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"The high today got down to 89, and thanks to an incoming coldfront, tomorrow should come to 85. Also thanks to this front, we should have storms through the rest of this week..."

The wolf looks up from his book at the TV, where the weatherman did his usual motions in front of a large map. It was nice out yesterday, he thinks, only half-listening. Even nicer to get a little cooler. He turns back to his book: "Upon retiring, he had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror..."

"...And lows this week are expected to hover around the mid-60's, so don't forget a jacket when you leave the house."

"Hmph." He turns the page. Onscreen, the camera flicks back to the pair of news reporters from which it had switched a few moments ago.

"Actually, if you live in the lake area, authorities are saying don't go outside at all. A string of murders is currently being investigated, where all of the victims have been found dumped into the lake..."

He reaches for the remote and turns the TV off, then closes his book and stands. The world can be such a dark place, can't it? It is what it is, though, and things would certainly be very boring otherwise. He tucks the book under his arm and passes through the kitchen on his way to the garage, not forgetting to grab a jacket as well as his car keys. As most Mondays, work today was going to be slow.

~ ~ ~

It's not until early evening when he finally gets back, having had to run a few errands he had forgotten over the weekend. Tired, he pops something into the microwave and then heads into the living room to plop down onto the couch, but - lifts his nose to the air and sniffs. Did he leave a window open this morning...? A quick scan around the room verifies that he did, indeed, one over by the TV. He hardly ever opened windows... but, upon closer inspection, he finds the screen of the window to be loose and bent in one corner. That's right; he had gotten to work on replacing that screen at the start of the weekend, but must never have finished.

The microwave beeps just as he finishes closing the window. He had a nice, quiet evening of doing nothing ahead of him, apart from eating, relaxing in front of the television, and reading, maybe. Today had gone by slowly, as Mondays had a tendency to do, and already can he feel the alluring waves of sleepiness course through his body. Bedtime early tonight.

When he settles back in the living room after retrieving his meal from the microwave, something else seems off. It might just be the tension of the day and the annoyance of how long it took to get home weighing down on him, but there's something here that doesn't feel right. The TV is off; overhead light is also off, as the positioning of the windows in this room allows for sunlight to suffice for another hour or so; Sunday's newspaper remains on the table, opened to the back side of the comics page; next to that, an almost-empty glass of water. Nothing out of the ordinary. He turns on the TV and sits back to eat his dinner, and thankfully, the feeling passes after some time - and then, fifteen or so minutes into a new episode of one of his TV shows, he realizes that there is no coaster under the water glass. "You're so scatterbrained," his mother used to tell him, "forgetting about the big things and worrying about the little things." She always got on to him for fretting over where the best place was to hide the spare house key outside, and then forgetting to lock the door when he left the house. He can't help it, though; those water rings are damn hard to remove.

He has gotten over that forgetfulness, though. Most of the time. Every now and then, he'll go to get the mail after returning from work, and find that he left the front door unlocked from when he went to get the mail the previous day. After finishing his dinner, he realizes that today is another of those days, and makes an effort of remembering to lock it on his way back in.

He casts one more glance into the living room before retiring to his bed to read for the rest of the night, and sees that he forgot to put the glass of water away. Oh well - not like it's going anywhere.

~ ~ ~

The next morning, his alarm doesn't go off, thanks to him forgetting to turn it on the night before. He wakes up on his own only thirty minutes later, thank God, but that's thirty minutes to his morning lost; no breakfast or relaxing before work. In a bit of a rush to get things done before he becomes late, he zip up his pants on the way through the kitchen - and then notices that he doesn't have his keys on him. A look into the car's window verifies where they are, and he curses under his breath. No big deal, though; this has happened several times in the past, and in case it ever happens again, he started keeping a keyring with both the housekey and the car key in the same drawer, and he never takes or removes just one, just in case. Besides, today, he doesn't have the time to deal with that.

