Chapter 29: The Locked Door
The click of the bedroom door lock was louder than a gunshot in the silent house. Travis leaned his forehead against the cool wood, listening to the echo fade into nothing. Leo’s words were on a loop in his head. Following up with his own assessment.
Simon wasn’t backing off. The paperwork hadn’t been enough. He was circling, looking for a seam, a crack in the armor. The cold, procedural fear of the inspection was gone, replaced by something hotter and more personal: the violation of a hunter studying his fence line.
Travis’s hands were steady, which surprised him. A flat calm had descended, the kind that comes when the only move left is to dig in. He crossed the room to his nightstand. The top drawer held the usual clutter—chapstick, loose change, a spare phone charger. Beneath it all, wrapped in a soft cloth, was the band.
He pulled it out. The leather was supple, well-worn, a deep chestnut brown. It was a simple, wide strap with a padded interior, a heavy-duty buckle on one end, and two black carabiners clipped to D-rings on the other. It smelled of leather and faintly, of himself.
He stripped quickly, letting his clothes fall into a heap on the floor. The air was cool on his skin. He wasn’t thinking about pleasure, not in the usual way. This was about reclamation. A reset only Mavis could initiate.
He sat on the edge of the bed, facing the wall. The hole, with its smooth, flesh-toned silicone flange, looked back at him. It was just an opening. It was everything. He reached out, running his fingertips around the perfect, engineered edge. It was warm, almost body-temperature from the room.
He guided himself inside, a slow, practiced slide. The silicone yielded, a perfect, encompassing pressure. He shifted forward on his knees until his pelvis met the wall, the frame a firm press against his skin. Here, he was held. Anchored.
He brought the band around his lower back, just above the curve of his ass. He fed the strap through the buckle, pulling it snug—not painful, but inescapable. The leather hugged the dip of his spine. He reached back, his fingers finding the carabiners. With two solid, decisive clicks, he fastened them to the screw hooks embedded in the wall studs on either side of the frame.
The effect was instantaneous. He was secured. Cantilevered. The tension in his shoulders, the constant readiness Leo’s call had ignited, didn’t vanish, but it was forced to reroute. His body had a new, undeniable fact to process: he was not going anywhere. He had given up the option. A shuddering breath left his lungs, one he felt like he’d been holding since the phone rang.
He rested his forearms against the wall, his head bowed. The only sound was his own breathing, gradually slowing. He closed his eyes and listened. Beyond the gentle thump of his own pulse in his ears, he listened for the other heartbeat in the house.
It wasn’t long before he heard it. A soft, deliberate scuffling within the wall. Not the hurried skitter of play or alarm, but a slow, approaching cadence. Travis stayed perfectly still.
A patch of darkness within the smaller, rectangular service hole shifted. Two points of reflected lamplight appeared, watching him. Then Mavis stepped onto his tiny balcony, a silhouette against the deeper black of the interior wall. He didn’t speak. He observed.
Travis could feel that gaze travelling over the line of his spine, the pull of the leather, the utter vulnerability of his position. It wasn’t a judging look. It was an assessing one.
“He called them,” Travis said, his voice rough against the drywall. “The inspector. Leo. Simon called him today. Asking questions about the wall.”
Mavis was silent for a long moment. “What kind of questions?”
“Structural anomalies. Anything ‘unusual’.” Travis let out a humorless puff of air. “He’s coming, Mavis. He’s not letting this go. He’s going to find a way in here.”
The tiny figure moved. He stepped off the balcony, onto the ledge that ran along the interior frame of the main hole. He was close now, just inches from Travis’s confined flesh. Travis could feel the slight disturbance in the air.
“Then we make sure there’s nothing for him to find,” Mavis said. His voice was low, utterly serious. All mischief was gone, sanded away by the same threat. “But you’re not here right now. You’re there. In his head, in his questions. You need to come back.”
“I don’t know how,” Travis whispered, the admission leaving him hollow.
