 
# What Goes On In The Walls At Night

### Thirteen tales of disgust and delight.

## Andrew J. Schrader

### Contents

Foreword

Quotes

Prologue: What Goes On . . .

The Boy Who Swallowed Rocks

The Big Feel

Wings

Bradbury Walks At Midnight

The Developer

The Sewers Are Angry!

The Night of Running Children

Every Day

The Parasite

Howlin' Rain

Who Goes There

Epilogue: In The Walls At Night

Acknowledgments

About the Author
Copyright © 2017 by Andrew Schrader

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN: 978-0-692-84707-7

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> _"Finally, I do not pretend to have set down . . . a true, or even a consistent model of the universe. I can only say that here is a bit of my personal universe, the universe traversed in a long and uncompleted journey._
> 
> * * *
> 
> _If my record, like those of the sixteenth-century voyagers, is confused by strange beasts or monstrous thoughts or sights of abortive men, these are no more than my eyes saw or my mind conceived. On the world island we are all castaways, so that what is seen by one may often be dark or obscure to another."_

— Loren Eiseley, _The Immense Journey_

> _"I've seen the future and I've left it behind."_

— Black Sabbath

# Prologue: What Goes On . . .

I didn't sleep during most of seventh and eighth grade. Around two or three in the morning, every night, I'd wake up terrified that someone was waiting for me in the hallway. I'd peek out over the rolling dunes of my covers and watch shadows pace back and forth in the crack between the floor and the bottom of the door.

Sometimes the shadows whispered things to me, though I don't remember what they said. Occasionally I'd fall asleep again an hour or two later, after I grew too tired to keep watch. But most nights I stayed on guard until morning.

Those years I wandered around in sleep-deprived numbness, never really awake. I developed a paranoid personality and acted out at school. I had few real friends. Fortunately, I had books and movies to look forward to during the day and to comfort me at night.

About this time I discovered the books of Shorty Gray. _Vanish Into Midnight_ was one fiction paperback I found at a thrift store and never saw again: A man and wife are preyed upon by shadow people in the forest. Terrifying for twelve year-old me; I could relate.

Ironically, reading horror stories gave me courage and helped me stay sane and functioning. In time, the shadows left me alone, although I still rarely sleep for more than four hours a night and am often stalked in the jungle darkness by the two panthers called Panic and Terror.

* * *

For a long time I forgot about Shorty Gray. I read somewhere that he'd published twenty books, maybe more, both fiction and nonfiction of all genres, in addition to essays and short fiction in magazines, yet most of his work is out of print. I still hunt for his books. I rarely find them.

But what a life. He rode trains cross-country in the sixties, helped occupy Wounded Knee in 1973, spat on President Nixon once in protest. He had never cared much for readership or about making money. I found so little information about his personal life, it was impossible to know if he had a family. He wore no wedding ring, as far as anyone knew. Then again, no one could really know: Shorty Gray always wore a long, black sleeve and glove covering his left arm and hand.

One night, about two months ago, after a convention on book publishing, I checked into a cheap hotel outside of Philadelphia, in a place so old the wallpaper had taken root in the walls. I set my stuff down on my squeaky mattress, sat around, grew bored, then wandered down to the hotel den. It was dark and damp in there, lit up only by a few solitary yellow-lamp blobs floating in the black.

A light turned on. In the darkest corner of the room, laid back in a comfy armchair, sipping a glass of whiskey, amazingly, was Shorty Gray.

I froze, undecided about whether to approach or not. He must have seen me staring, because the next thing I knew he was holding up the bottle and motioning me to sit. Soon I was having a conversation with my lost hero.

We talked all through the night; or, rather, he talked and I listened.

He told me about how, when he was eight years old, he'd worked the grounds at a place called Pickering Cemetery with his parents out in Connecticut. How one night there, in the basement, he'd heard shadowy voices in the walls, whispering to each other, telling stories, one after another, all night long.

"You know what I'm talking about? The . . . _shadows_? The _voices?_ " he asked, his bushy eyebrows raised, as I leaned forward in full attention.

I nodded. I knew it too well.

Sap from the logs in the fire popped loudly. He sighed and said, "This may sound . . . strange, but I have something I'd like to tell you. I'm dying, and don't have much longer to go. Cancer. Maybe a few weeks, a month. Who can tell? I've had a good life, a life of adventure. But there's one event that I haven't written about. It was the catalyst for everything, my writing, my wandering . . . In any case, I'd like to tell you about it . . . if you have the time."

Of course I said yes, and took out my pen and paper.

"I was only eight years old when it happened," he started. "My parents and I had taken jobs as caretakers of Pickering Cemetery, living there. A large place, hilly, rolling, almost fifty acres in size.

"Something unusual about this cemetery: it had a columbarium, an ornate structure the size of a small church. Housed inside were hundreds of urns containing ashes, and some bodies. Its front loomed thirty feet tall, with protective gargoyles perched at the tops on both sides. My mother told me that long, cavernous tunnels ran underneath, in mazes carved in the dirt. When I had to pass by the columbarium to get home—home was only a few hundred feet past—I would run and never linger lest the massive door fly open and let the spirits out . . .

"Our own little home was made of brick and had only three rooms above ground—a kitchen, a bedroom, and a small living space. There was, however, a basement. I never did like the cold much, and was much more sensitive than my parents, so I spent nights below, listening to the furnace gurgle and belch, its metals expanding and contracting and heating me while I slept.

"One night after work I went downstairs, dog tired, dirt rolling off my hair and onto my pillow, and fell into a deep sleep. But at some point I was awoken by the sound of scratching.

"At first I thought the furnace was making noises, but all I heard was the tick-tick-tick of it cooling. No, this was behind me, behind the brick walls, somewhere deep in the earth. I put my ear up to the wall; I heard rustling followed by scattered sounds of dirt or rock falling, or being pushed, through a hole. What it was I couldn't guess—what moves in solid dirt? A mole?

"In any case, it was coming from the direction of the columbarium. The tunnels under the earth, I realized! My mother was telling the truth!

"I leaned in closer and put a hand against the wall for support. I heard more scraping. An animal, perhaps? Maybe. I put an old funnel up to the wall, and in my ear I inserted the smaller end, magnifying the sound. Only then was I able to hear what sounded like muffled speaking . . . The muffled speaking of the voices in the walls."

Shorty sipped his drink, one eye shrouded in black, the other large and wild and fixed on me. "Would you like to know what the voices told me? What stories I heard?"

* * *

What follows are all the tales he told me that night, which I've translated from my scribbled shorthand notes as best as I could.

# The Boy Who Swallowed Rocks

I remember him. Shallow eyes and a pudgy face, with hands scabby from sifting through sediment all day and night. He had the hands not of a twelve-year-old boy but of a cement worker. Thick, sweat-creased lines, tinted with the red-orange of an afternoon sun that hits at a surface angle but over prolonged periods creates the weathered look of tired baseball mitts, started at his hands and fanned themselves out into webs flung across his arms, wrists, and face.

The boy who swallowed rocks used to sit on the sidewalk and shovel pebbles in his mouth.

Sometimes dirt, mixed with his saliva, dribbled down his chin like lemonade after a hot summer day's play. He would grin and stare at the professional men and women passing by on the busy streets, meaning no harm, but—due to the rock-eating—offensive, nonetheless. He would sit and chomp his earthly delights in the corporate bushes and company streets, just outside the cathedrals of finance in the center of downtown.

The boy who swallowed rocks drew in the local homeless, who thought him a riot—though after a few minutes of the poor watching their freak show they'd be shooed away by police. Always sly and distrusting of authority, he would halt his sediment-chewing when the cops came and resume only when they were out of view again. But he'd quickly remove the next rock form (maybe a basanite, which were his favorite, and which he could only get from his home, two miles away) from his pocket and chip away at it with his two front teeth. Those teeth, somehow both dulled and fanged now, molded and carved, chomped and gnashed and shredded away at the hundreds, thousands, of ancient pieces of stone and mortar and sand—which would crumble like feta or burst apart, bomblike.

Thirty or forty of us had been protesting for weeks, standing impotently around Grand National Bank (one of the big five in the world at that time) and waving signs, or sometimes marching. Bank and government policies, combined with lower wages, inflation, and a number of systemic inequalities, had made evictions and repossessions of cars and homes ubiquitous. Grand National had made over 11 percent of the loans for home mortgages and were ruthlessly dispossessing residents in the Bay Area.

That day, the kid arrived sometime before nine. The sun was far along already in its godly ascent, casting down heat-soaked rays of yellow and morning gold that conjured sweat on the brows of elite corporate wage earners.

Today, though, he sat quietly, staring blankly into the gutter as the sun's heat threw a sheen across the street, reflecting the silvery glow of passing hubcaps. I watched him from the opposite sidewalk. The day had come: he had no rocks! Had he grown out of his habit? Had he eaten all the city's best stones?

He sat awhile, turned around and peered up at the high-rise building under whose shadow he'd sat, and then he stood and stutter-stepped his way to the edge of the building, regarding the corner wall—studying it, stroking it—like a mother does her child's face.

He tilted his head sideways, opened his mouth, and set his creaky jaw against the building. Scraping and wiggling his teeth against the granite, he eventually made enough of a dent in the building to take a bite. The side of the building shrieked, awakened out of nonexistence, panicking, calling suddenly for help. As for the boy, he simply chewed, his tongue pushing the marble and granite to the back of his throat before it made its way to his iron stomach.

He continued, eyes like a contented cat's, the demeanor of a well-satisfied hog. He'd had enough of small pebbles and gravel; this was the real show. He continued to bite, chew, swallow, and repeat. The building's outer shell broke, bite by bite, and slowly the rebar and encasing concrete became exposed. I looked for signs of the boy's stomach growing full and expanding. There were none. Sweating freely from the hard work in the tremendous heat, the kid showed absolutely no signs of fatigue or stomach ache.

Gradually a crowd gathered around the edge of the building. Businessmen on their way to work in one of the nearby skyscrapers and stay-at-home moms out shopping crowded around the boy. Aghast, amused, frightened, curious. They'd been used to seeing the boy who swallowed rocks, but a boy who swallowed buildings . . .

He'd carved his way into the skyscraper—starting from where two walls met (about four feet off the ground)—two feet in on either side, two feet up and down, and nearly one foot deep. Presently his head was buried in deep darkness, looking as if he'd run very fast and hurled himself into the thing and gotten stuck there like some foolish cartoon character.

By the time he'd gone two feet deep, the police officer had circled back. The well-meaning and all-around nice man approached the boy and gently tried to pull him away. He set a hand on his shoulder, just to the right of his face—and without hesitation, the kid simply ate across the building as if it were corn on the cob, and coolly bit into the officer's wrist.

Shock. Pain. Blood. As the officer's vision went black, red streams shot into the air, striking the building and running down its exposed orifices. The crowd, torn between the emotion of seeing a good man go down in battle and the fascination of boy-versus-building, simultaneously wanted the kid to stop _and_ continue.

More cops came, quickly. Decisions had to be made. The boy now was three feet deep and four feet across on both sides of the corner of the building. Sensing his time was limited, the boy sped up, shredding and swallowing faster, thrashing his neck like a serpent with its head lopped off. His tongue, powerful as a jackhammer, flicked in and out, punching the concrete into cheap, soft fluff. His stomach, large as a pregnant woman's, sweating and distended, roared for more.

The crowd, meanwhile, had crowded around the boy in an airtight semicircle. Police at first tried to reason with the people but were met with swift objections. They didn't want the officers hurt; they just wanted the boy to continue.

At five feet deep, the manager of the building was called. At six, the governor. The boy would soon be eating one of the eight foundation pillars that were holding up the twenty-one thousand cubic feet of concrete.

His belly resembled an elephant's; still, he showed no signs of slowing down—only speeding up. The stomach gurgled, the earthen rocks inside conspiring with one another, celebrating their newfound freedom. Hurriedly, the rocks inside made space for new debris to come join them, compacting themselves more and more.

Then came the tear gas and flash grenades. The crowd dispersed. The boy's focus deepened. Faster and faster he ate, while all around him mothers and fathers were beaten and cast aside. It had been decreed that there would be no more property damage today, not in San Francisco. The decision from the governor went to the mayor and then to the police chief, then down to the officers who were stripping off their gas masks as the smoke cleared.

The order was given to an expert shooter, an Irishman named Sergeant MacReady. Removing his gun from his holster and aiming it carefully, MacReady paused for just a moment to give the kid one more warning. The boy turned and looked askance at the sergeant, crazy-eyed, mouth full of blood and sand. He grinned, then raised his middle finger into the air.

The officer fired.

* * *

Two days later, I sat across the street and watched city workers patch up the side of the building. Business was back to normal. The day after that, for some reason, I returned. Others sat with me. Together, we've watched and waited, hoping that someone else would come to finish the job of tearing down that useless bank and all the other buildings like it.

I sigh. I'm an old man now. Twenty-four years have passed.

And no one has ever come.

# The Big Feel

Each day Everett Thompson went to work was the next greatest day of his life. Somehow today __ was always brighter, livelier, and just simply better than yesterday. And yesterday had been more glorious than the day before that, and so on. He loved his job—that was the reason—and you'd never find an airport security man more full of skipping and smiles and good cheer.

Three days ago, Everett strolled into work with freshly polished shoes and his breast badge over his truck-chested build—as was his custom on Mondays. It had taken him hours to get his clothes ironed and primped and acceptable for work at the airport in Oklahoma. His hair was gelled and pulled to the right side, and this day he bounced in so hard, so fast, that the dandruff was already caked around his uniform collar like snow after a blizzard.

For Everett, his job was all business. As he rounded the corner to the Continental Airlines terminal checkpoint, his delicious, egg-sucking smile faded, and his face grew hard and emotionless. Everybody knows that smiling, good-natured people appear less intimidating to the passengers coming through security, and Everett's job was all about intimidation. You can't be afraid of a happy person, now can you? Besides, the Transportation Security Corporation discouraged its employees from smiling.

There was already a long line at 9 a.m. The hundred-deep flock of people stretched far back beyond the security conveyor belts out into the concourse, past the two security guards who sat in front of the conveyors checking boarding passes and identification cards all day long. This Monday it was Thomas and Melinda, and they were stealing glances at each other in between matching faces on passengers with the faces on driver's licenses.

If you're a passenger flying on Continental Airlines out of Oklahoma, you should know how their security works; this way you'll be prepared. It's very bad when you're not ready, for the security guards grow red and angry and are liable to embarrass you or steal things from your luggage. So listen closely. At times it may feel like you're defeating bosses at the end of some video game level. It's designed to feel that way.

After Tommy or Melinda mindlessly marks up your boarding pass (by the way, there's no reason to mark up your ticket, they're just bored and like to doodle) you will be instructed to remove your shoes, belt, phone, pens, lighters, change, tokens, matches, and everything else from your pockets. (I've heard some airline security men and women make you remove the lint from your pockets because it messes up the X-ray scanners.) Anyway, this is mostly for intimidation purposes—half the time the guards forget to turn on their detection equipment—but this way you'll feel naked and won't question their authority.

Everett, by the way, only cares about the naked part, but we'll get to that in a minute.

You'll place everything on the conveyor belt and hope nothing gets caught on its way into the scanner. If it does, beware! Any deviation from the norm sends the guards into a tailspin, and very often they shout so vehemently they spit on their passengers. Oh, and remember that you need to fit all your liquids into a quart-sized bag—not a gallon-sized—or they'll dump it all in the trash. Place everything you have in the gray tubs—not the green ones, which the agents only put there so they can yell and shame you in front of the others. It keeps passengers in line, because who wants to be humiliated like that last guy?

So, with your suitcase, clothes, and other items in the gray buckets on the conveyor, STEP ASIDE to your LEFT. Don't hang around your luggage too long, or the guards will think you're hiding something and dump everything on the floor and stomp on it and yell at you and make you feel like a dummy. No, step to the LEFT and AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS. Your luggage will be safe and back with you momentarily. Unless it's not.

As you keep one eye on your things going under the all-penetrating eye of the X-ray scanner, keep the other on the agent in front of you. In this case, it's Eddie, who wears white gloves, and who will signal you to step through the millimeter wavelength scanner. This, by the way, does produce some measured amount of radiation, and is generally considered harmful to your health. By keeping you weak and docile, the authorities have determined you will be less likely to break any rules, whether at the airport, at work, or at a government building.

If you choose to go through the scanner, as most people do, then, when prompted, rush into the plastic cylindrical radiation emitter and hold up your hands. This is important, because you may be clenching some sharp blade in your armpits or between your buttocks, and the agents need to know these things to protect the nation.

After the scanner finishes, step out! Don't hesitate! They'll dock you two points for that one, and everyone knows that three points is all you get.

If you've made it this far, congratulations. You'll probably make it out okay, unless the all-seeing eye of the X-ray spotted something nefarious in your luggage— _an extra bottle of nail polish, perhaps?_ —in which case you and your things will be detained for further questioning. This is why they tell you to arrive for your flight four hours early. They must be thorough, of course, because if you're that one terrorist out of the many millions of people who fly each year, the security guard who let you pass could get in some minor trouble, maybe even be laughed at or humiliated on the news.

And if you don't pass the test? In that case, glance back and to the left of all the equipment and conveyor belts, to the area where no one likes to look. If you see a massive, corn-fed head with curiously big eyes and glinting teeth that sit inside an oversized mouth, then you've really messed up. Because that big man is Everett, and he's here to touch you.

He's made of 70 percent meat and 30 percent corn, give or take. He has rolly, pudgy hands that know their way around flesh and bone, and this is exactly what you want from an airport pat-down person.

You may also see a brief smile appear on the man's face, which then extinguishes as it becomes self-aware. That's because Everett's about to do his favorite thing in the whole wide world, the thing that makes him so happy, that makes each day better than the last. He's going to _feel_ you.

Most people love to touch and be touched, but Everett's a little different. He hates to be touched, but loves touching others. Not in an intimate, romantic way like you or I might like. No, no, he likes to _touch_ , mostly against people's will. That's the only way to really feel someone, he says. When they're tense and closed, that's when he loves to _feeeeel_. Or grope—he loves groping. Or fondling or caressing or stroking or patting or petting or fingering or tickling.

Everett loves it all.

Only he doesn't get to feel as many people as you might think. There's the occasional pat-down when someone goes through the scanner with a metal plate in their head, but those are usually old war veterans. Anybody can, if they want, refuse to enter the scanner and choose to visit Everett—though no one ever does. It's too humiliating. In fact, in the three years since Everett left the pig slaughterhouse, no one had willingly opted for the pat-down.

That's why Monday was so different.

A very thin, though not frail, man with large beaver teeth and round, bulging eyes made his way past Thomas and Melinda, loaded his things onto the conveyor, then stood and waited for his turn through the radioactive death machine.

The agent in charge waved him through . . . but the man didn't move. He just grinned and said, "I want the pat-down."

How strange! Who actually _chooses_ to have a _man's_ hands all over his body, at the airport, in front of everyone?

People behind him stopped. The nebbishy woman behind the grinning man froze, unsure of the proper protocol. _Should I move on? Or just stand here? Or back away?_ She began biting her nails, which were already nubs. The agent waved her forward, and she shook violently as she stepped into the scanner.

The man with the grin was then waved through the gate next to the scanner, where Everett could be seen methodically pulling on his latex gloves. One eye was trained on his yellow hands, and the other couldn't help but wander to the strange beaver-toothed man who was so eager to meet him.

Like I said before, the pat-down is the only reason Everett loved his job. It constituted his one and only duty working at the Continental Airlines terminal. So at this point, with the grinning man approaching, Everett mentally prepared himself. He was a champion—the Muhammad Ali of airport security men. And the preparation was a whole process, a work of art. First, he made his show with the latex gloves, like Ali lacing up his gear. Then he looked menacingly from side to side, frowning a little, making sure to stand tall and stiff. He usually stared into the helpless person's eyeballs, and would sneer for a little while. The pat-down was required by law, though if Everett had his way, there would be no warning—no formalities of any kind—just the touching and the pleasure it brought him.

He motioned for the grinning man to stand over there— _no, over there!_ —and set the man's things on the metal bench beside them. "Sir," Everett said in his perfected menacing tone, "what I'm going to do is perform an invasive search of your body. I'm going to press the back of my hand over your person, including your groin and buttocks. Do you understand?" The grinning man, after "invasive," "groin," and "buttocks," moaned a little and began breathing heavy.

"Yes, please!" the man gasped through his woodchuck teeth.

_This guy's insane_ , thought Everett. Still, he had a job to do, and touching was better than no touching. So he continued.

But the man was making the feel difficult, because he was staring straight into Everett's eyes, and for once, Everett wasn't doing the intimidating. It reversed the structure and flow of power, and this is quite unacceptable to any agent—especially one as serious and involved in his public duty as Everett.

Uneasiness came quickly: the kind of feeling you get when you're about to walk down a dimly lit alleyway at night. Something kind of sinister, though you can't tell what it is—or even if it's only in your mind. Everett decided the man must be a terrorist— _yes, that must be where that feeling is coming from_ —but first, he had to prove it.

"Hold out your arms, palms up," Everett said.

"Anything you say," the man purred.

Everett ran his latex-gloved hands up and down the man's arm, gripping the polyester material tight against the man's skin, which felt flabby under his clothing. The grinning man closed his eyes ever so slightly, his face relaxed, and his mouth opened just a teensy weensy bit.

Everett ruffled the areas around the man's feet to make sure there was nothing hiding in the cuffs of his white denim pants. A smell from the man's feet drifted up to Everett's nose—flowers of some kind. Everett rubbed the back of his hand down the back of the man's pants.

The man giggled.

Next came the upper leg search, usually Everett's favorite part of the procedure. Today, though . . .

When his hands touched the insides of the man's thigh, such a deep wave of ecstasy escaped the fellow's lips that Everett froze and looked around, hoping, praying, that nobody—not his staff, not the passengers, not God—had heard it.

Everett quickly finished up. "Gather your things, move along."

The grinning man was grinning no longer. He did, however, have a supremely satisfied look about him. "Sir?" he said.

Everett just stared.

"Thank _yooou_ ," said the man, glassy-eyed. The words sat there. Moments passed. "That was . . ." The man licked his lips. "Very _pleasant_. Very _niiice_."

No one had ever said _that_ , much less been appreciative to have Everett Thompson's hands on them. Everett retreated a couple steps, glancing around to see if anyone else had seen this.

The once-grinning-but-now-very-pleased man plucked his single briefcase from the end of the conveyor, sat down on the bench to slip his comfortable loafers back on, then patted his knees, looked around, rose, and left. But just before he reached the end of the security checkpoint, he turned back to Everett—who was still standing there with his mouth kind of open—and he winked suggestively, as if they'd shared some private secret.

* * *

Everett's day dragged after that. Nothing could cheer him up. Not even the three young, plumpish females who came in near the end of the day, whose tickets said they needed a thorough pat-down before entering the plane. It was this very situation that gave Everett the most pleasure; not only was he getting to touch and feel and grope and prod, but it was somewhat random, and the females were taken by surprise—which usually made the whole experience more delightful. But even that couldn't cheer Everett. He was lost somewhere in his own head for the rest of the day, listening to the voice of the once-grinning man: " _Thank yooou . . ."_

That night, Everett had his normal dinner of 70 percent meat and 30 percent corn—with a few stewed prunes and cream for dessert. He awoke the next day, fresh and determined, excited once again for his rewarding job. What would the day bring, he wondered. Punk teenagers, maybe? Stay-at-home moms? Oh, maybe even Boy Scouts! A jolt of adrenaline ran through his chest. Everett quickly gathered his things and slicked back his wavy hair. Fun juice shot through him driving into work; he forgot all about the grinning man, who was gone now anyway, gone to whatever fruity island he was visiting.

An hour later, Everett was electrified by touching two nuns who were traveling to Memphis to start a new Baptist church. After refusing to remove the crosses around their necks, they were sent to Everett for further feeling. And feel he did. He'd never felt a nun's habit, the coif, the wimple; never seen up close how it was pleated at the neck; and the whole time he performed his invasive maneuvers—even running his hands along the black serge underskirt, ever so briefly—he asked them both loads of questions about a nun's life. _Could they date? Had they ever touched a man?_ Would _they ever touch a man?_ One of the nuns snapped at him about something, but Everett simply laughed her off, patted her on the tush, and sent them on their way.

Fabulous!

Then there was the soccer mom with three kids and a husband (four kids, in other words), who was as thrilling and chilling to touch as Everett's first feel ever. She was both skinny and curvy, somehow, with hair the color of the most golden dawn, and perfect skin with not a blemish in sight. She wore tight workout shorts and a T-shirt, and Everett made sure when he saw her in line to pass a note to Eddie to send her to him. Most people Everett took to the rear of the conveyors so everyone could watch them be dominated.

But not today. No, today, Everett decided some alone time was necessary for him to do his job properly. Instead of using the back of his hand to touch her, he used the front, and ran his fingers right down beneath her waistline. Furious that he couldn't stick his grubby fingers underneath her underwear, he settled for running them across her pelvis. I won't go into more details here about what he did to her backside— _this is starting to feel icky_ —but let's just say when the woman left, there were tears and sadness, and the children couldn't figure out why Mommy lay in bed the rest of the trip.

Everett reclined in his personal lawn chair that he'd reserved just for these occasions. If smoking were allowed you'd have seen him puffing on some huge cigar. Instead he settled for lying back with his hands behind his head, feet up, wearing a smug, self-satisfied smile. He was so happy and content that he fell asleep, and didn't even notice when Eddie sent his next victim over. Everett woke and hurriedly stood at attention, wiping the sleep from his eyes.

Everett stopped. No, it couldn't be. Could it? Not in his seven years as a transportation security man had he ever seen the same person within two consecutive days. Maybe within two consecutive weeks, but the only people who did that were business travelers.

But there he was, _the grinning man_ , standing sheepishly over by the metal table, holding his single briefcase with both hands by his abdomen. He was slightly hunched and staring at Everett with the grin of someone who has been caught doing something rather naughty. The man's smile grew larger and larger, and he slowly set down his briefcase and walked himself, without being told, to the inspection section. And, with the precision and gusto of a soldier on the battlefield, he assumed the position: legs splayed out, arms up, palms up.

Like this he waited—for Everett and the big feel.

"I'm ready, sir!" the man nearly yelled, trembling with anticipation. His knees shook, his arms quivered. The man's breathing grew rapid and shallow, and his eyes fluttered. Little drops of sweat gathered around the edge of his hairline, and stains were becoming visible under his arms.

Everett excused himself and rushed to one of his fellows, a fattish, rubbery man named Billy. Would Billy switch with him, just this once? Billy was confused; Everett had never, ever asked anyone to switch jobs. In fact, being the thorough pat-down guy was all Everett cared about, all he wanted, all he lived for. So Billy looked at the grinning man, who was still standing across the room with arms and legs spread like someone giving themselves to the Lord. Unfortunately for Everett, creepiness can be sensed across considerable distance, and Billy told Everett right then, no, no thank you, you do this one. Then Billy was called away to check something on the scanner monitor, and Everett was left arguing with no one. Meanwhile, the line was backing up; customers were complaining of the long wait times, and there were more disabled people coming through who needed to be searched by hand.

Everett had no choice but to return to the grinning man.

The man was of thin build— _food probably went right through him_ , thought Everett—and his skin-tight pants showed absolutely every curve and indentation from the waist on down. How such a little guy could intimidate Everett he didn't know, but Everett felt oddly like a child, who, finally reaching grade school, gets a look at the oldest, meanest kids, and knows deep down he'd better stay on his toes.

So Everett psyched himself up and stood tall, deciding that he was being silly—that nobody should be able to intimidate him like that. He, Everett Thompson, six-foot-five, all-American pig slaughterer, 70-percent meat eater, _wouldn't be afraid of no one_.

He circled around the man and put on the meanest possible face. "Sir!"

The man still had his eyes closed, though his chin was pointed up at the ceiling and his mouth had a dreamy quality to it. He was clearly in some kind of rapture. "Yes, yes, sir," he said. "I'm so happy you're here today. I've been waiting and thinking and waiting and dreaming about this all morning. It was so good yesterday, so good. I'm ready for you now."

Everett decided to take it slow, delay this as long as possible. "Sir, what's in the briefcase?"

"Oh, nothing. It's empty."

"Did you check your other bags?"

"Oh, no, I didn't bring other bags."

"Where you flying to?"

"Well, sir, my ticket says New York."

"Where'll you be in New York?"

"New York? Oh, I'm not going."

Everett paused. "What do you mean?"

"I don't think I'll leave today after all."

"Where're ya going, then?"

"Back home, I'd imagine." Now the man stared doe-eyed at Everett.

Everett squinted. "Why would ya buy a ticket, then not go anywhere?"

The man licked his thin lips and smiled his naughty smile. He looked Everett up and down, admiring something below his belt. " _You_ know," he said. And with that he shut his eyes and flung his chin back up at the ceiling, waiting for his inspection to be completed.

Approaching panic, Everett tried to speed this up. "Arms up, palms up," he said, when—

"Oh, sir? I think you're forgetting something. I'd like to make this inspection a little more intimate." Then he said something which drove spikes of fear through Everett's heart. "I'd like a _private_ room."

"I th-th-think right here is fine, sir."

The man grinned even wider. "Ah, yes, well, this man here"—he pointed to himself with both thumbs—"knows that by law, each and every person who comes through here is allowed to request a private screening"—his eyes flashed—"so as not to cause the subject any undue embarrassment."

What could Everett do? He knew he was right. If he refused, it could cost him his job. And even though, at this moment, _this man here_ made him hate his job, made him regret that he'd ever left the slaughterhouse in the first place, Everett knew he could safely reason that this would be the last time he'd ever have to see this man. He couldn't let one person drag him down, make him question his life, his own existence. It was, after all, just a man.

Everett led him to the private room, to the back-right of the checkpoint. It was secluded, isolated, though there was a camera mounted in the top-left corner of the room that captured any and all events.

The man put one foot down in the small feet marks on the floor, which were painted in white and yellow. He pounded his other foot on the floor like a soldier reporting for duty then stared straight ahead.

Everett started. "All right, sir," he said, full of contempt. "Once again, this is an invasive search. I'm going to be touching sensitive areas, including . . . your private areas."

The man gave his enthusiastic approval.

Everett began, this time, by running his fingers around the collar of the man's bright yellow polo shirt, then, flattening his palms against the man's back and chest, pulled downward on the material as hard as he could. By the end, the man's shirt was hanging loosely at the collar and two inches longer in the front and back than when he came in. The man didn't care, didn't notice; he was much too happy, giggling and oohing and aahing and cooing at every touch. Every palm and finger that touched the man through the shirt sent fresh spasms of ecstasy through his body.

"I'm going to touch the inside of your thighs . . . and your buttocks," warned Everett, now close to tears. Still, he had to proceed. It was his job. And like most people who work solely for their job, Everett was able to stop the tears and stuff them way deep down inside—to explode at some inopportune time in the coming weeks, months, or years. (You may have read about these people: the term is "going postal," and it occurs when people spend most of their waking hours upset and unhappy at a job and a life they never wanted.)

As Everett stuffed his unfortunate feelings he ruffled the cuffs of the pants down by the man's loafers, then flattened his palms against the man's bony legs and worked his way up, feeling the veins and bones in intimate ways normally reserved for lovers. In fact, Everett felt like a lover of sorts. And when he'd reached the top of the man's jeans, to the upside-down V that signifies where the legs meet the groin, he realized he was face to face with the most intimate of intimate places. Everett was on his knees, looking up at the bulge in the man's pants, and beyond the pants there was the man, and the man was smiling, gazing down at Everett, nodding and grinning, nodding and grinning.

Everett looked up over his shoulder at the camera in the top-left corner of the room. The red light on its top was blinking every couple of seconds, and Everett shamefully realized that this would all be on camera, saved for all eternity. There would always be evidence of the man with the erection.

Suddenly, Everett felt a pull on his fingers. Not like someone was tugging them, just a pull towards the man's belly button. At first Everett thought he'd stumbled, and tried to draw back, but the pressurized jerks were overwhelming. Everett quickly found himself wrist deep in the man's belly button. He gasped, looked up, saw the man's face—who'd thrown his head forward, grinning, of course, to watch the show. The arm went in, up to the elbow, then there was a popping sound, and Everett disappeared altogether.

Everett is fine, don't you worry about him. He's lying down now, resting, somewhere in the dip of my stomach, near the pyloric sphincter, where he won't be jostled by the ocean waves of my belly. At first he tried to fight his way back up to the esophagus, but I soon taught him his lesson with a cup of hot coffee. So now he sits and waits, though he gets hungry at times. It was difficult, at first, for him to adjust to my vegetarian lifestyle (his old diet being 70 percent meat). But now he lies, waiting for the next batch of food, and though I'm sure it sickens him his survival instinct is strong, so he continues to eat. He must be careful, though, not to get sucked into the intestines, for there is no coming back up once he goes down.

