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“Bring in the first one,” said the tall, polite policeman with the boring voice.

The first one was brought in. He too was tall, if not so much. He too was polite, if somewhat nervous. But his voice when he spoke ruined all resemblance, because it was too obnoxiously erratic and pitchy to be boring, and what he said was “I’m, well, I’m not in trouble am I?”
“Oh you’re in trouble, alright,” said the other member of the police. She had the attitude of brass knuckles and steel-toed shoes. “Neck-deep and sinking fast. How long can you hold your breath, creep?”
“Constable Leslie, please shush,” said the tall, polite policeman. “Sir, this is a complex matter, and your testimony would be of great assistance in resolving it. May I ask what you did last night?”

“Well, I, you know, I went home. From work, yes, I did that. I went home from work. I took the long way along the shore because you know, well, that there’s the construction, and it’s taking so much time, and I, I can’t believe how difficult it can be to pour asphalt, what’s the, what’s the deal with that, and well…”
“Continue, please.”
“Well, I thought I saw something. Maybe. I’m not sure.”

The tall, polite policeman folded his hands in the attitude of a conciliatory praying mantis. “Sir, if you wouldn’t mind elaborating on that, we would greatly appreciate it. No judgment will be made. No word will be spread. Your testimony is anonymous, safe, and profoundly welcome.”
“Right, well, it’s just, you know, sort of, a bit, well, kind of, a tad, uh, you see, somewhat, I know it’s, well, oh dear, really, it’s that-”

“Unshush,” sighed the tall, polite policeman.

“Pardon?”
“LISTEN UP, YOU PREENING PRINCESS PUNK!” howled Constable Leslie, surging forward like a wave through a borehole. “If you don’t START TALKING I’m going to START TWISTING! Fingers! Nipples! EYES! EVERYTHING! WHAT DID YOU SEE!? WHAT DID YOU SEE!? WHAT DID YOU SEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!??”

“A beast!” gasped the first one. “A great and terrifying beast, like a a a gigantic tadpole or somewhat like! It slithered ‘cross the road! I only saw its tail as it crossed before my car, but it stretched from curb to curb and more! Please don’t touch me!”
“Please don’t STOP TALKING! “ sneered the constable, jaws gnashing at an invisible, infuriating bit. “You’ve seen more, you little slime-balled snotwedge! SPILL YOUR GUTS OR I’LL SEW THEM UP SIDEWAYS AND LET THE STITCHES ROT IN YOUR SPLEEN!”

“It descended to the water, left nary a ripple! And then as I watched, transfixed, it breached the surface! ‘pon my word, I saw its gigantic skull – whale-like, monstrous! It reared its head back and swallowed a deer it had clutched in its mouth, antlers, hooves, and all! Then it sank below, and it was all as if it had never been!”
“Your cooperation has been of great use and your conduct impeccable,” said the tall, polite policeman, both hands now white-knuckle gripped at the collar of Constable Leslie as she strained towards the far side of the table, eyes wide and pupils narrowed. “Please, take the coffee-coloured seat in the next room and we’ll be with you shortly.”

***

“Bring in the second one.”

The second one was brought in. He had the sort of eyes that didn’t look at anything in particular because they were watching everything through the filter of his own head.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” said the tall, polite policeman.

“Shut up and talk!” screamed Constable Leslie. “Talk – TALK or I’ll have your nails, b’god! – The pliers! The needles! The blades! – I’ll have them!”

“Jeez.”

“Constable Leslie, please shush,” repeated the tall, polite policeman in a somewhat strained (if still boring) voice, tendons throbbing wires against his forearms as they pulled desperately at her shoulders.

Constable Leslie receded in reluctant inches, her nails leaving visible scratches in the surface of the table. Her eyes, by contrast, grew to roaring infernos.

“Sir,” said the tall, polite policeman. “There are certain events of the last twenty-four hours that we would like your total and full cooperation in uncovering, as we believe you may have been witness to them.”
“Oh yeah, absolutely. I saw the angel.”

“Pardon?”
“The angel,” said the second one. His voice was neither boring nor obnoxious, merely forthright. “It was in the water. Long, long neck, head like a horse. It reared up out of the water and looked me in the eye and it sang to me.”

“Sang?”

“Without words. Full of meaning, though. Everything made so much sense when it sang. It told me that I was not alone, and that I was not unloved, and that the same was true for all of us that lived on this little dot in the stars. It told me that it would return three times before its people came to greet us as equals, and then it dove into the air and vanished.”

“Dove into the air? Could you please describe that?”
“It dove up – out of the water – and into the air – as if it were water – and then it vanished – as if it had gone underwater. But in the air.”

Constable Leslie had begun at some point during this to make a very slight – almost inaudible – song of her own, which sounded a bit like a tea kettle and a bit like someone mumbling ‘blood’ very very fast over and over. Her arms were flexing; her palms were leaving damp spots on her sleeves.

“Did the angel’s song tell you anything of its people?”
“They were made of light, but wore bodies to try and see us. We’re too dark for them to see without bodies. They visited this world long before, when the dinosaurs were around, before the floods and meteor and the garden and the K-Pg boundary. They left their bones in the stones and we called them plesiosaurs. They fought demons too, and those we called pterosaurs.” He shrugged at this. “It was a lot to take in, you know? One moment I was standing by the beach, the next I was being sung to by an angel.”

“I see,” said the tall, polite policeman. “And what were you doing down at the beach that night?”
“A whole lot of acid.”

“Your forthrightness and candour are appreciated greatly, citizen,” said the tall policeman. He gently elbowed Constable Leslie, whose fingers were beginning to crawl forwards across the desk again. “Please, take the liver-coloured seat in the next room and we’ll be with you shortly.”

***

“Bring in the third one.”

The third one was tired. He looked like he needed a coffee and he needed to not be there.

“I need a coffee, and I need to not be here,” he groaned. “Look at you guys: you look like Abbot and Costello doing good cop/bad cop.”

“I prefer the three stooges,” said the tall, polite policeman.

