Entropy in Bloom

Birthday parties at Pizza Playhouse were hell, but Julie was a great kid and Roger knew he’d do just about anything for her. At least their hosts had kept the pitchers of cheap beer flowing, and in the end that had been the only way to tolerate the keening screams of the children and the repetitive parental small talk. It definitely didn’t help that Roger and his wife Claire ended up at a party table with Abe Pearson, who wouldn’t shut up about the fence he’d built by hand on his family’s property. Fucking perfect Abe—who had four equally perfect little boys and a thriving dental practice and a real charmer of a wife—couldn’t stop talking about how he’d got a permit and cut down every tree he wanted to use for the project, and milled the boards, and pounded in every post for a half acre, all by himself.

“Saved a bunch of money, I think, and it felt good to really work the project from beginning to end and watch it come to life. But I’ll tell you there were some sore mornings where I thought about calling in help. And my hands, well . . . ” and then Abe held up both of his palms to show off a topographic map of scars and calluses. “You probably know how that is from working over at Cumberton, right Roger?”

“I’m not on the mill floor, actually. I work scheduling admin and help with our safety program. But most of our guys wear gloves.”

“Oh, they’re missing out. Sure, it’s tough on you at first, but working with your bare hands you get a real sense of the wood, you know.”

Claire reached out and lightly set her hand on the side of Abe’s arm. “Looks like fence building’s a good workout, at least. What do you think, Rog? We could use a new fence.”

“Sure,” Abe said, before Roger could even respond. “I could even help you get started, bud. Give you a couple tips and save you a few of my dumb mistakes.”

“Oh, that’d be great!” said Claire. “Last time I asked Rog to build me something I got a planter bed with no bottom and the gophers destroyed our garden.” She laughed, then looked over at Roger with a smile and winked. Her hand was still on Abe’s arm.

Roger drained the other half of his mug and slammed it down on the table. Abe and Claire jumped. “Yep. That planter sucked. I guess I didn’t get a sense of the goddamned wood.”

He stood up, not sure if he felt more embarrassed or angry, and excused himself to go grab another piece of cake.

Failing to locate any extra dessert—the kids had wiped out the entire chocolate-layered thing at locust-speed—he found a full pitcher of beer and poured himself another. He finally looked back over at Claire, who had moved to another table and was using a tiny plastic brush from the party gift bag to style Julie’s hair, and he realized that this was the same thing as ever—Claire was the fun, flirty, social one who tried to make something worthwhile out of these parties and that’s all it was and she was such a great mom. But still . . . . fucking Abe and his precious hand-made fence and Claire laughing at him with her hand on his huge arm.

The ride home was quiet—Julie was in a cake coma, and Claire stared ahead at the road. Roger was still thinking about how he could build a fucking amazing fence if he wanted to, if that was really what he wanted to devote his time to. But he didn’t need to do that, because he did a million other things for his family, and they knew that.

Regardless, every time he thought he’d calmed down, he pictured Claire’s hand on Abe’s arm again, and found himself wrapped up tight in the same bitter, halfway jealous vibes.

He drained his water bottle on the drive home in an attempt to dilute the effects of his overindulgence at the party. Still, when Roger arrived at their house he was slightly more buzzed than he probably should have been, and he made it all the way past the living room and into the kitchen before his beer-lagged brain acknowledged the massive hole in the drywall where their flat-screen TV had been ripped away.

Panic. It hit instantly, alongside the heat-flush of a heart leaping into double-time.

He turned toward Claire and little Julie, thankful they were exhausted and hadn’t yet made it up the walkway to the front door, which was still wide open. Claire had a batch of tin foil-wrapped pizza in her left hand and their sugar-crashed kiddo cradled on her other arm, half-asleep against her.

Roger quickly took several long, urgent strides across the living room and out the door, covering the distance to his family, doing his best to look composed.

“Now.” He leaned in and whispered. “We got robbed. Get back in the car. Take Julie down to your mom’s place. I’ll call when you guys can come back.”

“Are you fucking with me?” Her eyes flashed, alert but suspicious. “Is this about that party thing? You’re just kidding around to freak me out, right?”

Roger instantly regretted all the pranks he’d played on Julie over the years. He needed her to take him seriously at times like this, when there could be people with guns inside their house, somewhere, right that moment.

“I’m not kidding. GO!” He yelled it. Too stern. A well of anger was boiling up inside him, mixing with fear, causing him to shake.

“Nothing, Jules. There’s a little problem with the house.” They were moving back toward the car at least, heading in the right direction, even though it wasn’t fast enough for him. Roger imagined a man in a ski mask charging out over their foyer, hatchet in hand, ready to slaughter them all. He put his hand on the small of Claire’s back to speed her along. “You’re going to head to grandma’s for a special sleepover and I’ll call you when the house is all fixed up.”

“No, honey.” Roger opened the back door to load Julie into her car seat. “We can’t go into the house right now.”

Roger couldn’t stand the idea of dealing with a tantrum over a plush blue owl while someone might be escaping their backyard at that very moment with a laptop containing all of their unencrypted financial data. He went with a cheap counter-move.

“Check it out, Jules. I’ve still got some of the Skittles you bought with your game tickets. You want tropical or regulars?” He tightened her seat belt while she pondered the question. Claire started the ignition and gave him a “Seriously, more sugar?” look that he did his best to brush off.

It’s like she’s already forgotten our house has been robbed. Who cares about the goddamn sugar?

He was wise enough to say nothing. He kissed Julie on the forehead, slid her some candy, and gave her a hug. “Have fun at the sleepover, baby.” He turned to Claire. “You’ll call and let me know you guys made it, yeah?”

“And I’ll call you once I have this figured out. I’ll let you know when it’s safe.”

Safe. Cute word—felt like an absurdity over Roger’s lips, but it seemed to give Claire a sense this was really happening. Her face softened.

“Okay. Are you safe, though? Why don’t you get in and we’ll call 911 on the way and then they can let us know once they send somebody out?”

She doesn’t think I can handle this myself. Why? Because I can’t build a planter? Jesus. That’s bullshit. She needs to know I can take care of us.

Roger looked back at the house. He pictured strange men crawling in through the windows and across the bed where he slept with his wife and he had a sense of all that had been taken from his family. He wanted to look Claire in the eyes and say, “I’ve got this, babe. I’m going to head in and secure the place, and if anybody’s still in there I’ll fuck ’em up.”

But she might not believe me. She needs to believe me. I can show her. I’ll handle this.

And Claire believed him, and drove off into the night, leaving Roger with their broken home and the fresh wounds inflicted by strangers who’d claimed it as their own.

ROGER COUNTED TO THREE hundred—enough time to ensure Claire wasn’t pulling back around the block—and then walked through the front door.

He crept over to their kitchen and pulled their largest knife from the wood block.

You know how to use that, pal? Or you just want to hand some career criminal an easier way to kill your dumb ass? Maybe Claire and Julie can come back and find your head’s been sawed off and stuffed in the dishwasher? Don’t be stupid. Get out. Call the cops.

Roger held the blade out in front of him and did his best to not notice the way the steel blade vibrated along with his jackhammering heart.

You should yell something. Let them know you’re here. They’ll go running. Do it for Claire. She trusted you, and now you’re back in the house playing Rambo like you’re not someone’s dad. Jesus.

Roger sensed a new electricity in the air. The part of him that had a long history of diving deep on bad impulses was enjoying the idea of conflict. Something to make him feel vital, and strong. He imagined himself confronting a thief, driving his blade into the man’s guts and looking into his eyes as he bled out.

They shouldn’t have fucked with me. They shouldn’t have threatened my family.

The part of him that cared about making coffee for Claire in the morning and braiding his daughter’s hair thought: You’re only gassing yourself up because you know the robbers are already gone. What are you trying to prove? But that idea was quickly washed away by a haze of adrenaline and beer and forward motion.

Did we leave it like that, or did they? How long were they here? Are they even gone?

Roger was five feet away from the master bedroom, silently approaching, steeling himself to rush in, sweat beading across his forehead, when his cell phone rang.

It rang again. And this time he wasn’t the only one who heard the jangling tones.

Something thumped against the rear wall of the house with enough size and strength to make the floorboards under Roger’s feet tremble and send shockwaves through his bones. A painting of two nesting doves fell from the wall. The glass in the frame shattered—Roger was looking at the shards in disbelief when he heard the sound coming from his bedroom. He felt it in his chest first, then his ears, as the rumble moved from its subsonic state to full warning.

The knife was forgotten, dropped to the hardwoods. The anger drained to nothing.

He was all the way to the street in front of his house when some kind of reason returned, and it was then that he heard a more human sound in the night air.

Wherever the man was, he sure as hell thought the situation was hilarious. Robbing this dumb family. Scaring the husband into a cardiac arrest with some kind of sound effects.

They’re playing with you, old man. Rush back there. Bust that punk’s nose and pin him until the cops show.

But the feeling of the growling animal was still a tremor deep in his marrow, and Roger found he could not go back into the house.

And they might be huge. Or some kind of animal. But I can’t say that or you’ll ditch this as a crank call.

Roger blinked, and pulled the phone from his ear to look at it. Did I tell her my name? His ears were ringing. He couldn’t remember. Don’t be dense, they can probably pull it up on their caller ID system.

“No,” he finally answered. “My wife and daughter are headed to the in-laws.”

“Okay. That’s good, sir. Do you have any reason to believe someone else might still be in the residence?”

“I . . . I’m not sure. I only saw the living room, really, and noticed the TV missing.”

Static crackled over the line. Roger felt a sharp pain behind his forehead, pressure behind his ears, building to nearly intolerable levels.

What now? Wasn’t my house getting jacked and me getting scared like some little bitch enough? Is this what a heart attack feels like?

“Sir, do . . . might be . . . enter the house . . . kill them a . . . grab . . . shovel and . . . pieces?”

“Come again? I’m sorry.” What the hell? Am I going to stroke out right here? I’m losing it.

And then, as quickly as the pain came, it faded. The white noise which saturated his hearing cleared, the sound of ocean water draining from his ears at the beach.

“I wanted to know if you have somewhere you can go until police arrive?” the voice on the other end said clearly. “We do not advise you remain at or enter the property. Nothing you own is worth risking your life. Do you have a neighbor you might visit?”

Roger tried to think, but it was like the gears in his mind wouldn’t lock together. Three years at this house and I still can’t remember a single neighbor’s name.

“No, I . . . uh. Sorry. I’m freaking out, I think.” Roger saw a flash of light, short and bright, from the periphery above his right shoulder.

“Sir? We’ve got an officer in your area. He’s being dispatched to your property. Do you have a vehicle on site that you can enter and lock?”

Roger couldn’t stand the idea of being cooped up in the cab of his truck. Hell, he was breathing so fast he felt the night air around him running thin.

He opened and closed the door of the truck, holding the phone out for the 911 operator to hear it creak and latch.

“Still sounds like you’re outside. I can hear crickets. Wind on the receiver. Your dress shirt flapping in the breeze.”

“No, I’m in the . . . ” Wait, how does she know what kind of shirt I’m wearing?

“Okay, the officer is reporting he’s a block out. He’ll be with you in a moment.”

And with that there was a click on the line. Roger turned from his house to see an unmarked patrol car parked across the street.

THE OFFICER’S LED FLASHLIGHT was so bright that Roger could barely see him until he was a few feet away. Casual dress. Must be an undercover. Or maybe he took the call after going off shift. Happened to be in the neighborhood. Something like that.

“Very good. Thank you. I’m Officer Hayhurst. Can you tell me a little bit about this situation?”

“Only asking because I had a case last week, the guy comes home blitzed, I mean three sheets, trashes his own house for whatever reason, breaks his ankle stumbling down the stairs into his garage and passes out. Then he wakes up, calls us, thinking somebody knocked him out and rifled his house. We show up, ask him what they might have taken, or what he’d have that they’d want to steal, and he gets shifty and tries to give us the boot. While I’m trying to calm him down, my partner looks in the guy’s bonus room and finds a couple of pounds of partially wrapped mushrooms—I’m talking the Schedule I type—and there you go.”

