He remembered the sound of evening cicadas, that eternal electric drone.
He remembered slashes of orange and red sunset blazing through the treetops, shattered fire in the air. He remembered the ice of the cool evening breeze on his fevered face, his swollen skin. He remembered the sound and the weight of footsteps that were not his own—ponderous, heavy, pounding the earth like a blacksmith’s hammer, slow and steady wins the race.
But most of all, he remembered being carried by a monster.
Clutching his burning body were these impossibly strong arms, thick and hard and veiny, smooth, cold, so like the stony arms of an ogre. Wayne expected to hear the battle-chant of Sauron’s army of Uruk-hai all around him, and the clank and clash of iron swords, and battle cries in unintelligible tongues. But the face looming so close to his own, gargantuan though it seemed, was not a cruel beast from Lord of the Rings. No, it was the face of an old woman.
Spirals of black hair framed her face, shot through with darts of steel-gray. Her cheeks were round, her chin and nose and forehead wide, her mouth a thin, miserly whip-slash. “You been bitten by a snake,” said the ogre-woman, in a grunty Cajun accent. Her teeth were the mottled yellow keys of an abandoned piano in a haunted house. “We gon’ get you some help, boy, just you see.”
Someone slathered ice on his leg. Wayne flinched.
“Now, calm yourself, wiggle-worm,” another voice, a pinched, wizened crow-voice. “I’m puttin’ something on that snakebite that’ll do you real good, arright? It’ll draw out the poisons, so you can—”
And then he was on a gurney, yellow lights flashing in his face. “I think he’s having an allergic reaction,” said a voice to his left: a woman, but this one young.
Ambulance.
The room shook. A siren rang out somewhere outside, rising, falling, yodeling. “Can you hear me?” a man asked. White, dressed in a blue polo shirt, with an ink pen behind his ear.
“Yeah.” Wayne coughed weakly. His throat whistled as he spoke.
“What color was it?”
“Color?” he asked, confused. The lights were so bright.
“The snake that bit you, son. The snake, what did it look like? Did it make a noise like a rattle?”
“Copperhead,” said the woman. “One of the other boys killed it. We have it.”
When he opened his eyes again, he found himself in a cold, dark room under a too-thin blanket that felt to his leg as if it were made of barbed wire. The only light came from a nearby door, seeping in around the bottom, giving shape to dark angles. After a moment of disoriented, delirious eyerolling, he concluded he was in a hospital room.
Someone was asleep in the chair next to the bed. Wayne shifted to that side and discovered Leon, his rumpled army-surplus jacket folded up under his cheek.
As soon as he saw his father, something inside Wayne broke, a brittle eggshell crumpling deep inside of him, and tears sprang to his eyes. His throat burned with shame and embarrassment. I bet I scared you so bad, he thought, grimacing. I am so sorry. I am so sorry I asked you to let me walk home.
“Daddy,” he said to the dim figure, but all that came out was a breathy squeal.
Leon snored.
Discouraged, Wayne lifted the covers and examined his left foot, the soft cotton sliding across his sensitive knee like the roughest burlap. At least a tiny part of his mind expected it to simply be gone—hacked off with a bonesaw and stapled shut, wound about with a bloodstained bandage. But other than tenderness and mild swelling, the extremity was present and accounted for. The bandage around his calf was tight but clean.
Too many horror movies.
He lay back down and again considered trying to rouse his father, but in the end he decided it would be better to let him sleep. The ol’ man probably had a hard night, and without his patent-pending liquid courage, it must have been twice as difficult.
A clamp on his finger radiated a feverish red light, and a wire ran from it to an outlet in the wall over his head. A pair of flatscreens mounted to the wall next to the bed displayed a whole litany of inscrutable numbers and the ever-familiar heartbeat line of an ECG. The lightning-bolt of his heart beeped slow and stately. At first he was afraid taking it off would set off some kind of chirping alarm, wake up the whole hospital and summon a nurse. But when he screwed up his nerve and pulled it from his finger, nothing happened except the glowing blue seismograph turned to a flat line and all the numbers disappeared.
