Explanation i

— Some people, I say, go when they have to and whoosh, they’re out of your life. But you’ve got that connection, right. So when you catch up again a few years later, you just pick up like right where you left off. I pause. You ever had that?

— Yeah, she says. Couple of people. We both stop, watch the people pass by outside the café window. So Dennis, she says. One of those people?

— We’ve met up maybe three times since uni. And each time… Memories. You know?

She nods.

— Do I know him?

— Dunno. He might’ve been before your time. Although. Were you at Annie’s wedding?

— Mm-hmm.

— He was there. Pretty much conquered the karaoke. Little guy. Really deep voice.

— Oh! Yeah! With the hair, right? She mimes a white man’s afro with her hands, a big round motion.

— That’s him. Guy with the hair. I smile, nod, sip coffee.

— How long’s he down for?

— Couple days.

— Lovely.

1

The mobile sounds. I pick up.

— Hi.

…Yeah, I’m at the station.

…About ten minutes, I expect. How you doing?

…That’s good. Danny? I can hear him. What’s he up to?

…Aww, no way! I’m kind of gutted I missed that.

…Yeah, I know, but it’s not the same. Can you put him—?

…Hello, Danny! Mummy says you had a really exciting day today. What did you see?

…Oh, wow. That’s really great. And what else did you do?

…Really? And did the dog say hello back?

…Oh, that’s great.

…OK. Daddy loves you, Danny. Bye, bye.

…Ha. Yeah, I’m fine. Yeah. Already done.

…I know. Listen. I’m missing you.

— Yeah, I haven’t seen him yet. Bugger. It’s raining.

…No, I’m at Llansamlet.

…Yeah, yeah. This is him all over. He always does this thing, right, where he comes up with these crazy convoluted travel plans, and it’s to save money or time or it’s like for some reason that makes rational sense to no earthly agency apart from Dennis.

…Mm-hmm. So it turns out that his train is coming in at Llansamlet.

…Yeah, but then it’s not you travelling, is it? He’s got this intricate and closely-timed journey that’s added something like three changes and ninety minutes to his travel time, booked two weeks in advance, and it’s saved him seventy-five quid.

…Seventy-five quid. Who am I to argue? It’s just that it stops at Llansamlet and not in town.

…I know. But he’s a mate.

…Yeah. I think it’s going to arrive. Listen. Send my love to your mum and dad.

…Oh, I think I can manage that.

…Love you. Talk to you tomorrow, I expect.

…Yeah. Love you. Bye.

2

I press the hang-up button, look at the phone for a minute as if anyone’s texted me, out of a sort of reflex action. Dennis doesn’t own a mobile.

Here’s the rumble of a train; automated voices, Welsh and English, man and woman, confirming that this is indeed the train that Dennis will arrive on.

It’s a little two-carriage affair. Hardly anyone is on it, and only two people get off, the first a thirtysomething woman in a business suit, good-looking enough that I feel guilty for looking at her and watching her until she has gone from the platform, and I do not see the figure in front of me, who says, in a familiar bass baritone:

— Hello.

I jump; I do not recognise him. He is shorter than I remember. He wears a plain black scarf wrapped around his mouth and nose. Under his battered leather jacket, he wears a wash-worn grey hoodie, and the hood is pulled up over his head. It’s dark now. I have been here a long time.

— Hello, he says again. His voice is always as it was, a baritone, but the kind that comes from the back of the mouth rather than the chest, which always gave the voice a kind of quiet, halting quality, emphasised by the habit he had of swallowing sometimes in mid-sentence.

— Dennis! How are you, man? I put out a hand. He pauses, looks at it, shakes. His hand is very bony, very hard and very cold.

— I’m well. Thank you.

I reach for the larger of his two bags.

— Good journey?

— Fine.

— Shall we—? I wave a hand towards the car.

— Actually, he says, would you mind if we wait here for a minute? There’s something I’d like to see.

— Um, OK. I put the holdall down on the bench, put one hand on the back of my neck, look along the rail tracks. Dennis looks at a digital watch with a threadbare strap.

— It will only be a couple of minutes.

I sit on the bench next to the holdall. He joins me, on the other side of the bag. His footfalls are small and closely paced. He was always a little stiff, but I can see now that he has a small but definite hunch on his back.

The automated voice (Welsh and English, man and woman) says that the next train shall not be stopping here. Dennis stands, takes a couple of paces across the platform.

The train is a full-length Cross-Country. It whizzes past at full speed. In the split-second I see it, it looks like it’s lit dimly red inside, like the people are all standing and in shadow. I see for the briefest moment a man, face pressed against the window, looking like he’s shouting, and a split-second later something that gives the illusion of being large and winged. I’m tired. It’s dark.

— We can go now, says Dennis.

We head to the car.

3

— Oh, no, he says. I didn’t mean to give you the wrong impression. It’s OK?

I am driving.

— Uh, yeah. Yeah. Completely.

— You hadn’t gone to too much trouble?

— No. No. Not at all. I have cleaned the spare room from top to bottom. I have filled the fridge and freezer with vegan food. No. it’s cool.

We stop at a set of lights. I look across at him, wonder what is up with the scarf. Maybe it’s an affectation. He’s done that before, like when he went around wearing a set of NHS glasses without any glass in them. He is looking out of the passenger side window; he turns and looks at me. In the dark, he is only lit by the red light, and I cannot see his eyes. I give him a tight-lipped smile; the light changes. I return my eyes to the road, set off.

— So whose place is it you’re staying at?

— Joe and Sarah’s. I don’t think you know them.

— No. It doesn’t ring a bell.

— They’re not around anyway. I’m just house-sitting.

— Oh.

— It’s a good base. It means I can catch up with some other people who I was wanting to see.

— Oh yeah? Who’s that, then?

— People. You don’t know them. Maybe you’ll meet them on Sunday.

— OK.

I drop him off at the house, one of the really big, nice places at the West Cross end of the Mumbles Road, with the really long drive and maybe six bedrooms. I would have known about someone who lived here. Wouldn’t I?

He has a key.

I help him carry his bags in, look around the hall. It’s beautiful. No pictures, anywhere. But lovely. Except that the cupboard door under the stair has a broken panel, the lower right-hand side one, like someone bashed a hole in it from inside with a really big hammer or something.

— Hey, I say. What happened there?

— No idea, says Dennis. He shuffles towards the kitchen. Tea?

— Yeah.

He watches me drink it. He doesn’t have any of his own. I head back to mine. I watch TV.

4

I decided to walk. I am in no hurry, and it already a beautiful morning. The traffic on the main road, on the other side of that wide grass verge, seems very far away. Hardly anyone else is on the esplanade, and by the time I get as far as Blackpill Lido, no one is there at all.

The beach on Swansea Bay is very wide and very flat. The tide comes in and out a mile or more in minutes, and it comes in while I walk, the sea lapping against the wall on which the south side of the path sits, that keeps Swansea from the ocean. A band of light, like a path to somewhere else again, stretches across the sea from me to the still-low sun, and follows me, and I imagine hopping over the crumbling path and walking along the path, and vanishing into the light. And I would be the last to go, because everyone else has gone.

5

At the top of the drive, in front of that big white West Cross house, there’s Dennis, first person I’ve seen today, sitting on the path next to the flower bed, hands clasped over his knees, staring at the flower bed. He’s still wearing the kerchief. I stand next to him, look down, and I am a little shocked at how grey his tight brown curls have gone.

— Hey. What are you looking at?

He points at the earth. His finger is longer than I remember it being, the nail long and filthy, like a storybook witch. He is pointing a mass of something pinkish under and around the daffodils, a lump of something like flesh that seems to twist and fold in on itself as I watch. It takes me a moment to figure out what it is I am looking at.

— That’s an awful lot of worms, I say.

— Mm.

— What do you think they’re doing?

He doesn’t reply immediately. A movement behind his kerchief reminds me of how Dennis used to lick his lips before saying something, and how you knew how he was choosing his words.

— Did you know that there are a million earthworms for every human being on the planet?

— No. No, Dennis. I did not.

— When we’re gone, they’ll take over. They’ll replace us.

— Wasn’t that supposed to be the cockroaches?

— No. He is in earnest, as he always was, serious or joking. No, the earthworms. Definitely the earthworms.

— Oh.

I put a hand in my hair, tongue in cheek, look down the path at the silent main road. I let a breath out, lower lip pushed out.

— Listen, I say. Wanna do the charity shop thing?

Explanation ii

— So when’s he coming?

— Friday. Through to Monday morning.

— And you’re going to watch TV and visit charity shops. She sips her coffee, faintly amused.

I laugh.

— It’s like a tradition. The Great Charity Shop Crawl. Dennis, right, he’s massively into science fiction. And he’s a big reader. And he’s a completist. And he’s poor. And you know what that makes?

— No.

— It makes a man whose obsessions are hampered by a perennial lack of funds. He can’t just go to Borders or Amazon to find the stuff he’s after. Besides, most of the stuff he collects is rare or completely out of print. So he like developed this terrifying ability to learn by heart the exact location of every single charity shop and second-hand bookshop that exists in like the whole country.

She raises an eyebrow.

— And you have too?

— It’s like he’d visit, and swear to God he’d spend a whole day, maybe two and we’d scour every junk shop in the city, like the whole city, and he’d be like looking for the middle book in a set of juvenile sci-fi paperbacks from the sixties or seventies and he wouldn’t have started reading them until he had the whole set, and he’d've have had some of these books for years. Years. Or this one specific Fighting Fantasy book. Do you remember those?

— No.

— They’re like the Choose Your Own Adventure books, only with dice.

— I haven’t heard of those either.

— You’re hopeless. Anyway, he used to find stuff for me that he knew I wanted. So I get a whole run of the Valkyrie Luther Arkwrights and like the illustrated hardback version of Elric at the End of Time. Or some old Judge Dredd books he knew I didn’t have.

— None of this means anything to me.

— And I’d help him out. Music with me. So I’d make him mix tapes and send him vinyl and CDs I’d found in Rowlands and the fairs. So he got all the Syd Barrett and the Viv Stanshall and some Half Man Half Biscuit.

— Still, she says, miming her hand going over her head, whoosh.

I sigh.

— Look, the point is that our relationship was largely founded on sharing this stuff. Like we were the Great British pop culture archaeologists. Amicus horror movies and Robyn Hitchcock on vinyl and dog-eared copies of Warrior and Misty.

— Aren’t you a bit old for that sort of thing?

— Well, yeah. A bit. I mean, it’s a young man’s pursuit. Not every young man’s pursuit. A certain sort of young man. But it was a long time ago. And we were young men.

— So it’s nostalgia.

— Yeah. It’s been years.

And this is what I don’t say: that it won’t be long before no one’s ever going to call me young again. And that it’s a very long time since I was that sort of young man, and that I am a little frightened that I have forgotten what it is like.

6

We have by this point ranged across Mumbles, West Cross and up as far as Derwen Fawr and Clyne, a circle of several miles, and we have visited shops I have never heard of, tucked away in streets I barely knew existed. The main roads are exceptionally quiet today. At times it seems like I haven’t seen a single car or pedestrian, but I know for a fact I must have seen someone.

Now the side roads; I can accept that no one is there. They are dead.

The shops represent charities I have not heard of, names painted on faded board. Indigent Support. British Asylum Builders. International Euthanasia Guild. Feed the Wretched.

Every shop, if it appears to have anyone inside it at all, contains as its presiding spirit a single grim-faced old biddy, sitting behind a counter cluttered with porcelain knick-knacks and cheap discoloured cuddly toys, in a grotto walled with unwanted ornamental jugs and out-of-fashion clothes and jigsaw puzzles depicting seaside scenes from the other end of the country. Each time, the old woman smiles briefly at Dennis with his kerchief and shuffling gait, as he heads for the books, but fixes me with an eye like a chipped glass marble, and does not look away until I have left the shop.

The smell of age hangs in my nostrils. I shift my feet. My neck itches.

By about third or maybe the fourth of these shops I start imagining things. Behind neatly folded chintz curtains and plastic baby-walkers and racks of those little old lady hats that I cannot imagine anyone makes any more, here is a foetus in formaldehyde. An electric lamp with brown twisted flex and a once-white 13 amp plug made from someone’s skull. A curved, brown knife, with the label in wobbly handwriting, Sacrificial knife, 75p.

In this last shop, a cardboard box on a chair sitting just outside the door has a sign made from one panel of a very old cornflakes packet, on which is written FREE. Donations gratefully received within. Dennis is already squatting by the bottom shelves, head cocked to one side, reading every spine, one by one, occasionally taking a book out, flipping through it, putting it back.

