John Dies at the End

I stood there, laughing softly, steam puffing into the darkness. Then finally did what I should have done first. I went and sat on the step Amy had vacated. As I passed, John pulled Amy back behind him, backing off from me. Giving me lots of space. I started to take off my right shoe, thought, then went for the left instead. I yanked off the boot and the sock and looked at my big toe. Then I started laughing, laughing so hard I could barely breathe.

John looked at me with no expression because he already knew, looked like he had known for some time. Amy hung back, behind him, looking nervously between us. I brought up the foot and rubbed at the pi symbol on my toe, as if I could make it come off. I knew, of course, that it never, ever would.

Epilogue

“AND, WELL, THAT’S my story,” I said. “I’m sorry that it’s so, you know. Retarded.”

There is no word in the English language for the feeling someone gets when they suddenly realize they’re standing next to an unholy monster impersonating a human. Monstralization, maybe? I suppose it doesn’t matter because the reporter I was talking to wasn’t experiencing that emotion right now.

Arnie Blondestone of American Lifestyle magazine (or was it American Living? It was too bland to remember) had neither a tape recorder nor a notebook visible. Arnie and I had been walking as we talked, me relaying my story in the moldy halls of the defunct Undisclosed Shopping Centre. I stopped in front of a narrow, closed maintenance door and faced him. I said, “There it is. The door. The door.”

He glanced at it and said dramatically, “The door to another world!”

“Well, uh, it was. Through there and then in the little room behind it. But it wasn’t a real door, like I said. It was a ghost door.” I was going to add that John had named the other world “Shit Narnia” but I decided not to lower Arnie’s opinion of us any more than I already had.

“Well,” Arnie said, rubbing his hands together excitedly. “Let’s go.”

“Have you been listening? Even if we could, you really think they’d let us escape again? And I’m not even sure that world is habitable now anyway.”

“Come on, let’s give it a shot. Just let me poke my head through. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I completely believe your story. I just wanna confirm that one detail. The one about the ghost door that leads to the world of the bug herders.”

I suspected he might be patronizing me. I shook my head and said, “We can’t. Even if we wanted to. The door is gone. The other door, I mean. We’ve been back here several times but the wall where the ghost door was is just a wall now. But I know you’re not asking because you think it’s there. You’re asking because you think I’m nuts.”

That’s not true, though. If he thought I was dangerous, would he really have let himself get stuck in this abandoned place with me? I could have a cache of guns in here for all he knows. And if he thinks I’m bullshitting him, couldn’t he have easily excused himself by now? So what was it? Morbid curiosity? What’s your game, Arnie?

Arnie reached out and turned the rusting silver knob on the maintenance door. It swung open with a labored creak. He glanced inside the room and then back at me. He gestured at the door as if to say, “See?”

I said, “What?”

“This is the door you said got blown off its hinges when that thing, the monster came through it?”

Hmmm. That was an interesting point. I walked up to the maintenance door and ran my hand over it.

“They must have fixed it, I guess. But look at the opposite wall. You can kind of see marks in the plaster where the door bounced off it. See those scuff marks at the top there?”

Arnie shrugged, unimpressed. I tried to imagine this article in Life in the USA magazine, complete with a big full-color photo of the wall with the caption, “These are the actual scuff marks that prove an unholy demon-engineered beast burst through a nearby door in order to prevent David Wong from passing through an invisible portal to a gargantuan secret complex with a path to an alternate reality inhabited by a race of half human beastmasters.” I mean, I would read that article but I would probably be the only one.

But why was he still here? Hell, why had he come in the first place? No matter what he said, I still got this vibe from him that he wanted to believe me and that I was letting him down. He had been listening patiently to my story for six hours straight. I wouldn’t have done that if the roles were reversed. I would have politely said, “Well, I think I got all I need!” and then sprinted the other direction, laughing maniacally.

But Arnie looked like he had come here expecting answers and would now leave empty-handed. I had seen that look before, on the faces of tourists visiting the Texas Book Depository in Dallas where Lee Harvey Oswald took the shots at JFK. I took that tour and met some conspiracy buffs, all of us standing at the gunman’s window and looking down to the spot where the motorcade passed. It’s right there below the window, an easy shot at a slow-moving car. No mystery, just a kid and a rifle and a tragedy. They came looking for dark and terrible revelations and instead found out something even more dark and terrible: that their lives were trite and boring.

I had a thought and said to Arnie, “The cop, John’s uncle Drake. He really did disappear, you can look that up, along with everything else. And that’s two cops who’ve gone missing and in both cases I was the last to talk to them before they did. They’ve questioned me and I have a lawyer and everything.”

“And you told the cops he was sucked into another dimension, killed and replaced by a monster?”

“Basically, only without the words ‘another dimension’ or ‘replaced’ or ‘monster.’ We told them he pulled us over and acted all crazy. His partner, the black guy? The one who was piling snow on his crotch? He went back to work that next day, like nothing happened. That’s the one Amy shot, you know.”

“Can I talk to him? Because he’s also secretly a monster, right?”

“I dunno. His name is Murphy I think. I bet he doesn’t remember that day, though.”

Arnie eyed me carefully. He couldn’t ask me the big question, couldn’t point out the elephant in the room. How do I know you haven’t killed all these people, Mr. Wong? The cops, Fred, Big Jim? How do I know I’m not talking to a bona fide serial killer right now?

Instead he said, “Look at this from my point of view, Wong—”

“No, stop. Stop that reporter bullshit, that act where you change your personality according to what you think’ll get the most information. Acting like the skeptic one second and my best friend the next and my interrogator after that, whatever it takes to coax the ‘real’ story outta me. I’ve been honest with you, Arnie.” Mostly. “Now be honest with me. Can you do that? Do you have a real personality in there or is everything an interview technique with you?”

He threw out his arms to his sides, his “what the hell do you want from me” gesture, but said nothing.

“I want to know what you’re doing here, Arnie. I mean, you picked this story, right? You probably got people feedin’ you ideas all day and you get to decide which one gets written up, right? But you drove down to the ass middle of nowhere from, uh—”

“Chicago.”

“—from Chicago and used up a whole day out of your schedule to hear this. And you came prepared, notes and shit, you read all the Web sites about us. So you got another day of preparation in this thing on top of that. Tell me, Arnie, what did you think you were gonna find?”

He shrugged again. Hesitant. “I don’t know.”

I had another thought and said, “You’re down here on your own time, aren’t you?”

He didn’t answer, but his expression answered for him.

I stuffed my hands into my pockets and felt the little metal canister. Cold. I let out a long breath. I nodded toward the floor, which had never been tiled. Just bare, unfinished plywood, graying with age.

“You see that part of the floor over there, Arnie, the section of plywood next to the wall? See how it’s all scratched around the edges, like it’s been pried up?”

He didn’t answer, but he was looking at it.

“Help me pull it up. You gotta see this.”

Doubt crept into Arnie’s face. Maybe a little fear. Maybe afraid of what was under there, maybe just not wanting to mess up his suit.

I got down on my knees and started without him. The board had warped and I knew it would come right up. John and I had never replaced the nails when we pulled it up months ago because by that point in the project we had both been pretty drunk. I pulled up the sheet of plywood, probably three by five feet in size, and leaned it against the wall. Under it there was a framework of metal rails holding up the floor. And under that, a body. More of a skeleton by now, to be accurate.

I stepped back from the square hole in the floor and gestured for Arnie to see for himself. He gave me a cautious look, stepped forward, and froze in place. A look of—

Monstralization?

—cold recognition hit his face. He didn’t know exactly who or what I was, couldn’t know, but he did know at that moment that I had killed.

Trying to sound casual, he said, “And who is that?”

“Me.”

Arnie took two steps back and here it was, the big moment. The moment at which Arnie would turn on his heels and run away, or plunge fully into the dark madness of Wongworld.

Arnie really looked like he would run. I turned and sat calmly down on the floor, my back against the wall, looking up at him. If he ran, I would let him go.

Would you?

He hesitated, ran a hand over his mouth. The bones below him were long rid of any muscle or skin, now a dried-up, ash-colored framework covered in crumbling clothes. I thought of the squirming masses of beetles and worms and spiders and maggots that had feasted on “my” body down there, building writhing nests where my mouth had been. I gave a shudder.

I said, “We were gonna shove it through the portal, but by the time we got here it was gone. No ghost door. So we debated for about half an hour, had a dozen beers, then finally decided to cram it under the floor and go back home.”

Arnie stood silent for a long moment, then said, “What, you didn’t worry about somebody finding it? Like the cops?”

“What crime would they charge me with? Suicide?”

Arnie actually barked a dry laugh. He turned away from the corpse under the floor, surely wishing he could rewind his life to a time before he had seen it. He walked to the opposite side of the room and sat.

He said, “This doesn’t change anything. Fine, there’s a body. But that don’t make the rest of your story true.”

I sighed and said, “Arnie, come on. I know what you’re saying but, really, what did you think you were gonna find here? Talk to me, buddy.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t—it’s a hobby of mine. That’s all. The paranormal, all that.”

He stopped talking. I waited. He said, “And the thing with the shadows, I guess, kind of caught my eye. In your story. There’s a lot of that going around now, on the Net, elsewhere, stories of the shadow people. I think Dean Koontz wrote a novel about them, but you have to ask, did his book come first or did the stories come first? But all of a sudden, everyone’s talking about them. Everyone and no one. Do you know what I mean?”

Oh, I know, Arnie. Trust me, I know.

He continued, “And I would think back to what I saw, in my basement that day. The shadow. And after that, every now and then, maybe I saw them but maybe I didn’t, you know? It’s like once you see a mouse in your kitchen you start seeing it everywhere. But there’s something else, too. At certain times, mostly when I’m really sleepy—and this is gonna sound crazy as shit but considering what you’ve said I think I might as well let it out—at those times I think I see a cat. Just glimpses, out the corner of my eye. A cat slipping around a corner or running past my chair. And I think, okay, that’s Fluffy. That’s my cat, Fluffy. But I’ve never owned a cat. And then I think I can remember that maybe I did own a cat. Or maybe I didn’t. And I swear I can remember a life with it and one without it, and then I heard your story—”

“With Todd?” I said. “You heard about the thing with Todd and thought maybe it was the same thing? That maybe the shadow people took your cat?”

He shook his head, but not in disagreement. It was a gesture of resignation. He said, “I’ll never say the phrase ‘the shadow people took my cat’ out loud or agree to it when you say it out loud. I got a life to live, you know. But yeah, in my drunker moments I think that somehow I had a cat and that the cat was stolen from me, both in the present and the past. And then I heard bits of your story and I think, here’s somebody who’s been down the same road. If nothin’ else, maybe he’s got the same psychological disorder or maybe we did the same drugs in college and maybe I can get to the bottom of it. So that’s why I’m here. The short version, anyway.”

And that’s true, Arnie. I believe you. But that isn’t the whole truth, is it? Why do you keep stopping short of the whole story?

I said, “There’s more, isn’t there?”

He looked over at the open grave in the floor and said, “You say John helped you move the body?”

