A patch of red, a very small one, on the ground, on another patch, a bigger one, a patch of leaves. It is fall. There is a pile of leaves in the park, piled deliberately. The leaves of the oak are just as red as the patch, as the trees were red oak and they were just the right rusty red that would hide the patch well unless somebody got quite close and noticed the other distinguishing characteristics of the patch on the patch.

Lei was walking back from yoga class where she was supposed to be an learning instructor. She was thinking to herself that she probably wasn’t going to go back. There was no particular reason for this. She liked many things, but yoga just didn’t seem to be one of them. She had already learned the routine, but it didn’t matter, she could offload that easily. She had also already bought a mat and everything, but perhaps she could offload it too, on one of her friends. No big deal.

She also didn’t like tripping over a stray fallen branch, but this turned out to be a bigger deal than she could have expected. Lei stumbled, teetered for a few moments and, as if deciding it were the better option, landed somewhat lightly on the patch of leaves. A few of the leaves flew up in protest. Another few were clotted together and only fluttered awkwardly. Lei put a hand up to steady herself and noticed that she had to first withdraw it from what felt like a chocolate cake.

The cake writhed and released her hand with the sticky snap. She grimaced. It didn’t smell good. It wasn’t really a cake, either, what would a cake be doing on the ground in the fall? It was a person. A face and an arm split in the end in shapes vaguely resembling fingers, clothes grimy with soil and mildew and fungi. The person was dead even though they appeared to be squirming slightly on the surface. The moving wasn’t of its own volition. Their body was crawling with insects. Fall is a great time for small critters to wander the ground looking for material, and as any human will tell you, the human body is some pretty nice material to live in.

Lei was a reasonable living person, so she wrenched away as quickly as she could and flung her hand up and down, sending whatever was stuck there flying. She didn’t really care to take a closer look as to what it was. Instead, she picked the yoga mat up by its corner gingerly, without looking at what she had just stuck a hand though, and whipped it up. It had grazed the body a little and also sent bits flying on its way up, there was a stain of who-knows-what on the back side.

The back side slapped nicely into the face of someone who had been trying to look over her shoulder. It was a man walking a small orange cat on a leash. He gave a yelp and a dramatic stumble backward, releasing the leash. Lei observed him, caught between the two extremely compelling options of apologizing or escaping while he was in shambles.

The man’s cat sat exactly where it had been when its walker lost his grip. Lei leant down and stroked its head and waited for the man to get up. Although people who walk cats on leashes may not be in their right mind, people who love animals are rarely evil.

The man eventually settled down and sat up on the leaves. He rubbed his mass of dark hair, which you didn’t see very often around those parts, and stared at Lei with two eyes that appeared to be different colors. Upon blinking though, they both seemed the same color. Lei blinked again. Then the man stood up.

‘That was embarrassing,’ he said.

Lei pet the cat one more time, from head to tail tip, but looking at the owner.

‘I’m sorry I snuck up on you,’ the cat’s owner said guiltily.

‘That’s fine. I’m sorry I hit you,’ Lei said. She stood up. The cat was a good, calm cat, it did not run or stand. It waited patiently without so much as fidgeting. One may have thought it was just a stuffed cat. In fact, it made Lei a little nervous.

‘I was wondering what you were looking at,’ the man said.

‘A person,’ Lei muttered, struggling to think of a way to describe it. ‘I fell on him.’

‘Oh.’ The man looked at his feet. His eyes traced an arc around her feet, and the cat’s feet and tail and landed on the patch of leaves with great concern. ‘It doesn’t look like there’s anything there.’

‘That’s because he – she…? – It’s dead,’ Lei continued, trying hard not a break into tears or break the man’s face and make an quick escape in case he knew more about this body than he was letting on.

The man glanced between Lei and the patch, and back and forth again. He seemed to resolve not to get much closer to either. ‘I don’t see anything,’ he said.

‘Step closer.’

The man made the least enthusiastic tiny step closer. ‘I still don’t see it.’

‘It’s covered by leaves. It’s fall, you know.’

‘I know. But I thought I’d at least see a bump or something, since you fell on it…’

‘I tripped over a branch. I only fell on it with one hand. It got… stuff all over my hand.’

‘Then why isn’t there any… and bodily residue on your hand?’

‘I got it off.’

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know! The floor? Don’t you think we should call the police instead of wondering about this? Anyway, if you really want to see some, step closer… or look in a mirror. There’s some on your face.’

And indeed there was, where the yoga mat had slapped him. The man’s eyes narrowed, as if he didn’t believe was he was hearing, and wiped his face cautiously with his hand. Brownish sludge scraped off neatly onto his fingers. Lei was about to give a deadpan utterance of ‘See?’ but after a moment of observation the man shoved his fingers, sludge and all, into his mouth.

