layabout

To answer that question, we have to start all the way back in ancient Egypt, with little figurines called Ushaptis, and then onto Victorian morning dolls, made to look like idealized versions of dead children.

Enter Robert the Doll, who might be the first truly haunted doll on American record, from

“a place none other than Key West Florida, and who, for more than 100 years, has been”

independently witnessed, moving, mocking children, locking people in rooms, and cursing anyone who doesn't ask permission before taking a picture. But why stop there? We're also talking about West African Hudu Poppets, Japanese Tsukumogami, and the night parade, where countless household objects marched through the empty streets of Kyoto, which of course

brings us back to Mexico City in those damned mannequins. But maybe none of these things are monsters, maybe they're part of an alternative conscious ecosystem, or maybe it's just phantoms and projections all the way down. Anyway, you can come to side for yourself, this week on Gods, Ghosts, and UFOs. The podcast where we talk about all the things they said weren't real.

I invite you to be a tourist and step into the minds of those people lost to the unknown.

“When I was five years old, I became terrified of something in my room.”

"There was this embodied voice, sign, and I moved around the room and the voice moved with me." When I was a little kid, I used to see, like, the medicine men have to go outside and chase away, skinwalkers. "Plarveoyens is seeing mental images, symbols." "Why did that sell many DMP experiences report being pulled into alien realms?"

"We have hundreds and hundreds of people who have seen these UFOs." "I am desperately afraid of being seen as crazy." "The weird borderline between dream and reality worked at the cemetery. There's something moving through the woods that stand right outside of our light." From behind, the fridge door comes up big, dark figure, and I could just see the small red

beauty eyes.

“She got really close to my face, and he said, "Stay away from things you don't understand."”

Spectorision radio, a strange podcast network, for strange times. "My name is John Jaffey.

My first memory of the incident is waking up groggy to see my delivering angel bending

over me." Nicole, Nicole Mill, how many other guys out there have probably dreamed of her, and for some reason she was right there sitting on the edge of my bed, and I tried to shake the sleep dust off and said, "Is that you? You're really here?"

She had heard from the writer of the independent film I just co-produced that I'd gotten terribly sick. So even though she didn't know me especially well and hadn't seen me for three months, she decided out of the blue to drive all the way out from LA to visit me. It was surreal.

I lay there barely able to move, and she, of course, was looking like the star she was, and a smart denim jacket, hair tied back with a silver clip. I'd already fallen a little bit in love with her on the set in November. She agreed to a supporting role in the project.

Her first ever film appearance after several increasingly successful records, modern folk

stuff. And I'd watched her butt heads over the script day after day in her stubborn, occasionally profane, but rather cheerful way, and she and I had more than a few prickly conversations about some of the bad ideas the director seemed to stuck on. She knew the movie was going way off the rails, but she gave it a best shot.

Her production got tense and fraught, and in the middle of it, I got sideswiped by a nasty pneumonia, maybe somewhat stress-related, and on the tail of that, something a good bit worse. Post-aviral what? Nicole said to me, "They're in the bedroom of the house I grew up in."

Post-viral orthostatic intolerance. I was in day 12 or 13 of almost total muscular weakness, with probably 10 more to go, just meds and sleep and HBO, and my mother and sister putting up with my needs.

and sick. But I did not expect was for Nicole Mill to show up, and, well, still like me, but she clearly did. I didn't know her current relationship situation, but when someone that talented and smart and beautiful, playfully pokes your bare foot to see if it has feeling and she sits on

your bed, you tend to want to push all your chips to the center of the table.

“She even intended to stay the night before heading back to the city the next day, why not?”

It was nice out here, she said, "She'd never been, and my mom and sister said she was

more than welcome." I was lying there and baggy sweats, very grateful my bedpan was invisible, hoping I didn't look too skinny and frail. We talked for 20 minutes about the ramshackle state of the movie, about 10 minutes past the point my body felt like enduring, it wiped me out, but I tried not to let on.

I pretty much passed out as soon as she went down the stairs to get back to her laptop. Mom and Viv came in a half hour later, all giggly and conspiratorial.

She is terrific, mom said, "Viv was even more a gag, she'd never met a celebrity, of which

Nicole certainly qualified for, be-list status. A couple of her early songs had even been living on Viv's phone for five years already. You two should get married in Milan," she

“said, "mentioned Milan, I think that's a favorite city. I read it. I'd never felt more”

like I was 14 again, even though my adult body was currently in horrific disrepair." They dropped off my lunch, and my mitochondrine, and then I begged them to get the hell out of my face with their matchmaking, so I could eat and rest. I wanted some strength back by dinner, so I could make it through it if Nicole was there. Without Mom and Viv, I think my depression after the POI hit me would have been pretty

unindurable. I'd made the right call going home. I got full credit for long visit, plus the best care around. Mom used to be a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle, pretty big time. Sometimes when I was a kid, she'd appear on one of those TV round tables, so there's a weekend things. She got burned out kind of early, taught writing for a while,

“then decided to focus on Viv after the divorce. But she still published the occasional”

opinion piece when she wasn't rotating through various fitness trends. At 60, she was in better shape than I was, 32. At dinner, Nicole asked her a lot of questions about her work on the island war-nose case. She'd covered it in her heyday, and it was the subject of her only published book. No dining room attendance for me. The three ladies and my life all brought chairs up to my bedroom. We take out fish and ships from a place I'd grown up with. My protectors, balancing plastic

baskets in their laps, and sipping Pepsi from star from cups. The window was open a little and the early season crickets hummed as we talked. I was trying to conserve my energy, but it wasn't easy. Viv, still star struck, was hoping to get a little industry dirt out of Nicole, and she was okay with giving it. She told us a hilarious anecdote involving a famous rapper defending a flight attended from the biggest moron passenger in the history of aviation. I couldn't place the name of

said rapper and Nicole and Viv both called me a clueless loser. Mom wondered loud if celebrities had to attend funerals every single weekend because they just wound up knowing so many people. And for some reason we all found this unintentionally funny and snorted helpless laughter. Talk stayed with music a while into the Casio keyboard in the corner of the room, which was actually Viv's not mine. Couldn't go unnoticed. A performance was arranged.

