Hidden in the closet stairwell of a stranger’s home, Kelley sat huddled behind several cardboards boxes. Caroline had come home early. And from what he understood, for no reason at all. Just to fuck with him. He couldn’t believe it. There was no reason for her to believe he might be there, and yet here she was. The unfair intervention of justice had left him utterly shell-shocked, and so he merely sat there, cursing his luck, as Caroline descended the staircase with shotgun in arms, fully intending to, in her words, “paint the walls with brain colour.”
With each step, came the pop-hiss of her artificial leg. It seemed like it was taking forever. Either she was going down one step a minute or his brain was about to overheat. The smell of dust overpowering. All there was was dust and the presence of Caroline above him, buzzing like a ten-ton battery.
“You never should have come back,” she yelled, choking on her words.
What did she mean “come back”? There was no way she had spotted him before. Sweat collected around the sides of Kelley’s pale, hook-nosed mask. What was her fucking problem? She never did this. He had watched her for almost a week straight, and he never did this. Never before in his life did he think to be so prepared, and the one time he did he found it instantly regrettable.
Every day, Monday-Sunday, Caroline went from gym to bar. Bar closes, she goes home, alone, and howls for a few hours until she gets tired and does something else. Sleep or masturbate, Kelley assumed.
She was an alcoholic. Why would she change? She wasn’t just unlucky with meeting people at the bar, she was addicted to it. Expert psychiatrist that he was, Kelley figured the more she struck out, the more obsessed it would make her with trying. Not tonight apparently. Tonight he had planned to rob her house, and so somehow she just knew.
I shouldn’t have watched her, Kelley thought, shaking his head. Obviously now that there was no one there to watch her do it, she had no interest in going to the bar that night. Or some such subconscious nonsense.
From the outset, something about this robbery had been different. He had wanted to try this time. Not just break in on a whim, but really put some effort into it for once. Apply himself. He had even gone to Old Crow for advice.
“Man is a creature of habit,” Old Crow had told him, topping up a brass goblet with more moonshine. “People don’t change. Follow them around for a week, and you’ll have done it for life. We used to understand this, and then the TV went and fucked it all up. Now everyone’s waiting for their story arc.”
He popped a fat finger into the air.
“And they’ll be waiting a long time. Oh yeah, right into the grave!”
Old Crow had been a detective many decades ago. Notoriously awful, his one claim to fame was almost catching the Moonshine Phantom, a burglar known to leave liquor bottles at the scene of his burglaries. He had once likened the pursuit to that of a dog chasing its tail.
“No one suspected you?”
“Oh, they suspected me alright. But what were they going to do about it? File a complaint? To me?”
He laughed.
“They did, by the way. I laughed in their faces and then spat liquor at them when they wouldn’t leave. ‘We’ll be back when the Chief’s in!’ Yeah, you do that. Who do you think trained me, you stupid pricks?”
“And you never got fired?”
Crow’s voice suddenly became quite solemn.
“It was a small place. You take the characters you can get. You can fire them, you can scare them away, but you can’t change them. And when they’re gone, they’re gone. What are you going to fill that hole with? Civil obedience?”
In the dusty closet, Kelley felt at his chest. And what are you going to fill this hole with Crow, you stupid asshole? Formaldehyde?
In his arms, he cradled a small jewelry box. The lock was in the form of a screaming woman’s head, hair locks black, writhing wildly like snakes. Sitting on Caroline’s dresser, with moonlight licking her high cheekbones, Kelley had been instantly attracted. Something about it looked out of place. Surely she wouldn’t mind if it went missing.
That was when he had heard the front door unlock. Kelley slid behind the door and froze. Pop-hiss up the stairs. Caroline was home.
His heart skipped a beat as he heard her walk past him and into the bathroom. He let out a soft breath.
Don’t freak out, he told himself. Don’t freak out. You get caught that way.
He thought of his conversation with Crow.
“How old is this lady?”
“I don’t know. Over 40.”
“Over 40, over 40,” Crow repeated, stroking his goatee.
“Did you know,” he said, strumming his goatee, “Women over 40 can’t hear male footsteps. It’s the frequency. It’s too low. Women nearing a barren age need to be able to be snuck up on before it’s too late.”
Kelley had paused, waiting for Caroline’s next movement. Was Crow serious? I mean, he was who he said he was. He really had never been caught. And surely he had experience with women over 40. He looked almost 60 himself. Should he just book it?
Fuck it. Whatever. What’s the worst that could happen?