Upon opening that drawer, though, to his concern, he finds that one of those keys is missing - the house key. This worries him, yes, but again, he doesn't have the time, so he swallows the wave of unease this discovery brings and heads out the door. Damn his own irresponsibility. His mother had always warned him about that.

It doesn't bother him now, but when he pulls out of the driveway, he sees the window of the living room - the one with the bent screen - standing open.

~ ~ ~

"Godammit."

After getting home from work that day, the wolf stands at his emergency drawer in the kitchen, feeling around at the back for wherever the house key could have gotten to. Doubtful that he actually had taken it off, for he very well knows the importance of its being there, and had put quite a bit of effort into working that into his brain... but, just as doubtful that it had fallen off.

Muttering to himself, he crosses the room and heads for the front door to get the other spare key from outside, pushed into the planter at the little paper flag that read "Basil". When he comes back in, he almost bangs his shoulder on the open door of the side closet in the entry way, and so closes it with his foot. First the window, now the key... what's next? Will he leave the oven on, or the back door standing wide open, or what?

As if today hasn't already been long enough. He works the key onto the ring and tosses it into the drawer, which he shuts with a bump from his hip, and then heads into the living room to begin his daily ritual of unwinding. The couch sighs underneath his weight, and he reaches over to the arm to grab the remote, where he left it last night... except, it's not there. Maybe he hadn't left it there. A quick look around brings him to find it on the table, resting atop Sunday's comics page, next to which a mug of what looks to be cold coffee sits. The TV turns on with a click, back to the same news channel he had it on... yesterday morning.

The thought of going into the bedroom to grab his book enters his head, but ultimately, he decides against it, and then realizes he still has to shut the window. This time, he remembers to lock it, and remains there for moment looking outside, just... thinking. Things had been a little weird for a while: a few days ago, he woke up with his lamp turned off, even though he clearly remembered leaving it on just before going to sleep in order to read, and couldn't recall ever turning it off; and then there was how he had once found a plate, glass, and set of silverware at the dinner table after returning from the store, despite how he only ever ate on the couch; and then today, finding the window open after closing it yesterday, as well as the missing key...

Not that any of these are particularly out of the ordinary, though - just the products of a scatterbrained and forgetful mind. What stumps him, though, as he turns back around, is the mug on the table. Last night... last night, he had left the glass of water there, and today, it's gone, in its place that coffee. He doesn't like coffee. Hell, he doesn't even have any coffee around the house. That, he doesn't have an explanation for.

Trying not to let it bother him too much, he takes the mug into the kitchen and, upon returning, checks the latches of the window to be sure that he had actually locked it. There's a reasonable explanation for the mug: he used to wake up in the middle of the night and do things that he had absolutely no recollection of come morning, based on claims from his brother, who had a tendency to stay up late. Still, though - coffee? The last thing he wants to worry about right now is the off-chance that some stupid kid managed to get a hold of his house key.

He lay down on the couch and closes his eyes, allowing the exhaustion of the day's problems to weigh down on him, the relief of finally being home like a warm blanket...

~ ~ ~

It's dark outside when he wakes up, and a warm draft washes in over him from the next room. The TV is turned off, as the overhead light is, too, so he has little to go by to see before his eyes adjust. The darkness of early evening is further deepened by a smooth, steady pattering of rain outside. The wolf stands, stretches, pops his neck, and looks out the window: the sickly yellow-orange glow of a few streetlamps is all he can see through the swaying leaves of the tree outside and the sheet of rain. Wonderful.

Always has the rain appealed to him, ever since he was a young pup. There's just something... calming, something relaxing about the endless gentle drumming of the drops, about the soft grey-green tone of light the clouds seem to cast, about the coolness, the moisture, the scent, the façade of loneliness. The house has taken on a somber, eerie quality, what little light that comes in through the windows only reaching so far before melding back into black with the other darker parts of the house, but it's a pleasant sort of eerie.

