The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 19

TIM PRATT From Around Here

I arrived on a ferry made of gull cries and good ocean fog, and stepped from the limnal world into Jack London Square, down by Oakland's fine deep-water port. I walked, pre-dawn, letting my form coalesce from local expectations, filtered through my own habits and preferences. I stopped at a plate glass window downtown by the 12th Street train station and took a look at myself: dreads and dark skin, tall but not epic tall, clothes a little too raggedy to make robbing me worth a mugger's time. I walked on, feeling the thrums and creaks of a city waking up or going to sleep or just keeping on around me. I strolled past the houses of sex offenders, one-time killers with high blood pressure, altruists, guilty activists, the good-hearted, the fearful, and all the rest of the usual human lot. I was looking for the reek of the deeply crazy, the kind of living crack in a city that can swallow whole neighbourhoods and poison the well of human faith in a place utterly. The kind that could shatter lives on an afternoon spree or corrode them slowly over decades.

After a while, I found a street like that, and then I went to get some breakfast.

It was the kind of diner where you sit at a counter and the menus are sticky with the last customer's pancake syrup and you hope for the best. There were no other customers — I was between morning rushes, which made me lonely — and when the waitress came to take my order she was frazzled, like nobody should look at five in the morning. I said, "I don't have any money, but maybe we can work something out." Either she was from around here, and I'd get some breakfast, or she wasn't, and I'd get thrown out.

She got that faraway look like they do, and said, "Let's work something out."

I nodded. "Where you from?"

"Grew up in Temecula."

"Ah. The Inland Empire. Pretty black walnut trees down that way."

She smiled, the way people do when you prod them into a nice memory.

People have different ideas about what «home» means. For her, home meant a good chunk of California, at least, since Temecula was down south a ways. I'd never been there, but I'd probably go eventually. For some people, home just means one town, and if they stray from there, they feel like foreigners in strange territory. For others, home is a neighbourhood, or a block, or a street, or one room in one house where they grew up. And for some, home is nowhere, and me, I have a hard time talking to people like that.

"What can I offer you?" I said. My stomach rumbled. I'd never eaten before, at least, not with these teeth, this tongue, this stomach. I couldn't even remember what food tasted like. Things of the body are the first things I forget.

She told me, and I knew it was true, because I wasn't talking to her conscious mind, the part that's capable of lies and self-deception. I was talking to the deep down part of her, the part that stays awake at night, worrying, and making bargains with any gods she can imagine. She had a son, and he was in some shitty public school, and she was afraid he'd get hurt, beat up, hassled by the gangs, maybe even join a gang, though he was a good kid, really.

"Okay," I said. "Give me breakfast, and I'll make sure your son is safe."

She said yes, of course, and maybe that seems like a lopsided bargain, keeping a kid safe through years of school in exchange for a plate of eggs and sausage and toast and a glass of OJ, but if it's in my power to give, and doesn't cost more than I can afford, I don't worry much about parity.

The waitress snapped out of that deep down state and took my order, knowing she'd pay for it, not sure why, but probably not fretting about it — and for the first time in however long, she wasn't worried about her boy getting stabbed in the school parking lot.

Breakfast was fine, too. Tasted as good as the first meal always does, I imagine.

The neighbourhood I settled on wasn't in the worst part of Oakland, or the best — it was on the east side of Lake Merritt, maybe a mile from the water, in among a maze of residential streets that mingled million-dollar homes and old stucco apartment complexes. I walked there, over hills and curving streets with cul-de-sacs, through little roundabouts with towering redwoods in the middle, tiny triangular parks in places where three streets all ran into one another, and past terraced gardens and surprise staircases providing steep shortcuts down the hills. A good place, or it could have been, but there was a canker along one street, spider webbing out into the neighbourhoods nearby, blood and crying and death somewhere in the near past, and lurking in the likely future.

First thing I needed was a place to stay. I picked a big house with a neat lawn but no flowers, out on the edge of the street that felt bad. I knocked, wondering what day it was, if I was likely to find anyone home at all. An old man opened the door and frowned. Was he suspicious because I was black, because I was smiling, because of bad things that had happened around here? "Yes?"

"I'm just looking for a room to rent for a few weeks," I said. "I can make it worth your while, if you've got the space."

"Nope," he said, and closed the door in my face.

Guess he wasn't from around here.

I went a little closer to the bad part, passing a church with a sign out front in Korean, and was surprised to see people sitting on their stoops drinking beers, kids yelling at one another in fence-hidden backyards, people washing their cars. Must be a Saturday or Sunday, and the weather was indeed springtime-fine, the air smelling of honeysuckle, but I'd expected a street withbars on the windows, people looking out through their curtains, the whole city-under-siege bit. This place pulsed with nastiness, the way an infected wound will radiate heat, and I knew other people couldn't feel the craziness the way I could, but shouldn't there have been some external sign? I wasn't sensing some hidden moral failings here — this was a place where violence had been done.

