The Cipher

by Kathe Koja

Don’t be a stupid macho bastard, I told myself, and meant it, but it wasn’t so much the accusation of fear as the implication that she was somehow—it sounds ridiculous—intellectually braver than I, that she had the guts to push a thing past its limits, to turn it upside down and shake it with all her might, when I was frightened to handle it at all. Maybe it really was as petty-simple as who’s the better man; I’d like to think I’m smarter than that, but who knows. At least my own stupidity can’t surprise me much anymore.

Crouching beside her, hating my own excitement, her fingers blunt and steady as she knotted a handmade fishing-line harness around the mouse’s chest and back, and I said something, nervous stupid whisper about nice job and she looked at me, very seriously, and said, “I always think things through.” The mouse, nose going a mile a minute, squirming in a terror that reached crescendo as Nakota’s firm dangle brought it over the maw of the Funhole: to the mouse it must have looked like Armageddon, deeper than death, and its back arched in a spasm so fierce that I thought the harness would snap and the mouse fall to an unexplored death, but Nakota’s work was good and the fishing line held.

Her wet hair dribbling down, fluid on her almost skeletal collarbones, one drop above her breast a slow prismed tremble of light as some freakish angle caught it, jeweled it as I half turned to rise, put my tongue on that wayward drop, imagining as I did that it was the source of the scent given off tonight by the Funhole, black nectar and I bit at her nipple, the half head still safe in my thoughtful grasp. Now her murmur was approval, I was pleasing her at last, pulling her with one hand, nipple still between my teeth and I bit harder, releasing only to lay her down and kneel between her damp and narrow thighs.

Skid and drift, that was me and the way I lived my life, foolish, hopeless, irredeemable, a broom-closet hellhole my epiphany, my one true love a woman who had never come close to loving me, even on my best days, her best days, this woman my lover now again in what was at most a terminal waste of time. Ah God, the happy hells I can create, you too, all of us. Even Nakota. We are all our worst best friends. Don’t agree? Go fuck yourself.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” and she hung up on me, oh good I told myself, heart running hard, now you’ve pissed her off. Nothing less predictable than a pissed-off Nakota, and you, dickhead, you had to load the gun, didn’t you. I stood there in my own anger until, looking without seeing, the dull numerics of the clock on the counter turned over: 8:28, shit.

I did not this time wonder how long it would last; I was too smart for that now. Take what you get, and don’t think. Of course it could never be that easy, but there were moments, like now, that I could successfully pretend that it was, and I had no inclination to try to peer past those moments. I’m not one who wants to know the future: at the best it spoils the present, with longing or dismay, and at the worst, well. Who really wants to find out how tight the sling is, for your own very personal ass, who wants to know how deep the shit will really be? Not you. Not me either. Because it’s rarely bliss saved up, is it, when you finally get there. I’ll take my now, waking with a lover’s scent still on me, around me, take my hopes before they’re maybe tragedy; a good morning is still a good morning, even if it leads to apocalypse at night.

Footsteps, aiming down the stairs, and I pushed off hurriedly from the wall, stuffed the last of my sandwich into my mouth, nonchalantly swinging around the chewed-looking newel post as the walker passed me by, a skinny black-haired white man just this side of boy, head down as if in communion with a daily tragedy too dense to share even by acknowledgment. Which was okay by me: I’ve never resented being ignored. I watched, waited for him to push his way out the big downstairs door, then hustled myself back up to get my name badge and my coat. Be on time today, I thought. Or even early.

Pausing on the second-floor landing, listening to the woozy shrieks of what, anger or pleasure, it was just sound to me, somebody doing something in one of the flats. Close by the Funhole, would living next door to it cause an issuance, a distortion, in your daily rhythms, would you brush your teeth with mare’s milk, would you crawl around and dart your tongue like a rattler? Would you bite?

“Video,” bending one finger, “Hut.” The other. For once, I argued. I mean really argued, which at first genuinely surprised her, then angered her to a high cold pitch I had rarely seen. We went through all the steps: I couldn’t do it, they’d find out, I was a worse thief than a liar and I was a lousy liar, she knew that.

