Climate of Hunter
We Have Entered Deserted
He Has Gazed From My Windows
As If All That Replaced Us
Could Still End In Me.
-Scott Walker, “ Sleepwalker’s Woman,” from Climate of Hunter
The thirteen years spent in the old Silver Spring bungalow with my second wife and our daughter often show up in memory as idyllic, with lots of gauzy, lovely memories of a perfect situation. Lots of wonderful things did happen on a daily basis during our stay there, and that period is precious to me.
Those idyllic times were, however, punctuated by some of the blackest, most chilling events. Terrifying medical problems, motor vehicle accidents, aging house horrors, god-awful personal losses including the deaths of the three nearest (and dearest) neighbors in a relatively short span of time, loss of one of my daughter’s oldest friends in an accident, and of course capped by a divorce and a few years later my escape to the west coast, which was no escape at all, only a new way to learn the idyllic is often a transient state.
One of the most bizarre things that took place at the Money Pit (as we affectionately called the house, since upon moving in we lived a virtual duplication of the movie by that name, during which I learned the true source of that insane laugh Tom Hanks turns loose when the bathtub falls through the floor. Perhaps this was a sign of things to come) was a break-in that took place one summer night in 1992, and which I’ve thought about a lot lately for reasons that don’t bear going into here.
My daughter was then eleven years old and in her first year of middle school. She had arranged for a friend to sleep over one Friday night, and we were more than fine with that. Her friends were uniformly nice kids, and since our daughter had the entire upstairs suite for herself, the two (sometimes there were more) could disappear eventually, without really disappearing. Ideal. Idyllic. Nice.
The night of the sleepover was unremarkable, pleasant, just fine. At least that was what my then-wife and I both thought until Saturday morning.
During the night I’d wakened briefly to hear sounds of feet shuffling in the hall outside our bedroom door. The girls are raiding the kitchen, I thought idly. Wouldn’t it be funny to throw the door open and startle the bejesus out of them? No. No, it wouldn’t. Besides, I’d have to actually get up to do that. Forget it. And with that I went back to sleep.
We were awakened early on Saturday morning, not the usual thing for us, as the daughter always respected our chance to sleep in and would entertain herself until we finally got up. Not this morning, though. We could hear her and her friend calling us, yelling from over the side of the wall of the loft that ran alongside the open staircase from the juncture of living room, dining room and hallway. We shook ourselves awake, looked at each other questioningly, then got up to see what couldn’t wait, what they had to yell down to tell us, wondering why, if there was something needed, the daughter couldn’t come down and knock on our door as per usual. This was odd and slightly annoying.
We appeared at the bottom of the staircase, looked up and, in unison, asked
“What do you want?”
The answer was “Is there anyone down there?”
I replied “We are! What are you talking about?”
The answer perplexed us. “There was a guy in here last night.”
“Whaat?”
“Yeah. He came in through the back window.”
Wife offered: “You dreamed it.”
“Well we both had the same dream,” daughter responded, friend at her side’s head bobbing in agreement. They didn’t seem terribly upset. It was just strange.
“Explain, please,” said wife.
“Come down and explain,” I corrected.
The two came bouncing down the stairs and we all sat in the living room as the story unfolded.
“Some guy climbed in the window with the air conditioner it it,” daughter said matter-of-factly. “It woke me up and at first I thought maybe he was a Sears service guy or something. He took the air conditioner out of the window and held it while he climbed in, so I thought maybe he was working on it.”
We looked at her for signs of possible drug use. Her friend was nodding in the affirmative and was bright-eyed. The friend said “He didn’t wake me up then, but yeah, he did come in. I saw him later.”
“What did this guy look like?” asked my wife, still seeming unconvinced.
“Kinda not tall, athletic looking black guy,” the daughter replied. By now I was starting to wonder if maybe there hadn’t been some sort of weird business. The girls just didn’t seem especially excited or at least very troubled. Then more details.
“He was in the house for hours!” daughter said. “He dropped the air conditioner and I figured that would have woke you guys up, but I guess not.” She rolled her eyes.
“Where is the air conditioner now?” I asked.
“He put it back in the window. He picked up the plant that fell off it and cleaned up the dirt and put it back in the pot and he was very careful about that, so I figured he was some sort of repairman. Then I noticed it was dark outside and that didn’t seem right.”
“It wouldn’t have been,” said my wife, starting to show signs of horror as the story filled out more and became real to her. “Did he look at you?” The two had been sleeping on a sofa bed in the loft, since the daughter’s bed was a twin and too small. The loft had two windows, and since the house had steam heat we had window units all over the place. The light had been on up there when we went to bed. I could see it was still on as we talked.
“He looked around, but I watched him through my eyelashes,” said the daughter, “so he wouldn’t know I was awake. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I watched him. I don’t think he knew I was awake.”
The friend added “I didn’t see any of this. I slept through it.”
“Yeah!” said the daughter. “Even when he dropped that air conditioner she didn’t wake up!”
“I was tired,” the friend protested.