“Sure. I couldn’t have done it alone. It’s hard enough hauling my own fat ass around without having to double the load.”

“So after he knew about, you know. After he knew the truth, you’re saying he stuck around?”

I shrugged. “Well—”

“Because you guys killed a cop when you found out he was one of these things. Why would it be different?”

“Well, that was only after he actually turned into the monster—”

“And what about Amy? Can I talk to her?”

“Uh, no.”

“Is she still—”

alive

“—around?”

I didn’t answer. Arnie sat up straight, energized to be back in reporter mode, ready to dig again. “There’s more, isn’t there? What is it? Does it have to do with the girl? With Amy? What happened to her?”

I rubbed my eyes and said . . .

IF YOU HAD asked me then, as I sat there in the snow and biting cold of my backyard, I would have said it was the worst moment of my life. And that would have been a ridiculous thing to say, since technically my “life” had only been a couple of days long at that point.

I don’t know how long I sat there looking at my bare foot and the symbol on my toe, with Amy standing a few feet away in a horrified paralysis. I saw John sit on a tree stump and pull out his cigarette-rolling kit, watched him carefully roll one before patting around his pockets for a lighter and realizing he had left it in another universe. He threw the cigarette aside with a curse. That’s when Amy began crying, like a switch had been thrown. Softly at first, her head in her hand, her fingers clawing handfuls of copper hair. She leaned against the toolshed and then she was crying hard, a wretched, coughing sound as her body convulsed with sobs. Little kid–type crying. Jerking, unrestrained and terrible, terrible, terrible.

“Let’s, uh, all go inside . . .” John began, weakly. “Amy, come on.”

She didn’t hear him, her whole body spasming with sobs, a sound like her lungs were having a fistfight. It was truly awful. I closed my eyes and would have plugged my ears, too, but not even that would block it because the very air stank from the sheer awfulness of it all.

John looked long at Amy, then at me. Finally he nodded to himself as if coming to some conclusion and said, “Okay.” He stabbed a finger at Amy.

“Amy,” he said in a voice that was strong and abrupt. “Stand up straight.” She didn’t.

“Hey. Amy.” He strode over and grabbed the shoulder of her jacket, shaking her. “Man up. The night’s work ain’t done. You ready to man up?”

She wiped her face and looked at him.

“Okay,” John said, “you still got the gold cross? The one Dave gave you?”

She nodded. I noticed a snowflake landed on the lashes of one of her eyes.

“Okay,” John said. “Take the cross and touch Monster Dave with it. If he’s evil, he’ll explode.”

I pulled on my sock and shoe and said, almost too quiet to hear, “Leave her alone, John.”

“Human Dave wouldn’t have said that!” John shouted, loud enough for my neighbors to hear. “Now sit still while she touches you with the cross.” He turned to Amy and pulled on her arm. “Come on. Man up.”

He pulled her to her feet—roughly, I thought—and she mumbled something to him so I couldn’t hear. John answered with, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.” She pulled her arm from him and he said, “Amy, I’m not asking you. This needs to be done.”

She dug into her shirt for the cross necklace and wrapped the thin chain around her fist. She glanced doubtfully at John, who urged her on with a gesture.

Holding the cross between thumb and finger like a key, she took a few cautious steps toward me, her face showing caution bordering on naked fear. I heard myself say, “Amy . . .”

“SHUT UP!” John screamed. “Don’t listen to his lies, Amy, for that is a crafty one there.”

She drew closer, holding the cross at arm’s length. I looked down at the powdering of snow on my pants. I looked up suddenly, the cross an inch away from my face. This movement seemed to startle Amy and she lunged forward with the necklace. The cross jabbed me right in the eye.

“OH, SON OF A BITCH!” I threw myself to my feet, clasping my stinging eye. “You jabbed that thing right in my—”

“I KNEW IT!” screamed John, his face a picture of indignant monstralization. “AMY, BACK AWAY.”

John tore off his coat and flung it into the snow. Then he pulled his shirt over his head and stood there, bare-chested, snow landing on his naked shoulders like dandruff. I blinked my injured eye and was relieved to see I wasn’t blinded. I said, “John, don’t be a—”

“SHUT UP. I hope you likes Chinese, Monster Dave.” John threw up his fists. “Because today the menu is Kung Fu Chicken. And it’s ALL YOU CAN EAT, BABY.”

John flung himself into a pseudo-karate stance, one hand poised behind him and one in front, posed like a cartoon cactus. I thought for an odd moment he had moved his limbs so fast they had made that whoosh sound through the air but then I realized John was making that sound with his mouth.

“WAIT!” This was Amy. She ran over between us. “I got him in the eye with it! Don’t. John, don’t. Calm down.”

John let her stop him, of course. He reached around her and jabbed a finger at me.

“She just saved your life, my friend. I’d have been wearin’ you like a pair of pants.”

I sighed and said, “I’m going inside.”

I turned and walked toward my door. After a moment, John dropped his hands by his sides and said, “Yeah.” He picked his jacket and shirt from the snow and bundled them up in his hand. We strode in casually, like we were coming in after a tiring game of basketball. Amy stayed behind, standing there in the angry swarm of snowflakes. John turned to her, said, “Come in where it’s warm, Amy. We’ll hammer this out over a nice can of Leinenkugel’s.”

She looked at him and then at me, not quite sure what had just transpired. John went back to her and leaned down, whispering harshly but out of my hearing. Almost like he was scolding her. She said something back, casting nervous glances at me. They continued this covert argument for a few minutes, with me already inside and watching from my kitchen. I wasn’t completely sure what it was about and I still don’t know. Finally John stomped away from her, toward the house. He turned back to her one last time and said, just loud enough for me to hear, “You know fucking well what I mean. I mean you literally never knew him. When we showed up at your house that was Monster Dave and it was Monster Dave thereafter. And I’ll tell you what, whatever you think, he’s a lot nicer now than he was before. But you wouldn’t know.”

He stormed away from her, looking pissed, and brushed past me as he entered the kitchen. I said to his back, “John, we gotta move that body.”

“It can wait. You’ll still be dead tomorrow.”

I took one last look at Amy outside, snow gathering on her like a lawn ornament. I said, “You coming?”

She made no move and I waited at the door for a bit before finally turning and heading inside. I went to the living room and sat in my leather recliner. I stared into the cold, dead fireplace on the far wall. It was one of those gas fireplaces that would burn real logs so that it looked authentic, a modern heating source dressed up to look like an old-fashioned one. It was an idea I had always found ridiculous, wondering if in the future they wouldn’t have some kind of laser fireplace dressed up to look like a mere gas fireplace, with fake gas lines running from it.

I heard the kitchen door click open and I knew Amy had decided to come in. That shouldn’t have surprised me. Where else could she have gone? I thought for a moment and glanced at the notepad next to my phone, the one I used to leave myself messages (“GET MILK” it said in my hurried scrawl); I wondered if I drew up a quick Last Will and Testament would it be legally binding. John is a notary. I could write it up in a few sentences, leaving the house to Amy so she would have somewhere to live, sign it and then shoot myself in the temple. But then I felt my pockets and once more remembered I had lost the Smith hours ago. I ditched the plan for the time being.

John popped out of the bathroom, fully clothed now, and turned to intercept Amy in the kitchen. They talked some more in those same low, rough tones before both of them entered the living room. Amy sat stiffly on the couch, her arms wrapped around her midsection as I had seen her do so often before. It suddenly occurred to me that when she sat that way the stump of her left wrist was hidden behind her right upper arm. To a passerby, it wouldn’t immediately be apparent she was missing a hand so there would be no reason to do the double take that Amy had grown to dread. Seeing her like that, they’d just think she was cold. John took a spot on the floor between us, sitting cross-legged. “Okay,” he said, as if he were the moderator of this panel. “How much do you remember, Monster Dave? What memories did they give you?”

I shrugged and said, “Everything, I guess. There’s that missing bit from when I first showed up here—”

“When you came here and shot the real Dave?”

“Yeah. It happened out in the yard, I guess. There were tracks all over. But otherwise it’s the same as before. Or, you know. As far as I know.”

“But you don’t know anything of the real stuff? Like where you came from or why you’re here?”

I said, “Did you remember those things at the time of your birth?”

“But you remember your—I mean Dave’s—childhood and all that. School and your parents and friends?”

I waved a dismissive hand. “Yeah, yeah. You and I met in computer class. Mr. Gertz. You did the ASCII vagina, got kicked out, and so on.”

“And you know you got to be at work tomorrow? And you know where?”

“Video store. Wally’s. Sucks. Coworkers are retarded. Yeah, yeah.”

“And the five hundred dollars you borrowed from me last month.”

“Fuck you.”

John nodded in satisfaction. “Okay, then. I’m goin’ home. I gotta sleep in my own bed tonight because I got work tomorrow. And if I don’t leave right now, I’m gonna get snowed in here. Amy is going to stay here tonight.”

He raised a hand to silence my objection.

“I don’t wanna hear it,” he said. “She’s gonna stay here and watch you. Now we don’t know what exactly you morph into, but if it’s like those things we saw before, we know one weakness is fire. Amy, if you see Dave turn into any kind of monster, set him on fire. Dave, show Amy where the flammables are in this house. Get her a lighter and one of those huge cans of hairspray that old ladies use, if you have any. Got it?”

John climbed to his feet, Amy looking at him with an incredulous, squinted look, like he had broken some new bounds of human idiocy that she previously had not thought possible. John said to her, “Remember what we talked about.” And with that, he pulled open the front door and vanished into the white swirl of the storm.

On the David Wong Social Awkwardness Scale, with “1” being going to the “Pickup” instead of “Order” counter at a restaurant and “10” being a guy getting caught on national TV having sex with a dead baboon, I’d have to say that the following minutes alone with Amy rated about a 9.6. A while into this wordless meeting, ten minutes or an hour, I don’t know, the phone rang. We both jumped out of our skin. I picked up, glancing out of my window to see sheets of ice bits raining down in the night.

“Hello?”

“It’s me. I made it home. Slick as hell, did a three-sixty going around a corner at Lex and Main. Have you turned into a monster yet?”

“No, John.”

“Get this. Molly is here.”

“At your place? John, how does she even know where you live?”

“It’s even better than that. She wasn’t standing outside the building when I got here. She was in my apartment.”

“She broke in?”

“Don’t know. She’s eating a package of hot dogs right now.”

I sensed Amy walking past behind me and a moment later my bathroom door closed. I said, “You gave her the whole pack?”

“Yeah, they’re expired. She’ll stop eating when she gets full, won’t she? Hey, is your power out?”

“No, lights are still on.”

And with that, the lights went out.

“Fuck. They’re out now, John.”