Everett and I are very happy, thank you very much. We get along; sometimes we bicker when I exercise and shake him around—but for the most part we are good together.

What I love most is when he climbs, hoping, somewhere, somehow, he'll find a way out of my cavernous tummy. The climbing and touching provokes wonderful waves of ecstasy and pure giddiness—the feeling I grew to love back at the airport.

And you know how much I love to be touched.

# Wings

My part in the Martin Nicholls affair started almost twelve months ago, when he called to ask if I would drive the 140 miles or so from Madison, Wisconsin, to Wausau that same evening. I had just thrown my bags down on my living room floor, hung my captain's cap on the hat rack, set my pilot wings on the kitchen table, and was settling in for two weeks off, deciding what to do with my free time, when the phone rang.

No, it wasn't an _emergency_ emergency, he said, but he needed an old friend, someone he could trust. Yes, tonight. It had to be tonight. It had been years since college; he would be so happy to see me in person and catch up. Could I leave right now? Please don't tell anyone, he asked, he couldn't handle any press sniffing around his business again.

You might remember Martin Nicholls, if you're a sports fan. Day after the Packers' last-second 21-20 victory over San Francisco four or five years back, Martin held a rushed, end-of-day press conference where he announced his departure from the NFL to his estate in upper Wisconsin.

Big news, for a first-round draft pick to leave mid-season. Made front page headlines for a few days. Soon, however, his story was bowled over by some sports scandal involving price-fixing or something, and Martin Nicholls happily disappeared from the limelight. After that he split from his beautiful model wife, and then he was alone.

I looked at the clock and reviewed my options. It was 7:30 p.m. For him to call me after twelve years, out of the blue, alarmed me. He could have been suicidal. Perhaps I could talk him into a program. I agreed to come that night.

" _Adios_ ," he said, and hung up.

* * *

Three hours later a 767 screeched overhead. I was near the airport, standing in front of a supermarket in an urban part of town outside Wausau. Martin had given me instructions to wait in the parking lot of the Ranchero Market on North 17th Avenue and wait for his call to the pay phone.

Another plane roared. Made me homesick. Not for my home, for the plane. I can't stand not being in the air for too long. Honestly, I found the idea of two weeks off utterly depressing. With no wife, no kids, and nothing holding me back except four walls, a roof, and the payments on them both, the time ahead loomed before me like a lonely highway in the desert.

For me, nothing beats the air. I have the displeasure of having been born in the wrong body, as the wrong animal. When I was four I leapt from the play structure at my preschool—I'd just _known_ that I could fly. And I did, for about two seconds.

Weeks later, after the cast was taken off my arm, I tried it again. I thought it would be different this time. It was. I broke a leg. After that I stopped trying to fly.

But the love of flight had taken hold. Posters of World War II aviators, models of P-51 Mustangs and Boeing 314 Dixie Clippers, and other paraphernalia for my imagination consumed all available wall and dresser space. Once the comic books started, my mother sat me down for a chat.

Without real wings, I settled on being a pilot. I received my first in-flight training at sixteen—a surprise birthday present from my father—and flew my own grasshopper illegally the year after that. From there I earned my private pilot certificate, my commercial license, and my flight instructor certificates and found work for Belle Airlines. That was thirty-five years ago, which makes me a veteran.

I think about it sometimes. _It_. The end. I can't fly forever, and in a pilot's life I'm passed my prime. Morbid considerations, maybe, but considerations nonetheless. I've always thought I'd like to die in flight. I used to think I'd crash a small pond jumper into an empty barn, or fly high enough for the air pressure to dissipate and the engines fail. There I would eject with no parachute and—

The phone rang.

"Here's what I need." Martin's words came out in an avalanche. "Can you write this down—don't forget it, I need it, and you have to get exactly what I need, what I need right now—"

I pulled out a pen and paper. He sounded much different, agitated, like a man losing control of himself. I'd seen it before. In the air you see a lot of things, one of them being people panicking. Panic attacks are common up there. It starts slow: at first a person can't breathe. Then they look around, all wide-eyed and crazy, and sometimes they just spit their speech like a child spits their food: messy and mushy.

"Here it is." Martin took a deep breath, which sounded labored and wheezy. "Twelve whole chickens, two pork loins, three tri-tips, a New York steak, six slabs of bacon, fourteen packages of processed bologna, ten packages of hot dogs like you get at the baseball park—chicken, beef, whatever they got, the more meat in them the better—forty or fifty cans of Vienna sausages—on second thought, just buy whatever they have in stock, the hot dogs I mean—a rump roast or two or seven, eight packs of pork ribs, ten or fifteen packs of hot links, however many whole frozen turkeys they have today, and clean out their selection of ham hocks."

I finished writing. "Is that all?"

Martin cleared his throat, coughed, spoke. "Can you get me some oats? I need the fiber."

"Is _that_ all?"

"Some roast beef, prime rib . . ." He then listed off another dozen or so items that on second thought were absolutely vital.

"Martin, this will cost at least—"

"I have a tab. Just give them my name. They know me."

"You have a _tab_?"

"Jesus Christ, I was MVP, remember? They _know who I am_." He talked like I was stupid or something. But no MVP I knew, or anyone, ever, had a tab for meat at the grocery. Unless—

"You gonna tell me what this is for? I just drove three hours to get here. Are you having a party or something?"

He snickered. "Party? Yeah, sure. You and me, bud. There'll be drinks, dancing, steaks!" He laughed and laughed, then choked, coughed, sputtered. "Just get here. Please. Here's the address . . ."

I wrote it down, hung up the phone, and went inside.

He was telling the truth, too. The man had a running tab for meat.

After three attendants packed my trunk, back seat, and floors full of frozen meat, I sped off, the meat piled so high I couldn't see out the back window. Soon the city lights faded far behind me. I drove out of the city, fifteen or twenty miles, into the wilderness, and there was no longer any need to see out the back window, for I was all alone.

I wound through a forest of birch and cedar trees so thick the moonlight never touched the floor. I ascended a mountain towards my old, isolated friend's even more isolated estate, and soon found myself at a gated mansion set far back at the top. The twelve-foot high gate was already open. Vines snaked around the bars. Dead leaves flew up as my car passed. The gate shut behind on its own, and I drove the last two hundred feet up to the face of Martin Nicholls's manor.

I stepped out of the car, heard the birds first. They were all around me. If you remember the news story of Martin's seclusion upstate, you may also remember that he'd retired on an old bird sanctuary.

I turned as a hooded oriole perched itself on my car's antenna. To my left I identified a black-headed gull, several sparrows, a warbler, even a mountain bluebird. Birds aren't usually out at night. These ones were.

Overgrown shrubs and bushes and trees lined the property. Flowers had been planted, had grown, matured, and died; now their skeletons wound around the house. All the foliage (the entire estate, in fact) had been neglected for some time.

The mansion itself was symmetrically perfect, with two massive domed structures that jutted up on either side of the house like turrets. I guessed from left to right the place stretched two hundred feet, one hundred on either side of me, since I stood in the exact middle. Behind my car, near the circular driveway, was one of those tasteless statues of a mermaid standing straight up, spitting water ten feet into the air. There were, in fact, three of those girls, all with their heads back, breasts jutting out of their seashell bikinis, covered in birdshit, ready to do Martin's bidding.

The car, too (I assumed it to be Martin's) sat caked in dust and dirt. From the looks of it, it hadn't moved in many months, possibly a year.

In any case, the meat shouldn't sit there in my back seat, and I would need help to bring it all in. I honked the horn twice to signal Martin.

He didn't come out.

I honked again, waited.

Then, a voice, amplified by a megaphone, exploded from inside the house.

"YES, THANK YOU, COME IN RIGHT AWAY! AND DON'T FORGET THE GROCERIES!"

The front door opened with a tiny push, and I stepped into a beautiful, marble-floored reception area. Ahead stretched a wide staircase that started as one then split off into two and wrapped around the second story. The hallways extended along either side of the upstairs hallway, and led to various rooms, so the whole upper floor was one big open circle that overlooked the entryway.

The house, though, was under invasion of dust. It had a smell to it, too: a sour, rotten odor. Full of sweat and fog and funk and age.

And meat. Of course, the meat.

Red meat. Cold meat. Raw meat. Cooked meat.

Days of cooking. Lifetimes of cooking.

The stench of boiled, baked, sautéed meat had buried itself in the walls, in the bannisters, the furniture. It had claimed the house, held it hostage, and I doubted any amount of washing or de-stinkefying could expel it.

"QUICKLY, QUICKLY, IN THE KITCHEN!"

I rounded the corner to the kitchen, a turkey under each arm.

I stopped abruptly when I saw him.

"Glover, my friend," said the 800-pound bloated bag of mush in the corner. He let go of the megaphone and it rolled onto the floor. "You came!"

I turned away, almost at once. Martin, my friend, was leaned up in the shadowy corner. Some yellow from the porch lights outside the kitchen streamed in between the cracks of the blinds, casting slivers of light that cut across his bulbous, mushroomlike head. Both his head and body were coated in a greasy sheen.

"I know, I know, this looks bad," he said, raising his rolling red arms that could block out the sun. "But you know what, I'm happy, and that's all that matters. That's what's important, right? Hey, Glover— _Gloooo-verrrr_! Look at me, come on, don't treat me like a leper."

I must have looked like a kid avoiding his parent's gaze; I still hadn't seen Martin straight on. Slowly I turned my head, cautiously, saw a little, turned away, turned back, keeping my head now in one place, so I only saw him at an angle.

"Your face!" I said.

"Oh, that." He rolled his eyes, his hand going up to his forehead, as if he'd just realized it was there. "Yeah, yeah, oh well. What can you do?"

"But—it's completely red! And—?" There were bands across his face. White bands of muscle.

I turned slowly and faced him straight on, as curious now as disgusted. He was still mostly bathed in darkness, and I stepped forward to get a better look.

Martin's face had lost its roundness. It was now almost completely flat, like a slab of steak. His nose had faded into the planar surface of the skin beneath his eyes. His hairline fled toward the back side of his skull. His eyes were sunk far back into the flatness of his Mack truck face, so far back that his skin covered them over, giving him vision troubles. Ears he still had, only they were tinier and pulled back tight against the side of his head.

Then there were the bands of color that ran diagonally, haphazardly, across his face every which way, like scars, or meaty muscles.

His head looked like a rectangular piece of meat.

"Martin," I said, steadying myself on his kitchen counter to sit down on a stool, "I know it's not my place, but I think you have a problem."

His breathing came in short wheezes, his red and white striped shirt stretching across his waist, his stomach bulging sideways, three feet across. Down near his groin, at the bottom of his stomach, his fat, wormlike loins were impossibly stacked on each other. A little bit of his hairless fish-white stomach peeked out under his shirt. His arms rested on the sides of his body like propped-up sausages.

_A giant balloon man, made of pork._

"Yeah, you could be right." He mouth-breathed, unable to get air. "I _do_ need help. You're such a good friend, that's why I called you."

His breath snagged in his fatty windpipe, and he coughed and gasped and burped and farted, all at the same time.

When he stopped rumbling, all the fat around his midsection hung so low his legs appeared to connect with his stomach. The skin around his calves was pulled tight, stretched and red with broken blood vessels.

"In the morning," he said, "we'll call someone. A doctor—a good doctor. A physical therapist. I will start changing myself, by God. But, tonight, I have to eat. I can't expect to change my life in a few hours, and you already bought all the things I needed—and, really, thank you soooo much—so could you continue being a good friend and bring the groceries in, so I could have a nosh? I couldn't get myself up tonight, and had to call someone."

Then he smiled somewhat deviously, bringing his fingers together and touching the tubby tips. "I'm famished."

I agreed to cook for him, on the condition that he agree to see a doctor friend of mine that very night. The doctor was a nice man with a moustache, I told him, whom I'd flown several times before in a private plane, and who I was sure would do me a favor. In fact, he lived less than a half hour away.

"Fine, fine!" Martin snapped, eyes hurt and brooding. He looked away, crossed what he could of his heavy arms, and pouted angrily. "Just get me the meat. Pig liver first!"

I called my friend, who agreed to come at once. Doctors are like that. I was halfway through cooking Martin's fifth course, three lamb shanks (after the pig liver, two packages of boiled hot dogs, a 32-ounce filet, and a whole roasted chicken), when Dr. Harris arrived to examine Martin.

Later, the doctor took me into the living room, sat down, and shook his head as I passed him a cup of tea. Martin was in the kitchen, gorging himself on a rump roast, slurping greedily, and muttering and singing under his breath, clearly in some kind of edible ecstasy.

"I'll have to check the blood work to be sure," the good doctor said, "but I wouldn't be surprised if his LDL was north of 350. 400 maybe. That's your cholesterol, your bad cholesterol. Very high numbers are 200. I've never seen anyone above 300 live very long."

The doctor sipped his tea. "His blood pressure is 260 over 140. That's near death. Heart attack any second. How he's lived this long is a miracle."

We sat in silence for a few minutes more, absorbed in our thoughts, listening to Martin defile himself in the next room.

Finally, the doctor set his teacup down and slapped his knees. "I'll be in touch about the blood when I get the results back. I'll hurry up the lab in the morning, should have results soon.

"My advice is to get him a trainer right away. But be careful—your friend's blood pressure is so high while resting his heart could explode with too much movement. Go easy. I'll be back in a week or so to check on him."

I thanked the doctor, walked him out, watched him drive off.

It was 1:30 in the morning. I stood in the driveway and reviewed my options. I could leave, leave my friend alone in his overbright mansion with his mountain of meat, or I could stay and try to help him.

The thought of planting myself in his house for any amount of time invoked cottonmouth, a distressed stomach, sweating, numbness, and a tingling scalp, but the anchor of responsibility, to do the right thing, prevented me from leaving. _Never leave a fallen man behind_ , I heard the little voice inside of me say. With a sigh, I resigned myself to stay the night.

The next day the doctor called. Lab results were in. Martin Nicholls's LDL numbers, the bad cholesterol, were at 612. His blood sugar stood at a whopping 1,500. His TSH level (thyroid) was north of 400. A normal TSH level was in the 1 to 5 range.

It looked like death was imminent. I heard the pity in the doctor's voice and the disappointed tone he took when I told him that against all pleading Martin refused to be taken to a hospital or be ambulanced out of his home.

There was little anyone could do but let him eat himself to death.

And eat he did. That day he consumed over twenty-five pounds of beef, pork, and chicken. All day I found myself walking in and out of his giant meat freezer, in and out, to cook and return for more. The meat I'd stacked the night before, I carried out now by the armful.

To his credit, Martin recognized the need for help, and in exchange for my assistance (plus, he couldn't hoist himself off the floor alone) he agreed to see a man named Sebastian Fit, a dietician and exercise guru I found in the phone book.

Sebastian rang the doorbell in bright green shorts and a skin-tight shirt, chipper and light, armed to the gills with pre-portioned food bowls and organic frozen berries.

"Okay, gang!" the man cheerfully squealed upon entering the home. "It's time to butter up those buns!"

He skidded to a halt just inside the kitchen, the expression stripped from his face, no doubt in shock at the sight of the hippo in the corner who was slick with grease, surrounded by old plastic wrappings, and drenched in meat sweat.

Martin grinned at the trainer like a Mack truck, toothily, mouth-breathing as usual and wheezing more than normal. His shirt was pulled so tight his tummy rolls looked like smooth kielbasa sausages. His whole body—head, arms, chest, stomach, legs—shook with each inhale, so great was the amount of force needed to help him breathe. On the exhale the same body parts trembled in aftershock, ripples of fat reversing their course. I think his mind and body had transcended in many ways the foul or lovely nature of being human; he now exemplified a level of comfort and acceptance for himself normally reserved for enlightened mystics.

"Meat!" Martin yelled through gritted teeth. "MEAT!"

"I'm sorry," I explained to the trainer. "I refused to feed him for the last two hours, since I knew you were coming. He must be starving. He eats every fifteen minutes, so you can imagine the hunger."

Sebastian the Trainer treated my old friend with respect. He smiled and explained his program while lovingly stacking his measly frozen food containers in the fridge, labeling each with the weekday and time of consumption, so even a three-year-old could survive on his own.

Each meal had its own inspirational, halfway enlightening and fully mediocre statement, like "Don't worry about the trek up the mountain. Think about the view from the top." Then there was Wednesday's factually inaccurate 6 p.m. dinner quote: "Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll be among the stars." Then there was my favorite: Thursday's poignant lunchtime notification—"Once you choose positivity, anything is possible."

Sebastian presented Martin with his first meal on his new diet plan, removing the stainless steel dome top from the plate and waving a mashed sweet potato, a mousy, perfectly sterile piece of chicken parmesan, a quarter-cup of blueberries, and a fistful of spinach with raspberry vinaigrette under Martin's supremely disappointed smell holes.

Martin ate, but all the while stared intensely with bloodshot eyes at his new trainer, making Sebastian uncomfortable for sure, muttering under his breath while shoving a hand full of berries to his mouth and grinding his food to mush.

After letting my friend digest and rise from his mid-day lethargy, Sebastian engaged Martin in a little exercise, which consisted of Martin flapping his arms under Sebastian's commands, sitting up a little straighter, and wiggling his toes. After leaking nearly a gallon of saltwater sweat, Martin took a nap, shining the floor with his legs as he twitched.

The next couple days went like that: Martin eating scraps, fluttering different body parts, sweating, sleeping, and over again. Sebastian had taken this on as a full-time assignment; a bedroom was made up on the second floor. I often heard him singing in the shower, in his room, on the stairs. Jolly guy. I moved up to the third floor for solitude; often I still heard him through the vents, the floor, the walls.

Martin couldn't stick to only the scraps Sebastian provided. He was afraid his body, too used to the influx of hot dogs, linguica, pork loin, ribs, ground beef, and duck pate, might revolt against him and shut down if he stopped the meat train. Nodding understandingly, Sebastian settled for _two_ rounds of physical exercise each day, and a decrease in one pound of meat _per week_ until Martin's health improved.

Here the narrative takes a slight detour. For it was here, with adequate time away from Martin, and buffered by Sebastian, that I had the space to begin forming my own theory about Martin's physical changes.

First of all, I didn't believe that eating in and of itself could have transfigured his body, face, hands, feet so grotesquely. I have seen large people, fat people, obese people— _insanely_ obese people—before. Every two or three flights I make brings in someone who needs two seats—sometimes all three in the row—to fit in the plane. Though everybody is different in body type, they all still look human.

Not so, with Martin. The weight was one thing, but it was his body itself that simultaneously interested and disgusted me:

The flattened face like a slab of steak with a receding hairline.

His belly of a dozen sausage links.

His hot dog fingers (which I realized were, in fact, getting thinner).

His legs. They shone and dripped with sweat, sure, but they were also proportionately much skinnier than one would expect from an 800-pound man. At the top, around the thighs, they bulged thick and juicy, but they tapered down past the knees, until they were thin as broomsticks.

His feet. You could hardly grip half of one with both hands. If you can imagine an hourglass with a longer middle section, that was generally the look of his legs and feet as a whole.

I was most drawn to his feet. Something beneath those pressure socks called to me, told me to _look there_.

While he was sleeping that night, I snuck downstairs and unrolled one clammy, sticky sock from around his left ankle, stripped it off in one motion, and shined my small pen light at his foot.

Though webbed toes wouldn't be the right description, it was close. His toes weren't toes anymore, just fused bumps of flesh set like a leg of chicken or turkey. Raw chicken. Little bumps of pink flesh dotted them all the way around. They felt almost scaly. And the toenails were completely disintegrated.

A freakish and unthinkable suspicion began to fester in my mind. It had been there, under the surface of conscious thought, for days, but until now I hadn't given it the courtesy of real contemplation. The thought went from a hunch to near certainty.

Given the amount of meat consumed by Martin Nicholls, given the changes in his body, the receding hairline, the flat, meaty face, the sausage stomach, the chicken legs—no matter how ludicrous, insane, or farcical it seemed—the evidence was clear that Martin Nicholls was slowly turning into a giant piece of meat.

* * *

"Interesting." Martin gurgled and stared past me, his blubbery tummy rising and falling gently. He narrowed his eyebrows and nodded slightly as I told him my theory. He was calm that day, sober and focused like I'd never seen him before.

It was a full minute before he spoke again. "Makes sense." He thought some more, nodded again, and repeated, "Yeah, it makes sense."

That it made no _logical_ sense didn't bother him. "Who the hell's eaten twenty-five pounds of _anything_ a day," he said, throwing his hands up. "What government's tested that? Who'd even _think_ of it?" His eyes lit up. "Maybe I'm the first."

"The question is," I asked, "can you stop eating? You heard the doctor. If you go on like this, you'll die, maybe next week, or even tomorrow. You've got to quit."

He rubbed his flat, greasy chin. "It's the hunger, the obsessing. When I don't eat, even for an hour, the voice inside me yells. It _screams_ , Glover. What can I do? I can't fight it." He thought, shook his head, and threw his hand in the air. "It didn't start out this way. But it got worse. Much worse. First, I just liked to eat the stuff. Ham, beef, whatever. Steaks with dinner, packages of ham or turkey at lunch. I had the money to buy the best meat—so, why not? Then, at some point . . . I couldn't stop."

He looked at the ceiling. "When I needed pâté for breakfast, that's when I knew I had a problem. I'd put it on toast, then I ate it out of the can. For lunch, more beef, more sausages, more bacon . . . I haven't had a vegetable in months," he admitted, his voice cracking, his head drooping.

Then, as if struck by a revelation, he whipped his head around at me in terror. "What if, what if I did stop eating so much? What if I only ate fruit or salads or smoothies but never turned back into myself. I'm almost 800 pounds of pure meat. What if I stay like this forever?"

I tried to console him. "You got this way from eating too much. If you ate something else it would steer you away and into a . . . different figure, perhaps."

"What, like a giant piece of lettuce? And how much do I eat? Twenty-five pounds a day?"

"You _could_ try eating _less_. If you ate normal again, you might _be_ normal again."

"And starve?" He rested his chin on his sternum. "Face it. There's no solution. If I stop eating, the voices start. If I eat something else, I risk turning _into_ something else. If I keep eating like I am, well . . ." He sighed. "It's hopeless."

Inwardly I agreed with him, but said nothing. He slouched there for the rest of the night. In the morning I made sure the trainer and my friend the doctor had everything they would need for the future, then I drove home. I think Martin was glad to see me go. I don't think he wanted his old friend to see him suffering.

* * *

About three months later I was staying in a hotel at Central Wisconsin Airport, just fifteen miles south of Wausau. My flight to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport got delayed on account of my copilot coming down with pneumonia, so I was given a rental car and put up for the night. The next morning I would receive a new copilot and be on my way.

I decided to check on Martin. I called but got no answer. I tried two more times, with no success. A little worried, I hopped in my rental car and drove to his mansion, hoping to find him sleeping but otherwise safe.

The gate was again open but this time did not close behind me. There were three cars in the driveway now: Martin's (still covered in bird shit), Sebastian's, and my friend the doctor's. What were they all doing here on a Tuesday night at 11 p.m.? Martin and Sebastian, of course, both lived there, but the doctor?

I went inside. Martin's normal spot against the wall was deserted. And the kitchen was spotless. The grease skids on the floor were gone. No more dishes scattered on the counters. No more meat wrappers anywhere. The place sparkled.

I yelled for Martin. No answer. I was about to leave the kitchen and start up the stairs in the entryway, when an icy draft blew against my back. I circled the refrigerator and entered the 10-foot by 10-foot stand-in meat locker.

Sebastian's frozen body hung from a meat hook. His upper half was mostly intact, his eyes and mouth wide in permanent terror. His legs, however, were missing. Cut cleanly off at the knee.

I whipped around. To my right, hanging too from the ceiling, was part of a woman's body. The maid's. I could tell it was her from the apron hanging on her lower half. The head had been lopped off. So had both her arms. Dangling from the meat hook was only a torso and legs.

There was a third body, back and to the left. I didn't need to look hard to know it was my friend, the doctor.

"Glover!" Martin's mountainous voice boomed in the tiny freezer, as he stepped into the light, a pistol in hand.

His flattened face had regained its shape, though the cheekbones were higher, like a woman's. His hairline had returned, his hair thicker and fuller, long and silky. His eyes were different colors now: one brown, one blue—the shade of blue consistent with the maid's eyes.

My eyes traced down his body; his torso had shrunk. His chest was more muscular, while the lower half of his stomach still puffed out like an inner tube.

One arm was longer than the other. His right hand had longer nails—a woman's nails—than the left.

Though he was still obese, 600 pounds or so, the overall meat-body look had largely disappeared. His skin glowed warm and creamy instead of red and inflamed. The white muscle bands in his face were gone.

Martin grinned and stepped fully into the freezer, his gun trained on me. "Your theory was right. Well, almost. I _was_ turning into something else. So you figured that if I ate something else, perhaps I could _become_ something else.

"But there's more to it than just eating." He motioned around the room. "I haven't eaten much of them. Maybe sixty pounds total. The trick isn't in the quantity I eat, but the amount of _thought_ I put into eating. The concentration, the visualization. If I ate a pork loin while thinking positively about pork loins"—he slapped his free hand across his belly—"that's what I became."

He motioned to the decapitated maid. "Likewise, if I imagine the arm while I eat it, or, say, the eyes"—he leaned in close so I could see his bright blue eyeball—"if I really _feel_ it, if I'm _positive_ enough, suddenly it's easier to _become_ the thing."

He pointed across the freezer wall, where he'd displayed a huge banner with sloppy words drawn in crayon. "It's all right there," he said. "Sebastian was right."

The banner read: "Once you choose positivity, anything is possible."

He turned back, looked at me like I was dead wood.

"What about me?" I asked.

"I'm missing a good lower stomach. And I like yours." He cocked the gun and pointed it at me.

" _Adios_ ," he said. He stepped forward and pulled the trigger.

A funny thing about half-meat people: the combination of weight, sweat, and grease makes them a bit slippery.

When Martin Nicholls cocked his gun and stepped forward, his clubbed cut of prime hoof twisted on his weight, rolling his ankle. Down he went, the barrel of his gun pointing up at his face, the jolt of hitting the floor causing him to pull the trigger.

Meaty chunks exploded on the walls and ceiling.

* * *

After some time, I left the freezer, letting the door shut behind me. I sat in the kitchen for what felt like hours, just thinking. I picked up the phone several times and contemplated calling the police, but each time couldn't bring myself to punch in the numbers. Instead I held the phone next to my head, listening to the dial tone until it became just another background noise.

Eventually the sun rose, and I hung up the phone.

* * *

In Martin's room I found a notebook documenting the last few weeks. He'd indeed found that eating parts of the human helped recreate his physical form. Eating them whole seemed to help him visualize and think positively. Hence, the reason he only had to eat a single eye to gain its form. Obviously, he couldn't eat an entire arm, leg, or groin in one bite. Those he cut up.

Most fingers, he found, however, can be chewed whole, if not swallowed in two bites. So can teeth, fingernails, ears, or other body parts. He wrote that he liked the knuckles on the maid's left hand, so he ate those. When I returned to the freezer to compare the third knuckle on his left hand to the rest of his knuckles, I found it daintier and more feminine than its hairy, brutish companions . . .

* * *

You might remember the profile the media did on Martin Nicholls after his football career. One network did a whole breakdown of his property, almost to the yard. It's big news for the locals when a famous person settles in a smaller, nondescript location like outer Wausau, since it tends to raise house prices, and may help with tourism.

As I said previously, a small footnote in that broadcast was that Martin owned an old bird sanctuary. As I may have said, too, there are many thousands of birds in this area: hawks, terns, red-necked phalaropes, long-tailed jaegers, snipes, orioles, wrens, and partridges. One of the previous owners had erected an expansive net that stretched three hundred feet long and approximately one hundred feet wide, similar to one you'd find in a zoo.

I fixed the holes in the netting, meticulously examining each one to safeguard against unauthorized exits. Then I gathered the birds.

With some of the many thousands of dollars I found under Martin's bed I bought dozens, if not hundreds, of each breed of bird I desired, flown in from all over the world—parrots, macaws, lovebirds, canaries, cardinals, double-crested cormorants, owls, doves, robins, bluebirds, sparrows, finches and more.

I mingled these with the birds I collected from this native area, and soon the mesh enclosure was full of God-knows-how-many squawks and squeaks and chirps and gibbers and whistles and bird songs, day and night.

Over the next few months I took time off from my real job, to focus primarily on restoring the bird sanctuary. The airline was good enough to let me scale back to domestic flights only; on off-nights I stayed at Martin's house.

Ditching the cars that sat collecting dust in the front yard took some effort. Since I couldn't risk enlisting anyone's help, I had to drive each car to Lake Michigan and take the bus back to Wausau. I couldn't afford to leave a paper trail, so I financed my trips with Martin's cash.

The bodies I kept in the freezer. I wasn't sure what to do with them. Fortunately, this whole process has gone by fairly quickly, and in the last few months not a single person has come calling about the maid, the doctor, or the trainer.

No one has disrupted my eating.

The first thing I'll say about that— _the eating_ —is that swallowing the birds whole is too damn difficult. They really are bigger than you think. What you've got to do, in my experience, is focus only on the parts of the bird you like, while you chew and swallow. Being untrained, it took me many hundreds of birds to get the right effect.

Lately I've focused on the beak, and have crafted just the right size and weight with which to break nuts and seeds on my long flight south for the winter.

About a month ago, my toes were replaced with the talons of a great horned owl. I then sprouted my first feather; now I am in full bloom. Two weeks ago I lost my human eyes and gained the eyes of a red-tailed hawk. I've replaced most of my parts, but left my fingers, since I've found them useful as both bird and man.

Just this morning I lifted myself off the ground with the beating and flapping of my new wings. Afterwards I peeled back the mesh door of the sanctuary to let the rest of my birds out, and then came inside one last time to burn the last of Martin's notes on the stove.

In just a few minutes I will be long gone, above the airplanes, swimming in the clouds with no steel or metal confining me, as is my birthright. Don't bother scanning the skies; you won't find me.

_Adios._

# Bradbury Walks At Midnight

Elliot pulled his baseball cap farther down his face, hiding his scowl from the group of giggling teenage girls he passed in the street. His face went hot and red; he was in no mood to engage with anyone. When he smiled, it hurt; when he caught himself laughing, it sometimes felt so foreign and alien and uneven that at first it surprised him, then embarrassed him, and, hating both surprises and embarrassment, he'd go right back to scowling.

So the girls passed and he stared at his feet and shuffled on, blotting out the world around him as best he could, his mind rolling in tsunami waves that drowned out all happy and coherent thoughts and left him with only the low tide of dismal thinking.

He'd had it with life, at the young age of thirty-one, cornered by frustration and disappointment. A double bind of the worst kind. His thoughts closed in on him like jungle cannibals clutching sharpened spears. His mind was out to get him, and tonight it was having its way.

The air was crisp and sweet with the oncoming fall—yet he wished for spring. The birds sang for fun and for the end of the hot summer, but he moped in silence. A thick wool of self-loathing clogged his ears, nose, eyes—everything.

It was in this sorry state that he crossed the tranquil Devon Road in his hometown and trudged down the paved path under the overhanging oak trees to Golden Hills Park. He couldn't hear the chirping crickets, the scurrying rodents, the wonderful night noises in the thickets on either side. He glanced at the sign that read "Hours - 6 a.m. to 10 p.m."—and didn't care. It was midnight now, and no one would be there to enforce the rules anyway.

He continued down the meandering path, blind to everything, building an armor of misery. _I'm angry and mean, and I hate everything_ (in reality, he was a pussycat); _I'll fight 'em_ (he'd never fought anyone in his life); _I'll shoot 'em_ (never fired a gun); _everyone hates me_ (won the high school superlative for best personality). _I'm —_

"Oh, shut up, your thinking is ruining the view." A voice from a smiling mouth rang out of the darkness of the park.

Elliot froze. He scanned the playground and the small open field behind it and saw a figure on a bench dimly lit by the single ethereal light on the opposite side of the park.

The man wore a suit and tie, had coke-bottle glasses and wild gray-white hair, and was grinning and staring up at the stars.

"Isn't it marvelous?" the man asked, head thrown back, gazing at the cosmos. "I never tire of it. The stars and planets and lights hitting us from places we can't see or imagine. _How much escapes our senses?_ Think about it—all around you are universes big and small: tiny worlds with life and magic— _yes, magic_! Somewhere on the face of the cosmic clock an inanimate object decided to become something else—and then it got up and walked. Fish leapt from the water, onto land, into the trees some millions and millions of years ago—just because . . . well, you know why, don't you?"

Elliot felt compelled to say something to this man with sparkling eyes, this charming lunatic who held the supposed secrets of the universe, and though he found it difficult and choking to do so, he croaked a "No."

"Of course you do. Everyone knows why, even though the reasons are smothered by oppressive thoughts and the opinions of others. Everybody has the choice to become like the fish and sprout legs, even if their own immense journeys seem cloudy and uninviting." His eyes twinkled. "Yours is happening now."