Lei gave a sort of gurgling choke and looked away. She could head the man actually licking the stuff off his hand like it was some kind of delicious sweet candy that one had to eat in an exaggerated fashion so everyone knew it was really that good. Once the slurping stopped, she heard him drop the leash he had been holding pad over to the patch of leaves and rustle around. Deciding it wasn’t a good idea to turn her back on such a lunatic, she turned around very slowly, just in time to see the man shove a camera into his pocket. He was intent on the ground.

The man brushed away his surroundings and withdrew a chocolate cake on a pink platter from the leafy depths. It was a bit worse for wear, the edge having been smashed in with a suspiciously hand-shaped indent, but it was a truly delicious looking cake, with white loops of icing around the sides and mostly covering the top, with the perfect brown innards of a deep chocolate pastry.

Lei stared at it with more horror than she had treated the corpse with. ‘What in the world…?’ She struggled with her words for a few seconds. ’I don’t understand. What… what would a cake be doing on the ground in the fall? It was a body!’

‘I see,’ the man said grimly and combed his hair back with his free hand, effectively wiping the grime off his hand on his hair. It was dark hair, though, so it did not matter except to Lei, who was watching, or to the body, whose remains were not being smeared through a strange man’s hair.

‘I’m not crazy. I saw its face! And its hands and clothes…’ Lei’s voice trailed off. It seemed pointless to argue. The delicious frosted evidence was right there in front of her.

There was a pause. Then the man helped himself to another taste of the icing. ‘No. I do see. I believe you. So he’s struck again…’

‘What, someone’s turning dead bodies into cakes?’

‘It certainly seems that way,’ he said, taking another whip of cream from the cake. ‘Out of pure curiosity, how long have you lived here?’

Lei fumbled to her senses, trying to put together the most general summary she could. ‘Not very long. Well, I was born here. My parents lived here. But I’ve been away for school… since junior high. I came back a while ago, I’m living in my parent’s house. They’ve moved out of town…’

‘Good for them. Don’t worry about your personal life, that’s not what I’m interested in. I was just surprised that you didn’t know. This sort of thing has been going for a while now. It’s really pretty terrifying, when you think about it.’

Lei thought about it. ‘I guess so. Getting a cake might not be bad, but I think if somebody died, their family would want to know, and say goodbye to them as a person. Cakes aren’t good closure except on birthdays, and a death is like the opposite of that.’

‘That’s a good way of looking at it,’ the man agreed. ‘And also, there’s nothing that says cakes go to heaven. Although… I don’t believe there’s anything concrete that says they don’t…. But that’s also a sad, or at least a complicated thing, at least for the families that believe in a heaven.’ The man turned to Lei from his thoughts on the spirituality of cakes. ‘In any case, I think something has to be done to put a stop to this.’

‘Well, yeah. But you’d think the police would be on it.’

‘The Cake Killer,’ said the man, rolling the phrase over in his mouth like it was a piece of cake itself, ‘Has managed to avoid the police since he does not actually commit any crimes. In fact, he isn’t a killer at all. It’s almost certainly always somebody else doing the killing. He only replaces bodies with cakes. He doesn’t leave behind any crime. He cleans it up, in a manner of speaking.’

‘That’s completely ridiculous.’

‘Well yes, the issue of the cakes. It would be ridiculous, but he’s making bodies of dozens of loved ones disappear weekly without any rational explanation and that has to be stopped, even if the killing cannot be. The funeral business cannot run on cakes. That’s why I’m on the case.’

‘This doesn’t make any sense. Not just the cake part, either! People don’t die that often around here. Or anywhere, for that matter.’

The man looked at her grimly. ‘You mean, “We don’t see a lot of dead bodies around here.” That just means the Cake Killer is doing his job. It’s also why I asked how long you’d lived here. If you’d been here enough, been bored enough to follow the news, you’d have noticed that death rates are way down this year, even though people have been disappearing. They just aren’t deemed ‘dead’ until they are found.’

‘This is ridiculous.’

‘You already said that. And it is, but what are you going to do about it?’

‘What are you doing about it?’

Lei received a blank look in response. She frowned. ‘You said you were on the case, didn’t you?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Are you a detective or something?’

‘Not really.’

‘Sort of. Not really. What’s what supposed to mean? You sounded so passionate about the cause, and now you’re clamming up? I was just thinking of what I could do for all those poor people…’

‘You’re volunteering to help?’ the man said, brightening up instantly. He clapped his no doubt filthy chocolaty hand on her shoulder, still balancing the plate of cake on his hand. ‘I knew I could rely on you.’ Then he set down the cake carefully at the trunk of a tree and headed off towards the street. ‘Come on.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m going to brief you on the case. Come with me.’

Lei looked at the cake. ‘Isn’t this evidence?’

‘I have plenty more of them back at the house, and pictures too.’ He tapped his pocket.

‘What about your cat?’