I looked for a likely house, and picked a small adobe place near a corner, where an elderly Chinese woman stood watering her plants. I greeted her in Cantonese, which delighted her, and it turned out she was from around here, so it only took a few minutes to work something out. She took me inside, showed me the tiny guest room, and gave me a spare key, zipping around the house in a sprightly way, since I'd gotten rid of her rheumatism and arthritis in exchange for bed and board. "We'll just tell everyone you're my nephew," she said. "By marriage. Ha ha ha!" I laughed right along with her, kissed her cheek — she was good people — and went out onto the street.

I strolled down the sidewalk, smiling and nodding at everyone I met. The street was long and curving, cut off at either end by a couple of larger cross streets. There were some apartment houses near one end, with younger people, maybe grad students or starving artists, and some nice bigger houses where families lived. The residents were pure Oakland variety — Koreans, Chinese, whites, blacks, Latinos of various origins. Even the cars on the sidewalks were diverse, with motorcycles, beaters held together with primer and care, SUVs, even a couple of sports cars. I liked it. It felt neighbourly. But it also felt wrong, and I couldn't pinpoint the badness. It was all around me. I was in it, too close to narrow it down further.

A pretty woman, probably half-Japanese, half-black — I'm good at guessing ethnicities and extractions, and the look is a unique one — sat on the steps of a three-storey apartment house with decorative castle crenulations on the roof, sipping an orange cream soda from a bottle and reading a slim book. There was something about her — ah, right, I got it. I was in a body again, and she was beautiful, and I was attracted.

"Afternoon," I said, walking up to the steps and nodding a greeting. "You know Miss Li?"

"Down on the corner?" she said. "Sure."

"I'm her nephew. I'll be staying with her for a while, maybe a few weeks, while I get settled."

"Nephew, huh?" She looked up at me speculatively. "By marriage, I'm guessing."

"You guessed right," I said, and extended my hand.

"I'm Sadie." She shook my hand. "Welcome to the neighbourhood." There was no jolt of electricity, but she wasn't giving me go-away vibes, either, so I gave it a try.

"Are you from around here?"

"Me? No. I'm from Chicago, born and raised. Just came out here for school."

I grinned wider. I couldn't have a dalliance with someone from around here — it would be too easy to steer them, compel them, without even intending to, too easy to chat with their deep down parts by accident. But she had a different home, so we could talk, like people. I was a person now, for the moment, more or less. "I could use someone to show me around the neighbourhood, help get me oriented."

She shrugged. "What do you want to know?"

I sat down, not too close. "Oh, I don't know." How about "Why aren't you terrified? Don't you sense the presence of something monstrous in this place?" "Who's that guy?" I pointed at a young Latino man tinkering on a motorcycle in the garage across the street.

"Hmm. I think his name's Mike? I don't really know him. He goes on motorcycle rides most weekends."

"Okay. How about him?" This time I pointed at a big man in an unseasonable brown coat, walking up the hill dragging a wire grocery cart behind him. He was middle-aged, and had probably been a real bruiser in his prime.

"That's Ike Train," she said. "Nice guy, but kind of intense. He's a plumber, and he fixes stuff for people in the neighbourhood for free sometimes, but he likes to hang around and talk for a while afterward, and he gets bad BO when he sweats, so not a lot of people take him up on it. He's got a deal with whoever owns my building, though, and he does all the plumbing stuff here."

"How about her?" I said. A woman in sunglasses, attractive in a blonde-and-brittle-and-gym-cultured way, was walking a little yip-ping dog.

"Martha." Sadie rolled her eyes. "Put your trash cans out on the curb a day early and you'll catch hell from her. I think she's in a hurry for this neighbourhood to finish gentrifying. So why all the questions?"

"I just like talking to you," I said, which was the truth, but not the whole truth. "Asking about people passing by seemed like a good way to do that."

She laughed. "You never told me your name."

Why not? No one ever even remarked on the name — except to say it was weird — unless I was on a Pacific island, and even then, it meant so many things in so many different languages, no one ever guessed. "I'm Reva," I said.

"Interesting name. Where you from?"

"I was born on a little island in the Pacific," I said. "You wouldn't have heard of it. But I didn't stay there long. I've lived all over since then." I thought this was going well, but we were reaching the point where the conversation could founder on the rocks of nothing-in-common. "You said you're here for school? What do you —»

Someone shouted "Sadie!" A short man with wispy hair, dressed like an IRS agent from the 1950s — black horn-rimmed glasses, white shirt, narrow black tie — bustled over from the house across the street, an ugly boxy two-storey with heavy drapes in the windows. He reached our side of the street and said "Vocabulary word: 'Obstruction'."

"Oh, Christ," Sadie muttered.

"Something that gets in the way," he continued. "Another: 'Obstinate'. Unreasonably stubborn; pig-headed."

"The back bumper of my car's only in front of your driveway by an inch, Oswald," she said. "The car in front of me is too far back, I'm sorry, it's not like it's actually in your way."

"In my way, and in the red," Oswald said, not even glancing at me, staring at Sadie with damp-looking eyes magnified behind thick lenses. "The police have been notified."