"Mine?"

"Yes—you, me, everyone! We're all just like those fish waiting to _decide_ to become something else and leap from the water onto land. But in order to make the jump, you have to first be convinced—either by yourself or by watching others who have gone before—that such a jump is possible. And if it's _not_ possible, you jump anyway, if your true place is on land. Do you understand, my boy?"

Elliot had to admit he didn't.

Ray Bradbury held up a hand as if to say, "Wait, wait, I'll show you," and pointed up at the stars. "Right now our government is stupidly delaying our leap into the unknown; money for our destiny in the stars is wasted on war. We've lost a sense of wonder and plucked the magic from our lives like the last petal of a rose."

"Why do we do that, do you think?" Elliot gulped and shrank at his own voice, which Ray noticed and smiled at but stayed silent about.

"I don't know, my dear boy," he said, sighing. "But you've got to exorcise the cynicism from your life. You _must_. Life is simply too wonderful for all that."

Then Ray looked around stealthily and smiled and lowered his voice as if to let Elliot in on a secret. "Do you know why we're here? The . . . meaning of life?"

Elliot shook his head.

"I'll tell you. But I want you to listen carefully. You must clear all the leaves and dead branches from the forest floor of your mind—and then banish them in a flash of lightning fire. _Whoosh_ —just like that!

"The reason you are here is to witness the miraculous. Nothing more, nothing less. There is no other reason to be alive, except to look at that tree, at the oceans, at your neighbor, and realize to the best of your ability that life is _full of wonder_. People die, people live, people change, and even though you are unhappy, there is no excuse for living without joy. Life is indeed a miracle and you are here to _witness it_."

Ray leaned back and grinned. "That's the secret of life, huh? The answer to the question, 'Why are we here?' To live in the sunlight of the _wonder-full_ , and to preach—yes, preach!—the message to everyone around you, so that they can believe in and make for themselves the leap from ocean to land, from the Earth to the stars, from fear to love. For they are miraculous, and so are you."

He put his hand on Elliot's shoulder, which had grown wet. "You're okay," he said, smiling gently. "You're doing just fine in life."

And he knew this was all Elliot needed to hear, and after a moment he pulled the young man tighter in next to him and pointed with his other hand somewhere up into the heavens. "Now, you see that set of four stars up there? Those make up the constellation Cassiopeia . . ."

And the two talked until dawn, watching the miraculous unfold above them.

# The Developer

Thunk! The truck bounced, jolted, woke the kid. Little Charlie peered through sleep-baked eyes at the road and the dead, pale green grasses that stretched to their left and right. "Are we almost there?"

His father, Alan, bounced once with the truck, took the toothpick out of his mouth, and set it in the cup holder. "Be there soon. Probably another fifteen minutes."

Silence. After a moment, a shimmery gold peeked through the clouds. "Dad, what's that?"

"What's _what_?"

"That yellow stuff."

"Oh, that. That's the sun. You remember the sun, the report we saw last week saying it would be out? There was a sighting somewhere on the East Coast."

Charlie wrinkled his forehead. "But what _is_ it?"

"It's a big ball of gas that used to help us grow food. It would shine down on us, all over the world, and that's what caused plants to come out of the ground."

"Why doesn't it come out all the time?"

"It does, but, well, we had to block it out. It was dangerous. Besides, we don't need it anymore."

The truck bumped again. Charlie watched the yellow thing called the sun for a while, the dark gray sky having dulled it to a drab red so he could look straight into it without blinking. After some time, he turned his attention back to the road, hoping for cars but knowing they wouldn't see many—if any at all.

Charlie decided his father was lucky, since he still had a truck. A big one, a hauler. Only one of his community school friends' parents drove a car—and then only on special occasions.

Charlie watched his dad concentrating on the road, gently turning here and there to avoid a broken-down shell of a vehicle or a busted tire or a pothole, and smiled at the thought of returning home to his friends with the trip of a lifetime. They were going to see The Developer—the machine they'd only seen pictures of, the thing so massive it had to be built in the middle of the desert in southern California.

Charlie turned and slid open the little hatch that separated the cab of the truck from the forty-foot cargo hold. Inside he saw the dozens of dead cats and dogs—and live ostriches, tied down. The ostriches they'd bred at the house, all eight of them.

They'd put the dead animals in crates and filled the empty spaces with mothballs and other agents to prevent decay and keep away the rats. And then there were the wood, old metal parts, furniture, and other Resources stacked atop and around each other to maximize space. They'd filled the thing to the brim—and then some. But the animals were the big prize, according to Alan.

"Dad, are the ostriches going to sleep forever?"

Alan absentmindedly picked at his teeth, then found the discarded toothpick and put it back to work. "Yep."

"Will they feel anything?"

"Nope. Not a thing."

The kid was silent.

"What's the matter?" Alan asked. "Aren't you excited to see The Developer?"

"I'm just tired."

"Okay then."

They went on in silence, rolling with the _thump-thump-thump_ of the tires and losing themselves in the meditative quality of the drive and the road.

After some time, they passed a few large vehicles, and Charlie nearly leapt out of his seat in excitement, one of his overall buckles coming undone and hanging limply down his chest.

"Look at that one there," Alan said, pointing at a behemoth flatbed trailer maybe fifty feet long and fifteen feet wide. "Horses!" And there were dozens and dozens of them, all stuffed into the back of the trailer, surrounded by metal gates about four feet tall with wire fencing above.

"Wow!" Charlie looked back at his dad, wide-eyed. "There's gotta be fifty of them!"

"More."

"Really?" Charlie screamed. "How many more?"

"Well, I've read those haulers can carry _one hundred_ Whole __ Horse __ Resources."

"How much money will they get for them?" Charlie asked, bouncing up and down and eyes full of fire.

"Oh, I don't know . . . quite a lot, though. Thousands and thousands, for sure."

"Are _we_ going to make that much money?"

Alan grinned. "Not that much. But plenty."

The horses, exposed to the open air, were bucking around, kicking each other, kicking their enclosures, at nothing and everything. Several were up on their hind legs, trying to jump, trying to—

"Are they trying to get out?" Charlie asked.

"Oh, no," Alan said. "They love being in there."

"How do you know?"

"Because they're Resources, silly. And Resources don't know about, or think about, or feel anything. You know that."

Charlie furrowed his brow. What his father said made sense on some level, but something didn't add up.

Then—

"Oh, Dad, look!" Charlie leapt up and pointed at the back of the trailer. A large, brown horse with white legs and a long mane was standing with her front legs over the metal barrier; she was pushing one line of barbed wire down, forcing half her body over the side of the trailer and the open highway. "What's it doing?"

The horse turned her head and, with one large, frightened eye, peered at Charlie, made eye contact for a moment, and turned back to the road. Her back legs tightened and extended, and she sprang forward, launching herself over the railing, onto the highway.

Her neck hit first, whipping her head down onto the pavement. Her neck snapped instantly, spraying blood and brain across the asphalt. The truck's back tire ran over the body. The truck bounced but kept going.

Charlie screamed and jumped up and down in his seat, and begged his father to stop and see if the horse was all right. Alan refused, and calmly tried to explain that the horse was dead and that was that and that there was nothing left to do.

After several minutes of sobbing and covering his eyes, Charlie spoke. "They're all going to die, aren't they? All those horses?"

The father spoke slowly, cautiously. "Die? No, of course not. Don't be silly."

"Then what's going to happen to them?"

"I told you. They're Resources. They're going to be _developed_. The government says being developed is always a painless process. Besides, they're only here so you and I and everybody else can use them. So it's okay."

Alan waited a moment, then patted his boy on the shoulder until the sniveling stopped, and pointed through the front window. "Look," he said. "We're here."

Charlie sniffled and peered through the windshield. As they slowed down to take the off-ramp from Highway 10, toward the north shore of the Salton Sea, Charlie saw broken-down vehicles surrounded by men and women with desert-cracked skin. Some held signs saying things like "Not lazy, just hungry" or "Mother of four, no work." Charlie felt sorry for them, but he was quickly reminded of his father's take on "those people"—the people who refused to pull themselves up on their own. They were all beggars, here to live in the choking exhaust and pollution for the chance at a few bucks, and to eat another day.

They passed through a checkpoint made of metal and X-ray machines, between the giant sides of the gate, and there the people stopped. The winds picked up again and the smoke swirled behind their massive truck; and if you were looking back, you would quickly lose the beggars behind the billowing dirt and grime and the closing gate.

* * *

Three hours later, Alan and Charlie were still several miles from The Developer. But Charlie thought nothing of the time; the other trucks around him had sucked his attention.

He watched the men and women checking and rechecking their cargo, administering sleeping aids or poison tablets to apes and dogs and birds—there were even sage grouse, coyotes, elk, and buffalo. Others counted, double-counted, triple-counted the birch trees and bushes, nervously checking their devices to read the current price of their cargo and determine their cut of the loot. Electric-powered parking attendants made of silicone and aluminum yanked and jerked their mechanical arms, guiding the drivers into their proper places in line.

Vehicles bearing Resources from all over the region had converged on this one spot, on this bright day in American history—the opening of The Developer.

The Developer: a building so large it was given a permanent location in the desert of southern California—to account for the millions of Resources it would soon digest. Five years in the making, its wiring alone consumed more electricity than New York City.

The Developer would save the economy.

"What does it do?" Charlie had asked.

Alan had put him on his knee and explained. He told Charlie how the modern stock market had ruled the minds of men. How it calculated and integrated vast swarms of data in milliseconds, ripping apart information like vultures picking meat off bone, then put it all back together again so the economy could run properly. Before, most business between people was done without the authority of the government, and so the market could only estimate prices of, say, rubber or wheat. There was no one single source of pricing. Therefore, prices were unreliable.

So corporations had come up with a brand new idea. Why not have a machine that could be the single interface for all markets, and all people? Furthermore, why couldn't regular, ordinary citizens bring the raw materials of the world directly to the Developer, and be paid a 60-percent cut of the profits for their efforts?

Hours after the announcement for The Developer, millions of Americans took to the remaining trees, to chop them down; to the broken-down, dilapidated buildings in their districts, to strip them of wire, glass, steel, wood; to the desert, in search of rare plants; to the dying oceans, to net a few fish; to the bird feeders in their backyards; to the abandoned cell phone towers, to collect the copper wiring; to the dumps; to the recycling centers; to the animal shelters; to the swamps, for precious American crocodiles; and to the Great Plains, for the remaining one thousand ground squirrels in existence.

Animals and plants and trees and other natural elements quickly became the most valuable Resources.

"Why is that?" Charlie asked.

"Because of their rarity," Alan explained. "Rarity is essential in any economic system. That's what makes anything valuable."

The Developer would make making money easy again. Every transaction recorded by each Resource Owner was mainlined directly into the veins of the economy. Prices were recorded and broadcasted across the planet, so everybody could see the going rate of beef or diamonds or Douglas fir trees. The crab fisherman could more easily estimate his morning catch, the car junker could justify scrap metal prices, the banker could price his derivatives. Market crowdsourcing, they called it.

And this first Developer was only the beginning. Soon, there would be smaller ones in Montana, where the national parks were finally sold off; and in Virginia, where there was more biodiverse life than in the rest of the country.

"But where do they all go?" Charlie asked.

"The Resources?"

"Yeah."

That, Alan wasn't sure about.

* * *

Hours passed. Their truck rolled silently onto a movable walkway; they turned off their engine and slept. The conveyor belt carried them somewhere through the night, deeper into the exoskeleton of the complex that housed The Developer, though it was so dark Charlie could hardly see anything except dim outlines of buildings and oddly shaped structures.

Morning came, a toxic gray morning.

Gray was all the sky could be anyway. It had been years since the flesh was put around the Earth to block out the dangerous light from the sun. Skin cancer and other diseases had sprouted up all over the world. Those with money escaped inward, toward the earth, building cities beneath cities from which they could run their above-ground businesses. Governments stayed running above, doing what they could to keep the peace.

Human ingenuity combined with a good old-fashioned corporate drive kept life going, but as the sun's rays became too radioactive for anyone to be outside, exposed to it, it was decided that a razor-thin but sturdy net made of micrometals would be hoisted into the air and kept at 40,000 feet using powerful magnets. The combined use of metals, chemicals, and synthetic agents could keep out not only the harmful rays, but repel the heat of the yellow goddess, which had begun taking its toll on terrestrial life.

Florida and New York and the states in between had already been swallowed by the rising seawater—as had all the islands in the Caribbean. Only the 90-foot wall that now butted up against the Louisiana border could protect the inland from drowning.

It was during these crises that the government had to gather its ingenuity and raise the appropriate funds while also employing people and keeping the economy running. So the federal government, which subsumed the state governments, struck a deal with the titans of business. The government would be lent the funds necessary to build several Developers across the country. Corporations would take the immediate profits, then loan the money back to the government at interest. Each Resource developed would be priced using their corporate system, so they could set all prices for all goods based on their algorithms.

The reality was that whatever was developed made no difference to the corporate forces, whether it be skunks, fig trees, or electric generators—what mattered was that it could be priced. What mattered was that it could be reduced to parts—whether meat or metal. The rarer it was, according to their system, the more money it was worth.

To develop the last Resources in America, the Developer (and those soon to come) would need to be huge. Once built, they'd be fifty-five stories deep and fit a hundred thousand automobiles above ground.

One million workers traveled from all directions to build it. Hundreds of thousands came from the deep south, across the humid terrain where lizards and serpents had doubled in size in ten years due to the rise in temperature. Others came from the north, from Washington and Oregon and Northern California, fleeing the dying and fungus-infested redwood forests.

Locals though, they had it a little better. Once thought to be one of the worst and driest areas to live, Indio and the surrounding towns grew rich overnight. Desert people opened up their homes and charged exorbitant rents. Water quickly became scarce. The locals, having dug secret wells miles outside of town, could charge an hour's worth of government pay for a single bottle of water. Many now had mansions outside of town, though the exhaust from all the invading vehicles was beginning to smoke them out. It was a gold rush for them in monetary terms, and they were thankful.

* * *

Charlie frowned as he got his first real glimpse of The Developer. He couldn't see much, only the facade of the building itself and some giant pipelines coming out of the top that wound their ways over the back of the building. Presumably they carried the Resources wherever they needed to go. They fanned out hundreds of miles in every direction, across the desert, over and under towns and freeways, out to the West Coast and down to Mexico, bright and shiny, ready to carry Resources anywhere they needed to go.

After a bit, Alan and Charlie were halted at a series of checkpoints, marked by white and yellow lines on the ground. Their truck and bodies were searched thoroughly, and, after the soldiers had double- and triple-checked the duo's paperwork and payload, they were ordered back into the truck and told to wait on the conveyor belt in a large station.

Armed guards with dark eye-shades and fingers near their triggers stood against the walls, waving them along. From there, Charlie and his father were taken past two dozen cameras, X-ray machines, metal detectors, and many other devices pointed at anyone who entered.

They soon reached the back of the large warehouse. The metal door clanged shut behind them, and a new one opened in front of them. They were ordered to stay in their truck at all times, as the conveyor belt took them through room after room.

Then—up ahead. There it was. A giant hole in the wall. The Developer.

Its giant metal jaws flung open.

Charlie looked inside the mouth. There was nothing, only black. Above the mouth, where the eyes might have been, a phosphorescent and seemingly magical glow lit up the face of the great mechanical beast. A giant screen displayed ones and zeros, ones and zeros, ones and zeroes.

A dozen soldiers stepped forward, out from around the face, approached and opened the back of the truck, and began bundling up the Resources. Charlie watched in the rearview mirror as each man emerged, pulling stacks of Resources encased in nets. Each lugged the Resources around on the floor in a wide arc and set them at the front of the giant mouth. No grunts, no groans, no bent knees—not a hunched back did Charlie see on any of the men.

The ostriches came out last. All eight of them. They were set first at the altar, which was marked off in a black circle. Everyone stepped away from the circle. There was a whirring sound, and then a ding. The floor beneath the ostriches gave way, and they dropped under the building and disappeared. The numbers on the big screen spun and rolled.

The board flashed: _HIGH MARKET RATE FOR 8 WHOLE OSTRICHES: $27,350_

One of the pullers stepped up to the cab of the truck and handed Alan his cut of sixty percent, or $16,410.

"Where will they go?" Charlie asked, jutting his head out over his father's shoulder. "The ostriches."

"Fire," the man grunted. "They go in the fire."

"You don't use them for anything?"

"They _have_ been used." He pointed his big beefy hand to the screen above. "Their price has been broadcasted by the market."

Charlie grabbed the bottom of Alan's shirt. "Please don't let them kill them."

"Don't be silly," Alan said, head down, counting his money. "It's over. The market has already absorbed them. They're gone now."

"No, take it back. Give them back the money!"

"Quiet," Alan said. "Let them finish."

"Give it back!"

Charlie ripped the money from his father's hands and exploded from the cab of the truck. The pullers didn't try to stop him. He ran inside the mouth of the Developer.

"Please, take it back!" Charlie yelled, waving the money.

Alan screamed and jumped out of the driver's seat. But it was too late. The floor of the altar dropped out. Charlie disappeared.

Alan watched helplessly as the Developer absorbed his child. The giant screen eyes lit up again—a brilliant white and yellow this time. The room shook.

Everything stopped. There was a ding sound. Then the jaws opened.

Up on the screen: "HIGH MARKET RATE FOR WHOLE CHILD..." Alan waited anxiously. "... $110,354."

Alan was sad. But he got paid his 60 percent, or $66,212.40. And he was reimbursed for the ostriches, too, which brought his total to $82,622.40. Then there was the money for the other items, which made him quite a bundle.

He was shuffled on his way, out the door. He called his wife to tell her the bad news. And then the slightly better news.

Charlie had been absorbed by the market. But Alan had made history as the first father of a Developed Child.

The news quickly got out, and everywhere around the nation, men and women began bagging their children for their high prices.

The next year, six more Developers were built.

# The Sewers Are Angry!

Most people don't realize this, but you can flush more than just shit down the toilet. All kinds of things. Socks, wallets, electronics, pens, cans, bikes, dirt, shampoo, old hamsters who've outlived their usefulness, bowling pins, executive suits. An ingenious person can make almost anything disappear down that twisting vortex. You may also be surprised to learn that there exists an entire competitive flushing league with loose teams and fellowships around the world—some stationed in the U.S., others in Greece, even more in Iceland where they really know how to flush turds (and bankers).

Hundreds of thousands of kids rush home every day after a long, sweaty slog at school and barge into their garages and workstations to shave millimeters off their next piece of wood or hard drive or bike seat—all to win the next great achievement of champion flusher.

Why, just last year Miyaku Yamamoto, age 13, won the worldwide championship by sending a whole engine block in three separate flushes, weighing 350 pounds cumulatively, somehow, magically, straight down the tubes and into the Japanese sewage main, where it missed the treatment pipe and went into the public water supply.

(In related news, three thousand people were treated for acute metals poisoning.)

You have the technology, right here, right now, to flush whatever you want. You're bound only by the confines of your imagination.

Flushing is a young person's game. Anyone will tell you that. Older people go soft and forget the toilet's magical properties. At thirty they start grumbling about the added costs of water and plumbing damages, and how every dollar counts in this economy.

The key to the game is squaring off your puck (that's slang for whittling down whatever you're sending into the shitter) so it fits into the hoop (that's the hole). To get started, you'll need to cut, chop, filet, squeeze, juice, or otherwise vivisect your puck. As you get better, your pucks will grow bigger.

The smartest kids know how to perform all the right moves for the highest runs (those are points). Squared edges earn the most runs. The hoop is round, so rounder things go down it easier; thus, they earn the _least_ runs. Go ahead and start with something small, like an old sock. A rusty doorknob. Golf balls. Anything to get you some runs and put your team on the board.

In America, we have some of the best flushers in the world. One in particular had the goods. A true all-star, he was proud, cocky, had a strong work ethic, ambition, and stick-to-itiveness. On the minus side, the kid was ugly, real hideous. His name was Edgar Thorpe. He had a face like a red apple and semi-jagged teeth that were set back in his jaw, so his mouth resembled an over-biting bear trap. No one enjoyed his company: 1/3 due to his smell, 1/3 because of his jaw, the other 1/3 due to his repulsive red skin, and all of them because the kid was meaner than a possum in a birdcage.

Nothing brought more joy to the ugly boy's heart than flushing his fellow students' favorite toys down the toilet. As he watched things most loved swirl down the pipes, a sense of power and authority would rush into Edgar's belly and up to his head, and he would dance and cackle around the bowl as everything made its way to Shit World.

Yet he was plagued by frustration. He aimed to be the best. And for everyone to _know_ he was the best. Not in the country—in the world.

But he couldn't be, not while Guo An Nu from China continued making headlines flushing an airplane hangar, piece by piece, down his vintage Prescott toilet bowl. (Guo, though, let's remember, was unfairly advantaged: his toilet flushed counterclockwise, and everyone knows it's easier to flush things counterclockwise.)

One day Edgar sat and brooded next to his toilet. Hate sputtered out his mouth in torrents. Even though his flusher was brand new, and made of the finest porcelain in the world, and had his name engraved in solid gold just above the handle (to remind everyone of Edgar's champion spirit), he hated the thing. It would never take him to the top. Edgar sat there, sullen, crying, choking on snot, and he flushed his father's favorite watch just to cure his self-pity.

Suddenly, a monster— _bleeeech!_ —shoved his head through the hoop and leapt out of the toilet. Caked in shit, its body consisted of all the things Edgar had flushed over the years. Edgar at once recognized the two bike frames that now substituted for the thing's legs; the piggy bank that made up its stomach; the guitar neck running up its spine. He even saw the doll heads he flushed years and years ago: Raggedy Anne dolls he'd stolen from Anne Marie, after she'd refused him a kiss in preschool.

The thing had popped one of the doll heads onto the guitar neck, making a rough neck and face. Poop and toilet paper filled in the gaps of its face and body, so the thing resembled a giant shitty mummy that left chocolate trails wherever it went.

But Edgar was too sad to care about the shit monster. He could hardly lift his head off the hand that supported it. He just sat in the bathtub and moaned.

"Why the long face?" asked the shit monster. Edgar wiped the tears from his ugly eyes and told him about his dashed flushing dreams.

"Hm, that is interesting," said the shit monster, listening to Edgar's story, sitting on the toilet, legs crossed, his right hand fingering his pubic-hair-trimmed shit chin, his body smearing shit all over the seat.

"Well, it just so happens," continued the monster, "that I, having a unique underground perspective of all things flushed, should be able to help you.

"Think about this: No one, not even the Japanese champion, has eyes and ears in the pipes, _inside_ the sewer! With me, you'll know what's working for you, what's not, how to refine your strategies, where and how to cut the next item for maximum runs, and, most of all, what the specific twists and turns of the pipes are down below, so when you send down your next television or Fabergé egg, you'll know exactly what obstacles lie ahead! Think of the possibilities!"

Edgar contemplated this. In a flash he leapt up— _glory, sweet glory!_ —and he grabbed the shit monster and they danced, banging into the glass shower door, flinging shit on all the walls, the toothbrush, the mouthwash bottle. What a fantastic idea!

But Edgar stopped the celebration and withdrew, suddenly suspicious. See, he'd been taught by his father, a wily American, to trust no one, no matter how nice or giving they seemed to be. Everyone had an angle, everyone was trying to screw everybody else. So why was this shit monster so eager to help him?

"You've got me," the shit monster confessed, eyes pointed downwards, holding his brown brim hat low like a beggar. "There _is_ something I'd like."

"Aha!" exclaimed Edgar triumphantly, through yellowed teeth.

"As you can see," continued the monster, "My body has survived for a very long time on the things you've thrown away. I'm grateful for your help. Without you, I'd be little more than a sack of poo. But I want nothing more than to be human."

He glanced up, his eyes barely meeting Edgar's.

"Lowly as I am," he continued, "I propose a partnership. I will gladly help you become the greatest flusher in the history of man. In return, all I ask is that you send down bits of flesh now and then—maybe an arm or a head or a leg, when you have the time, of course—and I will reconstitute myself in your image, in the form of my creator. And, in doing this, you will have become the world's number one flusher—for who else has sent whole parts of a human being down the shitter?"

The shit monster had a point. Edgar knew it. He mulled it over. No one _had_ , to his knowledge, flushed a human being before. It was such a complex organism, what with the skin and bones and blood and fat; something could easily become unhinged and stick in the pipes or the sewer, then flow back out into this world.

Within seconds, Edgar had his plan. He would start small, maybe flushing only fingers, hands, ears. Then he'd work his way up to larger pieces, until finally—one day—he would flush an entire human body. This would surely make him the best in the world. It must!

"You've got a deal." Edgar purred, his thin tongue running along a thin smile. "By the way, what's your name? What should I call you?"

The shit monster replied, "I only know of your world from what has been flushed to me. But once I was sent a lovely movie about a woman captured by Indians, and a relentless racist who went to find her. I love it. I've seen in a million times. Call me John Wayne."

Thus began their partnership.

* * *

The next day, Edgar began looking for prospects. He watched his fellow students—their arms, their legs, their hair, the way they moved—and for the first time he noticed how delicate and individual each of them truly was. Suzie Margopolis moved with the grace of a butterfly. Elizabeth McClane's full-bodied, delicate lips quivered like gelatinous lemon meringue pie slices when she knew an answer in class. And Joey Small with the fast legs, his thighs like tree stumps, exuded the spirit of a true Olympian.

Yes, Edgar noticed everything. Fingers, eyebrows, painted toenails. He kept a journal, detailing which parts to take from which person—which hands and heads and breasts and neck would best fit on John Wayne. And from here, Edgar Thorpe drew his own personal, anatomically correct Frankenstein's monster, with arrows and diagrams detailing what would go where, all the while giddy with joy over his inevitable flushing championship medal.

Later that day, Edgar waited outside the school for the young Tom Barcelona, a Spaniard with a needle-thin moustache and mousy countenance. After clubbing young Tom over the head with the school's fire extinguisher, Edgar dragged the unconscious frame around the corner, removed the sharp Ginsu knife from its plastic sheath, and sloppily separated all the fingers and toes from the boy's body.

An hour later, Edgar stood over his toilet bowl, quivering with excitement. No one had ever flushed human parts before—at least, not in the public records you'll find at your local library. So when he saw poor Tom's fingers and toes plunge into the deep unknown, a great calm came over him. He was on his way to greatness. He'd soon be paddling his canoe on Serenity Lake. And everyone would know the name of Edgar Thorpe.

For the next several months he dedicated himself to his craft. A hefty sledgehammer over the head usually did the trick for most of his victims; then, he would remove whatever parts were needed. Ears and eyeballs and tongues and cheeks—all went down the drain. Edgar graduated to more complex parts of the body, like the liver, stomach, spleen and gallbladder, so John Wayne could start digesting solid food.

As for John Wayne, he began to look and feel like a real human being. He lifted weights, down there in the sewer, made from the old scrap metal that Edgar had flushed over the years. His broomstick arms gave way to bona fide human arms. He popped off the wheelchair seat he used for an ass, replacing it with a real human ass. He even gained some vision, and when he received the nose of a teacher-turned-oenophile, he marveled at his newfound sense of smell.

"Phew, what a stench there is down here!" he exclaimed. "I'd better clean this shit up!"

And he did. Years of hoarding Edgar's trash had taken its toll on his little home. Stacks of newspapers and televisions and old picture frames had to be cast out, so John Wayne dropped everything off at the local recycling center. With the money he received from the scrap metal and soda cans, he was able to furnish a little living room with a couch, just below the main sewer line that delivered him body parts every few days. He bought himself a suit—a nice suit—even had it fitted. A top hat. And with the replacement arms, legs, lungs, and intestines both large and small, John Wayne fashioned himself a new life.

Existence took on a new meaning for Edgar Thorpe, too. Dedication can make men obsessive, but for him there was an added benefit: a deep and abiding respect for all of creation. Flowers bloomed brighter. Wind delighted him. He found grace in falling leaves. His ugly red apple face soon disappeared, replaced by a green pear. He stood straight. He looked people in the eye. He was reborn.

Still, something indefinable needled, bothered Edgar. He wasn't concerned with getting caught, for he _had_ been caught after his second victim, Eduardo Sanchez, was found with his tongue and eyeballs gouged out with a grapefruit spoon. The police had shown up at Edgar's house, flashing bright badges of institutional metal and looking rather upset. However, when people around the town learned of Edgar's true reason for killing Eduardo, coupled with the fact that Edgar might win awards and bring much-needed notoriety to their city, they were overjoyed. Money flowed in from state and federal government grants to support the flushing effort, and citizens set up the local sports stadium in Edgar's honor. "Everyone needs to see this artist's work," they gushed.

Edgar, the instant celebrity, had no problem getting candidates after that. Dozens, a hundred people, argued and fought with each other day and night to get their knees, elbows, and pelvises chopped off—all so Edgar could flush them down the crapper. "Please, please, pick me!" the teenage girls would yell, plucking out their eyeballs, swinging them around their heads by their optic nerves, just for the chance to be used by Edgar. The federal government even set aside money so Edgar could compete internationally, and soon the events were televised with multinational corporate sponsors. Edgar was catapulted into such a whirlwind of glory and money that billboards bearing his face appeared in Times Square, cutouts of him were printed on cereal boxes, and there was mention of him on every talk show across America.

Then came the big day, the day the world had been waiting for. The day of the big flush. The one for all the marbles. The big kahuna.

Edgar would flush an entire human.

Down below, John Wayne beamed with pride at his new body, flexing at himself in the mirror. Striated patterns of muscle ripped his biceps, tore his calves in half, stretched and puffed out over his pectorals. But he wrested himself from the mirror and hoisted himself up into the sewer to help drag down the body if it got stuck. This, of course, was a clear violation of the rules— _ssssh!_ —and if the officials above found out, Edgar would be disgraced and disqualified.

In fact, Edgar was already ashamed of himself. His newfound stardom, his "amazing talents," were becoming increasingly harder to square with how he felt. These last few months he'd been cheating, depending more and more on John Wayne to pull his pucks through to the sewer. The truth was, Edgar had grown lazy. His heart just wasn't in it. When Edgar had flushed that cat, John Wayne had been the one to climb up and pull it down by its tail. When that truck axle had lodged itself at the cross section in the sewage line, the shit monster had to drag it the rest of the way, to the exit point three hundred yards down the chute where the officials were waiting, clocking the time of the object's voyage through Shit City.

The truth was, Edgar Thorpe no longer cared if he flushed or didn't flush.

While John Wayne spit on his hands and readied himself in the sewer, on the metal beam overlooking his shitty little home, Edgar sighed and trudged up the stairs to the melon-shaped platform made just for him.

Onlookers looked on by the thousands. Fans screamed. Little girls cheered. Old people waved tiny American flags. Boys shook their fists in war cry celebrations. People of all colors united. Vegans and meat eaters embraced. Thieves robbed those who weren't paying attention.

Edgar stepped onto the platform. He looked out over the crowd and wiped his snotty nose all over his shirt. _The show must go on_ , he told himself. _The show must go on_.

In true American style, Edgar squinted and scrutinized his toilet for any tampering. It had been brought to this outdoor amphitheater by city officials and had remained guarded by no fewer than a dozen federal agents with nothing better to do.

While scanning his throne, Edgar was reminded of his original love of flushing. A tear rolled down his cheek. He thought about the good old days, when he'd flushed for sport, not for fans—when he'd had a real connection to his toilet bowl. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," he blubbered at his inanimate best friend, the toilet. "I've forgotten all about you. I've flushed everything under the sun down you without ever asking you how _you_ felt about it. Oh toilet, my toilet—please forgive me."

The toilet forgave him. "One last flush," it told him. "One last flush."

Edgar agreed, patted his tank on the head, then turned to the crowd. His hand rocketed up into the air, and he pointed straight up at the sky, screaming into the heavens: "I'm number one!"

The crowd cheered! This was it. The big flush.

Who was to be flushed down the porcelain vortex? None other than Edgar Thorpe's handsome father, Ben Thorpe, had volunteered for the job. Would he make it out alive? Would he get stuck and drown? This and many other questions were on the lips and minds of every person in the world.

Ben Thorpe wiped the tears from under his eyes and placed a loving hand on Edgar's shoulder. He told him how proud he was, how this was the happiest moment of all the moments of his super happy life. Then he strapped on his football helmet, tightened his knee pads, and hunched into position, readying his stance for the big dive down below.

Meanwhile, John Wayne's curiosity had gotten the best of him. He'd snuck up the pipe, just under the toilet hole, to hear the crowd, to hear the roar, when he'd heard Ben pronounce his fatherly love for Edgar. John Wayne was so touched by the man's words that he accidentally drifted too far north—and he popped his head out of the toilet.

