Chapter Text
All of Juno Steel’s belongings fit in a single cardboard box.
Not even a particularly big box, either. Most of his stuff had been tossed out in the dumpster, and what little had remained was easily packed away. He pulls his tranquilizer gun from the top of the pile and turns it over in his hands, checking the safety. Then he aims it at the cracked mirror hanging on the now-bare front wall of his apartment.
“Last chance, Detective Steel,” he mutters. “Don’t fuck it up.”
He sees his own drawn, tired face reflected back at him—the face of a city-renowned private eye who isn’t going to be renowned much longer unless he can solve another case soon. He doesn’t like looking at it. And why would he? Mirrors have only ever been a reminder of things he’d rather not think about. Of the boy who’d once shared that face and now is nothing more than ashes stored in a glass tupperware case at the top of the cardboard box.
Juno averts his eyes for a moment, and when they return to the mirror, he’s no longer the only figure reflected in it.
He flinches violently, cocking his gun and opening his mouth to cry out—but then he recognizes the second figure. It isn’t an intruder. It’s a tall, reedy woman with black hair and sunken eyes, watching him with a vaguely judgmental expression. A woman he’s seen too many times lately, in shop-front windows and puddles of rain and side-view mirrors on the bus.
“Good luck, little monster,” she says.
When Juno pulls the trigger, it isn’t because he thinks she’s really there or that shattering one mirror will free him from the specter that’s been haunting him for years now. He doesn’t expect it to solve anything; he just wants to break something. Once he's successfully done so he lowers the gun, her laughter echoing in his ears.
“Steel! What the hell do you think you’re doing?!”
Juno hastily stashes the gun away and turns to see a tall man in a checkered vest. It’s his landlord—or rather, ex-landlord. “Uh, hey. Sorry. It was an accident.”
“You’re not getting your security deposit back,” the man snaps at him.
Juno sighs. “I know, Mr. Engstrom.”
“And you had better get the hell out of my building by tonight.”
“I’m going, Mr. Engstrom.”
“Good riddance.”
Juno cleans up the glass as best he can, ignoring the glimpse he catches in the shards of an eye that isn’t his own, then carries his box down to his car.
The tupperware container of his brother’s remains rattles as he sets it in the trunk.
“Sorry,” he mutters under his breath. He’ll find a good place to scatter them soon, he tells himself, some beautiful river or calm meadow where he can lay his twin to rest. He’s been telling himself that every day for the past five years. Nowhere ever seems right, because Benzaiten Steel shouldn’t be a pile of dust in the first place. He should be a person, still smiling and dancing and alive.
It takes a few tries, but he manages to start his beat-up sedan and pull out of the building, driving until the city is nothing but sparkling lights on the horizon.
As Juno drives north, the green trees give way to autumnal oranges, reds and yellows. He suspects that vibrant foliage is the only reason anyone would ever visit the place where he’s headed.
The town of Chestnut Falls is nestled in the valley between two mountain ranges, with a population under two thousand and little to put it on the map besides the surrounding nature and a nearby college—which, Juno decides, doesn’t really count. Ridgewater College, as its name implies, is located in the neighboring town of Ridgewater. Not Chestnut Falls.
So it’s really just the leaves.
Well, that and the mysterious disappearances. But those are new.
He’s alone on the road as he drives into the town, greeted by the sleepy quiet of a Sunday afternoon. Sleepy afternoons don’t exist where he’s from, and he’s probably meant to find it peaceful, but the empty sidewalks and closed shutters unnerve him. There are no children playing on the lawns, no cyclists out and about to enjoy the weather, and the one person he passes on the way to his new home—an elderly man tending to his garden—gives him a dirty look. Whether the dirty look is aimed at him for being an outsider or at his belching, decrepit sedan, he can’t tell. He hopes it’s the sedan, though; it deserves it.
