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My legs and arms cramp as a wave of rigor hits me. A semi roars by and blasts its air horn at us. Startled, I drop the cane. But I can’t even fall over. My body is rigid against the rail.

Howard comes over, smiling.

“Not feeling so good, are we? Relax. It will all be over soon. But I still need some of your blood.”

Howard grabs my arm.

As quic

kly as it came, the rigor eases and I can move again. I pull my arm free of Howard’s grip. That doesn’t go over so well with him. He grabs the cane and swings it like a baseball bat into the side of my head. It hits and I drop onto the road like a dead flounder. He beats me with the cane a few more times while I’m down, just having fun. Cars honk and people video us. It’s L.A. Blood lust runs deep.

When beating me isn’t fun anymore, Howard throws the cane away and drags me to the swirling mist. He squeezes my arm where I cut myself earlier. Black blood flows into the magic circle. The dancing light seethes for a few seconds, then goes out. I’m able to roll away a few feet, but that’s all.

The center of the pentagram begins to sizzle. Pieces of it fall away. The burning continues to expand and pieces of the circle continue dropping into a dark abyss. The incandescence stops at the edges of the larger circle. There’s a void the size of a manhole in front of me. Howard gives me a kick on the side of the head with his nice shoes and drags me toward it.

“You were right. This isn’t Ludovico’s Ellicit. Although, to be precise, it was the Ellicit until the point where I added your blood,” he says. “What to do with you was a problem, you see. I could send you to Hell, but you’re perfectly comfortable there. I could kill you, but, again, you would go right back to Hell, which solves nothing. Altering the Ellicit was the only solution.”

The piece of shit has been dragging me this whole time, and now my bruised and woozy head dangles over the freeway chasm.

He says, “Most people think that the opposite of life is death, but that’s not true. The opposite of life is nothingness. That’s what reversing the Ellicit has conjured—perfect, perpetual nothingness. You can spend eternity there thinking about your wasted life. Or going mad. Whichever suits you.”

He drops my head and tries to shove me into the hole. My dead nerves don’t feel a thing, but I can smell my flesh burning. Before I slide in, I manage to get my arms around one of his legs and hang on like an angry tick.

I suppose if I’m really leaving for good, the freeway is the best place to do it. If nothing else, L.A. is the city of roads and I’m an L.A. boy. Plus, I’m not going out entirely dead. Just Hollywood dead. I hate not making it into the movie, but maybe they’ll include a couple of my scenes in the director’s cut.

Something thumps repeatedly against my back and I realize that Howard is beating me with the cane again. I can’t look up at him, but every few seconds, a car passes by and throws his shadow on the road. He’s working Casey Jones hard to get me loose. And he’s doing it. My arms are loose. I slide a few inches down his leg.

Goddammit, I don’t want to go, especially not at the hands of a ten-dollar corpse fucker. But only the lucky ones get to choose how they go out and that’s not me.

Candy was right. I should have stayed at Vidocq’s. Candy was right about a lot of things. I miss her already.

There’s a skid and a thump. The undercarriage of a car flashes overhead. All of a sudden Howard’s gone and there’s nothing for me to hold on to.

I fall into the dark.

WHAT’S TERMINAL VELOCITY in nothingness? Is there air drag? Updrafts? I wish I’d brought a book. I suppose I could Google it, but I don’t think they have Wi-Fi in nothingness.

How long do I fall? How far? Am I going to float in nothingness or fall forever?

Do those questions even matter in a total void situation? If there’s no up or down, how do you measure time or distance? I don’t think you can and everything is the same forever, which I’m guessing is part of Howard’s “going mad” plan for my future.

I wonder when that starts.

Has it started already?

My head feels funny.

Is today my birthday? I can’t remember.

But I met a cute alien. That was cool.

How long have I been here?

I’m going to miss touching things and smelling things the most, I think.

I hope Candy isn’t too mad when I don’t come back. I hope Alessa takes good care of her.

How do you tell time here? Has it been a million years yet?