A Styrofoam container lay on a table by the bathroom door. Probably something to eat in there. Cold or hot, he didn’t care. He glanced at his sleeping father again and slid out of the bed. Under his left foot, the floor was searingly cold. Limping across the room, the boy found a dispenser on the wall and managed to squirt some sanitizer foam into his hands. As he rubbed them together, his stomach gnarled up and growled, and he wondered how long it had been since he’d eaten lunch the day before. He was starving.
In a chair underneath the TV were his shoes, and in one of his shoes was his mother’s wedding band. He slipped the cold chain around his neck.
Underneath the chair was a black gym bag. Wayne opened it and rooted around in it. Fresh clothes. Probably his own.
He thought about putting something on, but the idea he might need to stay in his gown for some reason or another made him reluctant, so he left it alone. He took the Styrofoam container—half a club sandwich, three soggy onion rings—and stood at the foot of his bed and watched his father sleep, still racked with shame.
I just know you been scared as hell all night. I’m so sorry. I had no idea there would be a snake in there.
Really, though, he was lying to himself.
Of course he’d been afraid of stumbling across a snake. It was why he’d hustled to get away from the weedy clown car, wasn’t it, all full of snaky-looking brush and sticks. But he’d just walked right on into that Gravitron, hadn’t he, without a care in the world.
And God in heaven! The bills would be astronomical, he just knew it.
On top of everything else, his dad was going to have to pay the hospital a kajillion dollars because Wayne was so stupid. He remembered reading about antivenin in Science class. The exotic names of the drugs had sounded so expensive.
This was my fault. His hand instinctively went to the ring dangling against his chest. He felt puny, unworthy. Raising the ring to his eye, he studied his father through the ring, looking for the familiar comfort of the protective metal hoop. I knew it was dangerous and I did it anyway. I am so stupid. I’m a stupid kid. A stupid baby. I deserve to be grounded. I deserve to be locked up in my tower and never let out.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” he squeaked.
Leon just snored. A wooden door, like the kind you’d see in an old house, stood behind Leon’s chair, leading out of the room. Paint flaked from its surface.
Wayne blinked.
Three-oh-six.
The ring dropped from his eye and the rusty door vanished.
Astonished, he shuffled over to where he’d seen it and put his hand against the wall. Cold cinder block, painted gray, nothing else. Gently feeling the wall with both hands, Wayne searched for the door he’d seen, but there was no indication it’d been there at all—no doorframe, no knob, no nothin’.
He stepped back a pace and looked through the gold wedding-band monocle again.
There it was again, big as life, and solid.
The doorframe was the green of grass, of frogs and avocados.
Three-oh-six. It was happening again. The door in the wall. He got a mental flash of himself craning to look upward through his father’s windshield at the motel room door over his head, the door that disappeared, the door he never told his father about, with its 306 in gold lettering.
Three-oh-six.
But this one wasn’t a motel room door. Looked like it belonged to an old house. He stepped close and put his hand against it. Instead of the cold block wall, he pressed his palm to wood, rough and jagged with paint, as warm as if the sun were hitting it from the other side. The doorknob throbbed in his hand, hot but not painfully so, invitingly, radiating from within like the hood of a car on a sunny day.
He turned the knob. The latch disengaged with a click.
Wayne threw a glance over his shoulder. Leon was still asleep. Probably a sleeping pill—his father was given to using medication like Benadryl and Tylenol PM to knock himself out when he was having a bad night. And this definitely qualified as a “bad night.”
Opening the door, he wasn’t sure what he would find on the other side … but it sure wasn’t his own house.
Dark and deep, the Victorian at 1168 Underwood Road gaped before him. All he could see was a blotch of the floor and a bit of the wall, illuminated by a weak, aquatic light from above. He was looking at the second-floor landing, from the perspective of the doorway leading up to the cupola.
