Page 11 of Torment

3

Jolie

I stared,unblinking, at the note on my fridge.

I’m going to get you, you nasty little bitch. You need to be punished, and you know it. But I won’t take you yet. I’ll just let you know I’m here. Watching. Waiting. Always.

I haven’t decided exactly how long I’ll play with you yet, but you should know it’s coming.

Soon.

The note wasn’t there when I went to bed just after midnight. It was Sunday today, which meant I’d woken up early for my weekly hike out at Maurepas Swamp, and it was currently only five-thirty. That meant at some point in the last five and a half hours, someone had gotten into my apartment and left the threatening note while I slept.

I knew exactly who it was, too.

Fuming, I snatched the note off the fridge and stomped over to the apartment across from me. After I’d hammered on the door for a solid five minutes, it finally opened. Old Mr. Bennett poked his head out, eyes bleary with sleep. “Jo, what the hell are you doing? It’s the fucking middle of the night.”

Incensed, I held the piece of paper up to his face. “You think this is okay?” I said. “Because it’s not. I’ve let you get away with this shit for way too long, and this time I’m calling the police!”

He snatched the note from me and scanned it, rheumy eyes narrowing. “You think I left this?”

“Well, you’ve left enough nasty notes on the bulletin board over the last eight months to make you the prime suspect,” I said, my voice dripping with condescension.

He held his palms up. “I wrote some stuff about you hijacking my Wi-Fi a while back, but that’s it.”

I snorted. “Bullshit. I’ve been getting these threatening notes for weeks now. Under my wipers, in my mailbox, and now on my fridge. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you, I didn’t use your Wi-Fi! Even if I did, these threats are taking it way too far!”

Mr. Bennett sighed. “I know you didn’t steal my internet. I found out it was the young man in the apartment downstairs who was using my connection. That’s why I stopped bothering you about it.”

I stared at him open-mouthed.

He narrowed his eyes and continued. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going back to bed.”

He slammed the door in my face. A chill went through my blood as I tiptoed back into my apartment. This whole time, I thought the notes I’d been receiving were from Mr. Bennett. It freaked me out, but not to the point where I feared for my life. I thought he was just a crazy old bastard trying to get a rise out of me.

Now I wasn’t so sure that I didn’t have to worry about my life. Somehow, I had attracted a bona fide stalker.

My mind whirled through all the possibilities of who could be doing this to me. At the hotel job I had before starting at the library two weeks ago, there was a guy who had a crush on me. He was kinda weird, but he didn’t seem like the type who would stalk me now that I was no longer working there. I couldn’t think of anyone else whose skin I might have gotten under in recent times, either.

Unless it really was Mr. Bennett, and he was pulling some sort of long con on me.

With a sigh, I wiped my tired eyes and put on a pot of coffee while I racked my brain for ideas. Eventually, I remembered a wild story I once overheard someone telling their friend in a café. Apparently some guy had appealed to an online message board for help, saying he was sure his landlord was entering his house and threatening him. He thought this because every morning, he would wake up to find creepy notes on his study desk. There were no signs of breaking and entering, and apart from him, the landlord was the only one with a key.

Before he went and accused the guy of anything, he wanted solid proof, so he asked the people on the forum what he could do to obtain that. Someone suggested that it might not be the landlord after all. They told him to get a carbon monoxide detector.

He did, and it turned out the levels were dangerously high, especially in his study. Every time he went in there to read and write, the carbon monoxide began to seriously affect his brain, and he wound up writing the crazy notes himself. The handwriting looked different to his usual writing because it was so jerky and stilted, given his state of mind at the time. But it was him the whole time, essentially stalking himself.

If a random internet stranger hadn’t told him to get himself checked out, he might’ve suffered serious complications from the near-constant exposure to the gas.

So maybe that was it. There could be a gas leak in my apartment, and I could be going insane and writing the notes myself whenever I was in the building.

I put my coffee mug down and padded over to the lounge room to look at a circular white device on the ceiling. When I first moved into the apartment, the owners told me that they were required by a particular building code to install a CO detector in each apartment. They said that as long as the light on it was green and not flashing, I didn’t have a problem.

I peered upward. The light on the white device was solid green.

My shoulders slumped. Shit. I wasn’t being driven mad by gas, so that meant I actually had a real-life stalker. But who?

I went and double-checked the locks on my doors and windows, and then I headed over to check my handbag, where I kept a bottle of mace and a knife stashed in the side pocket. I might’ve spent my formative years in an underground hole, tucked away from the rest of the world, but that didn’t make me naïve. I carried self-defense items with me wherever I went. I’d even used the mace once, on a would-be mugger who tried to get Lauren and me as we went for a jog through a park during an overly-ambitious fitness stage we both went through.

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