Glass Between Two Frightened Men

Dawn did not clarify the house at Berriedale. It disguised it. The darkness that had rendered the property sinister throughout Karl Jenkins's long vigil gave way to winter sunlight that touched the cream brick with gold and softened the drawn blinds into something resembling privacy rather than concealment. The eaves cast modest shadows. The timber deck acquired mid-century charm. In morning light, the house looked precisely as it was supposed to look — unremarkable, suburban, innocent — and the transformation was the most unsettling thing Karl had witnessed since arriving.

Inside, Luke Smith pressed his back against the kitchen cabinetry and tried to breathe quietly enough that the sound would not carry through his own walls. Beatrix Cramer had departed minutes earlier — a Portal opened against the living room wall, a step through, the surface returning to ordinary charcoal as though nothing extraordinary had occurred. Her exit was triggered by the car parked across the road and the horn blast that had fractured the morning's quiet. Luke's Portal Key sat dead in his pocket. He pressed its button once, twice, again. Nothing. No activation, no connection, no escape route to Clivilius.

Karl crossed the road with long strides, carrying no badge — left on the bedside table — no warrant, no weapon. Only conviction, and the particular recklessness that follows a night spent awake past the point where the distinction between courage and compulsion ceases to matter. He knocked. The sound travelled through the house with the acoustic clarity of a structure whose emptiness amplified every intrusion. Behind the kitchen island, Luke heard it and felt his pulse accelerate into territory he associated with Clivilius's shadow panthers rather than suburban Tasmania. Karl heard only the silence that followed — dense, expectant, chosen rather than accidental.

The side gate yielded to Karl's weight. Luke heard it rattle and understood: the boundary between street and property had been breached. Footsteps moved along the narrow passage between brick and fence — measured, deliberate, the tread of someone who knew he was trespassing and had decided the trespass was worth its consequences. Luke left the kitchen for the hallway, navigating his own home with the stealthy economy of a burglar, each footstep placed to avoid the boards he knew would creak, his phone raised in trembling hands.

They almost met. Karl reached the bedroom window and stood close enough that his breath would have fogged the glass. Luke edged his gaze around the corner bedroom's doorframe and found a tall silhouette casting its shadow across the venetian blinds — close enough to touch if the wall had not existed, close enough to identify if Luke had held his nerve for another half-second instead of gasping and pulling back into darkness. Two men on opposite sides of plaster and brick, each convinced the other represented a threat beyond confrontation, each hiding with the desperate improvisation of plans that had failed to account for this specific convergence.

The neighbour arrived with the timing of someone who had been waiting for an excuse. Terry stood on his side of the boundary fence — tartan dressing gown, white hair combed to military precision, eyes performing the kind of assessment that Karl recognised immediately as decades of institutional discipline applied to the civilian task of monitoring a street. His challenge carried the authority of a former serviceman who had catalogued this trespasser before finishing the question. Karl produced a wallet, angled it to catch the light, and let the leather do the work that the absent warrant card could not. No badge inside. No identification. Only receipts and an expired library card, presented with enough speed and confidence that the contents remained uninspected.

The bluff held. Terry offered his name and his location and, with it, intelligence that neither Karl nor Luke had anticipated. A woman had been visiting the property. Multiple trips. A small truck. Deliveries — not removals. Material entering the house rather than leaving. On Karl's side of the wall, the information landed as evidence that contradicted every narrative of voluntary departure and empty premises. On Luke's side, it landed as confirmation of catastrophic operational failure — the neighbour he had barely acknowledged across years of distant nods had been cataloguing movements and was now providing that catalogue to a detective who had been given a business card pulled from a wallet containing nothing else of value.

Terry departed with a promise to call, its phrasing implying Karl was not the only person who had expressed interest in the property's activities. Luke remained pressed against the hallway wall, processing the scope of his exposure while Karl returned to the bedroom window and performed the count that would dismantle whatever professional restraint the night had left intact.

Seven bags. There had been four, perhaps five. The number admitted no ambiguity, no distortion by fatigue or wishful perception. Seven was not five. And the difference meant activity inside this house — someone adding to the collection, disposing, concealing — during hours when Karl watched from across the road or when exhaustion had briefly claimed him.

The fly screen came away from the window frame with the reluctant creak of aged aluminium. Karl's phone buzzed against his thigh — Sarah's name on the screen, conscience given digital form — and the vibration startled his grip loose. The screen clattered to the concrete. The sound carried through the morning with the acoustic generosity of metal on stone, and inside the house Luke heard it and scrambled from hallway to kitchen, fumbling again for the Portal Key that returned nothing, its mechanism dead, its connection severed.

Karl declined the call. He looked at the exposed window, at the bent fly screen that would not sit flush, at the trail of evidence accumulating around him. The thought that surfaced was not horror but something far worse — opportunity. A reported break-in would generate legitimate grounds for entry. The logic was corrupt. Its corruption was visible to the part of Karl that still functioned as a detective. That part was no longer in command.

His elbow met the glass. The crack came first — pressure yielding — then the squeal, then the shatter. Fragments exploded inward and outward, catching the morning sun, turning light into accusation. Splinters tore through coat sleeve and into skin. Blood bloomed through wool. Pain arrived sharp and clarifying, burning away the fog that had accumulated across the night, returning Karl to his body and his body to the specific reality of what it had just done.

Inside, the sound of breaking glass reached Luke at the bottom of the internal staircase. Nowhere left to go. Portal Key dead. He wrenched the sliding door's deadbolt hard enough to bend back a fingernail, stood in the doorway tasting cold morning air, and heard the car engine roar to life across the street. He sprinted to the rear fence. Caught only a dark silhouette disappearing in dust.

Karl drove away with glass in his forearm and blood soaking through his sleeve. Behind him: a broken window, a damaged fly screen propped against the wall, and the wreckage of every professional boundary twenty-three years of service had constructed. Behind Luke: the same broken window, the same cold air entering the bedroom where seven black bags sat in their careful formation, and a Portal Key that offered nothing when he pressed it again in the study — once, twice, several times — its silence absolute, its refusal to connect him to the world he had built on the other side of a threshold that had, without warning or explanation, ceased to exist.

The house held the aftermath with indifference. Glass on carpet. Cold air through the gap. Two men retreating in opposite directions from a convergence neither had intended and neither could undo — one carrying the evidence of his trespass in the blood on his sleeve, the other carrying the evidence of his exposure in the dead weight of a device that would not answer, each frightened, each alone, each certain that the morning had changed everything and unable yet to calculate how much.