The man looked back, more perplexed. ‘What cat?’

Lei looked back. The cat was gone, just like the corpse. But there was no delicately iced cake in its place. So the cat was probably still alive and had run off while nobody was looking, like cats often do, and its owner just so happened to be missing a few screws. Lei sighed. Did she really want to follow this person?

‘Oh, and bring your yoga mat. I think I have some use for it back at my place.’

‘Is that where we’re going?’

The man nodded and began making his way back towards the sidewalk. Lei reluctantly turned to follow. She looked back at the red spot on the red leaves, although she didn’t distinguish its different color from where she was, and then at the cake sitting at the base of the tree. She rubbed her eyes and groaned inwardly just seeing it. What was a cake doing on the ground in fall? Of course, there was a stealthy criminal replacing layabout corpses with them.

So stealthy, the corpse had been replaced only a few feet away from her after she’d fallen on it. Did that mean the corpse thief was still nearby?

She turned swiftly away and went back to wondering if she should kick the strange man in the balls and go home, or if she should follow him back to his house before doing so, or, perhaps, exercise some trust in the face of all peculiarity and try to work with him. Behind her the wind rustled the rust colored  leaves lying on ground, matted with chocolate and/or blood and gut, flying up and sticking to the cake. The slender worms of white icing lining the sticky surface flicked and squirmed, and looped over each other, embedding themselves in their dark soft surroundings, away from the cold and whatever other horrors lay beyond. Cakes were good places to live in too.

—

The man introduced himself as Val and said spoke nothing more than directions on the way. His house was situated in a block of row houses between another set of row houses with boarded up windows and a closed down pharmacy off to the right. The street seemed devoid of people, yet somehow still rife with trash clustering together when blown into corners and forming pseudo tumbleweeds of plastic bags and misplaced mail and whatever grime was lifted.

‘I bought this lovely piece of real estate because it was cheap,’ Val said as he struggled to turn the key and open the poorly oiled door. ‘Sometimes at night the bike gangs come around, but they never stay long. Other than that or the constant construction, it’s very quiet.’ He gave the stuck door a running tackle and dove into the house. Lei followed.  Val turned on the light. ‘Of course, the only construction done has been on this house, and we’re mostly done.’

Lei was astounded. The place was much bigger, much lighter than one may have guessed from the outside. The wall between at least two of the interconnected houses had been knocked out entirely, leaving one large room two stories high. A metal spiral staircase led upward at one corner, up to a landing above the living area where bookshelves and an assortment of pillows and a bench were illuminated under a generous skylight. Much of the walls were also lined with bookshelves of wood or metal, all messily arranged, with certain volumes stacked over each other rather than shelved nicely – a well used collection.

A disorganized menagerie of chairs was spread around the room, a few well cushioned ones sitting in front of a large flat television screen placed behind some of the windows that were boarded up from the outside. Several others, including a rocking chair, were placed at a table with a cereal bowl on it, the only chair with wheels sat against a paper laden desk over in the corner under the book-balcony. The desk also had a cereal bowl on it. To the opposite corner was a kitchen unit with a separate bar counter sitting just away from the wall, there was a cereal bowl on this as well.

It was a beautiful house. The lights and the sunset coming in from the skylights gave its metal parts a warm golden glow. Lei took one dazzled step in and stepped on an empty, crusty unwashed cereal bowl.

‘Whoops,’ Val said hastily and fished it off the floor. ‘Sorry. The cat likes to have morning cereal too. She doesn’t care what kind we’ve gotten, if we’re having it, she’ll have it. They say sugar’s not good for cats, but she’s lived a lot longer than so many people I’ve known! And if it makes her happy, why not? Oh, feel free to walk around.’

‘Oh, so now you’re saying you do have a cat?’

‘What?’

Lei wisely chose to abort that line of conversation. ‘So you live here with somebody?’ she asked, moving into the house more cautiously now, and taking note that there were also cereal bowls on the footrests, some of the shelves, and of course piled high in the kitchen sink.

‘Hm. Yes,’ Val said. Lei turned around to face him just in time to see an unintelligible expression wipe itself from his face. He smiled quickly and started for the sink. ‘Let me clean that stuff up. Do you want anything to drink? There some fizzy stuff in the fridge. Look out for the evidence.’

Lei put down the yoga mat on the floor by the dining table while Val wrestled with the already-loaded dishwasher. She approached the large chrome fridge. It was so large, it had four doors, one was small, and that must have been the freezer. Altogether, it could have stored the body Lei had seen, and a good five or six more. And perhaps fifty times as many cakes.

The fridge she opened was in actual fact holding about twenty cakes, each wrapped in clear plastic film, misted over slightly. There were a few that looked a lot like the one they’d seen earlier, chocolate with white frosting, some were a more colorful pink with white frosting, some yellow and white or blue and yellow or red and blue, some had pictures of flowers on them, some had chocolate chunks, and some were rather old and stale, with dried out icing and dotted with rotted remains of fruit. Some stank to high heaven, caved and wrinkled under their own weight after weeks of unserved purpose. Lei closed the fridge door.

