‘I think you should change your shirt,’ was the first thing Lei said to Val the next morning. It was surprising at all that she have even bothered to come. It surprised her, at least. Val seemed smug about the fact that he had been expecting her to be there, but was a little disappointed she had not arrived for breakfast.

He was also somewhat crestfallen that she was telling him to change his awful, awful shirt. It appeared to be a Frankenstein of shirts, the top was made of some unevenly cut lavender paisley material, some of the elbow appeared to be a thick knit, and the rest were patchworks of similar colors that, even though they were similar shades of khaki, did not go well together at all, giving the appearance of rashy, off colored flesh.

‘Go find plain tee shirt or something to put on. You have to have something. What about that thing you were wearing yesterday?’

‘Please don’t tell me what to do in my own house,’ Val whined.

‘Alright,’ Lei said, ‘But if you scare off the Cake Killer and all your favorite animals with that loud as hell shirt, don’t come complaining to me.’

‘But that doesn’t even make sense. Why would a killer be scared of a shirt?’

‘Have you looked at that thing?’ Lei groaned and rubbed her eyes. ‘It’s not so much that he’ll be scared, I’ll give you that. It’s just that they’ll see you coming from a mile away – which isn’t going to be such a good thing for us seeing as we’re probably going to have to sneak up on him to catch him.’

‘Or follow track him back to his base.’

‘Or that. Yes. Of course.’

‘Ah. Now I think you’ve raise a good point,’ Val said, now looking perhaps overly thoughtful over something so trivial. ‘I’ll go change into something more appropriate.’ He disappeared into a room on one of the walls that extended from the roof to the back of the house and closed it. Lei vaguely wondered what was on the other side of that door. A bedroom, or a bathroom perhaps. Those were two things that didn’t appear to be present in the main room.

Lei sat down on the cream colored lounger she had occupied yesterday and leaned back on the fluffy pillows. It was like lying on a literal bed of cream, or perhaps mayonnaise since the leather was so shiny. She tilted her head back and looked up at the light spilling in from the numerous skylights up top. How were they installed? How were they cleaned? The only part of the house that would allow one to access the skylight was the mini-library balcony up the spiral staircase in the corner. Lei up-righted herself then wandered over to the staircase.

As she got closer, she saw little devilish faces leaning through the bars of the stairwell staring out at her. Their sharp horns and terrible fingernails poked through the bars to their left and right and coiled around, as fingernails do when they are uncut for long periods of time, say about 5 weeks. They were all uniformly colored, a deep, glinting obsidian. Their empty eyes were holes right through their bodies. You could see exactly what was behind them. Throughout the rest of their bodies, similar holes were placed between elegant loops of darkness, or of metal. Actually, more truthfully, of metal. These monsters were just the decorative shapes between the stair rails, metal bars twisted elegantly and painted black. Lei was impressed with their craftsmanship. From a distance, they didn’t look like anything special.

She put her hand on the railing held up by the first little beast’s horns and started up the metal staircase, an echoing tap with each step. She hadn’t taken off her shoes, but Val didn’t seem to mind. He, too, seemed to roam around the house with shoes.  Perhaps he was also wary of kicking into one of the cereal bowls that he always left lying about on the floor.

The landing she reached was bathed in a pool of sunlight. It really illuminated how much dust was up there. The books here all seemed to be thick reference books in some foreign language, although there was a single magazine up there too lying on the beanbag couch, advertising only the latest and most highly developed computer hardware, or so it claimed. The magazine was dated back to Christmas seven years ago.

Lei opened the magazine, setting loose a cloud of dust bunnies. The first article featured a personal computer that highly resembled a microwave in both size and shape. The header for the article was: Slaughter the Competition. The Power is in Your Hands. Apparently this particular computer had been targeted at gamers. It even featured a screenshot of an extremely pixilated man getting his head blown off by the amazing prices that could be provided if you went to the flagship store in person. The pixel man’s pixel blood flew across the page and drenched the small table listing OS compatibility, core processors and hard drive space. The little squares of blood sank through the pages and made the pages below it red with gradually smaller spots, eventually leaving a tiny red dot on the sofa.

Frowning, Lei tilted the page up to the light, and breathed a sigh of relief. Upon closer inspection, it seemed that someone had just tried to circle the table of specs, but had burst the ink tank of their red pen all over it.

