He dropped the glass on the bed like something that nauseated him.
Ridiculous. He shook his head, then put his brow into his hand. I’m not cracking up, am I? Now his watch—not a distant bell—beeped once.
Just go to bed…
He began to undress but found his eyes oddly lured upward, toward the ceiling. The trapdoor, he thought, staring at it. In a moment he was standing on the bed— feeling ludicrous in his boxer shorts and Gaultier shirt—reaching up. He pushed on the board, slid it off, then stood on tiptoes and patted his hand around just inside the egress. There, he thought, feeling something. He pulled it out: a rope ladder.
Why am I doing this? the question drifted but it never solidified. He hopped off the bed, slipped a penlight in his shirt pocket, then grabbed the unstable rungs, ignoring the rope’s sheer age. Carefully but with determination he couldn’t fathom, he climbed up. Eventually he was standing stooped in a long narrow wood-scented chamber. There were no dormer windows or vents—nothing to offer light or air; in seconds he was shedding sweat. He aimed the penlight around, finding nothing of interest, just several boxes—reading in Magic Marker XMAS DECORATIONS—and piles of what appeared to be old drapes. Dust lay an inch thick on the floor but his light showed him the footprints of someone else. They appeared very new.
Had someone been up here recently? Probably Mr. Baxter, putting the decorations away after Christmas.
But Fanshawe couldn’t figure why he’d come up here. What did he expect to find? I’m just getting nuttier and nuttier, I guess. Still, he walked down the narrow space, fanning his light. Tree sap—more than likely cooked out of the rafters and wood slats from hundreds of years of hot summers—hardened like tinted glue everywhere he looked. When he made it to the chamber’s end, he stopped, sniffed. He wasn’t sure but he thought he smelled—
Old cigar smoke?
But the fetid odor was gone just as he thought he’d detected it.
Enough Nosy Parkering for me. He climbed back down and replaced the trapdoor, shaking his head at himself. Snooping in other people’s business wasn’t like him, but then he laughed and frowned at the same time when he realized the outrage of that impression.
I’m a voyeur, a peeper. I’m the worst kind of snoop.
He went to bed, baffled by his actions. But at least the trip into the attic, if only temporarily, had freed his mind of the impossibilities he’d glimpsed—or thought he’d glimpsed—on the hill.
Some time later, he was sinking into sleep—sinking, as if in a trench of slime. He twitched under the sheets; the darkness clotted around him.
He dreamed…
««—»»
A bright window comes into focus through a familiar binocular frame. A beautiful woman is undressing, in seeming slowness, but once she’s nude, she turns toward the window, showing all—
Behind him a voice trumpets: “Freeze! Police!”
Fanshawe is slammed against the alley wall, his cheek rubbing bricks. Snap! Snap! and next his wrists have been handcuffed behind his back. “How do you like that shit? A peeper…” Red and blue lights pulse blob-like within the alley.
Next, Fanshawe sweats on the pay phone in the booking section of the chaotic police station. “Artie, it’s me. I’m in big trouble. Call the lawyers and get me bailed out…,” and then he tells his confidante what he’s been arrested for, his voice tinted by shame. Artie’s initial reaction is only a guttural silence, as though he were choking on the information—
Next, Fanshawe stands haggard in the foyer of his luxury brownstone, his shirttail out, his hair mussed. A Tiffany clock on the mantle chimes three a.m. as Fanshawe’s silk night-gowned wife stares with a look that’s half-outrage and half stupefaction.
“You-you…were arrested for what?”
“I—”
Next, she’s haphazardly dressed in the spacious bedroom, her head a blond blur as she maniacally crams clothes and toiletries into a suitcase. When she slams the case closed, tears fly off her face.
“Laurel, please,” he croaks. “Let me ex—” but the words die as if his lungs have collapsed.
“You think you know someone,” comes her shrill sob, “you think they love you so you give your life to him, and then you find out he’s a pervert!”
“Honey, I’m sorry, I—”
“You’re sick!” she shrieks.
He pleads now not to her but into his hands. “I’ll get help, I go to a counselor—I don’t know how to explain this to you because I don’t even understand it myself—”
Laurel’s face has contorted into a pink mask stamped by every conceivable negative emotion. “Explain what? That you’re a pervert? That you’re a common criminal who gets his jollies looking at women in windows?” but then the rictus deepens with a worse thought. “They were women, weren’t they?” She is teetering in place. “Or were they really children?”
Fanshawe feels flattened, like the ceiling has just collapsed on him. “No, no, I swear, it wasn’t anything like that.”
Laurel spins round, grabs her purse and keys, then the suitcase. She doesn’t believe him. “Don’t ever speak to me again. Do you have any idea how much this hurts?”
Fanshawe sobs himself now. “Please don’t leave. I love you. I swear, I’ll never do it again. I-I…I just have this problem…”
“You’re sick! And that’s what you make me: sick! I want a divorce!”
The whole room concusses when she flies out and slams the door. Their wedding picture on the wall falls down and shatters.
Now Fanshawe sits on the couch in Dr. Tilton’s sterile office, and looking at him from behind the big desk is Dr. Tilton’s sterile face. “—a sickness, Mr. Fanshawe, a chronic paraphilic fixation that has reached a transitive state. This isn’t simple voyeurism, it’s an extremity of late-stage obsessive disorders such as Scoptolagnia and Parascopily…”
He feels as lost as one sitting in an electric chair. When he rubs his face, he feels sand-papery stubble. “What’s wrong with me?” he drones.
“You’re ill,” she snaps back. “You need treatment. Otherwise you’ll never be able to function normally in public… All your money and lawyers may keep you out of jail, but you’ll always be a pervert in society’s eyes—always, unless you stop right this instant…”
“I will!” he pants, “I will!”
The doctor’s elegantly manicured finger raises up to touch her chin. “But I’d like to ask you something rather pertinent, as—and don’t be offended by this—most patients suffering from such anti-social habituations as this generally lie to their psychiatrists initially, but…are you being honest with me when you say that it was a woman you were spying on?”
Fanshawe glares.
“Not a child? Not an adolescent?”
“No, no, no!” he yells and wishes just then that he could crush his own head in his hands—
««—»»
—and that was when the clot-like darkness seemed to force its way down his throat, almost like someone’s hand, and when Fanshawe began to gag, he sprang awake.