“Yeah, mine were off when I got in. I thought it was the bad guys maybe, making their move. But I turned on the radio and it’s down in several parts of town. I guess they’re working on it. They got the storm on every station, talking like it’s a natural disaster. The ice is knocking down trees and power lines and they said at the state prison the snow drifted up against the fences so high that inmates were able to just walk over it. The guards couldn’t shoot ’em because they were afraid of the ACLU.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that the winter storm had been a huge event for practically every person in town except for the three of us, who had bigger fish to fry. I got off the phone with John, blinked as my eyes adjusted to the darkness and then dug around my cabinets for candles. Amy emerged from the bathroom, her purse slung over her shoulder, and she pawed around the wall to find her way. She put her glasses on, as if they would help her see in the dark. She asked, “Will your heat go off with the power out?”

“Oh, I’m sure it won’t.”

I wasn’t sure, though. Can people really just freeze to death in their homes in times like this? I hunted around for a book of matches, found none in the kitchen and tried the bathroom as the only other likely place. I pulled open the drawer on the vanity and found my matches. I opened the medicine cabinet—

Someone had been here. I normally have three prescription bottles of medication and all of it was gone. Hell, even the aspirin was gone. All of it had been here after we came home to find the house ransacked. I had checked.

I shuffled around in the drawers to see if anything else was missing and I saw my scissors were gone, too. I could have just misplaced them, though. I suddenly flashed on Amy leaving the bathroom, her purse with her, and figured out what a smarter person would have figured out the minute John told Amy to stay with me.

It turned out I was wrong about the furnace. The house started losing heat rapidly the moment the lights went down. I guess the gas stays on but the electric fans that blow the heat around don’t operate without electricity. An hour later, Amy and I were huddled in front of my fake fireplace, sitting on the floor and wrapped in blankets like Bugs Bunny Indians. I got the fireplace lit and turned up as high as it would go. There were no logs in it but they were just for visual effect anyway, the blue flames licking the air and putting out their own heat. We sat there like that, a flickering pool of amber light around us, with no sound but the hiss of the gas and the creak of the wind leaning on exterior walls. The silence was driving me nuts.

“You have my medication in your purse?” I finally asked.

She didn’t answer.

I said, “So I’m on suicide watch? Do you have my scissors, too?”

She said, “I’m sorry that I freaked out before, in the yard. That wasn’t fair. You have to accept people for what they are—”

“No, no. Amy, you were right. You were right then, when you freaked out. You’re wrong now, that you’re calmed down and telling yourself everything’s gonna be okay. It’s not.”

“You did fine today. Yesterday, too.”

“That’s not the point. Whatever happens, whenever it happens, we know one thing—that I won’t be able to control it. Amy, you have to get out of town. Away from this place.”

“We all do. Let’s all move away. Bring John if you want.”

Bring John, she says. Like he’s my pet . . .

I said, “Amy, I told you before—”

“No. We tried it your way. Let’s get far away from here and if the bad guys follow, we’ll deal with it then. But let’s at least try.”

“Okay, but it’ll take time for us, John and me. We got jobs, we got to get things in order. John’s got family here. But you, you can go now and I say we do it tomorrow. Is there anywhere you can go? You got friends far away? Anywhere? Somebody with a couch you can crash on?”

“I don’t know. I guess. I know a girl on the Internet; she lives in Utah with another girl. They’re lesbians.”

“Good. That’s good. You’ll call them or send them something on your computer and ask if you can crash there. We’ll buy a plane ticket and fly your ass to Utah.”

She said nothing. She scooted over and leaned her head on my shoulder, ribbons of firelight dancing on the lenses of her glasses. Eventually she said, “And then I’ll never, ever see you again.”

I couldn’t think of a way to answer that without telling an outright lie, so I just mumbled something that sounded reassuring. She said, “I’ll go, but I’ll call when I’m out there. And you have to take my calls. If you don’t I’ll just come right back. If I don’t get an answer from you I’ll be on a flight the next day.”

“Okay. Um, sure.”

She rearranged herself so that she was lying down, her head on my lap. Her breathing slowed and softened as she drifted off. She mumbled, “It’s, like, so cool that it’s snowing out there but not in here. It can’t snow on us. That’s so cool . . .”

She started snoring softly.

And that was that. I formulated a plan that if she got out there and away from the Hell that is this town, got a job and went to bars with her lesbian roommates, she’d settle in. Forget all about this, all about me. Out there the guys would figure out how hot she was, even without both hands, and she’d meet somebody and she’d stop calling and then all the loose ends would be tied up. I could shoot myself or take a bunch of pills and that would clean up the situation once and for all. I could do a real will, even have a lawyer draw it up, complete with a stipulation that John had to deliver my eulogy in the form of a seventeen-minute-long guitar solo, performed with a dual-necked guitar shaped like a naked woman. As for the property, I could sign it over to—

I saw a light to my left. I slowly turned my head to see that, with power still out all over the city, the television had clicked on.

Hands. That’s what I saw, a pair of hands, palms pressed against the screen. Then another pair, fingers clawing at the glass as if trying to escape. For a moment I thought it was snowing in the background but then my mind registered the worms, the white flying worms that poured through the air behind them. I thought I heard a scream, or felt it somehow, and a spray of red splattered the hands on the screen. A pair of hands fell away and just two were left, grabbing at the glass in desperation. One hand formed a fist and smashed against the glass, as if trying to break it. It pounded again and again, and I thought I could see blooms of blood opening on the knuckles. The fist reared way back this time and swung and—

Thump

—the TV shook. I almost pissed my pants. The fist pulled back, blood trickling down between the fingers now, and smashed against the screen once more. Again, the TV rattled on the shelf of my entertainment center, the whole set edging forward an inch with the impact. The fist drew back one last time—the set clicked off. Blackness.

Those transmissions, the ones from Shit Narnia, never returned. It took me four hours to fall asleep.

IT ACTUALLY WASN’T for another couple of days that we were able to get Amy on a plane. The storm broke that next day but the weather had still messed up the flight schedules. It took a day to hear back from her lesbians. They were thrilled to the point of giddiness to have her, though, and after an hour-long, giggly phone conversation they made arrangements to meet her at the airport in Salt Lake City. The two girls lived in Millcreek, which I guess was just outside of the city.

We kept busy during those two days before Amy left for presumably forever and I successfully avoided any real conversation with her. I had lots of snow to clear off the sidewalk and even made paths around the side of the house for Molly. We took Amy shopping and she bought luggage and a bunch of sweaters because we couldn’t convince her that Utah wasn’t a frozen, mountainous wasteland year-round. I went back to Wally’s and finished a long-delayed project of placing anti-theft stickers on all of our DVDs. It was the kind of tedious, dreaded task that I wouldn’t want to dump in someone else’s lap after I committed suicide.

On Wednesday Amy packed up and I drove her the three hours to Undisclosed International Airport in my Bronco. I had begged John to come along to act as a buffer against the awkwardness but he had work, his crew fixing a wall on a local diner that had collapsed under the weight of a fallen tree. Several times during the drive Amy would ask me if I was okay and I would say, “Sure!” and turn up the radio.

I almost made it. I carried her bags in and we waded through the airport bullshit that seemed to take forever. She picked up her boarding pass and we checked her bags and there the security guys made it clear that only the one with a boarding pass could go any farther. I said good-bye and wished her a pleasant flight. And that’s where Amy lost it. She threw her arms around my neck and started crying into my shirt, telling me I had saved her life and she didn’t know what she would do if something happened to me and a whole lot of other ridiculous things. Then she made me promise that I would take care of myself. I did, before I could catch it.

She stepped back and wiped her eyes and said, “You promise?”

“Yeah.”

“Remember that. Remember you promised.”

I pointed at her and said, “Hey, say what you want about me but I keep my promises.”

“And you guys will come see me out in Utah? I’m serious about this now. I’m gonna be mad if you don’t.”

“Sure, Amy. You and me can share a room, John can sleep with the lesb—”

“And you’ll look after Molly? And take care of my house?”

By “take care of” she meant “destroy.” We had talked about that, decided to burn the place down. Our only point of disagreement is I wanted to make it look like an accident to collect the insurance money. She wanted to do the opposite, let the insurance lapse and just blatantly torch the place.

We kissed and said some gooey things to each other that would sound silly if you weren’t there. I stood around and waited for her to board, passing through security and letting them check her shoes and all that shit, watched her walk away and kept watching out of a terminal window as her plane climbed and turned into a speck in the sky. I didn’t cry. And if you think I did, good luck proving it, asshole.

I started to wander back toward the exits when I noticed a little girl following me. She couldn’t have been more than five years old, chubby, blond hair down to her waist. I walked, she kept up, I stopped, she stopped. Her eyes never left mine. I finally turned and was about to ask if she was lost, when she got down on her hands and knees and then lay flat on her stomach.

Confused, I considered just walking away when she started slithering along the floor like a snake, legs clasped together and swishing back and forth behind her like a tail. She slithered across the floor like this all the way to the nearest wall, pushing her way into the men’s restroom, opening the swinging door with the crown of her head.

Of course, I followed. I stepped into the room and saw the little girl melt into a puddle of black oil. The blackness rose and took shape and I began to consider that I had made a mistake.

I started to back out of the room, realizing the two guys pissing at the urinals nearby didn’t even acknowledge any of this. Suddenly the black shape sprung at me and for a second, all I could see was darkness.

THE AIR STANK. My ankles were submerged in cold liquid that sloshed when I moved my feet. I blinked and could almost see I was in a doorless room. I reached out and touched a metal wall. I could see only by two small spots of orange light and I realized with horror that it was the shadow creature’s eyes. There was a steady rumbling sound from all around us and I had to brace myself as the floor seemed to shift and tilt under me. The black thing stood at the end of the room and stared.

“Where are we?” I asked, to see if it would respond more than anything else.

The answer did not come in the form of an audible voice, but a picture. In a blink I had a perfect, mental image of an airliner and of a spot under the passenger compartment where a large center fuel tank was housed. I was standing inside the center fuel tank of a passenger jet. The liquid at my feet was jet fuel. I also knew with some certainty that this was Amy’s plane, that I was standing just a few feet under the spot where she was sitting and likely striking up a conversation with whoever she was seated with.

Strangely, the first thought that came to me—even before “Am I really here?”—was that they had forgotten to fill up this tank. Then the answer came to me that they often leave it empty depending on the distance and load of the flight. Then I realized how creepy it was that I was having this telepathic conversation with this thing and I made an effort to close my mind to it.

The shadow thing moved. It drifted like a puff of smoke in a mild breeze, stopping near a bulky apparatus that emerged from the ceiling and dangled to the floor, probably an instrument for measuring how much fuel was left. The fumes were burning my eyes and nose and lungs. It was making me light-headed. The black thing drifted to the apparatus, swirled a black appendage over and around a conduit, a jointed line that probably housed an electrical wire. The black thing caressed the line, almost sensually. Sparks flew from the conduit.

I screamed.

I TURNED TO Arnie and said, “There was light and heat and noise. A sound like a junkyard falling down a mountain.”

I concentrated, tried to bring back the memory. That very real feeling of my flesh burning to vapor in a millisecond, my bones cooking to black charcoal. But I couldn’t, not really. The memory was hazy and unreal, like the memories of the hamster we owned when I was five, the one that escaped and then got eaten by a snapping turtle. I can’t picture it, but I know it was there. And that it wasn’t very fast.