Nicole agreed to sing "Bride Eyes" because Viv had been devastated by it when we watched the old watershed down movie, long time ago. Viv moved over to the bench and sat down at the

keys super excited. She was 20, 12 years younger than me. It had always been tough on her

from when she was a kid. She'd never lived anywhere else. She went to college online, which she felt comfortable with. My own medical misfortune was small potatoes to

to make walking and therefore assimilating. Difficult all the way into fifth grade.

“The social difficulties it had caused her made it tougher her to live like other kids did.”

And much to my parents' sadness, even in later years she'd never really come all the way out of

that shell to enjoy being around people she didn't know well. Braces and physical therapy did a lot to correct her posture but much inscrutable damage had been done inside, I guess. I'd always felt bad that I was out of a house and roaming by 20 and it couldn't be a better brother as she went through adolescence, mostly alone. I never told my mother how much I disapproved of her and dad not selling that old house down a long dirt lane so Viv could be physically

closer to the neighborhood kids just to give her any advantage there she could get. Viv was bright though

“and funny though it looked like she'd always be very socially insecure and she didn't take care of”

herself so well. She wanted to work some day in economics she loved that stuff. So there in my bedroom she played the fake piano and getting the lyrics off her phone Nicole sang flawlessly on a lovely early spring night north of the Santa Clarino Valley. My mom smiling ear to ear. Viv missed a couple of notes but it didn't matter. It was a fine moment. After mom sensed I was flagging and she herded everyone out. Nicole lingered just a little after promising

them that sure she was up for a watch of Moonrise Kingdom because she wasn't totally sure I'd be awake for her departure the next morning. She wanted to say so long officially just in case.

“She said good luck saving the movie feel free to cut out all my parts if it helps.”

She asked if I was gonna be alright and I said sure. What I didn't tell her was that between the professional disaster and the sickness it had been a scary ugly time. I wound up telling her something unguarded. It was almost more to myself thinking out loud. It just came over me. After lying there warm in my old bed for days with my mother and sister downstairs I told her that now I couldn't imagine getting old without having children. I changed.

Almost as soon as the words were out of my mouth I realized how that might have sounded. But Nicole said she thought she understood.

Kind of an amazing thing happened when she left. There was no promise to text later that week or

see me when I was better. No schedule coordination for next meet-up. She just said so long. Blue me a little kiss and went downstairs and in a very powerful way that prominent silence told me not that she wasn't interested but that it was such a sure thing we'd get together again that there was no need for the slightest moment of awkwardly swapping contact at the tales. It was going to happen. I knew it then. I felt infused with quiet confidence about it.

And it was with that confidence that I drifted off the sleep terribly weak but content that the future was going to be much better than the present. Not much sleep for me though. Strange dreams, troubling dreams all night and unsettled feelings I couldn't quite name that caused me to stare at the ceiling at 4 a.m. at a loss for the specific source of my angst which felt dark somehow not rooted in everyday troubles.

A dog barked intensely somewhere far away but then seemed to get closer and closer until I was convinced it was just outside on the property. Maybe at the top of the lane. I eventually awoke fully to a startled shout from outside. Morning light was coming into my window. It looked more golden than usual almost

I heard faint female voices and then the front door downstairs opening and closing.

“Look at that light. I remember thinking. Where's my camera?”

My breakfast had already been set out for me on my night table, a plain bagel with butter and yogurt and juice. The physical effort of retrieving it was a little much for me. And I ate lying on my side rather than sit all the way up. I thought about texting Nicole but I thought no, no, let it be. Everything was left just the way it should have been. Give it all some thought and some time.

I ate some, then fell back asleep. I wanted to be rested up because

Viv wanted to play wingspan that afternoon. They came into my room a couple of hours later.

“All three of them. Nicole included. I was surprised. I'd happy to see. They had quite the story to tell.”

They'd all been standing in our nebulous dirt and grass driveway where the country lane merges into it, having coffee and granola bars in the morning chill and chatting about San Francisco. Then someone had come up to them from their right. He must have emerged from the woods on that side of the property. But neither mom nor Viv nor Nicole saw him actually do it. Their hearts had all skipped a nervous beat. There was some disagreement about

the bicycle, the man had been riding. They all agreed it was old but Viv thought it wasn't even of the 20th century. Like imagine an omnisch farm bike if that's the thing. She said, "Was it even really a bike?" My mom wondered. I mean, I know there were wheels. Were there three wheels? Nicole thought too definitely too. The man had worn a grey hat and a kind of cape they said. The hat looked like it had the stick end of a broom, jutting up from the top. Almost a

foot high, a truly odd augmentation. He looked very old. Mom thought he had no teeth when he

“smiled at them. Nicole said, "I don't know, I think there were teeth but they were bent funny."”

