Shanty Shanty Shanty

Organized religion can be a trap.

I’m mainly referring to Christianity, or Catholicism. Church-goers are consistent, and even though they don’t like the word “superstitious”, it isn’t so far from the word “devout”. Not in this case. If you were to blow a tsunami onto their shores and stop it when it spits on their front porch, they would call it a miracle and turn their thanks upward, instead of forward, to the sea that so benevolently did not steal their livelihood (or lives) from them.

I took control of this shantytown over three months ago, and I have hardly had to leave the beach since then. I’ve been admiring it from the shore for a few days now, with several fish flopping on the sand next to me. Or, they were flopping.

The shantytown was not a difficult place to liberate from its old owners (the residents). When I say shantytown, I mean there are several thousands of souls here, and hundreds more that tear through a part of it on the highway. There is almost no one tearing out of here, though. And despite the town’s small size, it took six days for news to reach from one end of the town to the other that I had seized it. And then there was not much for them to do.

There is a large house on the shore that belongs to a family that lives elsewhere. It was their summer home, and now it is my court. I believe in things like courts, the same way Christians believe in churches, but more political and less spiritual. There’s power in these walls, though there isn’t much else. It is more beautiful and daunting on the outside than on the inside, because the inside is saturated with the lived-in smell of old linens and pipe rust and carpets. I sit on the porch, facing the water, and rise when the humans come to speak to me, if only to make them believe that I have taken notice of their interruption, and I have no intention of this conversation interrupting me more than it must. Really, the interruption is somewhat welcome, because otherwise I walk indoors and then out the other side, and sit beneath the beech tree and inspect the changes in my legs (new freckles, new hairs, the way muscles shift around bones when I move them).

It isn’t a superpower, what I do. My colleagues (acquaintances, family, kin, etc.) all shoulder the burden of this same super power. They must see it as a burden, because there are hardly any recent story about our clever ways. Our charms, our glamours. There are ways to look human, one of my kin once told me, quietly and fervently, like it was a secret, something superior and forbidden and tantalizing. Then everyone was doing it, and suddenly it lost its appeal, apparently. We have charmed children to look like tree branches and tubers and large vegetables. Some of us- not my kind specifically- have traded them and made off with the children. My kind just decided to start leaving their skins about everywhere. It was all a planned sort of laziness. A trap that required nothing more than a shucking off of clothing. Then luring others to it. We did it so efficiently, so unthinkingly, that I imagine we were something like smart children in a boring environment. Learning to adapt, condensing into adulthood. But ability fades without use. If most of them were to try to stretch that muscle now, they would achieve nothing but snapping it.

The glamour is nothing more than a safety precaution. If humans were to see us with their children in hand often, there would be some problems. It is better by far to hand over a piece of driftwood made up to look like a drowned child than to offer up a drowned child. There are only so many children in this shantytown, anyway, and humans being sent to talk and negotiate would notice a sudden decline of the one generation keeping them going. So it is branches and sticks of wood and pieces of tarp that become a part of the ruse. A way to smooth the edges, and pave and sand the streets. A few days later, when the children (or beautiful wives or handsome husbands or sickly parents or lovers) are back to being bits of driftwood and nothing more, there must be some relieved exclamations. Yet I’ve never been called upon to explain myself.

I only know it has been enough to secure this shantytown, and it is the superstitious, religious folk that would build me an altar and sacrifice everything but their firstborn to keep me appeased.

Some of them put crosses on their doors too, to no effect. It was a fun couple of days, listening to them hammer away.

The first of the negotiators came within two weeks. Sent by some power of the United States. Homeland Security, of the FBI, or some other waste of taxes. Citizens of the United States had much better options, but this was what they gave me. A twitching, often young, member of the shantytown, stumbling over their words as they asked what it was I wanted or needed, to keep them and the town safe. I had a hell of a time telling them that there was nothing Homeland or the FBI or the President of the United States himself could offer that would appease me. I would disappear into the beachside house and come out the other side, steal a twig from the beech tree, and between the front door and the back door I would make it appear like the arm of a child. I screamed once, for good measure. And broke some glass once, just for the illusion. This is not something that my kin would do- this is not part of being clever. This is what comes, I suppose, of being the only one up here, the only one on the sand rather than in the waves. Eventually, the loneliness is enough to make you a little dramatic.

