Hush
M.R. Wilson


     The first thing you must know about me is that the only man
I have ever loved was named Roderick Martin.  Junior, if that's
important.  I was eleven.  He was eleven and a half.  We had
known each other since kindergarten, where the vagaries of the
alphabet made us best friends for life.
     Yes, this is important.  You wanted to know the why of it,
and I'm giving it to you just this once.  Afterwards, they'll ask
me, and you'll have to tell them.  I doubt I'll be able.
     Now where was I?
     Roderick.  His parents and our teachers still called him
Roddy, while he went by Rod to the other kids in school, when
they weren't calling him names.  To me, he was always Roderick.
     You'd be bored to hear all my memories of Roderick.  We rode
our bikes together for endless summers.  We camped out in each
other's backyard.  We counted stars and caught bullfrogs by the
stream in the woods.  You know, kid stuff.  You wouldn't have
thought he was much into outdoor things to look at him ---
gangly, skinny, his glasses a quarter inch thick.  Until we met,
he'd barely been outside because his mother had been afraid he
might break.  His father had, but that was different.  People
tend to break pretty easily when they get hit by trains.
     Roderick never knew his father, and I think that had a lot
to do with the kind of boy he turned out to be.  At school, he
was quiet, contemplative.  He read thick books of poetry in his
spare time, and sometimes he'd read it out loud to me, Byron,
Shelley, Tennyson.  It was totally different from the poetry they
made us read in school, and when I open my own books now, I can
hear his voice, youthful, but cracking into maturity, reading the
words.  You haven't lived until you've heard a prepubescent boy
reciting "Each man kills the thing he loves" and meaning it.
     Mind if I smoke?  Thanks.
     I don't usually smoke, haven't since I was fifteen.  I only
pick them up when I really need them.  Thanks for the light.
     You might say we were both outcasts.  He because he was so
shy, me because my family was poor.  Our town was a lot like this
one, small and too open to gossip.  Everyone knew that Grandpa
lost the little money my family had with gambling and drinking,
and everyone said there'd be no good coming out of any other
Malloys.  Looks like they were right.
     School was never easy for me.  Too much knowledge, trying to
cram into my brain, while the other girls giggled and whispered
behind my back.  I can still remember the look on Mary Bridget's
face when she asked me in front of the rest of her friends if my
family was too poor to afford a real daughter.  I kicked her in
the shins, and had a week's worth of detention.
     Roderick told me later that I should have been above that. 
I told him I wasn't.
     Roderick was what we might call a sensitive boy these days. 
When I was in school, sensitive meant queer.  That he spent all
his time with me marked him even more.  Funny, thinking back on
it, that the only boy who hung around a girl on a regular basis
was the one they called queer.  Billy McDaniels was the worst. 
Every school has its bully, and Billy was ours.  He was the one
who made sure Roderick fell in the mud every time the boys had to
play football in PE.  He was the one who pulled up my skirt on
the few days when the girls had to wear them, and led the cries
of "Leggy Meggy!"
     After the hell of school let out, our time was our own. 
Roderick was the one who created all our games.  Some days we'd
be pirates, and some days spacemen, and some days jungle
explorers.  No matter who we were, though, our nemesis was always
the Evil Billy McDaniels.  I can't count the number of times we
stalked him in our imaginations, giving him as a peace offering
to the cannibal chief, or stranding him on a deserted planet
somewhere near Orion's belt.  No matter what fiendish plot he
came up with, we always outwitted him and saved the day.
     Like any evil nemesis, Billy had a stronghold.  It wasn't
really his house --- he lived halfway across town, and we weren't
welcome anywhere nearby.  In our imaginings, though, his fortress
was the Dalton house.
     Yeah, I know chain smoking is bad for me.  At this point, I
don't care.
     I can describe that house to the shingle.  Two and a half
stories high, with a small window at the top where the attic
would be.  Peeling puke-green paint.  A porch on the front and
the side, both in disrepair.  Slate roof, in much worse
disrepair.  The back part of the house came out from the front
section like a misshapen third leg.  The curtains were always
drawn over the windows, the lawn always slightly overgrown.
     In our town, everyone knew about the Daltons.  Like my
family, they had fallen into ill fortunes due to a not too
distant ancestor.  Highly religious, they homeschooled, so any
glimpse of the Dalton children was fleeting.  They were ghostly
white faces who came out to play after sunset, and never spoke. 
