DAMAGED Part 1 Accession By sheer coincidence, Mike was the first to see the beaten, battered old Volkswagon Bug roll to a stop outside the cafe. Sliding into a parking space, the car gave an exhausted mechanical cough as the engine was cut off. Mike lifted his gaze from the swirling patterns in his cup of coffee just in time to see the driver emerge from the car. Deep in thought, he was surprised into attentiveness by the incredibly gaunt form that grew from the doorway of the black-and-blue Beetle like a dry desert plant sprouting from a tin can. His heart leapt as he saw that the figure wore a hood, but then sank as the individual approached with an odd, stiff walk. The bizarre shape of the newcomer looked nothing like who he was waiting for.

A short leather coat glistened in the noon sun as the gangly young man made his way up to the glass door of the cafe. The guy wore a brown sweatshirt under the leather jacket, a weird choice of apparel that momentarily took Mike's mind off the face he thought he kept seeing in his coffee.

Eyes concealed under the heavy hood, the thin man pushed open the door to the cafe. Mike noticed he wore leather gloves as well. He heard a distinct clicking noise as the person disappeared into the coffee shop.

Were those steel-toed boots? Mike wondered to himself.

A hand fell on his shoulder. Jumping in his chair, he noticed the hand was entirely human. What did you expect, stripes? he thought sarcastically to himself, as he turned to see the broad-shouldered figure of Officer Local standing over him.

"Son," said Local, "we need to talk."

"What's the problem, Officer?" Mike asked casually, sipping his coffee. Officer Local's eyebrows furrowed.

"Mike...you can call me 'Dad' from time to time. It's not going to kill you."

Smirking, Mike leaned back in his chair as his dad settled down opposite him at the table. "Alright, then, Pops. What's up?"

Jeremy Local steepled his fingers and leaned forward onto the wire-frame table. His badge gleamed in the light that filtered through the coffee shop's awning.

Officer Local was a prominent policeman in the Miscellaneous county, and ranking precinct officer. His rigidity in upholding the law was only matched by the straightness of his posture and the iron ridges of his eyebrows, which he used to communicate most of the few emotions he displayed: namely sternness, concern, irritation, and wrath.

Rarely did his son's snarky attitude amuse Officer Local. Today it was customarily ignored, and Local chose to cut to the chase.

"Son," he said, glancing around to ensure that the rest of the cafe's patrons were inside, "you've been sitting in that chair for at least three hours, virtually every day, for the past three months. You know that?"

Mike did indeed know that. He had no intent of telling his father why, however, and continued to sip his coffee, which had somehow become more bitter. "Yeah," he replied noncommittally.

Officer Local tried to look his son in the eye. Mike, a seasoned veteran of the "eye war," avoided his father's steely gaze with the agility of a Rebel X-wing pilot. "Son," said Local once again, "I'd like to know why that is."

Mike shrugged. "I come here after work. I like hanging out here."

"I swing by on patrol now and then, Mike. You always seem to be here. Why?"

Another shrug. "The coffee's good."

Officer Local gritted his jaw. He had expected these kind of games from Mike when his son was a teenager, but not now, not after the boy had graduated college. What Mr. Local didn't know was that Mike's stubbornness hid a very deep secret. There were few things in the world which would open his mouth on this particular subject.

There was an uncomfortable few moments of silence. Then Officer Local said, "Some of the other patrol officers have been calling it loitering."

This incited a direct glare from Mike. His father inspected the edge of the table closely before adding, "Nothing'll be done for a while. But people have been edgy around here, Mike, even the boys down at the station."

"Yeah. I know." Mike's flat monotone indicated he was fully aware of the nervous state that had crept through the town in the last few months. Something insidious seemed to have sunk into the streets themselves.

"There could be trouble. No one's got any idea why, but the town's running scared. Has been ever since this 'devil' nonsense really got going." Jeremy bit his lip and frowned, wrinkles deepening in his weathered face. "People...react to it in different ways."

He's calling me crazy, Mike thought. Then it occurred to him: Am I crazy? The thought bothered him. He knew he hadn't seen her in months, and since their last meeting he'd heard nothing more from the greatest and most beautiful enigma ever to grace his life. Had he imagined her?

"I'm not nuts, Dad," Mike said quietly, and sipped his coffee.

Officer Jeremy rubbed his silvery handlebar mustache with one hand. "I know, son. I know. But maybe you should...try something new. Take up a hobby. Get around, see something different."

Mike stared at the quiet little shops across the street. Cars rushed by, tires rasping on the pavement. People were walking outside less and less, recently.

"Hell, maybe get outta town for a little bit," Officer Local continued, smiling a bit as he misinterpreted his son's silence as consideration. "I mean, this is Miscellaneous. Nothing much happens here anyway."

Everyone knows fate can't resist a line like that, and so it was only two seconds after Mr. Local uttered these words that they both heard the shriek come from inside the cafe.

TEN MINUTES EARLIER

The metallic clicking of steel-toed boots caused the quiet chatter in the cafe to shrink to a low murmur. What few heads there were in the room turned to look at who had just walked through the door, and most of them kept turning, as their eyes followed him to where he sat in the corner, immersed in the smell of coffee grounds.

His hunched posture and incredibly angular, skinny appearance caused him to stand out like a nail hammered into a pristine wooden table. Gradually, though, heads began to turn back to coffee mugs and magazines, away from the bizarre hooded fellow who had made a clicking, slouching entry.

Which was just as well, for them.

Narrowed eyes glared from under the hood. A weak but bony jaw twitched underneath the cowl.

Fifteen seconds after sitting down, the man began to talk to himself.

His whispers were quiet, sibilant, just low enough to be inaudible to those sitting nearer to him. He watched them through slanted eyes that caused them to quickly avert their gaze whenever they dared to glance at him.

They saw him as a strange intruder into the usually quiet and secure world of the coffee shop; he was vaguely reminiscent of an equally unsettling character who used to frequent the place over a year ago. Speculation and curiosity buzzed in between the gathered teenagers, yuppies and businessmen; but like all gossip it quickly faded. They saw him as an unfamiliar element, not much more.

He saw them quite differently.

In fact, his view of the world was so contradictory of theirs that had the two collided, the very fabric of their realities would be endangered. The thin young man with the large eyes and hood and leather jacket saw every single other person in the cafe as a foul and repellant pest, fit only for extermination.

At least, that's what he tried to tell himself. He was very tired, and something refused to stop nagging at the back of his frayed mind.

"Why do I feel like I've been here already?"

There was a barely discernible pop as a one-foot-tall figure popped into existence next to the thin man's elbow. No one else in the room could see the fat little troll-like Bub's Burger Boy statue, but that didn't prevent the hooded figure from glancing at it with an expression of deepest disgust.

"Well, obviously it's because you have."

The thin fellow squinted at the suspenders-clad, red-and-white-checkered entity. Before he could say anything, the round head of the statue swiveled and spoke again. "Hmm, this place looks like it could be fun. Ah, smell that coffee! Delicious, right? Go get some!!"

"Go away, Meat. It's been years. I'm not giving in."

The head swiveled again, the protuberant plastic hairdo pointing at the hooded skeletal face like a turret. "Yes, you will. I keep telling you, buddy, everyone gives in eventually. It's human nature!"

"Go...away."

"I won't. Not until you let me in." The stubby figure smacked its lips, razor teeth showing through the painted cartoon smile. "Mmm, you can practically taste those cinnamon rolls! How about some?"

No response was forthcoming from the hunched form who sat with elbows propped on the table. The hooded man stared at the shiny ceramic surface with a deliberately vacant expression.

"I feel like I've been here before."

The ghoulish grin on the burger boy's face shrank. "You said that already. Obviously you have. You've been around the whole country by now, and what a glorious trip it's been! But why do you care if you've been here before? It's just another room in the world." The spherical head tilted like a gear on an axle. "As I recall, you didn't buy anything the last time you came here either." The painted eyes stared at the thin man's stretched lips. "How long has it been since you last ate, anyway?"

The undeniably seductive scent of brewing coffee was beginning to wear on the gaunt young man, whose drawn face pulled tighter as he stared moodily at the espresso machine and began to rant.

"Something important happened here, I can feel it. Something crucial, worth remembering. I need to know. Why can't I remember?"

"Who cares?" The freakish little burger-troll seemed to be swelling with excitement. "There's so much to do here! So much to experience! The sights, the smells! Stop staring at the table, Johnny! What's wrong with you?"

A sardonic tone entered the quiet mutters of the madman. "A great many things, Meat, one of which is you."

"Oh, that hurts, ol' buddy ol' pal. It really hurts. I mean, after I've been so faithful to you for so long..."

"Shut up...I'm trying to think." The rant continued unabated, as the narrowed eyes of the maniac raised to stare at the sunbeams lancing in through the window. He dragged one leather-clad finger across the table. "The dougboys have been gathering dust for years now...so why can't I remember? What's stopping me?"

"You're always so depressed! Lighten up a little! Look at everyone desperately trying to enjoy their short little lives, like you should be! Drinking hot chocolate, eating crepes...Hey, look, those two are flirting!"

"And what does that have to do with me?" A growl slipped into his speech. "They're insignificant. But at least they have a reason for being here. I don't even know why I came here. Miscellaneous, what a stupid name for a town."

The burger boy giggled and wobbled to and fro on the table. No one saw and no one heard the little creature hissing, "You came here for the experience, obviously! For the sensualities of life, because I wanted you to! And you won't leave. Not until I let you." It launched into gurgling laughter.

Enraged, eyelids twitching from lack of sleep, the lanky young psychopath shot to his feet and screamed at the figment of his imagination. "You don't control me! I AM NOT YOUR PUPPET!"

Unfortunately, unlike the sinister meat mascot, the thin man was very visible to the people of the cafe. Silence fell over the hazy interior of the coffee shop and the fluorescent lighting illuminated a dozen faces staring in surprise and fear at the panting lunatic.

"Oh, look at that. You've been here ten minutes, and you've already created a little scene." The grin spread, turning into a massive shark's smile on the face of the being known as Reverend Meat. Razor sharp teeth began to crowd the wide mouth, until they overflowed from it. "I know what would make you happy now, Johnny. Kill them. Kill them all!"

Shaking, the young man realized his hood had fallen back as he stood up. His partially shaved skull was fully visible to the room, as well as the two long locks of hair that stuck out from his forehead almost like antennae. The suspense in the room grew suffocating as his hands twitched viciously inside his leather gloves.

"Fuck you, Meat," he snarled, and bolted for the door.

OUTSIDE...NOW

Mike started for the door, but his father got there first. The howling shriek from inside had Officer Local on his feet in half a second, his hand preemptively darting to his holster. He reached for the door when it burst open, knocking him to the ground.

The spindly figure exploded out of the doorway, slithering past Officer Local like oil. Mike barely had time to think before he engaged the lunging character, thrusting himself at the gangly form in an attempt to slow its advance.

His groping grasp caught an arm and a shoulder. He felt a thrill of repulsion; the form moving under the ratty leather jacket seemed to be all wire and whip-like steel cable, no loose flesh at all.

In an instant he was in agonizing pain as a pair of prong-like fingers descended on his face, cracking the bridge of his nose with a simple twist. Another clawing gloved hand clamped around his throat and he was thrown onto the cafe table, his coffee splattering in an airborne spiral through the air.

He got one glimpse of his attacker through the veil of pain in his eyes. The face that stared down at him seemed to be composed of all hard edges and twitching lines, broad and with enormous bulging eyes. A few angular strands of hair hung from the forehead of the vicious assailant, and Mike felt a cold edge of metal against his throat.

"Don't touch me," the man hissed, and with a snakelike motion he darted out of Mike's view, the iron hands retreating along with the knife.

Choking and gasping, the young man lay where he was on the table for a few seconds before staggering up, his blue sweater stained with coffee and his nose sending a stream of blood down his chin and into his mouth. The man with the steel-toed boots was gone.

Officer Local was leaning on the cafe door, staring around with the outraged look of a dog that has barely let a rabbit escape. "You alright, son?"

Mike had a smart response on the edge of his lips, but he was still too shaken by the swift, savage brutality of his experience to say anything. Instead he simply nodded, drops of his blood shaking off his chin onto the ground.

Officer Local stalked to and fro, sweeping the parking lot and the street with his vision. There were dozens of small alleys nearby. "Bastard got away." He glanced at Mike. "Time for me to do my job. Wait out here a minute."

Unclipping his police radio from his belt, Mike's father headed into the cafe, his solid stride broadcasting an aura of authority. Almost envious, Mike rested against the table, breathing hard and pinching his agonized nose to stem the blood flow.

His mind leapt to the Volkswagon that the man had parked. He turned to the parking lot and then stared, his mind stalling. The car was gone. No engine had stirred after the aberrant character had fled. Both he and his father would have noticed the man driving away. It was as if the vehicle had never been there.

Mike realized he had something clutched in his right hand, the one he had used to try and fend off the guy. It was a sleek leather glove.

THE WOODS OUTSIDE OF MISCELLANEOUS

The boarded-up old house had fallen out of time and memory of the town. Its paint almost completely peeled, its shingles moss-infested and rotting, the house had been swallowed up by the woods, which had grown over it like a scab covering a wound.

The dark eaves of the trees sheltered the slowly decaying edifice in silence. Winds heavy with shadow beat against the boards covering the windows.

The house would have long ago established a reputation as haunted, were it not for the eldritch wards which marked the basement foundations. The runes etched into the mildew and concrete worked to undo the memory of those who passed near to the house, slowly eroding their curiosity and interest in it, and at long last causing them to forget it altogether.

However, magic does not affect everyone, and there are a scarce few who can overcome it through sheer force of will. One such intrepid adventurer had made his way through the layers of arcane concealment surrounding the property, and had forged a path to the house's very door.

At the time he had been overjoyed to delve so deeply into the mysterious woods, and to have found the house that his mind insisted on trying to keep hidden from him. Now, bound from head to foot in a dark room with partially shredded walls, he was much less enthusiastic.

"Someone's here."

Her voice sent shivers of cold down the core of his spine. Something about it just made him want to shrivel up inside.

She could feel the waves of fear coming off him, every time she spoke. Standing at the window, she peered through the cracks in the boards with her claws pressed against the wood. His confused terror washed over her like the warmth of a cozy fire.

Turning to her captive, the statuesque creature put a claw to her chin. "Someone new is in town. I wonder who he is?"

The bare, dusty wooden floor had been pressed against the young man's cheek so long that he could feel the grain of the wood imprinting itself on his face. He didn't want to look at his captor, even wreathed as she was in the half-dark.

She stalked back across the room to him, her hooves clacking against the floor, and knelt down next to him.

"What's the matter, James?"

He squeezed his eyes shut as he felt her presence increasing, until the cold was almost like liquid nitrogen on the inside of his mind.

"Aren't you glad to be close to me, James?" Her voice, right next to his ear, made him tremble and bite his tongue so hard it almost bled. He wanted her to go away. He begged and pleaded to any fate that was listening to make her go away.

"No? But isn't this what you wanted? I mean, you came all the way out here looking for me." She rose with a rustle of diaphanous wings and hooked his backpack through its strap with one clawed finger.

"I sure am popular with your type...You know, I was never terribly popular in school." The demoness looked down at the shivering boy, wrapped almost head to foot in the striped length of her tail, and a slight grimace of distaste wrinkled her lips.

"But I was different then...Just look at me now." She smirked.

The young man's eyes were closed tight behind his glasses. The fanged woman's expression changed like lightning as she hauled him off the ground to hang in the air in front of her.

"I SAID LOOK AT ME!"

He opened his eyes and immediately gave an involuntary gasp of horror. A third eye stared banefully at him along with the other two, crowned by twin horns and shimmering violet hair that seemed to be made of spun titanium.

The demonic woman smiled, satisfied with this reaction. She dropped him to the floor again, still bound tightly in her tail. He whimpered in pain and closed his eyes, the zigzag stripes of her skin dancing in his mind's eye like the scribblings of a madman.

"That's better." She disemboweled the backpack with a flick of a claw, its contents spilling out like kidney stones. "So what have we here? A flashlight, some filthy human food. Oh, a book-'The Life and Words of Mahatma Ghandi' ? What are you, some kind of wannabe hippie?"

Perplexed, he looked up. The self-proclaimed Goddess of Miscellaneous casually pressed a hoof down on his head, pressing his skull to the floor with absentminded cruelty.

She flipped the book open. "'When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won,'" she read aloud, her face screwing up in disgust. The stripes running up her cheeks bunched together like snakes coupling. "'There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always...' What a load of crap." She hurled the book into her victim's face, before spiking the pages with her claws and shredding it into bits. "And what's this? Aww, how cute. It's a little keychain of me. Mind if I shove it up one of your orifices?" When he made no reply, she crouched down next to him in the darkness. Instinctively he inched away from her. The cord-like binds around him constricted as Sandra tightened her tail's grip. "You know, I was just planning to give you some nightmares and let you go. But recently, I've been feeling hungry." She placed one cold palm against his pale, acne-strewn cheek. "Tell me, James...do you know what 'exsanguinate' means?"

TO BE CONTINUED

No, wait, just kidding. Here you go.

SOMEWHERE IN TOWN

"Well, that didn't go very well."

Panting, the madman slumped against the brick wall of the alleyway, staring at the dumpster in front of him.

"Well, if you'd just listened to me, it would've been much more fun."

He jumped as Reverend Meat materialized on the dumpster's lid, smiling vacantly, buck teeth sticking out. "YOU! Will you just stop it already? You're always following me like some...some kind of thing that keeps following me!"

The burger-wielding figment stared at him for a moment. "That's the best you've got, is it?"

"Ssh. Quiet. There are people out there." The maniac crouched behind the dumpster, peeking over it at the few people walking the street outside the alley.

"They can't hear me, you know..." The phantom apparition rotated with a squelching noise to face the passersby. "What are you so worried about, anyway? Go make some friends, Nny!"

The insane eyes of the man known only as Johnny C. scanned the pedestrians like an electron microscope. "That doesn't usually work out so well."

"Oh. Right. What with you being a crazy psycho and all."

Nny raised an eyebrow. "I've been wondering. Am I still crazy, or are you just telling me I'm crazy, therefore making me crazy?"

There was a short pause. "I'm a talking Bub's Burger Boy that only you can see or hear. Let's not make it into one of those things, shall we?"

"Agreed." The fiasco at the cafe quickly forgotten, the deluded man stared at a passing car. "Look at them. They're like bugs. But their machinery is broken. Their thoughts, their feelings get in the way of the essentials." He shuddered as he watched a little girl coming home from school give her mother a hug. "Frightening, all the possibilities-"

With a yelp he leapt up, his angular body gyrating. "GAH! What was that?!"

"What was what?" Reverend Meat asked, chubby fists clinging to his checkered suspenders.

"I felt someone touch my shoulder." Nny shivered, though the autumn wasn't quite so cold out of the open wind. "There's something up with this place."

"No kidding. I haven't seen a Slurpee machine in ages. It's like they don't even have them here."

"No, not that." Scratching the space between his shoulder blades, the half-bald murderer leaned close to the wall. "Check out this shadow here."

Meat craned his stubby body over the side of the dumpster, staring at the shady spot on the wall that his charge seemed suddenly interested in. "What about it?"

"It's so...deep." Nny scraped a gloved finger down the wall, inspecting it afterward as if more than brick dust clung to it. "It's like wherever the sun doesn't directly shine, everything's soaked in ink."

"Very poetic. Hey, how about a hot dog? You used to like hot dogs."

