Can I Come Inside?

Sometimes they come in the form of a lost child, other times, they come looking for a phone because their car broke down, but they always ask the same question.

“Can I come inside? It won’t take long.”

I first met one when I was a child. I was home alone, my mother having gone to the store for an hour or so, and a woman holding a baby knocked on the door. She told me that her car broke down and that she needed to call her husband. It was hot outside – really hot – and I remember thinking it was weird that the baby was bundled up in a blanket and not crying, and even stranger still that I didn’t see any car outside.

I told her no, and closed the door. She didn’t knock again.

Although I wouldn’t make the connection until nearly a decade later, I heard a story on the news that evening of a family disappearing from their home. There were no signs of a struggle, no signs of violent entry, and no signs of packing. They had simply just vanished.

Yesterday, I had a little boy come to my door. He was crying and told me he lost his mom and needed to come inside. He was about six perhaps, but when I asked him where he lived, he didn’t respond. He just said. “Please can I come inside? It won’t take long.”

That sentence sparked a connection in my brain that took me back to when I was a child and the woman with the baby, and the disappearance of the family down the street. Word for word, he’d said the exact same thing she had: Can I come inside? It won’t take long.

Against my better judgement, I told him no and closed the door. There were other houses he could go to – mine is by far not the only house on the street – but something inside the instinctual part of my brain told me that I needed to close the door.

An hour ago, on the news, I watched a story about a family that had seemingly disappeared from their home. Their car was still in the driveway, there was no sign of struggle or forced entry. The front door was left open and the phone was off the hook. The only clue the police had to go on was a hastily written message in the corner of the wall, hidden by a table that looked like it had been pushed there in a hurry. It read: DON’T LET THEM INSIDE. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Manchester

The last house I burglarized was three years ago.  I’d been doing it for nearly a decade before that house, and was extremely talented in getting in and out without ever being detected.  I would spend weeks picking my target, making sure it was nobody I could have ever crossed paths with, and then weeks after that casing the house and learning everything I could.  When I finally decided to make my move, there was no closet I didn’t know about, no dog I hadn’t befriended in the yard, and no camera whose blind spot I couldn’t exploit. This house was the home of Winston and Mary Manchester, a couple in their mid-eighties who inherited their wealth after the death of Mary’s parents.  Her father was a businessman with questionable ethics who often dealt in off-shore accounting, and although the whole sum of what he left to his only daughter is unknown to anyone but the Manchesters, their estimated worth was in the hundreds of millions, even after all these years.  They spent the first twent
Read more

Open the Airlock

The surface of the moon was a dull, dusty gray, but the view from the lander window was still the most beautiful thing I had seen in my life.  The earth shone brightly in the distance on a canvas of pure black, surrounded by legions of stars.  I and my four other crewmates had just landed on the moon’s surface a few hours ago, cementing ourselves in the history books alongside only twelve others who had witnessed the same majesty in person. “Crazy, isn’t it?” a voice asked from behind me.  I turned, knowing well the voice of the man whom I had worked closely with for the past two years in preparation for this mission.  It was Andrew Ratcliffe, the crew’s geological specialist. “I can hardly believe it,” I said breathlessly.  “I’m looking at it with my own eyes, and even still I can’t believe we’re here.” “Decades of staring up here wondering what it looks like will do that,” another voice chimed in - this one belonging to Diana Figueroa, our mechanical engineer.  “Doesn’t seem real.” T
Read more

My Daughter Who Went Missing Just Showed Up On My Doorstep (Sarah)

1 My wife and I had just sat down to dinner when we were interrupted first by the sound of the front doorknob twisting, then by three loud knocks. I stood up from the table and went to the front door, wondering who would have tried the knob first before knocking - my brother maybe, but it was a little late for a visit from him on a weeknight. The sound of the rainstorm outside grew as I opened the door. When I saw her standing on the porch, covered in rain and mud, my heart nearly leapt out of my chest. “Hi daddy,” Sarah said. The way her eyes and nose were scrunched up told me she was crying, even though the rain washed away her tears the second they fell from her eyes. “Can I come inside? It’s so cold.” I heard something glass shatter in the kitchen, then rushed footsteps. I grabbed my daughter in a tight embrace and began to sob. “Oh my god. You’re home,” I said. Three years ago we had reported our daughter missing. We t
Read more