A week or two down the line, and the city was looking bleak. The one day of snow had given way to a morning of unpleasant sunshine, and a dry, murky Christmas passed by without much notice. Lei and Ravel ate some of Val’s remaining cereal and cold hot dogs, and then parted ways without saying much. The remains of the blizzard had already been shoved out of the road, and soon melted away.

With their lingering sense of duty, assistants returned the day after, quietly checking in at the respectable hour of 9:00 am, but to their confusion, someone had locked the door. It refused to budge no matter how much they charged at it, without regard to their synchrony or persistence.  Lei slipped off the stairs into the muddy snow, Ravel bruised his elbow, and they went home.

There was the option of the rooftop, but on the one day they had decided to give it a quick reprise, they found the door to #18, or #48 as it should have been: locked tight, the windows covered in black tar-like substance. They had not tried again since.

With the New Year on its doorstep the town seemed in a state of suspension. People were at home, visible through their windows but untouchable. Everyone had their own things to attend to. Work was off for most, or at its height for others. This was the one season, maybe, where there was nothing on the ground. No leaves, red or green, no snow, no small crunchy insects or fruit and for some time now, no blood, bodies, or cake.

Well, work was off for Lei and Ravel, but it seemed to both that the other did not have a whole lot else to attend to. Lei’s friends were busy, and her family was out of town. As far as she knew, Ravel didn’t have family or friends at all, other than the knitting grand-relatives he spoke of sometimes, all dead or far away, of course. Since their situations coincidentally allowed for it, they decided to go to dinner on the night – somewhere cheap but not too crowded. Thankfully, their late employment situation ensured that was easily possible.

On the eve of the 31st, Lei dragged a sweater over her head and a coat over her shoulders and waited for Ravel in front of her house. Ravel arrived promptly, less than a minute later, in a battered old police car driven by a battered looking officer. He was looking satisfactorily informal.

‘Back from having a run in with the law?’ Lei asked.

‘Um, no,’ Ravel said. ‘I was just… seeing a friend.’

‘Friend?’

‘Okay, more of a work friend. You know.’

Lei wasn’t sure. The police car pulled away, the driver waving as he left.

‘So I was thinking,’ Lei said reluctantly, ‘Maybe we should drop by Val’s one more time, just to see if he’s in and if he wants to go.’

Ravel shrugged, ‘That sounds okay. That sounds good.’

‘The bus stops running in an hour, if we want to go, then we should go now.’

‘Sounds fine by me.’ Ravel started tugging at the ends of his red hair scarf nervously. The ends were frayed quite badly. Did he ever wash that thing? It didn’t even look that warm.

‘We have about ten minutes to catch the next one.’

‘Uh huh.’

Lei eyed him suspiciously. ‘Are you sure you didn’t have some kind of bust at the police station?’

He shuddered out a nervous laugh. ‘No, no, it’s nothing like that. They were actually helping me. It’s not important.’

‘The police, not important?’

‘Well… they’re looking into something important. Actually, a killer. What was Val saying about the police not caring? I’m not sure what he was talking about, because this is pretty big.’

‘I don’t know if anything Val said to us was trustworthy.’

‘Hm. But anyway, I recognized the guy from that day at the greenhouse and he offered to drive me and let me know about the investigation a little.’

‘Oh, I thought he looked a little familiar.’

‘Yeah.’ He frowned. Then, as if finally coming to terms with where he was, his face cleared. ‘Ten minutes until the bus, right? We should talk on the way over, let’s go.’

The bus was half empty, which meant that it was relatively crowded, in such a way that wasn’t quite conductive to finishing their conversation. For some reason or another, everyone was quite eager to leave and was crowding around the glass doors of the bus. Every stop, there was a shove to back away from the door enough to let it open, let more people in, and let the doors close again.

Pinned between a five-unit family unit and a bearded man with at least six bags of last-minute groceries and extremely loud breathing, the ride was not comfortable. Lei had a sort of sidelong view out the window, and saw the streets go from dim to near lifeless. There were a couple of pedestrians with their heads down, but all the stores were closed. Even the 24 hour convenience store. Well, to be fair it was the New Year’s. Closing the convenience store might save grave embarrassment for a few, even if it caused some inconvenience.

When they were nearing their stop, the door was blockaded by a couple, a year or two older than Lei and Ravel, who decided to engage in a French kiss much to the delight of their rowdy friends. The sucking noises were at peak volume when the door opened at the bus stop at the end of Val’s street.

‘We should leave,’ Ravel whispered.