But, then, as the wolf stands at the mouth of the living room, he frowns. Something's not quite right. Here, he can feel that warm draft quite a bit stronger, as if he left another window open. He can feel a few stray drops of rain against the backs of his ankles, spattering up from the tile floor...

The front door is open.

By now the floormat is soaked with the rain, and the floor a good three or four inches past its edge stands an unbroken puddle. Immediately feeling his heart drop, the wolf steps over the collection of rainwater to close the door and lock it.

Could it have been the wind? Perhaps he hadn't closed the door as tightly as he thought he did whenever he came in last. No, no, that was stupid; if he had closed it at all, no simple wind could open it. Actually, now that he thinks about it, he can't remember ever locking it...

On these thoughts, he holds his breath and stands still, paw on the knob, trying to hear whoever it was that had made their way into the house - but, the continuing rain offers no chance or mercy, and he gives up. His paw shakes as he removes it from the door; he clenches it tight in an attempt to keep this under control. What would his parents do in this situation? What would his brother do? His mind fleeted back to one event in his childhood: a noise outside had jarred him from his sleep, and when he rolled over and looked out the window, he found the face of someone with a baseball bat poised to shatter that window grinning back at him. Oh, how he had been terrified of such a thing for quite some time afterwards, keeping both the blinds close and curtains drawn shut, so that he wouldn't be able to see if there was anything out there.

Only now can he see the irony in doing that.

A quick look back into the living room, even upon finding it, thankfully, empty, does little to soothe his nerves and his heart. From here, he can also see the dining room, and then part of the kitchen, hellishly dark. To turn on any lights would most likely draw attention to himself - given that someone really is in the house - and that could only end badly. As he tries so, so hard to step quietly and keep his claws from clicking on the floor, more memories from his child, of his being absolutely terrified of the dark, especially following the window incident, come back to surface, and the notion of just leaving the house and calling the police comes to him.

His eyes, now fully adjusted to the darkness, show him nobody in the kitchen, and nothing out of the ordinary. The door leading to the garage remains closed, and from here, he can just barely make out the turned latch above the knob, reassuring him that it is still locked.

Leave it to him and his damned irresponsibility, again. Just like him for this to happen. Cautiously, quietly, he peers down the hall leading to his bedroom, the shadows so thick they seem almost solid. Thank God for the carpeted floors in this part of the house, he thinks, for cushioning and quieting his footsteps. No odd shadows are cast into the hall from windows in rooms whose doors have been left open, and he can't smell anything strange... well, he can't smell much of anything at all underneath the cloying scent of the rain. This only unsettles him further.

About halfway down the hall and seriously considering leaving the house and spending the night in a hotel, he hears a loud noise behind him - and reaches it just in time to see the lock of the front door turn to locked, from the outside. He can't see anything through the darkness and the rain through the window when he gets to it, and just as soon as he does, he feels an impending dread, a powerful want to be anywhere but close to a window. The television has been turned on since he left the room to check the hallway, and it flicks back and forth, back and forth between little pieces of whatever channel it's turned to and static, thanks to the storm's ravaging of the wolf's satellite service. At least now he knows where the emergency house key went. There's no way he'd be able to get a hold of a locksmith over the phone in this weather - and just as unlikely that he'd leave his house to find one...

There's a spare bedroom at the end of the hallway, one that he uses for storage - mainly of books, furniture he hadn't been able to sell, pictures he couldn't find a place to hang, that sort of thing - that has no windows save for a small one that a feral squirrel would have trouble fitting through, as well as a door that locks from the inside.

Jumping at every crack of thunder and any other noises, he makes his way towards that room, not even bothering to turn the TV back off. Perhaps tonight is not the night to finish the Lovecraft collection he has been reading.

