otherwise relaxing piss stream.
When he walked back out into the hallway, the sound of chattering neighbors pushed him away like a mosquito from a burning TIKI torch. Call it morbid curiosity, but he decided to make his way through the old house. At the end of the dark hallway with the creaky floors was the bedroom of the old man.
Could I be in the room a man died in? Well, I guess technically you can say that about any room in any old house. How do I know if someone actually croaked in my house. Even in the very spot I sleep at night?
The bedroom was what you’d expect for an old man, dark and musty. There was a certain odor that came from the room. Not necessarily bad, but if the word ‘old’ had a scent, this place was drenched in it. Chris could feel it on his clothes, and it made his skin feel as gross, and musty, as the room itself. There were no pictures, just a bed in the center of the room with two night tables perfectly placed on each side, reminding him of the bedroom sets from those old sitcoms from the 60’s. The switch lit up both lights on the two tables. Each had a shade over them that gave the room a sort of orange atmosphere, like Mars.
The other side of the room, had a desk with a lineup of all Albright’s manuscripts. Chris had never read a single one of his books, but the idea of how much original manuscripts for a now dead writer could go for was enough to make him skim through a couple.
Old dead writers gotta have something of value to work with.
The top drawer creaked as if it hadn’t been opened since he bought the desk. It had a couple of pencils, a tarnished silver letter opener (which Chris slipped into the flap of his coat pocket), and a thin blanket of dust that you could almost mistake for plastic wrap over everything except the letter opener and pencil shaped clear spots at the bottom of the drawer.
The second drawer, which didn’t open with as loud of a creak but did require a bit more of a pull, had a large stack of papers in it. What caught Chris’ eye first weren’t those papers so much as the lack of dust. He pulled out the papers, and saw a cover page which simply read, “The Woman in the Mirror, a Novel by Walter Albright.”
He sat at the foot of the bed, and began to skim the long, hand written manuscript.
It told the story of a woman named Massie, who was burned at the stake after she was accused of being a witch during the Salem Witch Trials. Centuries later, her spirit returned to kill the descendants of the families who killed her. She came through the mirrors and began killing people off, one by one, by sticking her fist down their throats.
This is great; but has anyone else seen this? No, Veronica said Walter never showed her anything before it was finished.
Most people wouldn’t think of stealing someone else’s story, especially after they were dead. That wasn’t only illegal in the publishing world, but showed a complete lack of common decency. Unfortunately for Walter, but fortunately for Chris, he was not in possession of common decency. He stuck the manuscript under his arm in his jacket, closed the drawer, turned off the light, and slipped passed everyone in the house without a trace.
The only sort of contact that Chris and Walter ever had was about two and half years ago. There had been a blizzard and Walter was struggling to shovel his stoop, but there was only so much an out of shape 84 year old man could do alone. Chris and Lisa lived diagonally across the street from Walter, and it was Lisa who noticed Walter’s struggles. (Chris had noticed first actually, though only by a few seconds, but he chose to ignore them.) Despite his disapproval, Lisa made her way over, and offered to help Walter. For some reason, Lisa was the only one who could break through Walter’s hard shell, and the two soon formed a friendship.
While Lisa would stand by her belief that he was just a “lonely old man,” Chris would insist he was a “horny old man” and wanted her body. These types of talks would always lead to a fight, and cause Lisa to either go to her parent’s house, or more recently, over to Walter’s. By the end of their marriage, Lisa would spend almost all of her free time at Walter’s, cooking him dinner, doing his shopping, or even just sitting on the stoop talking with him. Chris didn’t know what they were talking about, but he knew there was a good chance it had to do with what a terrible husband he was. She never told Chris anything, and that just led to more fighting.
Chris knew Walter didn’t like him when they met, but he didn’t have any reason to hate him. After his friendship with Lisa, however, he could feel the hatred, sometimes by a glance he would give him if they ever happened to cross paths on the block, or when Walter would drive away and stare at the house with pure distain. Chris knew that look was all for him. Though he couldn’t prove it, he was also sure Walter had something to do with Lisa’s decision to move out and leave Chris. He was also positive Lisa told Walter about the night of the miscarriage.
