Judging by the smell, Cassidy expected the intruder to be female.

It was perfume, not aftershave. Judging by the gender, he expected her to be Elise. Judging, again, by the smell, there were doubts.

If not her, then who? He needed to find out. It must be whoever was leaving the messages. Why else would they be in his house? Listening out for sounds of movement, and for steps seven and nine, he repeated his search of the other night. They wouldn't escape again.

The ground floor was empty, so she had to be upstairs, perhaps replacing the batteries in the mirror. The smell pervaded every room, its strength remaining constant throughout. Surely it would be more prominent closer to her.

Oh, wait...

He'd placed air fresheners around the house. The type that puffed out an aroma at regular intervals. He never knew how to interpret the strange concoctions the manufacturers combined. Lavender and cedarwood? Egg white and shrimp cocktail? They were all the same to him. He'd choose one and hope for the best. When he put them in place, he generally turned them onto their fastest frequency to oust any unpleasant odours hanging around in dark corners. After a week or so, he'd reduce the speed to keep the fragrances even, and extend the life of the canisters.

He'd been out and just returned, so the scent would seem stronger. It was natural. Nothing sinister about it.

He smiled at one of the units as he passed it.

"You almost had me there," he told it.

In response, the air freshener squirted out a shot of ketchup and seaweed. Cass automatically breathed in.

And it was nothing like the smell pervading his house.

For fuck's sake! What was going on? Why couldn't he just be left alone? There'd be much better people out there to harass. More important than him. More interesting! He was a nobody. Well, maybe not that. He did have a relatively good opinion of himself, though it veered far from being arrogance. Cass thought he was OK. A nice guy with fairly decent morals. Nothing special and nothing too mediocre. He was an everyman, and he was fine with that. His aspirations didn't extend to great wealth or stature. He just wanted to be happy and survive. To live contentedly and, hopefully, have someone who loved him as he loved them.

Drama was a fact of life. It gravitated to some people, circling them like space debris around a planet, making it the centre of their universe. Drama was the shrapnel of life. If you moved the wrong way, it would cut deeply, leaving scars that might never heal.

Cassidy wished he didn't have any drama in his life, but Life tended to throw it up in the air, sand in the face of Humanity. It was unavoidable and reached into all your nooks and crannies, making you intensely uncomfortable and unable to remove all traces. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. He had tried with Elise, but she saw relationships as a way to have someone be there when times were good and to take the shit when they weren't.

He had a job he liked. Not necessarily a career. Not close to a vocation. It paid the bills, though, and left some in the pot. It didn't depress him. When he woke in the mornings, he didn't dread getting out of bed because it meant he'd be one step closer to getting to work. He had a house he'd soon come to call home.

He'd been single before. More than once, particularly when he was younger. There'd been periods where he was without a girlfriend. It wasn't something he minded at all, though he preferred to not be. He liked to share. Life, laughs and love. Perhaps it was a cliché and, if so, he didn't mind that either.

So, drama could go fuck itself, except it was prone to fuck him instead.

He was wallowing. His break up, combined with the mysteries his house presented him, was stressing him more than he wanted to admit. His ability to compartmentalise was clearly suffering as a result.

Get it together, Cass. This ain't you.

"Coming, ready or not!" he shouted up the stairs.

Because the perfume was everywhere, he was unable to follow it to its source. He'd have to improvise.

He ran up the stairs quickly and loudly, taking them two at a time and missing the infamous seven and nine. When he reached the landing, he stomped over to the wall opposite. There was a window in the centre with a wooden horizontal blind. On the sill, he'd stood a small, fake, Aloe Vera plant. He'd never been very good at keeping house plants. Garden plants fared no better. Picking the pot up and testing its weight, he turned and settled into a crouch, his back to the wall.

"Hey, honey, I'm home!" he called.

He leaned forward slightly so, when the plant was thrown, there was room for his arm to move. His throwing experience was only really limited to playing catch with dogs, so hitting any moving target would usually be a failure. From this distance, there wouldn't be a problem.

"Come on. Let's just get this over with," he said loudly. "You've had your fun, now show yourself."

Of course, there was no sound of movement. He didn't expect any. They'd be hiding. He'd be hiding. His breath would be held, as would the fart that'd be bubbling in anticipation of his being discovered. He could imagine someone crouched possibly much like he was, waiting to be found while hoping it didn't happen.

Well, this time, it definitely was happening.

"You know you're going to have to come out eventually. May as well make it now, Elise."

Cassidy had no idea if Elise was hiding in any of the rooms. He was beginning to doubt it. She wouldn't expend so much effort on him. She'd told him, quite proudly, how quickly she'd moved on from her boyfriend before him. By the weekend after, every scrap of him had been deleted from her life. Any clothes he'd left were binned. Any photos, burned or deleted from her cloud backup. The shelf in her refrigerator that had housed the foods he liked and she didn't, was emptied and filled with those he loathed. By the following month, the kitchen they'd chosen together had been ripped out and replaced.

She called it 'deleting.' It wasn't the first time she'd done it, just the most recent. Until Cass, he assumed.

If that was how she dealt with the ending of relationships, she wouldn't be invading his house. She wouldn't be wearing such strong, flowery perfume. Hers had woody, warm tones. He knew that from a discussion from an assistant at a perfume shop shortly before one Christmas. He'd listed the ones she'd had and Cass was told the types of scents they were.

Not flowery.

Fuck this.

He pushed himself to standing and hefted the pot. It wasn't large as the sill wasn't either. It was, though, solid. Heavier than it looked. It wouldn't do any real damage, and he wasn't planning on that anyway. It was there for shock value. To scare the person and make them think they were going to be hurt. They were, but not seriously. It was more for punishment than injury.

Unless the impact shocked them too much and they stumbled and fell down the...

Shit.

Cass needed to go and check, not wait for them. Who waited anyway? Any normal person would search for the person who'd broken into their house. Or they'd call the police! Why didn't he think of that in the first place? Because it might have been his ex? Was he holding back just in case? What if he was completely wrong and Michael Myers was hiding in his bathroom?

He hadn't because Amy could have been Amy. Real or fake. A trespasser, a spirit or his imagination. One would have been fine for the police. The others, not so much.

The spare bedrooms were empty. The bathroom was, too. Why did he think it might be otherwise? He moved to his own bedroom, stopping before he stood in the doorway.

If the room was empty, what would he do then? He couldn't answer that. If there was no one hiding under his bed or in the wardrobe or simply standing there waiting for him, he didn't know what he'd do or think. The smell was still there. Still as strong. Something, or someone, had to have made it. There had to be a reason. A cause.

He walked through the doorway into his empty bedroom.

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