CHAPTER 14

“The first thing you need to know, Simon,” says Ichabod, “is that stories are dangerous. Information is alive.”

Ichabod Knock talks with his mouth full.

Ichabod Knock talks with his mouth full, sitting stark naked, body covered in the weeping wounds of symbols and glyphs carved into flesh. He points a large chrome handgun at Simon, who is equally naked, save for his socks and boxers.

Ragged strips of red hang down Ichabod’s chin. The gore catches and clots in his great beard, strings of viscera trailing down to the raw pile of fur and meat and organs and paws on his dinner plate. Ichabod picks something glistening out of his beard and eats it.

Events taken out of context may have a tendency to sound bizarre.

Backtrack.

* * * * *

Tensions bit deep at the Obsidian Sanctuary that evening, and Nyx decided to lead the guided meditations. She led them through the controlled breathing. She led them inside, made them climb into a secret place, the treehouse of the mind. Everyone had their own tree. Some climbed up rope ladders, and others up wooden rungs nailed into the trunk, and still others up the lower branches, hand and foot.

“Is everyone there?” Nyx asks.

Eyes closed, gathered in the church basement, everyone nods. Simon nods, sitting in the back row, but also sitting with the roosting Corbies in the ghost tree, hastily building a fort. Nyx leads them to a door in the tree-fort, and through the door, and everyone has their own unique door. She leads them into a room, and everyone has their own unique room, bigger on the inside than on the out. Nyx’s room, tonight, is a grand library. In the room, she leads them to a skulking creature.

“Do you see it?” Nyx says. “It has a long, prehensile tongue, and it has hollow teeth, and the teeth lactate black poisons dribbling out of the mouth. Do you see it?”

Everyone nods, eyes closed.

“It’s a damaged fragment of your soul, all your little insecurities, doubts, fears, all personified in one nasty imp. It’s the thing that keeps you up at three in the morning with anxiety. Its claws are clicking and it’s crawling toward you. Do you see it?”

Everyone nods. Some squirm in their chairs.

“Don’t run from the imp. Hold your ground. Open your arms to it. Step forward. Coo to it. Tell this creature you accept it. Tell it everything will be all right. Hug the creature. Embrace it. The imp is in your arms now, weeping black venom. Do you see it?”

Everyone nods.

“Now kill it.”

Silence. Mouths open.

“I said kill it! Right now. Strangle it, bludgeon it, bite its ear off—just kill the bastard!”

Dozens of foreheads wrinkle.

Nyx continues. “I just gacked mine—put a gun to its temple and bam! That’s right: it was me, in the library, with the revolver. I can hear its brains plopping out of the huge exit wound. I want the same from you. Take your lead pipes, your candlesticks, and your knives. I want you to brutalize your inner demon.”

Everyone holds a breath.

“Find the voices that tell you you’re worthless, that say you’re gross, that tell you to despair, that beg you to destroy yourself in tiny bites. I want you to focus and turn each one of those voices into an anthropomorphic creature, and I want you to execute every last one of the motherfuckers!”

The closed eyes squint.

“I know in this age of Oprah-wisdoms, we’re instructed to tenderly reconcile with all aspects of our being. That’s nice, as far as it goes, but sometimes, you just have to savagely murder the million little pieces of you that say you’re no good. Fuck ’em. So kill the imp. Put a plastic bag over its head and squeeze until it pops an eye. Throw it in a wood chipper. You take your doubts and you slaughter them. That’s called Mental Thuggee, my chickadees. It’s the vicious inner healing. You make your fears afraid of you.”

Silence. Everyone breathes heavily. Some have tears and trembling lips. But then, all at once, everyone is smiling and cheering, and some are laughing through the tears. Nyx blows the smoke from an imaginary gun.

“Over the next few weeks, I want to hear you all comparing heinous kills, outdoing each other with new and imaginative forms of impicide. I want grizzly details. Maybe we’ll award an imp-kill of the week. Zack, how did you just kill your imp?”

“Uh . . . I shoved a pencil through its eye.”

“All right. Samantha, how’d you end your imp?”

“I dropped an anvil on its head.”

“Sweet. Chaz?”

“I set the microwave on high and watched it burst.”

“Nice. Extra points for the Gremlins reference. Val?”

“I painted its face with honey and buried its head in a mound of South American fire ants. It’s still struggling.”

“Yes! Keep going. No one’s going anywhere until the inside of each and every one of your skulls is painted with imp guts. Semper Fi! Cobra Kai! Do or die! Huzzah!”

The basement fills with cheering, and Simon watches as unlikely hope spreads like a pathogen. He smiles as the Corbies dine on imp entrails.

* * * * *

“Icky Knock once performed an exorcism using Enochian phrases, while playing the double bass.”

“Icky Knock does shots of coral snake venom when he writes.”

“Medusa’s stare only gives Icky Knock an erection.”

After the night’s meditation, Simon had asked about Ichabod Knock. In response, several members of the Obsidian Sanctuary recited absurd jokes about the exploits of the one they called Icky. They formed a messy circle, starting a ritual Simon did not know.

“It’s just their stupid game,” Nyx says. “They call it Icky Facts. The challenge is to try to outdo the last ‘fact’ offered. The man does not deserve their worship.” Nyx did not participate.

“The devil waits at the crossroads, every thirteen years, because Icky Knock owes him five dollars,” says a Sanctuary member.

“Dogs go crazy and shoot people when Icky Knock whispers to them,” says another.

“A famous person once lost a bet with Icky Knock. Now, that person doesn’t exist, but no one remembers who it was.”

“Man’s a mad genius,” says a teenager in a T-shirt sporting a Gonzo journalism symbol. Simon recalls his name is Carl. “Years back, he was bass player in a string of short-lived underground bands: Vestigial Limb, Necro-Ophelia, Rambunctious Homunculus, Azathoth’s Taint, Banana Hammock—”

“Never heard of any of them,” Nyx mutters.

“You’re not a connoisseur,” Carl says. “Anyway, he decides to leave the music scene and write books about the paranormal. The man has been around the world, seen impossible things, parties with celebrities—we’re talking freaky orgies—and has imbibed every drug known to man and maybe some that aren’t. He’s like Hunter Thompson, Aleister Crowley, and Ozzy Osbourne all spliced together in a lab, with an extra gallon of pure elemental awesome thrown in.”

Even as they disagreed with Nyx, they tried to emulate her—those rhapsodic rants. Eh, Jane?

“You’re talking about a burnout who couldn’t cut it as a musician, who then fails upward, as a writer, into semi-celebrity, and is likely infested with every STD known to man and maybe some that aren’t,” Nyx says. “He’s like a bag of dicks in a blender with two cups of self-destruct and suck.”