My parents told me to stay away from them, told me that if the
Daltons found me on their property, they'd toss me in the stewpot
and eat me.  When I was five, I believed them.  By the time I was
eight, it was another adventure, but a well-defined one. 
Roderick and I never actually ventured onto the property, but we
did pretend.  During our sleep overs, we terrified each other
with whatever horrors we could imagine lurking behind those
curtains.
     Had our lives gone on exactly that way, for the rest of my
life, I think I could have died a happy woman.  But things
change.  For me, they changed forever the summer I turned eleven.
     My birthday is in June, so as usual, I just missed getting a
birthday party at school, instead getting my birthday lumped in
with all the other summer babies.  I didn't care much, but yes, I
admit, when Mary Bridget's birthday had rolled around in
February, it had hurt a little to see how many kids brought
brightly-wrapped presents for her.
     My parents threw me a party, invited my cousins and my best
friend.  After the cousins left, Roderick gave me my real
birthday party.  We went out into the woods behind our
development and caught crickets.  Then he pretended to teach them
to sing "Happy Birthday" to me.  My present, not the obnoxious
pink plastic tea set his mother had bought for him to take to the
party but my *real* present, was a pocketknife.  I'd been wanting
one forever, and he'd scraped together enough money from his
allowance to get it for me.
     How could I help but fall in love with someone like that?
     Like I said, I was eleven.  The other girls were giggling
about the boys.  Mary Bridget was going with Paul Andrews, but
that didn't mean anything.  They didn't even hold hands.  Still,
it was getting harder to avoid noticing the differences between
Roderick and I.  One of my birthday presents, which had
mercifully not been given at the party, was a lacy training bra
from my mother.  Just one more reminder that Roderick was a boy
and I was a girl, and soon it would no longer be acceptable for
us to camp out together in the back yard.
     On my eleventh birthday, other than the already-forgotten
bra, I didn't have to think about those things, at least, not
much.  Instead, we hung out in the woods until after midnight,
watching fireflies.  I talked about baseball.  He talked about a
story he'd read, a farm run by animals.  Life was good.
     I'm getting there.  Trust me.
     Billy McDaniels moved.  Well, his parents moved, which meant
he had to move with them.  He moved into our neighborhood the day
after my birthday, just down the street from where Roderick
lived.  Our lives became hell almost overnight.
     People gravitated towards Billy, neighborhood boys, mostly,
who wanted to be popular.  What had once been only casual teasing
at school became a regular litany of tauntings and fights, as
Billy's gang quickly and efficiently took over what we had
thought of as our turf.  They chased us in the woods, threw mud
if we stayed in our yards.  The only safe base was inside, and it
wasn't long before we were driving my mother nuts.  We went to
his house, because his mother worked, and there we stayed.
     For a few days, it was okay.  Roderick had a big enough
imagination to keep us occupied.  But I wanted to go outside and
enjoy what I was peripherally aware were my last days of true
freedom.  I coaxed him out to the city park, where there was
usually a cop not far away.  That worked for another few days,
until Billy's gang found us.  A cop was standing not twenty feet
away as two boys pushed Roderick to the ground and bloodied his
nose, while three more grabbed me and attempted to do the same. 
I got in a good kick to two, and the cop came over, then told
Roderick and I to behave, and threatened to tell our parents we'd
been fighting.
     We stayed away from the park after that, and went back
inside.
     Relief came when Billy's family went on vacation.  For a
week, they were going to be in Florida.  Roderick and I crept out
of the inside, blinking in the long-denied sun, and spent the
first day running through the woods, whooping like Indians.
     We knew how precious the week would be, and planned our days
accordingly.  The second day was dedicated to building a fort
deep in the woods, which really meant just out of sight of the
row houses.  The third day we reinforced the fort with plenty of
projectiles.  On the fourth and fifth day, we played far away
from the fort.  Cowboys and Indians, I think.  The sixth day was
a Sunday, which meant church for me.  In the afternoon, once my
skirt was exchanged for coveralls, we rode our bikes to the river
and had a picnic.
     I remember that picnic well.  We brought peanut butter
sandwiches, and chocolate cupcakes in cellophane wrapping.  We
had little cardboard containers of orange juice to drink, because
his mother wouldn't let him drink soda.  He brought a book, and
read "Casey at the Bat" to me.  We caught crawdads and let them
go around twilight.  We slapped at mosquitos, scratched the
bites, and generally enjoyed ourselves as much as we ever did
before Billy moved.  We were talking about Bugs Bunny when he
kissed me.  It was only a little peck on the lips, nothing major,
but it signaled the end of our being best friends, and the
beginning of something else.
