Horror - Short

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. Fool Me Once Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

FOOL ME ONCE

“I’m sorry, I’ll—”

“Enough, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“No, but I mean it. I’ll never—”

“Stop! It’s done, forget it.”

And that was that.

And there they were, side-by-side, working together, riding the shaky rollercoaster of marriage after repeated infidelity. Of course, she took him back and part of her considered that a weakness and another part considered it a strength. Tie goes to the runner. Love is love is love and the sides of her brain were forever at war.

Move on, he’s ruining you.

You need him.

Only six years in and she promised herself after the first time that there was never going to be a second, and then after the second, never a third. Whom was she joking? He had her number and her heart.

Best to focus on work, to keep both sides of her brain from imploding.

A quick peck on the cheek rattled her from the task at hand, or rather in hand—brushing red dirt from a bone. It was a filler project with no deadline. To make use of all public grounds, the council ordered the mass prisoner graves of the former Tammany penitentiary exhumed and bundled.

Gloria lifted her eyes from the brown-stained vertebrae to the man she wanted to hold and to choke in almost equal parts. He stood awaiting something. “It appears there were three children, not just two like we originally thought.”

“Another girl?”

Gloria nodded and refocussed her gaze. There were three parts to step one: cleaning, measuring, and sorting. Step one was obvious, but step two involved sorting somewhere between forty and sixty skeletons, and at a glance, bones were just bones. Each was subtly different. Each fit a deceased person like a puzzle piece.

It was a chore likely to need more time than she had to offer.

Make-work. Late July had come again and her lectures were through for two months, and no historians or collectors tugged at her tail seeking a keen, informed eye. It had been a while since the police called for help as well.

Helping the police was the most stimulating of her tasks, but also the rarest.

“Message for us,” Kris said as he eyed the bones, no intention to assist. “On the machine, I mean.”

Gloria kept her gaze on the brush in hand. “And?”

“Since you’re busy, I’ll tell you later.”

The workplace was not the best locale for playful husband-wife banter. Gloria’s spiteful side figured if it wasn’t for her work ethic and capabilities, Kris would be teaching full-time at a school somewhere in the far north. Somewhere where colleges tossed credibility around like candy canes at a Santa Claus parade.

In every relationship there’s the smart one and there’s the dutiful one…so how is it in this one I’m both?

“Come on, spill.” Gloria took a breath.

“It was our friend Mr. Priestley.”

Kris had Gloria’s full attention now. Mr. Priestley, Officer Morgan Priestley.

“What did he want?”

“A couple city employees found human remains in a rarely used sewer route over by the cancelled district. Mr. Priestley said that by the look of the deceased’s suit, it’s from the ‘sixties or ‘seventies.” Kris beamed; these rare cop jobs meant at minimum a blurb in the paper about him. “Must be thinking of finishing the asphalt crawl toward the woods.”

On the last case involving police and anthropologists, the duty reporter (Alex Koval, mid-twenties, fit, firm, flexible) did a center-section, a color spread about Kris, and Gloria, and the remains of a mother and her daughter bludgeoned to death from sometime in the ‘nineties.

As far as Kris knew, Alex was one he got away with, unscathed. Unscathed but for his burned conscience. In reality, Gloria knew about the reporter and fought countless internal wars on what to do about it.

—

“Sure is dark down here,” Kris said. “How do the workers find their way?”

“Breadcrumbs,” Priestley said.

“The rats must love that.” Gloria was giddy.

Priestley laughed; Kris did not. He was squeamish about rats and dark spaces.

All wore headlamps (off) and carried heavy steel flashlights (on). The sewer was mostly dry, but the earthy odors wafted around them, mingling with distant scents of methane and sulfur.

“‘Round the next corner.” Priestley jerked his light a little to show direction.

Taking the bend, the trio came to shine their bulbs down on the strangely unmolested body. The skin had gone to paper and the matter within the eyeholes had rotted to raisins. The hair trailed like corn whiskers. Long in life, long in death, bright blonde under a pork pie hat. The figure wore a dusty green leather jacket and brown corduroy bell-bottoms.

“I have an idea who it is, but I haven’t touched him yet.”

Gloria bent, pressed the button to light her headlamp. “You have all the pictures you need?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Kris stood back, set down the retrieval kit and the toolbox.

“I wonder why nothing got to him,” Kris said. “It’s almost like he’s tainted or sacred. Remember that video of those, uh…in Peru or whatever, where nothing touched the bodies?”

