Trembling With Fear 8-20-23

Backlash, by Len Klapdor

The blow came unexpected. He awoke from the sound of his black denim pants being dragged across the floor. Not the sensation, though. His body had lost sensation. He had lost control over his body. Panic erupted inside him. This hunt didn’t go as planned. It started ideally. Maybe that ought to have made him suspicious.

She was the perfect victim. He found her in the inner city, during the first heat wave of the summer, coming from an autistic women’s self-help group meeting. She caught his eye because she wore trousers and a long-sleeved shirt even though it was hot outside. He often lurked around the building of the Joint Welfare Association since he moved to this city because it hosted several of those groups. Not just autistic women, but borderliners, trauma survivors, drug addicts. He knew he could find his best prey here. He pretended to be one of the trauma survivors and approached her in the hall at a health brochure display – just a short, polite conversation. She could barely look up at him, talked in a voice brimming with insecurity, and laughed nervously even though he hadn’t made a joke. She was perfect. An anxiety-ridden woman whose social skills couldn’t handle deeper relationships. Nobody would miss her, and her life was probably miserable anyway.

Following her to her home address was easy as pie. He stalked her for a few weeks to get to know all her routines. She left the house every morning for about two to four hours, sometimes to attend the self-help group, or for grocery shopping, often followed by a long walk through the forest near her house. She always took her camera and binoculars with her on those walks, and from what he could see, she was a bird watcher. The walls in the living room were plastered with bird photos, and he started to wonder how many of those she took herself. She was always back by afternoon, then she cleaned the house (every day) and did some yoga in her bedroom. Never more than twenty minutes, though. Not enough to build up significant muscle tissue, barely enough to not feel lazy, he figured. Afterwards, she would disappear into the cellar for one or two hours. This puzzled him at first, until he noticed that she always took her camera with her and realized that she must’ve had her own darkroom down there to develop her photos.

She would shower in the early evening, and he was pretty sure he heard her masturbate once or twice. This waste of sexual energy enraged him, maybe even more than a lover would have. But he would show her.

In the evenings, she ate a microwave-dinner in front of the TV watching “The Big Bang Theory”. While spying on her through a living-room window of her one-storied house, he witnessed how she spoke the actors’ lines between bites. After dinner, she would start working on her laptop while Netflix endlessly re-ran the show for her. He hadn’t found out what her job was, but judging from her lifestyle, it was remote, earned her enough to be comfortable, but not enough for a security system. She would fall asleep in front of the TV, then wake up around 2am and slouch over into the bedroom. She never had guests, and never talked to anyone on the phone. She might communicate with people in chat apps she used on her laptop, but without hacking her network, he had no way of knowing. He didn’t feel the effort was necessary, though. If her friends were all online, chances were they didn’t live in the vicinity.

He decided to attack after she’d fallen asleep again. It would be easy to sneak up to her and give her a tranquilizer injection that would make her defenseless. Excitement ran up and down his body. She would be his, all night.

The house was dark and silent when he cracked the back door’s lock and entered. Carefully stepping on the linoleum floors of her spotless kitchen, he made his way through the hall towards the low breathing sound that came from the bedroom, not really a snore, more an audible wheeze. He’d entered the room and just seen the open window when the blow came, and everything went black.

The dragging stopped in the hallway, and he heard her fumbling with keys. She must’ve given him the injection meant for her. He couldn’t move enough to see what she was doing.

She threw him down a dark flight of stairs next. He heard something crack and was sure that he broke a bone, but the tranquilizer didn’t let him feel pain. He was forced to lie on the ground, his extremities sprawling to all sides, facing the stairs. Each breath came harder. The cellar door sounded heavy when it fell shut. Fluorescent lamps twitched to live with a low bi-bi-bim sound.

His prey stopped at the end of the stairs and stared at him, putting both arms up against the edge of the ceiling. She wore a tank top and tight leggings he’d never seen her wear before, and she was more muscular than he had expected. Her arms were puffy with muscles, more than his own, only he didn’t see it when they met in person. No. She hid her outline behind wide clothes. He’d thought she was just insecure about her body, like every woman. Her eyes were devoid of emotion as she gazed down on him. Her face was so still. There was nothing of the insecurity he’d sensed in her before.

She pushed away from the ceiling in a sudden move, stepped down and walked around him. He strained to follow her with his eyes…and gasped. Almost the entire side of the wall was plastered with photos of him. Photos of him lurking around the Welfare Association’s building. Photos of him leaving his home, taken last winter. He knew because he was wearing the coat he bought himself for Christmas last year, when he had just moved here. Photos of him hiding near the bus station where she waited for the bus every morning. How had she taken these without him noticing?

But there was more. He saw a long row of portraits of men, unknown to him, and many of them were crossed out in red. There was a map, not just of the USA, but of all of the Americas. Pins in different colors marked certain places, some were connected by thin woollen strings. Dozens of pins. His mistake started to dawn on him.

The sound of a 1000° Celsius-hot flame roaring to life made him look at her again. Her eyes were focused on something he couldn’t see, but then she turned around, and he recognized the hand-sized cutting torch she was holding. He knew he had only one chance.

“You’re just like me!” he gasped under strain, hoping something about the sameness between them would make her have mercy on him. She looked almost surprised at his words, but after a second, her features placated themselves into the same cold stillness.

She stepped nearer to regard him closely for a second, then produced sunglasses from a pocket and put them on. “No.” Her voice was unagitated. “I’m not a rapist.” She went to one knee next to him, and he watched helplessly as she grabbed his numb arm and spread it in position.