“Actually,” says Carl, “Icky Knock has no STDs. They all killed each other in a massive Mexican Standoff gone horribly awry.”

Laughter. The game begins again.

“Icky Knock once caught HIV. The virus immediately fled his body, screaming. To this day, it gathers around campfires, with other STDs and tells horror stories of what it found in there.”

“Icky Knock once had sex with a six-foot Humboldt squid in the Sea of Cortez. It orgasmed seven times.”

“Icky Knock only exists because he opened a temporal portal, went back in time, and impregnated his own mother.”

Simon wanders over to a corner of the room where the Sanctuary has already constructed a shrine to Jane Doe: flowers, pictures, drawings, even a graven image in a bar of soap.

You were holy to them, Jane. The vision. The mystery. The golden-eyed Madonna.

Standing over the Jane shrine is a very short Frankenstein’s monster with a Hallmark card.

“Hello, Robin,” says Simon.

Robin waves. Nyx had explained earlier that the little girl had a whole collection of rubber Halloween masks and usually felt safer when wearing one. “October is the best time of the year for our Robin,” Nyx said. “She’s in season then.”

“I like your mask,” says Simon.

Robin looks up with a Boris Karloff stare and hands him the card. The words To my darling wife, on our 50^th anniversary are crossed out with red crayon and written over with the message Miss you.

“I think Jane would very much like this card.”

The monster face nods, and Robin places the card among the drawings, photos, and flowers. They stand together, the macabre Chaplin and the little monster. Neither minds the lull in conversation.

“It is a common misconception that the monster is called Frankenstein,” says Simon.

Robin nods.

“The scientist is Frankenstein. The creature had no name.”

Robin nods.

“Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.”

Jane stares back at them through the soap bar. Robin takes Simon’s hand. Meanwhile, an epic game of Icky Facts ensues.

“Icky Knock uses rattlesnakes as condoms.”

“That’s a Chuck Norris fact. You stole it from College Humor-dot-com.”

“They stole it from me!”

“You guys ever check out Icky Knock’s Twitter page?”

“Knock does not have a Twitter page.”

“It’s him. I swear. You can check it out at Twitter-dot-com-slash-Icky-Knock. You should see the things he posts.”

“Bullshit!”

“When Icky Knock has a sore throat, he sucks on adrenal glands.”

“Icky Knock understands the plot of each and every David Lynch movie.”

“When a pink elephant drinks too much, it hallucinates a parade of Icky Knocks.”

“Icky Knock once sent a series of drunk texts to Abdul Alhazred. And the rest, as they say, is history.”

“There is only one porn movie in existence that arouses Icky Knock enough to jerk off to. We call it The Exorcist.”

“You guys seriously need to get a new antihero to deify,” Nyx says, and then she stalks off, taking Robin with her.

“Now you’ve done it; you’ve made Nyx mad,” Jolly Roger says. “She and Icky don’t exactly have a copacetic past,” he explains to Simon. “He’s got a history. Goes through colleagues like Band-Aids. Sometimes he gets some tagalongs on his little spook outings, and then . . . bad things happen. He’s come around here a few times. A few of us followed, like Neil Barnes.”

Everyone goes quiet at the name. The game of Icky Facts ends.

“The Imp of the Perverse,” Byron croaks from Roger’s shoulder.

“Last time Ichabod Knock came by, Nyx broke his nose,” Jolly Roger says through gold and platinum teeth. “Polhaus could just barely hold her back.”

Simon slips out, thinking Icky thoughts.

* * * * *

The chalk outline greets Simon. Orange lines mark the sidewalk with a hopscotch court, complete with a head on top and hands drawn on the cross-section ends to form a crude body. Wild orange hair splayed about, Xs for eyes, and the hopscotch girl stares up at Simon like a kindergarten crime scene. Simon stands in the orange square of her chest, looking down at her face. The drizzling rain washes it sad. The branches of the ghost tree shiver at the ambient vibrations.

The lines trap the echoes, and you take on the dreams of those who skipped there. Eh, Jane?

The wind blows and a crinkled sticker saying, Be Nice To Me—I Gave Blood Today, bounces by like a clumsy foreshadowing. All those messages and letters in the wind. A chain creaks as a wooden sign swings, and Simon looks up. House of Oddities, says the sign on the closed-up building. The place looks decades dormant. No lights; most of the bulbs on the sign were shattered long ago. Next to the locked, chained door is a darkened ticket booth. With brick walls painted purple, it’s easy to spot.

The locks are not difficult, just a series of tumblers to trip, a sequence of inevitable clicks. A bored graveyard-shift police officer had taught Simon how to pick a lock; for a time, Simon came to the morgue, not with his coins and cards, but with bags of locks bought at the hardware store, to work his surgical hands on, until that became too easy. Simon kept his little tools on his key ring.

The chain slides to the ground and then the door’s lock clicks into place. Simon enters yet another door, chased by memories of the flashing police tape: Do Not Cross.

“Ignore the bossy tape,” croon the Corbies.

Simon enters. Before he can strike a light, a figure springs up in the pitch-thick darkness, sending Simon sprawling to the floor. The figure towers over him, saying, “Welcome, ladies and gentleman. Step right up. Put a brave foot through the portal, bid the mundane world goodbye, and gain entrance to the fantastic. Have your tickets ready.”

Click.

Simon shines an LED flashlight on his attacker. The light reveals a man with no face, wearing a top hat. He strikes poses in jerky motions. His tuxedo is decayed and tattered. His face, torn off, dangles from the neck by a thread. But the exposed mechanical skeleton reels through its preprogramed motions, glass eyes staring at Simon through the clockwork skull. The animatronic barker continues his patter:

“Feeling brave tonight? How brave? Brave enough to tear the cloying shroud from your third eye? Brave enough to witness grotesque anomalies of nature, paranormal histories, and parazoological wonders? Step this way. Feed your perverse curiosity. You are certain to see much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might excite disgust. Have your tickets ready and shed that most persistent of illusions—reality.”

Simon gets to his feet and shines his light about. Reluctantly, the darkness gives up its secrets, revealing bars meant to herd visitors into lines that terminate in a turnstile, itself emptying into a walkway that leads away from the lobby and deeper into the building. Simon advances through the empty line. The barker barks on:

“Be advised that not everyone is ready for the twilight truths that lie beneath our universe. Those who are pregnant, have heart conditions, or suffer an imbalance of the humors are bidden to seek respite in the lobby gift shop. We caution parents to reconsider giving us your children, for the management does not promise to return them. For the rest—step this way! Enter this abode of curiosities, this home by strangeness haunted. Welcome to the House of Oddities.”

Simon leaps the turnstile. In the darkness ahead lurk shelves and dust and empty and half-empty displays. In the lobby, the barker concludes:

“Step this way. Have your tickets ready. You are already beyond the threshold. There is no turning back!”