     When we rode our bikes back home, I had a grin from ear to
ear.
     Day seven was our last day of freedom.  We wanted to mark it
with something special.  We went out to the stream in the woods
and caught the fattest bullfrog we could lay our hands on, snuck
over to the Dalton place, and set him on the stoop.  Then we
knocked on the door and ran like hell.
     From where we watched, the door opened, and old Mr. Dalton
himself poked his hoary head out.  He saw the frog, picked it up,
stared at it, and took it inside.  We both laughed until our guts
hurt.  Then I stood on tiptoes and kissed him, holding on a
little longer than he had.  And that was all.
     The following day, Billy was back in town, and we were ready
for him.  We hid out in our fort.  It took his gang three days to
find us, and when they did, we pelted them with rocks and twigs
and acorns, and anything else we could find.  We ran out, of
course, and they chased us through the woods.  Again, we were
ready.  We'd explored the paths around our fort, and led them
through every set of brambles, every spot of slick mud, and every
dog turd we could find.  By the time we were out of the woods,
they were well behind us, though not out of sight.  We were too
dirty to even think of running into my house.  We were right
beside the Dalton place when they caught up.
     We ran into the yard, and they didn't follow.  Billy's
friends had grown up here.  They knew the stories.  Without them,
Billy was nothing.  They stayed at the edge of the grass, while
we, unexpectedly free, looked for a place to run where they
wouldn't come around and catch us.  There was none.  As long as
we were on the grass, we were safe.  So we stayed, until they
went away bored.
     Then I noticed the open curtain.  It was just a crack, but
it let out a bit of the dark from inside.  I wasn't tall enough
to look in, so Roderick did instead, for just a few seconds.  I
heard a muffled noise from inside.
     He pulled his head away, grabbed my hand, and ran like hell,
dragging me along behind him like a rag doll.  Billy's gang,
who'd been hiding not that far away, cornered us a block later,
but for once, they didn't keep us.  Roderick plowed through them
like a bulldozer through a tissue, pulling me along in his wake. 
We made it to his house and he bolted the door behind us.
     I tried to get him to tell me what he'd seen, but he shook
his head and refused to talk about it.  Shaking, he went
upstairs, and I followed him to his room.  We didn't play.  We
sat on his bed, dirt and all, not saying a word.  Whatever was
inside that house, it had scared all his words away.
     The only thing I could do was hug him, let him know I was
there for him, whatever it had been.  I kissed him on the head,
on the cheek, on the tears that squeezed through his eyelids. 
After a while, he kissed me back.  It wasn't the kind of
passionate kiss you're thinking.  It was just a touch of lips, a
way of communicating that didn't involve his having to tell me
what he saw.
     When his mother came in, she didn't take it that way.
     Mrs. Martin squawked and almost bodily kicked me out of the
house.  I told Roderick I'd see him soon, but the look on her
face said I might not.
     By the time I got home, my parents were waiting.  Mrs.
Martin had called them, and neither looked pleased.  My father
yelled.  Afterwards, my mother in a much softer tone told me the
facts of life.  I didn't spoil her fun by telling her we'd
already seen the filmstrip at school.
     The following morning, my mother announced we were going to
see her sister Edna in South Carolina for the Fourth of July, and
that we were leaving that very afternoon when my father got home
from work.  I was pretty sure we had made no such plans before
the phone call, but I still had to go.  I wasn't supposed to
leave the house, but I snuck out to see Roderick anyway, just for
a minute.
     Yes, he'd been in trouble both before and after the phone
call.  Yes, he was grounded, possibly for the rest of the summer. 
No, he wasn't supposed to see me ever again.  Yes, we were going
out to play at the fort as soon as I got back.  I hugged him, he
hugged me, no kissing, and I ran back home.
     We got back from South Carolina at midnight on the fifth.  I
didn't find out about the accident until the following morning. 
Roderick had been riding his bike, not a block away from the
Dalton house, when he'd been struck by a car.  Hit and run.  Dr.
Szlezny, the man who'd treated us both from infancy, given us all
our shots and occasional lollipops, had seen the accident, gone
to Roderick, and been the one to pronounce him dead about ten
minutes later, just as the ambulance was turning up the block.
     I know this because Dr. Szlezny told me at the viewing, and
told me that Roderick had been calling for me when he died.