I’ll wait out here, I think. Absently, I pick up a fat, tatty paperback with plain white covers, turned yellow at the spine, with the sour, decrepit smell of old cigarette smoke hanging from the paper. It falls open in my hands. I read a couple of paragraphs in which the writer discusses the best way to degrade and murder a child. I close it, without looking at the title, and put it back between The Da Vinci Code and some Jilly Cooper novel. I look up, see the old woman smirking through the window. Her shoulders rock gently. She is laughing at me for taking offence.

I decide to stay outside in the sun. I sit on the front garden wall of the boarded-up house next door and wait. It is beautiful today. Red-brown leaves litter this street. The sun is bright and the wind is low. It is a golden, melancholy Autumn day like the ones in which years ago I used to take solace in a comfortable kind of loneliness, or in friends like Dennis and the collections we shared, whiling away the time until I was no longer single, no longer without children.

I cannot hear traffic anywhere.

As Dennis comes out of the shop, he slips something whitish and I think evil-looking into his jute shopping bag. He sits on the wall next to me. It surprises me a little how small he is. How his feet dangle next to the ground.

— Find what you were after? I say.

— Some things.

I run a hand through my hair, let out one of those sighs that sometimes used to serve when I was younger as a conversational gambit, when I was uncomfortable with nothing being said. The breeze turns cold.

— You know, I say. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Mumbles so dead. We’ve barely seen a soul.

Dennis grunts. It’s an odd, wet noise, as if made around the base of the tongue and rolled around before coming out. His kerchief moves a little. I put my hands on my knees, turn to look at him. It is late in the afternoon and the sun is in my eyes. I cannot clearly see his face.

— Dennis, I say. I have to ask.

He makes a throat-clearing sound.

— Hmm?

— You know your — I wave my fingers around in front of my mouth — I was wondering why you were wearing it. I mean, it’s not like the glasses. Is it?

— No. It’s not like the glasses.

— OK. So, can I ask — ?

— Do you remember, he says, where you were twenty-three, perhaps, and you said…you said you felt how if you were in trouble… or felt trapped. That you did not have to stay. Anywhere. That there would always be a way out? You remember.

— I remember. It was a long time ago. I don’t —

— You were wrong.

He is looking away from me, toward the sun. He is unsteady in his posture, swaying, not solid. For a moment, against my will, I imagine that he is not my old friend, but that he is a double made from hundreds of worms, and that I could poke him and he will disintegrate into a wave of worms that would wriggle and slither away from an emptying heap of clothes.

— I was young, I say. You say things like that when you’re young. Because you have to. Because when you’re that age you think you’re invincible. And you wouldn’t achieve anything if you didn’t.

He clears his throat again. As has always been Dennis’ way.

I stand.

— Where to next? I say.

Dennis hops down, smooths his hands on his cords as if they are wet or dirty. He gestures up the hill.

— One more. It’s just around the corner.

7

— So, I say, are they on holiday or something?

We are standing in the hall of the big West Cross house and I am hanging up my jacket on a brass wall hook.

— Something like that, says Dennis.

I got a bag of chips at Dick Barton’s. Dennis said he wasn’t hungry. He never ate much, I tell myself. He sorts me out with a plate and fork, and watches me.

But I admit to myself a faint disappointment that I shall not see him eat.

I’ll walk home, I say. I should start soon, I say. Maybe I’ll be in time for the last bus, I say. Tomorrow, I say?

— Not in the daytime, he replies. I promised a few people I’d catch up with them.

— But in the evening. Film and Who?

— I would like that.

— Tomorrow night, then. Maybe, I say, giving in to my curiosity, you can get your mysterious mates along.

— Maybe.

8

A bus pulls up at the stop before the roundabout. The 3A, my bus. Its doors open and the driver turns his head towards me.

He looks like he’s made of earthworms, thousands of them all knotted together, writhing, imperfectly forming and reforming eyes and lips as worms wriggle away into the mass and new ones take their places. Overflowing from and wriggling back into a filthy FirstBus Cymru uniform. No one else is on the bus.

I step back, as you do; the uniform shrugs and shudders. A pulpy hand presses the button, closes the door. The bus moves on. I shake my head. I’m tired. It’s dark.

I shall walk home.

Explanation iii

— So Dennis knows The Prisoner and Blake’s 7 and Space: 1999 all by heart, but his first love has always been Doctor Who. Long before it was everyone else’s.

— That doesn’t surprise me.

— Heh. Yeah. He’s a huge —

— Geek?

— Aficionado.

— Sorry.

— It’s OK. I don’t think he’s as self-conscious about it as I am.

— OK.

— So every time he rocked up, he’d bring a little stack of videos, and it’d be like a classic story I hadn’t seen. And also maybe like a cult film I haven’t heard of. I shift a little in my chair. We’d bond over it.

I give her the look that says, I am soliciting your approval, because you are a friend, and this is what you do.

— I mean, it’s not everyone’s idea of fun, I say.

9

I spend most of Sunday at home. I catch up on my reading. I walk along the seafront as the sun sets.

I don’t see or hear from a living soul all day.

10

On the massive flatscreen television that would consume the wall of any other house, but which looks in place here, Tom Baker runs in that somewhat sedate way 1970s British actors do through a corridor, pursued by marching, black-clad gun-toting aliens in round helmets. My eyes grow heavy. He runs through the TARDIS. He runs through a public swimming baths. I drop off.

I wake up; still in the lounge of that big West Cross house, and the room is dark and the TV is still on, and now Dennis and I have company, six or seven others perched on a footstool, the sofa, the floor. The lights are down. Their faces are in shadow. They’re all watching the TV. It takes me a minute for my eyes to get used to the dark.

Every face is covered, every figure is small and skinny, mostly male as far as I can tell, although one wears a floral dress and black tights, without having any other sign of gender. Every one has his or her face covered, at least in the lower half. A huge Tom Baker woolly scarf, wrapped up round and round over a nose. A hockey mask, or something like a hockey mask, not like the bloke in the horror film, more modern than that. A black bandana, printed with skulls and roses and thorns and 1980s rock band images. Someone sitting on the floor near the door, peering through the gap between the sofa and the armchair in which I am sitting, is wearing a motorcycle helmet.

Here is Dennis, on the other side of the room, sitting on the arm of the big armchair by the bay window. It is hard to see, but I am convinced that he glances at me and sees that I am awake, and nods towards the TV screen. I squint into the dark, trying to make out these people. Did Dennis introduce me to his friends? Was I so tired I don’t even remember?

Someone on the TV screams.

On screen, a corpse, the big reveal. A young son and a teenage daughter have found their father, his face eaten off, one of his arms missing, and they are sick with shock and fear. They hold each other, mouth reassurances, and it becomes apparent, though it is not spelled out, that these words have long ago become unfamiliar to them.

The scene cuts to a woman in her forties. I assume she is their mother. Someone is pursuing her through the run-down, deserted streets and alleys of a provincial British town by a figure or figures half-revealed.

Wait. This is a slasher film. I hate slasher films. Dennis knows I hate slasher films.

The shadowed pursuer is short, and wiry. A shot of a hand pressed against a wall shows long, filthy fingernails, bony knuckles. Another shot, a split-second, in close-up, depicts a long tongue running over wide, stained teeth.

The woman collapses at a corner. Her back is against the wall of an end terrace house. She looks over her shoulder, around the corner, up the street, listening for footsteps, her breath irregular, made in little yelps and gasps. The shot pans back. Behind her, from the alley, three stiff, hunched silhouettes approach under a streetlamp. She turns, sees them, tries to get to her feet, to run, trips, falls on her face, tries to crawl. Cut to her face and shoulders; something is pulling her backwards. She clutches at a lamp post. She screams. Blood from out of shot spatters the pavement around her. She stops screaming. Her eyes roll back into her head and she goes limp, falls on her face. Cut to a shot from above. The bottom half of her body is almost completely gone, a few bloody bones from the waist down.

Cut to the boy and the girl. They are in the kitchen, and they are arguing again. They do not know what to do. The girl is begging her brother to take a carving knife; he is near-hysterical. The boy runs to the lounge, tries to curl up behind the sofa. The girl chases him, sits on the floor beside him. She tries to calm him down, stops shouting, holds the boy tight, tells him, perhaps for the first time in a very long time, that she loves him, that everything will be all right.

The lights go out.

The girl holds her brother tight, and then slowly, they get up. She takes her brother’s hand, and tells him to be quiet. They advance to back of the house. They keep to the wall. The girl holds the knife out in front of her. They get to the back door. It is locked. The key is just there, across the kitchen. She puts her finger to her lips and smiles, and leaves the boy at the back door as she crosses the kitchen, walking around the wall of the room. She puts out her hand to get the key from its hook.

Something stiff and strangely apelike reaches down from above the cooker and grabs her, lifts her kicking and screaming from the floor and up out of shot. Cut to a close-up of the knife dropping to the kitchen floor and clattering, and drops of blood, first one or two and then great splatters, falling on it. The screams continue. The boy snaps and runs past the falling blood, back into the house, dives into the cupboard under the stairs, closes the door, curls into a ball.

Cut to his face, streaked with tears. He tries his absolute best to collect himself, not altogether successfully, and it is then we see something terrible dawn upon him. He is not breathing raggedly; the sound of panting continues. The camera pans up from his face. Behind him and above him we see a grinning maw, full of those broad stained, uneven teeth. They part. A long pointed tongue licks around a huge lipless mouth.

Cut again: a simple view of the cupboard door under the stairs, central on screen. The handle moves once, twice. Something inside bangs against the door. A brief scream, muffled. The lower right-hand panel of the door buckles suddenly from the inside with a single loud crack, like it had a smart impact from a sledgehammer, or if someone kicked it really, really hard. Then silence.

The credits roll over the shot of the door.

And I think, wait. The small smothered figures around me watch intently, silently as the names of actors I have never heard of roll up the screen and it fades to black. They have all moved slightly closer to the screen. I am no longer sure which one is Dennis. My eyes are so, so heavy. I am warm. I am not, I register with sleepy surprise, frightened. I nod off.

11

It is full morning and I am lying on the sofa with a crick in my neck. The plush upholstery is damp under my face, where I have drooled on it. Someone has draped a blanket over me.

The bay window faces south and slightly east, and although the curtains are closed, the room is filled with soft golden light. Dennis is sitting on the arm of the chair nearest the bay window. By the time I have seen him, he has turned away. He stands, steps to the side of the bay, pulls the cord. The curtains open with a sort of hiss.

Bright sunlight fills the room. Dennis approaches. I sit up, hand on the back of my neck, the thumb and index finger of my other hand on my eyelids. I put my hands on my knees, blink, squint into the light. Dennis stands almost in silhouette in front of me.

— Sleep well? he says.

I make a non-committal sort of noise. My eyes get used to the light. Dennis is not wearing his kerchief.

The lower half of Dennis’ face is wholly taken up by his grinning moon-on-its-side mouth, vast and wide, chipped teeth like piss-streaked gravestones. The gums are bordered by choppy scar tissue as if someone cut the lips off with a Stanley knife to make room for the mouth. A slightly raised area of reddish flesh, dotted with blackheads, sits where a nose should be. His eyes are perfectly round, sit under heavy, low brows, and are indeterminate in number: one, two, more, I can’t tell.

And Dennis’ voice.

— Cup of tea?

I screw up my eyes again, try to squeeze the picture out of my head, open them, look straight at him. Teeth. Eyes. Ruined flesh.

— Yes. That would be nice.

So we head to the kitchen, past the cupboard door with the wrecked panel, and we sit at the kitchen table, me and the old friend with the charnel mouth, and he makes me a cup of Earl Grey, and I am stiff and shivering and I am breathing irregularly with little yelps like I’m about to hyperventilate, or already am hyperventilating, only I haven’t realised that I am yet. He watches as my hands shake and I fight to raise the mug to my lips and drink, and I think I spill some, and Dennis show no sign that he has noticed. He watches with no drink of his own, hands clasped on the table, grinning, grinning, grinning.

And he says to me, after a time,

— It’s been really good to see you, Simon.

I put the mug down.

— Yeah. Thanks.

— I thought of you often.

— Yeah. I did, too. I realise that this is true.

— I used to count you as one of the best friends I had ever had. He sounds terribly sad. He grins. I was so glad when we caught up. It’s been great catching up. It has.