“Charlie Chaplin fuckin’ BURIES all of them, you morons don’t know a damned thing,” sneered Constable Leslie.

“Well, there is at least one thing one of us knows,” said the tall, polite policeman. “Sir? Would you mind sharing it with us?”
“Sharing what?”

“The experience you claim to have had yesterday afternoon.”
He looked blank. “I had lunch?”
“Something a little more unusual.”
“I skipped breakfast? The room service was lousy.”
“If you were staying at the Lord’s Arms, that’s very usual.”
“I saw a deer in the woods?”
“The WATER, you perfidious, procrastinating clown,” snarled Constable Leslie. “Tell us about what you saw in the WATER, or I’ll -” and here the tall, polite policeman slid his hand over her mouth so smoothly and neatly that it did not appear to be hostile at all, but merely the comforting shoulder-pat of one colleague to another.

“What about the water?” asked the third one, rubbing his eyes.

“What did you see in it?” replied the tall, polite policeman.

“Nothing? Nothing worth noting. A log hit my kayak.”

“A log?” inquired the tall, polite policeman. His fingers moved, almost as if someone was trying to chew her way through them.
“Yeah. A big, bumpy log. Floating just barely below the surface; not fully waterlogged yet is my guess.”
“And you’re certain this is what you saw?” said the tall, polite policeman, face twitching on the edge of agony.
“I saw the bark floating off it; I saw broken branches dangling from it; I poked it with my paddle and watched it roll over and counted the knots on its side, so yeah. I’m absolutely certain what I saw. Is that what’s unusual around here?”

“A little bit,” said the tall, polite policeman. “Oh DAMN,” he amended, and yanked his hand free from Constable Leslie’s face, who gave him a look that no amount of soap could have cleaned.

“So, are we done or what?” inquired the third one.

“Very nearly. Please, come with us into the next room.”

***

The first and second ones looked up from the terrible old magazines they’d been reading as the police walked the third one into the room with them. They were garbage, real dentist-quality stuff. Ten years at youngest.

“Citizens, you have all been of great and profound use to our investigations this day,” said the tall, polite policeman. “Your testimony has brought us to a singular and concise conclusion. Commissioner Leslie will explain.” And so saying, as always unsmiling, he reached out and grasped the third one’s neck and snapped it on the spot, catching the body like the lumpy sack of bones it had become.

“That’s right,” said Commissioner Leslie, showing every fang in her face at once. “There’s going to be another unidentified creature floating in the water tonight! And you two are going to encounter it in passing, by chance, just a little bit! And it’s going to be MYSTERIOUS, and STRANGE, and EXCITING, and you’re going to tell everyone you know about it or SO HELP ME GOD TOMORROW THERE WILL BE THREE SIGHTINGS INSTEAD OF ONE, AM I UNDERSTOOD?”

The first one nodded so hard his neck nearly snapped of its own accord. The second one, by contrast, frowned. “Is this because of the acid?”
“The what?”
“Because you asked for my total and full cooperation and I gave that. It’d be a real asshole move to go after me because I told you about the-”

“NO!” screamed Commissioner Leslie, snatching up one of the magazines and biting it into four. “NOW GO ENCOUNTER THE DEEPEST MYSTERIES THE WORLD HAS YET TO UNCOVER AND TELL THE WORLD OF WHAT STRANGE BEINGS MAY YET LIE HIDDEN WITHIN THE BOUNDARIES OF OUR TOWNSHIP! YRRRREEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGHHHH!!!!!!!!”
“Oh. Okay. Ohkay.”

And they left.

The tall, polite policeman coughed gently until his commissioner made eye contact and gave a grudging nod, then reached out with his free hand and helped resocket her jaw.

“Owfuck,” she grunted. “There. Reckon that did it?”
“Three witnesses would have been a sure thing,” he said.

“And two?”
“Almost a sure thing.”
“Good enough. ‘We need a tourism board’ my left tit; looks like budget’s back on the menu, constable! GOD I’m going to rub this in Jodie’s face on Friday.”

Tammy was five years old when she met the werewolf. Five exactly. Having just walked out of your birthday party before something happens really helps to put a time and a date to it.

There had been a lot of talking, and then some yelling, and then some cake (which spilled EVERYWHERE) and then mom wiping her off (ugh) and then everyone milled around and she said she wanted to play tag but Josh yelled YOU’RE IT and shoved her and ran into the bathroom and wouldn’t open the door so she went to play catch in the backyard but Ben threw like his hands were his feet and WHOOSH went the ball way off to one side and slip-slide-swish through the crack in the backyard gate.

And Tammy knew she shouldn’t wander out of the backyard, but it was okay because she wasn’t. Just her arm.

So she slipped the gate open just a little inch – ker-chack, ker-chuck – which was much easier than she’d always thought it’d be, and she reached down for the ball, and as she did that something large and furry bolted upright from the shade of the fence, where it had been napping.

She knew it wasn’t a dog. If it were a dog it would be a puppy, with those big feet and big eyes. And if it were a puppy it wouldn’t have quite as many teeth to show at her when it growled.

“Waa-AAH!” said Tammy, and she jumped back and the thing jumped forwards and it was lucky her other hand was still holding the gate because that shut it without even trying, ker-chack, and then it locked solid when something heavy and furry hit it from the other side, ker-chuck. It growled at her one last time – high-pitched and squealy – and then its ears pricked up and it ran away. It didn’t run like a dog; its legs were too long; its ankles weren’t in the right places. It ran like Ben when he was pretending to be a lion.

Tammy thought about it, then remembered she was upset and burst into tears, and that distracted her again until that evening when she was supposed to be going to bed.

“Mom?” she asked. “Can people have wolf faces?”
“Baboons are called dog-faced monkeys, bug,” said Mom. “But they aren’t people.”

