Trust me, Kitty

Chapter 1

Kathryn

I was walking home when I saw him.

I had spent the evening at Brooklyn's house party which she had organised now that her parents were on holiday in Japan and she had the house all to herself. A party where Mikey was supposed to have been too but where he had never arrived.

I had tried to call him but he hadn't answered. After a few unanswered calls I had concluded that maybe he was sick and had muted his phone and gone to sleep. I supposed he was real sick. It was the only reasonable explanation I could come up with, unless he had died of course, but that wasn't really something I would have wanted to consider as a possibility. He was my boyfriend after all and no one really wanted to consider the death of their boyfriend as an option.

His friends had all agreed with me. Mikey never skipped parties. It was just something he wouldn't do. Ever. Except that now he just did it.

It was pretty quiet outside since it was already way past midnight. I was walking as quickly as I could because, I have to admit it, I was a bit scared of the dark and I just wanted to get home as soon as possible. I wanted to snuggle into my bed and feel safe.

I really wished that Mikey had been here by my side taking me home from the party as he usually did. Walking alone late at night as a young woman didn't always feel that safe. You never knew what kind of people would appear from somewhere out of the dark and what they might try and do to you. Especially when you were a bit drunk and wearing only a small dress.

So I admit it. Feeling the way I did I really freaked out quite badly when I suddenly heard someone coughing. I had seen absolutely no one after leaving Brooklyn's house and suddenly someone was coughing. And the cough seemed to come from very close.

I glanced around, alarmed. Not very far away, in the beam of a street light on a dark alley, I saw a very dishevelled looking old man. He had messy gray hair and an equally messy beard. He was wearing a dirty apron and his arms where hairy. He looked pretty disgusting and messy in every way. He seemed just like the kind of a creepy man that no young woman would want to meet alone on a dark alley late at night. So of course meeting him like that was just what happened to me.

The man was also smoking a cigarette and the smoke floating around him in the small beam of light he was standing in made the expression turn out even more creepy than it already was. Luckily the man hadn't noticed me and to make sure he wouldn't, I quickly hid behind the corner. It had apparently been him whose cough I had just heard. No wonder he was coughing while smoking that cigarette, I thought, but why on Earth was he out smoking it so late at night?

But there was another question that puzzled me even more. Beside this man I had just seen someone else, or at least I thought I had seen someone else, too. I wasn't exactly sure. Him being here was so strange that I felt it was more likely that my imagination was just playing tricks on me than that I had actually seen him.

So, my heart thumping, I had to peek out from behind the corner several times before I could believe that it actually was him. That my boyfriend actually was standing right there next to that strange and dishevelled looking old man, under the same street lamp, breathing the fumes of that cigarette the old man was smoking.

My boyfriend who had just skipped the party although doing something like that was against his very nature. My boyfriend who hadn't answered my calls though I had called him many times. What the fuck Mikey? That was all I could think of. What on Earth was he doing here? Why hadn't he been at the party if he wasn't sick? And who was that man he was with?