‘I’m fucking trying,’ Lei hissed back.

‘Please, we have to get off,’ Ravel wailed weakly over the heads of those he could manage to speak over. Lei twisted forward and wrenched a hooting boy in a sweatshirt out of the way, driving his body in the body of the two kissers, sending them flat against the front window.

Lei dropped onto the sidewalk breathlessly. She straightened out her jacket and hair. Ravel came out of the path she had made, looking a bit better for wear. There was some booing. Most of the other passengers were staring at their shoes. The kissers did not seem to stop even with an additional body tangled in. The door closed and the bus rolled back off. Ravel sighed. ‘Those kids are getting out of hand.’

‘They weren’t even kids.’

The street was entirely dark. Val’s house, which took up the whole block, was not lit, but neither were any of the surrounding houses. Lei had not met Val’s neighbors personally but she could have sworn the place was never this dark, even if she left past midnight. The only light around was coming from the glowing clock face hanging under the bus stop canopy, and a streetlamp two blocks down. Not a soul in sight. However, after the bus ride, it seemed almost welcoming.

Striding up Val’s front steps, Lei muttered, ‘This better be worth it,’ and knocked on the door. She caught her breath. The door did something it had never done before. At the faintest hint of her touch, it swung open.

—

The lights were off. That much they already knew. The sun had started sinking long ago, leaving the sky a strange mottled purple and ultramarine that didn’t provide any useful light through the numerous windows. There was a rustle of paper from within as a few strands of fresh air made their way in. The entire room smelled stale and slightly sour, with a pinch of sweat and the odor of skin and mixed trash, like the remains of party that had got out of hand. Lei doubted that had been the case, though. Whatever had happened, nobody had given the place much ventilation since then. And from the overlaying odor, something foul had been trapped in there for a while. Lei took one step in and balked. Ravel let out what sounded like a choking whimper. Having still not moved further than the door, Lei hit the wall where she remembered the light switch being and a few of the bulbs shivered to life.

A familiar yellow light dropped onto a few parts of the house where the bulbs were still functioning. The lights over Val’s desk, or where Val’s desk had once been standing, came on first. Then the one over the coat rack. One of the bulbs over the kitchen sink managed to come on, only to burst with an explosive crackle. In that flash, it revealed a countertop almost entirely coated in the smashed contents of the kitchen cabinets, and the shining white shards of the porcelain dishes. Most of the dishes seemed to have been smacked to the floor, though. Slowly, the flickering and bursting settled and let them see with finality what had happened.

It was the big things that caught Lei’s attention first. There was not a couch upturned, even the ottoman was neatly knocked over, the yoga mat half rolled-out underneath it. One of the seats, the family size beige sofa, had a huge jagged gash in it, not the sort of smooth knife knick the swordsman Ritz had made but a hole made by the force of a battle axe, or a saw, no, something more vicious and powerful than that. It must have been so, because there was a similar mark cut clear through the table’s surface, and the kitchen island. A single Christmas tree, the only one visible, near where the television was, was of course, knocked flat with pines floating through the ocean of garbage covering the floor. All across the ground, bits and pieces of food, glass, pine needles, cotton stuffing, ruined carpet and furniture, and what must have been several novels’ worth of paper were coating the tile. An additional layer was added by something that explained the smell.

In the dim light it was hard to discern, but Lei began to realize that most of the shadows that coated the floor and furniture weren’t shadows at all, but blackened blood. She first spotted it clearly on the white door of the fridge, flecks that reached midway up the walls, and then began to notice its dull shine all over the floor, against the windows, soaking into the couch where the fabric lay in pools of it. She hoped Ravel didn’t notice it yet, and the fact that he wasn’t retching was a comfort, at least. Despite the cool, dry weather, the smell was still rancid, and upon noticing it the odor seemed to be amplified. The smell was the least of their problems, though. Where did all that blood come from? From what she saw, there was a hell of a lot more than one person could have spilled, on accident or by force. And how the hell had the stuff flown halfway up the walls? Val’s living room, or what had been his living room, was three stories high.

Lei’s mind swirled around for dangers.

A shootout? They’ve have to look for bullets if that was so. There didn’t seem to be any, not a case or bullet hole in sight.

Did a bomb go off? No, there were too many things suspiciously still intact. The kitchen table was mangled while the soft armchair next to it was close to unharmed.

It didn’t make sense. Where were the bodies? There was no cake, but no doubt there were bodies here at one point.