The negotiator would leave, and I would sit on the porch and look at the waves and think that this was a stupid shore to have washed up on, and if I could choose again, I’d go the long way round and do to the west coast, or I’d cross all the way back to my people’s first home. There was better music there, I heard, and even more superstition, of the old-but-not-Christian variety.

It’s been nearly five months now. The fish keep tumbling onto the sand and dying, which isn’t normal. Members of the shantytown bring me food I don’t care to eat, and wine I don’t care to drink. None of them bring the one thing that could stop me, because only one person has it. I don’t know who it is, and if they never return here, then I will never return to the waves. So it’s all on the humans, really. One human. Until that day, if it comes at all, I’ll remain here, and the humans will have as little choice as I do to deal with it.

There were other efforts made, before now, to evict me from the shantytown by force. But present a SWAT team with some glamoured pieces of flotsam and jetsam, some crosses charmed to look like the bodies of children or beautiful women (always women and children, they all want to save the vulnerable ones) and the SWAT team begins to sweat beneath their fatigues. If I’m stuck in a stalemate, waiting for one of their kind, then they can be stuck in a stalemate as well, waiting for me to leave or do whatever I will with this town.

Of course, eventually someone will realize that the bodies I send out are unidentifiable, and that I’ve exceeded the population of this town with my body count, or that the town has not actually decreased in size despite the growing body count, and then I might have to do some creative truth telling. But on that day, if things continue in this boring way, I might just be happy to face the challenge. My kin always said I wasn’t good at being idle. None of us are.

I’ve reached five months and the beach smells of rotting fish. I hear a car approach and watch it around the side of the house. The person standing on the asphalt is no one I know, but I don’t need to know her to recognize her. She is a negotiator, donning the neon vest that makes all negotiators look like perhaps they are planning to direct air traffic. She also carries something in her arms, and it looks like a sweater, which is odd on such a warm day.

“Fuck,” I say, when she comes closer, and I can see that in her arms it is no sweater. It makes me smile, and it makes me relieved, and it makes me feel that I’ve lost the game. I doubt They (They being the people behind these machinations, behind sending her, the FBI or Homeland Security or whoever it is) knew what they were doing when they sent her, or knew just how equipped she is to send me away.

Because she has my skin folded in her arms.

I wait on the sand, because I may as well be close to the waves, in case the unlikely does happen.

“Please wipe your feet on the mat before entering,” I say when she finds the back porch.

She looks at the grainy, wet sand on the beach, and the grainy, wet sand on the porch, and then the grainy, wet sand on her feet. She’s younger, but quite pretty. Could be worse. “What is really going on here?” she asks.

I say, “I’ve taken over the town.”

She hoists my skin up in her arms. She doesn’t even seem to realize it’s there, but she must. She says, “Why this town? What are you doing here? We’ve never had this kind of trouble before. Why didn’t you take it somewhere else, like, somewhere bigger or something? You’re afraid of being found out, aren’t you.”

Perhaps They had chosen her because of her intellect, and not because of extreme fortune in coming across my skin. I would never again just leave it out to dry on a rock, I decided. “I’m afraid of nothing. Haven’t you heard? I’m a killer and scoundrel. I’m here to stay, unless, the obvious were to happen.”

“Or unless I just take you away right now. What’s the stop me from just carting this away from the ocean and making you follow me?” She shakes the skin a little, to taunt me or to frighten me.

“My charm.” I flick my fingers and the wave behind me jumps. If she is so smart, she should know that it’s we that have stopped the sea from swallowing this town, on occasion. “My dashing good looks. My personality. Or the fact that you owe me. Don’t you?”

