Patches didn’t hear a word Val said. He was quite simply asleep, peacefully immersed in at least three layers of thick, woolly sedation. His usual well of numbness had taken that opportunity to swell up and consume him. Any sensation at the outer edges of the balloon that surrounded him, be it fingertips, knives or saws, registered only as a slight tickle. His muscles couldn’t be bothered to move in even the tiniest response, his brain let them lie slack. Recounting his life story was out of the question. But if he had been awake to prime himself, treat himself to a lovelier end, he may have thought this:

---

☀

Sun. If anything important happened, it happened in the sun, against a vague backdrop nearly stark white. A bit of grass, maybe the black asphalt of the road. Everything else fell back, all around him there was nothing, leaving no distractions from a tightly burning, inevitably infuriating focus point. This was how Patches spent his early days.

It could be said that his bad habits started to arise a few days after his tenth birthday. It could also be said that it did not really ‘start’ but rather finally took shape - the coals had always been lit but until then had simply gathered a murky, bitter fog with no point of release. That might have explained why it felt so good to finally get it all out, grind bone to face, baby teeth decked from their shallow roots, the young slender neck of a fellow student twisted so fascinatingly out of shape that he felt he could not blink. There was a beautiful sense of respect from the observers who backed away at the sound of clattering teeth and creaking bones, eyes wide. Patches completed a swing that had hit its target exactly, fulfillingly, and then swooped down again to keep on hitting, and hitting and hitting and hitting.

He was young, back then, and owned shirts in more than one color, as was appropriate for a child.

He had started the day fixing up some of his grandfather’s birdhouses, mostly resetting their roofs and hanging them back up after some neighbor’s kids had tugged them down. Patches never had any desire to meet those kids, anybody his own age, or anyone at all. They were, without exception, crass, stupid and ugly. Not worth the time, according to his grandfather, yet even without meeting in person, they managed to whittle at his patience. To see them was nigh unbearable. His schoolmates’ stick thin arms would wave nakedly in the sun, crowding voices brayed loudly in the early morning as they passed his house. He woke up to them. Their voices were one of the reasons he knew they were the ones who had pulled down the birdhouses. He’d also seen them do it.

And it wasn’t the first time.

Patches had one eye squinted shut, tried with the other to focus on his task. The right eye was the one he was peering in with, the eye he'd later lose. Having two eyes didn't help him much. His hands shook as he tried to re-insert the support sticks for the tiny roost. He couldn’t quite manage it no matter how hard he tried. His body wanted to do something else, and his mind was not committed to the task either.

It was the sun, it was too bright, and at the same time the leaves in the trees were so thick they blotted out the light entirely in large swathes. Little slashes of whiteness shone through the leaves, while giant slabs of black obscured most of his work. The pinpricks of light danced around the tiny point he had to fix, like flies, not letting him focus, not letting him see.

The little wooden stick snapped and he roared in frustration and slammed the whole thing down into the grass.

The few chortles from the passing kids, already on their way to the bus stop. To meet up with their friends. And talk.

Patches bit his tongue and picked up the disgusting little toy house. He roughly lobbed it back up into the trees where it nearly fell down immediately, but he didn’t care.

He lifted his belongings from the lawn and hurried to the bus stop, where the sleepy queue had started to board. The inside of the bus looked cool and inviting. Patches stiffly guarded his place in line. But the boy behind him wanted to join those in front of him, and this desire far outweighed the importance of whatever boring idiot was standing in between them. The one in front shuffled slowly, as if it would encourage Patches to fall back. The boy behind rammed up against him, apparently with similar sentiment.

Patches took one step into the bus and a spidery leg swung around him and hooked him back out. The boy behind him had decided to make his message clear. Patches did too. He grabbed at the door and shoved his shoulder into whoever was coming up, but failed, so he fell back. It was just a slight loss of balance, but it was a fatal error. The most infuriating, fetid person in the world grabbed the rail next to him and swung up in his place.

“Psycho,” said the kid whose name he didn’t remember, fastening his brow over narrowed brown eyes. Not a second later the boy had erased any sign he had ever took notice of the clumsy cretin behind him and had turn to his friends with a wide, toothy smile; he had won. He was with his friends. Patches didn’t even have friends. Though considering what happened next, that may not have been surprising.