Everything is shelves and darkness. The beam of Simon’s light ignites jars of viscous fluids in a blue glow. Jars with floating fetuses—some human, some animal, some less identifiable. Tiny eyes in strange places, watching. Vestigial limbs at odd angles. Conjoined twins sharing a mouth. Little creatures hunched over, serious, contemplating the cosmos. Beings that never knew open air or a mother’s touch, only primal womb stew. Odd primordial creatures of strange symmetry.

A womb, Jane, cannot be a very different environment than the blood-warm prehistoric oceans.

“Cold-cold tomb,” croon the Corbies.

Simon takes a large gulp from his Thermos. The wormwood slithers into place. The ghost tree grown bigger, the ghost crows more tangible. The lines bleed away and all those little eyes and mouths float through one dark sea punctuated by the blue glow.

“Cold-cold soup,” croon the Corbies.

Simon pauses, considers the scene. His light is no longer a straight beam. It is bent by the optic play of curved glass and embryonic fluid, refracted and redirected, zigzagging and igniting jar after jar in a ghost blood glow, lighting all those tiny bodies—a sepulchral prism.

Simon hardly breathes. He is paralyzed in a monomania. Only his fingers move, manipulating the beam of blue light, searching for the perfect angle to express something indefinable.

“A Still Life in Ghost Plasma.” Eh, Jane?

Monomania, and how many minutes had passed?

“Simon!” scream the Corbies. “Simon!” They shriek and cry and peck staccato SOS signals against his skull from the inside. “Listen, Simon. Listen!”

Simon comes to and hears it.

“Mmmmmmmmmm . . .”

Dead Water chill traces his veins. All those staring unborn, human and otherwise: two-headed, too many eyes, multiple mouths yawning in little bellies. All those eyes. Glaring. All those mouths. Malevolent frowns and silent, liquid screams. Tiny sculptures in pickled meat. The upside-down tree quivers, and Simon senses it—the wormwood branches picking it up like feelers—the air turning angry, movements in the formaldehyde-filtered light.

“MMMmmmmmmm . . .”

It’s that first sound: the sound of wanting, the sound of suckling, the first letter of the word for mother in so many different languages—a sound of deep want echoing across the decades. But this sound is twisting, twisting like the things in the jars, turning malevolent, growing into a keen. Innocent need becoming rancid. Simon senses more frenzied movement at the edges. Did he imagine that? Did he imagine that whine, like skin streaking across glass?

“Danger! Danger, Simon!” shriek the Corbies. “Fly! Let us fly!”

The angry dark closes in on Simon, a frenzy of peripheral movements. He can feel it, just centimeters from his skin. But Simon is an unlikely fellow. The same signal of horror, meant to excite our fight-or-flight instincts, bends and refracts in him, like blue light through a murky jar.

Simon’s eyes soften.

“Shhhhhhh,” he says to the mad, screeching dark.

His hands reach out to gently caress each jar. All those little misfits—little ones in need. Poor, pickled souls. All he sees are his littlest patients.

No one had ever cradled them, Jane. Death is the universal denominator of life, not birth.

“It’s all right,” Simon coos to the gibbering tide swelling around him. He reaches out, to each jar. “Shhhhhhh.” With the flashlight, Simon stages a shadow puppet show for the little ones in the jars. Then he performs card and coin tricks. And some of the screeching and wailing subsides. Simon does pratfalls and hat tricks and feats of vaudevillian, physical comedy. And more of the cries quiet.

The Corbies hum an ancient tune and Simon finds himself humming along. The Corbies sing the old, old lullaby. Simon sings and his mouth is their mouth:

“Lullay, Thou little tiny Child,

Bye-bye, lulloo, lullay.

Bye-bye, lulloo, lullay.”

The screeches quiet. The angry vibrations die away as the peripheral movements calm. Where had the song come from? Sixteenth century was it? The Corbies argue the lyrics, come to nanosecond agreements and sing. Simon sings with them:

“O Sisters too, how may we do

For to preserve this day?

This poor youngling for whom we sing,

Bye-bye, lulloo, lullay.”

The jabber-cries cease. The phantom movements cease. All else is quiet except that barely audible sound, that pleading, needful, primal sound:

“MMMMMMMMmmm . . .”

And Simon sings:

“Herod, the king, in his raging,

Charged he hath this day

His men of might, in his own sight,

All children young to slay.”

The Corbies feed Simon the words and he wanders on autopilot, eyes closed, in the dark, in a waking wormwood dream, until—what? How did this happen?

The jar nearest Simon is open, its liquid contents sloshing about. Simon wonders when he did that—if he did it. He must have, for cradled in his arms is a tiny body, slick and preserved, sharp-smelling and pickled. All its limbs and limbs and limbs are loosely coiled about his arms. Simon does not recoil. Simon does not drop the child. He hugs the malformed little body to his chest, cradles and gently rocks it, oblivious to the chemical slime soaking into his suit and running down his sleeves.

Simon sings to it:

“Then woe is me, poor Child for Thee,

And ever mourn and pray,

For Thy parting neither say nor sing,

Bye-bye, lulloo, lullay.”

Absinthe turns the room to gelatin, swaying to the soft beat of the Corbies’ lullaby. He stares down at the tiny, twisted body, as he cradles and rocks it, feels the dead love.

Simon longs to take out his scalpel, to draw a tiny Y into each and every chest. He longs to take all the little ones into the Dead Water, to hear their stories, then set them free into the ebony sea. The Corbies salivate from their branches, hungry at the prospect of all these little spiced bites of Dead Water.

“Feed your head, Simon,” sing the crows. “Feed your head!”

“No,” Simon says. “There is no time.”

He cradles the tiny body. He gently closes its eyes—all of them. He kisses it on the forehead, the formaldehyde goo burning his lips. Simon tucks the little one back into the jar and seals it.

Simon sings:

“And when the stars in gather do,

In their far venture stay,

Then smile as dreaming, Little One,

Bye-bye, lulloo, lullay.”

Only then does Simon note the razor tears in this clothes, the clipped patch of hair falling from his shoulder, the tiny cut on his cheek.

“Little flesh gargoyles,” the Corbies say. They probe the catches and defects in the ether. “A set trap. Crafty trap. Your struggles kill you quicker. Your fear kills you. Your disgust kills you. Your horror harms you more, and the harm horrifies you more. Exponential death.”

Simon, following the blue glow of his light, finds a stairway and leaves the room of jars, careful to keep singing all the while:

“Lullay, Thou little tiny Child,

Bye-bye, lulloo, lullay.”

And in the silence and the darkness, the unborn smile as if dreaming—and wait.