“I’ve never made a deal with you,” she says, because apparently she truly is that smart.

“I know that. But don’t you believe in having a little gratitude?” She doesn’t say a thing, or give up my skin. “If I were another thing, I could convince you to dance with me until your feet grind down to nubs and your bones turn to dust and everyone you love is dead.”

She grimaces, like I’ve just shown her a picture of the outcome. “I’m not really a dancer. I’d say no. And you can’t do that, so.”

I make the waves jump a little higher, and crash on the sand, over my feet and right up to hers. “I could take your firstborn and leave you with another and you wouldn’t notice until one day you had a child that couldn’t lie or travel across water or stand the smell of human blood.”

“That’s unoriginal,” she says. “Try again.”

I nudge a dead fish with my foot. There are fewer right now than there were a minute ago. The waves I called have taken some of them out. “I could make you a lady among my people. There are humans that would die for that opportunity, you know.”

She smiles into my skin. I could almost smile myself, which is when I realize that it will have been the first time I’ve smiled in over forty days. I can almost feel her smile pressed into my skin. It is right there, in front of my, and the ocean is right there, behind me.

“A lady,” she says. The waves crash behind me, through no work of my own. “As tempting as that sounds, I don’t want to see what your home is like, if this is what you’ve done to my town.”

“I’ve been bored,” I say. “My home is nothing like this. You’d be the only one to have seen it for dozens of years. What do you say to that?”

“What difference would that make? Would it stop you from doing this again?”

I smile. “What would stop me from doing this again is in your arms, but you don’t seem to want to give it up. If you come along with it, then we’ll both be happier. Or leave yourself behind, and I’ll make sure we remember your generosity.”

She looks down, where silvery fish bodies are being rolled by the froth and the brine into the waves. The beach looks like rippling, living metal. She says, “I know you can’t lie, but I’m sure you’re not telling the full truth.”

“I’d tell it if you asked for it,” I say. “You’re the human one here.”

More fish roll into the sea. One hits my ankle and stays there on the sand, staring up at me. The vitreous humour dried out a while ago, so it’s nothing but a dark socket and some scales. I can already tell where this is headed, because she’s human and I’ve been around them for months now, and for years before that. “You sound pretty human yourself,” she replies. “You look it too, without this on. I think you’re hardly something else anymore. There’s almost no point.”

I hope my kin push back and drown this town.

“I’m going to hold onto this for a while, just so you can’t do this again,” she says, turning away with my skin in her hands. Now that I’ve seen it again, I cannot easily let it out of my sight. “No more dead bodies. That’s the first rule.”

She leads me around to the front, past the beech tree, and if she hears the sea start to toss, she doesn’t say anything. I have no choice but to watch her keep the skin on her lap as she drives me into the police station, accompanied by applause from half the town.

Their clapping sounds almost like the tide coming in.

Art by Anna Dittmann

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Victims

One would think that there were something in my past, or my genetic make up, to indicate exactly what I’d do. But there was nothing. I was born a nobody, to a family that had no more respect for the Good Ones than most. Another white family that didn’t care about its Irish or Scottish roots, only that West Virginia voted right in the upcoming election. I lived hours away from city, and I use the term city loosely, because what city meant to us was that there was a movie theatre with more than two people working in it, and more than one Starbucks. Where I came from, people passed around stories about torrential rain blowing off roofs, or deer jumping tragically in front of bumpers, or having to chase goats away from the tractor innards on the lawn.

