Synopsis: While out walking her dog, down-on-her-luck Kylie McKenna has the misfortune of looking a gorgon in the eye. As the consequences of this act catch up, Kylie tries to rationalize away what is happening to her even as her sense of reality gradually begins to unravel…

NOTE: the thumbnail images for each chapter of Stheno are by EliseEnchanted and Kizuna-Chan, on DeviantArt.

Table of Contents

Chapter One: A Rocky Start - Kylie McKenna takes her dog Tig for a pre-work walk and on a secluded path runs into a mysterious Muslim lady named Stheno. They talk congenially about each other’s respective pasts, but when Tig begins acting aggressively, Kylie accidentally gets a glimpse of Stheno’s face through her burqa…

Chapter Two: Light And Local, On The Rocks - Despite feeling extremely ill, rent anxieties force Kylie to attend her job as a dive bar waitress. Customers and coworkers alike express concern for her, and she soon realizes that her malady is like nothing she’s ever suffered before…

Chapter Three: Scared Stiff - Kylie endures a tense walk home, and her illness progresses until she can no longer escape the reality she’s been hiding from all day…

Chapter Four: Taken For Granite - Stheno returns to taunt Kylie, and the latter is forced to endure a humiliating cocktail party where she is very much the center of attention…

Chapter Five: Stone Cold Killer - A friend arrives to crash the party, and the grand finale ensues.

The previous chapters may be read here: (I) (II) (III) (IV)

The header image is by EliseEnchanted on DeviantArt.

Stheno inhaled sharply. She withdrew her lips reluctantly from Kylie’s, and turned in annoyance to the door.

“Closed,” she called hoarsely.

Kylie’s whole being quivered in dreadful, erotic anticipation. She hated it. Hated the pleasure building within her with no chance of release. Hated that she was enjoying Stheno’s touch. No- not her. Her traitorous body.

Stheno turned back to continue kissing Kylie’s stone lips, to toy with the marble globes of her breasts. But the knocking resumed, more forcefully this time. She withdrew again and rolled her eyes, then dismounted Kylie’s pedestal and strode boisterously over to the door.

“I said we’re closed!” she yelled sharply.

“Sorry. I- I forgot my wallet,” came the muffled, contrite reply, “Pretty sure it’s by the ballerina statue. If you could just…”

Stheno snorted indignantly. She glanced down the long hallway. There was no wallet on Stephanie’s plinth, but there were a lot of statues that looked like ballerinas. She readjusted her sunglasses and carefully patted down her hijab to make certain it was secure.

“My sincere apologies,” she said, unbolting the door’s many locks, “I’m more used to knocks from-”

The door was thrown open forcefully. Stheno fell on her back with a surprised yelp, and out of the corner of her eye, Kylie saw someone barge through the doorway. A tall man. Wearing riot gear. He was holding something long and black and she had just enough time to recognize it as a shotgun before the man disappeared behind a jet of flame.

Stheno shrieked, was hurled back by the blast just as she was clambering to her feet. The thunderous boom rang painfully in Kylie’s ears like the pealing of churchbells and she wished she could cover them. All lingering pleasure from Stheno’s kisses dissipated in one frightful instant, and if her heart still beat it would have pounded out of her chest and taken flight. As it was, she stood motionless, her entire body electrified by an urgent, unanswerable impulse to flee, and she could only watch in terror as the man cast aside the shotgun. It clattered onto the marble floor of the gallery, and for a moment all was quiet save for the ringing echoes of the gunshot.

Stheno was dead. She had to be. Nothing that breathed could survive such a point-blank assault of raw, hateful lead. But in her left peripheral, Kylie saw something moving; a black, hissing heap of rags that slowly rose back to its feet.

“Did you think that would kill me?” Stheno hissed venomously.

“No,” the man replied. “That was just to piss you off.”

Kylie’s stone stomach fluttered at the sound of his voice. She recognized it. It was him. Him. Cedric. From the bar. But how… ?

He strode forward, chest puffed out confidently. Entering Kylie’s full field of view, she could see that he was dressed for war. Plates of glossy black composite armor fitted snugly over his chest, his arms and legs. Beneath them, a polypropylene shirt and balaclava like a knight’s mail. He wore a steel helmet with a transparent visor, and fitted over his eyes was the strangest pair of goggles Kylie had ever seen. They seemed to be cast from bronze or brass, but the lenses were a shifting kaleidoscope of colors- one moment they were ruby and emerald, the next amber and sapphire, the next amethyst and turquoise. As she noted this, Cedric reached down to his waist, and his gloved hand gripped the hilt of a sheathed sword.

Like lightning, he drew the sword from its scabbard. A gorgeous, straight blade of wan silver. Made to sunder steel and bone. Its quillons inlaid with gold-leaf patterans that Kylie couldn’t make out from her limited perspective. Once the sword was fully drawn, Kylie was temporarily blinded as it suddenly burst into white hot flame before her eyes. To her left, she could hear the unmistakable sound of snakes hissing.

“Dyrnwyn…” Stheno rasped lowly.

Cedric didn’t bother replying. He raised his sword up to his shoulder, and advanced towards Stheno.

Quicker than Kylie would have thought possible, Stheno shrugged off her hijab and the black abaya with it, leaving her stark naked in the middle of the gallery. Her sunglasses clattered onto the tile floor with the rumpled clothes, and Kylie saw for the first time the monster’s true form.

Stheno’s skin was a mottled shade of greenish brown, like dying moss. Her arms and legs were coated in drab, warty scales, studded irregularly with shiny black osteoderms, while her stomach and chest were lined with wide crocodilian plates the color of curdled milk. Now rid of the leather gloves, Kylie saw that each of Stheno’s knobby fingers was tipped with a long, jet-black talon.