     I've never understood viewings.  It wasn't as if it was an
open coffin or anything.  We went, we milled, we spoke words of
consolation to a woman who would never be consoled again.  I
walked around in a numb haze for those days, for the days of
summer following.  I stayed in my house, I read thick volumes of
poetry, I talked to no one.
     They never found the person who hit him.  Some people
thought the Daltons must have been involved.  There was an
inquiry of course, but nothing ever came of it.  The Daltons kept
living their lurking little lives, Billy's gang kept the streets
unsafe, and Roderick kept dead.
     When school started back up, most of the kids treated me
like a widow.  Which in a way, I was.
     Life went on.  I grew up, spent less time in the woods, more
with the books Mrs. Martin had given me before she moved.  When
it came time for high school to end, to my surprise my grades
were good enough for a scholarship to the state school.  I went,
majored in English, hung out with dangerous people, smoked a
little pot, had a boyfriend and a handful of one-night-stands. 
Eventually, I graduated.
     I got accepted for the teaching position in Durem a few
weeks after my graduation.  I made plans to leave the East Coast
in favor of Missouri, and tied up a few loose ends.  Turned out
that Billy had gotten Mary Bridget knocked up, and hit with a
sense of responsibility, or more likely hit by Mary Bridget's
father and three older brothers, married her.  I found him at the
same bar downtown where my father went on occasion, and picked
him up.  My last one-night-stand, a pouting musician with little
talent outside his pants, had given me a case of the clap.  I
gave it to Billy, picked up my prescription for Keflex, which I'd
held off on until after my conquest, and loaded up the U-Haul.
     Roderick would have called it poetic justice, I think.
     Does the phrase "I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my
own fashion" have any meaning for you?  I guess not.
     Sometimes, I still dream of Roderick.  His face is encrusted
with drying blood, and ribs poke through his shirt.  One arm
hangs at an angle, and neither leg has working kneecaps.  You
might think that sounds horrible, but if you dream about it every
night, after a while, even horror becomes commonplace.  We walk,
we bike, we hold hands.  No kissing, though.
     I settled into life here in Durem.  I wasn't a bad teacher. 
I've always tried to be fair to my students, rewarding them for
making an effort, supporting their activities, what have you.  I
like my job.  I like my house as well.  It's small, but it's
neat, and it's within walking distance to the school.  I'm still
enough of a rambler to want to spend every minute I can in the
fresh air.
     Funny.  Who would have thought that a tomboy like me would
be wearing a skirt every day to teach high school English?  In
Missouri?  When I was eleven, I wanted to drive a race car.
     The one thing I didn't like about my walk to and from work
is one house.  Yes, you know the one, on the corner of Oak and
Main.
     It looked just like the Dalton house.
     I'm serious.  The same green, peeling paint, the same
disgruntled slate roof, even the same curtains on the windows. 
The only things missing were the Daltons.  The people were called
Thomas.
     Let me tell you, and please don't interrupt.  This is
important.  This is all important.
     At first, I walked by it without looking.  Only when I
noticed the resemblance, and it took a while, did I start getting
a bad feeling every time I passed it.  I walked a few blocks out
of my way so as not to go by the house, justifying to myself that
it was because I wanted to see different sights.  I went by now
and then in my car, safe with my rolled-up windows.  Sometimes
the Thomas clan would be on the porch.  Unlike the Daltons, these
weren't fundamentalist Christians trying to educate their
children in their own religion.  These were just dirt poor white
trash, the way everyone back home always said my family was.  The
children were filthy, the innumerable cats scrawny and
malnourished, the adult humans barely either.  Oddly, they were
what I expected to meet moving out here.
     I've heard the same rumours about that family as anyone, and
you can be sure there will be more as you look into what
happened.  What I'm telling you is the truth as I saw it.  You
can put me into a padded cell for saying it, but know that I am
not making up a word of this.  I swear on Roderick's grave.
     A week ago, I knocked on their door.  It was for a school
fundraiser.  We were all supposed to hit every house in our own
neighborhoods.  I almost didn't go there.  The old fears were
back.  I'd been dreaming about Roderick almost constantly for
nights on end.  He'd been trying to tell me something, but his
voice came out in a wet slur, and all I could hear was my own
name.  When I tapped on the door, it was with the terror of all
those dreams behind me.