Gloria heard, and for once agreed, but she’d had her suspicions before she entered the sewer when she listened to the fact sheet. There are things about the city. There are myths and monsters. There are tales about the sewers beneath Tammany.

The officer knew these too, even believed, to an extent. The deep born-and-raised-in-a-city-full-of-mystery kind of belief that never really died.

Gloria did not believe, obviously, but the folk tales tickled her attention.

“Matwipego,” Priestley whispered.

“Matwipego.” Gloria grinned at the officer.

Kris was an implant, had no knowledge of the local lore. “What the hell is Matwipego?”

“She’s a folk monster. You’ve never heard of her?” Gloria returned her attention to the corpse.

Kris covered his nose. “Ugh, let’s get this over with, okay? It stinks down here.”

“Is there a wallet?” Priestley asked.

Tapping the front and then the back pockets, Gloria said, “No and no.” She reached into the jacket. “Bingo.”

“Does it say Maurice Mansfield?” Priestley knew already, was but a hint shy of certain.

Gloria flipped it open and read the information aloud, “Mansfield, Maurice Marion. Date of birth June nine, ‘forty-nine. One-six-one Ninth Ave, Tammany, Ontario. How did you know?”

“This is my town. I hear everything eventually, and some whispers hang on for years.”

—

A little deeper than folklore. The proof was tangible, physical, and quite possibly created to lead eager minds onto the path of supernatural sewer monsters. Since the first officially collected and itemized incident ninety years ago, men of Tammany have disappeared without explanation and left only slimy, swampy, gas-stinking sites in their wakes.

A heavy-handed pimp named Mo Mansfield had vanished back in 1973. His Victorian home was full of Matwipego’s telltales. Cracks in the plaster oozed slimy green-yellow syrup that reeked of sewer. Every lightbulb had burst, and in that same nasty syrup, the words Praise Matwipego and Matwipego Answers were scrolled on the living room, master bedroom, and kitchen walls. Fingerprint smears gone dry on the washroom mirror told the cops this show was on point.

Stories came in, slowly but surely. The old home still had all the servants’ quarters and at the time, housed nine prostitutes ranging in age from sixteen to forty-one.

There was sounds. I mean before the screams. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch, you know? Like a maraca, ch-ch-ch-ch-ch. It started and stopped. I ran out when I heard Mo scream.

Then:

Actually, no, more like a rattlesnake, it hissed too. It was Matwipego.

And:

I didn’t hear any rattling, couldn’t over all the shutters banging and the glass shattering. It was her all right; someone called her and she come. Mo wasn’t so bad, don’t know who raised…

Finally:

‘Course I think he’s dead. I know he’s dead.

Not long into the case, a manila envelope surfaced, affixed unintentionally to sticky golden sauce at the bottom of a Chinese restaurant dumpster. There was a picture of Maurice Mansfield, a list of his comings and goings and the crimes he’d committed against the girls and women of his stable.

The death was a hit made out to look like something else, simple as that.

Officers wrote off the prostitutes’ accounts and the displays. The public wasn’t so simple. Matwipego was no joke; townsfolk knew that. Pimps, politicians, and businessmen taken in the night leaving behind the stinking trail of clues. Maurice wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last.

Gloria was an expert on Matwipego and explained this history to Kris. He was more his usual self once back in the lab, under the bright lights and immersed in the clean smells of recycled and filtered air.

“Sounds freaky, what does she look like?”

This part wasn’t entirely clear. Any claims of sightings were of eyes blazing in the darkness. Fantastic, crystalline, unnerving, sparkling green-brown bulbs where there was no light otherwise.

“Nobody knows. Genetically, if we follow the lore to its roots, it suggests a coastal Aboriginal. Matwipego is probably of Mi’kmaq descent.”

“How does she know who to get?” Kris played with Mo’s retro clothes, taking pictures for the file, pretending to be busy.

“She’s summoned.”

“And how does one summon her?”

“This is pretty neat. Okay, so the idea is that a woman has to be in the bathtub or by a sink. It’s important that the injured party drops her blood or tears into the water and lets it run down the drain, taking proofs of the wrongdoing committed against her. Then, she says Matwipego’s name, or writes it on a mirror, or both. These things are never completely solid. You know how that goes.

“Anyway, the drain burbles back with a sewage burp before it all runs down the pipes. The sewage tells the victim Matwipego heard the call. Fun, huh?”

“Sure, but what about victims without running water in the bathroom?”