“We booked him for it and logged the contraband, but it still felt like a colossal waste of time. So, when I get calls this time of night, I start to look for how much alcohol might be a factor in the situation.”

“That makes sense. But I didn’t get drunk and rob my own house. I mean, I was driving home with my five-year-old and my wife in the car.”

“You’d be surprised, sir. We pull over plenty of parents who thought they were sober and still blow a point one zero.”

“I’m sure. That’s very sad.” Roger thought back to when he was five, flying around the big back seat of a Ford Galaxie while his dad swerved and took slugs off the bottle of Crow he kept stashed in the dash. A different era.

“Yes. When I went inside I noticed that the TV was missing. I got Claire and Julie out of here and then called you.”

And then I went inside thinking I might kill whoever busted in, but I got spooked when I realized there might be a giant in my bedroom and I was about to shit my pants when something growled at me and then someone was laughing and I called 911 and maybe started having some kind of seizure or psychic breakdown and now I’m here with you and you’re not helping one fucking microscopic iota. So that’s about that, pal.

“Do you have any reason to believe the perpetrators might still be in your house?”

“No. Might have been here when we first arrived but I think they would have heard us and left by now.”

But there also might have been someone on the roof, shining something at me and filling my head with noise. I break out that little fun fact and you’ll have me puffing into your breathalyzer, right?

“Okay, Roger. I’m going to head in and clear your property, and then I’ll invite you in and we can go over the next steps. Is there anything inside the house—dogs, security devices, things of that nature—that I should be aware of?”

Maybe a kitchen knife in the hallway, but you can’t tie that to me. Can I be prosecuted for self-endangerment?

Roger nodded and looked up to the sky and listened to the sound of police helicopters hovering over the city in search of the kind of people who laughed when a man ran in terror from his own home.

“WELL, THEY DEFINITELY MADE a mess of things. But they’re gone. You can come on in.”

Roger had never had a man with a gun tell him he was allowed to enter his own home. Had never needed anyone’s permission to enter his own home before. Something about it made him shiver.

Officer Hayhurst gestured to the gaping hole in the drywall where the television and its mount had been ripped clean away.

“That surprises me, honestly. They’re not grabbing TVs much anymore, now that the price point came down and they got more trackable. Obviously, they didn’t have the time to unscrew it from the wall. Did you have that thing hooked into a stud?”

“Yeah.” Roger had wanted to mount it dead center on the wall, but Claire was paranoid about the thing falling onJulie’s head during an earthquake, so he’d made sure it was secured to the frame of the house even though the asymmetry set his brain to twitching when he noticed.

“Most of ’em are. And in this case, actually, you’re dealing with a burglar. A robber steals from people using force. A burglar steals from properties. Easy way to remember it is to think of the Ham-burglar. He was sneaky. Creeping around, stealing burgers. Already dressed in jail duds, which was dumb now that I think about it. But you didn’t see him pistol-whipping Ronald and jacking his fries. He did that, he’d be the Hamrobber.”

“Main other places you want to check are the master bedroom and the office. They usually don’t bother with kids’ rooms and the kitchen. They stay away from the front of the house in general, especially if their exit point is out the back. Nobody wants to get trapped.”

They walked down the central hallway. Hayhurst pointed to the knife on the floor.

“That’s weird to me. Sometimes they grab a nice set of knives, but they usually nab the whole block. Can’t help but picture the intruder waiting for you with that, trying to decide if they were going to run or fight. Looks like you got lucky.”

He pictured the thieves collating his routing and checking numbers and Social Security numbers and birth certificates and credit card numbers and everything they’d need to make his family’s finances an unholy mess for decades to come.

Toppled, probably just for fun: the bookshelf. Technical manuals and military thrillers and comic books everywhere.

And there, on the center of his desk, surrounded by the dust outlining where his laptop used to exist, was a framed black and white photo of him and Julie, taken last Father’s Day.

Over the top of the image, scrawled on the glass in fast, violent strokes, a large red X across both of their faces.

“Now Roger, I want you to know that we’re going to take that seriously, as it could be construed as a threat, but I also have to tell you that I’ve seen thousands of burglaries and I can’t tell you how many times they leave behind a little something to mess with the victims. You seem like a down-to-earth guy, so if you’ll pardon my French, I can tell you I’ve seen much worse. Family photos shit on. Wife’s unmentionables laid out on the bed with come all over them. Housecat strangled and stuffed in with the kid’s plush animals. Awful. Some types, it isn’t enough to take a family’s property. They want your sense of security too. They’re either too juvenile to guess at the kind of damage this sort of thing does, or worse, they don’t care at all. It’s fun to them.”

The reading lamp in Julie’s back corner was on, shedding soft light on dayglow kid posters and pony bedding. Nothing appeared to be disturbed. Roger flipped the switch for the brighter overhead lamp and paced the room looking for anything amiss, skin crawling at the thought of some asshole in what was supposed to be his daughter’s idyllic space.

“Yeah, I don’t think they came in here. Quick check in the bedroom and then we’ll go around back and see if they left anything behind for us.”

Hayhurst went in first and walked to Claire’s dresser, pointing to the open jewelry box on top.

Roger scanned the box. It was in total disorder, but he didn’t know enough about Claire’s jewelry to determine if anything was missing.

“Maybe check the little black boxes. Burglar’s been at this any length of time, they can tell right away what’s costume jewelry and what’s going to get them something at pawn.”

Son of a bitch. He rarely had enough money to get something nice for Claire of his own accord, and now they’d taken five anniversaries worth of scrapping and scrimping and they were probably already on their way to trading them for one tenth their value in drug money. Goddamn it.

“Yeah. Looks like they were pretty well targeted. You’re going to want to check that drawer too.” Hayhurst pointed down to the lowest drawer, where Roger kept his boxers and socks. It was already open, the contents tornadoed. He squatted next to the drawer.

“Guns. Drugs. Your best jewels. That’s mainly what they’re looking for. Small, valuable shit. Easy to abscond with. Easy to use or trade. And the odds say they can find at least one of those things in a man’s sock drawer. You tell me why that is, because I don’t know. But this definitely looks professional. Normally, this close to the bus line, I might guess a bored teenager did it, but the longer I look around your house, the more this seems too pro for your average teen or tweaker.”

A pro job. The idea gave Roger zero comfort. Had they been watching us? For how long? Had my computer been hacked? Had they seen my response to the party evite? Could it have been one of the parents who didn’t come to the party? Who else would have known we’d be out. . .

“Do you own any guns that might have been stolen? It’s very important that we get as much info about firearms as we can.”

“No. No guns. I grew up with them, but my wife . . . ” Roger shrugged. Claire saw guns as death incarnate, a physical manifestation of fear, and the need for them a kind of moral weakness.

“Say no more. My wife’s the same. I try to not even let her see my service pistol. That’s good news though. One less stolen gun on the streets.” Hayhurst walked around the king-sized bed at the center of the room and pointed to the open window. “And over here we have the point of entry. Looks like they pulled the screen, applied a little pressure to the glass, and slid the window to the side. You can even see a footprint here where they stepped on your bed coming in. Tracked some grass with them.” Hayhurst clicked on his flashlight and leaned out the window. “Yeah—very close to the ground here. Easy to hop in once it’s open. No security latches?”

Roger couldn’t think of a response that didn’t make him feel either dumb or defensive or both. The truth was that he’d fucked up. He’d barely thought of the windows, of how accessible they were, of how easily secured they could have been. He’d thought their new place was, somehow, safe. He’d done nothing and now his family had been endangered. Who knew how this would impact Julie, or how Claire would look at him now? It was his job to protect them and he’d failed.

The cop cleared his throat, waiting on Roger’s response. “No. Nothing. No security, aside from the deadbolt on the front door. We thought . . . this kind of thing isn’t supposed to happen in this neighborhood. That’s why we moved out here after dealing with all the bullshit in the Northeast.”

Hayhurst’s eyes took on a strange dull softness then. He looked right at Roger, then past him.

“Hey, Roger.” The cop’s voice had taken on an odd monotone. “That’s magical thinking. There is no glass which can’t be shattered, no lock which can’t be broken, no life which can’t be taken should someone else possess both hunger and the will to feed it.”

The cop’s disturbing lack of affect reminded Roger of the strange voice he’d heard on the 911 call. Is he even really saying this?

Then, just as quickly as his demeanor had changed, Hayhurst smiled, and the light returned to his eyes. “Yeah, I’m surprised too,” he said, as if he hadn’t already replied. “This neighborhood has very low crime. I can’t remember the last time I was called out here, honestly.”

Roger decided—especially with his sobriety already in question—to let the moment pass.

The officer crossed the room and pulled out a smaller flashlight which emitted a soft purple light. He shone it on the jewelry box while running what looked like a tiny shave brush over the surface.

“That’s what I expected—jack shit for prints. Burglary’s a hell of a tough case to crack, most of the time. Last year we only caught folks in about twelve percent of cases, and most of those were tweakers too dumb to recognize tagged or LoJacked gear. I mean, if you have to get into a career in crime, burglary’s probably the safest bet you’ve got.”

Roger stared at the cop and wondered if he had ever passed any form of sensitivity training. Hayhurst spotted his bewilderment.

“Sorry, man. Facts are facts. Anyway, let’s check your medicine cabinets and then take a look around back.”

THEY SCANNED BOTH BATHROOMS and their cabinets and Roger ran an internal monologue matching meds to maladies. All was accounted for, aside from a small bottle of Valium which he occasionally used when his lower back went out. But Roger said nothing of the pilfered blue V’s, as he used them to treat a pain caused by the risk and impetuousness of his youth, and Hayhurst might ask too many questions about mistakes in Roger’s past he felt lucky to have escaped.

THEIR OUTDOOR ADVENTURE CONSISTED primarily of Hayhurst pointing out many of the house’s additional unsecured areas—”This place is a burglar’s dream, Roger. You could hide in a yard like this all day and strip the house at your leisure with a truck in the alley.”—and then acknowledging that the rained-on grass would yield no useful shoe prints.

It wasn’t until they stopped scanning the exit route and Hayhurst brought the flashlight up to the outside surface of the bedroom window that they found their first real clue.

There, in the caked dust on the window glass, they saw the shape of the two massive hands which had so easily pushed the window out of the way.

Hayhurst lifted his own gloved hands up to the window. The outline of the fingers on the glass was easily an inch wider and two inches longer than the officer’s.

And most notably, the imprint of the left hand appeared to be missing its pinkie finger.

“Will you look at that, Roger? Big guy! And that missing digit means we just might find out who burgled your house after all. Let me dust for prints.”

But Roger—whose mind was awash in red X’s and low growls and flat voices telling him about hunger—wasn’t so sure that even solid evidence and well-applied laws offered any kind of comfort anymore.

“Nope. Gloved up. No prints. Pros for sure. Not that this was a hard nut to crack, mind you. Truth is you made it easy for them. You were so easily penetrated.” It almost sounded like Hayhurst was admiring them. “Not your fault, not really. These days it’s not as clear cut as it used to be. Back in my father’s day a man knew where he stood. You prepared and you protected. You kept a shotgun near your bed if trouble came calling, and you knew it was on you to provide your wife and child with a sense of security. You get that, right?”

Hayhurst’s earlier comment was still echoing in his head—You were so easily penetrated. Something about the way the cop said it sat in Roger’s guts and made him feel like he was shrinking away and furious at the same time. He crossed his arms over his chest and wondered what it would feel like to drive a fist into Hayhurst’s nose.

“Yeah, I can tell you know what I’m talking about, Roger. You’ll do the right thing, going forward. Maybe you could use a new fence back here. Something more serious than that chicken wire. City code will let you go up to six feet now, plus trellis on top. Anyway, let’s head in.”

IN THE END OFFICER Hayhurst left him with only a floppy, computer-printed business card with his police department info on the front and a case number jotted on the back.

“That case number’s really all I can give you at this point. I got a photo of each room and the vandalized picture in your office. Besides that, all I found was a partial print that’s probably yours.”

