‘What is this?’ Val asked when Lei put the loaded shopping bag she had brought that morning down on his dining table. The bag had a big yellow happy face under which was written in some Lucida font: ‘Thanks for shopping with us!’

‘Bread. Fruit. Other stuff. Thought I’d do you a favor and bring you actual food,’ she said. ‘You need something other than cereal once in a while. You’re paying me, so you can keep it all. It was pretty cheap, anyway. I’m friends with the girls at the supermarket, so they give me great discounts.’

Val circled the bag at a distance. He stared the happy-face logo right in the eyes as though it were a dangerous wild animal. ‘Is there cat food in there?’

‘I got a few cans. You do have a cat.’

‘That’s bad,’ Val said. ‘I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but I’m not sure how this is going to work out. You know the cat will only eat things that I’m eating, so that means I’m going to have to eat cat food.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Lei.

‘That’s why I only eat cereal. It’s easier that way. I don’t have to think about setting portions aside for the cat. There’s always extra cereal.’ As if considering the possibility that Lei might be offended, Val added, ‘Thanks for trying, anyway.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ Lei mumbled, and dug into the bag for yet another, smaller bag with a yellow happy face on it. This bag was full of bagels. She took one out and started gnawing at it, tossed the bag back on the table. The bagel’s soft brown skin split, leaving its spongy cinnamon-scented innards to steam into the open air. Val stared at the bag and bagel wistfully, as if he really wanted one but was just too strongly restraint by the militant law of his house cat.

‘What are we going to do today?’ Lei asked.

‘Huh? Oh, I don’t know. I figured we’d go for a walk in the park. We’ll probably find something there, or on the way there. There’s always something. I don’t think I’ve ever gone a day without finding a body when I went out looking for them. There are just so many, you don’t even realize.’

‘It’s true. I don’t.’ Lei got to her feet, having finished half of her bagel. ‘I’ll wait for you outside. I have some calls to make. Try not to take an hour this time.’

Lei didn’t bother to wait for Val’s response. She headed to the door, wrestled it open and stepped out onto the front steps. She didn’t have any calls to make, either. That had been a lie.

The house’s brown-tiled exterior looked incredibly gloomy from the outside on a day like this. It seemed so dull in comparison to the vibrant blue sky and the fiery red trees of fall. The stringy masses of garbage rustling up and down the street didn’t make things any look any less grim. But that wasn’t what bothered her. In fact, filthy depressing neighborhoods were something she was pretty used to. What bothered her was the feeling that a pair of eyes, somewhere out there, was watching her.

But where? The street was empty, just as the street outside her house had been empty the night before. The alleyways were dripping with stagnant water and trash dragged around by animals in the night, but those animals were asleep at this time of day. The houses all around were completely boarded up. They were asleep. All that stared at her were the open-eyed windows of Val’s combined row house. And most of those windows were also boarded up. It just didn’t quite make sense.

Frowning in confusion, Lei opened the front door to check on what Val was doing, hoping he hadn’t disappeared into his side room to change again. He hadn’t. He’d barely moved from where she’d left him. She found him placing half a bagel on the floor of the dining area while simultaneously eating one and shoving another into his pocket with his elbow. Upon realizing she was watching him, he stood up guiltily and shoved the rest of the bagel into his mouth. He chewed vigorously and put up a finger, indicating that she should wait for him to finish eating to launch an excuse.

‘Forget it,’ she said. ‘Let’s get going.’

—

The park was full of red oak trees. Their leaves were very sharp. One of the differences between red and white oak trees is that the red oak has sharp leaves and the white oak has rounded leaves. Some sharp eyed biologists may point out that the color is also a difference, which one may think was obvious, but when you think about it they are both trees, they both have brown bark and green leaves. In spring, the white oak’s leaves are even red. In the fall, the leaves of both trees turn brown. They fall to the ground and dry up into curling, brittle little slabs – as dead things do, after enough time.

Some of the leaves are quite sharp. Some of them are round. But they make the same sort of sounds when stepped on, a nice satisfying crunch. Now this is something that not all dead things do.

Val had left a trail of crunchy brown bagel crumbs all along the sidewalk as they had made their way there. Somehow, eating while walking had given him a heightened sense of caution, and he actually took note of pedestrian lights and passerby. He had even held Lei back from jaywalking on a shortcut to the park. It was really quite surprising.

It was a good thing that Val was showing so much vigilance that day, even if it was for no particular reason, because Lei was more distracted than ever by the eyes, the disembodied eyes somewhere out there that had followed her home and back again. She glanced around suspiciously at everyone and everything they encountered, not a bird or shop window mannequin was spared, every old lady and sweat-suited teen got thoroughly inspected. She didn’t say a word to Val the whole way. But nothing came to her. And so they reached the park and were now wading through its sea of crunchy brown leaves.

They crunched along until there was a slightly less satisfying crunch. Val stopped abruptly. Lei stopped too. And for a moment, the eyes faltered, maybe they knew what was coming, or thought they did. Lei also thought she knew what it was.

‘That crunch didn’t sound like leaves,’ she said.

Indeed, it had been a bit of damp sound, a mushy sound, a heel going through some form composed mostly of liquid, with some spongy interior, wrapped in a strong but soft and not entirely unbreakable outer layer.

Val knelt down as if he were going to tie his shoe, which was mostly buried under several days’ worth of dried leaves, but instead of tying it, scraped something off the front of it. ‘This something’ looked familiar.

It was a sort of yellowish color, or maybe brown or grey or green with a hint of red or pink. In other words, it was a mixture of colors that people don’t really like thinking about or putting into words because it brings unpleasant things to mind. If there was a word for it, it would be something ugly like ‘puce’ or ‘toilet water green.’ It was the color of something you didn’t want to eat, mushy things on the ground, things you’d scrape off your shoe in the dying season of autumn. Lei’s hair stood on end as Val eyed her with the blob of toilet water puce on his fingers, then brought the fingers closer to his mouth-

‘Don’t you dare,’ Lei said, as the events of their first meeting played out in her mind.

‘I wasn’t going to do anything,’ Val lied, lowering his hand. He dug around in the loose leafy humus for a while and, after feeling the ground all around him, tugged up something. Lei stumbled back, startled that it was something it was not. It was, in fact, a crushed, discolored colored carcass of something that had once been fresh and attractive and somewhat alive. It was a puce-colored old pear.

Lei breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Oh, thank god. It’s just a pear.’

‘Just a pear…’

‘I thought it was… something bigger. If you know what I mean. Something to worry about.’

‘Don’t be so insensitive,’ Val scolded. He held the ruined pear very close to his lips and whispered, ‘Rest in peace, friend.’

‘For the love of god – get that thing away from your face. Who knows how long that thing’s been there, how many people have stepped on it, how many bugs have crawled through it?’

Val eyed the festering piece of fruit and decided she was right. He wordlessly tossed it at the base of the nearest tree, where it burst with an unpleasant splatter into many mushy puce colored pieces, weakly hanging together by tattered pear skin. Globs of pear meat rolled down the tree and rested on the leaves. Val stared at it for a while with great remorse and then slowly began to walk away. Lei followed suit, without quite so much lingering on the dead pear. Their footsteps crunched away gradually.

Further down the rows of trees, there was another unusual wet crunch under Val’s feet.

‘It’s another pear,’ he informed Lei as she approached. This time, instead of holding it very close to himself, he was holding it at arm’s length which was just as well, because this one was covered with an army of nervous black ants. Unfortunately, arm’s length this meant that it was right in Lei’s face. She batted it away, sending ants and vessel sprawling.

‘You’re killing them!’ Val moaned.

‘I’ll kill you,’ was what Lei wanted to say, but it didn’t seem appropriate considering what she wanted to do here, which was stop murderers. So instead she said, ‘Where did all these pears come from? I didn’t think pears grew around here.’

They looked about them. There were a lot of oak trees glowing red and yellow, drowning out the sunlight from above with layer after layer of sharp leaves, there were a select few white oak trees, but it’s not like they were differentiable at this distance, their leaves were also red and brown and yellow. What was important was that there was not a fruit tree to be seen, and even though Val insisted there were flowers on the lake shore where there was actually none, he could not deny that there was nothing resembling a pear tree down this row.