“Sewer grates, waterways, basins, lakes, whatever, anything that runs water to the sewer system. I guess to the peripheries of civilization where waste goes.

“Story is that Matwipego was once a beautiful girl, strong-willed and clever. Vikings slew her family and raped her sisters while she hid in the marsh with shepherded pigs. Matwipego buried her entire body but her eyes, nose, and mouth in pig manure so that the Vikings pillaging her people didn’t see or smell her.

“For days, she lived under the filth, watching, learning, and when the Vikings trudged further inland, she emerged with a heavy heart and knowledge of the ways of these particular barbarians.

“She trailed, followed the rivers as the Vikings had, and with each village they pillaged she took vengeance upon them. One or two every night, after they’d gotten drunk and bloated, after they’d taken lives and sex. She got them while they slept. She wore black sludge from the riverbanks and moved in the dead hours, slicing throats and dragging away bodies.

“Eventually the Viking party fell to the short number of six and recognized a formidable enemy hunting them. They no longer pillaged the tribal villages they passed. Survival mode, see? Fear carried the last three to what is now right around the Quebec-Ontario border.”

“That would take forever to get from the coast all the way over there,” Kris said, enthralled by a story he planned to regurgitate whenever the chance arose. “Then what?”

“Not done yet. Best part, the Vikings pleaded for their souls, begging the night sky and their Norse gods to spare them. They offered a sacrifice of one of their own. The Viking horror party was down to two men and a head on a pig pole.

“Matwipego was not impressed and the following morning, one of the Vikings arose to find two decapitated heads next to him and the smoldering fire pit. This last Viking was last for a reason. He was the smartest, strongest, and fastest. Matwipego had to play the waiting game. He moved on, further and further until he found a peaceful tribe in what is now Tammany.

“For three years this Viking lived and learned to survive amidst the Iroquois. He’d become a willing slave, for his safety. She waited until she saw the terror waning and one night when he dropped his guard, Matwipego slit his throat.”

“Then what?”

Gloria shrugged. “It’s a case of the white man’s demon. Scary savages tracking relentlessly. It’s a manifestation of guilt.”

“How did the story stick around?”

“As far as I can tell, Matwipego initially came about with the first permanent European settlers. So, somewhere in the nineteenth century. I’m not certain where she lived before sewer systems. Underground is a convenient place for myth.”

“Okay, so what happened to Matwipego after she got the last one?”

“Nobody knows. The only portion of the story that lends any credence to possibility is that Vikings did hit the East Coast. That’s it though, not even any proof that a raiding party moved inland.”

“Still a good story, even if there is no end.”

“There’s an end, sort of. Matwipego hides under the filth watching and waiting. So, you’d better behave.” Gloria meant this as a joke, but it came off with a hint of Freudian slippage.

Kris frowned. Gloria understood that new sex was like a fantastic drug and that his guilty conscience likely screamed ruthlessly in afterthought. He loved her, but he lusted like a lunatic. Cheating was a step, and once that foot went through the door, his body followed—over and over again. He’d vowed, never again. She wondered if he’d ever really meant it.

—

Priestley called two weeks after finding the pimp’s body in the sewer. Kris had done an interview about Matwipego—he ignored the flirting of a certain reporter, nobly so. After that, a local cable news agency requested an interview. Kris never shied from explaining that Gloria was the real expert.

Gloria wanted none of the attention.

After the feature ran on the local station, a man went missing and an apartment complex offered a trail of slime. The manager had cleaned the high traffic areas—the insurance adjuster lived close enough to snap relevant shots without delay.

The lobby and elevator looked mostly back to normal, as did the hallway on the fourth floor, but that’s where it stopped. Inside 409, the green, pungent mess rode the walls, ceilings, and floors. Plywood covered the broken windows. The bulbs overhead had burst in their sockets. Glass coated the carpet like crystal snow, shining under their flashlight beams.

Priestley needed a firsthand expert, he’d asked for Gloria, but she insisted that Kris come as well. The detective accepted this, did not care for the husband, not since a training seminar in Toronto put him in the same hotel where said husband was to give a lecture, also where said husband stumbled around the hotel’s slot machines with an unfamiliar woman on his arm. Draped, suggestive, even obvious at times.

Still, having extra eyes would likely help. Priestley needed to find something off or overdone. There was always something a mimic left behind.

“Where is the man?” Kris asked.

“Gone.”