“I have to eat,” I said. “Every day.” “I’ll do it,” she said again, “myself. Or,” more coldly still, “I’ll do it without a camcorder.” She said this like a duelist with the laughable advantage, but oh yeah, I am stupid, it took me a second or two to figure out what she didn’t mean—a camera—and then what she did. And that she did. Explicitly. I said absolutely nothing, stood there with my mouth still open on my next brilliant point, looking into those eyes that looked into mine with the calm confidence of the winner, because either way, either way she had won. I still said nothing but she saw somewhere in the slump of my features my acquiescence, and as soon as she saw it she did not smile but gave me a nod that was almost worse.

All at once a distraction, in the form of me standing, post-wipe, pants around my ankles and with her eyes open she knelt right there on the bathroom floor and took me in her mouth. Oh did she feel good. Bony hands cupping my balls as she worked me, hair swinging in hypnotic rhythm and I grabbed that hair, that head, pulled her tight to me, her nose, I felt it, softly bending against my body, my breath rising, groaning hard and quiet when I came. Slow, slow she pulled away, wiped her slick mouth like a fed cat. I leaned against the sink; puffing out a spent breath, and saw her lean elbows-over the toilet and expertly expel a milky stream of semen, gazing up at me as she did and daring me with that gaze to complain.

A clocked minute of static—a long time to sit and watch nothing, I was all for fast-forwarding but Nakota glared me down—then a sip of absolute blackness, recorded blackness, rich and menacing as an X ray of a cancer. Nakota, lips parting to say something but the thought drowned in the flash of an image: something like bloody stalks, caressing the screen like hands behind the glass, so greedily intimate even Nakota gave a tiny backstepping whoop. Then as if a barrier shattered, ferocious fun, whatever provided the images warming to this game: a vast black grin like the Funhole itself become its namesake, black asshole-mouth studded with teeth or bones like broken glass and in that Pandora opening Nakota breathless and me with my mouth hanging wide open, village idiot at freak show, a vertiginous glide forward as upon the screen came things I didn’t want to know about, oh yes I’m quite sophisticated, quite the bent voyeur, I can laugh at stuff that would make you vomit but how would you like to see the ecstatic prance of self-evisceration, a figure carving itself, re-created in a harsh new form from what seemed to be its own hot guts, becoming no figure at all but the absence of one, a cookie-cutter shape and in but not contained by its outline a blackness, a vortex of nothing so final that beside it the Funhole was harmless, do you see what I’m saying, the Funhole was a goddamned carnival ride next to this nonfigure and all at once what I wanted least, least, far less than...

I fell back to sleep with a mouthful of beer, woke again to the toll of a monstrous headache, beer soaked and clammy on my shirt and skin, TV buzzing and Nakota fast asleep, back curled like a question mark and hands, childlike and defenseless, loose-fingered against her cheek as a shadow grew on her face like a cancerous smile.

I almost expected—what? a sizzle of flesh? a blinding burst of light? her to get sucked right into the ‘IV? Of course nothing happened, nothing visible I should say because that’s the tricky part, isn’t it, that’s where the rub comes in. The worst wounds are internal, I should have known that from my own experience, but I’m the type of guy who doesn’t learn. She sat like that for a while; I let her; I saw no reason not to. I stopped staring, put my things away, although it didn’t seem right to start cooking dinner or anything; how does one behave at an ecstasy?

So the evening, bed, no sex, her skinny body cool to the touch and dropping into sleep like iron into sand. I sat up to read awhile but could not wholly concentrate, the words jumbling into other words, sentences into diatribes and paragraphs into convoluted polemics on the pressure of instinct, and then the words changed again into symbols I could not read and I knew I was asleep and dreaming, and I was not disturbed even though the words changed again to writhe on the page as if they were pinned there and me some spiteful collector who would have them no matter what. They spelled out challenges, feeble defiance, and I laughed and slammed the book shut, over and over, enjoying my rhythmic cruelty to such a monstrous degree that I finally woke, scared, sat up to wipe at my eyes. And saw Nakota was gone.