Her face was even more awful to behold unveiled. Kylie had seen some of it earlier- her swarthy skin and too-large nose, the scowl-lines and sausage lips, all still presently caked over with makeup like a harlequin’s mask. But she hadn’t received the full brunt of her eyes, those searing nightblack eyes with their eerie blue irises, framed by a dense unibrow. Her stone skin felt colder still at the dread sight of them, and she thought she might even turn to stone again, metamorphosizing into some harder substance, tungsten or diamond.

But all of this was a mere footnote to Stheno’s hair. It was not as the gorgon hair imagined by generations of artists, a writhing thicket of dozens of serpents whose lengths amounted to an ophidian bob-cut. She had only ten. Atop her forehead, like a pharaoh’s uraeus, grew a pair of black, hooded cobras. Each side of her head anchored three vipers, their hides covered in reticulated patterns of black, brown, and tan triangles, and their snouts tipped with stubby horns. The last two snakes were by far the largest; a pair of mottled brown pythons, their thick bodies splitting right out of the back of her head. Ten serpent heads, and accompanying them were three rattlesnake tails growing like cornrows from the midline of Stheno’s scalp, along with thin, scraggly wires of jet black hair growing out between the various snakes. The rattletails and cobras were short, but the vipers and pythons were not and they grew thrice as long as Stheno was tall. In the brief moment after the gorgon shed her garments, Kylie saw how she’d hidden them- the snakes’ long bodies were wrapped in snug coils around her arms and torso, perfectly concealed beneath the loose abaya cloak.

Cedric faced Stheno squarely, and if he was at all surprised by her appearance, the balaclava and brass goggles hid it entirely. Kylie wanted to scream at him to run, to look away before he suffered the same fate as she and all the other stone people in the gallery. But he stared right back at Stheno, and nothing happened. No graying skin, no crackling of stone. He kept walking calmly towards her as if her appearance were totally unremarkable. The goggles, Kylie thought, The goggles are keeping him safe… somehow…

Stheno frowned when Cedric didn’t immediately turn into a statue before her. The almost pouty expression a small amusement to Kylie, in her otherwise intolerable situation. But Stheno didn’t need to rely solely on her eyes to defend herself. When Cedric failed to petrify as he was supposed to, her seething mass of serpents arrayed themselves in a protective halo around her, such that she almost seemed as one super-serpent, poised to deal out a swift death of venom and fang.

Cedric continued his advance with the slow but sure tread of a big cat. Kylie watched as the serpents leaned in closer to him, putting their fangs, their ominous white mouths between him and their mother. Forked tongues flicking the air. Their eyes like inkdrops. She watched breathlessly as they closed on each other, and then the combatants halted about six feet apart, right in the center of Kylie’s field of view. The serpents suspended in the air on her left, Cedric and his sword to her right.

“Pretty glasses,” Stheno remarked. Her voice frayed and hard. She drummed her talons against the smooth green scales of her hip. “Whose tomb did your Order desecrate to acquire them?”

Cedric huffed. Gruffly, he replied, “Kulkera.”

“Aaaaah,” Stheno cooed, “I suspected so. That was the last time I saw them- when she and her army left their deplorable oasis and scaled my mountains. Those goggles did not save her from joining my collection then; nor will they avail you now.”

She reached up a clawed hand to stroke the smooth belly of one of her vipers, as if it were a tree branch and she were lackadaisically strolling through an orchard. She glanced back at Cedric and once again Kylie wondered how the glasses were protecting him. That they were, there could be no doubt, but what was the mechanism? She wished with all her heart she’d had them back at the Home Depot.

“It is such a shame,” Stheno continued, “Such a shame, that your American army had to destroy the caves. My collection was so vast. Just south of the Silk Road. The work of centuries, knight. Gone in an instant, because of one bomb.” She sighed heavily. “No matter. Now that I have been invited so cordially to live among the very people who invaded my home, I have their interstates to bring me new prey.”

“I didn’t come here to chat,” Cedric said coldly. His posture was taut as a bowstring, leading with his left leg, ready to strike at a moment’s notice.

“Yes- I know how it goes, knight,” Stheno spat. “This only ends with either my head in your hands, or your body on one of my plinths. So please allow an old woman one last oration, for-”

The cobras struck first. Jets of milky white liquid spraying from their fangs, right at Cedric’s eyes. Despite the visor and goggles he raised his free arm to shield his face from the venom. Immediately one of the vipers snapped out at Cedric’s unprotected belly. Its white fangs pulled free of their pallid gum-sheaths right in front of Kylie’s stone eyes and struck home on Cedric’s stomach, only for the snake to find itself mouthing the stab-resistant vest like a sock puppet.

Recovered from the initial surprise of the cobras- spitting cobras!- Cedric stabbed down at the viper, but it had already withdrawn and one of its brethren caught the flaming blade in its mouth. Stheno’s laughter was like scraping metal, a thousand devils dancing in her beady blue-ring eyes. The blade glew red hot where the viper held it and its next tortured hiss was barely heard over the sizzling of its own flesh. It spat out the sword like it were acid and recoiled, the roof of its mouth cauterized.

Everything happened too quickly for Kylie to follow, even with her front-row seat and unblinking gaze. Stheno’s serpents struck out at Cedric. Fangs gnashing on air. Parried by the flat end of the sword or deflected by his armor. Recoil. Strike again. Quicker than bullets. Quicker than lightning. Six pairs of fangs against one blazing blade. If the lone knight was not as swift as the serpents he made up for it with lionhearted courage. Sword whirring, burning the air in its wake. As soon as one viper dared a strike against him he slashed down righteous fury upon it, and slowly he gained ground on Stheno.