     A woman answered the door, dishwater blonde hair a mess,
muddy grey eyes suspicious.  I introduced myself and told her
about the fundraiser.  She slammed the door on my face without
saying a word.  I caught a glimpse of the inside of the house --
dingy yellow wallpaper, trash on the floor, the smell of unclean
people in closed rooms.  No other horrors lurked in that glance,
and even as the door slammed, I felt a curious sense of peace. 
The demons of my youth had been put to rest at last.
     I started walking by the house again, nodding to it as I
went, as a kind of accepting measure.  The house existed, and I
existed, and both were content.
     Three days ago, as I was driving along Oak Street, I saw a
kitten in the road, maybe six weeks old.  From its state of
health and obvious lack of pedigree, it had to be from the Thomas
house.  Not wanting the poor thing to get run over, I scooped it
up and knocked at the door around the side, where I was.  At
first, no one answered.  I knocked again, a little louder.  From
around the street corner, a man walked towards me at a strange
gait.  His face was contorted, his jaw limp, his eyes not quite
focused behind his glasses.  I guessed he was maybe forty, and
likely retarded.  I couldn't help but speculate that's what
happened when the family tree didn't branch.
     He said the house was his sister's place.  I explained that
I'd found the kitten in the street, and then he knocked on the
door.  The same woman who had answered before poked her head out. 
I held out the kitten to her, trying to keep my voice friendly.
     The hand at my back was sudden and solid.  I stumbled
inside, onto the floor with the strewn trash.  The kitten yowled
and jumped from my hands, landing in and scattering a sheaf of
papers before dashing off through an ajar door.
     I got to my feet, but the door was already shut.  The man
and his sister stood in front of it.  My back broke out in cold
sweat.
     "I should be going," I said, my hand already in my pocket,
closed around my old pocketknife.  Reliable and sharp, it still
wouldn't be much help if the two of them were going to rush me.
     "What do you want?" demanded the woman.
     A girl, maybe five or six, came out of the room the cat had
entered.  Her hair was the same dirty blonde as her mother's,
long and unbrushed.  She ignored me, went to her uncle's side,
grabbed his leg, and stood there, sucking her thumb.
     "I just wanted to give the kitten back," I stammered.  "She
was in the road."
     "He," said the little girl in a thick Hoosier accent.
     "He was in the road," I corrected.  "Now, if you'll excuse
me ... "
     "You're spying on us," said the woman.  "What do you know?"
     Crazily, my mind filled with mathematical formulas.  "What
do you mean?"  My mind also filled with half-heard rumours. 
Witchcraft, some people said, and devil worship.  Others had
hinted at the real identity of the children's father.  I'd
ignored most of the talk, remembering my own days in a small
town, but now it all came back.  "I didn't see anything."
     She glanced to her brother, who shook his uneven shoulders
and said, "She saw."
     "But I didn't!  I don't even know what I didn't see!"
     There was another door, one that led to the front.  If I ran
through the slightly open door, it would lead to the front room,
and out.  I bided my time, waiting for a chance to flee.
     But it looked like I wouldn't need to run after all.
     "Horace, you've scared the woman for no good reason. 
Sorry," she said, almost breaking into a smile.  I wasn't fooled.
     "That's okay," I lied.  "But again, I really must be going."
     "Uh uh," said Horace.  "I've seen her.  In the yard."
     The woman's eyes went hard, and I knew that no matter how
much I protested, she would not believe.
     I said, "Oh, that.  That's because ... "  I turned and ran
like hell through the door.  The living room was even more of a
mess than the hallway had been, but I had no time to sample the
decor.  Past the shocked faces of two pale children sitting on
the couch watching cartoons, I reached the front door, thought
enough to check for and throw the bolt, and ran outside.
     Everything seemed out of joint.  Even the sunlight was
wrong.  I didn't care.  I found my car, pulled the door open,
jumped inside, and breathed a sigh of welcome relief when the
ignition turned.  The wheels squealed as I pulled away.
     I didn't see him until it was far too late to stop.
     The bicycle flipped over my hood, its occupant thudding on
my roof with a crunch and rolling to a sick thud on the pavement. 
I slammed on the brakes, terrified, shaking, almost forgetting to
throw the parking brake.
     He lay on the ground, barely breathing, air hissing from his
lungs where a sharp bone poked through.
     I fell to my knees beside him, shock racing through my
system like morphine.
     "Roderick ... "
     Incredibly, he was still alive, his soft brown eyes looking
up at me in pain and wonder.  He moved his lips, but no sound
came out.
     I turned my head, tears flowing freely now, saw the too-
familiar streets of our hometown, at the very end of the street,
Dr. Szlezny's Cadillac turning the corner towards us.  We had
only an impossible minute.
