everything else out; I was an animal, running scared. But the bills still had to get paid. I clicked myself into robot mode and forced myself to get back to work.
The horror faded after a few hours, the mundane duties that had become second nature by my third year in this job: checkmarks and clipboards, lifting boxes, stacking produce. There was a litany running through my mind in the voice of reason, the voice of Peter Mansbridge, a gentle, rational voice. If the thing wanted to kill you, the voice said, it would have. It would have killed you. It therefore didn’t want to. And it could have, easily. You felt that strength. Look at our fragile bodies, with our squishy tubes and internal skeletons, no claws, no fangs. It kept you alive. Because it needs you. It wanted you to do something and you refused, but it didn’t kill you when you refused. And so. There must be something else it wants. It offered a reward before it offered a threat. Remember that. Tell Johnny that. Don’t forget.
As if I could forget. Its words had seared into my memory—if someone X-rayed my skull they would see everything written on there, like a branded steak in a commercial. And the words would not be in English but the dark language that was its first tongue. English was probably not even the thousandth language it knew.
AT THE END of my shift, I took the bus home, got the car, and let myself into Johnny’s house, both hoping and not hoping that she’d be home. I hadn’t really wanted to come; I had wanted to go home and be with Mom and the kids. Someplace safe and normal, free from magic and monsters, someplace I wouldn’t be watched. But it seemed more and more now that what I wanted didn’t matter. I had to tell her what had happened first. Tell her about the deal I had been offered.
Inside, I felt woozy, dizzy, reaching to steady myself on the walls as I wandered to the main kitchen, tracking the sound of the red coffee machine. The pleasant smells of melting cheese and fresh coffee wafted down the hall.
She looked up, apparently unsurprised, juggling something from a plate to a pan. “Grilled cheese,” she said, waving the spatula at me. “Want one?”
“Maybe in a minute,” I said. Four pieces of bread. She knew I would come here. “Stomach doesn’t feel too good.”
“Go get a yogurt from the fridge. That’ll settle it.”
I did, then perched at the counter to watch her flip her sandwich. It smelled like kimchi—she liked all sorts of things in her grilled cheese, olives or apples or tomato or Cool Ranch Doritos, with kimchi and fries being particular favourites. I cracked open my yogurt—one of her weird flavours, passionfruit and lemon. It occurred to me that I didn’t even know what a passionfruit looked like. I ate it anyway.
“John,” I said. “Listen, I just came to tell you about that... thing... it cornered me at work today.”
She went very still, hand halfway to her sandwich. “Let me clarify that in a way that gives me useful data,” she said. “It found you at a place that you have not seen it before, a place with other people nearby, and confronted you directly, though not—I assume—in view of witnesses?”
“Yeah. All of that. It must have been waiting in the storeroom. I didn’t ask, but I assumed no one else saw it. I didn’t hear any screaming.” I scraped my spoon in my empty cup and looked at her, a hectic red glare under her eyes that I was starting to recognize as absolute bolting panic, just barely hidden by her iron will. It was as if her fear was the ocean and her rationality a tiny submersible, one of those round ones with a two-foot-thick viewport just an inch or two across, only looking at the world through that lest it be crushed, able to resist the pressure specifically because of it.
I began, weakly in the face of that panic: “It... it wanted...”
“Did it offer you a covenant?”
“What?”
“Try to make a deal?” she said sharply.
“Yeah. Tried. It asked me to get them the reactor.”
“In exchange for?”
“It just said ‘reward.’”
“And that was it? That was all it said? Nothing else?”
“Yeah. Well, I mean, after it said it would reward me and I still said no, it sort of threatened me instead.” I closed my eyes, remembering—oh Jesus, the stink, the darkness, the