“And then,” I said, “everything was back the way it was. I was standing there again, in the dark, shoes and socks soaked in that stinking, ice-cold liquid. To say it was a weird feeling doesn’t do it justice, because at that moment I had a distinct memory of the explosion happening and an equally clear memory of it not happening.”

This seemed to confuse Arnie, understandably enough. He said, “So, did the plane go down or not?”

“No.” I paused for a moment and said, “It didn’t. Not yet.”

This confused Arnie further, but he waited patiently for me to explain. A good reporter, down to the last.

I said, “And as I was standing there, in the stench and the darkness, a thought came into my head, perfect and clear. The voice of that thing, the shadow man. ‘This moment,’ it said, ‘is forever.’ And I understood right then that all moments are forever and that they can go back there to that spot at any time, in the wet, stinking belly of that plane. They can go back and short that wire or jam open some valve and blow Amy out of the air along with two hundred other people. But that ain’t so strange, is it? You drive to the doctor’s office to hear the results of your X-ray and you pray that it isn’t cancer. Isn’t that what you’re praying for, that God will reach back in the past? Back before the X-ray was taken, before you even saw the doctor. Months before, so He can stop that tumor from forming in the first place?”

Arnie nodded and said, “Only this was the opposite, right? A threat. They were tellin’ you they can go back and make bad things happen, take your girl out of the equation. Anytime they want. So you wake up someday and see empty bed beside you and say, ‘Gosh, it’s a pity Amy died in that plane crash all those years ago.’ And you look and see all the headlines have changed and all those lives are lost and history is tweaked. Changed to suit their needs.”

I said, “You do catch on, Arnie. It takes a little time, but you do catch on.”

“And the message,” he continued, “was that you need to back off. ’Cause why else make the threat? They were saying you need to stop interfering with whatever plans they got, because if not they’ll go back and cut Amy out of the timeline.”

I started to speak, couldn’t, then swallowed and finally said, “You see, I screwed it up. I had it just right in the beginning, I had no connections. No family, no money, no career, no nothin’. What could they do to me? What could they take from me? But all that changed with Amy. Now they’ve got me, now they’ve got a hold on me. And I see her and she’d look up at me with those green eyes and I think, hey, saving the world, that’s Hollywood bullshit. The best I can do is save this little bit of the world, this little corner that me and this girl stand in. And every time I think that, somewhere I can hear laughter. Them laughing. Like the game is over, check and mate.”

Arnie said, “And you never ate her?”

“What?”

“You never turned into a monster and ate her?”

“No. I’ve never turned into a monster at all.” I thought for a moment and said, “As far as I know.”

“But you’re going to?”

I shrugged. Arnie let out a breath, then stood up off the floor and brushed off his pants with his hands. He said, “I don’t know what this’ll mean to ya, in light of what you just said. But I think you should hear it.”

“Are you going to tell me everything this time, Arnie? The real reason you’re here? Because I’m gonna tell you now, if you do decide to write all this up as a feature article it’s gonna suck.”

“For the purposes of what I’m gonna say,” Arnie began, “we’re gonna start with the premise that the shadow people are real, okay? Not that I’m convinced, but just for the purpose of what I’m about to say.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“And that time don’t mean the same thing to them as it means to you and me. And, like you said, they can reach backward and pull you right out of the past and present and everything and nobody is the wiser.”

“Right, right.” I motioned impatiently for him to go on.

“So how far back do you think they could go? Could they go back and vanish the guy who cured polio?”

“Oh. I don’t—I don’t think so.”

“But say they worked it like links in a chain, they touch the guy who pulled Bill Gates out of a car wreck thirty years ago. Make it so that guy was never born, so he could never save Gates. Gates dies as a child and tomorrow we wake up in a world where everybody is using Macs?”

I shivered. “Oh. I don’t know, Arnie. Do you?”

“You mentioned earlier that you got a box on your TV that you play games on? The games where you wander around and shoot people?”

“Well, John’s does. He’s got six of them, if you count the ones in his closet. A PlayStation and an Xbox and whatever else they sell.”

Arnie nodded. “Those names mean nothin’ to me. Tell me, you don’t find anything weird about it? Don’t get a funny feeling when you play on those things?”

I shrugged. “I dunno. Not really.”

Arnie, said, “The first time I saw one of those game machines was a month ago. And then, everybody had one.”

He waited, but I didn’t reply.

“I got a nephew,” continued Arnie. “Eleven years old. He’s all about comics and his remote-controlled cars and Rob Schneider movies. But a few weeks ago I come home and I see him sittin’ on the couch, leaning forward like he’s entranced. I mean, I never saw concentration like that on a kid’s face. Never. And he’s got this plastic thing in his hands with buttons on it and he’s just hammering away. And I turn to the television and I almost get sick. There’s just a gun barrel on the screen, at the bottom, muzzle flash shootin’ out the end and people getting ripped to shreds. Sprays of blood everywhere. And I realize, with a feeling like I ate something rotten, that he’s controlling the gun. He’s sitting there operating a damned murder simulator and his mom comes in and tells him to say hi, that his uncle Arnie is visiting and she glances at the TV like it’s nothin’, like it’s perfectly normal for a kid to do somethin’ that used to make new recruits puke back in the war. To look at a human shape—and the people on the screen looked like they were real as you and me—to look at a human shape and pull that trigger and watch it go down and not even flinch, to not feel that instinctual twinge at causing a death . . .”

Arnie wiped sweat off his brow.

He said, “I served next to some coldhearted bastards in the war, guys who had that stare, you know, kids from the streets, kids who got beat before bed every night growin’ up. And even those guys, those hard characters, they would freeze up the first time they had to pull a trigger with a living thing at the other end.”

I said, “Well, they’re pretty violent but they’re just games—”

“Open your ears, Wong. I’m not tellin’ you these games have been around and I’m such an old geezer that I never noticed them. These games, the devices that play them, they didn’t exist before last month. And now they’re everywhere, on every TV set and, hey, ask around and people say they’ve been common for years and years. I’m a journalist, I travel, I got kids in the family, I know the world. And they didn’t sell these game boxes before, I know they didn’t because it’s insane that they do at all. But I start seeing the shadows move and I get up one day and suddenly every kid is glued to a box that’s training him. Tell me it ain’t. Millions of them, all over the country, all over the world, millions of kids spending hours and hours getting quicker and quicker on the trigger, getting truer and truer aim and colder and colder inside. That’s training. That’s conditioning if I ever saw it. And in your world, in this world, this version of reality that played out, nobody finds this strange? Really?”

“Well . . .”

There was nothing to say. The thought that the bad guys had that kind of power just sank me, left me numb. The bad thing was I couldn’t even write off Arnie as crazy, since he had already wasted most of his day on me and that really wouldn’t be fair.

“And the thing is,” said Arnie, “as time goes on I can feel it fading. Like a dream. I get used to the idea, I think, ‘Yeah, sure, they’ve always been there, these games. It’s me, it’s the stress, it’s age, it’s the drugs I did back in the day comin’ back.’ But then I flip around on the news and I see other little differences, things I know ain’t right. Like the pope. Pope John Paul the second, still out there popin’ and lookin’ one hundred years old. I remember that guy getting shot and killed, way back in the early nineties. He got replaced by a guy named Pope Leo the something. And I squint and I can almost picture that other pope’s face. A black guy. Younger, in his fifties. But no. No, he’s nowhere to be found now and here’s yet another little thing that’s been tweaked. And it’s impossible and it’s so big, the idea of it, that thinkin’ about it makes me feel like a worm stuck in the treads of a tire on an eighteen-wheeler. You know what I’m saying?”

I nodded, slowly. “Yes. Yes, Arnie, I do.”

“So what do we do? If this is really what’s goin’ on, what do we do?”

“I’m going to suggest ‘nothing.’ ”

He turned to me. “Because you’re afraid they’ll take Amy. Look, if we entertain the idea that these things are real and that this thing, this ‘Korrok’ is really tampering with the world, and I assume it’s not for the purpose of making it better, then surely there’s something we can—”

“Oh, there is, Arnie. I know there is. It’s called being willing to sacrifice everyone around me for the cause. And why not? All of the great men do it. The pyramids were built with tens of thousands of nobodies who were worked to death so that the big thing could be achieved. That’s the name of the game, that’s how you defeat the bad guys. Just be willing to spend your friends like pennies, that’s all. You asked me earlier if I was a sociopath. Well, you’d better hope I am because the world was built by sociopaths, men willing to send a million innocent boys into battle to be chopped to screaming giblets, all so a banner can be raised over another piece of land with houses and markets and roads soon after.”

I was talking faster and faster. I bit back my next sentence, made myself calm down. Got to focus. Freaking ADD.

I said, “That psychologist back in school, she gave me the PCL-R, that’s a test where they rate you from zero to forty based on personality traits of sociopaths. Glibness, inflated ego, violence, juvenile delinquency, all that serial killer shit. Anything above a score of thirty gets you a diagnosis of sociopathy. I got a twenty-nine. And the irony is that I had to steal the file from the cabinet to find out that score. Do you think that’s worth the extra point?”

He shook his head slowly. “I’m not following you.”

“Which would prove I’m a monster, Arnie? Sacrificing the people I love for the fight? Or walking away from the fight to save the people I love?”

Arnie didn’t want to get sucked into a debate on that subject and instead said, “Just hear me out. Say we just go public with it, with your story. My story, too.”

“Why, Arnie? What good is that gonna do?”

“You get other people to come forward, other people like us who sense what’s goin’ on. Strength in numbers. Hell, people believe in angels and UFOs and every other thing. They’ll listen. The bad guys can’t make us all disappear, can they? They got to have limits to what they can do. They got to.”

“Why?”

Arnie again threw out his hands, like an NBA player acting baffled by a referee’s call.

“This is all I got, Wong. I have no faith to speak of and no skill but what you see. The truth, the power of knowledge in the hands of the people, all that journalism school song and dance, that’s what I believe in. It’s all I believe in. I got nothin’ else. I got nothin’ else to fight with. But I know this, too. You took my calls for a reason. So that makes me think you had the same idea.”

I said, “It was Amy’s idea. Meeting you.”

Arnie asked, “She’s still in Utah?”

“Who?”

“Amy.”

“Just checking. Yeah, she’s still there with the lesbians. There’s been some incidents since she left. A big monstrous guy came after me and I killed him. Twice. Had to cut off his head. I found a big slug thing in my kitchen. We fought a monster made of meat. They take their shots. I didn’t want Amy to be a part of that, I wanted something better for her. I tried to sort of cut her off, get her to start a new life. Her own life. But she calls me. All the time. Ever since she left, she calls and calls. I wound up with a four-hundred-dollar phone bill one month. I told her about you wantin’ to meet me and she told me I should do it, that she had a feeling.”

“See? She knows. She knows, and you know, that we got to shine light on these cockroaches. The shadows hate the light, let’s shine my light on these bastards. Let people know what’s happening to their world.”

