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Then a click, and an empty hum.

It wasn’t until nine the next morning the police came to tell her they’d found Eileen, hanging by a studded leather belt from the shower-curtain rail in her apartment.

It was a lovely day. Birds singing and everything.

* * *

“I want you to go away,” Mavis told them.

They, as usual, said nothing.

She paced up and down, feeling the strain in her limbs with every step. Her hips cracked as she turned to face them again.

“Who are you? What do you want?”

One of them, bored, tilted its head slightly towards the window. The others remained level, the blackness beneath their cowls locked steady with her eyes.

“Speak, God damn you!” she screamed.

The room dimmed, and the air filled with dust. A kind of murky haze seemed to rise from her beloved furniture, making it look old and clumsy and precariously perched on the edge of decay.

“It’s Eileen, isn’t it?” she said. “Isn’t it? You want me to say I’m sorry, don’t you? Well, I’m not. She was just like her father, never finished what she started. Thought she was better than me, who had to work for my living, but she found out, didn’t she? Nothing but a whore, she ended up, and that’s the plain truth.”

They watched. Waiting.

“And what do you know about any of it, anyway?”

Dust filled her nostrils, stinging her eyes. She blinked at them, coughing.

Suddenly, a dull pain rolled through her like a tide.

“All right,” she whispered. “I am.”

The distracted one’s head whipped back, surprised.

“I am,” she repeated, sure of it now. Then: “Oh, I am.”

Tears clotted the dust on her cheeks, as the light faded even further.

For a moment, nothing happened.

And now they’ll go, her mind chattered away somewhere in the distance. They’ll go now. They’ll go. They will.

Then a kiss of pleasure rippled through the room. She looked up, just as the tallest one bent to show her a wide, flat, sharp smile that split its face from side to earless side.

Mavis smiled back, uncertainly.

Won’t they?

“You repent,” the tallest one said, in a voice like wind along a gully filled with dead leaves, at the height of October. “Good.”

The others nodded.

“Now we can begin,” they replied.

And as they raised their hands, Mavis saw their fingers were knives.

* * *