Oh God. I tried to talk to her, talk her away from the craziness but she kept straining past me, little whine in her throat like a sick animal, mumbling about her head and pushing with all her strength against my body as if I was a wall or door she must surmount to be free. This would go on all night, forever, until she wore me down and I had no doubt she would. Eventually. She was the queen of eventually.

Back across the room and it hurt to watch, bruises like clouds, massed and banked all over her but especially on her arms, where I had gripped her harder; the memory of my tyrannical panic made me wince, but I knew for once I had been purely and unarguably right. An odd feeling. Not pleasant. You can get used to being wrong all the time; it takes all the responsibility out of things.

said shut the fuck up!” and I slammed my hand down on the bed, quake of covers and the Nyquil splashing green as chartreuse and a pain that made my eyes spring to watering, oh God that hurts, Nakota subsiding but with shiny eyes, I closed mine so I wouldn’t have to look at her. “Leave me alone,” I said. And she did. But I felt her thinking.

Down the hall. Staring into that dark mouth, closer now, both of us, she hands in pockets or on her knees (always, always a chill for me to see her do that, remembering) and me behind her, her knight in twisted armor, awkward picking at his bandaged hand as his lady fair beheld her grail. In silence, always, and always parting at the stairwell, she hurrying off brisk and wordless, me to trudge upstairs to try to concoct a distraction, something, once I even pulled out my pathetic roll of poems. Beer, too, but you know? I didn’t want to drink it. Instead I would sit at the window, eyes closed, breathing cold air until I fell asleep. Waking with cramped shoulders, piss-full, my hand hurting, hurting. Nothing got better.

It snowed all the way home, dull relentless flakes, more and more against my windshield and my wipers not up to the job, driving through a landscape smeared and troubled and my sore hand aching, aching against the wheel. Back home I tore off the new bandage, let my hand sit palm-up on the open windowsill to touch without catching the steady reach of snow. I slept there, and when I woke, in the early dark, my hand instead of being cold stiff as the rest of me was a lustrous pink, the flesh pliant and warm and I touched it, wonderingly, and as I did a spurt of fluid as thick as jelly burbled out on the iced inner sill and in its yellow clot I thought I saw swimming a bright and winking eye.

What an accolade. Shut up, I advised myself, he can break you in half. We stood there smiling at each other for a few more seconds, me wondering what the hell to add to this surreal bonhomie, but Randy had no worries, he knew exactly what he was about. Leaning even closer, one more inch and he’d be right in my face, conspiratory murmur: “So when can I see it?” “See what? The Funhole? Haven’t, hasn’t Na—Shrike taken you there?”

The rest of the day dragged. Was I actually excited about my new job as ringmaster, hur-ry, hur-ry, hur-ry, step right in to the greatest hole on earth, you betcha. For once exercising my bullying rights as assistant manager, I made the new guy close up, drove home too fast for the weather, slewing and skidding, arriving a little before six.

In the following silence my anger shriveled. I looked away, out the window into the ten o’clock dark, shifting wind but not as black as it gets, no. He pulled you out of the Funhole, you dumb ungrateful piece of shit, remember? Sat by you and watched you puke. Talk about only a mother.

I was so tired of hating myself. But I was so good at it, it was such a comfortable way to be, goddamn fucking flotsam on the high seas, the low tide, a little wad of nothing shrugging and saying Hey, sorry, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t know it was loaded, I didn’t think things would turn out this way. It’s so easy to be nothing. It requires very little thought or afterthought, you can always find people to drink with you, hang out with you, everybody needs a little nothing in their life, right? Call the specialist when you do. You don’t even have to call, chances are I’ll already be there, you’ve just overlooked me because I’m in a corner, crouched like a dustball, a cobweb, my busy little spaced-out grin and oops it seems I’ve stumbled on some sort of exalted hellhole, Funhole, do excuse me while I let it out, while I let it into my body, while I let it run my life because somebody has to, right? somebody has to take the goddamned brunt even if it’s a void.