The thin shell of whatever he had been before snapped and out poured a seemingly endless supply of hatred and worse, energy. The red fog had burst to a plane of white light. Patches saw nothing but his own hands and the path before him, ending in the problem that happily crushed his world, his existence, underfoot. He waited, and another faceless imp behind him began to complain. And complain, and complain and bitch and moan through that stupid hole. Patches finally gave him a shove. The bitching droned on. Why was this thing allowed to live and continue in a world where he'd lost? Patches couldn’t fix the past. But he could take better aim in a second attempt.

Whoever was standing behind him got a sharp elbow to the chin and screamed. Patches stormed up the small plastic stairwell of the bus and approached the Winner and stood over him.

Even back then, Patches had looked quite plain, just another child expecting the world to bend before him. He was not large and not small, as pasty and as surly as any other boy, so he obviously failed to get the effect he wanted. What he got was a laugh, pointed right at him, spittle on his shirt. As animal-like braying that suffocated the dark interior of the bus, and in that moment when time seemed to be bending around this horrendous sight of undeserved life before him, it occured to him that he had other options.

Then there was a snap, a wet squash of fat bloody cheek and a shattering of teeth. And the thump of a head against glass. And a crack. And another crack. And another. There were voices now, frantic, but they gave him space. They were afraid. It was a good feeling.

---

After that time, he should have had enough. He should have made do with that he’d done, and felt sorry for doing such a thing to another human being. Only it wasn’t a human being, and even it if was, there was nothing to regret. He hadn’t been allowed to finish, either, before the bus driver had dragged his arms back, pulling him out of the fog for all to see. All those supposed humans, but he had no regard for them anymore. All he could wish for was more arms so he could throttle them all at once, and shoulders large enough to toss the driver through the windshield so he could get on with it.

The ex-winner’s mother came in, hive haired and large chested, and shrieked and pointed her thick oval nails. Patches wanted to bite them. The looked like bitter candies, he imagined the crunch.

The injured creature itself was wailing and rolling in a chair with two wads of tissues stuffed up its nose. Patches stared and stared and heard that he should have been satisfied, but he was not. He absolutely was not.

The principal was anxious. He had a high pitched squeal of a voice that only added to the blizzard of irritations. He had many heavy and sharp looking objects on his desk.

But Patches’s grandfather also came in. The floorboards seemed to creak under his weight, the ceiling lamp was nearly disturbed by his looming hairline. The air was silenced by his very being. He smelled like sawdust and vomit. He muttered a few words, perhaps nobody even really heard them, but they certainly saw. That put an end to any complaints.

When they left the office, the eyes of his dozen or so classmates followed.

“You’re in trouble,” said a friend of the ex-winner.

Inconsequential. The feeling on his fists sustained him throughout the sleepless night. The next day, the friend of the thing looked disappointed, nearly shocked that Patches hadn’t received a beating or similar. “Your grandpa’s a wimp! A sissy! A fag, you live with a--!” The fog descended again and this new target was hauled to the concrete, slammed headfirst into the sharp edge of the gutter.

He couldn’t stop, and didn’t want to. It wasn’t helping, but stopping it wouldn’t help either - these may have been the first inklings of Patches’s future ethos.

He saw this one through. A car was sent to the hospital.

‘My mom’s such a bitch,’ he heard over the lunch room, and this really ticked him off for reasons he couldn’t describe. Smashed noses were to follow. ‘My life sucks,’ Twisted fingers. ‘He has not reason to come after me, I shared a table with him in fifth grade.’ Dislocated wrists, glass shards in cheeks, keys through hands, knees through guts. Black and blue where he had gripped an arm so its owner wouldn’t run. They all deserved much more. For what it was worth, he sustained not a single major injury of his own. He had a few light scratches, and the bruises on his knuckles were caused by his own will.

They were ugly too, though.

“You actually like it, don’t you?” hissed the English teacher after the principal backed out of another meeting, citing a busy schedule. “You like the attention. But everyone’s going to stop taking notice eventually.”

That wasn’t true. He hated the attention like he hated everything else.