"Whatever," Sadie said. "Fine, I'll move it." She stood up, glared at him, looked at me apologetically, and walked over to a well-worn black compact that was, maybe, poking two inches into the little driveway that led to Oswald's garage. She got in and drove away.

I nodded at Oswald. "Beautiful day," I said.

He squinted at me, then turned and went back to his house, up the steps, and through the front door.

I glanced at the book Sadie had left on the steps. It was a monograph on contraceptive methods in the ancient world. I wondered what she was studying. A few moments later she came walking up the sidewalk and returned to her place on the steps. "Sorry," she said. "Oswald's a dick. He never even opens his garage. As far as I know he doesn't even have a car." She shook her head.

"Every neighbourhood has a nasty, petty person or two."

"I guess. Most people here are pretty nice. I've only been here a year, but I know a lot of people well enough to say hello to, and Oswald's the only one I really can't stand. Him and his 'vocabulary words'. Somebody told me he's an English teacher, or used to be, or something. Can you imagine being stuck in a class with him?"

"I'd rather not think about it. So Am I someone you'll say hello to in the future?"

"You haven't given me a reason not to yet," she said. "Look, it's nice meeting you, but I've got studying to do."

"What subject?"

"I'm getting my master's in human sexuality. Which, today, means reading about how ancient Egyptians used crocodile shit and sour milk as spermicide."

I wrinkled my nose. "Did it work?"

"Actually, yeah. But it can't have been very much fun." She rose, picked up her drink, and went into the apartment building.

I love a woman who can toss off a good exit line, I thought.

The next morning I ran into Sadie, and she invited me to brunch at a cafe down near the lake. We ate eggs and drank mimosas on the restaurant's patio, where bougainvillea vines hung all around us from pillars and trellises. She wanted to know things about me, and I was game, telling her a few stories from my travels. She was from Chicago, so I told her about the month I'd spent there, leaving out my battle in the train yard with a golem made of hog meat. I told her a bit about my months working on a riverboat casino on the Mississippi, though I didn't mention the immortal singer in the piano bar who'd once been a pirate, and wanted to start plundering again, before I convinced him otherwise.

"So you're basically a drifter," she said, sipping her second mimosa.

"We prefer to be called 'people of no fixed address,'" I said.

"How long do you think you'll stay here?"

"Oh, I don't know," I said, leaning across the table, looking at her face, which seemed to fit some ideal of faces I'd never before imagined. "I'm like anybody else, I guess. Just looking for a place to call home."

She threw a napkin at me, and it bounced off my nose, and I thought I might be falling in love.

Sadie had to study, so I spent the rest of the lovely Sunday meeting people in the neighbourhood. It's not hard, once you overcome their initial reluctance to talk to strangers, and hearing I was Miss Li's nephew made most folks open up, too — the lady was well-liked. I visited the closest park, just a few blocks away, where some guys from the neighbourhood were playing basketball. I got in on the game, and didn't play too well, and they liked me fine. I got invited to a barbecue for the next weekend. I helped an older guy wash his car, and then spent an hour with Mike, who was rebuilding the carburettor on his motorcycle — I didn't know much about machines, but I was able to hand him tools and talk about California scenic highways. I chatted with mothers pushing strollers, young kids riding scooters, surly teens, and old people on afternoon walks.

And every time I got someone alone, if they were from around here, I talked to their deep down parts, and I asked them what was wrong with this place.

I didn't find out anything unusual. Oh, there were crimes — this was a big city, after all, even if a residential neighbourhood. There were occasional break-ins, and a mugging or two, though none right around here. A couple of car thefts. But nothing poisonously, unspeakably bad. Maybe my senses were out of whack, or I was picking up the irrelevant psychic residue of some long-ago atrocity.

I have trouble adapting my mind to the shortness of human time scales, sometimes.

It was late afternoon when I went past Ike Train's place. He had a tidy little house, and a bigger yard than most. His porch was shadowed, but I could see the big man sitting on a creaking wooden swing, messing with something in his hands. I was going to hello the house, but Ike hailed me first. "You're new!" he shouted. "Come over!"

"Mr Train," I said, delighted, because I do love meeting people, especially ones who love meeting me. "I've heard about you." I passed through the bushes, which overgrew his walk, and went up to his porch. He held a little man-shaped figure made of twisted wire and pipe cleaners in his hands. He set the thing aside and rose, reaching out to shake my hand. His grip was strong, but not a macho show-off strong, just the handshake of a man who wrestled with pipe wrenches on a regular basis.

"You're staying with Miss Li," he said, sitting down, and gesturing for me to take a cane chair by his front door. "Her nephew?"

"I'm Reva. More of a grand-nephew from the other side of the family, but yeah."

"What brings you to town?" He went back to twisting the wire, giving the little man an extra set of arms, like a Hindu deity.

"I've been travelling for a few years," I said. "Thought I might try settling here." Maybe I would, for a while, if I could find a way to get rid of the bad thing making the whole street's aura stink. Being in a body again was nice, and even on our short acquaintance there was something about Sadie I wanted to know better, like she was a flavour I'd been craving for ages.

"It's a nice enough place," Ike said.