He climbed atop the dumpster, sitting in a slouched position, feet hanging over the edge. "And the people...they seem depressed. Nobody seems to look up. A lot of them look...mindless, almost. Drained." He cocked his head. "You know what it feels like?"

"What?"

Nny leaned against the brick wall, the coldness of it seeping through his leather jacket. The shadows seemed almost to swallow him, leaving only the gleam of his eyes in the cramped alleyway.

"It feels like home."

THE ASTRAL PLANE

"Woah!"

Adrift in a sea of ideas and concepts, pure truths and imagination given shape by magic, a wizard blinked.

Extending his senses through the swirling ether, the arcanist held out his hands, watching the sluggish flow of human hopes and dreams ooze over his incorporeal fingers. He concentrated, and frowned.

"What's wrong, Jack?" The magical book floating at his side, or rather the astral representation of it, tilted to the side like a curious child cocking its head.

"Didn't you feel that?" Weaving his hands in subtle patterns, Jack manipulated the ether, sending out pulses of magical "sonar" to get a better idea of what he was looking at. "That pulse. It was like a wave going through the dreamscape."

"Yes, I sensed it. But what is it?"

Jack's brow furrowed under his lopsided, uncombed black hair. "How should I know? I'm still trying to see if it did any damage."

The tome's cover, a cycloptic ruby eye with a bizarre half-grin underneath, stared at him. "I'm just asking. You would know better than me, at this point."

The Master of Plaid found himself pondering this as he wove his will into a more concrete form, a net to sweep the astral plane for intruders. There was a time when Tomie, his magic book and one of his best friends, knew far more of the ancient arcane arts than he did. The book had protected him from a collapsing pocket universe, guided him through the basics of sorcery, and kept him alive with the knowledge it provided. To hear it tell him he'd exceeded its expertise was significant and slightly troubling.

"Well...I can't be certain right now, but I'd say it's definitely something nasty. It paralyzed several ideals on its way through and it even managed to take out a couple of the town's centers of hope. Whatever it is, it packs one hell of a punch."

The tome rotated on its spine to stare into the infinite expanse of tumbling dream-shapes, many of their indescribable forms now flattened or torn. "Your precautionary spells are holding. However, I am detecting a negative presence somewhere that way."

Jack turned his attention to the direction the tome indicated. Essentially, he was floating in a plane that encompassed the residual energy of human emotions. "That way" was, according to what he knew, the origin point of the negative energy "bomb" that had just gone off.

Since the astral plane was mainly composed of human emotional offal, the void around him was filled with hopes, prayers and desires, which appeared as swirling motes and ribbons of light and color. There were also many, many inky blots of nebulous fear and hate floating like astral pond scum through the sub-dimension. He tried not to touch those, as a rule; spiritual contact with them left residue in his own soul, which manifested as phobias and depression later. Plus, they were cold and icky.

He moved closer to the source of the pulse, simply willing his spirit to shift towards it. After his last mishap in the astral plane, he always approached any new presence with extreme caution. Laying down protective spells of determination to shield himself, he closed the gap between himself and the origin of the unpleasant wave.

His efforts were not wasted. As he got closer a twisting, crawling sensation started in his mind, and although he could not clearly see what lay ahead, he could sense its malevolence from an astral half-mile away.

"Holy crap," he muttered, forging ahead. "What is that?"

A writhing, pulsating hole of grasping darkness throbbed in the near time-distance. Ropelike tendrils of hate lashed out at nearby dreams around it, pulverizing those that were too slow to escape.

"Beats me," said Tomie helpfully. "You probably shouldn't touch it."

"You think?" Jack asked the book sarcastically. Shadowy clouds, manifestations of depression and misery, surrounded the blob of negative energy. He could see occasional rows of needle teeth poking through or weird, staring eyes that bulged out before sinking into the morass again.

The whole thing was about the size of a basketball, but he could feel its clawing coldness on his spirit like a sucking wind. Also, something else was attracting his attention and tipped him off to what this new arrival might be.

"Look at that," he said, pointing with an astral finger. Tomie rotated and observed as several grimy webs of despair and paranoia slowly fell through the astral plane towards the thing.

"It's drawing in negative emotions. That means it's entropic, right? Power from mental decay?" Jack asked.

"Correct." Jack rubbed his chin, leaning back in the void. "Could be the Crawling Chaos. Has Nyarlathotep been up to anything recently?" "Not around here. Last I heard he was busy fighting that reincarnated guy." More brow furrowing occurred as the young sorcerer's brain picked at the puzzle before him. "Alright. As a general rule, this part of the astral plane represents Miscellaneous' emotions, right?" "That's what we sequestered it for, yes." "There's tons of fear and anger in town. Sandra's been working at new batches of devilry for months, and as far as we can tell the last fight didn't slow her down." He itched his knee. "What's the absorbance rate of this sucker?" "It's pulling in negative feelings at a steady clip, and it looks like it's eating them. At this rate I'd say it'll double in size in a few days." Tomie hovered over Jack's shoulder, staring at the pulsating emotional lump of afterbirth.

"Not exactly. It's far too powerful to have been created recently. It's small and concentrated, like a black hole. You'd need a major spiritual death event or a multiple-soul-based cataclysm to start up a sinkhole like that."

"So where the hell did it come from?" Jack mused.

"My guess is that it's an outside element. Something like that couldn't have avoided our spells for this long without help from the Old Gods, and it's too small for them to care about."

"So it's new in town."

"Yup." Tomie's fixed grin did not reflect the grimness in his voice.

"Then what was that wave we experienced just a minute ago?"

Tomie tilted to the side again, thinking for a moment before replying. "Difficult to explain. It's a powerful entropy force, parasitic in nature, right? An entropophage. But a parasite has to latch on first. I'd say it just attuned itself to the environment, somehow-found the right frequency to start feeding on emotional essence."

"Like turning on a radio and finding the right frequency."

"Uh-huh."

"Alright, enough analogies." Jack crossed his arms, advancing a few steps towards the wriggling mass of crimson darkness. "If it's just attuned itself, that means it must have been dormant previously, or at least not actively feeding. So somehow it got here and woke up, and now it's getting a free-for-all buffet. What are the consequences of this thing munching on the town's collective brains?"

"Um...in the short term, the town gets worse emotionally. In the long term..." Tomie took a long look at the creature. "If it's entropic it could metamorphosis and then manifest, corporeally, after it eats its fill. We could be talking the birth of a major entropic entity into the physical world."

Jack's mouth set in a firm line. "If it's parasitic, it's got to ride inside something. It's not a true spiritual organism; it's not mobile. So it's got a carrier. It's got to survive and avoid attention until it reaches its new feeding grounds, so I'm guessing a human."

Tomie bobbed assertively, his equivalent of a nod. "I would advise withdrawal from the astral realm. That thing is going to gain intelligence soon, and I doubt it's going to like us." The writhing thing bulged and squirmed, bands of chitin stretching across blood-red ligaments.

Jack grimaced. "Yeesh. And we've already got Sandra's aura permeating the network, trying to keep us out. These two combined could make it very hard for us to keep up the wards."

Tomie bobbed again. Jack sighed and released his concentration on his inner self. The astral universe dissolved around him as his mind traveled back into time and space, away from the mental realms of dream and back into his physical body.

He was sitting cross-legged on the floor in his meditation circle, in his room. Darkness, a necessity of meditation, was broken only by the glimmering glow of many candles around the periphery of his studying zone. Most of them were placed on top of piles of old porn magazines that he had long since lost any use for. The double pentacle around him shone brightly for a moment as he dispelled it, and then faded with a whisper of power as he stood up.

Stretching stiffly, he plucked up Tomie from where the book lay in front of him on the carpet. "How long we got till sunset?" he asked it.

"Two hours, seven minutes, and forty-three seconds, approximately."

"Good." He tucked Tomie under his arm. "We need to locate the source of this boogey-thing, and quick. The wards are already saturated with Sandra's essence, so they can't track it. We need to find it and take care of it right away." Jack rolled up his summoning candles into the empty tool pouch he kept under his bed, grabbing a battered backpack from the corner.

"What about cataloguing Sandra's weaknesses on the astral plane?"

"That can wait. Besides," Jack said, blowing out the candles, "we're probably not the only ones who noticed it. It came in guns-a-blazing into the ethereal world of emotions and thoughts. Sandra's on her way to becoming a full-fledged demon queen. She'll probably sense it soon and see it as a challenge to her territory."

"What's wrong with that? Can't we just let her take care of it, then?"

Jack shook his head. "Nope. That brain-eating thing has a human carrier. I'm not going to stand by while she finds out who it is and hunts them down."

"But something like that can only be destroyed by killing the host."

"Exactly."

"That's not good."

"Nope."

Jack scribbled out several small notes on enchanted slips of parchment, and with a word sent them whispering through the aether. "There. The seconds are in position. Now let's get going."

Throwing open the door, Jack hustled down the hall, yelling. "Wally! I need you!"

A door opened and a bleary-eyed blonde young man blinked at Jack. "What?"

Jack rolled his eyes as he hurried past the werewolf. "Get your clothes on! We're going out!"

Wally's helter-skelter dash for his clothes nearly ended in catastrophe as he tried to hop down the stairs while putting on his pants. "Why? Is Sandra on a rampage?"

"It's not Sandra. It's something else. Grab that moon pendant I made for you-we're going on a mission!"

Damaged

Part 2

Convergence

"That one. Right there." Reverend Meat leaned forward over Nny's bony shoulder. "What? The goth chick? You wanna kill her?" "No, I don't want anything to do with her." Nny bit his tongue viciously as he crouched behind a dilapidated cardboard box, his bloodshot eyes boring into the subject of his interest, who stood outside a dingy liquor store. "She's just...interesting. There's something about her that seems familiar." Perched on a rusted metal garbage can, Reverend Meat smirked. "Are you sure you don't want to kill her? Or ask her out?" "No." "How about talk to her?"

"Well, you're going to have to do something, because she noticed you staring."

Nny froze and whipped his head back around to look at the girl. She had indeed caught him looking at her, and as he watched, her depression lifted slightly, and she cocked her head like a curious dog.

She was of medium height and build, with obviously dyed black and purple hair. She wore a black sweatshirt with little skulls on the end of the string ties, and a pair of black cargo pants that looked as if they'd gone through a shredder. The heavy shadows under her wide eyes and the big chain earrings she wore clinched the "goth" look, and she'd accentuated it by standing with slumped shoulders and wearing an incredibly miserable expression.

But now the shoulders perked up a bit, and the fog of misery around her face seemed to lift as she turned toward him.

The burger boy in the alley with Nny giggled like an obese cartoon character, and vanished.

The slight pop that Reverend Meat made as he went was enough to send a shiver of trepidation through Nny's spine.

Meat always seemed to disappear right when Nny was about to give in to his physical or emotional urges. However, it was anyone's guess as to just which one of those urges it would be.

The girl put one foot forward, a wistful look in her eyes. "Shit," he whispered to himself. "Shit shit shit." She stepped off the curb and started towards him and the thin strands connecting him with self-control began to snap.

"Don't panic," he muttered to himself, staring at the grit-strewn alley floor, with its dusting of old rotted coffee grounds. "Think happy noodle thoughts, think happy noodle thoughts..." No use. His deranged mind scrambled like a gerbil trapped in a transparent ball being thrown into a furnace. She was curious!

This was not good. He couldn't let her get too close. He looked up, formulating a desperate and carnage-filled plan.

She was right in front of him.

Oh well. So much for that.

Near the cafe

Mike was trying very hard not to touch his nose. It wasn't easy. The injury throbbed and pulsed like a living thing, and he could barely think straight.

His father had tried to keep Mike close as the police made interrogations, but the college graduate had refused to stick around. After getting a splint and some cotton balls, he had made the decision to head home for what was left of the day.

"Why?" his father had asked him, genuinely befuddled as he scribbled down the details of the scene for the investigation to follow. "You've been up to your elbows in mystery books since you were thirteen, son. Shouldn't this be right down your alley?"

It was true that Mike he had never been one to back down from a conundrum. He remembered pestering his father as a boy about unsolved police cases, until Officer Local simply refused to tell him any more. In college he had single-handedly proved that many of his fellow students were secretly gay, neurotic, or cult members worshipping spam canisters on the football fields by midnight.

Times were different now, though. Things had changed. Officer Local had never seen Mike back down from a challenge. But there were things his father didn't know about.

The sun had gone from yellow to orange and was sliding down the sky like a fiery bead of water down a car windshield. Mike idly kicked a leaf as he plotted a course towards his apartment, trying not to think about his father's weathered face and bristly hair, and what he had said.

"Mike, the guy broke your damn nose! Aren't you at least going to help me look for him?"

Mike had simply shaken his head and replied, "I'd rather he didn't break anything else." His father had stared in quiet perplexity at him as he left. Mike had felt himself being removed from the equation of the scene by Local's shrewd policeman's mind. When he turned to look back his father had already gone back into the cafe.

The wind moaned down the mostly empty street. Mike shivered and tugged the sleeves of his blood-spattered windbreaker down over his hands. The gusts tugged fallen autumn leaves from the gutter, which danced in primal patterns over the asphalt.

He often found himself unreasonably frightened by the wind, especially at night when it howled past his window. At least several times in the recent past, he could've sworn it spoke his name.

Maybe Dad was right, thought Mike. Maybe I am going crazy. He was, after all, obsessing over a person who hadn't talked to him in months. Any sane person would have given up by now. And Mike was doubting his sanity. Several times in windows and mirrors, he'd been convinced Sandra's face was looking out at him. When he was outside, he frequently got the feeling of being watched.

Right now, he was getting that very same feeling.

Mike spun on his heel, strangely certain that a face would be inches from his. But there was no one there. In fact, there was no one on the entire street. It was utterly empty.

The sun was edging down to the tops of the buildings, yellow light glinting off the silent shop windows and parking meters. The wind whistled down the empty street and Mike felt a sharp, firm tapping on his shoulder.

He whirled around once more, his heart hammering. Once again only empty air met his eyes.

A piercing pain from his nose distracted him long enough for the mounting fear to ebb slightly. Sufficiently unnerved, he scanned the street and sucked in breath over dry lips.

"God damn it," he whispered. "What's wrong with me?"

Meanwhile, several streets away...

The homeless guy looked pretty harmless at first. Far too skinny to be healthy, he was crouched behind a trash can, peeking over its crumpled tin lid at Crystal.

"Hello?" Crystal asked, her curiosity chasing away her cloudy thoughts. "Are you okay?"

The incredibly huge eyes of the bony vagrant continued to gape at her from under short spiky hair. Half amused and half unnerved, she smirked.

"Do you think I can't see you behind the trash can? I can totally see you."

He blinked, looking up at her. He didn't seem to be all there. Crystal, deciding to put her best foot forward, stepped into the alley and thrust her fishnet-covered hand out. "Hi! I'm Crystal."

The crouched man in the tattered leather jacket spoke for the first time. "Did...did a chihuahua send you?"

"Nope!" Crystal responded, smiling. "I just saw you looking at me. What's your name?"

A spindly limb, tightly wrapped in black cloth and bits of old belts, snaked over the top of the trash can. His trembling hand clasped hers tightly and shook, slowly, as if he'd forgotten this simple ritual of greeting long ago.

"I'm...Nny," he said, still staring. He hadn't blinked again and she noticed his eyes were bloodshot.

"Just Nny?" she asked, curiously.

He let go of her hand. "Yes. Just...just Nny." He seemed to realize he was still crouching behind a garbage can, and shuffled stiffly out from behind it. He wore one leather glove on his left hand and a pair of tight leather boots with large, shiny metallic toes.

She couldn't help but giggle at his awkward stance and the way he seemed to start whenever she moved. "It's okay, I won't bite. So what's up with the one glove? Going for the Michael Jackson look?"

He blinked and glanced at his right hand, suddenly captivated by it. "Uhh...I didn't know I'd lost one."

"It's okay, you're not nearly as creepy as him." What with all the leather, Crystal thought, he looked a little like a goth. But he was more brown than pale anyway, and she had long ago lost interest in discussing makeup choices and styles. This strange man in the alley was the first person she'd seen in Miscellaneous today who didn't add to the gloom gathering inside her, and she was wondering if she could find a friend behind his nervous exterior.

"Maybe I can help you find it! When do you last remember having it?"

He shivered, drawing slightly away from her. "Er...no, thanks. That is, I mean, thanks anyway. I'd better be going."

Downfallen, Crystal sighed. Nny stared as her bottom lip began to achieve incredible proportions, and he gradually realized he had upset her somehow.

"Um, well, I guess you could...help me look..." He fidgeted, a nervous tic beginning under his eyelid. "I might have dropped it when I pulled my knife on that-er, when I bumped into someone earlier..."

"Great! I'll help you find it!" Overjoyed, Crystal beamed, procuring a magnifying glass from somewhere on her person. "Now let's retrace your steps. Where were you today?"

"Uh..."

"Crystal!" A pattering of feet was heard and Nny jumped. A sour-faced, four-foot-tall anthropomorphic rabbit raced up to Crystal, clutching a six-pack of beer bottles which rattled as he skidded to a stop. "Where'd you go? Weren't we supposed to stick together?"

"Oh...sorry, Sam."

He blinked at Nny, his piercing eyes glinting like metal shards in the middle of furry black circles. He wrinkled his nose. "Who's this? He smells like subplot."

"This is Nny," Crystal informed him. "I'm going to help him find his..."

When she glanced back at Nny, he had vanished. Soggy old papers fluttered in the alley, and the cool autumn wind teased the rusted chain hanging from the dumpster.

"...Glove," she finished lamely, staring around in bewilderment. "Where'd he go?"

Sam was staring at the alleyway in amazement. "I've never seen anyone move that fast," he muttered.

"You scared him off," Crystal said sadly, slipping her magnifying glass back into her purse. The childish joy drained out of her face and she returned to a depressed, glum attitude as the wind pushed a couple empty aluminum cans down the street.

"Good thing, too," Sam growled. "I didn't like him."

"Didn't like him?" Crystal put her hands on her hips. "You didn't even look at him for more than three seconds!"

Sam didn't say anything. He simply scowled at the now-empty alley. The street around them was growing amber-colored from the gathering sunset.

"He was the first friendly person I've met today, and you had to go and scare him off." Crystal sighed again and hugged her arms close. "Now we'll go home and it'll be same-old, same-old."

Sam's furry brows kneaded. He nodded and beckoned for Crystal to follow him as he padded down the sidewalk. "I guess not everyone is accustomed to seeing a four-foot-tall cartoon rabbit walking around," he murmured.

"Well, yeah, that probably didn't help," Crystal admitted, scratching her half-dyed head. She'd stopped thinking about Sam as a rabbit a long time ago; to her, he was just a person. Most of the town thought he was a hallucination, which was oddly helpful, as it meant he could walk around unimpeded.

Sam was staring ahead intently. "You didn't tell him where we lived, did you? Or your social security number or anything?"

She blinked in annoyance, responding sarcastically. "No, 'Dad.' I just said hi and introduced myself. What's so wrong with that?"

"He was a creepy guy wearing leather, hiding in an alley."

"Well, yeah, but he was a nice creepy guy!"

"Uh-huh. C'mon, time to get home."

Sunset came faster to Miscellaneous than it had once done, and this was not just because of the impending winter. In recent months, the town had been filled with a demonic presence, a hissing armada of sibilant whispers that spun from every shadow. Sometimes time seemed to stand still in Miscellaneous, as the darker hours stretched on and on, far longer than they had any right to. Other times, as now, the day moved frighteningly quickly. By the time Sam and Crystal turned the corner onto Nonspecific Street, the sun was all but gone, leaving only the faint post-sunset shade of gloom over the cold lanes and driveways.