I nod. He clears his throat.

— It means a lot that you would come to visit me, he says.

And this makes no more sense than the face, but I know I should reply with yes, great, let’s do it again sometime, but I cannot, and it dawns on me that perhaps Dennis knows full well that I cannot, and that he approves of my honesty.

— You’re still one of my oldest and best friends. I hope you know that, he says.

I am facing the hall. I can see the door to the cupboard under the stairs.

— I think I do, I say. We have history, don’t we?

12

I shake his hand, which is cold and hard and lumpy and which has appallingly long nails. I do not offer to accompany him back to the train station, because I think I would be unable to keep from guessing what train he will take, and where it will go, and I don’t think that I could cope with that.

So we say goodbye, and although it has begun to drizzle, I ignore the bus stop, and I cross the still-silent Mumbles Road by the West Cross Inn, and walk along the esplanade and watch the tide come in and grow whiter and angrier. By the time I rejoin the main road a good hour later, I have to press the button on the Pelican crossing at the bottom of Brynmill Lane and wait for the green man because the road is too busy to cross without waiting.

And I walk up the hill, passing the usual traffic of young mums and hungover students and pensioners, and the seagulls and swans are in fine voice across the lake at Brynmill Park, angry and hungry and declaring they are alive, they are alive.

And I unlock the door, and pick up a letter for my wife from the bank and a Jiffy bag containing a Scott Walker CD I won off of eBay last week. And I sit in my lounge and let the cat come and sit by me, and I absent-mindedly stroke him, and I wonder what I am going to tell my wife, when she brings my young son home and asks me, how was your weekend?

“Dirty animals, those cats,” he said, pressing a .308 round into the Winchester rifle.

“I think that’s Grandma’s cat,” I said, but I didn’t think so, I knew so. She called it Monkeyface because its dark, mottled tortoiseshell head gave it a chimpy look.

“I know who’s cat that is.” He jacked the bolt forward. He rested the gun on the kitchen windowsill, handling the weapon gently like it was a carton of eggs. He peered through the scope. I could hear his beard stubble scratch against the texture of the rifle butt. “My mother has to learn that she should keep her filthy little shits to herself. They bring in parasites. What do I always say?”

I swallowed hard. “We don’t abide trespassers.”

“Goddamn right. You’re a good boy, Raymond.”

“Okay.” I didn’t know what else to say.

Pop sucked a little air in between his teeth, sniffed a snot back up into his nose, then pulled the trigger.

He wouldn’t let me wear ear-muffs whenever we went out shooting, said it was queer or stupid to wear those things. Of course, he was mostly deaf in one ear. When the shot rang out, I smelled the nose-burning sting of spent powder and my ears were left ringing. (Though I don’t know why they call it ringing, it was more like one of those tones they play to test your hearing in elementary school, except it doesn’t stop for hours.)

The shot missed the cat, but must’ve hit close by. The cat jumped like it had just been bitten on the ass by a little rat, and then lost its footing. Its legs went akimbo and it slid down the tin roof, claws on metal, making a vvviiiiiiip sound.

Followed by a thud.

Monkeyface hit the ground, and contrary to legend, the feline’s internal gyroscope didn’t allow it to land on all its feet. Well. It landed on its feet, I guess. It just didn’t land successfully.

“Scope needs adjusting,” Pop said. “Go get the cat.”

I just nodded, and did what I was told.

* * *

Three of the cat’s legs were broken. It wasn’t hard to tell, because they were bent at funny angles. The cat panted like a dog would, and made this low keening sound in the back of its throat.

“That is an ugly cat,” Pop said, chewing on a thumbnail.

He was right, but I wasn’t going to say so. I felt guilty just thinking it, because here this cat was cradled in my arms, crying and suffering. “What’re we going to do?”

“Set it up for target practice, probably. Nail it to a fence, maybe put up some Ginger Ale cans or beer bottles alongside it.” He scratched the bald spot at the back of his head. “You could go get your .22, I’ll bring the .308, maybe call your uncle see if he wants in.”

“I feel bad.”

“For the cat?” he asked, incredulous. He barely stifled a bitter laugh. “That’s your mother talking, God rest her soul forever and ever. I hear her voice come out of your mouth sometimes. She was a good woman, but you’re not a woman, remember that always.”

“Okay.”

“Still,” he said, pausing. “We could give it to Whats-His-Name, the salesman. See what he does with it.”

“Mr. Carlson,” I said, reminding Pop of his name.

“Right. Carlson. Sure. Take Monkeyface to Carlson.”

I looked down at the cat, who was moving his one good leg as if trying to set an example for the others.

“Okay,” I said.

* * *

Mr. Carlson didn’t look so good. His face was the color of paste, and his lips were chapped like they’d been rubbed with sand. He didn’t even seem to notice me coming at first, but when I got closer and flicked on the cellar light, he jerked his head up, eyes wide. He pulled at the shackle around his right wrist, almost like he forgot it was chaining him there.

“Little Raymond,” he mumbled. His lips pulled back in a mean smile, showing off yellow teeth. “Want to buy some encyclopedias?”

It was his joke, and I never laughed. That’s what he came to our house to do, sell his encyclopedias. Nobody bought those anymore, I said. What with the Internet and all. Pop said we didn’t need them (Pop said we didn’t need the Internet, either), and that the man was trespassing, and you know what he says about trespassers.

“No, sir,” I told him. “I have something for you.”

“What is it? Tell me.” He strained to see what I had in my arms. The smile vanished, and for a second he looked feral, worse than the meanest cat, even one that’s been shot at a bunch of times.

“It’s a cat named Monkeyface.”

“Why would I want a cat?

“I dunno. My Dad wanted me to give it to you, I guess to keep you company.” I shifted nervously from foot to foot.

Mr. Carlson hissed: “Did they get to have pets?” He jerked his head to indicate the other three bodies sitting against the wall. Two of them were all bones, by now, but the third still had a little meat on the skeleton. One of them was real estate agent. The other two were a Jehovah’s Witness and a UPS man that Pop said was trying to steal stuff from our garden. The room smelled bad, but I was used to it by now.

“No,” I said. “Do you need anything?”

“Please let me go,” he mewled.

“Can’t. Pop says trespassers have to learn their lesson. Maybe you want some water?”

“Water’ll just make me have to piss again.”

“I’m going to put the cat down now,” I said. “But don’t grab at me or anything, or Pop will have to take off your other foot.”

I think Mr. Carlson started crying, then.

I laid the broken cat down next to the salesman, and it tried to run away but just plopped down onto its three shattered legs and cried out.

“You two play nice,” I said, and I meant it. I felt bad for what they were going through, but Pop liked things a certain way around here, and I wasn’t going to argue with him.

I turned off the cellar light and went back upstairs. Hopefully, Pop wouldn’t be mad anymore. You just never knew. But I didn’t worry too badly. I was a good boy, and I didn’t abide trespassers either.

Snails don’t think much, on the whole.

Ooh, lettuce, thinks one, making for the vegetable patch. Could do with a bit of rain, thinks another, probing around on the dry stone path. Please don’t eat me, bird, thinks a third, as his antennae withdraw into his head and his head into his shell.

This one thinks, Damn, that’s it, then, as a footprint shadow obscures the light and everything goes darker. The snail shrinks back into his shell, waiting for the end. But the foot stops; hovers for a moment, moves to one side before setting down on the ground.

And pwic suddenly, the snail is plucked off the ground, leaving behind a frightened little smear of slime. And then it stops. The snail puts out an edge of its stomach-foot, and feels a reassuring green leaf. An antenna pops out, followed by the other. A voice, a big shape in different colours, and the taste of greenery.

The snail, of course, forgets what happens.

But he is not the only one watching.

2. She has a halo of sorts

— Today, thinks Rebecca, it will be All Right. I have a little bit of good karma.

She stops for a moment and looks at the iridescent slime that coats the snail’s body, the way the snail doesn’t so much move as flow, at the ridgy spiral of its shell, so solid and so fragile. She likes the way its little feelers move around. She’d almost think it was happy.

She finds the sight of a snail munching on the leaf of some weed inexplicably cheering.

— It’s the little things that keep you going, she says out loud to no one in particular. And she hoists her bag over her shoulder, and heads for the bus stop.

Thursdays aren’t normally a good day. But: Rebecca arrives in time for the bus and she gets a seat; she arrives at the Post in plenty of time; she manages to avoid the eye of the editor; the stories are, on the whole, interesting and not in need of terribly difficult amounts of subbing. And if no one in the office talks to her much, and no one remembers to invite her to the staff lunch, and no one pays any attention to the way that this morning, unbeknownst to her, her hair seems to have caught the spring sunlight and held on to it like some sort of halo, well, she doesn’t seem to mind.

You might almost think her blessed by some higher power.

3. Same time, same place

Friday, Rebecca, walking to work, sees a snail in the same place. She looks around, and satisfied that no one is watching, crouches, and says,

— Hello. Are you the snail I met yesterday?

The snail seems to stop eating, and its antennae almost seem to wave in her direction.

— You are, aren’t you? She pats her hair. Well, I had a nice day yesterday. I hope you have one too.

Rebecca is about to say something else, but someone walks past her, unexpectedly, and Rebecca blushes, and straightens her bag strap and pretends to be looking for something she dropped.

— See you, she whispers.

4. She dreams of snails

At dinner this evening, when Rebecca’s husband, Rob, asks her how her day was, she smiles, and says it was the absolute best it could have been, under the circumstances.

— I suppose that I’m in with the God of Snails, she says, tucking into her conchiglie bolognese (she cooked the pasta shaped like shells rather than the twisty stuff out of some sort of reflex action. It just seemed right).

Rob smiles; Rebecca has a talent for whimsy.

That night, she dreams of snails.

5. Superstitions and religions

The web of coincidences and happenstance defines us. We link all this stuff that happens in our heads, and imagine some sort of causal relationship. Superstitions come from this sort of thing, and sometimes religions.

For Rebecca, it’s something of a whimsical in-joke shared with her friends, a thing to laugh about, no more than that. She’s nice to the snails that live in her garden and on her street, and she has a good day. She doesn’t see a snail, or fails to say hello, and she gets shouted at by her boss or has to sub-edit stories about marrow-growing competitions in one of the other local papers.

Rebecca imagines the King of All Snails smiling down on her; in her head she pictures a benevolent Buddha-like figure with iridescent, bumpy skin, antennae and a huge shell on his back, sitting on a throne and sending good things down to her.

And now Rebecca has a baby coming, and her husband is solicitous and swells with pride, and she feels full of life and love, and slight misgivings about no longer being able to fit in any of her clothes.

Months pass. Rebecca says hello to the snails, and avoids stepping on them, and picks them up and puts them on luscious green leaves, and imagines them waving their little antennae in thanks. And life is sweet.

She sees a lot of snails these days, in her overgrown little back garden, in the street outside her house. It’s just a coincidence.

6. Pilgrims

Mondays, Rebecca doesn’t have to go to work. Her usual routine: she gets up late and does her hair, writes a couple of articles for her newspaper, and maybe meets a friend in the afternoon for a cup of tea. It’s all pretty civilised.

She’s not feeling so great this morning. The Bump is playing up a little. She woke up at six today, and never really got back to sleep. Still, she lies in bed and grunts a half-asleep goodbye as Rob heads out to work, and dozes in fits and starts until nearly ten.

The milk she pours on her Fruit’n’Fibre is on the turn, and she manages a mouthful before deciding that breakfast is not for her (she puts a hand on the Bump and whispers, Sorry). The rest of her breakfast goes in the composter, except that it’s full, so Rebecca has to find her slippers and dressing gown and go outside to empty it into the compost bin in the garden. And it’s raining.

Still, it has to be done. So she takes a deep breath and opens the kitchen door, to find hundreds of snails waiting patiently in columns and rows at her front door.

They regard her, standing there in her dressing gown and slippers, with no makeup, and messier-than-usual hair. Holding a green plastic composter. And Rebecca gets the strangest feeling, like there’s some great occasion, and she is terribly underdressed, like she feels in that recurring dream where she’s back at school and about to do exams, only she’s in her underwear.

The snails don’t seem to be particularly bothered. The front row extend their antennae towards her, and then shrink them back, bow their heads almost into their shells, and then, at their accustomed pace, turn and move to one side. The second row take their cue and move forward, and the rows behind them each take the place of the one in front.

Rebecca stares at this balletic manoeuvre for a whole ten minutes before clearing her throat.

— I’m terribly sorry, she says to the snails. Would you mind waiting for a while?