“Well, like I said, this guy or guys, it was a pro deal. And even if that partial is theirs, it doesn’t work like you see on the CSI. I’m not sending out a tech for what appears to be a standard-issue jewel theft. So what you do now is take inventory of what you lost and call the insurance company first thing in the morning. They’ll make it right. And remember, they have no way to verify how much cash was or wasn’t stolen from your property. So be certain to search through your house and figure out how much cash was stolen. It was probably quite a bit.”

“I would never officially advise you to falsely report cash losses. But I can tell you that by the time this all sets in, you are going to find yourself spending a lot of money securing this joint. Trust me. So let the insurance company make that right, too. Take care, Mr. Stephenson.”

There was a moment of silence after Roger closed the front door of the house. He was exhausted. He leaned his forehead against the cool of the door and wished that he could close his eyes and when he opened them he’d find out it was all just a bad dream, that everything was the way it had been before they’d left for the party. But that was bullshit, so he considered another option: set fire to the place. It wasn’t theirs any longer—the moment intruders opened the window and stepped inside it had ceased to be his family’s home. Even if he tidied up and offered reassurances, his family would always remember this night. How the only ones he yelled at that night were the ones he should have protected. How some stranger had walked through their home and taken everything they’d wanted. So he’d soak the damned place in gasoline and spark a match and watch all proof of the invasion turn to ashes, then drive two cities over to be with Claire and Julie and start afresh.

But then his phone rang, and the world wasn’t a place which allowed such fantasies, and the screen said “CLAIRE” so he had to answer it and start lying to her about how everything was going to be okay.

I’ll bring some clothes and supplies out to your mom’s house tomorrow afternoon. I need you and Julie to stay there for a few days until I get things cleaned up and safe around here.

I know. I know. It sucks. But I’m pretty sure I have most of our pictures and videos on a back-up drive. Or in that cloud account I keep forgetting to cancel.

No, they don’t have any of those videos. Those are only on the camera card. I never moved them to the hard drive. I swear.

No, you make sure Julie gets to school and then head to work. I’ll call in tomorrow, stay home and deal with all of it. Insurance. Banks. Credit agencies. Get this place locked down.

I know, babe. It’s a fucking mess. It’s going to be okay though. I’ll handle it.

HE WONDERED WHAT WOULD have happened if he’d told her everything. What if she knew about the strange voices and the ink-slashed photo and had some sense of who might have been in their home? He imagined she’d demand that they put the house on the market and move somewhere, anywhere, else.

But he’d hidden the truth, and the doubt and concern in her voice doubled his resolve.

He’d cleared his throat halfway through the call and shifted his voice into a lower register. He would show her he was the kind of guy who could handle any trouble that came his way.

DESPITE A FLOOD OF adrenaline from the night’s events, Roger knew the right thing to do was to get some rest and start as fresh as he could at daybreak. But when he walked back to his bedroom and felt the air blowing in through the open window and saw the huge footprint canyon in the middle of his wife’s pillow, he knew that this was a place which would offer no sleep until set right.

What was the worst of it? What had to be addressed to quell the rage and frustration he felt pressurizing in his chest?

He thought back to Oakland, when things had gone bad there. You had to work fast to reshape reality before it became the thing that swallowed you whole.

First: undoing the things he didn’t want Claire to ever know. A Windex wipe down for their rear window erased the outline of the printless four-fingered hand. Screen reinserted, window closed.

The comforter and pillows went in the laundry. If Claire ever found out the burglar had stepped on her pillow, she’d throw it in the fire before sleeping on it again.

The X’ed out picture frame was stuck in a trash can two houses over, and the photo of him and Julie tucked away in a family album. Couldn’t risk Claire asking about the absence of the frame or spotting it in their own trash.

Roger would have to ensure any and all follow-up cop conversations rolled through him.

The worst and most unsettling evidence of the burglary addressed, Roger worked the rest of the night on restoring order, feeling like a lonely ant tasked with rebuilding an entire hill after some kid had kicked it to pieces for cheap thrills.

He dusted his desk to de-emphasize the absence of their computer. He pushed his bookshelf back up and tried to remember in what order he’d organized his books, back when they’d first moved in. He hit the hole in the living room wall with a patch-and-paint kit, and since there was more coffee in the pot he drained that and then stayed in motion until sunrise so that he could perfect the illusion that nothing bad had ever happened here.

HE HADN’T FALLEN ASLEEP so much as he’d just stopped being conscious right there in his chair at the kitchen table. He woke to a puddle of drool on the dark wood table and too-bright sunlight beaming in through the sliding glass doors to their patio.

The table had become the central workstation for Operation: Un-Fuck This. Roger reoriented himself, poring over the insurance docs and jewelry receipts and current bank statements and even the laptop manual, where he’d actually had the rare foresight to jot down the serial number. He checked his phone and saw nothing from Claire and hoped that she was about her usual routine. That gave him nine more hours to lock things down.

He used his phone to shoot an email to his supervisor at the mill. They were still a month out from quarter end, so if Roger had to be gone, now was the time. He’d miss a few droning meetings about the implementation plans for the new safety regs. That was fine by him.

“Stomach flu knocked me sideways. Trust me, you don’t want me there. Might be sick for a day or two. Lance has access to my Q3 folder for the morning reports.”

Roger had figured out a while back that a stomach flu was the best illness to fake when you needed an excuse to take a day off. Everybody sympathized and nobody asked questions, for fear that they might get answers involving shit and/or vomit. Plus, if you stayed out for a fake cold, you had to spend that whole first day back putting on theatrics, making little dry coughs and sniffling back imaginary snot. The flu would get him to the weekend without having to worry about anything other than the house and how this was going to affect his family.

Even after all the clean-up, she might still think it’s blowback from Oakland. But it’s not. It can’t be. That was sealed up tight. Anybody who would give a damn is still in jail.

And normally those thoughts would have given Roger comfort— it was true, he knew it in his bones. No matter how much Claire fretted, it would be pure paranoia at play. Oakland was behind them, so long ago, and even if it wasn’t, then at least he knew what kind of folks he was dealing with. This, though . . . he had no idea. And even in the light of day and the heat of work, he still found himself plagued by cold sweats and a fluttering heart.

I’m exhausted—that’s all. I’ll get the house together, get one night of good sleep, and then things won’t all seem so out of joint.

He nodded his head at the thought, trying to drive the affirmation down, to make it feel true.

I need to leave to pick up supplies and get the place locked down. But if I leave and it’s still unsecured they might strike again, and this time they’ll take everything. They know the layout now. They think I’m a mark.

They’d hit us at night, when we’d have normally been home. Your average burglar shows up during working hours because they know everyone is off on their grind. But we were hit at prime time. They had to have been watching. Waiting.

So Roger walked the perimeter of the house three times with an aluminum baseball bat slung over his shoulder. He poked around in the bushes and high hedgerows that surrounded his backyard and made it so thief friendly.

He walked the street in front of their house, the bat now slung at his hip. He covered the whole block, doing his best to memorize the neighbors’ cars and minivans so it’d be easier to identify any intruders.

The street was sedate. Only squirrels, birds, and Roger and his bat were in motion.

It’s morning. They’re working. I could rob all these places right now. Hell, the guy across the street left his fucking garage door open again. I could walk right in and help myself to some pie and jewelry.

Spotting nothing obvious or out of the ordinary, Roger returned to the house, turned on every light, and then locked the front door and started to leave.

BY THE TIME HE had the hammer and nails in hand, he knew this was what Claire had been nervous about. That this would turn him manic. That his more questionable impulses would surface.

He put up the hand-printed note anyway, nailed it to the forest green siding beneath their bedroom window.

HEY, FUCKFACE,

FIRST OF ALL, NOW YOU KNOW THERE’S NOTHING LEFT INSIDE BUT AN OLD-ASS TV SOME MISMATCHED DISHES, AND SOME PLUSH TOYS. SO STAY THE FUCK OUT.

SECOND, HOW DO YOU KNOW I REALLY LEFT? HOW DO YOU KNOW I’M NOT THE KIND OF GUY WHO PARKS FIVE BLOCKS AWAY AND THEN SNEAKS HOME TO WAIT FOR YOU TO COME BACK IN? HOW DO YOU KNOW I’M NOT IN THERE RIGHT NOW, WAITING BEHIND THAT CLOSED BATHROOM DOOR, HOLDING ON TO A HUGE KNIFE?

MAYBE I WANT YOU TO COME IN. MAYBE I WANT YOU ON MY PRIVATE PROPERTY SO I CAN ASSERT A FEW OF MY RIGHTS. THAT MIGHT BE ALL I WANT IN THE WORLD. TO HAVE A LITTLE FUN WITH YOU BEFORE THE COPS COME TO HAUL YOUR DUMB TWEAKER ASS OFF TO A TWENTY YEAR JAIL TERM.

YOU DON’T KNOW WHO YOU’RE DEALING WITH.

SO THINK ABOUT IT, BUDDY. IS IT WORTH IT?

SINCERELY,

THE OWNER

P.S. BRING THE LAPTOP BACK. IT’S LOJACKED. PUT IT ON THE FRONT PORCH BEFORE THEY CATCH YOU WITH IT.

Roger pictured Claire coming home to find that note. Another wave of sweat popped on his skin.

HE DROVE THREE SLOW laps around his block before he finally felt comfortable driving away from the house. Saw nothing which caused alarm. It was a quiet neighborhood. He’d loved it, until last night. He resolved to do everything he could to make it so he could love it again someday.

He drove accordingly. If he happened to run a red or two, he put his hand up in front of his face in case the intersection had one of those automated photo ticket systems. He rode a few bumpers to induce a sense of fucking urgency. Speed limits were suggestions for people who weren’t trying to protect their homes from giant four-fingered professional thieves.

He hit the home supply and electronic stores in turbo mode. His cart tilted to two wheels when he rounded corners. He almost clipped a gray-haired old lady who was indecisive about which pruning shears she wanted.

HE EXPECTED TO FIND the house gutted upon his return, instead of locked tight and smelling like burnt coffee.

Time to lock it all down: toolbox opened on the table, drill on the charger. Credit card receipts and open boxes strewn across the control center/kitchen table.

Room by room. Every window got a vibration alarm. Anybody who tried to enter from the outside would get hit with enough decibels to drive them deaf in less than two minutes. Every window got a security dowel and sliding aluminum lock latch. Every window got metal screws across the top of the frame, every three inches, so there was no possibility of lifting the pane out unless you removed them from the inside.

The sliding glass door got quadruple-redundant lock systems. Side gate got a lock you couldn’t drill through unless you owned a diamond tip.

Rear fencing was fortified with three upward-extending feet of chicken wire. He’d bought the cheap kind because it cut his finger when he was trying to make a decision on which roll to buy. He’d almost asked the clerk if they had razor-wire, but decided that was beyond the pale. Plus, that would give Claire a sense of how he felt, which was how she shouldn’t feel. This was his problem.

He ripped up his little warning note. The rear window it had been protecting was now a barely-openable sheet of glass rigged up to wail like a banshee if a fluttering leaf accidentally brushed its surface. He felt better about that.

Roger noticed that it would be easy to escape from his backyard to a side alley through one of the neighbor’s unfenced yards. That was unacceptable. There should be no easy point of access.

Where’s Abe Pearson and his amazing fence-building skills when you need him?

But Abe Pearson was a goodie-two-shoes—hell, a dentist. Roger thought himself from scrappier stock. He went old school, constructing a four-foot-high bramble patch outside that stretch of his fencing, stacking cut blackberry stalks and thorny rose branches until his arms were covered in tiny seeping cuts.

CLAIRE WAS STILL SPOOKED. He could hear it in her voice. It was easy to talk her into staying another night at her parents’ house.

“Good. Good. I think we’ll be all set for you guys to come back tomorrow.”

“Hell yes. I miss you guys. It’s too quiet here. I’m used to having some music playing through the TV . . . ”

“Definitely. I mean, not a lot. It still feels kind of weird here. It’s going to take some time.”

He looked around at the chaos of the dining room, the unaddressed paperwork, his arms smeared with clotted droplets of blood and metal shavings.