What nobody knew, except for Chris, Lisa (and probably Walter), was that that night Lisa, who had been 4 and half months pregnant with their first child, was awoken to the sounds of her drunk husband stumbling his way through their house at 1:30 in the morning. This was not the first time Chris came home drunk, but on this particular night, he got so angry, that he pushed her to the ground, which led to her losing the baby. Chris begged Lisa not to tell anyone, not concerned she would press charges, but rather her family branding him an alcoholic and cutting off the money.
Chris did debate calling Lisa to tell her about Walter’s death. But decided he just didn’t care enough about either one of them to make the time for that call.
It took Chris about three nights to type out the entire manuscript onto his computer. It was identical down to the letter. The only difference being, it was now “A Novel by Chris Montgomery” instead of “A Novel by Walter Albright”.
Any proof of Albright’s hand in this story was slid through the shredder.
The garbage was his original plan, but that could backfire. Someone could find it, and make the connection that Chris had stolen it. Far-fetched sure, but matters like this needed to treated as such.
After it was finally finished he had reached the dreaded deadline and knew all that was left to do was to call his agent with his powerhouse novel.
It was late, a little before 11:30 PM, and although he contemplated it, even Chris (in one of the few decent decisions of his life) decided calling his agent at this hour was too much. Instead he chose to email him.
The shattering of the glass made him jump and he nearly belted out a scream to echo the sound. Before sending out the email he walked away from his computer to investigate.
He walked into his kitchen and saw a broken glass on the floor. He walked over to it, and looked around. It was weird, but certainly not the most abnormal thing to happen.
I must have left it too close to the damn edge.
He got a broom and dustpan to clean up each of the thirteen pieces. He got almost all the way through it (number eleven to be exact), before he sliced the middle of his index finger. The blood oozed out and filled up his palm before he even realized what exactly happened. He angrily clenched his teeth together. He made his way over to the sink, turned it on and let his hand settle there for a few seconds, watching the blood wash away from his palm down the drain. It stung enough for him to bite his lower lip, but he pushed through it, not pulling his hand away just yet.
He looked up at the window in front of him, that faced out into his front yard. The night was still, and silent; the sort of evening that would make a gust of wind seem ominous. Chris couldn’t explain why, but something felt uneasy about it. He stood there gazing out the kitchen window into the darkness, almost waiting to see something, but there was nothing to see. It was late and the world around him was as silent as a cemetery.
The only light that shined was the one that came from the den, which reflected off the kitchen window. As he looked through the reflection, towards Walter’s house, the silhouette of a man appeared from behind him.
He whipped his body around with a sharp gasp. He saw nothing in his now empty den. The only three things to fill in the silence of the moment were the raging faucet, the pounding of his heart, and that same smell of ‘old’ from Walter’s bedroom.
You’re tired, overworked, and losing blood. Just relax!
He wrapped up the wound with a paper towel, shut off the faucet, and went to the bathroom to get anti-bacterial cream and a bandage. The blood from his hand had begun to seep through the paper towel so he took it off and put his hand under the bathroom faucet, feeling that same sting.
He looked at his reflection, and while he tried to gather his thoughts he couldn’t help but think about what he had just seen. He couldn’t make it out too clearly, but it definitely looked like a man; an older man, since he had a bit of a hunch.
But that doesn’t make sense. None of that makes sense. The only thing that makes any sense is that I’ve been spending the last three days reading a story about some ghost in a mirror and now I’m tired and seeing the same thing.
That’s a thing isn’t it? Being so tired that you start to see a mix up of reality with your imagination? Yes, of course it is. I’m seeing that little woman from the story, because I’m tired, and that’s all that’s on my mind. But I didn’t see a woman. I saw an old man.
The image was so clear, it couldn’t have been a hallucination. Chris has hallucinated before, and this was not that. The warm water, which was now turning too hot for Chris’ hand to handle, had snapped him out of the rabbit hole his mind was going down. He pulled his hand away, shut the water off, and gave himself a slight but firm smack across the face. He bandaged his hand, flicked off the light, and walked out of the room.
He locked the doors and shut off the lights. He couldn’t understand why, but that “being watched” feeling haunted him. He checked his entire house, even crawling down on his hands and knees to check the very edges of the closet, feeling for a potential hole in the floor that something could crawl through. It took him almost twenty minutes to realize that he was completely alone.