‘Maybe they were a miracle from God,’ Val mused seriously.

‘That doesn’t help at all,’ Lei said.

‘Maybe the trail will tell us where we need to look for the answer.’

‘What trail?’

‘The trail of fruit,’ Val said, gazing out down the row of trees out towards the other edge of the park.

Lei followed his gaze with hers, but didn’t see anything but a crunchy reddish brown sea leading up to the short, dark iron fence that marked the end of the route. ‘I’m guessing you’re sensing something that I’m not.’

‘Some people just have more sense, than others,’ Val said, which was very true. ‘Don’t feel bad. Follow me. We’ll follow the trail of bodies to their murderer.’

He strolled forward confidently and before long sent his foot through yet another pear lying on the ground, hidden by the fallen leaves. He ground the ball of his foot into it with a squelch, as if to make sure it was what he thought it was. Then he gave Lei a triumphant smile and raised his foot for presentation, puce globs and all.

A few feet back, Lei nodded with a weary expression that passed as a smile of approval to someone as nearsighted as Val.

Val continued to saunter along the row of trees, crunching through the leaves and sending his shoe right into every filthy rotting pear that came into his path. He even seemed to step to the side just so he could stomp on them. Lei wondered if he was doing it to let her know that he was following them. It just seemed so unnecessary. There were pear remains crawling up his pant leg and it was frankly rather disgusting, especially since she was still doubtful if he did laundry or not.

As they neared the black iron gate at the edge of the park, Val deliberately put his full weight onto a particularly juicy pear and sent a sick spray of pear juice in all directions around his foot like a sugary festering fountain. Lei made a face and commended her decision to remain at least four feet away from Val and his messy march. But enough was enough.

‘For a guy who cares so much about them, you sure are determined to stomp on each and every one of these things. You don’t have to step on every pear, you know, you could just follow them.’

‘I can’t help it! They’re everywhere, everywhere I step,’ Val said, although he didn’t look remorseful at all.

‘I’ve managed not to step on any.’

‘I told you, I’m attracted to dead things,’ Val mumbled, kicking slime off his feet into the leaves. ‘Or dead things are attracted to me. I explained it all to you. It’s a gift.’

‘You didn’t tell me anything! You told a lie, you even said it was lie.’

‘I did? Which story did I tell you again? Was it the one with the flying canoe?’

‘Are you serious?’

‘No?’ Val paced in a loose circle, wiping grime from his shoes off onto the leaves with little to no effect. ‘That’s the one I think I’ve told the most, maybe I got bored and just made something up, or maybe I accidentally told the truth and lied when I said I lied, even if I didn’t realize it at the time. Man, I should really be more careful-‘

Val did not finish his sentence before the leaves below his feet, as though they had had enough of his rambling, caved down beneath him with a crack and pulled him down into a vast dark cold emptiness right under his feet. Lei barely had time to register what was happening before the top ends of Val’s dark matted hair dropped out of sight beneath the waves. Her eyes widened and she immediately dove over to the spot where he had disappeared.

‘Val?’ she asked. She pawed at the ground, but carefully, she didn’t want to go slapping into any filthy discarded pears. As it turned out, she didn’t have much to worry about. There was no ground to hold any pears. Instead, there was a jagged edged hole, or rather, a piece of wood that had a hole the size of a man broken through it. Underneath there was nothing but blackness and damp stench.

‘Hey, Val?’ Lei called down the hole. Her voice echoed as though stumbling down a tunnel. If there was a tunnel, it was out of her sight. Squinting, Lei brushed away the dried leaves surrounding the hole and leaned a little closer.

At first, nothing. But then from the shadows she could make out a face – well, it was more like an eye. A single eye in the blackness looking out at her. A monstrous, single eye or was it a mouth? It could have been a mouth, a small round mouth shining with saliva… A single mouth in a void? That was unnerving. But when another appeared next to it, she was put at ease, it had just been an eye. Together, the eyes seemed much less alien, and a familiar face began to take form. The face fell into a bewildered smile.

‘You okay down there, Val?’ Lei called down. ‘Nothing broken?’

‘I’m fine! It’s just like opening my front door.’ Val laughed. Lei heard a rustling as he got up from the bed of leaves on which he had landed. He brushed himself off and looked around. ‘Looks like a secret dungeon that the park rangers wanted to keep hidden from the public.’

‘I’m pretty sure it’s just a lazily covered manhole.’

‘It’s actually pretty pleasant. You can feel a breeze coming from somewhere. It smells nice. Like fruit. Like pears, would you believe it?’

‘You’re in a sewer. Are you sure you’re not smelling something else?’

‘Are you sure it’s a sewer? Let me smell again.’ Lei waiting feeling faintly ill as Val took a deep breath of sewer air. But to her surprise he gave a loud, satisfied exhalation and looked up, tapping something metallic to his left. ‘It’s pears all right. But you’re right, there is a little… human touch in there. Yes… Hey, There’s a ladder on the wall here. Why don’t you come down and smell for yourself?’

—

Lei came down the black metal rungs planted into the concrete wall of the sewer. She was surprised when she reached the bottom. Val had been right about several things. It was fairly cool and dry, not unpleasant at all. There was a faint breeze coming from somewhere, carrying down the smell of some juicy fruit rooted in some unseen location. When her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she could see that they were in a large, sort of square room, with faint lights coming from the other side, probably from drain grating out in the street, the a small sunbeam set a sort of olive hue from the wavy wet moss clinging on the walls. With the soft odor and calm, distant lights, and the sound of running water echoing down the tunnel, it felt almost more of an ideal forest than the real forest they had just been walking through, with its leaves burning red and sharp and dead all over the ground, filthy pears hiding in wait to split themselves all over unsuspecting feet. This forest was cool and green and smooth. Not a crunch to be heard, but somehow it was still satisfying to step through the spongy mold coating the floor.

Val was also right in his evaluation that there was a ‘little human touch’ to the scent. But it wasn’t quite was Lei had been expecting. It was actually something that ruined the whole image just a little bit. It smelled damp and bitter, a hint of knives and spoons, of meat left out too long in a damp, enclosed place – such as a sewer. Of course, that’s what it was.

‘Smells like something died in here,’ Lei mumbled. Her mumble was amplified to an embarrassing rumble and echoed through the square sewer plaza they were currently in. The sound drifted out the holes on the edges of the room. Outside the sewer grates connected to the plaza, above ground on the street, a few passerby stopped at the noise, wondered if they were hearing things, and decided it was better to move on before someone else thought they were.

‘Something – or should I say someone – did,’ Val said proudly. Above ground, a few more people stopped, frowned to themselves, listened harder and then moved on. ‘Wow, the echo in here is awesome. Should I yell something? How about-’

‘I think you’re already talking loud enough. And lower your voice, geez; we don’t want to attract attention. Who knows if it’s even legal for us to be down here?’ Upon seeing that Val’s concern with the law was no different from any other day, Lei made a second appeal. ‘And a dead someone could mean the Cake Killer’s around. What if he’s down here with us right now? Do you want him to know you’re coming?’

‘Ah, you’re right,’ Val said, immediately dropping into a whisper. ‘It’s so dark, and there are so many tunnels, we wouldn’t even know if the Cake Killer were sneaking up behind us, right as we speak. Well, we’re not dead, so it would be more likely to be just a plain old serial murderer, but still-’

By now, all passerby on the street above were ignoring the echoing conversation coming from the sewers. If some wanted to stay and listen, the desire not to look like a lunatic prevented them from doing so. But the street was not the only place the plaza led out to. One listener, unafraid of looking like a lunatic, or perhaps actually being one, had entered the tunnel, unbeknownst to our sewer-raiding heroes.

There was a small splash. A wet footstep, from not to far away. The sound was small, but it hung in Lei’s ears like a warning siren. Someone was down there in the sewer forest with them.

‘What was that?’ Lei asked, looking around frantically without seeing much of anything.