     "Meg," he said, wetly.
     "I loved you," I said.  "I never stopped."  I looked at him
again, and moaned.  "Oh, God.  I'm so sorry."
     "Love you," he said, or I think he said it.  I could barely
hear through my own weeping.  Then, "Run."
     I bent over, kissed his mouth, where the blood was already
seeping out.  Then I stood on shaky legs, got back into the car,
and drove.  I parked the car near the woods, walked by memory to
the fort.  I lay down, closed my eyes, and fell asleep listening
to the faraway stream.
     When I woke up, it was dark.  I stumbled back to my car, and
drove back to the Dalton place.  I didn't have anywhere else to
go.  Police tape was everywhere, but no police.  At the dead of
night, even cops need to sleep, I guess.
     I knocked on the front door, and kept knocking until old Mr.
Dalton answered.
     "We already answered all your questions," he said.  "Go
away."
     "What have you done?" I asked, still crying.  I had my
pocket knife out and at his throat.  He met my eyes calmly.
     "Whatever happened, you did yourself."  I pushed him back
into the house.
     In the living room, the little blonde girl lay curled on the
couch, a blanket pulled up to her chin.  The television blared "I
Love Lucy" to no one in particular.  Her mother stood in the
doorway, smirking.
     I got dizzy.  I couldn't handle this.
     I ran away from Mr. Dalton, past the woman, through the
door.  It did not lead back to the other door, but to a hall and
a stairway.  The two pale children sat on the stairs, sad white
faces poking through the slats at me.  I stifled a scream and
kept running.
     There was a door at the end of the hall.  I fumbled with the
handle.  It led to a nearly dark room that smelled of mold and
old dust.  There was a window not quite covered with curtain, and
daylight poked through.  I went to the window, trying to get my
bearings.
     Outside, it was daylight.  The yard stretched for miles to
distant mountains.  Twenty feet away should have been another
house, but there was nothing but terse grass, a few lonely trees. 
The light from the window shone into the room, onto a form I
hadn't seen because my eyes had not adjusted to the low light. 
It did not move, and against my better judgement, I looked
closer.  It was Billy, or had been.  His skin was paperlike,
stretched over his face, and looked somewhat moth-chewed.  He
could have been sixty or ninety, but I knew him, and knew he had
been dead a very long time.
     I stumbled back through the room, avoiding the mummy, out by
the stairs and the silent children, found another door.  It led
to the basement stairs.
     I'd rather not describe the basement, in this world or the
next.  The basement was where the rest of the family lived.  I
don't think they saw me.
     Only when I crept back up the stairs did I really take
notice of the pale children.  They were of an age, a boy and a
girl, and did not look like any of the Daltons or Thomas or
whatever the half-human beasts downstairs called themselves.  In
fact, they were almost familiar.
     I turned and ran through the door I had come in first. 
Again I was in the living room, but no one was there.  The
decorations on the walls were circa 1920, and the television had
been replaced by a radio.  I had to take my chances with the side
door.
     Horace was guarding the side door.  I stabbed him with my
stupid little pocket knife and left him clutching his leg as I
peeled out the side door.  My car still waited at the curb where
I had left it last time.  I eased it out and pointed it towards
home.
     I didn't sleep last night.  Jetlag, timelag, call it what
you will, I was too busy.  Not a lot of gas stations are open all
night, and I couldn't hit the same one twice without raising
suspicions.  I got fifty gallons, total, siphoned them neatly
into whatever containers I could find.  God only knows how I
didn't manage to blow myself up in the process.
     The conflagration was lovely, I assure you.  I waited at the
corner where I could see both doors.  The fire did strange things
to the shadows and the smoke bit my eyes, but I'm a good shot. 
No one made it out alive.  Of that I'm certain.
     There are going to be a lot of things said about me, and a
lot more said about them.  Not everything I shot was human, and
not everything I saw in that basement got out.  From what I've
heard, it burned to the foundation.  You're going to find some
interesting remains when you poke through the ashes, Detective.
     You're probably thinking I've lost my mind.  Maybe I have. 
It doesn't matter much.  You see, they all didn't live in that
house.  I know that.  Some of them live out in other places, and
they'll come for me wherever I hide.  I won't have enough bullets
for them all.  They'll come, and they'll have me, and they'll
take me to that house, through some rabbithole in time.
     And I will play with Roderick in the back yard, after the
sun has set.