‘The one you’re looking for is on the far right. The other two doors are for the cakes. That one really needs cleaning, but those were the first of the killer’s cakes I ever found. I just don’t have the heart to throw them away.’ Having gotten the dishwasher started, Val moved to the yoga mat and unrolled it, patting it down. ‘May I?’

‘Go ahead. Keep it. I don’t need it anymore.’ Lei opened the rightmost fridge door to a much more pleasant sight. This side of the fridge looked normal. There was a little drawer of meats and a bottom rack of vegetables, some soft drinks on the door. The only strange thing was the multitude of milk cartons, all 2%, all stacked over each other. Considering how much cereal seemed to be consumed in the house, perhaps this was no surprise. Lei picked out a can of a familiar lemon soda and shut the door and looked over to see what her host was doing. He had turned the television on, but all that was on was a stock ticker over some quiet classical music. What he was focused on was laying the yoga mat out under the ottoman.

He stood up proudly. ‘That thing was sliding around way too much to eat on. Dripped milk everywhere whenever anyone nudged it. It’s not a flat surface, but at least it’s not shifting around anymore.’

‘It’s supposed to be for your feet.’

‘Why would I put my feet on something I was going to eat on?’ Val asked, as if he were being told to do two entirely incompatible things. ‘Well, to each their own, I suppose. But we’re united to one cause. Stopping the Cake Killer. So let’s get started on that. Take a seat.’

Val went to harass the papers sitting on his desk while Lei sat down on the edge of one of the nicest looking loungers in the room, sipping the soda. When Val returned, he flopped down on the lounger opposite – and immediately put his feet up on the ottoman. Lei was too exhausted of his antics to boggle any further, although the thought of punching him flickered through her mind again for different reasons than they had been earlier. She was also too exhausted to get up and do the deed, so she just sank down further into the lounger. ‘So how long has this cake thing been going on?’ she asked.

‘Not very long.’ Val leafed through the folder he had brought over. All that he leafed through seemed to blank pages. ‘At least, if my observations have been correct. I think I’m the only one around who actually goes looking for corpses, so my observations are really the only thing I have to go on. If I can’t trust those, then I can’t trust anything, and if I didn’t trust anything I would probably be too frightened to leave the house. So believe in myself. I hope you can learn to believe in yourself too.’

‘Well, now that you put it that way, I don’t want to be stuck in my house the rest of my life because I can’t trust anyone.’

‘Exactly. You wouldn’t even be able to go out and buy food. Unless you managed to get people into your house, turn them into corpses, and then let the Cake Killer replace them with cakes. But then there’s the question of nutrition, and I don’t really trust the mechanisms of the Cake Killer either, I mean, what if he’s the one I lure back home and murder? What happens then? He can’t replace himself with a cake if he’s dead. I’d starve! And then there’s the issue of getting a total stranger into your house at all–‘

Lei did not like where this conversation was going.

‘But like I said, I believe in myself, so there’s no reason for me to even consider those things. Long story short, I first noticed the bodies were disappearing in April. After that I went out specifically looking for bodies that were going to be disappeared, and got the confirmation I needed. So far I’ve detected about 120 cases of bodies gone missing and replaced with cakes. The cakes have gotten more and more ornate over time; originally they were just covered with fruit, as if the colors alone were sufficient to make a cake special enough to replace a human. But the intricacies of the icing of today’s cake was surely a step up-‘

‘Wait, hold on a second. You actually saw bodies get taken away?’

‘Of course I didn’t see the act, or I’d have caught the culprit already. I’m not the best at restraining people, but you’d think after maybe 50 encounters I’d at least have succeeded at tripping him on his way out, or something, some such.’

‘But you were around between the times when the two were switched? You actually found bodies when you were looking for them. That’s what I gathered from what you said…’

‘Oh. Yes. That part is right.’

‘And you didn’t think to call the police? Or do anything about it other than let them get switched with cake? I thought you cared that they were disappearing!’

‘I do care! But they disappeared as soon as I took my eyes off them.’

‘Would it have killed you to keep your eyes on them while pulling out a phone, dialing in three numbers and giving someone your location one of those 50-something times?’

‘Look,’ Val said sharply, ‘I think you misunderstood. I’m concerned with the bodies disappearing, not that they are dead in the first place. If I don’t look away, they don’t disappear, and then I’m not sure if I should be concerned or not because I don’t know if the Cake Killer is around to make them disappear. Besides, it’s easier to take my eyes off them than keep my eyes on them.’

‘I can’t tell if you want to stop this guy or not, anymore.’

‘What makes you think I don’t?’