As he'd passed them on his wobbly conveyance moving over the grass, he'd made his if to throw a frisbee at them. A grand unfurling arm motion but what came out of his bony hand was something different. Beads, mom said, "Tiny like this big," she said, pinching her thumb and finger together

and squishy. It was basically sand more like Nicole added. Viv was of the opinion that whatever it was,

it began wet but dried as they brushed it out of their hair and their clothing. Is it all gone? Nicole asked me and I had the slightly breathtaking privilege of touching her long black mane as she dangled it from my casual inspection head down. There was something still there, a little patch of something over her left ear, neither beads nor sand but what looked like a thousand incredibly small letter sees. The texture was soft and downy and as I touched them with my finger they

seemed to evaporate, warmed the touch. So weird I said unhelpfully to them. The man had pedaled away. I didn't see his legs move. Viv said, "Was he really pedaling?" Of course he was pedaling. Mom said, "It was a bike, right?" He had rolled up the lane around the bend and out of sight. Their morning coffee was over. Not exactly the kind of thing you call the police about. They had noticed the sky too. The gold color I was referring to, coppery almost.

But they weren't sure exactly when it had faded. Just after they'd come back inside, it was their conclusion. My flimuxed caregiving staff decided to let me be and filed out. I called after Nicole, said, "Head it out soon?" But it was like she somehow didn't hear me at all. Though she was the one to close the door behind them. The last one out. The latch thumped and I was alone again. I let myself drift feeling unrested. Was that now our parting, mine and Nicole's, I thought?

they happened a lot during my illness, especially after a rest deprived night like I'd had.

“For the time being, my body was making its own harsh calls about when I would sleep and when”

I would wake, and I'd gotten used to it. Famished, I turned to the night table, expecting a now-stale lunch would be there. Instead, a single red apple sat, unplated beside the digital clock. I pushed myself up and bed and got woozy. My nervous system still unable to fully regulate my blood pressure. I drank the entire glass of water that had accompanied the apple and used my cell to call mom, asking her if I could have some actual lunch or early dinner. I was really

starved. I put her an apple out for you. She said rather coldly of the phone.

No food in the house, suddenly. I said, trying to be lightly teasing, but rather irritated by the

“apple. What could was that going to do me? She replied in a bored, distant voice, that she”

guessed she could drop everything in, cater to me if I was going to line about it, and she'd send Nicole up with something. I expressed surprise that Nicole was still there, and to this, mom simply disconnected the call without a reply. My mind spun to the possibilities of what I might have said to upset her, but came up with nothing. She'd been in a perfectly okay mood when they'd all left my room. Petty Peek was not a thing my mother really ever expressed. I was so hungry I

ate her damn apple slowly. When you're that weak, after-day, even that small amount of nutrition gives a tangible energy boost. I could feel it in my legs. But I was completely dependent on the

fan to get me food and hydration on schedule, and this was the first time they let me down.

The bedroom door opened 15 minutes later, just as I was considering calling mom again. Nicole came in, her hair loose. She'd gone for the denim jacket and black blouse again, no particular vanity here. I brightened, but she had no smile from me. She was holding a turkey sandwich in a napkin. I asked her jovialy if she decided to move in, but she didn't find that funny apparently. Setting the sandwich down on the night table, she only said she'd been delayed.

She asked me with kind of a service sector tone. If there was anything else, she could get me. I looked a skew at the sandwich, which had come with not even a slice of lettuce on it,

“and certainly no dill pickle, which had become kind of an important sodium source for me as I was”

laid up. I decided to tread carefully and ask her if she could bring me some more water. She looked at my glass and seemed to take it reluctantly, telling me she'd be back in a bit. I said she could just fill it from my bathroom tap, and she merely nodded, seeming to think it over. Catching a glimpse of my closed hamper in the corner, which had begun to overflow, she pointed at it. I guess I'm supposed to be your maid for stuff like this.

She said to me without a trace of her usual humor. Flustered, I sputtered a series of nos, and of course not, trying to laugh it off, but she turned away from me irritated, and set the water glass back on the night table. Then she went over to the hamper, bent, and lifted it off the floor with a slight grunt of effort. Your mother said there's a shoot. "You really don't have to do that, come on," I said, lifting an arm. "Sit down, let's talk

about your tour." I guess I'll find it myself, she said, curtly, and walked with a hamper toward the bathroom. I lay still and stunned the silence. I heard her in there tossing clothes into the shoot I'd ridden down twice in my youth, unbeknownst to my parents. When she was done, Nicole came out again without the empty hamper, and ignoring my water glass entirely, headed for the door. I started to mount some half-assed apology for something I didn't do,

and she physically waived it off. "No, that's okay," she said, tiredly, putting a hand to her

I repeated softly, shell-shot. What is it with people like me?" "Oh, just that," she said,

“sometimes all that fixes you as an axe to the face. And with that, she exited the room.”

My childhood home carried sound very, very well. Lots and lots of wood, all of it personally repaired, and re-repared over the years by my handy father before he divorced my mom and left the country. When people walked out of my room, you could hear their footsteps creak in the hall, and then every third or fourth stair would announce their continued progress towards the bottom floor. When exactly the creaks came under those footsteps changed from season to season, and had

something to do with humidity, I suppose. I listened carefully to Nicole's steps all the way down, and then I could even hear very faintly vocalizations being exchanged down there.

But unless I was standing at the top of the steps, I'd never been able to hear individual words.

So, I'd only sensed the tensions mounting between my parents over the years and the conversations they had in the kitchen about the hours she put in for the paper, or about how to fix the shaker out of her isolation. Standing over the vents in my room as a kid, I'd listen only for inflections and changes in volume to signal how heavy things were getting. And if the wind kicked up outside, different effects were heard off of the house,

I could even hear it in the laundry shoot. If it got really blustery out, a draft sort of pinged its way through that metal passage,

though you can never feel it unless you stuck your hand all the way in.