One viper moved in like a rolling wave, going for Cedric’s briefly exposed side as his sword arm was held aloft, busy parrying one of its brethren. His polypropylene shirt a tender target between a gap in the plating. The viper dodged and weaved as it drove in for the strike, fangs out, ready to kill…

But Cedric was no longer there. He whirled to the right and brought his sword suddenly down. The viper hissed but once as it was bisected by the blade, gutted like a fish from its head back in a long, sweeping arc. Stheno shrieked in agony, and before the viper limply hit the ground Cedric was already swinging back up at one of its vengeful brothers.

The viper caught Cedric’s hand in its mouth. Grappling uselessly at his glove, a wet mess of venom dripping from its fangs and onto the floor. Another serpent dashed to the aid of its comrade and bit down upon the midsection of the sword, unmindful of its own crozzling despite Stheno’s sibilant shrieking. For a long moment, the pair of serpents pressed unyieldingly against Cedric’s strength.

Roaring like a tiger, Cedric was finally able to heave the snakes away. In a backslash so quick and violent Kylie would have missed it had she still been able to blink, Cedric removed the heads of the offending vipers.

Stheno shrieked in earsplitting agony. The instant Cedric relieved the vipers of their heads she fell to her knees and clawed at the writhing, blood-spraying tubes left behind, trying to gather them up in her arms. The snakes convulsed furiously in their death throes, writhing like live wires, short-circuiting synapses expending all at once the last of their lifeforce. When they finally went limp, the dead snakes detached completely from Stheno’s scalp, leaving her with only two vipers on her right side, and one on her left. Where the snakes had once sprouted from were now raw circles of pink flesh.

Stheno cradled the limp tubes and sobbed over them, screeching “My babies! My babies!” while her head bled profusely all the while, and a surge of exhilaration coursed through Kylie’s stone body. Had she been able to move at all she would have trembled in uncontainable excitement. She would have shouted and punched the air and cheered Cedric on. As it was, she stood as an inanimate witness to the deadly duel playing out before her unmoving eyes, just like all the other statues in the gallery.

And in that moment, she could imagine all her fellow statues silently cheering along with her, their minds mutely exulting their champion, this latterday knight in composite armor. The most attentive yet introverted audience in all of history.

He’s winning! she cheered from behind her passive stone eyes, Three! He got three! Come on Cedric! Come on!

The remaining three vipers arrowed in at Cedric, while the spitting cobras resumed their venomous fusillades. They were either natural-born sharpshooters or Stheno had trained them well, for the cobras loosed their venom only in the precise moments when no viper heads were in their paths, and they struck Cedric’s visor without fail. Not to damage his eyes, but to blind him nonetheless behind the wet visor. To try to clean it in the midst of the assault would be to invite instant death, so he simply fought on through the poisonous rain.

Behind her dainty marble eyes, Kylie’s soul was aflame in equal parts joy and terror. Joy at the possibility of rescue from this waking nightmare, or at the very least joy at the revenge being so violently inflicted upon Stheno. Terror, because she was helpless as she’d never been before. Each serpent’s strike, each blinding blow of Cedric’s sword, drew perilously near her fragile stone body. Even a glancing hit would be enough to knock her nose off, or reduce her dainty marble fingers to dust. Her whole body radiated with the potential energy locked within her rigid muscles. Straining under a burning surge of adrenaline that screamed at her to move, commanded her to run, but to which she was agonizingly incapable of responding. Every time the sword slashed down inches from her face, each viper’s bite so dreadfully close to her neck, she tried to gasp in spite of herself, to blink, to cringe away from her seemingly imminent destruction.

Up to this point, Stheno had stood well back from Cedric, allowing her serpents to fight on her behalf. But the deaths of three of them in short order roused such black hatred in her heart that, with a deafening shriek, she dropped the vipers she had been cradling and rushed recklessly forward through the thicket of her remaining snakes to battle Cedric herself.

He was too preoccupied to notice her charge. Two of the vipers were on his flanks, harrying his arms, while the third tried to sneak around behind him to snap at his heel and hopefully pull a leg out from under him. Cedric knew their game, and parried the flankers whilst yielding to the ankle-biter, intending to whirl in the motion to bring down a blow upon its head, but Stheno herself threw off his plan. She leaped through the air to meet him, arms up and claws out like a bird of prey, cursing him in tongues unspoken for a thousand years.

Stheno had the natural weaponry, her claws and snakes, but Cedric had strength and skill far beyond hers. When she impacted his armored body they rolled over each other and Cedric wound up on top. Stheno kicked out hard, catching him in the stomach and throwing him into one of the statues with a tremendous crash.

It was the detective. Cedric hit him in his midsection, and his marble body cracked in two. Kylie watched helplessly as he collapsed to the floor and out of her field of view. He fell, it seemed, in slow motion. Like a skyscraper, or a sinking ocean liner. She didn’t see him impact. Just heard the rending crash. The unmistakable cacophony of stone shattering. Then a cloud of pumice rose from where he had fallen.

The fighting ceased. The room silent save for the ringing echoes of shattering stone. Stheno and Cedric each stared at the rubble which had once been a living, breathing man. Each of their faces a panting mask of rage.

Then their eyes narrowed upon each other once more. A low, throaty growl rippled up from Cedric’s throat. Stheno’s rattletail locks riffled menacingly in reply. Her entire face contorted into a nightmare scowl of fang and paunch, so dreadful it made Kylie wish to gouge out the riversmooth pebbles of her eyes.

Far from intimidating him, the gorgon’s visage served only to reinforce Cedric’s rage. He raised up his sword again, leaned back on his right foot, and prepared to renew his attack with equal fury.

Then Stheno’s face softened. She looked quickly around the gallery, at all the dozens of statues, as if noticing them for the very first time. She ran a hand back along her head, through bloodmatted scraggles of hair. The wounds where her late serpents had detached itched madly, but she dared not stop to scratch them. She turned back to Cedric, her mind now made.