"Sam...you're not mad at me, are you?"

Sam sighed gutturally as he gripped the handle of his beer pack tighter.

"I'm not mad because you talked to the guy. I'm just mad because I thought I told you to wait outside the liquor store. We can't afford to walk around alone."

Crystal rubbed her elbows with the palm of her hands, a habit she had taken to recently. She did it so often that the fishnets were worn thin. "Yeah...I know. But he looked so lonely..."

Sam grunted. He was far more concerned than he let on. Crystal was a trusting person-especially now, when she desperately needed friendship to keep her from succumbing to the fear that pervaded their tiny world. She was reaching out to anyone and everyone she could. But Sam knew that sometime you couldn't afford friendship. Not when the person offering it demanded a high price for the comfort they provided.

Crystal hadn't been watching the man when he turned to run, but Sam had. He had gotten out of that alley faster than anything Sam had ever seen, like a reel of film played extra-fast. In the blur of motion it had been hard to distinguish anything about him.

But when the skinny guy had turned to run, Sam had noticed something that had stood his fur on end. The inside of that raggedy leather coat had been lined with knives.

"Keep an eye out for that guy," Sam said as they turned onto Anonymous Street. "He's trouble."

"He didn't even do anything!"

"Trust me. He's bad news. Don't go near him."

Crystal shook her head, turning her eyes to the sky. "Sam, not everybody is dangerous or a homicidal murderer. He was probably just some druggie down on his luck..."

Sam hopped in front of her, his jacket rustling. "Oh, no you don't. You are NOT doing that."

"Doing what?" Crystal asked, perturbed.

"You are not going to ignore this guy because of a half-assed logical explanation. First rule of an escalating narrative: ANYBODY unusual who you meet is without a doubt going to be very important later on. I am not going to sit back and watch you get eaten alive by cliche!"

"Uh..."

"Making friends with obvious plot devices. What's next, sparing a mortal enemy? There must be a writers' strike on..." Grumbling, Sam fished the housekeys out of his coat pocket as they passed the mailbox of 216 Anonymous Street. He jammed the key in the lock as Crystal hung nervously behind him. She glanced several times out at the darkened road. They hadn't run into the town's patron demon recently, but that didn't mean she was far away.

As Sam shouldered the door open, Crystal found herself staring out at the long expanse of the silent suburbian street, the sparse trees and dead shrubberies shivering almost imperceptibly. The night spread like a stain.

It was living in fear that she hated the most. That sensation that nothing was certain any more, that at any time one of her friends could be maimed or torn away from her. The house provided no safety from a force that permeated every corner, every inch of every home.

Crystal could almost feel her sometimes, like a very cold, dark river. Sometimes that river surged up past her knees; sometimes it threatened to drown Crystal in a wash of hopeless terror. But it never did.

She couldn't help but think that this too Sandra's fault: that the fear never completely took over. It was yet another part of a massive, mind-numbing puzzle. The thing that had once been Sandra Eastlake had never laid a hand on her, never hurt her like it had Jack and Sam, and even Wally. She wished she knew why.

Maybe Sandra knew it was enough of a threat to be a constant, unyielding danger to everything Crystal had left. Maybe it had been easy for her to figure out how to disassemble Crystal piece by piece, until there was nothing left. Without her friends, Crystal would have nothing. One of them was already gone. When would the demon come for another?

The moon had already begun rising, far before its appointed time. The sun was gone. The street was cold and gray, the last bits of light seeping down into the gutters and down the drain grates. Did she do this consciously, Crystal wondered? Did she deliberately suck the life out of the world at night, taking perverse joy in leeching every inch of security and peace out of it?

"Hey! What are you doing standing out on the porch?" Sam called from inside. "Shut the door, you're letting the evil in."

Crystal obediently came inside and shut the door, pushing it closed as slowly as possible to minimize the noise. Kneading her hands, she went to the kitchen. Sam was putting the beer in the fridge. The table and its white tablecloth sat empty, four chairs around it.

"Crystal, go find our fearless leader and your throw pillow. I need to ask them something."

"Okay. HEY JACK!" Crystal hollered up the stairs. She was surprised when her voice echoed up onto an empty floor. "Jack?"

Sam grunted, picking a note up off the table. "Huh. 'Gone to destroy brain monster and save town from horrible mind-leeching peril. We might not be back for dinner. Hope you remembered to pick up eggs.'"

"Oh no!" Crystal fretted. "We forgot to get the groceries!"

"Aaah, well," Sam shrugged, reaching into the fridge. "Beer's more important anyway."

The Woods

His heart was hammering so hard against his chest he thought his ribcage might break. Coughing and panting, he forced his aching legs to go faster, pounding through the thick woods in a blinding panic.

Shoving leaves and branches out of his way he stumbled and nearly catapulted face-first into a log. James righted himself and kept running, hoping to God that it was finally over.

"Not yet."

The jeering voice and mocking laughter seemed to come from every dusk-shrouded leaf, rather than from a real direction, electrifying him. The dozens of scratches all over his exposed skin and the scorched, enervated patches of flesh on his cheeks burned with pain and he cried out.

It wasn't the physical hurt that caused his eyes to fill with tears. He could barely breath-he could barely see. The things she had shown him!

His foot slammed into a patch of cold mud and it splattered up into his face. Sputtering, he wiped it with a tattered sleeve and kept sprinting, trying to fix on the last traces of yellow sunlight. Soon he would be out.

But there was the old boarded-up house, right in front of him! James couldn't help but choke back a scream. He had run in a straight line away from it! How could you run away from something and come back to it?

Turning, he darted back the way he had come, plunging through the undergrowth. He realized he was sobbing. The twisted images floated in his mind's eye, growing more and more imposed until he could see his ex-girlfriend from middle school laughing at him, and hear his father muttering darkly about his son's femininity.

"Oh, poor James...lost and alone..."

An iron-hard line of what looked like striped steel cable whipped out of nowhere, stringing across his path and pulling taut. His neck slammed into it and his eyes bulged as the laws of motion flung him off his feet and onto his back. The cabin-creature's whispers hung in his mind like a stream of cold mercury.

"You should be relishing this experience," her voice whispered from the trees. "So few of you little humans get a chance to be lost and alone. You hole yourselves up in little houses, shut yourselves in with food and television and company. Boxed in with everything you need...Aren't you glad to be living on the other side for once? It makes you strong. It made me strong."

He scrambled to his feet, stumbling, choking, a sheet of soaking mud clinging to the back of his body and limbs, seeping through his hair. The woods were getting so dark, so gray, so quickly!

He scanned the malnourished trees, most of which were shrunken, their bark shriveled. Convinced that violet eyes were watching him from every knot, every hole in their lengths, he staggered away from the cord that had clothes-lined him.

He began to pick up his run again when he found another length of black-and-white, ropelike material stretching diagonally across his path, the ends disappearing into the shadowy elms and oaks. He stopped short and turned to run another way.

With a sound like metal cord being shaken or piano wires being viciously clipped, two more thick strands of tail shot across his path. This time he could almost catch the spade-shaped tip in his vision as it raced past his eyes, slithering into some dark corner like a snake and leaving its entrapping length behind.

Gasping for breath, he moved on shaky feet away from the impossibly long bands of constriction. A remote corner of his mind kept mentioning how impossible this all was. He knew that tail-thing was attached to the base of her spine, and thus should not be able to do what it was doing.

But nothing was real any more. For the last five hours he had been listening to that horrible voice scraping and scratching its way into his ears and mind, until he simply couldn't take it any more and just screamed, begging her to stop telling him about how his mother hated him and how his father considered him a failure. In between running long razor-sharp striped claws in intricate motions down the skin of his legs and arms, she had laughed a high, cold, cruel laugh and told him this was what he needed to hear. For his own good.

At last he had been unable to scream anymore and simply laid there, taking it, his mind driven into shock. The visions dancing insanely in his mind did not stop, but at length he had realized she wasn't there anymore. She, it, the Thing of the woods, had vanished.

Scarcely able to believe it, he had crawled to the stairs, tottered through the house. He left his belongings behind. They didn't matter to him now. All that mattered was getting out of the creaking, shuddering old house, with its weird electrical equipment piled in closets and corners and its odd sigils etched upon the walls. At one point during his staggering escape he had noticed the sun going down outside.

Somehow this had terrified him. He began to realize that it really was too good to be true, as the doorknobs he reached for grew eyes in their keyholes, and the boards on the floor began to look more like zigzag ribbons of ink.

As she started to giggle at him from the corners of the house he'd rushed blindly through the doors and corridors, pushing and shoving at walls to try and keep the claws from coming out of them. Finally there had been escape: he had burst out of the front door and crashed down the steps, nearly breaking his ankle.

And yet it still was not over.

For as the house had shifted and creaked in the gathering darkness he felt the cold presence slither and shift out into the very grass around him, and he knew she was with him still.

He'd run anyway, through forest and clearings. He had run till his asthma threatened to kill him. He almost would have welcomed death at that point. The things she had said!

Another tail-length shot across the air like an arrow. Then another, and another. The cold woods around him began to look like a freakish obstacle course...or some kind of giant net.

Shivering, he edged from foot to foot, the clinging muck on his back seeping down into his pants. He winced, eyes still wide in anticipation. Soon, the boughs of the trees creaked at him: soon. Soon the end will come.

He made a couple false starts, but every time he tried to run in a new direction, the tail flung out a new length and he stumbled back, biting his lip to keep from screaming.

When the darkness was nearly complete and he thought he might faint with fear, he heard the rustle of steel-wool hair and the feathery brush of purple lips against his ear.

"Got you, Jamesy. Got you now..."

Generic Street

Jack had taken to jogging lately. This was not because he wanted to show off to the ladies, or because he liked wearing a sweatband and baggy sweat pants that flapped like ships' sails.

It was out of sheer necessity. More than ever these days, his life involved a lot of running-usually from a certain former friend turned dire and horrific enemy. So he had started many preemptive measures to help keep pace with her, so to speak.

His tuxedo-pattered T-shirt was starting to show sweat stains already. He grimaced and pressed on, sprinting underneath a flickering streetlight alongside Wally, now in wolf form.

Loping at Jack's heels, the bear-sized shapeshifter asked uncertainly, "Jack? Where are we going?"

"Uh..." Jack consulted his book. "Where are we going, Tomie?"

Tomie's pages fluttered in the wind as he turned to a specific page. "I dunno. You should probably find where this monster thing has been, and then maybe we can pick up its trail somehow."

"You mean where the host has been. And how am I supposed to know where it's been? We picked up that pulse an hour ago!"

"It's a minor entropic god-being, right?" Tomie said matter-of-factly. "So you should probably head for a major center of population. Somewhere a lot of people would be. Like downtown for instance."

"Alright," Jack said. Then he blinked and skidded to a halt, a nonplussed expression sweeping over his face. "Hang on! Wait wait wait. You didn't say anything earlier about it being a god!"

"I know, but since then I've analyzed the magical signature it put out. The sub-arcane wavelengths resembled certain primeval forces of-"

"I thought you said it was new!!"

"Jack, I'm not perfect, okay? Error comes with sentience. It's a given bargain. Even the most advanced of calculators are sometimes incorrect-especially when presented with data they don't understand!"

Jack sighed, straightening his lopsided hair a little and rubbing his temples. "Alright. I'm sorry. Just, next time...could you try and be a little quicker on the uptake, please?"

"I can't do everything I used to, Jack. Sandra's become something we never expected. She's able to cloud my senses in ways my creators didn't account for."

Jack stared at the book, the ruby in its cover winking at him. "You mean...she's stopping you? From helping me?"

"Little by little, yes," the book said morosely. "She's everywhere, Jack. Especially out here. It feels like I can barely breath."

The fact that Tomie didn't have lungs did not blind Jack to what the book was trying to say. He gritted his teeth angrily. Sandra was screwing around with his sidekick, his main man...or tome, rather. This was not something he had been expecting.

Wally, who had only heard Jack's side of the entire conversation, blinked. His two different eyes stared curiously at his wizard friend. "Jack? What's going on?"

"Sandra's messing with my book's radar," Jack muttered, tracing one of the spiral designs on Tomie's ancient surface. "Fogging up his brain. She's trying to pull the rug out from under us."

"I wouldn't be able to even talk about it out here in the street, if she weren't otherwise occupied," Tomie said. His voice seemed to grow smaller as he whispered, "Jack?"

"Yes, Tomie?"

"Could you...put me in your robe, for the duration of this mission? I'd feel a lot safer in there. At least until we get back into your room."

Jack sighed, nodding, and put the book away. "Alright. We can't risk any more contamination of you, anyway. Wally, would you be able to find a new person's scent in this town?"

Wally frowned. "Maybe. I don't know-the tourists and thrill-seekers smell different, but I have no idea who the brain-thing's host is."

"Just try and sniff out a patch of new-person smell," Jack said, scratching his chin. "I'll take it from there."

Wally nodded, and put his large wet nose to the ground, snuffling across the pavement towards downtown. Jack followed him, his plaid robe billowing out behind him, trailing red checker patterns over the ground, which melted to mist as they walked.

"We've got to find this thing," Jack muttered, rubbing his hands together and glancing balefully up at the cloudy night sky. "Before she does."

Damaged

Part 3

Collision

The Woods

James screamed as loud as his ragged vocal chords would allow him, and thrust himself away from the psychically repulsive creature that hung like a bat from the eaves of the trees. Her third eye, positioned at his head height, glared at him.

"Jumpy, aren't we?" The tail suspending her from the trees lowered her slightly more towards the ground, her weirdly patterned wings pulling tight around her body in a black-and-white cocoon. "You should be impressed. I made this little web idea up just for you."

Turning like a doll trapped on a rotating stand, James whipped around. Her tail was everywhere-strung between trees and hanging from branches, suspended at the level of his ankles and crossing the air at the height of his chest. It did look like a massive, chaotic spider's web.

Sandra licked her sharp teeth with a forked purple tongue. "It's amazing what you can do when you try, isn't it? Speaking of which, you're holding out well. That asthma of yours should have killed you by now."

He stared at her, realizing just how tight his chest was. His throat started to feel very small.

"You should be thankful that I helped you to forget about it for a little while," she murmured, and smiled. Upside-down her eyes, blazing with the fey fires of insanity, were disturbing and terrifying. The stripes on her cheeks jumped as she bared her teeth at him. "At least long enough for it to do a little work for me."

He coughed and suddenly, out of nowhere, he was asphyxiating. Dropping to his knees, he fumbled for his inhaler with clumsy limbs.

"Oh, you dropped this," she added, twisting into a standing position, her hooves levitating inches above the mud. She held out his inhaler in one hooked claw. "I suppose you want it back. Well, you know what they say. Finders..."

By the time she reached the end of the aphorism, he was already unconscious.

Across the street from the liquor store:

"Jack! Over here! I've got something!"

Jack the Plaid spun around on his sneakered heel. He darted over to where Wally was sniffing a decrepit-looking alley.

"Another tourist trail?" Jack sighed. "We've marked out eight so far. This isn't going to do it, Wally...We need to narrow it down."

Wally shook his massive furry head. "No, no. Not a tourist...at least, not like any tourist that I've ever smelled." He furrowed his wolf brow, wet nose swooping over empty tin cans and shredded bits of paper. "I don't smell any digital camera. But they're definitely from out of town. And...Huh. Wonder what that is."

"What is it? And remind me to ask you sometime how you can smell a digital camera."

"They smell like microchips," Wally informed him. "But over here..." He flicked his ears at a spot next to a Dumpster. "I've got out-of-towner smell, coupled with...I dunno. A lot of leather, that's for sure. And metal, and more leather. Weird."

Jack stared quizzically at his sister's boyfriend. "Metal and leather? Care to enlighten me on what you're talking about?"

"He was wearing a lot of leather and had a lot of metal on him," Wally said. "It's all very sterilized, though. And...Woah."

Jack crossed his arms. "Spit it out! What now?"

Wally flinched. "Sorry! It's just...There's this weird trace of something, like burnt electrical wires. And...I thought I smelled dried blood. But it's gone now."

"Huh. Time for some magic." Jack pulled back his sleeves and wiggled his fingers, eyebrows oscillating up and down as he whispered a spell. Eventually the eyebrows drew together again and he flexed his fingers once. There was a tiny resonation of energy down the alley, and Jack blinked.

"Hey. Looks like you hit the jackpot, Wally." He stepped forward, kneeling in the rubbish. "I'm detecting a very subtle hint of entropy here. It's a different flavor than Sandra's doom aura thing, but too strong to hide. I'll bet it accounts for that burnt smell, too. Looks like we won't be needing those markers after all."

"Jack! There's more!" Wally was busily snuffling the ground outside the alley. "Crystal and Sam were here!"

"What? Really?"

"Yeah! And...looks like they came right up to this spot."

Jack stiffened. "Wally, did they...did they go away with that electrical wire smell? Did they follow it?"

Wally investigated further, and then shook his head. "No. They went back down the street. The leather guy and the weird smell went down the alley."

Jack relaxed slightly. "Thank God. I'm so sick of Sandra hanging over our heads, I don't want another mysterious evil thing making off with our people."

Wally swept his head back and forth. "Looks like he went this way," said the werewolf, padding down the alley.

"Okay. By the way, what makes you so sure he's a guy?"

"I can just tell," Wally said. Something about the terseness of his voice bothered Jack. Wally was like a kid most of the time-but all of a sudden he sounded tense, almost angry.

"Uh...Wally? Buddy? What's wrong?"

"Nothing," growled Wally. "Let's go." He loped around the obstacles in the alley and Jack quickly followed him.

"Right!" said the wizard assertively, as the swollen moon peeked down through the clouds at them like a massive eye. "We'd better hurry. Dark things grow in power as the night lengthens...There's no telling what sort of foul fuels it will consume and grow stronger on at this hour!"

THE PARK

"Mmmmmm...Tacos..."

Nny's eyes rolled back slightly as he chomped viciously down on another deliciously greasy and meaty Midnight Taco, the spicy beef grind feeling like nirvana between his teeth.

An entire armful of them, far more than he could actually eat, were cradled in the crook of his elbow as he crouched on a park bench. Having not eaten in what might have been weeks, the twisted social deviant was utterly enveloped in sensory joy.

Naturally, Reverend Meat was nowhere to be found. He hadn't returned after Nny's very brief conversation with the goth girl, instead hiding in some dark corner of the young man's brain until such time as he wished to emerge. At the moment, Nny was giving in to the raging hunger within his skeletal frame, so the little troll-thing had no further work to do.

"Tacos...so...good," gurgled Nny around a mouthful of said comestible. He took a moment to pick his teeth with an agile bony finger before cramming another one in his mouth so far that only the end stuck out.

His chewing was the only noise in the middle of the park at night. The crickets huddled in their tiny holes, silent, feeling the presence of the town's resident demon rise like a sickly overflowing pool in the misty air. Nny remained oblivious to this, although he cast his eyes around in subtle scanning patterns, seeking out any kind of threat for his paranoia to fix on.

It didn't take long before one emerged. Nny's sharp ears captured a rustling noise from behind him, the sound of something big moving through the bushes.

A normal person would have gotten nervous, perhaps heading for the hills. But Nny stood fast, crouched in a defensive position. Pulling his tacos tighter to him, he elected to defend the delicious meaty munchies with his life.

The bushes shivered as something crawled on silent feet towards him from out of the sparse trees. Nny's eye twitched.

He waited until he saw two different-colored eyes gleaming up at him from out of the brush, and then screamed like a banshee, unleashing a flying hail of tacos at the unseen threat.