Life in an old house. There was only a little wind that afternoon, not enough to drown anything out. So, I heard my mothers very first step on the staircase down there, and each one all the way up, and then down the long hallway, past her own bedroom. Her pace was strangely slow and deliberate, giving me the same sense of mounting foreboding that came once with the approach down that same hallway of my father who was coming to ground me for two weeks for smoking a joint.

Her hello to me was neutral enough. She'd brought me a bottle of deer park, I saw, no pickle.

“I asked her why everyone was so suddenly tense, was everything all right, did I do something?”

Were they freaking out about that trespasser? What, please, I wanted to know. She set the bottle down on my night table and eased herself down onto the edge of the mattress where Nicole had the night before, perching there. She pushed away a long strand of her hair,

which she was dying less and less those days, starting to finally let herself go completely gray.

We should talk about something, she said, and I, of course, was all ears. We've been discussing your quality of life, she told me, whether it's something you want to endure.

“What the hell does that mean? I asked her. You talk with who?”

Viv? Nicole? Nicole too? All those who hold a stake in this decision, she said with strange formality. We want you to look at your life and ask yourself the hard questions. The silence between us in that moment was the worst we'd ever had, even when I told her at 19, I knew about both their affairs, moms and dads. But this silence seemed to give me no room for a rational way forward through whatever conversational you were having.

What? I said, the hell are you talking about? It might be easier on all of us if you passed, she told me gently, like she was telling me it would be easier on all of them if I took the garbage out on Thursdays instead of Tuesdays. For yourself too, she added, this hasn't

I tilted my head up and called out loudly then for Viv. Her room was too flowers below, having carved herself out a living space in the furnished basement. My mother closed her eyes as if exhausted with me. Stop crying for someone to get you out of every jam you ever made for yourself.

“She said, those two don't especially care if it's painless or not. You should deal with me.”

I informed my mother that whatever dark, sick, joke, Nicole had put them up to because it wasn't at all possible, she and Viv would ever come up with something like this themselves. It needed to end now because they had sufficiently terrified me into believing their minds were shot.

For the first time in my life, I raised and levelled a finger at her, summoning a discipline mode

that had become regretfully necessary in my clunky career in the entertainment industry. That finger will be the first thing I break. She said mildly, and arose off the bed. Once again, I called out for Viv even louder this time. My mother couldn't seem to care less.

“She closed my bedroom door behind her. Viv did not answer. Viv did not come.”

I was shaking. The tremors in my hands seemed to kick start the ugly, illness-born engine that caused even worse shaking in my legs. The kind that had made me think twice about even trying to stand for the last three days. I closed my eyes tight, rocked back and forth, and tried to clear my mind. I'd put myself on back on the nightstand beside the remains of my sad apple. Fully charged, it worked just fine. My mind cycled through the possibilities and I

scrolled through my address book to narrow them down. The friend who lived closest to the house was sadly one of my most neglected. Dennis and I went back to high school. I didn't hesitate.

“We had something powerful in common back then. In addition to suffering through the annual woes of”

the pod rays together, we pretty much hated everybody. But he didn't pick up. I swore loudly just before the tone to leave our message. I found it myself stymied, but I gave it a shot.

First I apologized for not being in touch for so long. Then I told him I was at the house,

but that I was very sick with limited mobility and something was very wrong with my mother and Viv. And I really needed help with them as soon as he could give it. I hung up feeling like I'd inadvertently downplayed the situation. By some miracle, he called me back less than ten seconds later, telling me he'd been in the middle of something at his cafe in West Palmdale. He had me go through the problem again, but I glossed over the details and focused on urgency. I told him I was at

an utter loss for what was wrong with mom and Viv. Did not mention to Cole and said I was actually a little scared. Talking to him now, made me realize how much I'd really owed him over the years. He said he could be at the house in about 20 minutes. I thanked him twice and intentionally added a note of theatrical desperation to my voice. I looked at the bedroom door, calculating the distance.

I'd made it there twice since my convalescence began. My knees buckling so bad the second time,

I'd headed back to my bed on all fours. I'd drained to the rest of the water in my glass, as I ruled down the bland turkey sandwich, desperate for whatever energy I could harvest. I wanted very badly to at least open the door to see if I could hear voices downstairs again. The last bites of the sandwich gone, it was time to make a go for the door. As I pushed my legs off the sound of the bed, that feeling of my body being twice as heavy as it really was, came quickly

back, despite the fact that I'd been losing weight. My head swam and I had to wait for a moment for the world to stabilize. What it caused me to fall before was moving too fast, causing an eruption of black spots to swarm in my vision as my joints buckled unexpectedly. An absolutely necessary wooden cane was propped beside my bedpost and I took it in hand. It really should have

inevitable dizziness. It was bad this time, but indurable. My knees, which felt like some piece of

“industrial machinery someone forgot to oil, shook, sewed my hands. I had no way of knowing if my legs”

would simply give way. The cane, though, something my father had carved for his late brother 30 years before, was strong. The vast desert between the bed and the door promised a possible fall with every step, but by waiting several seconds after each small one for my equilibrium to correct, and minimizing my movements however I could, I made it. I reached out and grabbed the knob like it was grabbing a life raft. I leaned heavily for a while against the door itself, going over my

strategy for the next few minutes. Finally I pulled the door open. Viv was standing right outside it.

How long she'd been there I had no idea. Somehow she'd come up the steps so quietly I hadn't heard her.