“You wish to kill me, knight? To take my head and free my prisoners? Well, you shall find that they are my loyal servants yet!”

And, so saying, her remaining vipers lashed out to either side of her, fangs out, and wrapped their sinuous bodies around the arms of two stone women- Excess, Rebecca, on the one side, and an unknown girl on the other. Effortlessly, they yanked the statues from their plinths and dashed them to pieces on the gallery floor.

The two huge pythons at the back of Stheno’s head, held in reserve until now, joined the vipers in their murderous task, their massive mouths wrapping around the heads of two other statues, decapitating them and hurling the stone blocks at Cedric. The first exploded on the ground just in front of Cedric’s feet, forcing him to leap back a pace, while the second head smashed into the statue beside Kylie, Kristina. It struck with such force, such a horrendous, thundering din, that Kylie knew Kristina must have shattered on impact.

Indeed, the stone head hit Kristina so violently that Kylie was pelted with shards of her disintegrating stone body, hard enough that she felt a sizzle of pain as a chip was taken out of her left shoulder. She couldn’t see it but it felt as if a knife had been stuck into her and she prayed through the agony, Please God, please please please let it only be a scratch, oh my God it hurts, Jesus and Mary and all the saints in Heaven please don’t let my arm fall off, don’t let me shatter, oh Jesus FUCK it HURTS.

Cedric raised his free arm to shield his face from the shrapnel, in spite of the helmet. When he looked up again Stheno was gone, falling back into the maelstrom of dust and shattering stone she was so eagerly creating. As she retreated, she gave each statue a brief sendoff before either she or one of her snakes pushed it from its pedestal.

“It was nice knowing you, Abigail! Goodbye, Wendy! And farewell to you, Charlotte!”

Hearing the iconoclastic slaughter continuing up the hall, Cedric gritted his teeth and charged into the cloud of dust after her.

Kylie could hear the fight long after it moved out of her field of view. Cedric roaring in fury. Stheno shrieking back. Sword whirring. Serpents hissing and rattling. The cacophony of stone bodies shattering, living bodies being thrown into the wall and bouncing heavily off.

All Kylie could do was stand perfectly still and wait for them to return. As if by means of echolocation, her ears told her of the battle moving further and further away. Desperately she wanted to turn her head to see the rest of the fight. To at least see the foul serpents coming her way before they shattered her. The sharp pain in her left shoulder had faded to a dull, throbbing ache. She could still see her stone fingers, could feel the dust settling in her palm, so she at least felt sure that her arm wasn’t going to break off.

She was certain Cedric would prevail, but since the detective fell and the destruction of the other statues began, she wasn’t at all certain she would survive it. That’s what this was now. A battle for survival. No longer was she a mere spectator to this clash of serpent and sword. She had been selected for destruction, and all that stood against her becoming a pile of gravel was pure, random chance.

Presently she heard the fight moving back her way again, and she redoubled her futile attempt to run or even flinch away from the annihilation she knew was barreling towards her. Her stone heart could not beat its way out of her chest. She had no pulse to pound. But her entire being was plunged into an icy, electric vise of frantic terror, building relentlessly within her until she felt crushed by thousands of pounds of pressure as the din of battle approached. It was a worse helplessness than any caged animal had ever known.

More rubble pelted her. She couldn’t see the statues to her left. Could only hear them falling. Breaking. She heard Cedric yell inarticulately. Then suddenly he was thrown back into her field of view. Thrown. Through the air. He crashed into the only plinth to Kylie’s right, swordless. He grunted on impact and as he tried to scrabble back to his feet, one of his errant legs kicked into Kylie’s pedestal. Whatever glue had been applied to her soles was no match for an impact of this magnitude, and for a gut-wrenching moment she teetered helplessly on the plinth. Her sense of balance tortured her and she writhed within herself, trying to catch her fall.

Please Jesus God don’t let me fall please please please please oh God oh God…

She wobbled for what felt like an eternity. Then the tottering of her stone feet slowed, until finally, blessedly, she came to a stable stop. A wave of cool relief washed over her like a spring zephyr. Unable to sigh it out, she simply relished it, glad to be alive, there still being a slender possibility of rescue.

She now faced a few inches to the left of where she had been before, granting her a better view of the gallery. What was left of it. Every single statue behind her had been demolished. All that remained on most of the plinths were the stumps of stone legs jutting up like Roman pillars. A few had their whole lower bodies intact, but above that there was nothing. Three had simply been decapitated, their heads crushed somewhere in the heap of quarry tailings that now littered the floor.

But not me! Kylie thought exuberantly, high on surviving her near-fall. Then she became grimly aware that nothing had changed at all, and she was still a statue, totally incapable of defending herself. Not yet, anyway…

The statue to her right wasn’t as lucky. When Cedric hit its plinth, it too wobbled like a spinning top, and fell onto him. He grunted at the impact, the three-hundred pound torso cleaving in two on his back. Kylie could only just barely see him out of the corner of her unblinking eye. He didn’t move for a long time. Then with a pained groan he rolled over onto his side, panting. Might have broken something. Or several things. He started to rise, shakily, then collapsed.

Come on, get up. Please get up, Kylie thought torturously, Please don’t give up.

He did not get up. He groped at his waist and from his belt he withdrew a small, silvery, egg-shaped object in one hand, and another device shaped like a tiny dumbbell, with Swiss cheese holes scattered around it. In the same instant he threw them Kylie realized they were grenades.

Her whole field of view exploded into a sheer curtain of light. Like she were inches away from the surface of the sun. Her ears rang and rang and rang. Were she still flesh she would have fallen to the ground, clutching her head, trying to hide from the unbearable assault on her senses.