"EAT TACO DEATH!"

A surprised yelp was heard and considerable thrashing and bumbling commenced as Nny bombarded the big furry animal in the bushes with a non-stop barrage of hot taco value meals. "Die! Die! Die!"

"Woah! Hey! Easy with the, uh...tacos!"

Nny spun around, balancing on top of the bench's backrest on one metal-toed foot. On the asphalt coming towards him was a nervous-looking character in a very long plaid shirt and jeans, wearing a tuxedo-patterned T-shirt and holding up his hands in a gesture of peace.

Unfortunately, simple things such as gestures of peace are hopelessly lost on the insane. Nny hefted a taco, ready to hurl its spicy contents at the approaching individual.

The young man stopped, sneakers squeaking on the pavement of the park path. He stood very still. "Wait! Just...calm down for a second."

"Jack?" came a growly voice from behind Nny, sounding at once nervous and eager. "Should I get him?"

"Down, Wally," Jack ordered firmly. "We're just going to talk to him. Right?"

"Er...right," Wally said, observing Nny's twitching eyes and spastic movements.

"You'll never get them, lettuce-people!" hissed Nny vigorously, clutching his holy payload. "You'll never get my tacos! Not even if you masticate rugs and plea forgiveness!"

"Uh...What?" Jack blinked.

"They're mine! All, all mine! No spit-drooling anal bleeders are going to take my precious meaty begonias!"

"Um..." Jack stared. "Okay then."

"Are you here for the Noodle Boy comics?" the leather-clad figure asked, narrowing his eyes and lowering one foot to crouch with perfect balance on the back of the park bench. "You can't have any, I gave them all to the homeless guy I met on the way here."

"Uh..."

"He might have been dead, I'm not sure. STAY AWAY FROM MY TACOS!" Nny screamed abruptly, and Jack jerked back a short distance, his hands still held out.

"We're not here for your tacos," he said, attempting to convey some kind of authority in the sentence, an endeavor that failed mightily. "We're just here to talk."

"Yeah," Wally said. "Now if you'd just get down off the bench for a minute-" "HOLY SHIT, A TALKING WOLF!" Nny flung up his hands, sending tacos flying, and took cover behind the backrest, peering over it at Wally. Tacos began to rain down. Jack caught one nonchalantly and then, thinking better of it, slowly put it down. "Um...I've been talking all this time," Wally said slowly. "I'm a werewolf. We do that." "A werewolf?" Nny blinked. "Are you from the IRS?" "The what?" Wally, who had never paid taxes in his life, cocked his head curiously. "They're all werewolves. I proved it. Or maybe vampires. I was pretty sure they were one of those." "Uh-huh..."

Wally nodded. Nny slowly turned to face Jack. "Questions, you say?" One of his eyes widened to grotesque proportions while the other seemed to shrink to a slit.

"Yes," Jack said, swallowing as he stared at the bizarre man-creature on the bench. "There are things we need to know."

"Ah...Then we'd better get introduced," Nny muttered, and smiled. The sneering grin seemed to stretch from ear to ear. Jack felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

Nny stepped off the bench, leaving one foot still on it. Stretching out a hand, he introduced himself. "I'm Johnny C.; who might you be?"

"I'm Jack," the sorcerer said, reaching for the proffered limb. "I'm-"

Nny, suddenly realizing his hand was bare, snatched it back out of reach. Staring at it, he gradually remembered his glove had gotten lost, a fact that had slipped his brain in the haze of taco-devouring.

"Hmm," he said, gazing at his own hand with fascination.

"I'm a wizard," Jack said into the silence.

"That's interesting." Nny traced the scars on his palm.

"I cast spells," Jack elaborated, feeling for some kind of reaction.

"This one was from that flower vendor. I-What?" Nny looked up, surprised to find the plaid-wearing lad still nearby.

"I said I'm a wizard," Jack said, relieved that the guy was focusing on him once more. "I do magic." He didn't like that creepy stare, though. In fact, now that the guy was looking directly at him and not blinking, he kind of wished the obviously insane person would go back to palm reading.

"I...see," Nny said slowly, his mouth hanging slightly open. Then something clicked in his brain and the ghoulish smile was back again. "You are, are you? Excellent. I suppose you do children's parties?"

"Something like that," Jack said. He was getting a very bad vibe off of this guy. Doing his best to keep his poker face on, he stared back at Nny.

"Lovely." The gangly maniac turned around and put his hands behind his back. "And you? What do you do?"

Wally stepped out from behind the bench, rolling his shoulders to dislodge the taco chunks. "I...turn into a wolf," he said lamely. "And back."

"Neat." Nny turned to Jack again. "And what was it that you said you wanted?"

Jack was about to answer when he noticed Nny was tapping a short, razor-sharp stiletto blade in his gloved hand. "I-uh..." Holy crap, he thought to himself, suddenly feeling faint. Where did that come from?

"We just wanted to ask you some questions," Wally said, sounding fairly chipper about the fact that he was addressing a complete nutball. "We think you might have something to do with a...a thingy..."

"A presence," Jacked finished, trying to keep his eyes off the small knife. "A presence in the town. Which seems to be associated with, uh, you."

Johnny C., the Homicidal Maniac tilted his head to one side, his eyes gaping wide above his fixed grin. "Oh really? And what, pray tell, led you to that conclusion?"

Jack unintentionally stepped back as Nny approached him. Oh man, he thought. What the hell are we dealing with here?

Above Miscellaneous

James came to with the cold sensation of a strong wind on his face. He blinked, dizziness slowly releasing its hold on him even as the haze of unconsciousness faded.

Below him the suburbian expanse of Miscellaneous stretched, the red-brick houses emitting yellow light from their many windows. James stared agog for a moment and then the freezing chill of fear flooded his veins.

He tried to move, but somehow he could only kick his legs and twist his head. Looking down, he saw a pair of black-and-white arms, strong and lithe and powerful, clamping his arms to his chest. A slender, powerfully muscled body pressed against his back.

He whimpered.

"Oh, awake, are we?" the sickening crooning voice came from right above his ear. "That's too bad. I was really enjoying the view."

He squirmed, but without any real hope. Inside he knew that there would be no escape-at least none that he chose.

"It's so beautiful when you're looking down at it like this," the demon sighed as she carried him soaring over the rooftops and winding streets. "Like a huge organism, so full of microbial life. Look at all the little lights."

It was at once a frightening and amazing sight. True flight, without planes or mechanical apparatus, was the stuff of childhood dreams for people like James. He sensed his captor knew this. He could barely tear himself away from the panorama that unfolded out of the night mist.

"Yes," he found himself saying. "Beautiful."

She smiled, unbeknownst to her captive. It was nice to know he truly shared her feeling. She could hear it in his voice.

A pity that their time together would be so short.

She dipped lower towards the town. James jerked in her grasp as she glided above chimneys and lightning rods, satellite dishes and radio antennae.

"Sucks, doesn't it, that this beautiful sight is really just another human hive," she said wistfully. "A city without the people, now that would be something to see."

Uncertain of what was coming next, James tried to turn to look at her, a question forming on his lips. Then the sudden, searing memory of the last six hours burned itself into the back of his eyes and he felt himself go limp. Her touch abruptly seemed repulsive and hideous, just as ugly as the threads that she dangled into his brain with her words.

"Ah, well," Sandra said, banking and doing a twisting barrel-roll that left James sick to his stomach. "It's not much to work with, but I do what I can. I mean, I'm a single demon, working from home, and I've got a whole town to invade and terrify."

James thrashed weakly in her grip. The arms tightened, and he stopped. "Oh, and don't you dare think of kicking me. I'd drop you just like that, and you'd make a big splat."

The simple rhyme seemed to amuse her and she laughed as she coasted down to the back lot of a pizza parlor, where rats scuttled to and fro, infesting holes in the crumbling brick walls.

"Well, this is where your ride ends, Jamesy," she said briefly, slowing to a stop and gripping him by his shoulders as her hooves slammed down on the edge of the parlor's roof. "I would make some quip about thanking you for riding Demon Airlines, but I just haven't got the strength. Our little fun-fest tired me out." She rotated him around to face her, the claws of her hands digging into his shoulderblades as his feet dangled in the air.

"Besides, I've got a visitor to track down and do terrible things to. Now go back to your little life of World of Warcraft and Star Wars action figures, and keep our little talk in mind. I'm sure you'll find it useful someday." She smiled at him, eyes vacuous, and then let go.

With a scream he plunged down fifteen feet into the open Dumpster, where rotting food and soggy, moldy cardboard dampened his fall. The detritus of the trash receptacle began to pour down on him as he sank into it, so that he could barely see the horned figure waving goodbye to him.

With a sweep of a wing she turned away and was gone. James' inhaler tumbled down next to him in the grime, and with a mighty struggle he managed to grasp it, taking several desperate pulls of its life-giving diaphragm.

His heart had started to slow its violent pounding when the rats began to creep in from all sides, squeaking curiously at the new warm food amongst their usual fare.

THE POINTED HOUSE

Crystal had finished tidying up as best she could, for lack of anything better to do. But no matter how much she cleaned the house it still felt filthy. Diseased, somehow, as if a poison or a plague had crept in unnoticed and wriggled into every corner.

Removing her fishnets, she opted instead for a large ratty sweater, as they had begun conserving heat to help pay the bills. When she noticed the faded yellow halo on the front she almost began to cry.

It wasn't fair. None of it was fair. They had been holding on, holding out and weathering it as best they could-all the strangeness, the frightening fights and weird adventures. And then someone had to come along and make it all horrible.

She hated thinking about him. In fact, her thoughts on him were about as close as Crystal could come to real hate. She didn't like hating people-it gave her a nasty clenchy feeling inside as if something were eating her up. But if it weren't for the terrible Professor Broadshoulders, they wouldn't be in this mess.

Why did he have to go and make that stupid hell portal? she wondered. What did he do to her in there that made her choose to be that...that thing?

It used to be that she'd be furiously baking by now, working out her anger by vehemently whisking eggs in a bright yellow bowl to make a batch of brownies for her odd little "family." But the time had passed when the smell of baked cookies or cake could wash away the troubles from her mind, and she didn't imagine that the other members of the household would have felt any better if she baked for them.

She went to the living room and watched Sam through the doorway. He was watching the TV on muted volume; the eerie silence coupled with the bright pictures dancing over the screen gave Crystal the chills. It was only the evening news, though, and a frizzy-haired reporter was discussing the disappearance of a hiker who'd gone out on a search for the "demon of Miscellaneous" and not yet come back. Crystal shuddered. She thought she might know what had happened to him.

Suddenly the picture wavered. The frizzy-haired reporter changed, and Crystal saw Sandra, waving at her out of the screen. She looked just like old times, thought Crystal: sad, but with plenty of life in her. Then the stripes on her skin lengthened and grew jagged and vicious, and her tongue lashed out in a razor-thin whip at the screen.

And then she was gone. Crystal clutched a hand to her heart, right above the frayed yellow circle on Sandra's old sweatshirt. She thought she might choke on her own breath. Sam heard her coughing and turned to look at her, concern written all over his craggy features.

"Crystal?" he said nervously. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," Crystal said. "Just...hungry, that's all." Sam looked at her, and gave her the kind of sad stare that told her he wanted the truth.

But she didn't give it to him. Not this time. Crystal had been seeing Sandra's face in the shadows for weeks and not told anyone. But Sandra had never hissed at her, or made any attempt to frighten her. She only watched. Until now.

These visions were always gone in a heartbeat, and Crystal always felt deeply sad when she had them. She knew her friend, deep down, wanted help. Needed help. But Sandra wasn't herself any more, and Crystal barely knew her. She couldn't comprehend what would drive the cranky but secretly sweet Sandra to torture people, or give them terrors in the night.

Maybe she did comprehend it, on some deep level, but refused to accept it. Whatever the case, Crystal just wanted her friend back. Life, once so filled with light, was now gray and plunging toward a black pit from which Crystal saw no return. Not even the terrible goth poetry she'd written half a year ago could compare to what was swimming down there.

Sandra had never snarled at her like that in her visions before. She knew what it meant.

Sam continued to watch her as she turned around and made her way back into the kitchen. She looked almost like an old woman, he thought, and the idea gave a fresh new twist to his already knotted stomach.

He sipped his beer and stared at the news, and waited for it to get worse.

THE PARK

"So you're saying there's something in my brain," Nny said flatly, but not uncomprehendingly. Jack nodded, the instinctive fear in his gut telling him to run for his life. At some point between sentences, the switchblade had been swapped for a small machete, with a smiley face etched in the pommel. Jack hadn't seen the swap occur, which didn't help him feel any better. He really didn't want the thin man in black to get any closer to him.

"Well, that much is obvious," said Nny, shrugging his pointed shoulders. Everything about him seemed pointed, thought Jack, right down to the ends of his fingers. He was having a hard time concentrating on his attempted negotiations when his interviewee kept slapping the flat side of the machete against a gloved palm, over and over and over.

"There have been things in my brain for years," said Nny, scratching the asphalt with a pointed metal toe. "They pick and they scratch and they fight. But I've kept them mostly quiet for a few years. Except for the burger boy. He never goes away. Not completely."

"Right," Jack said, and nodded. He glanced over Nny's shoulder at Wally, who was crouched beside the park bench, surrounded by the splattered remnants of fallen tacos. The wolf-boy's canine face was twisted in an expression of deepest unsettlement. That wasn't good. Jack needed to be able to count on his comrade's machismo to get them both through this.

"So if you want to find out what's in my brain, why don't you just have a look?" Nny said, smirking and giving Jack a twitchy leer.

"What?" Jack said. There was something about talking to this guy that made you lose your train of thought. The knife was so shiny, and it moved with such languorous grace in those dexterous hands. It was too easy to imagine that knife sliding in between one's ribs, penetrating delicate skin, driving through wet connective fibers to sink into spongy lung tissue, or neatly puncture one throbbing chamber of a pulsating heart.

Jack composed himself. A few minutes ago the guy had seemed normal. Now Jack was primed to sprint for his life. Something was up.

Tomie, he thought desperately, please, help me out here. I'm not doing so good. How did I lose my cool so fast?

Close-range telepathy was touch-and-go in these days of Sandra's reign, much like soul-smelling, which had ceased to be useful months ago. But Tomie shot back a mental reply through the psychic gloom, the book glowing warmly against Jack's shirt.

It's close, Jack, whispered the book. So very close. Be careful.

But how can I get to it? Jack thought. How can I get the thing out of him?

Tomie made no reply. Perhaps he couldn't.

"Yes, just have a good look," Nny was saying. "You're a wizard, right? Can't you read minds? Have a look at mine." That grin was like something out of a madman's sketchbook, Jack thought-it twisted far too high up Nny's face.

Jack paused. A simple mental probe would suffice to scan the surface memory of a target. But this was no ordinary man-and obviously no ordinary mind. If the taco-hurling and the knives were any indication, this guy was either crazy or very much off his meds. A mind probe could damage his brain even more, and expose Jack to some things he'd rather not see.

But there was one other option. One technique that might work to give him all the information he needed. Jack had learned it from a much older wizard, a man named Harry Dresden. It was called a soulgaze.

Jack had only experienced it once. Mr. Dresden, a scruffy tall man in a great overcoat, had insisted on it shortly after they met. He had come to investigate what he called "disturbing mutterings" from Miscellaneous, and had figured out pretty quickly that something terrible was going on. Only Jack's insistence had kept the man from marching out and confronting Sandra himself.

"She's my responsibility," he remembered telling Dresden stoically over bitter cups of coffee in the cafe downtown. "As long as I live it's my duty to take care of anything that happens with her. It's my job, and no one else's."

Dresden had stared down at the table for a while. "Sounds like you've got your mind made up," he said gruffly. His voice reminded Jack very much of Sam's.

"Yes," Jack said, setting his jaw firmly in a square line. "I'm sorry, but I can't let you go after her. She's my mistake-mine alone."

Dresden remained quiet, the quiet of a man who is silently judging another. After a while, the long-faced wizard from Chicago seemed to come to a conclusion. He leaned forward, a silver pentacle amulet gleaming where it hung from his neck.

"If you're not going to let me handle the situation," he said slowly, meshing his ragged gloved fingers, "then I'd at least like to teach you a few things. You don't deserve to go up against this thing unarmed. Hell's bells, boy, this is something nobody's ever seen before-a corporeal demon, in mortal flesh. You're going to need more than a bag of tricks to handle her."

Jack studied the glinting pair of eyes that stared out at him from under clenched eyebrows. There was a question that needed to be asked; a question that had been lurking at the edge of their conversation. After Doyenne, Jack needed to be distrusting of magical outsiders. So far, Dresden seemed genuine, and Jack suspected he was a good man under the lanky hair and pointed chin. Dresden had smiled when he first saw Jack performing for the children in the park-that was the first time Jack had seen him, sitting on a stump at the border of the woods, hands curled around his runed staff.

"How do I know you're the real deal?" asked Jack. Dresden frowned, but nodded, as if this was a question he'd been expecting.

"You're a good kid, Jack. Got a good pair of parietal lobes under that weird hair of yours. But the truth is, there's no mundane way for you to find out whether I've been honest with you or not." Dresden slurped his coffee, wiping the brown liquid from his stubbled upper lip. "But there is one way for you to make sure I'm on the level."

"What's that?" Jack asked.

Harry Dresden didn't reply, instead lifting his gaze for the first time from his crossword puzzle to meet Jack's eyes. He held the gaze, and continued to hold it. Jack didn't want to back down, but suddenly-

Later, after it was over, Dresden told him what he'd experienced. It was a total supernatural exchange of views, a way to use the eyes as mirrors to look into another's heart. They would see yours, too. It was called a soulgaze.

Jack never forgot what he'd seen. And he never forgot what Harry had taught him, even though most of the spells were the kind he didn't dare to use. Since then Jack had not soulgazed anyone. He'd been afraid to. It was an utterly disconcerting sensation to be so completely intimate with another human being's essence.

But it had been necessary to show Jack that Dresden was, under his slightly menacing exterior, a kind man. Jack had looked upon Harry Dresden's soul, and found that it was good.

There had been many other things besides good in Harry Dresden's soul, but the strength of conviction and determination to help others overrode the darker things that Jack glimpsed in the depths of the man's heart. It had evened the playing field that day.

Perhaps it would even it now.

What kind of a soul was riding under that skeletal surface? Jack wondered. What kind of perversions would the leather-wearing, knife-wielding entity before him conceal in the shadows of its deepest essence?

Only one way to find out.

Jack took a deep breath, and for the first time that evening, he met Nny's eyes.

WHAT NNY SAW

Suddenly you are the entymologist, with all the tools at your disposal. You see a peculiar little creature on the dissecting table. Curiosity drives you to see what it is made of, to see what is inside it. What drives it? What makes it clockwork move, what makes it tick? You cannot help but try to find out.

The creature screams as you vivisect it and pin the flaps of its essence to the sides. The tiny, almost inaudible noise does not make you uncomfortable, but it is distracting. Ignoring it, you press on.

Handling sterilized silver instruments in safely gloved hands, you pick apart its inner workings. The basic structure, the exoskeleton, is built of perversion and physical needs, a simple substance you recognize immediately. You readily file the insect under the genus Perverticus, hoping that its guts will not have the unpleasantly familiar stink of so many you've seen before.

You are pleasantly surprised! Something new and interesting awaits you after you switch on the microscope and focus it on the bleeding, pulsing guts of the creature. Stretched out on the cold reflective steel, its inner workings entrance you.