“It meant she must have been extremely careful and deliberate about her stealth,”

maybe walking on the sides of the risers. Hair barely combed as usual, swimming in a huge pink sweatshirt. She looked at me, quizzically. "Oh, Johnny, she said, amused. Nope, no good, come on, come on, and she stepped forward to wrap her arms around me aggressively and firmly, and she had a couple of times before when helping me out of bed. I spoke words of protest, but she kept shaking her head, telling me this was dangerous. I could offer some resistance,

but not much. If I struggled too hard, I'd lose my balance and go down. Too quickly, she walked me the few steps backwards to the foot of the bed, and if it became

“two strange dancers whose bodies were both unstable in different ways. She eased me down,”

cooling a little, telling me it was going to be okay. I let myself collapse backwards on to the quilt, exhausted, looking up at her pleadingly. She stood bent over, wincing, supporting herself with her hands on the mattress for a moment, needing to take the pressure off her poor spine out of breath. Then she turned and started looking for something specific, scanning the night table, and then the dresser. Not finding it, she returned to me, saying nothing while she plunged one

hand, broodishly into the deep left-hand pocket of my sweatpants, her hair dangling in her face. My cell phone was in there. I need that, I said impotently, but she shook her head again. What you need is to sleep and not get overexcited, she insisted, and guided my feebly-raised hand back down onto the quilt. She set the phone down on the night table and looked at me. Sign. A joke I whispered, "Please, is it all a joke? My kid, sister, who used to help build cushion

forts, which she'd then festooned with handwritten glitter-glazed signs warning of dangerous cryptids lurking within, looked both sad and offended." "Not a joke," she said. She lifted the phone again and walked to the window with the gate of a woman the three times older. She undid the latch, pushed it up. "No, I protested, propging myself on my elbows. She threw myself on out the window where the sun was starting to fade over the hills.

I heard the softest thump as it hit the dirt down there. She turned, looking satisfied, then crossed the room back to me. Lay about, lay about, she mocked me.

Always you bitch and complain about. She looked quite pleased with her stupid,

invented nursery rhyme. A crooked means smile on her face. I begged her to stop, begged for all of them to stop. None of this was funny, all of it was terrifying. "Not a joke," she said again, and reared back and slapped me hard across the face. "My neck cracked and I flopped back down onto the bed. Consciousness was interrupted again,

While dizziness pitilously scrambled my brain and made any movement completely impossible,

“I heard her say, "Dead soon, that's a promise," as the door opened again.”

Her footsteps creaked down the hall and then the staircase as currents of sharp pain rolled through my head from left to right, left to right again and again. She'd left the bedroom window open. A cool draft whaffed it in, and the sky grew dark. It was my first girlfriend, maybe, from college, who'd tried to warn me about things. She believed in every dark force out there around us, ghosts, telekinesis,

curses, but not in a curious upbeat way. There was a real fear there. She believed we invented new screens for ourselves every day, layer upon layer.

So we would never see the mysterious things that were actually right in front of us.

When I challenged her on this, she said to me, "With her usual cynicism."

“Yeah? How many homeless people did you conveniently not see before we got to Starbucks?”

I spent a winter break with her in her parents' house when things were getting serious. And there was an upstairs room they never went into. Never once for the past 10 years. Never even opened the door. It was to play Kate Laura. She'd seen something in their ones. I remember playfully trying to pull her toward it down the hallway, but not really. I wasn't really going to pull her in there. It was just playing.

She'd hit me then in panic. Almost as hard as my sister hit me on the night everything broke. A closed fist against the side of my head, she meant it.

“That mystery door stayed closed. Laura cut off all contact with me soon after.”

I could not prepare much for my second journey toward my own unlockable door. I wanted to be at it by the time Dennis arrived. I needed to hear what was happening downstairs. There had been times since I'd come back to the house when I'd made the wrong series of moves as I merely lay in bed and wound up totally mobilized for 15 minutes the room spinning.

And I never understood exactly what I'd done to make it happen. So I tried once again to take

it slow. Though each moment of pause now made my fear worse, constant action and progress was the only bomb for me. I decided to simply crawl this time, pulling my cane along until I got to the door. Once there, reaching up to the knob caused another very bad moment, it felt like someone had kicked my power cord very lightly again, causing consciousness to sputter. I took several slow, deep breaths and regrouped. I got the door open and from the floor looked out into the dark hallway.

Then just listened, chilling my sweatpants and old podries t-shirt, my feet were bare. From far away there was a brief rattling sound all the way from the basement I thought. It stopped and then something heavy was moved to table, maybe. No voices.

If they were all that far away, I'd never be able to hear them speak.

But then I did hear a laugh through the vents. A jovial but sharp laugh. As if a cruel person being amused by a grim joke. My mother, I thought, no one joined her. Pulling myself up into a standing position that was going to be difficult. I looked down at my traitorous limbs and knew I'd have to kneel first for a time and see if that uncomfortable position wouldn't cause me to tremble to badly to keep going.

I very much needed more water, but at this point the bathroom in the hallway was closer than my own. With Viv having left my window open, I heard the sound of a car moving over the dirt track, leading off our little country lane, and saw the faint suggestion of headlights glinting off the glass. Dennis, he'd been true to his word. My heart beat a little faster and I closed my eyes and tried

I didn't think he'd be able to hear me well if I called out and wouldn't anyway for a fear it might

“set someone off. I wanted to go back in time and have perched in the window still so I could”

make contact with him in some way. But I would wait, I would wait until the door opened down there. There was the slight hope he might see my cell phone down there somewhere, very slight. The doorbell ran, low and prolonged. Another long ago installation by my father, Mom used to laugh about how serious it sounded, how ecclesiastical. Footsteps padding across planks, and then the door opened, and I heard Viv saying hello. And then something that

chilled my blood. She closed the door again after stepping outside to talk to Dennis instead of letting him in. There was no reason for her to have done that. It was cold outside.