I said, “Just telling our stories, that won’t do shit. Testimony of two nutjobs, that’ll just get us lumped in with the Roswell guys, a minority of nerds pleading a ridiculous case, supported by e-mails from equally crazy and lonely people.”

“Then what do you want to—”

“We show them this.”

I pulled the silver canister from my pocket.

“This is real, Arnie. A physical piece of evidence. That’s what Amy thought, that if you could get this in the hands of somebody, a lab or something. I don’t know. And there’s gotta be more soy sauce out there. We already got two canisters. Or maybe it’ll come back in this bottle, the way it did before. Maybe the bottle manufactures it. But you got to know people, at a university, somebody with an electron microscope. Because I’m thinkin’ that whoever takes the first close look at the soy sauce is gonna have a brown stain down the bottom of his lab coat a second later.” I thought for a moment and said, “Just make sure they keep it cold.”

Arnie nodded. “Yeah. Yeah. Make that the story. Hell, let ’em see the effects themselves, feed the shit to a lab rat and watch the fun begin, see the thing start levitating and speaking French.”

And just like that, I felt an intoxicating rush of hope. I tried to crush it, to push it down, to expose it to reality and kill it off. But I couldn’t. It was a sunrise, a kid’s sight of snowfall on a school morning. Hope. That all this can turn out okay, that somehow a tide this big and black can be turned back. Hope like a wildfire, thoughts of presents under a Christmas tree and a smell of cookies coming from a kitchen and a certain look in a girl’s eyes that lights you up inside. That beautiful border between nightmare and morning when you realize that all of the monsters menacing you have evaporated like smoke, leaving behind only the warm blankets and the pale sunlight of a Saturday dawn.

Amy Sullivan. Her name is Amy Sullivan. Her plane landed in Salt Lake City and she called me just two days ago and we talked for four hours and she had bought a new album and made me listen to the whole thing over the phone. Amy Sullivan. She’s still there. Amy—

I said, “And you’re willing to risk everything? Your life, your family? I mean, best-case scenario, your career as a journalist is gonna be over because from now on this is all you’re gonna be known for. And don’t forget that there may be people, real people, who don’t want this out. The people who ransacked my apartment, the people from the factory or the CIA or NSA or Men in Black, whoever it was—they don’t want this stuff known. Are you ready for all that, Arnie?”

“Shit. I been around, Wong. My first year out of journalism school I got knocked cold at a segregation protest. That was 1964. I wake up with my camera busted on the pavement and blood runnin’ down my shirt. This fat guy steps over me and says, ‘Stay down, nigger.’ I think back then I knew what I was doin’ this job for. But in the years since—”

Arnie saw the look on my face and stopped talking.

“What?”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t answer.

“What? Wong?”

“They—they called you ‘nigger’? Even though you’re white?”

“Is that some kind of joke? What are you . . . hey! What are you laughing at?”

I couldn’t answer. This time it was because laughter was choking off my air. Arnie was infuriated.

“What? Asshole, answer me!”

I couldn’t. It was the kind of laughter that’s so hard it doesn’t make sound, a spasm in the lungs. And the brain. I was bent with it. Arnie stomped over and grabbed my shirt, pushing me against the wall.

“What?”

I choked out, “Describe yourself to me, Arnie. Physically, tell me what you look like.”

Arnie stepped back. Horror blew all expression off his face. He knew exactly what I was asking.

He muttered, “No, no . . . You’re fucking with me.”

“Come on, Arnie. I got places to be.”

“No . . .”

“Because to me you’re not black, Arnie. To me you’re a chubby white guy with a gray mustache. A big, fat necktie tied in a huge Windsor knot.”

Arnie’s eyes went wide, then narrowed in disgust. He threw me against the wall one last time, then backed away.

“My first thought when I saw you, Arnie, was that you looked just like I imagined you. I actually said that to myself. I should have known. And now I’ve wasted my whole day.”

He sprayed something nasty under his breath, turned on his heels and stormed from the room. I sat there, seizures of suppressed laughter trembling through my gut. Gotta cut that out. Inappropriate laughter is the universal first sign of madness. I took a series of long breaths. My whole afternoon. Wasted. Slowly the ridiculousness of the situation suddenly stopped being funny and started pissing me off. If Arnie left in his car, I didn’t have a ride back. I climbed to my feet and followed the echoes of his footsteps through the mall.

I caught up to Arnie in the dark of the parking lot. He had his keys in his hand and was walking toward the rental car, then stopped. He was staring at the car, at a spot toward the rear. The trunk.

I walked up slowly, not sure what he would do next. You never know how people will react in this situation. The way he was looking at the trunk, he knew something. What would he do when he figured out the truth? What would you do in his shoes?

I stepped up, about ten feet behind him. I said, “You think there’s somethin’ in there, Arnie?”

He didn’t answer. He was studying his car keys.

“Come on Arnie. Open it. The sooner you do, the sooner we can move on.”

With shaking fingers, Arnie twisted the keys in the lock. He lifted the trunk lid, stared wordlessly at what was below him for probably a full minute. His keys fell from his hand and hit the gravel with a chink and for a moment, I was sure Arnie would faint. Was that even possible for somebody who was already dead? An interesting question.

I strode up behind Arnie. In the trunk was a thin, black man, probably in his early sixties. A graying afro that grew in a pattern-baldness horseshoe around a head that was splattered with blood.

The head was not attached to the body. It had been neatly sliced off, a job so quick and efficient that the bloodstained bow tie around the severed neck was still tied and straight. The man in the trunk could not have looked more different than the Arnie Blondestone I had known. But he was undoubtedly the real one.

I said, “I’m sorry, Arnie. I really am. I think I’m one of the few people in the world who can truly sympathize with you.”

Arnie wheeled on me like I was the Devil. He pointed a finger gun at me and said, “You did this! You killed me, you son of a bitch!”

“Look at your body, Arnie. The one in the trunk, I mean. Look at the dried blood. You’ve been dead for days. No, I think somebody got wind that you had contacted me and so they took you out. I’m really sorry about that. It’s sorta my fault, I guess.”

“I’m not a fuckin’ ghost! This is bullshit! Bullshit! I drove you all around town! I can touch you!”

He reached out and grabbed my shirt to demonstrate. “What kind of trick are you playing, asshole? Is this some game you play, the way you made me see that thing in your truck? Did you drug me?”

I reached up and easily pulled Arnie’s hand off my shirt. I then reached out, put my hands under his armpits and lifted him into the air. He was about as heavy as a department store mannequin. I doubt you’ve ever lifted one of those but you can probably guess that they’re not very heavy.

Arnie’s eyes grew wide once again and I set him gently back down.

I said, “You’re an astral body. Do you know what that means, Arnie?”

Arnie didn’t hear. He clutched at his chest, looking at the world around him as if suddenly every stone and blade of grass held some new terror behind it. I said, “It’s a stage of manifestation between the physical and spiritual. A body that’s half there.”

Arnie ran. He sprinted to the driver’s side of the sedan and yanked open the door. He threw himself into the seat and went to get his car keys, realized he didn’t have them. He put his hands on his face and leaned over the steering wheel, eyes closed.

I walked up to his door and said through the window, “This is my fault, Arnie. Not just you gettin’ killed, but this, this half life you’ve got. I did this, I projected you. It’s the soy sauce, it’s one thing it lets me do. I’m thinkin’ you got killed right after we talked on the phone. You know how you talk to somebody and you imagine what they look like based on their voice? Well, when you got killed you immediately assumed the shape of—”

“This can’t be. It can’t. I don’t accept that. I—I got grandkids. I got a vacation comin’ this June, I’m goin’ to Atlantic City. I got tickets.”

“Yeah, you’re in the denial stage right now, Arnie. This is all normal. I gotta go, okay? I have to go call Amy and tell her she owes me five bucks.”

“Shut the fuck up, Wong. Right now. I refuse to believe that I’m only here because I popped outta your imagina—”

Arnie vanished. I said to the empty car, “I’m sorry, Arnie. I really am.”

I went around to the trunk of the car and almost closed it, but thought that maybe I shouldn’t have my fingerprints on a trunk containing a corpse. This also eliminated the idea of driving the car back to the restaurant. I looked up into the starless, overcast sky and hoped the rain would hold off until I got back to my truck.

I WALKED INTO the night. I passed a weedy vacant lot, a Burger King, a church operating out of a building that used to be a bowling alley. I passed a rail-thin guy who looked homeless, and did a double take because he was wearing a stained white T-shirt that seemed to have my name on it. It had a yellow caricature of a bucktoothed Asian man that said MR. WONG under it. I thought I had seen that character before somewhere, and dismissed it.

Half a block later I saw two kids who looked maybe thirteen, smoking cigarettes and looking at me suspiciously. The kid on the left had a black concert shirt with a picture of some glam-rock band on it. Below that it said, THE DARKNESS. The other kid had on a flannel shirt, unbuttoned. Most of the T-shirt underneath was obscured, but between the flannel the words, IS HUNGRY peeked out.

I thought I could see a sentence forming there, which wouldn’t be all that strange in the context of my life. I passed an old lady coming out of a storefront craft store; her blouse didn’t say anything. I saw a busty girl with an olive T-shirt that said STAY OUT OF IRAQ and I thought that might apply.

I stepped onto the blacktop of the They China Food! parking lot and saw a white T-shirt approach. I squinted and saw it said in bold, black letters, ” “BALLS: IT’S WHAT’S FOR DINNER. I looked up and saw it was John wearing the shirt.

“Where’d you go?” he asked. “I saw your Bronco but the lady at the counter was closing up. Said you left a long time ago. Did you meet the guy?”

I asked, “Did the waitress remember me being with a guy?”

“She said she couldn’t remember. The question seemed to confuse her a little. Did he show? I came so he could get my picture.”

I waved my hand dismissively toward the horizon. “Eh, it didn’t work out. Turned out he was dead the whole time. He didn’t even know it. He was a semi-solid astral body.”

“I hate it when they do that.”

“Yeah, I had to break the news to him. He was drivin’ around a rental car with his own corpse in the trunk. I’m lookin’ at this old white guy who looks like a door-to-door salesman, and that’s not even what he really looked like at all.”

“Well he’s black, right? Dave, his picture was at the top of all those articles I printed out for you. Got the bow tie? Kind of bald? Didn’t you read any of them?”

“I don’t know. I got busy.”

“So I guess he’s not gonna do the article?”

I gave John a scowl that told him I wasn’t going to dignify that question. I said, “I gotta go back out to the mall. I left that floorboard pulled up. I was showin’ Arnie the body.”

“I’ll put it down. I was gonna go out there anyway.”

“You go out there by yourself? Why?”

He shrugged. “Hey, Amy called, lookin’ for you.”

“Big surprise there.”

“She said call her cell phone as soon as you get in. Hey, didn’t you bet her five bucks the thing with the reporter would turn out to be a clusterfuck?”

I WALKED IN my front door and threw the silver canister on the end table with my car keys and spare change. I found my TV remote between sofa cushions and clicked on the TV. It was some show about a family that builds custom motorcycles while they scream at each other. About a half hour later the phone rang. I glanced at the caller ID, picked up and said, “You owe me five bucks.”