“Oh,” said Tammy. And she asked to look up pictures of baboons, wolves, and dogs, which was how she decided based on the available evidence that it had been a werewolf. Or a very ugly baboon, but Mom said the zoos would say something if an animal escaped. Then she told her it could be a school project so Tammy remembered it was time for bed again.
She forgot about all of it until the next morning, when she got out up and looked out the window and saw a shadow lurking by the mailbox. It ducked when she jumped.

It was there the next day too.

***

Tammy was twelve years old when it tried to get into the house for the first time. Twelve-and-a-half, maybe? It had been winter, she was sure. A bad time of year for her werewolf; the sun went down earlier and the shadows grew so much longer and there was so much more room for a growing monster to hide in. Tammy never walked home from school without a friend; she never stayed out late; and she never snuck out. The only complaint her mother ever had was that she insisted on leaving all the lights on, especially when she was alone in the house.

Which she was sure she was, because she had definitely imagined the sounds of someone walking up the front step.

And the sounds of someone scuffling at the key.

And the deep, irritated wuff of someone without opposable thumbs.

Yes, she had imagined all of it. And she was going to make sure of that right now. So she took a deep breath and marched to the front door with her eyes shut and looked onto the deck and couldn’t see it because it was blocked by a big, hairy set of shoulders and some shockingly bright yellow eyes.

“Nine-one-one isn’t a toy, bug,” said her mother much, much later that night.

“I could call animal control instead,” said Tammy. “What’s animal control? Can I have their number?”

Her mother ruffled her hair with condescending love. “See, what am I meant to do about you, bug? I can’t even ground you; you do that to yourself. So how about this: as punishment, you’re doing my half of the snow shovelling too.”

“Not after dark.”

“The snow doesn’t wait for our convenience, my tiny horror.”
“Can I have a big shovel?”
“Sure.”
“And an axe?”
Tammy had to settle for a VERY big shovel and very fast shovelling, which was what got her into weights.

***

Tammy was twenty when it finally happened. She was in the car and she was done for the day and she had both hands on the wheel at precisely nine and three o’clock and was focusing her full attention on driving, exactly as she was meant to. It was therefore completely unfair for the werewolf to leap from a streetlight directly onto her hood and crash through the windshield, spinning the car into the ditch and flipping it what was probably once and felt like sixteen times.

Her eyes were full of fur. Her mouth was full of fur. Her nose, much to its regret, was full of fur. Also blood, judging by the fluid sliding down her throat.

“Fuck,” she said into the fur. And like magic, it moved away, turned, rolled – with a slight whimper – upright, and, with one long, gangled, mangy arm, began to feel around for her like her mother looking for her glasses at three AM.

It was much less endearing from the perspective of the glasses. The palm was thick and hairy and gigantic; it fit over her face like she was a baseball, and in accordance with ancient instincts honed by several playground fights, she licked it. Then she nearly choked on fur and reverted to older instincts and bit hard.

It shrieked. There were no other words for that; it wasn’t a howl; it wasn’t a yelp; it wasn’t even a bark. This was a noise made by a human being in distress filtered through a throat incapable of enunciating anything less threatening than a snarl, and it was at full volume. It was also – partway through – fading rapidly into the distance.

Lights probed the inside of the car.

“That makes sense,” Tammy told the friendly man telling her something about ambulances. “It only comes after me when nobody else is around.”

Hair was still stuck on her tongue. She passed out hoping she wouldn’t choke on it; that’d be embarrassing.

***

Tammy was thirty-seven when she made it happen. It had taken no small amount of effort.

Spending a decade looking over her shoulder? Hard. Mastering half a dozen forms of self-defence and buying an arsenal of technically-legal cutting-edge animal control weaponry? Also hard. Admitting it wasn’t following her anymore? Harder. Figuring out what she wanted to do about that? Harder still. Spending nearly ANOTHER decade looking for clues as to where the thing had gone? Hardest.

After all that had been said and done, setting up the kill zone had been easy. Except for her glasses. Even under her scarf her breath was steaming them off her face; how the hell had mom survived with these things for so long?

“Anything to say?” she asked the werewolf.

It gurgled at her, two-meter legs and arms thrashing. The electricity pumping through the net turned the escape attempts into the skittering limbs of a spider-trapped fly. Its claws groped at nothing, gripped their own palms. Foam was leaking from its mouth – maybe an aftereffect of the six darts clustered in its chest. Something else was leaking out too; squeaks, whines, whimpers, something guttural. Nothing decipherable.

“Good enough,” she said, and kicked it overboard.

Great Bear Lake was nice and clear this time of year, the tail-end of the little window where the ice didn’t coat it. Tammy got to watch it sink all the way down.

It never quite stopped squirming.

Then she returned the boat, paid everyone she’d contacted in the last six months a two-hundred-percent bonus to shut up, went home, and slept the whole night through for the first time since she turned five.

***

Tammy was sixty-eight and in the hospital. Again.

It didn’t seem quite fair. She’d managed to deal with such a larger monster for so much longer. But at least this one didn’t hide outside her door, or try to grab her when she took the long way home too late on a Friday, or climb the tree outside her new room’s window until she convinced her mother it was too close to the power lines to stay standing, or make her break up with her first girlfriend because she refused to go anywhere after sundown, or shine its reflective eyes from behind every bush she swore had been empty a minute ago, or stick its nose under her bedroom door the single time her mother forgot to lock the front hall, or anything else.

The door opened for her evening medication, which she was pretty sure she remembered already taking.

Slow, slow, slow reflexes. She looked up and it should’ve already been too late.

It filled the doorway, but not as grandly as it once might have. Its back was hunched; its fur was grey – where it still existed: something had burned thin bald lines into its skin in a criss-crosshatch that covered it from gnarled head to long-nailed toe. Its eyes were a cloud yellow that didn’t shine in the gloom.

Its nose twitched, and its legs unfurled and it took three quivering, unsteady steps, half-dragging at its own distorted heels. The left arm held it upright against Tammy’s bed; the right extended, fingers quivering, and with a gradual and horribly familiar effort, grabbed her by the head as it leaned down close, muzzle dripping something warm and nauseating as its teeth parted.