He pulls into the driveway of the house where he’ll be spending his next few weeks. It’s big and sturdy, all red brick and Georgian windows—the kind of house that’s been around for a very long time and was built well enough that it’ll probably still be standing for many more years to come. He’s renting just a single room, but all things considered, it had been a steal.
Juno has to ring the doorbell three times before it finally opens to reveal a stooped, older woman with a long mess of white hair plaited down her back. She squints at him suspiciously. “Yes?”
He gives her the best wave he can manage while his arms are occupied with holding the cardboard box. “Oh. Um. Hello, Miss K? We talked on the phone. I’m your new tenant—”
“Juno Steel,” she finishes for him. “You’re younger than I expected.”
“Sorry?” He’s not sure why he’s apologizing, other than that the way she’d said it made him feel like he was supposed to.
Her eyes linger on his faded purple hair, then move to the piercing in his nose, before continuing down to the tattoo of a snake on his right bicep. He’s hoping that she won’t keep going and see the chipped polish on his fingernails when she says, “Come inside.”
Juno exhales a breath he hadn’t known he was holding and follows her into the building. If she takes any issue with his presentation, she’s at least polite enough not to bring it up immediately upon meeting him. If she ever does bring up the tattoo, at least he’ll have a good story to justify it: My late brother was named after the goddess Benzaiten. The snake was one of her symbols, so I got the tattoo to commemorate him. (Never mind that he’d gotten it done at seventeen, two years before Ben’s death, having drunkenly selected the snake from the artist’s flash sheet because it “looked cool”).
The interior of the house is sparsely decorated, its walls covered in faded floral wallpaper and floors lined with furniture that looks like it hasn’t been sat on in decades.
As Miss K leads him to the foyer through the kitchen, his nose is filled with a heavy, floral scent. It’s so strong that he has to set down the cardboard box on a nearby ottoman, hold an arm over his face, and take deep, slow breaths in through the nose and out through the mouth to fend off an asthma attack.
He’d smelled something similar when visiting a friend’s grandmother years ago—Mrs. Mercury’s house had always smelled like someone had unloaded an entire bottle of perfume in each room of the building. Maybe it’s an old lady thing, he reasons, but if the whole place smells like this…
Right as he’s starting to consider digging through the cardboard box to find his inhaler, he takes another few steps and the smell lessens from “overwhelming” to “tolerable.” He gasps for breath, grateful that the lungfuls of air he’s taking in aren’t as sickeningly sweet.
“Are you all right over there, young man?” Miss K has finally noticed his dilemma and is peering at him with an expression that looks one-part concerned and one-part annoyed that he’s holding up the tour of the house.
“Uh, yeah,” he chokes out. “S’fine.” He picks his box and hurries after her. She must have left a diffuser running too long, soaking the furniture near the entryway with its scent. He makes a mental note to avoid the area when possible.
Miss K leads him around the rest of the ground floor, dispassionately pointing out various doors and informing him where they lead. Upon reaching the kitchen, she grabs a set of keys off the counter and drops it into his hands.
“Your room is on the third floor,” she says. “You have the run of the place, excluding my bedroom, the office and the basement.”
“Why not the basement?” he can’t resist asking.
“It’s under construction. The workers will be in next month to finish putting the flooring in.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“You’re welcome to spend time in the garden, too. I never go out there except to feed the fish. The insects are positively despicable…”
Well, his therapist is always telling him that being outside in the fresh air is good for his health. At least, she told him it up until a year ago, when he’d walked out of her office in the middle of a session and never came back. Dr. Heine was a nice lady, but no amount of niceness could make sitting in a room for an hour a week and talking about his feelings any more enjoyable.
Juno thanks Miss K, then brings his box upstairs to his new quarters. It’s just a small attic room painted a sickly puce, but it has a big bed and its own bathroom, so he isn’t about to complain. There’s even an empty desk with a large cork board above it, which will definitely come in handy while he’s working on the case.
