Malice

One day as I was walking to my house from work, I came across someone knocking at my door. From the sidewalk, I asked if there was anything he needed. He said he needed my wife in a very grainy voice, almost like there was a complete lack of saliva in his mouth. I told him that I lived there as well and I could help with any thing he needed. At this time of night, my wife was probably sleeping. He said, “You don’t understand, I don’t want to talk to her.” You could here the annoyance level rising in his voice. He did not want to talk over a cup of coffee, he wanted something else, and something he could not have. I told him that whatever he needed could wait so he left and I went about my night.

I woke up that morning to an odd lonely feeling; I opened my eyes to see that my wife was not there, I called around the house to see if she just woke up early to make me breakfast like she sometimes does. She was not there. Both of our cars were in the driveway so I knew she didn’t go anywhere, at least not alone. I decided to call her cell to see if she had it, she did not, it was on her dresser. One thing that was different was her voicemail, it was changed to say “Hey, I am going to be gone for a few weeks, do not worry!” It seemed kind of forced though. I decided to just calm down, I was just being paranoid because the voice of reason was away. The only thing that scared me at this point was why she did not have here phone if she went to the trouble of changing here voicemail.

The next night I came home to the same man at my door. I told him that my wife was not there. He said, “No, she is here, she has been. You do not know your wife.” At this point I was freaking out, I called the police. The man thoroughly expressed that he meant no immediate harm but you could hear by his grainy, voice that screamed the word malice. He told me that I knew his name. As a reflex I shouted, “Malice,” a little louder than I intended. He said it was. I asked why he had such a dark name and all he said was, “When I was little, my parents thought something was wrong with me.” He would not tell me why.

When the police arrived, they almost instantly dismissed that there was a strange man on my door step and said that they wanted to search my house. I said yes but I found it rather strange when they seemed to ignore the man following us in to search my house. Even when I brought it up they ignored it, almost as if he had authority over them. In the total darkness and silence of my house, we all started hearing a scratch. A dragging noise of nails on wood. We found that it was coming from the attic. We went in expecting to find someone or something there but we just heard it more coming from deep inside the attic. An officer turned on his flash light and started looking around. There was a smaller door up there, it looked like a regular closet like the one my wife and I have in our bedroom. The officer opened it and it abruptly stopped. To all or our surprise, it was full with clothes. Not our clothes but clothes none the less. The officer pulled back the clothes. “Ahhhh!” was all I remember saying after I saw my wife standing there looking like she had been there for years, we felt her heart beat but she would not move out of here position. When the officer called for an ambulance, his phone stopped working right before he said the address of our house. What we found odd was that she was pointing at nothing. Then it hit us. That was where Malice was standing moments before. Then it actually hit us, a pan from the kitchen did when Malice returned to hit us with it.

After that, all I remembered was waking up with my wife in bed with the clock saying that it was yesterday. After that, my wife has never been the same. Never her full self. Never always there.