"So tell me," I said, leaning forward. "Are you from around here?"

Ike's hands went still, the wire forgotten. "Oh, yeah," he said, and his voice was different now, slower and thicker. "This is my home. Nobody knows how hard I work to keep it clean, how filthy it gets. The whole fucking city is circling the drain. Dirty, nasty, rotten, wretched…"

I frowned. That was his deep down self talking, but it didn't sound like him. "Ike, what do you —»

"We have to twist their heads all the way around," he said, his voice oddly placid, and turned the little wire man in his hands, twisting its round loop of a head tighter and tighter until it snapped and came off in his fingers. "Break them and sweep them up. Clean up the trash, keep things clean. Yeah. I'm from around here."

"Ike," I said, careful, because there were sinkholes in this man's mind, and I didn't know how deep they were, or what might be hidden inside them. "Maybe you and me can work something out."

"No," he said, and crushed the little man. "There's nothing to work out. Everything's already been worked out." He stared at me, through me, and his eyes were wet with tears. "There's nothing you can offer me."

I stood up and stepped back. He was from around here, I was talking to his deep down self, but Ike wouldn't work something out with me. I didn't understand this refusal. It was like water refusing to freeze in winter, like leaves refusing to fall in autumn, a violation of everything I understood about natural law. "Don't worry about it, Ike. Let's just forget we had this talk, huh?"

Ike looked down at the broken wire thing in his hands. "Nice meeting you, ah, buddy," he said. "Say hi to Miss Li for me."

I headed back down the street towards Miss Li's, thinking maybe Ike was crazy. Maybe he had something to do with the badness here. Maybe he was the badness. I needed to know more. I asked Miss Li about him, over dinner that night, but she didn't know much about Ike. He'd lived on the street longer than anybody, and his parents had owned his house before him. He was seriously from around here. So why had talking to his deep down self been so strange and disturbing?

"Hey, Reva," Sadie said when I answered the door. "You busy?"

It was Monday, and the street was quiet, most everybody off about their business. "Not for you," I said, leaning against the doorjamb.

"Could you come up to my place and help me with something?"

I grinned, and grinning felt good; I'd forgotten that about bodies, that genuinely smiling actually caused chemical changes and improved the mood. "I'm at your service." I pulled the door shut and followed Sadie down the steps and up the street. I didn't bother locking the door — nobody would rob the place while I was staying there.

"What do you know about spiders?" she said, leading me into the lobby of the apartment building. The floor was black tile with gold flecks, and there was a wall of old-fashioned brass and glass mailboxes. I liked it. The place had personality.

"Hmm. Eight legs. Mythologically complex — sometimes tricksters, sometimes creators, sometimes monsters, depending on who you ask."

She looked at me, half-smiling, as if she wasn't sure if I was joking. She opened a door, revealing an elevator with a sliding grate. We went inside, and she rattled the gate closed. Back in the old days there would have been a uniformed attendant to run the elevator. This must have been a classy place in its day. "Can you recognize poisonous spiders? I've heard there are some nasty ones out here, black widows and brown recluses, stuff like that. There's a spider in my tub and it's freaking me out a little."

"It's probably gone by now, right?" The elevator rattled and hummed as it ascended.

"I don't think it can get out. It keeps trying to climb the sides of the tub and sliding back down."

She was standing a little closer to me than she had to. I wondered if I should read anything into that. "So you want me to get rid of it?"

"If it was a snake or a rat or something, I'd do it myself. Most things like this don't bother me. But spiders…" She shuddered. "Especially when I don't know if they're poisonous or not. I heard the bite of a brown recluse can make your skin rot away. Bleah. Vicious little things."

I shrugged. "They're just trying to get by. Besides, there aren't any brown recluses in California."

She frowned. "But everybody says there are."

"It's a common misconception. Only a handful of brown recluses have ever been found here, and they all came with shipments from the south or midwest. They aren't native anywhere west of the Rockies. Hundreds of people go to their doctors in California every year saying they've been bitten by recluses, but the bites are always from some other bug, or they're just rashes or something." The fear of brown recluse spiders in California was an oddly persistent one. I'd once seen a billboard in San Francisco, with a several-million-times-life-size depiction of a fiddleback spider, and a strident warning in Spanish. People do tend toward the fearful, even without cause.

Sadie gave me a new, appraising look. "No shit? You're, like, a spider expert or something?"

I laughed. How could I explain that I just had a really good sense for where things came from? "Nah, just something I read about. Anyway, whatever kind of spider it is, I'll take care of it for you. There are lots of black widows out here. Not to mention scorpions."

"My hero," she said, and touched my arm. It was the first time I'd been touched in this body, other than a handshake and Miss Li's friendly embrace, and I had to stop myself from taking Sadie in my arms right then. Having a body again was wonderful. Why had I gone without for so long?

She let me into her apartment, which was furnished in student-poverty-chic, mismatched furniture and beat-up bookcases overflowing with texts, prints of fine art hung alongside real art of the student-show variety. The apartment was big, though, for a single person in Oakland, with a nice sized living room, a little kitchen separated by a counter, and a short hallway leading to other doors. "This is a nice place."