By seven that night he had their exact same model of television installed in the living room, and a slightly newer laptop running in the office. High On Fire was blasting from the TV speakers in the living room; Roger found the sound a comforting replacement for his own frantic breathing and constant room-to-room footfalls, even though at one point the vocals reminded him of something he was trying to forget from the night before—that growling—and he had to turn down the volume.

On the way back from his second outing of high-speed shopping and credit card limit testing, he noticed, for the first time ever, that there were little signs mounted on the lamp posts around his block.

He decided it was time to reinvigorate the watch and rouse it from the fucking coma which had allowed his house—and their neighborhood—to be infiltrated. They needed to know that they had failed, and they needed to start keeping an eye out for the next invasion. Roger wolfed a batch of microwave chicken tikka masala and tried to calm down his all-day coffee binge with some beer. Then he opened up a new document on the laptop.

Dear Neighbors,

I regret to inform you that our house at 1450 SE Lily Court suffered a break-in yesterday evening, somewhere between 4:30pm and 9:00pm. Several pieces of jewelry and electronics were stolen. Our family is unharmed, so we’re very thankful for that blessing. However, we’re now feeling much less safe in a neighborhood that we’ve loved for a long time, and we certainly wouldn’t wish for you to feel the same. In the event that these burglars have decided to target this neighborhood, I recommend you take a look at the security of your household. And I know it’s considered rude for this area, but it might be wise to start leaving exterior lights on through the evening.

Also, as this occurrence managed to slip right under the nose of our normally vigilant neighborhood watch, perhaps we should step up our game and really keep an eye out for anything strange (whether that’s unfamiliar vehicles on our block or questionable, lingering pedestrians, or even solicitors who ask too many questions about the inside of your home).

Hope all is well with you, and my apologies for whatever my filing this police report might do to our property values. Ha Ha!

Best wishes,

Roger Stephenson

He printed fifty and distributed them to every mailbox—or failing that, doorstep—in a six block radius. He noticed how many houses were dark, looked uninhabited. He noticed how easy it would be to break in to almost all of them.

“There is no glass which can’t be shattered, no lock which can’t be broken.

He contemplated filing a complaint about Officer Hayhurst, but knew “He Made Me Generally Uneasy” wasn’t something they’d put Internal Affairs on right away.

He saw no one else on the streets. But on the way home there was a rustling in the bushes in front of him and suddenly a tiny black rabbit shot out and darted across the street, finding cover behind an above-ground garden hutch.

The incident made him notice two things. The first was that he was scared in a way he couldn’t spend too much time thinking about. The second was that his instinct, immediately, had been to kill that rabbit.

MOUNTING THE SECURITY CAMERA was the last step, and then he promised himself he’d call it a night.

The eaves where he wanted to tuck the camera were up much higher than his bedroom window, and night had already fallen so he had to work with a headlamp on, but he was determined. After struggling to find even footing in the wet soil below, he finally got to the top of the wobbling ladder and found a way he could shift his weight that kept at least three of the feet below firmly planted.

A huge brown mama spider hovered near a bright white cluster of eggs. Was she waiting to nurture them, or was she exhausted and hoping to eat a few babies on their birthday? He didn’t care, cancelled his normal laissez-faire policy toward spiders, and crushed the lot of them under the knuckles of his leather work glove.

He’d nearly bought the fake version of the exterior camera at the electronics store, thinking it would save an additional eighty dollar dent to their credit balance, and that the appearance of surveillance would be enough to make a burglar think twice. Then he remembered the laughter which had come from his backyard the night before.

Someone else was treating this like a game. Someone clever enough to leave no prosecutable trail. Someone who wanted to severely agitate and confuse Roger as a bonus.

He bought the real camera. Even splurged for an upscale edition which could broadcast to both his laptop and a concealed hard drive near the device.

The mounting went easy, aside from Roger’s exhaustion-based hand-tremors and one quest through the wet evening grass for a dropped screw. Then he drilled a slightly larger hole through the siding into the attic and ran the camera lines into the house.

He hadn’t been in the attic since they bought the place, years ago, when he’d decided to save on handyman charges and box some improperly insulated electric splices by himself. He didn’t remember much from that adventure, other than wishing he’d worn a mask after stirring up all the insulation, and regretting the moment when he un-hunched just enough to drive the point of a rusty roofing nail into his back. The moment after that nail went in he pictured Oprah in his mind, yelling, “You’re all getting. . . TETANUS SHOTS!”

He wasn’t a fan of the attic, but he was ready with a headlamp and dust mask this time, so up he went. He’d have an electric eye beaming down on his backyard by midnight. Anybody made it past the brambles and the sharp elevated fencing and the drill-proof locks, they’d be right there under Big Brother’s gaze, exposed for the bullshit creepers they were.

The attic: exposed beams and insulation, trapped heat and tubing and years of suspect electrical modifications. Spiders ruled the far corners, and the old wood framing seeped sap which looked like blooms of mold or clusters of frozen blood droplets. The ceilings in the house were high and the attic was squat, which meant that Roger had to slide or crawl to get anywhere. At some point in the life of the house someone had run plywood across a couple of pathways, but not enough to get Roger over to the rear of the property so he could finish bringing in the camera wires. That meant there’d be a long section where he’d have to do a combination push-up/crawl under the rafters until he made it all the way back, his hands and feet balanced on the attic beams.

He stayed low, shaking with fatigue, and did his best to dodge splinters, nails, and plumes of lung-seeking insulation. Spider webs and long tendrils of drifting dust clung to his sweaty face. For a second he thought he saw a spider about to drop from his headlamp to his nose, and in the effort to brush it away he slammed a shoulder into the drywall beneath him.

Great! Fucking great! Yeah, honey, I got the property secured, but I also fell through the ceiling trying to wave away a spider. Hope you don’t mind the insulation in the bed. We can pretend this is the skylight you always wanted.

When he finally made his way back to the newly drilled hole and threaded in the remainder of the camera line, he found it was actually quite easy to hook up the dedicated hard drive and tap into the electric line.

The final thump fell on the roof above his head. Fragments of sap and insulation drifted down onto his hair. Roger froze.

He was still trying to decide between remaining entirely immobile and speed-crawling out of the attic to pursue whoever was on his property, when he heard the unmistakable sound of a man’s laughter.

And then a white light was born behind his eyes and there was pressure and pain and then nothing at all.

HE WOKE IN THE dark with dusty insulation coating his mouth. The taste reminded him of when he’d helped demolish an old barn on his Grandpa Dave’s property, after he’d passed and they were prepping his property for sale. Everyone had been crying that day, but Roger was young and had barely known the old man, and was mainly excited they’d given him a sledgehammer and the right to use it. They didn’t worry about things like black mold back then. They got the job done. But in retrospect it made sense to Roger that he’d had a chest cold for about three months after they tore down that rotten old barn.

Without light to orient him, Roger spent a moment thinking he was in his bed. Only after something crawled across the back of his neck did he realize he was still in the attic.

He slapped the back of his neck and felt an immediate, sharp jab as something crunched under his glove.

Should have brushed it off, idiot! You just slapped yourself into a nice old spider bite. Great. And my lamp’s out. I have to get back to the garage and grab a flashlight. Finish this wiring. Then I HAVE to go to bed. I’m cooked.

Roger turned around and started to crouch-crawl toward the dim, distant light coming from the attic access point in his office.

He slapped the side of his headlamp once, then twice, and something in the jostling set the batteries straight and light came flooding out across the sea of insulation before him.

Dozens of dead birds. Tiny, desiccated. Some with their talons turned toward the sky, others curled in on themselves. Some with eyes missing. Some with eyes dried and hollow but still shining back as the light struck them. A field of them, each a few inches apart from the other, their corpses floating on insulation, entwined in the fiberglass.

He heard a rustling sound behind him and turned his lamp to see another tiny bird struggling to lift its body and fly away with its one remaining good wing.

Roger almost finished the question but knew that there was no reason to be pursued here. Something wrong was happening—staring at it wouldn’t aid survival but might induce some kind of paralysis.

Got to clean up this die-off before it smells. I’ll look for the hole in the siding where they got in later. Then finish the camera hook-up. Claire and Julie are coming back! And I could really use another beer.

He did his best not to think again for the rest of the night, to let motion remove reflection, and so he cleaned the wound on his neck and gathered all of the corpses in the attic in a white plastic work bucket and set it out on the patio. And once he’d finally powered up the security camera and ensured it was running properly, he headed back out to the patio to grab the bucket of dead birds.

He lifted the rusty metallic lid to the fire pit in their backyard and dumped in the bodies, watching loose feathers drift down onto the pile of ash-covered dead. Then he sprayed them with an entire bottle of lighter fluid and dropped a match and tended the blaze long enough to ensure that all of the tiny hollow bones were rendered to nothing.

Once the pyre was embers, Roger turned and walked back to the office and deleted the last two hours of security footage because none of this had ever happened, and that was fine.

“I KNOW, I KNOW. I miss you guys too. There’s a little more work to this than I expected. You guys camp out for one more night and then we’ll have all weekend to hang out.”

And I need a little more distance between you and the last two days, so you don’t look at Daddy and see he’s losing his mind. One more day and we’ll be alright.

In the end Claire acquiesced, though she was slow to make the call and Roger was certain she was worried about him now. But he’d promised to drive down with Mr. Grubbins and Julie’s favorite blanket to join them for dinner, so he knew if he could spruce up by then he would set Claire at ease. He’d shave the beginnings of the wolfman beard creeping up his cheeks, take a much-needed shower, and wear a nice long sleeve shirt to cover up his lacerated arms.

ACCOUNTS CLOSED—NO SUSPICIOUS TRANSACTIONS identified, thank god. New accounts opened, cards issued. New checks ordered—”Have them shipped to the branch and give me a call when they show up.” Social Security Number, birthday, and mother’s maiden name provided over and over again to a variety of bored call center employees. Equifax/Transunion/Experian notified to place a permanent “Fraud Alert” on their systems to shut down attempts at identity theft. Credit monitoring account established and hard copies of all reports pulled and reviewed. Passwords changed for eighty-three goddamn internet accounts.

There was not enough coffee and music and sunshine in the world to make that morning feel like anything other than some kind of modern circle in Dante’s Inferno.

“And here we see the poorest of souls, guilty of the sin of being burgled.”

“No, this is what is owed to these souls, who imagined a fanciful kind of safety was owed to them and chose to live in a tapestry of lies which denied the true balance of the world. These are souls who ignored the evils of our kind and by doing so allowed it to flourish.”

“And to verify I’m speaking with the correct person, sir, could you please provide your Social Security Number?”

“And to verify I’m speaking with the correct person, sir, could you please lean toward your webcam for a brief retinal scan?”

“And to verify I’m speaking with the correct person, sir, could you please write your earliest shameful memory on fine vellum and send it to me via certified mail?”

ROGER WAS FINALLY SITTING down to what he was certain would be a long and arduous call with his insurance company when he heard a knock at the front door.

He sped to the foyer—ready to explain the meaning of his NO SOLICITING sign to those mouth-breathing CenturyLink reps for the third goddamn time—and was surprised to find a diminutive, old-timey cowboy on his stoop.

The man stood all of five-and-a-half feet, even with brown leather boots on, and was wearing a golden belt buckle so big it could have been a buffet plate. His perfectly-waxed white moustache came to a sharpened-pencil point on each side and stood in stark contrast to the deep leather wrinkles which gave his face a look of permanent concern.

“Sorry to bother you, Roger. My name’s Clem Tillson. I’m a neighbor of yours from a few blocks over on 17th. I got your little note on my doorstep this morning and I have some concerns.”

Damn it! Did I just invite every retiree in the neighborhood over for a stop-and-chat? I can’t deal with that shit right now.

“Shoot, Roger. It’s cold out here. I can tell from your face you think I might be in my dotage and looking to run my mouth. That ain’t it. I promise. We need to talk about this, and I’m hoping you might be the sort of fella’d be kind enough to offer me a beer and your ears for a spell.”

Something about the look on the old man’s face told Roger he was sincere, and the smell of Brylcreem from his slicked-back gray mop reminded him of his own grandfather. Aside from that, the sound of Clem’s voice—clear and unencumbered by the hisses and clicks of a call being recorded for quality control purposes—made Roger feel human and a little less than crazy for the first time in days. Maybe it’d be good for him to take a little break. He’d earned it.