This was when Lei spotted, under another dying flickering light bulb, a spot on the floor that had been cleared. Or rather, something had attempted to clear it. Or something rough and heavy had been dragged across it. The trail pressed into the blood smeared a path past the upturned couch, over a few bowls on the floor, and over to the left side of the room. The trail ended flat against the left wall, under the door. The door that Lei had never been through. The bulb over it, as if responding to her realization, burst.

‘Ravel, I think-‘ Lei began, but Ravel had begun wading through the debris to the right side of the room, where the black metal staircase and its twisted metal demons were beckoning to him. Lei glanced over it. It seemed pretty well intact, and the bookcases above, oddly enough, were still standing.

But it wasn’t the books Ravel was interested in. He started pawing over something small and hairy, left hanging over the curled railing. Lei took a careful step in, and ended up getting a lovely stew of blood and notebook paper on her shoes. ‘What the hell?’

‘Look, look what happened.’

Left hanging in the railing among the bodies of the demons, almost invisible at first, about halfway up, was Val’s black cat. Another source of smell, another source of blood. Although curled like a piece of fuzzy tinsel, it was now stiff as wood, the split wide open down the stomach as clear as the cuts had been on the table and counter downstairs. All that had been in that opening had fallen out, and Lei was not keen on looking for them. Its face was frozen in a sort of squinted look that happy cats sport in commercials. Its arms were frozen upright as well, almost like a toy.

There was some dust crusted around its eyes. Lei felt ill.

Ravel seemed unsure what to do with the body now that he had dislodged it and had it hanging precariously between two fingers. ‘Where do you think the other one is?’

‘If it isn’t here, that’s probably a good thing. Now put that down,’ Lei rasped. ‘Before someone… something happens.’

As if that was what he had needed to make a reasonable decision, Ravel put it down as quickly and as carefully as he could, letting it clang unceremoniously onto the bumpy metal stair and roll quite nearly off the edge. Although she consciously did not want to touch it, Lei lurched forward instinctively to catch it. The carapace teetered slightly, paws off the edge, and stilled again. Lei’s foot landed with a dull splatter and crunch in a piece of bloodied paper. She exhaled with a hiss and glared at Ravel.

Ravel stared back guiltily, then turned away to look anywhere else. His eyes landed on the dirt splattered skylight above the metal balcony. ‘I don’t remember that being so dirty after…’ he dug through his mind for words that wouldn’t influence his gag reflex. ‘The blizzard. The day they all left.’

‘Huh,’ Lei muttered, reaching the stairs and taking a breather from the fetid stew covering the floor. With Ravel’s reminder, the stink seemed all that more vile. ‘Yeah. I wonder what he did with the body parts his friend bought. There’s not a bone in sight. Maybe someone…’

Both of them looked at the bloodstained refrigerators, still standing against the wall, and then looked at each other.

‘Don’t throw up on me,’ Lei said. She continued up the stairway to the dusty landing. Anywhere to get further away from the carnage, even if it meant going back down to it later.

Lei grazed past the bookshelves, puzzled. Each and every one was still standing. It seemed that even the most atrocious of disasters would disorder Patches’ collection of dictionaries and encyclopedias. ‘Looks like the fight didn’t get this far.’

‘Why bring the fight up here?’ Ravel looked around like it was the first time he’d been there. ‘

‘I don’t know, ask the cat.’

‘That’s not funny…’

Lei grimaced and ran her fingers through the coat of dust covering the upper edges of the thousand page tomes.

‘Do you think they were looking for something?’

‘Who do you mean by ‘they’?’

Ravel didn’t answer.

Lei smirked and continued for a bit, then stopped her hand abruptly over a strange spike in the row. She frowned. It was taller than any of the other books but nowhere as thick. In fact, it was such a thin volume that nothing could be written on the binding. She fastened her fingers around it and yanked it from its lodging. She slapped it onto the top of the bookcase in disgust. ‘What in the- they kept this god damn thing?’

‘Is that a PC magazine?’ Ravel flipped through it as casually he would in a coffee shop. ‘Wow, this looks pretty old.’

‘Seven years old. Slaughter the competition.’

‘What?’ Ravel was horrified at the idea of further slaughter.

‘Some ad in the magazine. Someone really liked that, because that’s the page it was on. Looked like it hadn’t been moved in a while, but I guess Patches put it away. Anyway, I saw this thing when I visited Val’s house the first, maybe the second time.’

‘Ugh, gross.’

‘Uh, sure,’ Lei shrugged.