“So…what happened next?” asked the now very concerned wife and mother next to me.
“He went in the bathroom and peed. I could hear that. He flushed. I was trying to wake her up,” pointing teasingly at the friend. “She sleeps hard.”
“I was tired!” the friend reiterated.
I was now beginning to wonder just what the hell had happened, and asked “So…?”
“He must have thought the cucumber face stuff [some facial cleaning gel in a jar] was hand cleaner, because I could hear him rubbing his hands together and I could smell it. He was still rubbing his hands with it when he came back into the loft. Then he went into my room and he was muttering to himself about not being able to turn on the light.”
“And…” wife and I said in unison.
“And then he went down here. He was down here for a long time. We waited a minute, then we got up and snuck into the bathroom. There’s no lock on the door,” she rolled her eyes again, “so we took the curtains off the window, tied them together, tied one end to the towel bar and the other to the doorknob.” The upstairs bathroom door opened out instead of into the bathroom. Idiots before us did that. It came in handy I thought. I also thought about how easy it would have been to defeat that flimsy security measure.
“We were in there for hours!” the daughter moaned. “He wouldn’t leave! Then he came back upstairs. We could hear him. We wondered what time it was, so we tried cracking the door to peek out at the clock, but he was standing there right outside the door, leaning on the wall up there.”
“Yeah, we could see his arm,” said the friend, now looking a little more appropriately disturbed. “It was creepy.”
“It was!” said the daughter. “He just hung around til about five o’clock in the morning. We finally heard a car start and drive away, so we thought maybe he was gone. We looked out and didn’t see him by the door. We were up there and waited as long as we could to see if he was still in the house. We didn’t want to wake you up too early, but once the sun was up we were pretty sure he was gone.”
My wife sat there, her mouth hanging open. “Jesus!” she finally said. “That really happened.”
“You think it didn’t?” our daughter asked, appalled.
“Well you have to admit, it sounds weird at the start…” wife trailed off.
“Okay, I’m calling the police. That was not a repairman,” I stated, suddenly feeling very, very strange as adrenaline flooded me. I got up and went into the kitchen to the wall phone to call, and noticed a plate with a mostly-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich on it.
“This belong to any of you?” I called into the other room. All three came in, looked at the plate, and shook their heads. Wife said “He made himself a sandwich!” outrage in her voice now.
I then remembered the sound of feet shuffling outside our door in the middle of the night. That wasn’t the girls. It was our visitor. Had I chosen to jump out at that moment I would have startled….
I remembered a recent incident at a neighbor’s house where the woman was at home alone and had awakened to find a man staring at her. The woman had Graves disease, so her eyes were always popped as though startled or angry. I recalled her saying the eyes of the man staring at her had gotten very large and he had run out of the house at high speed. I wondered why I only now was connecting these two visits. Same description, same behavior, only he stayed at our place a lot longer…because…?
The police sent one officer, a woman, and she listened to our story. She seemed not very interested, but did follow me upstairs to observe the route of entry. I opened the other window, the one without the air conditioner, as she was taking some notes in a very casual manner. I climbed out onto the low roof that extened about seven feet, sloping gently downward. I imagined catching the intruder in the act and how I might have slammed him with the air conditioner and knocked him off the roof. I was deeply offended at the lack of interest shown by the officer.
Then I noticed something strange. It was some beaded, dried substance on the siding of the dormer outside. It looked very much as though someone or some thing had urinated against the side of the dormer, perhaps before entering through the window. Insult to injury, I thought as I called the officer to show her what I’d found. Immediately her casualness gave way to a sudden sense of urgency. She called on her portable radio for detectives and a mobile crime lab.
“This is really fucked up,” she muttered. I wondered why the dried urine had changed her outlook on the incident so suddenly. I didn’t know what to ask, though. We went back inside and downstairs, where she explained to all of us that there would be investigators there in a few minutes and to please answer their questions very carefully. We all nodded. I was gratified but also felt an increasing sense of violation and creepiness I still cannot describe.
Additional police showed up quickly, followed by a very competent detective named Jay Brown. The mobile crime lab was there right behind Brown. Detective Brown sat down and conducted an interview which was amazingly sympthetic and skilled. We were to become close friends over the next few weeks and months, Brown and my family. He asked the girls a lot of questions in a very low-key, sensitive but not overly excited way, and they worked well with him, seeming almost like they were talking with an old friend.
The interview was interrupted by one of the officers, who took Detective Brown aside to tell him of something they had found. He came back and in turn took me aside to inform me some “DNA” had been found both on the siding outside the window and also on the rug upstairs. He gave me a meaningful look and I thought of the cucumber gel, the sound effects, and another look was exchanged. I nearly gagged while at the same time feeling a sudden urge to kill someone. Brown put his hand gently on my arm and I sat back down.
The last question I recall Brown asking the girls was “By the way, what race was the guy?”
The girls thought for a moment, then my daughter said matter-of-factly, “Black.” Her friend said “Yeah. He was black.”
“Thanks,” said Brown, then looked at me. I knew what he was thinking. This was really strange.