‘Keep your voice down!’ Val advised, though Lei suspected he was now more concerned about the Cake Killer than their personal safety.

‘Let’s move somewhere else,’ Lei said, giving Val a mostly blind shove towards the ladder.

‘We can’t leave! There are bodies to find. What if the entire body stash for the past 30 years is down here? That’s hundreds-thousands of bodies!’

‘Even more reason not to hang out down here.’

‘You know, sometimes I feel like you aren’t interested in finding all those bodies!’

‘Is that so?’

‘Yeah it is. Wait, was that a trick question?’

While Lei and Val continued their empty argument, they were unaware that there was another listener. This one was also either unafraid of looking like a lunatic, or a lunatic themselves. While the listener’s keen, waxy yellow ears were pricked for the pointless conversation going on in the sewer plaza, the listener’s keen, waxy yellow hands reached out and pushed, ground a large object closer to the manhole opening.

Fully enveloped in their conversation and its echoes, Val and Lei didn’t hear it coming.

‘So a rhetorical question isn’t a trick question?’ Val was asking.

‘Actually, I think trick questions are a kind of rhetorical question,’ Lei explained, ‘or maybe it’s the other way around. I don’t really remember learning about the two at the same time.’

‘Hey,’ Val said, ‘Is it raining leaves?’

‘Is that a trick question?’

Val pointed over to the ladder, where it did seem to be raining leaves from up above. The dry red leaves were falling down the manhole where they sat in an anomalous red pile in a single beam of sunlight, among the green moss of the cool, dark sewer forest. Another drifted down, and then another. There was a rustling from up above. Then the sunbeam started to thin. Lei slowly turned to look up the manhole to the world outside that was shrinking, the light eclipsed with a big black shadow. It took only a moment to realize what was wrong.

‘Someone’s trying to trap us down here!’ she said, leaping up the ladder.

‘Get up there and break his neck!’ Val cheered, making no effort to get up there himself.

Lei reached the second to top rung of the ladder and came face to face with a boulder. There wasn’t enough space to get out anymore. Someone was pushing the boulder from the side that was conveniently blocked from her view. She didn’t have enough leverage to push back, and the leaves spilling in, being bulldozed in by the boulder, were making a huge clamor all around her, and were incredibly frustrating if not all that strong. They flew at her face and hair with their sharp, dry points and stuck and broke and crackled. Lei gave a cry of frustration and dropped back into the darkness of the sewer.

The final thing she saw before the boulder fell onto the manhole was the culprit. Somehow, it wasn’t surprising. It was almost like she’d seen him, her or it before. It was a person, wearing entirely black clothing, with deep black sockets for eyes. A glint of something in them. A human light, or a reflection of light, like the kind you see in guns and knives and well-cleaned car hubcaps? Either way, they seemed somewhat inhuman.

In other words, they weren’t the eyes that had been watching her.

Lei tapped back down to the concrete floor of the sewer. She dusted herself off and flicked away the dried leaves that had decided to cling to her person. Then she looked at Val with a completely humorless expression. He looked similarly humorless, or at least was trying to. He looked like he was going to break into a grin at any moment.

‘We’re trapped,’ she said.

‘There are other ways out. This is a sewer tunnel.’

‘Looks like an abandoned one, though. It might be blocked off. Let’s call for help.’

‘We can do that anytime.’ Val looked over to a tunnel to their left. ‘Let’s go look for bodies.’

Lei glared at him. A breeze blew through. The smell of ripe pears somewhere was somehow mellowing. Pears with a hint of people. Lei sighed. ‘Okay, fine – lead the way. Try not to step in anything. I don’t want people throwing us back down here when we try to get out because you’ve gotten yourself filthy.’

—

The two sets of feet patted down the sewer tunnel, squishing in the moss, occasionally splashing into puddles and just sometimes falling onto some unpleasant object with a stiffer crunch. Lei preferred not to look at the things she stepped in, and for better or for worse, pretty soon the tunnel got so dark, it was hard to see. She sometimes heard Val grunt and a little crack as he walked face-first into some moldy sewer walls. Whenever this happened, they changed direction.

Val seemed to be stepping as deliberately as he could on anything he could lay his feet on, so Lei wasn’t worried about losing him in the dark. He didn’t seem very worried either, which was good in this case. But what she was worried about was meeting someone they weren’t expecting.

She held her breath while they shuffled through the inky blackness, listening out for anything other than Val’s breathing and heavy, wet footsteps. It was a little hard to tell if there was actually anything out there, he was so loud. There could be a murderer right behind her exercising no tact whatsoever, and she wouldn’t even be able to hear them. It was too much.

‘Val, what did I say about keeping it down?’

‘But I’m not talking,’ Val said at full volume, his words barreling down the tunnel.

‘Shhh! I was talking about your feet. Shut them up.’

‘Oh. Oh, sorry.’

His footsteps now faded as if her were getting further away, and eventually diminished into complete silence. All she could hear was his breathing, and even that was getting fainter. Lei wanted to groan, but that would be making even more noise, and she didn’t want that. She continued forward as silently as she could, hands out in front of her to avoid walking into Val and his long-unwashed coat that now had sewer grime on it in addition to whatever else.

A small dot of light made its way into her vision. It turned into a long bar of light, faint but there. There must be a drainage grate up ahead. She continued down the tunnel feeling a little easier in both body and mind as her surroundings became visible, although these surroundings were not ideal, they were better in light than in dark. The smell of pears was full on in this tunnel. Pears and rotting meat blowing with the wind. Lei grimaced. Lovely combination. At least it was a tunnel with ventilation.

Lei saw Val’s silhouette pass through the bars of light coming through the drain and disappear around a corner. He was pretty far ahead. He walked surprisingly quickly when he wasn’t trying to step on everything as thoroughly as he could. Lei jogged a little, falling into the rays of sunlight. Her eyes were dazzled for a brief moment, she stopped and whispered out over the corner, ‘Sorry, boss. I know you’re excited about finding bodies, but wait up a little! I don’t have your power-walking skill.’

No response. Lei frowned and took a step towards the corner. ‘Hey, are you even-‘

‘Am I what?’ said a voice from a few inches behind her.

Lei swiveled around violently and managed to smack Val in the kidney with her elbow in doing so. He reeled backwards out of the sunbeams, rubbing the sore and stepping into a puddle. Lei was boggled at the sight of him. He had somehow managed to wind up behind her rather than in front.

‘Please tell me you looped around the tunnel.’

‘Okay. Uh. I looped around the tunnel,’ Val said completely uncertainly. ‘I thought you hated lies. Why did you want me to say that? And what were you saying about bodies?’

‘I thought you were in front of me. I saw someone go around that corner!’ Lei gestured furiously at said moldy sewer corner. ‘But if it wasn’t you, then who was it?’

‘Is this a trick question again?’ Val complained. ‘I didn’t even see them. You’re the one who keeps saying there’s someone down here, so it was probably that person. And what were you saying about bodies?’

‘We’ll be bodies if we don’t get out of here soon!’ Lei bawled.

‘Calm down,’ Val said. ‘Everybody is already a body whether they want to be or not.’

Lei stared at Val blankly. He stared back equally blankly, not even he was bothering to process what he had just said. The faceoff stood still in disbelief. A breeze blew down the tunnel, whistling through the drainage grates and pipes. Around the corner wheresomeone who was not Val had turned, a few yellow autumn leaves drifted into Lei and Val’s view. They watched the limp shapes swirl briefly in a loop under the bars of sunlight, then disappear on their way into the darkness of the tunnel to the right. Right on the tail end of the breeze was the odor of ripe pears and ripe meat.

As if the smell of one or the other invigorated Val and he strode purposefully down the tunnel and around the corner. Lei was too sick of talking to him to do anything but follow in begrudging silence. They rounded the corner indifferently then stopped. Val’s eyes widened. Lei’s did too, although for different reasons. As Val’s face broke into the sunniest of smiles, Lei’s dropped into the contortion of  bulldog having just smelled something awful. The smell here certainly was strange. The sight was almost stranger.