This surprised Ben so much that he screamed and fell backwards. In his terror he turned and clawed at Edgar's shoulder, trying to put distance between himself and the toilet. But this pitched Edgar forward, straight into the bowl. Edgar tried to catch himself but caught the handle by accident on his way down and went screaming headfirst down the big hole into Shit City.

Because the big flush had happened sooner than expected, the proper pipes hadn't been turned off just yet, and a huge backflow of water came rushing out from the main sewer line, past John Wayne's humble abode, shooting hundreds of gallons of water back up the pipes. Edgar, propelled by the flow of water taking him down, passed by John Wayne, downwards, and landed in the shit monster's home.

The ceiling door slammed shut above him.

John Wayne, however, felt the full wrath of the vomiting stream and was forced up and out of the shithole. He flew thirty feet in the air above the platform, the gushing water cradling him like a god, then slammed down onto his head in front of the thousands of attendees and millions of others worldwide.

The ensuing crash shattered windows in a ten-block radius. Buildings lost pieces of brick. The platform crumpled to the ground.

Silence.

John Wayne wiped the water from his fear-filled eyes, lying there, his legs folded underneath him. Ashamed, he tried to hide the last bits of him that were still brown and shitty, for he didn't want anyone to see who he truly was. He knew that the crowd had been expecting Ben Thorpe to go down the tubes, not Edgar, and that they especially hadn't been expecting some half-breed to shoot up. Yet here he was, with his big blue eyes, wavy auburn hair, and masculine form, with tiny rivulets of shit running up and down along the veins and muscles lines of his body, not yet filled in with spare skin. He peeked through sun-choked eyes, holding one hand up to block the harsh glare of the sun. And as the mob of fuzzy outlined people came into focus and he saw the ferocious faces and hands holding tiny American flags, such an intense feeling of separation and homesickness shot through him that he leapt back into the toilet, pulled the handle, and flushed himself down the tubes.

He soon arrived at the chamber door of his humble abode. He knocked once, twice, but there was no answer. After much deliberation, John Wayne realized that his place in this world had to be up top; that he could no longer be a part of the sewer system. He'd changed bodies. He'd changed perceptions. It was over.

With a half-hearted wave and dull brown shitty tears running down his face, John Wayne turned and left forever.

* * *

As for Edgar Thorpe, he lived out the rest of his days down below, reading philosophy and watching an old VHS copy of _The Searchers_. Peaceful living suited him well, and although sitting and lying and standing in shit all day shortened his life considerably, he did achieve a measure of happiness of which men like us only dream.

Shit slid down the pipes each day, sticking to him as it had to John Wayne. Slowly, it replaced his body: toes first, hands second. Then, his stomach and spleen and gall bladder, and soon he could no longer digest solid food. Initially he resisted, using the old bike parts and metal pieces that he'd inherited from the shit monster to prop up his failing body. Deciding to practice true nonattachment, he let go of the replacement body parts and let nature take its course. His intestines and brains melted into goo, and when the rest of him went, the ensuing puddle fanned out into a happy face that permanently stained the concrete floor.

* * *

Like all great American celebrities, John Wayne had a hard fall. With no role models, he fell in with a bad crowd, and after years of drug abuse and prison sentences, he was spit out the bottom of the porn industry. However, he too learned something about nonattachment and was able to let go of the shitty past that so shamed him.

He came back swinging just three years later, reinvigorated, writing two bestselling books before running for mayor in a small town in Nevada. Voters related to his conservative views, and he was elected to the Senate after promising to ignore climate change. After he served three consecutive terms and pushed through massive tax cuts for corporations, the powers-that-be decided John Wayne should be the next face of American politics.

You can now reach John Wayne in Washington, D.C., out on Pennsylvania Avenue. The number's 1600. Let him entertain you with tales of the old days. He knows what it's like to be down and out. You'll relate. You'll see yourself in him.

After all, Americans love electing total shitheads.

# The Night of Running Children

The first one had been sitting, cradling his tablet, seeing the mouths move on the screen without really hearing them speak, numb to the house and the family and the world around him. He'd been engrossed in the nothingness of the digital, his thoughts blurred by snippets of video that slid across his mind like an ice skater on her knees.

First, there was nothing. Then there was the feeling. The feeling of running, of movement. A pressure cooker in his chest began rumbling. It started first as a centralized ball of energy and diffused through his body.

Setting his tablet down on the couch next to the other members of his home, Jacob glanced around, like an animal being stalked. His hairs went up; he drew down close to the floor and listened for—something.

The door opened on its own and an icy burst of winter hit his face. His parents looked up, bleary-eyed— _shut the door!_ Jacob regarded them for a moment, felt the air, felt the wind, smelled the smell of near-frozen oak and redwood trees. The cold felt _good_. There was something in the air, something in the . . .

Jacob burst upstairs, grabbed his athletic shoes, shoved them over his feet—not thinking, not questioning what he was about to do—and raced back downstairs, whipping the door shut behind him. His parents yelled for him as he left—he was sure of that—but he shoved them out of his mind. Frozen-faced, ears cocked like a deer, sensing a hurricane of invisible movement down Virginia Hills Drive, he took off, inexplicably, body commanding itself, after whatever waited for him . . . out there.

His legs ached from misuse. The weak, disintegrated muscles tore open on each footfall. His whole body jarred and jostled, the vibrations sending instant waves of nausea and headache to his upper half.

Still, he ran.

The energy of a thousand pent-up days, ten thousand hours, a million seconds, roared through his body. He passed the last oak trees on his street—the giant ones, forty feet tall, whose branches and leaves waved him on—and rounded the corner like a runner around third base heading for home.

In fact, he was _going_ _home_. He was up and moving, and there was no mom or dad or teacher to stop him.

Just then another boy, Carlos, with eyes like frightened headlights—also baffled by what was happening to him—burst from his house and ran beside Jacob. His parents screamed after him, lurching out from their home and stilled by the frozen air. His hair streamed in ocean waves.

On the next block, a six-year-old girl they both knew from school, Anna, sprinted out of her home and joined them. Overalls flapping, pigtails bouncing, her arms pumping back and forth, propelling invisible air that cascaded behind her little body, protecting her and her new friends from Anna's parents, who were in pursuit.

They sprang to the right down Elderwood Lane, losing their parents, soon joined by three more kids. Then five more. A dozen. Soon, other children, handfuls at a time, feeling the indefinable feelings of joy, of possibility, of electricity, ran beside them in shimmering bursts of glee.

They formed packs. A hundred per pack. _A thousand_. Running atop cars, scattering over gardens and lawns. The stampede of animal children took over the town.

Adults sought shelter, praying the thunderous beasts wouldn't destroy their electronic caves. The children became wild buffalo on prairie lanes, trampling the earth, readying the soil for the bugs and larvae and ground squirrels. They shed their human minds and bodies and became animals, dirty and snarling—and loving.

They made wild hissing sounds, then broke apart in laughter. They passed through a ladybug swirl and invited the bugs to join the pack. They did.

More children, young prodigies of the earth, soon carried creatures with them—on their backs, in their hands, wrapped in their hair. Heads became swarms and hives. Shoes became sanctuaries for bugs and bees and other small creatures.

All were invited. Plants and animals around the neighborhood came to the cyclone of loving children, and all gathered as one, running and growing and running and growing in a never-ending tornado.

All the city's children, and of all the wildlife that goes unnoticed in civilized life, gathered their troops for the great rewilding. Town after town, county after county, state after state. No resting. No stopping. No need.

Soon all the nations' and the world's children and animals were whisked up in the frenzied tornado. And everyone rose up together and left their parents and this planet for that strange, magical place where the night of running children lasts forever.

# Every Day

Out near the pastures, past the grazing cows and beyond the edge of the giant rocks that spatter Dinosaur Point, Richard and Jamie were wed. Over seven years, they'd loved, split, loved again, and were now taking their most sacred of vows. They held their palms pressed together, parallel to their lips. Far away, the sunlight split a cloud, lit up the sides of their faces, and disappeared into the shadows of the hills as the two lovers came apart.

They stayed just that way: lips locked, smiling, separating, smiling, and kissing again. It was a lovely pattern enjoyed by few couples. Time spent together had no better use. Sleep proved difficult, as their bodies were too eager to find each other. Time outside of work was celebratory. It was a joyous life.

Yet, as time worked its contradictory magic, their habits became both frayed and grooved over the years. Love was overcome by tedium: grocery shopping on weekday nights, whiny children, five-day workweeks, quick breakfasts, too much television, and not enough time for anything except the tasks of daily living. Vacations were brief and infrequent.

While zest and life rarely mixed over the years, their love remained. Sometimes it was buried, and sometimes their bodies did not press together at night. Sometimes anger came fast over small difficulties, and sometimes flaring tempers tried their patience.

On a Wednesday morning (the worst day of the week for some), Richard rose for work for the ten thousandth time. He would soon look forward to Thursday so that he could look forward to Friday, which would be unbearable, except for the last two hours of the day when he could taste the weekend.

They went to work. After making plans to have Jamie's sister pick up their two noisy children, Richard and Jamie decided to celebrate their wedding anniversary by meeting at their favorite restaurant in the city.

Richard arrived first. He ordered a drink and waited, trying to hide the bouquet of roses he'd picked up around the corner (men get embarrassed at having to hold flowers in public, for reasons unknown).

The minutes passed, but still no company. Richard checked his watch. It was much too late now—twenty-five minutes past their meeting time. As he stepped out of the booth to leave, he glanced toward the door and saw a magnificent-looking female, all dolled up in an extraordinarily tight, red dress that stopped inches above her knees.

This woman was dressed unlike any woman he'd ever seen before.

It was his wife.

In she came, looking around the restaurant like she was searching for someone she didn't know.

Richard waved and caught her glance, and the woman cocked her head at him, slightly puzzled. Keeping her head to one side as if she didn't recognize her husband, she walked straight up to him and asked:

"Are you Michael?"

Richard blinked.

He decided that he had better play along with his wife, this woman who'd come all the way here, dressed like a model, and called him strange names. Yes, he was going to play along.

She extended a hand. "Macy."

"Macy?" He smiled.

"You don't like it?"

"Of course I do."

"Are those for me?" Macy pointed to the roses he was still hiding beneath the table.

He quickly apologized and gave them to her.

Macy settled back in her chair. "I hate red roses. Are there drinks?"

His wife, Jamie, had always loved red roses.

Then, he remembered this was a play—his wife was pretending.

"Waiter!" He flagged down a young man with a mustache, and he and his wife were soon tipsy.

* * *

After a few drinks, Richard stopped asking himself whether he should break the charade. Instead, they learned about each other's new personalities—his name was Michael, and he'd been schooled at Notre Dame. After a brief career in classical music, he'd become a programmer at a Fortune 100 company, inventing a technology commonly used in something that only tech people cared about.

Macy had just gotten out of a marriage to a boring old geezer who'd never loved her anyway, and she worked as a high-profile advertising executive at a large television station in the city. She had no children, and never planned on having them. She enjoyed her freedom.

The surreal nature of the night overshadowed their normal, everyday lives, and Richard was lost in the fantasy. He forgot about his work, their kids, their house that needed a new roof, the dog with the bad hind leg, the car that needed a new transmission, the in-laws who always had a problem with the way they'd done _something_.

Habitual life faded into the horizon of memory, and for those few hours, this man and woman became lovebirds anew. They spun fantastic stories about lavish trips they'd never taken, fairy tales about robbers and daring getaways from the police, mind-readers from Calcutta, and Michael told Macy how he suspected his neighbors were some kind of werewolves raised from the Dead Sea. Later, they crept up to that neighbor's living room window, where they remained, peeking in, waiting for werewolves until the sun came up.

In the morning, Richard sat up and rubbed his eyes, rolling out of bed—left foot first, as always—before heading to the bathroom and brushing his teeth. He stepped out of the bathroom and watched his beautiful wife wake up.

"Good morning," she said, stretching.

Richard responded, all in good fun, "Good morning, _Macy_."

She blinked. "My name's Annabelle."

Richard rolled his eyes and went back to the bathroom to finish getting ready. But when he returned, he couldn't get Macy—or Jamie—to act like his wife. After several minutes of joking, then arguing, then joking again, Richard decided to leave it alone and go to work.

Later that night, Jamie still wasn't acting like Jamie. Or Macy. Instead, she was still pretending to be Annabelle, the orthodontist with a practice two towns over.

Richard was perplexed. Still, what could he do? That night, he took on the persona of Oliver, a hip bartender from the East Side.

They had another magical night.

Days passed. Then weeks and months. Annies and Shanes and Dannys and Janes, Cindys and Sams and Alishas and Scotts all came to know and love one another. For the next twenty-seven years, two consecutive mornings never saw the same two people.

Good times and bad times and everything in between came and went. Deliriously happy days that found the woman bubbly and inspirational were followed by days of her waking up sick, miserable, and refusing to work. One day she was a high-profile civil rights attorney and the next, a writer from Belgium. They went to bed excited for what the next day might bring. There was no more dread for work or groaning at life's little problems.

Things were new again.

Even when life presented those terrible times that come to us all, the man and woman stayed sane and delighted. There were no more bad days—even when they _were_ bad. Each day was precious and significant. Previously boring trips to the grocery store at rush hour, when tired bodies plodded down the aisles for frozen chicken and vegetables, became exciting as the man and woman learned about who they were that day.

But then, a horrible day came—a day we all know will come and avoid discussing. For months, the woman had been growing sicker, and she was about to pass at the old age of 85. She called out Richard's name and motioned him over to her hospital bed.

"Hey," he said, "you called me Richard! It's you, Jamie. How long have you been back?"

She smiled. "I've always been here."

"So, you _were_ only pretending!"

"Yes and no. I _was_ pretending, but one day, the day before I created Macy, I realized something. You and I, and everybody else, are always somebody else, each day. Each night we go to bed, and the next morning we are reborn. We only think we're the same people every day because our minds tell us it's so. I thought we were getting tired of each other, that life was just about running errands and taking care of kids and being with the same person. But it wasn't true."

Richard smiled. "Yes, I guess you're right. I only think I've seen the inside of our home before, our car, your beautiful face, but the truth is I've never been here because today is a new day. And neither have you seen our house, our car, my face. And if you and I have never been here before, then each moment is new, forever . . . Now that I think about it, every time I'd get mad or annoyed at you these past years, I'd also get instantly sad. I think it's because I knew it would be the last time I'd see you. And how could I really be angry at someone I knew would be gone in just a few hours?"

Richard paused, smiled. "We really lived every day, didn't we?"

Jamie looked up at him, eyes wet. "Most people want to fall in love once, just once. But we've fallen in love ten thousand times."

Then they hugged and cried, and Richard knew this would be the last day he'd ever spend with his beautiful bride—with whom he'd just been reunited after all these years. He crawled into the hospital bed with her and held her frail body, wrapping her hand in his.

"Darling?" he asked.

"Yes, dear?"

"Tell me about who you are today."

And she did.

# The Parasite

I see these kids sometimes driving their parents crazy: screaming, kicking, crying in the airport or the grocery store while the red-faced, infuriated mother struggles not to smack their grimy face. "I swear, my son doesn't kick the walls like this at _our_ house. He just needs more space." This is one version of the usual explanation, but the parent is fucking boiling inside.

Those kids are bad, but bad in the normal kid way. The kind of bad I'm talking about is _bad_ bad. I'm talking about evil. A deep _badness_ that no parent can scream, cry, cajole, or beat out of them.

I have one of those kids. Actually, it's my wife's kid. After she died, I was entrusted with his care. I'm not sure how to say this without sounding awful, but sometimes you just _know_ something about someone: a feeling, a deep-seated unease that's hard to explain.

They revolt you.

That's how it was with Cory. Twelve-year-old Cory. Waves of disgust rolled through me as his care worker wheeled him in when we picked him up to bring him home with us. My wife, Sally, waited for him with open arms. Cory had lived in a facility most of his life, and his biological father—long since divorced from my new bride—had been his primary caretaker.

Cory had a rare form of palsy. No one knew how to treat it. The doctors could only label the symptoms, not the disease itself, which made him a medical anomaly. His mind and body were born atrophied and stayed that way.

I could only pity the kid. I'd met him once before, seven years before, when his mother and I drove down to Ventura from our home in San Jose. I remember the open room with huge windows that diffused the flowers and piano and patients in a soft, white glow like an old movie. Cory's back faced us, and I shivered when the nurse turned him around. Beady eyes, one larger and higher on his face than the other. His tiny smile bored right through me.

I hated him immediately.

Two years ago, Cory's father died in his sleep. It was mysterious. His heart had stopped. When they opened him up, rumor said that the coroner gasped. Later, she admitted that she had no explanation for the extreme calcification of the man's heart. Men twice his age didn't have the blackened muscle of this fifty-year-old man. In some rare cases in people exposed to extreme radiation—like those in Chernobyl—their hearts would calcify and age prematurely. But that was nothing compared to this.

Through complications with the will, there was little money left for Cory's care. The facility in Ventura cost thousands of dollars each month, but with no more incoming cash, the hospital released him into Sally's care.

We set up the spare bedroom, once my man-cave: part poker room, part movie corner, and total sanctuary. I got rid of everything, stuffing it all deep into the garage. We retrofitted the room and adjusted the internal wiring for Cory's equipment.

We added a small fridge for his medications and amino acids, and we purchased a van specially designed for his wheelchair. Then, of course, we moved Cory in. It took two hours to get him inside. I eventually got it down to thirty minutes. Normal ins-and-outs required knocking down the kitchen wall and widening the door frames. Three months and $28,000 later, Cory was settled in.

I didn't like the way Cory changed our personal lives. I stayed later at work, went out with my coworkers, and did whatever I could to stay away from Cory and the house. I don't know why. Maybe it was the shitty feeling I got when I saw him.

About two months later, Sally came home complaining of a sharp stiffness in the back of her neck that ran down to her ass. Her entire spine and the surrounding muscles had tightened, causing headaches and forcing her to walk hunched over. Lying down brought some relief, but the pulsing pains gnawed at her and forced her to lose several weeks of work. With the remodel and the time we'd had to take off work, we were almost out of money and our savings was gone. We'd mortgaged the house—again.

I took more time off from my sales manager position at a large server manufacturing company, and Sally and I began making the rounds at doctors' offices to try to treat her. The first doctor, the one through my insurance, called her condition TMJ. His hypothesis was that Sally's years at a desk job had caused severe muscular issues. But this didn't satisfy Sally. Muscles in her back would seize for minutes or hours at a time. TMJ couldn't explain that.

The second doctor proclaimed it was multiple sclerosis, which his tests couldn't confirm. We went to a third doctor, who labelled it fibromyalgia, or phantom pain. It was never the same diagnosis.

Two months later, we came home from the fifth doctor. I helped Sally inside, one arm slung around her back and one propping her up under the armpit. Staggering around the corner, we stopped mid-stride.

Cory was lying facedown on the hardwood floor near the kitchen. His wheelchair was several yards away, which meant that he fell out and then crawled.

Impossible.

I rushed over. Cory was awake. He dribbled a bit, his eyes fluttering once and locking on mine. I picked him up to put him back in his chair.

"What happened?" came a squeaky voice. It was just loud enough to hear over the buzzing refrigerator.

I nearly dropped him. Speaking? Impossible! His vocal cords never developed. _How could he talk?_ I looked at Sally, but we were both shocked.

"What happened?" the voice repeated.

"I think you crawled, little guy." What else could I say? With that, I placed him in bed and inspected him for bruises.

"Thank you, Dad," he said, almost as an afterthought.

"You're welcome." I waited patiently for the soft sounds of sleep and then left, exhausted.

I helped Sally upstairs. Her feet curled under at the arches. Hunched, she hung with one arm around my neck, the other gripping some unseen pain on her back, just above the hip.

We walked on slowly.

The stairs took ten minutes.

Sweat soon came in rivers, making her makeup run down her face. By the time I got her in bed, her complexion had turned sallow, and her face was mottled by pain and cosmetics.

"What's happening to me?" she lamented before submitting to sleep. We didn't talk about Cory.

* * *

Over the weeks, her symptoms progressed. The muscles around her skull and the back of her neck became taut like rope. Every night, I'd spend an hour patting her down with heating pads and then massaging out whatever knots I could.

After a week, I started using the rolling pin from the kitchen on her skull and back. It would help for an hour or two, but then her muscles would snap back and make everything worse. Sometimes the pressure made her vomit for hours at a time, and sometimes she could only mutter hoarsely the next day.

A week later, her legs locked at the knees and then at the ankles. Her shoulders, high and compacted against her neck, stuck out like a hunchback in an old movie. Her fingers were gnarled like oak.

We visited every specialist in a fifty-mile radius and then expanded outward from there. We received confused diagnoses and tried certain drugs hoping they would help. Nothing did.

Work became a distant afterthought. Bills piled on bills.

Meanwhile, Cory's physical health improved. Little bastard. His crawl was apparently not a fluke; I noticed as I cared for him that a certain plumpness has returned to his legs, arms, and face. Ribs still protruded from his caved chest, but they were supplemented with muscle. His thighs quickly lost their veiny markings.

His diet hadn't changed. The paralyzed boy's growing smile, returning strength, deepening vocals, the flexing of his fingers, toes and biceps, his catlike eyes and expanding jaw working up and down chewing on nothing, it all gave me the creeps.

With his physical health came mental abilities the boy had never had. This was not a return to an old self, like a recovery from a stroke. No, Cory became the boy he never was, and the doctors could offer no explanation for his miracle.

While the climb toward proper health continued for Cory, it plummeted for Sally. They were opposites. She collapsed more and more. She always tried to get around on her own and never listened to me.

One night, I found her passed out on the kitchen floor. Cory was lying next to her, cradling her head.

I knew Cory moved around more than he let on. He'd hide it. I could tell.

Sometimes I'd be lying in bed, comforting Sally with a bear hug while she convulsed and tried to sleep, and I'd hear scuttling downstairs. I'd listen to the sounds of fingernails gripping the floor, making tiny tap-tapping noises.

And, once, I could swear I heard what sounded like a body dragging itself up the stairs, pausing just outside our locked door, and then the soft, nasally breathing of a young boy with damaged lungs.

* * *

I had nothing but bad feelings for Cory after that. I developed a strange fear of entering his room, sleeping for only a few hours a night. I couldn't eat much. Normal creaks and groans in the house startled me and set my heart racing. I needed outside help, someone to tell me if there was something wrong with Cory or if I was going insane.

The opportunity presented itself in the form of a coworker, Peter.

Peter was a man of special training and intellect. I can't say to which branch of the armed forces he belonged, but he was, way back when, trained in tracking and apprehending insurgents in foreign countries during the time of our country's great fucked-up war. His combination of logic and intuition made him the perfect advisor.

I figured it was best to invite him over, let him see Cory, and see what happened. If my intuition were right, he would pick up on something with Cory. Vibes? Bad mojo? Hopefully, I could see that he _sensed_ something, and that would be enough to start a conversation—or at least validate my sanity.

When Peter arrived, I showed him around the house, saving Cory's room for last and explaining our family's medical situation. He was genuinely interested and didn't seem put off by any medical talk that provoked ickiness in most people.

I opened the door to Cory's room. Peter remained stoic—not a muscle moved. There was no surprised look or gaze that lingered a little too long. Nothing. Not even when we approached Cory's bed and looked down on the sleeping boy with drool down his chin.

Peter asked questions about the equipment. I answered them. That was all.

Disappointing.

"Peter," I said, as I opened his car door for him later on, "can I ask you something? It's a little weird." He nodded. "Did you feel or notice anything odd about Cory? A _feeling_ , maybe? When you went into his room? An emotion?"

"A _feeling_?"

I backtracked, rambling. "Yes. When we spoke once, you said you would get . . . in the Army, about people or places, when you went somewhere new . . . emotions, off of people. Shit, maybe I'm talking crazy or something."

He blinked. "You're not crazy. I did say that."

"Well, did you feel anything strange? About Cory?"

Silence. Peter's brow wrinkled.

I continued. "See, I've always had this feeling about him, but I can't really explain it." I pinched my nose. "Oh, hell, do you know what I'm trying to say?"

I wanted him to know I was genuine, that I truly felt something fucked-up was happening at home, but what could I say?

"The word you're looking for," he said, "is intuition."

"Of course!" I said. "Well, what does your intuition say about my home?"

He looked at his feet and pretended to fix his watch. "Me? What do you mean?"

"You told me stories of being in the jungle, having a sense about a particular place and all. And . . ." I went ahead and told him about the bad vibes around the house, my wife's sickness, Cory acting strangely.

"I don't know," I pretended to laugh. "Sometimes, I think our house is cursed . . ."

He paused and then said, "I don't want to offend you."

"Don't worry, you won't."

Peter breathed in deep through his nose and looked around. "Something's off."

"What do you mean?"

"The kid. I'm sure he's well behaved and all, and I know he has a medical condition. Ah, hell." Peter bit his thumbnail and frowned. "I can't be sure. It's intuition, not science. Still . . ." He cocked his head to one side, debating with himself. "It's not usually wrong."

He paused again, unsure whether to continue. "The boy feels like he's sucking the life out of you."

The air hung still. Peter understood my hesitation, looked back out the windshield, nodded, and continued.

"The impression I got from being in that room was that the boy is feeding off you and your wife. That's where he's getting his strength. In a normal environment, the same is true—the child always receives its strength from the parents. But this is different. Let me ask you something. Your wife. She's gotten worse since Cory came? And he's gotten better?"

"Yes."

"If I were you," Peter said, "I would put the boy back in the home. Whatever it costs. But do it quickly."

"Why's that?"

"Because he knows we're talking about him. And he doesn't like it."

He motioned with his head toward my upstairs window and then zoomed off. As the exhaust from his truck cleared, I turned and looked upward.

Something shadowy stood in the foggy moonlight. It had the shape of a hunchbacked boy with a huge head and bug eyes.

* * *

Three weeks later, Sally passed unexpectedly, her muscles having weakened to the point of disintegration. Her heart, being one big muscle, simply stopped working.

The funeral was hot, sunny, and miserable. Only a few distant relatives came—my immediate family was all gone. Sally's family was sparse, too, having thinned out over the years.

Cory stayed home. I broke the news to him as soft and gentle as I could. I swear he smiled a little.

That night, I checked his oxygen (which he didn't seem to need anymore) and head brace (which he also hardly needed). I went out and lit a candle for Sally, and I resolved to keep it burning each night for one year.

Then I had a drink that lasted three weeks.

* * *

Soon after my binge, I awoke one morning with a pain in my neck. Nothing more. It was one of those sharp pains that burned whenever I turned my head. I could only keep my head straight up and down. All day, I felt like a skeleton. When I turned to grab something or speak to a coworker, the needlepoint pain jabbed in tiny spears up and down my back from my shoulders to the bottom of my spine.

My head throbbed. I couldn't see much because my eyes were watering, and my vision had turned cloudy. I could only drive with a hand over one eye. Each red or green light caused brain-shocked agony.

The next morning, the vicious pain had dulled to a constant pounding. I checked on Cory, who looked wet. Sweaty. Maybe the temperature had been turned up in the night, and he'd been baking. I looked, but the heat was fine.

Cory's temperature was normal, but his concave forehead was fiery to the touch and his breathing more rapid than usual. His eyes had moist droplets surrounding them, and his orbs were moving rapidly underneath the spotty lids.

As I changed his shirt, my left calf muscle seized and stiffened up. So did the whole left side of my body. I fell, caught myself on Cory's bedside bar, and shifted my weight.

The pain was intense. Just like a charley horse, it got tighter the more I tried to move. Nothing I did could dislodge the knot inside me, not even jamming my fist deep into the muscle tissues of my leg until I thought I felt bone.

Cory's big, brown eyes opened. He stared at me sideways. His half-cracked smile seemed to be conveying some joke only he understood. Crusty white flecks dotted his lips. His tongue, covered in white bacteria, lolled around haphazardly. I shrank in disgust at his splotchy skin and his flaking forehead and eyebrows caked in dandruff. Some of it fell into his open mouth when he moved. He either didn't notice or didn't care.

He threw his head back in what I think was laughter, head rolling around on its own in an elongated circular motion. A fresh round of pain shot up the left side of my body up into my face, and the muscles began to droop and hang.

My lips. My cheeks. I touched my face. I felt nothing. Numb.

Then, Cory's leg—his left leg—shot out from under the covers. The blanket peeled back, and out came his knobby knee and emaciated limb.

The muscles grew. The calf seemed to generate meat and mass from nowhere, veins and tendons and joints popping up like popcorn.

I looked at my leg. Felt it. It was shrinking. Muscles were vanishing.

I hobbled to the dresser drawer on the opposite side of the room and grabbed four bungee cords from the bottom drawer.

I swung one cord around Cory's left arm and tightened it. I snaked both ends around him, hooking them together so they connected behind the gurney. I pulled them tight to hold him in place.

He didn't like being constrained and tried to rise from the bed. But the cord did its job, and Cory couldn't budge. Instead, he turned his head and bellowed a wave of rank breath that poured down my throat.

I nearly vomited, but kept myself composed long enough to strap down Cory's other arm and doubly secure his torso against the bed. I stumbled to the other side of Cory's bed with a third bungee, positioned myself against his strong leg, and hooked one end of the cord under the gurney. I wrapped it twice around his leg.

I yanked the cord tight. The veins in his leg bulged. Cory tried to buck wildly, but the restraints worked.

A minute passed. The flesh turned purple.

_Sally, were you watching? Did you believe that your son was some kind of inhuman parasite? That he'd sapped our strength, sucked it right out of us and into him? Or was I insane?_

I pulled harder. Cory's leg bulged and pulsed as red liquid tried to pump through his ever-shrinking blood vessels.

_Stop!_ A voice cried out from deep inside me. _You're torturing a small boy! He's helpless!_

Cory had maybe another minute before he permanently lost oxygen flow. His leg would be useless.

But—

My toes! As blood in Cory's leg dammed up, blood cascaded through mine like a rushing river from my hip to my soles.

I stood, the feeling restored in the left side of my body. My face tightened. My jaw worked again.

Cory's lips were tight and eyes wide, his face still in a semi-paralyzed state. He didn't have the strength to escape the bungees. From his darting glances from the cords to me, I could tell he was aware of his situation and that he was frightened.

He frowned and pouted. Air came in short, rapid bursts from his nostrils. His leg turned dark purple, the color of desert sunsets. His eyes watered in fright and pain.

He begged me to stop with muted grunts, pleading with me as best he could. Something like words sputtered out, but I wasn't listening. I leaned back, blood running from cuts the bungee cord had left on my hands. I didn't care. My leg had come back completely.

Suddenly, the boy's groaning stopped, and he stopped resisting the bungees.

I didn't see it in time. Somehow he'd gotten his left arm out from under the cord.

Cory grabbed the heart monitor and yanked it toward him. The stand fell. Cory held onto the device. His lips moved as he whispered under his breath.

His arm shook and his eyes closed.

Everything went quiet.

A humming. A flash of light. From the heart monitor. Elevating in pitch and intensity.

Cory's body vibrated with energy, faster and faster.

Something was whistling inside of him, moving rapidly under his skin. I caught a whiff of smoke, as if someone had lit a match. The smell grew stronger. I looked down. Small wisps of smoke billowed out between the buttons on his shirt and grew cloudy.

His body vibrated still faster. The smoke grew thicker and whiter. It came out of his pores like fog rising from a lake.

Fire shone through the skin on his face. His body turned red and orange. Tongues of yellow darted out of his skin, caught his clothing on fire, and singed his flesh. His lips curled around his gritted teeth in a sick, lopsided smile.

I leapt back and lunged for the door. When I turned around, the fire had already consumed Cory's body and the bed.

A massive pyre burned to the ceiling. Flames grabbed at the drapes and then swallowed them completely. Cory's eyeballs caught fire, melted, oozing from their sockets and dripping to the floor where they sat like mushy coals and lit the carpet aflame.

I ran haphazardly out of the inferno, slamming the door behind me. I remember racing down the stairs and out of the house, but I don't remember driving away.

I'm here now in a small motel near Livermore. It's been a month or so. I'll be here awhile. Last week, I left work for good. It seemed like a good time to start over.

The insurance companies still haven't determined what caused the heart monitor to malfunction.

There's not much to do here except catch up on my reading, sit by the pool, and smell the cows.

But today, I'm scrawling this story on hotel stationery because I got some news recently.

After their sweep of the rubble, the police said they'd found no evidence of another body. "Yes," the detective had said, "in very hot fires, the body will burn to almost nothing, but we invariably find teeth or parts of the heart. In this case, we've found nothing. It doesn't rule out that he's gone. We just can't prove it."

I haven't left the room in days. I keep the blinds drawn. I don't let the cleaners in.

Maybe I'm insane. I don't care.

Three days ago, my left leg began to cramp, and I woke up the next morning with a familiar stiffness in my neck that ran from the base of my head to the bottom of my spine.