“NOT TO SOUND UNGRATEFUL, but you happen to have any Budweiser? Or Milwaukee’s Best? This fancy stuff tends to write me a one way ticket to Nap Town.” Clem handed his smoked porter back to Roger.

Roger popped the tops off two ales and handed one to Clem. He slid a batch of insurance docs toward the center of the table and offered the old man a seat at the end.

“Yeah. This table is old school. It’s giant. I’ve got an extra leaf for it out in the garage. I think it’s from 1918, but who knows? My wife finds this kind of stuff at the Goodwill. She’s got a sixth sense about bargains.”

“You happen to have a coaster? Wouldn’t want to leave a beer ring on your wood.”

“Oh, sure.” Roger had a stash of promotional coasters from beer festivals stored above the fridge. Coaster off the top promised that Hammertown’s Double IPA would deliver a Lethal Dose of Hops. He handed Clem the cardboard disc and then sat down at the table.

The room went quiet. Clem tapped the base of his beer on his coaster a few times and took a deep breath. Roger looked over at his insurance docs and imagined the hours he still needed to spend on the phone. “You said you have some concerns?”

“Sure. Sure I do. Only thing is, when you get to be an older fella, you kinda learn to pick what they call an ‘angle of attack’ when you have something important to say. Otherwise people have a real easy time writing you off.”

“Listen to your elders? No, that ain’t true either. Trust me, I’ve got plenty of friends my age that haven’t had a new thing worth saying for years now. That’s why we mostly fish and drink and sit there quiet. Maybe play some cribbage. No, don’t listen to me because I’m old. Listen to me because I used to be the county sheriff, and I understand a particular malady that’s gripped this area for too long.”

“Well . . . there’s a house. It’s right over by me, on 17th, across from my place and down two, right next to that big beige foursquare McMansion thing they built last year, that don’t fit the look of the neighborhood at all.”

“And I need you to know that this house, and the folks who live there . . . well, pardon my language, but if this side of town had an official ‘Department of Fucked Up Shit,’ then the headquarters would be right damn there.”

Great. Gramps has some old beef with his neighbors and now he’s trying to drag me into it.

“Clem, what’s any of that have to do with me? You think the people who live there are the ones who broke into my house?”

“Did you see something? This could be great! Did you see them carrying stuff into their house on the night of the burglary? Maybe a really big TV that looked like the one over there in the living room?”

“Nope. Didn’t see a thing like that. But a couple of nights ago it was a full moon, wasn’t it?”

No wonder this guy’s making me feel sane. He’s fucking Looney Tunes senile.

“Roger, I can see I’m losing you. Maybe I chose the wrong angle here. So forget the moon thing. And did I mention their tunnels?”

“Okay. Well imagine I never said that either. Damn. It’s never easy to talk about this.”

“We’re talking about a house where I see people go in, but never, ever come out. Or I see people leave and they come back wearing the same clothes but not the same face. And some nights there’s a purple shimmer over the place—”

“Clem, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to go now. I’ve still got a lot of clean-up left to do around the house.”

Roger had almost forgotten the way the pressure had built in his head the previous night, how it had been followed by phantom conversations, and the appearance of those bodies in the attic. He couldn’t hide the truth on his face. He flinched. Clem’s eyes lit up.

“I knew it! I’m telling you, Roger, I’m not crazy. They have ways. We watch those sonofabitches all the time and they’re always changing how things work.”

“Oh, ah . . . royal we, I guess.” Clem held his beer out and looked at the label. “This is definitely hitting me faster than a Bud.” But Roger couldn’t help but notice that the old man’s eyes were sharp and his speech never slurred.

“Maybe I should call back the cops. You want to talk to them— maybe leave out the stuff about the moon and tunnels—and tell them you think you know who hit my place? It’s possible that they were the ones that broke in, and if the cops pay them a visit, maybe we can put this whole thing to rest.”

“I wish. I wish. I gave up calling the cops on them a while back. Even my old friends on the force were getting impatient with me. Getting old’s the worst. But I’ve suspected it’s them whenever a house in our area gets robbed. There’s a nasty smell that comes from their place too. Like blood sizzling on a hot plate.”

Roger wondered how Clem would even recognize that smell, then remembered he’d once been a sheriff and decided not to venture the question.

“I think they’re making drugs in there too and venting it right out of the damn side through the dryer exhaust. They don’t even try to hide because nothing sticks. I managed to record enough footage of comings and goings to help get a search warrant drafted. They found all kinds of chemicals, but nothing that made sense. Nothing that’d make the street drugs you’d expect. Then, after there was that rash of dog killings—maybe that was before your time out here—I worked with some other folks in the neighborhood, Susie Jenkins who’s a realtor and Dan Rostrum who’s a banker, to see if we could do some kind of workaround and get the house foreclosed. Hell, they’d nailed Dan’s dog Chester to the tree in his front yard . . . no eyes . . . nothing left inside that poor mutt . . . ”

“Unholy shit, you ask me. But again, nothing stuck. Get this—nobody owns that property. Not really. Somebody owned it once, sure.” Clem pointed at nothing with the neck of his beer bottle, as if to say, This is the only reasonable fact I can state. “But after the banking crash, the original deed of trust got passed from bank to bank and then whichever one was supposed to have had it last couldn’t even find a scanned copy in their files. Not even the damn county can find their version. Somebody services their property tax with cash once a year, so we can’t get ’em that way, and there’s no viable documentation to force a regular foreclosure. City even says they have some kind of damn ‘squatter’s rights.’ Since when does a dug-in tick have fucking rights?”

Clem set down his beer with a hollow clunk. He’d drained it. Roger offered him another.

“No. That’s kind of you, but I’m good. One more beer for me will turn into all the beers for the rest of the day. Took me eighty-some years but I finally learned to accept that about myself. Besides, I need to be clear in what I’m telling you next. I need you to really listen to me.”

Roger leaned forward and made eye contact. He was still unsettled that Clem knew about his strange fugue state headaches. And he hated to admit it, but the more he listened, the more he could reconcile the last few days with the world around him.

“Something about your note . . . forgive my saying so, but you sure seemed scared, and angry, and right away I thought to myself, ‘They’re playing with him.’”

Roger remembered the laughter he’d heard on the night of the burglary, the feeling that someone was enjoying his terrified reaction as he’d fled the house. Still, Officer Hayhurst said that some criminals did extra shit like that for kicks. It didn’t mean he was part of some ongoing harassment.

“How do you know it’s them? Couldn’t it be a standard-issue crime? They got my wife’s best jewels.”

“First, that kind of thing really doesn’t happen all the way out here. I mean, this is the city in name only—most of your regular criminal element can’t deal with the inconvenience of getting all the way to the boonies. Why do you think I chose to retire out here? Cops know where the pits are, and where things are mostly nice. No, this little enclave, it’s a good place. Aside from that one house. Second, though, I responded to thousands of burglaries in my day and I know this wasn’t your regular old bash-and-dash because now I’ve seen your face. That’s what I had to come over to confirm. You really want to tell me this feels normal to you?”

Roger’s lips sealed tight. He thought of the dead birds in his attic. Had that even happened? His brow furrowed and he took a deep breath and shook his head from side to side:

“I have to, Clem. Listen . . . I think they’re threatening my family. They messed with a picture of my daughter and I. And everything that happened the night of the burglary felt . . . wrong. There was a handprint left behind, and it was missing a pinkie.”

“Okay then. Thank you for being honest with me. This is good. Because if I know they’re targeting you, and you believe me about that, then maybe you have a chance to do the right thing.”

“Not joking. Not drunk. Never cute, young man. Now you look me right in my fucking eyes.” There was a new electricity emanating from the old man. He was still sitting in his chair but he’d tensed up, coiled and wiry. Looked ready to beat his message into Roger if he had to. “They’re interested in you. Why? I don’t know. Never understood how they pick their targets. But this is bad, truly bad, and I’m sorry to you and your family that you’ve wandered into this. I’ve watched this happen before. Watched them target someone in this neighborhood and drive them fast as they could in the wrong directions. I’ve seen people, good people, walk into that house and never come back out. Not really come back out anyways. And that’s not going to happen to you. You’re not going to give them what they want.”

“Hell if I know. I gave up on trying to understand the devil a long time ago. You just gotta steer clear. They’ll try to use your anger, or your curiosity, against you. How do you think human beings found out which foods were poisonous and which ain’t? How many poor fellas died clutching their guts on the way to that know-how? The cost ain’t always worth it. So I’m telling you—that house, and the people who live there, the whole damn situation is as poisonous as they come. You don’t need to know what you’re dealing with. You only need to get away.”

“She will. Lots of folks feel like moving after a break-in anyway. It’s natural. Start there. Or, hell, we’re close to the interstate . . . tell her you’re worried about the air quality. Don’t know your wife, or what would sway her. That’s on you.”

“Moving’s out of the question. This is crazy. Assuming what you’re saying is true, or even a little bit of it is, there has to be something else this neighborhood can do to drive them out. What if we got the whole community together? Like every last one of us, and we had a town hall meeting, and we focus on the fact that there’s a house right under our noses where the tenants might be involved in theft and drug manufacturing and animal mutilation, to say the least.”

“I tried that, a couple of times. The folks around here are mostly retired, and not just from working. Loads of ’em gave up giving a shit about anything that don’t directly affect them. Hell, I’ve tried most things I can think of, aside from setting that damn house on fire.”

“Stop feeling here, Roger. Think. Think about you and your wife and your child, and get out of here.”

Roger’s exhaustion and confusion finally set in. He slumped his head into his open palms.

“I’m sorry. I’ve pushed you too fast. But I think you’re hearing me, and I hope you’ll make the right decision. I know this is a lot to absorb. Nobody wants to be uprooted, especially if they feel like they’re being a coward. But you have to understand that you won’t be running away. You’ll be running toward a real future.”

These men didn’t understand that Roger could handle things when the chips were down. It could be that running away wasn’t the answer at all. Maybe there was only one real method for dealing with criminal assholes like the ones this tiny old man had come to warn him about.

Roger straightened his shoulders and leaned toward Clem. “You mentioned setting the place on fire. And that’s insane, I know it, but what if . . . maybe there’s some way, hypothetically . . . maybe we get a group of like-minded guys together late one night and we pay that house a visit and make it really clear that those bastards can’t live there anymore.”

“Shit. They’re already drawing you in.” Clem ran a hand over his slicked back gray hair and sighed for a moment before looking back at Roger. “I know we just met, but . . . I worked with the law long enough to get a read on folks, and I don’t think you’re the kind of hard man that runs around at midnight issuing threats.”

“No, but I’ve talked to you long enough. What I’m saying isn’t meant to insult. World needs more kindhearted men. Lord knows we’ve got more than our share of macho morons bashing around. Besides, the kind of ugliness you’re talking about is just what they want. The violence. The conflict. Devils love a good game. They love to get you outside your own head. So, no, Roger, there aren’t going to be any old-fashioned lynchings down at Doc Frankenstein’s place.”

Telling me to stand down. It wasn’t his goddamn house that got broken into. It’s not his wife waiting in another city to hear that everything is safe again. You want to help me, old man? Help me take care of the motherfuckers who did this to my life.

“Christ, Rog. I’ve seen that look in your eyes before. Don’t go thinking some moral upper hand gives your anger any more power. I had a friend, once, had that look in his eyes all the time. I don’t like to talk about what happened to him, but I think it’s clear you need to hear his story. Can you stop mad-dogging me first?”

Fuck. I’m acting like an asshole. This guy, crazy or not, is just trying to help.

Roger laughed and shook his head. “Clem . . . I’m sorry. It’s been really intense, the last couple of days.”

“Fair enough. Fair enough. And thanks. So . . . my friend. Name of J. P Schumacher. Good guy, solid as they come. If they had a factory for righteous dudes, Jason P Schumacher would have been the prototype. I knew him when we were brothers on the force, back when we all called him ‘Spud’ ‘cause he brought a baked potato for lunch every day.”