He doesn’t love that there’s a large mirror hanging on the wall as well, but… he can cover it up if he has to.
Juno paces the room for a while, desperately trying to decide where to start his investigation, but his only theories are scattershot and facile. After an hour has passed and all he’s managed to come up with is “The fact that most of the missing person cases are people under 35 probably means something,” he knows this isn’t going to work.
He sighs, grabs his jacket and bag, and heads down to the garden. “This one’s for you, Dr. Heine.”
To Dr. Heine’s credit, he feels better the moment he steps outside. The garden is sprawling and overgrown, tendrils of ivy crawling up trellises and a fresh blanket of leaves covering the ground. It must have rained recently; the dirt is soft beneath his boots and petrichor hangs in the air. A pathway made of flat stones leads him to a small pond where black and orange koi swim lazily in the murky water.
He’s thrown back in time to a park on the outskirts of the city, where he’d climbed trees and jumped in the fountain and played hide-and-seek with his brother. The memory is tinted in sepia like a movie from a different era. The era before his mother hated him. The era when everyone was still alive. Back when the worst pain he had to endure was a scraped knee from falling off the swing at the playground, and a world without his brother had seemed as impossible as a world made of chocolate. Maybe even moreso, because at four years old he had seen photographs of structures built from chocolate, but he had never seen a life without Benzaiten Steel in it.
His phone beeps loudly—he’s never figured out how to silence it, to the chagrin of anyone who’s ever shared a movie theater with him—and yanks him back to the present day. He flips it open to read the message.
BOSS MAN: I got word that they’re awake, by the way. They want to see you.
BOSS MAN: I’ll send you the address of the hospital.
BOSS MAN: You should go once you finish this case. Wallowing like an infant isn’t going to help anything, Steel. This’ll at least give you some closure.
He closes the phone again without replying. “What if I want to wallow like an infant, Vicky?” he grumbles to himself.
Valles Vicky, the eponymous owner of Valles Vicky’s Private Investigations Agency, is the one who’d given him this case. She’s also the one who’d threatened to sack him and blacken his name if he doesn’t do a half-decent job at solving it. Pretty funny that she’s suddenly decided to pretend she gives a shit about how much he chooses to wallow. This isn’t about giving him closure, it’s about strong-arming him into cleaning up the mess he’d made.
But some messes can’t be cleaned up so easily, and he’s pretty sure this one has already become a permanent stain.
Leaves crunch somewhere behind him. He glances back, but there’s nothing there. Just a squirrel, or a deer, or some other cutesy woodland creature that frequents quiet little towns like this. There’s a container of fish food by the pond, so he opens it and tosses some in. The koi swim to the surface, excitedly gulping up the pellets.
He’s walking around the pond to explore the remainder of the garden when he stops, boot poised in the air. Right where he was about to step is a footprint, captured perfectly in the mud. Feeling like a caricature of a detective you’d find in a children’s picture book (except without the magnifying glass, which honestly might’ve come in handy) Juno kneels down and studies it. The imprint is smaller than his boot, but not small enough to belong to someone as small and shriveled as Miss K. The prints circle back around the pond, and he follows them cautiously, feeling his heart rate pick up.
A gardener? No, it’s obvious this garden has never been taken care of by anyone, let alone a professional. Some precocious pre-teen? Juno had trespassed in plenty of yards as a kid, just to mess around, retrieve a lost tennis ball or outsmart his friends during a game of cops and robbers. But the footprints are too big to be a child’s… So who else would be lurking around an old woman’s fenced-in property?
The hairs on the back of his neck prickle as a cold draft blows through the trees. His hand instinctively moves towards his purse, but there’s no tranquilizer gun inside of it. He’d left it inside, nestled somewhere deep in the cardboard box of his belongings.
It’s nothing. You’re jumping at shadows. What are the chances that you’re being stalked by a murderer?
Except, of course, that you already know there’s a murderer in this town. That’s kind of the whole reason that you’re here.
