Episode Two. 

It was still raining. It plummeted from the leaden sky in torrents like stair-rods, striping the dark world with reflected light, drowning the streets and transforming the window panes into elaborate water features. Pax stared out through one such from her place at the Shark Pancake café, watching the world try to wash itself clean by moving the silt around. She played idly with her coffee stirrer and hasn't touched the drink itself. A slice of cheesecake sat, uneaten, on a plate in front of her. 

“Good morning,” came a voice from behind and Pax turned around to see her friend Izzy dripping on the floor as she flipped down the goods of her raincoat and offered up a smile as bright as the absentee sun. 

Pax merely raised an eyebrow in reply. 
“Well, okay, it's pretty rotten,” Izzy conceded, before taking the seat opposite, “but at least it's not snowing.”

That was Izzy, always positive, despite the weather, despite the endless parade of misery on the TV news channels, despite everything that had happened two weeks ago.

“Do you want some cheesecake?”

Izzy glanced down at the untouched slice and sighed. 

“How long has that been sitting there?”

“About as long as I have,” Pax confessed.

“Then you should eat it. I'll order something else.” She pushed the plate a little closer to Pax, who stared at it listlessly. 

“Oh, come on now, Pacifica, eat!” Izzy demanded suddenly, “it'll do you some good. Lord knows we all need it.”

Pax looked up. “And what does that mean?”

“It means that your constant moping is bringing everyone down. You need to cheer up, get over it.”

“Terry almost died,” Pax replied, showing each word out like a shotgun blast, “he stabbed himself in the stomach and cut his wrists with the frame ripped off of one of our lampshades! It was such a mess, I didn't think he'd live another minute, never mind the time it took to call an ambulance. I can't get it out of my head, so I'm sorry if I'm bringing the group down, but, actually, I don't much care.”

Izzy stared at her like she's just been slapped. 

“But it was two weeks ago. You can't keep thinking about it.”

“Do you think I haven't tried? That I want to be this way?”

“Well, he was your Resentine…”

“My what?”

“Your Resentine. The crush you resent, your reluctant Valentine, if you prefer.”

Pax just stared at her, not believing what she was hearing. 

“Oh, come on,” Izzy continued, “you can't pretend it's not true.  We've all seen the way you look at him when you think nobody's watching. Unless… you aren't even aware of it yourself, are you?”

“I…” Pax simmered.  “I…” It was like her friend hadn’t been listening to her at all.  “I…”  The entire conversation had been a waste of words, of good breathable air.  She stood up.  “I think I’m going to go now, Izzy.  You can finish the cheesecake.”


Pax stared at her sodden feet for much of the walk home.  She watched how they splashed through puddles, churned up the rippling surface patterns made by the never-ending raindrops: a peripatetic agent of chaos.  She wanted to focus on the details, on the weather, her environment.  She wanted her mind to stay outside of itself, because she wasn’t sure what she’d face when she finally let it head back inside.

Darkness awaited there.  The image of Terry lying, bleeding in the aisle, the ragged remains of a lampshade soaking it all up, turning the mustard fabric crimson black.  And the jagged wire.  In her memory it was always sharper, crueler than it could possibly have been in reality, as if it hadn’t just been snapped out by a young man on the edge, but whittled away over time by a keenness not born of human sanity, nor of instability, but of something much, much older.

And was he even ‘on the edge’?  She couldn’t understand it.  The Doctors said that he’d stopped taking his Rovain, that he had suffered from severe depression and that the withdrawal from his medication made suicidal thoughts that much more likely.  She knew that mental illness wasn’t always easy to diagnose, that the sufferers often hid what they were feeling behind barriers only a trained professional could break down, but at the same time, he had seemed so… Terry.  Stable, dependable, boring Terry.  Had that calm, controlled demeanour really been a cover for something so unhinged underneath?  Could Terry have really hated himself that much?  Pax was pretty certain that even she had never hated him like that.

Or…

Raindrops.  Puddles.  Splashes.  Keep to the outside, keep to dripping here and soaked-through now.  Don’t look up, don’t look in and don’t ever look back.  Take each step as it comes and don’t worry about where you’ve come from or where you are-

“Watch it!”

The voice was so sudden, so unexpected that Pax reacted without thinking, leaping back from the source and glancing up through the wet spikes of her fringe at the black anorak which swirled before her, only half concealing an elderly hand wrapped around a pile of boxes before the whole slick enterprise turned away from her and disappeared through a gap in the hedge.  

She blinked, as much to clear her eyes of raindrops as from the sheer surprise, then put her head down and started walking once more, continuing the battle to think about nothing.

So, it was a good few hundred yard before all the strange pieces of the encounter began to bother her.

The logo on the boxes was all-too familiar to her: the red and blue slashes of Feirmont Brothers Department Store.  The voice had been familiar too: strangely accented and monotone, despite the speaker’s obvious annoyance.  She could hear it muttering those three syllables once more, Tsu-na-my…

But the oddest thing of all was the hand.  She’d thought elderly in the instant that she saw it, but hadn’t been able to place a gender on the person who owned it.  But that wasn’t the strangest thing.  She could have sworn - could her memory be playing tricks, or was it this storm-light?  She was almost certain that the hand had been covered and threaded through with something bluish-green, like mouldy bread.

She turned around then, although she wasn’t really sure why.  Perhaps it was some humanitarian desire to get help for an elderly citizen, some sense of civic duty.  Perhaps it was just curiosity, or the dull, nagging ache of horror yet to fully dawn.  She retraced her steps to the hedge, paced along it in the rain to find the gap through which the old person had vanished, felt along the foliage for some way in.

And it was then that she saw it, fed through the interior of the hedge like a parasitic plant, a long twisted stretch of curved wire, pennants of silk still dripping sadly along parts of its length.  One end was cut sharply, jutting out into a small gap, the one the black anorak had stepped through.  Its point seemed rusted, but still looked vicious, more jagged than any accident could achieve.  She stared at it for a long, long time, comparing sight to memory, imagination to reality and then she let out a gasp and started running up the road.

For, of course, the point wasn’t rusted at all.