The Silent Man

Tammy looked at the window of her living room that was smashed, sharp pieces of broken glass lying piled up on the window sill and scattered over her sitting room carpet and her heart leapt into her mouth.
"How could that have happened?", she wondered, "Without me hearing it?".
The window hadn't been broken when she'd come into the sitting room earlier, she was sure of it.
She remembered, after coming out of the shower and putting on her dressing gown, coming into the living room and, while drying her hair with a towel, looking out through the window at the garden beyond, thinking about how her hedges needed trimming.
Then she'd just gone into the kitchen, hadn't she, and made tea?  Surely, if the window had been broken while she was in the kitchen, she would have heard it and, from the look of it, all the glass had been broken out of the frame as if some one had slowly struck every part of it with a hammer.
"How is that possible?", she thought.
And if someone had broken the window, where were they now? Were they inside her house?
She looked round about the room and then another thing caught her eye that filled her with panic.
The door. The door of the room was shut. She'd left it open. Now thats something she was certain of, that the door had been open.
She leant against the back of her couch, feeling weakened by it all, her head racing to make sense of it.
"Whats going on?", she thought.
But then she remembered something, something from the day before that burst from her memory to the front of her mind.
She'd been talking to the man who lived next door, she remembered. Well, not really talking. He'd been talking and she'd just been pretending to listen, watching his lips move but thinking about things at work but now she remembered she had asked him why it was she couldn't hear his lawn mower. He'd been visibly mowing his lawn but without making a sound.
"Wow", she'd said, smiling to him over the garden fence, "Your lawn mowers very quiet. How do you get it to be so quiet".
But then he'd started talking about some science thing he'd been experimenting on in his shed and her brain had just switched off, infact she'd just wished the conversation could end but he kept on talking about something to do with 'dissipating sound waves'. He'd said he had some kind of machine that stopped noise; that made things quiet, she was sure thats what he'd said.
"Oh, if only I'd been paying attention", she thought.
But then, looking up she noticed the door to her living room was wide open again.
She rushed to grab hold of poker from her fire place and lifted it over her head.
"I'll phone the police", she thought, "I won't tell them about the silence. That would just make me sound crazy. I'll say I wasn't in the room when the window broke; that I heard it break and that I think someones in my house because I heard them moving about".
She felt her mobile phone vibrate in the pocket of her dressing gown and reaching into it with her free hand she grabbed the phone and pressed the button to answer the call, placing its reciever to her ear.
"Hello", she said, warily.
"Hello Tammy", she heard her mother say on the other end of the phone.
"Oh, Mum. Mum, I can't talk to you now", she said in a whisper
"Why not?", asked her Mother, sounding disappointed.
"Because I have to phone the p -".
But then suddenly, its as if someone had snatched away her voice. Her lips and tongue were still moving but she couldn't hear the sound of her voice.
"Mum, mum. Can you hear me?" , she tried to say as if the call had just been cut off but ofcourse her mother couldn't hear her because she couldn't even hear herself.
She dropped the arm holding her phone by her side, shocked by what had just happened.
"What is going on?", she tried to shout at the top of her lungs.
But though she could hear herself shouting inside her mind, there was no sound coming out of her mouth.
And then, just out of the corner of her left eye she thought she saw something move past the door, something out in the hallway like the dark figure of a man.
She put her phone back in her pocket, feeling it vibrate again as if her mother was trying to ring her back and then, with the fire poker raised above her head, warilly took steps towards the door.
"Hello?", she called out instinctively although she couldn't hear herself say it.
"Its so wierd", she thought as she walked closer to the door, "Like being in a silent movie. A silent horror movie".
But then, looking out at the hallway, she couldn't see anyone but something was different. What was it?
Her hall mirror. Someone had hung her hall mirror back to front as if they didn't want her to be able to use it.
She backed away from the door.
"No. No.", she thought, "I can't go out there. Not if I can't see the whole hallway properly; he might be hiding around the corner. He might attack me from behind and if I can't hear him; if I can't see him in the mirror then I'll have no warning".