“I do.”
Mavis reached out. A tiny, warm hand, pads slightly rough, pressed against the base of Travis’s shaft, right where he emerged from the silicone. It wasn’t a caress. It was a claim. A reassertion of domain.
“This is mine,” Mavis stated, the words devoid of arrogance, full of a fierce, simple truth. “This room is mine. You are mine when you are here. He doesn’t get to have this part of you. His name doesn’t get to be in this space.”
He began to move, his hands impossibly clever and sure. He mapped Travis not with teasing, but with a profound, focused attention. Every touch was a counterpoint to the cold dread Simon Vale had injected into the day. Here was warmth. Here was specificity. Here was a devotion so complete it felt like defiance.
Travis’s forearms slipped on the wall. His head dropped lower, a groan trapped in his chest. Mavis worked with a relentless, grounding precision. He wasn’t just playing; he was pulling Travis back, strand by tangled strand, from the specter of that phone call, from the imagined figure of Simon peering at blueprints. He was rewiring his nervous system, replacing alarm with a crescendo of a different, blinding frequency.
The leather strap creaked. The carabiners tapped a faint, metallic rhythm against the wall hooks. Travis’s world telescoped down to the point of contact, to the overwhelming, merciful fact of sensation. Thought evaporated. Simon’s name shattered into meaningless syllables, then into silence.
When the climax hit, it wasn’t an explosion but a total systems failure. A white-out. For several long, blessed seconds, there was no house, no threat, no past or future. There was only a pulse and a profound, liquid quiet.
He sagged against the restraints, his body boneless, spent. Sweat cooled on his back. The frantic, clawing energy was gone, purged. In its place was a deep, weary void.
He felt Mavis’s ministrations change, becoming tender, cleaning him with a scrap of soft cloth produced from his space. The tiny hands were gentle now, almost apologetic for the earlier intensity. The click of the carabiners releasing was soft. Travis managed to push himself back, slipping free from the wall. He fumbled with the buckle on the band, his fingers clumsy.
He turned and slid down the wall to sit on the floor, his back to it. Mavis hopped down from the ledge, landing softly on the rumpled quilt, then made his way to Travis’s knee. He looked up, his big eyes searching Travis’s face.
“Back?” Mavis asked softly.
Travis nodded. He felt scraped out, raw, but present. The ghost of Simon’s threat was still in the house, but it was in the next room now. It hadn’t been allowed past this door. “Yeah. I’m back.”
He reached out a trembling hand. Mavis climbed into his palm, and Travis brought him to his chest, curling his body around the small, warm life. They sat in the quiet, in the dim pool of lamplight.
“We need a plan,” Travis murmured into his own knees. “Not just paperwork. He’s past paperwork.”
“I know,” Mavis said, his voice a vibration against Travis’s sternum. “Tomorrow. We’ll start tomorrow. Tonight, you sleep.”
Travis eventually pushed himself up, turned off the light, and collapsed into bed. Mavis didn’t retreat to his walls. He nestled into the space between Travis’s jaw and shoulder, a constant, breathing weight. Travis’s last conscious thought wasn’t of Simon Vale. It was a simple, bodily awareness: the faint, sweet ache of the leather strap, a temporary brand that had, for now, held him together. The battle wasn’t over, but the first, critical retreat had been successfully defended. Sleep came, deep and dreamless, for them both.
Sleep came, deep and dreamless, for them both.
The peace didn’t survive daylight. Travis woke to a clenched stomach and a dry, metallic taste in his mouth. The memory of Leo’s call was right there, waiting for him in the grey morning light like a bad guest who hadn’t left. He rolled over, the sheets tangling around his legs. Mavis was a warm comma against his collarbone.
“Your gut’s talking,” Mavis murmured, not opening his eyes. “It’s all knots.”