"I know!" she said, and I liked how sincere she sounded. "It's crazy cheap, too. I looked at a lot of apartments when I first moved here, and they were all way more than I could afford, but this one's half as much as other apartments this size. I've got a bedroom and an office. I guess the owner doesn't live around here, and doesn't realize how rents have gone up these past few years? I don't know, but it's my good luck."

"You don't know the landlord?" I disapprove of absentee landlords on principle.

"Nah, I just mail rent checks to a PO box. There's a tenant on the first floor who gets even cheaper rent than the rest of us for managing the place, making sure leases get signed, interviewing people, all that. If she ever moves out, I might try to get that gig. It can be a lot of work, though — there's a lot of turnover here. Because it's so cheap, we get plenty of people who are down on their luck, and some them just take off without paying their last month's rent. I guess that's what deposits are for, though. Two or three girls have skipped out since I moved in, just leaving their stuff here. Not that they had much. They were all on drugs, I heard. Sometimes this place is like a halfway house."

"Huh," I said, thinking. "How are the pipes? You said Ike Train is the plumber here?"

"Yeah. I don't know if he's a lousy plumber or if the place just has shitty pipes, but it seems like he's over here all the time — somebody's always got a leak or a bad drain or something. But, hey, at these prices, we don't expect perfection. Anyway, speaking of bathrooms…" She led the way down the hallway, opening the door onto a nice big bathroom, with an old claw-footed tub.

I looked into the bathtub. "That," I said, "is a daddy longlegs." Specifically a Spermaphora, but why show off?

"Aren't they, like, the most poisonous spider in the world? But their fangs are too short to bite humans?"

"Another myth," I said. "They're pretty much harmless. They can bite, but it wouldn't do much to you." I reached down, picked up the spider by one of its comically long legs, and walked over to the open window. I set the spider on the sill, and it scurried off down the exterior wall. I looked back at Sadie, who stood by the door, looking at me.

I hadn't been in a body for long, but I knew that look. "You're not afraid of spiders at all, are you?"

"I needed some excuse to get you up here," she said, taking a step toward me. "I wasn't sure if you liked me, but the way you looked at me in the elevator…"

"I guess I'm not subtle." But I was lucky.

"That's okay. Games can be fun, but there's nothing wrong with the direct approach, either." She stepped in close and kissed me, putting the palm of her hand on my chest, over my heartbeat. I kissed back, my body responding in that wonderful way that bodies do.

"Mmm," I said after a moment. "So you're a student of human sexuality, huh?"

"Sure," she said. "But there are some things you can't get from a book."

Afterwards, as she brewed tea in her kitchen and I sat, feeling loose-limbed and glorious, on a stool at the counter, she said, "Look, I don't want you to get the wrong idea…" She had her back turned to me, and that was too bad, because she wasn't saying anything she couldn't say to my face.

"Don't worry," I said. "It was what it was. And it was very nice. But I don't think it gives me a claim on you. Which doesn't mean I'd object if you wanted to do it again."

Now she turned, and she looked relieved. "Sometimes I just want to be with somebody. You seem nice, and god you're pretty, but I'm not looking for a boyfriend or anything right now. I'm so busy with school, you know?"

That gave me a little pang, I admit, because of course I wanted to be seen as irresistible boyfriend material, even though I know I'm no more constant than a bank of fog blowing through. But she was being honest with me, at least. A lot of bullshit in this world could be avoided if people just told the truth, however inconvenient it might be. And maybe, if I could get rid of the nastiness on this block, I could settle down here, and become more constant, and win Sadie over. I was pretty low-maintenance. Hadn't I rambled around this world enough? Maybe it was time to pick a home and stick with it for a while.

I had an idea about the source of the badness here now, anyway. It's not like I'm a great detective or anything, but I can see how things fit together, when it's right in front of my face. I wondered why no one else had ever figured it out.

"Want to go out again sometime?" I asked. "I haven't taken in much of the local scene yet."

"Sure," she said, placing a cup of steaming tea on the counter before me. She looked me right in the eye. "We can do something this weekend. Or we could just stay in all weekend having sex. I've got toys in my bedroom I didn't even show you."

My heart went pitter-pat, and other parts of me did other things. Having a body was so wonderful, I wasn't sure what had ever possessed me to leave my last one.

Ike Train's back yard had a nine foot wooden privacy fence, overgrown with vines that made it seem even higher. The lock on his gate was nothing special, though, so I popped it open pretty easily that night. He had a big garden back there, lots of tomato plants, the earth all churned up. I checked his back windows again — still dark, and he was probably deeply asleep, like the rest of the block. I found a shovel and a likely mound of earth, near the back fence, and started digging. I didn't worry about Ike waking up and noticing me. I wasn't going to get noticed unless I wanted to be. I was in a body, but that didn't mean I'd given up all my powers.