And that was how Kelley found himself stuck in a stairwell. The moment he took off, he heard a click and a shotgun being readied. Something told him not to go out the front door, and so he didn’t, instead drifting down the hallway and slipping into the nearest closet as quietly as he could manage. For this woman over 40, sound did not seem to be an issue.
“I was never like this before,” moaned Caroline.
She was almost at the bottom of the stairs.
Kelley closed his eyes and pictured his demise, staring at his corpse as if into a mirror. Flesh peeled in rusty petals, wet with an amalgam of mercurial fluids. The squeal of leaking gasses. Shards of bones embedded in soft tissue.
Opening his eyes, he felt better. His hand had stopped shaking. There was a pen-knife in his pocket. Did he have no other choice?
Scouring the closet, he locked eyes with a garden gnome.
Hit her.
He picked up the gnome. It was hard to get a good grip. His hands were too cold, too clammy. But what else? She was too close to do anything else. Besides, he couldn’t hit her. He didn’t have it in him.
Coward.
He glanced at the closet door. All he had to do was make it that far. Fingered a vial in his pocket, Kelley took out the penknife next to it and began to slice a circle into his forearm. The pact needed to be sealed. He would find a way out. It would be like he was never there. As he cut, he felt nothing. Too much adrenaline. He may as well have been circling his arm with a feather.
BANG.
Too late.
Kelley’s ears rang with the splintering sound of buckshot and shattered glass. Losing vision, he fell back to the ground, head spinning.
When he opened his eyes, no one was there. Just him and the empty closet. He touched his face, then his stomach, just to make sure it was all there. The pop-hiss of Caroline’s false leg whipped past the door. He could hear her sniffling.
Kelley’s eyes narrowed.
The ringing began to subside, and Kelley thought he could just make out the click of the back door closing. Was there someone else in the house? Maybe, and maybe she was dragging his corpse into the garden to bury it.
Sucks to be him.
Kelley cracked open the closet door. In the hallway was a headless black manikin strewn out over broken glass.
Then he felt something touch the back of his head.
“Don’t move,” said a voice behind him. Unconfident, wavering.
“Why?” said Kelley, slowly turning his head. Out of the corner of his eye, he could make a man wearing glasses over a head stocking.
“I have a knife.”
“And?,” said Kelley slowly. “You’re going to stab me?”
“Well yes, I’m going to stab you!” he replied hotly. “I have a knife. What else was I going to–”
Before he could finish his sentence, Kelley had twisted the man’s wrist. The knife clattered to the floor like a dull wood-wind instrument. The man’s disappointment was palpable.
“Oh come on,” he said, hardly audible.
“Who are you?” Kelley whispered. “You don’t live here.”
“Neither do you.”
Another burglar. He would have laughed if it wasn’t so depressing.
“She’s in the backyard.”
“I saw.”
Pushing past the other burglar, Kelley dashed towards the front door. He groped at the door handle, twisting it gently at first, then furiously shaking it.
Locked.
There was no lock mechanism under the doorknob, just a keyhole peeping back at him.
“It locks from the inside,” said the other burglar, who had caught up to Kelley and had begun peering over his shoulder.
“Yes, I know it locks from the outside,” whispered Kelley angrily. “But who has a home that locks from the outside.”
The man shrugged, “I do.”
They both turned their heads at the sound of a click. Caroline had returned from the back garden. The pair fled up up the stairs in a hurry, sure that Caroline had spotted at least one of them. Kelley led the way into the bedroom. It was the only room with a window big enough to jump. The other burglar followed and shut the door behind him.
Moonlight bathed Kelley’s face with a bloodless glow. He looked out from the window as his stomach plummeted. Nothing to cushion the fall save a small vegetable garden. At best, he would break a leg. And then, what? He was on parole. He was not going to get arrested. He’d rather take his chances with the shotgun. Hell probably had a shorter processing period than book.
Maybe there was a way down, he thought. Something to use as a rope or cushion the fall. His eyes darted to the bed. Absolutely bare besides a pillow. No sheets, no blanket. He grew hot with anger. How did he not notice it earlier?
At that moment, a pair of knee high socks slapped him across the face. Furious, Kelley turned to the other burglar, who was ransacking the sock drawer.
“What are you doing?”
“We can tie them together! Help me make a rope so we can climb out!”
“Are you an idiot? Do you know how many socks that would take?” Kelley hissed.
The burglar tossed a bundled pair of ankle socks to his chest.