The English teacher was right in one way: they did stop looking, or tried to. But that didn’t stop the ever-present red haze that had taken over. He’d grab them by the ear, the jaw or the scalp and turn them in his direction, or simply take a swing at their heads from behind. One by one, his classmates, and the kids in the years above, below, snaking outward to their parents and the staff, realized they couldn’t turn their backs.

“Well, I hope you’re happy,” the English teacher said on their final meeting, before the school board simply gave up.

Patches thanked his teacher by sending one of the principal’s paperweights through his car window. The teacher was in the car at the time, and swerved wildly. He hit a row of students who had huddled by to watch, so dedicated to their entertainment that they remained clustered together even as they hit the fender. The ambulance came. Nobody was seriously wounded, there was no need for punishment, stuttered the principal. Rewarded with only a few black stares, Patches seethed.

---

The neighborhood whispered. A dark, cruel aura descended over the house Patches shared with his grandfather. At first, the nearby kids thought it would be an excellent show of bravery to retaliate, just a bit. If Patches came barging out, they could escape before he even noticed, and even if he did, they’d be gone before he left the door, with time to spare and yell from out of sight "Can’t you take a joke?"

Obviously, he couldn't. But that was what made it so funny!

After the first few weeks, the pranksters were no longer able to make it to step 2. Patches was not to be taken by surprise. His grandfather's eyes made sure of that. Visitors were either dragged to the ground, chased blocks or, when that had proven more danger than distraction, simply warned off early by the sight of their maker waiting on the front steps.

And in less than a year, he’d built his grandfather the perfect view. The lawn grass flourished and the birdhouses sat nicely where they had been placed, tiny stick roosts intact. There was nothing in view but a block of idyllic lawns, and the hot empty street. As if they knew, even small animals and passing birds took the long way around. That was alright - the birdhouses weren’t for them.

“It’s better this way,” his grandfather had said. Not particularly approving, but certainly no objections. He was far too busy. Complaints from parents did not good; they had to twist their necks to see his face, and that was an even greater deterrent than any the school board could come up with. Patches’s grades began to plummet, but those were things of even lesser consequence. And forget the idea of his grandfather being approached outside the school. Without so much as lifting one of his colossal arms, he already instilled fear. The fact that Patches went unpunished also protected him from retaliation - nobody knew his grandfather well enough to know his business that held him back, not exceptional sympathy for his grandson.

In short, Patches’s abrupt rampages were to be hindered by neither his grandfather nor the neighborhood. The only method of protection was to make sure you and those you cared about did not wander into eyeshot. Of course, this did nothing to still the underlying rage.

He had not yet resorted to thrashing inanimate objects. The thrill of hitting flesh down to a papery flatness then pounding the bone below was still a requirement. He wasn't being greedy, he told himself, it was only right. It was not so much required for satisfaction as it was for completion, like having to finish a school worksheet or pages of reading. Blindly he realized why assignments took such importance in schools; if someone very powerful felt the same way he did about his mission, it was no wonder everyone was forced to do all those droll meaningless equations and essays. They simply needed to or this figurehead would die, or else go berserk and everyone else would die. It was not a choice.

He took to patrolling the streets, looking for signs of life.

Whenever something turned up, he directed all of his hatred into it, whatever it was. Things went all the better when nobody else was looking. He thought smugly of how he defied the teacher who had claimed he was ‘doing it for attention.’

He threw bricks at passerby, or in a pinch, at squirrels or sparrows. A neighbors' rabbit in a neglected cage proved to be an easier target. They watched in terror behind the thick screens of their windows as he tore an ear and let it go. When he first caught a bird, it was fat pigeon, and he broke its legs, because it already had wings - it was unfair it could both fly and run. A cat, slightly more feisty, escaped with a crushed paw and fragments of a tail; with clawmarks on his fingers he had been surprised that something had dared fight back.

One morning he found a dog on an empty road. It was an ambiguous brown-black animal, knee height, with pointed ears. Dogs were rare, it was hard even to bring an ordinary mutt into town, and he hadn’t seen this one before. It looked filthy, weak and possibly wild. Even if it were not ordinarily so, something had happened to it that made it look like it had not a friend in world. Yet it smiled stupidly, tongue and teeth bared, hopping about as if he’d feel sorry for its efforts.