“Forgive me. It’s how an old man’s memory works, plowing through the garbage to find the rest. Anyway, he worked vice with me for a while before he took another tack—got married, had a kid, went back to school and pursued a judgeship. He said the bench was better for him. That once he had a family he couldn’t handle some of the shit we saw out on the streets. But the truth was that even behind the bench it all still stuck in his craw. He’d never learned to let it go, or drink it away at least. And then he had a case that went sideways in his court and a fuck-up in the chain of evidence puts some repeat kiddie fucker back on the street.”

“Yeah . . . . So one evening a week later J. P. decided that court was still in session. Bought a pistol, put down the short eyes like a rabid dog.”

“You’re thinking he made the right call. Part of me feels that way too. But the moment he decided to pull that trigger he signed his own death warrant. He exposed himself and his family to something he didn’t fully understand. Turns out the pedo had been mobbed up and running a film line for a crew out of Ukraine. Now Ol’ ‘Spud’ had put a kink in their money. He fucked up their production schedule. So what do you think they did in return?”

“They killed him, yeah? But at least he got one of those bastards off the streets.”

“Oh, they killed him. After everything else. After raping his wife in front of him and stomping in her face. After force-feeding him shards of glass and trussing him and running a white-hot fire poker up his ass.”

“Well, we never found her. So maybe they introduced her to their film business. Which means maybe they killed her once she no longer proved useful, or maybe she overdosed on the shit they use to keep those kids docile. Either way, she was in hell. Might still be there for all we know. And all because J. P. Schumacher thought the righteousness of his anger was a shield. He charged into a world he couldn’t understand, and it destroyed everything he loved.”

Clem stood up, letting out a low moan as he rose. He lifted his cowboy hat from the table, and slid it onto his head.

“I’m so sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Roger. I hope that later in your life you’ll be able to look back and thank me for it. You choose to stay, you try to fight them, try to force some kind of order . . . it won’t stick. Okay? They don’t have the same laws. Not so sure they have any laws at all. The only truth that matters is that you need to get you and your family as far from here as you can.”

“Yeah. I know, buddy. It’s a shitter, no doubt. And thanks again for the beer. I’ll show myself out.”

He thought it and did his best to believe it, to no avail. Fact was, the things Clem told him put Roger’s feet back on solid ground for the first time since he’d discovered the crime.

You call what you’re on right now ‘solid ground’? You’re just happy to find some doddering old man as crazy as you are. How do you know this isn’t some form of mass psychosis? Maybe the stained-glass factory a few blocks away let off a bunch of toxic plumes again . . .

Clem’s little talk had eaten up Roger’s chance to call the insurance company, and he’d barely had time to shave and give himself a whore’s bath with a washcloth before bolting out the door to deliver Julie’s plush toy and blanket. He’d slicked back his hair with a wet comb and hoped the wind through the open truck window would help it dry before he saw the girls.

He wanted to be fully present for Claire and Julie by the time he arrived, but he couldn’t help obsessing on things Clem had said.

Clem mentioned drug manufacturing. Was there even the slightest chance that someone in that house knew about Roger’s time in Oakland? How dumb and reckless he’d been, and how much he’d risked for . . . what?

Partly that. Partly the thrill. Knowing he was doing the wrong thing. Knowing he didn’t even need to be trafficking—his college tuition had already been covered and with his work-study job and credit cards he could have managed everything else. But Claire liked fancy restaurants and cruises and how he had a big new truck when most college boys were still driving the busted old sedans they got when they turned sixteen. And her friends loved how he kept an open tab and bought round after round of champagne when they were at the club. It had been easy to win Claire’s interest and her friends’ endorsement, and he truly adored her.

But he didn’t tell her, until much later, about coming through LAX with a thirty-year-sentence worth of ecstasy jammed up his ass. She barely knew about the time a regular buy turned sour and he found out he was capable of violence when threatened (though even the memory of him and Bobby S. kicking Kenny Liedke’s curled-up body and bloodied face turned his stomach and crept into his dreams). And he certainly never told her about the long, terrifying shipment run he made to Utah and back, how he’d never buckled his seatbelt once because he knew that if he heard sirens he’d have to take his own life in a fiery car crash. He couldn’t stand the idea of being caught—he knew the gravity of what he was doing and he sure as shit knew that his reasons for doing it were childish at best. What shame, to have your devil-may-care attitude turn into a devil on your back? He’d rather have died than face his parents and say, “You raised me right and I still did all this dumb shit and I barely even know why.”

Then he and Bobby S. got robbed and beat by a batch of kids with hatchets, and Roger suffered a cracked vertebrae. Doctors told him he narrowly avoided paralysis. Shortly after that Wilson straight-up disappeared and Roger knew it was time to cut and run and never look back. He dodged a multi-pack meetup that turned out to be a bust, but everyone who got clipped was higher up in the operation than him, so he couldn’t imagine them bothering to roll on his name. But he could imagine them thinking he’d been the one who rolled. That night he told Claire that he was in trouble and she told him that she wasn’t some naïve Kansas farm girl and that she’d long-guessed what he was up to. In fact, she kind of liked it. That he was crazy.

He’d bailed north and couch-surfed with friends. Grabbed an easy gig as a lab courier and waited for the other shoe to drop. Claire finished her semester and moved up to join him in a little apartment he’d scored for them on the outskirts of town.

He felt so lucky to discover that she still loved him when he wasn’t crazy. That she’d agree to marry him when he was just another schmo with a nine-to-five.

Roger had been waiting a long time for his past to finally catch up with him, but it felt more distant each year and eventually he guessed that the statute of limitations had passed on the ugliness of his early twenties and he decided he was ready to be a father.

Claire was six months pregnant when Roger’s parents had died in a terrible RV accident outside of Sedona. It crushed him. But he secretly felt a sense of relief: They’d never found out. No matter what happened from then on, they would never know.

Then Julie was born and it shifted the hands of the clock forward, past the time when he was ashamed, past the time where all he could do was grieve, forward to a time where he realized that his past was behind him, and he could be pretty much anyone he wanted to be.

And now, for some reason, it was possible that someone was trying to drag him back to that old, bad place.

Why? Is this really some game? Couldn’t it be that somebody actually wanted a fast way to come up on a TV and some jewelry?

How could Clem have known about that? And why did everything he said feel so true?

He made the blanket and plush drop off at the in-laws in time— he had to blink back tears when Julie pushed right past the Mr. Scrubbins toy he was holding out and jumped into his arms—and let Claire know that he wouldn’t be able to join them for dinner.

“No, not just about dinner. You sure you should be headed back there? Maybe a night with us would be good for you. You look kind of . . . rough.” She smiled, but it was slight. “Or maybe we should pack in and come home with you.”

“No, I’m sorry. Don’t know why I said it like that. I really want the place to be dialed when you guys come back, and the dining room is still a blowout. I have to call insurance in the morning. Besides, I thought I might surprise Julie and have a big LEGO set waiting for her in her room. Something nice to help her feel comfortable coming back.”

“Yeah. So give me one more night to take care of everything and we’ll all hang out tomorrow. I promise.”

“Okay.” Her smile widened. “You sure you don’t have your mistress over? We’ve been gone a long time.” She always joked with him about infidelity. It felt like a show of power from her—he figured she knew deep down he was like a rescue dog she’d saved and that he’d be forever faithful.

“Damn it, you’ve got me figured. She flew in from Brazil and we still have half the Kama Sutra to work through before you can come back.”

“Well, better get back to it, chief. I know what you’re really up to anyway. The bank called me today to authorize a bunch of your changes. Said I had to sign off since I’m the primary on the account. Hold on, Julie has something she wanted to give you.”

Roger crouched to see what she had in her hands. Some kind of abstract LEGO creation. She made these tiny things all the time and declared them to be fascinating, complex contraptions.

“It’s a Robber Die-erator, daddy. This is the sensor, see, this little yellow part, and it shoots out lasers and if any robbers come in and the sensor sees them then they get lasered in half and they die. So they can’t take away our things anymore! Do you love it?”

He spent another ten minutes trying to say goodbye without really being able to leave. Finally, Claire’s mom shouted out to the condo parking lot that dinner was ready, and he had to let them go. Once she confirmed that Julie was back inside Claire ran over to Roger and grabbed him and gave him a long, slow kiss. She looked him in the eyes as she pulled away and said, “Thank you for doing all this, baby. You’re the best.” And in that moment he felt like that was true—that he was doing right by her, despite the cost. He felt like a good man.

HE WAS HALFWAY HOME, doing his best to focus on the shiny, rain-slicked road, when he hit a rut and his rear tires exploded.

The truck fish-tailed. Roger tried to compensate and apply the brakes slowly enough to keep from heading into a spin. The rear of the truck made an awful grinding noise that vibrated his teeth as he slowed. Then he veered right too early, and only narrowly avoided the chariot spikes of a neighboring semi-truck’s front tires as he swerved back into the middle lane. Once the behemoth passed he managed to hobble to a narrow shoulder and bring the truck to a stop. Even with the windows closed he could smell the noxious smoke of metal on asphalt.

One tire and he would have slapped on the spare and gimped home. Two, though, meant he was immobilized. He put in a call to AAA and let them know his make and model and that he would need two fresh tires.

Twenty minutes later help arrived and had the rear of the truck jacked up. The Incident Response driver was busy removing the blown-out remnants of rubber when he called Roger over.

The man held up a swatch from one of the busted radials. In the headlights of the rescue truck, it was easy to spot all the screws embedded in the rubber.

“Actually, both tires are like this. Whatever day crew you’re paying for site clean-up, you might want to dock their pay or give ’em some better magnet sticks.”

“Well, who knows then? I chucked those junkers in the back of your truck, for whatever they’re worth. Your front tires looked clear for screws, far as I could see. Those new ones’ll get you back on the road but you might want to park somewhere different tonight until you get a chance to check your driveway.”

He composed himself. Started the engine. Found his water bottle lodged under his seat. Looked to the floor mat in front of the passenger seat at something scattered there. Hit the dome lights.

The Robber Die-erator. It’d flown from his jacket pocket and crashed to the floor, bright plastic pieces in disarray.

SURE ENOUGH, THERE WAS a profusion of tiny silver screws glinting back at Roger from the lower half of his driveway. He parked next to the curb between his and the neighbor’s house and got out for a closer look.

The screws were sharp and short and it looked like a whole contractor’s box had been emptied behind his truck.

It’s attempted murder, if you think about it. This is insane. Claire and Julie can’t come back as long as things are like this. It’s bad enough they’re doing this shit to me. I’ll lose my mind if they try anything with the girls.

Roger entered the house, relieved to find the interior hadn’t been gutted—Think of the positives!—and grabbed a push broom and red metal dustpan.

Some other part of his mind said, This isn’t a case. It’s a game you shouldn’t play. They’re trying to get to you. Clem’s right. You want to end up like J. P. Schumacher?

He took pictures of the evidence with his phone before he swept and bagged it. Then he pulled the truck into its spot, slumped into the house, ate a half-cooked frozen burrito while standing in the kitchen, and staggered to bed.

He was surprised at how quickly he passed out. The room was stuffier than he wanted it to be, but with Roger’s upgrades it now took an act of congress to actually get the windows open, so instead he simply threw off one of the comforters and slid into a much-needed sleep.

A single knock, thunderous, threatening to crack the wooden door from its frame.

This is how it’s always going to be here, from now on, every single night. Any noise will be the end of the world. Everything will be them.

He ran to the front door, stopping only to grab his baseball bat from the dining room. Then he cursed himself for not installing a peephole. He couldn’t throw the door open, not without knowing who was behind it and why their knock might have shaken the house through its frame.

He hopped the sectional couch in the living room and peeked through the slats of the front window shade.

Was it the wind? A tree branch that finally fractured and slammed the front door on its way down? Kids out night-knocking for cheap thrills?

Clem really got to you. Maybe he’s right, and there’s a purple light floating around the neighborhood, hoping to claim the first poor soul that answers its knock. Or maybe it’s one of his face-changing squatters trying to provoke you to do the wrong thing. Or maybe it’s fucking Santa Claus, lost and looking for directions back to the North Pole. Christ, Rog you’ve officially lost it.