And she closes the door and steps inside.

— Right, she says.

She showers, dresses, puts on some lipstick and brushes her hair. As she’s leaving her bedroom, she hears a knock at the front door. The postman has brought her a small, awkwardly-shaped package.

She thanks the postie, and inside, opens the cube-shaped package. A box of the kind that might contain a ring. Except, flipping it open, she finds a gold chain and a large, heavy jewelled pendant, fashioned in some fabulously baroque and archaic way to resemble a snail’s shell. It must be someone else’s. No, that’s her name on the brown paper, written in what looks like old-fashioned fountain pen ink.

She holds the necklace in her hand, taking note of its weight, and wondering where it came from. No card or note came in the package. It seems somehow appropriate to put it on, however, and wearing her new acquisition she returns to the back door to find the snails waiting patiently for her.

— You’re going to stay here until you’re done, aren’t you? She says to the snails.

And so, she receives her visitors, row by row, as they show respect in the way that only snails can.

After an hour of this, Rebecca has to go — apologetically — and get a chair, because her back is killing her. But she comes back.

Rebecca doesn’t get bored. Long into the afternoon, she takes pleasure in the adulation of these creatures, taking note of the unique ways each one moves, the variations in swirls and colours on a snail’s shell.

She doesn’t tell anyone about it. Not the friend she talks with that afternoon, not Rob, not her mum who calls for a chat and a lecture about what she’s got coming when the baby comes. Not because they won’t believe her, although they won’t.

But because this is her time, her special time. It’s her secret.

7. She counts snails

She finds it hard to sleep; as Rob lies beside her on his back, breathing gently, she stares into the dark. And she does not sleep. She closes her eyes and sees the snails, and pictures the snail-pendant that sits hidden in her shoulder-bag.

She’s at the cusp of something. Something must begin soon.

She decides that if she’s going to picture snails, she might as well do something about it. So she counts them. Like you’d count sheep. Only more slowly.

And she drifts away to sleep…

And wakes, she’s wide awake, aware of an odd lettuce-green light that bathes the room, shining through the front window of her house.

She sits up, rubbing her back, expecting the light to fade, half-believing it to be some visual left-over from sleep. But it’s bright and real, and so she looks out of the window, and nothing is there.

She says out loud, That’s odd.

She sits down on the side of the bed and looks at the window. And then she sees the King of All Snails, fat and shiny and smiling, sitting on the windowsill, a snail-trail leading up the window, out through the gap where it’s open, down the other side and presumably down the wall to the street. He’s about a foot-and-a-half in height.

Rebecca opens her mouth, closes it, opens it again, closes it, runs her hand through her hair, and says,

— I thought you’d be a bit bigger.

— Oh, I’m big enough. The King of All Snails shrugs and extends his eye-stalks. Aren’t you going to ask why I’m here?

— Um. It had crossed my mind. But I thought it would be a bit rude to ask.

— Quite so. The King of All Snails beams and settles somewhat, his mushy snail-flesh bulk rippling under his white robe.

— Should I be standing?

— No, no. If anything, I should be showing respect for you.

— How so?

— I love you.

Rebecca doesn’t know where to put herself. She reaches around with her right hand, as if trying to locate something like a pen or a lipstick with which she can fiddle.

— Oh. I- I mean, that’s lovely. But —

— No, no. I’m a snail. That sort of thing is out of the question. Besides, we don’t do it like —

She cuts him short.

— What is it like, then?

— I love you because you are extravagantly kind and generous to even the lowest of us, and because you are bright and funny and because you do not take yourself seriously. I love you because you are beautiful, because you are aware of how that life inside you reflects that beauty and extends it to more than one human life. He warms to his subject, extends pudgy snail-flesh hands in an attitude of blessing. I love you, he says, because you are my friend.

Rebecca doesn’t know what to say.

— I don’t know what to say, she says.

— Be my priestess.

— Sorry?

— My priestess.

The King of All Snails explains that the last of his priesthood died out a long time ago. He is unloved, and unremarked. When small gods need a friend, he says, what they really want is a little bit of worship.

In some stories, this would take on a sinister bent; perhaps the King of All Snails would ask for human sacrifice, or perhaps slowly, he would insidiously turn Rebecca into a snail, or perhaps he would infest the region with carnivorous gastropods. This is not one of those stories.

And Rebecca, feeling that she knows this in the way that you know things when you are having a dream, is about to accept when something occurs to her.

— But I made you up, she says.

— Maybe. He shrugs his eyestalks, which shorten somewhat. So how about it?

— Well, I have this contract at work which, erm, cracks down on moonlighting. You know But I’m going on maternity soon. And they don’t have to know. And I don’t think I really want to go back after Bump is born… She bites her lip. Oh, go on, then.

The King of All Snails expands and the lettuce-green glow intensifies.

— You won’t regret it. Thank you. I’ll let you get on. He gives a malleable flourish, and turns, flowing up the window and down the other side. Rebecca watches him go.

She doesn’t go back to sleep.

8. Lettuce leaf sacrifice

Dreams usually depend on going back to sleep, or waking up, don’t they?

Rebecca reminds herself of that, even as she regrets giving up caffeine. She just about manages the hoovering, and is dozing in an armchair when the postman thumps the door again, asks her to sign for a sizeable package.

In a box covered with silvery spiral designs, Rebecca finds a lovely green silk robe, with the same spirals embroidered all over it in gold, and a headdress made of gold, designed to look like snail antennae. And a little instruction book, bound in lovely hand-made paper, painted in thousands of little spiral swirls.

Which is why, when no one is looking, she wears her priestly (priest-ess-ly?) regalia and with great ceremony, sacrifices a lettuce leaf in her back garden, and will do nearly every day until her baby is born, happy and healthy, and ready to receive every bit of love she has.

The snails won’t mind one bit. Snails don’t think much, on the whole.

On my way to work I drive down past Ashbrook Lane. I go past that little yellow real estate office with the guy out front dressed like a dollar sign. I pass by the party supply store and the Pet Palace.

Somewhere along the way, every day, I see this guy. Something isn’t right with this guy. He’s maybe sick or got some other problem. He wears a pair of jeans all torn up and fringy at the bottom. Even now, with that October cold coming in, he wears a flannel shirt, unbuttoned, a gray-belly paunch sticking out.

Every day, I catch him before he makes it to the China Skillet, that little fast-foody, can’t-sit-down joint with the greasy Tso’s chicken. I wait in the alley between China Skillet and the Kinko’s clone. The guy passes by me, and I drag him into the alleyway, and I beat him with a tire iron. Sometimes, I stab him with a kitchen knife.

I do this every day.

I think it’s starting to affect me.

2.

It was two Tuesdays ago that Mary asked me if I was doing okay. I told her I was.

“You don’t look so good,” she said.

“I feel fine.”

“I had to wash your pants again.” She sounded a little annoyed. Sometimes, when I destroy the guy, he gets stuff on me. Yellow stuff. Kind of like butterscotch pudding, but with veins of red in it.

“I know. I tried to wipe it off, but…”

“And it’s just mud?”

“Just mud,” I said. “The parking lot at work is falling apart, and they won’t pay to fix it. It’s muddy. I step in mud.”

And she left it at that, but I caught her looking at me strange a few times before bed.

3.

It’s maybe like that movie with Bill Murray and the groundhog. Not the golf one. The other one.

He’s out there again.

I catch him at the mouth of the alley and drag him in. The dumpster smells like rotten garlic and ginger.

“Guh!” he says to me. He can’t talk. He opens his fishy mouth and clacks those moldy chompers at me.

I kick him in the knee and the cap pops like rotten wood. The leg folds backward and he topples. I hit him in the head with the tire iron. It’s easier than squashing a pumpkin.

4.

I watch TV every night – Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, and the news. I always wait for the news to say something about this guy. But nobody ever does. I don’t think people can even see what I’m doing. He passes them by and they don’t look at him. They walk right by the alley as I beat him or cut him into pieces and leave him there. The first few times, I moved the parts. But that was too messy. Plus, they’re usually gone by the next day anyway.

Nobody cares.

“What’s this?” Mary asks.

I look up and find her holding a sandwich baggy. In it is a sandwich. My sandwich.

“Oh,” I say.

“You didn’t eat it?”

“Guess not.”

“It’s ham and swiss. Why didn’t you eat it?”

“Wasn’t hungry.”

I wonder if the guy would eat the sandwich. I consider trying to feed it to him the next day, but I just end up cutting his head off with a camper hatchet.

5.

I decide not to drag him into the alley. Instead, I beat him into a paste right out on the sidewalk. I step on his hand, and it doesn’t crunch as hard as it should. Bones should crunch. This just feels like Styrofoam peanuts in a sock full of jelly.

People move around us, like we’re doing construction work or something.

6.

“You missed work,” Mary says.

“No, I went,” I say. I can’t really remember going. But I know I went. It was part of my routine. Work was part of me.

“They called looking for you. Where’d you go today?”

“I don’t know.” Shit. This wasn’t good.

“This isn’t good,” she says, echoing my brain.

“I’ll go tomorrow.”

7.

I don’t go to work the next day.

It’s weird. I do my business with the guy. I just use my hands this time and it’s not really that effective. It works, but it’s too much trouble to pull him apart like that. He just keeps wanting to move away from me, even when I’m grabbing handfuls of gut flesh and just pulling it away from him like it was moist pot roast.

And then I stay in the alley.

I don’t go to my car.

I don’t go to work.

An hour later, the guy shows up again. He looks the same. Purpled tongue jutting from gray lips. Sores all over. Same drunken stagger, same throat-buried grunts and groans.

And I slam his head in the dumpster. It pops off and lands on a bed of rancid bok choy.

8.

Mary cries when I get home. The sun is coming up. She’s weeping and beating my chest, then she’s hugging me and asking me where I’ve been. I just move past her and get out the set of golf clubs from the bedroom closet.

She says something about me being gone for days, but I know that’s not possible. Mary is maybe a little crazy sometimes.

9.

I sit in the driver’s side, and I think about the guy for a little while. Who is he? Why does he do this every day? He’s fallen into such an awful routine. How did he get this way? How does he keep coming back?

For a little while, I think maybe about asking him these questions. It’s rare that I give him any chance to say anything at all. Maybe I should, I think. Maybe I need to give him the opportunity to explain himself. I look over at the passenger side and see several baggies of sandwiches sitting there. On half of them, the bread is green. Could be the guy is hungry. I itch a sore on my hand and lick it. It tastes funky, but it isn’t the worst. Mary’s right. I don’t look so good.

This time, I decide I’m going to ask him what’s up. I’m going to talk to this guy, find out everything I need to know. And I’m going to give him a sandwich.

As I think this, I go to my trunk and get out a nine-iron. I leave the sandwiches behind.

© Chuck Wendig 2009

“Breakfast,” he reminded himself, and focused his eyes on the treats inside the box.

His bleary gaze scanned over the options. Captain’s Wafer crackers? Probably a good idea given the pulsing hangover that lived in his brain and gut, but the idea of dry carbs just wasn’t doing it for him. Pretzels? Meh. He’d rather eat a handful of sand.

Wait. Oh yeah, there it was. Chocolate.

Damn yeah.

A yellow wrapper caught his attention. Top right corner of the machine.

Flix Bar.

He’d never had one. Never heard of one, actually.

Blinking, he popped his quarters into the slot, and punched the code. The metal coil uncoiled, sending the bar plummeting to the bottom with a bang.

<*>

Donnie watched the farm report – well, the farm report was on, but who really watches the farm report? – and examined the Flix Bar.

Yellow wrapper, as noted. “Flix Bar” written in blue letters bordered by pink. A little green thing, some kind of alien by the look of it, held up a pair of delighted jazz-hands next to the logo. Big smile, too, on that alien. Purple teeth grinning.

He tore the bar open.

Inside, a dark chocolate brick.

He smelled it. Strong cocoa smell. Or cacao. Or whatever.

Using his front teeth like a rabbit, he bit the end off the candy bar. The taste of honey hit his tongue. Some kind of sweet syrup – not quite caramel, definitely not nougat – connected with the roof of his mouth and he had to lick it off.

“Oh, man,” he mumbled through the sweetness, “that’s good.”

The texture was just right, too. Soft chocolate, wet honey-goo, crunchy flake wafer. He picked a gobbet of candy from a back molar, savoring it, then glanced at the alarm clock next to the bed. Donnie had to move a half-empty bottle of tequila and a pair of dirty socks to see it.