“God,” thick mucus voice and tears running out of my eyes, “oh God,” and I wept into a paper towel, crying hard in the kitchen’s warmth, my body half-folded against the table, retching sobs like vomit. I cried a long time, past pain until I felt so empty nothing hurt, nothing anywhere, if I had died I could not have felt more husked. A walking depletion. “Aren’t you the poet,” I said out loud, my voice a hush in the larger silence, and I wiped at my eyes, then almost smiled, weary, when it hurt: orange juice in my eyes, burning like gasoline. You dickhead.

I remember thinking, Why, I’ve made a choice. I don’t want to be part of this anymore, and I’m, I’m opting out. Imagine. An actual decision, and I was very much enjoying my novel sense of resolve and picturing, in a self-indulgent way, the manner in which the bullet would come flying up the barrel, when something new came to me: shame. Not disgust. I was intimate with that. Not self-hate either because I was, if not done with it, then so possessed by it that I could no longer feel it, as a perfect swimmer no longer consciously feels the sea as an element apart. But: instead a profound and simple shame, a sensation as immediate and irresistible as pain or heat. In my big, my unique moment of decision I was behaving as needlessly as stupidly, as typically as ever, because by this action I would bring trouble on Nora, big trouble, on a person who had actually tried to help me, who had given me what I asked for. Typical. I lowered the gun. That’s just like you, you cheap piece of shit. But not the shame.

In the glare of the shame I saw that if I must be myself, if there was no changing the aimless scramble that was me, if I must be in the end a victim, then: yes. But not this way. Not at another’s expense, or at least not an innocent other. Because that was mutable.

And knew that what I most wanted was not to know. Wanted instead to be ridden, not mindless but adrift, still, in the eddies of my helplessness, there is such peace in helplessness, it’s better than death any day, you’re still able to enjoy the ride. It had nothing to do with anyone else, not even Nakota, maybe, though as nothing as I was, I knew I loved her, that much was no shame. But. She said it didn’t work without me, and without wanting to I believed her, finally, without beginning to understand why this should be so. But. If I really loved her, if it really was quiescent without me, why not then stay away for good, let it shrivel or bloom as it would without my presence?

Because in the end we are what we are, we want what we want, whether we know it or not. Whether we care to resist or not, or whether in the end it’s worth resistance after all.

They came in, hooded eyes blinking in the changing light, Nakota refusing to move for the woman, they pushed shoulders, the kind of juvenile territory shit I thought only men fell for. Apparently not.

“I got your note,” Randy said. “Shrike said something, you quit your job?” “Yeah.” I looked at him, at Vanese, fingers moving in her pockets, picking at something, a cuticle, a sore. Longest at Nakota, scarecrow, my heart’s desire still. Leeched by the force of the days past and to come, pilloried, walled up but still: desire. Who can fathom that, deeper than change, deeper than the Funhole maybe. “Come on,” I said, looking only at her. “You wanna see something, you’re gonna see

Not what you would think, no, not suction or even a true sensation, but if you could touch an insubstantiality, a fever dream, rub hallucinations on your skin, if you could cradle your own mind when you dream, trace the hills and gutters of the brain’s landscape—there really is no explaining it, I’m sorry but it’s so. Even they, who were there, even Nakota who was in all senses closest to me, well. They didn’t really get it either. I didn’t get it all, but what I got, going into it with empty eyes open and empty hands at the ready, was horrifyingly intense, not so much empowering but the sensation of such, I heard my own voice howling as if I was in pain but I wasn’t, you see, I really didn’t feel anything bad at all even when I looked down between my open orbiting knees and saw the steel of Randy’s sculpture running over the skin of my knuckles, dripping down to fall not into the Funhole as one would think (and one would think) but flying off in a strange arc as if repelled, dropping somewhere to the right but my vision didn’t go, didn’t really go that far. Nakota was trying to touch me, I could see that much, but she wasn’t making contact or if she was I wasn’t feeling it. I had my other hand, my right hand, out of the hole now, some other part of me was inside, or maybe not because I was falling, losing altitude we call that, God damn sometimes this was funny. Sometimes I was funny. But apparently not now because I heard voices, they sounded scared or screaming or somet...