I sit here now, propped up in my chair at the hotel dessk. Ive lost feeling in my body. i just have the muscles in my fingertips, scribbling words as best i can. My fingers ar cramped. I cant turn my head or even look down at what imwriting. i only see the wall. this will be where they find me.

i dont want to make a sound. even the scratching fo my pen is too much. everything is shutting down now. i can feel it ahppening. i hope someone finds this.

i can hear him breathing. scratching.

hes int he room.

help me

# 2081

The year was 2081, and the stock market stood at a historic 67,821. The stock market used to be called things like the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Its new name was the Freedom Index.

The government had long ago realized that freedom was strongly correlated to economic growth, and had finally enough sense to bind them together. Since then, both freedom and economic growth had been booming.

Peering down on the city of Libertas were 27,491 cameras. Not one was mounted in the open. Most were hidden in the mechanical clouds hanging overhead and in the robotic birds zooming above and between the buildings. Camera vision blanketed the city, not one square inch missed.

Herman Shute stepped out of his apartment building and onto the street, set his cane firmly with one hand, adjusted his hat and the vest of his custom three-piece suit, and began strolling the city to see the celebration. The afternoon sun hung high and beamed love upon everything.

The giant banner on the street proclaimed this day the twenty-seventh anniversary of the Market Exclusion Act, the annual Market Appreciation Day. In order to preserve maximum freedom and economic growth, the act decreed that no exchanges could be made outside of Market Forces. No trading, no bartering, no unauthorized monies.

Herman rounded the corner onto Adam Smith Lane. He moved slower than other festivalgoers, due to his age of 71, but his smile was bigger and thus propelled him at a higher joy-to-movement ratio.

The street was blocked off by official-looking signs and ribbons. Dozens of vendors lined the streets, selling official J.B. Clinton–approved hats, clothing, and electronics with invisible cameras inside.

Only two companies existed under the Market Exclusion Act and were permitted to sell within Market guidelines:

J.B. Clinton ran the financial, economic, and consumer goods services.

Homeland Security ran freedom.

Herman moved along the sidewalk, gracefully stepping aside for other festivalgoers. He waved them on with his hat, bowing from time to time, and always with a smile. He hadn't climbed the ladder at J.B. Clinton steadily for thirty years by being standoffish.

Halfway down the street, the lines of vendors split on either side, and in the middle Lorraine Rousseau gave her yearly sermon. One hundred or so Libertans gathered around her. She was dressed in a flowered skirt. She had nice arms, plastic black hair, and glasses with large frames.

"We are gathered here to celebrate the Market," she proclaimed to loud cheers. "Decades ago, we lived like animals, each of us buying and selling based on our own selfish desires. We never asked the Market what it needed to grow. Not once did we truly align our wills with the Market's. As a result, we had stock market dips, crashes, tidal waves, tsunamis. We did not recognize the divine in Market Forces.

"All that changed twenty-seven years ago today. Since implementing the Market Exclusion Act, we've lived lives of dignity, unity, and freedom. Through serving the Market, we've regained our true selves.

"We are each like fingers on a hand, connected to each other by the Market. It has allowed us to grow closer, to be more human, to be more free."

Herman agreed. It was a moving summation. He clapped with everyone else. His smile, though, was bigger.

The speech concluded a few minutes later. A few dozen people remained with Lorraine to pray during the tree-burning ceremony. The white oak tree for the burning sat on a truck bed behind her. It had been planted especially for this twenty-seven-year anniversary, some years ago, and was now twenty feet high.

The rising smoke symbolized the superiority of the Market. The Market loved burnt offerings—natural burnt offerings. One of the first principles taught in Market Theory courses is that Market Growth is directly correlated to burnt offerings. There is no growing without destroying. No creation without destruction.

It was a principle everyone could understand, even children.

In fact, every child had his or her tree-burning badge displayed proudly at home.

When children are seven years old, they're taken into the fifth-growth forest outside the city. Each is given a gas can and some matches, and each burns their own tree and receives a badge. Afterwards, as a class, they watch the Market's pricing mechanism change the value of white oak worldwide. They see how their actions cause the oak trees to rise in value.

All are included in the economy.

Herman moved on, stopping at a vendor to buy a J.B. Clinton–approved T-shirt with words stenciled on it: "Peace on Earth." Its visuals incorporated a blue whale on fire, with one human hand shaking another above the flames escaping from the whale's blowhole.

Herman and the cashier made their verbal agreement on the price of the shirt, which was strictly regulated. It cost $87. The verbal agreement was the pronouncement of their intent to buy and sell, which the cameras above needed in order to prep the Market Forces of Intent.

Herman and the cashier joined hands, looked to the sky, and gave the Market Prayer.

Each person's prayer is personal, and it would be rude to reveal it—although Homeland Security knows, and keeps them all on file. (The deeply curious could file a Freedom of Information request; they're usually fulfilled within 75 years.)

After the prayer, Herman and the cashier pushed the appropriate buttons, and the appropriate number of credits transferred from his device to hers.

Next came the inputting of Expository Information about the purchase, as was required by law. Questions had to be answered. _Why did the thought to buy this product strike you at this moment? Was there any childhood nostalgia involved in the decision-making process? How many similar items do you own already?_

Market Research must be precise and thorough to accurately gauge demand and to price goods in the future.

An hour later, Herman finished his questions. He massaged his aching fingers and looked up at the dry sun that was turning from yellow to orange, and decided to finish his loop and head home for the evening.

In the meantime, the festival had blossomed into a full-blown party. Two children chased each other through the streets, waving invisible guns. One played the human hunter; the other, some extinct animal species that had once flourished but was wiped out by the superior Market Forces.

Men and women, some pushing strollers, others holding hands, skipped through the streets, twinkles in their eyes, most of them respecting Herman, their elder, by nodding to him as they passed.

Herman's leisurely stroll home was interrupted by a commotion in the grocery store. Out of the door exploded a boy of seventeen or so in the hands of federal agents, each of them holding an arm. In one hand the boy gripped a sugar cookie still in its cellophane packaging. He was red in the face, snarling and insane, dragging his feet, resisting arrest.

Herman stopped to watch. So did a few dozen other onlookers, many with children. It was important for them to see justice served on Market Appreciation Day.

Some of the children hid their faces. Others foamed at the mouth and bashed their knuckles together. The parents of those kids stood proudly behind them.

Four officers in faceless masks tried to force the boy to his knees. He wouldn't budge. One quick snap of the baton fixed that, and the boy went down.

Then—

_Shzoom, shzoom!_ from up above . . .

Eyes glanced up to watch the arrival of the drone-copter. Wind blew down on the people, kicking up dust, momentarily blinding the cameras in the brick walls. Men and women covered their faces, kept their hats on with one hand.

The drone-copter landed in the middle of the street, and out stepped the magistrate, Judge Dinkins, clutching all 3,719 pages of the Market Exclusion Act.

Judge Dinkins never let what he considered his bible out of sight. He held it close when he slept and when he ate. The pages were dog-eared and ragged, and also wavy and warped from being softened by shower steam (the judge couldn't bear to part with it, even while bathing).

Judge Dinkins whipped his cape behind his back and marched up to the boy. He put one hand on the back of the boy's head, and used the other hand to cradle the book in his forearm. With his nimble forefinger he expertly flicked to the exact right page, all the while with his chin held high, eyes closed, murmuring a silent prayer for the young man in front of him.

After a few preliminary questions, he said to the boy, "You've been caught stealing item number 4,894,587 listed in the Market Exclusion Act: a sugar snack, wrapped in plastic. It is the shared property of J.B. Clinton and the citizenry of Libertas. You've broken Law 8,975, Code 291b-83c."

He cleared his throat and looked with pride at the gathering crowd. "We all must work together to keep prices stable and the Price Discovery Mechanism working. As we learned after the Fourth Great Depression we can no longer make transactions outside the Market's knowledge. It is too dangerous, and it retards the endless expansion of the Market. It's been proven, if we do not band together to increase the Freedom Index indefinitely, our economy will collapse.

"We have also seen," he continued, making full use of the crowd for his history lesson, "how the insidious hiding of information disrupts the economy and stagnates growth. This occurs in the interpersonal realm as well as in the natural. Think what would happen if we didn't know the exact rainfall coming next week. How could we predict future crop production and the price of food? And if we were unable to price food, you would be unable to feed yourself. So you see, all is connected and all information is invaluable to the service and longevity of the Market."

He wiped his brow. "By now, everyone should know to log information as seemingly innocuous as what time of day you had what type of drink. Or whether your daughter overcame a math problem she had difficulty solving. Perhaps you had tried to teach her the solution in several ways, but only until it was explained in a _certain precise_ _way_ was she able to understand. If the Market did not have access to what caused the breakthrough in thought, how could it be expected to update speech catalogs and help future children overcome adversity?

"Of course, many more industries could be affected by such information. Maybe your speech patterns could one day help a doctor communicate to a diseased cell! Think of what that could do to lower healthcare costs for you and your fellows. Think of the possibilities for the limitless expansion of the Market!"

The magistrate suddenly looked up from his book, blinking, still in a daze, sweat staining his underarms and leaking down his white collared shirt. He slammed the book shut and raised it high over his head.

"I find the defendant guilty. If he refuses to produce wealth for us on his own, he will produce it for us _on the inside_."

The boy sniffled, looked up at Herman.

Herman frowned and looked at the ground.

Then three officers shot electricity into the boy, so he'd give them no problems on the way to his long-term prison sentence. They handcuffed him, ankle-cuffed him, then chained his handcuffs to his ankle-cuffs, threw him into the back seat of the drone-copter, and zoomed into the air, over the mechanical clouds.

Herman couldn't watch. He stared at his feet and kicked at the concrete. Watched the loose pebbles fly into the cracks of the sidewalk and disappear—until he could no longer hear the low rumbling whir of the vehicle.

The crowd slowly dispersed. Some people shook their heads; others distracted their overly sensitive children by waving toys in their faces and running off into the streets.

It was back to the festival for them.

Not so, for Herman. His eyes were moist. He didn't know why. Something in the boy's look, something Herman recognized. The boy _had_ broken the law, and why Herman would feel anything like sympathy for a law-breaker who selfishly acted against the interest of his fellow citizens he couldn't explain. Perhaps he was just getting older. Maybe he was already too old. Good thing he was retired.

Before he realized it, he'd walked almost all the way across town, still frowning, staring at the ground, contemplating the unwanted emotion that had poked its head out like a ground squirrel on a prairie. How much time had passed he couldn't say, but he was growing tired anyway, and he should probably get home to feed the cat.

He turned right down Prosperity Street and more children barreled past him, nearly taking out his cane with their feet. One was waving a fake plastic gun at the other, pretending to shoot, sound effects— _pow, pow!_ —escaping from her mouth.

The sun had sunk almost all the way below the tall 400-apartment buildings that lined Prosperity Street, fading now into a red-orange hue. More and more of the vendors had broken down their tents, filled out the rest of their Expository Information, and said their Market Prayers. Above, the mechanical clouds and robotic birds kept watchful eyes on the vendors. The sky was full of the camera-clouds now, all of them concentrating on the information passed on by the vendors to their handheld devices, making sure no one was pocketing any extra money.

Not that there was much risk of that happening. To become a vendor, one had to pass many Trust Tests. Plus, one needed an impeccable record of record-keeping, which was taught at age six, and which was expected to continue for the rest of one's life.

Record-keeping scores were graded on a scale from one to ten (ten being the highest). Scores were meticulously tracked. Those who maintained a ten score received, by default, the best jobs, since they were proven most capable of feeding the Market with timely, correct, and verifiable information. "Tens" were the most valued in society.

Herman Shute had previously been rated a full-blooded ten.

He'd lived his entire life being as thorough of a record-keeper as possible. He obeyed every rule laid out for him by society and by his parents, and hoped he made them proud. His wife, too, bless her soul. Even after Judith had left her body and (hopefully) floated higher than the mechanical clouds, Herman had recorded his every thought, good and bad, every purchase he made—including how the memory of making her laugh during their first picnic on Dinosaur Hill convinced him to buy a particular brand of J.B. Clinton bread the day after she passed. He'd bought it in remembrance of their first date, when they'd had a picnic and the same brand of bread had stuck to her teeth and she hadn't noticed and he'd found it remarkably cute and realized even then that he would marry that damn woman.

The day she died Herman told the Market all about it. And the Market responded: the value of J.B. Clinton bread went up half a percentage point the next day.

All are included in the economy.

Herman walked to the edge of the city, up to the street with the high walls and barbed wire fence that wrapped around them, when a voice whispered from the alley—

"Mister!"

A teenage girl, maybe fifteen, poked her head out of the sewer. She looked around hesitantly. "Do you have any food? We're hungry down here." She looked at him in desperation. Her lips were chapped; her face, dirty and swollen.

"No, I'm sorry. No food."

The young girl looked dismayed. She shivered and wrapped her arms around her bare shoulders.

Herman looked down at the shirt he'd just bought, the J.B. Clinton–approved shirt. He'd bought it for the memory of the anniversary of the Market Exclusion Act, like he had every year. All his shirts were lined up neatly in oak drawers at home. So he knew what would happen if he brought it home: it would sit in the drawer with the other shirts, something he'd probably never wear.

Without thinking, Herman held out the shirt. The young girl crawled out of the sewer and up to him. Her arms and legs were thin as sticks, the skin glued to bone. She wore only a ratty tank top and shorts, and was certainly grateful for another layer. She smiled and took the garment.

The next thing Herman saw was the building in front of him turning upside-down, then right side-up. Then he felt the craggy asphalt crunching against his face.

Several faceless officers lifted him up. Two others rappelled from the buildings on either side of the alley.

The magistrate stepped out of the shadows. "All right, Herman, we got you."

Herman quickly tried to explain his way out of this. After all, he had seventy-plus years of good behavior, total allegiance to the Market, nothing but—

"Huh-huh," said the magistrate, waving him off dismissively. "You've been found guilty of gifting outside of the Market. Of course, we've seen this coming for years. We knew you'd been getting lax with your record-keeping. You went from a ten rating to a nine to an eight, and when someone of your age starts slipping to a seven, it's time to put them out to pasture."

The magistrate then read the appropriate and applicable sections from the Market Exclusion Act. By the time he was done, the sky was a ripe black and blue.

Herman asked to be escorted away quickly so no one would see him. Soon the drone-copter disappeared, carrying him off to a mandatory prison sentence.

The magistrate congratulated the young girl on her sting. Because of her, the Market would absorb Herman into the prison population and generate more freedom for everyone. The price of labor would rise slightly, and the cost of goods might go up. But adding another person to the prison workforce might lessen the load on the others and make everyone more free and productive. On the other hand, adding another mouth to feed could increase the debt load on everyone.

So it might balance out. Or not. Who knows? Market Forces are mysterious things.

One thing is for sure, though:

All are included in the economy.

# Howlin' Rain

Big Bob McElwee zipped up his rifle bag, swung it over his shoulder, and took one last look around the study with its vaulted ceilings and granite fireplace mantel. He nodded at each of the stuffed animal heads mounted on the walls—the elk, the buffalo he'd shot last year in the Montana highlands, the antelope from his trip to the plains, and all the rest. He smiled a little at the prairie dog who stood upright in its fixed position, frozen in its inquisitive look, head cocked slightly, just the way Big Bob remembered it before he'd shot it in the belly.

Gazing upon each of his animals—all two dozen, big and small, the ones he'd kept; he'd hunted hundreds of animals, after all—he remembered each kill, how he felt, where he was at the time, and so on. This was his tradition, and before he went out _this_ time to find a wolf with a pretty pelt he could turn into moccasins, he gave each of his babies their own salute and a silent promise that he would bring back a new trophy to keep them company.

He counted the tent poles and packed them with his tent, then stuffed his water filter and nine packs of dehydrated food into his duffel bag. And of course he'd remembered his other baby: a Remington Sendero SF II with its 26-inch barrel. He also brought plenty of ammo, and his six-inch buck knife hung on his belt.

He drove the clean, straight roads up Highway 3 from Fernwood in Benewah County, Idaho, the fir and pine trees creating striating shadows across which his vehicle cut. He passed the city of Santa and turned left onto Highway 6, which sent him south well into Saint Joe National Forest. Looking to the passenger seat, he expected Harry's goofy Burt Reynolds moustache to be shining with beads of sweat that accumulated when the weather was hot. But, two months had passed since Harry's disappearance somewhere in the forest, and nothing but memories remained in his usual seat.

Bob frowned at this, and clutched at his right side, the memory having awakened some physical pain. In fact, the last three weeks he'd seen his fair share of increasing anxiety and discomfort: some kind of gastric distress, he'd thought. At first there were headaches—tension headaches of some kind—followed by bouts of terror during the night, where he found himself awakening from dreams he could no longer remember but whose resonance grated him. Most nights recently were sleepless. His wife Nancy, precious and caring woman that she was, also began experiencing anxiety, simply by proxy, and together they'd sit up until dawn sipping coffee and then go to their respective jobs, tired and dragging.

Bob and Harry had met hunting, of course. Big Bob had hunted his whole life, and killed nearly every type of animal there was to hunt in Idaho—rabbits and squirrels when he was younger, then ducks and deer and elk.

Three years ago he'd taken to hunting wolves; it was his first time at the derby. He'd found wood-folk just like him, folk who'd flown in from all over the country. The experience had redefined him as a hunter, especially after shooting a couple wolves during the event.

He'd met Harry in the woods during the hunt, and Harry quickly became friend and mentor to the talented Big Bob. Soon after they'd made plans to hunt together, and they did, twice a year: one session at the derby, and one on their own, together, in some remote forest of their choosing.

Bob was six miles into Saint Joe now, and the trees were blocking out the sun so that it appeared later than early afternoon. He could see no real animal life from his truck, but he knew better; the woods were always teeming with a million billion unseen life forms. Even a small rock housed under it ants, spiders, and micro-organisms that came into focus if you put them under a microscope at 10×, 50×, 200× normal magnification.

Presently he reached down by his right leg, which was glued to the gas pedal, sifted through the old papers, shop goggles, and empty packs of cigarettes, and found an old plastic water bottle which he propped between his thighs and periodically used to spit his dip juice into. "Poor bastard," he thought, thinking of Harry, and his mind went back to that day months ago when Harry's wife, Maria, had showed up at his door and told him through tears that Harry had gone out duck hunting and simply never came back. Bob knew that a story like that usually meant a man had just taken up with another woman, but with Harry he knew differently.

His suspicions had been correct. The police found Harry's car nine days later at a turnout several miles into the woods on Highway 6, in the very spot where Bob now stepped out of his cab.

He let the motor idle, shut the truck door, and walked across the gravel, facing east, feeling the crunch beneath his boots. The lines from the wheels of Harry's truck had been smoothed over by the wind and other vehicles come and gone, and presently a breeze picked up, and Bob looked down, tipping his hat to his lost friend, who was somewhere—somewhere _out there_.

Deep in the woods, the cry of a meadowlark rang out once—close to the ground. The wind cleared suddenly and all was still, which to an experienced hunter like Bob signified not calm but danger. His ears pricked up, and so did the hairs on his arm. Steadily he scanned the jagged patterns of trees, looking for bulky, squatting shapes or something horizontal hiding among the vertical lines. For a full minute he watched, his eyes picking up every detail—ears on high alert—and as he completed his 360-degree view of the area, a bird chirped, the wind picked up, and the feeling of being hunted left him.

* * *

A few hours later and four miles from his car, Bob set up his tent. With no real plans for the rest of the evening but get drunk, make a fire, and watch the flames, Bob took his time preparing the tinder and kindling. Since he was a boy, Bob had started his fires with only wood and paracord. On the wolf-hunting trips, the feeling of crafting each of the four fire-making wood pieces made the experience more real, alive and powerful—somehow bringing him closer to the family friend and aging tracker who showed him the secrets of fire all those years ago.

First there was the handhold, the thunderhead, which he made by chopping a thick branch and partially hollowing out half of the already rounded end. For the spindle, which he would press between the handhold and the fire board, he shaved the bark off an inch-wide pine branch, sharpened one end, and rounded the other. The hardest part to create was the bow. It took him fifteen minutes to find a suitable branch that was curved in just the right way. After expertly carving a fork into the bottom with a few switches of his buck knife, he tied the paracord in tight and made rapid movements around the top and bottom of the bow, over-tightening it at first and then loosening it enough to wrap around the spindle.

The fire board—the only part he allowed himself to carry, besides the paracord—came out last, aged with time and colored in mostly black or grey due to the many holes created by the friction of fire.

Next he readied the tinder and created a teepee of twigs and leaves and old bark. He placed the ball of moss and leaves beside his fireboard, wrapped the bow on his paracord around the spindle, and knelt to set his hand upon the thunderhead. With the weight of his body he applied pressure down upon the thunderhead, the spindle, and fire board. After only ten seconds of ripping the bow back and forth and spinning the spindle against the fire board below, a coal dropped onto the board.

Bob placed some moss onto the coal and gently guided it onto his tinder bundle. After some blowing, the coal sprouted, bloomed, and flowered into a warm fire. Bob fed it well into the night and slept pleasurably.

The next morning's wolf kill came fast and unexpectedly. Bob had risen before dawn and set off deeper into the woods. Two miles from camp he found a small clearing. From behind a fallen Douglas fir two hundred or so feet ahead, he set up, downwind, with an unobstructed view of the clearing. He made himself comfortable and waited. Patience was something he knew well, and he could out-sit, outlast any situation long after other hunters got restless and moved on.

Bob had a feel for the forest: he knew when to stay put, when to move, when there was game, when there was none. An intuitiveness denied others—gifted to him. He tried to explain it once to a group of good old boys in trucker hats, down at a derby. At this particular event, the men were allowed to hunt anything and everything—not only wolves, but squirrels, rabbits, snakes . . . If it moved and wasn't human, it was fair game. Bob returned with three wolves, several snakes, foxes, and other creatures, in an otherwise dry season for the others. After being awarded top prize, and upon being questioned by the trucker-hatted men, Bob tried to explain, unsuccessfully, his intuitive feelings surrounding the hunt. He just . . . could feel where things were, where they lived, where and when the jackrabbit would pop its head out from behind the fern . . .

The men had simply stared at him. It was hard not to sound like an idiot, so Bob shrugged, sipped his beer, and said: "I guess I was lucky."

The feeling he knew but could not articulate always flared up before a kill. A sense of calm would flow through him, guiding his left arm to grip the barrel of his rifle, his right hand to steady his aim.

Today, the animal appeared—a gaunt, grey wolf. Its ribs poked through tight skin, its breath exaggerating the tension. To the outside observer it might have appeared weak, but Bob knew it to be a lie. Inside the skeleton was a fierce animal, with more fight in it than in a badger or a possum. He settled into his rifle, took aim, breathed in once, and fired.

He skinned the front legs first, making one incision on the underside of the legs, at the feet, and worked his way upwards. The knife skirted the flesh and bone expertly in short, rapid movements, cutting away any underlying skin and severing the joints and knuckles near the toes so he could unwrap the hide in one piece.

There was only a little blood from the legs, but the shot that penetrated the heart and both lungs had sprayed fresh red across the yuccas, and now that the body was hung upside down a pool gathered beneath it. Soon Bob had begun the k-skin, making two cuts near the hind legs and unfolding the patches of fur, which now hung off the body like wilted flowers on a hot day.

After the back legs came cutting the tail away from the meat, and when he was done working his way down the long, bony piece, he reached in and pulled the tail bone from the hide.

Half the wolf's fur hung from its body like an upside-down ballerina. Bob plugged his nose with some cotton; at first the rotten smell of the animal hadn't bothered him much, but now it was overpowering. Bad, like rotten meat, despite the fresh kill. He continued unrolling the wolf's fur downward, cutting away the skin to preserve the hide. He whistled as he worked.

The head was hardest, always. After cutting around the eyes and digging out under the ears, the knife peeled away the hide around the skull, and skin fell off the bone. He finished pulling the hide clear and scraped away the residues of flesh as best he could.

The wolf's naked body looked like a long, ugly chicken.

Bob sat for a moment to catch his breath. Though the body stank, the sight of meat made his stomach rumble. His dehydrated beef stroganoff sounded pretty good, he decided, plus he was far enough from the camp to leave the kill without attracting animals to him. Given that he had more than half a day left before sundown, he could return to camp, make a fire, and hang the hide to air dry until night came and he'd have to put it in his scent-proof bag.

Bob thought about this as he readied the hide for travel back to the camp. He cut the body loose from the hanging tree, and the pink, naked thing crumpled to the forest floor. He stretched; the hours of waiting, the rush of killing, the labor of skinning had conspired against him, and now his body ached.

By the sun, he judged it was past noon. He'd been sitting for at least four hours. If he left now and packed his site quickly, he could make it back to the truck and go home tonight, but a sigh escaped his lips as he remembered his lost friend, and he decided one more night in remembrance was in order.

The hide was drying. Slowly. Bob watched it in the heat and the shadows of the flame.

The jittery nervousness of the hunt had faded, and exhaustion was now setting in as night fell. In the air hung a mist, which had come in with the disappearing sun. Unusual for this forest, this time of the year. His tent called to him, but instead Bob hunkered into his jacket, refusing to leave the flame; it was still too early for bed.

Above the fire the hide hung, still wet and shiny. He'd soon need to wrap it up in his bag, and probably hang it in the trees. The thing stank like shit.

The mist grew heavier, wetter. Bob smelled rain. He'd checked the forecast before he left; it was nothing but sunshine and moonlight.

Still . . .

Somewhere in the woods there was a howl—a long, piercing sound that made Bob jump a little. It sounded like pain, like grief, like—

There was another. It was close, too, maybe a couple miles away.

_Howling at the moon_ , he thought.

Bob quietly pulled out his rifle from its case, loaded it, and set it across his lap. Everything went quiet again, except for the pop and crackle of the sap in the kindling. He sat awhile, another twenty or thirty minutes, once again growing drowsy and relaxed by the heat of the fire.

The sense of being watched came suddenly. The feeling he got just before a kill returned, only now it was more focused. Inverted somehow. The crickets stopped chirping. So did the frogs. The owls, too. All animal noises ceased.

_I'm being hunted._

Whether it was an animal or something else, he didn't know, not for sure, but it was there, beyond the fire. The shape of it was there, darker than the rest of the forest only dimly lit by the moon. It was too dark, and he was too frightened to know if the thing beyond the fire even had a real shape or if it had only taken shape in his mind.

But the thing was standing upright.

Sweat sprouted on Bob's brow. Terror seized his lower half and immobilized him. His hands shook and white-knuckled the rifle. Somewhere in the back of his mind a voice tried to scream him out of paralysis, but had no effect. He blinked and looked to the right—out of the corner of his eye the shape appeared more definite, less so when he looked at it straight on.

Something _was_ standing. It was bipedal. It had broad shoulders.

A twig snapped in the fire, ejecting a whirl of red embers, illuminating the space past the fire, and something like a face appeared for a hot second.

The upright thing's face was pink and brown, caked in mud and hair.

A second large pop from the fire blinded Bob for a moment. He looked down at his gun, willing his hands to move, but they refused.

The thing across the fire was breathing. It was soft, nasally, and on the exhale a guttural sound like air moving past a clogged windpipe.

It began to move. Bob watched it track left, then . . . it started to disappear. The shape grew smaller as it backed away into the forest.

Over the next fifteen minutes, the sense of being watched slowly vanished, and Bob realized he was alone.

* * *

Bob had packed up camp and was set to hike the four miles back to his truck when he realized the stupidity of his plan. At first all he could think to do was flee, but now he was thinking clearer.

To wander through the woods with a head lamp, attracting that thing . . . as a hunter, he knew better. Whatever it was, it could see in the dark, and Bob didn't feel like going up against it on its own terms, in its own backyard. He was at a disadvantage, and he knew it was stupid to try.

He'd have to wait through the night.

So, he placed his packs close to him and built up the fire until the flames reached three feet high. If he couldn't see in the dark, he'd try like hell to even the playing field if the thing came back. He found dozens of branches and even used his hatchet to hack up an old dead tree, not twenty feet from his tent, that had been eaten out by beetles. Soon he had enough wood to see his fire through the night.

He checked his watch.

_Damn. Only 11:43._

He made sure his rifle was loaded and that he had plenty of ammo in his pocket. Then he crouched close to the fire and waited.

When he was a young boy, Bob had once been out walking on the east side of Rocky Mountain National Park. He and his father were staying on a friend's property, and Bob had liked to take morning hikes before his father woke up. This time, about twenty minutes down the path leading into the park, Bob looked up the embankment on his left and saw a group of five coyotes steadily creeping along, no more than fifty feet away. The slope leveled out at the path up ahead, and a few dozen yards to his right was an 8,000-foot drop, straight down. In the distance were nothing but snow-topped peaks and blue skies.

Little Bob thought quickly. There were pine trees all around him. If he was lucky, perhaps he could shimmy up one of them and stay there until his father came looking for him. Only his father wouldn't know where Bob had gone; several paths led out of camp. Plus, he could see no footholds in the trees. Instead of running, Bob had removed the knife from its sheath attached to his Levi's and grabbed a large branch that had fallen onto the path. Slowly he'd backed down the path, wielding the branch and the knife, one foot extending behind the other, keeping guard, hissing and snarling, until he'd reached his father's tent, piss and sweat soaking through his jeans.

A freezing chill blew through camp. It felt like a foreign wind from some distant mountaintop, full of stinging ice. The pelt above the fire swayed back and forth. It was wet again, having gathered moisture from the mist. Now it shimmered. A drop of blood fell into the fire and sizzled.

Drops of rain pitter-pattered on the ground. Just a few at first, mimicking the blood from the wolf's hide. Big drops. Soon Bob's hat and face and clothing were soaked.

He shielded the rifle from the wetness as best he could, and started digging through his backpack, only to remember he'd brought no rain gear.

_Nothing to do but shiver._

The rain's intensity built. Sheets of it drenched Bob and his camp, but the fire was so large and strong the rain couldn't extinguish the flames, so they sizzled on the embers in defiance.

Only minutes later, the water was so thick and suffocating Bob could only squint through closed eyelids and scan between the Douglas firs and lodgepole pines for any sign of the return of the thing across the fire.

Lines and shapes of all kinds—perhaps created by the fire or by his own imagination, or produced by real life—dominated his vision. He could take the hallucinations no longer, and he pulled out his gun, cocked it, and—

His shotgun let loose across the fire, behind it, to the right and left—then he reloaded and fired again.

He spat war cries into the woods, and didn't stop until he was tackled from above.

The smell of burning flesh hit him first, followed by the realization that he'd been slammed by something and had fallen into the fire.

He put his hands down to push himself up onto his feet. Only when he had stood and was looking down at his red, bleeding palms did he realize he had pushed himself up off the coals.

A mixture of yellow and orange flames obscured his vision. Blinking did little to combat the bright lights behind his eyelids; closing his eyes didn't produce the darkness he'd hoped for.

All Bob could do was run, arms outstretched like wild probes feeling their way between the trees and through the thickets. He vaguely sensed that whatever had tackled him was now chasing him. Judging by the vanishing sensations of heat and brightness, he was moving away from the fire.

Where he was going he had no clue, and he didn't care.

Breathing came mixed with little bursts of yelling. He howled in pain as branches and barbed bushes gouged his arms, legs, and face.

The rain came in vertical rivers now—all at once, down the trees, carrying bark and whole sections of branches with it.

He slipped in the mud, staggered, drew himself up again. So liquid was the forest floor that his right boot sank half a foot into the earth. He wrenched it out, screamed in pain as his right ankle snapped, set his left foot down, and then the water and world turned upside-down on him, and his foot seemingly fell through the ground.

All the air left him as his body hit the bottom of the mud pit twelve feet below.

He lay there a moment, unable to breathe. On his way down he had felt his head crack against a rock in the side of the wall. Now he tasted a metallic substance in his mouth, something mixing with the mud and rain.

He was only dimly aware that he'd fallen through a false floor in the earth; a trap, like the ones he used to make as a child to catch wild boars. He rolled over and vomited into the small well of water that had begun collecting at the bottom of the mud pit.

He looked up, his mouth wide open and caked in blood and vomit. His vision slowly returned. He reflexively tried to blink the mud out of his eyes, but couldn't. Leaves fell, heavy with rain, spinning down the hole, covering his face.

He tried to shift his body, realizing one leg had folded beneath him and the other was stretched against the mud wall. The pit was only five feet across, and couldn't hold a whole laid-out body.

The pit filled quickly with water. The walls were slick, and he couldn't get a real grip on anything. He untangled his leg— _get up, you fuck_ —and tried to stand by bracing his hand on one side of the wall, but slipped and fell sideways, slamming both hands on the wall in front of him—and to his surprise, the wall gave as he pushed against it. He felt something move, bend inward in the center, as if—

The muddy wall crumbled and fell. His arm sank a foot deep, the mud creating a kind of vacuum that sucked on it as he tried to pull it out.

But it was a hole. There was nothing behind the facade of mud. It was hollow.