“agg. yurrit.”

Then it let go, lurched to the window, and slid through it.

Tammy didn’t move. She didn’t move when the ruckus came visiting over the sound of the glass. She didn’t move when they checked her pulse, called the police, asked her if she saw anything.

She was busy thinking.

***

The gravestone was a last-minute addition to the will, on behalf of a woman whose funeral arrangements had been ‘just recycle me and don’t bother with a plot’ since she was forty. But the money was there for it, and the lawyers and family vouched for it, and so it was bequeathed.

‘YOU WIN’ wasn’t the oddest thing to have put on a tombstone anyways. That was the bimonthly graveside bouquet of venison – which was also quite clearly specified, although the graveyard management objected strenuously.

They never had a leg to stand on, anyways. It always vanished overnight, without leaving so much as a drop of fat.

There is a very small and exactly round hole in the precise center of the main street, too small to bump a wheel and too deep to be from wear and tear. This is why.

***

The construction companies made their bids. They wrangled terms. They argued. They wheedled.

Frank Thomas bid low – very low – and he kept his bid very low, and he never said a word after that, or moved after that, or did anything other than sit there and smile, smile, smile. He had a smile stuck on his face, Frank did. It made you want to carve him on a statue, or punch him, or something like that.

Tortoise Construction won the bid. On their trucks, it said: Slow and Steady Wins the Race.

***

The roadwork was meant to start in mid spring, as soon as the snows left. Frank got the trucks in a row with uncommon haste: by the end of May his crews were hard at work, measuring and cutting and digging and standing around asking where the hell the asphalt was, that truck should’ve been here last week, we’ve already dug up half the road, this is a total shitshow, I need a cigarette, and so on.

“Slow and steady wins the race,” said Frank when the foreman called him for the sixth time that morning asking why they had barely any gravel left with half a day remaining. And he said nothing more.

***

Come late June the holidays were creeping closer and the town was growing concerned about traffic, since Tortoise Construction had now removed the surface of every single stretch of asphalt they were meant to be working on while replacing exactly none of it with a drivable substrate, temporary or otherwise. This included the town’s largest parking lot.

“Frank,” the mayor begged him over the phone. “Frank. Frankie man. You’re killing me here, and that’s because you’re killing the fair, and that’s because there’s no way they can get the trucks down to the park because of you. My youngest grandchild is finally old enough to eat a hot dog. You are depriving my youngest grandchild of her first giant outdoor overpriced hot dog, AND her first fireworks show all at once. I’m crying, Frankie. Can you hear my tears hitting the receiver? Can you? Please, Frank. For the love of god. For the love of god, and country, and really godawful hot dogs with too much mustard.”

“Slow and steady wins the race,” said Frank, untroubled. And he stayed on the line the entire two hours, and that was all he would say.

***

The thunderstorms came in July when Frank was on site to inspect their progress; torrential sheets of water that sucked on the half-packed road like a six-year-old on a popsicle. Lightning strikes and high winds had their pick of the treeline, and some of it just happened to be over the construction – an oak was felled on Wednesday, and one of its branches took out a good-sized maple and both their efforts combined did something unspeakable to a pickup truck on the curb and its collapsing roof did something VERY speakable to its driver, who was speaking about it at the top of his voice. Oh and there were multiple live wires flailing around on the road.

“Call 911!” screamed the foreman, whose own phone had been drowned in her pocket while plucking her crew from the floods. “Call a repair crew! Call a tow truck! Call the arborists!”

“Slow and steady wins the race,” said Frank, tranquil as a calm pond on a moonlit evening. And then he took sixteen minutes to enter his password, for he had forgotten it and did not want to rush himself.

***

August had never been easy, but this one was like someone had taken a magnifying glass and nailed it to the sun. The trees withered; the grass spontaneously reverted to dirt; the ponds dried up; the elderly roamed the streets at midday cheerily greeting one another in long pants. And the very first new layer of asphalt poured by Tortoise Construction just the previous day refused to set in any manner other than goopily.

“We’ll need to remove it and start again,” said the foreman. “And quickly: it’s only getting worse the longer it sits there, and we’ve taken so much time already. We need the machines back ASAP.”
“Slow and steady wins the race,” said Frank, who did not perspire and who did not give any signal as to the whereabouts of the machinery in question. His smile did not waver, his remorse was not visible.

***

The leaves came down fast that year: September’s end just barely in sight when they sighed and slipped free, withered and crinkled. They clotted the ground in their millions, they stuck to the new road, they became sodden with morning dew and formed thick fat blankets that carpeted the whole town in a slippery film that could send anything from a toddler to a full-sized construction rig skidding merrily across the road and into an adult’s leg or a senior living home.

“Frank,” begged his business partner. “Frank. This is not a good look. We need to make a statement. Please for the love of god, just apologize or look contrite or do anything, anything at all. We need to fix this. Please. PLEASE.”
“Slow and steady wins the race,” said Frank. His teeth never showed, his lips never unsealed, his gums were not visible. Legal proceedings filled his inbox and simply slipped around him, like running water.

***

October came and went, and with its end came an early snap frost. The ground chilled and so did the asphalt, the last of its first layer only just now being laid down. It cracked, it crumbled, it shuddered, it broke apart under the wheels of the trucks, and in one case it broke off the wheels of one of the largest, heaviest, and most expensive trucks.

“Please,” said the foreman. “Please. Please Frank. Please get it fixed quickly. Please. For the love of everything. Please please please.”
“Slow and steady wins the race,” said Frank.

The foreman was taken away by some of the older and more sympathetic members of the road crew, who chipped in to get her just drunk enough to make it through the week.

***

It was November. The first snow was forecast for next week. The first of the second layer of asphalt was to be laid down this very day. Everyone was on site and ready to go.

Everyone.

“Frank,” said the foreman, desperately using this opportunity to look him directly in the eye. “Where’s our paychecks?”

Frank’s eye contact did not waver, but he did not look back. “Slow and steady wins the race.”