Hunger still gnawed at his insides. Maybe …
Wayne glanced at his father again. He didn’t know what was going on, but if he’d been given some strange superpower by being bitten by a snake, he ought to take advantage of it and duck into the house for a bowl of Fruity Pebbles. And with great power comes great responsibility, you know, so he’d grab Leon a couple of his energy bars while he was in there.
Madness, said some rational voice deep in the back of his mind, less in words than in pure, essential feeling. This is madness.
Hmm. No, he mused, peering through the wedding band. No, this is a dream. That’s exactly what this is. Light coming in under the hospital suite door glinted on its gold surface. He let it drop to his chest, hanging from the necklace. I’m still lying in my bed over there, sleeping and dreaming, and this is a dream.
The door remained, still open, still revealing the interior of the Victorian. Well, I guess if this is a dream, I might as well dream on.
Steeling himself, Wayne stepped into the darkened house.
It eased shut behind him. Click.
Wayne’s heart leapt and he spun around, but the door was still there. He tried the doorknob. It wasn’t locked.
Relieved, he looked around the landing. Something was subtly off about the house, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. He reached behind his back to pinch his gown shut and made his way down the stairs.
The foyer was quiet. A little table stood against the banister at the bottom, and on it was a black rotary telephone, something Wayne had only seen in old movies. Why did Dad buy an old telephone?
As he thought about it, he realized what was different about the house.
The walls were supposed to be blue, dusky raincloud-blue. Instead, they were green, the pale fifties-green of spearmint gum and the floors at his old school in Chicago, the green that belonged with salmon-pink on the flank of a Cadillac convertible parked at a drive-in movie.
Wayne picked up the receiver and put it against his ear. No dial tone.
He stuck his finger in the rotary dial and turned it. The earpiece made a subtle tikkatikkatikkatik sound, but nothing else happened. Listening to the faint rattling, his eyes wandered over to the left and he noticed the front door was a different color. Wayne hung up the phone and went over to check it out, his bare feet padding on the soft, intricate runner carpet. The front door was white, the bottom chewed up by time and neglect, the paint coming off to uncover rusty metal. A placard in the middle said WOMEN.
A restroom door? Wayne’s hand found his face and he rubbed his forehead in confusion.
Too strange. Time to get to the kitchen, get what he came for, and get back to the hospital. He would talk to Leon when he woke up later, and see what was going on, but for right now he just wanted to get something to eat and get off of his increasingly tender foot. Steaming along on this dream-logic train, Wayne limped down the dark hallway and hooked right into the kitchen, stopping short.
Pale, dirty light filtered in through the window over the sink, like sunbeams coming through the scummy surface of a pond. This sickly glow drew the contours and corners of a black kitchen—black walls, black ceiling, the stove was black, the paint bubbling and peeling. He touched the stove, and his fingertip came away with a paste of damp soot.
One winter when he was in second grade, maybe, Wayne caught chicken pox and had to stay with his Aunt Marcelina. She’d turned on the stove to boil water for a cup of hot chocolate, but it had been the wrong eye, searing the painted tin eye-cover on top of it. The foul smell of burnt paint had hung in the air for weeks, like a curse on Marcelina’s apartment.
This same acrid stink now lingered in the black kitchen.
Wayne opened a few cabinets, searching for his cereal. Nothing in them except for canned food with old-looking labels and brand names he didn’t recognize, many of them with dented sides. The cabinet where they kept the drinking glasses had a box of cherry Pop-Tarts and a box of Life, but he didn’t like cherry and had never tried Life, so he left them alone.
“What is goin’ on, man?” he asked the strange kitchen.
The floor creaked in the living room, the slow tectonic croak of a ship’s deck.
Wayne’s head snapped up and he fled to the other side of the table, which was not their small round wooden table, but a large Formica oval with metal trim, like something out of a diner. It was thick, and bulky, and felt protective.
“Who’s there?”
No answer. His heart fluttered in his chest.
“Pete?” he asked the darkness. “Zat you?”
Waiting for a voice, Wayne stood behind the table for a long minute. None came. He opened the silverware drawer, found hand-towels, opened another drawer, found a jumble of random utensils. No weapons to be had.
