2013. Los Angeles, California. Kaitlyn.
I dropped my pad.
The black leather case plopped open, spilling pen, paper, and hastily scribbled reservations across the smooth bamboo floor.
Plastic smile. Never moving. Never blinking.
Marco was waiting for me to respond.
“I’m calling the cops,” I finally rasped.
“Ha-ha! You are a funny girl. I find that I’m liking funny girls!” Marco carefully gestured with his hands as he spoke. It was stilted, precise, and rehearsed. Like he was giving a presentation to an elementary school assembly.
“Seriously, get out or I’m calling the cops to pick up what’s left of you after the guys in the back finish beating you into a liquid.”
“That’s getting old.” Marco dropped the bubbly talk-show persona. His voice went flat. His features lost tension somehow, slackening into an inhuman mask. “Don’t say it again.”
His face seized painfully and twisted back into the eager Marco simulation.
“You should get some new material!” he practically screamed.
“What are you, gonna rape me right here in an open restaurant? Customers will come through that door any second. There are twelve guys with knives in the kitchen, dipshit.”
“Rape you?” He said the word like it was nothing. Like he was ordering something foreign off the menu. “Ha-ha! Why would I do that, chica?”
I moved to leave, but the second I started to turn I saw his arm reflexively shoot out to the side. It was an alien gesture, more like a spasm than a conscious movement. His whole body convulsed and then he was abruptly standing a few feet closer. I barely saw him move.
My dad had a gardening shed back in Barstow. During the summer, you’d get these big black spiders. When you opened the door they would skitter, just an inch or two, and then stop. They were so fast. Watching them traverse that tiny distance, you knew immediately that they were too quick for you. You could never reach them in time to swat them.
I had that same feeling just now, watching Marco take one short step closer to me. There was a good fifteen feet between us, and only a few from where I stood back to the wait station—to the kitchen doors and to help.
I would never make it.
“I’m famous.” His voice lost intonation again. His face and body like an abandoned puppet propped up in a corner. “I am very rich. I am attractive and fit. You have a deformity and are a waitress. You are honored that I am speaking to you. You are flattered. You want me. You are ashamed of it. It is okay. I will take you. Just ask. Ask me, Kaitlyn.”
I could barely hear him. My pulse throbbed in my ears. A dull, resounding bass that drowned out everything else. I couldn’t expand my chest enough to get a full breath.
I’m so goddamned stupid, I thought, glancing down at my pad scattered across the floor. That pen was the closest thing I had to a weapon. I had nothing else on me. Nothing even close to me. And he was so fast. He was just waiting for me to do something, those non-eyes unfocused in my direction. They tracked me vaguely without actually seeing me, like a predatory bird watching a still lake for signs of movement.
I heard the double doors to the kitchen bang open, and Carl yelled some friendly string of obscenities to the prep cooks. I whirled.
“HELP!” I screamed.
There was a sharp bang and the sound of bells.
When I looked back, Marco was gone. The door was swinging slowly shut. The hydraulics groaned as they gently eased its weight inward.
“What?! Jesus.” Carl jogged around the wait station and saw me standing in an empty restaurant.
My favorite character from a nineties high school sitcom is an inhuman monster trying to sexually assault me, I didn’t even think of saying.
“S-spider,” I stumbled, and flushed red. “Thought I saw a spider. It’s nothing.”
Carl took the blushing as embarrassment, not the shaky retreat of adrenaline. He smiled that patronizing paternal grin and shook his head at me all the way to the bar.
* * *
It’s so absurd. I’m caught in a mad paranormal melodrama, and after this monstrous son of a bitch shows up at my work in the morning, moving like a giant cockroach right after you switch the light on, I still had no choice but to ignore it and carry on with the rest of my shift.
For two hours I served salmon salads to women ironically wearing skorts, then another four serving pomegranate martinis to men in ties that cost more than my first car. All the while wondering what I was going to do about the—what the hell was Marco, anyway? Something like a vampire? For that matter, why did he even want me? As insane as it sounds, I almost understood the other night, in his car. He was some kind of predator, just taking advantage of an easy situation. But to come back, like this, in broad daylight? He didn’t seem concerned about what I might do. That I might report him. He even seemed to think I wanted him here.
Did he really think we were … dating?
I almost laughed at the thought, but there were already enough crazies laughing to themselves on my bus ride home.
Funny girl.
I find that I’m liking funny girls.
No, Jackie.
I swiped at the screen of my phone, smearing restaurant grease over the surface. No matter how many times you wash your hands, that viscous ooze stays on you for hours after a shift. Gets in your pores.
Tiny dogs barked. I let them do so for a solid five minutes. No beep. No voice mail.
What the hell, Jackie?
I texted her again: GETTING SCARED ARE YOU OK PLEASE CALL FUCK YOUR DOGS
I locked the door to my apartment behind me and systematically checked every inch of the place. The doors were solid wood covered by heavy metal mesh screens. Thick iron bars on all the windows. All locked. All secure. I scouted every corner and closet. I opened the shower curtain and shone a flashlight into the cavernous space beneath my bed. Nothing.
I thought about pouring myself a drink to relax, but after a mere four hours working with alcohol, the thought alone turned my stomach. I woke my phone, checking to see if I missed the notification bing that signaled a new text. There was none. I closed my phone.
You have to wait twenty-four hours to file a missing-person report, right? Or is that just something I pulled from TV? Do you have to be family?
I curled into a ball on my worn leather couch and woke my phone again. I pushed the Web search box and typed “police missing persons.” I got a funny YouTube cover of a song by The Police, a few conspiracy theorists insisting that the police are the ones abducting people in the first place, and a Yahoo question asking, “Y police no help miss pppl.”
The highest rated answer was: “fuk u in teh butt>”
Goddamned Internet.