“Yes!” he replied, his voice shaking. “So come on, get started.”
Thump, thump, thump. Caroline had begun to bound up the stairs. The burglar jumped, his frenzied hands spilling socks all over the floor.
Kelley closed his eyes. No choice. He took the pen knife from his pocket, and began the circle he had carved into his arm. Then, he reached into his jacket and pulled out a vial containing a thread-thin, green worm. He uncorked it, brought it to his lips and swallowed.
January was waiting. Kelley had teased him long enough. He had already tasted his name on the tip of Kelley’s tongue. It had escaped in the breath before the words had come.
The other burglar sat in shock as Kelley held out his streaming wrist to the open window. Strange sounds slipped from his tongue, none which Kelley himself could recognize, but whose music pushed him further and further outside his own body. He felt himself shooting through a kaleidoscopic tunnel, then a vast expanse of darkness speckled by iridescent stars.
Before he could become accustomed to his space, Kelley felt the sensation of falling. Arms flailing as he fell through the darkness, his organs desperate to escape through his feet.
As he fell, he began to see the faint etching of doors, their edges shimmering like a spider’s web. He did not know which one to take. But there was no time to think. He reached out to the first door his hands could touch, and toppled through it.
On the other side of the door, Kelley sat face to face with a black-eyed fish. A hooked nose sat askew on the well-worn skin it wore as a mask. The room was otherwise empty and cold. Though he felt the warm drain from his body, Kelley assumed a face of boredom.
“Hello, January.”
Kelley stuffed his fear deeper down his already plummeted stomach. Still, he felt something wriggle inside him. His fear was not unknown. The fish-man eagerly eyed the blood trickling down his wrist.
Mine?
“Give me what I want, and it’s yours.”
Tell, said January, sniffing eagerly around the wrist with his fake nose.
“Make the window in front of my body into a door. Give me a safe landing.”
Mine? Repeated the demon.
“This is mine, not yours”, Kelley spat, bringing his wrist back to his chest. “Unless you do what I say.”
Pact, said January. As he said it, letters began to sear themselves across the forehead of his mask.
“Take it,” said Kelley. He presented his arm.
Hungrily, the fish-man dove towards his wrist, lapping up the blood with his icey, white tongue. He then dug his teeth in and began to suck. Kelley’s gum burst open, staining his teeth a rancid brown.
Intoxicated with the taste, January would not relinquish his grip. Across his mask, waves of skin tags erected themselves like gelatinous thumbtacks.
Kelley tried to push him off him, but his strength was failing him. He had already lost so much blood. Not knowing what else to do, he leaned in and dug his teeth into January’s face. He felt his canines break skin, and warm blood, with not an unfamiliar taste, flooded his mouth.
Distraught, January let go. Leaning forward, he looked at Kelley like a six-foot mantis staring down an infant.
I am Kelley. Where do I want to go?
“Anywhere.”
Anywhere, January said, enjoying the taste of each syllable as it rolled around his ribbed, white tongue. The boy flattered him. He had given him a choice. It was not often he could make his own choices.
I am Kelley, repeated the demon. I can go anywhere I want. I know where I will go.
Where to go? The choice tasted almost as sweet as blood.
Anywhere.
A cold wind swept through Caroline’s bedroom. Kelley stood up. His face smeared red.
“I’m going to jump.”
“Are you crazy?” said the other burglar. “It’s too high. You’ll snap your spine!”
Kelley glanced at the hardly meter-long sock-rope the man had managed to cobble together.
“Suit yourself. I’m jumping.”
The other burglar looked at Kelley for a moment, stunned.
“You’re bleeding,” he finally said.
Pop-hiss, step, pop-hiss. Caroline was behind the door. The other burglar lightly stepped to the end of the door, hoping that if she opened it hard enough, it would conceal him.
“I haven’t slept in that bed since that night,” she said from behind the door. “You defiled it. But I still can’t throw it away. I don’t know what you did to me, but I can’t throw our bed away. It was ours. Did you not know? Was I the only one who knew?”
Inside the room, the two stood like statues, the burglar behind the door with his hand pressed to his mouth.
“I fucked you, but it wasn’t enough to keep you, was it?”
There was another pause.
“But you came back…”
“Goodbye,” Kelley mouthed to the other burglar. He tip-toed a few paces back, looking for a running start. As soon as he did, the door burst open. There stood Caroline, shotgun held to her hip. Her eyes were puffy from tears, and she shut them briefly from the fierce light of the moon.
