Whispers
The bus ride home was uneventful, as Evan had expected. A couple more passengers embarked at later stops before he finally stepped off. The street was relatively quiet for a Saturday evening, which was fine. He didn’t really feel like dealing with anyone tonight, anyway.
Since his bus stop was practically across the street from his building and he had a ground-level apartment, so it only took him two minutes to get to his door after he left the bus stop. The light above his door was out, but there was still just enough light outside to make that a non-issue.
The inside of the apartment felt like time stood still. There was no movement, no sound. No clocks ticking. Not even the sound of a car passing in the street. It would have seemed eerie, had Evan been listening for them.
He turned on the light and walked into his bedroom, dropping his keys onto the nightstand and hanging his jacket on a nearby hook. He glanced at his alarm clock. 8:33 pm. Too early.
Walking back to his living room area, he glanced at the wall of picture frames in the short hallway leading into it. Twelve frames in all, non of them was larger than a five by seven, but all of the were empty. A few had once contained pictures of past and almost-girlfriends, but the memories and feelings they brought up just created a frustration he didn’t need. He never really looked at the other pictures, but the apartment somehow felt way too empty with nothing there at all. Empty frames had thus far proven to be the least troublesome solution.
He picked up the TV remote and held it out, stopping just short of pushing the power button. He ran through the evening’s lineup in his head. Since there wasn’t anything on that interested him, but more because he felt too drained to care about anything that did, he put the remote back down, turned the light out, and walked back toward the bedroom.
Glancing at the wall again hadn’t been a conscious decision, so it didn’t immediately register that the top left frame was no longer empty. The picture within was blurred, as if taken while moving, but at its center was a single figure wearing a white suit and hat. Evan had barely passed it when the realization struck him. He spun around, only to find the ‘picture’ was actually just an odd configuration of shadows.
But it seemed so real. At least…he thought it did.
“I,” he whispered under his breath, “am going insane.”
He dismissed the hallucination to his mind playing tricks on him, an obvious carry-over from his fascination for the scene at the restaurant. He quickly changed into a comfortable pair of flannel pajamas and crawled into bed, turning his mind over to other, more moderately pleasant thoughts.
I wonder if I’ll see Audrey at church tomorrow. Of course, he knew he would. The real question was would she look in his general direction and at least say hi. Yeah, right.
So much for pleasant. It didn’t matter, anyway. As tired as he was, he was asleep in under ten minutes.