Olivia Lost believed if you thought everything was going well, you obviously weren’t paying enough attention. While sitting on the toilet and struggling to register for her winter term classes, Olivia felt peculiar. She became dizzy, vomited, and passed out with her pants around her ankles. She lay unconscious on the cold black and white tiled floor for nearly three days. She should have died. When she finally came around, the vomit had dried on her shirt, she was dangerously dehydrated, and she had a terrible headache.
Olivia was very upset when she stumbled downstairs Tuesday morning. She was very thirsty and realised that none of her three roommates had noticed her absence.
“The party is Saturday. You need to pick up the Christmas tree and decorations,” said Shannon, an aspiring criminal. She was eating a bowl of Shōyu ramen for breakfast. “You said you were going to pick them up on the weekend.” Shannon was very short, had a shock of red hair, and hadn’t paid rent in months. Then, “Is that vomit on your shirt?”
“I’ve been passed out since Saturday,” said Olivia, looking down at her shirt with a grimace. “And no one noticed.”
“No,” Shannon agreed.
“I think I nearly died,” Olivia said, upset.
“Well, you obviously didn’t,” said Shannon. “And we still need those Christmas decorations. There was only so much we could do without them. All we had were the old red-pepper lights from when Duncan worked at El Camino.”
Duncan was Greg’s boyfriend and had moved in during the fall. Greg was Olivia’s oldest friend and was currently in Iceland studying lichen for his master’s degree. Duncan missed him terribly. Duncan had dropped out of university where’d he’d been studying physics the to focus on his art. When he could afford the materials, he painted massive works of politicians in compromising positions. Otherwise, he made small landscape sketches he sold at the Lansdowne farmer’s market. “Don’t let Shannon take advantage of Olivia,” Greg had told him a few weeks earlier before leaving for Iceland. “Olivia is too considerate of others and needs reminding that her needs matter too.”
Olivia winced as she peered into the spacious living room. Her head still hurt, and the strands of blinking Mexican chilli lights weren’t helping matters.
“Also, your banker called. He said he’s coming back later this week for his money. He was in yesterday and I told him you were out of town for the day. I don’t think he believed me, even though I am a good liar. Apparently, he was right. Also, angry. He’s a nasty looking man and I don’t like the way he was looking at me. You should pay your bills. I don’t want to get evicted. Or worse.”
“He can’t evict you; this is my house.”
“You should tell him that.”
Olivia deflated. She knew she’d made a mistake thinking she could afford to keep such a large house on her own. Being a barely employed university student was not lucrative at all. When unable to make her property tax payments, she’d been introduced to Derek. Derek solved short term money problems by creating long term health ones. It had been a mistake to borrow money from a sociopathic loan shark, but she’d thought she would be able to rent out some of the rooms (the house had far too many as it was) and pay him back quickly. Now she was months behind on his payments, and he was getting upset. Derek was a big man, a strong man, a man you didn’t want to meet during a particularly violent riot.
“I could really use your rent,” she told Shannon.
Shannon looked at Olivia as though she were mad. “If I could afford rent, do you think I’d still be living with the three of you?”
“Half?”
“No. About the party. How will it look if we don’t have a tree? I need it to be the best party of the year.”
Olivia sighed. Greg frequently said they should never have agreed to take Shannon as a roommate, but she was there now and given her personality, Olivia didn’t think anyone else would take her. At times Olivia wished she could be more like Shannon. Shannon did and said whatever she wanted, and didn’t take shit from anyone. But then most people didn’t like Shannon so there was a downside.
“I’ll pick up the tree, then worry about Derek.”
“You smell like a subway toilet. You might want to shower first,” said Shannon, returning her attention to the screen of a new laptop she’d found on a store display counter. “Fuck!” She swore, having read something upsetting. She slammed the lid down. She turned to Olivia, “Oh, and River got his flight booked. He’s only here for a few more weeks, so your time is running out.”
“Good for him.”
Shannon had introduced River to Olivia and for no discernible reason felt quite certain that the two were destined for one another. Olivia did not agree. River was like a day-old cafeteria muffin forgotten on the counter, and she felt nothing for him. And regardless of how many times she told Shannon she was not interested, Shannon persisted in trying to set them up. Oliva wondered if Shannon liked to create chaos for the sake of chaos. River, Shannon frequently reminded her, would be leaving for a year in Spain where he would likely fall in love with a beautiful Spanish woman with perky breasts and a good accent. She’d probably be rich as well. It seemed everyone was rich and had perky breasts. Olivia must act now to save him from that horrible fate. “You better tell him how you feel,” Shannon said.
“It seems a heartless thing to randomly tell someone you’re ambivalent towards them,” Olivia replied.