You have it so good. You wouldn’t understand my troubles, but you have love to spare, don’t you?

Patches stalked up to the creature, one hand poised to grab, the other curled into a hard fist. The fog that rimmed his vision was closing in on him again, and he could almost hear it buzzing in anticipation for release.

“What the hell are you doing?”

It was a raspy voice, harsh but imminently clear. In front of him, blocking the setting sun, was the silhouette of a person. No face but a scraggle of dark hair, headlight amber eyes in a band of blackness, as wild as the dog or even worse. Tall and ragged, old and foul, gloved hands held in front of him in fists as if he were lifting some invisible bag. Gloves and a huge coat in the dead of summer. Patches hated him immediately.

“Go away, I’m busy,” Patches snapped. “I was here first.”

“No, I was," rasped the man.

Even as a child, near blinded by anger and instant loathing, Patches thought it was odd to hear such a line from an adult.

“If you were here first, is that your wire?” The man pointed at the dog’s limping paw, tangled in a metal thread. So thin it was almost intangible, but strong enough to draw blood and resist tugging and dragging and biting. “Some really shitty work you did there. I can’t stand half-assed jobs. It's yours then? Maybe I should pull that shit off and show you how it's really done...”

Inwardly Patches writhed in frustration, but he didn’t know if he could reach the man’s face, even his legs or neck, before anything happened. His frustration increased.

“Maybe you didn’t hear me,” the main continued, and advanced.

“It’s just a dog,” Patches had said, and he wanted to smash his own skull out on the pavement for sounding so lame.

“So what exactly are you planning to do with it?”

This was when Patches saw the man’s fists weren’t empty - they were holding a tight coil of rope the same color as his gloves. The tip of the coil dropped free as he stepped, his hands moved apart and pulled taut a length that would have been just wide enough to wrap around someone’s neck or arms - with little room to spare. Arms apart, the decrepit shadow of a jacket was pulled open just an inch, and Patches saw the handle of a knife tucked into a belt loop. It had a few silver accents, like a kitchen knife, but was most definitely too large for any reasonable family food. A flash of metal, and of wire and steel bolts set in some plastic tool.

The fingers loosed and coiled casually, one by one. The man wasn’t going to stop. He wasn’t afraid of some indignant child.

Patches stood his ground for a moment or two, but his body wouldn’t allow him to move forward to face the approaching shape. The man’s silhouette eclipsed the sun, stood over him, inspecting him as though he were the most pathetic being in existence. The dog didn’t look concerned at all. Patches took a step back, then another, and turned.

He may have heard a final yelp from the dog, but with the blood pounding in his ears and the heat searing through his veins, he wasn’t taking in much. He would never see the dog again. He knew that. It should have been his. He stomped down the streets to his home, and missed a green pedestrian light by five seconds. Even though there were few enough cars he could cross on red, it seemed an irrevocable offense. Why was he being forced to wait?

Tears began to spring into his eyes and this seemed unfair as well.

And in front of his house, a boy his age, who lived a few blocks away, was coercing his little brother into throwing water balloons at the door after assuring him the monster had definitely gone out on his afternoon walk. They didn’t even see him return.

By sunset, the boy’s family had to rush to a hospital. They spent the night somewhere far away.

---

When Patches wasn’t prowling the street or wasting the day away at school, his haunt of choice was the backyard. In the yard, there was a treehouse his grandfather had constructed sitting in a center of a low, Y-shaped trunk and this was where Patches sat, looking back into the house. There were tall, guarding fences around the yard even though nobody lived to the left or right of them, and the back of the row bordered a dense green forest. He was totally alone save for his grandfather, who did not tend to look out to the yard anyway. Through the glass sliding doors of the house Patches could see the old man was far more interested in his wood carving, or his television screens.

