He sat at the desk, his pencil sharpened and unmoving, while his mind wandered through a bedroom on the floor above. For short spurts, it was comforted with memories, until sharp stabs of realization turned the empty room icy and resentful. Searching for rest, his thoughts would surge back to the work before him, anticipating the numbing protection of monotonous numbers, only to be tempted again into pursuit of her—or rather, what he had believed her to be. She had fucked him over. They all had.
Dropping the pencil, his concentration unavoidably reverted to an image of jealousy involving her and the other in a different house somewhere far away. He didn't know what the place looked like or where it might be, only that it existed and that part of him was searching—always searching—and that was inescapable. Rising from his seat, Harry walked out of the room to the refrigerator. Swinging open the door, he gripped a handle of Seagram's with the delicate hands of a father clutching a newborn baby. Unscrewing the top, he poured another glass and swirled the cup clockwise, soothed by the calming sound of swishing liquid. The relief was minor and short in duration. He sighed.
The house emitted the same silent hum that so often accompanies a tombstone or an uninhabited clearing in the calm of night, and in that silent humming all he could hear was her voice—her sadistic, siren mutterings of accusation. She told him of all the problems he had brought with his lack of involvement, his time spent working, and his alcoholic tendencies. Bullshit.
Harry was well versed in the art of denial, and he was at that point of inebriation where nothing was his fault, unwittingly only a glass or four from a state of intoxication in which every wrong committed since the dawn of civilization would rest on his less-than-stable conscience. Slowly and deliberately, he walked back to the desk where he knew no work would get done and sat down.
The room was clean, mostly empty, save for his work desk, a slender incandescent lamp in the corner, and a tall Acacia bureau. His wife had always had a particular love for this bureau, which was why Harry had fought so desperately to keep it in the divorce. Sarah's father had bought the dresser while visiting his brother in Yemen—an incredibly inconvenient and, in Harry's opinion, stupid souvenir. The price for shipping such a bulky piece of furniture had surely been ridiculous, but something about its complex geometric border and the intricately carved mythical creatures that littered the bureau's surface had intrigued Harry's former relative enough to go through with the difficulty. Harry almost chuckled to himself at the thought of how disappointed the old man would be to know his daughter had failed to maintain ownership of this would-be family heirloom.
Basking in his minor victory over Sarah for a moment, Harry stood up and stumbled to the bureau to better examine his prize. Two snake-like dragons lay symmetrically against the horizontal sides of the chest, their eyes meeting at the top of the door, forming a bizarre optical illusion of a bodiless face smiling back at him, as though it too were reveling in his accomplishment. Running his fingers across the smooth definition of the border, Harry reached for the handle of the door, curious about what was inside, as he could not consciously remember looking at the contents of the damned thing. His grasping fingers pulled.
To his dismay, it was locked. Harry found that strange, as he had never seen his wife use a key to gain access to the bureau's contents—though not that he had really paid attention. He would call his lawyer tomorrow to get the key, which he now realized Sarah must have intentionally stolen to spite him. Walking back to his desk to take another sip of his drink, Harry began to sit down when he heard a soft scratching noise behind him.
Startled, he jerked his head around to see nothing but the bureau, exactly as he had left it in the corner of the empty room. Pausing for a moment, not quite sure what he was looking for, Harry stared at the locked door and, after a few more seconds of silence, attributed the perceived sound to a trick of the mind. A trick. An illusion. Just like everything in his life had been up to that point.
He thought of his deceptive wife, who had tainted his ability to feel compassion for anyone but himself and stolen half of his wealth, including his grandmother's wedding ring. Sarah had initially thrown it at him, but once the divorce had evolved from its preliminary symbol of their ending relationship into a very real dispute over the house, savings accounts, and possessions, she had argued for her continued ownership. He remembered how she had stupidly cited Harry's claim on the bureau at the meeting where she took the ring back—an irrelevant observation, as they were well past discussing ownership of furniture and were onto delegating jewelry. She knew he held a minor emotional attachment to the ring, it being his only physical memory of his grandmother, and that succubus had snatched it from him just like everything el—
STTTCHCHC STHCHCH
There it was again. The faint scratching he had imagined earlier, coming from the direction of the bureau. Nearly positive it had really happened this time, Harry stood up and walked back to the corner of the room. He pulled at the door sharply. It stuck just as before. Knocking on the cabinet, he pressed his ear against the wood and heard the echo of a hollow, empty chamber, exactly as would be expected. But something was off.
He turned his gaze back to the outside craftsmanship of the chest and felt uneasy. The dresser suddenly reminded him of a story he had read when he was younger, about a girl named Pandora, and looking upward, he felt that the dragon face's grin looked far less comical and more malevolent than he had remembered only a moment before. Harry didn't like it. He suddenly felt the inexplicable urge to be as far away from the bureau as possible—to leave the house and call his wife—his ex-wife, he meant—and tell her she could have the damned thing, and that he would comply with the restraining order and not return to the house until she came to get it. He walked to the opposite corner of the room and stood there, watching the bureau tensely, trying to decide what to do.
After about two minutes of silence, his heartbeat sank back to normal and his senses came to him. "I'm just imagining things. It's this empty house and that slut, and this whisky probably isn't helping. There's nothing there but a piece of furniture. It is very ugly, though," he reasoned with himself, "and I don't really like it in this room when I'm working."
"It doesn't match," he said out loud, as though he needed to justify to someone that the color scheme was his only reason for wanting to move the bureau. He had slept at his desk the past two nights, unable to bring himself to face his empty bedroom, and he didn't like the idea of sleeping in the same room as this bureau tonight. It hadn't bothered him before, but he wanted it gone. Now.
After taking another drink to calm his nerves, Harry decided he would move the bureau to the basement. It was, after all, a small enough piece of furniture that a sober man of his strength would have been capable of moving it with the utmost care. It would only take a second, and it would really open the room up.
Bending his knees, Harry gripped the bureau from its base and lifted. It was heavier than he had expected, and he dropped it almost instantly. Had he possessed a sober state of mind, Harry would have realized what a poor decision he was making and would have left the bureau as it was. But Harry was in no mood to admit personal inadequacy of any kind, so he repositioned his grip and lifted once more.
Stumbling through the hallway, he reached the basement door, only having to set the bureau down once on his journey. Now came the tricky part.
Harry pulled back the basement door slowly, with the solemnness of one opening a casket, and stepped down onto the first step of the staircase. Holding one hand below the bureau, he used the other to guide the object into a controlled slide downward into the crypt. He took a step backward, walking gently and deliberately. Then another. Then another. As his foot met the sixth step on the staircase, he heard it for the last time: the scratching noise, now louder than ever before, clearly coming from the center of the bureau.
Panicking, Harry's moving foot dropped an inch past the step it was intended to land on, throwing his balance off and sending him into a free fall. Instinctually jolting upward, Harry's unfortunate hand desperately grasped at the only thing it could reach—the knob of the bureau's previously inaccessible door. For some perplexing reason—perhaps the new leverage induced by the angle of Harry's arm or the frantic force with which he pulled—the door swung open, and for a second he glimpsed the fiend.
Harry's face paled as he stared into the ghostly eyes of the wicked, impish creature that had caused all of his misery. Emitting a distant, silent scream, Harry fell backward from the stairs onto the dark, unfinished basement floor; and as the bureau tumbled after him, the dull crunch of its wood against his ribs was drowned out by a sharp, piercing shatter. Nineteen shards of glass lay next to the opened dresser door—the only remnants of his demon in the bureau.