“I know.” Travis stared at the ceiling. The calm from the night before felt like something he’d hallucinated. The vulnerability, the release—it had been real, but it was a temporary anesthetic. Now the wound was awake and throbbing. He felt exposed, his privacy dissected by an invisible, smirking gaze. Simon was probably having coffee right now, thinking about his walls.
He dragged himself to the shower. The hot water didn’t help. His reflection in the steamy mirror looked gaunt, shadows pooling under his eyes. He tried to brush his teeth and gagged, spitting white foam into the sink. His body was rejecting the morning itself.
He pulled on sweatpants and a faded t-shirt, his uniform for days he worked from home. The kitchen was too bright. The smell of yesterday’s scones, still sitting in their bag, made his stomach lurch. He put the kettle on for tea, hoping the bland warmth would settle him. He stared at the blinking light on his coffee machine, a piece of normalcy he couldn’t touch. Coffee was acid and panic in a mug now.
Mavis watched from the edge of the counter, tail-tip twitching. “You need to put something in there that isn’t just nerves.”
“I can’t.” The words came out thin. “It just… comes back up. My body thinks it’s poisoned. It thinks everything is poison right now.” The kettle whistled, a shrill sound that made him jump. He poured the water over a tea bag, his hands trembling slightly.
He managed three sips of the weak, herbal tea. It sat in his stomach like a lead weight. He gave up, pushing the mug away. He walked to his office, the side of the house meant for clients, and booted up his computer. The screen flared to life, projects and deadlines glowing in neat squares. It all looked like gibberish. Like code written in a language he’d forgotten.
He opened a file for a brewery logo. The shapes swam. All he could see were the lines of his own floor plan, the specific, targeted questions about ‘structural anomalies’. Where would Simon look first? The exterior wall? Would he get a thermal camera, looking for heat signatures that didn’t match?
A cold sweat broke out on the back of his neck. His breath hitched. He put his head in his hands, elbows on the desk, and just tried to breathe through the tightening band around his ribs.
A tiny pressure on his wrist. He lifted his head. Mavis had crossed the vast desk and now stood beside his keyboard, hands on his hips. “You’re spiraling,” he said. It wasn’t an accusation. It was a weather report.
“I can’t stop it.” Travis’s voice was ragged. “He’s in my head, Mavis. He’s just in there, picking at everything.”
Mavis considered him. “Then we need a better distraction than work.” He scampered up the slope of Travis’s forearm, his tiny feet cool on Travis’s skin. He didn’t stop until he was perched on Travis’s shoulder, nudging against the side of his neck. “Come away from the screen.”
Travis let himself be led. He pushed back from the desk and walked to the living room, collapsing onto the worn sofa. The curtains were half-drawn. Mavis slid down his arm and into his lap, a spot of warm, focused life in the stagnant room.
“I need you present,” Mavis said, his voice low. “So here’s the deal. You can have this.” He leaned forward, pressing his small body against Travis’s stomach in a firm, full-bodied hug, his face buried in the fabric of the t-shirt. He nuzzled. It was a deep, grounding pressure.
Travis’s breath caught for a different reason. His hand came up, cupping around Mavis entirely. He felt the delicate structure of ribs, the soft fur, the absolute trust. He bent his head, pressing his lips to the space between Mavis’s mouse ears. He stayed there, breathing him in. It was the only thing that felt real and unpolluted.
“You can have as much of that as you want,” Mavis said, his voice muffled. “Anytime. But the price is a saltine. And a glass of water. You don’t have to keep it down. You just have to try. Every time.”
It was a brutal, gentle economy. Affection for sustenance. Stability traded for basic bodily function. Travis nodded against him. “Okay.”
He went back to the kitchen. He found a sleeve of crackers in the back of the pantry. He filled a glass with water. It felt like preparing for a medical procedure. He sat at the table, Mavis a watchful sentinel beside the glass.
The first cracker was dust and glue in his mouth. He chewed slowly, forcing himself to swallow. He took a sip of water to wash the paste down. His stomach clenched, a hot, protesting fist. He breathed, staring at the grain of the wood table. He waited for the inevitable revolt.