‘You seem determined to make things as difficult for yourself as possible. You go looking for bodies only to let them go missing, and refuse to call the police about it. I’m not sure I want to work with somebody like that.’

Val put the papers down on his lap and folded his hands, deep in thought. Lei saw that the topmost paper was decorated in one corner with a doodle of a flower and a butterfly. ‘The first is the reason for the third. I can’t tell the police when I find bodies, even if the bodies don’t disappear. Imagine what that looks like! A guy reporting a dead body.’

‘Gee, how shocking. Nobody in their right mind would report a dead body-’

‘And again, and again and again, and again, up to five times a day. Why would one person encounter so many bodies, unless they were making them! You’ve found something special! You’ve found a killer among hundred dumb enough to report themselves! You’d probably put him in jail! Especially if he called you out and all you see is a fruit cake! Five times a day! Then he’s probably even crazier than most of the killers!’

Thinking Val himself must be crazier than most of the alleged killers in town, Lei replied, ‘How are you even finding these bodies? I only found one today, and I’ve never seen any around before. There’s also the non-killing killer making them disappear. How are you finding so many?’

‘That… That’s a secret of the trade.’

‘Sounds like a trade that will get you arrested.’

‘That’s why I don’t call the police.’ Val flipped through the pages nonchalantly, the butterfly flapped its wings awkwardly, the flower wobbled. Lei resisted the urge to put a fist through it. With a bit more effort, she also resisted the urge to put a fist through her host’s nose. Instead, she took a sip of soda. A stiff, mechanical sip.

‘What is your trade anyway?’ Lei asked suspiciously.

Val looked up with two eyes that seemed two colors but then were just one color again. ‘I’m a detective,’ he said. ‘Sort of.’

‘Goddammit, not this again. You said in the park that you were ‘not really’ a detective. So what is it? Are you? Or are you not?’

‘Okay, not really.’

‘So you’re not a detective?’

‘No.’ Val said. His eyes dropped to his feet. ‘Or should I say yes?’

‘Just explain it to me in non-detective terms,’ Lei said.

‘Explain what?’

‘What you do. What’s going on here, why there are so many killers, or so you say. How you keep finding bodies. Why you actually are about the bodies disappearing, since you obviously don’t care about the families.’

‘Are you sure? It’s a long story.’

‘Sure, why not. If I’m working here, I might as well know. And you seem to be making a good living off this business, if your home renovations mean anything. Well, you or your roommate who may or may not exist. So go ahead and tell.’

‘You might have trouble believing it.’

‘It can’t be any worse than the whole cake business.’

Val raised an eyebrow very slowly and seriously and then lowered it again to its resting position. Then he kicked back onto his chair. ‘If you really insist. Okay. Where to begin… since you’re asking about me, I’ll tell you my beginnings. Like you, I was born here, and while I did attend grade school here I left for the rest of my education. What I remember from my childhood is foggy and scarce. I remember things used to be beautiful in the spring. The park had a lake where I used to walk with my old cat. I can’t remember how many cats we had, but there was only ever one at a time. The cats loved the flowers. In the fall, you can’t see them but flowers of all colors grow by the lake in the park.’

‘No they don’t,’ Lei said. ‘There aren’t any flowers there. There never were.’

‘Who’s telling the story here? Okay, so enough about that. I went to a school in a city far away, a bigger city than this, the people and buildings had a bit less character but the overall image was somehow more dynamic. You’ve left this place, so you know what I mean. It also seemed safer somehow. And there, I learned far more than I could have ever learned here. I enjoyed learning languages, although I was not very good at it. I enjoyed myself, really. I didn’t really have any pressure to do well, I just enjoyed life. Any time away from this place was good. I believed my choice to leave had been ideal. I did not return for three years.’

‘What about your parents?’

‘They died when I was a child,’ Val lied.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. They were killed by a man dressed as a clown, an infamous murderer of the time. I hear he was really quite funny, and people died happy, so it was a pretty good end, all in all. And they didn’t get replaced by cakes, so I did get to say goodbye to them, even if they didn’t get to say goodbye to me. The Cake Killer didn’t exist back then, naturally. Well, there was a criminal who was replacing body parts with bananas, but he was not as skilled, and actually captured. You should really not attempt that sort of thing unless you have the sufficient skills not to make a fool of yourself. But that’s another story altogether.’

‘Uh,’ Lei said.

‘Anyway, to leave was my own decision. And urban life was very agreeable, very… interesting. There was no risk of anybody dying. The most wanted criminals around there aren’t even killers. They’re fast drivers, people who don’t pay taxes, kids who paint on walls when nobody is looking. Isn’t that strange? There are so many other things you can do while people aren’t looking. I think the most dangerous criminal of the time was just a smuggler. I met him, he was nothing much. In fact, when I met him he had just gotten himself into a car accident. What an idiot.

