Between the Shoes

Quickly checking over his left shoulder he dashed to the entrance of his apartment and hastily took out his keys. Struggling to fit them into his lock his panic started rising.

Counter-intuitively, this lowered his accuracy. Through the rising adrenaline, he finally managed to find the lock and he wiggled his keys around until he heard the relieving click of success. He pushed through the door and just as soon as he had slipped in he rammed it shut and re-locked it, hoping that anyone who tried to cheat the lock would struggle just as much as he had.

Mr.Ableton was a rather rotund man, not suited to this level of dexterity, and of that, he was well aware. He was a banker and, stereotypically and self-admittedly, boring. He liked it that way. So why was it that for the past few weeks, he felt the shadows shift and the noises of the city had become sharper?

He felt eyes burning into his back, but whenever he looked around he saw nothing. The people he spent the most time with, his co-workers, had noticed his constant attention to every noise and constant jump at every sound. The decorum of the workplace implied that the observation should remain unspoken so no one asked but everybody noticed.

Mr.Ableton dashed up the stairs to his bedroom rather clumsily and made a beeline for his closet, the only other lockable door in his house. He had been frequenting the closet as a refuge because he felt it was a last resort to keeping the strange feeling out. 

He had been stewing over a single question trapped in his closet: why? Why was this happening to him? What had he seen or done? He drew a blank.

He was a nondescript, overweight, middle-aged man who tried to appease people. He didn’t understand why he had to hide or look over his shoulder but somehow, instinctually, he knew that he needed to.

Mr.Ableton crouched underneath the bland gray and black suits he had hanging up in his closet. He had a particular spot in the closet that was always his default; when he felt the need to hide he would come to sit under his clothing right in between his gray dress shoes and his black dress shoes.

As a rather large man, he had to move quite a few of his dress shoes to prep his spot, but once he was done, you couldn’t see him from the entrance of the closet. He even hid the excess shoes in his bathroom cabinet, so it didn’t look like a large number of shoes had been displaced.

Mr.Ableton may not have been dexterous, but his years as a banker had taught him to be thorough.

The rest of his week went rather quickly. He finished his work and struggled with the same obsessive routine. He had found no more reason to confirm his suspensions and yet his back continued to burn and the path home seemed to get more dangerous the more he had to walk it. 

On his weekends he curled into the space between his shoes. It was his only remaining defense to keep his hold on his rapidly deteriorating sanity.

As the days went by and the hours got longer Mr.Ableton would obsessively arrange his shoes, each pointed at exactly thirty-seven degrees and ordered by their shade of gray. He did this not only as a calming mechanism but also because he would have a foolproof method of determining the presence of any visitors. Mr.Ableton was not confident in much but he took pride in his unique ability to determine shades of black.

It was an abnormally dreary Tuesday when Mr.Abelton came home. As was compulsory, he went straight up the stairs to his closet.

He immediately noticed a discrepancy in the organization of his shoes: his Onyx pair had been moved between Ebony and Charcoal and they were at 45 degrees instead of his standard 37. 

Mr.Ableton had been preparing for this moment for weeks; of course, Mr.Ableton’s preparations meant finding the hiding place. He went to his standard spot between the shoes and took comfort in his foolproof hiding spot. Mr.Ableton’s sole design flaw was that, while he was keeping whatever may have after him out, he had also locked himself in. 

Detective Jen Wilson snapped out of her reverie: she had a tendency to imagine how a victim was feeling and acting before they were murdered, especially in a case as strange as the one she now faced. 

The victim was an overweight white male in his late 40s; he worked as a banker and there was nothing of note in his personal life. He had no friends and a few distant acquaintances; his only close personal connection was visiting his senile mother in a nursing home every Sunday. His coworkers stated that he had been on edge for the last couple of weeks but nobody knew why. The unfortunate victim had been named Timothy Ableton.

His body had been found in his closet, underneath a bláse collection of office apparel and right next to his dress shoes. The closet door hadn’t been forced open, whoever opened it must have had a key.

At first glance, it looked like an execution type killing a bullet straight through the head but after a closer inspection, there were cuts on the body, small and clean knife marks on his stomach, and his thighs hidden under his shirt, that were made after he had been killed. This confused the older detective. She had seen crimes of passion disguised as executions but never on someone so, for lack of a better word, nondescript.

She puzzled over this as she left the crime scene. There had to be a story here but it would perhaps remain untold. As she was lamenting over the complete lack of evidence she paused and noticed that the shadows by Mr.Ableton’s house seemed rather malicious.

After observing the way the shadows seemed to follow her, she understood the desire to hide between the shoes.