Weak ocean-floor sunlight whispered into the living room as well, bandaged by the sheer white curtains. The suggestion of a brown sofa lurked next to the rumor of a coffee table resembling a pirate’s chest.
Wayne chewed his cheek, eyeing a weird wooden TV with a rabbit-ear antenna and a bulging gray screen, accompanied by a panel of numbered dials. Creepy wood-framed pictures lined the walls: praying children with bulbous Casper heads and shiny blond hair, painted on black velvet.
He leaned over and was reaching for the television’s power button when something inhaled behind him, a ragged wet grarararararuhh that made him think of engines and dragons.
Ice raced down his legs and arms, his mouth falling open in terror.
Behind him, a mass of greasy, rumpled hair was wedged into the back corner where the watery sunlight faded into shadow. Green owl-eyes opened in a massive head that brushed the ceiling like a grown man in a child’s playhouse.
Rarararararuhhh …
The beast leaned away from the wall, reaching for Wayne with orangutan arms and too many fingers, smelling of filth, of old blood, of death.
The boy ran.
Leading out of the kitchen and out of the house, the back door was metallic gray, patchy with rust. A sign near the top said NO ADMITTANCE—EMPLOYEES ONLY! He shoved it open, running through it into what should have been the backyard, but instead was a dark indoor space, swampy with the stink of old motor oil.
Turning to face the monster, Wayne found only a blank wall of corrugated aluminum.
He was alone.
Tears made cold tracks down his cheeks. He ground them away with a wrist and sank to his hands and knees, shaking and nauseous. The constricting bandage around his swelling leg was killing him and his left foot buzzed with pins and needles.
Chains rattled on the other side of the wall. Wayne stood up.
Sun-bleached kart bodies rusted quietly in the shadows, strewn with broken engine parts. Signs made out of plywood and sheet metal leaned against the wall in piles. The first one was a menacing cartoon of a clown. VISIT HOOT’S FUNHOUSE! GET LOST IN OUR HALL OF MIRRORS! The back door of the strange green version of his house had brought him to what appeared to be some kind of mechanic’s garage, the cement floor dark and greasy under his bare feet.
A huge roll-up garage door dominated one wall. Moonlight slipped underneath the bottom panel.
Another sign, this one as big as a barn door, welcomed him to Weaver’s Wonderland, and beside that was painted a picture of a mom and a dad walking into an amusement park, a little girl sitting on her father’s shoulders.
The clanking of chains and muffled growling echoed from a black doorway. “Grrnngh!” growled something from the other room. “Hhhngh—thp thp thp puh, puh—HELP!”
Goosebumps prickled Wayne’s skin. He peeked inside.
Planter hooks had been screwed into the wall by the door, stuck through the links of three chains. One of them lay useless underneath, but the other two ran across the room to ceiling pulleys.
Two men hung upside-down from them, a black guy and a white guy, both of them naked except for their skivvies.
The one in the thong was squirming and undulating furiously, jerking on the chains binding his hands to the floor. A cloth gag dangled around his neck. “Jesus Lord help me, get me the hell out of here,” he pleaded, and noticed Wayne peering through the doorway. “Oh God, oh God, get me down, get me outta here, you gotta get me out of here, please.”
Wayne ventured into the room. ARE YOU TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL? asked the coyote on the sign. “What’s goin’ on?”
“I been kidnapped, this man has kidnapped me, I don’t know if he put something in my drink, or put something in my steak, but he knocked my ass out and when I woke up I was chained up in here and right now I need you to go over there and unhook me so I can get down and I need you to do it right now. Right now right now right now.”
Taking hold of the chain, Wayne tried to pull the man up to give himself enough slack to pull the hook out of the link, but he was just too heavy. The gritty floor bit into the sensitive sole of his left foot.
“I can’t do it.” Panic overtook him and he started weeping again, his throat burning. “I got bit by a snake on my foot and I’m so tired. I been in the hospital—”
“Honey, what’s your name?” asked the man.
“Wayne.”