Taking his chance, Kelley sprinted towards the window. Not looking, Caroline unloaded a buckshot.
She rubbed her eyes.
“Is that you, Tin Man?” she said quietly. The mouth of her shotgun hovered above the floor.
She couldn’t open her eyes.
“Did I kill you?” she said gently, sounding like a child. She brushed back a few loose strands of blonde hair.
“I won’t live without you. I promise,” she said, smiling. She placed her chin under the barrel of the gun. “Wherever we go, we can go together. That’s how it was supposed to be.”
Between the brightness of the moon, and her eyes swollen from tears, it seemed the world was underwater.
Behind the door, the other burglar was shaken from the gunshot. Nerves firing in every direction, he held up his right leg so it wouldn’t continually thump on the floor. If he wasn’t found out already, his leg would soon give him up.
What was there to lose?
Kicking the door, he screamed like a teenager clutching his first bayonet, and then hurled himself towards the window. Caroline could only watch in shock as a squiggly, thin figure fell gracelessly out her window. She knelt the shotgun on the floor and got to her feet.
Rubbing her eyes, she took a better look around the room. Small holes peppered the upper corner. Never had anyone missed a target as catastrophically. But there was someone there. She was sure of that.
Then who was the second? She grabbed her hair with both hands and twisted until her scalp felt her anger. He had brought someone to her bedroom. Again. To embarrass her. As if she hadn’t been embarrassed enough.
She looked out the window. Nothing. No indication anyone had even jumped. No impact on the garden. Not a leaf out of place. No one limping down the street. Empty roads and sidewalks. The warmth left her chest.
What if they didn’t jump that far? What if their bodies lay broken and contorted against the side of the house?
Dead. Did she really want him dead?
If he’s dead, I’ll kill myself. She repeated. For a moment, a spark of warmth returned to her chest. The knowledge of what to do animated her body. If he’s dead, I’ll kill myself.
She continued to stare out the window for several minutes, watching the leaves tumble in the air, before she went downstairs to check the side of the house. To her disappointment, no one was there. In her life, there was not even a corpse to keep her company.
She grabbed a blanket from inside and found the decapitated manikin head. Sitting cross-legged in the vegetable garden, she draped the blanket over her shoulder and held the head in her lap. It couldn’t replace him, but it would never leave her, either. The more tender her touch, the warmer the head began to feel.
The more love she poured into the plastic, the colder she became. She didn’t care. It was better that he have it.
In a different part of the city, Herbert removed his glasses and pulled the stocking off his face, using it to dab his sweaty face. He sat on the roof of a four-story low rise. Next to it was a pale pink six-story building with most of its window shattered.
Beside him, Kelley lay sprawled out like a stranded starfish, coughing softly to himself while clutching the jewelry box emblazoned with the fierce woman up to his chest. Though the blood on his mouth had already begun to crust, fresh red stains soaked through the bit of shirt he had wrapped around his arm.
He was utterly depleted, and yet, he felt pretty great. A little bloodletting mixed with adrenaline. What a high.
Herbert sparked up a cigarette. He looked inquisitively at Kelley.
“Jesus, you’re a mess.”
He tossed him a rolled up pair of running socks.
“Here, I found these in my pocket.”
“You really thought you were going to be able to make a rope with those?”
Herbert scratched the side of his temple.
“I don’t work well under pressure. That’s why I smoke.”
Herbert looked around curiously at the cracked pavement below. It was not an affluent part of the city. Vines crawled up the sides of buildings through overgrowths of weeds and wild grass. Maybe a quarter of the streetlights hacked up a pale, yellow glow. In comparison to the moon, they looked quite pathetic.
“This isn’t Lancelot court.”
“Probably not.”
To his surprise, Kelley found himself breathing cleanly through his nose. The air smelled good.
“Hey, I don’t remember,” said Herbert coyly. “How did we get here?”
Kelley pointed to a shattered window.
“We jumped.”
“Right.”
Herbert took a deep drag.
“Hell of a coincidence, huh? Two burglars robbing the same house. What are the odds?”
“They’re not good.”
“Well, you don’t seem like a bad guy, so I’m glad you were there.”
“I think you being there almost got me killed.”
Herbert shrugged.
“How was I supposed to know that?”
“I guess you wouldn’t.”
Herbert sighed, rubbing his cheek. “I don’t think this is for me. It was the first time I’ve ever tried to rob a house, but I think I’m already tapped out. So now I’m back to square one. I still need the money.”