“And what did he do, I mean if someone went to all this trouble, they wanted to send a message, right?” Gloria shined her light around, obviously intrigued by the effort.

“Turns out, Choi Ho-in owned a coffee shop in Walker’s Forest and he used that shop as a front to bring in desperate immigrants. Korean, young. You could go into Smiles Coffee and pay a buck-fifty for a cup, or you could pay fifty bucks for a cup. If you paid fifty, you got to meet a Smile Girl in the basement. Fifty was just the meeting price from what we can see. You could buy an hour or the whole girl.

“This apartment, way the hell over here was part of the ruse. Choi Ho-in was, possibly is, a very wealthy man.”

“He’s dead,” Gloria said.

“Yeah. Likely, but until there’s a body... Unless he did all this to disappear. Although, nobody was officially onto him. It makes all this unnecessary. The ledger of clients has several interesting names, however. Interesting to the folks of Walker’s Forest anyway. Mayor, financial advisors, three police officers, a dozen well-to-do businessmen, and one elderly widow. So far all but two girls are accounted for.”

“Somebody knew,” Gloria said. The apartment was freaky, but wonderfully exact. “Are the girls talking?”

“Sure, in Korean or Mandarin or something. Nothing about Matwipego.”

“This stink is getting to me, I’m waiting out in the hall,” Kris said.

“Someone knows about our local myth and knew that the Walker’s Forest police weren’t an option. I bet it was the news, but someone knew.”

“Want to take a ride out of town?” Priestley asked.

“Sure, think we need Kris? He’s more of a PR guy than a nitty-gritty guy.”

—

Walker’s Forest was just shy of three hours to the northwest of Tammany—add an extra twenty-minutes at take-off because Priestley had to shoot home to retrieve a forgotten scrap of paper featuring a phone number. To get there, they passed through farming communities and factory towns.

Smiles Coffee was clean and inviting. It had futuristic flavor. Bright colors, stainless steel poles, legs, and beams, huge coffee cups, and tiny MP3 jukeboxes in every booth. It looked like a place happily accepting a good deal of business. That it was only a masquerade made it eerie, and suddenly so empty and surrounded by yellow police tape. Gloria shivered, if only slightly.

Nothing to see on the public floor, the detective and the doctor stepped into the basement. It wasn’t so inviting. A dozen closet-sized bedrooms lined the corridor where the girls had slept two to a bed in most cases. Local officers had already scoured for evidence, not that anyone was about to press charges against the girls.

Gloria gave each room a quick glance, disinterested.

“Can I see where they bathed?”

A room at the end of the hallway was dimly lit, but still took only seconds to see what others missed. “Ha! They’re really going for it. Look at the sink.”

Sludge had back splashed up from the drain and left a stain.

“Hmm.”

Matwipego’s reality had begun to sink claws.

Gloria leaned in toward the mirror above the sink, exhaling a hot breath against the glass. A word formed: MATWIPEGO.  “Somebody is really trying to make this look good.”

“That or they called a monster to life.”

—

Talking to the sex slaves was a bust; none betrayed so much as a twitch at the mention of Matwipego.

Rather than delaying their return further than necessary, Priestley pulled into and out of a McDonald’s drive thru. They ate on the road. At minutes after six, Gloria saw the home she shared with her husband at the end of the block. She also saw an unfamiliar car in the driveway and her husband kissing another woman.

“Drive around the street, please.” Gloria pinned her chin to her chest.

“Right.” Priestley flicked a last-second blinker and veered back toward downtown. “I saw him once at a conference, with another woman I mean.”

Gloria shook her head, unable to look at the officer. “Please no, I can’t…they’re just—”

“Just nothing, your husband’s a fucking idiot. You’re wonderful and beautiful and…”

At this, Gloria fell into a heavy sob. Priestley pulled over to park in front of a tall, redbrick mid-century split. From the McDonald’s bag, he offered a napkin.

“Thanks.” Gloria smeared the modicum of makeup she wore as it ran from her eyes.

A brief near silence settled into the car where only gentle sniffles and the purr of the engine marred the completeness.

“What if Matwipego’s real?” Priestley said. “I mean what if she’s real and doing justice?”

This broke Gloria’s sadness and she laughed, long and hard, using the little mirror to fix her face.

“You know, I understand why he does it. I wish I didn’t love him, but I do and he loves me. He also loves sex. I do not. I mean, I don’t hate it, but I just don’t really care, and he needs it. We’ve come a long way as a species because the sex was there; there’s no species without the act. It’s ingrained. How can I really be all that mad at him?”