Ike had dug a good grave. I went about five feet down before I found the girl, wrapped in cloth sacks and sprinkled liberally with some kind of lye-based drain cleaner, though not enough to dissolve her body completely — that takes a lot of lye, even more than a plumber would have on hand. She was mostly just bones, at this point. I couldn't unwrap the burlap completely, because the lye could have burned my skin; that was one disadvantage to having a body. How many other girls were buried here? Lonely women with no families, women with drug problems who jumped at the cheap rents in the apartment house on the corner, who opened their doors to that nice plumber Ike Train and found out he wasn't so nice after all. I wondered if he lured them to his house, or somehow took their bodies out of the apartment building. I couldn't imagine how he'd gotten away with something like this — in a city, someone is always awake, and witnesses are a problem — but serial killers can be lucky motherfuckers.

Well, Ike didn't have good luck anymore. Now he had me instead.

"Here's my problem, Ike," I said, after he woke up, and realized he couldn't free himself. He tried to yell at me, but he was gagged pretty good, and still woozy from the chemicals I'd knocked him out with, and it was just muffled noise. I leaned back in the chair I'd dragged over by the couch where he was bound. "I could just call the cops, and let them know about the bodies in the backyard. I can be really convincing, especially if the cops are from around here. You'd get arrested and put away for a long time. But that would be bad for the neighbourhood. People here don't realize there's a monster like you in their midst. Everybody knows you. You've been in most of the houses on this street at once time or another. To find out you've been killing women and burying them in your back garden…" I shook my head. "Most of these people wouldn't trust anyone ever again. There'd be news reporters all over. Property values would plummet. People would move away. I'd hate to see that happen."

He made furious noises. I removed the gag. He tried to bite off my fingers. I couldn't blame him. "Make a fuss and I'll knock you out again," I said. "You've got lots of nice chemicals under your sink I can mix up."

His voice was low and intense. "You don't understand. This used to be a nice place, when I was a kid. Now all that trash lives on this street. Spies, chinks, whores and junkies. Jabbering away in Spanish and Chinese, trying to cadge change off people so they can by drugs, all that bullshit. This whole place is a toilet now. I wish I could flush them all."

I raised my eyebrow. "What about black folks? Want to flush us too?"

"I got nothing against black people," he said, wounded, as if I'd slandered him. "And there's decent Chinese people, like your aunt, and some Mexicans I don't mind, but the kind of garbage that rents rooms down at the castle apartments, they're just worthless, they —»

"So killing them has got nothing to do with your sexual gratification, then?"

"That's sick," Ike spat. "You're disgusting. I do what I do to keep this neighbourhood nice, to keep it safe. A piece of shit like you couldn't possibly understand that."

"You're no prize yourself, Ike. You know it's all over now, right? You're finished."

"You can't mess with me," he said, his eyes shining, as they had when I'd spoken to his deep down parts before. "This is my place."

"It's my place now. And you don't have a home here anymore." I put the rag of chemicals over his face again until he passed out.

I held a hammer in my hand with every intention of caving in Ike Train's skull, then disposing of his body out in the desert somewhere, but I couldn't do it. He was a person. I'd expected a monster, and yes, Ike was a monster too, but I couldn't see past his humanity. In my more natural state, without a body, I would have found executing Ike Train as simple as flicking an ant off a tablecloth. But for now I was wearing a human form, and Ike was one of my tribe, albeit a crazy, dangerous one. I couldn't smash his head in, not if I wanted to keep functioning in this body. Such an act would tear me apart. I put the hammer down.

Still, Ike had to die, and disappear, if I wanted to save this neighbourhood from imploding. They could never know this monster had been in their midst — such a revelation would poison the wellspring of camaraderie and human kindness I'd found here. I had to do something fast, though. He was a big man, and he would wake up soon, and I couldn't bear talking to him again.

Sometimes, back in the old days, I'd watched people drown, disappearing beneath churning waves. Losing those people hurt me — diminished me — but it felt more natural, somehow, with the elements taking their lives, instead of a human hand.

I'm not stupid. I know killing is killing, even if some natural phenomenon is the murder weapon. If you cast someone into a churning sea, and they die, you've murdered them, even if it's the water that ends their lives. But maybe you can sleep a little easier, since the blood isn't on your hands. Maybe.

Ike Train was a man who prepared for things. There were several gas cans in the garage, by his emergency generator. They sloshed full when I picked them up.

Fortunately, Ike didn't wake, even when I piled pillows around the perimeter of the living room and doused them with fuel. The smoke would kill him before the fire touched him. A mercy, and more than he'd offered his victims. But I'm not about vengeance. I'm about finding bad homes and making them good again.

When I felt tears on my face, I tried to believe they were just stinging from the gas fumes.

House fires aren't exactly good for neighbourhood morale, but they tend to make a community pull together. Everybody came out and watched Ike Train's house burn. The fire trucks got there pretty quickly, but not quickly enough. The roof collapsed while they were still hooking their hoses up, but Ike was surely gone by then.

Nobody paid any attention to me, not even Sadie, though she stood only a few yards away. Everyone was watching the flames. I needed to get cleaned up, and shower off the mud from Ike's backyard. Maybe I'd visit Sadie later, and see about making myself into boyfriend material. This could be a nice place now.