Amy said, “Hi! It’s me! What did you say?”

“Nothing. I don’t think that thing with the reporter is gonna happen.”

“Can you hear me? Go to your door.”

“What did you say? Amy? Hello?”

Somebody could get rich by inventing just one cell phone that actually works.

“Go to your door.”

This all seemed very strange. I tensed up, went to my front door and peered out of the little window at the top. Nothing. Cautiously I opened the door and stepped onto the porch. I turned to my right and saw Amy sitting in one of my plastic chairs, her cell phone in her hand. She was wearing a white-and-yellow sundress and sandals. Her hair was longer than I had last seen it, actually touching her shoulders a little now. That was about as long as it would grow. In a timid voice she said, “Surprise!”

“Are you—are you really here?”

“Yep! I flew in this afternoon. For your birthday. John knew all about it, blame him. He didn’t really go to work today so he could pick me up instead. He wanted it to be a surprise.”

I was surprised, if for no reason other than the sudden realization that my birthday was just two days away.

“So you’re here? Now?”

“Yep! Hey, check this out. This is awesome.”

Amy leapt to her feet, raised one leg and planted her foot on the railing of the porch. This caused her dress to fall back on her thigh and my heart skipped a beat, like I had never seen that particular naked patch of skin on a woman before. Amy was pointing out something on her ankle and she was putting her leg back down before I took my eyes off her thigh long enough to notice it. She had gotten a small tattoo on her ankle, of a Chinese character.

“It’s, uh, nice,” I said. “What does it mean?”

“Ankle.”

She laughed, then closed the distance between us and clamped a hug around me that knocked the wind out of my lungs. She said, “Do you like it? I told Crystal you wouldn’t like it.”

“What difference does that make? If you like it, then that’s that. If I don’t like it I can screw myself.”

“So you’re saying you don’t like it.”

“It’s fine, Amy. You, uh, just got the one, right?”

She pulled away from me and gave me the most sly and devious expression her face could manage.

“Maybe. You won’t know unless you check me.”

I laughed. She giggled. We both fell silent. We left a trail of clothing from the front door to the sofa.

A CERTAIN AMOUNT of time later, Amy and I lay on the couch under an American flag afghan that John had bought me from a garage sale years ago. The TV was still on, we were both watching it absently. I asked, “So, how long are you in town?”

Amy didn’t answer at first, then said, “These guys get all worked up about building these motorcycles, don’t they?”

“You’re still working at that craft shop, right? When do you have to be back at work?”

She shrugged.

“Amy?”

“I quit.”

“Oh. So when are you going back?”

“I wanted to talk to you about that.”

“Amy, no. No. You can’t stay here.”

“Why? You have another girlfriend?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“I can’t go back there, David. It’s awful. Crystal and Tonya, they’re always, like, having naked pillow fights and stuff. I can’t be around that.”

“Really?”

“No. They told me to tell you that.” She laughed.

“Amy, don’t make me go through all that again, explaining why it’s not safe. I shouldn’t have to.”

She twisted around to face me.

“No, see, I worked it all out. I think that right there, that’s proof you’re not, like, evil or whatever. You’re looking out for my safety even though you’re lonely and depressed every minute I’m away. If you were truly bad you’d only care about yourself. You’d tell me you wanted me to stay around, knowing it was dangerous for me but doing it anyway.”

I thought about this for a moment, then said, “You’re wrong.”

“How?”

“I do want you to stay.”

“Good,” she said brightly. “I will then.”

She kissed me on the cheek and rolled over again. I tried to figure out exactly at what point I had lost control of the discussion. She said, “Now, I really don’t have a place to stay here in town . . .”

“Well . . .”

“But John said I could stay with him until I found something.”

“Over his dead body.”

She laughed, said, “He told me to tell you that. He also wanted me to tell you he has a king-sized bed so there’s plenty of room for me. And that he sleeps naked.”

“You can stay here. For now. But Amy, you’re not living with me. You understand me? I mean, you’ll be living here, but not ‘they’ll be getting married next’ living here. It’ll be ‘she doesn’t have a place to stay’ living here. Okay?”

“Sure. Everything’s worked out then. You know, it’s good to be back. One thing I can say about [Undisclosed], you know it’s gonna be more interesting than Utah.”

NOTHING INTERESTING HAPPENED for the next four months.

ON A BLISTERING late-August day, John and I hauled Amy and about a dozen cardboard boxes of her possessions down an exit ramp, my Bronco passing a green HOME OF [OMITTED] UNIVERSITY sign.

The school was a little more than two hours from Undisclosed, which I had figured was a safe distance should a pit open under the town and swallow it into Hell once and for all, and yet close enough that Amy would agree to go. It had taken about twelve arguments and one crying fit to come to that compromise. In the end I convinced her that she would have to get some kind of education and actually continue her life at some point. See the world, broaden her horizons. Get off my couch and stop typing on that damned laptop. She was a sheltered kid. She had a shitty time in high school and had barely been outside city limits since. You don’t realize how terrifying the world can be for someone like that, someone who would rather stay in a familiar hole than an unfamiliar mansion.

Which is why you haven’t exactly jumped at the chance to move away, either . . .

But we finally looked into the college thing, did the research and found that her SAT scores were actually good enough to get her a partial scholarship. That and some future-crippling student loans were all it took to get her in the door. There was lots of paperwork and Amy turned into a nervous wreck for the last three weeks before move-in day at the dorms. But here we were.

And that, I thought, will be that. The Utah thing was poorly thought out but now she’ll have classes and meet fascinating people and she’ll love it. She’ll call every day, then every week. And then she’ll mention a guy. A friend, she’ll say. And then she’ll call once a month, only visit twice a semester and then you’ll get the call and she’ll say she’s sorry, she’s met someone, he’s an English major and plays lacrosse or some shit. And she will have grown up. She’ll get some job right out of school in some other city and she’ll never, ever come back here.

And that’s how it should be. She’ll be out of my orbit, out of my sphere of concern, a poor target for anyone or anything that wants to get to me. She’ll be safe. This time.

When a man plans, a woman laughs.

We unloaded boxes and waded through the lobby of the dorms. We wound up waiting in line for elevators along with crowds of skinny girls and well-dressed parents, chubby boys that looked far too young for college and a surprising number of Asian kids. Some guy came along and was handing out packets of forms, dorm rules and shit, and struck up a conversation with Amy. She got along so easily with people, so laid back. She had a light jacket draped over her arm on this ninety-four-degree day. It concealed her missing hand perfectly. They talked and she giggled and he moved on, handing out his packets.

I said, “That guy seemed nice.”

She said, “Uh-huh.”

“Did you get his name?”

“James or Jack or something.”

I said, “Well-dressed guy. Probably gonna be a doctor or something.”

John looked at me, then at Amy then at me again. He said, “He, uh, had a nice ass, too.”

Amy turned, rolled her eyes and we piled into the elevator. We rode up and moved her stuff to her tiny dorm room. And so, for the second time, I said good-bye to Amy and for the second time was sure it was going to be forever. We hugged and I wished her good fortune about a dozen times. Finally I broke off and headed for the hall, sure that I had succeeded, thinking that if you love someone you do have to set them free and that I had done just that, for the good of all. And juuuuust as I was almost out of grabbing range Amy snagged the back of my shirt with a fist and turned me around. She said, “Uh, thank you for helping me move.”

“You said that already. No problem.” She looked like she had something else to say. Quite a bit else, in fact.

John said, “Yeah, it’s not a big deal for me to lift heavy objects. I’m sort of used to it, if you know what I mean.”

I held up a hand to silence him. “John—”

“Of course I’m talking about my penis.”

I said to Amy, “Ignore him. His penis is just like everybody else’s.”

Amy said, “I was just gonna ask you if—”

“You’ve never seen my penis!” bellowed John. “I’d show it right now, to everybody here. If we had time.”

I turned on him. “If we had time? What?”

“Because, well, if you want to look at my penis, you’d better have a whole afternoon, buddy! You best have five or six hours to take it all in, lest its majesty escape you!”

Before I could stop her, Amy said, “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It would make sense if you could see it!” shouted John, plainly agitated. “It would be making loooooong sense, honey!”

“John, just calm down, okay.” I gestured down the hall. “Go wait by the elevator.”

He didn’t move. From behind me, I heard Amy say, “Do you want to get engaged?”

And there it was. I had a sinking feeling, visualized a moth flapping toward a blowtorch. I tried to think of the best, most soothing way to turn her down and said, “Sure.”

John looked at his watch. “Well, congratulations. Now we gotta roll. If we leave now there’ll still be enough light to get in some basketball.”

THE DAY WAS so hot it stank. Asphalt baked under our shoes, bodies rustled against one another dancing to the irregular PAP PAP PAP beat of a basketball smacking the pavement. I backed toward the hoop, about where the free-throw line would be if we had played on an actual court rather than this giant cracked piece of playground sandpaper. I spun, jumped, threw up a shot that was doomed the moment it left my fingers.

John snatched the rebound, spun, jumped, slammed. He pumped his fist in victory. “Ring it up! Two hundred seventy-four to one thirty-seven!” In John’s game, each shot is worth one hundred and thirty-seven points. “If I had a dime for every basket I made today, you’d still suck!”

I tracked down the loose ball and handed it to John. In this game, like life, scoring means you get to keep the ball. He dribbled twice, glanced up over my shoulder, and froze. I saw the expression on his face and turned. John squinted and asked, “Was that there before?”

It was a black sphere, floating just over the weeds at courtside. It was gleaming and about three feet wide, looking like a giant hovering eight ball. John strode over to it and I heard him say, “You can sort of see into it. I think I see people.”

He bent over and picked up a broken chunk of concrete. He lobbed it at the sphere, which swallowed it noiselessly. John looked over his shoulder at me and said, “Hole to another dimension, I bet. Wanna go through?”

“After this point.”

John got the ball and dribbled behind the cracks and bundles of weeds we called the three-point line. I knew from the look in his eyes that he was going to take the shot. As soon as the ball left his hands I was bounding toward the rim, that subconscious gauge in the back of my mind already telling me it was a miss off the backboard. It clanged, I leapt. I scooped the rebound from the air one-handed and before John could recover into defense I turned and hooked a shot that ripped prettily through the net.

“Like a drop in the bucket, baby,” I said. “Splash!”

“Damn.” John said, hands on his hips, chest heaving. “Your game be chubby today.” He said this in such a way so that “chubby” rhymed with “today.”

“Tied at two seventy-four, Monster Dave.”

He retrieved the ball from the grass, then heaved a chest pass at me that missed badly. I turned to watch the ball go and, sure enough, saw it hit the black sphere and disappear just like the piece of concrete had.

“Whoops,” said John. “I tossed our ball into another universe.”

“You wanna go home?”

“Yeah, just let me get my ball.”

He walked over to the sphere and peered into it. He lifted a leg and stuck it through, then ducked in and soon it was just his left leg sticking out of this floating ball. He pulled it through and he was gone. I sighed, looked at my watch and wandered toward the spherical portal. I knew he wasn’t coming back until I at least poked my head through, so I bent over and pushed my way in.