CHAPTER 15

The door to the upstairs apartment opens easy—no locks to pick, only hasty glyphs and symbols carved in gashes into the door and frame. It slides open with nary a creak or complaint. No furniture inside, only dishes of water and cat food and litter boxes.

No cats, Jane. I saw no cats.

All the rooms are bare, except the study. Inside this room swells a storm, a living chaos of shelves and books and notebooks and pens and a computer and a radio scanner and words jotted on napkins and receipts and pages and pages. Sitting, in the eye of this storm, at his desk, is Ichabod Knock—completely naked, face dripping with feline gore, symbols and glyphs carved into his flesh, some old and scarred, most fresh or refreshed.

They were for protection, Jane. I could read their red, runic rhymes. I do not know glyphs or runes, Jane, but I can read scars.

Ichabod is tall, even sitting, and long muscled. His long, frizzy hair shocks out in all directions, matching his immense beard, black with bolts of iron streaking through. He looks, rather madly, like a fallen storm god baptized in blood—rather different from the clean-shaven, devilish grin on the dust jacket of his book. But the nose is the same—impossibly wonky. Simon can see stories in the crooked lines of that nose, all the angry faces in which it played a central role and all the times it was broken.

The cat on the plate is white.

Ichabod looks up at Simon, still outside the study, and he smiles. The thick blood of the cat turns the smile into a gashing wound in the beard. Ichabod motions Simon to enter and Simon does so, noting the little glyphs carved into the doorframe.

As soon as Simon’s foot crosses the threshold, Ichabod’s bloodshot eyes bulge and he stands, tall, exposing all his nakedness and the angry red, dead language of the runes run over every inch.

“No!” Ichabod shouts. There is the flash of a large, chrome handgun pointing at Simon. “Not another step. Your clothes, man, your clothes! They can hide under clothes. That’s how they got Taylor. Slurps you all up and all that’s left is husks and smiles—godawful smiles! And bad eyes! That’s how to know. Take off your clothes!”

Simon considers fleeing, considers the gun, considers Jane. He begins to take off his clothes, throwing them in a pile. Ichabod seems satisfied when he is down to his boxers and socks. The bloody-gash grin returns.

“Well, come in, come in, Simon Meeks,” Ichabod says, waving Simon inside with the gun. “You got past my security—my pickled punks. Curiouser and curiouser.” He motions around the room. “Sorry. Always get like this when I’m neck deep in scrivening a book.”

Simon enters the room and stands in front of the desk. “How do you know my name?”

“Oh, I know your name, loveling. Simon means ‘he who listens,’ and you listen to the rots. And Meeks . . . well, that’s just too easy, in’it?” Ichabod speaks in a voice that is gravel floating in rich syrup. Simon guesses the accent is British, but it sounds corrupted, oily, and bleeding into lots of other places. “You know my name, don’t you, Simon? You must have heard of me.”

“Mr. Knock.”

“Goody. How’s Nyx? Still struggling with daddy issues?” Ichabod rubs his nose. “Precious. Do they still play that silly little game at the Sanctuary? Icky Facts, is it? Truth is stranger than fiction, Simon, and the little darlings try and exaggerate, but, well, what do they know about the things I’ve done? I’m Ichabod Knock! I’ve opened the walls of reality, groped insanity, seen the purple dimension, talked to the invisibles! Once, I had a threesome with both Olsen twins. That was before they were famous. . . .”

Simon creeps closer.

“Easy, loveling, easy,” says Ichabod.

Click, says the hammer on the gun. Simon remains still. Ichabod smiles and un-cocks the hammer.

“The first thing you need to know, Simon,” says Ichabod, “is that stories are dangerous. Information is alive.” The police scanner chirps in the background and a radio plays, set to scan, switching stations every five seconds, alternating between music and commercials and talk. “Every story is a doorway. Some doors do not open again once closed, the worse ones do not close once opened—and the nastiest doors you cannot come back out of . . . unchanged.”

Ichabod talks with his mouth full. Then he is only eating—slurping, masticating—loudly. Simon stands there, mostly naked, for several minutes as Ichabod eats, very unaware of Simon’s presence.

Simon looks about the room. Chaos. A dimension of notes and scribblings. Scratched in pen, on a crinkled bit of loose-leaf paper, a note reads: Talented schoolchildren of North Shore disappear. White vans. Where is the facility? Contact died of cardiac arrest.

Written on the back of a forest preserve pamphlet is: Children revere the tree. They bury their offerings. But it is hungry. The Halloween Tree is always hungry.

Written on a mustard-stained napkin from an all night hotdog stand: The rats . . . the rats! Chew holes in my mind. Nightmares fall out. Did I dream the rats? Did I dream the wolves that come for them? Or did they dream me?

Notes on the floor, hanging out of books, pinned to cork board. Shelves and shelves of books. Symbols carved into the desk and along the walls. Simon tried to find a sense in it all, an order . . .

“If this be method, then there is much madness in it,” say the Corbies.

“Blood, guts, and bone, we can smell our own,” says another.

“Whaddya think grows in his head?” asks a third, and the tree in Simon’s skull explodes with laughter. Simon wonders if Ichabod can hear it.

Simon’s eyes follow the symbols and come to rest on a fly pinned into the wall with a tack. He thinks of Mother and moths. Next to the fly, a large spider is transfixed to the wall. Next to the spider, a bird is messily nailed in place, its body broken and twisted from the effort. And next to the bird, a crushed cat’s head.

Simon’s eyes follow the trail—fly—spider—bird—cat—his mind threatening to fall into monomania again.

“There was an old woman who swallowed a cat—Imagine that, she swallowed a cat,” sing the Corbies.

Above, on the wall, in sloppy permanent marker, the decaying mosaic is labeled: Chart.

“That’s their system, not mine,” Ichabod says through a mouthful of entrails, breaking the silence. He doesn’t look up from his meal. “I don’t eat lives. Those pyramid schemes are dangerous—zoophagy on a mass-market scale. ‘Start small, dream big!’” He breaks into manic laughter, ending in a coughing fit. Bits of meat and organ fall out of his mouth.

When Simon turns back, the cat is finished. Ichabod has eaten it, fur and tail and paws and all. The plate is licked clean, except for a few bones and the head, which stares at Simon through eyeless sockets.

“Oh, Dinah-Dinah-Dinah-Dinah,” Ichabod says. “I’ll miss you most of all.” He spins the plate, staring intently—very intently—into the empty eye sockets. “The stories I could tell you about Dinah.”

Scratch. Flare. And Ichabod, face and mouth still slick with cat’s guts, lights a large, unevenly rolled cigar with a match. He puffs, filling the room with an alien odor. With red-veined eyes like cracked, stained glass windows, Ichabod stares at the flame for a long moment before putting it out.

“You start counting the lights yet, Simon?” Ichabod asks, coils of smoke filling the room.