Lei put the magazine back where it had been before, pondering its poor taste in phrasing in a Christmas issue, and tugged one of the reference books from its place on the shelf. In comparison to the shelves downstairs, the ones up here seemed to be very well organized, and far less used. That’s what one would have thought, anyway, upon looking at them all shelved so nicely that day.

But when she opened up this first book, setting up a cloud of dust once again, she was met with something that wasn’t really a suitable page for a 10 pound reinforced-binding reference book. The page was blank. It wasn’t even the nice flimsy reference-book paper, it felt more like cheap printer paper. Lei flipped through a few of the pages, and was only half relieved to see that only about a fifth of the pages were like that, the rest were well suited to the Russian thesaurus that (she guessed) they were part of. On one of the further back blank pages, there was a little doodle or rather, words in someone’s doodly handwriting. In faded grey, the familiar words Slaughter the Competition.

Lei made a quick flip through the rest of the book, and although there were perhaps a little over a hundred white pages after that, none of them had anything written on them. Puzzled, Lei replaced the book where it had been and pulled out another, from the leftmost end of a different shelf.

This one felt a little too light – or more specifically, a little too light and compressible in the center and heavy at the edges. Having watched many an action-horror movie in her lifetime, Lei sort of knew what she was to expect when she opened the book. She laid it flat on her arm and lifted the front cover.

The book’s pages were, as expected, cut out in the center in a perfectly even square, with sides of roughly 5 inches. But instead of finding a pistol or a piece of jewelry or a zip lock bag of cocaine stashed away in this secret compartment, there was instead a folded piece of paper, the same consistency of the cheap printer paper inserted into the previous book. Lei flipped it over. On it, in the same handwriting as was in the previous book, there were the letters spelling out To P.

Curious but wary, Lei pulled up the corner of the folded paper, which didn’t reveal much of the contents of the letter, but did reveal the letters spelling out the final words of the letter, Love V.

                                                                 

Lei glanced down at the doorway Val had disappeared into the change his clothes, then back at the letter. Then she looked back at the door and froze as there was a loud thump from within. She stood perfectly still, and then turned back to the letter. There was another thump that nearly tore her soul from her skin. She sighed and shut the book, putting it back on the shelf. There were no more mysterious bumps.

Lei was prepared to head back down the steps and ask Val what exactly the hell he was doing in that room and how it related to changing his shirt, but decided to let him take a few more minute – in that time she could take a look at one last book. Two examples weren’t really enough to tell her enough about this strange collection of books to sate her interest. That last one had really been more of a box made out of a book than a book itself. So just one more.

The book she picked out this time was a little thinner than the others, but not by much. It had a pretty gold strip going around the edges of the covers. This one was for English readers – The Simple Dictionary of Etymology, A-K. Lei opened it. She leafed through the first hundred or so pages – disappointingly, there was nothing surprising to be had. But then, on a page in the late four hundreds, there was a small white index card placed in the center of the page containing words from ‘erstwhile’ to ‘etaoin shrdlu.’ Lei guessed that this one had been written by a different person from the other two. The handwriting on this one was much neater than the others, and put at the top left of the card, perhaps to leave space for future messages. But the care had gone to waste, as there was nothing more added beyond the first line of text.

What this line said was Please don’t turn around.

Lei slammed the book shut (disturbing yet another family of dust bunnies) and replaced it back on the shelf.

She went straight for the staircase and took each step as quietly yet as quickly as she could, squashing all the minor obsidian demons with her boots or pushing them back into their posts between the banisters with her hands. She hit the wooden floor and made a beeline for the sink next to the computer-shaped microwave and washed the dust off her hands.

At that moment, Val emerged from his changing room, wearing the exact same shirt he had entered with. He entered the room, stood grinning at the doorway for a few moments, then sneezed explosively.

‘Wow, it’s dusty in here. I should open some windows.’

‘I see you didn’t change your shirt.’

‘Oh.’ Val looked down at himself in confusion, as though the shirt had put itself back on his body without him realizing it. ‘Oh, that’s right, so that’s what I went into that room for. Of course. Well, I’ll just put a coat over it.’

‘Then what were you doing that whole time?’

Val gave Lei a look, the look he had given her when he said ‘You aren’t going to believe me,’ before launching into his life story yesterday, which had been composed entirely of lies and had been an overall waste of time. Lei conceded that it wasn’t going to be productive to continue the conversation in this fashion. ‘Just find a coat, at least,’ she said.