“Mine is Jo-elle. Okay, Wayne baby, Wayne, take the chain in both your hands. See how the hook curves?” The chain had been pulled down onto the point of a hook on the floor. “I want you to take the chain in both hands and push it off the hook. Can you do that?”
Bracing himself, Wayne got under the chain and pushed. Jo-elle’s weight made it seem impossible at first, but when he put his hands close to the hook and pushed as hard as he could, throwing his whole body into a series of shoves, the link began to scrape free.
The sleepy growl of a four-stroke motor grew outside the building, reminding Wayne of the golf carts the security guys drove at the mall back in Chicago.
Jo-elle shook with fear. “Oh Jesus, hurry up, he’s back, God almighty, he’s back.”
Shove, shove, shove. Almost there. Wayne renewed his grip on the chain and ignored the tingling-prickling in his swollen leg. The filthy floor caked dried motor-oil between his toes. Tink! The chain slipped free and whipped through the pulley like slurping spaghetti, making a loud clatter. Jo-elle fell on his head, swearing in pain.
Outside, the golf cart engine shut off.
Jo-elle scrambled to his feet, freeing his cuffs from the hook screwed into the cement and wriggling out of the chain wrapped around his ankles. “We got to go, we got to go.”
“What about the other guy?” Wayne asked, pointing at the man still chained to the ceiling. His bruised back was to them.
“He’s dead, baby, there ain’t nothin’ we can do.” Jo-elle took off into the other room, staggering in circles and looking around wildly. “How did you get in here? Where did you come from?”
Wayne held up his mother’s wedding band. “You’re gonna laugh at me, but I think I made a door. Or maybe I found one.”
“You made—what?” Jo-elle winced in confusion. “You made a door? How do you ‘make’ a door?” He waved off the coming explanation. “Just show me the way out so we can get—”
“But there’s a monster—”
“What?”
Keys jingling in the workshop. Door unlocking.
“A monster in my house—” Wayne began to say, and recoiled as Jo-elle lunged for him, grabbed him by the head, and gazed into his face.
“We got to go. We got to go now.”
The door in the workshop opened, and someone thumped across the oily floor in boots, tossing a keychain full of keys on the worktable. Hollow thunk of some sort of plastic container. Gas can? The rattle of chains.
A raspy voice. “Hey, how’d you get down?”
Jo-elle ran over and slammed the door, swearing under his breath, bracing himself against it. The handle rattled.
“There ain’t no way out of there, pizza-man,” said the killer’s muffled voice. “You might as well come on out. I’d lock you in there and let you starve, but I kinda need to bleed you like your buddy in here.” He coughed, cleared his throat. “Nothin’ personal, you know. It’s my job. Well, part of it. Blood-collecting. The people I work for, they need it for the garden. Always blood for the garden.”
Boots scuffing on cement: the man walked away. The bump and clatter of tools being rummaged through, assembled. “It never ends, it never ends.”
“You ain’t got to do this, Red,” said Jo-elle.
“Sure I do.” The killer paused. “You know what? Call me the Serpent. That’s what the papers back in New York used to call me. I like it. My friends called me Snake when I was little, but ‘Serpent’ sounds so … I dunno, Biblical, doesn’t it? Man, it just rolls off the tongue.”
Everything went quiet.
Hiss, a burst of noise came out of the door-crack as the Serpent spat through, his lips against the jamb.
Jo-elle twitched, almost losing his leverage on the door. “You let me out, and I ain’t tell nobody, man,” he said. “I swear. You let me go and it’ll be like this never happened. We both go our own way and it’s all good.”
The Serpent laughed. “Fat chance, homo. You’ve seen my face. Not gonna happen.”
“Homo—?” Jo-elle’s face darkened. “You mean…?”
“Oh hell naw. I don’t swing that way, pizza-man. You kidding me? I mean, yeah, I done some things I ain’t proud of to put food on the table, but deep down I’m as straight as a…” The killer drummed fingers on the door. “Help me out here, what’s something really straight? You know, other than ‘not you.’”