There’s a symphony of splashes below him. He looks down and sees that the koi—previously gathered at the surface of the pond in the hopes that he might give them more pellets—have now turned tail and swum down into the murky depths.
Almost like they’re running from something.
He stares at the pond, seeing his own pallid, wide-eyed face reflected back at him. The surface of the water is still, its tranquility mocking his fear. He takes deep breaths, trying to retain some modicum of composure.
Then a figure appears beside him in the reflection. One that’s too tall to be Sarah Steel.
“Hello there.”
Juno lets out a cry and stumbles backwards. His boot slides and his legs fly out from under him. He tries to catch himself but fails spectacularly, coming to a very painful and muddy landing.
“Er, are you all right?”
The man peering down at where Juno has planted his ass right in the middle of a mud puddle doesn’t look like a murderer at all. In fact, he might just be the most beautiful man Juno has ever seen.
His dark eyes, which are currently fixed on Juno with concern, are framed by hexagonal, gold-rimmed glasses. He has the kind of cheekbones that Juno has only ever seen in magazines, complemented by perfectly arched eyebrows and sleek, pin-straight black hair. He’s tall and lanky, so thin that he’d probably be able to hide behind a telephone pole if he turned sideways, but the ochre yellow cardigan he’s wearing softens his otherwise sharp features.
Juno gapes, doing what is probably a very good impression of the koi fish. “I. Um, I’m fine, how are you?”
“Better than you, I think.” There’s an amused lilt to the man’s voice now.
He reaches out a hand and Juno stares at it stupidly for a moment before realizing that the man is offering to help him up. He takes the hand, stomach fluttering at how easily the stranger is able to lift him back to his feet. By all accounts there’s no proof that he isn’t a murderer yet, but if he is, Juno decides he would rather be murdered by this man than any other.
“At risk of sounding rude,” the man says, “may I ask who you are?”
Juno shakes himself, trying uselessly to wipe some of the mud off his pants. “I was actually about to ask you the same thing. I’m renting one of the rooms here.”
“Ah! That makes sense. I am a tenant of the inimitable Miss K as well.”
Juno frowns. “I didn’t know there was another tenant.” Miss K had never mentioned that when they’d discussed him coming to stay at the house. It would’ve saved him a whole lot of emotional turmoil if she had, he thinks bitterly.
“Nor did I—though admittedly I do my best to avoid our lovely proprietress, so I don’t hear much news,” the man says. “Here, follow me. There’s a spigot by the gazebo that you can use to clean the worst of that off.”
He leads Juno past the koi pond to the gazebo nestled on the other side of the garden, which is furnished with a wicker table and two matching chairs. A sprawl of papers covers the table, with a teacup resting on top of them. Juno is able to make out the contents of the sheets as he approaches—they seem to be floorplans of a house, hand-drawn on graphing paper. The teacup is full to the brim, though even in the chilly Autumn air no steam is rising from its surface.
Juno makes his way to the spigot, yanking the rusted knob until a thin stream of water comes out. He washes his hands and vainly scrubs at his pants before going to join the other man at the wicker table.
For the first time, Juno is able to take in the entirety of the man’s appearance without his head clouded by shock or fear.
He notes the embroidered, deep purple boots he’s wearing, the silvery cuffs on his ears, his perfectly gelled hair and glossy lips—and can’t help but breathe a small sigh of relief. From what he’d observed during his car ride to Chestnut Falls, he’d been a little worried he might be the only one of his own… ilk in the area.
He needs to make a better impression than the one he’d just given, and fast. He takes a deep breath, remembering back to his late teens as a newly out and newly single lady-on-the-town. He recalls the drag king at the bar where he’d worked nights pulling him aside and giving him a lesson in pick up lines after watching him fail abysmally at sweet-talking three different people in a row. It had taken some practice, but he’d improved as time went on, and now he’s pretty confident in his ability to make a flirtatious introduction.