‘School was quite agreeable too. Although I was not the most diligent of students, my teachers grew to like me, even if my peers did not. My language teachers often helped me further my knowledge outside of lessons. But in my learning of the tongues I stumbled upon a book that nobody seemed to know the origins of. It had some really interesting pictures, pictures of the outside and insides of various creatures, and plants and diagrams of circles in other circles and triangles. Fascinating, but nobody looked at it very long, not even the teachers; they wouldn’t answer any of my questions, so I assumed they could just not be bothered. But after that, they avoided me for a bit. That was a shame. Or maybe they already knew what it was. Or maybe they just could not be bothered with what they could not read? A lot of people aren’t. But can you guess what it was?’

‘No,’ Lei said uncertainly.

‘The book was a book of magic,’ Val fibbed calmly. ‘More precisely, a book of dead magic. Necromancy, mediation, rituals, all that. It’s hard to be specific in a language such as this, what was in it can’t really be spoken, but I can see it all clearly in my mind even today. But those kinds of things don’t open themselves up to just anybody. I didn’t realize what it was until I had had it for a while. I looked at it every day and every night, just trying to figure out what it was saying on my own. And one day, it just came to me. I could suddenly read every rune, I knew what every diagram meant. It was like a flood of shining knowledge had entered my head and I could hear and see things I hadn’t heard before. Some say that after that I lost my mind. Or at least my common sense.’

‘Really. I wonder why.’

‘But they had no idea of the magnitude of my discovery! At first it terrified me. I would feel compelled to follow animals around. I felt that I could no longer concentrate on conversations, or on books. I felt bad for anything dead, even if I couldn’t quite make them out, even plants. In the winter I became so depressed that I attempted to burn the book that had brought such troubles upon me. I took out my lighter in my unlit room and set the purple pages to a fluorescent pink flame. The flames were beautiful, but they were unnatural somehow, and made me nauseous. They bit into the walls and my clover print covers and the other books on my shelf and I collapsed sometime during the night. When I awoke, something happened that compelled me to return to my hometown.’

‘Was it something in the book?’

‘No. But what I am about to tell you is absolutely true,’ Val lied. ‘When I awoke, I was in my childhood home, lying on my own old bed, which also had clover print covers. It was sunny. We just had a typical suburban house, separated from other houses by fences, with a little yard in the back. Actually, that was the first place I went to. The fence was made of wood, and there was a trash can at the corner of the fence. Looking over the fence from the other side, just above the trash can, was a cat faced man.’

‘Bullshit.’ Lei said. ‘Are you messing with me?’

‘I am absolutely serious,’ said Val, without really answering her question. ‘Although I guess he was more of a boy than a man. School age, same as me. He was struggling to get over the fence. A man faced cat may have made it over with ease, but this was a cat faced man and men’s bodies aren’t really made to vault fences, believe me when I tell you this. He called out to me and I saw that his face was injured. There appeared to be a sort of black dart about half a foot long and hairy, sticking out of his right eye. Black juice was streaming either from the eye or the dart, it was hard to tell. Either way, I was wearing my white school uniform and didn’t really want to get any closer. The black stuff was really getting into the white fur of his face, and I didn’t want to have to wash something like that out of my shirt.

But before I could turn back to go into the kitchen because I was hungry (the daylight indicated it was breakfast time and I was in the mood for some corn flakes) he kept calling out to me, saying the grasshopper was going to get him with this weird protesting tone. Not really a cry, more like he was only just trying to stop me, not save himself. I kind of just stood there for a very long time watching him.’

Lei did not qualify Val’s pause here with a response.

‘Well, eventually I figured that he must not be in too much danger since he’d been there a while. I also figured that the grasshopper must not be very dangerous if it had not gotten to him yet, and if it couldn’t jump high enough to pull him down by his leg it obviously wasn’t going to vault the fence. So I walked over and got up on the trash can to get a better look at the whole thing. The other boy still looked flustered, but stopped complaining once I was up in his face. He was panting nervously, but I mostly ignored him then. I looked over the fence and saw an enormous black grasshopper leaping around in the empty pool on his side of the yard. It seemed to be trapped there, not much of a threat at all. It had even lost a leg, a black hairy leg. I supposed the leg must have gone through the boy’s eye by accident, either by the fault of him or the grasshopper. Either way, there didn’t seem to be anything to be afraid of. I told this to the catface.

And he whispered to me very quietly, “Please, don’t turn around.”

Since he said it so nicely I decided to listen. When he gestured that I should get over the fence onto his side, I did that too. I landed on the grass, and so did he. He didn’t make a lot of noise after this. We sat with our backs against the fence for a while and looked at the lame grasshopper in its white glassy prison, watched it trip over an inflatable inner tube left there; fumble around on its back, rub its wings together…

Finally, the boy told me, “My eye hurts,” which wasn’t really a surprise, and it had been bothering me for a while, because it seemed to be moving in its socket and that was quite unusual for grasshopper legs to do. It also seemed just a bit too hairy. He told me, “My arms are tired from hanging on the fence. You have to take it out for me.” I asked what I should do. He said, “Just do what you think is right.”