The air on the other side was at least thirty degrees cooler. I stepped out, realizing as I did that I was emerging from a white sphere on this side, brilliant as sunlit snow. I stepped out onto a basketball court that itself was not terribly different than the one we had left. But the world was changed nonetheless. The sun was gone. The overcast sky was an unnatural ceiling of tar-flavored cotton candy and the air had a vague farty smell.

I scanned the landscape and saw other small differences. The park in Undisclosed had been in a polished neighborhood, Victorian houses and carpet lawns. Here the houses looked empty and forgotten, windows smashed, weeds overgrowing, rusting mailboxes. The yellowing white house nearest to us had a single nonsense word spray-painted across the front:

BLOODWORMS.

A dry wind blew, bringing with it that vague sulfur stench once again. I saw John standing nearby, looking up at the rim of one of the half dozen goals that bordered the court.

He said, “Where you been? I’ve been walking around for two hours.”

“Time must move differently here. I came right after you.”

“That’s always your excuse.”

I said, “At least it’s cooler here.”

“No nets here, though.” He was right, the naked rims stood silently over us like very tall, thin and largely ineffective sentries. He said, “This one’s regulation but a couple of those other goals are bent on the rims. Must be a lot of dunking in this world.”

There was a tinkling sound from behind us. Glass breaking. We both turned. A bone-thin woman dressed in rags stumbled toward us. She had feebly hurled a glass jar at us that crashed twenty feet short on the pavement. Her eyes were swollen in amazement, a bony finger aimed right at us.

“Y-y-y-you!!” she screeched. “Unstained! Unstained! How!?!?” Her left arm was missing, ending just above her elbow in a jagged stump, as if it had simply rotted off. Her screaming was suddenly cut short when four beings I can only describe as some kind of flying baboons descended on her, beating her savagely with clubs. They hauled her unconscious body into the sky. We watched them fly away, saw they weren’t coming back for us. We exchanged a look, then shot free throws to see who would start with the ball.

John won. We played for a bit but the game wasn’t that much fun. It was the wind. That steady, rotten wind that blew constantly from the south and brought with it faint sounds of screaming and an insectile shrieking noise; it drove every outside shot off the mark by a couple of inches. Soon we both abandoned three-point shots, which brought the game under the hoop. That was John’s domain. His three-inch height advantage gave him a series of rebounds and easy layups, quickly giving him a 548-point lead. Sweat stung my eyes as I drove under the hoop once more, trying a little running hook under the baseline. John’s hands were quick, swatting the shot away. The ball went bouncing off the court.

“Hey!” John shouted after it. “Toss it back!”

I turned to see who he was shouting at. There, by the ball, was hovering what looked vaguely like one of those wet/dry Shopvacs they sell at Sears. It made no sound. I could only presume it was some kind of droid common to this world, though it lacked any kind of eyes or robotic facial features we add to our movie robots to give them personality. What it did have was a bristling array of probes in front of it that were aimed at the two of us, sensors of some kind.

I said, “That thing doesn’t have any kind of ball-handling appendages. You’re going to have to go after it.”

John turned on me, indignant. “I got it last time.”

After five solid minutes of debate we decided to go get it together. At the ball site we noticed the droid was still there, taking its silent measurements or whatever. To our surprise, it spoke.

“Identification please.”

John smiled. “Assey Cocklord.”

It turned to me, repeated the question.

“Felipe Enormowang.”

“Identification not on database. Please state your habitation sector.”

John: “Your Ass.”

Me: “The suburbs west of Your Ass.”

“Sector not on database. Please report to your nearest quarantine facility. Failure to report within thirty minutes will result in—”

We walked away and left the thing chattering back there. It was my ball and I managed to score two quick baskets to get myself back into the game.

Suddenly, from the sky rose a wobbly, mechanical thumping sound, like a car running on a flat tire. I looked up at it and John took the opportunity to steal the ball from my sweat-coated hands. He stepped and hopped and again utilized his genetic ability to dunk a basketball.

“Booyah!” he said, arms in the air. “Dunk off a steal! I done dominated you in two universes, bitch!”

I was sick of basketball. My game had gone as sour as the ominous wind that blew and I longed for the courts of my own universe. Also, that distracting pulsing sound grew louder. I grabbed the ball and sat down on it, using it as a stool.

John said, “Come on. Let’s get in another game before we have to go back to Hot World. I bet it’s not even seventy out here.”

“Nah,” I said. I noticed an old, time-browned newspaper on the ground, headline in three-inch-tall letters: “PHENOMENON CONTINUES AROUND SOUTH POLE, PRESIDENT URGES CALM.”

That thrumming, pulsing sound grew louder. Suddenly there was a sharp CRACK and we both spun around. Where the Shopvac droid had been there was now only a charred spot on the ground and bits of twisted debris.

Above and behind it were five human figures flying slowly toward us on little booths that looked like lecterns. They descended, landing in front of us, undulating clouds of bright blue plasma cushioning the machines as they touched down. All five were adult males, clean, wearing sleek black uniforms that looked military. It occurred to me that they had probably been nearby for some time now but had been hidden by some kind of futurey cloaking device like those ships on Star Trek.

They stepped off their flying machines and approached us. One guy took the lead, a handsome officer in his thirties, a neatly trimmed beard.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “I am Sergeant Vance McElroy of the Human Liberation Army. Your appearance here must be quite a surprise to you, but not to us. Prophecy has foretold the coming of strangers from another world since the day of the Great Corruption. It is an honor to meet you. I confess that I do not know from where you came, but I can tell by looking at you that you have not been infected with the . . .”

He talked for what seemed like forever. The wind kicked up again and I wondered if there were any indoor courts here. I couldn’t find a pause long enough to ask the guy. I looked over and saw John giving the man a series of his fake “I’m listening thoughtfully” nods.

“. . . and if you cannot defeat him then all hope for mankind is lost. Gentlemen, the winds of destiny have blown us together. A bright dawn is about to grace this lost and broken world.”

We hung in awkward silence for a moment, but then I had an idea. “Question,” I said. “That flying Shopvac earlier mentioned a quarantine. I presume they used old public buildings for this, such as hospitals and schools, right? So my question is, do any of these converted quarantines still have their gymnasiums intact? Or at least the part that had the basketball goals?”

“No, I’m afraid all of the educational institutions were razed with the first siege, right before the mass book burnings. Human ignorance has been their greatest weapon. But that is not the worst the dark ones have done. Often the . . .”

He droned on and on, and I instantly regretted asking the question. I looked at my watch, saw that it displayed 66:69 as the time. I began to accumulate a list of all of the ways this universe sucked.

“. . . therefore, only with your unique otherworldly genetic makeup can you resist the infection of the—”

“Yes, that’s very interesting,” said John. “But to perform this task you request we’ll need a number of items from our world. You must allow us to return there and come back to begin our quest.”

The man nodded. “It is good, then. We shall await your return.”

We picked up our ball and ducked back through the dimensional rift. We stepped from the black sphere and were glad to see the sunlight and netted goals. We weren’t so happy with the return of the oppressive heat, but decided to deal with it rather than return to that other crappy, dysfunctional universe.

We decided on one more game. Before we could inbound the ball, a gang of four strong-looking, attractive, twenty somethings walked up. Two boys, one black, one white. Two girls, one Asian, one a pretty blonde. They oozed curiosity upon seeing the portal and exchanged what sounded from a distance like witty comments. The white boy and girl seemed to dislike each other and bickered good-naturedly as they stepped through the portal, a sense of adventure in the air.

John rolled his eyes. We had an argument over who had the ball last, but John finally admitted he was wrong and gave it to me. We played for a bit, but fatigue had set in and we exchanged two missed shots each.

Then, suddenly, all four of the twenty somethings were ejected from the black sphere. They were covered in dirt and bruises and minor cuts.

“Look!” gushed the Asian girl. “It’s the same moment when we left! None of that time passed here!”

“She’s right!” said the black kid. “Yo, am I glad to see that sun! We saved the whole damn world, man!”

The white boy and girl kissed, apparently having fallen in love during their quest. The boy disengaged and looked at us with excited eyes. “Dude, you guys won’t believe what just happened to us!”

John turned to him.

“You bored a stranger with your stupid-ass story, and he pulled out his cock and whipped you with it like a stagecoach driver?”

The kid shut up, baffled. John picked up the ball and bounced a pass to me.

“Your ball.”

PAGE 375 SCIENCE AND THE BEYOND DR. ALBERT MARCONI

was the last survivor of the plague.As the team made its way through the abandoned village, the priest described the outbreak that had taken every single member of the tribe but him. Painful sores, blindness, madness, limbs that in the course of minutes seemed to rot and split like bad fruit. Horrors an old man should not have to see in his declining years (the priest had lived to the ripe old age of thirty-seven).The priest believed he had been spared by Koddock only to relay the tale to me, to warn me off. He bid me farewell, saying he intended to strike out into the jungle, to walk west until he touched the sun or until the land reclaimed him. I didn’t tell him that walking that direction meant he might wind up as part of a tour group out of Iquitos. I shook his hand and left Peru for good.A week later I was back in New York, relaxing with Sharon after Dr. Haleine’s memorial service, enjoying cups of coffee laced with a great deal of brandy.We stood on the balcony, looking over the city through clouds of my pipe smoke.Sharon said, “Those poor people. Why did they have to die?”I snorted a laugh around my pipe. “We all have to, dear.”She didn’t smile. “You know what I mean. The way they died, sick and blind and screaming for their gods to save them, with no answer in return.”She turned her eyes to me.“The gods are cruel, aren’t they, Albie?”I drew a deep breath and replied, “Every living being has but one need: power. Power over other living things. You need it to grow, to eat, to reproduce. And cruelty is the ultimate expression of power. To impose needless, extreme suffering and humiliation on another. It is the purest demonstration of strength. Toddlers learn it in the nursery.“Therefore every organism, from the microbe up, wears its cruelty as a badge to mark its upward progress. Prey must be subdued, competition must be starved, enemies must be wiped out. One would thus assume that we find the same among the gods, only more so. That at each level of the heavens we find higher and higher levels of greed, brutality and mindless spite. How else could they have become gods?”Sharon shivered, though it was not cold on the balcony.In a barely audible voice she asked, “But is that really the way it is? The work you do—you would know better than anyone.”I set my pipe aside and turned, to let her look into my eyes. I said,

Afterword

If you want to know when the next edition in the John and Dave series will appear on bookshelves or when the film adaptation will hit theaters, go to my permanent home on the Web at JohnDiesattheEnd.com. There you can keep up with the latest news and further explore the John Dies at the End universe. You can also find me at comedy megasite Cracked.com, where I serve as the editor and, as such, have somehow gained full-time employment writing poop jokes. Yes, it is a ridiculous universe we live in.

Speaking of which, it should be pointed out that the story behind this story, the tale of how John Dies at the End wound up in print at all, should be an inspiration to anyone who works in a cubicle and/or is really easily inspired.