Or maybe you were just dreaming. Did you ever stop to think of that? Go back to bed.

Within seconds he had on his jeans and long-sleeved shirt. He slid into a pair of canvas slip-ons in the foyer, grabbed his truck keys and his bat, and charged out into the driveway, heedless of the tremulous knock which had fallen on the front door a short time ago.

His truck headlights flashed on and off. The alarm whooped until he could figure out which worn button on his key fob actually shut off the damn thing.

Roger was still wondering what had triggered the alarm when he heard someone charge over the hedgerow in his neighbor’s yard and bolt out into the street.

He didn’t have to think, because it was night and someone had been terrorizing him and he had a bat in his hands. Claire had told him he was the best and that made him feel strong, like he was ready to put an end to things. He gave chase.

The figure was tall, lean, clad in white pants and a long black hoodie. And they were fast. Roger hadn’t run in months, and he felt the beginnings of a beer belly jostle as he pounded the pavement. If he couldn’t close the distance, he hoped he could at least keep them in his sightline to see where they went.

They made it to the end of 14th and the would-be truck-jacker gave no sign of slowing.

He’s turning left, toward 17 th. Maybe I can catch him out front of the house by Clem’s and give him enough of a scare to make those fuckers back off.

They crested the peak of the street. The road dropped down into a valley and Roger tried to take longer strides, to find some way to let gravity help him catch this son of a bitch and put an end to the whole mess.

Roger yelled, “Hey, asshole!” hoping the distraction might slow them, or provoke whoever it was into turning around. No use. As if spooked by the sound, the figure suddenly veered right and hopped a neighbor’s fence on 16th.

Roger made it to the fence, but knew he wouldn’t follow. He wasn’t about to risk entering someone else’s property and getting shot for the trespass. He didn’t even know if he had the energy left to hop it.

Was this all some kind of a trap? Is that what they wanted? For me to chase them all the way out here?

There was a foul smell coming from the fence where they’d cleared it in a single easy vault. Roger stepped closer and squinted, and that’s when he saw the dark handprints left behind.

The smudged prints were shining in the moonlight. They were shifting, dripping slowly downward. Blood? Black oil?

Roger watched the prints slug trail their way down the wood fence for a moment, disturbed by the musky animal scent that hit his nose.

He looked toward 17th, wondering if the one he’d pursued had made it back to the so-called house of horrors. I’ve got to show these prints to Clem tomorrow.

Except when Roger looked back to the fence the fluid was already fading. It almost appeared that it had seeped into the wood. The fence made a cracking noise, as if it were expanding ever so slightly as it absorbed the evidence.

Roger looked up at the sky and took a deep breath, then another. He was exhausted, or knew he should be at least, but he felt something. An urge to see more. To not give up the chase just yet. Maybe he could find a way to finish this.

ONCE HE WAS ON 17th, he didn’t even need to use Clem’s description to find the place. Clem’s house was obvious: the squat white ranch, with an old hooptie Buick sitting out front, sporting a bumper sticker which read “Support Your Local Police.” Right across the street was the new and aggressively mundane beige foursquare Clem had complained about, looming over the neighboring houses.

And there, somehow smaller and darker than the surrounding houses, was the house at the center of the old man’s stories.

At the very least, Clem was right about one thing: the building had an aura, though to Roger the purple shimmer Clem had described looked more like a mist of ultraviolet light hanging over the place, wavering like the fumes from a pit of toxic waste. Made his eyes water.

How are people not seeing this? Or are they ignoring it? Or am I imagining it because these fuckers won’t let me catch a wink and Clem gave me some world class heebie jeebies?

Even without the shimmer, there were other things off about the house. Someone had used what appeared to be white sand or borax to draw a series of lines and circles all over the black roof shingles. Maybe it was only moss killer, but there was something about the shapes and intersecting lines that made Roger’s eyes vibrate from side to side and lose resolution. He found he couldn’t look straight at the place for the disorientation.

The yard itself was too perfect and clean. Grass only, a pattern without variation. Was it AstroTurf? Nobody did that here. The grass grew like crazy. But nothing lived in this yard. There wasn’t a single growing thing to be maintained or tended. It was more the appearance of a yard than an actual human space.

The windows were dark, but it was the dead of night, so he couldn’t fault them for that. Still, the vibe of the place was actively hostile. The house sat low, as if hunched, ready to spring. The breeze shifted in Roger’s direction and he caught another whiff of that strange animal smell. Made him think of the time they’d had to pull a dead squirrel from their chimney. Smoke and rot.

Roger jumped out of his bones and stopped just short of wind-milling around with the baseball bat at skull level.

Clem was behind him, his white hair in disarray and swaying above his head, his shriveled body covered by light blue pajamas decorated with covered wagons. Old leather flip flops on his feet. The left side of his moustache was bent down at a right angle.

“I been checking on the place every hour or so. Wife got me a phone with a fancy alarm in it. I can keep it under my pillow and it vibrates me awake without bothering her. Once I talked to you today, I had a feeling I might still find you here tonight.”

“I think you might be right about this house, Clem. They spiked my tires tonight and I almost got smeared across the interstate by a semi. And I chased a guy over here but he jumped a fence and left behind some kind of disappearing oil print.”

“Huh . . . never heard of them doing that before, but like I said, they’re always changing how things work. They don’t seem to take our reality too seriously. I hear ’em laughing sometimes. They got an awful laugh.”

“Stop asking, Rog. Go home. Lock your doors, wait for daylight. Stop playing their game. Book your family one of those nice long-term suites a town over and get your realtor on the horn. Please. I’m tired. I can’t keep doing this.” The old man brushed his hands together in each direction. “I’m washing my mitts of this whole travesty soon. Don’t make me watch them take you. Go home.”

With that he turned and walked slowly back toward his house, his flip flops smacking his heels and the road in turn. Roger decided to follow him, see him in and then go home. Whether Clem was crazy or not, his kindness meant something and he didn’t want to keep him out and worried in the cold.

It was good advice. Roger followed it and made it back, hoping to finally sleep through till morning.

He tried to let it go. Let the dog bark itself out. Let him finally get some goddamn sleep. He might actually call their realtor tomorrow. Something about that house, about the way he felt they were playing with him . . .

The barking grew louder. It felt like it was closer now, or coming in through an open window.

Cocksucking fucking dog. Somebody wake up and bring his mangy ass back in the house.

The barking intensified. Panicked. Hoarse. The dog whined loudly between the rounds of frantic barking.

“Hell, they’d nailed Dan’s dog Chester to the tree in his front yard.”

Roger couldn’t sleep. And no matter what was going on, he couldn’t listen to the dog suffer if something terrible was happening. He didn’t have it in him to sit through that.

He slopped into his clothes—so tired, so fatigued—grabbed his bat, and walked out the front door. He almost forgot to lock the front door behind him and had to turn back to snap the deadbolt into place.

He walked toward the unpaved alley that ran by the right side of his house, where the sound was coming from. But right as he stepped into the alley, his foot crunched on gravel, and the barking came to a sudden stop.

Roger looked over his shoulder toward the center of the alley. There was a man standing still under the single streetlamp illuminating the dark stretch, facing him. The guy was huge, not like the one he’d chased earlier, and wearing the same outfit—black hoodie and white pants.

The man said nothing. He stood unmoving under the lamplight, staring straight at Roger and saying nothing.

It wasn’t until Roger got within ten feet of him that his eyes properly adjusted and he noticed something that couldn’t be real. It looked like the man’s eyes were . . . missing.

No, not missing. They shimmered in the light. His eyes were pools of black liquid, held inside the man’s face by the corroded purple light which rimmed them.

Roger stopped and began to choke up on the bat when the man smiled, opened his mouth, and began barking.

Roger turned and ran, never once looking back, gauging the distance between him and the man only by the terrible tortured dog yowling which trailed. He had his key pulled and ready before he reached the front steps, and he swore he could feel the hot breath of the man fall across his neck as he slid through the entrance and slammed the door behind him.

And then, of course, he heard laughter. It sounded like it came from one man, then many, just outside his door.

Clem was right—it was a terrible sound, and it echoed in Roger’s mind long after leaving his ears. Only once the maddening noise had ceased and the early sun began to crest did Roger manage to fall asleep with his back still pressed against the door, doing what he could to keep out whatever that had been on the other side.

All Roger had to do was figure out a way to sell Claire on the whole venture without scaring her and Julie to the high heavens and/ or getting himself institutionalized. Roger couldn’t spend another night living near the house on 17th. Whoever or whatever were living there, they had his number and he knew they weren’t going to let things go.

He put a call in to Claire and told her he’d be coming to stay the weekend with her and Julie, assuming her mom and dad didn’t mind having guests a few more nights.

“I’ve been here for too long, dealing with the burglary. I think it’d be good to have some time away with you guys. Maybe have some pizza and root beer floats and all that.” And then I’ll have a very long, strange conversation with you at night about how we’re going to sell our house and I’ll be the only one going back there, and only during daylight hours, and I’ll have to hope you still love my kind of crazy, at least a little bit.

“That sounds great, babe. We’re missing you pretty bad. Julie’s asking a lot of questions about the burglary. She wants to know who was in our house, and how we know they won’t come back in. She thinks they’re after her toys, which is cute, but still . . . it kind of breaks my heart.”

“Yeah. Shit . . . I’ll bring the laptop tonight, look up how to talk to kids about dealing with something like this. I’m sure I can find some advice.”

“Sounds good. Hey . . . what did the insurance company say? Do you know how much they’re going to reimburse us for?”

Shit! I’ve been so busy with . . . everything. She can’t know I haven’t even called them yet.

“Good. Thank you so much for taking care of all this. I can’t wait to see you. And when we get this mess straightened out, you and I need a serious date, mister.”

“Oh my god. Yes. I’m barely feeling human these days. Can’t wait to see you guys either.”

Roger held out his phone to thumb the End Call symbol when he heard Claire’s voice start up again.

“This is a little weird . . . I almost forgot to tell you. The other thing I was thinking for tonight was that it might be cool if we could have a slumber party and all crash together. Julie’s been having these really intense nightmares. Last night she woke up screaming and she said, ‘They got him.’ And I asked her who and she said, ‘Daddy.’ Then she said something like, ‘The dog man got daddy in his van and he’s taking him to where they kill the doggies nobody wants.’”

“Yeah. So I think she could really use some time with you. And if she stays like this at night, we might want to talk to her school and see if they recommend anybody for counseling.”

Roger could barely hear her last sentence, his head flush with the surge of blood brought by new panic. What were the odds she’d see that in her dreams? Are they manipulating her too? How did they find her?

“Did she mention any kind of funny lights or pressure headaches or . . . ” He failed to hide the alarm in his voice.

It’s my fault. They want me and now they might be messing with Julie. Even once we get moved, my kid’s going to have to go into counseling because of this. How are they doing this to us? Will they be able to follow us? What if Clem is wrong? What if moving changes nothing?

Roger held the phone away from his face and tried to take a calming breath before responding, but was still betrayed by a shaking in his voice. “Nothing, babe. Nothing, I swear. Just exhausted. I had some bad dreams last night too.”

“Jesus. You don’t get to fucking yell at me, Roger. This is hard on me, too.”

“I know. I know. I’m sorry. I just need to attack a few more things and I’ll be headed your way, I swear. But I need to go.”

Claire said, “Okay, fine. Go then. Get it done and come back to us. We need you more than that damn house right now.” And with that she ended the call.

Roger sat down his phone with shaking hands and felt anger thrumming through his body in a way he’d never before known.

He pictured a hooded figure crouched on the roof of his in-law’s house, shining something down, invading his daughter’s dreams.

“Stop feeling here, Roger. Think. Think about you and your wife and your child, and get out of here.”

He pictured J. P Schumacher—impaled on a burning steel rod, screaming through a mouthful of glass, knowing before his death that he’d killed his family.

“He charged into a world he couldn’t understand, and it destroyed everything he loved.”

Roger slowed his breathing and unclenched his fists and he thought: No. This is over. Daylight is wasting. My family is waiting. It’s time to finish up and get the hell out of here. They’ll never even know I saved all of our lives. They’ll never believe me.