"Vocabulary word," said Oswald, walking over from his house down the block and joining the spectators. " 'Conflagration': a large fire. Also a conflict or war."

"Shut the fuck up, Oswald," someone said wearily. "We think Ike Train died in there."

"Another," Oswald said softly. " 'Cothurnus'. A tragedy. Also the costume worn by an actor in a tragic play."

Then he looked at me, for a little too long, like he had something to say, but some people just have eyes like that, intense and too direct. I slipped away from the neighbourhood crowd, though being among them was all I wanted. I knew the ugly burned-out lot in the middle of their street would be better than the ugliness that Ike Train had caused. I'd used fire to cauterize something much worse. But I still felt guilty. A shower would help, a little. You have to start getting clean somewhere.

I was on my way to visit Sadie the next Saturday, for our weekend of sex or tourism, when Oswald hailed me from his front yard, where he was brutalizing a patch of unkempt grass with a weed whacker. "Mr Reva!" he said, turning off his buzzing yard tool.

"It's just Reva," I called back.

"I wonder if I might have a word with you," he said.

"What, vocabulary words?" I called back, trying to sound cheerful, because even a miserable little guy like this probably had some good in him somewhere. But I really just wanted to see Sadie.

"Very droll," he replied. "Please? Just a moment? I have something inside that might interest you."

Was this a come on? Was Oswald so cranky because he was closeted and gay? I'd seen that sort of thing before. I wasn't interested in him, but maybe, if he was from around here, I could talk with his deep down self, and help him relax, and be a better neighbour. "Sure," I said, and went up the steps, following him to his front door. He opened the door and gestured for me to enter. I did, and it was dark inside — very dark — so I paused just inside the door. "Maybe we should turn the lights on — " I began, and then he shoved me, hard, and I stumbled forward into empty air, falling hard on what felt like a mound of rubble and broken glass. "Fuck!" I shouted, and turned over, my eyes starting to adjust. There was no bouse inside his house — it was scooped out and hollow, just a few beams to support the roof and walls, otherwise an open pit of dirt and rocks.

I realized, then, that I'd seriously misinterpreted the situation on this street.

Oswald leapt down from the little scrap of flat floor just inside the door, landing in a crouch on the dirt before me. He moved more like a spider than a man, which made sense; he wasn't a spider, but he wasn't a man, either. I started to rise up, and he threw a rock at my head, hard enough that I don't remember the impact at all, just the coming of the darkness.

"Vocabulary word," Oswald said later, tying up my wrists with lengths of wire. I was naked, and the rocks in his house were cutting into my skin. "'Chthonic'. Dwelling under the earth. Gods of the underworld. Me."

"Oswald," I said, alarmed at the slur in my voice. How hard had that rock hit my head? Way too hard, judging by the pounding in my skull. "We can work something out."

"Another: 'Autarch'. Absolute ruler. Tyrant. Me, here, in this place." He wired my legs together.

"You don't have to do this." I tried to twist, to kick, but he was agile, and I wasn't, and he didn't even stop talking while he dodged my flailing.

"Another: 'Autochthonous'. Originating where it is found. Native. From around here. Me, me, me." He kicked me in the chest on the last word, and darker black dots swam into my vision against the darkness inside his housepit, and I gasped for breath.

"This is my place," Oswald said, "and Ike Train was my man. He made the proper sacrifices to me, kept me fed, kept me happy. And you spoiled that, stranger, outside agitator, you ruined it, and now I have to cultivate another man. But you'll die. Not a sacrifice to me. Just somebody who got in the way." He gnashed his teeth, and they clacked together like gemstones. "You didn't have to burn Ike. He wouldn't have killed that little bitch Sadie you like so much. She has too many friends. We only kill the ones no one will miss. Well, usually. Someone might miss you, but I don't care."

Oswald was the reason Ike Train's deep down self had been so strange. I couldn't make a deal with Ike, because he'd already made a bargain with a creature like me. Well, sort of like me. Oswald and I had the same means, but different methods and motivations. That explained why nobody had ever discovered Ike Train's murders — Oswald had used his powers to protect him, and he probably did other things, too, like keeping the neighbourhood safe from danger, but the price he demanded was just too high.

As far as Oswald knew, I was just a guy, somebody who came to town and discovered his lackey's secret. He didn't know what he was dealing with. Fortunately.

Oswald stood up, letting his human shape drop, revealing the shambling earthen thing underneath, the creature of the dark and deep who'd lived here, on this spot, for centuries. Oswald was a local spirit, tied to this place, but he was an ugly one, who chose to live off pain instead of prosperity. He reached out to me with arms of darkness, endless limbs that stank of minerals and stale air. "Vocabulary word," he hissed, in a voice that could never be mistaken for human. 'Decapitate'. To cut off a head. Another: 'Decedent'. One who has died. "You."

Then he killed me.

While I was dying, I remembered the problem with having a body. The problem is pain.