“Ah, crap.”

He was going to be late for work. Again.

<*>

That didn’t stop him from grabbing two more Flix Bars from the machine on the way out, of course.

<*>

Bob Horkin, with his smashed-flat nose and puckered butthole eyes, came over and dropped a stack of pink forms in front of Donnie.

“Late again,” Horkin said, sniffing, snorting, gloating.

Donnie rubbed his temples with his thumbs. His head throbbed.

“Mm,” he answered, squinting.

“Tie one on last night?”

Donnie mustered a nod.

“How long’s it been now?” Horkin asked.

“How’s long’s it been since what, Bob?”

“C’mon, Donnie. Since Tracy left you.”

“Week. And one day. Thanks for your sensitivity, by the way.”

Horkin shrugged. “You really knock her up? That why she left?”

“Bug off, Horkin.”

“You gonna get those forms filled out today?”

Donnie gritted his teeth. The guy’s voice was like sandpaper on his frontal lobe. “Didn’t I just say to bug off? Bug off. Shoo.”

“Gimme one of those Flix Bars, and I’ll leave.”

Next to the mountain of pink forms, and only a few inches from the leaning tower of blue forms, sat the two Flix Bars he’d purchased earlier.

“You like Flix Bars?” Donnie asked.

“Always have.”

“Then, no, you can’t have one. Go away.”

Horkin made some exhalation of disgust – a pfah! sound – and marched off. Donnie didn’t need him as a friend. Denying that man pleasure was the only measure of satisfaction he could muster. To bring up Tracy? Low. His heart hurt just thinking about her. Like someone had tied a boat anchor to it, and the weight was dragging it into his guts. He didn’t deserve this. Maybe he deserved the hangover, sure. But not the heartache.

“One of those candy bars for me, man?”

Donnie looked behind him, found Tabor bringing the mail cart with the one squeaky, epileptic wheel. Tabor was huge, hunkered over that cart like Godzilla playing pinball. The fact that the cart was painted white and Tabor was about the darkest shade of black outside of a midnight sky during a lunar eclipse, it only enhanced the visual.

“As a matter of fact,” Donnie said, “it is.” And it was, too, no lie. He tossed a Flix Bar back, and Tabor caught it in the palm of one tennis racket hand.

Tabor pulled up an empty chair.

“How you holding up, brother?” he asked.

“Yeah, let’s not talk about that.”

The big dude’s lips formed a surprised ‘o.’

“What?” Donnie asked.

“It’s your breath, man. You don’t need to tell me how you’re doing, because your breath tell the whole damn story. Smells like someone poured tequila on a dead possum and shoved it in your mouth to pickle for a couple days, maybe weeks.”

“I drank some.”

“Some?”

“Most. All. Just eat your Flix Bar.”

Tabor crumpled the wrapper, shot it at a wastebasket and missed. Shrugging, he bit his candy bar in half. It formed a swollen lump in his cheek as he chewed.

“Like it?” Donnie said. “I figured you might wanna try one.”

“Try one? I love these things.”

“Oh, you had one before? This was my first.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Yeah, right what? I’ve never had a Flix Bar before.”

“Who hasn’t had a Flix Bar? That’s like someone saying they’ve never had a can of Coke or a Big Mac. You living in a cave in Afghanistan or something?”

“Shut up, I’ve never even seen one of these before.”

Tabor pitched the second half of the Flix Bar into his maw and chomped away. He waved a dismissive hand at Donnie. “Whatever, man. You’re still drunk, that’s what I’m hearing you say.” He stood up, swung the chair back under an empty cubicle desk. “Never had a Flix Bar before, my ass. I’ll see you later, Donnie. Stay sane, brother.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m fine.”

“Fine. Uh-huh.”

<*>

It was a curious thing, how alcohol cured a hangover. It’d be like if getting punched in the face a second time helped the pain of the first.

He couldn’t do tequila, though, so tonight it was cheap wine. Tasted like fake strawberry. Came in a box. Perfect.

“I’m going to rot my teeth out of my head,” he said to himself as he unwrapped another Flix Bar.

He started to crumple the wrapper, but then uncrumpled it.

On the back, he read: “Made by Perigree!”

Never heard of them, either. Must be a new company, he figured.

As he licked smears of chocolate from the corners of his mouth and the flats of his front teeth, Donnie thought about Tracy. It was hard not to, which was what the wine was for – to smother those thoughts beneath pillows (of rock salt and sackcloth). Drowning was probably the better metaphor, but Donnie didn’t much care.

He wondered aloud what she was going to name the kid.

“Boy or a girl?” he asked nobody. Appropriately, nobody answered.

Stupid kid. Stupid Tracy, wanting to have a kid.

“I’m not stupid.” He licked his lips and reached for the remote. “I’m smart.”

<*>

The fruity wine, now half-empty, was starting to gross Donnie out. The sweet candy treats – four Flix Bars by this point, he was going to have the worst case of acne – weren’t helping. He wanted something salty. Maybe pretzels, even though, you know, blah, yuck. Instead, he just sat propped up against the headboard of the bed, flicking through channels, feeling queasy.

Buzzing past a channel, he caught a glimpse of something.

Green alien. Purple teeth.

Waggling jazz-hands.

He flicked back.

“—proud to announce the 50^th Anniversary Flix Bar! Inside every special edition Flix Bar is a secret code! Text message the code to this number –“

Sure enough, a number flashed on the screen below the dancing alien.

“—and Flixy the Moon Alien might call you back to tell you you’re a winner!”

“What do I win?” Donnie asked the television. Being half-drunk and three-quarters queasy, he believed that the television could probably hear him. He was not disappointed. The screen erupted in colors. The alien put a few new moves into his dancing: a little disco spice, a dash of Travolta, a pinch of roller rink panache. It made Donnie dizzy just watching it.

“You win a lifetime supply of Flix Bars!”

“Ugh.” His stomach roiled at the thought.

Wait.

The 50^th Anniversary?

“I call bullshit!” Donnie stammered.

No way this stupid candy bar had been around for fifty years. It couldn’t have been around for five years, much less fifty.

“Screw you, Flixy! Moon Alien bastard!”

Donnie pitched the remote at the television. It caught the corner, and spun upwards in an erratic mid-air pirouette. It hit the wall and exploded into many pieces.

“Serves you right, remote control.”

Sometime soon after, Donnie found himself in the bathroom, throwing up.

Sometime soon after that, Donnie passed out in the tub.

<*>

His head was ringing.

No. Wait. Phone.

A phone was ringing.

Somehow, he managed to crawl out of the tub and slug himself to the nightstand by the bed. The alarm clock told him it was just past two in the morning.

He answered the phone.

“Guh,” he said.

“Donnie.”

“Tracy,” he said, surprised. His mouth turned to cotton. He felt suddenly very awake, very sober. “How’d you –?”

“Find you? Tabor gave me the motel name.”

“Oh.” She sounded like she’d been crying. “Have you been crying?”

She sniffed. “I did it.”

“What? Did what?”

“I had an abortion.”

Silence. Crickets. Tumbleweeds.

“Well, that’s good, right?” he asked, finally.

She didn’t say anything. Just another sniff.

“Now we can get back together,” he said. It was true. Wasn’t it? Couldn’t they? No baby to drag them down? No sudden pressure to get married, raise a litter?

She said nothing. Nada. Just her, breathing. Just transmissible grief.

“Babe –“ he tried.

“It’s over,” she said. “We’re done. I just wanted – I just needed you to know.”

“Trace –“

Click.

He tried calling her back.

Went straight to voicemail.

“Guh,” he said, and curled up in a ball.

<*>

At work, everything hurt. The fluorescent light pried open his eyes like a demon with hands of white fire. The demon tore open his eyelids and kicked him in the pupil repeatedly. His mouth tasted of brine-soaked gym socks. His lips were dry like balsa wood.

Everyone was looking at him. Eyes peered over cubicle walls. Whispers and murmurs drifted around; he caught his name, periodically.

Even Horkin seemed suddenly sensitive.

The pig-faced jerk brought by another ream of forms to add to the still-existing pile resting on Donnie’s desk.

His beady stare drifted up and down Donnie, then he laughed, all nervous-like.

“You probably don’t need these, right now,” Horkin said. He picked the forms back up.

“Your voice sounds like hammers,” Donnie said.

“I’ll bring these back later,” Bob said, retreating.

Sometime later, Tabor came up behind him, rested one of those hamhock hands on Donnie’s shoulders (though in his defense, it was as gentle a touch as Donnie had felt, almost as if Donnie would break into little fragments if he wasn’t handled with the uttermost gingerness).

“Lunch time, man,” Tabor said.

“Not hungry,” Donnie managed.

“I think we need to go out somewhere. Right now.”

“Can’t. Work to do.” Not that he was doing it. Stupid work.

“Donnie?”

“Tabor.”

“You know you’re wearing sweatpants? And a robe? No shirt?”

It was news to him. He looked down. Sure enough, gray pair of sweatpants (with a few chocolate stains on the thighs, thankfully upfront and not behind him), ratty hotel robe, and – whoops – no shirt. Sweat beaded in his meager chest hairs.

“Huh,” Donnie said. “Uh-oh.”

<*>

It was a gray day outside, bleak and bleary and with clouds that looked like hairballs bobbing across the steely expanse. Tabor drove – a hatchback Honda far too small for his hulking musculature – and Donnie sat in the passenger side, lying against the seatbelt strap, moaning.

Tabor wanted to talk. He was friends with both Donnie and Tracy, he said. Wanted to help everybody.

“Then help us get back together,” Donnie said.

“Don’t work like that, dude. Abortion’s some rough stuff.”

“So she told you.”

Tabor paused. “Yeah. She told me.”

“She regrets it,” Donnie said. “I heard it in her voice.”

“Do you regret it?”

“No.” Lie. Big lie. Gigantor lie with crushing feet. “Yes. I don’t know.”

“I’m hungry,” Tabor said.

“Super. I’m sitting here, my head feeling like a rotten pumpkin filled with bees, and I’m pouring my heart out – in a conversation you started, by the by – and now you don’t care and just want to eat.” Donnie closed his eyes and breathed loudly. “Fee Fie Fo Fum, Tabor smells the blood of an English-mun.”

Tabor rolled his eyes. “Man, don’t be that way. Listen, you want to keep talking, then we need to eat. It’s lunch time. I got blood sugar issues.”

“Fine. Fine.”

“Where you wanna go?”

“Not hungry. Don’t care.”

Tabor waved a hand. “You gotta eat something. When’s the last time you ate?”

“Last night. Flix bars and boxed wine.”

“Oh, you a health nut, now.”

“Don’t mock me.”

Tabor started rattling off restaurants – local joints, chain places, fast food.

“Fast food,” Donnie said. He needed some grease to hold his body together.

“Where?”

“Burger King. I think I want Burger King.”

“The hell is Burger King?”

“What?”

“You deaf?” Tabor enunciated every word: “What. Is. Burger. King?”

Donnie felt his pulse quicken. He didn’t need this kind of nonsense. His head was fragile already, a Faberge egg held together with spit and masking tape. Tabor, his best friend – and without Tracy, his only friend – was turning against him, toying with his tender brainmeats.

“Shut up!” Donnie barked. “You damn well know what a, a, a Burger King is! It’s the place! Where the – the King of Burgers lives! Golden crown? Kind of a gay beard? Big smile? The BK Broiler? Jesus!” He pounded the dashboard with the flat of his hand to enunciate how little he wished to be messed with right now.

“You need to settle down, man. I seriously don’t know what you’re talking about, I am not making this up. Tell me. Is there a Burger King nearby?”

Teeth clenched. He was thisclose to screeching like an attacking raptor and pouncing on Tabor with beak and talon (or at least unbrushed teeth and sweaty palms). He sucked in a deep breath. “Burger King. Corner of Redstone and Spring Market. By the entrance ramp to the bypass.”

Tabor frowned. Waited. “Oooookay.”

“Okay what? What’s the frown for?”

“That’s not a Burger King.”

“It’s not a – well, then, what is it?”

“Man, that’s the Burrito Hut.”

<*>

“The Burrito Hut,” Donnie read the sign.

It’s what the sign said. A slim burrito arch – the giant tortilla dripping fake hot sauce, beans, meat chunks, and for some goddamn reason the giant tortilla had big googly eyes – framed the words.

It wasn’t new, either. The Hut looked weathered. Its purple walls were fading, pocked; someone had sprayed graffiti on the back dumpster. Place was busy, though. Cars lined up in the drive-thru. Parking lot at least half full, and through the glare on the outside window Donnie could see people agglomerating at the counter.