After a couple hours the initial investigation ended and Brown explained to my wife and me that there had been several similar breakins in our immediate neighborhood, all with the same patter, same description, only difference being the culprit had stayed at our house for hours, where in every other instance he had been discovered and had run out a door or dove out a window. It appeared he was a second story man, and Brown explained, out of range of the girls, that this was classified as a sex crime, that the perpetrators “got off” on looking at someone who could not see them, that they often liked to imagine they were invisible. “Our main concern is that they often escalate if they’re not caught, and someone could be hurt or worse.” We both nodded our understanding of what he meant by this, and I recalled a conversation 20 years earlier with a small town constable who had been to a seminar on this sort of criminal activity. He’d told me then it was considered a sex crime. Now I understood better why.
Over the next few weeks Brown and a partner staked out our house. They were out there several nights per week and would come inside in the morning for coffee. One day Brown remarked “Other than the nut this has to be the deadest neighborhood I’ve ever seen! It’s hard to stay awake out there. Nothing happens — ever.” He was right of course, except for when something did happen. The interloper was clever. Crazy too, probably, but good at his “job.”
One night I heard on the fire/police scanner a call for a break-in at a house a block or so down the hill from us. I knew what it was immediately, and also knew the responding police would come down our street. By then I realized the nut would not come out on the street, even if he were parked there. He’d go out the back and across the nearby railroad tracks. I ran outside and jumped into my truck, driving out of the neighborhood and onto the parallel road behind, where there was no direct connection. I drove down past the rear of the address where the police would be headed, made a U-turn and came back by. As I passed the intersection near the school, a short, stocky, handsome young black man was crossing as I started to turn. He stopped and made an “after you” gesture.” As I turned in toward the railroad tracks I realized he matched precisely the description the girls had given of the intruder. I turned my head and he had vanished. I’d almost had him. He was like a ghost.
When word got out in our very classically liberal neighborhood, people talked to me in outraged tones. When I told people I would like to have killed the guy, they mostly were supportive and understanding. I didn’t want that reaction. I wanted someone to tell me that was wrong. No one did. A few even went out and bought guns. I stopped taking my midnight walks for fear one of these neophyte gun owners would shoot me. Things got tense for a while.
One day I came home from work to find a neighbor’s son, a classmate of my own son, being taken away in handcuffs. The husband of the neighbor with Graves disease had fingered the young man as the one who had broken in their house and had later shown up on their front porch in the wee hours. I knew this was wrong. I knew It couldn’t be the young man who lived down the street. Nothing about that made any sense. Later I was informed by Detective Brown that the fellow had actually confessed to several commercial breakins on the night in question, saying “I’ve done some wrong shit but I’m no pervert.” He did some time for the robberies, but at least he had a solid alibi for the local non-profit breakins. It meant that much to him not to be seen in that light.
One night the house down the street was revisited, as was the habit of the pervert. I spoke to Brown about it and he was amazed. He told me he’d been unable to sleep that night, obsessing over the crazy man he’d been trying to catch, and his wife had told him to let it go, get some sleep. He cursed himself. “I knew he was out here then. Why did I know that?”
Eventually things cooled off. The break-ins stopped, people quit talking about it, my daughter almost never mentioned the incident at our house, although she kept the three rear dormer windows closed and locked at all times. She’d never hesitated to return to her upstairs suite, though I have no idea what may have played out in her head. She is very strong, very brave. She never let on if she was plagued by what had happened.
Eventually the same sort of break-ins began to happen in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood in D.C. The M.O. was identical, and the description was the same. I wondered if he would come back to our place and one night he did, momentarily, just looking in the den window at me typing. Soon as I noticed the cat was staring at something I looked out and he fled. I chased him with a bat, but he was fast and again disappeared. Finally one night in his new hunting grounds a woman spotted him crawling along the ledge outside her apartment window. He had now advanced to removing his clothing before breaking in. He was, indeed, progressing. And someone was surely going to get hurt. The woman who spotted him left her lights off, but went to the kitchen and got a steak knife, then went to bed and waited. Eventually the crazy entered through a window. He eventually wound up standing over the woman as she lay in her bed, pretending to be asleep. He was invisible in his mind, but he was clear and solid to the woman he was watching, and suddenly she came up like lightning and buried the steak knife in his calf. He ran, screaming, and disappeared, only to show up later, naked and bleeding, at a hospital’s emergency room. He was finally caught then. One woman accomplished what two police departments had been unable to do. He was sent away. I don’t know where he is now, but I do know there are people like him, half-formed, not-sane people, people with very strange, twisted hunting instincts. People who will eventually hurt someone or be hurt or killed themselves.
My cat continued to watch out that den window for a long time. No one ever came back.
My daughter would soon begin to endure more and more traumas, some directly, some indirectly. She handled each of them with incredbile grace and equanimity. I am awed by her resilience even now.
I pity the fool who violates her space next time.
(Also from “Climate of Hunter,” a chillingly accurate view of madness):