Something hit her. Big, but not hard. Not another chunk of stone. It slapped into her face wetly and bounced off her shoulder. Wet? She couldn’t see what it was but the warm stickiness of it, dripping down her cheek, her curled hand and her arm, suggested blood. She hoped it was Stheno’s, but since the monster had survived a point-blank shotgun blast Kylie had little hope that an explosion would kill her either.

The light lasted but a few seconds and then faded, leaving splotchy smears of bruised purple across her peripheral vision. She saw Cedric reaching feebly at his belt again. Another of the queer, silvery eggs. It didn’t look like any sort of grenade Kylie had seen in movies, but she knew nothing of military equipment.

He threw it. Feebly. Not hard enough to even come close to Stheno.

Slap.

The silver egg hit Kylie square in the chest, spattering a yolky yellow fluid over her stone breasts which promptly dripped down onto her right hand. Acid? If it was a weapon to be used against Stheno it was the only thing she could think of. But the liquid did not melt through her stone body, nor make her marble skin sizzle or corrode. Indeed, it felt pleasantly warm.

She heard cold, brittle laughter to her left. Stheno. An ophidian silhouette in the dust, heralded by a flourish of hisses and rattletails.

“Look at you. Is that really all?” she rasped contemptuously, “A few cheap parlor tricks? I expected far better from a Knight of Andromeda. What would your Grand Master think? What would Hudson think?”

She slouched into Kylie’s field of view and the stone girl realized whatever had hit her in the explosion might well have been a chunk of Stheno. The gorgon was drenched in blood. Only one of her vipers remained, along with the cobras and pythons. One of the fallen vipers still hung on at the root like it had been split by a hatchet. Her makeup had all run down like melted wax. Her lip bled freely, and she now had a pronounced limp, but still she carried herself with the confidence of an Olympian as she strode over to Cedric’s prostrate figure. When he reached at his belt again and drew a pistol, she kicked it out of his hand and stomped on his fingers before he could fire.

“You know I can still see the look on his face, before I turned him to stone. Poor, poor Hudson. I think you should see him, Cedric,” she hissed malevolently, “One more time. I’ll turn you to stone in front of him, and let him watch as I crumble you into dust. Slowly. I’ll start with your legs, and leave your head for last. So you will know, for at least a few hours, or days, the same fear I have lived in for years. I won’t kill you. I’ll pluck out your eyes and grind down your ears. I’ll leave you as a deaf, sightless husk, just a mind trapped forever in a broken chunk of stone. For my sister.” She grinned, licking her bloodied lip hungrily, “I think I’ll call you- ARROGANCE.”

She squatted down to him. Her last viper coiled tensely, fangs out and ready to strike. Cedric looked up at her and one of the pythons shot out like a river of mercury. Quicker than Kylie could make out, it coiled itself around his waist, pinning his left arm to his side. The other python slithered in just as fast and engulfed Cedric’s right hand in its mouth. Cedric screamed raggedly. His arm leaking crimson onto the floor as the python chewed its way up to his elbow. Reaching it, the python must have thought its victim secure, for its razor-fangs sank deep into his flesh and it went no further.

With her prey sufficiently restrained, Stheno reached out one clawed hand to Cedric’s visor. “Now, let’s get rid of those silly glasses…”

Kylie once again tried to move. Out of the way. She expected one last, desperate lunge from Cedric, trying to heave the serpents off of him, and she knew if any such scuffle occurred she would be toppled and that would be it. She tried to step back, to cringe away from the fight.

Her fingers twitched.

The sight like liquid nitrogen. Unbelievable, but. She tried it again. Yes. Real. The fingers of her right hand wriggled slightly at her command. As she tried the third time, they flexed almost fully. Her left hand was working too, the knuckles brushing feebly against her neck. The joints crunching like gravel underfoot.

Looking down from her fixed gaze, she could plainly see the color returning to her chest, her breasts resuming their life-warm pinkish hue, the gray pebbles of her nipples reverting back to a rich brown.

Her heart- did she hear it beat? Not yet. But she felt pure euphoria nonetheless. The stone nightmare was ending and she knew that no matter what else happened, if she was given but five minutes to let whatever formula she had been doused with do its job, she would leave this dreadful place alive.

But her fear did not vanish, despite this joyful certainty. Rather, her joy at the possibility of release only intensified the terror. The thought of the fight resuming before she was able to move away. Her being shattered against the ground into a red slurry of half-flesh, half-stone. She wriggled her fingers frantically, trying to speed up the process, but they moved as feebly as a hatching bird and she knew there was absolutely nothing she could do to relieve herself except wait.

Stheno was taking her time with Cedric, still taunting him. She had just wrapped one claw around the edge of Cedric’s visor, nudging the plexiglass up slowly, when a switchblade sprouted from the python’s neck like a horn. It didn’t even hiss, so suddenly was death upon it. Its mouth too full of Cedric’s arm to make a sound. With the python still attached to his leaking arm, Cedric swung at Stheno in a wide semicircle, aiming his knife for her eyes. She stumbled back and he missed, and caught her last viper through the roof of its skull instead.

It was too late to pull out of the sledgehammer swing and Cedric wound up arcing back down and stabbed himself in the shoulder. The blade driving completely through the other python, pinning both it and the viper against him like an entomologist’s specimen board. Then Cedric ripped the blade sidelong, grating against the python’s spine. It went slack as a knot coming suddenly undone, and he wriggled his left arm out of the slick brown coils, grabbing the thick body with his free left hand and yanking hard.

Stheno wailed shrilly. Rage and sorrow combined into a dread banshee’s howl. When Cedric began to reel her back towards him, pulling the dead python like a lasso, she met his efforts willingly and leaped upon him with all the fury of a jaguar.