“What do you need it for?” asked Kelley.
“I’m glad you asked,” said Herbert, grinning. “I’m going to change the world.”
“Oh.”
“You don’t sound very interested.”
“Sorry.”
After clearing his throat, Herbert reached into his pocket and pulled out a slug-like creature covered in a hexagon texture. At the end, where a face ought to be, sat a pulsing, lubricated hole. He held it up to the moon, where it made a gentle sucking sound.
Kelley raised himself onto his back in a hurry, spitting out pebbles of black gunk.
“What is that?”
Herbert smiled.
“Oh, now you care?”
“A little, sure. What is it?”
“It’s a prototype of the future,” said Herbert, looking at the slug affectionately.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t think human beings are meant long for this planet. If disease or war don’t wipe us out, it wouldn’t surprise me if some ecological disaster burns, drowns, or swallows us. So I wanted to make something that could weather the storm, any storm, and that could survive in our place. Not man, but man-made. Something that can eat plastic and oil and live happily in extreme climates.”
“What would be the point of that?”
“What’s the point of having children? For me, it’s the same kind of thing.”
“Would they dream?”
“I don’t know.”
Kelley made a circle with his thumb and forefinger and held it above his right eye.
“What do you think would happen if I stole the moon?”
“The tides would fall, I suppose. I don’t know, it’s not my field.”
“I think I would steal the world’s dreams. No one would have a reason to do anything. And then the only people that would survive would be like your little homunculus, sucking at air. What a world that would be.”
“It has a reason to suck the air, or it wouldn’t do it.”
“Do you think I should steal the moon?”
Hebert smiled, “Maybe not yet. I still have dreams of my own.”
The homunculus began to gasp. Herbert plopped a finger into its hole, which it began to suckle on fruitlessly. Kelley suddenly felt nauseous.
“That’s disgusting.”
“It doesn’t need to eat, you know,” said Herbert, his voice trembling. “And yet it’s desperate to feed. Isn’t that wild? You talk about reasons to live, and that’s fair, but what’s wrong with eating? You know, for its own sake? It seems like getting back to basics to me. When the first organism met the second, I believe the first thing it did was eat the other.”
Kelley cleared his throat before finally speaking.
“Have you shown this to anyone?”
With a defeated air, Herbert raised his arms.
“I’ve shown it to potential investors. But they’re all out to fuck me. No matter the institution, they want complete ownership of whatever work I do. Greedy, fucking pigs. Here’s the funny thing; it insults them when I say ‘no’. People that haven’t so much as shaken my hand think I already belong to them.”
A bitter expression on his face, he put the slug back in his pocket, wiped his slimy fingers across his pant leg then pulled out a pack of cigarettes.
“You want one?” He said, offering Kelley a cigarette.
“I don’t smoke.”
“Well, why the hell not?” Hebert replied incredulously. “I don’t know what I’d do without them.”
“They’re addictive.”
“So is water. Honestly, whatever you’ve heard about cigarettes is 100 percent fiction. Nicotine is a stimulant and a neuroenhancer. It’s no different than a cup of coffee.”
“What does that mean? It makes you smart?”
Herbert shrugged, “It makes you smarter.”
“So that’s why you smoke?”
“No. I smoke because it feels right. When I smoke, I enjoy doing nothing.”
Kelley narrowed his eyes.
“Alright, give me one.”
Hebert took a drag then beckoned with a finger.
“Give me something from that box.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Quid pro quo. Nothing in life is free.”
Fishing out a lock pick from his pocket, Kelley began to work at the lock on the woman’s mouth. It took a few gentle twists before the corners of its mouth severed, revealing a box of empty velvet lining. He showed it to Herbert.
“Oh, well,” said Hebert, passing a cigarette to Kelley. “I guess you owe me one then.”
He held out the lighter for him. It didn’t even take half a drag before Kelley burst in a coughing fit.
“These taste like shit.”
“They’re supposed to. They’re good for you.”
Kelley looked at the end of Herbert’s cigarette. It brightened with each drag, like a firefly landing on a reed. He began to melt into the calmness of the moment, and soon became used to the feeling of fumes circling his lungs.
“Do you want to do this again sometime?”
Kelley coughed, a thin smile on his lips. “Yeah, alright.”
With faces bathed in moonlight, the pair gazed at the distant rooftop tines lined with the night’s transient silver. A warm breeze cut across the cloudless night. It felt good to be alive.