You’re alone! You’re alone! You’re alone!
He was creeped out, but not to the point of panic. He didn’t allow his mind to go there.
He decided to go to bed, but managed nothing more than to lie there for what seemed like hours but in reality lasted no more than ten minutes.
He tossed and turned, punched the pillow, kicked off the blanket to just his sheet, and quickly decided to pull it back up again. This little dance, which he had hoped would tire him out, only served to make him more awake.
He got up and went to his kitchen to pour himself a scotch. He finished the first glass in two quick gulps. He brought the bottle with him as he made his way over to the den to watch TV.
An old rerun of The Brady Bunch was just starting.
Ba-da-bum-be-bum-bump, Here’s the story, of a lovely lady...
The light from the bathroom flickered back on...
Who was bringing up three very lovely girls...
Chris looked over to the bathroom...
All of them had hair of gold, like their mother, the youngest one in curls...
He slowly stood up...
Here’s the story, of man named Brady, who was busy with three boys of his own...
Chris walked toward the bathroom...
They were four men, living all together, yet they were all alone...
The bathroom light was off, but the reflection from the mirror was bright...
Till the one day when the lady met this fellow, and they knew that it was much more than a hunch...
He walked into the bathroom, his breaths getting louder and sharper with each step....
That this group must somehow form a family...
His hand shook as he reached over to the light switch...
That’s the way they all became The Brady Bunch...
In the mirror, Walter walked in, his eyes blood red, jaw hanging open, as green foam oozed through his rotten teeth...
The Brady Bunch...
Chris screamed...
The Brady Bunch...
Walter lunged through the glass of the mirror like an open window...
That’s the way they became The Brady Bunch!
Walter pinned Chris to the ground, spread eagle. He felt weightless, but the force coming from him was holding Chris down to the point where he couldn’t move. Chris attempted to struggle, but he couldn’t find the strength to pull himself out of this thing’s grip. Walter balled his hand into a fist, and began to stick it in Chris’ mouth. He shut his jaw tightly, but the fist made it through the defense, sliding past his teeth, down his throat. The first pain Chris could feel was the cracking of his jaw, and the slow pressure of his throat closing as it wrapped around the large fist. His eyes filled with tears, as he gagged on the knuckles. With each gag, feeling more and more like his eyes were seconds away from popping out of his head.
Chris stared into the face of his dead neighbor. What stared back at him was that same look of pure distain he knew all too well.
As the room started to go dim, and his struggling began to lessen, the only thought that could come into Chris’ mind was if anyone would ever know what really happened to him?
The apparition, without opening his mouth communicated in Walter’s old gruff voice. The last two things Chris heard was the perky voice of Marsha Brady, and Walter Albright saying to him, “This is for Lisa and the baby.”
The apparition’s hanging jaw slowly turned into a menacing smile as Chris’ eyes rolled back until... blackness.
Chris Montgomery died on an early Thursday morning. Since he lived alone, the exact cause of death couldn’t be determined, or for that matter, the time. The coroner’s report cited Hypoxia/swallowing his tongue- T.O.D. between 2AM & 4AM.
Nobody was particularly sad, but they were surprised. Chris was a young man and seemingly healthy, though rumors quickly circulated about his alcohol abuse. In fact, that’s what everyone eventually believed killed him.
The email that had been typed out, but never sent, was gone from his computer, as was the story, leaving no trace behind for anyone to know what it was that actually happened that night, or the story that was never released.
The only thing anyone knew was that Chris Montgomery and Walter Albright, two neighbors who hated one another, were now plagued with eternity’s slumber at Saint Charles Cemetery. And that was all anyone needed to know.
Author’s Note:
I came up with this story after reading the short story, The Cat from Hell, by Stephen King, from his collection Just After Sunset.
While these two stories have almost nothing in common, the dark nature of that tale sparked an idea in me that lead to the writing of this story. So, as with almost everything I write, thanks must be given to the King.
The biggest thanks, however, has to go to my editing team (also known as my Dad). Thanks for sitting with me for hours, looking over this story and making your suggestions.
Lastly, thank you to everyone reading this. Thank you all, for taking the time to support what I love doing. I hope you all enjoyed this story, and will come back for more.
Your writer friend,
Mike