They tussled on the ground, rolling over top of each other, grunting and snarling. Cedric still had the dead python attached to his right arm and relied on his southpaw to grapple with Stheno, to fend off her wild claws and the close-range snaps of her twin cobras. He still swung with his right nonetheless, trying to stab her with the protruding switchblade. Stheno clawed frantically at his visor, trying to rip the helmet away, to get at the protective goggles and end the fight in one instant of crackling stone.

They wrestled in and out of Kylie’s view, but she paid little attention to them, so laser-focused was she on escape. Her breasts had fully reverted to flesh, and her cheeks twitched at her command, though her lips remained sealed in stone and her gaze was still fixed ahead. The most dramatic recovery was to her arms. She could flex her fingers completely now, though her right arm was still partially gray below the elbow. Her left, held against her neck, was in better shape- here the formula had dripped from her cheek onto her curled fingers and down her entire forearm, before the egg bounced off her shoulder, so she was able to move her entire forearm as if she were doing dumbbell curls. But slowly, slowly. Her muscles and tendons groaning as they thawed from their stone slumber. Now that salvation seemed imminent, she was of one mind- Oh you bitch, you absolute fucking bitch I’m coming for you I am going to fucking get you.

The fight moved. Back on their feet now. Both of them obviously weakening. Exhaustion from several sustained minutes of ferocious combat starting to take its toll. For a moment they grappled with each other’s hands as if engaged in a deadly waltz. The claws on Stheno’s left hand digging into the flesh of her own dead python where it had sunk into Cedric’s arm. Cedric’s helmet had been knocked off, and all that saved him from the gorgon’s gaze now were the brass goggles. The cobras sprayed jets of venom right at them, and at his mouth, trying to poison him through the balaclava.

In this moment of tension Kylie saw that somehow a coil of dead python had gotten wrapped loosely around Stheno’s neck. If only there were a gallows to hang her by…

The pythons’ bodies didn’t detach from her head like the vipers. Too well-anchored to her skull to simply fall off, though she surely would have been able to grow new ones in time. Presently, though, the deceased serpent was choking the life out of her. Her cheeks and forehead swelling purple as Cedric pulled hard on the python. Its teeth cutting so deep into his arm was now a source of strength, and he wound back like he were tugging an anchor chain, gripping the dead snake’s thick body with his left hand as well. Stheno yielded to him, trying to relieve the pressure on her throat, and as she lunged she took a wild swipe at his face.

The goggles’ right lens went flying off. Kylie saw it go, passing right in front of her, and she tracked its path, now finally able to move her eyes again. It shattered against a chunk of marble that must have been part of Rebecca.

Cedric snapped his eyes shut. Held his left palm flat over the empty frame to prevent him from meeting Stheno’s gaze, but she was already in his face, trying to pry it off. Her claws dug into his wrist and he winced in pain as beads of blood welled up from the punctures. The cobras on her forehead hissed in gleeful anticipation, finally about to use their venom for its intended purpose.

“Give up, knight!” Stheno growled, her voice still choked by the coil of serpent looped around her neck. “Look into my eyes. Don’t be rude. Let’s finish this once and for all.”

Cedric gritted his teeth. His hand was being pulled inexorably away from his eye. If he didn’t open it Stheno would simply pluck it out, or one of her cobras would blind him. Winking his right eye shut as tight as he could, he looked over with his still-protected left at the plinth where Kylie stood. She was facing him, Stheno’s back to her as she slowly returned to life. Her eyes wide and blue, staring at him beseechingly.

With a jagged scream of pain and fury, Cedric ripped his right arm free of the dead python’s mouth. His blood jetted crimson from a dozen arm-length lacerations, and with the last of his strength he threw the python’s head in Kylie’s direction, into her open arms.

She caught it in both hands and gripped the python’s smooth body as tightly as she could. Then, she pulled back hard.

Stheno yelped, a strangled sound as Kylie reeled her in. Just like tug of war, Kylie thought. She didn’t dare loosen her grip and her fingernails dug deep into the serpent’s scales. Stheno clawed at her neck and scrabbled about on the floor, trying to free herself, to dismember the python, to pull Kylie from her plinth to end the assault, but it was too late. Kylie’s was the strength of stone, and though she teetered perilously on her heels against Stheno’s efforts, she held against the exhausted gorgon long enough for Cedric to come back around, bloody switchblade in hand.

Kylie watched- how could she not?- as Cedric stabbed out at Stheno. His eyes must have still been shut tight, for the blade missed its mark and sunk deep into her cheek, scraping on bone. But that first probing effort was enough, and his next try did not miss. Stheno’s splitting shriek was cut short when the blade found first her right eye, and then an instant later her left.

She fell dead to the ground, and Kylie finally released the python and wobbled back once more to a stable position, looking down at the slumped, ragged body of her tormentor.

Cedric fell to the ground beside Stheno, rolling onto his back and panting heavily. Then he started laughing. Just a chuff at first, then great guffaws of joyful uproar that quickly devolved into a pained fit of coughing.

Kylie didn’t begrudge him his joy but she had her own, far more immediate problems to contend with. Her skin was rapidly restoring to flesh- her arms and chest fully healed now, her head and hips partly so. But though her lungs begged for air, her throat wasn’t yet loose enough to draw breath. Blind panic shot through her as black curtains began to dance at the edges of her vision, threatening to shutter closed at any moment. No, no like this- please not like this! The thought of asphyxiating so close to salvation paralyzed her, and she tried with all her might to inhale.

Then, finally, she felt life-bringing moisture in her mouth, her throat. She gasped; a dry, ragged sound like she had just awoken from a long, thirsty slumber, and she tumbled from the plinth.