There was another drain hole in the ceiling down on the end of the tunnel. A shaft of white daylight peeking through. But the light was blocked, mostly; by a mass of greedy golden leaves. There should not have been such things in a sewer tunnel, but a rather healthy looking tree was growing right there at the square concrete enclosure, a healthy glowing yellow against the backdrop of cool mossy, toilet water green. It wasn’t just a sapling either; it was a full-sized tree with numerous black branches, a substantially tall and wide trunk and a number of heavy pears bending its branches and on the ground around it to show just how fruitful of a season it had. It was curled into itself a little in places where the tunnel could not accommodate it, but was otherwise enjoying itself as a tree would, being the grandest, and most fragrant of the plants in the area (although it perhaps did not consider that the only competition was mold and algae.)

It was really quite a majestic, magical picture, an amber colored tree covered in ripe fruit growing in the only patch of sunlight of a dark tunnel, loosening a shower of bright yellow leaves into the sunlit patch around it with every breeze. If you didn’t bother to cast your eyes downwards to the roots, it was downright enchanting.

The large black roots curled their stringy fingers around the unique source of nutrition that had been offered to them. This source of nutrition was, if you looked closely, not actually giant puce colored blobs of jelly, but the bodies of people, bloated with the dampness of the years, all trace of clothing rotted off and colorless or chewed off by animals or with roots poking through them, and skin faring even worse than clothing. Hands and feet and heads and stringy remains of hair lay on the ground among the twisting roots and fallen yellow leaves like animals in some twisted cage, a cage that had been filled and thrown into a trash compacter. There was a whole pile of people, and though Lei could not see them all through the roots they added at least 6 inches to the height of the tree. There was a little dark colored juice coming from the pile. This appeared to be where most of the smell was coming from.

Another breeze showered Lei and Val with a mist of yellow leaves, the scent of pears, mixed in with more than just a touch of rotten hamburger meat.

‘Ugh,’ Lei groaned.

‘I know, it’s amazing!’ Val cried.

‘You’re unbelievable.’

‘You sound like my friend when you say that,’ Val said as he scrambled over to the pile with the apparent intention of climbing it. ‘He said that a lot. Although he always said it in a different way, like he was crying.’

‘I’m not surprised if you did make him cry.’

‘More than that,’ Val panted as he tripped over a root and landed with his other foot flat onto a rotten pear. He steadied himself quickly on the mountain of bodies, laughed, and continued on his way towards the tree. He looked at his feet discerningly. ‘I wish it was raining.’

‘We’re in a sewer tunnel. If it rained, we’d be in big trouble, and knee deep in all kinds of crap.’

‘Yes, but maybe I’d be able to clean my shoes off. How did they get so dirty?’

Lei’s eyes glazed over as she attempted to calm herself inwardly. She counted to ten, ignoring Val’s stumbling and footsteps, which were now sounding squishier than ever, and had to try again multiple times before she succeeded. She blinked, took a deep breath and looked back at the situation. Val was now clambering up the branches of the tree, rustling practically the entire upper tree with his efforts. The branch he was standing on now was practically bare from his foot grinding at it. The sunlight above had a clear path down at that very spot. Lei blinked rapidly. It seemed so bright.

‘Val! Is the drain up there, by any chance, not covered up?’

Val looked at her for a moment in understanding, and then plunged his head upwards into the leafy mass. He disappeared up to his legs in the mass of the tree, pawing around, sending another shower of leaves down. Lei waited with bated breath, partially because another breeze was blowing by, sending that foul smell through the air again. She was still trying to ignore the bodies. They, too, were being disturbed with Val’s weight shaking the tree. It almost looked like they were convulsing in their cramped little cage.

There was a metallic clanging from where she guessed Val was handling the drain up above. ‘Looks like the tree grew so big it pushed it out of place. It’s at a strange angle in the hole, though.’

‘Can you dislodge it or anything?’

‘No,’ Val said, although it didn’t sound like he was trying very hard. ‘Hey, can you check the bodies down there for me while I do this? See if there’s anyone who looks important. Hurry, before the Cake Killer comes.’

‘I don’t think the Cake Killer is the big problem here,’ Lei said. She looked over at the bodies, but just with the corner of her eye. Maybe it was the smell they were giving off in the damp, but it almost stung to look at them. ‘You know what, why don’t you come down here and look at the bodies, and I’ll get up there and try to push off the drain cover?’

‘Playing to our strengths? I knew you would make a good assistant.’

‘Yeah. Sure.’

Regretting her suggestion almost immediately, Lei gingerly took her first few steps up the hill of roots and bodies and up to the trunk of the tree. She looked around for footing. A corpse with a face hidden somewhere in the pile had a hand directly underneath the tree had a big, fresh filthy footprint pressed into it where Val must have leapt up. In fact, his shoes were now so grimy with stomped pears that she could see all of his footsteps quite clearly, quite disrespectfully mashed into the skin of the bodies all the way up to the tree.

Eager not to do the same, Lei pressed lightly off one of the roots and into the tree. It was rooted surprisingly well even with two people on it. How heavy were all those bodies? They anchored it well. That was not all that made it a good tree for climbing. It was strong and had branches all very close to each other, it was like you had no chance of falling out, and even if you did, there was a relatively soft, if smelly landing pad for you in addition to only a few feet to fall. Lei was feeling more confident already.

‘You sure climb fast. I can’t get down right now. I think my jacket is stuck on the branches,’ Val complained, shuffling around. ‘This might take a while.’

Lei ignored him and began to pull herself up the tree on the other side. She dove upward into the mass of golden leaves and, after a moment of rustling and round edges brushing her sleeves, her outstretched hands hit the hard concrete ceiling. She opened her eyes and exhaled sharply, as though she had just surfaced from a pool, and was assaulted by the blazing light from above.

Down in the pool, Val was fumbling in the depth if he were drowning, but she knew he was okay because he appeared to be humming cheerfully while untangling himself from the branches, and people don’t usually hum when they are drowning.

After the sunspots faded from her eyes, Lei turned to the issue of the drainage cover above. A few particularly ambitious branches of the tree were extended out of the rectangular hole, and at one point she guess the tree must have been much bigger, as the cover was, as Val had said, shifted out of place.  It was also at an awkward angle that locked it in place. She gave it a cautious shove, wary of the branch underneath her feet. The metal cover ground against its sides, but didn’t loose up very much. The branch below her also bent threateningly. Lei stopped. The thing was lodged in well.

She waded around to a different part of the tree to try to get a better angle, to try to see if there was anyone out there past the branches, she not really sure where Val was, but at least she did not step on him. He had not freed himself from the tree yet, as she could still hear him fiddling with the leaves and humming tunelessly to himself. She circled around and somehow ended up looking out to the sewer tunnel. It felt strange to be looking at it from so high up.

But something gave her a stranger feeling. Maybe being among the fragrant depths of the pear trees had cleared her sinuses, but the tunnel smelt worse than ever. Not just hamburger meat, it now smelt metallic, more familiar, but unexpected. Lei looked around for the source of the smell. It was strong, as though right under their noses. More literally than she first thought. But when she looked down, she saw it.

Over the leaves surrounding her, she saw a body. This body had clothes that were not rotting off it. The clothes were still colored, the shirt was clearly green among the yellow leaves, and the jeans were deep blue with the waistband embroidered with the words DAILY PANTS, the name of a well known Denim bootlegging company. The head was out of sight for Lei, it was in the shadow of the tree, and she didn’t care to bend over further get a further look. She wished she didn’t have to see the body at all.

Because it was lying on top of the leaves, it was still full of color, smelled like metal, and had a large brown or black stain on the green shirt and that was the color green turned when it was hit with something wet and red like barbecue sauce or very watery ketchup. Unfortunately, condiments don’t tend to smell like metal so that could mean only one thing.

‘Uh, hey, there’s a body here that wasn’t here before…’ Lei said shakily.

‘What was that about bodies?’ -came Val’s muffled voice in the leaves.