The treehouse looked simply like a wooden cube from far away, with a large, square shape cut out for the entrance. It was so low it did not require a ladder or stairs of any sort. That was fine - it wasn't meant for hiding. Patches would sit at the entrance with his schoolwork, or more recently, with homemade plastic dumbbells or piece of wood to chip at with a chisel. When his eyes stung at that, he’d watch his grandfather sand and slice wooden panels inside the living room, and catch what he could of the televisions. The screens weren’t restricted from him by any means, he just disliked sitting inside the house, in a cloud of sawdust and the screech of the saws.

He disliked a lot of things.

One day, at noon exact, his grandfather had decided to take a trip out of the house to check up on a major project. Patches had chosen not to go to school that day and sat in the treehouse, flipping through the pages of one of his textbooks, occasionally cracking it open to a page, reading one sentence, then going back to the sound and feeling of flapping paper. He was mostly focused on the televisions inside. On one faraway monitor he saw there may have been a traffic accident at the intersection he’d crossed when running from the knife wielding stranger.

He was in a fairly neutral state of mind. With nobody around, no noise, only a slight distant misfortune to observe, he was feeling quite relaxed. It was the sort of time that made him think, See, I know exactly what I’m doing. And I can stop whenever I like.

Someone wandered into the garden. Patches could not believe his eyes at first as, in the corner of his vision, a small figure darted up from the back fence to the base of the treehouse. Probably thinking it was out of sight.

Patches slammed the book on the wooden floor and spoke, “Who's there? You need to get out.”

A head popped into view. A kid about his age, but nobody he’d ever seen before. A tangled shock of dark hair and eyes like torches, wide and gawking. His clothes were matted to him with dirt, and his shoes resembled bricks of mud. He did not fill his clothes properly. He was small, crusty, possibly malformed. Patches puffed himself up and glowered.

The tiny pupils in those torchlight eyes shifted guiltily and the unwanted guest retreated back under the base of the treehouse. Patches lunged off his post and whirled into the cool shadow beneath the wooden block. There was nobody there. He circled the tree once, and again. Feeling somewhat foolish, he returned to the treehouse, and there it was.

The figure was standing, and in the shadows, he looked larger than he should have. He crunched intently at some grimy candy from a cardboard box. Some fat insect, larger than an ant but smaller than a roach, crawled out of his sleeve, over his hand, and disappeared. He took another bite, the crunch may well have been on insect shell.

Patches was disgusted. “Are you deaf? Or stupid? You can’t be here. This is my house.”

Another crunch. The forehead, cheeks, chin, everything seemed covered in a layer of ash or grease. The teeth, however were white as snow. Sharp.

“I’ll give you ‘til the count of ten. Then I’ll make you get out. One...”

“How can I go? You’re blocking the door.”

A thin rasp, higher than the man with the rope but a reminder nonetheless. Someone he’d let go, for some reason. Had he been scared? No, he had not said to himself ‘I’m scared’ so he hadn’t really been scared. Just stupid and too nice. Well, that didn’t have to happen again.

He beat one hand against the entranceway, and the visitor jumped slightly. Patches glared and began to draw in, this animal was cornered.

He got no response but nervous crunching. As he got closer, he found all sorts of reasons to be upset with this invader. He was messy, gross, evidently not too clever. Probably kicked out the school. That made him worse than all the others. Probably a burglar. Didn’t know what he was in for. Eating trash and bugs. Probably had a stomach full of worms that he’d vomit all over once he was doubled over on he ground; his stick arms wouldn’t do anything no matter how many layers of old shitting coats he wore; and it was summer too, he--

When Patches was one arm’s length away, the visitor vaporized. It was instantaneous. The box of candy fell to the ground and out came a jumble of multicolored chocolates, and one terrified beetle. Patches glanced down at it in surprise, and by the time he looked up his visitor had, without even disturbing his massive overcoat, whipped out a knife. It seemed too large for that slender, clawed hand, but that was all the more unnerving. It was almost as if that twig of a limb should not have been able to lift such a thing. And the knife was not what he’d expected to see here on his property.

Patches stopped. His head throbbed with confusion and impotent rage. He shook an arm at the visitor, who was poised still as a wax figure. “Where did you get that?”

“It’s mine.”

“No, it’s not, I saw-” He was struck by a bizarre thought. “Wait, have I seen you before?”