‘Okay, okay,’ Val said, and before she could stop him he had disappeared into the side door once again, closing it tightly behind him.

Lei groaned and sat back on the lounger.

From behind the kitchen counter, Val’s orange spotted cat emerged, licking milk and cereal crumbs off its fluffy grey lips.

—

It was sunset when the two of them set out. Val had vanished into his room looking for his coat at about 12 noon and took well more than two hours to accomplish the task. Lei had managed to take a substantial nap in the time it took him to find it and come out of the room again. It had taken another thirty minutes to find his shoes, which were tossed in completely different corners of the living room for reasons Lei did not care to inquire about.

The two meandered down the trash laden streets (Lei noticed there were some newly ground tire-tracks, the motorcycle gang must have passed by) and towards the busier blocks of town. Val walked with purpose and determination, not stopping to think or catch his breath, or allow leeway on the sidewalk for the elderly, or let traffic lights change before barreling across a road. Thankfully, the roads around his neighborhood were mostly barren. But as they got closer to the nearest train station, there arose a worrying number of speeding cars and freighter trucks.

Along rode such a truck laden with pigs at what looked like 80 miles an hour. Val sauntered directly into its path. Lei grabbed the back of Val’s coat and wrenched him back to the sidewalk to let the hulking, squealing, stinking flurry tear by, splattering the sidewalk and fouling up the air. Lei covered her eyes and backed away as it passed. Val, however stood on the tip of the sidewalk for just enough time, then immediately made off again as soon as the end of the truck flew by his nose. Lei followed warily.

‘Uh, not to disturb you, boss, but do you even know where you’re going?’

Val turned around, wide eyed. ‘Where are we going?’

Lei placed her face in her hand and turned away.

Val shrugged and continued along his merry way. Lei groaned and looked up just in time to leap forward and yank him out of the way of an oncoming sports car, loaded far over capacity with sweat suited, sunglass-wearing teenagers. Seven pairs of eyes turned at them like a sort of mutant spider made of red metal and human bodies. One boy wearing a black cap hooted wordlessly in Lei and Val’s direction before the car screeched around the corner and out of sight. His hoot echoed down the street.

‘Wow, some people here impress me with their lack of caution,’ Val said, and proceeded to wander directly into the line of traffic once again.

‘It sure is unbelievable,’ Lei muttered.

She followed Val in seething silence for at least another ten blocks. They were now in a nicer part of town. The backdrop of sharp concrete buildings fell away to reveal the warmly colored sky, above a collection of nicely constructed, individual houses with their own gardens and garages. The failing light cast heavy shadows between the decorative pillars, the rose and laurel carvings at the corners of the buildings, the eyebags of the angel guarding the spray of a fountain. A variety of reddening trees spilled layers of leaves with the wind; the leaves hit the pavement with a light scraping, twirled and then blew on their way. A few caught on Val’s hair, and he didn’t seem to notice. One slapped him in his empty grey (or perhaps yellow eye) and he didn’t seem to notice that either.

Lei stopped cursing Val to death by the most violent of traffic accidents, as he so justly deserved, and looked around them in wonder. How were these townhouses and their beautifully manicured gardens so close to the district where pigs were being delivered and hooligans drove around blocks in their sports cars hooting at passerby?

‘I’ve never been to this part of town,’ she said. ‘The houses here are amazing.’

‘I used to live here,’ Val said.

‘Huh. You mean as a kid – the house from your story? I thought you said your story was a lie.’

‘It was,’ Val said vacantly.

‘Where did you live around here?’

‘I don’t remember. I was a kid back then.’

Lei gritted her teeth and pressed on. ‘Did you like it, though? It’s very different from where you live now. Would you ever consider moving back?’

‘I suppose I have some fond memories here. But no,’ Val looked wistfully at a giraffe-shaped topiary in the yard nearest to them. ‘No, this is where my parents were murdered by that clown suited man who brought me so much woe. I could never move back here.’

‘So that part wasn’t a lie?’

‘No. Well. Yes.’

‘So which is it?’

Val was inevitably formulating yet another useless answer when the conversation was but to a halt by a distant cry of, ‘Please, open the door!’