“An arrow? I don’t—”
“Be original!”
Something pistoned hard against the door, BANG!, and Jo-elle jumped away. “Ow!”
A nail protruded from the door’s surface, dripping blood.
Taking advantage of the moment, the Serpent kicked the door so hard one of the plywood signs fell over. The sign behind it was a painting of a sweating glass of lemonade.
WHEN LIFE HANDS YOU LEMONS, GIVE EM BACK—OURS IS BETTER!
Wayne pressed the gold ring to his eye.
Adapt and overcome.
Nothing about Jo-elle’s end of the room was special, but when he turned to the back wall, there it was again, the doorway back to the green house with the burned kitchen. Be bigger. Be stronger. He was going to have to brave that strange dark place with its giant hairy creature. It’s got to be better than this Serpent person. I know he’s going to kill me, but I don’t know what the monster wants.
“The evil you know” versus “the evil you don’t.” Adapt and overcome.
Summoning up all the courage he could find, his body cold and trembling in deepest terror, Wayne opened the strange door. Beyond, the hollow Victorian promised nothing but darkness and silence.
“The hell—?” Jo-elle was staring at him.
BANG! Another nail shot through the door, appearing between his fingers as if by magic. He snatched his hand away, cursing. The Serpent gave the door another kick and it flew open, squealing.
Scooping up the boy, Jo-elle fled through the door into the Victorian. Wayne got a quick glimpse of a shock of the killer’s red hair, beady eyes, a scrawny throat, and then the door slammed shut behind them, plunging them into blue-green twilight.
The afterimage of the killer’s face resonated in Wayne’s mental eye. Seemed so familiar. Where had he seen that face before?
Jo-elle breathed, “Where are we…?”
They were back in the burned kitchen. Wayne pressed against the man’s clammy side, ignoring his sweatiness and the fact all he wore was a pair of bikini underwear. Jo-elle was solidly built—if a little soft around the midsection—and that was all that mattered. “It’s supposed to be my house,” he explained in a pained whisper, “but for some reason it’s painted green instead of blue. And … and there’s some kind of monster in here.”
Peeling him off, Jo-elle squinted at Wayne. “A monster?”
“It’s big and hairy. It’s like … I guess it’s like a Bigfoot.”
“You got a Sasquatch. In your house.”
“I’m not sure this is my house.” Wayne pressed a finger to his lips. “Shhh, or it’s going to hear us and come after us.”
“It is, or it isn’t. How can it be your house and not be your house?” Jo-elle blinked in recognition. “Wait. Wait. I know this house. I’ve sat at this table before. This is Annie Martine’s house. She used to babysit me and my brother when I was a little boy like you.”
Now that he was out of danger, Jo-elle seemed to favor his right foot, using the kitchen counter as a crutch as he left the room. Out in the hallway, he supported himself on the armrest of a chair. “Yeah, this most definitely Annie’s house. You mean you livin’ here? I didn’t even know it was still for sale. I figured it would be fallin’ apart by now.”
“Is Annie Martine the witch that died here?”
Jo-elle eyed him. “Where you hear that?”
“My friend Pete told me.” Wayne stopped to rub his leg. The gauze wound around his left knee was so tight he couldn’t stand it, and his ankle felt plump, tender, like a big warm sausage. “He lives over in the trailer park. He said her husband pushed her down the stairs.”
“I don’t know if I believe in witches, but I don’t speak ill of the dead. Annie was a good woman.”
He sat down in the chair. Wayne grabbed his arm and tried to pull him back up. “No, we can’t stay here. It’s not safe. I told you, there’s a monster here.”
“Just let me rest f’minute. I been upside-down for hours. My head is spinning.”
“No!”
“Little man, just cause I’m sittin’ here in a clearance-rack thong don’t mean I ain’t gonna slap you. I hurt myself falling on the floor, and you making it worse.” Jo-elle took his hand away, rubbing his wrist.
Wayne scowled and headed for the stairs. “Okay, then … I’ll leave you here. You should—”
Deep, guttural breathing rumbled along the hallway, grarararararauuuh, and the floorboards groaned.