So Juno sits down at the table and says, “I think your tea’s gone cold.”
What the hell is wrong with you, Steel?!
The man blinks at Juno, who is currently wishing he could shapeshift into a patch of moss, and then down at his tea. “Hmm, it seems you’re right. I get so caught up in my drafts sometimes that I forget it exists,” he says. “I do most of my work out here if I can manage it, but my room is on the second floor.”
“That’s good,” Juno says without thinking. When the man gives him a questioning look, he continues, “That your room’s on the second floor, I mean. Because I’m on the third floor. So… we’re not on the same floor, which is nice.”
The man leans on his hand, a bemused smile playing across his lips. “You’re happy to not be too close to me?”
“No!” Juno says too quickly, feeling his cheeks heat up. “I mean, you’ll be happy not to be too close to me. I’m kind of, uh, loud. When I sleep. My last landlord lived in the room right beside mine and he hated my guts.”
“...‘Loud?’”
If his face gets any hotter, steam might start coming out of his ears like in the cartoons he and Benten watched as kids. “You know what, forget I said that. Or the thing about the tea. And while we’re at it, you can forget about the whole falling-ass-first-into-a-mud-puddle thing too. You’re meeting me just now and we’ve never spoken to each other or seen each other before, all right?” He sticks out his hand. “Hi, I’m Juno Steel, the new tenant.”
To his shock, the man doesn’t seem at all put off by his sudden inability to socialize like a normal human being. He just chuckles and accepts the handshake. “Lovely to meet you, Juno. I’m Peter.”
“Peter. That’s a nice name,” Juno says, choosing to ignore the exclusion of a surname. By all accounts he shouldn’t use his, either, but he needs it to remind himself that he’s a Steel. To carry that albatross around his neck for all to see. Anything else would be too easy. “I like it.”
“It’s a very dull name,” Peter corrects him. “Juno, on the other hand… What brings someone with a beautiful name like that to a town like this? Forgive me if I’m being impolite, but you don’t look like you’re from around here.”
Juno snorts. “What gave it away? The dyed hair or the piercings?”
Peter nods at his bag. “It was the pin that says ‘city girls do it better.’”
“Oh. Okay, that makes sense.” He’d forgotten about that, and now he feels even more flustered. At least Peter doesn’t seem particularly bothered by the “girl” part of the pin, or—presumably—the colorful flag pins right next to it. “If you want even more proof, I can show you something I wish I had any use for here—”
He fumbles in his bag, but before he can find his metro card, he knocks something else loose. A printed photograph, one of many he’d stuffed inside it before leaving his apartment, flutters out and drifts towards the ground. He and Peter’s eyes both follow it to its landing on the gazebo floor.
There are a few tense seconds during which they are both staring down at a photograph of a gray, bloated, human corpse, and then Juno blurts out, “I’m a private investigator!”
Peter looks back up, cocking an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“I mean, that’s why I have that. I’m not a murderer. I don’t just carry around photos of dead bodies for no reason,” Juno continues hastily. “I’m investigating the recent string of deaths and disappearances in the area.”
Shockingly, Peter doesn’t look disgusted or alarmed. If anything, he just looks intrigued. “You’ve been holding out on me, ‘city girl.’ I hadn’t realized you were so interesting,” he says.
Juno reaches down to pick up the photo, but Peter gets to it first. He holds it up and studies the image, seemingly unbothered by its graphic nature—unlike Juno, who’d had to fight to keep himself from gagging the first time he’d seen the corpses.
“This is that teenager who drowned in the river, isn’t it?” Peter muses. “A tragic accident, certainly, but last I heard the police believed that there was no foul play involved.”
Juno grabs the photo back and stashes it in his bag. “Those lazy assholes would’ve said that even if there was a bullet hole in his forehead. I talked to the coroner who did his autopsy upstate, and she said there were loads of weird markings on his body. It was hard to make them out because of the damage from the river rocks, but she was positive that they were unnatural. Almost… surgical.”