“No.” Simon eyes the gun now resting on the desk.

“You will. First you’ll recall how light seemed so plentiful, once upon a time. Then you’ll become aware of light—hyperaware. You’ll notice the lights are feeble. The bulbs weak. The light falters, flickers. You’ll yell obscenities in public places when another streetlight skips. It’s all so fragile. You’ll lie in bed wondering when you changed the bulbs last. You’ll count the number of lights between your bed and the car, the number of streetlights between your home and the convenience store. You’ll huddle in the dark, no longer certain the sun will rise, not in this place.”

See them now: our silent film hero—shivering scarecrow, Dead Water junkie, corpse friend, cadaver lover—entrails-reading Simon, standing next to Ichabod Knock— spook seeker; cat eater; bloody, rune-written flesh parchment. Can obsessions and madnesses interact, echo to each other like radio signals or bat sonar? Can the shadows and glass shards crawl out of one set of ears and into another?

“I’m here for Jane Doe,” Simon says.

“Excuse me a moment, Simon. I have to take a slash.” Holding the gun again, Ichabod lilts his head to the side. A yellow puddle forms on the floor under his desk. “Now, what was that?”

Simon steps closer. Point blank. “Jane Doe. Tell me about her. Tell me about the hammer and Club Wendigo and Apex Consumers. Tell me about you.”

“Me? I’m a rancid piece of work. I yelled ‘Marco’ into the dark. It answered. I apologize, Simon. I would offer you something, but my cupboards are quite bare. Perhaps you’d like to hear about the time I paid a bearded woman to go down on Robert Downey, Jr.”

Ichabod watches Simon’s impatience and mouths the words before he can say them. “Mother Hubbard!” Ichabod says. “That’s your phrase, isn’t it, Simon? Motherfucker! You can’t say it, can you? Say it! Ha! You can’t. Fantastic! Even your profanities are all Mother Goose.”

“How—?”

“It’s very endearing. Like watching a three-legged dog walk.”

“How do you know what I—?”

“We’ll get to that,” Ichabod says, puffing at the cigar, his eyes getting glassy. The smoke and the odor are taking over the room. “Cigar? I roll them myself.” Ichabod nods toward a box.

Simon looks inside: plastic bags filled with brown sheets that look like ancient parchment or dried leaves. But on closer inspection . . .

“Toads?” Simon asks.

“Yeah. Particular species. South American. Chemical in the venom of the skin produces the most wondrous hallucinations when inhaled.”

Ichabod exhales brown smoke.

“Did you know, Simon, that the ayahuasca vine of South America grows in a spiral? Ingesting it induces visions of twin serpents coiling around each other. Shaman understood this to be the basis of physical existence.”

Ichabod spirals his finger through the smoke. “They painted cave walls with the twin snakes, one black and one white, active and passive, twisting into a spiraling double helix. They called it the sky ladder. Imagine—fucked up mystics in a cave understanding the structure of DNA thousands of years before it’s named. Cosmic serpents swimming in the void. The spiral! The shape of the universe. The shape of molecules and snail shells and hurricanes and galaxies and all of them spinning inside each other. The flight path of a carrion bird over something dead and bloody.”

Ichabod takes a long drag, exhaling more smoke into the room.

“You have to take something, dear Simon,” Ichabod says, “to solve this mystery; you have to take something to skew your view, to see the shadows in the fog—the skulls beneath the skin.”

“Absinthe,” says Simon.

“Oh, that will do. Yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-yes. You’ve seen them, haven’t you, dear boy—after the witching hour, gnawing at the edge of your vision, that first time mommy took away the nightlight?”

“Look!” calls a Corbie, noting a circle of white salt around Ichabod’s desk.

“Protection!” calls another.

“It is all about protection,” say the Corbies. “The unborn, the runes, the circle, and the cats!”

Simon nods, the ghastly picture forming in his mind. The cats. Like everything Ichabod did, they were a protective ward against the things that hide under clothes and slither between molecules. Paranoia—stress—comfort food. In the lore of many lands, cats were a protection from spiritual evil. Even today there are those living in old farmhouses who claim their cats stare at moving objects no one else can see, that they chase off ghosts. Icky went into the dark—and Icky did fall—and Icky did break. His twisted synapses collided: the instinct for comfort food, the notion of cats as spiritual protection. The chemicals fused into a fiendish compound.

This preternatural eating disorder.

“You’re trying to protect yourself,” Simon says, “from the inside out.”

The gun lowers toward the floor, and all the wicked lines in Ichabod’s face fall to wariness, whole unexplored continents of caginess beyond anything Simon knows. Ichabod slumps in his chair. “Oh, Simon. You’re supposed to say exactly that, just now, and have those insightful thoughts about me. . . . When you enter the Weird, you have to invest,” he says in a near-lucid voice. “Or it eats you all up. You protect yourself from secrets with secrets, so you can get more secrets. You have to keep on top of that shit, like a credit card bill, but soon you find that the APR is too high. You invest—more deals, more pacts, more tricks—stranger and stranger, and worse and worse, and you’re always deeper in than when you started. No exit.”

The radio plays a toilet bowl cleaning jingle. The police radio squawks something about a domestic disturbance.

“Simon, do you know what kills people the most in this dark, dark world?”

“What?”

“Embarrassment. If you have no shame, you might survive another night.”

“Please, Mr. Knock, I need to know what you know about Jane Doe. Tell me.”

Ichabod bolts up, standing, the lines on his face changing back from wary to wicked. “What I know? I could tell you things, loveling, that would crack open your head and let the goblins in. I can whisper the words that will sacrifice the corpse of your inner child on the altar stained with Santa’s blood. I could tell you such things.”

Ichabod leans forward, so close that the brown tendrils of smoke reach out from his mouth and caress Simon’s face. So close that Simon can smell the burnt toad and raw cat.

“This is your last chance to go home, get under the covers, and pray the Weird forgets you exist.” Ichabod smirks. “But you won’t listen, will you? You’ll just keep knocking on doors. You’ll go . . . there.”

“Where?”

“Down the rabbit hole, boy! Past Hell, through the looking glass darkly, and into the secret room where Alice plays tea with corpses. No deposit—no return. Once you see the Abyss, it sees you.”

With one hand Simon slaps the gun from the naked man’s grasp, as the other snaps forward, holding a newly materialized scalpel to Icky’s face.

“My, my, my, but you are fast,” says Ichabod. “What a nifty trick.”

Simon carefully bends to the floor and takes the gun, points it at the eater of cats. “Tell me what I want to know, Mr. Knock.”

“You strike me as a man who cries while masturbating, Simon. Be honest, ever do any tearjerking by candlelight?”

Click, says the hammer of the gun.