“You can be mad all you want!” Priestley had never married, and was livid. “You can be mad, because he’s not an ape, because he’s not a Neanderthal. He’s intelligent and knows better. Does he know that you know?”

This had nothing to do with Matwipego. Her relationship with Priestley was about crime, not her marital problems. She stuffed the wet McDonald’s napkin back into the greasy paper bag.

“Take me home now, please.”

“I didn’t mean to cause any trouble; it’s just, not right, you know?”

“Please.”

—

It was a surprise to find Kris so gleeful to greet her.

“You just missed Helen!”

“Your sister?”

“Yeah, she’s back from Bolivia. She’s stopping in tomorrow morning and we’re going out for brunch; unless you’ve got something else.”

“No, I don’t.” She bit down hard on relief. She had a right to be suspicious. Still, it made her feel guilty to jump at conclusions. “That will be lovely. Did she say how it was?”

Kris’ sister was a psychologist who left off once every three years for eight months at a time to help with the group, Doctors Without Borders. The traumas of war were never only physical.

Her visits were always a treat, from an anthropological view anyhow.

—

The meeting with Kris’ sister was better than expected. She was older than Kris and much wiser when dealing with people, women in particular. He wasn’t her patient and that made things different. She punched him in the eye when he confessed to cheating on Gloria.

After that, Helen sat them down in a practice sense. Gloria opened up about how she felt and so did Kris. They agreed to counselling sessions with a professional. The future was maybe even bright.

—

Priestley cleaned his car that Saturday evening, and once again, it was to be him and his friend Jim Beam. Nothing came of the sex slaves or the missing man. There were charges laid in Walker’s Forest: assault, rape, imprisonment, and so on. The girls knew more English than they’d originally suggested. It was amazing what a few weeks of trust could do.

A small grocery bag of garbage from the floor of his car moved into the bin in his garage. Priestley poured the first of eleven drinks at 5.:02 PM.

—

Muggy, Gloria flipped the blanket from her body. The heat was intense. She rolled from bed. Kris slept. She flicked the light in the washroom that connected to the bedroom. Scooping the water, she drank from the tap as it flowed down the drain. Sweat beaded on her forehead. She straightened her back as she stood before the bathroom mirror.

“Hot flash.”

“Hon?” Kris called. “Are you warm?”

She looked into the dim bedroom. The heat wasn’t internal. Wiping her hands on a towel, she again looked to the mirror. Drifting from the bottom up, steam clouded over her reflection.

Hot and then hotter still.

Boiling.

A smell hung.

M-A-T-W-E-P-E-G-O scrolled one letter at a time across the steamy mirror.

“How the hell?” Gloria swung open the mirror door.

Normal everyday bottles and salves.

“What’s that smell?” Kris arose from bed and hit the light switch.

“Someone’s play—” Gloria started, voice cut off by a sound.

A rattle: Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch, ch-ch-ch-ch-ch.

“Gloria?”

Gloria stepped out of the washroom and followed Kris’ gaze across the bedroom to the window. It bowed inward and green slime crept around the frame like liquid moss.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch.

Gloria picked up the telephone; no dial tone.

“What’s happening?” Kris asked.

“I don’t know.” But Gloria did know. She yanked her cell from the charger wire and dialed 911. “Come on.”

The phone clicked and the line connected.

“Hello!”

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch. “Summoned. Summoned. Summoned,” a gargling voice said into her ear. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch.

She threw the phone.

“What?” The hard edges of Kris’ tone swam in fear.

The window shattered inward and a gust of swampy, gassy air blasted them like backdraft, knocking them from their feet. The bulb overhead burst and incandescent slime crawled toward them like fast-action vines.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch.

The framing within the walls creaked and the drywall cracked as more slime invaded. Hands slapped on the wet window frame as if climbing from below and a shadowy silhouette stood. Two eyes in the night, blaring green-brown horror.

Wind gusts whispered a name: Matwipego.

“Kris?” Gloria was on the floor.

The room had become devoid of light but for the preternatural glow of the slime and the floating green-brown eyes approaching them.

Kris didn’t answer. Gloria swung an arm and found him, grabbed tight.

“Kris!”

“Huh?” He sounded groggy, as if hypnotized.

The eyes blazed. In a greenish-yellow glow, encroaching slime fingers reached along the walls, ceiling, and floor. The silhouette moved with a slow stumbling amble. She was nude and firm, muscular.