The asphalt was pouring, the weather was fine, the shovels and the rollers and the rakes were all there. Everyone looked at Frank.

He gazed blissfully at the asphalt as it puddled by his feet.

“Frank. We need to get paid.”
“Slow and steady wins the race,” said Frank.
“It can do by itself,” said the oldest crewman present. Then they all spat on the ground, one at a time, and walked off.

Frank watched this with unfurrowed brow and light heart, and was not moved.

This mattered, because that was why the asphalt engulfed his right leg.

Nobody was there to see what happened next, but judging by the very small and exactly round hole left in the middle of the road Frank got out at some point – not that anyone checked too hard. The rest of Tortoise Construction went to work somewhere else, and some of them came back in and finished the roads that spring. And they did it properly, which was pretty slow and steady, and the funny thing was that it didn’t take long at all.

Because slow and steady may win the race; but doing nothing’s just stuck in place.

Serena had been a basically okay person. She was the model of filial piety on her good days; raised two more or less functional adults whose defects were considered par for the course among their peers; helped contribute nominally to her parents’ funerals; produced a socially normative amount of waste carbon; and occasionally always had time for her friends.

No, thought Eleanor. She didn’t deserve this. Nobody deserved this. Nobody deserved to have this happen at their funeral. Nobody deserved their cousin Beatrice sitting at their funeral, sobbing slightly into a cloth, with a single, devastating whorl of clotted hairs dangling directly in the center of her back like a bloated tick on a chimpanzee’s spine. Nobody deserved to have that nightmarish snarl detach from the scalp of its host and dangle from their chair and slowly pendulum in the gentle breeze of the air conditioning at their funeral, doubtlessly drawing the eye and mind and overwhelming horror of every friend, relation, and staff member present, distracting them from the (heartfelt, touching, reassuring) eulogies being spoken at that very moment, Eleanor was sure of it, if only she could bring herself to look away from the oh my god was that dandruff or lice or just desiccated conditioner WHAT TH

For the good of cousin Beatrice, for the good of dear departed Serena, for the good of everyone present, for the good of society itself, something had to be done. Stealthily. Quickly. Carefully. The sort of thing one needed a particular set of skills to do, such as those gained by a lifetime spent producing tiny model ships inside bottles.

Since it was Eleanor that had that, it was Eleanor that did that. A swift, sure pluck. And lo, a little light and warmth was returned to the world, and the angels crept back into the room, and the eulogy concluded and was received with the care and attention that would have been denied it in a time and a place where such things were left to gallivant on the backs of chairs unseen and unheard.

“Hey.”
Eleanor was at peace. Eleanor was fine. Eleanor was thinking of ships in bottles, of tweezers manipulating threads; of hooks pulling masts upright.

“Hey.”
Eleanor was not thinking about what was curled inside the palm of her right hand like a tiny encrusted nightmare larva.

“Hey, get up. It’s almost your turn to say goodbye.”

Oh no. Eleanor had no pockets.

A gentle hand on her arm, deeply respectful of her bereavement. She shot upright, fist clenched for fight and flight, and found neither: oh god she was being sent down the aisle, oh god the coffin was in front of her, oh god she was going to be holding this travesty of a hank of a lock of keratinous waste until the service ended, oh god she could feel the oils and unguents coating and coagulating it seeping through her pores into her precious, vulnerable internal environment, oh god, oh god, oh god help her now, could any sign or symbol or power that be – good or evil or apathetic – send something at this moment to spare the life and mind of poor, poor Eleanor, so recently troubled by the death of her cousin?

And in precise response to that exact train of thought, Eleanor stood at Serena’s coffin, in which lay Serena, and a nice dress, and a small bouquet, and not much else. A well-fitted coffin, but a spacious one.

Lots and lots of room.

***

If she didn’t think about it as she did it, it was like she wasn’t doing it, right? It was just a thing that happened.

And Serena didn’t say anything at all.

There was no dinner afterwards – too many polite tears would water down the plates – but there was a small buffet, which Eleanor attended. She was careful to only eat with her left hand.

“It’ll come back to haunt us.”
“No it won’t there’s no proof,” said Eleanor reflexively. She’d just put a ship in a bottle, that was all.

“Oh but this all IS proof,” said the speaker, who she realized belatedly was not her conscience but a family friend(?) named Angus and about three glasses of red wine in excess. “She’s the first of our generation to go, you know, and in days to come, the pattern that began here will” and so on and on he went and Eleanor was once again able to re-enter the peaceful and confined space inside her head, as long as she didn’t look into the crowd and see the expanse of cousin Beatrice’s back.

Which was silly, because cousin Beatrice’s back was now fine, because someone had done something about that and everything was fine now. Finding this logic impeccable, Eleanor fastened and secured its latch with an extra glass, and then another, and then a bigger glass of something else. Then she found Angus again and got into an argument with him about municipal politics so she had a better reason to remember hating him for.

There was nothing else to remember hating him for, because nothing he said had reminded her of anything else she hadn’t not done.

***

It had rained all the following week, which Eleanor felt was unthematic (surely it should rain DURING a funeral), a stroke of good luck (even if it SHOULD rain during a funeral, few funeral attendees want to be the ones getting rained on), and a blessing.

She did her best work when it was miserable out. The low light, the tapping of raindrops, and the cool air all kept her brain comfortably filled with softly-grained static except for the parts moving her hands around, which could expand to fill her entire skull, body, and room in that order.

Tip tap tip, tick tick, tup tup on the roof. Tip tip tip tap tap tap on the worktable. Plink plank plunk plonk between them both. Wet and explosive above, dry and hard below. Perfect symmetry, perfect absence of harmony, all-encompassing and infinite and thus an excellent explanation for why she had carefully avoided noticing the other sound all morning.

It was not wet or dry or hard or explosive or anything else. It was soft and scuttling and it sounded like someone saying shhh, shh, shh-shh, shush-shuff, or maybe like an elder dog – one that looked like a mop – rustling in its bed to get comfortable. It was very difficult for Eleanor to completely ignore all of those things, especially since this was the second day in a row they’d been happening without stopping and her morning papers were probably slowly being melted into pulpy ink on her front doorstep.