The grasshopper was dead now, on its back in the pool. I held my hand up to the still-writhing leg and followed its movement with my fingers, finally landing a good grip on it. The hairs were actually quite sharp and cut into my hand, like a stingray’s tail when pulled. The other boy made a weird noise, I couldn’t tell if it was in pain or something, but I would guess that it was, and the leg shook violently. I realized that there were more sounds than my friend’s crying, but I couldn’t really tell what it was. I anchored myself in the grass and yanked harder. The noise continued. In fact, I could hardly hear the crying anymore. Something was coming from the house. It sounded like a hundred grasshoppers, only louder, and higher pitched, maybe like an electric fan or a fluorescent light mixed with voice telling me things I couldn’t make out and I had pulled made several attempts at the leg and was all set to give up and maybe go back to my house but the boy grabbed my sleeve and got black juices on it and maybe ripped it a little and that made me really mad so I threatened to just leave and he started whining again and pulling at my arm even harder, so I grabbed the grasshopper leg one more time and gave it one more try, mostly in hopes that if it was hurting him it would shut him up, and then maybe everything else would shut up. But on that final attempt, the leg dislodged itself from where it was, and I was out cold again, my friend’s face dripping blackness the last thing on my mind. That, and the voices, the voices saying so few things in so many words, and what words I made out where names of places here and names I knew. Back in this town. That’s how I knew.’

‘Whatever was there was onto us, but I didn’t see it because I pulled the grasshopper leg out so violently that I punched myself in the face with my own hand, knocking myself clean out once again. Perhaps in the eye as well. How ironic would that be? Ha ha.’

‘Good,’ Lei said. ‘Good fucking work. Is that why your eyes are sometimes different colors?’

‘What are you talking about?’ Val asked, speaking more genuinely that he had been throughout his entire story thus far.

‘Never mind.’

‘And so ended the story of my discovery of power,’ Val sighed, ‘And my first love.’

‘What?’

‘When I woke up, I was back in school. It was Monday, and that really blew, I mean really, really blew, after that really nice dream I’d just had. To make matters worse, my favorite book was gone. My shirt was in a foul state. I just wanted to go home. So I did. That very day I booked the first train out of there, back here. It was my last year of high school, too, but I’d spent so much time crying over dead grass that my grades had plummeted, and I did not care, and I think by then, nobody else did either. So I didn’t graduate.’

‘What a tragedy,’ Lei said empathically.

‘I was supposed to return that book to the library, too, and since I’d never be able to do so now that it had moved on, I did get some consolation after leaving. I came back here and stepped into the park, feeling all the warm memories come back to me. It was summer, so everything was full of life, although I could feel small pricks of death here and there, and the ducks and dragonflies felt it too. They were roaming around in a little circle at the far edge of the lake. I circled over and stepped down the embankment and found the first corpse of many to come in my days here. It was slightly purple, probably a woman but it was difficult to tell. Maybe you would have done a better job. As I dragged the waterlogged carcass to the shore, people were screaming and yelling and covering their children’s eyes and such. But it did not shock me, somehow. It was terrible, surely, but I knew that it was what I had to do.

‘The body was still warm, and hardly bloated at all, recently dead. I knew this, as a learned wizard. I retreated to the surrounding forest, as I thought the killer must have done not long ago. I carefully placed my trusty scabbard at my side, with my hand on it, looking for any movement, ready to slice at any instant. The forest seemed so grey that day. The leaves seemed redder than they should have been for the summer, but not reddish-green because that is brown, more of a faded red, similar to the color of the bark, which in that light was grey, so the trees were altogether quite grey. And since they made up nearly all of my surroundings, things were really very grey. The fungi on the trees even looked colorful in comparison. What should have been a bright blade became melancholic, so well shined it could reflect nothing more than the dullness around it. The grass was also really thin since there was less light under the forest, and in the grey light the grey dirt looked even greyer and I remember thinking to myself, gee, what a boring place, why do people even come here when there’s nothing interesting to look at, the only thing that could make it more interesting would be-’

‘Wait -why did you have a sword?’ Lei interrupted.

‘What sword?’

‘I think I’ve heard enough,’ she said.