“Maybe he’s already met someone,” continued Shannon, ignoring her. Shannon did not hear things she did not want to hear. “And you’re being stupid. It’s been three months and now he’s leaving. Maybe forever. You’ll spend the rest of your life alone.”
Shannon’s bluntness was legendary.
Olivia shrugged and returned upstairs to clean the vomit from her shirt.
Outside, looking in from their snowy perch on a nearby branch, were two crows. The first turned to the second and cocked its head and cawed, “Well, there you go. It’s begun. We’ve done what we can. Let’s hope this doesn’t cock-up things up even more.”
“Couldn’t leave well enough alone, could he?” cawed the second.
“I thought it would be different this time.”
With that, they flew off into the sky.
Olivia returned later that afternoon with a small second-hand tree from the Salvation Army tree lot on Third Avenue. Carrying the tree on a city bus was not easy and many people had complained about the space she was taking. She’d tried making light of it, but no one laughed at her jokes. People on city busses were generally in a bad mood. Also, it wasn’t easy coming up with a good joke about carrying a tree on a city bus. It was a miserable start to the week, but at least now she smelled like spruce, not vomit.
While the others decorated, Olivia retreated to her bedroom to rest. Despite having been unconscious for three days, she was very tired and fell into a deep sleep. Around three in the morning she woke to an acidic odour.
She opened her eyes.
A lanky grey goblin-like creature clung silently to the ceiling above her bed. It was staring at her from behind an uncomfortable number of jet-black eyes. Its magnificent head swayed gently, curious about the young woman on the bed below it. There was something unusual about her it did not understand.
Olivia shrieked.
The creature recoiled, shocked by her outburst and nearly lost its hold on the ceiling.
In a moment of self-preservation, Olivia leaped from her bed, accelerating towards the hallway, and would have kept going had she not run headfirst into the closed door.
The creature dropped from the ceiling and crawled across the floor to nudge Olivia’s unconscious body. “Fuck me,” it hissed.
Olivia woke on the floor. She didn’t remember much about the previous evening. Her head was sore and once again she seemed to be covered in vomit. The week was not going well at all.
After showering, Olivia found Duncan sketching in the sunroom. Having a sunroom when she couldn’t afford basic upkeep was a silly thing, she admitted to herself. However, it wasn’t the sort of thing you could easily put on eBay. There were also three unused bedrooms and a walk-in pantry empty except for an ever-growing collection of yellow ramen boxes from a subscription she couldn’t find a way to cancel.
“I think I’ve caused a concussion and need advice,” she told him. Duncan had once taken a first aid course at the Red Cross. “I fell off the toilet on the weekend and now I’m feeling out of sorts.”
“Did you hit your head?”
“Maybe. I was passed out for three days and no one noticed.”
“Here?”
“Yes. Shannon didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
“Oh. Sorry,” Duncan winced. It was the sort of thing Greg might get upset about. “I had thought you were out of town.”
“That’s what Shannon said.”
“The entire time you were upstairs unconscious?”
“Yes.”
“I’m a terrible roommate,” he said.
“It would have been nice if someone had noticed,” she admitted.
He put his hands on either side of her face and stared into her eyes. “Well, I’m here now.”
Duncan had handsome eyes. For Halloween that year he had dressed as Superman unironically. A lot of Duncan was handsome, even if he didn’t realise it. He hadn’t hit his stride until the first year of university, having spent the proceeding years playing Dungeons & Dragons by himself. Greg said this made him the perfect boyfriend. Greg was right.
“Have you vomited?” he asked.
“Yes, but that was days ago. Well, then again last night, but I don’t think that’s related. I’ve showered since.”
“Today?”
“Showered?”
“Vomited.”
“Oh. No.”
“Headaches?”
“Yes, but I have a bruise. I think I hit my head on my bedroom door.”
“When you fell off the toilet?” That seemed a long way to fall.
“No, last night.” She pushed back her hair and showed him the spot near the top of her forehead. “It’s tender,” she added. “I was having a nightmare, got confused, and hit the door at run.”
“Jesus,” he said.
“It’s been a bad week,” she agreed.
Duncan grimaced. He was clearly failing in the one asked from Greg. “Any dizziness?”
“No.”
“That’s good then. I remember my instructor saying dizziness was a sure sign of a concussion. Any other symptoms?” He listed them.
“None of those.”
He sat back looking thoughtful. In the months since he’d moved in with Greg, he’d never heard Olivia complain, and it did worry him that she’d been passed out for three days. It was the sort of thing Greg would get upset about if he came back and found her in the hospital or worse, dead. Still, she seemed fine now, so it was likely nothing serious.
“I think you’ll be okay, but you might want to get checked out properly. And maybe take an Aspirin.”
“We don’t have any, and I’m broke,” said Olivia. “Speaking of which, I need your rent money.”