“Please cooperate, Mr. Knock,” says Simon. “Or I will have to shoot you in the head and find the answers with my scalpel.”

“See the shy boy blossom in the dark. Lovely. What would you like to know, then?”

Keeping the gun on Ichabod, Simon takes something from the pocket of his jacket, still in the pile of clothes on the floor. “Tell me about Jane. Tell me about this.” Simon shakes open the folded Club Wendigo flier, the one from Neil’s planner, and holds it out.

Ichabod snatches the paper and looks over it as carefully as if he were deciphering cuneiform. “This? This is magic” the radio chatters, and Ichabod points to it, saying, “That is magic, too.”

A jingle plays on the radio, enticing the listener to purchase a half-pound burger with bacon and onion rings.

Giggling, Ichabod slaps the flier down on the rune-marked desk and slams a heavy book next to it. The dark tome looks ancient, some eldritch work of the occult. Ichabod gestures back and forth between the book and the flier. “It’s the only magic that’s ever existed, Simon. Pay attention!”

Simon watches the madman with every Corbie in his head.

“Language. Symbols. Signals. All floating freely,” Ichabod says. “Dangerous stuff. You see, my little dove, a grimoire.” Ichabod points at the old, occult book, “is just a fancy-fancy way of saying ‘grammar’ and casting a spell is just the act of spelling to the universe. It’s true!” Ichabod slams a heavy dictionary on the desk. “There is just as much here—” he points to the dictionary “—as there.” He points to the occult book.

The radio sings the praises of a certain brand of cola. The police radio squawks something about a high-speed chase. The cat’s head does not comment.

“Once upon a time,” says Ichabod, “the first shamans were storytellers. Writers. We forgot. We fell into the current paradigm and stupidly believe that art is merely cheap entertainment, something to make half-hour time capsules for skags to swallow while waiting to die.”

“Mr. Knock, what does Club Wendigo have to do with Jane’s death?”

“Once upon a time, bards were the most feared magicians. What would a witch do if you pissed her off—cast a curse? Twist your son in the womb? If you pissed off a bard, he could cast a satire on you. Ruin you in the eyes of your family, of strangers, in your own eyes. If he was really clever, they’d still be laughing at you centuries after you’re worm-shit and your basic essence is corrupted and you wallow in your own vile absurdity!”

“Mr. Knock, how is Apex Consumers involved?”

“Shapers shape the word, shape reality. The only warlocks left are the advertisers—spells and hexes through the media, cast by the jiggly breasts of plastic seductresses. They can hex an entire country, thewhole country, to think the same insipid thought at the same time.”

“Mr. Knock—”

“Information is a super weird substance underlining the universe, more basic and universal than gravity. This suggests that the physical universe is merely a byproduct of a primal information. Or, to put it more simply: In the beginning, there was the Word.”

“Mr. Knock, who was Jane Doe?”

“That is the most interesting question you’ve asked.”

“Who was she?”

“Life support. But she died. So you can imagine what happened to us.”

“What’s her name?”

“No. No names. Not in the game we played. She was just she. She was just a white rabbit, popping up in so many plots. I had to know what she knew! The whisper in the river. . . .”

Ichabod falls back into his seat and takes an enormous drag on his poisonous cigar.

“You are speaking too cryptically, Mr. Knock.” Simon presses the gun to Ichabod’s head. “Tell me how it all fits together.”

“Why didn’t you say so, loveling. You want the story. Your story. I can tell it to you. Word. For. Word.”

Ichabod looks up and his pupils fill the globes of his eyes. He speaks, and the words sound like arcane mumbo-jumbo to Simon—but they gain cadence, rearrange themselves until they make sense.

Knock says, “Would you like to hear a story? This is a good one. And very short. This is the story and the story goes: Simon meets Janie D. at work. She tells him who hurt her. She smiles. This is love. This is rigor mortis. The end.”

The words fill Simon’s head with deep-ocean pressure, cutting his thoughts with serrated migraines, distorting his balance. The reality of the room quakes.

Knock says, “There is a longer story. The devils all lurk in the details. It is a story just big enough to cram into a human skull.”

Dentist drills embed themselves in Simon’s nerve endings he drops the gun and grabs his head. “What are you doing?”

“I’m telling you the story,” Ichabod says. “There’s much, much more.”

Knock says, “It is quiet in the morgue on this side of the A.M.—just the young pathologist and the golden-eyed cadaver, both smiling, both tense, both afraid to make the first move. Simon stares at the smile and the impossibly large eyes.”

Simon can feel the suture-cracks of his skull breaking apart with a sound like the hellish feedback of a microphone brought too close to the speaker.

Knock says, “Simon cuts the noose from her neck, lovingly removes the rough locket and bags it. He leaves the knot intact. Knots have their own clues to offer.”

Simon falls to his knees. The room buckles and stretches. “Please. Please stop,” says Simon.

Knock says, “With the aftertaste of evil licorice, he feels the green alchemy, the roots of wormwood growing in his brain, the upside-down tree that grows in his head and feeds off the dead, and the Corbies, always the Corbies, shrieking apocalyptic limericks. Simon takes Jane’s hand.”

Simon collapses to the ground and curls up as wave after wave of agony savages his head. And then, it stops. The room is solid, the pain gone. Simon looks about the room, now empty of both Ichabod and his gun. Simon gets up and runs out of the apartment, down the stairs, and back into the House of Oddities, chasing the acid laughter of Icky Knock.

* * * * *

Icky Knock runs through the House of Oddities and Simon follows. Simon runs past the pickled punks and ancient carnival posters.

Knock says, “‘It’s not you, it’s me,’ Simon whispers to the fish. He kisses the mucous-slick of her face and, very sadly, lays her down to sleep. He consigns her to the beyond.”

Reality distorts, and Simon loses track of Ichabod.

Knock says, “Simon waits for the door to close, waits for the footsteps to trip-trap far down the hall. Then he places the teddy bear in the arms of the dead girl. ‘Sweet dreams, Tamara.’ Simon slides her back inside and shuts the freezer door. He misses her already.”

Reality cracks, and Simon trips over a box, falling into a dusty display of Houdini’s stage equipment.

“I’m sorry, Simon. You wanted to know the bigger picture. How everything fits together. Yes, let me see. Once upon a time—” Ichabod takes a deep breath somewhere in the dark “—there is a house in Englewood that bleeds from the pipes. Windows like staring eyes. . . .

“There is an orphanage in the southwest suburbs run completely by children. They all have an identical scratch on the cheek. The adults are gone. I barely escaped. . . .

“On the South Side, there is a black dog attacking pimps and protecting prostitutes. . . .”

Simon gets up and tries to pinpoint the voice as Ichabod continues to recite the fractured fairy-tales of Chicago.

“There is a renegade garbage truck that drives the streets at night, transporting bodies and secrets. . . .