~ ~ ~

He drifts in and out of an uneasy sleep in that room until morning, his waking hours interrupted with fits of powerful panic and terror. The pads of his feet hurt from his endless pacing around the room and stepping on sharp little things that time has scattered off the shelves and furniture to the floor, pins and staples and pens and pencils and what all else. Every now and then he pauses with an ear pressed to the locked door, listening for something - for anything - but afraid of what he might hear.

By the time morning comes, his paranoia has receded quite a bit, and he works up the courage to open the door. How silly it seems to lock himself away because someone was in his house - _his_house! There are knives in the kitchen; he has a cell phone. He'll call someone after work today, after this storm, to come and change his locks... and until then, he'll just have to keep an eye out, get less sleep for a few days. No big deal.

No big deal.

An hour before he has to leave for work, he warily goes around the house. The television is still off, all the doors still closed... but, in the kitchen, a cupboard stands open and a neglected bowl of something sits on the table. The thought of that - of some stranger entering his house and then staying while he was elsewhere, while he could have been asleep, could have been vulnerable - causes his heart to drop once more. As a child he slept with a nightlight to dispel phantom figures conjured from the shadows, given life by his imagination - nightmares while he lay awake, seeing the outlines of someone in the corner watching only, only to disappear with the shedding of light...

Perhaps those fears weren't so irrational after all. Maybe, even as an adult, they still aren't.

Today, after all of this, he's actually eager to go into work, to get away from this and be somewhere he's not alone, somewhere there are other people. Today, he'll go in an hour early.

~ ~ ~

The nearest locksmith he can find after work is closed - dammit. The rest of the drive home is spent in a taut and bitter mood, and upon pulling up to each red light or stop sign, he finds that he has to tug his claws out of the protective cover of his steering wheel.

The storm still carries on, heedless of the preferences of anyone down below. Grey earth, grey sky, grey rain, grey mood. Against comes the thought of spending the night in a hotel, anywhere but home, reinforced by the sight of his living room curtains being pulled all the way open as he pulls up into the driveway. As is suspected, the front door is unlocked, and even stands a few inches open; he hesitates and waits there for a few long seconds, torn. No sounds come from inside the house, though, so he puts a shoulder to the door, pushes it open, cautiously steps inside...

...and then, he sees all of the wall-hung pictures have been turned upside-down, some with their glass broken. All the photos of his family, of Mom and Dad, his brother, his cousins; the pictures from his childhood; memories from past vacations... in a large frame at the center of it all is something that causes his breath to catch in his throat. It's not a picture he had taken, no, but a new one: a photo of him, asleep, taken from directly above and a little to the side of his bed. The bright yellow timestamp in the corner, probably left there on purpose, glares at him amidst the darkness of the photo: it reads two days ago, a little after two in the morning.

Deeply disturbed, he fumbles at the back of the frame to remove it - only to have another one flutter out between his fingers when he does. This one Is dated one day before the other, when all this began with the disappearance of his house key, and shows a different view of him sleeping: this time, with the paw of the photographer holding a kitchen knife against his neck.

He glances around the room, trying to figure out what each nondescript shadow in the gloom of the rain is. As he stands there, silent, a flash of lightning every now and then illuminates everything in view of the window - and then, of course, causes him to jump and gasp with the accompanying thunder.

The photos flit to the ground from his opened paw, alongside the frame. Have to get out, he tells himself; have to get out. But where can he go? He made an effort of moving far away from his family when he decided it was time to get his own place, so they're out of the question; again, always a hotel, but how would he get his things...? Who's to say that his things will still be here when he returns? Everything could -

A rather loud boom of thunder startles him out of his thoughts. You're overthinking this, he tells himself. All he has to do is call the police, and let them handle things. That's it. He reaches into his pocket for his phone... only to find it, of course, not there. Dammit. Even then, the storm would not have permitted him to reach anybody...