Lei didn’t answer, because down the tunnel she saw two little light colored bars standing out in the blackness. They were getting bigger; they were getting closer, swinging from side to side. Their ends split into something like branches, but only at the end. When they got close, Lei saw that they were yellow, waxy arms. A little closer and she could make out the owner of the arms, but she already knew before that.

‘Freedom at last,’ Val sighed from somewhere in the tree, getting the last needlepoint branch tips out of the unraveled sleeve of his jacket. ‘Now it’s time for some detective work!’

‘Val, for god’s sake don’t jump down now, someone’s coming!’

‘Is it the murderer you were going on about earlier?’

‘I don’t know! But I do know it looks like the… thing that pushed the boulder over us in the park! They may very well be a murderer too!’

‘Then why aren’t we keeping our voices down?’ Val yelled in response.

They had been speaking at the top of their lunges the whole time. Their voices rattled down the tunnels like trains and burst up all the drains around in a fifty meter radius. Lei wasn’t listening, though. She dragged herself back up to face the jammed grate in the ceiling.

‘Get up here and help me shove this thing off, we should really get out of here!’

‘I think I’m stuck again!’

‘Just rip the freaking tree!’

‘I pains me to do something like that to such a beautiful creature, I-‘

‘Jesus, Val!’

In the name of Christ – or was it common sense? – Val tore himself free from the branches and surfaced next to Lei, his hair lined with a disheveled laurel of yellow leaves. He watched her fumble with the drainage cover, smack it, twist it, and punch it, all to no avail. Slapping her hands down into the leaves around them, she glowered at him. ‘Well? What do you think?’

‘I think you’re doing a good job. I just want to let you know that I appreciated having you around for that one day, even though that Cake Killer got those bodies, it-’

‘Stop making it sound like we’re going to die!’

‘I never said I thought that.’

‘Although we might not, if you help me out with this stupid metal cover!’

‘Now you’re making it sound like we’re going to die!’

Lei raised a fist in frustration as Val smiled triumphantly in front of her and a waxy yellow serial killer drew closer and closer to the tree on the pile of dead humans and a pair of recently surfaced eyes searched for her up above the ground. It wasn’t the eyes that found her, though, but the ears. Lei was only on the lookout for eyes, though, so maybe this was why she did not expect when this person approached using only their ears.

But it was lucky for Lei and Val that he reached them before the killer did.

A familiar voice came through the branches up above. ‘Hello? Is someone down there?’

‘Yes!’ Lei pulled as close to the surface as she could. ‘Yes! There are two of us! We’re stuck down here! Help us get this grate up!’

‘What grate?’

‘Over here!’ Lei waved her hand up through the hole, but she realized nobody was going to see anything past the leaves. ‘It’s over here, under this tree!’

‘It’s yellow,’ Val said helpfully.

‘I don’t see any tree. There’s a pretty big yellow bush though. Does that count?’

‘Yes, that’s it! We’re down here!’

Lei saw two far less yellow, and virtually not-waxy-at-all hands appear and part the branches of yellow leaves above, and fumble over the lodged metal grate, giving it a few test shakes and turns and taps. At the same time, she gave the grate another hard shove, creating an awful grinding noise. The hands flinched away.

‘It’s stuck in pretty tight,’ she called out. ‘You’re going to have to hit it really hard, or get something heavy to smack it with. Warn us if you do that, though, we’re right under it!’

‘Okay, hold on a second,’ the voice above said, and some metallic fumbling was heard.

‘What’s up there, anyway, out of interest?’ Val shouted.

‘It’s like… a greenhouse. Nobody lives here, though. It looks totally abandoned, and it was left unlocked. I came in because… because I heard, and I thought that maybe someone was in here. Or needed help in here. You see-‘

‘We can talk about this later!’ Lei protested loudly. ‘Is there anything up there that can help? Anything heavy? Anything hard?’

‘I don’t know, it’s mostly just junk and dead plant stuff…’ The voice petered out.

Lei was about to beat on the drain again when the tree gave a sudden shake. She looked over at Val. Val was looking over the edge of the tree, where he had a better view. The tree tipped slightly to the left, then tilted right. The pile of corpses was being distressed by more weight. Although it held Val and Lei well enough, that was the limit, and it just so happened that this yellow, waxy, black-clothed weight was just enough to tip the balance.

‘There’s someone coming,’ Val said, looking perplexed.

‘Is there any kind of weapon up there?’ Lei half-screamed up at their new and not very helpful helper. ‘Something you can throw down?’

‘Is there anything that you’d use to break into a house and murder somebody with?’ Val asked.

There was a crash of something being dropped and an ‘Oops,’ followed by, ‘Oh, I found something that might help.’

Lei saw the leaves above part again, this time not by hands, but a by a large, rusty piece of metal, about an inch thick and curled at the end into a fierce hook. A crowbar.

‘Thank god. Here, put it over here.’ She reached up and pulled the tip of the crowbar, along with the person attached to the unseen end of it, and put the end of the crowbar against space where the drain cover was stuck. ‘There, that should do it!’ The tree gave a shake again. ‘Hurry!’

Some grunting drifted down from above, and more horrible grinding of metal and concrete bumping uglies without much of an end in sight. The ugly sound tore its way down the sewer tunnel, and people streets away felt their hairs stand on end. At the same time, someone very ugly was coming for them, and had reached a thin hand over to the tree trunk.

Lei had mostly been able to ignore the person approaching, since she was trying to cover her ears while maintaining her balance and put some weight on the drain cover to help the crowbar-wielder along. The slab was moving. It moved very slowly, but it was moving. She uncovered her ears to give the thing one last effort to wrench it from place. Her hands hit it with a clang.

Leaves around them fluttered down. And the drain cover came loose.

‘Yes!’ Lei hissed triumphantly, clawing her way up to the surface. She felt the tree tilting more than ever as he moved from its waving branches onto nice, solid concrete. She pulled her entire body from the tunnel and the branches and slumped onto the floor in the sunlight. It was a greenhouse, like their helper had said. An unkempt one, with all dead plants and a stain on every pane of glass, but a paradise of light and aromas compared to the sewer.

Their helper himself, however, was nowhere in sight. All that was left was a rusty crowbar and a flapping, open door. Lei did not care too much about him at the moment. She took in a deep breath of the musty air and enjoyed every molecule of it.

She only had time for one sigh of relief before she remembered Val. She got up and scrambled over to the top of the manhole and looked down. Val’s head was bobbing on top of the tree, which was at about a 40 degree angle from perfectly vertical. Val looked up at her.

‘I think it has my foot.’

Lei frowned.

‘Give me a moment,’ Val said.

And then he was dragged under.

Lei stared at the spot where he had been pulled down for a few seconds. She debated getting back in there to help him. Val was her boss, after all. And he wasn’t such a bad guy. He paid her, and he liked animals. He was making money, and giving it away, and still having enough to renovate his house and eat what he liked, so he must have been doing some things right. However, he was also an incredibly insufferable conversation partner. Who knew if anything he said was a lie. It was a surprise he had even lived to the age he was at, whatever that age was. He insisted on chasing down killers, but hated the police. Did she really want to deal with that?

‘Whoa!’ Val said from below.

‘Are you okay down there?’ Lei asked.

‘Yeah, like I said, the fall is just like opening my front door,’ Val quipped cheerfully. ‘And there’s something interesting down here. Why don’t you come down and see? Hey, what-‘

‘Val?’

‘This guy doesn’t look so good. Can you come down and help me? There’s something I can’t get out from under this- hey! Get off me! Lei! Come down and see!’

‘I can’t tell if you’re dying or having a tickle fight. But I’m not following you down there again,’ Lei said flatly. ‘Help yourself. Heads up.’ She tossed the crowbar down into the deep below.

‘Thank you!’ Val called up.

Lei sat at the top of the ditch and pulled leaves from her clothing. She dusted off her pants and kicked dirt from her shoes. Seeing the shoes reminded her of her boss. She felt slightly bad. Far off in the distance, there was a police siren. Would she be responsible for the murder of Val if he died down there?  Would he be killed like the person with the DAILY PANTS jeans? He had a crowbar, though, how could he lose?