‘No, no, I’m not talking about you! It’s this–’ Ravel flinched away from the magazine as though it had assaulted him with its flimsy glossed pages. He shuddered and began wiping his hands on the sides of his pants. He tapped the spot just next to the corner of the paper. ‘Someone got blood on it.’

Lei peered around Ravel’s shaky shoulder. Sure enough, there was a smudge on the corner of the cover; where there was a spiky word bubble testifying that the magazine would give the reader great Christmas deals. The letters had a few smudges of dark red over them, smooth at the very tips where Ravel’s hands had flailed, but pressed into an uneven grainy pattern all around that. Lei picked it up to look at in a better light, and then set it down and began browsing through the books again.

Next to the spot, or rather the slim slit that the magazine had taken up on the shelf was the final volume of a set of Russian thesauruses. Next to that, the Dictionary of Etymology, words starting with the letters A-K.

With a sudden revelation, Lei hauled out both the Russian book and the Dictionary, and let them hit the top of the bookshelf as heavily as they could. Rather than the full, satisfying thump of a real reference book, they hit the wood with a hollow tap. The surprise almost caused Ravel to out of his skin. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Look through this other one, will you?’ Lei pushed the Dictionary over to Ravel and stared down the green cover of the Russian thesaurus. The corner of this book, the leather cover and its many pages up to about halfway through, were soaked in blood that dripped onto the black metal grating they stood on. Peeling open the pages and quickly leafing through to the middle, Lei found the hidden compartment formed by rectangles cut out of a few hundred sheets. Inside, there lay a piece of paper that had been handled by somebody with bloodied hands, who had made no effort to clean themselves before writing their message, which resulted in some very sticky paper. It had been folded over at least eight times. Lei began to pull it open.

She saw that the first line was ‘Dear assistants.’ Tugging at the paper a little more to release the blood sealed edges; several other pieces of paper fell out. They landed face down on the bookshelf top. Lei peeked at them briefly.

She glanced at Ravel, who was looking through the book he was given as though it might blow up at any time. She set the fallen pieces of paper back face down.

She looked at the letter in her hands. The lettering was miniscule, but considering Val’s familiarly awful handwriting, it started off fine enough. But the bottom half looked like it was something regrettable.

Dear assistants,

Are there still two of you or is it just one now?

I know you have been looking at these papers, although you didn’t ask about it so I can’t blame you for lying about anything. Don’t be scared, I am not mad. I am glad you did look at them now! We think along the same lines, which I think is good for co workers.

First, I think I owe you an explanation, but I don’t want to write it all out because I might have hurt my hand in the thing that happened and because of this second thing.

The second thing, I think more than one of you owes me an explanation.

Let us meet up as soon as possible.

Happy holidays!

Further down the page below the center fold, in much messier handwriting (and this being undeniably Val’s writing, it was borderline kindergartener and unreadable at this point.)

I tried to clean the house up before you came but there was no fixing anything so I just let it go. The house isn’t important anyway. There was too much of a mess. I think I like it better this way too, except for a few things. But we will have to meet somewhere else now. You will know the place, I left you a map. I don’t know if you both will understand them because we are different, and you are different from each other, but you will both find the right answers quickly enough. Do you know what I mean?

Does either of you, if you are both reading this which I think you eventually will, think that the best stories are the ones where people get pets? I think they are better than the ones where people meet other people, even if they are people that they hate or love and more things happen to both people as a result than if the person were to just spend time with their cat or dog or bird or rate at home. I think I know why this is, but it doesn’t make sense to people who hear it. I think it has something to do with the ending. When the pet leaves, it is sadder than when a person leaves, because many people deserve to die in pain and in pieces, and you can definitely find a good reason that a person needs to have their life ended if you look at them long enough. It is easy if you hate them and can be easy even if you love them. I can never see that reason in animals. I hear that some people do (like that one guy I introduced you to, if you remember him, I am never sure about your memories) or they just don’t need a reason because they are insane. They won’t feel regrets because they look at what the animal could not give them instead of realizing that there is no giving and only less taking away, and in that regard nothing or animals are the best and it is people will always be the worst possible creatures for each other.