Sitting up, Cedric caught her in his arms, but he was too weak to hold her; she rolled out of his grasp and onto the cold tile floor. Panting. She couldn’t move. Well, she could, but. Her muscles were all gone to jello, having strained so hard to exert themselves all during the fight. It felt so good to breathe. Her mouth was dry as a bone and she was incredibly thirsty but she didn’t care. She rolled onto her back and just breathed, watching her bare breasts rise and fall with each exhalation. She didn’t know how long she laid there, didn’t count the seconds or the minutes. She lived by the breath. The blessed inhale. Rich oxygen filling her lungs, her chest rising, falling. The sacred exhale.

She didn’t care that she was naked. Didn’t even try to cover herself. She cried. Laying on her back the tears pooled in her eyes until finally they spilled over and ran hotly down her cheeks. She pressed her palm to her heart and listened to it beating. Cherishing each precious bu-dum, bu-dum, bu-dum, as if she thought it might stop again at any moment.

Finally she rolled onto her side and was aware again of the pain in her left arm. A little triangular divot taken out just under her shoulder. It bled freely, bright scarlet rivulets running down her arm. She held her hand over it, applying pressure until the blood welled between her fingers and continued dripping down her arm.

“Here,” Cedric said.

She stiffened. Surprised. Suddenly aware of her condition. Naked, in front of a stranger. A man. She cringed, curled into a fetal position against the pedestal. Haphazardly attempting to lower her right arm to shield her breasts while still holding her shoulder, while her left hand shot down to conceal her mound. She looked over to where Cedric was now sitting up and saw him holding out a roll of white cloth. He’d pulled his balaclava down, though he still wore the broken goggles. She watched his emerald eye track quickly up to hers, away from the direction of her chest, the curve of her hips. His cheeks flushed when he realized she’d caught him looking. He cleared his throat and looked down again, at the cloth, at the floor, at anything but the nude beauty in front of him.

“For your arm,” he explained, gesturing with the cloth.

His own arm still bled freely. The python’s fangs had ripped through the stab-resistant fibers of his sleeve when it engulfed him, and when he tore his arm free of its grasp it shredded the sleeve to ribbons. The wounds undressed, as of yet. Just a bled-through rag wrapped around his hand, so as not to mar the white cloth he was now offering to her.

“I think you need it more than me,” Kylie said, her voice dry and cracking. Almost laughed, at the absurdity of it all. In a more primitive era such a victor would simply have hefted her naked body over his shoulder and carried her home with him, but now he was sheepish about looking at his prize. Is that what she was? His prize? He’d saved her from a fate worse than any death, and despite her naked shame, if now he wanted to drink in the sight of her, she would not blame him one iota.

“Let’s do yours first,” he said, “Then you can help me with mine.”

He’d certainly need help. Aside from his arm, he had multiple abrasions on his face. Probably from being pelted with stone fragments. Very well, she thought, I can play Nightingale in the nude.

She sat up and held out her left arm gingerly. Tensing just a bit as he took her hand. Still holding her right arm over her breasts. He wrapped the tourniquet tightly until the pressure gave the wound a pulse. It felt good, in an odd way. Just as searingly alive as her heartbeat.

Cedric looked at her. Her eyes, this time. Right into them. He cleared his throat and started to say something, then shook his head. He fumbled for words. As soon as he thought of something he seemed to think better of it and went mute once more.

“Are you alright?” he asked finally.

She nodded.

“Right,” Cedric said. He cleared his throat again and held out his arm. “Well, uh. Can you help me out with this?”

She nodded again. “Yes.”

He sat up and took off his goggles, then began unstrapping his armor. There was more of it than Kylie thought possible.

“You look like Robocop,” Kylie said as he started taking off the anti-stab vest, the chest and back plates.

“Always come prepared,” Cedric smiled, wincing as he reached to unclip his shoulder pads and arm protectors. It all went into a big pile on the floor- the Kevlar collar, the kneepads and leg protectors. He peeled off the balaclava and then shrugged out of two separate long-sleeved shirts- the outer Cordura, the inner Kevlar. Underneath all of that was just a sweaty white T-shirt. He wore a silver rosary around his neck and she looked at the crucifix intently, merely thinking- Thank you.

She started inspecting him. No nursing skills but she didn’t need any expertise to identify a cut. There were only a few. Some abrasions on his face, probably from being thrown into shards of broken stone. Most of his torso was welted with black and blue bruises, but there were no scrapes that she could see. Or bitemarks, besides his right arm.

“Where did you get the bandage?” she asked.

“That was all I had on me,” he said. “I left a backpack out in the hall. Can you do stitches?”

She shook her head.

“Alright,” he replied, “We’ll just have to tourniquet it really well for now. Go get the bag.”

She did as he asked. Groaned to her feet. She rose wobbly, fawnlike, as if she needed to learn how to walk all over again. As she limped away, she felt his eyes on her backside. Well, let him look.

Kylie poked her head cautiously out of the doorway, but when she looked around there was no one there. Just the empty, red-walled lobby she’d been carted through earlier. She supposed no one else was allowed on this floor besides Stheno and her guests. Nevertheless, in her nakedness she felt compelled to be furtive and her steps were quick. The backpack was sitting right beside the door. She tugged tentatively at the handle. Heavy. There was a canteen in the side-pouch and she chugged it greedily. While she drank she tugged her hair forward so it fell over her breasts, at least partly covering them. Her thirst slaked, she returned the bottle to its pouch and fussed over her hair a moment longer. Then she hefted the backpack up and waddled back into the penthouse. She shut the door quietly behind her and trotted over to Cedric. The medical kit was at the very top of the bag, a white plastic latchbox with a red cross on it.

“Hand me the disinfectant,” Cedric said. He opened the bottle and poured it all over his arm, wincing and gritting his teeth. “Alright, gauze me.”