“Hm. How strange,” Peter says, still unmoved. “Nonetheless, I would have thought this was a job for the proper authorities. Not a private eye.”
“Yeah, well, the police were doing a shitty job, so somebody had to step in,” Juno grumbles. “Besides… I could use a big win. That way I can finally start getting enough cases to afford an apartment with a view of something other than the parking lot.”
Peter is looking at him with genuine interest now, which is a relief. Juno had been just about certain that he’d lost any chance of ever interacting with him again. He needs to pivot this conversation away from himself as soon as possible, before he accidentally screws something else up. “Well, ninety percent of the time being a PI just means hunting down cheating spouses, not murderers. But even we have our days,” he says. “And you… you’re an architect? Interior designer?”
“Hmm?” Peter glances at the hand-drawn floor plans on the table, then nods. “Something like that.”
“That’s an interesting career, too. Sounds way more stable.” Architects make decent money, too—at least, he’d thought they did, but the fact that Peter is also renting a spare room in a random elderly woman’s house suggests otherwise.
“But far less noble. You’re here to help a town in need and catch a terrible murderer,” Peter says. “To step in and do the job the police are too incompetent to complete. It all sounds very heroic.”
Juno can’t tell if he’s teasing or not. “That’s, uh, definitely an overstatement.”
“Well, speaking of work… I really ought to return to it.” Peter gets to his feet and starts gathering his things. “As much as I prefer to do so out in the open air, it gets dark rather early this time of year, and I’d rather not sketch by lantern light.”
All of a sudden, Juno is gripped with the inexplicable need to stop him—to grab hold of his arm and insist that Peter stick around. Thankfully, he manages to curb that impulse and just say, “Can’t you stay a little while longer?”
Peter turns back and tilts his head. “You’d like me to?”
“I mean, if you want. I liked talking to you. It’s not like I know anyone in this town, so—”
“Very well then,” he says, looking thoughtful. “I’ll stay. But only for a little while, yes?”
Juno may have been the one who requested it, but he’s still shocked to get a positive response. “Great. Okay. So, um… Where are you from?”
They spend the next sixty odd minutes sitting in the gazebo and talking, as the sun sinks lower and lower in the sky. By the end of the hour, Juno feels like he’s both learned nothing substantial about Peter at all, and like he now knows him better than anyone he’s met in years.
Peter’s from out of town too; he’s been living in Miss K’s house for a few months now; his work takes him everywhere… His favorite tea is Jujube because it helps him sleep, and he knows how to play three different instruments. In turn, Juno regales him with a few of his funnier case stories and tales from the drag bar.
Peter finally gets up to leave again when the automatic outdoor lights turn on, illuminating the now shadowy garden. “We will talk again, won’t we? It’s been so lovely to meet you.”
“Of course,” Juno promises. “Any time you wanna talk, I’ll talk. If I’m not working, I mean.”
“Excellent.”
Peter touches him on the shoulder as he passes, and he shivers beneath the gentle brush of the man’s long fingers. Then Peter is through the sliding glass door and back in the house, and Juno is left to stand alone beneath the starry sky.
“Fucking hell, Steel,” he grumbles under his breath. “It really has been too long since you last got laid.”
Juno spends the rest of the evening in his new room. He procrastinates doing any actual work by unpacking his clothes (instead of just letting them sit in the box for weeks like he normally would) and painstakingly tacking all of the photographs and leads he’s found so far on the corkboard. At least that way there aren’t any left in his bag to fall out at inopportune times.
Benzaiten’s ashes are set on his desk, beside the lamp. He considers putting them away again so he doesn’t have to see them, but he can’t bring himself to. Ben deserves better than to be hidden away in the dark, even if the alternative is a rickety old desk.