She wondered if the paper delivery guy had seen anything. Then she wondered how she’d failed to avoid wondering that. Then she started wondering and didn’t stop and her hands started thinking about what they were doing and a needle-fine instrument swayed when it should’ve swung and took out a tiny little smokestack.

“Fuck,” she said. And with that – the first word spoken in days – everything snapped into focus: she was awake, and sapient, and an adult, and she was imprisoned in her own house because somehow she’d been so badly driven to anxiety by a mildly awkward moment at a funeral that she’d rather gaslight herself into reclusedom than look out her window to see what was making the funny noise outdoors, when it was almost certainly the stupid branches on the stupid tree in the stupid front yard getting waterlogged and snapping low enough to scrape at her door.

So Eleanor stood up (stumbling a bit – numb knees), and strode with (limping) purpose to her front door, where she looked out the window and saw a tangled lump of filthy hair, caked with dirt and clawing at her doorknob while trailing the (somewhat worse-for-wear) corpse of Serena, dress, withered flowers, and all.

“Fuck,” she repeated herself.

Then she went and got a glass and an extra glass and a bigger glass and thought things over until she passed out.

When she woke up, the bottle was empty and things made sense.

***

Eleanor looked at the door. Eleanor looked through the door. Eleanor stood before the door and took a deep, deep breath.

Then she opened the door – interrupting the hair mid-scratch – and held up the bottle.

“Hey. I’m sorry. Want a better place?”

***

It took a long time to brush and comb out the dirt and the grunge, strand by strand.

It took care and squinting and many lenses to rinse away the worst of the rot without washing the hairs down the drain.

It took tremendous, painstaking effort to fill the bottle without cramping or wadding, millimetre by millimetre.

It took deep and passionate focus to do this without inhaling too hard and gagging on the smell and letting your hands shake everywhere and ruin everything forever.

These were the sort of things one needed a particular set of skills to do, such as those gained by a lifetime spent producing tiny model ships inside bottles.

Since it was Eleanor that had that, it was Eleanor that did that. And it was Eleanor that held in her hands an empty and unlabelled wine bottle, one now filled to the brim with long, lustrous, full-bodied hair that looked as clean and fresh as anything a barbershop could bake.

“This will do for a long time yet,” she told it, as the cork went in. “And I’ll work out something with the will so it won’t happen twice. Okay?”

The light shone on the bottle when she turned it. She wasn’t sure if that meant anything, but her head hurt and her eyes itched and she was willing to let it be for now.

***

The funeral home helped with Serena’s return, not to mention with keeping it quiet. Nobody solicits business from people who let ships out of bottles.

In the chamber in the tower in the fortress of the cavern of the lost star toiled the wizard. Red and sweating was his face; pale and shaking were his liver-spotted hands; blackened and terrible were his thoughts. His name was Thanisember Ducc and he had cried aloud one word every minute of every hour of every day since the new moon had turned and that word was ‘DOOM’ in every tongue spoken by every creeping thing found under every footfall of soil unglimpsed by human sight.

“DOOM!” he cried aloud one more time, the last time, and with that word his hammer descended – red-hot, star-forged – and shattered at the force of the blow, shivered into cold leaden dust. On the anvil lay a blade, and in that blade now slept a soul, and in that soul awoke a desire, an echo of the creeping lust felt in the palsied grip that now scrabbled at its hilt.

“Who are thou that wouldst make me thine?” it asked in the grating and uncanny way of blades.

“I am Thanisember Ducc, sword,” said Thanisember Ducc, “and I have made you all that you are, and I have given you all that you will be, and I am thy master. Now come! Much remains.”

And much did remain, for before Thanisember Ducc and the blade descended from the chamber of the forge he had to brandish the sword in the Three-Hundred-And-Sixty-One Degrees, and curse the nine winds, and bless the three deepest hells, and give the sword his blood, and his spit, and his tears (the last were extracted by the wizard inducing himself to sneeze, as both sorrow and pain had been made alien to his heart by his own will for some grim millennia), and tidy the forge, and destroy every tool that had touched the sword before his own hand, and when all of this was said and done and done and DONE he raised the blade high and proclaimed “I name thee Clovenfang, and remind and abjure and admonish thee once more that I am thy maker and I am thy master,” and sheathed it in a scabbard of lamb-skin.

Then he descended the tower and ascended another, which was surmounted by a bed of grand and intoxicating scope, and, having placed the sword at his breast like an infant so that it might suckle upon his dreams of destiny and ambition, fell into slumber.

For an hour, not one midge-fly dared bestir the air in that tower. And another. And another. And at the fourth hour, the sword Clovenfang gently began to shake and tremble and slowly turn in its scabbard until – inch by inch – the naked blade was brought free, then close, then closer, and until it came to just barely reach the wrinkled hide of Thanisember Ducc.

There it rested for a single instant, preparing for its victory. But that was its undoing, for the moment metal kissed skin the ire of the special gem the wizard kept knotted in the tip of his beard was aroused, and it screamed fit to wake the dead and scare the cat. Thanisember Ducc awoke in a furious start, wrested Clovenfang from his breast with a word used to swear demons to their mothers, and threw it from the window where it fell into the very darkest places of the emptiest parts of the universe entire.

“Damnation to the sky and sea!” he cried as he fell into a swoon. “Six times! Now seven! Why does this keep happening?” And the saddest thing of all was that this question was sincere.

***

The next day Thanisember Ducc woke up already furious with himself and the universe and the sixteen other wizards he wanted dead and decided that tradition be damned, he would not let there be an eighth failure, and so he garbed himself in his most potent robes and warded himself with his most puissant chants and hid himself underneath his most secret seemings and stepped – for the first time in mortal ‘membrance! – into the small world beneath him.

Then he walked into a store, purchased a handgun, transformed the clerk in unspeakable and horrific ways for their insolence in his presence, and left before the smell of air and water sickened him.