Mavis climbed onto his wrist, a warm, steadying presence. He didn’t speak. Just waited.
The nausea peaked, then, slowly, receded. The cracker and water stayed put. It was a small, shocking victory. Travis let out a shaky breath. “One down.”
“Good,” Mavis said, his tail giving a single, satisfied flick. “Now, about that hug I’m owed.”
The days blurred into a cycle of negotiated survival. Travis’s sleep was fractured, full of half-dreams of knocking and invasive footsteps. He’d wake tangled in sweat-damp sheets, heart hammering. Mavis was always there, a constant in the dark, pulling him back with a touch, a whispered reality check.
He existed on a scant diet of plain crackers, white rice, and sips of electrolyte water. His belt needed a new hole. His cheekbones became more pronounced, giving his face a sharper, haunted look. He moved through his own house like a ghost, jumping at settling noises, peering out side windows at empty streets.
But he held to Mavis’s deal. Every attempt at food, however feeble, was met with an immediate payout of touch. Mavis would curl in the hollow of his throat as he worked, or press tiny kisses to his fingertips. He became a living anchor, a tactile reminder that not all contact was a threat.
One afternoon, three days into the siege of his own nerves, Travis managed to keep down a whole bowl of rice. He celebrated by lying on the living room floor, Mavis sprawled on his chest, tracing idle patterns through the fabric of his shirt. The silence was comfortable, almost normal.
Then Travis’s phone buzzed on the floor beside them. A local number. Not Leo’s. His entire body went rigid. The fragile peace shattered.
Mavis felt the panic seize the muscles beneath him. He sat up. “Don’t answer it.”
“I have to,” Travis whispered. “If it’s him, I need to know what he says.”
The phone buzzed again, insistent. Travis grabbed it, his thumb slick with sweat. He swiped to answer, put it on speaker. “Hello?”
“Is this Travis Vanner?” The voice was older, officious, but not Simon’s. It held the bored tone of someone reading from a script.
“Yes.”
“This is Maureen from the Clark County Zoning Board. We’re sending a formal notice of hearing via certified mail. The review of complaint file CV-783 is scheduled for next Thursday, the 18th, at 10 a.m. You are required to appear, either in person or through legal representation, to present your case for home business compliance.” A pause. “Do you have any questions?”
Travis’s mouth was desert-dry. The date, the time, the file number—they were bullets. “No. No questions.”
“Very well. Good day.” The line went dead.
The silence in the room was absolute. The hearing. It was real. It had a date and a time. They wanted him in a room, to defend his life, to explain his walls. To sit across from Simon Vale.
A violent, sour rush flooded his throat. He scrambled to his feet, staggering to the bathroom. He made it to the sink just as the bowl of rice he’d been so proud of keeping down came back up, bitter and acidic. He gripped the cool porcelain, retching, his body violently rejecting the news.
When he was empty, he spit, leaning his forehead against the mirror. He saw Mavis in the reflection, standing on the back of the toilet tank, watching him with an expression of fierce, helpless concern.
“The 18th,” Travis croaked.
“I heard,” Mavis said. His tiny hands were clenched. “So we have until then.”
“To do what?” Travis asked, the despair a hollow echo in the tiled room.
Mavis’s eyes glinted in the bathroom light. “To find his anomalies. He’s hunting for a weakness in your wall. We start hunting for one in his life.” He pointed a tiny finger at Travis’s pale reflection. “But first, water.”
Travis rinsed his mouth, filled a glass, and drank. The water stayed down. It was a start. A very small one. He had a date. He had a target. The free-floating dread had finally solidified into something he could see on a calendar. It was terrifying. It was, in a sick way, better. The waiting was over. The war had a battlefield now.
The war had a battlefield now. The knowledge did nothing to stop the slide.