“This used to be a Burger King,” Donnie said. “Like, yesterday.”

Tabor blinked. Eyes narrowed to concerned slits.

“It’s been here forever, you say?” Donnie asked.

Tabor nodded. “Yeah, dude. I eat here all the time. Their Shimmy-Chimi is pretty much the best damn thing since cable television.”

“And you love Flix Bars.”

“You know it.”

“And you’ve never heard of a Burger King.”

Tabor held up his hands like a Vegas dealer, slapped them together as if to show that he wasn’t cheating. “Never, not once.”

“I gotta go,” Donnie said, suddenly.

“I gotta eat,” Tabor countered.

Abruptly, Donnie left the idling car and ran. Somewhere behind him, Tabor’s voice called after him, but it was lost, forgotten. He didn’t know where he was running, or even why, but there was the distinct feeling that something was both chasing him, and he was chasing something.

<*>

That night, Donnie found himself back at the motel room. His legs burned and itched from all the running. He hadn’t stopped running since he took off out of Tabor’s car, which was easily six hours ago. His robe was soaked with sweat. His sweat pants were soaked with sweat, too, though arguably that was their purpose, you know, hence the name.

He looked in the mirror of the bathroom, barely recognized himself.

Bloodshot eyes. Gaunt face. Mouth frozen in a slightly-horrified rictus.

He was seeing things, too. All during the run, he felt a presence behind him. His peripheral vision caught sight of something, too, like a shape running alongside of him, watching him from behind hedgerows and trashcans. The shadow wasn’t a big thing, no larger than a dog or a dwarf. A midget, maybe. Maybe he was being chased by a midget. A ninja midget. Shit. That didn’t make any sense.

His stomach growled.

“Shut up,” he told it.

He considered going back and filling his gut with more booze. A bottle of whiskey sat atop the television. He decided it would be a bad idea. A profoundly bad idea. He did it anyway.

Lips on bottle, hot Irish fire charbroiling his esophagus.

He pulled away from the bottle such a sucking foomp, and set it back atop the TV.

Then he noticed.

Jack Kenny Whiskey. Blue Label, it said.

Donnie blinked.

There was no such thing as Jack Kenny Whiskey.

And yet, here it was. He’d just had some. It wasn’t far from a trashcan filled with Flix Bar wrappers, and Flix Bar didn’t exist, either. And Burrito Hut, about five miles away. Goddamn Burrito Hut.

That’s where he’d go. Burrito Hut.

“But I just came from there,” Donnie explained to himself.

Didn’t matter. Here, he couldn’t ask any questions of a pile of Flix Bar wrappers or a neck-empty bottle of so-called Jack Kenny Whiskey. At Burrito Hut, though, he could get to the bottom of things. He could ask some questions. Find what they did with Burger King. Was it drugs? In the water supply? A conspiracy was afoot.

He took a few quick deep breaths, slapped his legs to get the blood moving, then broke into another crazy marathoner run out the door, back to Burrito Hut.

<*>

Public drunkenness, they called it.

Which wasn’t fair, not really. Donnie wasn’t drunk. Any of the lingering buzz from the not-really-real Jack Kenny Whiskey had long since faded when he ran through the front doors of the Burrito Hut.

The bars of the holding cell were surprisingly warm. The whole place, with its cement walls painted banana-colored, and its metal toilet, was actually pretty damn humid. Moisture glistened on the walls. When they threw him in here, alone, the one lady cop told him that the air conditioning was busted.

He took a deep breath. What he’d seen in the Burrito Hut, what he’d glimpsed –

Everything seemed normal, at first. Late lunchers, lining up at the counter. A pair of Hispanics in front of him, and in front of them, a little girl in a side-sprouting pony-tail with her mother busily thumbing numbers into her Blackberry (probably text messaging Flixy the Moon Alien, Donnie thought at the time, a thought that would later become alarming relevant). Manning the single-register counter was a rubicund, fat-cheeked teen with a purple paper hat.

Donnie didn’t know what he was expecting. He had no script. He felt sick inside. The fast food joint had felt constraining, like it was closing in on him.

He got to the counter, and let fly.

What he said, he didn’t precisely remember. Something about Flix Bars. Something about conspiracies. Maybe even something about Tracy. The smell that drifted from the kitchen was a mix of sharp spices and potted meat, a tangy (too tangy, really, to be appetizing) conglomeration of the two.

In mid-rant, that’s when he’d seen it.

Behind some kind of massive pressure-cooker – some stainless steel thing with a line of dried refried beans crusted to its side – Donnie saw movement.

It was a shimmering shape, unreal, a specter. Like those blurry shots of Bigfoot or any lake monster, the details were imperfect, almost incomprehensible. A swath of green flashed against a half-moon slice of purple. Movement like fly-wings buzzing, too fast, too strange. And then it was gone again, blinking out of existence. The cooker continued to bubble and steam.

Donnie freaked.

By his recollection, he did a lot of wild gesticulating.

Maaaaybe some yelling.

Not impossible that he said something about aliens, and then spit on the register.

Mistakes were made.

Worst of all, he hadn’t noticed the police officer that had come in soon after he did and was waiting two people behind him.

And now, here. Jail. Holding cell. Shit.

<*>

His one phone call, made to Tracy.

It was probably a mistake. He should’ve called Tabor. But while it was irrational, it felt like Tabor was part of whatever was happening. Tabor loved Flix Bars. Tabor couldn’t get enough of Burrito Hut. Tabor probably bathed in a swimming pool filled with warm Jack Kenny Whiskey.

Donnie asked Tracy to post bail.

“I don’t know, Donnie. It’s a lot of money.”

“You only need part of it. You could sell my old Monkees LPs. They’re worth something. The comic books, too. Even the toys! I’ve got a lot of toys.”

“I can’t see you right now, Donnie.”

“Tracy, please, I’m in jail.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

Desperate gambit time. “I love you.”

“I know,” she said.

“That’s it? You know?”

“I have to go.”

“But – wait! Tell Tabor! He’ll help! Send Tabor!”

It was too late. She’d already hung up.

Behind the sound of the dial tone, Donnie thought he heard a baby crying.

And then they were pulling him away from the phone, and the sound was gone.

<*>

Things got weird around midnight.

Donnie was half-asleep on the cot in the cell’s corner, trying to shut out the light (the cops informed him that the lights never shut off, not even at night). He was caught in the throes of half-dreams to go with his half-sleep. Shadows of Tracy visited him, but every time she went to talk he heard a baby squalling somewhere and her words were lost. Something about how it was too late, too late, if only. Tabor the Giant came along with his squeaky white cart, except he was easily twice his normal size, and in these partial dreams he kept picking Donnie up and shoving him in the cart, murmuring something about a “mail call.” Sometimes, Donnie felt the taste of a Flix Bar in his mouth, or the burn of Jack Kenny Whiskey down his throat, or the sickly sweet scent of Grade-E-but-Edible Tex-Mex fiesta meat from the diabolical Burrito Hut. Other sensations visited him, too, ones he couldn’t explain: the nasal tang of an unknown perfume, tinny electro-pop music like which he’d never heard, the mysterious taste of a falafel (he was certain it was a falafel, though he’d never eaten, or frankly seen, a falafel before).

And then he saw them.

Moon Aliens, like Flixy.

Seven of them.

Except they weren’t cartoons – he caught a glimpse of pinched reptilian flesh, and white fangs stained with grape-colored smears – and they came at him, hands reaching, stubby fingers wagging in the humid jail cell heat, and they shimmered as if seen behind a gauzy haze of heat rising off a blistering highway–

And Donnie wondered when this dream would move on and give way toward something even stranger.

But the dream did not move on.

Green hands that smelled of metal and chocolate covered his face.

He tried to cry out.

The lights went out.

And that’s when things got really weird.

<*>

Lights coruscated all around him. Each flash felt like it cut straight to his cerebral cortex, burning an image into his brain.

He saw flying babies zip past him. Cherubic grins. Fat faces. Curious hands reaching for him as they zoomed by.

His guts felt like taffy.

And it felt like someone was trying to pull that gut-taffy out of his body through his mouth, ears, and anus.

Then – a pop sound, preceded by a faint sucking noise, like the one Donnie’s lips made when he pried them free of the Jack Kenny bottle.

All was dark, at least for a little while.

<*>

“Some people do not react well to change.”

Donnie lurched upright. His head swam, vision dipped.

The room was long, narrow, with walls of steel and a faint blue light suffused throughout. At the margins of the room, Donnie saw several of the Moon Aliens shuffling back and forth, grunting like piglets with slop in their mouths and noses. The Flixies chattered back and forth, sometimes clacking their empurpled teeth.

At the far end of the room – the end Donnie sat facing – was a pull-down screen. At the other end of the room blinked the winking eye of a projector.

Projected on the screen was an image Donnie couldn’t quite parse.

It seemed to be a generic gray and black 9-Volt battery with a pair of googly eyes, like the ones glued to a cheap arts-and-crafts doll. The fake eyes looked this way, and that.

“I’m on drugs,” Donnie whispered.

“You’re not on drugs,” the battery said. He knew the battery said it because with each word – each syllable, really – the battery pulsed with white light.

“You’re a battery.”

“I am merely an image you would understand. Were I to show you my true form, your human mind would explode into a thousand personalities and leave you wailing in a pile of your own fetid mess.”
Gently, Donnie stood.

“I’ve lost my mind,” he said.

“You’ve not lost your mind,” the battery asserted.

The Flixies chuffed and snorted in what might have been agreement.

One of them casually ate what appeared to be a chimichanga. Another displayed its beckoning jazz hands.

“That’s a chimichanga,” Donnie said, wide-eyed.

“Yes,” the battery confirmed.

The room was silent for a little while, except for the snorfling breathing of the two dozen or so Flixies shifting from one stubby green foot to another.

Swallowing hard, Donnie said: “A little help here? If I’m not high, and I’m not crazy, then –?”

“As I said, some people do not react well to change. These people – like you — are the ones who cannot properly compute the dimensional shifts.”

“Dimensional shifts.”

“Yes,” the battery said. “The subtle alterations to the fabric of your reality are performed through delicate dimensional shifts. Ninety-nine percent of people accept these changes without thought or concern.”

“And I’m part of the one percent?”

“Yes.”

Silence again as Donnie regarded the googly-eyed battery. The battery may have regarded him in return, but it was hard to tell, what with the googly-eyes and all.

Suddenly, Donnie snapped his fingers. “Flix Bars! I bet they’re part of the subtle alterations of dimensional, you know, whatever. Right?”

“Yes. Flix Bars, Burrito Hut, Jack Kenny Whiskey, Ganymede Electronics, Vaginex Creams, Lung Sui-Wu Cookery Sets, Cowboy Tom’s Microwave Falaf –“

“Okay, okay, you can stop. All those products are now in our dimension? And they weren’t before?”

“Yes, but not just your dimension. We established a product roll-out covering four hundred Earth-based dimensions, as pioneered by the Perigree Corporation, which is owned by the Jimza Conglomerate, which is owned by the Meiner-Schiften People, which is owned by –“

“All right!” Donnie barked. “This is a little much for me to handle.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine. Why are these products now in our dimension?”

“Money. More dimensions means more sales. More sales, higher stock.”

“I’d like to just go home, now,” Donnie said, and it was true. He didn’t feel well. He was dressed in a robe in some alien ship or dimensional box, and he really didn’t belong here. He said as much to the battery.

“No,” the battery pulsed. “I’m afraid we have to destroy you.”

“But –!”

“What we’re doing goes against the Quantum Code as established by Earth Seven in the Year of the Dragon, 1976. We cannot have you blowing the whistle.”

Movement to his left and right. The Flixies shuffled cautiously toward him, purple-smear teeth glowing weirdly in the bluish light. Some of them held knives that could’ve doubled as Satanic gynecological equipment.

“But – why? Why did you even bother to bring me here?”

“All sentient creatures deserve knowledge.”

“But by telling me this, that means you have to kill me!”

“Yes. Knowledge has its price.”

The Flixies pounced. Hands grabbed at him and dragged him down. Teeth clacked and chomped at one another; some kind of mad language. He saw the glint of a blade moving toward his heart.

“Wait!” he cried. “Let’s make a deal! Please!”

The Flixies stopped, as if hearing an unspoken cue.

“You can offer us nothing,” the battery declared.

“No,” Donnie stammered, “but you can offer me something.”

