The Cellar
In truth, it wasn’t the gun fire that scared me. I was 14 when the unrest started. War was officially declared on my 15th birthday. I got conscripted on my 16th. I’m mostly used to it by now. I can sleep through almost anything. Except the silence.
The house gradually caught her attention because it was trying
too hard to fit in. The woman walked her dog on the street in front of
it almost every day, as she was about to do now.
Although she had lived in the neighborhood a dozen years, she
only began looking at the house closely during the past few months,
[This document is for the sole purpose of aiding the FBI, DHS, and other participating agencies into the investigations of Drs. Barbara Rodriguez and Anton Petkov. All text is taken from Dr. Petkov’s notebook unless otherwise indicated.]
02/04/2012
- My first meeting with…
I got my first mental health diagnosis at the age of twenty-two: bipolar type one. Given my family history I wasn’t surprised. Disappointed? Sure.
I had been set. Graduated cum laude, landed a Big Five firm. I had worked my ass off to avoid Mother’s life; the diagnosis felt like a death sentence. For the uninitiated, bipolar drugs? Not exactly energizing. I had 100 hour work weeks; I couldn’t even afford a cold. I was tired as hell and getting desperate for alternatives…
It was a dark and stormy night…I know, I know, that’s how you start a scary story that you’re telling to children, but the fact is, that’s exactly the kind of night it was. Here are the rest of the facts.
It was just me and Skidmark Jim left at the grill when the stranger entered; everyone else had already gone home, and you should thank their lucky stars that they did. Now, for the record, Skidmark Jim got that name in middle school when Frankie Rizzo claimed that Jim shit his pants watching a Freddy Krueger movie at a sleepover…
The telephone chimed daintily in the distance and Jerry Miller clenched his teeth. Why Shannon had preferred that to a normal, old-fashioned ringer, he’d never know. She’d also tried to convince him to replace the landline with his seldom-used cellphone, but he didn’t want to be “in constant touch with the world,” as she’d put it. If that were so, he wouldn’t have retired at forty, taking just a few occasional contracts too lucrative to pass up. He should have dumped Shannon after six days, not six months. Sure, she’d made some decent improvements to the place—like the sauna, the 72-inch smart TV, and the barbecue smoker—but she was a nitwit. Great in the sack, though.
The chiming went on for a few more seconds before the answering machine took it. He could have picked up the basement extension—set never to ring—but he didn’t answer phones. From where he was standing, he could just make out Celeste’s voice on the other end, but not her words—something about “audit” and “sorry.”
His mouth twisted. He supposed she was telling him she was stuck at the bank—again. For once…