“You on y’own!” said Wayne, running for the foyer.
As soon as he got there, the hulking green-eyed shadow reached out of the living room doorway with those long, hairy arms.
“Oh!” shrieked Jo-elle. “What the Christ!”
Halfway up the switchback staircase, Wayne paused to make sure he wasn’t alone, and he wasn’t, because the lamp-eyed creature was crawling up the wall and across the ceiling at him like some kind of huge horrible spider-bear. Wayne screamed and fought to get up to the second floor, slipping, clawing at the steps, banging his knees.
Inhaling, the creature made a deep crooning foghorn noise—Hhhrrroooohh!—and crabbed over the edge of the landing.
When Wayne reached the top of the stairs, it was already there waiting, crawling over the banister. “Oh!” he just had time to shout, and then the creature was on him, mumbling, wet, reeking of mold and garbage. The thing’s mouth widened, a pit cracking open a long head like a watermelon, and rows of slimy teeth glistened in that eerie sea-light from above. It leaned forward and took Wayne’s entire head in its jaws.
A leathery tongue pressed against his eyebrow, hot breath washing his face. He could hear a muffled whispering-crinkling noise from deep in its throat, like a candy wrapper in a pocket.
Clang!
The monster straightened, growling at Jo-elle, who stood over it with the rotary phone in one hand. “It’s for you, bitch!” He brought the phone cradle down on that shaggy head again. Clang!
Grateful for the distraction, Wayne clambered on his hands and knees across the landing.
Since the monster had cut him off before he could reach the cupola door leading back to the hospital and Leon, he fled down the hallway to the upstairs bathroom. Flinging the door open, Wayne was surprised and dismayed to find only a bathtub and a toilet.
He looked back just in time to see the deformed Sasquatch pin Jo-elle to the floor and rake fingernails across his bare chest. Blood splattered up the wall.
Gathering his feet, Jo-elle leg-pressed the creature’s chest, almost lifting it into the air, and pried himself free, loping after Wayne on all fours. They crowded into the bathroom and Jo-elle shut the door, locking the knob, as if that would help.
BANG! The thing outside threw itself against the door. A cup of moldy toothbrushes toppled into the sink.
Mysterious night lay opaque against the windowpane like black felt. The window over the tub was painted shut. “Now what?” asked Wayne, on the verge of hysterics. He ripped open the mirror.
Instead of a medicine cabinet, a dark room gaped inside, viewed from a high angle some ten feet in the air. Huge plate-glass windows to the left showered the room in soft gray moonbeams. The red numerals of a digital alarm clock burned in the black.
Wayne climbed up on the sink and through the medicine cabinet. “Come on!”
On the other side, he stood on top of a refrigerator, in a room that smelled like cheap shrimp and burnt hair. He climbed down onto the counter, stumbling over some bulky kitchen-thing, and jumped down to linoleum. His new thong-bedecked friend leapt down after him and fell, swearing about his ankle.
The crawlspace they’d escaped through slammed shut, becoming a painting. In fact, now that he’d noticed them, Wayne saw the wall was covered in paintings.
Bleeding on the floor, poor Jo-elle had a mini-breakdown. “Mother of God and home of the brave, what in the hell was that?”
The kitchen lights came on, dazzling them both.
A blond man with a crutch under one arm and a pistol in the other trained his gun-barrel on them. A small, pretty woman with a Mohawk stood next to him. Wayne’s eyes trickled down until they came to rest on the blond’s left leg, which ended in a nub just below the knee.
“Joel?” asked the man.
Joel squinted. “Kenway?”
“The hell you doing in my kitchen at—” Kenway glanced at the microwave, ejecting the magazine from the pistol and racking the slide. A bullet flipped out and he caught it in his other hand. “—Five in the morning?… Butt-ass naked? In handcuffs?”
“What’s it look like, hero?” demanded Joel, panting and grimacing, his hand over the lacerations on his chest. “I needed to borrow a cup of sugar.”