I cried, from pain, from relief that I had not been harmed, or not more than was bearable, and the fluid from my hand turned as luminously black as the rainbow and my tears too dripped down black and I cried harder, scared, scared, I still couldn’t move my hand.

“Interview you?” and she laughed, reaching for the blanket to wrap herself in, cold cocoon for the insect queen, the reader of buggy runes. What had she done with them, those twisted little bodies? And the mouse, whatever had become of it? “What’re they going to do, start a fan club?”

Which it did, and the light too at once and my clumsiness betrayed me, Nakota in instant triumph seeing the whorl of blanket f or what it was and saying, “There he is,” and me raising my head, reluctant and half-blind, blinking at her groupies. Whom I saw at once were more trouble than I felt up to handling: six or seven of them, hunching shoulders, big jackets, hands impatient in pockets and eyes like tracer gazes going all around the room, all of them stupider, meaner, wilder, more prone to that special brand of idiocy which most often turns into wreckage, spillage; blood. They smelled blood, all right, or maybe worse that more esoteric fluid that dribbled from me now, in a brightly vindictive stream that soaked the pillowcase and turned the sheet to clotted silver, a party color is it, well let’s start the party now. When in doubt, attack, right? And I was nothing if not always in doubt. About something.

It didn’t piss her off, as I had lamely hoped, or fool her for a minute. We both knew who they belonged to, and never mind that Malcolm’s charisma quotient had always been at least a quart low, that he couldn’t assemble an army at gunpoint. But let’s just remember, shall we, let’s make sure we don’t forget that he’ll be more than happy to hoard what Nakota collected, her cadre of dissatisfied jerks masquerading as the cheapest kind of mystics, fun junkies out gunning for the biggest fun of all; he’ll be more than ready to use whatever weapon, however blunt, they constitute, to serve whatever banal and horrible concept he—and worse, she—thought “best.” And of course we also know who it’s best for.

And I didn’t. Instead I lay tense, faking nonchalance as I observed Nakota’s sorry fucks sprawled slack-jawed before the TV, watching the video, the video, the video until I wanted to jump up and run out of the room, which was probably part of the point. Maybe all of it, though I wasn’t vain enough to think so, and anyway Nakota was famous for her crisscross motives, occasionally reaching heights so dizzyingly Byzantine that even she couldn’t say with certainty what the real reason was.

Oh, God. “I’ll tell you what I believe,” I said, with venom born of a restless night, a sorry ache in my head, a sorrier one in my hand that even now began to burble and spit, fat slow silver bubbles and I said it again, “I’ll tell you what I believe. That nobody knows anything about anything more complicated than breathing in and out, and especially not about that fucking Funhole down there, and that includes Nakota, that practically defines Nakota, am I going too fast for you or what?” and I hurled the beer so it barely missed the TV, one of my rare displays of temper but it pissed me off, it truly did, to wake after such a night to find the palace guard, armed with stupidity and questions, it was worse than having Malcolm there. I had my mouth open to continue in this vein and deeper when knock-knock, who’s there, sudden anxious fantasy of the irate neighbor from upstairs but no, almost worse: the Dingbats, all three, smiles turning to sudden worry as they saw the other two, the blurt of fresh beer stain on the wall, smelled the ozone of tension and tried to simultaneously discern and assess their effect on whatever was happening fast enough to stop if that was necessary.

No matter what sort of place it was-dark stinks and dancing slag and undisguised a lure so monumental that it need only make its promises in fluids and in blinks-it was, beyond denial, the place for me. Oh, God.