Two doors down, a plain looking man about Lei’s age was knocking on a door inlaid with a horrible gargoyle’s face holding a ring in its mouth as a door knocker. The man seemed unable to even look at the thing. He was sort of cringing and looking away from the door as he knocked on it at the very edge, as far from the gargoyle’s toothy grin as he could be. Unsurely, he bleated again, ‘Come on! Open the door!’ He gave the door another limp knock. ‘The police will be here soon! Hold on if you can!’

‘What’s wrong?’ Lei asked, giving his shoulder a tap undoubtedly more forceful than the taps he was giving the doorframe.

He swiveled around as though he were being approached by an axe murderer. Seeing that it was just a girl half a foot shorter than him did not seem to comfort him in any way. His eyes fixed on her with a mortified stare. It was the only eye contact he made for the rest of the day. And it was only for a moment. He took up staring at his feet instead. ‘Something… something really bad is going on in there…’

Lei stepped up to the door and gave the middle a few hard smacks. Then she grasped the ring in the gargoyle’s jaws and slammed the little nub at the bottom into its designated spot on the door but a loud crack. She let it swing back and forth with decreasing smacks each time. ‘Hey! Is anyone in there?’

There was no answer. But unexpectedly, from inside a pretty little chime began, and rang throughout the house, echoing against the walls and windows and expensive platters in their display holders and ears of all inside. It could not be ignored. But only one inhabitant raised their head to the chime. Only one could, it should be said.

Lei was about to give the door another beating to the horror of the man on the doorstep, but when she raised her arm to give it another slap, her knuckles drove into Val’s gaping face, which had for some reason been positioned right behind her shoulder. He fell to the perfectly lined floorboards of the front porch clutching his face.

‘God dammit, Val, have you ever learned about personal space?’

‘Who are you people?’ the young man on the doorstep cried.

‘Who are you?’ Val grunted, rubbing his nose.

‘Is there someone in the house?’ Lei practically screamed.

‘Yes,’ the man said, unable to look at her.

‘They’re already dead,’ Val said confidently, although his nose was dripping blood.

The man looked like he was going to collapse, or maybe make a break for it, Lei couldn’t really tell, and Val didn’t look too invested in the whole situation to bother with him. He wiped his nose with his coat sleeve. It disturbed Lei slightly that the blood did not appear on the sleeve. Stains didn’t show up on the thick dark material. Who knew how stained that thing was in actuality. Did Val even do laundry? Did he even know how to do laundry? What did he know? He seemed sure whoever was in the house was dead.

The three of them were just staring cross-eyed at each other when the one who had raised their head to the bell accidentally knocked over one of the plate holders holding a lovely blue china plate painted with a scene of a rural village. The tip hit the floor and sent everything into a disarray. The cows and caddies split in halves, each half heading off somewhere unknown to their bearers, the thatched cottages flew apart, the path the procession of farmers were trundling down cracked and sent its travelers soaring under cabinets, under the dining table, into the shag rug lying at the top of a staircase with a  soft thump. Most of the plate did not make a soft thump, though. They made a hard, sharp crash.

The three stooges at the door looked up at the noise, right into the eyes of the gargoyle, who of course did not know what the hell was going on, but it was convenient that there was something there with a face for all of them to focus on.

‘Already dead, huh?’ Lei mumbled, then went for the doorknob.

‘I don’t think we should be trying to break in,’ mumbled the tall young man next to her. ‘I called the police, they’re probably coming soon.’

‘We can’t just sit around if there’s still someone in there!’

There was another sharp crash, this time closer by. Lei and the young man turned to see what idiocy had just taken place. They were not disappointed. Val had launched a decorative stone turtle into the nearest window, shattering it entirely. ‘Hold it right there, Cake Killer!’ he roared joyfully through the wreckage, and picked up another stone turtle from the line of six still standing on the lawn to further clear the way.

‘Are you insane?’ the young man cried.

‘I’ll go take one of the back windows!’ Lei called over to Val, who was wholly absorbed in the tossing of stone turtles. ‘Don’t let anyone out of the house!’ She turned to the man on the porch, who couldn’t look at her. ‘You hear that? Watch the door, if anybody tries to make a run for it, stop them. Trip them. Slam the door on their fingers. There are so many things you can do, be creative.’ Then she darted down the steps and around to the right-hand side of the house, lifting up a two and a half foot sculpture of a squirrel along the way and gripping it like a baseball bat.