None of us are insane so I know you value reason along with everything else and that means you have a higher chance of understanding this than most people and should feel good. If you are like me not everything is easy, but you are lucky because you won’t get killed by the Weeping Blade because it is impossible for that the happen. Unless you are stupid, which is an entirely different story, but I think you are both smarter than I am, and I survived, so there is reason to be hopeful. And anyway, the Blade had spared plenty, even very regrettably alive people, some of whom you have met, like the Sentinel, or the Architect, or the Cake Killer. But like I said, and ending with people is almost definitely going to turn into a problem. It is hard enough with five or six people, but two more and things look very bad and become hard to plan for, but I am glad you two have been very compliant and flexible in the grand scheme of things until recently. So I thought, maybe it is time to take risks. I have an idea that might be a challenge for you. Remember the end is the most important thing and I think it will be coming soon, at least for you and me. It’s hard to explain since even though we are not insane, we are not equally smart or brave or just, so please just bear with me, do you remember a story I told you about a canoe…

At this point the writing started dissipating at the bottom of the page in tinier and more illegible writing until the sheet ran out of room or the writer gave up. Lei turned the page over, and there was nothing but the back ends of bloodstains. She turned it back to the written side.

‘What’s it say?’ Ravel asked, leaning over.

‘Just some Val word vomit. Actually, it gets a little more worrying at the end but… there will be time for that later. What does yours say?’

‘It just says, Please don’t turn around,’ Ravel muttered, peering at the paper in his book.

‘Oh. That one was there before.’

‘Val let you look at this stuff before?’

‘Well, I didn’t exactly get his permission, but it looks like he knew I did anyway.’

Ravel chose not to push the issue. ‘What is it with not looking behind you, anyway? Val has a ton of stuff that says that. What does it even mean?’

‘I don’t know. Means what it sounds like, probably. And it sounds like what you’d see written on the wall in a movie when the killer is right behind you.’

She smiled sweetly as Ravel’s face went from perplexed to terrified, and as soon as they faced each other there was a light but very distinct click from above their heads.

Ravel looked up so quickly Lei thought he might dislocate his jaw. Then he looked around so frantically he looked like he was having a stroke. Observing at his nervous dance in frozen panic, Lei jumped in spite of herself when something, she didn’t see what, landed on her head.

‘Are you okay? Are you okay?’ Ravel wheezed, pawing at her hair, half in concern, half trying to jump onto her shoulders for safety.

She moved him away to arm’s length. ‘It’s dirt, okay? Just dust and dirt, what else could it- no, never mind that. Where did- Did someone open the window up there? What–’

The skylight was moving. All of them were, in fact. They whirred mechanically, allowing in a gradually expanding cool winter breeze. This upset the paper and various lightweight pieces scattered across the floor and set them in motion, dredging themselves from the blood and sweeping around in circles, some out the door. All that time, over the rustling, was the hum of the mechanism controlling the windows. The mechanism that was the only way the open the skylights, the mechanism controlled, as far as Lei knew, from the side room. The side room whose door hid the rest of the blood trail. There was someone there.

In affirmation, something or someone in the side room shut a door or knocked something over with an audible slam and simultaneous crack. All attention was now on the flat brown door.

Ravel was the first to break. ‘Someone is in there,’ he whispered. ‘In that room.’

‘You don’t say,’ Lei grated.

Ignoring her tone, he continued reeling away. ‘Do you think it’s Val? What if it is? What if it’s not? What if they were the one who did all this to the house? What should we do? Should we leave? Should we stay here and hope they leave?’

Lei took a deep, unhelpfully rancid breath.

Another noise, something shifting in the back room. Their reception amplified the noise to thunder. Lei was only further agitated by Ravel’s hand shaking her and his equally shaky voice churning out worry after worry, ‘What’s going on? What do we do? What did Val say? Where do we go?’

‘Will you stop that?’ She pulled the pieces of paper off the top of the bookshelf and smacked the letter and addition into his hand in place of her sleeve. ‘Read this. Not now, when you have the time. Val wanted to meet us somewhere else.’

‘So we leave?’

‘I guess. Look at the thing he put with the letter.’

Ravel turned over the smaller piece of paper, his hands shaking. ‘It’s a photo.’

‘Yeah, but of what?’

Ravel looked up at the ceiling, until another footfall from behind the wall brought him back. ‘A- A church, looks like a church. Wait, I think I know where it is, is it the one over on the other end of the park? You know the one a couple of bus stops down. Like half an hour away. I know the name–’

‘I’m glad you know, because I had no idea.’

‘Well?’

‘Well? You wanted to go, get going.’ She started trampling down the stairs.

‘Quiet! Quiet! What are you doing? And go? What about you?’

Taking a reluctant first step onto the ground level mush, Lei glanced up at him and thought, realizing this was the first time she had to devise with something really convincing. Something that didn’t sound like a joke. There wouldn’t be time to argue, there wouldn’t be time later to explain. She had to get rid of him. But nothing that didn’t sound horrendously suspicious was coming up.