I came from dirt and I looked like it. My family is coloured like the land we live on, all brown and forgettable. I only thought West Virginia was beautiful when I got out of it. Up and took myself to Chicago, where the red brick buildings covered in so many fire escapes like parasites made me realize that you didn’t find that amount of green just anywhere outside of West Virginia. I didn’t regret it, and my family was proud to have me gone. I was always different, they started to tell me in letters and over the phone, only after I’d left. When I was in elementary school, bored waiting for the hot lunch program to fill me, I played games of checkers on a board made of salt and sugar packets, which I stuffed in my pockets for later. I never jumped at loud noises in the hedges, and whatever might have gotten caught in there, I gently hitched out of the brambles and set free. I was the only one to see what the crazy woman (Hilly- short for Hilda or Hillary, no one knew) saw, or to say I did, and steer her away from the strange creatures. I used to put out small ramekins of milk at night, for cats or ghosts I used to say. In return, mother said, nothing in the garden, and nothing in the fields, ever grew poorly or struggled, even through a particularly short season. I never lied, not even when a couple of short skirts in high school accused me of getting them drunk and figuring out for myself what was under those short skirts. I planted a mountain ash tree outside the house of a neighbour who had woken up with her hair in many knots, as deliberate as a sailor’s, as though someone had done it in the night. How grateful she was, my mother said, for the mountain ash, and how generous it was of her to gift me the money I used to buy my way to Chicago.

I bought the apartment, by the way. Not the ride. I rode in the back of the truck that came once a week to stock the convenience section of the gas station on the edge of our dust town.

Chicago wasn’t my first stop, actually. It was the last of many stops. I made stops in Columbus, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, down to Louisville, up to Milwaukee, and down again. I realized, over the trip, exactly how I related to people. It wasn’t something you always knew from living in a small town, but you got to know it fast when you moved around. Mostly, I got to know victims. I could pick them out in a crowd, whether I was trying to or not, and once I did, they flocked, like they sensed I could help them. It was like a buzzard’s love song, coming to me at once. I never wanted for a girlfriend.

I had a knack for picking them out, but they were really the ones that picked me.

In Columbus, Alina became sick to her stomach after drinking some sweet beer with a few boys in the park. She stuttered over her explanation, like I would be upset with her for spending time with other men. By the time she’d calmed down and had the tea I made for her from rose hips and salt, her stomach was right as rain, and she knew never to accept strange drinks from pretty boys again. She broke up with me two weeks later.

Gloria of Cincinnati loved to dance. She thought herself most beautiful when she was in the thrashing mass of people in a Latin club, and she had no reservations about who she danced with. We met and got together when she taught me how to meringue. We lasted as long as it took her to dance with someone else, which had happened before. She didn’t stop dancing, which hadn’t happened before. When I sprinkled some soil beneath her feet and took her one hand that wasn’t occupied by a man I refused to make eye contact with, and when I led her on a path of soil to the outdoors, and when I piggybacked her home because human legs aren’t meant to be used after four consecutive days of dancing, she learned that you can’t dance wherever you fancy. When I left Cincinnati, she was looking to open her own club on her family’s property. She had a steep learning curve.

There was one in every town, and not much variation: Elizabeth in Indianapolis who plucked an apple from a neighbour’s yard without asking dumped me three days after I plucked a poisoned splinter from the inside of her lip. Louisville Nuala jokingly traded her annoying baby sister for a face free from pimples, and found the crib empty and the window open when she went home that night. I gave her some SpectroGel, found her sister alive, unharmed, and only slightly dirty under a mound of soil in the ravine, and brought her back to her nursery, newly anointed at the windows and door with salt. The next weekend, Nuala and I were over. Milwaukee was no better. I didn’t mind teaching the lessons, though I could have done without the breakups. When I worked my way back up north, finally with a destination in mind, I swore off girlfriends, and swore instead on my talent.

Chicago is much better than it once was, but there are neighbourhoods still where it’s unwise to walk with earphones in, with your eyes down, with your head up, with your heels on and your brain still stewing in alcohol. Because those are the easiest to get, and mostly, it’s girls. The girls who aren’t in school, aren’t sober, aren’t at home every night, aren’t at home any nights, aren’t sure how to make a fist, aren’t above accepting a handout. It’s hard to turn some of them away, but I feel that, in the interest of keeping my life the way it is, I’d best skirt any police interference, or neighbourly interference, that comes with dating anyone below the age of consent. All the young ones just better wait a while before they make a hot and vulnerable mess of themselves.