—

With a smash and a crackling thud Lei’s boots landed on the evenly waxed floor of the study. The room was well lit by its enormous windows, but the light was all red, and the broken window was now letting the red seep in, all over, in the cracks of the dark wooden shelves and between the books. A red leaf from the red oak tree outside blew in to say hello. It landed on a velvet chair sitting behind a massive block of a desk. The velvet was green, but in the sunset it was pitch black. Red on green. Not the color you’d want a chair, although the velvet did look soft.

Lei carefully stepped onto the Indian rug and wiped the glass shards from her soles into the dancing wool mosaic. It all looked so happy. She leant the squirrel statue next to the decorative fireplace. It, too looked happy, as lawn ornaments often do, although half an ear was now chipped off from beating the window in. Steadying it straight, she stepped as quietly as she could out of the book-lined walls and into the hallway.

The hallway was also reddened by the sunset, but less so. The walls were more of a pleasant pink than anything. On them hung many rose-gold frames with photographs of many pleasant pink faced people, with similar hair color and almond eye shapes and perfect teeth lined up in perfect smiles. A mom and a dad and a little boy and a little girl. In some pictures, a grandma and grandpa. In some, an uncle or aunt or cousin. None of the pictures were labeled as such, but with some households you can just tell who is who. They fit exactly into your mind exactly where there are holes dug out for a perfect family.

The perfect family was on the floor now, even at Lei’s feet as she was looking at their photographs. It took a while for her to notice, since the floor was made of dark wood like the shelves in the study. In fact, she didn’t really get to see anything. What she noticed was the smell. The metallic smell of knives or spoons, knives especially, when you’ve cut your finger and gotten yourself all over it, and perhaps all over the cutting board.

They were only at her feet in drops.

Lei walked into the dining room. Over next to a glass cabinet against a wall by the stairway, she saw the remains of the fallen china plate. Only a few feet away, around the dining table underneath an elaborate glass chandelier, were the remains of the perfect family. The room reeked. It was also very, very black.

Lei turned away, so the gruesome details went mostly unseen to her. What she did know what that there were at least five bodies there for sure. Two of them, both facedown, were on the small side, and one was sort of hidden from sight since it was on the other side of the table, so there were at least two children here. Those two perfect children. Her mind did not have much time to process the rest because when she turned away, she turned right into Val, who was walking up the stairway.

‘You turned away,’ he said.

‘How am I supposed to keep looking at something like that?’

‘Not so easy, is it? How are we supposed to catch the Cake Killer if we turn away?’

Lei closed her eyes and resisted the urge to deck Val once again. She straightened up. ‘Right. Okay. There are five of them when I looked. You look for me. Are any of them cakes yet?’

‘No,’ Val said, ‘But I only see four.’

At this, Lei had to look. She turned to face the bodies, no longer caring what bits of head were missing or what digits were on the other side of the room or eyes were still open or necks were disjointed or what else and why. She counted the bodies. There are four.  Four, four enough to fit in Val’s fridge and one less than she was sure had been there earlier. One of the bodies had disappeared. She checked behind the table. Nothing. Not even a bloodstain. Not even a slice of pie.

‘There was someone back here when I looked.’

‘What did they look like?’

‘I don’t know, they were behind the table, I couldn’t see their face.’ Lei peered over the table and saw Val head down the stairs. ‘Hey, where are you going? Is there something-‘

Lei stopped now because, in the process of standing up, she had driven her shoulder into Val’s chin. He gave a yelp and jumped back.

‘When are you going to quit breathing down my neck?’

‘I just wanted to see if there was anything you missed!’

‘I already told you-‘ Lei grabbed the paisley collar of his awful shirt in spite of herself. But just before she could raise a fist, something occurred to her. ‘If you’re over here, then who just ran down the stairs?’

The two of them turned to look at the stairway. Now that they were quiet, they could hear the pattering of footsteps beating a hasty retreat, towards the front door.

With one movement, Lei threw Val down, vaulted over the clean white tablecloth without leaving a speck of dirt, grabbed the fallen dish’s wooden stand from the side table and flew down the stairway. She landed with a crunch of broken glass at the bottom of the staircase, then made for the next. Somewhere at the back of her mind, she became aware of the police sirens getting closer. But that didn’t stop her. She was focused entirely on the footsteps. Someone was going to pay for what was done to this perfect family.