When dinner time makes its presence known to Juno by way of his loudly growling stomach, he fixes a cup of ramen for himself in the kitchen microwave. Both Miss K and Peter are nowhere to be seen, so he eats the cup in silence while playing Solitaire on his phone.
He runs himself a shower before bed, but there’s no hot water—which is probably some form of divine punishment for making a fool of himself in front of what’s probably the only other queer person his age in the entire town. He white knuckles through it, and then it’s finally time for his nighttime routine.
His routine has been the same for five years now: put on pajamas, brush teeth, moisturize face, scrunch oil into hair, fill a glass of water for the nightstand, and then set down at least two clean towels on the bed.
He turns off the lights, curls up on the towels, and closes his eyes, only to immediately discover that he has to add another step. This is the first time he’s lived anywhere so painfully, eerily quiet. The silence is boring into his skull like a drill. Maybe most people would find that peaceful, but to Juno it feels like an open invitation for dark thoughts to creep in and fill the void.
He grabs his laptop and searches until he finds a video called “City Traffic White Noise (Two hours).” When he finally falls asleep, it’s to screeching tires, car horns, and the incoherent babble of pedestrians.
Then he wakes up several hours later, drenched in sweat, to the sound of someone screaming.
This, too, is part of his nighttime routine. Sometimes it takes him several minutes to understand that the screams are his own and that neither he nor anyone else is in danger, and he often doesn’t even remember the nightmares that had brought them on. Thankfully, he comes back to himself quickly this time. His memories of tonight's dreams are vague and amorphous, leaving him filled with clawing panic from a source he can’t name.
The clock on the bedside table reads 2:18 AM. He downs the entire glass of water to soothe his aching throat, tosses aside the sweat-soaked towel, and settles back down on the remaining clean one.
Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, he’d hoped that things might be different here—that such a drastic change of scenery might finally do away with the demons who have made their roost in his head and who become so much more active at night. But he’d hoped the same thing when he’d moved out of the apartment building, and then the borough, and then the city where Ben had died. The demons aren’t attached to any one location. You can’t take a bus or a car or a train to escape what’s inside of you.
He turns the white noise video back on and falls back into an uneasy, disappointed sleep.
The next time he wakes, the clock reads 3:40 AM, and someone is screaming again.
The difference is that this time even once he sits up, opens his eyes, and remembers who and where he is, it still doesn’t stop. This time it isn’t coming out of his own mouth.
He bolts out of bed, scrambling for the top drawer of the dresser where he’d hidden his gun. He doesn’t bother with a shirt, just slips out of the door into the darkened hallway wearing only his pajama pants and with the gun in hand.
The screams are muffled—are they coming from the first floor? The yard? He can’t tell for certain, but they get louder and louder the further he goes down the stairs. The voice is probably a man’s, but he can’t determine much more than that—only that whatever is happening to its owner is very, very bad. By the time he reaches the bottom of the stairs, the sounds are starting to trail off to choking gasps. Juno doesn’t know where, how or why, but someone is being very badly hurt, and he needs to help them.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he whispers. He’d come here to catch a murderer, sure, but he hadn’t expected one to show up in the middle of the night in his own goddamn home.
There’s a light on in the kitchen. He readies the gun, holding it the way the instructor at the gun range had taught him all those years ago. If this is the way he goes out, dying to some burglar or suburban serial killer, so be it. He isn’t about to chicken out. This time he’ll take the shot. This time he won’t let a murderer get away, won’t mistake his hands for his mother’s and the perpetrator for Benzaiten—
Then he rounds the corner, and the sound stops. It cuts off abruptly, like a recording being shut off… or like the person being attacked had finally received a definitive killing blow. He stands there, panting, his gun pointed at the only figure in the kitchen.
“Good heavens, Mr. Steel! What are you doing waving a pistol around at this time of night? You’re going to give me heart failure.”
It’s Miss K. The kitchen is entirely empty except for the landlady, who is dressed in a floral nightgown and matching nightcap, innocently brewing a cup of coffee.