Back in 2001 I was living a double life. During the day I was just a guy doing data entry at a law office, for single digits an hour. But at night, I would change out of those khakis and assume another identity: Guy Doing Data Entry at an Insurance Company. Fortunately the 75 hours a week I spent filling in columns of numbers on computer screens didn’t leave much time for the crushing depression.

Around Halloween of 2001, during the few hours of personal time between cubicles, I took to the Internet and shared a tale of me and my friend and a monster made of meat. On the first day, only six people read the story. The next day, the number grew to eight. Then ten. I had clearly stumbled onto a word-of-mouth phenomenon and after one year, the story had been read by nearly seventeen people.

Riding this buzz, I sat down again and relayed more of the tale and would do the same the following year. By 2005 the chronicles of our adventures had grown to 150,000 words. E-mails poured in from readers, fans telling me they stayed up all night reading the story, then called in sick to work the next morning to finish it. People were printing the whole tale, eating up a ream of paper and three ink cartridges in the process, then binding it with rubber bands and loaning it to friends.

I believed for the first time that I had tapped into something, and that something was the fact that lots of people are crazy and/or have lots of spare time on their hands.

At this point I was contacted by independent horror publisher Permuted Press, who asked me about doing a print run of the story as a trade paperback. I told them no, that no one would ever actually pay money to read it. Then the transmission went out on my car and I decided I couldn’t turn my nose up on whatever meager amount of money would come in. The resulting book, written by a data entry clerk with no previous publishing experience and not even an English degree to boast of, sold about five thousand copies through sheer word of mouth. When the print run ended, rare copies were selling on eBay for up to $120.

Next I got an e-mail from horror writer/director/producer Don Coscarelli (who made two of my favorite horror movies of all time, Phantasm and Bubba Ho-Tep), which I immediately deleted, assuming it was a hoax. But he was persistent and after convincing me on the phone that it wasn’t all an elaborate prank to get me up on a stage so he could pour a bucket of pig’s blood on me, we made the deal to turn John Dies at the End into a movie. After the ink was dry, more than half a dozen other offers for film rights would come in.

At that point it was pretty clear that the entire world was just fucking with me. Keep in mind I was still working at the insurance company, still sitting in a cubicle every day, eating those awful diagonally sliced sandwiches from the vending machine, and reading memos about the dress code.

Word of mouth. That’s all it was. No one “discovered” me, I didn’t get some big break out of the blue. It was a slow advance of strangers from around the world, passing around the link and loaning out those sad homemade copies. These are the zealots who would later buy copies, loan them to friends, then buy more copies when those never came back. Hundreds of passionate strangers whom I’ve still never met—they’re responsible for the edition you hold in your hands. I wish I could thank all of them by name. So, let me do that now. (Please turn the page.)

Amy Brown

Laura Taylor

Lee Beckman

Brandon Sharp

Tim Richardson

Ross Wiseman

Michael T. Hawkins

Ville Nousiainen

Nick Mathews

Curtis Jeffs

Matt Garner

Josh Yagley

Jennifer Liang

Charles Cooper

Jim Mahar

Nate Bailey

Tarnir Hadary

Ryan King

Chuck Sebian-Lander

Lucas de Carvalho Martinez

Rianna Turner

Tomas Fitzgerald

Alex Augustine

David Scully

Stuart Layt

Tyrone Cameron

Victoria Liakhova

Ira Jacobs

Bob Clark

Alex Zechiel

Sean Gray

Vincent Simone

Katters Smao

Shane Peter Davis

Dave Henry

Scott Holcomb

Anthony Clark

Thomas Buttrick

Eric Holodnak

James A Russell

Kevin Murray

Christopher Wells

Andrew Gordon

Craig Taylor

Drew Dexter

Alex Lysick

Joshua Heimendinger

Nadine Hearity

Steve Clark

Tom Cherry

Lance Johnson

Joshua Daum

John Walton

Nathan Cleary

Jess and Brett Ferricher

Robert Hight

Michael Schmidt

Jason Phebus

Steffanie Hirsack

Ed Gardiner

Owen Sprod

Joel Benge-Abbot

Nikola Pilipovic

Ira Porter

Lee Smith

Popovici Alexandru

Matt Nolan

Daniel Sloane

Jesse Hayen

Jakob Beacham

Michael Cornett

Heather Holl

Adam Quigley

Will Timson

Kevin Smith

Evan Lewis

Larry Coffey

(not the famous one)

Isaac Rowntree

Nicholas Charlton

Nicholas Seitz

James Goede

Samuel Raab

Benjamin Ashley

Ben Schuplin

Rich Beischer

Michael Scheahan

Eoghan C.

Anthony Nguyen

Jim Ribby

Robert Lawson

Erica Bercegeay

Nathan West

Ryan Salyers

Jonathan Edwards

Ben Driscoll

Joshua Madden

Alex Ennis

Jenn Tharp

Sean Hyslop

Damien Unger

Zac Wiggy

Stewart Dawson

Brian Wesley Schwartz

Christopher Petterson

Ryan Aston

Joshua Lucero

Joel Vandale

Nikki Barajas

Peter Christensen

Jonny Ashley

Angela Soper

Joel Thompson

Beau Ferreira

Daniel Andrew

Devin Pentecost

Matt Overstreet

Jadon Grayson

Justin Davis

Ethan John Davies

Andrew Patterson

Ben Wolfe

Alex Pascarelli

Matthew Waller

Jonathan Kimak

Conor Burnell

Kristina Himmelsjo

Sam Mackey

Brian Lemak

Cassie Hillyuck

Walker Reynolds

Jeremy Root

Nicholas Russell

Brendan Reilly

Christopher Brown

Ben Moore

Stewart Hills

David Bulger

Alex Mathews

Melissa Black

Aaron W Mosley I1

Lee Banford

Robert Roboi Parras

Stacy Farina

Katie Roe

Brandon Robinson

Austin Pettyjohn

Zachary Harper

Kenneth Cross

Jamie Lachance

Scott Bailey

Kitty Butchko

Jason Domanowski

Michael Free1

Juan Cabrera

Josh Hendren

Asaf Lackgren

Phil Loring

Brandon Dixson-Jack

Brad Schoonover

Courtney Shelton

Isaac Westerhoff

SPC Nicholas Young

Kevin Kuchta

Simon Thelwell

David Morris

Mark Cawdrey

Brandon Spoelstra

Magnus Eek Olsen

Alex Huss

Ian Breakey

Michael Hartley

Carrie Rivard

Kim McMillan

Josh Rickert

Jeremy Stevens

Steven Irvine

Dustin Quam

Josh Cohen

Megan Schnitz

Jeff Pallagi

Jason Glass

Mikki Cioffi

Brian Tolman

Jordan Dillman

Petter Vilberg

Matt Cowger

David Binford

Chris Heilman

Spenser Stefaniuk

Jon McCullough

Eric Main

Paul Harris

Paul Calhoun

Laura McDowell

Isaac Davidson

Allin Cook

Tom Andry

Colin Newby

Garrett Hille

Nikolai Gloeckler

Luke McCarthy

Joel Paine

Dawn Morrow

Ian Douglas

Fabio Zaccagnini

Michael Dubya

Z. Sheldon

Courtney Olivecrona

Cole Goater

Mark Gomer

Nick Stolk

Steven Gordon

Alex Winfield

David Piniella

Matthew Porreca

B. I. Flight

Joe Vandale

Matthew Parker

Daniel Griffin

Matt Picioccio

Sean Levesque

Brandl Couch

Eric Pelchat

Ike Wassom

Justin Dunsing

Hunter Tammaro

Teddy Lee

Jack Talbot

Loren Cress

Rowan Chapman Hill

Todd Aquino-Michaels

Adam Woodyard

Dan Heerdt

Henry Copestake

Zachary Helming

Karen Nickerson

Eric Bates

Michael Purdy

Marie Petty

Alexander Convin

David Nelson

John Diebold

Philip Howard

Scott Clark

David Scott

Kevin Smart

Bo Soderlund

J. “Buck” Caldwell

Janet Mysliwiec

Ashley Monroy

Kyle Nelson

J. Molloy

Reid A. Dawson

John Plandowski

Peter Armstrong

Tyler Calvert

Miia Lempinen

Alex Hirzel

Rutger Schreuders

Jack Clarkson

Dean Perkins

Philip Zaslavchik

Matias Ignacio

Joe Bautista

Matt Best

Lara Koenig

Nathaniel Lichfield

Jimmy Bean

Steve Wetherell

Jess Jeffery

Louie Klein

Greg Pfaff

Brian Malik

Aaron Macke

Jarad Geer

Frank Looney

Josh Palmer

Rebecca Johnson

Kenny Heard

Jude Taylor

Lyz King

Kyle Hellkamp

Jake Brown

Denny Wright

Robert Parsons

Jay Locke

Joe Defilippis

Connor Bishop

Michael Keen

Aaron Kinney

Rhett Stafford

Walter Sojda

Jeff Devine

Ellen Boring

Ben Pearson

Casey Harris

Benjamin Deason

Casper Van Gemert

Tarik Ghabra

Sean Tessena

David Costelloe

Nathaniel MacDonald

Chris Jensen

KYTE

Tom Heafey

Jeremy Harvey

Don Shihey

Azrael Macool

Russell Monett

J. D. Beideman

Mark Ulissi

Jeff Ward

Sean Emery

Simon Clair

Jonathan Barone

Dave Eng

Ben Ireland

Thomas Gorney

Brian Durbin

Brian Lernmon

Devin McGinty

Jeff Lengyel

Marc Williams

Ross Cochran

Darnian Holter

Christana Waterstreet

Dustin J. Shifflett

Manie du Preez

Cory Batts

Dan Bromley

Andy Melat

David Starr

Amanda Mack

Teemu Nordlund

Kaitlyn Werner

Brian Mack

Cress Fox

Jason Elledge

Brandon Crawford

Tommy Scala

Luke Norman

Julian Smith

Richard Kreski

John Miller

Andrew Briggs

Salvatore Ciano

Courtney Childs

Jefferson Nieto

Laura Engelman

Anthony Sgromo

Mick Weaver

Clae Wilson

Greg Ulfik

John O’Connor

Tim Young

Rich Larden

Hector Wakefield

David Saulrnon

Nate Arnold

Doug Tammany

Joshua Svendsen

Brent Donoughe

John Honey

Breno Nakao

Ben Heidorn

Stephanie Wagar

Brooks Cary

Gerald Rice

Aaron Jones

Joseph Zebrowski

Oliver Griinewald

Jonathan Bjorklund

Kyle Sechrest

Ben Heidorn

Garii Pearce

Reid Sheldon

and

Mike Brenner

Alan Thompson

Mark Chun-Ting

James Rodriquez

James Robson

“Chuwy” Chu

This is by no means an inclusive list, and I hope those who

were left off will forgive me. Thank you, all of you.

Hopefully you will still be alive when I get the sequel written.

Until then, you know where to find me:

JohnDiesattheEnd.com Cracked.com

—DW