“I do not understand.”

“If you grant me a favor, then you’ve got me on the hook. Suddenly, I’m in your pocket! I won’t tell anybody anything if I’m in your pocket! That way, you don’t have to destroy me! Killing me is probably illegal, too, right? Some, uh, Quantum Code violation?”

The battery seemed to think about this.

The googly-eyes narrowed.

“Yes. It is a violation.”

“It can be a mutual pact. A deal. I’ll keep quiet. Just help me with one thing.”

“Tell me this thing,” the battery demanded.

So Donnie told him.

<*>

The baby cried. The sound was joyous.

Slick with goo and red as a sliced beet, the little tow-head wriggled and sobbed and clenched his corn-sized toes.

Tracy looked spent, utterly so, but her face was beaming nevertheless. A nurse swabbed sweat from her glistening brow. Outside the window of the hospital room, Tabor’s big shape and shadow could be seen dutifully pacing, the task of a good friend.

The presence of his new son was going to be a big change. It’d require real responsibility. Donnie knew he was wearing the Big Boy Pants – the Daddy Pants – now, and that nothing would ever be the same.

But he was ready for the change.

The talking battery be damned.

Of course, the deal had some complications. Tracy had already had an abortion in this dimension, the battery explained. The baby was gone. To comply with Donnie’s request, they had to pluck another Tracy – the most similar Tracy they could find – from another Earth and, well, trade the two of them. It was fine. The battery told him that neither Tracy would know. Both would be happy in both continuums, whatever a ‘continuum’ was.

The nurse gave Tracy the baby. The doctor handed off the umbilicus.

Once in Tracy’s embrace, their son stopped crying and seemed to settle into a kind of happy gurgling.

Donnie leaned in and stroked her brow.

“What do you want to name him?” he asked Tracy.

She thought about it for a moment as a single happy tear rolled down her cheek.

“Flixy,” she said, finally.

Donnie started to laugh, it was funny, though uncomfortable-funny, but then he saw a faint shimmer around his new son, and the pink babyflesh became for a moment a strange hue of Iguana green, and he saw a flash of purple teeth reaching for Tracy’s breast beneath the sheet. Then the shimmer extended upwards to Tracy, too, and he saw her smeared teeth and green skin as she smiled.

Then it was gone. The haze dissipated, and his wife and son were back again.

A little voice in his head told him to run, run. Break into a hard run and never come back.

But he suppressed it.

“I like change,” he croaked. He shuddered. “Change is good.”

At least they gave him that lifetime supply of Flix Bars.

Drawing a deep breath, he reached toward Tracy and their new son, Flixy.

© Chuck Wendig 2009

Author’s Note: “This odd thing is a fake middle chapter to an imaginary novel. Artist Kevin Dart created the cover to a novel of his own invention — Stealing Candy From Babies — and I found it (and more of his work) so inspiring that, as an exercise, I decided to try writing a chapter of the book. Here I attempt a style of fiction and language befitting the style and, I hope, quality of the cover. You tell me if I hit any of the targets.

“Go look at Kevin’s art and his upcoming, incredible-looking classic-spy book. (And Fleet Street Scandal, too). His work evokes wonderful stories.”

Illustration © Kevin Dart

He stopped the car at a motel and diner, just over an hour up the road. She knew what that meant.

The lights of the parking lot revealed his face in the night through momentary flashes and bands of color. A stripe of white light from the diner windows showed his face expressionless and robotic, his eyes scanning and alert. A band of red light from the motel’s neon revealed him trying to hold back a smirk, the dash throwing devilish shadows from his eyebrows across his high forehead. In the yellow glow of the motel’s walkway lamps, his expression went back to neutral and he put the car in park.

“Here we are,” he said, almost cheery.

Candace got out of the car, pausing upright between her open door and the El Camino’s cockpit. She turned away from the motel and looked out into the night. A stretch of black and broken asphalt, dead parking spaces marked by the ghosts of white lines, yawned between them and the tall lights of the highway. Beyond the lanes of the rugged, crumbling highway was a wall of green corn, taller than she was, and then the rest of the state, running off into the night, all the way to the line.

She looked at him. He idly shut his car door while staring across to the diner.

The diner — a wannabe Waffle House — lay far off to one side, bright in the dark but muffled and distant, like a hot aquarium filled with smoke. It bubbled with the faint beat of the Big Bopper. The way there was either across the parking lot or along the roofed sidewalk that connected it to the motel. There was something like an empty corner lot between them, with a chain-link fence and a few concrete steps suggesting that a building stood there once, but had died.

Candace shifted her focus and found him looking at her, eyes narrow. He was yellow on one side, from the walkway lights, and shadow on the other. She shut her passenger-side door and, on the cue of the slam, smiled.That was a moment. She could’ve run right then, she thought.

That was a moment. She could’ve run right then, she thought.

“Come on,” he said, pointing with his bald spot.

He walked towards her, past her, heading away from the diner. As he passed, she felt the diamond hard against her skin, safe in its hiding place for now.

She tensed herself, ready to push off the asphalt and sprint around the car, for the diner, when she noticed another car — Colin’s Mustang. Even in the dismal light it was bright red and bright white, dirtied only around the edges with the dust of the road.

But… what was Colin doing here? How did he beat them here if—

“Come on, silly” the balding man said. She was more sure by the moment that his name was not Scott.

He walked right past the motel clerk’s door.

Candace, following him, slowed and pointed a thumb as she passed the door. “Shouldn’t we—?”

“Nope,” he said. He waggled a flat plastic diamond keychain next to his ear. “I’m way ahead of you.” He stopped and turned. He looked impatient.

She held her purse before her in both hands and hurried forward, exaggerating her steps in her high heels. Each step clopped a heel onto the sidewalk. She wanted guests to know there were people outside their rooms. She ran the risk that one of them was Colin, but if she knew him he was in the diner with Joe Camel.

As she approached, he turned and unlocked the door to a room just three or four in from the end of the walkway and the edge of the weedy darkness. He swung open the door and flipped on the light. Through the door she saw yellowing wallpaper and crusted carpet.

As she smiled and stepped forward, she ran options through in her mind. But if she ran now, things would escalate. He might chase her. He might yell, or she might yell, and then Colin would appear and she’d be back where she started, between him and the diamond. And if Scott had a gun — which seemed likely for someone who picked up hitchhikers and had a motel room ready — he might just shoot her instead of chase her.

No, as long as she kept him on the hook, she could control the tenor and the tempo. She knew how to keep a man hovering between lust and action. She let one red strap slip off her shoulder as she walked forward, into the motel room.

“Welcome to my humble… lair,” he said, tripping over the last word, clearly hearing the creepiness in it. He tried to cover it with a chuckle, a shrug, and a headshake. His eyes didn’t smile.

A moth puttered against the light above them.

“You were prepared,” she said, trying to sound relieved and stupid. But if he saw it as a challenge, that would tell her something at least: that he was wary of her suspicion. He gave off no signal she could read, though. She walked into the room, lifting the strap back onto her shoulder. “I’m, uh, glad I don’t have to spend all night in the car.”

“You sure don’t,” he said. He shut the door and fixed the chain.

“How’d you have this ready already?”

“I was just driving around listening to the radio. I got this room this afternoon.”

The place was cramped and orange, with an orange bathroom off the empty closet. Dark brown furniture held up dingy lamps, which cast parabolas of light onto canvases splotched with paint that loosely described flowers in vases. The walls and ceiling had worn-down gold-colored textures and patterns on them. The place was humid and warm like an armpit. At least three pairs of socks were wadded on top of an open suitcase, with a pair of pants sprawled on the floor beneath. The room smelled like those socks.

He’d been here longer than one afternoon.

“I’m lucky you came by, then,” she said.

“I think,” he said, “I’m the lucky one.”

Maybe all he wanted was carnal, and all she’d have to do was navigate his fantasy romance routineShe looked over her shoulder at him. His head was tipped down in a predatory gaze, exposing his bald spot, but his face had a fake-casual smile. He thought he was being charming — she recognized that easily enough — but he hadn’t ever seen himself in action and didn’t have the self-awareness to realize the vibe he gave off.

Maybe, she hoped, maybe he really was just some garden-variety dirty creep who picked up what he thought was a lonely hitchhiker. Maybe all he wanted was carnal, and all she’d have to do was navigate his fantasy romance routine until he fell asleep.

“Mind if I pop in the washroom? I’d like to freshen up,” she said.

“Not at all,” he said.

She moved toward the bathroom.

“You can leave your things here,” he said, hand out.

She looked confused, then scared, then hated herself for it. “My—?”

“Your purse or shoes. The faucet leaks. Counter gets all wet. Don’t want you to—”

“Oh!” She handed him her purse. “Thank you.”

He took it and leaned over to set it on the nightstand. This raised his polo shirt enough for her to see the black plastic grip of a pistol in his jeans, behind his back.
She stepped into the bathroom and smiled at him through the opening as she slowly shut the door. Then she locked it. Then she snapped a towel off the rod, whipped it into a fat rope, and tied the doorknob to the towel rod. If she was lucky, it would hold against one extra shove or flap off after a good kick and add to the chaos when he stormed in. If she was unlucky, the towel rod would snap off and hit her if he broke the door down.

Stop. Think.

He had a gun, which meant he wasn’t just a creep looking for a bounce off a lucky lonely hitcher. If this was bad luck, he was something rougher and maybe more crazed. If this wasn’t bad luck, it meant her father had hired men to come after her. After the diamond, really.

Which was probably the case — he took her purse and wanted her shoes. Maybe he thought she’d keep the diamond in her purse, of all places. Or her shoes. Right now, “Scott” was looking through that purse and feeling frustrated. Frustrated and armed. She imaged him pulling a bottle of gin from the nightstand drawer when she heard something sloshing in a bottle through the door.

But she still had her shoes. She slipped them off and felt her weight fall across both her feet, posed wide on the warm tile floor.

She looked in the mirror. Her hair, now more dirty than blonde, clung to her sweaty skin in dark but shiny strands. She adjusted her bustier. She gripped her red cocktail dress by the hem beneath her breasts, swiveled it up and then tugged it tight. The diamond between her breasts didn’t show. Maybe she could distract him with her cleavage long enough…

Long enough. For what?

Now she’d trapped herself in an orange, windowless bathroom with a mercenary and a gun between her and the hot Oklahoma night. And Colin was out there, and it seemed sure that if there was trouble, he’d be drawn like a moth, and double that trouble. Was there any way out of here that wouldn’t find that gunman’s hands on her body, or her body back in Colin’s car again?

The floor creaked outside the bathroom. The towel blocked the keyhole.

She twisted the creaky knobs in the shower. Water dribbled, then rained down.

“I’m going to take a quick shower,” she said, her voice free of fear or doubt. “It’s so hot tonight.”

An awful pause. “Yeah,” he said. “All right.” He wasn’t as happy as the idea of her getting naked should’ve made him.

She got opposite the door and wedged herself into a spot next to the toilet. She dropped one shoe onto the floor between her and the door. She gripped the other one tight in her right hand, fingers clenching the open toe, heel jutting out above her thumb.

The door shifted. She heard his weight shift and press against it. She heard the knob rattle against its lock. On the other side of the door, he sighed. On this side, she waited.

Minutes passed. Her toes ached, so she put her weight flat onto her feet. She had to stay taught to stay between the toilet and the corner. The time she could believably spend in the shower came and went.

He came back to the door. Rattled it again. She took that to mean he wasn’t quite up for what he—

The door shook against one firm blow. The lock popped. The second kick broke the towel rod free of its mount and sent it clattering off the toilet and then back toward the door. It his Scott in the legs somewhere and he skidded to a halt to get his bearings amid the noise and spinning metal.

As he did, she bounded forward on one foot and swung her high heel against his temple. He crumpled onto hands and knees. She got her balance and dashed past him.

He groped for her dress, got a handful of it behind her legs and tore a shred out of the skirt. It pulled tight as it tore, pinning her legs and sending or onto the carpet on her elbows and chin. Her shoe clattered under the bed.

She was halfway from the bathroom to the door already, with the bed mostly in her way. She went over it, toward the nightstand.

He started to yell at her, to get her to slow down. “It’s not there, you—” She grabbed what turned out to be a bottle of Jack and swung back around with it, aiming at his opposite temple.