He pictured himself later that night at the “slumber party” in his in-laws’ guest room, Claire passed out on one side of the bed, Julie sleeping peacefully between them, and he knew that none of his other concerns mattered. Not really. He’d keep a clear head, he’d close out the last details, and he’d be the man they needed him to be.

HE SURVEYED THE HOUSE, dialing down a mental list of what absolutely had to be done before he could leave.

He packed a suitcase with photos—their wedding album, Julie’s Baby Book—in case anything prevented him from returning.

He shaved as fast as he could and put on the aftershave that Julie had used her Tooth Fairy money to buy him for Father’s Day.

He filled a thermos with coffee to offset his sleep-deprivation, and was headed for the front door when he spotted the spread of documents on the kitchen table.

The fact that Roger had dealt with spontaneously-generating bird corpses and barking humans with black oil eyes in the last week didn’t negate the fact that he still had to call the goddamn insurance company. Both those awful realities existed and somehow the latter felt more surreal to him. Despite the absurdity, it demanded his attention—especially if he was going to pay off the credit card binge he went on to get the house squared away. And they needed to look financially solvent if they were going to start home shopping as quickly as he wanted. And Claire thought it was already taken care of. And he didn’t want to do it later—Claire and Julie didn’t need to hear any more details about the burglary than absolutely necessary.

He jumped through the standard hoops, gave their agent all the info he had. She let him know that even though she was his actual agent, he’d be receiving a follow-up call from someone at the adjustment center and they’d go into greater depth regarding the items stolen and their respective values. She told him she was truly sorry for the loss his family had suffered and he guessed from her cool, even tone that she spent much of her day being “truly sorry.”

What he had not guessed was how quickly he would receive the follow-up call from the claims adjustor.

“Mr. Stephenson, we seem to have a bit of an issue with the info you provided. Would you mind giving me the case number and the name of the officer you dealt with again?”

Even as he flipped Officer Hayhurst’s weathered card over in his fingers and recited the info, the shitstorm of the last few days told him where this was headed.

“Yes, that’s the information you gave us the first time. This is a bit strange, sir. We’re having difficulty locating an officer in your city with that name, and the police department told us the number you gave is three digits short of being an actual case number. We’re going to keep this claim moving, for your family’s sake, but it would be very helpful if you could go back over all your records and maybe speak with the local police department to get this information clarified for us. As is, this is a bit strange. But it’s common for victims to have some confusion after an event like this.”

Had he been playing this awful game from the very goddamn moment they arrived home?

The 911 call? How did they intercept that signal? What were they using on me from the roof? Is that why they knew my name?

Hayhurst was no officer. Between the post-party buzz and the post-burglary adrenaline, I let a giant flashlight and a handful of cop props fool me entirely.

He sprinted across the room to look out on the landing from the living room window. No one there.

They’ve never messed with me in the light of day. Maybe I’m hearing things because of the sleep dep.

Roger opened the front door. There was something on the welcoming mat: a single opened envelope. Extended auto warranty junk mail. Nothing special about it, but the post office never would have put his mail on the doorstep. So it was them, taunting him. Always them. He looked up towards the end of his driveway.

Don’t open the mailbox. They’re fucking with you, daylight or not. Remember what Clem said—they’re always changing the way things work. So get in your truck, and only come back to this place with a few armed friends from the mill, and only if you absolutely have to.

But he had to know, to get some sense of what they might do next. If they’d really already figured out how to find his family then moving was no guarantee anyway. Maybe there was some way to bring their fucked up game to an absolute end.

There was something in the mailbox: the photograph from his family album. Him and Julie. Father’s Day a few years back. Only the picture wasn’t the same anymore. Julie’s eyes were swirled out with purple-black ink. Above their heads was a note:

His phone vibrated. A new text: Home soon. Jules needed a few more things from the house and we couldn’t wait to see you.

The time signature on the message looked like it was sent forty-five minutes ago, which meant Claire would already be home.

Roger glanced back down at the vandalized photo and found he couldn’t bear the sight of what they’d done to his daughter’s eyes. He started to crumple the photo and that’s when he noticed the writing on the back.

He rushed into the house and grabbed the same massive kitchen knife he’d armed himself with on the night of the burglary. Within moments he was running down the street toward 17th with murder on his mind.

There were many things about that house which might have stopped a reasonable man from entering. The off-putting smell. The disconcerting softness of the ground once you took a single step onto the property. But for Roger, the only time he hesitated was when the knob to the back door turned smoothly in his hand.

For only a moment he thought, “This is what they want,” but then the rage was back and it was all he could see, blinding him and driving him forward.

The back door opened on a staircase descending into a daylight basement. Roger stepped in and let the door glide shut behind him, keeping tension on the interior knob to ensure he gently slid it into place without any clicks. He descended the stairs, stepping slowly and lightly, waiting to hear a creak from the worn wooden steps.

Light fell through the basement from narrow rectangular windows above the too-soft soil. It was the same daylight Roger was used to, but down here it took on a liquid wavering—something was eating away at the light from its periphery.

He kept his eyes wide for motion, looking for white pants and black hoodies. Nothing. In the far corner of the basement there was a single plugged-in hot plate with a beaker sitting on it. The beaker housed a thick yellow fluid, though for one second Roger thought he saw a flash of something black unfurling against the surface of the glass, like a sea snake loosening its coils.

There was a set of carpeted stairs at the far end of the basement, next to some kind of primitive mural drawn mostly in black on the white-painted wood paneling. As he approached the stairs the image became clear: a great wolf floating in the blackness of space, head low as if approaching prey. In its line of sight was a small blue-green orb you’d be hard-pressed to see as anything but the planet Earth. Black drool hung from the maw of the beast.

The closer Roger got to the painting, the more eyes bloomed across the head of the wolf. When it was right by his side he could feel that it was nothing but endless sight and great hunger.

Something about the image transfixed him—he wasn’t sure he could escape it. It felt . . . alive. He walked slowly up the stairs with the corner of his eye pinned to the wolf, waiting for it to move beyond the wall. Only when he reached the top floor did he let his gaze drop.

Roger rounded the corner and found himself in a small kitchen. Dated 70s décor. Cross-stitched art on the wall—Bless This Mess. A low, insectile buzz came from the fridge, its door slightly open, the sickly-sweet smell of soured pork floating out into the room. Another smell too—salty ocean rot that reminded him of the imploded anglerfish his Uncle Dutch had dragged from the deep sea. Roger remembered asking why its seeping eyes had popped. Dutch told him, “It was never meant to live up here, with us. It can’t take the pressure.”

The thin light from the fridge started to expand across the cracked linoleum floor. Roger scrambled through the kitchen and into the adjacent hallway.

The ambient sounds of the house dropped away, leaving Roger alone in the long corridor with only the sound of his thundering heart and short, sharp breaths. He pushed forward, knife held before him, wondering if he’d walked twenty steps, or two. The hallway seemed to have no end. He continued on, trying to ignore the sickening way time was stretching, wondering if his heart was beating too slowly or too quickly, until he suddenly had the sensation of pushing through a thin invisible membrane into sound and heat.

His vision blurred, then refocused: he was in a cozy, if poorly-lit, living room. The shades were drawn. There was a couch facing a wall with a grand fireplace, and his own TV, the one they’d stolen, mounted above it.

There was a man in the corner, seated in a plush tan recliner, his face barely illuminated by the glowing screen of Roger’s laptop.

“Hey, Rog.” The man looked up, bringing his empty blacked-out eye-pools to meet his gaze.

“Easy, killer! Easy. They are exactly where they should be, as are you. If you want to see them again, you need to set down that knife and have a seat and listen.”

“Okay, sure. Fuck me. We can take that path. Honestly, I’m just happy you’re here. I mean, I can’t believe you showed. I actually bet against you. Clem’s been on a hot streak lately. I think people take him more seriously now that he’s so fucking old. Gives more gravity to his little story about ‘poor old Judge Schumacher.’ He still telling that gem? Didn’t work on me, obviously, but he’s gotten better since then.”

Roger’s vision blurred again. Something about this house, the man’s voice . . . he could barely focus. He pictured Julie and Claire, bound and crying somewhere in this nest of devils, turning away from the empty-eyed men staring at them.

His vision returned. He pushed the knife out ahead of him and stepped toward the man in the chair. “My wife. My daughter. NOW!”

“You’ll be with them soon enough, though I’m not sure how happy they’ll be to see you. But slow your roll, Roger, and listen to me. All I’ve been trying to say is that I’m glad you’re here. We’ve definitely got some work for you.”

“Yeah, that’s your go-to, isn’t it? Just confusion. What I’m saying is: We . . . have . . . work . . . for . . . you. It’s pretty clear. The pill angle is starting to play. It’s such an easy ritual—they buy, they swallow, we’re in—and I think they’re finally manufacturing that shit properly. We need somebody local to help with distribution. Somebody who knows how to keep product moving. Keep people interested. Somebody who’ll push a condom full of toxic chemicals up their ass for a few extra bucks. That kind of guy. And a gentleman we used to know in prison down south told us you’re exactly who we’re looking for.”

“Obviously you’re not quite ready to work for us yet, which is why we have to go through all these old steps to bring you into the fold. All this ceremony. Speaking of which, I suppose we should get on with it.”

“I’ll never fucking work for you guys. You’re insane. Now give me my fucking family before I chop off your goddamned head.”

“Yeah, yeah. Heard it before, bud, and from scarier guys than you. But you’re the one who’s here now and I can tell from your face that it’s time to begin. So I was hoping you’d take a look at this with me.”

On the screen: a photo of Claire and Julie. Christmas last year, smiling in front of the tree.

“Maybe, Dad, you can help me figure out which one of these dumb cunts I’m going to fuck first, once you set them to our frequency.”

And the man in the chair began to laugh even as Roger brought the knife down into his neck and his face and his jet-black eyes over and over again.

CLEM FOLLOWED ROGER HOME. He might have misted up a little as he trailed the man, but he held back the tears—that wasn’t what a man did, and this wasn’t his first time at the rodeo. But he really thought Roger had heard him, damn it all . . .

Clem had an unmarked pistol holstered on his right hip—enough to take care of Roger—and another gun tucked against his calf, its cool yellow plastic loaded with bright blue rounds in case those fuckers from the house tried to run interference. This was his mess to clean up, and he always did his job, no matter how much it was starting to hurt.

Though he did have half a mind to call HQ tonight and let her know he was ready to take out the house. The war was getting nastier—they’d come for Roger in the middle of the damn day, when Clem had least expected. He was ready to be done with the mission and its daily tragedies. Shoot, he had the explosives. It’d be an easy vest rig, maybe strap on a few extra pipe bombs and gasoline-filled balloons for maximum burn. Charge in head first, yell, “Vaya con dios!” and then send the whole nasty hive back to hell on a ball of fire. Cops would figure it for a meth lab explosion. A great plan. Maybe it was time to push for it.

But for now, Clem stayed in pursuit. Roger—or whatever it was that now lived inside him—was clearly still learning how to walk, given the change in his vision. Clem never could figure how those bastards could see through all that blackness. Definitely made ’em slow moving at first.

Execution would have been easy if he could’ve dropped Rog inside that house. Now he’d have to drag the poor bastard back to his own place and take him out in the sound-proof basement. That or risk losing the whole family. If Roger even got his arms around them . . .

Clem pulled a syringe full of sedative and got in tight, but Roger sensed him somehow, was already more perceptive than the others had been this early on.

Roger had a reach on him, on top of his speed, and he managed to wrest Clem’s gun from his holster.

Holy lord, is this how it ends? Gunned down in the street by a brand new convert. And he’ll head in and switch the wife. And the kid. The kid. And the darkness will keep on spreading.

But Roger didn’t point the pistol at Clem. Instead he looked down at the gun, then back up at the old man. His face contorted as something awful broke inside whatever remained of his mind.

And then Roger swung the gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger and blasted the back of his sorry skull clean off.

Clem had never seen a convert manage such a task. But that’s how these bastards were, always changing the way things worked.

He set to dragging the body home for disposal. The black blood on the asphalt behind him was already melting into the road.