Well, it was Val. He might even end up taking off his own head with that thing.

Lei bent near to the hole one more time. ‘Val, I asked this before, but are you okay down there?’

No answer but the rustling branches. The tree continued to bend a little, now uprooted. Lei leaned closer. The stringy roots twining around the pile of bodies unwound and tore, now unable to support the upper half of the tree that was so heavy with pears. The whole thing was on its way down, with nothing to stop it.

The tree pulled its final, uppermost branches from the drain hole, back into the tunnel, which was to be its final resting place. It dropped to the ground with a final puff of yellow leaves mixed in with the crunch of at least a dozen pears hitting the moldy floor. The trunk smashed against the ground, caving in places, cracking down to the base, where crooked, broken roots hung lamely in the air above the pile of bodies, waving like hair or the slender arms of some stringy being. The tree rocked slightly left, then right, and then settled in between.

It had been uprooted more quickly than expected. Looking down at the now freed pile of bodies, Lei saw why.

Val was sitting there, on the edge of the pile, leaning against the wall opposite the tunnel where the tree had fallen. If it had tipped to instead of fro, it might have crushed him. But he had disturbed its rooting in such a way that it had to fall the other way. He had disturbed it with the crowbar. He had set the crowbar to a particular body which he appeared to have torn the clothing off of. He now held in his hand the crowbar with the remains of an enormous, faded stripy bodysuit hanging off its end.

‘Look what I got,’ he said.

‘Way to go,’ Lei muttered. ‘Where’s the guy who pulled you down?’

Val looked over at the tree. Lei tilted her head downward for a better view. Underneath the full weight of the tree, a waxy yellow hand was just visible among the remains, only because it was a slightly paler yellow than that of the leaves. There was no way the owner of that hand was going to be getting up anytime soon.

‘Way to go,’ Lei said again, more genuinely impressed.

‘It doesn’t smell so good down here anymore,’ Val said. ‘I think I’ll come up now.’

He stood up, stretched casually and reached the crowbar up to the top of the hole. Lei hauled him up some distance and hooked him over the edge. He then slung the huge, decrepit bodysuit over his shoulder and began pulling himself up.

Just as he reached the top, the tree heaved a little. He looked back.

‘What’s going on?’ Lei asked.

‘This again,’ Val said.

From under the tree, there was a muffled ringing. The ringing grew. If you had gone to look under the tree at that very moment you would have seen the contorted, cracked yellow face with the deep eyes and deep nostrils and wrinkles and worst of all the deep mouth from which the ringing was emanating. From lungs crushed under thousands of kilograms of tree came a noise that should not have been possible. It was scream so loud that the screams of the grate and the crowbar and the drain hole were nothing in comparison. Down the tunnels, moss shook and fell, water rippled and splashed within itself. The halls rattled, and outside the drains all around the city, passerby stopped, hairs at needlepoints, and stared, and stared at each other and finally found the courage in their horror to say, ‘Did you hear that?’ and ‘Yes, I thought I heard something earlier too,’ and ‘I thought I was going crazy,’ and of course, ‘Do you think we should call the police?’

Lei and Val stared at the drain with empty eyes once the noise had stopped. They were surrounded by the wreckage of the greenhouse. The glass had not taken the explosion of noise well. As matter of fact, they had counteracted with explosions of their own. Tinkling shards of glass fell all around them. The piece of clothing Val was holding sparkled with it. The crowbar looked like an abstract art project. Lei didn’t really feel like moving. Her ears were still ringing. She wasn’t sure she could stand up at that very moment, and with only broken glass to cushion a fall, she didn’t want to try.

Her ears continued to ring so violently that she didn’t notice the police car pull up behind the greenhouse. Two concerned looking officers popped out. They called out to Lei and Val, who didn’t answer. One officer with a large moustache stepped into the metal frame that had once been a greenhouse and circled the dumb and dumbfounded idiots sitting in the middle of all that glass. Only then did Lei notice. She squinted in an attempt to read his lips, since he didn’t seem to be making any noise to her.

‘Sir, Ma’am,’ said the officer. ‘I’m going to have to ask you to come down to the station.’

—

It was sunset when they left the station. They were covered in glass shards and sewer gunk and looking very lackluster and untidy. Val was an especially confusing sight, along with all the glass, his shoes were caked with rotting fruit and he was clinging to that huge, faded bodysuit.

‘The police here are just terrible,’ Val said. ‘Letting us go that easily.’

‘I don’t know, I see it as a good thing,’ Lei said. ‘I thought they were going to bust us for trespassing, but we got out of it again somehow.’

‘They didn’t even listen to my story.’

‘They said that someone informed them about us. This ‘informant’ said we were escaping from a wanted criminal by the sewers, made us sound like real heroes, apparently. I’ve been thinking… what if it’s the same guy we met back that mansion? You know the guy who was scared of the gargoyle doorbell?’

‘They didn’t care who this clown suit belonged to,’ Val said absently, ‘They don’t care about anything of real importance.’

‘I’d say you’re the one who doesn’t care about what’s important. And that’s supposed to be a clown suit?’ Lei asked suddenly. She inspected the rags Val was holding little more closely. ‘That makes sense… I can sort of see the colors, and the stripes. Wait a second- does this belong to… the clown?’ She lowered her voice. ‘That clown from your story? The one that killed your parents?’

Val looked down at the piece of fabric wistfully, and sighed. Then he turned and narrowed his eyes at her as though she were speaking utter nonsense. ‘Don’t be silly.’

Lei didn’t say anything.

Val continued walking. ‘But we did end up finding a stash of bodies. There were at least 15. That’s more than I’ve ever found at any one time! A big collection of bodies could mean we’re getting close to the Cake Killer. Hmm….’ He wandered on, stared off into the distant sky dreamily, getting lost in the reds and yellows and fantasies of catching this ‘killer.’ Lei followed without any input.

Val turned suddenly. ‘Say, why don’t we go back there and check on that pile of bodies for more clues? Maybe they knew the killer. Maybe we can find out how he transported them. Maybe he left something on them that will reveal his identity! Come on, we pass by the park on the way, we can go back into that tunnel and-’

‘What? No. You don’t even know that they were Cake Killer victims.’

‘We don’t know that they aren’t!’

Lei groaned and brought her hand to her face before she realized her sleeve was practically lined with broken glass. She drew her hand away quickly. ‘No thanks. You can go if you want, but I’ve got other things to do. You know, like take a shower. We did just crawl through a sewer.’

‘Are you sure? The park entrance is right here.’

‘Tempting, but no thanks. No way.’

The two reached the black iron gates of the park. There was a big arch over the entrance with the bars welded into shapes of leaves and flowers. The trees were red. Same as earlier that day, the morning which seemed to far away and foreign now. It wasn’t just the events of the day that made Lei feel as if time had slipped away, though. The park floor looked very different from what it had looked like that morning. The difference now was that it was actually visible. The sea of red oak leaves had been raked or blown away, revealing a path of light grey and brown stones. The leaves were all swept to the sides of the path, leaving plenty of clear walking space for visitors. There seemed to be a disproportionate amount of people hanging around considering that it was almost dinnertime. The largest cluster of people was gathered at the far end of the park.

‘I never knew there was a path,’ Val said, looking at the floor.

‘What are all these people looking at?’ Lei asked one woman who was sitting on a park bench, looking over at the crowd. She had graying blonde hair and large, clownish lips.

‘Oh, it’s awful,’ said the woman. ‘They found a person in the sewer tunnels, crushed under a tree. That poor man. Although I do wonder what a tree was doing down there. And what’s more, they found a pile of bodies. Can you believe it? They say they are the bodies of people who went missing years ago. It’s awful.’

‘It sure is,’ Val agreed.

‘I always come when they discover things like this because I always hope…’ the woman’s voice faded off as she looked over at Val, the wreckage that he was, with the absurd bodysuit draped over his shoulder. Her eyes widened. ‘Is that…’

‘It’s an old clown suit,’ Val said in spite of Lei frantically nudging him in an attempt not to say anything. ‘It belonged to one of the bodies down there. What, Lei? Stop hitting me.’