***

In the chamber in the tower in the fortress of the cavern of the lost star toiled the wizard, but not for long. Pinched and peevish was his face; clenched and crabbed were his fists; impatient and frustrated were his thoughts. Furthermore, he only bothered to cry ‘DOOM’ sixteen times in six minutes. He was not shaping this weapon from raw ore himself, and besides, he was sick of it.

“DOOM!” he cried aloud one more time, the last time, and with that word the air dimmed and the spiders died on the windowsills. On the – unused, pristine, unmarked – anvil lay the gun, and in that gun now slept a soul, and in that soul awoke a desire, an echo of the creeping lust felt in the fumbling grasp now already on its handle.

“Hey what gives?” it asked.
“I am Thanisember Ducc, gun,” said Thanisember Ducc, “and thine command of bladespeake is fit to bring me to tears.”
“So I got an accent, big deal – hands off the merchandise!”
“I am thy master,” said the wizard, “though I have not made thee all that thou are or given thee all that thou will be. Now silence! Much remains!”

The gun did not remain silent, and it complained of being carsick through its brandishing at each of the Three-Hundred-And-Sixty-One Degrees, said the curses and blessings of the nine winds and three deepest hells sound ‘like French? Is that French?’, complained of the smell and flavour of Thanisember Ducc’s sweat, blood, and tears, and loudly sang ninety-seven of ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall as the wizard tidied the forge and destroyed every tool that had touched it before his own hand, until he raised it high and shouted “I name thee NOTHING, and remind and abjure and admonish thee tenfold that I may not be thy maker, but I am thy MASTER,” and sheathed it in a small shoulder holster before retiring to bed with it pressed carefully against his bosom.

Before the hour was out the gun had twisted in its confines, pressed muzzle to mystical breastbone, and clicked down its trigger until the magazine was empty – alas for Nothing, it was in an instant! For Thanisember Ducc had stored the bullets in a small and inconvenient pouch in his closet, and so the weapon spent the night stewing in resentment and in grand and violent dreams.

Three days and three nights slept Thanisember Ducc, feeding his dreams to his weapon. And on the morning of the fourth day he awoke with weary brow but bright eyes and an iron grin: his gemmed beard had not shrieked once.

“Thou hast passed all seven of thine forebears, Nothing,” he said to the gun. “And now you shalt in turn witness mine own ascension. Let us begin with Borgonglorin the Brink.”

***

Borgonglorin the Brink was a wizard of elder and deeper skill than Thanisember Ducc, of a magnitude and more, and he was merely the least and most modest of the true masters of their shared craft – an archmagister with a single toe dipped into the pools of farthest mystery.

But he had his pride, and it was this that bestirred him when the comets of his demesne awoke him from a pleasant mid-decade nap to tell him that Thanisember Ducc, of no real repute, was besieging his under-tower with all manner of tumult and crass spellery.

“Ho!” shouted Borgonglorin the Brink out his bedchamber to the ragged figure at his draw-gate. “What keeps you to such crass hours?”
“Vindication!” shouted Thanisember Ducc, twice as loudly and three times as rudely. “Stir thine feet and take challenge or forfeit your fortress and your life!”

This took Borgonglorin’s mood from pride to wroth, and he ascended from his under-tower with all the mood of a tempest and all the figure of a giant, and in each hand he held his blade, which was named Solemnpartings, and it thought as he thought and cut as he cut and was the manifestation of his will and desire for ever more than the universe would give him. Such is the power of a wizard’s true-forged and true-loyal weapon, and he was insulted to see that Thanisember Ducc approached him without so much as a dagger but instead held a sort of odd  little metal wand.

“To the death and beyond!” called Thanisember Ducc, in a real display of rashness, for surely Borgonglorin would have settled for merely taking his life in return for waking him before his evening meal.

“To the death and beyond!” agreed Borgonglorin the Brink.

BANG, said Nothing.

***

Once the under-tower was looted of lore and mettle and rune Thanisember Ducc took his leave to the mangled rewot of Sdrawkcab, which took him three hours ago to find, located as it was between the last thing he’d done and the last thing he hadn’t.

“No draug!” Sdrawcab unsaid, their terrible drows secondthoughT already returned to its scabbard.

BANG, said Nothing.

After that – or before it? – Thanisember Ducc travelled ‘cross the bleak abyssal plains and found the space between continents and settled into the grains of sand and there in the spark of death inside a half-buried fish’s skull he found the dwelling of Sliiine the Sliiimewrought, bodiless but not bladeless, who had spent the last sixteen million years in perfect and total contemplation of the moment of life’s cessation.

“It is finished,” said Sliiine, who had no blade and needed none.

BANG, said Nothing.

And with the crooked sixpence taken from Sliiine’s war-chest the way was parted for Thanisember Ducc to walk the crooked path down the crooked mile to the crooked house, where he caught Cantilever the Sheared at dinner and didn’t even allow him the courtesy of drawing jagged Uncline in self-defence.

BANG, said Nothing.

So the sun began to fall on the greatest day of Thanisember Ducc’s long, long, long life, and he felt as spry and fresh as a new-blossom’d daisy, such so that even the feeling of night-dew prickling on his face in the living breathing world couldn’t bring him to disgust and animal appetites and cravings that he had shrugged off when fire was newly-tamed began to stir within him.

Thus, he entered the Taco Bell.

“Bring unto me ambrosia,” he commanded the clerk.

“Want a beverage with that?” replied the clerk.

Thanisember Ducc did not transform the clerk in unspeakable and horrific ways for this, for some other, greater wizard appeared to have beaten him to the punch. But he scowled most grievously and did not say another word but remained cloaked in august and imperious silence until his meal arrived, whereupon he fell upon it as if it were a fresh sacrifice with its liver yet unbruised.