“No.” The visitor’s eyes narrowed, he inspected Patches inquisitively as a fox. “I don’t think so.”

“Where did you come from? Why aren’t you in school?”

The visitor snorted. “I came from the back. And what about you? Why aren’t you in school? Did you finally get kicked out?”

Fury overcame Patches for a moment and he stomped forward, arm crooked to come smashing down. A piece of chocolate cracked beneath his feet. The visitor jumped again, took a wild, mournful look at his dropped snacks and back at Patches, the knife still raised. “You shouldn’t do that.”

Patches hammered a fist into his face.

He was immediately aware he missed, somewhat. His hand slid on what felt like powder, and caught the visitor on the neck. There was a somewhat satisfying oof and the knife slid limply through the air, as the visitor was slammed into the back wall. Patches walled him in, took a handful of that filthy jacket and punched, and again. The visitor squealed and lamely held his hands in front of his face which left his body wide open, so that was where he was hit. Again and again. Patches could feel he was hitting down to the bone, even through all that clothing, as something hard came into contact with his knuckles each time…

SNAP -- and his yell echoed along the desolate street.

Patches fell back hard onto one hand, the other swinging and shuddering desperately, two fingers clamped together by a steel trap set in a wooden panel. A mousetrap. He screeched horribly, and the visitor, who had slumped to the floor in a daze, set the knife down and held his hands out in protest. Patches took the trap with his free hand and yanked.

“Stop! Stop it, you’ll rip your own fingers off!”

Patches wasn’t about the listen to anyone, much less his attacker. The wood split and the metal wire snapped off its hinges; the trap detached and he threw it to the corner of the room. He nursed his fingers while the visitor looked anxiously at the trap, and at Patches, as if they were of equal importance to him.

The trap took priority. The visitor retrieved it from the corner and tucked it back into his coat. “You were kind of lucky, you know. This one’s just for mice. The other kinds could really cut right through bone, and take off your finger, even your hand.” He settled, cross legged and started to pick chocolate off the ground. “They’re supposed to break necks. Of the mice.”

Patches snapped, “Are you an idiot?”

“I’m not the one that got his hand caught.” The visitor chewed on one of the candies that had been dropped. There was the crunching again. A trickle of blood streamed down his chin. He saw it on his hands, and started to lick it up.

“Where did you get that knife?”

“I told you, it’s mine.”

“You’re lying. It belongs to...” What did he know about that silhouette on the street? “A man who lives around here. I saw him.”

“How do you know you didn’t just see me? I’m a man. I live around here. And this is my knife, so...”

“No, you’re a kid.”

“Hey.” The invading kid frowned and kneaded at the ends of his coat. “What else do you remember about this ‘man’ that makes you so sure?”

“He was tall.”

“I’m pretty tall.”

“No you’re not. And he had some rope. And some other things. Like wire, and-”

“Oh, like this?” The visitor reached into his coat without looking and flung out a coil of wire as if it were a ball of dust. “Don’t look so weird! I’m just showing you the stuff. Um. Don’t hit me.” Then he dug around and pulled out a length of dark brown rope bundled around thick black gloves. And then another knife, smaller this time, with a faux wooden handle. And lastly, a piece of plastic that looked a bit like a remote control, but with pincer-like fixtures at the ends. "See? All mine."

Patches boggled. It was everything he’d seen that day, only clearer, in full view. It was so clear, it felt like a trick. “Who are you, really?”

“Who are you?”

“This is my house. You’re the stranger, so you tell me.”

“It’s okay, I’ll just go, then.”

Patches stood to block the way. “Fine. I’ll go first. I’m Patches. I live here. And you?”

“Oh, Patches. Like a pirate?”

Like your dad’s spotted hamster, his grandfather had said. The man wasn't much of a joker, and it wasn't funny. It wasn't true either, it had to have been some other animal. Whatever the details, Patches didn’t repeat this to anyone.

“No. It’s just a name, it’s not important. And you...”

“I’m…” The visitor regarded the tools lying on the floor, as if they were supposed to be providing the information. He twisted the end of the rope and mouthed a few things. Patches wanted desperately to smack him across his pursed face but his hand still stung, the fingers beginning to swell.