For a single white-hot second she was brilliantly visible, her shadow huge and sharp on the wall…He stopped her with his forearm against he wrist. She flicked the bottle down against his skull with a weak clop. She saw now the blood oozing down his temple, across his cheekbone, into his eye. He put his weight forward, knocking her onto the nightstand. She was bent over backwards, her pelvis and torn skirt out, her shoulders back. She cried out.

His weight was on her. She was afraid her back might break. He fought the bottle free of her grip and tossed it at the closet. In that moment, she hoisted her knee into his crotch — the oldest trick in the book — and he was ready for it. He scuttled back off the glancing hit.

He went for his gun behind his back.

She reached over her shoulder and plucked the lamp from the nightstand.

It was a shiny silver snub-nose.

She swung the lamp overhand, upside-down.

For a single white-hot second she was brilliantly visible, her shadow huge and sharp on the wall, the whole room revealed by an unshaded bulb, she rising up and forward, the lamp on an arc from nightstand to skull, the gun pointed at her belly.

The lamp landed. Its base made a terrible sound as is it cracked and gave against his bald spot. He tumbled back, rolled across the carpet, screaming.

She panted. She traced the blood across the carpet with her eyes. She looked for the gun.

It was in a puddle of bloody carpet. She grabbed it. She adjusted its weight, pulled back the hammer with both hands, and aimed it.

Scott was on his feet. He yanked the door open, tearing the chain from the frame.

She hoped he would run. She yelled: “Fucker!”

Scott froze. She froze. In the door was a shape, taller than Scott, in jeans and a gasoline jacket, with a mess of black hair.

Colin.

With a fist that started high, next to his ear, Colin laid Scott low. He folded into a pile in the doorway at Colin’s feet.

Colin looked into the room at Candace. “Are you—,” he was breathing hard, “—going to shoot one of us?”

“If I have to,” she said.

Colin stepped over Scott and came casually toward Candace, hand out. “If this guy’s going to be shot, it should really be me. I’ve—”

Scott rolled out of the doorway, was on all fours for a minute, and then bolted into the parking lot.

“Shit!” Candace yelled.

“Let him go,” said Colin.

“He’ll call my father!” She ran for the door.

“We should go!”

She stopped, stood sideways in the door, and squeezed off three shots into the night. She’d never fired a gun before. She had beautiful form.

Colin admired.

She looked back at him, saw the look on his face. “I think he was going to kill me.”

“And you were going to kill him?”

“I—” She really didn’t have an answer for that question.

“What about me?”

She made a questioning face.

“Are you going to shoot me?” he asked.

She looked into his eyes. She became aware of the heat coming off the pistol.“I might,” she said. The gun was in her right hand pointed at the floor. She hadn’t caught her breath. Colin came closer. She pulled the hammer back, gun still pointed down. “He took the diamond,” she said. “You should hurry. You might still—”

Colin reached out and slowly, gently plucked the diamond from her bustier. “Did he now?”

She looked at it, pinched there between his fingers, like a glass strawberry. “Is it worth getting shot for?”

Colin made a face, then decided. “No.” He threw it on the bed. “I’ll go right now. If you want.”

She looked into his eyes. She looked from one to the other. She became aware of the heat coming off the pistol.

“I didn’t come for the diamond,” he said.

“Just luck?”

“Fuck luck. Earned and gotten — that’s all there is.”

Her expression was blank.

“I should go, then. Either give me the gun or make sure they know I’m the one who pulled that trigger, and you should be fine.”

She nodded.

“You never have to see me again.”

She nodded, eyes still on his. “Colin.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“Take the diamond.”

He raised his eyebrows further.

“And take me, too. Take me with you.”

He turned around and picked up the diamond. “If you want, I’ll throw this thing away right now. Far as I can.”

She shook her head. “We’ll need it,” she said. “In Vegas.”

He held out the diamond and an empty hand.

“No,” she said. “I’m keeping the gun.”

Writing © Will Hindmarch.

Original art © Kevin Dart, cited here without permission.

I never thought too hard about that. The guardian angels, I mean. Does everyone have them? Are they all so efficient? Do they all do their job adequately?

My own angel’s name is Daniel. He lost his faith some time ago. Maybe he wanted to do more than he could and fell short of his goals. Maybe he felt that circumstances thwarted his attempts to prosper and protect me. Maybe he was just lazy, but couldn’t see that, blaming everything but his own inaction. Did he do enough? I don’t know.

I imagine him as being like me, trying, but not trying too hard, bewailing the lack of breaks he got, the lack of opportunities which he really has no right to expect. Like me.

Whatever. Daniel began to doubt his place. He doubted whether God had given him the power to achieve anything. He achieved nothing. He began to wonder if he was just unlucky, surely a hard thing for an angel born into the sure knowledge of the providence of God to come to believe. But he did. He began to think that no justice could exist. He began to think that God either couldn’t do anything or didn’t care and wouldn’t.

I don’t know if Daniel is right. But right doesn’t have much to do with these things. Daniel lost his faith in himself, and then he lost his faith in God. Oh no, you’re thinking, oh no, an angel can’t lose his faith in God, because where would that leave us? And if you’re more theologically inclined, you’re thinking, how can this happen? An angel has no free will. If an angel loses his faith, who can be responsible for that but God?

Don’t ask me. It wasn’t long ago that it was all sure and sorted in my head. Now I don’t know. But I know that Daniel made his own decision. No one compelled him. His failure to achieve was his own doing. His doubts were his own and his loss of faith his own loss.

Daniel didn’t notice when he fell. He doesn’t know when it happened, just that one day he realised that God began to give him no time, no help, no notice, and that his praises to the Almighty began to be rote, and parroted, and empty.

He fell. But he was still my angel, and he is my angel still, even now. He just carried on doing his job. He takes no joy in the work, but there is nothing else for him to do.

He’s still in denial, really. He can’t bring himself to look in the mirror most mornings. He can’t bring himself to take note of the way that the feathers on both pairs of wings have become charred and greasy like a well-used grill pan, and he won’t acknowledge that the teeth in the mouth of his calf’s head have become sharp and yellow.

Daniel still writes to his colleagues. He never saw them much to begin with, and they communicated a lot through letters. He writes to them now of his fears and the doubts which consume him. They don’t write back anymore. But he keeps on writing.

(“Dear Uriel,
I sometimes wonder why so much of what happens to the people we’re supposed to guard is so bad. Why are we so ineffectual?”)

he saw one of his colleagues a few weeks ago, in the distance, all light and halo and shining wings, looking down benevolently on his sleeping charge. Daniel looked down and fingered one of his feathers, and he felt it come away in his hand, and he looked at it, all black and filthy. He held it in a bony black-nailed hand that he couldn’t recognise as his own. So he hid. He ran away before the angel could see him.

Daniel is finding other people to blame. He iswondering if this was my fault. He has begun to wonder if I’m not a hopeless case. I think that he is gradually beginning to hate me. If I won’t be helped, then why not just make me go down the path that I was always destined to do? So now he nudges my elbow. He tells me things to make me doubt myself and make me doubt my own faith.

And he kept me self-obsessed, so that I could not see what was wrong, and what she was going to do, and I wasn’t ready, and I wasn’t able to stop her, and now I am here at a funeral.

He thinks it’s all my fault, you see. But it isn’t.

I think that maybe we deserve each other.

© HD Ingham 2009

[ratings]

It’s snub-nosed, this revolver, with a fat cylinder in which he can see the little metal heads of bullets nestled in their shells. The gun is pointing out at him, as if this hand wanted his money.

He looks around him, up and down the street. He closes the mailbox door. He opens it again. There is a hand in there, holding a gun. He reaches towards it, squinting, wincing in preparation for the bang, then chickens out. He stands to one side of the mailbox and leans in front of it. He waves his hand past the barrel of the gun. Reaches into the box again, gives up again.

He goes inside, past his wife, who’s doing dishes, and gets the phone. He dials 911. She asks what’s wrong.

“There’s a hand holding a gun in our mailbox,” he says.

“Finally,” she says.

[© 2008 Will Hindmarch. First published at Ficlets.com]

They were remixers—hot young things living off the pop cred of turning data into apps—and I worked for robots. They wore threadbare T-shirts under designer-distressed sports jackets, both boys and girls. I was surprised they even talked to me.

I’d been wearing that same striped button-down shirt for probably five years. My tie hung dead from my neck like a rabbit by its ankles. Only reason I wore it was so I’d feel like I was at work.

We ended up in the same bars, a little late for the after-work crowds, in what I sensed was the middle of their day. These were tinted-glass places, hotel bars with internet feeds in the tables, where the dim light kept everything at the same nebulous hour all the time, and only the occasional cable news feed on the monitors gave you any sense of time. Since all the TV streamed onto the tabletops and the windows from online, you couldn’t keep time by the TV schedule, either.

They always seemed to celebrating, having a drinking lunch, in high spirits because they were young and their jobs were fun. I was young, too, I thought. Late twenties. But I wasn’t having such a good time.

I knew enough to be on the hipster-programmer bar circuit, at least. Knew where to hang out in the hopes that some kind of decent job would rub off on me. That I’d catch one like a cold.

A lot of the crews that came in were game developers, sassy and foul-mouthed and turning everything into a joke. Tax breaks and promises of new city-wide fiber optics had lured slices of companies in from Montreal, San Francisco, Berlin and Iceland. Parent companies shipped them here, to shitty weather and good times, like it was college. Except they were all making sick amounts of money instead of racking up student loans.

All they did was work and spend money. Jackets from Britain. Sunglasses from Italy. Phones from Japan. They smelled expensive and some of them had accents.

Looking at my reflection in the tranquilly animated oceanscape of the bar’s interface, I didn’t think I looked so different from them. From the neck up I looked like one of them, soft-haired, disheveled and unshaven. But my hair just dried that way. So I wasn’t doing it right.

Rain threw spots of water at the tinted windows. Little animated droplets dripped across the bar’s countertop interface like sweat running down a cold beer. A Budweiser logo materialized. “Click here for refreshment,” it read. I pinned the logo with one finger and side-armed it down the bar. It slid to a stop in front of an empty stool and waited, sweating.

I scrolled through cheap scotch options, double-tapped some Canadian whiskey, and when I looked up she was there. Rebekah. One of the remixers that worked on the other side of the skywalk, in the big glass needle across the street. Her straight blond hair fell into a tangle at the collar of her sports jacket. In profile, all I could see past her hair was the tip of her nose, an elfin button at the end of a long slope.

Near as I could tell, she was the arty one; the one who knew theater and literature. I don’t know shit about theater or literature, but I know enough about movies and books to find theater and literature attractive in someone else. She leaned into arguments about subtext and symbolism in a way that was so hot.

The loading graphic on her credit card’s screen was some hand-drawn cartoon dude from a French web comic I couldn’t remember the name of. He danced, capped it off with a flourish, and held up a sign that said “Approved!”

“Hey, Bekah,” I said.

She pushed her hair behind her ear and looked over. “Oh, shit, man. I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there. How’re you doing?”

I nodded. “Oh, you know.”

She nodded. “Yeah.”

She pulled down a menu on the bar’s interface and poked around for a while before settling on a Belgian beer with a long name. She tapped the menu once with the corner of her credit card. The little loading graphic on her card’s screen was some hand-drawn cartoon from a French web comic I couldn’t remember the name of. He danced, then capped it off with a flourish and a sign that said “Approved!”

We sat there while the bartender eyeballed his monitor and dug around in the back of the fridge for her weird beer. We sat there while he dropped off our drinks. We sat there, watching television in two different directions.

“How’s work?” I asked.

“It’s good. Busy. You know.” She turned to look at me. “What do you do again?”

“I’m a leader,” I said. “For robots. Scrapers. You know.”

She smiled. “Harvesters.”

“They’re harvesters or ‘importers’ when you’ve got a nice firm and a respectable application. Contractors like me and the spiders I work for? Are scrapers.”

She smiled and nodded, turning back to the plasma screen.

Leader. It sounded so much better than it was. I was a leader the way a bloodhound leads a sheriff: on a leash.

My sheriff was some remote investor in Beijing. His deputies—my bosses—were off-the-shelf internet robots, commercial-grade information scavengers, but ordinary mass-market software troopers all the same. Get together enough start-up money and you could buy the software robots, the servers, and a top-speed Internet connection in China, then double-click the software and be mining data inside of a week. A month after that and you’ve probably got enough email addresses and phone numbers to sell that you’ve recouped your investment. Every month after that is profit.

She turned back to me. “Do you like it?”

“It’s easy,” I said. “The hours are good.” We nodded again, glanced at our televisions. “But no. Not really.”

© 2008 Will Hindmarch