As I left my house this afternoon, I noticed some footprints in the snow. Always the reflective type, they inspired me to ponder some of life’s deepest questions — such as, “am I going to be brutally murdered in my bed tonight?”
Let me backtrack.
I had come home from work, gone for an orc-run, and returned, all without seeing the footprints. After a shower and an excruciatingly drawn-out session of nail-clipping, I went out the door, rosy cheeked and whistling, only to be stopped abruptly by the unfamiliar...and recently made...tracks in the snow.
They were made by someone wearing very ugly shoes.
A man-sized someone.
They had completely flat soles and were shaped like nearly perfect ovals. They were distinctive. They were hideous.
They were leading straight up my driveway.
Aghast, I tracked the prints. They went to the garage door, paused, turned around, and disappeared. After crossing myself fervently and whispering “aliens?” with a paranoid glance at the sky, I found that the footprints did lead out of my driveway again, but being on a packed tire track, were much harder to spot. I laughed unconvincingly, telling myself it must have been a neighbor, and then tried for the next hour and a half to think of a logical reason for anyone, neighbor or otherwise, to have walked up and down my driveway. I could not.
Returning home, I began to follow the tracks, hoping they would lead to whatever house had originally spawned them, only to be felled to the ground by a fresh wave of horror.
The footprints led not only into my driveway, but into the yard on the other side of my house as well! They wandered aimlessly through the deep snow, detouring into the neighbors’ yard before making a neat triangle into mine, near my bedroom window, then blundering back onto the sidewalk and up my driveway.
Obviously someone was casing the house.
I thought back over the last three hours and felt a cold tingling in my spine when I remembered walking into my bedroom after the shower in only my skivvies. Improbable as it was, the killer had no doubt seen me through the slits in the blinds and stumbled closer, trying to catch a better glimpse of his next pale and defenseless victim.
Trembling, I began to dial the police.
Then I remembered that I don’t have such a good rapport with the police. I decided to do some sleuthing on my own before getting the cops involved.
After grabbing my fedora and a pack of cigars and a lazy New York accent, I followed the footprints, this time in the other direction. I patted my overcoat pocket, warm with the thought that my good friend (he’s small, loud, and shiny, and always makes a good argument) was along for the ride. Warm with a slug of bourbon, too. Because I think that’s what detectives drink? Straight, of course. (That means without ice and stuff mixed in. I think.)
Okay, okay.
To be honest, I was scared out of my mind and trembling with terror and ugly crying. And I was totally alone and unfortified and unfedora-ed and unarmed and I had to pee.
But back to the story.
The footprints led me on, on, always and ever on, through the snow and the dark and the storm and....into my neighbors’ backyard! And into the next neighbors’ yard! And the next and the next! Eyes dilated, I fumbled for my phone, deciding to let the police in on the case anyway, so they’d have time to step in before the biggest, gruesomest, Americanest massacre since the California Genocide could occur. The footprints led all the way around the block! Going up to each house, breaking menacingly through the snowdrifts or treading invisibly on the shoveled pavement, I could feel their presence.
It was the presence of evil.
I opened my mouth to scream, to alert the neighbors, all snug at their dinner tables, little dreaming of what terrors awaited them in the dark hours of the morning................
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..
...
....
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Then I noticed that in every case, the footprints led undeviatingly to the meter box on the side of each house, and straight back again.
I slipped my phone into my pocket and wafted back to my house, propelled by equal measures of embarrassment and joy, leaving only two sets of footprints...one, huge, waterproof, practical, and one small and trembling...to tell the tale.
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