“There were more fate to footsteps coming from the living room. A short, almost an audible”

comment from one person to another, I couldn't tell who. I imagined Mom into cold standing at

the front window and looking out. That was the first time I looked around to be for the purpose of

figuring out what I might use to defend myself if it came to that. All I had was the cane. The strength that would take to swing it with any real force just once would certainly bankrupt my energy. The front door opened again a couple of minutes later, then closed a final time. I heard Viv wiping her feet on the mat, as we'd been trained to do all our lives. After that, no talk. Just silence.

I thought I had only one chance, slum as it was, to make contact. I took as much air as I could into my lungs and then hollered out Dennis' name, holding onto the door knob tight. My chin sagging onto my chest afterward. Black stars doing a gentle dance inside my closed eyes. There was no response. Dennis certainly wasn't in the house, but at that desperate volume, he should have heard me through my window if he was headed back to his car. There had been no sound

of an engine starting yet. Nicole, my supposed delivering angel, laughed heartily downstairs. Need something? Jesus child? My mother called up without the slightest tinge of empathy. I didn't answer. Wait till you see your surprise, Nicole yelled. It's coming right up! It was then that a single mental image flashed in my favorite mind without effort or warning. As if sent from a place beyond my understanding, as if sent by my old girlfriend Laura across

space of 12 years, like she was calling out to me and saying yes, you stubborn, unbelievable, even full. What you think is happening really is happening, and it's up to me to show you your only way out. Because it was my only way, and I don't know if the twisted wreck of my conscious thoughts would have ever made the right connection in time. I'd already started to move toward my bathroom by the time I heard the clanking from down the staircase. Something heavy being shifted and moved and lifted.

First onto the bottom stair, where at least two or maybe all three of them stabilized the thing

“before their effort began again. At some crucial moment my fear had begun to produce healthy adrenaline”

and I felt a brief surge of physical energy. My journey began. I had to first crawl to the bed, haul myself up, turn into a sitting position, then boost myself with my cane from there. As I dragged myself along, I heard my caregivers slowly struggle through their own journey, carrying a large piece of furniture or equipment up the staircase, which hooked left in the middle, 15 steps in all, I'd counted them many times. Whenever they were carrying knocked and bend against the

stairs again and again, and though they did not speak to each other, the strain of their physical effort was obvious. I made it off my bed and onto my trembling feet by the time they reached the L corner of the staircase and were motionless down there for a few moments. I was running out of minutes seconds. All that was saving me maybe was the fact that their cargo was so heavy. They

getting up to the Dickens as babies to say to my great irritation. She'd made a careful study since

“she was a pre-teen of words that made me cringe and used them liberally in my presence.”

Another laugh this time from Viv. The stretch between my bed and the bathroom door looked canyon-like, but I pushed off. After the first two hesitant steps, I became confident I wouldn't have to resort to crawling. My muscles were cooperating. The blood rushed to my head and mudded it

like always, but not enough to topple me, make me nauseous, or cause me to tremble. Brute

determination was buying me what I needed. I heard the railing on the stairwell take another jarring hit from the thing being carried up the stairs. They likely looked comical out there at the three of them lugging and panting. It must have been especially hard for Viv to help. I almost lost my balance when reaching for the bathroom door, but I longed for the edge of the sink in there and

“was able to support myself completely against it for several seconds, resting the cane against the”

drawer. There were coming down the hall now after a final short break, moving on a flat plane allowed them a much improved pace. The floor out there creaked in aggravation. I pushed the bathroom door closed, leaned against it, and locked it shut. Beyond it, the door to the bed room was kicked open as someone used their foot rather than give up their grip on their plaything. Thought you'd be in there? Mom would call out to me. That's okay, we've got a screwdriver.

Nicole was asking Viv where an outlet was. I turned to the laundry shoot, built into the wall, opposite the medicine cabinet. I was a much bigger person now than when I'd descended through

it at age eight or so to the ground floor. Never before had I thought about the width of that

“entrance and the fact that the shoot tunnel was so long it required even an adult to let go at some”

point and just slide. But this was no sleek shoot tucked away in the wall behind a cute trap door and latch. The hall was big and wide open because my mother had had nightmares about me or Viv sneaking into it and getting stuck or our next broken. My folks had relied on promises of epic discipline to try to keep us away from it. It had worked on Viv. I pushed away from the sink and staggered to the mouth leaving the cane behind, trying to hold onto it and get into the shoot at the same

time wasn't going to be possible. There came a final thunk from outside the bathroom door. It sounded like they'd set up their prop right in the middle of the bedroom. Imagine how messy this thing's going to make your head Johnny mom called out. The entrance to the laundry shoot was set higher in the wall than I could get to without stepping up onto something unlike when I was a kid and had simply jumped up. And oh god there it was. The hamper that Nicole had carried in

before. If I could flip it over with my foot I thought it might just be sturdy enough to do the job. Bending over to do that would send too much blood to my head too fast and if I passed out. Someone out there flipped up in a plastic safety shield and pressed the button. And my father's old bench top joined her, sprang into life, coughing out a wavering high-pitched buzz. It's blade mechanism. It was a rotating steel cylinder set into a long flat plane.

Anything pushed along that plane and over the cylinder was cut up by dozens of sharp heads in set in a spiraling pattern. They left the joint to running as someone approached the bathroom door.

I had to go into the shoot chest first. There was no other way it could make it happen.