The runaway feet started pattering out a different tone, the culprit had hit the marble floored hallway in the foyer, and they would be at the front door soon. Lei skidded past the wood-marble boundary and in line with the criminal. A very red man in dark clothing, or maybe green clothing, or maybe very stained clothing, either way he appeared dressed in black. The red sunlight here threw heavy shadows all over his face, like it had the cupid’s eyebags, except this man’s eyebags were much deeper, they drove all the way into his face, pulling his eyes to the back of his skull with them, and it appeared that he had a face made entirely of black holes, if it wasn’t for the glint that showed there were little gelatinous eyes in their somewhere, just like everybody else had.

Perhaps it was these eyes, or the thought of what he had done, or just the fact that she was charging at him so fast, but Lei didn’t think twice about crashing full force into the criminal and driving him into the wooden door with the wooden dish holder. They smacked against the wooden frame, causing the ring in the gargoyle’s mouth on the other side to bounce, giving the door a good knocking and setting off the charming little doorbell chime for the second time.

‘Is everything okay in there?’ came the nervous voice of the young man from outside.

Lei wanted to say respond, but the black garbed criminal was beginning to put up a fight. She restrained him with the dish holder against his neck, catching his hand in the process. He flailed violently with his one free red, red hand that stank of knives but did not managed to latch onto anything. She leaned hard on his back and sent him straight into the marble floor, facedown. He went limp.

Using one hand, Lei brushed her matted hair away from her face. She kept her knee against the murderer’s back, though, and the other restraining his arm at some unnatural angle. He was still breathing, but didn’t appear able to move this way, his face was pinned to the cold marble floor. The floor was red, and then it wasn’t. And then it was again. Then it was a different shade of red. It flashed through several cycles before Lei realized that it was being caused by police lights coming through the window.

‘We caught him!’ she called out to the young man outside.

There was no answer.

‘Hey, are you still out there? We caught the murderer?’

There was a thump against the door. This set the chime off for the third time. Lei frowned as the cheerful tune resonated throughout the whole house without really expecting anyone to answer it. There was another thump. Lei stood back a little, dragging the black suited criminal along the floor with a squeak. The floor was a very clean one.

With one more massive thump, the door flew open, bouncing off the back wall and setting the ring flying and the chime singing once again. There, with a large black battering ram, stood two policemen, and the frontmost of the two also had very dark, deep eyebags.

Both policemen looked at Lei and the criminal on the flashing floor. They looked over to the room on their left in which there was a little pile of stone turtles under a broken window. They looked at the drops of the perfect family that had gotten all over the house, and on the criminal’s hand that Lei was now holding awkwardly behind his back.

The frontmost policeman sighed, then put down the battering ram and reached into his jacket. ‘Hold it right there, ma’am,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid-‘

Lei feared the worst, but nothing prepared her for what came before the policeman finished his sentence. The criminal beneath her gave a sudden jolt as though electrocuted and then reared up, throwing her knee off, but not her hand. Then, either because he had managed to crack something with this effort, or for reasons nobody could really ever know, he opened his dark void of a mouth wide and released an explosive, wordless roar. The sound echoed against the glass and walls that had only ever experienced (until recently, of course) the laughter of children and the calm conversation of adults and the soft chime given off by the doorbell. The chandelier shook, the blood drops rippled, splashed, the house tilted, pouring out a thousand voices and black grasshoppers rubbing their legs together colliding, or not, even if so it could not have made a more unpleasant and suffocating sound.

It trailed off in its chaos like a tornado, the final gusts still rippling through its listeners’ eardrums even after the mouth had stopped giving off sound. The criminal gurgled to a halt, and let his neck go limp, along with his now dislocated arm. His forehead landed hard against the marble floor.

Val stumbled down the stairs. ‘I should have guessed that would happen.’

‘Val,’ Lei said mildly.

‘Yes?’

Lei threw the body of the criminal down and stood up. She walked past Val and headed up the stairs. They were well made, not a creak. The lack of noise calmed her, but not entirely. This part of the house was still red, away from the windows looking out at the police cars, although darkening. The sun was just about set. The faces of the perfect family in their photographs were red as flames, their white perfect teeth the heart of the fire. Lei stepped onto the floor where their dead bodies were. Or had been. The expected had happened. They had looked away, for just a moment and…

‘Val,’ Lei said, her voice raised.