A snap, from up above. Bob whipped his head and looked up. A faint outline of . . . something . . . up there . . . moonlight, perhaps, but diffused. An ethereal gray-yellow light permeated the trees above him like a mist, only . . . the light was bobbing up and down . . . and getting closer.

The red and white spots on his pupils were slowly diminishing. There was instead now a large, soft spot in his vision. Bob squinted up, as the light grew brighter, brighter still. There was a shape. The dark outline of a body approached.

It was the thing. The thing beyond the fire.

An inhuman, wolfen yell exploded from the top of the pit. The sound reverberated, loud as a train whistle; Bob clamped his palms over his ears.

Bob's brain fled his body, shut down in any conscious, thoughtful way. Only the visceral and instinctual frenzy of flight was there, and it overtook him. He spun to the wall, rammed one arm through the hole he'd made, and pulled out the mud, throwing it to the ground. He yelled with each thrust, until there was a large hole three feet across and—

He dove through the hole head first. There was no more mud behind the wall—it was indeed hollow. He fell to the floor and began crawling, directionless, just escaping, surviving.

The floor of the tunnel was packed hard, as if tamped down by someone or something. And it was cool in there, under the earth. It smelled similar to a rock cave, and was dark like one, but—

Up ahead. Up _there_. Something. Like a light. The tunnels seemed brighter.

He crawled on, unsure of how wide or long the tunnel was, just moving, thundering along, yelling with each elbow and leg he slammed on the ground, whipping his head around behind him, moving forward again, until—

Without thinking, he stood up and ran. The tunnel was very tall, as if made for a body of human height—something bipedal. He took off, toward the light, arms outstretched, toward the light, screaming, toward—

The light grew brighter. His vision was splotchy, but it was definitely lighter up ahead.

On and on he ran, his boots full of water and mud. He stumbled, and only then realized his legs weren't quite working properly. His poor, twisted, broken ankle simply refused to go on. Now he felt the pain. He limped along as best he could, using his right leg, dragging his left like it was weighted with bricks.

He almost ran into the wall at the end of the tunnel. There, to his right, he saw. The light. The _lights_. There were, in fact, three separate round circles in the wall next to him. All in a row. Like he was at a cross-section of a sewer.

_But not a sewer for waste. A sewer for getting around . . . Then, who's getting around in these tunnels?_

He forced the questions out of his mind, turned back to see if the thing beyond the fire was following him, and tried to focus on which tunnel to use.

All three seemed to point in the same direction, but each had varying degrees of light poking through—maybe being of different lengths. Without hesitating, Bob launched himself through the brightest one—the middle one—which started about two feet off the earthen floor.

He crawled on his elbows—this hole was too small to stand in. His foot throbbed as he banged it on the tunnel floor; his bones ground and slammed together, forcing his right leg to do most of the work. He gritted his teeth in pain and kept moving as best he could. There was light, goddamnit, and where there was light, there was—

Something.

Ignoring the burning and wheezing in his throat, he pressed on, elbow after elbow, up and down, racing to the end of the tunnel. The light grew brighter, and when he reached the end, he let his upper half hang out over the edge of the tunnel and gasped for breath and pushed himself over the edge and just laid there and looked.

This pinwheel-like room was lit by a large fire, right in the middle. Above it, there was a hole in the ceiling, and it looked out into the dark and the trees, though it was covered over slightly by branches and dead wood. The whole room was exposed to the rain, and even though the water fell it did not extinguish the large fire. Instead, the water merely crackled as it fell on the embers.

Bob rose, hopping on one leg, examining his surroundings. From what he could tell, several separate tunnels fanned out across all sides of the room. There were perhaps a dozen, all with their own ethereal light emanating from somewhere beyond. He looked behind him, back down the tunnel he'd crawled through, and listened for the sound of any follower. Satisfied he was safe, he turned back to survey the room.

Which way was up and out? He couldn't tell. Limping around the room, he tried to peer down each tunnel, but it was dark, too dark to tell how far back they went or where they led.

His eyes felt dry as deserts; they felt on fire, like a hundred tiny red ants were crawling and digging through his eye sockets. And his poor leg . . . He thought about removing his boot to survey the damage, maybe make a splint of some kind, but instantly rejected the idea. He might have to move quickly, and wouldn't have time to lace up again.

Someone—or something—had to have made this fire, and he or she—or _it_ —would be back. Still, he let himself enjoy for just a moment the heat and dancing images of the flame. The siren of the fire called to him, beckoned for him to stay and lie down next to it. It would be so nice, so nice to sleep, so nice to—

In sudden terror of the heat, of comfort, Bob wrenched himself up and began crawling again. He chose the tunnel that he believed headed north, back to his truck, toward home.

* * *

Ten minutes later, he found the tunnel twisting and turning, first slanting left, then right, then left again, then straight for a while. He was still heading generally north (he believed) but the tunnel was now so dark he'd bump into the wall directly in front of him, turn, follow the route some more, until he reached another dead end and had to turn again.

Then he found himself sliding.

One moment he was crawling along, the next he was falling forward, trying first to press his hands against the sides of the tunnel to slow himself down, so he held them impotently in front of his face as he slid down, down, down.

He shot out of the slide like a child at a playground, the impact of the dirt on his body sucking the air from him again. He rolled over, once, then stood, ready to defend himself.

Another fire burned in here, only it emanated from a torch that hung on the wall ahead and to his left. It flung yellow light across a giant mound of dirt in the middle of the room, about ten feet wide and long and five or so feet tall.

Bob instantly had the sense this time he was not along. "Hello—" he called out, the dirt walls absorbing the sound of his voice.

A hand stretched out from behind the dirt mound. The firelight shimmered on the skin, creating psychedelic patterns. The gnarled hand gripped the side of the dirt mound, pulling the body attached to it around with it.

The body groaned, straining to get itself to the other side. Its other hand slammed into the dirt mound, fingers caked in mud, digging deep, trying to get leverage, and with one final groan pulled the rest of the body around.

The eyes of his friend Harry softened, glowed with the joy of recognition. "Bob!" Then Harry fell to the earthen floor, too weak to hold himself up any longer.

Bob rushed to his friend, cradled his head, wept in happiness. Seeing Harry was like the ultimate oasis in a desert, a friend in enemy territory. They cried together, and it wasn't until his eyes were good and moist, finally, that Bob looked up, past the mound of dirt he and Harry were leaning on, and saw the dead bodies mounted on the wall or stuck to posts in the floor.

The human bodies were stripped of skin. Skulls, spines, and full skeletons in different sizes and shapes had been mounted in various poses. Some simply stood like medical cadavers in a science class, while others—the small children—sat with their legs crossed. Some even had their head perched on a fist, like they were thinking. Dozens and dozens of them lined the walls.

"Hunted," Harry whispered, wide-eyed. He flicked his head up to the wall. "Trophies."

"Who's hunting them?"

Harry licked his cracked lips. "Wolves, I think. Or men. Beasts. Something in between. They're nothing I've ever seen, nothing I could imagine . . ." He trailed off, lost in his thoughts, still moving his lips but with nothing coming out.

After several moments Bob spoke. "Have you been here this whole time?"

Harry blinked. "I think so. There were three others with me. Every few nights they took one out. And they haven't come back. They're using them, hunting them. I think they've been waiting to let me heal . . ." He motioned to his leg, which was black with old blood and raked through as if by claws. "Before they hunt _me_. . . But I won't make it far." Harry looked up, eyes wet and heavy. "I can't outrun 'em, can't outfight 'em—"

A door, at first unseen in the darkness, creaked and opened on their right. The two men whipped around, pale blue light spilling in from somewhere outside the door, somewhere . . . above.

They held their breath and waited for whoever, whatever was up there to come down. But nothing came. Something in the silence, something in the waiting, something in the _knowing_ he'd had since he was a boy told him to get up; he was supposed to go out that door, to face whatever was waiting for him. Besides, if he was going to be hunted, he knew he'd be better off fighting outside than down here in this dungeon.

He wrapped one of Harry's arms around the back of his neck and stood them both up. The two of them hobbled out the door and looked up. Ahead of them was a rough staircase carved in the mud; pale moonlight shone down the forty crudely carved steps that lay in front of them, that reached up to the forest floor.

They tasted fresh air as they reached the top. Harry closed his eyes and smiled, feeling the breeze and smelling the fresh forest rain. The rain pitter-pattered on his face, and for a moment Harry was a free man.

Bob let his friend down gently against the side of a large boulder, so Harry could lean against it and perch with one leg for a time. He didn't look directly at the beasts in the trees. He saw them but wasn't ready for the game to start just yet. He patted Harry on the shoulder, reached behind his back, and unsheathed his buck knife.

In one quick motion he slit his friend's throat. Harry made not a sound, just merely smiled and silently thanked his friend for the early death—then sank to the floor and went with grace.

The growls came, displeased, from the edge of the trees ahead of them; they were standing, dozens of them, nestled near trees and behind shrugs. They didn't like their animals dying before the hunt.

Bob calmly wiped his blade, sheathed his knife for a moment, then bent down to tighten his boots. He grimaced only a little as he pulled them tight, bracing his bad ankle for the pounding he was about to give it. Then he stood, straightened his shirt, unsheathed his knife, and waited.

The tall wolf bodies parted to either side, giving him thirty or so feet to pass. Bob knew they wanted him to run in that direction. He would oblige them.

A moment later Bob took off, hobbling as best he could, numb to the pain, heading north, for the truck. The wolves told each other later the big guy had gone the way wild things die: sputtering and clawing and gnashing his teeth; mad-faced and wretched—his screams forever drowned by the sounds of the howlin' rain.

# Who Goes There

### A Ghost Story

# Chapter One

If you have found this letter, Dear Reader, then my shotgun and senses have failed me, and I am dead. No doubt you have already removed the body of my brother, Charles, who lies here in the book room. But have you found _my_ body on the estate? Maybe I made it to the front door or even the courtyard. Or is it gone entirely? I confess, it's possible I'm still animated, strolling across some distant countryside. Perhaps, I, ecstatic at having escaped this house, have forgotten to return for this manuscript.

Though I doubt it.

It's possible no one has entered this room for a very long time. Do you smell the musty books, the damp blankets of dust strewn across the furniture? Have the weeds overthrown the front of the home? Have the salty sea and wind stripped the paint and lacquer from its frame? If so, then it's been a very long time, indeed. How much time has passed since my death? Seasons or years? My . . . instinct, let's say, tells me I've been locked in here for no more than an hour, but all I see is the dust and mildew of decades on all my father's things. Thick layers of filth blanket the table, and tree dandruff and seawater stick to the windows, gumming over my view to the outside. The whole place is conspiring to keep me here, to lock me in and make sure I never get out. That's how they work. They box you in. It happened to my brother. It happened to me.

Whether you've come searching for me or have stumbled upon me randomly, I suggest you pick up this manuscript and leave this house. Do not wait to finish reading.

After you're gone, and the sight of my ghastly childhood home has vanished from your rearview mirror, sit down and read this in its entirety. Had I known just weeks ago what I know now, much tragedy could have been avoided. My hope is that I pass on to you an important piece of the puzzle, and should you find yourself in the same predicament, maybe you can save yourself.

As for me, I'll have to keep my head down and write. It helps me keep my focus off them. Maybe writing this will even help prepare me for what I have to do next. You can read. I'll write. Let's keep it simple.

If what you read seems too fantastic, or if I seem crazy or incoherent at times, remember that every man wears his own rose-colored glasses, so that what appears pink and fuzzy to one is white and focused to another. If your mind closes on you, let me remind you that there is more to this world than meets the eye, and although we believe that in this year, 1934, we have conquered both nature and the cosmos, we still cannot explain the nature of energy—that most basic ingredient of the universe.

One more thing: If you find yourself peeking over your shoulder during the next full moon, at a cloaked figure in your periphery, or at a horrendous being looming in the empty spaces between the dark and the light just outside your bedroom door, don't look at it. Don't ever look.

You must never stare.

_You must never stare at who goes there._

# Chapter Two

Where to start, except with my brother and me? We're twins. I came out first, eyes open, ready for life. Charles, I was told, kicked and screamed, covered in bruises. And that's how he stayed.

I was always a man of business, and also a man of action, who can't stand to let problems sit for very long. I'm growing more intolerant of them as I age; as my body weakens so does my patience. I prefer to face those things most people find distasteful; I feel and sleep better knowing hardships have been overcome.

Not so, with my brother. No, Charles was never the one to take the initiative; he was always in one scrape or another, always insanely drunk and evading responsibility.

Most fellas grow out of that behavior, but he never did. He just couldn't put the bottle down. Every few months he would swear off for good, begin to gain a foothold in the business of living, then in an extraordinary display of destruction, tear it all down to the roots. Now I know the truth about him, and if I'd only . . . well, no point in thinking like that. There's nothing I could have done—

_Shown more compassion, maybe, more understanding, more tolerance, more patience when he got drunk on Father's corn alcohol and burned down the barn that summer when we were kids and used to chew hay together and giggle about the Paulson girls—_

Stop that!

Give me a moment . . . Why do my thoughts interrupt like that? Do yours just pipe up for no good reason, when you don't ask them to?

Anyway, Charles left for good a couple years ago, after our father died and willed us the family businesses. In true form, he stayed only long enough to sign some of the more important documents, then cashed in his bonds, corporate stocks, and a few treasuries and eloped with his beautiful bride, Maggie. Poor soul, Maggie. Why a woman would stay with such a drunk like him was beyond me. Freckles, red hair, and shocking blue eyes. A laugh for any situation. But no more.

If you go down to the cellar on the other side of the courtyard, you'll see. Open the outer door, then step inside and cut the chains I've thrown around the lock and the handle of the inner door to keep her in. But bring a gun . . . Poor Maggie. Those beautiful baby-blues are gone, now only white orbs that glow in the dark like planets knocked from orbit. She's no longer human, that I can tell you. _What_ is she now? Who knows. One of them, whatever they are. But you'll see. You'll see.

* * *

Sorry. I'll try not to ramble anymore. My mind isn't what it once was . . .

Armed with enough money and bootlegged liquor to fend off even the most frightful bouts of consciousness, Charles and Maggie, to my knowledge, traveled around California before settling into this estate. He'd been surviving almost exclusively off bathtub gin—speakeasy potions—and whatever morsels he could stomach that day.

Six months later, I began receiving letters—letters with sweat around the edges. Charles's handwriting, jagged and erratic, suggested an internal battle—another round of alcoholic detox, perhaps. I arranged for him to stay here, at our old boyhood summer home, on the coast, full of quiet ocean breeze. The idea was that with less influence from outside forces Charles could dry out and soak up a bit of the sea to replace the ethanol in his veins. Maggie, his dish, would join him. Good thing, too; God only knows what jams he would have found himself in had he not been sequestered here with her on December 5 last year, at the end of Prohibition.

Our letters were mere formalities by then, as he and I had been estranged for many years. Split by fights and squabbles over money and his drinking, we wrote back and forth only as business partners. Not that he had much of a hand in the family companies anyway. Though the businesses were in both our names, the contracts bore the ink of my pen only.

Over the months his letters became increasingly infrequent. I figured he'd gotten himself into some new habit; maybe a doctor in Bolinas, some twenty miles south of there, was filling him up with some new opiate or sedative. He became more and more agitated with every letter, and I feared that my Charles would soon join the club of the alcoholically doomed.

I couldn't be sure where he was getting his hooch, though, frightfully, I surmised at the time he'd been making it himself. I shudder to think that, with the amount he drank, he could have easily gone blind or been poisoned by lead, something not uncommon with moonshiners.

Yet, what happened to him turned out to be much worse. Was it the bathtub gin that caused this, this . . . cosmic aberration? Those bootleggers in their back rooms, daytime barbers turning bartenders at night . . . who knows what they put in that rotgut. All over the papers those dry years, there were stories of boozehounds, all of 'em smoked, cooking hooch in automotive radiators and blowing their guts out with antifreeze. Is it goofy to think that maybe Charles drank something he shouldn't have, something concocted in a magician's parlor, that brought this hammer of God down upon us?

* * *

Not long after Charles moved to this coastal home, I received some particularly bad news: our family's orange groves outside of Los Angeles were drying up from lack of irrigation, and under the counsel of our colleagues, we were to sell. Although my relationship with Charles was about as withered as our puckered fruit, our sales and acquisitions divisions still required both our signatures on the dotted line.

Just then, my errand boy appeared in my study with a letter. I thanked him and peeled open the sweaty envelope. Though it bore no return address, I knew the handwriting. The scratchy, scrawling cursive, with the finesse of a toddler with a crayon. Yes, I knew it well.

It started: "Brother, I can't fend them off for much longer. Maggie is frightened half to death. Please come." The next line read: "I am sober."

I contemplated this, sipping my recently legal Syrah from Napa a while longer and watching the fog dissipate off the coast of Monterey. Two seagulls perched on my cliffside banister, no more than twenty feet from me, awaiting some food. Lounging in my robe and slippers, I rolled to the side of my pool chair, grabbed a couple of pebbles, and threw them at the seagulls.

To whom was my brother referring when he said "fend them off"? Obviously it was nothing more than his panic attacks, with which he had been afflicted since his teens. Or so I thought at the time. I remember his leaving school when we were boys, complaining about dizziness, lightheaded spells, and flattened vision. From time to time Charles would wake up out of a daze, out of commission for several days or a week, and though I never believed his attacks were real, I soon realized _he_ did, and thus his own mind I believed to be the sole cause of his affliction.

I put the letter down. This talk of sobriety, of course, was a lie. However, given that Charles was in need, and given that I required his signature on the release of the orange groves, I grabbed my driving gloves, had my boy pack a suitcase, and readied myself for a drive up the coast.

# Chapter Three

The blue sea stretched before me as I drove along the cliff's edge. The roads were packed with dirt and not well maintained, but the drive at least was uneventful. I have a theory that people who live along the coast are calmer than those inland, if for no other reason, I assumed, that they only had one side of the world to worry about.

Strange people—coastal folk—privy to oceanic forces. Like a full moon's effect on a tide, the sea tugs on their minds and tunes their brains to a different wavelength.

I stopped at a gas station and an attendant sauntered out of the little hut, its peeled walls like scabbed knees. The toothless, flap-mouthed man filled my tank, never looking directly at me, staring across the town's center, to the water, mindlessly sucking on some tobacco under his lip.

"Damn rain's coming in," he muttered. I looked around. There were no clouds, only blue sky. The man shook his head again, cursing about bringing the cows into the barn.

I paid him and left. Not an hour later the storm was upon me, unloading furiously onto the pounding sea.

# Chapter Four

Lakes formed on the floor of my Oldsmobile Viking. The rain had filtered into the auto's electrical system, and the headlights shorted, forcing me to drive the last ten miles in the dark down winding roads, with only a glint of moon peeking through the storm clouds to light up my path towards home. Have you noticed it resembles a castle?

The barn's on the left; to its right, the help's small house (now abandoned), plus, the graveyard of a beet field, which my great-grandfather managed most of his life. How a person could labor over a farm is beyond me, repeating the same routines day in and out, rising, going to bed early, and never leaving the coast. Still, he lived to see his nineties, and that says something. Compare that with me. Half his age and I'll probably never leave this room.

Anyway, I puttered up over the last of the hills. Lightning cracked behind the home like a whip on the sea, a master in the black fields. I felt sad for my old, tired childhood castle.

I pulled up and ran through the pounding rain from the car to the front door, soaked to my skeleton. I burst in and threw my ruined, waterlogged bags onto the floor. They squeaked and squealed across the marble entryway that opened up into the wide sitting room to my left.

If you follow through the main hallway you find the kitchen and exit to the courtyard, just outside the large hub of the living area. Out back the place connects with itself via a series of hallways, so a bird's-eye view of the interior would reveal a massive torus, with a courtyard in the hole.

"Charles!" I yelled, stripping off my clothes.

Laying my coat over the couch, I noticed the place was in good order. Nothing broken—most everything clean and orderly.

But the chair to my left caught my eye. I passed a finger over its arm; it came up thick and chalky. All the seats were all turned inward, facing each other, arranged for some kind of party or gathering. The seats themselves, though covered in dust, were warm and depressed and recently sat in. I thought this strange but paid it no mind.

"Alex!" Charles's voice rang out.

He stood halfway between the light and darkness of the den. His eyes, big and buglike, protruded from their sockets; his hair was thin and ashen. His skin drooped like an old man's sallow arm, and he wore a tight-lipped smile.

Gone were the days of his boyish good looks; he'd been replaced by an aging, repulsive skeleton of a man. Emerging from the shadows, he took my arm like a person who, having been stranded on an island for many years, receives a guest from the sea.

"Charles," I said, believing him drunk, as he wrapped his stick figure arms around my body. "Is there dry clothing for me?"

"Yes, yes, I'm sorry," he stammered. "Come, come!"

He led me through the hallway to the bedrooms. It was then that I noticed that Charles was keeping his eyes pointed straight at the floor. He seemed to be walking with an overabundance of caution, making little noise as he moved, gliding on the floor more than stepping.

How different this was from the brother I knew. The loud, angry bastard, afraid of nothing, stomping through our home with mud on his boots and whiskey on his breath. Though he was surely drunk now, I assumed, I'd never seen him this meek.

"And Maggie," I said. "Where is she?"

Charles opened his mouth, but stopped, sighed, and shuffled his way into the guest room, the flame from his candle unfolding our path. "I'll be right next door to you, Alex. Anything you need, come right in. Maybe we could have a sleepover, like when we were young."

"Why aren't you sleeping in the master bedroom?"

He ignored the question and instead pointed behind me to the opened door of the bathroom, where steam was standing on the water. "I made a bath for you."

It was late, and I was not in the mood for games, so here I asked him what he meant in his letter about the intruders. His face froze in a half smile. "Oh, that . . . just playing around."

Many times when I'm at a party and I want to say something bad about someone nearby—and don't want anyone to overhear—I freeze a smile and speak in such a way to signal my partner something's amiss. For example, I may say, _"so-and-so is a terrific person, and I enjoy his company"_ —but all the while I am clenching my teeth and widening my eyes, so the intended party knows I mean the exact opposite. This was my brother's expression. Only there was fear in it.

So, through gritted teeth, he said, "There's nothing going on. Just a joke . . ."

Then his eyes drifted up the rafters, and a look of terror came over him. He immediately snapped his eyes downward again, as though I'd caught him watching a woman undress. He squeezed his eyes shut, flung his arms around my neck, hugged me so tight I couldn't breathe, and whispered, between sobs: "Don't stare, Alex. Never stare at them!"

And with that, he turned and left.

# Chapter Five

The rain had stopped by morning, the moisture replaced by a thick layer of dew and sea foam. I found fresh clothes in the armoire and readied myself for the day. I found Charles at the kitchen table, sullen and staring downward into a cup of cold coffee.

I yawned loudly to announce my presence. I was tired, having slept poorly on the lumpy mattress. It was time to sit with my brother, explain what I needed of him, and leave this place. "Charles, I have left our business to come here, and we have much to discuss. I'm not sure what you meant by your letter, but I'm prepared to forgive you for whatever you've done.

"I'm assuming you've been hiding out here for a good reason, and that there is something you want to tell me. Whatever it is, we can work through it. If something's happened to Maggie, if there's been . . . an accident . . . I am prepared to help. We can move you wherever you like—perhaps to Belvedere to give you the space you need."

He wasn't listening, preoccupied with his coffee cup.

I continued. "We can fix you up with a doctor, someone who can help you with your . . . drinking problem." Charles turned to me at that, bewildered.

"In the meantime, you don't have to worry about the business. You should focus on getting well. I will purchase your shares of our six remaining companies," I suggested. "And I can run them. You will be free of any obligations to the family."

The clock ticked. Charles swirled his coffee, absently moving his head side to side with the motion of the cup.

Suddenly, he stood and went to the door separating the kitchen from the dining room. Then he turned back, and with a quivering smile waved his hand, indicating me to follow him. My first impulse was to yell and haul him back inside and finish our conversation, but something in his sallow skin, his eyes of stone, his grave smile—and the contracts inside my coat pocket—convinced me to go.

We walked clear off the property. The house appeared small against the blue horizon and endless ocean. Wind whipped his hair into a frenzy. I saw that underneath the sandy brown top the roots of his hair had turned white.

Then he turned and grabbed my arm. "Alex," he blurted, his eyes pleading and frightened. "I'm sorry I couldn't say more inside. But the house has eyes and ears now. They're watching. Hopefully, they can't hear us out here." The rough wind rapped at his bones. He leaned close to me, his back to the house. "Something has taken Maggie."

Now I was convinced that Charles was in some kind of alcoholic delusion, had gone whacky, that he'd knocked off Maggie on his own—perhaps in a manic episode—and had convinced himself, out of fear and regret, that someone or something else was responsible.

I also realized at once that I was utterly alone with this man. This _thing_ I called my brother. I should have loved him unconditionally—no one should be afraid of their siblings, or their family, but seeing his eyes move the way they did, back and forth, back and forth, flighty and quick and full of fear, years of pent-up stress warping his spine, I erected a wall inside myself, distancing me from my twin. Besides, I needed those contracts signed, and I quickly formed a new plan of action.

"Charles," I said, warmly wrapping an arm around his shoulder, leading him farther away from the coast. "You're my brother and your happiness means the world to me. If something has happened, which I'm sure was caused in the fire of passion, we can fix it.

"Remember, we have means and connections. Our family has a good reputation, and if an . . . unfortunate circumstance has befallen Maggie, it is best to come out with it now so we can face it and be rid of it. I have no doubt it was a mistake, one we can easily dismiss in the light of a newfound sobriety and these papers, which I've brought . . ."

Even in his haze, Charles seemed to understand me. He said nothing, stopped shaking. So, I continued. "Charles, I'm here to help you. Remember that. You called on me. So what did you do to Maggie? What's your story?"

There are moments I can reflect on and wish I could revisit and change. Sitting here, writing this, they come flooding back to me. Like the time Peter Macready and Robert Gray ganged up on Elizabeth something-or-other and then we . . .

Well, we were young, twelve or thirteen, and after classes they'd found her walking among the eucalyptus, playing joyfully in her own company. Some people can do that, be happy all by themselves. It's a gift. We didn't see it that way. She was an ugly girl, or so we thought, and I'd left class and wandered home through the woods and found them.

They had her pinned when I walked up. Peter and Robert were tough, mean, and popular among the other children at school. Each had his knees pressed on her arms, so she had no leverage and couldn't move. She screamed, kicked wildly into the air, but couldn't get free. When they heard my footsteps behind them, the two boys turned and looked at me, sweating and smiling, paying no attention to the girl beneath them.

Peter grabbed the jar next to them, his spider trapped inside. A big hairy thing. Peter would carry it around at school and sneak it out to scare someone, anyone. He handed me the jar. I knew without asking what he wanted me to do.

I was in the bind that school children find themselves in: either inflict violence upon another or have violence inflicted upon them. If I refused, Peter and Robert would find me one day after school and have their ways with me.

But I had a reputation to uphold. Even then the tyranny of pride and ambition had ruined me. It was my responsibility to avoid signs of weakness. But why did I think that way? At such a young age, no less? Maybe our father, who used to smack us with reeds on the knuckles to toughen us up, had something to do with that. I don't know. Who does? In any case, I couldn't have the other school children thinking any less of me, and I soon shoved that spider right into Elizabeth's mouth. For a brief second she had looked at me, pleading with her eyes, shaking her head, begging me to stop before . . . before . . . ah, it brings redness to my cheeks just thinking about it.

In an instant, after I accused my brother of . . . _murder?_. . . that familiar redness spread to my cheeks. But never mind. I would use shame or guilt or remorse or even the carrot of brotherly love—whatever I had to—to get those contracts in my hand. My means and motives . . . what can I say about them now? I hope you don't think less of me . . . Then again, what does that matter now? Am I writing to save my reputation, or my body, or my soul?

# Chapter Six

I stepped away from writing for a few minutes. This is taking longer than I'd expected; my hand is cramping, and I can't seem to think straight. But there've been no strange noises from outside my door, no weird lights from outside, nothing out of the ordinary. Even the sea is quiet. Writing is helping me, so I will continue. Still, I grow tired. The clocks have stopped working—what time is it? It's still dark outside.

Will it always be this dark?

* * *

Charles didn't seem hurt, only disappointed. I wasn't fooling him; he knew what I was up to. I think he hoped that I would have believed him without question. I wish I would have. But no sense regretting anything now.

He looked up at the bright blue sky and laughed as a frozen burst of sea air swept through us. I shivered, but he simply threw his head back and enjoyed the moment. All his troubles left him for just a second, out there on the cliff. Then the wind stopped, and he returned. "I haven't had a drink in months, Alex."

"That's wonderful," I said, a smile plastered on my face. "Really, that's fantastic."

"Four months, I think."

"Amazing."

"Mm, yes, amazing. I think so too. So did Maggie. How could I go without drinking for twenty days? Or twelve? Or one for that matter. Do you know _how_ I did it, Alex?"

I shook my head, said nothing, eyebrows raised. Charles breathed deeply and settled, as if preparing for a long explanation. Here's what he told me.

I did my heaviest drinking in San Francisco. Maggie and I had taken up in a loft, living very cheaply after the market crashed. No matter what I did, I couldn't escape the hell of gin. Maggie, bless her soul, worked at the department store seven days a week, then came home and helped me from the bed to the bath.

My daily consumption of alcohol had grown enormous. Three to four bottles of bathtub gin a day, simply to stop the shaking. The morning was the worst; you'd find me vomiting for a good hour before I could keep any food or liquid inside me. I wasn't drinking for the fun of it. That was over with many years ago. I'd tried most everything to stop for good. I tried to regulate the amount, or the type of drink, or the time of day at which I started drinking, but nothing worked. It was impossible. Obtaining the gin wasn't too hard, not in San Francisco. Underground joints were everywhere. Still are. Back of barbershops, pool halls, you name it. So much of our money went to the booze, and many times, to my shame, I raided her purse when she slept.

One day Maggie saw an old friend at the grocery. Thomas was from the inner part of the city where the real drunks and dope fiends live. Maggie said Thomas was the worst kind of drinker, boozing since grade school. But now he had a fresh glow about him, and he told her a story that was just goofy. Long story short, Maggie brought him home to me later that day, and he told me how he escaped the bottle.

He said there's a fella named Lazarus. A spiritualist who'd apparently found some solution for alcoholism. No doctors, for thousands of years, have ever had a real cure. Even today the patients get locked up or killed.

Well, anyway, I was hopeless that day they caught me, and Thomas took me to this supposed miracle man. What could it hurt? He brought me near downtown, you know, the bad part of town, to an opium neighborhood where broads deal mickeys, and jackals with peeling hairlines and rotten noses sell bean shooters.

There was this old poorhouse, and steps leading up, which were hidden under a blanket of filth and human waste. The door opened on its own. The windows inside the flophouse had been boarded over with rotting wood. It smelled awful.

This Lazarus fellow patted a spot next to him on the couch. I can still smell the grease in his sweat, the pork and lamb in his teeth . . . And his eyes—it was too dark to make out anything else at this time—were a violent shade of yellow. Not bright like headlamps. Bright like a cat's eyes.

He took my hand in his, smelled it. "Gin," he said in a gruff and wheezy voice. I could hear his smile. "You like gin." He gave me back my hand. "Do you know why you drink?"

"Because I want to," I answered.

He laughed long and hard at that one. "Idiot, if you drank because you wanted to, you wouldn't be here. You've tried everything to stop, haven't you? Switched liquors, kept it out of the house, blah blah blah.

"Everyone tries those things, believe me. And more. _Much_ more. Some lock _themselves_ up in asylums. Others make the final sacrifice. But, a few others, like you, find their way here. They're the lucky ones. _You_ , you're one of the lucky ones. You don't want to drink, but you do anyway. You have no explanation, so you say you _choose_ to, but that ain't right. And the damage you do while drinking should be enough to stop you, but it doesn't. So, why do you drink?"

Finally, I shook my head and admitted, "I have no idea."

Lazarus leaned forward and patted me on the hand like a father explaining something important to a young boy. "What if I told you you are possessed?"

Before I could answer he raised a bottle of green, brackish liquid. The bottle was heavy and full of depth. "Alcohol is called spirits for a reason," he said. The room grew hotter, quieter, as if his voice were a great switch, dimming the roar of the world outside. "For years there has been no cure for your disease—except this one."

He sloshed the liquid around. "This potion can enter you and banish them from your body. You see, the spirits inside of you are the _real_ _reason_ you drink. Once you have drunk enough, you've crossed the gateway to the spirit world, and the spirits begin drinking _for_ you. The cravings intensify. This," he said, gesturing to the liquid, "will cast them out, and keep them out."

Of course, this was goofy. I didn't believe in spirits, God, the devil—any of it. It was insane . . . Only, it wasn't. Maybe on the surface it was, but underneath that, well . . . it _felt_ real. It felt like a key had turned inside my heart. Even if this were all some joke, all this some delusion, _what did I have to lose_?