Much of it is normal: veins of wit and sarcasm twine around muscles of necessity and the tendons of day-to-day difficulties. But the bone structure of the inner skeleton is so unique: it is made of pure determination. Solid and pure resolve composes the ossified pillars and curving ribs.

The intestines are twining ropes of intellect and understanding, their complexity forming a complex network which is meant to process information quickly and efficiently. How intriguing. This vermin has put much more work into its own body than most.

You inspect the hope gland. It is dark and shriveled, but still throbs weakly with life. You move on to the delightful fear system, the endocrine buds which dot the wetworks of its body. The little seeds of phobia are alive and well, but not swollen or tumorous. You move on.

The eyes are most peculiar. They lack the cloudy, gray film you are so used to seeing. Though not completely clear, the peering multifaceted orbs of the insect are large and keen. You suspect thick ocular nerves have enabled it to see the world, for the most part, as it really is. Interesting.

The nerves are frayed by constant wear and tear, but their inner fibers hold up well. You make a quick analysis of the epidermis and find it tough and hardened.

Yet inside the core of the creature, when you peel away the throbbing and quivering lungs, there is vulnerability. Well, that seems appropriate. After all, you reason, is it not so with all things of flesh and blood?

The ventricles of the heart are tender and soft. A few scars mar them, but their fleshy tubes quiver with bright life. It is the heart itself, however, that most interests you.

It is alight with wonder and aestheticism, a fascination with the great mysteries of the world coupled with a healthy dose of respect. The powerful, gleaming muscles of the still-beating heart pulse out a rhythm that is utterly unfamiliar to you.

After observing this for some time, you complete the dissection and make a note. You shall call this one Genus Mysticalis.

The creature begins to grow still, believing the worst to be over. Its pain begins to recede as its powerful immune system attempts to sew its own abdomen shut, concealing the well-kept secrets of its inner self once more.

But you will have none of that.

Applying more clamps to the bisected thorax, you adjust the slide so that the microscope pans over the hairy, armored body to the head. You prepare the most delicate of your instruments, touching the two sharp needles together and feeling a small sense of satisfaction as a spark of electricity jumps between them.

Your specimen, its keen eyes sensing the approach of something beyond all the pains it has yet experienced, struggles and writhes, attempting to escape. Your bonds hold it well. It does not escape, but neither does it die.

From behind your lab goggles you watch its pitiful movements. They are of no concern. No, you are much more interested in the prize behind its tiny forehead. Checking to see that the viewing apparatus is online and prepared to receive images, you make some last-minute system tests before leaning over your subject.

The needles creep and slide over the metal, neatly touching opposite sides of the little cranium. The eyes shine with agony as the points penetrate.

You cannot help but shiver in excitement. This is what you have been waiting for. The ultimate acquisition of knowledge, the truth of what has made this complicated organism what it is today.

The screen flickers. You have judged correctly. The urgent needles have punctured the lobes of the nerve-bundle that serves as the brain, and now you have but to watch as the shimmering story of its recent lifetime dances across your machine's image resonator in shades of grainy black and white.

WHAT JACK SAW

You awake in a room as dingy as it is tiny. A single lightbulb hangs from the ceiling on an emaciated electrical wire.

You stand and immediately you notice that your clothes are mostly shredded. Your plaid shirt is in ribbons and your pants have large gashes in them. Remarkably, you are physically unharmed.

There are several different doorways out of the tiny room. You turn in a circle on the stained floorboards, nervousness rearing its anxious head as you realize you do not know which way to go.

"Don't worry," says a quiet voice from behind you. "I can help you with that."

You turn to see a baseball-sized object hanging in the doorway. On closer inspection it appears to be the desiccated, rotted head of some sort of small animal, possibly a rabbit. Although it seems to be levitating in the doorway without the aid of a string, the expression on its lifeless features is serene, and you get a small sense of comfort from its curious presence.

"You're a floating bunny head," you say, because you can't honestly think of anything else to say.

"Indeed," says the head without sarcasm. "I am also the closest thing to a guide that you will find down here."

"What happened to my clothes?" you say, poking at the singed holes in your shoes. The bunny head bobs and responds without moving its lips.

"That probably happened on your way in. Don't worry, it's only peripheral damage. He doesn't like people being in here."

"Ah," you say, thinking you understand. "He doesn't like guests, then?"

"No, he loves guests," says the rabbit. "But he hates friends." It rotates and begins to float into the dimly lit hallway beyond the door.

THE POINTED HOUSE

Soon enough, it got worse.

Crystal was cleaning Sandra's room at the time. She refused to allow the dust to take over; it was her sworn personal duty to keep the place clean if her friend ever decided to return. It was one of the few remaining rituals she had left to help her believe there could be happiness for them someday.

Despite her attempts, the room stayed basically the same: silently frightening. The walls were bedecked with thousands of angry claw marks, signs of a demon's vented frustration. The bedsheets, looking as though they had gone through a shredder, lay clumped on the bed. Crystal desperately wanted to replace them, but she couldn't afford it.

She was dusting inside the computer desk when she found a small pile of papers. Tentatively she pulled them out; it wasn't right to nose around in Sandra's things, but Crystal longed for any reminder of the friend she once knew.

Scratchily doodled comic strips filled the thin sheets of printer paper. Hey, I remember these, she thought. Sandra used to do these to feel better. I even helped her with some of them.

At first she smiled as she paged through the surprisingly prolific amount of papers. But gradually the fond memories gave way to a growing unease.

They just get more and more depressing, she realized slowly as she delved through the pile. Why didn't I see it? Why didn't I pay more attention? If I had even tried to see what was happening to her...

"You did the best you could," a voice whispered next to her ear.

She shot up and whirled around, the papers cascading to the floor in a rain of rustling doodles. The room was just as empty and cold as it was when she'd entered it. Crystal remembered thinking once that Sandra's room was always cold.

"Stop that!" she shouted at the sliced wallpaper. "Why do you do that? Just come out and talk to me! It's not that hard!"

There was no response from the brooding, pooling shadows that sat in decrepit solitude around the room. The light from the hall was the only thing providing Crystal with any light: the ceiling bulb never worked in here no matter how many times she replaced it.

"You don't have to do this," she whispered, hugging herself. "If you would just talk to me..."

But she knew her friend wouldn't, or couldn't, talk to her. Maybe it was shame, maybe it was hate. After last time Sandra had visited their house, Crystal had to wonder if her Sandra even knew who she was anymore.

Crystal glanced at the comic-strip doodles on the floor. Sniffing back tears, she gathered up the papers and carefully replaced them where she had found them.

Clutching her yellow featherduster like a cross, she backtracked out of the room. She was about to close the door when a sound from downstairs made her jump. The phone was ringing.

WHAT JACK SAW (CON'T)

The hallway beyond is a shambling corridor, with odd twists and turns. Bizarre, meticulously detailed paintings on simple canvas line its walls, hung haphazardly-almost carelessly-from primitive nails and iron spikes. "I'm surprised you got in here, actually," says the floating bunny head to you as you follow its bobbing progress down the hall. "We haven't had a real visitor in years. Not surprising, really. He doesn't keep much company." "Have many people have been here before me?" you ask, trying not to look at the paintings. Many of them are so grotesque that they actually hurt your eyes; their subjects appear to be nothing human or recognizable, but merely twisted amalgamations of shading and shapes. "Only a few," says the bunny head. "His family never really bothered to pay a visit. But there have been a couple drop-ins over the years...like this one." A doorway lies immediately to your right. You swear it wasn't there before. The door is opened just a crack, but as you go to push it open the bunny-head whispers, "No, no. Don't do that. It's rude to interrupt. Just peek."

There's a girl standing at the window, who appears to be the same age as the boy but does not give off the same impression of awkward adolescence. She draws the maroon curtains closed with slow deliberation and then turns to face the young man, smiling.

"They're gone," she says with the satisfaction of deception. She seems to notice his nervousness. "What's wrong? Are you okay?"

The young man fidgets on the bed. His legs hang over it, shoes scraping back and forth across the floor in a tremulous parabola. "I'm...I'm alright." He swallows. His voice is very reedy and uncertain. "It's just, you know, I've never..."

She smiles with an almost motherly indulgence. She's also thin, but not painfully so, with chestnut skin and short black hair. You notice the faint, almost imperceptible faded remnant of a bruise on her cheek. She walks to the bed and sits down next to the boy. He seems surprised at this and a little frightened, but does not move away.

"It's alright," she says. "I'll show you." She leans in and kisses him, gently but without any kind of hesitation. His eyes open as wide as dinner plates for a moment, before he seems to calm, allowing her to slide her arms around him. Bracelets on her wrist jingle as they embrace.

On the dresser, beside a hairbrush and a piggy bank, a small burger boy statue watches silently.

Feeling voyeuristic and slightly ashamed, you withdraw your gaze, turning back to the hall and its macabre paintings. The bright sunlight from the room does not seem to even exist in the claustrophobic passageway, as if the room resided in another world entirely.

"She was the first," says the rabbit skull, rotted ears shifting as it rotates to face you. "And one of the last."

"What do you mean?" you say, still feeling bad for having watched the two, even though you were instructed to.

The rabbit's head shakes back and forth. "It's not a story that can be told. I'm afraid I'll have to show you."

You nod in acceptance, and follow the strange entity down the twisting hall, away from the cracked-open door, which closes with a click as you leave it behind.

THE POINTED HOUSE

When Crystal finally managed to overcome her shock and run downstairs, she found Sam standing in the kitchen, staring at the phone.

"Well, I'm not going to answer it," he said as she looked at him. She nodded, hesitating as she reached for the handset.

Nobody ever called their house. It was as if old acquaintances somehow sensed the pall over the place, and gradually stopped trying to make contact. Crystal herself had tried to avoid answering the phone after Sandra was first demonized. Contact with the outside world had to be minimal, to protect her friend.

And that rule had isolated the house, made an island of it. Crystal didn't think anyone had called in at least six months. And now the phone sat in its plastic cradle, beeping harmonically, announcing an unfamiliar concept.

"Well?" said Sam impatiently. Crystal nodded and nervously brought the phone to her ear.

"Hello?"

Sam watched from beneath furry eyebrows as Crystal's expression went from anxious to mortified. "Uh...just a minute," she said, her voice shaking, and clapped a hand over the mouthpiece.

"Who is it?" Sam asked.

Crystal bit her lip. "It's Sandra's mom."

MIKE'S APARTMENT

He didn't know why he bothered, really. There was no point in going on with it. He half wanted to sweep up the sketches and throw them in the trash. But Mike looked down at his drawings, scattered haphazardly on his desk, and saw something that had been sorely lacking in his life.

Beauty. Grace and strangeness. There was mystery, too, but that didn't matter so much to him now. Mike didn't care where she came from any more. He didn't care what had made her the way she was. He just wanted to see her again.

He felt exceptionally stupid for keeping this up for so long. The drawings, done in simple ballpoint pen, seemed to come alive on the page. The lines, her stripes and contours, seemed to shimmer and dance. But it was the stupid dream of a schoolboy. He half believed he'd never met her at all, and it had only been a long and very lucid dream.

"Sandra," he muttered, just to hear her name. It sounded unique and exotic in the light of his desk lamp, the only bulb he burned at night. He wondered if that was even her real name. She might have told him, if not for his mistake.

He had been too cocky, too forward. In a way even his later modesty had doomed him. Every turn he made, every change in himself that he created for her, had just sunk him deeper into some kind of hole. He didn't know how to get out.

A floorboard creaked in the next room.

Starting, Mike stared into the blackness of the kitchen. He thought he saw a form move in the dulled shapes. When he flicked a switch next to the fridge, however, the room was empty. He made a decision.

His father had given him the gun a long time ago, during a brief crime spree. "Best to have something to protect yourself," his father had told him, "or at least something to scare the shit out of someone." He'd never used it.

But it was there when he looked, sitting in the bottom drawer of his desk, under a wooden panel he'd made to hide it from sight. Tucking it into the pocket of his jeans, he checked the safety and then pulled the edge of his shirt down over it.

"No more shenanigans tonight," he muttered to himself.

There was a banging crash from outside the window.

Mike hurried to the glass to see what was the matter. In the dim glow of the streetlights he saw a gangly form staggering down the sidewalk. A trash can rolled into the middle of the street, evidence of the figure's unpredictable progress.

A drunk, Mike thought. But what kind of a drunk would be waving his arms like that? Drunks had nothing to wave about. He looked more insane than drunk. Mike's curiosity was piqued.

Then he caught himself. "Oh, no," he said aloud, his breath fogging the window slightly. "What did I just say? Enough. No more lunatics. No more mysterious people..."

But now the man was falling to his knees, clutching at his chest. And there appeared to be something darting at his ankles. Something small and furry.

Mike sprinted for the stairs.

WHAT JACK SAW (CONT'D)

The show goes on.

The rooms are like portraits. Each one presents a moment from a life-and there are many doors.

When the first murder room is exposed to your eyes, you leave with a shaken heart. The stabbing is brutal and unexpected; the skinny young man with the short limp hair who was so shy in the first "portrait" suddenly turns on a tormenter, skewering them and then fleeing.

The next is more planned. An unscrupulous teenager who laughs at the youth finds himself bound by nails in his hands and feet to a wooden table-and the young man with the large eyes has a machete this time.

The third one is a girl. She screams when he starts to cut her-and this time, he's smiling.

The details seem to blur together in your mind. The floating head shows you many rooms. Not all of them are so brutal. Some are quiet, empty of screams. In one, the young man sits silently in a corner, clutching his knees and shaking. In another, he rages at a silent phone and at last smashes it with a colorful hammer.

The hallways become more twisted, more wrenched and unpredictable. The young man grows more and more gaunt with each chamber that you see. Frequently you long to stop him from what he is becoming, but the bunny head won't let you.

"Everything has already been done," it explains. "Already these things are distant memories, most of them lost to his mind. He knows only the hurt they leave behind, and that makes him what he is."

The paintings grow worse. At first there were some happy ones scattered amongst the grue, but now it is almost exclusively a gallery of macabre, grim perversions that you see hanging on the walls.

There are stairs, and more hallways leading down, ever down. You follow your floating companion, eager to be free of this increasingly bloody world but somehow fascinated by the horrors the young man commits.

You watch him kiss a waifish woman and then viciously turn on her with his knives. Surprisingly, she fights back, viciously pummeling him and then fleeing. The barcode on his shirt is spattered with his blood when he finally rises from the floor.

Soon apparitions begin to torment him. Twin replicas of some kind of hideous Pillsbury Doughboy statue cackle at him and urge him onward. You understand these to be two halves of his splitting self. But they are not who he is.

Finally, in one room you see him laying on the floor, dead with a bullet hole in his skull. You think the story is over-but after a brief period of empty rooms, he is back again, doodling in crayon on the back of a murdered victim.

The Pillsbury Doughboy creatures are gone. Now his only companions are a scuttling cockroach and a gibbering, wobbling little statue of a cartoon burger advertisement. It seems familiar.

After a short climb down an elevator shaft, there is one room that the rabbit allows you to enter. "Not much more after this," it says. You walk in.

The room is empty. Blood stains the walls. A doll on a noose hangs from the ceiling, its eyes cut out. On the wall is a sign: ON HIATUS. PLEASE KILL YOURSELVES TO SAVE ME THE TROUBLE.

There is one more door on the opposite wall. It seems to be stained rather than screwed into its frame. A smell wafts from it that is like nothing you have ever experienced-a mix of every possible unpleasant odor.

"Is this the way out?" you ask, frowning at the brown liquid oozing from the bottom of the door. A faint gurgling noise can be heard from beyond.

"It almost was, for him," says the rabbit. "I wouldn't recommend you go there. It's still here after all these years-it's been waiting. The architects didn't build the plumbing right, and some of it survived after the last cleansing."

You don't know what this means. But you have a strange feeling that this is what you came for. You step trepidatiously towards the door. There is a smiley-face on the handle.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," the rabbit says, sounding genuinely nervous. "It's hungry. He hasn't fed it in so long. It keeps him alive but it keeps him silent. He can't move on and it can't stop being what it is."

"What is it?" you ask.

"Unspeakable," the rabbit replies.

"I came here to find it," you hear yourself saying. "It's the whole reason I needed to come here. To seek it out. To kill it."

"You can't kill it," the rabbit says sadly. "All men and women create it, at some point in their lives. All things that hurt are within it. You don't have the power to unmake it. Even God would have trouble with this kind of dooky."

"Nevertheless," you say uncertainly, "I must try to subdue it. Terrible things will happen if I do not finish what I came here to do."

"Suit yourself," the rabbit whispers, and it sounds resigned and unhappy. "But don't say I didn't warn you..."

You reach for the door handle. It is slimy and shockingly cold in your touch. It seems to move and twist like a living thing. Disgusting. Your ears pick up a wet and slithery sliding sound from beyond the door, as if something heavy and glutinous is pressing against it.

Seizing your courage and gathering it, you rip the door open. You have a brief moment of absolute terror as you see the indescribable red-black mass behind the portal, before it surges forward in a blast of concentrated human filth and envelops you in screaming, clawing eyes and mouths.

THE PARK

"Jack! Jack, are you okay?"

Wally darted to the young wizard's side. Jack lay where he had fallen, convulsing on the asphalt of the park path. Crouching down next to him, Wally shook his shoulder.

"Jack, c'mon..."

Foam started to gather at the corners of Jack's mouth. Wally's teeth tightened in a grimace of rage, and he turned to Nny.

"What did you do?"

Nny remained standing where he was. A slight shudder coursed through his entire frame. "Well," he said, his face fixed in an expression of revulsion, "that was...unpleasant."

"What did you do?" Wally howled at him. The skinny boy looked from the werewolf to the paralyzed wizard.

"I didn't do anything. He did something. Why don't you ask him?"

Wally stepped toward the gangly madman, growing with each step. His claws stretched and grew to the size of sickles. "What...did...you...DO?!"

Nny raised an eyebrow, his gaze fixing on the twitching Jack. "I-"

"FIX HIM!" Wally practically screaming, gesturing at Jack. "FIX HIM NOW! OR-"

"Or you'll what, Wally?" hissed a voice that seemed to come from every tree and blade of grass. "Bark at him? Maybe whine a little? I know that usually gets you your way...with Crystal, at least."

The temperature in the park dropped several degrees. Nny's eyes widened to enormous proportions and Wally felt a sharp, pointed claw run down the back of his spine in a slow, almost teasing fashion.

"But then again," said Sandra, stepping between the werewolf and the psychopath, "you've always been the squeaky wheel of the group. And you certainly got your grease, every other night. Isn't that right?"

Sandra wasn't as big as Wally, when he stood on his hind legs as he was doing. But he had been horribly beaten too many times to mistake her for anything but powerful. At least six foot seven counting her horns, Sandra was every inch a seductive and bizarre creature. Her shredded shirt and the remnants of clothes clinging to her waist contrasted sharply with the mesmerizing patterns running across her arms, legs and belly. Her tail lashed idly behind her.

"You," Wally hissed. An incredible amount of hate was concentrated into the phrase. "You get out of my way."

The stripes twisted as Sandra tilted her head. "Oh? And why should I do that?"

"Because if you don't," Wally said, baring his razor teeth, "I'm going to tear right through you."

Sandra's eyelids dropped to half mast. Putting a hand on her hip, she rolled a shoulder and her wings poured from her back in a waterfall of alternating patterns. "Oh, please. I'm not even going to dignify that with an evil laugh. That's just sad. We both know you can't tear your way through a paper bag." She licked her lips with a forked tongue. "Although you do manage to battle your way into Crystal's pants on a regular basis. So what is it like being the one to take advantage of her depression?"