The push upwards onto the metal slope would be hard and require some propulsive kicking that I'd be at a 45 degree angle head below my waist and we just see if I passed out before I hit the other hamper, set inside the washing machine, hutch on the ground floor. That one I could see was blessedly more than half filled with clothes and it would maybe cushion my fall if I hit it just so. Someone was going to work on the bathroom door lock with a screwdriver they'd brought.

It was Nicole, her voice oozed through the keel, and of the road lover, she said, "You're going to bleed for us." I used my bare right foot to flip the hamper and set it in place,

the thick plastic was indeed enough to keep the thing from bowing. I gritted my teeth insanely

“to try to somehow strengthen my muscles, my arteries, my resolve. Outside the door, Nicole told”

my mother that the screwdriver wasn't working, they might need to force their way in. I gave myself one big push into my outer thighs banged against the mouth of the shoot. My torso flopped forward and I used the last of my energy to wriggle deeper in. Once inside, I had maybe two seconds of full grip on the smooth metal sighting before I just couldn't keep my weight from overcoming gravity. I started to drop through. It was a quick ride,

and then I dropped through open air, my right shoulder slamming into the pile of clothes and the hamper. My body bounced off the pile, toppling the whole thing. The floor was hard-tile. Two

“separate jolts of pain ripped through my torso. One into the right side of my rib cage, the other”

exploding up into my neck and jaw. But instead of blacking me out, the pain had the opposite effect. This was clean, dagger pain that brought with it more adrenaline. I only partially broke one rib it turned out. My shoulder would swell up nastily in the ensuing minutes, but I'd been spared the worst case scenario. I tried to stand and was able to, without the cane, and though my right leg was wobbly, I could support myself against the wall outside the laundry hutch.

Upstairs, the jointer buzzed on. It's very possible the noise had drowned out the sound of my descent and bought me a little more time. I heard no further insults were, promises of death

“spoken from up there. It was time to go for broke, and it was the only chance I had to cover the distance”

I needed to. The pain from the fall throbbed through the entire upper half of my body. I started hobbling. I got into the hallway around the corner from the foyer and gave myself a good push off the nickname table supporting the digital photo displayer I'd gotten mom for Christmas two years before. My glance went briefly to my right into the kitchen where I saw that three sets of dishes had been carefully laid out for dinner, but that direction was of no interest to me. It was a mere 12 feet

at the front door once I got around the corner. A warm wave of spiraling burnt orange light washed through my mind as dizziness rose and I veered briefly off my course into the wall, but even then I

was always moving forward and there they were. My mother's car keys right on the male shelf,

resting as usual in a ceramic dish shaped like a striped baths. Into my hand they went and then I was pulling on the door. Instead of guiding it open gently to maybe muffled the sound, I went to the Hail Mary route and just got out as fast as I possibly could. It now felt like an iron chain was cinching around the right side of my sternum and the getting tighter. I threw the door wide and there he was right at the bottom of the front steps, the man, the bad man. He timed the sweeping

motion of his sheathed arm to my appearance as if he'd been waiting. Just like Vive, he moved been waiting outside my bedroom for just the right moment when I'd emerge. His bony hand

opened and something came out of it. Something not wet but not dry. A million specks of invisible

matter that glued themselves to my skin and then slid down off it, slid off my face and neck and hands. I tasted it in my mouth. The taste of dark logger almost, stinging my tongue but then deadening it. Yes, the old man wore a hat, something bigger than a fashionable fedora, something lumpy and ill-fitting. And it really was a broom handle sticking up out of the top. He was smiling and the coal was right. There were teeth, broken teeth, looking like shattered windows,

badly in need of repair. It wasn't so much a cape he wore as a layer of rippling gray blankets. He pushed off and began to pedal his oversized bicycle like machine even as I stood there,

a painless penetration. There was no chance to follow the man. He rode away swiftly,

“not up our dirt drive but instead tore the woods, wobbly on that wheeled thing that produced”

ugly scraping and cracking noises. I couldn't possibly give him a second bore of my attention.

Dennis was face up in the dirt near his car. The expression on his face was both terrible and inappropriate. As if he were still registering wide-eyed surprise at the attack, but pleasantly so like, "Oh, you got me Vive, how clever. How amusing. Well played." Yes, she'd gotten them. There was dark blood all over the front of his shirt and it had drenched his jeans above the knee. A defensive wound had fishered his left palm between his

index and middle fingers, causing the two halves of his hand to gruesomely misalign. I went past him. Surely they were coming now, surely they'd long since gotten into the bathroom

or heard me run. There was not even a second to spare for my friend. Mom's Corolla was right beside

“Dennis's SUV and I acute the key fob. The headlights flashed briefly. And that single burst of”

brightness itself was enough to make me so subtly woozy that I finally went down as if wind shear on an airport tarmac had cut my legs out from under me. A yelled out in frustration and rage and struggled back to my feet, opened the car door and collapsed into the front seat. The active swinging my legs and confused the flow of my blood once again and pushed me a final time to the brink of unconsciousness. The world came into focus again just as my pursuers emerged from the

open door in front of me. I turned to the key in the ignition and the engine rumble smoothly into life as they came out all three of them. Nicole was holding her screwdriver. Vive was holding the