"All I have to do is drink this?" I asked.

"Yes. It will cast them out of you. But—and listen carefully, this is important—maybe in a week, maybe a month from now, maybe in fifty years, or maybe never—there _may_ come a day when the spirits inside you will reveal themselves in the flesh. At first, they will only appear in the outermost corner of your vision. You may feel drawn to look at them. It may feel like a scratch on the top of your mouth you most desperately want to scrape, must scrape—but you can't.

"You must never _stare_. _You must never stare at who goes there_.

"When you drink this— _your cure!—_ the entities will shoot out of your body. I don't know where they go at first or if they will ever return to you in the flesh. If they do— _don't look!_ —they feed off your vision. The more you look, the more physical they will become. They will get closer, and closer, and closer still. And they will grow in shape and power, until they overtake you."

He leaned in, his withered nose almost touching mine. "If they can't get you from within, they'll get you from without."

And then I voiced my larger question. "And if I don't take the cure?"

"You are infected. You have a cancer. Can't bargain with cancer. Neither can you bargain with the spirits inside you. They will not stop. You have no control over them. When you take a drink, they take two. _They must have more!_ What you are experiencing is not a moral failing, a weakness of will or a choice you make; it is a compulsion caused by those _who go there_. And if you continue to drink, you'll drink until you die."

He raised the vial again. "This is the only solution I have for you." He pressed it into my hand. Soon after, we left.

I had to admit at the time his explanation made a certain kind of sense. _Why else couldn't I stop drinking?_ Why, when my brain would scream out to put the bottle down, would I pick it back up? Why couldn't I control my temptations? Was it true?

Was I possessed?

Three days later, I got a job at a warehouse. A real job. I hadn't drunk, and for that I was grateful. But as my first day ended, and I stepped outside into the foggy afternoon, a sudden terror gripped me, and a voice rang out in my head— _Go get a drink_. I knew it was a terrible idea, but more and more the desire for a drink began to overpower me. One drink, I told myself. _Just one._ It would be okay.

And I did. I remember taking _one drink_. Only my thoughts began to race, out of control, for another. As the bartender poured the second one, the voices quieted. So I drank it. And for a few moments they stopped completely. But they came back in full force. So I had another drink. And another . . .

Several days later, I woke up in an alleyway. The sun had burned my face red. When I got home, the police were waiting. Maggie was there, sobbing uncontrollably, and I realized I must have done something terrible. Apparently I had nicked a gun and robbed a shop. I remember nothing.

Sixty days later I was released from jail, for no other reason except Maggie had called up our lip and worked out some kind of deal. Our family connections paid off, again.

I was done. I could never again drink. I began to believe Lazarus's crazy story. I was not in control. I decided he was right. Hell, even if he wasn't—even if there were no such thing as spirits—what would be worse than this?

So I drank that man's potion right there in the doorway of our smelly apartment. It tasted like soot and burned like nail polish remover on the way down, but instantly the fog of liquor that plagued me so many years was gone. It was a miracle.

We moved here. For a while, life was good again. The days appeared brighter, and we were happy. I had absolutely no cravings for liquor. I was free.

A fresh wind blew past my face at top speed, momentarily drowning out Charles's voice. He kept staring right at me, not breaking his speech, even for a second. For a moment I saw his mouth moving, with only the wind screaming in my eardrums. Then his voice returned.

"One morning I woke up and walked from the bedroom, past the courtyard here—and _something passed through my vision_. What was it? Whatever it was, it had disappeared.

"I heard footsteps to my right. I whirled around and caught a glimpse of it, this time of something so outrageous and unnatural, Brother, that it defies description!

"The thing was upright, a tall, gray figure with long ears that stood straight up. And thick hair, fur, all down its body. It was some kind of rabbit man.

"Far off, I remembered Lazarus's warning. I tried to look away, but couldn't! The rabbit walked directly into my field of vision, then stopped abruptly and looked at me straight on.

"Long, blunt teeth hung down over its lower jaw. Its eyes looked like a black mesh filter. The whiskers were long and gnarled and thick like vines. Its arms were those of a child born with flippers instead of arms—short stubs that fanned out on both ends.

"I screamed. This farcical vision had gone far enough. I fell to my knees and prayed and yelled and sobbed and wept. Minutes, hours, decades later, Maggie found me and held and shook and begged me to calm down. When I looked up again, the rabbit man was gone.

"But I don't go into the courtyard anymore, dear Brother. The rabbit man—the place is his now."

# Chapter Seven

I remained stone-faced. "This . . . rabbit man . . . is the intruder you wrote about?"

Charles looked at me, his eyes loose and wobbly in their sockets. "They've taken Maggie. She is somewhere in the house. She moans in the night."

"Somewhere in the house," I repeated. Charles stared past me, unfocused. "There are more . . . spirits in the house?"

Several minutes passed as I tried to crab this. I still figured my brother had suffered an alcoholic delusion and killed Maggie. I said a silent prayer. The poor redheaded sweetheart who had stood by Charles all these years, only to be thrown off the cliff, or stabbed—or worse. I spoke up: "If you have hurt Maggie, we can work through this together. Do you understand?"

Charles's shoulders slumped; he sank farther into the muddy grass. Finally, he saw he hadn't convinced me. "Okay, Brother. You win. Follow me into the house, so we can finish this business."

I put a hand on his shoulder, providing my brotherly reassurance that I would take care of him. I would protect his secret. I wouldn't rat.

# Chapter Eight

The feeling of being dragged underground grew thick as we entered the house. Charles went to the window and flung the drapes open, revealing the Spanish-style courtyard.

"Brother, do me a favor? Would you look out there for me?"

I did. From the brick walls on the back side of the courtyard to the house is about two hundred feet long, the width of the yard about the same. In the center of the courtyard was our circular stone bench with floral patterns carved into its sides, and in the middle of that the large oak tree that marks the exact center of the courtyard. On the right side of the yard were the entrances to the master and guest bedrooms. All the bedrooms, in fact, have glass doors leading to the courtyard, which makes for an elegant stay in our home. Pink and red perennial roses that require little attention to bloom each year lined the outer walls to the rooms, though this year they were all but wilting.

"There . . ." Charles whispered. He pointed into the courtyard, his hand shaking. "Are you looking, Brother?"

I saw nothing except the roses and chrysanthemums waving at us.

"Keep staring." His voice weakened. Tears spilled down his face. "I love you, Brother. Please forgive me . . ." He shook harder. He mumbled. Saliva dribbled out his mouth.

I looked back to the courtyard.

"Do you see?" Charles sobbed. "It's getting closer. Please tell me you see it, Brother, I can't hold on much longer—dear God!"

I focused on a line from Charles's forefinger, outwards to the outer edge of the wall of the master bedroom. A small gap was there, behind the wall, where Charles and I used to run and hide from our parents, so they couldn't see us—from the very spot we now stood, trying to glimpse the . . .

"Do you see!" Charles cried louder. I stared, strained harder, and then—

Yes!

There was something. An outline, perhaps? Hard to tell. Sunlight outlined a shadow as it stepped out from behind the wall.

"Brother, do you see?"

I stammered. "Yes. B-by God, I see—"

"Look away!" Charles dropped to the floor and buried his head between his knees. "Before it's too late!"

To go into too much detail, to give you a vivid picture of the rabbit man, could be a grave mistake. What if you saw it in your mind, stared at it with your third eye within the confines of your skull? And what if you trapped him in there, and he never came out? No, it is too risky to trust yourself _not to think_ about this grotesque creature.

Charles knocked me to the floor and broke my near-trance. We sank to the floor, cheeks to the tile, staring at each other. But, there! Out of the corner of my periphery the rabbit man still lurked.

Closer it crept. A hundred feet away. Ninety. Eighty. I shut my eyes. My mind's eye wouldn't let the image go.

Seventy feet. Sixty.

_Fifty_.

When I opened my eyelid a quarter, a tenth, a hundredth of an inch, the rabbit guy was no more than ten feet away. His rusted, clawed toenails, thick with scratches and gangrene, sprang out of his half-man, half-rabbit paws. The feet were long and boatlike and covered in matted fur and green pus.

The sun's arcing away over the ocean now cast a horrific shadow, the blackened ears of the rabbit man stretched closer to the house than his body, imprinting themselves miles long in the courtyard brick.

Charles and I stayed there, on the floor, until the sun had long left us and we were sure the nighttime had swallowed the shadow up.

# Chapter Nine

I still can't explain why I could see the specter, as I hadn't been infected. Was the force of Charles's demon so strong it crossed over into my vision? I can only assume this is the case. I've also determined that this was the point at which the spirits must have chosen me next. It was my first point of contact, and as we'll get to shortly, my life was soon changed.

As I watched Charles on the floor, eyes shut, praying, the feeling of homesickness shot through me. I longed to be in our home as children again. This house was forever tainted. I wished for our parents, our grandparents, our friends. They were all gone now, and we were alone and helpless.

Something else happened, too. My perception of Charles shifted. The longtime boozehound, the hopeless case he was . . . I realized that none of this was his fault, that he'd been out on the roof battling something so far out of normal reality he was rendered impotent. I decided then and there to do all in my power to help him, to help us, to defeat whatever this thing was, once and for all.

* * *

"Are there more?" I asked later, huddled in a blanket next to the fire. "Spirits?"

Charles poured us tea. "Many more. I've often thought of leaving, but cannot go without Maggie." The fire threw up sparks and smoke. "They must have taken her somewhere. I can't leave, in case they follow me. What right do I have to infect the world with this?"

* * *

Later that night, Charles and I shared a bed for the first time since we were boys. I don't think either of us could have withstood sleeping alone.

"They don't like us here together," he said drearily. "They gather in strength in the dark."

Still, we slept. I did, at least—a little. Things went bump in the night. All night. I could tell by Charles pulling on the blankets that he saw things strange and ghoulish in the dark, but he had the courtesy not to tell me.

* * *

The next morning we made coffee. The sun was bright and lovely again. "I've been up thinking," he said. "The fella who gave me this potion, he must know more."

I agreed, and asked if he would go see him.

"No." He threw a rock into the yard. "But you should."

"Me?"

"Like I said, I can't leave. But you can. Go see him. I'll gladly die from this disease, but I don't want to stick someone else behind the eight ball."

"But—"

"You have no choice. They are upon you now, too. The rabbit man. He saw you yesterday. That's how it starts, I think. That's how it was with Maggie." A look of horror came over my brother's face.

"What is it?" I asked.

"They are watching you. Right now. They don't like us speaking about this. You've got to go. Find the spiritualist. Get him to free me, to free Maggie. Get him to talk. Please."

"How do I find him?"

Charles slipped me a piece of paper with an address scribbled on it. Apparently he'd already thought this through. "His name is Lazarus." He raised a balled fist. "He has no fingers. The tops of his hands are folded over onto themselves. Reminds me of a crab, maybe . . . no, like dough, like biscuits. A man with biscuit hands.

"Go to this address in San Francisco. You must get to him before it's too late for us. Quickly, leave now!"

# Chapter Ten

After a long and arduous drive south, I finally arrived at my San Francisco hotel around 10 p.m. I was too tired to visit the address on the little piece of paper in my pocket, so I thought it best to get some sleep.

What happened next is a little fuzzy, but I'll do my best to tell you what happened.

I remember handing my things to the clerk and browsing the dinner menu posted near the hotel dining room. Honey-roasted duck breast with pork belly sounded about right, I thought, when the thought sprang into my mind: _"How about a highball?"_

A drink sounded superb. It had been a long drive, longer than expected. Later, upon reflection, I would realize something was odd about that thought. Something about the quality, the texture. The thought, it seemed, did not originate in me.

Nevertheless, I ordered. I felt light, happy. I drank. I ordered another. Had that, too. Felt fine. Finer than fine. Relieved. The strange events of the past day left me. Hazily, I decided it was all a trick. Charles's dilemma. The rabbit fella. The spirits. Just dreams.

A broad sat down next to me. We ordered drinks, bumped gums, enjoyed each other's company.

On our way up to my room (I'll spare you the indecencies) my thoughts ramped up in intensity. One second I was focused on our conversation, then . . . fuzz, or noise. Like radio static. Then the voices came, like I was tuning in, finding a station on the dial. They became jumbled, careened wildly inside my skull. I itched uncontrollably. I needed to run away. My body rumbled. My hands vibrated.

Then—one thought, clear as day, rang out above the rest: _"A drink! Quickly!"_

There it was: the insatiable urge for rotgut. More of it. Gallons. If I didn't get it in my body right then and there, I was going to fall down and die.

_I must have it! Now!_

I ran down the hall, away from that poor girl (I never got her name), bolted down the stairs— _never mind the elevator, man, get the liquor!_ —skidded left into the dining room, waved madly to the bartender, and by the time I reached his side he held my whiskey in his white-gloved hand.

I took it in a single gulp and demanded a double. I drank it, then another. And another, immediately on top of that one. One by one the glasses thudded on the bar top, and patrons of the hotel began to stop and watch.

After my seventh drink the good bartender refused to serve me. The anger I felt! How could he refuse? Didn't he know that I _needed_ a drink right there—that _seven_ would not suffice? Without his permission, I leapt over the counter and swiftly drank damn near an entire bottle of hooch.

I don't remember falling. I remember nothing of the tube down my throat, the vomit, the doctors, the blood. Nothing.

* * *

Two days later I awoke in a hospital bed. Had it not been for my good business standing, I'd have been tossed into an ordinary asylum with the schizophrenics and other defectives. Imagine that—a man of my caliber!

A round doctor with a crooked nose visited me. His name was Doctor Leclair. He said he'd seen many alcoholic cases, and he gave me a brief rundown of various medical treatments—all of which I refused.

I told him whatever had come over me was surely gone now; besides, I wouldn't have a drop until I was safely back in my own home. After all, this was only the first time anything so strange had happened to me. I was fine. Perhaps it was the time of day (a person's temperature drops later in the day, requiring him to warm up), or maybe it was the stress of the situation with my brother, but I was no alcoholic.

I made no connection whatsoever between this unfortunate event and what Charles had told me. It must have been too horrific to consider. I was too tired, too stressed out, I told myself. This wouldn't happen again, right?

After making sure my hospital records would be kept sealed from any business associates, I showered off the stench of embarrassment and left. It was time to see the man with biscuit hands.

# Chapter Eleven

After Folsom Street there's an invisible poverty threshold where the decently well-off end and the poor begin. When I crossed it this time, the mood grew darker, heavier. The day had been fine on the sunnier side of town, but here in the Tenderloin it felt eternally cloudy, misty, uninviting.

I approached an old building whose address matched that on the slip of paper. A single door in the wall of red brick marked the entrance. I flung it open and a rolling wave of dust unfurled upon the steep entryway like dirt from a rug. Light hadn't permeated the stairwell in some time.

On my way to the apartment I must have disturbed someone on a lower floor, for a frail hag coughed her way out of her apartment and spat words at me between her gingivitis-inflamed gums. Ignoring her, I knocked on the door at the very top.

A person with scabs like scales opened the door. Half his face was blocked by the door frame. I looked past him and into the haze of black and smoke that saturated the residence, when someone's thin, rickety voice sprang out of the wild blackness. "Come in!"

The inhabitants apparently hadn't heard of lamps or sunlight. All happiness had long since been sucked from the room, which now held only the quality of homesickness. There were several men inside—dirty and decaying skid rogues who lurked around the corners and walls and who were reduced to mere outlines and shadows.

The silent scab-faced creature at the door led me to a long couch in the middle of the large, oblong room, where dope fiends sat around and bought their fixes. With long, floppy fingers he motioned me to sit down on the well-worn cushions alongside the dirt, dust, and bugs.

In front of me, on a facing couch, but separated only by a few feet, was Lazarus, the one I was there to see. He sat in its groomed recesses, and had reinforced his territory with stacks of blankets, books, writings, and food crumbles and bottles.

He was the dope-peddling king, Lazarus, and here was his throne.

I couldn't tell where the man ended and the couch began, so deep he sat. Though I could see only a little in the swamp of darkness, his eyes shone bright green and yellow. His body was gaunt, skeletal.

I heard liquid dripping. First a trickle, then a forceful stream. He closed his eyes and let out a soft sigh. King Lazarus grunted, shifted, licked his lips. I heard the sound of a moist hole spreading open followed by a hearty plop onto metal. The scabby hombre from the door waited patiently behind the king, and when the sounds had stopped, he bent over and removed the portable toilet from under the long couch. He left, presumably to dispose of the waste.

When he returned he lit a candle, keeping guard a few feet away. Enough space to give some awkward sense of privacy but not enough to matter.

The yellow flame illuminated deep pockets in the king's face. I could discern only some of his features. I traced the line of light from the crown of his head downward. His scalp was made equally of hair, scars, and pus. Dry flakes of skin made a patchwork quilt of his face. Deep grooves ran down his neck like dry riverbeds, perhaps from some long-lost battle in a foreign country, but the longest ran lengthwise through his eyebrow, giving him a demented, Mad Hatter-esque appearance.

I looked down at his hands. Charles was right. The fingers were gone or shortened to nubs. The tops and bottoms had folded over on themselves, giving them a doughlike appearance. Nails sprouted from a few of the distorted fingers, but they were freakish, green and full of gashes down the middle.

His hands resembled mittens, the kind you wear that cover your whole hand.

"What do you need?"

I uncovered my mouth and nose and made sure the gaseous smell had moved on. I reminded him of Charles, and brought him up to speed on our current situation.

"My brother," I said, "is trapped in our home and now refuses to leave."

Lazarus smiled faintly. "I forget sometimes that a whole world exists out there beyond this little apartment. I find it best to stay isolated nowadays." He suddenly frowned and murmured something to himself. "It's safer that way. For everybody. Your brother—his world will contract like mine."

Silence. For a moment Lazarus stared off into the darkness, then he looked at me with renewed enthusiasm, suddenly snapping out of his lethargy. He raised his biscuit hand to his lips, rubbing it against the old, white crust that had gathered around his kisser.

He seemed to be having an inner debate or dialogue. Finally, he asked: "Have you had any . . . compulsions yet?"

"Compulsions?"

"The feeling of _needing_ a drink right away, this very moment? Perhaps it's midnight, and you've been at the bar, and the owner is about to close. Do you feel a strong urge to get more liquor from the store and drink it _right away_?"

"No, nothing like that," I lied, clearing my throat. (I promise, Dear Reader, I didn't realize I was lying at the time. I wasn't in control—but I'll get to that more shortly.)

"Because when a man begins to drink like your brother, like me, the spirits demand more and more. The malady is progressive. And fatal. The drinking must continue, and becomes more and more excessive. It will not stop. The important part to understand is that it is not you who is doing this. It is _them_. They live inside you. And they will run you until you cannot take any more liquor. Why they are inside only some of us I haven't a clue. There is only one solution . . ."

He pulled out a small green vial from under his blanket and stared at it longingly. "Potion might be the right word. It was given to me many, many years ago. It isn't important who. Just another afflicted chump, like me, like your brother. Likely this has been handed down for some time. But this is the last of it. I drank some, and the rest I passed on to others. When the sufferer drinks it, it pushes the spirits out into the physical world. They become real flesh and blood creatures, who I believe can be destroyed."

"The spirits," I asked, "what are they?"

Lazarus shrugged. "Does it really matter?" He stretched back, looked at the pockmarked, cobwebbed ceiling. "We are better off not knowing. Not thinking about them at all. Our mental images could very well call them into consciousness. It is best not to understand."

"You said they could be destroyed?"

The king's eyes lit up again. He motioned me to move forward, and we leaned a little closer together. His breath stank. "At some point after I drank the potion I began seeing them. A few months later, I think. Horrible, evil things. Childhood nightmares came to life. I was told, as I told your brother, never to look at them, never to stare at them. Because when you look . . . they move closer. Hence, what I told your brother: _Never stare at who goes there_. . .

"For a long time—a couple years after first seeing them—I avoided staring at them directly. It went fine for a while. However, I developed a deep phobia of normal living. Life grew tremendously complicated. Others may not have had the troubles I did. Why it was so difficult for me to simply ignore them I cannot say; I know only that I began avoiding whole sections of certain streets, or of my home, where I'd seen them out of the corner of my eye.

"My nerves began to melt. I got the heebie-jeebies, most days. Unable to hold a conversation. Mind you, none of the _things_ had come very close to me yet—they were still in my periphery. But for me that was worse. And one day their proximity was too much to bear.

"Perhaps I should have been more grateful by their expulsion. Granted, I had forgotten the terror of constant drinking. But after years of them needling me, and slowly gaining power, I had had enough.

"I chose a place, a time. I stood, back to a wall, and waited for one to appear. It was a big fat slob with no shirt, his skin covered in red blisters, like he'd been roasting in the sun for weeks. I ran up to him, grabbed his neck, spun him around, and threw him against the wall. I squeezed the life out of him, but then—" Lazarus held up his big, red, folded biscuit-looking hands, raw from years of scratching and irritation. "When he fell to the ground, my hands had burnt off. They turned red as the fading sun, then black. In time the blisters came off . . . So, can they be destroyed? Most surely they can. But—" He showed me his stumps, emphasizing his point. "You must not touch them.

"I can no longer look after myself. I've sat here, in this seat, for ten years now, while my legs wither and die. I've waited for someone strong enough, who is not yet entirely afflicted, to erase my demons from this world forever."

I blinked. "How many more are there? How many follow you?"

" _Many_."

"Are they here now?"

Lazarus said nothing, only leaned farther back in his chair and let his eyes wander around the room.

As I scanned the apartment I realized there were even more dope fiends scattered around the place than I saw previously. Perhaps they'd just appeared, or perhaps I hadn't noticed them hiding in the darkness. Some were hidden in strange crevices or crouched inside bookshelves behind the piles of wood and stacks of trash.

They all seemed to be concentrating on Lazarus and me.

Then, as if struck in the head, I understood. Lazarus grinned. He knew that _I_ knew.

The people scattered about seemed to know, too, and they edged in closer.

For they were his demons, Dear Reader.

"Take this," said Lazarus, holding between his doughy hands the small vial of liquid. "It's the last of it. It was given to me. I won't need it. But you, you might. When you leave here, if the compulsion to drink comes, drink it before your mind talks you out of it. For the alcohol will surely kill you faster than the spirits. At least this way you'll have a fighting chance."

The ghouls were beginning to encircle us.

"If they do become completely physical beings, be ruthless. Murder them quickly. You must kill them in the flesh. That is the secret. But don't touch them! I was unable to do it, but there is hope with you. I can feel it!

"Reach under my blanket," he whispered feverishly. "Do it!"

I felt cold, hard metal. He grabbed my shoulders with both stumps, pulled me in so close I could smell the pus-filled cavities where his teeth used to be. "Use this gun to free us. Murder them. Murder them all."

And suddenly, in an avalanche of insane joy, he grinned and leapt to his feet. With one swing of his dough-hand a candle went flying into a drape, and ropes of flame gleefully ascended to the ceiling.

He turned, yelled into the darkness: " _Once more unto the breach, dear friends!_ "

And with that he ran screaming, arms flailing, into the small horde of spirit-men who'd amassed near the kitchen. He tackled two of them, knocking them backward with full force, cracking one's head against the countertop on the way down.

Meanwhile, the hellish fire swirled and consumed everything, spreading quickly around the large room. Smoke filled my lungs.

I turned to run out the front door but was flanked by two demon goons on my right. Without thought, I raised the gat and fired twice. I hit them in the soft parts of the belly; they landed backwards with the sound of a deflated balloon escaping thin lips.

A third demon sprung seemingly from the wall, and had the body of a full-grown man and the face of a small child. _Was it Lazarus as a young boy?_ I lowered the gun but heard the king's voice ring out from behind the kitchen wall: "Shoot! Shoot now!"

The boy opened his impossibly large mouth, vomiting blood and bile. I fired again, this bullet exploding through his neck. I've never killed anyone, but remember, these weren't people. These were something else. These were invaders.

I ran to the door, fumbled for the knob. The smoke was too thick to see much, but somehow I broke free the door from its lock, made it outside, and turned to slam it shut, when—

A charred biscuit hand thrust between the door and its jamb. Lazarus. The fire had thrown black soot over his face, burnt off the rest of his skin on his shiny forehead. His raccoon eyes flashed beneath layers of decades-old dirt that had accumulated on his face.

"Thank you!" was all he got out.

Then the home belched, a great rush of fire scorching my eyebrows. It engulfed Lazarus completely. He shoved me outside, then quickly slammed the door and buttressed his body against it, shielding me from the demons within.

I held tight to the doorknob, pulled with all my might. I'm not sure when the rattling and screaming inside stopped, because the smoke that billowed under the door eventually knocked me out—and there was nothing but darkness.

# Chapter Twelve

Days later I awoke in a hospital bed. I had suffered monoxide poisoning and a great gash to the head, though I still can't remember what blow had caused it. After convalescing for two days, I left a free man. The simple alibi of trying to break down the door to help save those inside sufficed for an explanation to the police and hospital administration.

There was also my stature as a prominent businessman. I'm not ashamed to admit it, though I acknowledge my privilege.

As I recovered in a bath at the hotel, my mind went to my brother and his ghouls. Who were the spirits? Could they have been real people at some point? Was the rabbit man some cosmic monster that just wandered into my brother's body, or was he born inside? How did the spirits pick their host?

And were they after me now?

I picked up the little green vial of potion and sloshed it about. The liquid, whatever it was, was thicker and heavier than water. The little brown flakes and strands mixed with it resembled embryos in a muddy tube.

It was 11 p.m. when I dried off. I had thought about driving back to Charles that night, though I opted for one more night to recover.

I decided to go for a short walk. Little did I know what was in store for me, and how the infection was spreading throughout my body and mind, driving me to make decisions, like the one to stay that night.

Had I left right then, ignored my thoughts, would things have turned out differently?

* * *

The past ten years have seen some of the most exceptional industrial growth in all of the country, San Francisco being no exception. Guys were working day and night, razing buildings, erecting new ones, laying foundation. On every block rebar sprouted like weeds from concrete slabs.

Two miles from the hotel I passed by a graveyard being removed to make way for some new building. Night men carried out coffin after coffin. A crypt, a monument had been felled by their sledgehammers, stones and debris scattered across the ground.

I was glum, gloomy, depressed. A group of high-class men and women half-stumbling through the street passed. A gorgeous dame in her twenties, with a tight red dress on, turned back for a glance at me. As her group turned to the right to enter a tavern, she paused, flicked the ash from her cigarette, and winked at me, inviting me to join.

Jazz and booze flowed freely in the upscale venue. One of those places where everyone still dressed in big frills and fringed beaded dresses. The dish had made her way to the back of the bar, past the band and dancing girls.

As I stood there, taking the place in, debating how to make my approach, a little thought— _a voice_ —came into my head. Calmly it said, "A whiskey would do you just fine."

Yes, of course. A whiskey. Perfect. _Nothing like a drink in a bar._ It had been a long day, a long week, a long life. I deserved a drink. It made sense. It fit. It would do the trick. Not once did it occur to me to rethink this plan. None of my brother's experience nor my night a few days before remotely entered my mind.

I ordered. I received. I drank.

Immediately my head cleared, my chest relaxed, my breathing came easier. I felt better, empowered, invigorated. Just what I needed. There's no other way to describe it, even now.

I glanced around the tavern to find my new dame. Yes, there she was—in the back. I tightened my tie, set my feet straight on the floor and began walking toward her. (I didn't think about it then, but I'm realizing now that my sudden infatuation with her must have sprung from the things inside me, to get me inside the bar and in a position to nibble one. Sneaky bastards, they'll use anything.)

After just a few steps, my body stopped, all by itself. I had meant to walk to the back of the bar, but my legs locked up on me like a car brake.

My mind raced. I told myself to keep walking—tried to will the strength with all my power—but nothing I did could wrench my legs from the floor in the direction I wanted. They would not obey.

Then, a hazy thought invaded my brain: _A drink._

My feet turned; my legs followed. So did my torso, my arms, my brain. My body took me back to the bar and slapped a fin down.

How to explain the sensation of being trapped in your own body? To lose control over your legs? In a panic I thought my automatic functions, like my heartbeat, would immediately cease. My vision would go dark. My knees would buckle and give out, sending me face first into the ground, grinding my nose and eyes into the cement and leaving me paralyzed for the rest of my short, miserable life.

Five drinks later, I was sobbing uncontrollably at my barstool. I tried to leave, but still my poor body wouldn't move.

"Please, no more!" I screamed. But it was only to myself, in my own brain, and nobody heard me. Pleading only sank me deeper in the abyss. The more I struggled, the harsher and faster the punishment— _the drinks_ —came. Why the bartender kept serving me I do not know; all I know is that I kept going. I had to.

Four more drinks. Then another. I was lit up.

When would the madness stop? The _others_ inside me were still not satisfied. To keep on going would have surely meant a swift poisoning. Still, _they_ ordered. The voice became my car, my chauffeur for the evening. It was the engine, and it drove me.

* * *

I remember nothing after that, and four days later I awoke in the same hospital bed I'd left twice before.

# Chapter Thirteen

The good French doctor, who had come to the U.S. to study medicine, stood over me, explaining that I'd been in a kind of alcoholic coma.

"As a doctor, I used to be embarrassed to admit defeat," he told me. "I've seen many, many alcoholic men and women wheeled through my doors. Some of them I've been able to treat. Others, well . . . And you, you are one of the worst cases I've ever seen. If you continue to drink— _even once more!_ —I am certain you will die, or go insane and need to be locked up."

I asked him my chances. He shrugged. "I've seen a hundred just like you. Almost every one, to my knowledge, has drank against my advice. I suggest giving your house key to a loved one, signing yourself into this hospital, and removing yourself from society for six to nine months. You have to live without drinking, and that is certainly impossible for you right now."

I told him _that_ was quite impossible, my being locked up in a mental hospital.

At this point five young orderlies entered the room, moving swiftly and arranging themselves in what I can only describe as a purposefully menacing configuration.

"This is my staff," said the doctor. "They handle mental illness cases here at the hospital. The ones who are . . . committed. The schizophrenics and pedophiles." He leaned in. "The alcoholics, too. It is my opinion that you should stay here for close observation. And since you are incapable of changing your own mind, I will try fear.

"You are a menace to society. Your drinking is dangerous to others. You are putting others at risk with your selfish behavior. If you leave, so be it. But should you return, ever again, you will _stay here_. I am under authority of the state government to keep multiple offenders off the streets. Here you will remain, under my close watch, like any common retard. Forever."

After some time I nodded and thanked the doctor. Then he and his henchmen left, and I quietly gathered my things and signed myself out of my unwanted accommodations.

# Chapter Fourteen

When we were children, my parents took us to the most extravagant zoo in Asia. A thousand animals lived within a royal palace, caged and in shame.

Naturally I was curious about the animal kingdom, but I was split between siding more with the animals or with their human captors. While I loved the zoos, a certain empathy took root in me, silently wishing that the animals would that very night break free of their cages and run out into the world, free at last. Children understand animals; it's no coincidence that children's toys are all made to resemble them. Presently I found this memory returning, and the realization that I too was trapped in a cage, for whoever (or whatever) had manifested itself inside me to stare at and control me.

My bucket rounded a bend off Fell Street, hit a pothole, kept going. The city was busy as I left for the coast; it was Monday morning, and everyone was getting to work. Massive construction cranes and lifts were setting men high above the street in shaky scaffolding. Children with dirty faces trudged to school or work; the rich men and women rode in cabs while the poorer marched down their half-finished roads.

Everywhere it stank like death. My clothes were damp and crusty and full of bad feelings, and I pressed the gas harder to get out of the city before it consumed me.

While weaving between other cars, passersby, and construction teams, a thought so stupid suddenly burst into my mind that I nearly leapt out of the driver's seat.

_How about a drink?_

It had to be a joke, some nasty sarcasm of the mind. I tried to laugh the thought away, refusing to give it too much attention else it became stronger. How could I possibly, after hearing the doctor's appraisal, after shivering at the thought of restrained incarceration, after knowing all that I'd known about such an illness—how could I consider even a glass of beer?

Yet no sooner did I reject the idea than it boomeranged back.

_The doctor's a quack. Don't believe him_. _You've never had trouble with drinking—that's impossible! It's your brother, he's the one with the real problem._

The thoughts swirled around in my seething cauldron of a head. It was like standing in one spot, watching the merry-go-round procession speed past me, each fake carousel animal another thought. And though it spun faster and faster, one animal—one thought—became clearer than the rest.

_A drink. Just one._

I pulled over to think and hopefully get my head straight. I knew this idea was deadly. But the thought of driving back to the house, to a depressed Charles, with only vague notions about what to do about any of this, was almost worse. What was this business about pulling spirits into the real world? Destroying them? _Murdering_ them?

_Wasn't I entitled to a drink, especially after my brother had put me through so much? I was doing this for him, after all._ I gritted my teeth, hate on my lips.