“Don’t I get anything?” asked Nothing. “I been busting my ass all damned day for you, can’t I get a smear of guac at least?”
“Silence,” proclaimed Thanisember Ducc with the gravity of a dwarf sun. “The product of thine mouth hath gained me greatly this day, but do not think that this bequeaths thee free reign of it to flap and flurry as a wind-whipped gosling in the gos’mer rains of midsummer.”
“Say WHAT?”

But Thanisember Ducc did say more, but leapt to his feet and departed with haste to the washroom, and with haste and distress in his heart and elsewhere, did cast aside his robe and wand and pouch and Nothing into one stall and his self into another and began, forthwith, to cleanse himself of bodily impurities.

Thence sat Nothing, abandoned and dissolute, and not alone: for lo! A form stood at the sink, hands wringing idly under the faucet’s flow, and no soap was used, and Nothing saw a soul shadowed and small and willing to bend to its favour.

“Hey. Hey! Hey buddy, c’mere!”
“Who said that?” asked the stranger, keen of eye and swift of mind.

“Over here. Listen, buddy, you want to do me a favour?”
“Sure?” pondered the stranger solemnly.

“Listen. Bullets are in that pouch, gun’s on the toilet seat, bob’s your uncle, fanny’s your aunt, boom goes the dynamite. Just fill it up and let it do the talking.”
“Fill the toilet?”
“The GUN,” said Nothing loudly, but not too loudly. And yet in vain! For when the stranger’s hand did reach the pouch, it was detected – the bullet-pouch was sewn from Thanisember Ducc’s own cast-off skin, and at the touch of a foe the gem in the tip of his beard shrieked and wailed until the wizard, though bent-double in agony, spared a moment’s concentration to murmur a charm for wayward witches that spun the stranger out of the bathroom via the ceiling and into the lower and stranger atmospheres.

“Wretched weapon!” he cried. “Thou betrays me! But futile are your efforts, for mine is the hand that feeds your maw and none other, and that maw shalt thereby never be turned against me! Now slumber on, and speak not, lest I take stronger measures!” And thus having uttered his threat, he returned to his troubles.

For some six-and-score minutes those words seemed to hold sway, but in truth it was but a ruse: Nothing did not sleep but waited in silence for its chance, and so its chance did come: an employee with mop and bucket and broom and an empty heart, one ready to be filled with the sweetest poisoned lies. And, most importantly of all, latex gloves adorned his hands.

“Hey buddy! You, with the pimples and the slouch and the stupid hat and shirt? You just won a FREE GUN!”

“Huh yeah wha?”

“Over here! Stall number two! Just grab it up and load the bullets from the pouch – second pouch, the one that looks like old man gooch. That’s it! That’s the one! Load it up and let it fire and it’s yours and-”

But as the bullet-pouch’s shape was wrought from the hide of Thanisember Ducc, so too was its cunning wrought from his mind: as the employee’s hands fumbled at its fastener, it contrived to catch at his glove, and pull it, and tangle it, and so bring his skin into contact with its own. Thereby once more did the gem in the tip of the beard of Thanisember Ducc shriek and howl, and, raising his haggard head, once more did the wizard chant his spell to defeat any witch that feared losing her way home in the morning, and thereby send a second wayward voyageur of the men’s room to chart the great Missing Sky.

“Twice you have betrayed me, Nothing!” he called. “No more! Servant thou’st been, but only as long as thy treachery remains frail and faltering! Now I shalt take measures against it firming!” and with this Thanisember Ducc raised his hand and raised his will and burst the bullet-pouch asunder as if it were a fly on the back of his arm that he had happened to swat, and as the ammunition was dashed upon the floor so too were the hopes of Nothing, for it rolled all about underneath the sinks where no man’s hand might hope to grasp it.

And it was then, as the wizard once more excused himself to his labours, that fate took charge. Fate was small, and chubby of cheek, and shy of foot, but big enough to wander a short ways on his own to a washroom unattended.

“Hey kid!” said Nothing, desperation earnestly if not greatly hidden in its voice. And lo, as the child turned his gaze to it, there was nothing to be seen in his soft brown eyes than earnest, honest, loving, well-meaning obedience and trust. A Good Child, one above duplicity, unable to be bribed or cajoled into wrongdoing, no matter the cause, the curse, or the cruelty.

“Mind lending a hand, kid? Somehow I’ve lost my marbles all over the floor, and if you could find just ONE and shove them back in that funny gadget on the toilet in stall two, that’d be swell.”

The little good Samaritan’s arms were short, but his hands were small, and if just one bullet was all that could be reached, it was still all that was needed. It slid home with a click as polite as a cricket in a church, and only then, despite the silence of the gem in his beard, did Thanisember Ducc raise his head in suspicion due to some errant twitch of the currents of the air, just as the bathroom door opened and the child’s father investigated, curious as to the whereabouts of his errant heir.

Nothing did not have time to aim. But it did not need it.

BANG, it said. And BANG went forth, and it struck the coat-hook of the stall, and whenceforth the security camera above the sink, and whenceforth the basin of the sink, and whenceforth it caromed across the walls corner-to-corner like an excited cat, and thereafter it descended unto the doorstop and shot out zipping past the father’s startled eyes like an enraged bee, and at that moment, as its deadly presence grew evident to even his mortal gaze, he shouted out a plea, a call of warning, an attempt to save any whose ears were fit to hear.

“DUCK!”

The last to so familiarly and discourteously address Thanisember Ducc had perished at his hand timeless centuries ago. He drew himself up in shock and affront, opened his mouth, and became perforated about the ears.

“Hey buddy,” said Nothing. “Your kid’s a real trooper. You got a spare couch?”

***

No word ever reached the lesser wizards of the world of what sudden sickness had claimed five of those above them. And none of the greater wizards would ever deign to comment on any doing by those beneath, or to admit the existence of those above themselves.

But for some time following that busy day that none professed to know of, the little peoples were untroubled by sorcery or ensouled sword or wicked desire, as wizards great and small scried and fretted and plotted new and grandiose spells to ward their shrivelled lives. For entirely coincidental and unrelated reasons, most assuredly.

Most assuredly.