“Oh,” said Duncan, uncomfortably. “That might be a problem. My Christmas cards of Christ being crucified on a Christmas tree didn’t sell as well as I thought they would. I’m talking to Greg later tonight. Let me see if his grant came in.”
That night the creature clung to the outside of Olivia’s bedroom window for hours, watching her fitful sleep from the other side of sleet covered glass. In a nearby tree, a black squirrel watched uneasily, alarmed by what it thought was a hairless racoon with far too many eyes and a cleaver. The neighborhood was clearly going downhill.
The creature ignored the squirrel as it did all living things and would have reacted with disbelief to know the squirrel was watching it. Living creatures couldn’t see it, and in return it couldn’t harm them. Such had been its life for a very long time, until last night. The events of the previous evening continued to dominate its dark thoughts. The young woman had clearly reacted to seeing it hanging above her, but that was impossible, wasn’t it? No one could see it. Not anymore. Not for a…well a very long time. Longer than it could remember. Longer than an age of the world. But clearly she had, and if she had, how? And why had it crept into her bedroom in the first place? What had drawn it there? The creature didn’t like any this ambiguity. It preferred a bit of black and white. Find a threat. Kill a threat. With perhaps a bit of torture thrown in for the accompanying acoustics.
Trembling with anticipation, it disappeared for a moment to stuff a dead crow into a nearby chimney. It hated crows. They were nothing but scheming rats with wings, causing incalculable trouble. Why Mother had trusted them, it did not know. Afterwards, while the squirrel watched, it pried open the window and slid into her bedroom.
Olivia woke from a fitful sleep feeling as though there were a heavy weight pressing down on her chest. There was. And it had far too many eyes and smelled like vinegar. She was confused. Then scared. And then a small spark of self-preservation that had always been there, but never needed, began to bloom. It was that first small pebble shifting on the hillside, unnoticed at first, but the start of something more. She became angry. She began to fight. She struggled furiously to push away the nightmare straddling her chest. The creature held fast, its sinewy legs tightening their grip around her waist, bony protrusions cutting into her ribs. She cried out in pain, flailing madly to free herself while the creature clung on, staring at her with burning intensity. Her eyes darted wildly back and forth between its own. There were so many!
The creature hooted and sneered, its lips pulling back to expose row upon row of highly functional teeth. Oh, how it missed that look of terror…ouch! An unexpected fist broke free and struck it across the side of its face. And with surprising vigor. It arched back with gleeful surprise. Not only could she see it, but she could hit it! It brought a hand up to touch its throbbing cheek. “Yes!” it grinned, distracted for a moment by that long-missed pain.
Olivia didn’t waste the opportunity. She groped for something, anything, to use as a weapon. She found her brass bed-side lamp. And with the lamp in hand, she struck it again. And again. And again. Teeth shattered and flew. “Leave! Me! Alone!” she yelled, surprising even herself. She felt powerful.
The novelty of being struck was quickly wearing thin. With one hand the creature blocked the next swing of her arm, and with the other it punched her hard in the face, knocking her out cold.
The now broken lamp fell to the ground.
Its arm recoiled, pain stabbing up from its fist. It cried out in agony. Real agony. That wasn’t supposed to happen.
Cradling its arm, its many eyes blinked as it climbed off Olivia and sat down on the bed beside her body. It hoped she weren’t dead. That would be disappointing. Her chest rose and fell as she breathed. Good. Not dead. It was easy to find dead things. Finding something living it could play with, well that was new. It hadn’t had this much excitement since…oh look, blood!
A trickle had run down from her nose onto the bedsheets. It dipped its spindly finger into the blood pooling below her swelling nose and sniffed it. It hadn’t tasted living blood in forever. Roadkill always had a taste of rot. Its finger went to tongue. Just a little taste…oh! Oh! A jolt of power ran through its body. Its many eyes rolled back into its head as it fell backwards off the bed. The sound of whimpering rose up from the floor. Many minutes later, mostly recovered, it climbed spider like back onto the bed.
There was something…familiar…about that taste. Like a tickle in the far recesses of its grubby mind.
“Just one more taste,” it muttered sheepishly.
Later, now on the floor again, it stared up at the ceiling and grinned.
The previous evening had been no mistake. This changed everything.
“How do you expect me to sleep with you making noise all night?” said Shannon the next morning as Olivia tottered into the kitchen. “Also, you’ve had a bloody nose. It’s not a good look. This won’t encourage River to come back for you. Anyway, I’m off to do some shopping. Really, you need to clean yourself up.”
After Shannon left, Olivia turned to Duncan who was staring at her with open concern.
“I hate to say it, but she’s right,” he said, fork left hanging over his cold Hiyashi ramen. “And there’s dried blood on your top. What’s happening to you?”