The next two days saw a decline in Travis’s health that hit bottom and didn’t come back. The hearing date, Thursday the 18th, was a black hole in the center of his calendar, its gravity distorting everything around it. His body, already strained, simply folded under the weight. He could no longer keep anything other than water down for more than thirty minutes, though he still tried. A bite of banana, a spoonful of broth—his stomach would seize, a hot, cramping fist, and send it all back up acidic and burning. He managed, at most, two hours of sleep, usually when he passed out in his office chair while working on finishing up what projects he had. The screen’s glow would etch itself onto the back of his eyelids, numbers and shapes swimming in the dark behind them.
He had put a temporary hiatus on accepting anything new for the time being. Mavis insisted that he shouldn’t put any excess stress on until he could keep food down, knowing that his current ones would pay for at least a month, and he had savings to supplement any emergencies. “The work will be there when your hands stop shaking,” Mavis told him, perched on the monitor’s edge, watching a cursor blink on an unfinished design for a pet groomer’s flyer. Travis just nodded, his head feeling too heavy for his neck.
Mavis was with him all the time now. In a pocket or hood, tucked against his skin, nestled in his hair. He was a foundational warmth, a counterpoint to the chill that seemed to have settled in Travis’s bones. He spoke in low, practical terms. “Your breath is sour. Sip, don’t gulp.” Or, “You’re blinking too slow. Lie down before you fall.” Every other night, they rested quietly in the in-ground tub. Travis would fill it with water just shy of hot, sink into the porcelain embrace, and Mavis would paddle in slow circles around his collarbones or simply float on his back on Travis’s chest, a tiny, furry buoy. The water muffled the world, pressure without weight. It was the only place Travis’s muscles occasionally unclenched.
Once a week he’d manage to get Travis to take a proper shower, if just so both of them would be clean of sick and sweat, and wash his bedding and laundry. The process was clinical, exhausting. Travis would stand under the spray, head bowed, while Mavis directed a bottle of body wash and a washcloth from the rim of the tub like a foreman. “Scrub your left arm. Now the right. Hair next.” The steam would temporarily clear his sinuses, the smell of generic soap briefly overpowering the lingering scent of fear-sweat in the room. Afterwards, wrapped in a towel, he’d stare at the heap of damp sheets and know the effort of stripping the bed, of starting the machine, was a mountain. Mavis would nip gently at his ankle. “One thing. Just the fitted sheet. I’ll help.”
On the second night after the call, the insomnia was absolute. Travis lay rigid on the fresh, tight sheets, watching the red digits of his clock change: 2:47, 2:48, 2:49. Each minute was a grain of sand piling onto his sternum. Simon Vale’s face, assembled from memory and imagination, smirked behind his eyelids. He could hear the man’s voice in the inspector’s words: structural anomalies. He saw him pointing a finger at his bedroom wall in a crowded hearing room. His heart was a frantic animal in a cage.
A tiny pressure on his temple. Mavis, walking from the pillow. “You’re doing it again. You’re building the whole courtroom in your head and you’re losing the case.”
“I can’t stop,” Travis rasped. “It just… plays.”
“Then we give it something else to play.” Mavis’s voice was a thread in the dark. He moved down, insinuating himself under the hem of Travis’s t-shirt, a line of warmth against his ribs. His small hands pressed into the space between ribs, finding the frantic drumbeat of Travis’s heart. He didn’t try to calm it. He matched it, a tiny, tapping rhythm against Travis’s skin. I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.
Focus narrowed to that point of contact. The imagined courtroom flickered, blurred. Travis’s breathing hitched, then slowly began to synchronize with the deliberate press of those tiny palms. The anxiety was still a vast, black lake around him, but Mavis was a raft. A very small, steadfast raft. He finally slept, not for two hours, but for forty-five minutes. It was something.
The morning of the third day dawned grey and slick with rain. Travis was at his desk, trying to proofread copy for a client’s bakery menu. The words “flaky croissant” shimmered and danced. He felt a familiar, saliva-flooding warning in his throat. He swallowed hard, tasting bile. He hadn’t eaten in twenty-two hours. The water in his glass looked suspect.