“There are dead, walled-up stations in the underground El. One of these is a secret storeroom where authorities keep evidence from freak cases. . . .

“At the house of 3383, there is a space. A nothing. Anti-space. A black hole. It grows slowly. Drop a corpse into it and the corpse crawls out hungry. . . .”

Ichabod’s words spiral and spiral—spirals within spirals—through the House of Oddities, and Simon follows. He runs past cryptozoology displays, past impossible bones and objects of taxidermy: Big Foot’s femur and a wall-mounted fish with fur.

Knock says, “Jane is all tucked in, slid back into her refrigerator. Simon closes the door, then flips it open and closed, open and closed, again and again. You hang up . . . No, you hang up . . . No, you . . .”

Reality spirals, and Simon leans against a wax figure of Vincent Price until the dizziness and pain abate. Then he is chasing Icky Knock through the House of Oddities again. He hurries past broke-down penny arcade machines, past bizarre medical photos, past a waxen H. H. Holmes holding a bloody knife, in a display labeled Murder Castle.

Ichabod’s voice comes on, in a crackle, through a sound system. “Ladies and gentleman, please direct your attention to our newest attraction: the gentleman necrophile, the man who puts the ‘romantic’ in ‘necromantic’— Simon Meeks! See the Dead Water junkie, who imbibed small doses of the Weird for years. Has he built up an immunity to the dark? Will he go farther than those before, or will he crash, too many track marks on his soul, nature aborting this most depraved of chemical experiments? Find out!”

Simon searches about, finds himself in a display with the wax figures of Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, and James Dean all standing around an alien medical table, dissecting and experimenting on Elvis, as little green men watch over and manage the proceedings.

“There’s one question you didn’t ask, Simon,” Ichabod’s voice says over the speakers. “The question you want to ask, but don’t want to ask. If you do indeed have the power of divination, what sort is it? There are so many forms of divination: hepatoscopy, necromancy, augury, haruspicy, extispicy. What flavor are you? Ever try cephaleonomancy, the art of divination through the broiled head of a donkey? You haven’t lived until you’ve seen infinity through the boiled head of an ass.”

Simon spies Ichabod and advances. The voice continues over the speakers.

“That’s the question, Simon. Are you a necromancer? Do you really commune with the souls of the dead. Or are you just a reader of entrails? Do you just squeeze cold facts from their guts? Is the Dead Water just a collection of these facts in a more pleasing form—the pathetic projections of a lonely mind?”

“No!” Simon yells, crashing into Ichabod, who breaks into jagged pieces, a funhouse mirror now shattered.

“Oh, my. Did I strike a nerve, loveling?”

Ichabod stands, lit by the red-orange glow of an exit sign. Simon gets up and advances.

“Limping on three shaky dimensions is no way to go through life, son.”

“I want Jane back.”

“That is precious. We live in a strange world, Simon, full of strange love. We live in a state where our impeached governor’s wife eats dead tarantulas on national TV in order to fund her husband’s legal defense. Now that, that is love.”

Simon charges.

Knock sighs and says, “Simon kisses her lips, cool like September sands, like the time in the year when everything turns sad and sweet. He blows living air down her mouth. Most of it escapes, but some rebounds, rushes back, just a little, the faintest bit; it echoes in her throat, just the tiniest bit, expels in the quietest of sighs.”

Reality hiccups and Simon stumbles. Laughter. When he looks back up, Ichabod is gone, the doorway open. Simon follows.

* * * * *

Simon catches Icky Knock on the rooftop and tackles him hard. They crash and roll and Simon pins Ichabod down, straddling his chest, holding his throat.

“Hello, loveling. You want to tussle with old uncle Icky?

Simon squeezes.

Knock says, “Hector devours the space between them, moving fast for something so large. Simon does not evade. He does not raise his arms—does not get ready for a fight. Simon cannot win a fight against Hector. He can’t beat something grown that huge on chemicals, human meat, and hate. Simon gives him a target with his grinning, Jack O’Lantern face.”

Simon can’t stop him once the words start, and the nausea and pain they unleash make Simon cry out. The world overturns. Ichabod sits atop Simon, their positions reversed.

“That really did hurt, didn’t it? ” Ichabod says, clutching Simon’s throat. “I’m sorry. I was skipping ahead in the story. That part hasn’t happened yet.”

Simon’s flicks his wrist and a shiny scalpel appears in his hand. He holds it to Ichabod’s throat.

“Where the fuck do you pull those things out of?” Icky asks.

“I want Jane back.”

“You never even knew her.”

“I know Jane. She taught me to play in playgrounds after hours.”

“Mmm, touching.”

“Tell me about the ones who killed her.”

“I’ll do one better, bucko. I can tell you where she is.”

“What?”

“You can see her pretty face right now.”

“I . . .”

“You have to promise to do me a favor.”

“What favor?”

“Never mind what it is! You’ll do anything anyway, so just promise.”

“I promise.”

“Swear on it.”

“I swear.”

“Swear on the Dead Water.”

“I swear.”

“Swear on Toby Reynolds’s wormy little soul.”

“I swear.”

“Great! Go have a look in the box.”

They both get up. Simon looks about the roof. A large ritual circle, with more mysterious symbols, is drawn on the roof’s surface in orange sidewalk chalk. Next to the circle sits a great weatherworn trunk made of leather the color of darkened tobacco.

Simon opens the trunk. His lips quiver. His scalpel clatters to the roof. The Corbies shriek.

Jane Doe’s head, partially wrapped in silk, stares up at him from within the case.

He lifts it out, hugs the weight of it to his chest, and falls back into a sitting position. He stares into the empty sockets that once contained those golden eyes.

Ichabod stands next to him. “I’m sorry, Simon. It would seem your employer sold her for parts. Someone else got the eyes. I used what contacts I could to procure the head.”

Simon runs a hand through Jane’s hair. “What favor do I owe you?”

Ichabod reaches into the trunk, pulls out a manila envelope and hands it to Simon. “My agent is looking for me. I owe a manuscript. This will explain everything to her. I need you to mail it for me.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.” Ichabod lies, naked, limbs splayed, in the center of the orange circle, staring up at the stars.

“What about the rest of it?” Simon asks. “The events at the morgue, the Mondays, the three strangers who attacked me, Apex Consumers, Club Wendigo. How does it all tie together?”

“There is one last thing in my trunk. Pull it out.”

Simon does so, removing an ancient-looking rib bone. Layers of mummified flesh, brown and yellow and leathery, still cling to the bone.

“What is it?” Simon asks.

“My treat. It’s a crash course, when you want to see. There is a bog—Volo Bog—forty-five miles northwest of here. Its water is the color of strong tea. Darker than amber. Go there. Drop the bone in the mouth of the bog.”