We date. There are actual dates, with romance and everything. Then the work starts, because inevitably they all make Little Red Riding Hoods of themselves, talking to people and walking places they shouldn’t. Some of them are street smart, and even them, you can hardly imagine what stupid things they do. They accept strange gifts, strange invitations, take detours, hold hands, make promises. But they all come to me when they make a mistake. Unlike the maniac with the ax, I don’t command their eternal gratitude, or their loyalty. Once they’ve been freed of their own consequences and their lessons learned, they cast themselves off, hardly ever lasting more than a couple weeks. It isn’t the girls that are thankful, but I do get the occasional client that I haven’t dated, in need of a handful of salt, or to take a walk over running water, and they’re always pleased with my services.

I was visited by a police officer that had apparently seen two young women, and a young boy with his distraught mother and a black river tracing of veins in his neck, enter my apartment all in one week. The officer – a lethargic lump of a man with more hairs in his moustache than working neurons in his brain- asked to see the inside of my apartment, then asked some questions about what I was doing in Chicago (living), and where I worked (here, on my laptop) and who those girls were (friends), before he seemed to realize that there wasn’t much else to discover. He couldn’t see what I was doing in a day beside making lunch on the stove and listening to the radio quietly and being generally happy alone. He met my newest girlfriend on the way out, and because she hadn’t been victimized yet, and smiled, the officer didn’t come back.

Not yet, anyway. There’s always time for mistakes, the sort only I know how to fix.

That girlfriend lasted three more weeks. I haven’t dated anyone since, though there have been girls.

There have been girls and now there is Tate Shuter. In her face I can see that she has all kinds of street smarts. She has the accumulated street smarts of possibly every girl I’ve ever dated, and she’s never once considered putting any of that intellectual energy into school. She works at one of the bars I frequent, where Ava, who works with her, tells me she’s capricious and unfriendly. Tate walks home late, alone, and gets into shouting arguments with strangers on the street. She mouths off to anyone before she knows them. If someone leaves their wallet behind, there’s a good chance Tate will rummage through it before they’ve even had the chance to notice it’s missing and call the bar. She takes stupid risks, is what a lot of this amounts to, but I’ve known girls who take stupid risks smartly, and that’s Tate. It isn’t a problem, except that she’s now met me.

I knew the moment I first saw her that she would need my help eventually. Not for the fighting or the raising a fist, but when she finally ticks off the wrong person. They won’t get her with a backhand or a broken bottle, and she doesn’t know how to fix an argument she can’t fight her way out of. Ava keeps telling me what she knows about Tate, and I can see she thinks that I’ve chosen Tate, already. Tate never lies, because she never thinks she’s done anything wrong. That’s a cry for help, but she’s not really asking for it. Tate puts out milk for some cats she thinks lives in the alley, even though no one’s ever seen one. Tate climbed into the bushes beside the turnpike outside of the city proper because she heard a sound like an animal fighting, even though it could have been two hobos fighting or doing something else. Tate will get herself into trouble, I think, but I don’t quite want to help her. I want to prevent whatever it is I’ll treat her for, and we can live in my apartment with salt on the windowsills and we can buy an obnoxiously loud motorcycle, because I can tell that must be an aspiration for her. And we can put out milk at night and never try to figure out what drinks it, and watch the strawberries in our garden grow and blossom no matter the weather, because I can tell it’s something that would please both of us.

Tate catches me watching her stack glasses and says, “Don’t tell me it’s dangerous. I already know that.”

I say, “I wasn’t about to tell you that.” Though I want to say “here are all the other ways you can be careful, so I never have to help you.”

But I know I will, so I let it slide.

Art by Frederico Infante

Text by Lucie MacAulay

As Soon As You Can Walk In The Sun Again

I must, before we go any further, make it clear that I do not trust, or indeed like, night crawlers.