Mavis was nestled in the hood of his sweatshirt, a weight on his shoulders. “You need a new angle,” Mavis said, his voice close to Travis’s ear.
“On typography for sourdough?” Travis muttered, squeezing his eyes shut against a wave of dizziness.
“On him.” Mavis adjusted his position. “He’s digging at you. We have to dig back. You’re a graphic designer. You find patterns. What’s his pattern?”
Travis opened his eyes, staring not at the screen but at the rain-streaked window. “He’s a homeowner. On the committee. Retired, I think. From something in… municipal planning, maybe? He mentioned it once. Likes rules. Likes order.”
“So he’s a man who trusts systems,” Mavis mused. “And he’s using the system on you. But people who love systems usually have things they put into those systems. Paper trails. Applications. Requests.”
A dull spark, faint but real, flickered in Travis’s fatigue. “You think there’s a record of him? Beyond just being a nuisance?”
“Everyone who’s ever asked the city for a permit, a variance, a noise complaint, anything—it leaves a mark,” Mavis said, his tone shifting into something tactical. “He’s looking for anomalies in your wall. What if he has an anomaly in his past?”
Travis’s hands, cold and shaky, hovered over the keyboard. He minimized the bakery menu. He opened a new browser tab. The Clark County public records portal was a notoriously clunky, ancient site. He typed “Simon Vale” into the search bar for property records. It loaded slowly. A list came up: one residential address. The one next door. He clicked. There were the standard documents—deed, tax assessments. Nothing unusual.
“Try something else,” Mavis urged, peering over his shoulder. “Not just property. Everything.”
Travis navigated to the zoning and permits section. He searched for Vale’s address again, this time for issued permits. The page loaded. A short list appeared: a roofing permit from eight years ago, a plumbing update from five. Standard stuff. He was about to close it when he saw the final entry. It was older, scanned from a microfiche, the text blurry. “Application for Variance: Rear Property Line Setback.” Date: seventeen years ago. Status: WITHDRAWN.
“What’s a variance?” Mavis asked.
“Permission to break a rule,” Travis whispered, leaning closer. The rain hissed against the window. His own nausea was a distant hum. “A setback is how far a structure has to be from the property line.” He clicked on the scanned document. It was a handwritten form, faded. Simon Vale had applied to build a detached garden shed or workshop within five feet of the rear property line, where the code required ten. The stated reason was “optimal sun exposure for horticultural projects.” The application was incomplete. A note from a clerk, dated a month later, simply said “Applicant withdrew inquiry. No further action.”
He withdrew it. Why? He wanted to build something right up against the line. Travis’s line.
“Seventeen years ago,” Mavis said, his tail twitching against Travis’s neck. “That’s before you. Before your parents even.”
“Yeah.” Travis’s mind, fogged for days, began turning over, rusty but moving. “He wanted to build something there. He didn’t. But he wanted to.” He stared at the screen. The hearing was about his compliance with the rules. About the sanctity of the zoning code. But Simon Vale had once tried to bend those same rules for his own benefit. He’d stepped back. But the desire was documented. The intention was right there, in a public record.
It wasn’t a weapon. Not yet. It was a thread. A single, frayed thread in Simon Vale’s pristine, rule-loving tapestry.
Travis took a sip of water. It stayed down. He felt a different kind of tension coiling in his gut, not sickness, but focus. He saved a copy of the record. He printed it. The printer whirred to life, a purposeful sound in the quiet room. Mavis climbed down onto the desk, sitting beside the emerging page as it slid into the tray, warm and smelling of ink.
“It’s a start,” Travis said, his voice still thin but clearer.
“It’s a anomaly,” Mavis corrected, a sharp little smile touching his features. He placed a tiny hand on the printed page. “Now we find out why he withdrew.”