As with many murders where the reason is stated to be 'She refused to see me,' the incident was considered compulsive and unpremeditated in a court of law or by law enforcement. The history of such compulsive and unpremeditated 'She refused to see me' murders is long and varied, with recent examples including a man going to the house of the woman he considered his possession and threatening her with a weapon (April 2021), detonating a homemade bomb (October 2020), or killing the woman and all of her family (too many to cite).
So perhaps it was a little surprising how displeased the man was when the dead woman began to visit him. Logically, the man should’ve been happy that the woman he had so wanted to see, the one who had 'refused' him to the point of putting him into a state of murderous rage, had seemingly changed her mind.
Instead, he was horrified.
The man was alone in the house. The man’s wife, because of her husband’s frequent late nights and sleeping out and general neglect and coldness, had slowly grown more and more hurt, and when she had caught him sneaking in one dawn in clothes she’d never seen before, making nonsense excuses to her before exploding in anger at her, she had packed her bags and gone back to her mother’s home. If the man’s wife had never come back, that would have been the best choice she ever could have made in her life. But that comes later.
Anyway, at this point, the man was left alone at home and had fallen asleep drunk and woken in the middle of the night. His eyes had simply fluttered open.
The man got up and went to the living room. He saw the dead woman standing in the middle of it.
She just stood there and did nothing.
The man screamed. He turned on the light. The woman was gone. The living room was empty.
The man called his wife. She answered, irritated, asking him if he knew what time it was, and he begged her, saying he had done wrong, to come back, that he would do better, anything and everything he thought she might want to hear. The wife, having no idea her husband had murdered someone — nor that the victim of this murder had come to see him, just as he had so very much wanted, albeit when she’d been alive at least — accepted this fervent and rambling apology.
She came back. She shouldn’t have.
The next night, his eyes opened once more. His wife slept soundly next to him. His phone showed the same time as the night before. The man got up carefully so as to not disturb his wife. He didn’t want to get up, but he also wanted to shake off that dreadful feeling of terror.
He came out into the living room. The dead woman stood there once more.
All she did was stand and look toward his direction. The man turned on the living room lights. The dead woman disappeared.
The man came back to the bedroom and lay down next to his wife.
He didn’t fall asleep for a long time.
The next night, and the night after that, his eyes opened in the middle of the night. And he crept into the living room, careful not to disturb his sleeping wife. When he saw the dead woman, he closed his eyes and turned on the living room light. He had tried turning on the light without looking at her, but he could not. Before he could see the light switch, he always met eyes with the woman’s dark and empty gaze first. But the woman would disappear with the light, and the man could go back to bed and stare at the ceiling. The woman’s gaze was always darker than the house was when he woke up at that mysterious hour. Every time he thought of her face, the man felt an inexplicable dread piercing his heart.
But he knew not where such dread came from and would eventually fall asleep in exhaustion.
His wife said one day, 'I had an odd dream . . . There was a woman standing in our living room.'
The man grew tense. 'What woman?'
'I didn’t know her,' his wife murmured, dropping sugar into her coffee. 'Her face was in shadow, but she was definitely standing in our living room. So I asked her who she was and why she was standing there.'
She took a sip. The man waited. She took another sip.
'And then?' the man urged, trying not to sound strangled.
The woman stared into her coffee cup.
'What did the woman say?' the man asked again.
'I don’t know. She didn’t answer.'
'It’s just a dream,' the man said. 'It doesn’t mean anything. Just forget it.'
The woman kept staring into her cup. 'But I keep having it. This dream. And . . .' She stopped. She took a long sip.
'And what?' His voice definitely sounded strangled.
'The woman is coming closer.' She would not meet his eye. 'I keep dreaming the same dream, but every time, the woman keeps getting closer to the bedroom.'
'What?' The man stopped all pretense of eating his breakfast.
His wife lifted her coffee mug again. She lifted her worried gaze to her husband.
'What happens if she enters the bedroom?' she asked. And then, 'There must be something in this house . . .'
As the man forced his hand to bring food up to his mouth and stuff it inside, he finally realised the reason for his nightly anxiety. More than the fact that he had killed the woman or that a dead woman kept coming to see him, the woman was also getting closer and closer to his bedroom.
He had to do something about this.
He went to the woman’s house.
It was as he had left it. The foyer was clean, and the mailbox wasn’t bursting.
When he entered and turned on the light, he was surprised the house was neat and looked lived-in, as if the woman had just stepped outside a moment ago.
She lay there on the bed, which was where he had killed her. Her dead skin had not decayed and was still soft and pale, her hair was still dark and lustrous, and her dead eyes, as they had in the man’s hallucination, stared darkly. It felt as if she would sit up if he called her name. Only the red handprints on her neck attested to her death.
And next to her lay her cat, staring up at him with its green eyes.
'Hey,' said the man to the cat, almost glad to see it. He said in a loud voice, 'Why are you in here? You’re not allowed on the bed.'
The woman had owned the cat since before her marriage. She had loved this cat and had taken good care of it. The man neither liked nor hated this animal. When his friend was alive and the man would visit, he sometimes stroked the cat or played with it. But after his friend died and the widow tried to move on from mourning and their affair, it irked him that the woman cared so much for the cat. He did not want to let on that he felt jealous, and so he pretended to like the cat when she was watching.
He looked at the cat now. The cat also looked at him.
Slowly, so as to not scare the cat into moving or running out of the room, he backed away and closed the door, keeping their gazes locked the whole time.
When he turned around, there stood the woman.
He had never seen her face so up close before. He could not move. He could not make a sound. The woman’s dark gaze froze him into place.
She opened her mouth.
— . . . not . . .
The man couldn’t answer. He could only stand and watch her red mouth and dark eyes as she formed the words.
— . . . Do not . . .
Her face came even closer to his.
—Do not go . . .
Her voice was a whisper now.
—Die with me . . .
Her cold breath brushed past the man’s neck. The man closed his eyes.
He felt something soft against his ankle. It was warm and cushiony and slinked past his right foot, stepped on it, and went over to his left. The man looked down. The dead woman’s cat stared up at him with its green eyes.
The man looked to the side. The dead woman was gone. There was only the late afternoon light weakly filtering into the empty living room.
The man ran out of there. He opened the door only a crack so the cat could not escape, looking down as he did so to make sure, and did not forget to close the door behind him. ...
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