‘I’m staying for now.’ A snide remark wasn’t going to work, so it was going to have to be the other standard. ‘I’m going to make sure whoever is behind that door doesn’t leave before the cops come.’ Looking back at the door, Lei turned over all the possibilities it might hold in her mind and decided to hold down exactly where she was. ‘I know it’s new years, but there are enough officers on duty for both here and the church, right?’

Ravel didn’t say anything. Looking at him meant getting an eyeful of the eviscerated cat next to him as well as his hideous hesitation, so Lei decided to look at her shoes, which also turned out to be a bad idea because the floor wasn’t a pretty sight either.

Ravel started down the stairs, suddenly a lot less shaky. His feet on the stairs sounded almost like gunshots to Lei in this situation, but she supposed that’s what other people sounded like to him under nearly every occasion.

He reached the bottom and also plunged into the mixture of blood and Val’s garbage. ‘You know…’

‘Yeah, I knew.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’ He rubbed his hands on his scarf as if they were cold. ‘I’ll go, fine. But are you sure you’ll be okay…?’

‘Are you volunteering? I’ll be better off than you, and I think you know it. Like Patches said, we have our own jobs to do and all that.’

‘When did he say that?’

‘Ugh. I’ll tell you that story some other time. Jobs to do. Yours just happens to be out there. Call the cops. Get everyone in so this doesn’t happen again. You can get that done pretty quickly, right?’

Ravel nodded, not really in agreement but at a loss for alternate ideas. He was a coward, the kind more afraid of failing his duty than dying in the process, and Lei momentarily felt sorry for him. He started moving jerkily towards to door, avoiding all the sludge and slime he had made no attempt to miss when heading over. Leaning a hand on the upturned sofa for balance he looked back one more time.

Having rarely looked him in the eye, Lei thought he looked strangely content in face, even though everything about him, his posture, his walk, his tone, the way he pulled his scarf like he wanted to strangle himself, was fearful.

‘Will I see you again?’

‘That’s a strange question. It’s not like I’m going to die.’

The very mention of dying only made him more anxious. ‘How do you know?’

‘Trust me. I’m not going to charge right in there, or into the path of something that charges out. But you should probably get moving out of the way, just in case.’ She smiled as kindly as she could. ‘And anyway, If something happens to me, then at least you won’t be around to fuck up my sacrifice.’

‘Ha ha.’ Lei wasn’t sure she had heard Ravel laugh before, it wasn’t a pleasant sound. He stopped and stared at her, or maybe at the wall behind her. ‘Don’t talk about it like that. I- I’m sure you know what you’re doing. But you know, sometimes I get this feeling…’

‘This isn’t the time for your feelings.’ Lei slammed a clenched fist against the railing, sending a low, long vibration through the metal demons. Her patience was hitting its peak. ‘Scram.’ She grasped the railing, which was still vibrating with the impact. Get out. Get lost. We have something do to, the demons seemed to echo supportively.

Maybe Ravel heard them too. ‘Some other time, then.’

‘Yes. Dinner, talk about feelings, whatever. Hey, maybe you’ll get a promotion from all this. If that happens, I’ll expect you to treat me.’

‘I… I’ll try.’ He realized he had revealed everything.

‘Sure thing. I’m counting on you now.’

He just made a sort of last helpless noise and lowered his eyes back to his path.

He finished his awkward march to the door and opened it, peered down the street left and with the conspiratorial look of an escaping prisoner, and then darted out. The tip of his scarf floated out of sight, red hairs catching the breeze. He left the door open.

He had managed to be completely silent, to Lei’s relief. And now he was gone. Lei exhaled for the first time in what felt like ages. Not the best way to say goodbye, but she thought she had been sufficiently supportive. Now to handle the other side of the matter.

She trod over the blood and needles, the paper and pens, fabric, ceramic, cereal and glass, to the door on the wall that she had never been through. The other side had been quiet for a while, but now that she was close enough, she could hear some muffled movements through the wood. She placed the piece of crumpled paper from her fist into her pocket and put her hand on the doorknob.

It was smooth and cool, and looking at it now, it appeared to be made of the same blackish metal that the stairway was made of. But it was not sculpted in any way. It was, however, a bit twisted, no sharp edges, but some soft dents. That might have been from the fight. She grimaced, took a moment of preparation, and turned it. The door opened smoothly.

Lei surveyed the one room in the house that she had never entered, and was only mildly impressed.

‘Now,’ she said. ‘What happened here?’