“She’s real.” Gloria jumped to her feet, stepping on glass slivers and plaster crumbs. She helped Kris upright. “Move, come on.”

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch.

He took off toward the door, to the hall, to the stairs rising from the main floor. Gloria was right behind him.

“Did you do this?” he huffed between breaths.

“No, how…? Never.”

“Then why?”

The sounds of his motion had gone. The world lightless.

“Kris?”

“Shh.” He pulled her into a storage closet. They huddled in with the vacuum, the extra linens, and rolls of toilet paper and paper towels. “You didn’t do this?”

“Kris, I love you. This is impossible.”

Staring into the darkness, both awaited the door opening and something supernatural climbing inside the space. Take him, possibly her too.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch.

Behind them, the wall thumped like a bass drum. Things slid from their places on the shelves. The scent crept alongside staggering damp heat. Kris coughed. Gloria gasped against the atmospheric change, felt her throat tightening.

Light shapes flared like neon tubing: MATWIPEGO ANSWERS.

“It can’t be.” Gloria clutched at Kris.

Thump.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch.

Hot sewer smelling gusts invaded the closet, gas chambering around them.

Thump.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch.

“I can’t breathe.” Kris gasped, swinging open the door.

It was slightly cooler in the hall. The air cleaner. He reached back and pulled on Gloria’s hand. Sweat slickened the grasp and her touch slid free of his.

“Outside, outside,” he said and ran.

She followed him, pure night, but she knew the way, knew he still led as his feet pattered on the hardwood and his breath took loud, short sips of the balmy atmosphere. Halfway down the stairs it changed.

Only her steps.

Only her breath.

“Kris?” Gloria reached the open front door. “Kris?” She looked about the quiet street. “Kris!”

Thirty yards from where she stood, she heard the familiar steel on steel of a manhole cover moving. She raced toward the hole. The disc fell into place just as she arrived. Below, the ch-ch-ch-ch-ch­ sound chimed and echoed, distancing.

Hopelessly, she clawed at the cover.

Get help! Call the police!

They won’t believe me.

One will.

—

Gloria parked on Priestley’s lawn, no room in his two-car driveway—one unmarked Dodge police sedan, one Mazda coupe. She pounded his door and got nothing, quiet and locked. She ran through the garage and tried another. There was garbage strewn around the doorway underfoot. The handle turned and she stepped inside, more trash.

The garbage served as a bachelor’s map of mile markers, while it lasted.

“Mr. Priestley!”

She proceeded in search of his bedroom; the garbage trail had ceased by the kitchen. The first door she tried was the master bath. She flicked the switch, gazed in, and moved on. The next door was the detective’s bedroom. He slept face down on his bed. The room reeked of liquor.

“Wake up! Wake up!” Gloria rocked the man.

Priestley rolled over and looked at her. Seeing that terror brought it all back to him, his drunken act.

The washroom sink, the McDonald’s napkin soggy with Gloria’s tears, saying the name, the sewage burping up from the drain, the word finger-painting itself on his mirror in thin grease, his pouring six more drinks.

“She came and took him! You’ve got to help!”

“You might not see it, but maybe it’s for the best.” He slurred the words, but they were clear enough.

“That’s crazy! You have to help me!”

“I did. I did it for you. You’re better off.”

“You…you what?” Gloria backpedalled from the room into the hall.

He’d summoned her.

That wasn’t for him to do!

Gloria panicked and ran from the detective’s home as he called out to her, attempting to explain himself. Her home was a horror scene, not a place she wanted to be. In her pajamas, she elected for House Java, her store charge card was in the glovebox. Gym sneakers and shorts in a duffle bag in the backseat.

Vacant gazing and dishevelled, she ordered a tall caramel macchiato, Kris’ favorite, and cried over it for close to an hour.

A barista offered to call someone for her.

Whom?

There’s nobody left.

You know whom.

Gloria stepped into the small his/hers/theirs toilet, locked the door, filled the sink, using a wad of paper napkin as a plug, and began the ritual. Her tears were the necessary fuel once again.

“I was never yours to save.” She clenched her teeth as she wrote the name with her finger, onto the mirror, uncertain if it was the written name or the speaking of the words that worked the magic. No more tears dripped. She pulled the napkin plug and whispered, “Matwipego. Matwipego.”

The sink burped fowl smelling gunk.

Goodbye, Mr. Priestley.

Goodbye and good riddance.

For once, both sides of her brain agreed.

XX