The policemen stared down the hallway at Val. One of his eyes was not the same color as the other. But then it was. Val shrugged and headed back towards the stairs.

‘Hold it!’ one of the policemen said, snapping out of his trance.

Val was on the staircase now. Somehow, he managed to make them creak, which annoyed Lei with its impossibility, but only slightly in comparison to the sight they found themselves looking at.

Yes, the room was red. Yes, the room was stained. It was almost exactly as they had left it, but now there were no bodies. What there was was four perfect red velvet cakes with vanilla icing, sitting on the floor, each in their own silver tin plate with a pool of congealing blood around them. They were even different sizes, two small child-sized portions. They all sat there in their little lakes smiling with their buttery, creamy round faces up at the gawping Val and Lei. The perfect family of perfectly delicious cakes. Lei groaned.

‘Hold it right there,’ the policeman said as he came up the stairs with two backup officers. ‘I’m afraid I need both of you to come down to the station for questioning.’

—

It was late. The sun had set hours ago. The not-so-dynamic-duo had returned to Val’s combination house, and was now sitting around in the dusty loungers inspecting a piece of paper they had been given at the station under the golden glow of the spotlight that shone over the sitting area. The television was on the stocks channel as usual. A frozen pizza was sitting in the oven, the only other light source currently turned on. It was a pineapple pizza.

‘It’s a miracle we got out of there so easily,’ Lei said. ‘I thought we were screwed for sure. You realize how bad that looked? A house full of blood, a guy passed out on the floor, and a bunch of cakes.’

‘We sure must have looked like a couple of lunatics,’ Val said. Something told Lei this wasn’t the first time it had happened to him.

‘We really got lucky that someone was there to help us out.’ Lei sighed.

‘They didn’t leave their name, did they?’

‘Nope. But it was probably the guy we saw knocking on the door. He knew for sure that we didn’t do it. I wonder why he was even there, though?’

Val shrugged.

Lei peered over at the little slip of paper he was inspecting. ‘So how much did they decide to give us again?’

Val held the paper up between both hands. It was a check made out to their names, from the police station for $2000. Val laid it down on the ottoman, unsmiling. ‘For capture of a wanted criminal, they said. I don’t like it.’

‘But he was a murderer. We know it. We saw what he did.’

‘Yes, but the police didn’t. They never got to see the bodies. For all they know, he didn’t kill anybody, but they’re still taking him in. That’s exactly why I don’t approve of the police force in this town. They aren’t very reasonable. And we didn’t even manage to catch the Cake Killer in the process.’

‘You’re not very reasonable,’ Lei snapped. ‘Aren’t you glad we stopped an even more dangerous criminal? This one was actually killing people! In your old neighborhood!’

Val sighed deeply and dramatically, sinking deeper into the couch, and Lei decided to let the whole thing just go. They had done a good deed, and they weren’t in jail and that was all she needed to know. The orange spotted cat wound itself around her foot and meowed. Val sank so far down into the couch that he appeared to be lying completely horizontally. The cat meowed again. Val kicked his feet up and sent the check looping through the air. Then he got up and walked into the kitchen area.

Lei remained at her seat. She picked up the check. ‘What are you going to do with this, then?’

Silently, Val removed the pizza from the oven and set it on the stove top to cool. Then he dug a bowl out of the dishwasher and filled it with some sugary ball-shaped cereal and milk from the fridge, and put it on the floor for the cat. He poked the pizza a little, singed his finger and winced. Lei watched all of this critically. With his burnt finger in his mouth, Val answered, ‘The check? You can have it. Consider it, I dunno, payment for your work.’

‘What?’ Lei asked in a small voice.

‘Don’t be upset,’ Val said, ‘We’ll try again tomorrow. Hey, do you want this piece? Sorry I put my finger on it, I didn’t get any saliva on it though.’

So Lei ended up 2000 dollars richer and was able to leave Val’s house that night with her head held high and proud. She kept her head up all the way to the bus stop and on the entire bus ride. She did not even take a nap. On her walk home past the park, she walked briskly; head still held high, eyes open. She arrived at her doorstep and only after surveying the street thoroughly did she enter the house, and even then she did not sleep until she had locked all the windows and doors, and closed all of the curtains.

Even then, she could not shake the feeling that someone was watching her.