“I’m… Val. I think that’s right. No, that definitely is.” And Val gave a toothy smile. "That's me.”

“Why did you have to think so long about it?”

“It’s hard sometimes, okay? I don’t usually meet new people.”

“But it’s your name.”

“Just a name, and it’s not important,” Val said breezily and ate another chocolate drop off the floor. “Is your hand okay?”

“Where do you live? Around here? This street?”

“I can I see your hand?”

“Don’t pretend you didn’t hear me,” Patches said, balling up his uninjured fingers. Val took one look and, despite looking rather shaken, shuffled towards him, fingers outstretched as if he were begging. Patches took a swing.

It caught Val in the ribs and he was bowled over; he dropped to his back with a thump, head hitting the wood. Patches pulled his fist back, but somehow in the last second, Val had grabbed the hand he wanted to see. Those claws were gripped tightly around it; dirty nails and worn fingertips grazed his skin. Patches struggled; Val was dragged back upright.

“You weren’t hurt at all,” Val said, clinging to Patches’s fist, as if it were a baseball. “I guess you hit it so fast, or your fingers were really strong. You’re kind of amazing.”

Patches unclenched his fist, half in flattered surprise, and half in disgust. At this, Val finally let go. He gathered his belongings into a single, giant black blob and shoved it into his coat, then got to his feet, the end of the rope swinging by his side like a tail. “Okay. It was good seeing you. I always wondered what was back here. But I should go.”

“You can’t go yet. You didn’t tell me anything.”

“But I shouldn’t be here, right?” Val patted his pockets. “I’ll tell you the next time I come. If I’m allowed to.”

“I don’t care if you do.” In other words, he was hoping for a return. That itself was a huge confession, Patches wanted to die right then and there as Val’s eyes lit with a mischievous glint. “I really don’t care. But won’t your parents get mad?”

“No, they…” Val looked around again, guiltily, and hopped out of the treehouse entrance. Patches gritted his teeth and pounced at the loose rope. He managed a magnificent grab and the rope caught on something in Val’s pocket and the lump of coats and dirt went crashing to the ground. Patches was yanked down too, his chest hitting the edge of the treehouse exit.

As he struggled to catch his breath and push himself up, Val recovered first. Leaping up as if falling on his face were an everyday exercise, he restuffed his pockets and dashed around the corner of the house before Patches had blinked twice.

Patches was left sitting in his yard, alone again. He let his feet hang out of the treehouse and his burning fingers catch what little breeze there was. Val’s stench seemed to have permeated the wood. There was mud in the corners and a piece of moldy chocolate rolling across the floor. Patches closed his eyes and squeezed his fingers; they were so puffy they wouldn’t sit together properly. There was nothing he could do about it. It was the calmest he had been in months.

---

“I met a guy called Val today,” Patches told his grandpa over some takeaway pizza.

“You were out socializing?”

“No. He came by the house.”

“Val did? He told you his name?”

“Yes. Real freaky, though.”

“I’ll say. And he came over here? In person.”

“Yes…”

“Well, don’t let him do it again,” his grandfather said darkly. “That guy’s no good. You’re too young to know, but take it from me. He’s been up to trouble for years, a spree that went on ten, twenty years.”

Even ten years might have been a stretch, there was no way Val was over fifteen. Patches frowned and then retched. There was sawdust on his salami. His grandfather inhaled it all with ease.

“You see that geezer again," his grandfather went on, "You unleash like you would on anyone else. Doesn’t matter that he’s old.”

Old?

“If you ask me, he should be drawn and quartered on the street, where everyone can see, after what he did to those kids.” Then his grandfather guffawed and Patches distrusted him immediately, and hated him intensely. The fool was surely going senile. The boiling in his core lasted all night, and the next day he went to school to seek some (unwilling) outlets. Someone had mistakenly locked his locker when he intended to leave it open (he did not enjoy digging out his notebook for the passcode each time) and he wound up tearing the padlock from the metal fixture and throwing it through a window, where it fell and smashed the windscreen of a car below.

When he got home, there were two more chocolates in the treehouse, where someone had been waiting for him but given up, and all the mistakes of the day came crashing down on him. He wanted to kill something.