This is not a rule. There is no antecedent, though there is precedent. I have never had reason to like night crawlers, and they have given me much reason to believe them to be deceptive, deceitful, cruel, easily given to malice and mischief, and not much of a contribution to our world.

Seeing a night crawler within my workplace is not unnatural, and on this particular day, when I looked up at the ringing bell on the front door and was hit unkindly with a night crawler’s pleased smile, I did not feel any more kindly or generous than usual. He wore full sleeves and a jacket beside, though it was late spring and more than warm outdoors. That was one of the simplest ways to spot a night crawler. There was rarely someone so dressed up on a summer’s day as someone who was uncomfortable in the sun. I had been in a good mood until then, believing that perhaps the sun would have driven night crawlers away from the shop today.

Had he not been a night crawler, I cannot think of a single thing that might have endeared me to him anyway. He did not enter my shop curiously so much as he did deign to step into it. His eyes as they scrutinized the shelves implied I should feel lucky they were doing so. He might have been admiring himself in the polished wood, or appreciating the number of books present. Night crawlers like their audiences large. He touched his fingers to one of the tables, as though to check for dust or to stake a claim to it and all furnishings and space around it. The closer he came to the counter, the clearer it was that he was a night crawler. There was a flower in one of the buttonholes of his shirt; his kind always wore flowers for luck or protection, as though they needed it. Sometimes they used their flowers to barter with the rest of us, like a flower might be adequate compensation for whatever they were about to put one through. My heart and head immediately distrusted him.

“Lea,” the night crawler said. He had the accent of a night crawler, the one that made my name, though pronounced correctly, sound incredulous to say. “How are you on this day? It is nearly summer. You must be happy about that.”

I did prefer summer to any other time. I preferred the solitude of those hot months; no one wanted to stay inside and peruse books when there was sun to be had, and those that were forced inside for whatever reason rarely interrupted my reading. The bookstore might have suffered, but I did not. I did not know how the night crawler had come to know this, but he had.      

“Is it a good day?” the night crawler said again.

I glanced down at his feet. They were bare. “It was,” I said to him. “How may I help you, sir?”

“You can help me in many ways, if you would like to,” the night crawler said, with a truly sinful amount of lasciviousness. “Standing there and listening to me talk is one way.”

“I have only so much time, sir,” I said. The minutes were ticking away as slowly as they ever had done. I sent a quick request to the man upstairs that he might hurry along their process. “To be completely honest with you,” I went on, “Within the day I can manage about an hour of conversation with any given person, possibly less for speaking with a night crawler. If you could gallop ahead to the point and your reason for being here, please?”

The night crawler let his hands relax in his pockets. He might have just fallen out of a yacht, and maybe expected to be falling into one. His complete lack of vexation made me more upset than his slow moving progress. If he had only looked as unhappy, I might have been buoyant on a cloud of agreeability. The night crawler crossed his feet at the ankles and leaned against my counter. I had never seen one so graceful. “I would like you to consider doing me a favour. The answer is entirely up to you, of course, but I would just like to emphasize that you stand to lose nearly nothing. I understand I must earn your trust, but at the end of today, I hope you will change your mind. I hope you will think me a good investment.”

I thanked our dear lord that he had provided no other trying customers for me on this day that I might have spent my patience on. “I am sure you care about my opinion only as much as I care about yours, if that.”

“I am sure that there is someone who cares equally for both our opinions, and whose opinion I care for and you might care for as well.” His smile was a strange thing to behold. I had seen many self-satisfied night crawlers, but never had their self-satisfaction been so directed at me. He looked as pleased as any rattlesnake or clever rodent.

“Oh? I can think of no one with whom we might both be acquainted,” I said, with as much icy civility as I could.

“Then good for you for having worked it out already. You are as smart as I’ve been told,” the night crawler said. He stood up a little more and squared his shoulders. “I still have a proposition to make. I understand you might know how to grant a new night crawler the ability to show themselves in the day sooner than nature allows. Is this true?”