I wasn't able to return for a few days. My new body was Korean, older, shorter, dressed in a plaid shirt and khaki pants. I'd needed to pick up some supplies, and they were tricky to get, since I didn't have money, and had to rely on the kindness of locals. I traded a lucky gambling streak for the truck, and the miraculous regeneration of some missing fingers for the stun gun.

I knocked on Oswald's door, late that evening. He opened the door, scowled at me, and I hit him with the stun gun. He was fully in his body then, so he went down shuddering, and I bundled him up and got him in the back of the truck, one of those little moving vans you can rent, though this one belonged to me for as long as I wanted it. I drove fast, hitting the highway and racing, because if Oswald woke up too close to his neighbourhood, he would shed that body like a baggy suit and come crashing right through the roof, and then we'd have the kind of epic fight that leads to waste and desolation and legends. Lucky for me Oswald didn't wake until we were miles and miles away from the place he called home, and he couldn't do anything but kick the wall behind the driver's seat with his very human feet.

I went north and east for miles and miles until I reached a good remote spot, down some dirt roads, out by a few old mines. It seemed appropriate, for Oswald's end to come in a place with underground tunnels. I couldn't abide him to live, but I could respect his origins. I parked, cut the lights, and went around back to slide open the door. Oswald was on his side, still tied up. "Vocabulary word," he said, voice thick and a little slurry. " 'Fucked'. What you are, once I get loose."

"You don't remember me, Oswald?" I said, climbing into the truck. "It's me, Reva. Last time you saw me, I had a different body, and you tore it to pieces and buried it in your lair. That wasn't very pleasant. I doubt this is going to be very pleasant for you."

He looked up at me from the floor. "Oh," he said, after a moment, then frowned. "You're like me. But you shouldn't have been able to take me, not in my place, so far from yours."

"It's true," I said, kneeling beside him. "I'm a long way from the place I began. I've got a vocabulary word for you. 'Reva'. It means habitation, or firmament, or water, or sky, or abyss, or god. Sometimes it's 'rewa' or 'neva' or other things, depending on where you are. It's a word from the islands, where I'm from. I used to be the spirit of an island, just a little patch of land in the sea, a long time ago. But you know what happened?"

I leaned in close to him. "The island sank. All the people who lived on it left, and I was alone for years. I could have just dissolved into the sea, but I made myself a body, and found myself a boat, and went with the currents."

"You abandoned your place," Oswald said, and tried to bite my face. "You're worthless."

"I didn't abandon it, it just disappeared, so I had options, Oswald. My people were travellers, and I became a traveller too. Anywhere I go is home, because I treat every place I go as home." I shook my head. "You're a monster. You poison the place you should protect."

"I do protect it. I keep it safe for the ones who belong there. I keep the trash out."

"You and me have different philosophies," I said, reaching over to open the toolbox I'd brought. There were lots of tools there, which I planned to use for purposes they weren't meant for. "My philosophy wins. Because you're so far away from home that you're just a man in a body now, and you don't have a choice."

He fought me, but he didn't know much about fighting without his usual powers, since he'd never left his street. I didn't try to cause him suffering, but I didn't go out of my way to prevent it, either.

By the time I was finished, he was altogether dead. Even if his spirit did manage to pull itself together again over the next decades, seeping out of the pieces of his corpse to reassemble, there was nothing around here but played-out mines, no people for him to make suffer, no sacrifices for him to draw strength from. I'd just made his neighbourhood a better place for the people who lived there. They wouldn't have Oswald's protection anymore, it was true, but the price he demanded for that protection was too high. I didn't regret a thing.

I buried Oswald in about ten different places, left the truck where it was, and started walking the long way back to the neighbourhood I now called home.

I didn't have any illusions about Sadie recognizing the real me in this new body, but I thought maybe I could be charming, and make her care about a middle-aged Korean guy. Stupid idea, but love — or even infatuation — lends itself to those. The thing was, once I knocked on her door, and she answered it, she didn't look the same. Or, well, she did, but the way she looked didn't do anything for me. My new body wasn't interested in her, not at all — this brain, this flesh, was attracted to a different kind of person, apparently. I always forgot how much «feelings» depend on the particular glands and muscles and nerve endings you happen to have at the moment. Having a body makes it hard to remember the limitations of being human.

"Can I help you?" she said.

"Ah," I said. "Reva asked me to give you a message. He said he had to leave town unexpectedly, and he's really sorry."

"Huh," she said. "Well, if you talk to him, tell him he doesn't have to be sorry. He doesn't owe me anything." I could tell from her face that she was hurt, and angry, and trying to hide it, and I wished she was from around here so I could talk to her deep down parts, and make amends, give her something, apologise. But she wasn't, and I couldn't.

"Okay," I said. "I'll tell him."

She shut the door in my face.

I walked downstairs, and stood on the sidewalk, and looked up the street. I felt as hollow as Oswald's house, as burned-out as the lot where Ike Train had lived. Why had I wanted to stay here? I wasn't needed anymore. I'd made things better. This wasn't my home, not really, no more than any other place.

Maybe I'd go south, down to the Inland Empire, to see those pretty black walnut trees. I could make myself at home there, for a while, at least.