What I'm about to tell you will sound strange, but it's all I know. One moment I was in my automobile, pulled over to the side of the road. The next, I was in a small bar, back in the city, with a bourbon in hand.

How I got there I do not remember.

I swallowed that one drink—just the one. Ha! I had done it. I got up, flattened out my crumpled shirt collar, and walked out to drive back to Charles.

Ten minutes later, however, I was smoked. Roaring drunk. Apparently, I had walked right back in again. No recollection of doing it.

The thoughts and voices swirled around in my brain, collided, transformed, aligned, screamed, disappeared, and returned for more alcohol. I was jingle-brained.

I couldn't drown them out; if I walked farther from the bar they roared louder. I couldn't reason, threaten, or cajole them. I gripped the sides of my head, praying for annihilation, but found myself ordering one drink, then another.

Soon after, the bartender, with the help of the few morning patrons, deposited me into the back alley, lest other prospective customers be turned off by insane clientele.

There was one thought, however, buried deep inside me that cut through the chatter, through the drunkenness. _End this. End it now._

My hands shook as I removed the small vial from my crumpled breast pocket.

What was in this potion? Would it kill me? Maybe Lazarus had created this as a sick joke. _Maybe it was poison_. I wanted to pitch the small bottle into the side of the building. I tried to convince myself my brother's letter, the haunting at the sea castle, this elixir, the opium spirits, were all figments of a severely damaged and twisted mind. This was merely a small scene in the world's longest nightmare.

Then, something horrible crowded in behind my eyeballs. Pressure built in my head, and a massive bloated face swelled in my mind. A half-twisted grin and balloon eyes that lit up like coals. The face rose bigger and bigger and clouded out all other thoughts. Its lips were rotting away, its teeth black. Its mouth opened wide and began to swallow my head.

I screamed.

I drank the potion.

# Chapter Fifteen

The storm in my head quickly faded, like a tide returning to sea. I could breathe; I stopped grinding my teeth. The pressure behind my eyeballs released. Even the crick in my back corrected itself; my brain fog dissipated.

I slowly looked around the alley. Everything seemed brighter, newer. The bloated face became a distant memory. Who was it? A figure from my distant past, or from an undreamt-of future?

As I walked down the alley I let my fingers brush the brick walls. They seemed so red, so beautiful. Above me the seagulls barked and yipped against the grey sky. Below me my feet rose and fell on the concrete, heels to toes.

It was all so real.

So I did this for a while—just picking my feet up and down, marveling at all my surroundings. I glimpsed a butterfly, then a honeybee, and I remembered suddenly that the honeybee was integral to man's survival. For if they didn't pollinate our flowers (or were they _their flowers_ ), we'd have no food, and no flowers to enjoy.

After I wandered dumbstruck through the streets I skipped. I was free. To describe the feeling of being _light_ would be almost impossible. Two men came out of a tavern sloshing pints around after a hard day's work, and would I care for one? No, _thank you very much_ ; I went about my day.

I walked past a boutique and gazed at the dandelions and the azaleas. I waved through the window at the hunchbacked _hausfrau_ within who appeared shell-shocked at the sight of a stranger blowing her kisses. People in San Francisco are notoriously unfriendly, after all.

Striding past the shop, I passed a brick alleyway between the buildings. A homeless broad with eyes like antennae—which were set back in the pits of her head yet also bugged outwards from their thin frames, so they had the strange look of being detached around the edges of their sockets—stared back at me.

She was covered in dirt, garbage, bugs. In one claw she clutched some bit of disgusting food, and ate from it. She shoved crumbs into her mouth, slowly chewing up some old bread or muffin she'd found in the waste bin. I thought nothing of her, and kept moving on down the street.

I passed another alley some hundred feet away. I glanced down—and saw her standing about fifty feet away, crouched between two dumpsters.

Impossible, I thought. She would have had to race down the alley in the opposite direction, turn the corner, race halfway up the passage, then stand there—before I walked fifty feet down the sidewalk.

I moved on, shoving my hands in my pockets, uneasy. I came to another alley, but this time I hesitated before cautiously peeking around the corner.

The crumb eater stood halfway down this alley too, perfectly calm, not at all out of breath. She couldn't possibly have run that distance in such short a time.

I continued on. But each time I passed an alley, I saw her down there, eating her crumbs and staring . . . at _me_. I should have realized what was happening sooner, but I didn't. I thought it would be impossible: the spirits, so soon?

Now approaching panic, I began to run; I'm not sure for how long. I stopped looking down each alley, I just ran, despite my burning throat and aching knees. Soon I'd reached one of the least desirable parts of the city.

It all happened so fast, the mugging. One pistol-whip to the head was all it took. I went down hard in some back alley. I felt a grubby hand reach into my pocket and grab my wallet. Then I saw a set of feet flying down the asphalt landscape, blurrily blend with it, and disappear for good. I never saw who hit me.

My vision blurred. The salty tears made a kind of second lens over my right eye, bringing into view the pitted face of the horrible crumb eater. I wasn't consciously aware that I was staring at her, but by the time I got up and turned away, the damage had been done.

The crumb eater was less than three feet from me.

# Chapter Sixteen

The candle flame flickers from a silent, invisible breeze. Perhaps there's a leak in the window by my table. Or, more likely, it's my rapid breathing.

As I sit here writing, I realize I've forgotten the time again, so single-minded I've been in trying to get this all down on paper. I haven't allowed for too many interjections, but at some point it is necessary for you to understand my situation.

Who was the crumb eater? I'm not entirely sure. The spooks, for me or my brother, seem to be half-real, half-imagined forms of people we know, or knew, or they're simply made-up from fears, shame, and a thousand other horrible emotions, many of which I've never felt before.

It is best to describe the entities as feelings. I think that's the closest one can get to explaining who or what they are. In the case of the crumb eater, the overwhelming emotion was helplessness.

She was a poor beggar living off the trash of others. My biggest fear, no doubt, one of my own possible realities. Though we looked nothing alike, here was me in another life: no money, no family, no ties. Everything stripped from me.

I turn away from the candle, but the flame still moves. I don't know why.

* * *

I got myself back on the road; I yelled, I cursed, I cried, begged, bribed, yelled again, cried, begged, bribed and cursed all over again. But you can't reason or threaten a spirit, especially one you can't afford to look at. So as I continued out of the city and headed northwest to the coast at top speed, the crumb eater rode in the passenger seat and took my abuse all the way, never saying a word.

If only I hadn't been so giddy and stupid to have run into the wrong part of town. I was doubly stupid not to have recognized the spirit right away. And now it was attached to me, so close it could reach out and touch me. Yet it didn't. Why not? Was she simply staying here to torture me? Why not just grab my throat and kill me?

But what really burned me was this: where it had taken Lazarus years to become plagued by the spirits, it had taken me no more than twenty minutes. Now I was stuck with the horrible stinking ghost who sat calmly in the passenger seat, staring at _me_ the whole drive up the coast. It's enough to drive a man insane.

Once or twice I tried kicking her out of the car, out the passenger side door, to bust open her maggot-infested head on the road. But I could not bring my foot off the gas pedal to keep the car in motion, plus the swinging foot caused my arm to jerk the wheel, so several times we almost flew down the cliff and onto the beaches below.

The crumb eater would have to stay.

After a while I settled down, and, although I would not let myself look directly at her, occasionally I made out a few features in my peripheral vision. As far as I could tell, the hag had only half a nose and was still covered almost completely in dirt and bugs. Stick bugs, no less—long, thick insects that looked like flat panels of wood. The smell of her and the bugs combined was worse than fish rotting in desert heat.

I guess, though, that people can get used to just about anything. Though the first two or three hours were insane, paranoid, and delusional, my nervousness began to subside soon after.

_We are going to stare at you_ , I thought. _At all of you. Hard and long enough to bring us close together, then we are going to kill you. Charles and I are going to tiptoe like mice stealing cookies, down to the basement, where Father kept all his weapons. Yes, that's right, revolvers and rifles and knives and shotguns. Then we'll bring you out, totally and completely, and then we'll pump you full of lead._

I smiled, pressed on the gas, and raced over the hills and grassy valleys and around the rocks and near the cliffs. By the time I reached the house, still lost in thought, the crumb eater had vanished.

# Chapter Seventeen

"Charles!" My voice rang out across my dark, silent home. I stood there in the doorway, waiting tensely for some sign before cautiously tiptoeing farther inside. In the kitchen I found a match and lit a candle. The light cast an eerie glow as I walked to the other end of the house.

I called again. No answer, so I headed outside, into the courtyard—perhaps Charles was in the master bedroom on the other side of the house. I made it about halfway before I heard the snapping of a branch behind me. A tingling shot up my spine. I wanted to turn—so badly—but I didn't look, not even once. Instead, I called out: "Who is it?" Nothing answered. Still, it was there. Right behind me. I could feel its presence.

_Snap, snap_. More sounds. Over there . . . I allowed myself to look out of the corner of my eye. There were others on my left and right. How many? I'll never know for sure, for I quickly raced to the door on the other side of the yard, ran inside, and slammed it shut behind me. The force of the door slamming spun me around, and I found myself face-to-face through the glass window with something hideous.

Smashed together, it seemed, dozens of faces, stacked atop one another. Maybe hundreds, nearly identical. And all of them were all plastered onto a single conk nearly seven feet tall, so the individual faces, collectively, composed the features—eyes, ears, nose—of the master face. The main face had the haircut of a distinguished gentleman—its neck ending at the collar of an expensive suit and tie.

The tongues of the hundreds of faces wiggled and writhed and licked up and down and slurped at their crusty lips. Each miniature head rolled its eyes around loosely in their sockets, focusing on nothing—but I got the sense they _saw_ everything.

Then, the giant head comprising all the faces began to rise. It was connected to an immense body, a giant, a hundred feet tall, and it stood, stood up, rose into a—

"Alex, close your eyes!" Charles's voice rang out from somewhere, rising above the sounds of slithering from the faces. I tore my gaze from the window and threw my hands over my face.

After several moments the scratching at the window ceased. The face—the _faces_ —were gone. I slowly looked up, my eyes bleary from pressing so hard against my palms.

When I found Charles in the master bedroom I ranted for three minutes, gathering up his things for him, throwing them in his suitcase, all the while telling him how we would go down into the wine cellar, ready ourselves with our father's guns, say our prayers, then head back up to the book room and wait with our backs against the sturdy bookcases. There we would stay until they came close. We'd stare at the spirits—both of us, very intently—and bring them into the physical world before blowing them to smithereens—

I stopped. "Charles?" He'd been silent the whole time. "Charles, have you heard a word I've said?"

Charles sat in the shadows of the room, deep in the cushions of Father's favorite armchair. "Yes," he answered softly. "I hear you." I told him to get up. He didn't. "I found Maggie" was all he said.

"Where is she?" I asked.

"In the wine cellar."

"What is she doing down there?"

"She isn't well."

"Is she sick? Hurt?"

"Yes, very sick. I've locked her in. We can never let her out. We can never set foot in the wine cellar ever again."

"But have you heard me, Charles? We need to—!"

"Yes, I heard you," he interrupted, despondent. "But guns won't do much good now."

I was about to ask why not, when a flash of moonlight poked between the giant curtains in our father's old room, illuminating Charles's face for just a moment. Bandages covered the top half of his head.

"After you left, I searched the house for hours," he said. "I kept hearing Maggie whining and screaming, so I lit a torch and went over the grounds of the estate. I saw nothing. I made a circle in the courtyard, then went through all the rooms. Then I caught a glimpse of a body stretched thin against the wall in the cellar, like it was trying to hide itself. It was Maggie! She came at me, clawing and biting—and I ran. I locked her in."

He slowly unraveled the gauze strips around his head. "I panicked. I couldn't bear the thought of seeing my dear Maggie again like that. The rules were simple, brother. _Never stare. Never stare at who goes there_."

Charles removed the bandages. "All I could think to do was to avoid looking at her anymore. It couldn't be real, it just couldn't. This is all my fault, Alex. Your plan—your plan is ruined."

"Charles, your eyes—"

"Yes." Charles whimpered. Flame-shadow danced inside his almost empty eye sockets. "I've blinded myself. I see no more."

# Chapter Eighteen

I sat for several minutes, saying nothing. Surely there had to be a way around this. First there was a blank, stupid feeling. Then, anger. Both phases passed.

"If you can't see them, then maybe they can't hurt you anymore." I formulated a plan. "Maybe we only need to kill my spirits. And, if I _am_ able to see your spirits, I will draw them out on my own, like the others, and send them back to Hell myself."

Charles seemed nearly comatose. He'd poked out his eyes with a kitchen knife, and was now wrapping himself again in gauze. I gave him a few minutes to collect himself, sat next to him with an arm around his shoulder.

When he said he was ready, I helped Charles to the bathroom so we could rinse off and prepare ourselves, though I alone would have to guide us down into the wine cellar and face whatever Maggie had become—without looking at any spirits on the way down.

I grabbed an old shaving mirror from my father's cabinet and with some strong glue fastened it to a broken shower pole. This way we could walk backward through the house, and I could see where we were headed without having to look directly behind me. I didn't want to chance accidentally looking at the spirits and bringing them closer to us before we had our gats. Perhaps this plan, fit for Medusa, would work.

We left the bathroom, Charles clutching my shirt. In my right hand I held our torch; in my left, the mirror. I held the mirror out in front of me and bounced the torchlight off it so I could see behind me.

We shuffled down the long hallway. Charles kept his face on a swivel, sending out invisible beacons like some kind of bat. My eyes never left the small 5″×6″ mirror.

We walked slowly. Ten steps. Eleven. Twelve. Charles shook with the force of earthquakes as we approached a dark shape in the hallway. It was the woman in the red dress I'd followed previously into the bar; though it was dark and cloudy in the mirror her eyes still shone. They were pure white. Her hair fell in wet spaghetti strands, as if waterlogged for months. The mirror worked. I could look freely without her reaching out and grabbing me. We both turned sideways to avoid bumping her, and as we passed, her image faded from view.

Other images slipped past the mirror as we went around the corner. Something like a lumpy clown blocked us from the door to the courtyard, so we walked to the next glass door, which was free, and backpedaled outside.

I stopped cold. A myriad of shadowy ghouls awaited us in the courtyard. "Alex?" croaked Charles. "How many are there . . .?"

"Dozens," I whispered, gazing into my mirror, wrapping his arm in mine. "Stay close to me . . ."

We began our slow shuffle backward. Using the mirror as my guide, I found a clear path through the formation of spirits. Over the weeds, under the rotting fruit tree, to the door that links to the cellar, maybe 150 feet away. Soon we'd be at the guns.

The emotions that flooded me, the faces I confronted in that mirror, are difficult to parse out, but I'll do my best to tell you about them. We nearly tripped over a fat, morbid goon, not more than two feet tall, shaped like a crab, whose head perched upon a 200-pound torso. He skittered along on imperceptible legs like a shelled sea creature dropped without warning onto land. An intense feeling of shame lit me up inside; I "saw" this spirit as a young woman I'd met in Paris in my twenties during a three-month stay. We fell in love (rather, she with me), and upon making plans to wed in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés, I promptly left the country on an epic bender, one day before our marriage at the church. Young and silly, that's how I justified it. Why she'd taken this form now, I have no clue.

Slowly we wound around the shadow people, the near-freezing sea wind emptying Charles and me of warmth. Still, we pressed on, and soon came to the cellar door at the other side of the courtyard.

Outside the heavy wooden door to the cellar we settled for a moment, mentally preparing ourselves. "I don't want her to suffer," he said. "Do it quickly."

I waited a moment before pushing the door open.

# Chapter Nineteen

The staircase down to the cellar was short and narrow. We went one at a time, me in front clutching my small knife and mirror. Charles came behind me, gripping my forearm and digging into my marrow.

The ancient wood groaned beneath our feet. How long since someone had been down here? Ten years, perhaps? Though not bright enough to light the entire room, our torch cut through the dark enough to fashion us a kind of cocoon of orange and yellow.

We reached the bottom of the stairs. To our front, some ten feet ahead, sat the wine racks. In their prime they had held a hundred bottles of wine, champagne, and brandy—now they sat empty. The cellar stretched fifty feet to our left and right. Old furniture and decorations draped in sheets were strewn about to our right, maybe twenty feet away, creating white waves.

"Maggie?" Charles whipped his head around again to get an auditory read on something somewhere. I, however, kept still. I had the feeling of being watched. Emptiness crowded me. I listened, heard nothing. If we fell backward, we'd fall forever. Who would catch us?

"Charles," I whispered. "The guns. Where are they?"

"Against the wall," he said, motioning with his head to the right side of the room, between the dozens of sheet-draped pieces of furniture standing on the floor that had been rotting in the saltwater air for decades. "In the chest."

We had no choice but to move through the white field. We started for the guns. "Brother!" Charles squeezed my arm. We stopped. He whispered softly, his voice carrying on the stillness. "Hear that?"

I listened, told him I heard nothing—

"Ssh!" Nothing. Then . . .

Low, almost imperceptible, just louder than an ant on a pillow . . . something.

I strained, listened again. In the silence I could hear the hairs on my ear waggle on a nonexistent breeze. I could hear a mouse scampering on a pin cushion before I could hear—

Wait. A breath, somewhere. Soft. Ladylike.

My brother pointed ahead, his arm shaking, past the rows of white, past the horizon of our sight, into nothing, into everything. We waited. Ten seconds. A minute. Two minutes. Five. The breathing dissipated, disappeared into the background. Finally, I gave my brother's hand two short squeezes. _Move forward_ , they said. _Move on_.

The white sails whispered at us, trying to hitch a ride, leave their lonely outposts. But we couldn't take them with us. We drew closer to the back of the basement, where the guns lay.

_Ten feet, nine feet, eight. . ._

Fire shadow danced off everything.

_Six, five, four. . ._

The strained breathing returned then. I couldn't place its location; it seemed to be all around us. I readied my fists and my knife. Charles sucked in a deep breath.

_Three feet, two—_

_One._

We reached the chest. I whipped around, protecting our backsides, expecting some spirit, or a deranged Maggie. But there was nothing.

"Quickly," I said, throwing open the chest. We'd found the heaters. Several revolvers, a shotgun, a rifle, all wrapped in blankets. Under them was a small removable drawer. Beneath that were the shells. I loaded the shotgun and shoved the rest of the shells in my pocket. Next came the .38 caliber slugs, which I loaded, and I tucked the revolver into the waistband of my pants.

I looked at Charles. His head wandered around on its own, snotty, sniveling, sensing his beloved. I gave him a loaded revolver to hold; I couldn't carry everything. When I looked back to the gun chest, two hands sprang from the infinite darkness within it and grabbed my shoulders.

Maggie pulled herself out of the chest. Her eyelids had been removed or had simply been sucked back inside her head, for her eyes protruded like a spider's. Cracked, peeling skin surrounded a lipless mouth and crooked teeth. She leaned in to swallow my head.

I screamed and fired the shotgun wildly. I must have hit her, because Maggie's hands flew from my shoulders and she disappeared into the chest. She fell far, as if the interior were a hundred feet deep. It simply swallowed her up. I turned to run but tripped over Charles, and my head split open on the floor.

Wiping the blood from my eyes, I looked up to find fire vanquishing the white sheets. I had dropped the torch when I fell and now the flames quickly ate them up. I leapt up, grabbed Charles by the arm, and dragged him through the fire, to the steps, where—

We were blocked by a body bathed in flame and shadow.

Maggie stood in front of the stairs, her cheeks hanging like bags of pus. In the firelight I could see her decaying hairline covered in maggots. Her whole body swayed back and forth, skinny and scrawny, her nakedness peeking out from behind what remained of her ragged clothes. She looked like she'd been in the cellar for decades.

"Maggie, darling?" Charles's whimpering voice called out behind me. To my horror he stepped in front of me and offered Maggie an outstretched hand. She regarded him as a cat does its owner, as a bird contemplates seedlings from a human hand. A tear formed in her droopy eye, then rolled down her face and caught in her rotting trap.

Charles moved forward, arms outstretched, and embraced her. As the last flames of the white sheet died out, I watched Charles lead Maggie farther into the darkness, behind the stairs.

For a moment all was quiet. Then there was a scream. Sounds of scrabbling. Ripping clothes. Yelling, snarling. Then—

A shot rang out.

I pointed my rifle into the dark and stutter-stepped forward, ready to put a shell into Maggie. But it was Charles who emerged. Beaten and bloody, he collapsed into me, his arm gripping his stomach.

His insides were sliding out. She'd clawed right through his belly, into his guts, where all indecent women try to kill their men. He'd clipped her with his revolver, but she'd gotten him good too. I wasted no time taking Charles up the stairs, then triple-locked and barricaded the cellar door from the outside.

Even then, I could still hear Maggie giggling.

# Chapter Twenty

"Father's armchair . . . set me down . . ." Charles seemed to have deflated by the time we returned to the library. One arm slung over my shoulder, he was barely able to walk as his legs had folded beneath him; I dragged them on the heavy wooden floor. He drooped like a wilted flower, blood and bile running down his legs and leaving a clear trail from the cellar to here. "Alex," he whispered as I placed him in his chair. "Open the cabinet door . . . next to the bed . . ."

I put my hand deep inside the cabinet and felt around, my hand leaving a bright red streak on the door's ivory handle. But I found what he wanted. I looked back at him, disturbed. He nodded at me. "Bring it here . . ."

The label on the bottle read "Macallan - 1840." My father's best whiskey. An expensive bottle. Maybe the finest we ever had. The liquid inside swirled like an ocean whirlpool, promising to carry us on its current far, far away from here.

Charles broke the seal, and the smell of fire roared from the bottle. My face grew numb. All memory of the last few days left me.

He put his nose to the bottle and inhaled deeply. His eyes rolled back a little. His exhalation was one of immense satisfaction, and I doubt he even noticed the fresh blood oozing from his side.

Then, miraculously, he corked the bottle and threw it aside. I watched as it thudded on the heavy carpet floor but didn't break.

Sensing my alarm for the bottle's safety, Charles smiled weakly and said, "Dear brother, wouldn't it be just poetic to forget this sobriety for one last drink? Well, I won't do it. For even with the spirits, I have won. I will die a sober man. Life has taken me, yes, but life takes us all. Today I have faced and destroyed that which had enslaved me for so many years . . . I'll die, but I'll die free."

He grabbed both my hands. "Please believe me, that in those years of drunkenness I didn't know what I was doing. You should know that by now. If I could make it up to you, I would."

I sat beside him, gripping his bloody hands, while he died. "Finish what you started," he said. "Face them, and go live a happy life. Do it for me. Fill 'em with lead." After a few minutes, his breathing quieted and he shut his eyes.

I remembered our first fights; our plays in the tree house; when he ran away from home; when he returned; our first drink together; the family reunions he'd missed; the sheepish, melancholy look he had when he came seeking forgiveness for liquidating accounts. I'd often yell, demand he tell me where he'd gone, why he'd missed one appointment or another. I remembered how he'd look at me with that bewildered expression I hated so much. I remembered the fighting, the hate in my heart for a drunk like him.

I know now that I've never known my brother, not my real brother anyway. I think the spirits have always possessed him, long before he began drinking heavily. I wonder what it would have been like to know him. Would I have turned out different? No doubt. Oh, what could have been . . .

# Chapter Twenty-One

The beasts, I hear them now. They pace back and forth just outside the door, while I load my guns. They're waiting. Why don't they just burst in? I like to think they sense my plan and are afraid. Maybe they don't want me after all.

But maybe that's just wishful thinking.

Who are . . . _they_? The rabbit man, the crumb eater, the crab scuttler, the face with a hundred faces?

_Who goes there?_

I do. A million forms of me. Emotions, fears, shame I've collected over the decades.

And who collects me, and others like me? Death himself, of course. He is the most successful collector. He always wins. Sooner or later, Death makes whimperers of us all.

It's time to leave this room, to meet my collector. I tell myself to load my gun. Get ready to face them.

But perhaps I've been mistaken this whole time. What if I've only seen Charles's ghouls, or only the best of the worst of mine have revealed themselves to me? Is it possible? There are others, I'm sure of it. I don't want to say more than that. I don't want to think about them. I can't.

Still, I have to load the last of my shells. The moonlight clouds lift for a moment, and a glint of light catches my eye from the carpet.

_What's that?_

The bottle. The last bottle of booze I'll ever see. A shipwrecked bottle of hooch on this barren beach of sobriety.

Pick it up? No. I can't.

I turn toward the door, gripping the gun in cold sweat. What lies beyond the great border of heavy oak? What was inside me these years, what horrifying memories have I repressed? What will they show me?

I turn back to the bottle. I feel better. If I just pick it up, just a little, maybe it will make me feel a little better. Like the old days, before all this.

I do it. I wrap my hand around the glass. Power flows through me. The scratching outside quiets down. My nerves loosen.

I let go of the bottle; my pulse quickens again. No good. I must leave, but I'm too afraid. What if I stare at them too soon, or too late? My gun could jam—and then they could touch me. Oh, no, I'd end up like Lazarus, with stumps. Maybe they wouldn't kill me, just let me live in torment for years and years. I'd be a prisoner in my childhood home.

And Maggie. The laughing. Even now, I hear her. Yes, she's still alive, crawling closer to this room. I can feel it. I can _feel_ her _laugh_ , the way she taunts me. I always hated her. Of course I did.

_Stop this. Figure this out. What are we going to do?_

The windows. Yes, draw the curtains. Make it dark. Leave just one light on. No moonlight.

Good. I feel better already. I'm almost ready to leave the room. Better look around, take in the books, the feel, the odor. All our best memories, except—

That one time . . .

No, don't think it! And I won't tell you about it either, Reader, because that would make me think it, and maybe produce one of the apparitions right here, before I'm ready! I'm a mess; I have to get myself organized.

_What to do, what to do?_

There's only one thing, one thing in this whole world that has ever helped me calm my nerves . . . And it _has_ always worked. Without fail. Well, except for the last few days—but that was before all this.

The spirits are all out of me now, after all. There would be no harm in just a sip. No problem at all. It would steady my hands just enough. Calm me right down. I'd aim my gun better, I know I would. I've never been more sure of anything in my life.

It's only a boost. Yes, that's it. A—a—a charge. Just what I need for my finale with the Collector.

_Just one drink._ Before I slip into the underworlds of space and time. Before I head out to sea on the Great Abyss. Just one, like old times. To steel myself.

Just one, before I face what I truly am. Before I face Him, whoever _He_ may be. _Just one drink._

What could it hurt? _How_ could it hurt?

_Just one drink_ , they say. _Just one drink, and we'll leave._

I remove the cap, put the bottle to my lips.

Just one drink.

_Just one._

# Epilogue: In The Walls At Night

Shorty Gray swallowed, rubbed his throat, and slumped back in his chair. Behind him the sun was peeking over the hills, shining between the gaps in the curtains in layers of yellow and gold. I stared at him, and he at me, for some time, until he closed his eyes.

"That's it," he said. "All the stories I can remember from that night. I've told them all."

I set my pen down and grimaced as I stretched my cramped, aching fingers. While Shorty recovered, rubbing his eyes, exhausted from the burden of memories, I organized my notes. A hundred pages of scribbled, shorthand, messy writing, only halfway decipherable even to me.

The green and yellow lamp lights around the room glimmered in an ocean of black space. Shorty sat outside the habitable zone of the lamp closest to us, just out of its gleam, the outline of his face and the watery glint of his eyeballs hugging the border of light and dark that separated our little worlds.

Time and space, once thought separate from each other, had collided for him all those years back when he heard the voices in the walls, and had now returned to haunt him. His lids drooped with decades of insomnia—same as me—caused by the fear of voices calling to him from across the universe.

"The stories could have lasted only a few hours, or a few days," he said. "Perhaps I slept the clock around and woke up a week, a month later. Who knows, when worlds stitch themselves together like that."

My eyes rested on the black-covered arm and hand that lay across his lap.

He sighed. "While listening to the stories I must have dozed off. I awoke with my ear still pressed against the wall. I rubbed the sleep out of me and repositioned myself.

"I heard something like breathing. Closer to me than before. Then it faded. The next thing I knew was total silence. As I turned away, something reached through the wall and grabbed my wrist.

"I screamed, struggled, tried to wrench my arm away. Almost ripped it loose. Candle flame flung shadows across the room. All I could see were arms reaching through the walls, gripping me. Six, seven, a dozen arms—who knows? Long, short, fat, hairy, scaly, reptilian arms; hands of all colors—some were ladylike and long-nailed, others had missing fingernails and were oozing blood from the nubs. The hands tore through the wall like putty.

"The more I struggled, the harder they pulled. I desperately tried to reach my bedpost with my other arm; perhaps if I could get a hold of it, it would give me more leverage to free myself. But it was just out of reach, and they dragged me closer and closer to the wall . . ."

Shorty retreated farther into the darkness outside his lamplight, his eyes like lost planets, his voice growing louder and frightened and—

"My arm was their property now. They were dragging it into the wall, into the dirt of the cemetery, into the fifth dimension . . .

"I felt the brick at my fingertips. It was not soft or mushy at all. It was hard and cold. There was nothing to do now; fighting was useless. So I let my fingers, my hand, my wrist, enter the otherworld. I was soon up to my biceps in it.

"Then, all at once, I heard a laugh and a loud popping sound. I yanked my arm away and flew back into my bedpost, the candle skittering across the floor of stone. I shot up and raced away, up the stairs, toward the light.

"In one moment I was free." Shorty paused. "But it took the next several years to . . . adapt."

Seeing my confusion, Shorty raised his arm wrapped in black material—the one always covered—grabbed the end of the glove with his other hand, and slid it off.

I turned away in disgust. He shouldn't have surprised me like that.

The shriveled, shrunken forearm; the dozen fingers of various colors, shapes, and lengths; the fingernails, some short, and some red and long like a woman's.

I did not like the mash-up of parts.

A piece of all the people in the walls had latched onto him, hitched a ride on his young body. Thumbs and forefingers from men, women, and animals grew out of his knuckles. Fragments of fingers, of other hands, sprung from his forearm and wrist.

Thick, large veins, blue and varicose, wrapped over and under his digits like jungle vines. Each of the dozen fingers seemed to move on its own: upward, downward, to the left, to the right. Each had seen decades, millennia; they were connected to their original owners _and_ Shorty in an unbreakable strand of time and space that you can't feel or see but, like dark energy, you know exists. The chains of evolution, broken or fixed— _who knows?_ —normally visible between species, were now inverted, transmuted into this freaky carnival show.

Where his body ended and theirs began was anybody's guess; they must have connected somewhere. In any case, Shorty was too far away now, traveling the distant cosmos within himself.

"Maybe I should have let myself go _all the way in_." His eyes gleamed, his fingers danced. "Perhaps I should have drifted along with the spirits. Who knows what adventures I would have had!"

He pushed his chair back and stood, turned away, and stared out the window. Clearly he'd forgotten I was there. The yellow sun silhouetted his grotesque figure, his many fingers sprouting from his bizarre hand: the hand of ages, of pyramids, of solar systems.

He raised it chest-level, his palm turned toward me. The many fingers on the bad hand waved goodbye to me, each on its own.

I turned slowly and left the man alone with his thoughts.

That was two months ago. Just six weeks later Shorty Gray abruptly left this world for another.

Perhaps he's finally found the secret of the walls . . .

* * *

A week ago, I dropped my last rent check in the mail and resigned from my job. I'm riding a train now, up through the Carolinas, all the way to Connecticut. I'm heading north to Pickering Cemetery, to the house where Shorty lived, to the basement where he heard the voices.

_What goes on in the walls at night?_

I'll tell you when I get there.

* * *

**The end.**

# Acknowledgments

I don't remember my reason for writing this book, but I'm sure it was a good one. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much I enjoyed recalling the stories of Shorty Gray.

It would not have been possible without the help of my beautiful wife, Briana Gokay. Karen S. Conlin's edits were gold. Travis Schirmer's insights into nearly every story were indispensable.

Thanks to Kim Scott (www.feedyoureye.com) for her magnificent cover art, and many thanks to my film partner Jordan Harris for his cover design and story notes. Also to Kyle, Kacie, and Thomas, and authors John Robin and William Burcher for their helpful notes on earlier versions of "Who Goes There," "The Developer," and "The Boy Who Swallowed Rocks."

To Ray Bradbury, for telling me what to write, and for cheering me on all the way. And to Loren Eiseley, for reminding me of the "things that rustle in thickets upon solitary walks."

To all the readers, thank you.

# About the Author

Andrew Schrader is a writer and filmmaker _._ His 2016 award-winning documentary, _All We Did Was Live_ , has helped raised awareness about homelessness in Berkeley, CA. He's also the award-winning feature filmmaker of _The Age of Reason_ and _Fever Night_ _(aka Band of Satanic Outsiders)_. This is his first book.

Please sign up for his mailing list for news, giveaways, and free stories from his upcoming book.

For more information, please visit:

    andrewjschrader

www.andrewjschrader.com