But she had to get out of the house somehow. If not through the hallway, then how.
Instinctively, she turned round to look at the windows of her sitting room but then, catching a glimpse of something out in the hallway, quickly lurched back round to face the door.
"No. I can't even turn my back on the door", she thought, "I can't even do that because he might come into the room while my back is turned".
But there was the window he had broken in through .
Moving slowly backwards, she quickly glanced at it before turning her eyes back towards the door.
"Enough of the glass has gone that maybe I could go out through it backwards", she thought.
But then, suddenly, she felt a sharp piece of glass prick her bare foot, only a small piece but it hurt enough to make her cry out.
Only she couldn't cry out.
She stepped forwards again and then, feeling the pain in her foot sting, hopped over towards her couch; a position from which she could see the window with her right eye and the door with her left.
"What was I thinking", she thought to herself, seeing the window surrounded in sharp shards of broken glass, "I can't go out that way".
Putting the poker in her other hand, she steadied herself against the couch and tried to pick the piece of glass out of her foot.
She twisted her leg up towards her and looked down at the sole of her foot.
"Its not too bad", she thought, seeing a small piece of glass sticking out of it and easily gripping hold of it between finger and thumb, revealing only a tiny cut.
But then, as she still had one leg off the ground, she saw a dark figure rush into the room and then he was grabbing hold of her.
She struck out with the poker but then she felt herself falling backwards onto the couch and the poker being pulled from her left hand.
"No! No!", she shouted out, although she still couldn't make a sound, curling into a defensive ball and kicking at him with her feet.
For a moment he looked down at her, waving the poker and she could see he was wearing a black ski-mask over his face.
But then he turned and looked over his shoulder at the window as if he was worried about being seen and then she saw him go over to it and begin drawing the curtains shut.
Without thinking twice, Tammy leapt to her feet and, barely feeling the pain in her foot anymore ran towards and out through her sitting room door.
She already had it in her mind where she would go; run for the front door and try her hardest to get it open and get out of the house where, maybe, there was sound so she could scream and be heard.
But then she was at the door, struggling with the lock and then she felt hands reaching around her pulling her back.
"No! No!", she tried to shout as she felt herself being dragged backwards and then back into her sitting room.
But then she felt herself being forced forwards onto her couch, forced to lie down and then she felt handcuffs being forced upon her wrists and then something being placed over her head, a bag.
All the while she was screaming inside.
But then, suddenly something odd, happened.
Just  as she was wondering if she was going to die she heard the sound of police sirens fill her ears and then someone else, two other men; policemen, she thought, were in the room wrestling with the intruder.
It was almost like listening to a radio play on Radio 4, she thought, one where the police rush in and apprehend the criminal.
Then, suddenly she felt the bag being pulled off from over her head by a policeman and then the same person, she thought, undoing her handcuffs.
"You have the right to remain silent but anything you do say will be taken down and used in a court of law", she heard the other policeman saying, reading the intruder his rights.
"Are you alright, Miss?", asked the policeman who had uncuffed her.
"Thank god you got here", said Tammy then, looking over at the intruder with his ski-mask pulled off, she saw that it was her neighbour.
He looked into her eyes and smiled as if to say,
"This isn't over".
"It was your mother who called us", continued the policeman, "She said you'd sounded frightened over the phone and then you'd got cut off somehow and she couldn't get through to you. We said we'd just check on the house but then we saw the broken window and that aroused our suspicion that something was wrong".
She thought about telling them about the silence; about the device her attacker had used to shut off the sound but then she decided against it.
"No. They'll just think I'm crazy", she said, "And then his lawyer will use it against me in court".
But then, a thought entering her mind, Tammy stepped forwards and punched her neighbour in the mouth.
She saw the smile wiped clean from his face.
"I guess its true what they say", thought Tammy, feeling slightly better, "Actions do speak louder than words".