Hells Heels

Hells Heels

His hand was already on the knob. Waiting, it had been there since he last raged intot the night, chafing his bare feet on the chapped asphalt of his driveway, in hopeless pursuit of a phantom sounds, around a half hour ago.
  He bent, still holding the knob in one hand, and raising each leg --- offensively, to the art of yoga --- into a standing half-lotus; he reached with his free hand to pick out pebbles of rock that were imbedded in the grated soles of his feet --- like roots of teeth in bleeding gums --- and a nesting weed wedged between the columns of his commanding toes.
  Intently, he listened, but heard nothing.
  He moved further from the door, slipping on a pair of loose sandals.
  Could a sound be intelligent, if it is not under the conduction of something already conscious? He wondered; for what he was hearing had to either be a jest, or his mind was truly on its losing end.
  Tap-tap-t.
  Before the heels could count to 3, he was out the door like a premature ejaculation.
  Tap-tap.
  He chased the sound to the street; that seemed to be everywhere at once and no where at all. The footsteps fell silent, and like a deaf dog, fugitive of his leash, he hound this spectral being, running to and from the enclave of Westminster Avenue, infiltrating the collocated gardened nooks of his sleeping neighbors; impossibly, seeing nothing and hearing even less.
  "Damn you," he yelled into the night.
 
Exhausted, he dropped onto a wet lawn. Inside his head, he could hear the menacing clacking of a woman's high heels.
  Only he wished that the auscultation be a gauntlet of his own mind; because he no longer felt so certain. As he stood to walk back, down into the stairwell gullet of his rented basement, he was quick to notice, but even quicker to forget, the spiked perforations and frontal prints of heels, in the clay banks of soil, along the side of the house, under the dimly lit arcade.


This was his fourth night without sleep. It had begun a month or so ago; that he would hear those same foot falling heels --- hell's heels, he began to call them --- under the pedestrian surface, in his basement, where he could hark up on almost every motion, impressed on the Tarmac above.
  At first, it had simply seemed to annoy him. He rationalized some woman, with very little to do (or possibly too much), had decided to take his street, more often than once, twice and often several times a day, at all times of day, in those inappropriately whore-calling heels, at the nearing end of fall, to attend to whatever business she had, if any, inside the labyrinth of suburbia. He knew that the explanation to such combined circumstances was probably much less ambiguous than he wanted it to be; but to find out for himself, and to witness upfront, the subject of his intermitting malice, he began to attempt to catch his mystery culprit, in her action.
  Quickly, however, he realized, that the task he had confronted, was by far, impossible to entire.
  And the heels of hell knew; for they became relentless: clacking and tapping their torment around the clock, night and day. He often wondered whether they could read his mind, because the sounds would stop, presently on his approaching being. The slightest push of opening his entering door would bring them to silence.

  But it was not until 4 nights ago, that the footfalls from the outlying pavement, bordered outside, had begun to breach into his home, and continue their dreadful punishment upon him, from the upper level floor of his basement.

The upper level belonged to a man and a woman, whom he'd only met once since his tenancy began, 1 year ago. However, he would see the man monthly; picking up the check left for him in the mail box. The man was a biker type: bearded like an old Norseman, with a beer-barreled belly, and inked white skin. The woman, another stereotype, was a prmoiscuously attracting red head, with gaunt features and narcotic eyes. She was a feather compared to the biker, and looked to be held together by the strapped tourniquet of her tightly leathered vesture. A fuck-toy, he concluded; it seemed that everything about her could be vaginally possible.


The ambulant heels, he noticed, would for the past 4 nights, begin outside, than continue their track into the house, above his sleeping quarters in the corner of his bedroom and study; luring him to attend their course down the low hall, that reached at it's end, a closed door used for storage; than gradated up a set of stairs on the floor above: TAP, TAp, Tap, quieter as they climbed. There, they would stop. Minutes later, from their departure, they would begin again; over and over, until he could take it no more.
  The heels were calling to him, and he knew, to thwart the precedence of insanity, he would have to answer to their call. He was not insane yet; "There is logic to this rubbish."
  But he would have to go to the second floor; to the biker's home, to find it.


On that very dawn, still wet from the dewy grass and browned with inspissated soil, he held in his ungainly hand a serrated knife, and like a jungle villian, set to work in the remaining dark, cutting the screen canvas of the biker's back, kitchen window.
  He tore off the remaining mesh with a quick jerk, powdering his face with fiber and dust. Then, pressing his hand flat on the exposed glass, he pushed and slid the window open; hearing no alarm, he thanked the biker's neglect.
  Swiftly, he entered through the aperture, into the domicile of his landlord's kitchen, caring little for the sodded farrago left by his soiled sandals; for the house, he knew, had been left genuinely abandoned. The settlement of mould and dust from the long vacany had already tunred a sedimental thickness, and he choked on the musty mote pervading freely in the tight space.
 
  Moving from the kitchen, he was amazed to find, the house so adoringly furnished, in vintage design. Someone, he figured, and he didn't think it was the biker, or the harlot-looking woman, put a lot of effort into making the house pleasantly scenic and vaible, then retired from all that effort, to live somewhere else. He snapped his mind back. He had not gone there to amuse himself with the suitability of the house's decor; however antique, and impressive it was.
  Before he could assign his mind to the task at hand, the pealing of the first tap turned his attention.
  Tap-tap-tap.
  The heels had answered, The bait was hooked. The mired man moved.

The formation of the house could be equivalently matched to his basement; with a platform that outlined the design perfectly, to his kitchen, bedroom, living room and hallway. As before, and always since four nights ago, the heels began to lead him down the long narrow hall. There, they would stop. Exemplar of his basement, where the locked door to the storage was, here, the hall continued into another room: a laundry. At his right side, as he suspected, was a staircase, leading up to the second floor. This was were he determined the heels would climb, and righly so, the footfalls continued their descent up the jointed staircase.
  No longer thinking, or reasoning, he followed (and to his surprise, fearlessly), the steering steps of a ghost.

Reaching the top was another hall. The walls were adorned with pictures of family: both pet and human. What struck him as odd was that the family on the old, almost Victorian photographs would not only now be dead, but also, uncannily, that they were black. The relation to the Celtic biker would be hard to justify. Another, of the too many mysteries present, he thought.

The hallway housed 4 rooms, or atleast allowed 4 doors.
  Tap-tap-tap. The steps approached the door at the far end of the hall, facing him. The knob turned by an invisible hand, and the door opened. The fear he had so far managed to successfully mask from himself, had disinterred itself in the subsistence of glistening sweat and a jerking shoulder. But he had gone this far, and he needed to know. That maybe at the end, he would be led to some propped box, instructed to be opened, and out would spring a clown, laughing hysterically in his face, played a recorded message of: "You've just been fucked, Buddy!'
  And so he entered the room.
  And to his skeptical relief; there he found his box: a large electric freezer.
  He had seen enough movies, to apprehensively anticipate the worst, from opening a body sized freezer, in an abandoded house, owned (mst likely illegaly), by a man would who looked to belong to the Hell's Angels.
  But the heels demanded it, and he was their good soldier.
  And so he opened, what he already knew was not a freezer, but a casket.

  Inside, capsulated under the thin ice, was the bound body of a woman; her red hear flaming beneath the ice. Her expression frozen with screaming pursed lips and her black, narcotic eyes, trapped behind a glassy world. All that was missing from this sexually leathered being was a  set of legs and some whore-calling heels.