I clamped my mouth shut quite quickly. There were always rumours of such things flying about. Someone was always hinting here or there that they knew a way to change the nature of night crawlers. Often times, these were people looking to scam night crawlers, or those people associated with them. Other times, they sympathized with night crawlers and were looking for a way to ingratiate themselves in the night crawler world. I thought it must have been hard for night crawlers to avoid the temptation to follow fraudulent or truthful leads. They were always looking for ways to be in our world, outside of the nighttime, faster than their physical make up allowed. I am sure that if God intended them to walk among us before their base impulses were ready to allow them, then he would have made them impenetrable to the conditions of our world more quickly. I said, “How many others have you heard have this ability, and how many have you already tried to coax into assisting you?”

“It is not for me, of course, but for a friend,” the night crawler said, as though I might be endeared by the power of friendship. He tapped his fingernail on the counter top. I was immediately sickened. It was a distinctly nighttime sound, like the tapping of claws on a window. I had not been able to hear it for a while without the feeling of fear descending upon me.

“I was not aware night crawlers fidgeted,” I said.

He smoothly ceased tapping the counter top- I did not let him see my relief, and tried surreptitiously to dab the sweat at my temple with my shirt sleeve -  and leaned once more against the wood.

“If it is for your friend that you require my services, perhaps your friend should come here instead,” I proposed, and I watched his face to see if that impossible proposition would perturb him.

He smiled as though we had created a private joke between the two of us just now. “For the moment, my friend might only travel at night, or with particular protection,” he said lowly, leaning forward, conspiratorially. “Though I did notice my umbrella was missing this afternoon, so my friend might be travelling the streets now. I might mention that it would be in your best interests to help and- oh, do not think that is a threat. I truly mean your best interests. We might have the same interests. What a beautiful piano, by the way.” This last bit was said with a nod to the keyboard wedged between two bookcases. There was a sign on it warning patrons that they need not act upon any impulse to play it. It had not been played for several months, and there was almost no one I would want to play on it ever again.

“I can’t imagine how any of our interests might overlap,” I replied. “So far, I am seeing no reason to trust you any more that I should trust any other night crawler that comes looking for a way to serve his own self interests. I have seen night crawlers serve their self-interests before, and I have been a victim of it. If only you were all petty thieves, I might still be inclined to help you. But you should take your business elsewhere.”

The night crawler took a step toward the piano. My feet itched to take me between him and the instrument. They were both cold and pale as the evening light began to drain from the shop. Night crawlers were most comfortable at night; I did not want him to make himself too comfortable in the bookshop. “I think you would not want that. I think you would want to be the one to help me,” he said. “I know you care for rare and beautiful books. I have done something similar, though not with a book, and she certainly came to me of her own volition.”

I put my hands down on the counter so firmly that the glass under it rattled. “Do not tell me whatever crimes you might have committed, or any deeds I would not approve of. Do not come into my workplace and involve me in your schemes. You are welcome to leave, now.”

The night crawler held a hand over the piano keys. “But I haven’t been helped yet, and you have not even seen her. She missed you while she was gone, and she misses you still, every day.”

I felt the cold descend on me and continue to descend, as though it were a current of water, pushing and pulling at me. “I can think of only one person who-“

The bell at the door rang, as it rarely did so late in the day. My daughter came in first, then the umbrella, which she closed immediately. She wore the same green coat I had last seen her in, and the same boots, though both looked darker now against her pale skin. She came and put her hand on the night crawler’s arm. A ring glittered on her finger and she smiled while my heart jerked erratically back to life.

“Oh, papa,” she said, “I hope he hasn’t been too much of a nuisance. David talks and talks, but his ideas are a good investment, I think.”

“Like myself,” David said. Never had I seen a snake smile wider. “I was getting around to telling your father that you had already decided so, and we plan to make it official as soon as you can walk in the sun again.”

“Oh, papa.” My daughter held her umbrella against her chest. “Please. It’s summer, after all. You don’t want me to miss all of it, do you?”

Art by Rovina Cai

Text by Lucie MacAulay