As if on cue, bang the door and Nakota, Mr. Bed, and three others, all but she smelling very much like Club 22, she was dressed in her barmaid black but I didn’t think she would be working tonight. Not serving drinks, anyway. She took one look at Malcolm’s proudly held box and said, “Done, I see,” with the utmost boredom, not even malicious, not really, just an obvious trigger and she pulled it, almost out of force of habit.

“Coming?” she said, leaning even closer to brush her speaking lips against my skin and for me a grateful shiver, it had been such a long time since she had deliberately touched me. She kissed my cheek, an action at heart so brutally calculated that I should have been sickened by its falseness, but how could I be when it was so essentially Nakota?

“Funny customers,” he said at once, getting himself a beer and one for me, at least you could always trust Randy to do the right thing. Ignoring Doris, who joined the worried cluster of Ashlee and Dave, he sat beside me, saying again as he handed me the beer, “Funny customers. Shrike’s bunch, you know, they’re big-time fuckups, I don’t know if you want them anywhere near that room.”

The thrum became a lullaby, God knew I needed rest. Not just sleep but rest, a breathing space, a place in which to forget. From upstairs I heard a shout, again, but this time I felt no warning pinch, felt nothing too, at some garbled groan from below. They said it didn’t work without me? Very well, I was doing my part, I was doing nothing. The role I was born to play. More yells, and in the ringing echo of their wake I felt myself slipping off to sleep, what a lovely pleasant thing to happen, what a fine idea. Warm, under the covers, and my hand smelled so good. Good enough, in fact, to eat.

Hands on the newel post, swinging around like a child does in play, an actor in a movie and I saw a babble of motion, heard a sonorous tone that seemed to be emanating from somewhere close by the storage-room door, where Randy tussled now with Mr. Bed, another of Nakota’s goons pushing Malcolm who was yelping like a pig and somebody’s head above the door. Hey, I thought, that’s my head. Plaster white and blind-eyed, frozen face not in peace but in ice, the coldest place of all. The mask. From which the sound issued. Twin to the sound of my hand. Twin to the sound of the Funhole, so loud it seemed from behind the door and a pull like gravity, I pushed without effort through the crowd, Malcolm’s yell directly in my ear, Nakota at my elbow, the others lost in swirling babble, the Brownian motion of a hopelessly unchoreographed fistfight, what the fuck were they fighting about anyway and someone, some guy I didn’t recognize, the upstairs neighbor presumably, wild-eyed and bellowing “What the hell is going on!” with such enraged and poignant confusion that at another time I might have felt sorry enough to explain.

But not now. Nakota hanging on me like the leech she was, I could feel the pant of her excited breath, and again without effort I pushed her away, shook her off, pushed in the door and a great vast scream of heat, like throwing open the door to a blast furnace, like Shadrach in the fire I advanced, careless, welcome, I could dance like Vulcan in a cindering flame, I could dance with Randy’s sculptures and one advanced upon me now, its metal limbs flung wide in fractured greeting, where had I been for so long? The leak of my hand gleamed, I understood the motif of silver now. Pressing my hand to the melting metal, a hissing sizzle like the boil of steam, but this steam was molten, this steam was iron. Fusing me to the metal. Pulling me like a magnet to the Funhole where the heat burned so delirious that I thought it would burn me alive, the ancient suns rising about me like a mantle, my arms reaching to embrace the fire as they embraced the sculpture’s living metal and through the burn an echo, the bubbling thrum, thrice loud: the mask. My hand. The Funhole. Me, myself, and I. And I giggled at the joke, so warm, my sweat like metal and my pupils scorched wide and at once the sculpture’s grasp fell from me, and sorry, I turned to see figures, bodies, walking toward me, weak silhouettes against the pallor of the hallway, and I said, “Who goes there?” and in the speaking saw at once the unmistakable scarecrow tilt: Nakota.