Further in the house, a door slams; the wolf instinctively avoids going down that hall and, instead, makes his way into the kitchen. Here, he finds all of the drawers and cupboards opened, and their contents removed and carefully stacked and arranged atop the counter, the large kitchen knife from the photo standing out. The rain drums on and on and on, endless, unceasing, relentless, grinding on his nerves, unsettling him. Now, fears from his childhood rush back upon him in a heavy torrent, backed by all the other things of stress and nervousness: the pictures, the things from the cupboards, the television, last night's events, the very knowledge of someone having access to his house and being in it, being by his bed while he slept, with full opportunity and ability to end his life right there, even making an effort to prove this to him.

Another door slams down the hallway, this one closer than the other. He's messing with me. The wolf shrinks back into the corner of the room, between the refrigerator and the door to the garage. Look at him, cowering like... like prey, to an adversary he can't even see yet. His brother always told him to grow a backbone and get over his fear of being hurt during their little play-fights - and, now, he can't bear to go get the knife from the counter because he's terrified of whoever it is that lurks down the hall, toying with him. Damn the carpeted floors in the hallway - keeping him from hearing the footsteps of this shadow, this creature... all he has to go off of is the sounds that he is wanted to hear.

He is terrified.

One time in the past during summer break off from school, he and his brother were in the living room playing video games, as they had a tendency to do. While his brother was busy setting things up, he went into the kitchen to get a drink of water. When there, though, he noticed that the light of the back porch was on - and that was the motion-detector light; though, it being night with many creatures running around, he paid it little mind, and pushed it from his head. On his way back into the living room, though, that light flicked on again, and he heard the distinctive quiet tapping of footsteps on the boards of the porch. Silently, with a wave of his paw, he motioned is brother over; and, sure enough, when they each worked to have a good vantage point out of the kitchen window, the form of someone obscured by the shroud of night. This person worked their way around the whole house, with the wolf and his brother following from inside; each time a door to outside was tried, they huddled close together, and could do nothing but hope that they had remembered to lock all of the doors.

Eventually, the stranger, finding no easy way in and either being unwilling to break in or having noticed the two young wolves watching him from inside, left. A small thing, yes, but absolutely terrifying at the time. For the next week or so, neither of the brothers left their rooms late at night.

In the first room down the hall, the lick flicks on. A shadow, projected on the other wall, moves around inside the room ,its presence further sharpened by the occasional flash of lightning. All the fears from the wolf's childhood, he realizes, have become manifest in this night: all the dread brought about from unfortunate times in his past...

The light flicks back off, and then he just barely sees the form of that person making its way toward the front door. It opens, stands open for a short time - magnifying the horrible pattering of the rain - and then closes... and locks. The wolf remains in the corner for quite some time after, trying to steady his breathing and heart rate. You're okay, he tells himself, you're okay. His chest feels as if it is going to burst from the pounding of his heart, but eventually - eventually - that returns to normal. Warily, he stands, and makes his way back across the kitchen, doing his best to ignore the cups stacked atop one another, and that vile knife glaring at him. Every noise startles him, from the trees outside swaying in the breeze and under the cold fingers of the rain, to the far-off growling of the thunder, to his own mistakes of bumping against chairs or walls or tables.

He shouldn't be this scared. He realizes that, he knows that. Maybe if he had been able to swallow his pride and accept his brother's offer of living together for a while, this wouldn't have happened.

There's something about being alone that makes fear that much sharper.

The intruder has left, he has to remind himself again and again. This is my house. Tomorrow, certainly, he'll get his locks changed - but, until then, what can he do? I am alone. I am alone.

In the first room down the hall, he turns on the light and then pauses, upon seeing something on the bed. It's a sheet of paper, folded over on itself. Nervously, warily, he makes his way over to it - this seems to be the only thing changed in the room. The paper is nothing special, simple white printer paper, probably from the next room; he opens it with a held breath and reads, in small, neat handwriting:

"you are not alone"

Out of the corner of his eye, he notices the front door stands open and sways slowly, as if it has been open for a few moments. Then - a noise behind him, and he feels a rope wrap around his neck.