“What will I see?”

Ichabod, on his back in the circle, shrugs. “Simon, do you know why conspiracy theorists believe in the mega-conspiracy?”

“Why?”

“Because, my boy, the alternative is more horrifying.”

“What is the alternative?”

Ichabod only smiles and smiles and smiles.

“What is your interest in all of this, Mr. Knock?”

Ichabod stares at the stars. “You’d have to stand on the moon and look down to see the pattern of the plan that I’ve enacted. I’m going to change the number of my dimensions. I’m going to walk through the final door. I’m going to become mythos, and then they can’t hurt me.”

Simon stares into Jane’s empty sockets, running his hand over her cold, dry cheeks. Eventually he turns to leave, but then pauses. He turns back.

“Mr. Knock, why did you want Jane’s head?”

“I did me a ritual. Right here. In this circle.” Ichabod flaps his arms and legs, making invisible snow angels. “You don’t know what that cost me! I had to know what she knew. I don’t have your talents, so I had the ritual, and it cost me. I drew the circle. I held her head. I looked into the two ant-lion pits of her skull, and I said, ‘Doodlebug, doodlebug, come out of your hole. If you don’t, I’ll beat you black as a mole.’ And all the information came pouring out and into my head. It was too much to fit. My skull cracked.”

Ichabod twitches in the circle.

“It cost me. And the prize? It wasn’t what I wanted. It wasn’t her knowledge. Instead, I learned about Simon Meeks—everything there is to know about Simon Meeks. Everything that will ever be known about Simon Meeks. You fucked up the works, loveling!”

Ichabod laughs, and the laugh goes from angry, to insane, to jovial, and back.

“That's the gag, Simon. Right now, this is happening. But somewhere else, I'm telling it to someone. And somewhere else, I'm reading it through her skull windows in this very circle. And somewhere else, you’re muttering bits of it in the dark.”

Ichabod laughs. Hard. He laughs with his whole body. He laughs so hard a blood vessel bursts in his right eye, painting it entirely red.

Simon leaves.

Icky laughs.

Simon finds and puts on his clothes and goes downstairs with Jane’s head and the mummified bone.

Icky laughs.

Downstairs, Simon follows the pointing finger on a sign that says, This Way to the Egress. He exits the building as the animatronic barker calls after: “Safe home, dear friends, and come again. But take a warning and a care, for though you leave this place, it does not leave you. Insatiable is the mind that tastes darkling truths. Henceforth, know that any doorway, window, or keyhole may lead you back into . . . the House of Oddities.”

INTERLUDE:

The Halloween Tree

Julio tried to put his hand up my skirt. Now the doctor says he might never be the same again. Rosette said she let Julio put his hand up her skirt. The police found her parent’s lab in the barn last summer. Now Rosette’s gone. Maybe if I had let Julio . . .

We were under the tree. The dare tree. The hungry tree.

“Wait,” I said. We squirmed. I used to be able to just hang with Julio. No one wanted anything. But that’s been changing—fast. I always beat Julio at arm wrestling and when I pushed him away that day his elbow hit the tree. It was a rotten patch, so it gave with a sticky crack. Then everything smelled like bio class dissection and that time Julio’s pet snake got sick and threw up the half-digested rat.

Then the pickled punks all fell out. That’s what my grandma calls them. Says she saw them in the carny tents for a nickel a peek, and they stared at her through the jars and soup, through two eyes and one eye and three eyes and sometimes from no eyes—and no face—at all.

Some of the jars broke.

Julio screamed and kicked one. It popped. Julio puked—mostly Tater Tots. His hand didn’t try anything else after that.

I didn’t throw up. I stared. And they stared, through the glass and the soup and the shards.

Then the sheriff was there, and the sun somehow went out like a cigarette burn, and everything was flashing reds and blues, like the night they came for Rosette’s parents. I was cradling one of the naked punks. The police took it away. They had to pry it from my hands.

They removed thirty-eight jars from the tree.

You can see the tree, every year at Halloween, on the walls of the kindergarten classroom. That’s when you draw it. Everyone does. That’s when the dreams start. You draw the tree. Then the tree draws you.

A week after we found the jars, Julio was still not allowed out. Then the strange man came and told me all about the jars and the pickled punks. I said I shouldn’t talk to him, in case he was a bad man. He laughed, said he was a bad man, but he wasn’t there to be bad to me. He smoked strange cigars that smelled like leaf burning and bullfrog catching. His accent was funny and he told me about the carnival route that used to run through here—from up in Milwaukee and Chicago, through our town, and into Indiana. He told me about the freak shows, and how this was a popular spot. Some of the freaks even retired here. I wasn’t real surprised to hear that. Some folks in town still look weird.

The strange man told me about the poor family that once lived here. That they were poor wasn’t a big surprise, either—everyone’s poor here. But to make extra money, the wife in this family would get pregnant, and she would drink bad things, like turpentine and lead paint, and she would do bad things to herself, so that the babies came out curious.

“Showmanship!” the strange man said.

When the daughters were old enough, their daddy made them bake batches of pickled punks too.

That’s when the strange man smiled, and his smile was like Julio’s hand, and he asked me about the thirty-ninth jar, the one I’d hid in my bag.

“Mayhaps you and I could make a deal, eh, loveling?”

So I made a trade. Never mind for what. Never mind why I took the jar. It wanted so badly to be held.

The strange man actually got all the jars. He slipped the sheriff a lot of cash. I asked why.

“Security,” he said. “Can always use more—there’s always room for one more.”

Doctor says Julio may never be the same. But I’m mostly fine.

“You didn’t reject them,” the strange man said. “They don’t like rejection.”

I found my drawing of the tree with some of Mom’s old stuff. It’s crinkly and faded, but it still has the bare black branch-claws, thick leg roots, and hollow mouth—just like all the drawings hanging on the kindergarten class wall right now.

We all used to go there, to the tree, on Halloween night. We’d sneak away and line up in silent rows, row after row of little hobos and skeletons and monsters, like at church, and we’d bury offerings at the roots—candy, the orange and brown ones that nobody wanted.

One year, it wasn’t enough. That’s when Samuel went away.

I didn’t remember that.

I remember it now.

I don’t always remember that.

Only sometimes.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOSHUA ALAN DOETSCH once built a flesh golem out of grave-robbed parts and leftover Halloween candy. By strange chance, this golem is fueled by rejection slips. Every day it begs and it pleads, “Please, kind sir, keep me alive!” And so Joshua writes. You can thank White Wolf for making the poor golem go hungry for another day.

Joshua is from October Country, Illinois, but currently writes video game dialogue in Montreal. He has a fondness for fedoras, does a mean Christopher Walken impersonation, and, once upon a road trip dreary, wrote a blues song about necrophilia.