Wally roared and swung at Sandra. She ducked, and with a casual flick of her talons, took off half the fingers of his right paw.

The werewolf's scream shook the trees. Sandra smiled and coiled her tail underneath her. Whipping her legs up, she slammed her hooves into Wally's lower jaw. The sound of bone breaking resonated like a gunshot through the park.

Wally staggered back and crashed to the ground. Sandra lowered her legs, dusting off her bare thighs.

"One, two, down and out," she whispered. "You have one more thing to thank me for, Crystal."

She turned to Nny. "And you. You're the new guy?"

Nny blinked and nodded, staring at the two fallen supernatural warriors. He scratched his chin. "That was nifty. Do you take karate classes?"

"No," said Sandra, her third eye narrowing in the middle of her forehead. "Why are you here?"

"He's getting up again," Nny advised her, pointing to Wally, who was indeed rising to his feet.

Sandra rolled her eyes, turning to Crystal's boyfriend with the gradual reluctance of an annoyed aristocrat. "You want me to take your eyes too? Because that can be arranged."

Wally clutched his bleeding finger-stumps to his chest. "You...burned down...our house," he growled through clenched fangs.

She pursed her lips. "Why, yes I did. And little David Copperfield here went and made it all better."

"Why don't...you leave us...alone?" snarled Wally, the words garbled as his broken jawbone shifted underneath his fur.

Sandra looked at him the way a Harvard graduate might look at a retarded person. "Didn't I already explain this? You know I hate repeating myself." He didn't respond, so she sighed and continued. "You're all hideous, annoying little irritants who keep me from doing what I want to do. You try to stop me from obeying my life's calling and you even put a spell on my pet rabbit to keep him away from me. And you wonder why I beat the tar out of you now and then..."

Her hooves clacked on the pavement as she walked over to Jack. "Get away from him!" Wally said, lurching slightly in her direction.

She just shook her head at him. "Idiot." A single lash from her tail knocked him off his feet and he went crashing to the ground.

Cupping Jack's cheek in her hand, Sandra frowned at the upturned whites of his eyes. "Jack, you miserable sack of it. Wake up and smell the brimstone." She slapped his cheek. "Hey. Jacky boy. Rise and shine. I need to beat the shit out of you for messing with my town."

He didn't respond, his hands clenching and unclenching as he let out a strangled gurgling gasp of breath. Sandra blinked and stood up, glancing at Wally.

"Wow, I didn't think he could find anything else to fail at. Maybe walking and talking was just too hard?" she asked the werewolf. He said nothing, glowering at her, his multicolored eyes gleaming in the night.

"Well, it doesn't matter. Time to attend to my new property." Sandra turned back to Nny, her austere expression broadcasting dignity and imperious disinterest. "What's your deal?"

"Hm?" Nny said, seeming startled from a reverie. "No deal. I just came here."

"This is my town," Sandra said. "You can't come here carrying an aura like yours and just expect me to ignore you. Now what do you want here?"

Nny seemed to think about this for a short time before responding. "Actually...I don't know. I lost track of where I wanted to be a long time ago."

Sandra bared her teeth. Wally, trying to stem the blood flow from his mangled hand, watched her carefully.

"So you're the demon?" Nny said suddenly as Sandra opened her mouth again.

"Yes," she said. He looked her up and down, with more than the usual helping of double takes she usually received.

"I didn't expect you to be so...naked," he said finally.

"What?" Sandra blurted, taken aback.

"Look at you! You've barely got a stitch on you," he said disgustedly, gesturing at her mutilated clothes. "Did those things use to be jeans and a T-shirt? For the love of meatloaf, woman, put some pants on!"

Sandra stared at him for a moment, and then frowned. Shadows twisted, and there was a brief hiss as her tail whipped out of the gathered gloom to wrap around Nny's ankles.

"Kill you later, Wally," she muttered at the werewolf without looking at him. "This little snot and I are going to have a talk."

Wally didn't bother responding. Hunched over Jack protectively, he merely watched as Sandra shot up into the air. Nny's eyes followed her for a moment, and then he was jerked off his feet and hauled into the sky with a small "Whoop!" of surprise.

Wally watched them disappear into the cloudy night sky. His hand hurt-he knew it wouldn't heal. Not even the moon pendant could help him there. And Jack was out of commission.

Crap, he thought as he tried to wake his unresponsive teammate. What am I going to tell Crystal?

Damaged

Part 4: Cohesion

"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."

--Friedrich Nietzsche

THE POINTED HOUSE

"Yes...um...hello, Mrs. Eastlake." Crystal's fingers shook as she held the phone to her ear. "I, um...How are you?"

Sam watched from across the table. Mrs. Eastlake said something, and Crystal twitched, nearly faking a smile.

"Uh...yes...yes, I'm doing fine. I, uh...I'm writing a book..."

Sam's ear twinged. He rubbed it absentmindedly, fingering the bandaged hole in it as Crystal stumbled through formalities.

"What's it about? Well...that's uh, kind of complicated. It's...um...I'll let you know when it's finished." Crystal was winding the phone's cord around her index finger very slowly. Mrs. Eastlake said something and she stopped, the wire dropping to hang in the air. "Oh. You do? Uh...Just a moment, please."

Crystal covered the mouthpiece with her hand. "She wants to talk to-"

"Give me the phone," Sam said.

"But-"

"I know who she wants to talk to. Just give me the phone."

Crystal reluctantly handed it over. Sam muttered under his breath as he sat down at the table. "Goddamn suspense-building crap," Crystal heard him say. "Time to get the ball rolling." He put the phone to his ear. "Hello. Mrs. Eastlake?"

He paused. "No, this isn't Sandra." Pause. "Yes, I know."

Crystal looked on in terror. Mrs. Eastlake didn't even know about Sam, much less about the strange things that had gone on in the house before Sandra's departure.

"She's not here right now." Pause. "No, she won't be coming back any time soon." Another pause, longer this time. Sam's brow furrowed and he leaned forward, resting his fist on the table.

"Mrs. Eastlake...I'd like you to listen to me very carefully. I-" He frowned. "Me? I'm a friend of Sandra's. You probably haven't heard of me-I understand she was very vague with the details when last she talked to you..." Sam gritted his teeth, and Crystal caught wind of a firm tone coming from the other end of the line.

Sam responded in kind. "Ma'am. If you could please just stop for a moment. What I have to say is very important and I'm only going to say it once." He waited for silence. Crystal clutched the pendants at her throat, her mouth dry. Once the voice on the other end of the line finally grew silent, Sam Sprinkles made his case.

"Ma'am...your daughter has made some very dangerous choices." He waited to see if she was going to interrupt him. From what Crystal could hear, she didn't. "She's entered into a lifestyle that is harmful to everyone around her. You wouldn't recognize her now. She's a very different person."

Crystal imagined Sandra's mother on the other end of the line: shocked, confused. Sam marched on. "The influence of a parent is the last thing she needs right now. She's not who she used to be, and because of what's happened to her she's lashing out at everyone she once knew. I'm sorry I have no better way to put this, but at this point there's nothing you can do to help her."

Mrs. Eastlake said something. Sam ran a gloved hand across his forehead as he replied, "No. Trust me, that wouldn't be a good idea. Myself and the rest of her friends are doing the best we can. It's not going so well."

Leaning back in the chair, Sam traced his index finger through the dust on the table. "Yes. Yes, we are. In fact, I hate to be cliche, but we're probably the only hope she's got...No, absolutely not. I'm sorry. This isn't something you can help with. She needs time to figure out that this isn't really who she wants to be, and any interruption is just going to make it worse."

Crystal thought she felt someone brush against her elbow. But when she looked, there was only empty air and the dust motes that traveled down in the light of the kitchen ceiling light. Outside the tiny cylinder of illumination the gloom of the corners seemed to watch her, waiting.

"Yes. I know she's your daughter, and I know you sure as hell don't have any reason to trust me. But you're just going to have to. I know her a lot better than most by now and she needs to do this herself. Not her mother, not her family, and probably not her friends. It's her thing, and she needs to take care of it on her own." He nodded. "Yes. Yes, I will. Thank you, Mrs. Eastlake."

Sam hung up the phone.

MIKE'S STREET

Mike felt as if he were trapped in a Romero movie, as the staggering man slowly approached him. He put a hand to his father's gun, housed firmly in his right pocket, but didn't remove the safety. It was never wise to shoot first and then ask questions.

The street felt painfully exposed for some reason. There was a fine mist in the air, with wet particles floating across the streetlights and giving them the same sort of blurry illumination that nineteenth-century gas lamps usually accomplished. The air was cold and moved like a living thing over every inch of Mike's exposed skin.

The staggering man was saying something: a long string of hushed syllables, spoken in a quiet gibbering stream. The figure passed under a lamp light and Mike saw he was young, maybe twenty. Acne scarred his features and his glasses hung limply from one ear. He had a banana peel on his head.

The remnant of the man's windbreaker fluttered in the chilly wet breeze. "Dominator, razor ruler, she of the many lines," Mike heard him chattering. "Eyes of poison, touch of flaming torture..."

"Are you alright?" Mike called. The young man didn't appear to notice him. He staggered right past Mike, wheezing air through a battered inhaler.

Suddenly the man fell, and began to writhe, screaming. "They're listening!" Mike saw lights flicker on in nearby windows-but no doors opened. There was no help coming.

He rushed to the fallen man's side and immediately jerked back in revulsion. The shirt that the guy wore under the shredded coat was bulging and leaping, conjuring horrible images in Mike's mind of alien embryos from old movies. After a moment of nausea he dove forward and used his pocketknife to cut open the front of the shirt, unable to simply stand and watch.

A huge rat boiled out of the hole, its matted form wrenching through fabric to claw at Mike with a scrabbling vigor. Mike fell back, swiping with his tiny blade, but the creature bounded over the asphalt and into the darkness beyond the streetlights. It left footprints of bright red behind.

Overcoming his disgust, Mike checked for wounds. Where the rat had been, there were vicious little cuts and bite marks. As if the rat had been trying to claw its way inside the man's chest cavity.

Feeling bile surge up into his throat, Mike pulled off his sweatshirt and pressed it to the wounded man's stomach. The injured party shrieked but made no attempt to stop him.

"They're listening." Crazily unkempt hair, which might have been straw-yellow but was now clogged with dirt, leaves and other fouler things, bobbed above the twisted face as the college-aged young man hissed the phrase over and over. "They're listening. They're listening. The children of the night are listening to her now." He grinned. "Can't you hear them listening?"

Mike shivered. The street somehow didn't seem like a great place to be. Oppressive waves of fog rolled over him, almost preventing him from seeing his own door.

"Let's get you inside," he said to the crazy man. He'd dealt with insane hobos before, even fending off a flaming one once in the subway. This guy seemed to be suffering from shock, rather than a case of the crazies. He didn't look like he'd been like this for more than a few hours.

But shock from what?

That old feeling that the game was afoot began to seep into his veins, but Mike quickly quashed it with his own sense of fear. Some mysteries should be left alone. His new charge was clearly in trouble out here on the street, and Mike didn't think a hospital would answer his call at this hour. A friend had told him that the night temp workers were leaving in droves; he was probably more likely to get an answering machine than any sort of real solution.

No, he was going to have to deal with this on his own. What was more, he wanted to. Some mysteries should be left alone. But on a few occasions, you didn't really have any choice.

FAR ABOVE MISCELLANEOUS

"It's so pretty when you're looking down on it."

--Devi, JTHM #2

The world spun. Nny stared with wide eyes at all the lights down below. Residents kept awake at night by strange noises and unexplainable fears had turned the village below into a web of weak, glowing stars.

The repetitive leathery flapping sound of Sandra's wings sounded from above him as she continued to gain altitude. It was fairly cold up here, and Nny's coat hung down from his shoulders like a drape. Countless small knives, hooks, razors, and assorted dentist's tools poured from his sleeves, the accoutrements of a macabre magician abandoning ship.

All in all, it wouldn't be an unpleasant way to die, Nny decided. He would have a much nicer view when it happened-and who knew, maybe the Devil wouldn't be so mean this time around.

The leathery flapping slowed to a regular beat. The tight tail-length wrapped around his ankle shifted slightly as his carrier spoke. "Let me spell it out for you. You don't come walking into my world and insult me like that." With a grunt of effort, Sandra pulled him up to her eye level. "Not if you want to keep your soul. You got that?" Nny's eyes wandered across her face, exploring the purple eyes, the strangely patterned skin, the striped horns. "I lost my tacos." A deep growl murmured out of her throat. "Did you hear me?" He looked back at her. "Yeppity deppity doo. Got it. Can I have my tacos back, please?" She looked at him for a moment, seemingly unsure. Finally she said, "No. No, you can't." He licked his lips. "Damn." As an afterthought, he added, "You look like a zebra." Her eyebrows set in flat lines of black, Sandra tilted her wings, trailing him behind her like an extremely bony kite's tail. "You need manners. Fortunately, I'm good at getting people to see things my way. We'll do it at my place," she hissed, licking her lips with an expression of distaste. As they passed over a local cafe, Nny stared down into the parking lot. "Hey! The bastards towed my car!"

THE POINTED HOUSE

As soon as the phone clicked in the receiver, Crystal exploded. "What did she do? What did she say? Oh, God, she hates us now, doesn't she?"

Sam's frowned. "No. I don't think so. She might need a box of tissues, though."

Crystal covered her mouth with one hand, the other going to her stomach. "She probably thinks Sandra's doing drugs or something...I think I'm going to be sick."

Sam let out a small, harsh laugh. "Drugs would be a pleasure cruise compared to what Sandra is putting herself through right now. Don't worry yourself about her mom, though. I think she got the message pretty good. She's got an ear for exposition." He opened the fridge, withdrawing a bottle of beer.

"But don't you think she might take that a little hard? Her daughter's gone off to do...terrible things, and you just told her she can't do anything about it!"

Sam used his lagomorphic teeth to pop the bottle cap off and spat it into his hand. "Every kid leaves the nest eventually. Sandra's mom didn't seem to realize that. Hopefully she does now-it might make it easier on her when we finally tell her the complete truth."

Crystal stared at the blackness outside the window, and reflexively drew the curtains. "Are we...are we really going to tell her? Sandra might not ever..."

"Don't say that," Sam muttered. "I don't know how, but we're going to stop this. She's not God. We can find a way to put an end to what she does without killing her, and show her that what she's doing is wrong. If you give up, then the demon wins, and we lose Sandra." He sauntered over to where Crystal stood, and squeezed her shoulder. "Don't give up."

There was a thumping noise at the door.

PROFESSOR BROADSHOULDERS' CABIN Nny was tossed unceremoniously through a hole in the roof down into a dusty, pitch-black chamber that smelled of dust and burnt charcoal. His angular body collected itself and he rose to a crouch. A soft fluttering announced the presence of his captor, who plunged down from the ceiling to land in a regal pose before him, illuminated in a dim pillar of starlight. "Look well, mortal, for you are in the den of-" "Hey, look, a unicorn." Nny jabbed a finger at Sandra's foot. The demon looked down and instantly the young man's knife was at her throat. "Ha! Made you look!" Sandra wrapped her tail around his neck and tossed him aside like a rag doll. Bouncing several times on the wooden floor, the maniac came to a stop upside-down against the wall. "Ow." "Why did you do that?" Sandra was genuinely puzzled. Stepping forward, she extended her wings to their full length, batting the youth upright again. Johnny C. rubbed the back of his head. "Never killed a zebra girl before. I thought it would be cool." Membraned wings pressed his arms to the floor as Sandra leaned over him. "If you mention the word 'zebra' again I am going to make you eat your own entrails. I am a demon. Got it?" "But you're all stripey," Nny said with the utmost sincerity. "Why are you all stripey?" Sandra looked at him the way an executioner might look at an amusing death row inmate. "You're not exactly reacting the way you're supposed to. Are you aware of that?" She removed her wings and stepped back. "You don't seem afraid. At all. Where is your fear?" Nny hopped up onto his feet, his large eyes adjusting to the lack of light. "Fear is an unfortunate by-product of sanity. I am, for one, exempt from its inconveniences." Sandra cocked her head. "So...you're crazy." "In a nutshell, yes." Nny tugged on one of the two strands of hair emitting from his head. "So are you going to kill me or what?"

THE POINTED HOUSE

Sam whirled around, some of his beer jumping out of the bottle to streak the floor. Crystal squeaked and attempted to hide behind him, despite the cartoon rabbit being two feet shorter than her.

"I'll get it," Sam said with grim resignation. "I have a feeling I know who it is."

He advanced to the door and pulled it open. Wally practically crashed through the open doorway, collapsing onto the tile. He was in wolf-hybrid form, but his usually hulking form was shrunken and shivering. Jack lay on his back, tied to Wally like a backpack with strips of his own magical plaid collared shirt.

"Wally!" Sam watched as Crystal plunged to her knees. He grimaced, seeing the blood before she did.

"His hand's bleeding," said the rabbit, kneeling down. "Get something for it." He turned the panting werewolf over on his side. "Holy crap..."

Two of Wally's fingers were gone. Bits of flesh continually attempted to grow over the wound in slow motion, and then dissolved into nothing as Sandra's demonic essence culled Wally's healing ability. Crystal let out a long-delayed shriek of horror and Sam winced, rubbing his sensitive ears.

"Didn't you hear me? Get something for it!" he barked, and Crystal dove for the first-aid kits she kept in various places around the house.

"Wally? Wally, snap out of it, buddy," Sam said, snapping fingers in front of Wally's face. "C'mon, fuzzy, stay with me."

Wally's eyes focused and he drew an elbow up under himself. "Who...you calling Fuzzy, Bugs?" he grunted, his jaw grinding audibly as he spoke.

Sam smiled and helped the werewolf to his knees, as far as he seemed able to go. "You had me worried there for a minute. Hold still, pal, it looks like you've got a severe case of blood loss..." The growing pool of red liquid on the floor certainly attested to that. "Don't tell me you walked all the way here."

"Had to. Jack...had to get Jack home..." Wally swayed, and Sam supported him, grunting at the weight of so much fur and muscle.

"Yeah, about that. What happened to him, anyway?" Sam stared at the wizard, who appeared comatose-eyes shut, drool coming from his mouth.

"Man in a leather coat...guy had knives...did something to Jack," Wally grunted. Sam felt his blood starting to grow cold. "Looked into his eyes...then he was just...gone."

Crystal scampered to her boyfriend's side, tears streaming freely down her face. "Oh god, oh god, oh god..."

"Hey, Crystal, calm down. He's fine," Sam said. Although I can't say the same for poor Jack, he thought, lifting the wizard's eyelid to see only glistening white eyeball.

"He's not fine!" Crystal practically screamed. "He's missing two of his fingers!"

"And she could have taken his head off if she wanted to!" Sam snapped back. "Now bandage the stumps; I'll get Jack."

"How did you...know it was Sandra?" Wally said.

"If the knife guy had done it, they would've grown back by now," Sam answered, tearing the strips of plaid and hauling Jack off of Wally. "Also, my sense of cliche is tingling."

"Wha?" Wally asked.

"Don't bother your head with it right now. We need to get this guy up and about," he said, laying Jack on the couch, "or we're going to be sitting ducks, when the authors decide there's been too much dialogue and start to really shake things up."

MIKE'S APARTMENT

"Yeah, he looks about twenty or so. Dirty blonde hair, blue eyes, maybe five foot eight." Mike glanced at his guest, who sat huddled in the corner, the cup of coffee Mike had made for him steaming nearby. "He hasn't said much that makes sense, but he's not acting violent or dangerous. I'm sorry to bother you, Dad, but the hospital line was busy, and I figured..."