“I–I’m sorry. It only shoots tranquilizer darts,” Juno explains, as though that alleviates the fact that he is currently pointing a gun at the elderly woman who he pays rent to. He quickly lowers the gun and says, “You didn’t… hear that?”
“Hear what?” she asks. “If you’re referring to the sound of you stomping down the stairs at this unholy hour, then yes. You’re a very noisy young man. I may rise earlier in the day than most, but I at least give my tenants the courtesy of being as quiet as possible when I do—”
“The screaming,” Juno interrupts. “There was a person screaming.”
She just looks even more unimpressed. “Yes. You, two hours ago. Don’t you remember? I was already up to use the bathroom, so thankfully it didn’t wake me. You’d warned me about the night terrors, but that was rather more unsettling than I’d expected.”
“No! I–I mean, yes, that was me, but I’m talking about right now. I heard it all the way from the third floor. It sounded like it was coming from down here. Didn’t you hear it!?” he asks desperately.
Miss K just shakes her head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Steel. I didn’t hear anything.”
Of course she didn’t. Now that he’s looking around he sees that there’s no blood, no overturned chairs, no signs of a struggle. There’s not even a TV or radio that could have been producing the noises artificially. Just an old woman making coffee in the kitchen. He peers out the window into the gardens just in case, but there’s nothing of note there either. Even if the noises had been coming from somewhere else nearby, there’s no way Miss K could have missed them.
“But…” He swallows. “I swear I heard…”
“It’s an old house,” Miss K says. “It makes all kinds of sounds when the wind blows.”
“Not sounds like that .”
“No. Most likely not.” She turns off the coffee machine, her milky blue eyes staring into the distance. “You’re not the first one to complain, though. I had a girl here last summer who kept talking about hearing ghosts. Now, isn’t that that funny?”
Apparently deeming the conversation to be over, she clasps her mug in her wrinkled hands and brushes by him towards her office, humming quietly to herself.
It isn’t funny.
Ghosts aren’t real, which means that either the screams were caused by someone actually being hurt, or they were invented by Juno’s brain. And given Miss K’s total non-reaction and the lack of any evidence of a struggle anywhere in the house, it’s seeming more and more likely that it’s the latter.
He passes the sliding glass door on his way back to his room, and isn’t surprised to see Sarah Steel reflected in it instead of his own image. Of course she would show up at a time like this.
“This is how it started,” she says. “Don’t you remember?”
“Shut up.” Juno is too tired to stop himself from speaking out loud to her. There’s no one around to see him do it, anyway.
“I claimed I was hearing things. I’d hear you every night, even when you weren’t there. I heard you instead of him, when I killed him. Who are you going to kill by accident, Juno? Miss K? Peter?”
“Yeah, I don’t have a real gun for a reason.” He waves the tranquilizer pistol at her. “That was your problem. Blame it on your brain or the drugs all you want, but there are plenty of addicts and mentally ill people who don’t swing fully loaded guns around whenever they’re angry. Who don’t kill their own goddamn sons.”
She ignores him. “You thought they sounded like him, didn’t you? The screams. They sounded like Benzaiten.”
“Not really.” That thought had crossed his mind, but… no. It hadn’t been his voice. It hadn’t sounded as young as Ben had when he’d died.
“Then who was it?”
He doesn’t give her an answer because he doesn’t have one. He just walks back up the stairway to his room, pushing aside the growing fear in his chest that she’s right —he really is becoming just like her. Tonight was just a fluke. He’ll go down to the local pharmacy and buy some sleeping pills tomorrow. They don’t do much to prevent night terrors, but sometimes they help him stay asleep until morning.
He refills his water cup without looking in the bathroom mirror, adjusts the towel on the bed, and settles back down for the third and hopefully final time tonight.
“Ghosts,” he mutters derisively into his pillow. “I wish…”