I called Jackie’s roomate, but she hadn’t seen her. I called Jackie’s work. They hadn’t seen her either, but it was her day off—why would they? I called the theater. Nobody there knew anything, either, but Jackie was supposed to be around for rehearsal later. They’d call me back, the box-office girl promised, whether or not she showed up. She totally understood how serious this was. She was taking a note.
I decided on that drink after all. I poured red wine into a coffee mug. It had a picture of a calendar, Friday highlighted, and said, “TGIFO: Thank God It’s Finally Over.” There was a knockoff caricature of Garfield on the reverse side.
I called the theater after nine, well past when rehearsal was supposed to start. Nobody picked up the phone. Assholes.
I repeatedly called and texted Jackie through the night like a drunken ex-boyfriend. She did not respond. I crawled into bed at midnight, cocooned myself in comforter, and dreamt of gargantuan brass gears, mashing tiny, furious dogs into a bloody paste.
* * *
Something is in the room.
Not this again. Part of the reason I have such an egregious, decadently comfortable bed is my profession. No, not waitressing: the stunt work. No matter how many safety measures you pile on, no matter how much training you have, it always hurts. You backflip onto a breakaway table covered in sugar-glass bottles, it still leaves huge, sugar-glass-bottle-shaped welts. But hey, what other job pays you to be a real-life action hero? Those actors get the credit on-screen, sure, but I’m the one that actually knows what it feels like to be lit on fire. I’m the one that jumps off tall buildings and ramps exploding Jet Skis. They just pretend to feel emotions over and over. I’ve got the better job description.
So the huge memory foam mattress is a necessity.
But that’s not the entire reason for it. I also suffer from sleep paralysis pretty often. That’s the official-sounding name for that feeling when you wake up in the dark and find yourself trapped in a limbo between consciousness and dreaming. Your mind is already warming up, revving to go, but your body hasn’t gotten the message. It doesn’t respond. You can’t move your limbs, can barely work your eyes. This usually triggers a panic response. Eventually you either force yourself fully awake or slip back to sleep and forget about it. In the old days, they thought this was caused by monsters—succubi, spirits, elves. Some of them literally sat on your chest, pinning you down. Now we know it for what it is: just a random brain misfire, screwing with you.
Sleep paralysis only happens to me when I sleep on my back, so I don’t sleep on my back. I usually sprawl on my belly, legs akimbo, or I curl up in a ball on my side. Either way, I need a ridiculous amount of space and a hell of a soft mattress just to get some shut-eye. But sometimes I wind up on my back anyway, like now.
Something is in the room.
Oh, shut up. You do this every time.
Just slowly concentrate on willing your leg to move. Once you move any part, every part starts working again.
Something is in the room.
You’re being irrational, Kaitlyn. There’s …
something in the room.
I could see it at the end of the bed. Two glints of evenly spaced light hovering in the dark.
They looked like eyes reflecting illumination, but there was no illumination here to reflect. They were the only shining points in a world of black.
I don’t have an end to my bed. It goes all the way to the wall.
It’s squatting on the mattress with me.
You’re still dreaming, Kaitlyn.
“You’re awake, Kaitlyn.” A voice, atonal and alien, sounded in the darkness. Every inch of me went cold.
Move your leg. Move your leg. Just your toe. Move. Move.
“I wanted to talk to you about earlier.” Marco spoke so softly I almost couldn’t hear him over my own frantic breathing.
Big toe. Curl. Curl, you son of a bitch.
“You should have asked me to fuck you.”
I had checked all the windows. I checked the doors. Steel and wood and iron. No way. No way this was happening.
“You should have let me come inside of you. Let it crawl around in you. Start to work on you. Let it hollow you out. You could be like me.”
I could feel sweat springing up through my pores. Trying to move the slightest part of me was like lifting weights with my tongue.
Just a wiggle. Just a twitch. Please. Please.
“Well. Ha. Ha. Ha.” He didn’t laugh, just said the words with little pauses between. “You could never be like me. I have been touched by the Mechanic. I have seen the machine. But you could be like the others, at least. You could understand.”
Every steely, stubborn ounce of willpower in me solidified at once. I felt like I was trying to do a sit-up at the bottom of the ocean. My teeth vibrated from the impossible strain of concentration.
“I think you should understand,” he said, and I saw the glints grow larger. They were advancing.
The sound of a zipper in the dark.
I heard something pop inside my head. A brief, bright red flash, like an errant laser pointer scanning across the insides of my eyes. The effort was so intense it physically hurt, but …
The toe. Moved.
It was a starter pistol for the rest of my body. I groaned, rolled to the side, and let muscle memory guide my hand to the light switch in the dark. It snapped on right as I pulled my feet up and away from Marco. I coiled back and braced myself against the wall to kick at his face.
There was nothing in the room.
My bedroom door was still locked from the inside. I pulled the heavy brown curtains aside with my foot. Intact iron bars, backlit by the blue neon signage of the grocery store across the street, cast long shadows across my bedspread.
I snatched the off-brand Mace from the built-in shelf beside the window. The slutty devil sucked her finger at me precociously. I thumbed the lock switch off and swung my bedroom door open. Moving like I’d seen those tactical teams do in Tom Clancy flicks, I swept the house. I cleared the corners. I double-checked every possible entryway … and found them all secure. I saved the bathroom for last.
I swept the shower curtain back … and saw only stained green tile and empty shampoo bottles.
When I passed by the mirror, my heart froze. I did a literal double take worthy of Charlie Chaplin and leaned in for closer inspection. I lifted a shaky hand to my left eye and pulled the lower lid down. It was bright, oozing red. Crimson spilled across the white like paint washing down a porcelain sink.
The blood vessel had burst.