The Doodle

Uri never liked homework. To be honest, she never liked education. The whole idea of going to class and sit around at one place, listening to the teacher blabber through the book was alien to her. Her parents often wondered if she had ADD. So much so that they had her tested.

“She has some difficulty in grasping new things, keeping still at one place, but in medical terms, she seems to be perfectly fine”. They were shocked at the diagnosis. “If she doesn’t have an attention-deficit, then I don’t have two eyes”, her mother had scornfully told the doctor.

Uri was sitting at her desk, pretending to be doing homework. She started doodling on the page. A triangle first and then a square beneath it, every child’s version of a home. A home with small circular windows. While she was shading parts of the house, she suddenly felt a void where the window was supposed to be, her fist drowning into the paper and through the desk beneath it. She could see a yellow glow from the hole in the paper and hear a whirring sound, a table fan blowing air into the room on the other side of it.

Afraid but curious she peeped into the hole to find herself looking into a dimly lit room. It was a small room with only a single lamb illuminating it from the ceiling. On the wall to one side was a huge board with several pictures pictures pinned to it with a red thread weaving a web with them. A man stood in front of it, studying something on the board, marking an X on one of the pictures. He was dressed in a neatly fitted black suit, the kind you have to get specially tailored for you.

The gate to the room opened and another man entered. He was tall and dark, his face hardly visible in the dim light. He moved forward, but the man wasn’t surprised at the sudden intruder. He was expecting him, then?

“I was wondering when you will show up. I have it all worked out you know. The killings, your murders, they end here, today.” The man in the coat turned slowly to face the killer. Uri noticed suddenly that the intruder had a gun in his hands. She wanted to shout for help, but as is often the case in situations like this, she was glued to her position. Her mouth shut with fear lest the persons on the other side notice her.

The intruder didn’t say anything. He moved the gun swiftly in front of him, pointing to the suited guy and compressed the trigger. A loud bang and the man fell to the ground with a thud. A fatal gunshot wound on the chest. Blood seeped through his suit, the stain getting bigger every second. He lay there, in a pool of blood while the killer dashed quickly towards the board to clean everything up.

As he was removing the pictures from the board, he contemplated on the research his friend had done. Faces he had killed marked with a cross, the red wire flowing from one target to the next. It ended with a final cross, a cross on the picture of the suited man himself. The killer was shocked, how had he known he was going to be next? Why was he waiting in the room for his fate like this? The suited man had done his homework, he had figured out he was next. But so had the killer. He had scavenged the place for bugs, for cameras or any electronic device for that matter. He didn’t kill unless he was sure to get away with it.

And still, this time, without any electronic devices, without any cameras, there was a witness. A little girl of 13 who had somehow broken through the very continuum of space and looked into the house in her drawing. The suited man had predicted his own death, but more, he had predicted the end of the killers streak with him. Had he known that there would be a witness this time?