“I had a nightmare,” she lied. Of the three options she’d considered, it was the one least likely to have her ending up in an institution. Alternatively, she was either going insane, or goblins were real, which likely pointed back to insanity. Olivia knew gods weren’t real, neither were horoscopes or a flat earth, and tarot cards were nothing more than a deck that didn’t work for solitaire. To admit she’d fought a multi-eyed monster, which deep within she knew to be what actually happened, was going to require an adjustment to her worldview.
“You had one earlier too, didn’t you?”
She nodded, then flopped her head down on the counter and winced. It was a mistake to rest the weight of her head on her nose when it was likely broken. “My exams went poorly, I didn’t get half of my classes so I can’t possibly graduate in the spring, and Derek wants his money. How am I supposed to pay him? What will I do with my life? I’m so tired, Duncan. I don’t know if I can do it anymore.”
“Oh Olivia,” said Duncan, uncomfortable with her honesty. Honestly was rarely a good thing this early in a friendship, particularly if you wanted it to last. Duncan didn’t know how to respond to any of it. “I can get you something for the pain,” he offered eventually. “And maybe something to help you sleep?”
“It’s so much more than that. I’ll never have the money I owe Derek. This is not the life I expected. Nothing is going to plan. Do you ever wish you could just start over? Try again?” Then, “I made an appointment at the bank. It won’t matter. Who’d loan a starving student money?”
“Other than Derek you mean?” said Duncan. He regretted it immediately as Olivia’s face fell. “Sorry,” he said. “Look, we’ll get you out of this. Somehow.”
On the other side of the city, Derek Powell was working.
Where most businesses believed in service with a smile, Derek believed in service with a threat. Sometimes a fist.
This was one of those times.
His mood was unusually foul as he loomed over the cowering baker. Fresh pistachio croissants lay scatted on the snow. A failed tribute in lieu of payment. For nearly a week Derek had felt out of sorts. It had begun with a jolt early Saturday morning, like a shot of adrenalin from a cold-water plunge. He’d thought little of it at first, but since then he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was forgetting something important. From the moment he woke, to when he finally slept, it nagged and tickled at the back of his mind. This made him angrier than usual, and he was dealing with it the only way he knew how, by taking it out on his clients.
Which brought him back to Jacob London, baker and small business owner. Derek wanted Jacob to get up. To fight back. To stop him. It was a rare client who ever tried, and never more than once. They let Derek get away with horrible violations to their well-being, mostly because if they objected, he inflicted even worse suffering. Irony was a foreign land Derek had never visited.
The baker stared numbly at his right hand. Its fingers pointed off in unexpected directions, like a tourist signpost to distant cities.
“I’ve seen what you charge for a strudel. Why didn’t you just pay?” Derek grunted, ignorant of the economics of artisanal pastries. “None of this would have happened.” Then, “I’ll be back for the rest of my money later this week. Have it ready this time, pointe shoes aren’t cheap, and the girls needs to dance.”
Derek reached down and grabbed a croissant. “No point in letting it go to waste, is there?”
Trudging away, he checked the position of the sun. He’d never really gotten accustomed to wearing a watch. It was nearly two. There were a few hours left to buy flowers before the recital.
That night, Olivia locked her door and lay in bed full of doubt. Duncan had given her a sleeping pill, but she left it untouched on her bedside table. She’d wanted a cozy life, a comfortable job, good friends, and maybe a dog. That dream was rapidly heading for a cliff.
For hours she lay there, focused on every creek and moan of the house as people moved about, or the wind rustled branches against the roof.
She finally passed out hours later, too exhausted for even her busy mind to keep her awake. And all the while the creature was perched on the toilet in her bathroom, listening. For the first time in a very long time, it had hope.
Downstairs, Shannon and Duncan were talking.
“She isn’t going to wake us up screaming again, is she?” asked Shannon, downstairs with Duncan.
“I hope not,” said Duncan. “I gave her some Zolpidem.”
“Well, she certainly needs something.”
“Cut her a break. She’s had a rough week, and now she’s worried about what will happen if she doesn’t pay her loan.”
“I don’t see why that should affect my sleep,” said Shannon. “It’s not our fault she borrowed money from a murderous loan shark.”
“When was the last time you paid rent?” asked Duncan pointedly.
“When was the last time you did?”
“I’ve only just moved in.”
“So, you paid this month’s?” Shannon didn’t mince words.
“Maybe we should both do better,” agreed Duncan.
“Well, I don’t know how I’m supposed to come up with it,” said Shannon. “I don’t have a job.”
“I’m sure you can find a way,” said Duncan meaningfully. “Aren’t you good at finding things?”
It annoyed Shannon that Duncan was right. She was a very good thief.
“Fine,” she said. “But Olivia better appreciate it.”
A Sneak, a Slayer, and a God 