I grabbed, I burned, I didn’t really want to but truth be told I didn’t care, really, and really it was something to see my hand sink into his skin, into meat, like a brand, a mark forever, he screamed—I heard it clearly, even through the ever-building thrum, the sound of a monstrous engine running hot—and Nakota chose that moment for her end-around. Sneaky bitch. Backhand, didn’t think I had it in me, did you? Did you? And more, a bigger crowd crowding in the doorway, my vision snapping finally clear through the heat shimmer and I saw them all, too many, I could hear. Randy yelling and I yelled back, he didn’t hear me so I did it again, “GET THEM OUT OF HERE!” and the neighbor guy and one of my, one of the Dingbats running presumably for cover, and in the room the marked man, Mr. Barbecue between the other two who had come in with Nakota but it seemed were more than ready to leave without her. Shitheels. “Take her with you,” I said, and it was somewhat comical to see them drop their buddy in her favor, I had to laugh. I had to. And them gone, and the door thankfully closed. And me all alone. With the heat. And the burn.

Her voice, and again I turned the knob, this time unthinkingly right-handed; it gave with a blow, almost toppling me. “Bad move,” said the mask, a petulant sound as the cold hall air slipped over me and I gazed up, my first look outside, and saw instead of my own the video face, and its eyes opened very wide and it showed fat impossible teeth: “Boo!” and I cried out, fell back, Vanese stepping quick and scared inside.

When I opened them the skull was lying placidly close, staring up at me with its stupid sockets, one of which closed in an impossible wink and without thinking a second I reached blind behind me, came up with a glass bottle of something and, right-handed, smashed it down with all my painful weakness, all my tired rage, and incredibly the skull splintered, chunks of steel and splits of glass, orange juice in my face and I cried out, pawing and blinking, and when I looked again the pieces of the skull were scuttling to the darkness, joining as they went.

Hands and knees and on my feet, braced as I rose, I was shaking from the inside out and I put my mouth against the door, lips mashed and moving against the wood, and I said, with the clear diction of absolute truth, “If you all don’t get your asses away from this door and out of this hallway I’m going to come out there and do things and I’m going to start with you, Malcolm,” and without thinking I reached out my hands through the door and grabbed hold of someone, I felt a headful of hair in my grip and I banged that head, boom, against the door, once again for good measure because I knew just by the feel that it was Malcolm’s, knew it before his squeal and bucking jerk to escape and I released him, grinning to myself and glad to have hurt him, heard Nakota’s happy gasp and felt, yeah, her touch on mine, felt the strong greasy heat of her greed and “I’ll break your fucking hands,” I said, and squeezed, brutally hard, kept squeezing, increasing the pressure until she finally screamed, till I felt her body, independent of her will, try to get away. And I let her go. With regret. Because no matter what it still felt good to touch her.

And Nakota’s yell and her banshee laugh, too loud, much too loud and again that echo from the Funhole, twin to her voice, and I turned to see the door bowing inward, bending, like hot rubber and steam in my eyes, scrabbling to make the last few feet push that body, push that motherfucker to the limit, come on, and the mask crying out, “Come in! Come in!” and she there, coming at me, bending with a diver’s grace to insert herself, finally, into that big black hole, fuck it with her thin arrow of a body and her greedy smile and her dissatisfied grinning soul. Prey and predator, all in one; eat, and be eaten. “Look out,” she said, my last words but with an inflection I could never match, wide ferocious rapture and stepping onto me, it was deliberate, I know it was because it was her, all of her defined in that gesture and I grabbed her ankles right above her sneakers, sunk my hands, my strong new rotten hands into her flesh and squeezed, crying out as she did not, squeezing all the way to the bone. Feeling the pivot and gash of her tendons, the slippery juice of her blood, crippling her backward as the bones warped and. splintered and, finally, her shriek, as wet a cry as I had ever feared hearing, and I saw the bright betrayal in her eyes, more monstrous even than the pain, the certain hatred that I was as she was and always had been, had been hiding my evil under the thinnest, strongest veil: of weakness. Nicholas Wiener. Cutting her off, literally, at the ankles.