‘A clown suit,’ the woman said, and closer her eyes. ‘My father wore a clown suit… he disappeared about ten years ago. He was such an old man, and the fit was not perfect, but he did love that suit. The suit looked a lot like that one you have there. I always hope they will find him, whenever I come to one of these scenes…’

‘Maybe it is your father’s suit,’ Lei suggested.

‘Maybe it is,’ the woman said.

Lei nudged Val in the kidneys again to make him give it to the woman for inspection. The woman’s eyes became wet as soon as she laid her fingers on the haggard old clown suit. She pressed it to her face, much to Lei’s horror and Val’s indifference. ‘Yes, this is my father’s. He sewed this himself. Look at the seam. My mother cried when he finished, he’d pricked his hands so many times. Do you see those little stains? His own sweat and blood. And I’d know the smell from anywhere, even after ten years.’

‘Really,’ Lei said.

‘To get closure at last…’ the woman said. ‘So he was taken down there, into that tunnel. My poor father, always running off in that clown suit, he was bound to meet trouble eventually. We always knew…  But I must thank you for this. What can I do to repay you two?’

‘You don’t have to,’ Val said. ‘Can I have that back?’

‘Oh, will you please let me keep it?’ the woman asked. She drew her wallet from her handbag. ‘Please? I can offer you all I have… five hundred? Seven hundred?’

‘Deal,’ Lei said. ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’

Val might have wanted to protest, but she gave him another nudge in the side, the hardest yet, and all he made was a wordless noise. The woman handed over the cash and thanked them profusely, shaking both Lei and Val’s hands more than a couple of times. As she did so, she cradled the faded old clown suit to her chest. Val’s spirit deflated as he realized that he wasn’t getting it back.

‘I guess I’ll have to go down there again and find something else to take home. I really wanted that suit,’ Val said miserably.

‘They’re probably taking the bodies out now,’ Lei said, ‘Since the police know. So don’t get any of your big dumb ideas.’ She quickly stowed away the money.

‘What was that?’ the woman asked.

‘We should be going home,’ Lei said quickly. ‘It’s getting dark.’

‘Ah, that’s right,’ the woman said. ‘It’s awfully cloudy isn’t it? It’s due to rain this afternoon, or tonight. A big storm, I hear. That’s why they raked the leaves today. Don’t want brown mush all over the path in the morning, do we? Crunchy leaves are far more satisfying.’

‘That’s true,’ Val said, still moping.

‘They say they might not be able to remove all the bodies before the rain,’ the woman said. ‘It took them so long to realize there was a boulder covering the manhole, I’m afraid they may not make time enough to get to my father. I don’t know how many bodies are down there besides him.’

‘About fifteen,’ Val said quietly. ‘So it sounds like they might not have enough time to get them all out.’

‘But now that I have his suit to remind me of him, I’m happy. Thank you two again.’

‘You’re welcome,’ said Lei uncomfortably. Val had looked entirely too delighted at the mention that there would be bodies left in the sewer for him later – in the rain, to make matters worse. ‘Um. We should really be going.’

‘I’ll be seeing you, then,’ the woman said kindly, waving as they left and cuddling the clown suit. She squeezed her huge lips together into a smile. ‘Thank you for your kindness, both of you.’ And to Lei:  ‘Take care of your father now, young lady.’

‘Huh.’ Lei muttered as she and Val moved onto the path. The stones dug into their feet.

‘Huh?’

‘Did she just refer to you as my dad?’

‘Nah, I’m sure she was talking about your real dad,’ Val scoffed.

‘You look nothing like me,’ Lei said.

‘And I can’t have kids,’ Val said.

‘What? Why?’

‘That’s not important. Now, why don’t we go into those tunnels and search those bodies? Or worse, the Cake Killer gets them? Let’s go, before it starts raining! Maybe I can get the clown’s false teeth.’

He was eagerly edging closer, as if that were an effective means of persuasion. Lei elbowed him in the side again.

‘Not on your life,’ Lei said drily. ‘Like I said, I’ve got other things to do.’

—

The eyes had returned. They were looking for Lei, but it took at least thirty minutes to find her, and the sky had grown darker. They found her, at last, waiting at her usual bus stop. They watched her check the schedule, and the time from the white plastic clock stuck to the wall over the schedule. They watched her grumble, loiter for a while, and then decide not to wait for the bus. She continued by foot down the sidewalk into the growing dimness of the suburban night.

The eyes were surprised.

Lei’s follower had to be more cautious than ever not to be seen. Without a cover of people on the sidewalk, things were getting more difficult. With nothing else to block it out, every footstep sounded like a bomb dropping. But Lei did not turn about. She didn’t stop. She barely noticed when the rain began falling, a light drizzle threatening to get harder soon. The eyes twitched. Maybe she was too exhausted to notice things around her? Then there was all the more reason to continue the pursuit.

Lei only yawned and sluggishly continued between the rows of identical houses to the front door of her own. The eyes watched as she drew out her ring of keys from her pocket (she never seemed to carry a handbag) and entered her house. The ground floor lights came on. The curtains were thin so the eyes saw that, but couldn’t make out of any action was going on inside the house.

The eyes squinted, and drew out from behind the fence they were hiding behind, moved a little closer. If they couldn’t see inside, maybe she couldn’t see outside.

The owner of the eyes padded softly across the grass of Lei’s front lawn. They were now maybe only a meter from the front steps. The body quivered slightly, and lifted a foot to take one step forward.

BAM. The sudden sound of a door slamming almost made the eyes burst in their sockets with fear. The feet wavered, wondered where to go, then the mind forced them forward. They dashed up to the steps with a long, loping gait and still shaking slightly, took one step up them. They creaked. The feet stopped. The eyes looked up at the door. It seemed so far to go, such a dangerous journey. Had anyone heard? What if-

The thoughts were cut off as something sandpapery pressed against the back of the thinker’s neck and drove him forward faster than he could have liked. The entire front length of his body smacked against the front door rather painfully. The sandpaper pinned his neck there. Something softer, but not that much softer, seemed to be trying to wrench his arm off backwards.

He twisted his head feebly to see what had snuck up behind him.

‘Hey there, pal. Who are you, and what are you doing here on a night like this?’ Lei whispered, spilling glass shards from her jacket as she moved closer. They fell to the floor with a faint clinking.

As if on cue, the rain doubled its efforts and began pouring harder and blotting the sky dark. The drops smacked against the canopy above them, filling the air with noise and making it increasingly to have a civil conversation. Luckily for Lei, she wasn’t looking for one.

‘Why have you been following me?’ she shouted over the pattering. ‘You could have made yourself known. It’s not like we’re total strangers!’

The man she was holding against her door was shivering, or maybe it was the rain’s impacts making the house shivering. Perhaps it was both. He looked terrified. But it was true; he was not a total stranger. He was the tall young man that had called the police on Lei’s first day on the job. He was also the unseen pair of hands that had fetched the crowbar that had gotten them out of the sewers.

‘Look,’ Lei said, trying to be sympathetic, ‘I know you probably just want to help. You’re the one who keeps telling the police we’re innocent, right? I keep thinking you’re probably a good guy, but it’s kind of hard when you’re doing things like this!’ With the effort she was putting into making herself be heard over the rain, she didn’t succeed in looking any kinder.

‘It’s not like we would have stopped you from following if you only told us! Why couldn’t you just come up to me and given me your name so something like this doesn’t happen?’

Lightning flashed, illuminating the lawn, casting black shadows on both Lei and the man’s faces. After six seconds, thunder boomed overhead. The storm was moving.

‘Are you going to kill me?’ the man asked as he shook.

Lei frowned. Her sandpapery sleeve didn’t budge, though. ‘No. Why would I want to do that?’

‘I don’t know. But that’s what I was scared of.’ He took a deep breath (complicated by Lei’s vice on his neck) and attempted to calm himself. ‘People die for no reason all the time. There are so many killers out there, but there’s no way to tell who is or isn’t one.’