“steak knife she'd killed Dennis with. The headlights glinted off smears of gore. Maybe she'd even”

brought up the staircase with her after the attack resting it on the jointer to free her hands. Mom had nothing in her. No time to search for something new to destroy me with. Or maybe she intended to do it only with her long manicured nails. They got to the front of the car and I was reversing fast to bumping over the dirt. Trying to perform a three-point turn would allow them to surround me so instead I floored the gas with my barefoot heading straight backwards. I didn't

dare turn my head because the whipping motion that would require might black me out. So I relied entirely on the rear view mirror to guide me back, back, gunning the gas ever harder, retreating up the dirt drive to where the property opened up. Several hundred feet shy of lonely, whipper will road. Farther, farther. They kept running, did mom, Vive and Nicole. The glow of the headlights gave me one last vivid glimpse of them, gripping what weapons they had, their mouths open in anger, and then they were

lost in the dark, and I turned the wheel to guide me around the long, slow curve that cut off my sightline to them. The car was jolted as it hit the slightly uneven seam of the cross-road on a straight perpendicular. I hit the brakes then. If I turn the wheel hard, the left at that juncture, I'd be pointed toward other houses, a waist down, and beyond that, roots sixteen toward town, two easy motions, well within my energy range. The pain in my sternum had even subsided quite rapidly. In fact,

I felt really okay, sort of strong and healed up. I just had to drive away, and I'd be safe from them.

A police station was even the first thing you got to on the way into town, even before Torby's

gas and go. Instead, after putting the car back into drive, I rotated the steering wheel not at all. I pressed hard on the accelerator again. The engine responded well. It was a divine sensation, roaring straight ahead, back toward the house. It felt so right. Good horsepower for the money, the salesman had told mom. She was the first one to reappear in my headlights. She registered, no surprise when I jammed my foot harder still on the gas pedal and angled slightly too,

hollow smack of her upper body against the windshield. She was too light to shatter it,

though her head connected hard enough with the glass before she tumbled over the roof and left a bloody splotch to cause a costly spider crack, everyone calls a rock star. Viv seemed to slow down, knife and hand, and that just made it easier for me to swirl and hit her dead on, catching her neatly with the front end's exact midpoint. Rather than tumble over the car, she went right under it into the dirt, causing the car to

buck and by angle to skew dramatically, I whipped the steering wheel left to ride as she disappeared under the unseen workings. There were two quick pronounced thumps, and then the back end of the car

“actually lifted from the awkward roll over her modest bulk. I remember congratulating myself in the”

moment for such a perfect strike, though, of course, I'd circle around eventually and make sure they were both dead. Slottering Viv had sent me off course toward the woods in the general direction the bad man had gone, so my approach to Nicole was a wide one, to her credit she did not retreat, did not try to mount some kind of escape. She looked confused as to my course anyway. My tires spun in the grass, fruitlessly before they caught onto better ground for my final burst

of speed. The tall sick and more tree in the yard would have provided Nicole with a perfect barrier to block my approach, but either she was too proud to get behind it, or, like me, she was utterly incapable of thinking logically. Forest into a tricky angle, I almost scraped the driver side of

“Dennis's SUV as I rolled forward, and in fact, came within just a couple of feet of running over”

my poor dead friend's head. Only the last second wheel correction prevented that. It was a

nifty bit of steering I had to do to both hit Nicole with edge of my bumper and avoid crashing into the tree, but I managed. I thought I heard her knees snap, and then almost cartoonishly her body spun her right into the sick and more. Napoleon, our family used to call him, with enough force for her face to leave an impressive gout of blood on it. She dropped like a sack of sand. Guess she wouldn't be selling a lot of crappy tour merch now.

I quickly hit the brakes before the Corolla part of the Neve line of scrub and weeds that used to mark the edge of my ad hoc with a ball field. From a moment I idled, feeling about as good about anything as I ever had in my whole life, and then I turned off the engine and rolled down my window, taking a moment to enjoy the natural evening silence. Then for a time I merely walked from body to body, please with my work. It turned out

the only one still alive was mom, more than halfway up the dirt drive. She was in terrible shape, but breathing, and one of her eyes was half open. I settled the issue with my bare foot, bringing it down again and again on her chest until I sensed there was no more movement, no more breath. Before I got back into the car, I locked over to the edge of the woods,

or the bad man, sorry, I have never thought of a more clever name for him,

had vanished on his old bicycle thing. Those woods ran only a quarter mile or so before they ended at the back of a strip mall. Time to go then. The breeze made me cold and the

“sheen of sweat on my body was concerned. I didn't want to get pneumonia all over again. Did I?”

Plus, I had other things to do that night. Sometime in the last 15 minutes or so, I'd begun to form very strong opinions about certain neighbors I now found offensive and disruptive to the point where there seemed to be only one viable solution for the problem they brought into the world. I decided to head out on foot. I kneeled and worked Dennis's good timberlands off his feet and stepped into them, pleased with their fit. They really were better than anything I had.

Inside the house I put on my winter coat and with minimal fuss and time loss, I managed to find two or three things that would facilitate the night work ahead of me. I left the door open when I left the house. I didn't count on ever coming back. By the time something like sanity came back,

Two more people were dead. A blazing ring of headlights surrounded me out on Hamlet Road near the

“strip mall. We ordered fishing ships from and the people with guns took me away.”

It was about three days later in a well guarded hospital room where my recovery from post-viral

orthostatic intolerance was completed that the person named John Jaffee finally recognized himself again

“from there straight to prison. So, no promising love story with a celebrity”

singer songwriter for me turns out. Nothing like that, not in this lifetime.

No anything.

“But what I wanted to do was not to get the most of the studio. The master by day laptop”

is soft behind the internet. So master is really great. I said, you can say that you can break the door. You have a story. But you don't understand. Egal, it's a news report. Make the whole thing like this story. And when they then work, he says, "Catching." "That's it?" "Safe." "How do you deal with your money?" Now post-viral news.