"Don't worry about it, son," Officer Local assured him from the other end of the line. "We'll be right over to pick him up. Just make sure he doesn't go anywhere-sounds like we might get something out of this one."

'This one'? Mike thought. "Dad, is this the first time this has happened?"

"I can't say, Mike," his dad answered gruffly. "Just keep an eye on him, make sure he doesn't go anywhere. And listen to anything he has to say, even if it doesn't make sense."

"What?" His dad wasn't in the habit of listening to lunatics. "Dad, what aren't you telling me? Is this guy important to the force somehow? Have you found more people like this?"

"We'll be there in fifteen," his father said, and hung up.

Mike glared at the receiver for a bit before setting it down. He turned to the living room of his apartment-a sparse affair with a beanbag and plenty of chairs for his friends who never seemed to come by any more. He remembered when they had weekly parties on Saturday nights-but no one was going out on the town these days, not even in groups.

Pondering the strange behavior of his choleric parent, Mike surveyed the newest addition to his residence. The acne-spotted fellow wore the remains of a yellow 'Watchmen' T-shirt, which Mike had torn open, and shredded khaki shorts. He was shivering violently despite the blanket Mike had placed over his shoulders, and hadn't touched his coffee.

Mike had made no mention of the rat over the phone

Advancing towards his guest, Mike sat down in front of him on the floor. "Is, uh, is the coffee okay?"

"Three," the man said simply.

Mike stared blankly at him, then looked back at the coffee. "What, three shots of espresso?"

"Three," the man reiterated. He began jabbing his forehead with his index finger, over and over, like there was a button there that would reset his damaged mind. His blank stare bored into Mike with eerie certainty.

The inhaler Mike had retrieved for him was clutched loosely in one hand; the guy kept squeezing it, over and over, like a rubber grip exerciser or a security blanket. Mike was worried he might damage it.

"Three," murmured Mike's newest acquaintance. "She had three."

Instead of speaking Mike hesitated. Something was nagging at the inside of his brain, but it seemed restrained, somehow. Unable to get out.

"Colors, over and over," whispered the man, lowering his hand and staring at the floor. "Just two, but such colors. Over and over and over and over..."

"Is there...uh...do you want anything?" Mike wasn't sure what the guy was going on about but he was pretty sure it was pure, unadulterated crazy talk. Yet still his brain nagged at him like a worrisome animal. What was it that made the man's mindless repetitions so familiar?

The man looked up at him. "She showed me everything," he whispered suddenly, and tears streaked down his face. "My past. My future. Everything I've ever wanted and never had, and all the things...the things I've failed at." He gulped, his Adams apple bobbing. "All the things I will fail at." His lips drew back to reveal clenched teeth. "She is the oracle, the reader of signs, she of creeping winds and quiet voices, the dweller in the dark..."

Here we go with that again, Mike thought, rolling his eyes. The guy was creepy, sure, but he was like a bit-part character out of a movie badly adapted from H.P. Lovecraft. All vagaries, no particulars. Talking in riddles. Going on and on about...

Then Mike felt a chill pass down his spine. She of creeping winds.

Hadn't he heard those same winds that now slithered outside speaking his name? He thought he'd been hallucinating, but stranger things had happened...

Officer Local had hinted there might be more of these people, just as crazy as Mike's unusual new friend. All that craziness had to come from somewhere. Mike had felt it himself. The town was filled with that quiet whisper, that shadow that was always there out of the corner of your eye...Had other people seen it too? Was this what happened when you couldn't handle it any more?

"Claws like candy-canes," the man giggled suddenly. "Eyes of amethyst, touch of blades..."

Mike, still pondering the man's words, noticed something odd. The coffee cup he'd set nearby was empty. But neither of them had touched it.

He felt a sudden release, like a hand leaving his shoulder. And even before the man spoke, Mike understood. He knew why the man had been touching his forehead. The snatching mentions of black and white.

You never wondered where she'd been all this time...

"THREE!" the man screamed at him, bloodshot eyes wide and glaring. "SHE HAD THREE EYES!"

Miscellaneous Police Station

Officer Local's hand rested on the phone for quite some time before he returned it to his pen. Touching the tip against his small spiral-bound notebook, he scribbled out several notes before stuffing it in his front pocket.

The middle-aged policeman's eyebrows slid together in a thick furry line. Mike had always been too damn inquisitive for his own good. This time it could get him seriously hurt. Local hadn't been on all the cases, but he had heard the rumors-isolated cases of dementia, stories of people fallen from rooftops in what could only be construed as suicide attempts.

Every time the accounts didn't quite add up. There was always something wrong, something slightly out of place. And though the department was content to file away the reports and keep things running smoothly, there were more reports every month.

Some of them made Local's hair stand on end just reading them. A man who had broken all the mirrors in his house, then attacked people with the glass shards when they tried to enter his home. A woman on Generic Street had torn up her flower garden, claiming it was tainted by the devil, and pulled all the shingles off her roof to pile under her bed.

And the thing was, none of these people were willing to give a good reason for what they did. Not a single witness had offered even a half-assed explanation. No one was talking-although they all seemed to know something.

It was enough to make one wonder...

Local's eyes strayed to a drawer in the bottom of his desk. But almost immediately he snapped them back to the empty precinct assessment sheets in front of him. Jeremy Local didn't believe in last resorts-the first and most practical way to get a job done was with straightforward vigilance, and no dodging around responsibility. What was waiting on the bottom of the drawer was definitely a last resort.

Leaning back in his chair, Local cast a surly eye on the painfully fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. His eyes had begun to itch already from lack of sleep. He curled his fingers around the cup of coffee to his right, and took a sip. Ah, good. If only coffee could solve everything, he thought.

"Joe. Get over here."

Joe Average, bearing a five-o-clock shadow that had come eight hours early, looked up from his paperwork. Above his pencil-thin neck and thick mustache, Joe's eyes had the same hooded look that everyone's were starting to get when the sun went down. However, he was still full of the eccentric energy that characterized his presence in the precinct.

"What's shakin', boss?" He didn't get up.

Local rolled his eyes. Average's repeated attempts to sound younger did not amuse him at the best of times. "We got us a crazy guy down on General Street, apartment 414. Concerned citizen picked him up off the sidewalk. You mind takin' care of it?"

Joe looked down at the paperwork covering his desk. "Gee, I dunno, Jeremy...I got all this crap to do. Folks up at the filing department are asking about last month's reports..."

"What about 'em?" Local growled. He hated those thick-spectacled goons and wished to see them flee the building in flames, but his personal opinion did not affect their exceptional job performance or tendency to nitpick till perfection.

"They said..." Average flipped through several typed notes. "Said the reports was 'weird,' sir. They cited the descriptions as...what was it? 'Unsettlingly vague.'"

Local's teeth ground together. "Is that so?"

"Yeah," sighed Average, scratching his mustache. "Boss, I dunno...I know that it's hip to be all gung-ho while we're on duty, but I gotta say...this stuff bothers me."

You and me both, Local thought.

"I've been wondering," Average said, chewing on the end of his pencil, "if..."

"What?" grunted Local, glancing around. No one else was in the office tonight, and Jean was out on patrol, but somehow he couldn't shake the sensation of being eavesdropped in here these days.

"Just thinking," Joe continued, "that they're kinda right. It is awful weird. Guy dropped on a car from thirty feet up. Fella with the mirror bits about a month or so back...and now that business down at the cafe..."

"Say your bit or shut your trap," said Local, although he thought he knew what was coming.

"I was just wondering, it might be a good idea to...you know, give 'em a ring," Average said, catching Jeremy's smoldering stare and fidgeting nervously. "They're good at dealing with this stuff, the folks over at the-"

"We're not calling 'em," Local snapped at him. Joe jumped, his oversized mustache quivering.

"I just thought it might be a good idea, is all. I mean, it's not every day a perp vanishes right out from under our-"

"We are not calling 'em," Local snarled, "and that's final. Drink your coffee, Average."

Joe deflated slightly and reluctantly slurped his caffeine brew.

After staring unhappily at his own paperwork for a while, Local grabbed a mike and paged Tanya, asking her to go pick up the new recruit for the funny farm. He thought he saw Joe watching him from the corner of his eye, and rightly so. There would be no calls for help from this precinct tonight.

As far as Jeremy Local was concerned, the Miscellaneous Police Department could handle this just fine on their own.

THE CABIN IN THE WOODS

"Kill you?" Sandra said, cocking her head. "Why would I do that?"

"Well, it's only polite," Nny said, spreading his arms in a gesture of effrontery. "It's what I do when I have guests over."

"You...kill them?"

"Yeah," said Nny matter-of-factly. "Isn't that what you're supposed to do?"

"Not that I'm aware of..."

Nny peered at her. "Don't you kill people?"

Sandra's tongue flicked over her lips. "I...no. I don't." Her claws flexed. "But I may consider it if you don't shut up."

He stretched his neck out, searching out her deadly talons and sharp teeth with his eyes. "But you're a big scary monster. And you're telling me you've never killed anyone?"

"I do things to people that make them beg for death," Sandra murmured. "Don't talk to me about killing."

"Ooh, torture!" Nny rubbed his hands together excitedly. "That's almost as good. Do you do repeated sessions, or just one long one? I prefer repeated, it really gets the message across while giving them plenty of time to think."

"What...message?"

"Why, the truth," Nny said, spreading his palms. "That they don't deserve to live. That they're worthless maggots crawling on the face of the earth. That everything they consider important is really just the buzzing of corpse-eating insects."

Sandra paused. The rage in her purple irises ebbed slightly, and she said, "Go on."

IN THE SAME ROOM

"All I'm asking is for you to plant the idea in his head. The rest will happen on its own."

Reverend Meat frowned up at the motionless, ebony figure towering over him. "Hmm. What's in it for me?"

The silhouetted phantom laced its black fingers together, the fixed electric-white smile spreading still wider. "It's very simple. You're his subconscious, his id, his primitive instincts and needs. There is no deeper connection between a figment and a mind than the one you have with his."

Meat took a bite from his plastic burger, his pale eyes narrowing. "How do you know all this?"

Mr. Chalk leaned back slightly. "I've been in the business a long time. And you, my little friend, are at the moment eminently useful to me." The laced fingers rose into a steeple of dark digits. "The dear young lady you see before you still requires a certain amount of cajoling before she can attain her full potential. After that point, well...we'll see."

Meat swallowed and belched. "So you want me to give him this idea, assuming he'll listen to me. Sounds like a lot of work. Why can't you do it yourself?"

The featureless face stiffened, and a hissing sigh emerged from the thin line of the being's mouth. "Because he never sleeps. It's very hard for me to induce such a notion into his mind when he never allows his subconscious to relax."

"What about the wallbeast?" Meat glanced at Nny, who was currently gesticulating madly before Sandra, oblivious to the conversation going on a mere ten feet away. "That fucker's been horning in on my action. Sending him urges that I never okayed, messing with his head. How can I get rid of that so I have easy access to his mind?"

"Oh, come now. The solution should be obvious to you at this point." Chalk's eyesless expression bore down on the Bub's Burger statue. "Join with it. It's not quite as destructive as its original incarnation. You two could work well together, if you just overcame your differences."

"Hmmm." Nny's inner urge center wiped some burger juice off of its lips and stared Chalk in the face. "Okay, buddy, I've heard your pitch. What's in it for me?"

Chalk's arms slid behind his back as he leaned low towards the little creature. "Think about it. It's not his logic, his mind, that's impeding you. That can be overruled. It's his personality itself, everything that makes him so damnably difficult to manipulate." A small spark of white-hot energy spat from the zigzag grin as Chalk intoned, "Once that's out of the way, what's stopping you from doing whatever you want?"

A DIFFERENT LEVEL OF AWARENESS

Nny giggled, twining his arms around each other. "And then when they're screaming, screaming like they never have before-get all maudlin and loosen the restraints, sighing about how you could never really do it. Then pull the switch and let the guillotine take off the top of their head!!"

Seeming both disgusted and enthralled, Sandra's three eyes bored into the jittery prisoner she had taken. "Sounds like fun," she said quietly. "But I really don't feel like cleaning up a dead body. Besides, the police might start noticing."

Nny snorted. "The police. You're a super cool demon type of thing, right? Just make them not notice."

Sandra's claw slid up the side of her cheek. "I...never thought about it that way before."

"For some reason, it was never a problem for me," whispered Nny, staring down at his hands as if forgetting about her presence. "At least until recently. But it's still there, isn't it? Keeping me alive. Keeping me wanting it..."

"What is?" Sandra asked.

"Nothing," Nny said. "It's not important." His neck twitched, and his hands spasmed for a moment. "So really, what's your problem with killing people? It's not like it's unusual. People die all the time."

Immediately on her guard, Sandra slid out her wings to cover her in more shadow. "It's my choice. It's not your place to question how I do things in my town."

"You know what I think," Nny said with a fiendish certainty, "I think you're scared to. How long have you been this way, anyway? You certainly don't act like you've-hgggk!"

The demoness tightened her tail around his neck, the shadows in the room deepening even as the room seemed to become tinier and more cramped. "You're an idiot. I have always been this way. I always will be. There is nothing else." She tossed him idly on the floor like a discarded toy. "Your talk of killing bores me. Be gone."

Not so easily discouraged, Nny hopped to his feet. "I can help you kill people. It's not that hard. Just like riding a bicycle."

"Not interested," Sandra growled. She touched the bare wooden wall, and a door appeared, growing out of the boards. "Now get out before I feed you to the house."

"You're just like the rest of them," Nny muttered, his face growing sour. "Stuck in your little habits, like every other self-indulgent speck."

Immediately she was behind him, as if the direction she had been walking was no obstacle to where she wanted to be. Her claws raked over his bony cheeks and she hissed, "I am not like them!"

"Don't you want to see what's on the other side?" Nny hissed, twisting around. Bloody slices leaked in his face, oozing blood in small trickles. If he'd paused to consider it, he might have wondered where the words were coming from-but something inside him pressed him on. "You could cross your only barrier. You could reach a new understanding."

Sandra towered over him, the cold around her palpable. "Don't pretend like you know my limits! I am the queen of this town-I have no limits!"

"Except killing," Nny sneered. "Give me a break. You're no monster. You might as well be wearing makeup."

The tail cracked with incredible speed, lashing across his face and snapping his head to the side. A red welt was left behind in its wake.

"You piece of shit!" Sandra shrieked. On the tips of her hooves she stood a good two feet over his hunched form. "You think you can insult me? I'll eat your skin, you pathetic human!"

"Don't call me that!" Nny snapped back furiously. "Do you know how hard I've worked to separate myself from them? The things I've stooped to? I've reached levels of satisfaction that you can only dream of! You cling to this last piece of humanity like it's a fucking life raft and you expect to find the truth?" He shook his head. "You'll find nothing without death. It's the only answer-the answer to all their ugly iniquities, all the failures that they assault you with every day. You seem to know them so well; how can you not want to kill every last one of them?"

Sandra hesitated, still seething, her sharp teeth filling her mouth with razor edges. As Nny's bulging eyes stared her down, her teeth retracted slowly into her gums, going from needles to fangs again, and she leaned back on her tail.

"Suppose I do listen to you. Suppose I kill people. What happens then? What will I become?"

Nny spoke, not hearing the words. "You'll rise above every restraint you've ever had. You'll be free to walk the world like a god. No more hiding in shadows, no more skulking. You can get anything you want. All it takes is one little murder."

The stripes of the demon-girl's face slanted downward as she scowled. "And you? How do you fit into this?"

"Blood is my paint," Nny said simply, his eyes vacuous. "I kill like the damned. I can help you kill, if you want. But there's something I need you to do."

Sandra shuddered, as the aura of cold around her met a halo of strong, foul energy around Nny. "What do you want?"

"Simple," Nny said, and the words sounded as natural to him as could be. "I want you to take my soul."

THE POINTED HOUSE

"What's wrong with him?" Crystal whispered. "Sam, he won't wake up."

"I know," the rabbit said tersely. He stared at the drawn shades on the windows. "Hurry up and figure it out, though. Somewhere, someone is being railroaded into a plotline, and I don't like it."

"I...I don't know what to do," Crystal said plaintively, staring down at her comatose brother. "I've tried smelling salts, elevated his feet, everything...I even waved a porn magazine in front of his face. Nothing happened." She gulped. "I don't want to electrocute him, but I might have to. It's not like my defibrillators have been getting any use."

Sam blinked at her, turning away from Jack's limp, twitching form. "You have defibrillators? Why the hell do you have defibrillators?"

"I used to want to be a doctor," Crystal muttered.

"I know, but seriously...defibrillators? Those metal paddle things? Where do you even get those?"

Crystal gave him a look. "I was very serious about my hobby, okay?"

Wally coughed from where he lay, still bleeding sluggishly, on the futon. Half-transformed back to human form, his concentration had been interrupted by blood loss, and now he lay in a state of half-consciousness, his body a frail mix of human and wolf.

"Crys...book," he hissed.

"Wally! You're talking!" Crystal hurried over to him, kneeling and stroking his chest. "Oh, your bandages are soaked through-let me get you some more..."

"Book, Cryst'l," Wally groaned more urgently. "Use...book. Jack's book."

Crystal jumped. "Of course! Tomie! Why didn't I think of that already?"

Sam, about to make a halfhearted wisecrack involving Lassie and Citizen Kane, was bowled over as Crystal rushed to Jack's side, searching his limp plaid robe frantically.

"Where is it, where is it..." Her groping fingers fixed on something solid at last. "Aha! Here you are!"

She yanked out the ancient Sumerian tome that had been responsible for Sandra's transformation years ago. "There's got to be a spell in here somewhere...What?" She blinked, frowning at Sam. 'Did you say something?"

"No," said Sam, shrugging. He glanced at the shades again as Crystal turned back to the book.

"Wait, there it is again...You're what?" Crystal's expression went from surprised, to worried, to relieved. "Wait, you're the book?"

Sam stared in disbelief as Crystal appeared to have a conversation with nobody.

"Uh...okay...what do you want me to do?" She appeared to listen attentively, and her eyes grew wide and confused. "Um, how exactly do I do that?"

Sam felt like he should interject. But a true actor knows never to step on another's lines. He kept silent as she continued her interaction with the air above the open book.

"What? What do you mean?" Another long pause, then Crystal nodded, looking fearful. "Alright! Okay! I'm going!" Carefully closing the book, she pressed it to her chest and charged into the kitchen. Sam finally decided he'd waited long enough and sprinted after her.

"What was that all about?"

"It's Tomie, the book," Crystal explained hurriedly as she rummaged in the cupboard, pulling out a small cardboard package of cooking salt. "He wants me to perform a ritual. He says it needs to get done now or Jack won't have any soul left."

Sam felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. "What do you mean, no soul?"

"Quiet, he's talking again." Crystal frowned, like someone concentrating on a hard question. Then she blinked and began to look nervous. "Come on, follow me!" she said to Sam.

Rolling his eyes, Sam hurried after her as she darted up the stairs. "What's the book saying now?"

"He says a demonic parasite has got ahold of Jack," Crystal explained, flinging open the door to her room. "Kind of like that time with the goblin bullet thing. But worse."

"Oh, great, plot recycling," grumbled Sam as he followed her in. "Well, what can we do to stop it?"

Crystal took a deep breath. "Look under my bed. There should be a photo album. Get it, bring it downstairs." She grabbed a flowery handbag from beside her rumpled pink quilt and began carefully piling her framed photographs into the bag.

"I don't generally make a habit of questioning deux ex machina," Sam growled as he pulled out the book of pictures, "but how is this supposed to help Jack?"