‘Are you saying I look like a killer?’

‘I just said,’ he rasped, ‘I can’t tell if somebody is or not. That’s why I hide.’

‘If you thought we might be killers, then why did you help us?’

‘Because even if you are, you’re helping to stop killers.’

‘Aren’t the police enough for you? You’re the one who keeps calling them.’

‘You and your dad are the only people who listened to me when I was saying people were dying in that house. I’ve always felt people dying, but nobody ever listened when I beat on doors. They didn’t realize until it was too late. I could never stop the killers. The police even threw me in jail for a while. They were deaf to the point where even I didn’t know if I believed myself. But you guys went into that house, you listened, and you stopped the killer, too. I thought… if I tried to work with you, and didn’t get killed, I might finally be able to…’

‘To make a difference in this ridiculous town,’ Lei finished for him. She sighed and released his neck. ‘By the way, I don’t know why more than one person has said this, but that guy’s not my dad.’

‘I’m sorry. Is he… then…’

‘He’s my boss. Although it might be hard to tell sometimes. He’s not the most competent person you’ll ever meet.’

‘Oh,’ the young man said quietly. ‘I couldn’t tell. I mean, I couldn’t tell if he was smart or crazy or incompetent. He actually looked more dangerous than you. He has a weird look in his eyes. It’s like each one belongs to a different person. That’s why I didn’t follow him.’ He shifted uncomfortably. ‘Of course, I don’t know him very well. Please don’t tell him I said that.’

‘The only danger he poses is to himself. Actually, I think you two have more in common than you think.’ Lei noticed that the young man was unable to turn around because she was still tugging his arm away from his body at a painful angle. She released him, and he turned around immediately, backed against the door like a trapped deer. ‘Chill. I hope I made it clear, I’m not a murderer.’

‘Yeah,’ he choked.

Another flash of lightning. The two of them watched the sky, this time there was only three seconds to wait. Another rumble of thunder shook the ground. They waited until the ground stopped shaking before breaking the awkward standstill.

‘Looks bad,’ the man commented.

Lei didn’t say anything, but watched him from the corner of her eye. He was shifting on his feet and looking sheepishly at the downpour awaiting him should he try to head home. She groaned, which was blocked out by the rain. Then she sighed, which was also blocked out by the rain. Then she walked to the front door and opened it, for the second time that night.

‘Come in. You can stay here.’ ‘

‘Really?’

‘On one, well two conditions.’

The man looked more nervous than ever.

‘First one, let me at least know your name.’

As if he had just dodged a bullet, he exhaled in relief. ‘Ravel. I’m Ravel.’

‘Ravel, okay. Now I have a name to attach to go with the face.’

The rain rattled overhead. Ravel evidently didn’t feel like he was allowed into the house yet, with Lei standing there blocking the doorway. Lei smiled sharply at him, sharp as the shards of glass stuck on her jacket and hair. She really needed to do laundry.

‘Second condition, Ravel. You come with me tomorrow to meet my boss. As much of a moron as he has proven himself today, I think he deserves an apology too, for you suspecting him of being a killer. And even if he doesn’t care, I could use someone to talk to who doesn’t always lie.’

Ravel nodded slowly. ‘Yeah. No more lies.’

‘Now that that’s settled, don’t spend any longer out there or you’ll catch pneumonia,’ Lei said, stepping away from the door. The warm light welcomed him in and then resealed itself, leaving the outside world in heavy darkness once again, the rain drilling endlessly again the canopy, spilling down the sides of the roof and finally racing through the drains on their way underground.

—

‘Come on, little lady,’ Val called to his orange cat. She was attached to a leash, but clawing away with all her might, eyes wide as they could be. She did not want to be here with him on a night like this. Nobody would, for that matter.

Against all common sense, Val had decided to return to the sewers. It was well past sunset, and well past the first warning drizzles of the storm. The rain was in full swing, and the sewers had come alive. The sound of rushing water poured in from all the surrounding tunnels. Val was shin-deep in water, and his cat was nearly in up to her neck. The current was making a monumental effort to shove them both back the way they had came. And gust of wind came howling down the tunnel, sending a greenish, stinking wave crashed over them.

‘Impressive,’ Val cheered, splashing on.

His cat screeched in protest.

‘Come on, this will all pay off in the end,’ Val said in his loudest, yet calmest voice. He picked his cat up and held her in his arms. His jacket was now filthier than ever. His cat seemed unable to decide whether to assault him or stay where she was. She just sat very still, matted fur on end, claws embedding themselves into his sleeve.

‘My assistant didn’t like it down here either. Until we found something really cool, wait until you see it. My assistant reminds me of you, sometimes. But nobody’s ever called me your dad, have they?’ Val stroked the wet fur and chuckled. He stomped onward, raising his feet deliberately with each step.

A little way down, wind seemed to be getting more powerful, the waves were now carrying down little yellow flecks, or rather toilet-water green flecks. Leaves from the fallen pear tree. Val squinted, his eyes catching full brunt of the wind and rain and stench. There was a wide shadow up ahead. A flash of lightning illuminated the tunnel for just a second.

Val smiled. A mass of yellowish leaves were standing up ahead. He waded towards them as quickly as he could splashing so loudly it could be heard over the rain. Somewhere along the line came the thunder. The cat dug its claws into his arm, hooking out droplets of blood, but they simply fell into the sewer water like any raindrop would. He didn’t notice. He was onto the tree. The water was knee height now.

‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ Val yelled, freeing one hand from the cat and grasping at the branches. ‘It saved me from a bad man today! Who knows where is now, but who cares about him! Just wait until you see what’s behind it all!’ He pulled himself forward slowly, as though rappelling up a waterfall.  A waterfall of stinking sewage. With a tree growing upside-down, and a hiker with a cat in tow.

Val grappled with the tree, a maniacal grin on his face, perhaps wondering what part of the clown he was going to take now that he was so close. He lay his palm on the roots of the fallen tree. So, so close. And yet, so far.

He stopped cold. Rain was pouring into the ditch above since the greenhouse above was now broken, and glass was sliding in slowly. He was under the drainage ditch in the greenhouse now, the base of the tree, where the pile of bodies had been. Well, they should have been there. But they weren’t. Val stumbled forward, his hands (and the cat) brushing the water slightly. His cat gave another wail. But Val only pressed forward.

He patted his free hand under the water where the pile of bodies had been. He couldn’t see anything, but there was not a hand or a foot to be felt. He stood up abruptly and stared down the tunnel. He had been walking upstream; he would have seen bodies wash down. There was no way the police could have cleared the bodies so quickly! Val’s inner child stomped and screamed as it reasoned this out. Val himself just stood very still in the tunnel, surrounded with the violent torrents and now looking a fitting part of the sewer, as soaked and stained as he was. Lightning flashed once again.

Down the sewer, he saw something. Something caught in the roots of the tree. So something had been washed down from where the pile of bodies had sat. It was a plastic box, beaten by the current, but still floating while maintaining its square shape. But the surprising durability of modern delivery boxes it didn’t make him happy, because as soon as he saw it, he knew what was in it.

Val walked over to it slowly. The water around his knees encouraged him to go faster, but he didn’t seem in a hurry to see it. When he reached it, he came very close to not even opening it at all, and when he did, he did so very slowly. The waterproofed plastic box revealed twelve tiny fruit cakes. Some had fallen over during their ride on the waves, and smudged their little blobs of white icing. Some cakes were crushed together; a few were even upside down. The tiny pieces of fresh fruit, though untouched by sewer water, were thrown about and some of the weakest berries were burst. There were slices of apple and strawberry, but no pears, it seemed. Even though he saw all the details so clearly with his right eye, it didn’t matter.

‘So there were twelve bodies left,’ Val murmured so quietly that nobody would have heard him over the storm. He closed the box. ‘But I was still too late. Again. Yes. I should have listened to you.’

He smiled faintly under the mass of hair hanging heavy with rainwater over his eyes. He stroked his cat, steadied her in both arms and shuffled back down the howling tunnel, into the shadows, and back towards the outside world.