‘No! This is the exciting part. I thought, the only thing that could make it more interesting would be clowns! Clowns are exciting. They are colorful. And then I saw it. The clown. A man in makeup and puffy striped pants and a hat that I can’t really describe. A sizzling blob of reds and yellows and whites on a grey backdrop. The clown that had killed my parents! But something was different. It was a natural thing, when you consider how much time had passed. He had been young when my parents were killed, but was an old man now; his white makeup was wrinkled and his missing teeth left big black holes between that red lipstick, which isn’t really suited for any men I know of. His sleeves were like deflated balloons hanging over dying twigs. He couldn’t make people happy before they died anymore, I saw, all he could do was hold a poor girl down to drown when her back was turned. Couldn’t even wrestle down a family like most of the murderers these days seem to be doing (which is why nobody lives with their family.)

He seemed out of breath and on edge from the police sirens that were approaching. He saw me and made to run, but tripped on his large red clown shoes and slapped down face first into the dirt without so much as a honk. It was a sad sight.’

‘What did you do then?’

‘I was planning to just leave him there and get back to the lake, tell the police where he was and go get some lunch,’ Val said, without a hint of truthfulness. ‘But he looked like he was going somewhere really important and I thought I should follow. He fell over again and again and eventually he didn’t seem to have the strength to get up. This was a 70 year old in a clown suit, keep in mind. He clawed at the grey grey soil for a while and then lay still and said to me with his head down, ‘I didn’t kill that girl.’ Then he said, ‘There are so many killers out there, I’m scared,’ then he said, ‘I’ll have fries with that,’ and then he dropped his head and started crying. I think he was going senile or maybe he was just really hungry or kidding with me, and maybe he was embarrassed because he was quiet for a while. But after I bent down to get a better look, I realized he wasn’t the one crying. He looked up very suddenly, some of his grey hairs slashed over my face. The last thing he said, in a very small voice was, ‘Please, don’t turn around.’

‘Like your friend the ‘cat boy’.’

‘Yeah, but I thought he was trying to trick me, so I turned around anyway, in case there was something behind me. There was nothing there, so I guess he really had tricked me. When I turned around he was gone. And what do you think was left?’

‘Don’t tell me it was a cake!’

‘No,’ Val said, puzzled. ‘Nothing was left. Just the dirt with the slight imprint of his face where he fell. He disappeared, and probably not by his own choice. My parent’s murderer was gone, probably murdered by another murderer. That did not really depress me since I didn’t know him personally, but he was like 70, he would have died on his own! That’s injustice. The police never found him, but they were happy. Happy! Because it stopped the town’s death rate from rising! Why in the world would that be important?

I kept going back to that spot in the forest, but there was nothing so much as a patch of red where the clown had been. Sometimes I found other bodies, but by then, it wasn’t such a surprise. Sometimes they disappeared, but that wasn’t a surprise either. But as time went by, and nobody did anything about it, I knew more than ever what I was called to return here for.‘

‘Go on, I’m at the edge of my seat.’

‘To find all the ‘disappearing’ killers’ stashes of bodies from the last thirty years and make the town death rate a record high. A world record high, even. Do you know how many people die, and then are taken away and never looked for? The Cake Killer alone has stolen hundreds of bodies! The big number could be in the thousands! And we could find all that. That will show the police, and anyone else who things ignoring it all is a good thing. It will be amazing.’

Lei sat there in silence for a very long time, just staring Val down with the emptiest look anybody could ever muster. Then she said in a voice just as empty, ‘That’s disgusting. But okay.’ She eyed him with great hostility. ‘You’ve got to be kidding. There’s no way any of that was the truth.’

There was a tense stare down. Val’s left eye flickered, almost yellow, while his right remained fixed and grave. But, after only a few seconds, he broke into a smile.

‘Alright, you got me. Not one word of what I just told you was the truth. I was just messing with you. I’m a detective. I look for criminals, even if nobody’s paying me. That’s just what I do.’

Of course, he was lying again.

Lei groaned and sank back onto the lounger. Val fiddled with the pile of papers he had brought over to the couch for what had turned out to be no reason at all. Lei groaned again. ‘I think I’ve had enough for one day. When’s the next bus out of here?’

‘Soon. Please, drop by tomorrow,’ Val said, ‘Maybe you can meet my roommate, and maybe the cat will be back. If you want breakfast, just come a little early, there’s always cereal. And we can get started on tracking down our Cake Killer.’

—

After a nice hot shower, Lei got out of the steaming bathroom with a towel wrapped around her and looked over to the window of her bedroom. The curtains were down, but the window was open. A very light breeze was blowing in from the night outside, lifting the curtains just slightly.

The autumn night was cool and dry. There was an owl out there somewhere. She could hear the hooting. There were also cats, meowing at each other in some unseen meeting point. And a raccoon, knocking over a trash can with a noise like a distant gunshot. A neighbor the next block over drove their car into their garage after a long day’s word and swore as they hit their toddler’s plastic tricycle which was for some reason left right in the wheel path of a car entering the garage. Nothing unusual, except…

Lei turned away and wrapped the towel tighter. It was a little cold now. And on the windowsill, where these things surely should not be normally, there was a lemon frosted slice of cake.