"His soul's under attack," Crystal said, and for the first time Sam heard a small hiccup of grief in the back of her throat. "Whatever's inside him is eating it. I need to draw the monster out."

"Wait, you're..." Comprehension dawned. Sam stared as Crystal picked up the last picture. It was a photo of her and Sandra in the backyard last winter, Sandra smiling with a tiny trace of bitterness beside the joyful Crystal in purple jacket and pink mittens. Sandra wore nothing but her stripes and her usual jeans and T-shirt. Sam thought she looked amazingly different in the picture-if not happier, at least somehow more whole. Into the bag it went.

"You're going to lure it out," he said quietly. "With this stuff."

"Not just with this stuff," Crystal said, clutching Tomie in one hand and the bag in the other. "I'm going to use myself, as well." She took an unsteady breath. "Tomie says I'm the bait."

BROADSHOULDERS' CABIN

"What?"

"Yeah, wait a minute. What did you say?" Nny said, glancing at Reverend Meat.

Meat shrugged. "I thought you'd like the idea. Get you a little freedom, right? A little room to move without all these emotions."

"But you want me to feel," Nny said suspiciously, leaning over the creature. Meat indiscreetly dug a booger out of his nose and ate it. "You want me to engage all that nasty wetware inside me. Eat, breathe, sleep, fuck. Why would you suggest that?"

"Who are you talking to?" Sandra said, her morbid curiosity replaced by irritation and a deadpan acceptance of the bizarre.

"Just one of my inner voices," Nny said to her. "Pay him no mind." He turned to Meat, who was trying on a poofy cartoon chef's hat. "Why would you want me to do that? I thought you wanted me as a sensory puppet."

"I do," Meat said irreverently, grinning. "But your soul is a big part of your personality. One I could do without. And so could you. Whaddya say? You've been looking for this chance. Why not take it?"

"You made me say all those stupid things, and now you expect me to believe you're helping me?" Nny hissed, brandishing a Swiss Army knife at the bloated cartoon tormentor. "What kind of stunt are you pulling here?"

"No stunt," Meat said, shrugging. "Just helping you get your chains off."

"Getting my rocks off, is more like it," Nny choked at him. "You've been a moose on my back for all these years, and now you just hand me my salvation on a platter? Yeah, right."

"Oh, use that pile of meaty gray software you call a brain and figure it out," Meat said, frowning. Barbeque sauce oozed from the corners of his lips. "This is what you've been waiting for. I'm simply helping you along."

"How?" Nny leered at him. "I've got your number. I lose my soul, you take me over. You get to do whatever the fuck you want, don't you? Don't think I'm stupid! My momma didn't raise no hamster!"

Meat sighed, a gurgling noise not unlike flatulence. "I don't get to take over shit. But if you lose that slimy soul of yours, it evens the playing field-because you keep your mind. Then it's logic versus appetite." He grinned. "Should be interesting. I know you like games. Take a chance, Nny-play this one."

"Excuse me," Sandra said dryly, "but if you keep leaving me hanging, I'll tear your thumbs off. What was that about taking your soul?"

Nny stared at his hallucination suspiciously. Meat edged closer. "Come on. When have emotions ever done anything for you? How many times have you told me you want them destroyed utterly? This is your big shot, Johhny. And mine, too. Don't fuck it up."

Sandra coughed. Nny looked up at her. "Yes?"

"Ah, good. I don't have to bite your ears off." She sidled towards him. "I believe you were saying something about a trade? Teaching me to kill, in exchange for taking your soul?." Not that I need to be taught anything, she thought in what passed for her mind. I am a demon, after all.

Nny thought for a moment. "Yeah, forget that, that's stupid. You can probably kill on your own without much trouble. But the soul thing might be a good idea-as much as I hate the burger boy, he has a point." Nny jerked his thumb into nowhere, and Sandra gazed bewilderedly at the empty space on the floor. "I could do a lot more without my soul. Come to think of it, that's the best idea I've ever had."

"Why would you want to get rid of your soul?" Sandra inquired cautiously. "Last I checked, most people were pretty attached to those things."

Nny shook his head. "Not me. I hate my soul." He licked his dry lips. "Emotions are filthy. I despise them. And my soul produces them like a polluted cardiac valve, pumping shit through my veins, filling my every experience with them. I want it gone. I want it out of me. Can you do that?"

Sandra seemed to consider this. "I guess so. There's very little I can't do, at this point."

"Then we have a deal," Nny said, his mouth widening into a smile as if pulled by fishhooks.

"No, we don't," Sandra said quickly. "What do I get out of this?"

"I'll do whatever you want," Nny said, cackling. "Whatever you want. Murder, arson, anything you can't handle, I'll do it."

Sandra inclined her head, her horns pointed towards Nny like small striped rapiers. Her face was quiet in contemplation, but behind the facade lurked a seething wall of madness. Enraged that he should insult her capabilities, the demonic part of her longed to rip Nny into small pieces, or burn him until he was nothing but a husk.

Yet there was still a human left in Sandra, and that human knew there were limits to what she could do. As much as she longed for it, she wasn't ready for killing. Not yet.

Besides, there was so much else to do.

"Alright," she said, offering her clawed hand to him. "We have a deal."

Repulsed by the idea of physical contact, he grimaced, but gingerly reached out a crooked hand and gripped her claws firmly. They shook, and it was done.

Mike was waiting on the curb when Tanya rolled up in front of his apartment. She thought he looked like a character in an old noir film, standing under the dim streetlight in the slight haze of the post-midnight fog. His hands in his pockets, he patiently waited as she parked by the curb and rolled down the window.

"Evening, Mike."

"Evening, Tanya." Mike had been around the station enough to know the folks who ran it. Tanya was actually a Sundry County state trooper who acted as a liaison between the boys in blue and the boys in gray. He'd always liked her, and they'd grown a simple sort of friendship over the years in their brief encounters. Privately, Mike still harbored sort of a subconscious crush on Tanya and her almond skin and hazel eyes. But that had been before Sandra. Before the shadow fell over his town.

Tanya, for her part, had always liked Mike. She knew him well enough by now, though, to know the look in his eye that appeared when he was on to something. It was sort of a spark, a tiny mote of brightness and interest that he could never quite hide. She'd mentioned it to Officer Local once, and he'd claimed never to have seen such a thing. It was understandable, really; on average Mike saw Tanya more than he saw his own father.

That little spark was in his eyes right now. This was why Tanya didn't greet him with her customary smile. Whenever he got that look, he usually started nosing into something or other, and when he did that, he frequently found himself on the other side of a wall of yellow tape.

Tanya didn't like putting that wall up. Sometimes it had to be done. She reflected that she hadn't seen Mike around the station in months, though; maybe whatever he was on about had nothing to do with police business.

Yeah, and maybe zebras can fly, she thought to herself. "How you doing, Junior?"

"Not so bad," he said, giving her an old familiar smirk. "Found myself a crazy guy a little while ago."

"Did you now?" She couldn't help but smile a little bit herself. "And where is he? Didn't let him loose, did you?"

"No," Mike said, and jerked his thumb at his apartment door. "He's in there. He won't come out."

Tanya lost the smile pretty quickly. "How come?"

Mike's grin faded too. "He seems to be afraid of the outside for some reason. Won't come out the door."

Tanya frowned, and fumbled for her radio. "Be OOC for a moment, Chief," she said as she pressed the button on the side. "Chicken won't leave the coop."

She opened the door and got out. "Do you guys always talk like that?" Mike asked. "I thought you had all sorts of fancy codes and stuff."

Tanya rolled her eyes at him. Mike had memorized all the police band numerical codes before he was fourteen. "Tonight's a bit of an off night. It's hard to arrest people who don't commit crimes."

Mike grunted as Tanya advanced to the door. "Huh. Just how many of these 'off nights' have you had, Tanya?"

She gave him a sideways glance, and was surprised at the seriousness of his expression. Usually he had a sort of cocky air about him whenever he was after a certain bit of information. Right now he looked like...well, he looked pretty grim, Tanya thought.

"How many do you think?" she asked him as she unclipped her nightstick and let it hang loosely from her belt, ready for action.

"Well, considering I haven't seen anyone on the street for at least...," he said,

counting off nights on his fingers, "two weeks, I'd have to say you've had at least half a month of 'quiet nights.' Well, you know," he added, "except for the weird stuff."

Tanya paused as she reached for the doorhandle. "What weird stuff?"

"Well, there was the graveyard thing about three months ago," Mike said, "and there were plenty of things happening before that, but none of it seemed...real, if you get me."

"I get you," Tanya said, and dropped her hand back to her side. "Mike, be straight with me. How much do you know?"

He gave her a long look, as if judging whether everything he said was going to go straight to his father's ears. Then he seemed to decide that didn't matter. "There was Jen Stone. She disappeared...everybody said she left, but you could tell nobody really believed that." He flicked out his fingers again, counting. "Then there was the graveyard thing. Then the screams at night. Nobody really seemed interested in those, and I know you guys couldn't nail anyone because there were no official arrest reports." His eyes turned skyward, as if thinking. "I stopped by a while back and asked Joe if anyone odd had been sighted around town-he gave me a lot of bogus about a giant rabbit, but he also gave me a lot of reports of what he called 'spontaneous defenestration'-people getting dropped for no reason, in other words. Then there was the big night." He took a breath.

"Howling down on Main Street, the sound of breaking glass, shouts, and I'm pretty sure there might have been an explosion or two involved." He gave her a hard look. "And nobody went out to go see what was going on. Nobody, not even the police. In the morning I saw Dad and a bunch of other guys clearing up about ten jillion big iron bars-they looked like fenceposts all curved out of whack, like this." He made a wonky shape with his fingers. "Later it turned out that they came from the town graveyard-the same one that got burned that night a while ago. Paper said the fenceposts were stolen, but no one mentioned how the thieves managed to rip a bunch of iron bars out of solid concrete, or bend them all into weird curves like that. So it was clear the event was just as mysterious and unexplained as the graveyard incident.

"And that's about all I know," he said, pausing, and then nodding.

Tanya had listened to all of it with steadily increasing fascination. Finally she whistled softly.

"Damn, Mike. You really got your shit together, huh?"

He smiled weakly. "You could say that. I've been really...distracted recently, but I notice a lot. And I like to know what's going on."

She blinked. "Man, if this is you distracted, I'd like to see what it's like when you focus. Why the hell aren't you a police officer?"

His expression darkened slightly. "Meh. I've got my reasons."

She squinted at him. "Whatever you say." She looked at the door. "We gonna get this guy back home, or what?"

The Pointed House

"Is everything ready?"

Crystal looked up. "Yes. Light them."

Sam looked down at the pile of photo albums and little notes, spread out on a fireproof blanket. It occurred to Sam that Crystal had had a fireproof blanket in the house probably years before he came along; yet he'd never once seen them try to put Jack out with it when Sandra lit him on fire.

He smiled a little as he struck a match, holding it carefully with his white-gloved thumb and index finger. There was good irony there-and also a sort of bleak cruelty. Sam reasoned that things had simply been different back then, and that's why it had never occurred to them. Sandra, Jack, Wally; all of them had treated the strangeness in their lives as a sort of joke. Sam, who hadn't laughed at slapstick since his acting days, had never found it very funny. Admittedly, being in a supernatural sitcom was different, and occasionally exciting. But he'd known that underneath that ribald hilarity there was something churning, unpleasant and dour.

Maybe that was why, when Sandra finally went off the deep end, he'd been the only one who wasn't even remotely surprised. Frightened, maybe; disturbed, but never surprised. He'd seen actors and actresses break down after mere weeks on the job, lashing out as their true selves rejected the cartoon shows which they'd been forced to perform by Tool.

Sandra had done superbly, impersonating a normal, functional human for nearly two years. But in the end, jokes weren't enough to keep her going.

Jokes didn't help when insanity knocked on your door.

He realized the match had nearly burnt out already, and with some reluctance, he dropped it. The reek of lighter fluid suddenly turned to a crispy charcoal scent as Crystal's most prized possessions went up in flame. The runes around Crystal, seared into the carpet by one of Sam's cigarettes, blazed suddenly as the girl sitting in the middle of them all stiffened.

Sam moved away quickly, and surveyed the situation. There would be time enough

for nostalgia later.

Things were getting hot.

Crystal knelt in the center of the runic circle, staring at the sizzling pages of her diaries and the curling corners of her photographs. Across the room from her, laying on the couch, was Jack, twitching and muttering strange snatches of words-mostly swears, as far as Sam could tell. Wally crouched in the corner, bandages wrapped around his hand, still injured but ready to leap in at a moment's notice if anything went wrong. He was mostly human by now, but his eyes lacked pupils and he'd retained his claws and some fur. Sam's sensitive ears could hear him whining from across the room, as Crystal's lip trembled.

Jack's sister's memoirs went up in smoke, and as the young woman shed a single tear, Sam thought he saw something moving underneath Jack's shredded shirt. It was as if a small animal had somehow gotten in there.

But it didn't move like an animal. It roiled and bulged like a...well, Sam didn't know exactly what it moved like, but he didn't really want to see what it looked like. Not at all.

MIKE'S APARTMENT (FLOOR HALLWAY)

"But I can't," whispered the man in the borrowed clothes. "She'll eat me."

"No, she won't," Mike said. "Her name is Officer Tanya. She's going to help you."

"Not her," his temporary acquaintance said irritably. "You know who I mean."

"What's he talking about?" Tanya asked.

"No idea," Mike lied.

"Is he safe?" Tanya asked. "Is he going to flip or anything? Has he exhibited violent behavior?"

"Not really. His name is James," Mike informed her. "From what he told me and what's left of his personal identification, I think he's from Connecticut."

"Jesus," Tanya muttered, as she watched James rock back and forth on the bench in the claustrophobic hallway. "A long way from home, huh? How'd he get here?"

"No idea," Mike confessed. "But I found a shoulder strap shoved down the front of his pants, so I'm guessing he may have hitchhiked." He didn't mention what else he'd found when he forced James to change his filth-smeared clothes: a tiny plush keychain doll that

looked horribly familiar.

"All the way from Connecticut?" Tanya said skeptically. "What the hell for?"

Mike gave her a look. "What do you think?"

"To hunt the wild Jabberwock," the man interjected. The ragged bits of stubble on his face, a glowing five-o-clock shadow, stood out against his pale skin. "Zebrus horribilus, the East Coast she-thing of legend and lore!" He giggled. Mike felt sick. Knowing exactly what James was talking about was much, much worse than assuming he was raving mad.

Tanya, fortunately, had no such advantages. "Well, he's out of his mind alright," she said satisfactorily. "Let's see if we can get him in the car."

"And do what with him?" Mike asked. "You can't exactly drive him all the way back to Connecticut."

Tanya didn't answer, instead holding out her hand to the young delinquent. "C'mon...James, right? Come with me. I'll take you somewhere safe."

James eyed her distrustfully. "She's closed your third eye," he said unhappily. "Your third eye is closed."

"It sure is," Tanya said. "And that's A-okay with me. Can you stand up?"

She held one hand on her nightstick the entire time she spoke to him. That didn't feel right to Mike-James was only the victim here, not the criminal. He stepped around the state trooper and sat down on the bench next to James, the old wood creaking underneath.

"Hey. Jimbo. It's okay. She's not going to hurt you," Mike said, giving him a gentle pat on the shoulder. "It's gonna be alright. We're gonna help get you home to your family, okay?"

James bit his lip. "Not afraid of one she," he murmured, pointing at Tanya. "Not afraid of two she. Not even afraid of three she now. New guy in town."

"You've lost me," Mike said blankly.

"The darkwhite mistress is busy," James whispered. "Busy, busy, busy."

Oh, really? Mike thought. And what, exactly, is she busy with? He still couldn't believe that Sandra (a tiny part of his mind still maintained: his Sandra) could have done this to anyone. The last time he had seen her she had been confused, as always...

But wasn't she a little more certain of herself? his inner pessimist asked him. Wasn't she just a little more angry, a little more rough around the edges than usual? The

damsel in distress attitude was slipping, wasn't it? Except you didn't want to see that.

Because behind that, there was something very ugly.

Then he heard the words, as clearly as if she had spoken in his ear.

"You don't understand, Mike...I hurt things back."

He couldn't help himself: he looked. Of course there was no one there. And when he looked back, Tanya and James were both staring at him.

"Mike. Earth to Mike," Tanya said dully. "Stop zoning out and please tell me I'm only dealing with one crazy tonight."

"Oooh, she likes you," James tittered, punching Mike's shoulder in a manly- compliment kind of way. "She pays you special attention, and look, she doesn't even defile your mind and soul!"

"Uh...Right. James, can you go with the officer now?" he asked. James nodded, grinning.

"Good luck with She-of-the-Parallel-Lines!" he laughed, somehow cheerful, and patted Mike on the shoulder as he stood. Mike's sweatshirt flapped on him like a loose tent. "Just watch out for the man in black."

"What?" Mike said, blinking. "What did you say?"

He followed James as Tanya led the deluded tourist to the cruiser. "Haven't you heard? There's plenty worse things to be afraid of now." The demon's victim cackled: a high, carousing drunkard's laugh. "She made a new friend, Mike! She finally made a new friend!"

Tanya gently bundled him into the back of the cruiser and shut the door. She dusted off her hands as if to say "job well done" and turned to Mike.

"Well, that's over for you," she said, and cocked her head. "What's the matter? You look like hell."

"It's one in the morning, Tanya," he said drolly. "What do you expect?"

She laughed at that, and her eyes gleamed under the streetlight despite the pervading gloom. "Well, get some sleep now, champ. You've earned it. Thanks for taking care of this guy till I got here."

She turned towards the car, but Mike stopped her. Raising a hand, he said, "I know I have no right to go poking into my dad's business. He's told me that often enough. But I've been straight with you, and I really, really need you to let me in on something."

She appraised him uncertainly. "Mike, what are you talking about?"

"How many people like this have you picked up?" he asked, holding both hands up now. "I don't need an exact figure or anything. I just...really would like to know. In case, well, in case I should be on the lookout for more guys like him." He gestured at James, who was currently dragging his tongue across the window.

He saw Tanya's lawful nature reassert itself in her features, and cursed inwardly. When a cop got to looking like that, they were about to shoot your inquiries out of the sky like a 5-year old playing Duck Hunt.

But Tanya didn't shoot him down. Instead she said, "I'm not sure. I know your dad wants to keep it on the down-low...he wants to make like there's nothing wrong with the town. And officially-on paper-nothing is. But we've been getting more and more people acting strangely in their homes. Reports of domestic violence-incidents of extreme depression. Nothing concrete, and nothing we can work with." She nodded at Mike's discovery. "This guy is the first person we've heard of who's actually gone nuts somewhere we can reach without a warrant."

Mike practically felt his brain click. "My dad wants this guy so he can find out whether there's actually something going on. Like...a mental disease or something."

"Something like that," Tanya agreed. "I can't tell you anything else. It sounds like you've been keeping track of things pretty well. But I'd say keep an eye out for more folks like this one." She looked around, casting a glance at the mist-shrouded street from under her curling black bangs. "And if you even smell a hint of leather boots, you come running. Your dad's pissed about that missing perp."

Mike nodded. "I will. Thank you, Tanya. You've been a lot of help."

She gave him a funny expression. "Hey, don't forget who's the cop here, mister. Now get your civilian ass back inside before you get involved in anything else." She shooed him away and hopped into her cruiser. Flicking the lights on, but foregoing the siren, she rolled down the street, the cruiser bouncing on the uneven parts. Mike waved goodbye, his mind burning with questions and horrible answers.