She took a handful of gauze, dabbed it in more disinfectant, and started cleaning the wounds, starting at the elbow and working her way down. Fresh blood still flowed even as she dabbed, replacing the gauze as it soaked red, but the arm looked a bit better with the old, caked blood removed. Cleaner, anyway. The lacerations stretched from his elbow all the way to the base of his fingers, like he’d jammed his arm through a broken window. He winced once when she dabbed the gauze into one of the deeper cuts but other than that he did not complain.

“I didn’t see any other bites when I checked, but you’d know better- did any of them get you, besides the python?” Kylie asked.

Cedric chuffed, “If they had, you’d be calling an undertaker right now. Those were Gaboon vipers.”

By the time she was finished dabbing the wound, fresh blood had covered up most of her work, but Cedric told her that was okay. “The important thing is getting any bacteria from the snake’s mouth out. It’ll heal on its own but an infection would be nasty.”

“Okay,” Kylie said. She pulled out a roll of the same white dressing Cedric had used on her, and began wrapping his arm. Up and down and back up again as the wound bled through, until finally she had it to almost cast-thickness.

“That should do,” Cedric said. He held up his arm and flexed his fingers against where the bandage wrapped around his palm. “Good. Good work.”

“Thanks.” Kylie replied. “Does it hurt?”

He laughed. Stupid question, but. “Yes. Yes it hurts. Here, hand me the med kit.”

He reached into the latchbox and pulled out a little orange vial of blue pills.

“What are those?” Kylie asked.

He took one tablet and then reached into the bag for the canteen. He held it up and was surprised at how little was left. He eyed Kylie suspiciously, then shrugged. “Fentanyl.”

“Fentanyl?” she exclaimed. “Are you fucking crazy?”

“I got mauled by a python,” he replied. “It’s a prescribed dose, don’t worry about it.”

He took a deep, contented breath as the painkiller kicked in, and when he looked back at Kylie his pupils seemed slightly constricted, the green forests of his irises encroaching upon them.

“Right,” Cedric said. He groaned as he clambered back to his feet. “Well, let’s get moving. We’ve got a lot to do.”

He reached out a hand to Kylie. She looked down at her chest with lingering reserve.

“I won’t look,” he said solemnly.

She nodded, then reached out and took his hand. He pulled her up effortlessly, still strong as a workhorse despite the punishment he’d taken. Once on her feet, she looked around the ruined gallery, all the shattered statues, the mangled corpse of Stheno, and finally her emotions caught up with her and she let herself fall into Cedric’s arms and clung to him desperately, weeping into his shoulder.

“Thank you,” she whispered between sobs, “Thank you.”

“It’s alright,” Cedric consoled. He clasped his hand over hers and Kylie wished dearly that he would never, ever let her go. “It’s alright. You’re safe now. Come with me. We don’t have much time.”

She nodded through her tears and only let him go reluctantly. Cedric walked back over to the doorway and picked up the shotgun he’d discarded at the beginning of the battle. “Can you walk alright?” he asked.

“Yes,” Kylie replied. She looked down at herself again. “I need clothes.”

“We’ll find you some,” Cedric said. “Come on.”

He began walking back down the gallery, deeper into the penthouse. Kylie turned to follow him but first there was something she needed to do. She turned back to the pedestal. Her pedestal. Stheno’s bloated carcass was slumped down in front of it. Her mouth hung open, forever gasping for air. The terrible eyes were reduced to bloody holes, unable to hurt anyone ever again, but the sight of her still sent a shiver racing down Kylie’s spine and she quickly looked away. The gorgon wasn’t what interested her, anyway. Finally she was able to see the title chiseled into the plinth she’d been imprisoned on- would have been imprisoned on forever, had Cedric not arrived. It simply read Privileged.

She scoffed and followed after Cedric.

“Where are we going?” she stammered. She had to mind her bare feet on the rubble-strewn floor. Jagged shards of marble worrying her soles. Now that she was restored to flesh and blood, she had to consider such things again. The chip taken out of her left arm throbbed and had already bled through the tourniquet, but it was beautiful and she relished it as she never thought she’d enjoy the sensation of pain before. Oh, to be able to bleed…

Cedric didn’t answer her. He kept marching down the corridor, possessed by a mad drive to find something. The path of destruction went on and on. Kylie couldn’t believe the fight had covered such a distance. She counted the plinths as they passed- twenty, thirty-five, forty-seven…

Sixty-four. She counted sixty-four pedestals. All scalped of the souls which had been imprisoned upon them. She would have made sixty-five.

She tread gingerly over marble fragments of hands, fingers. The gray crescent of some doomed soul’s face. It was not like walking through a ruined museum gallery. This was a mortuary, and if Cedric remained quiet, Kylie understood why. And she had even more reason to keep her sepulchral silence. For every shattered stone face she passed, each fractured hand whose stone palms still faced supplicatingly towards the heavens, might just as easily have been her.

“God, look at this,” Cedric said, his voice low as a churchgoer’s.

Kylie trotted over to where he stood in front of a plinth that held the lower half of a woman with her hips swayed as if she had been petrified mid-dance. The title read Decadence. The statue’s date, in smaller print below, read- December 2003.

“She’d been standing there for over twenty years,” Cedric gritted. His voice flushed with rage and remorse at the slaughter he had witnessed, had participated in, if only by self-preservative necessity.

Kylie wasn’t sure what to say. She just stared at the plinth silently, while her hand felt for Cedric’s. She found it and held it tightly, reassuringly. It jolted him, her touch. He looked over at her, his eyes wide and damp. She smiled sadly.

“You freed her,” she said. “You freed all of them.”

He pursed his lips. Nodded. Holding back tears, she knew.

“Yeah,” he said. He wiped his sleeve against his nose. Nodded again and sighed raggedly. Then he pulled himself back up and continued leading Kylie through the gallery.

Eventually the path of destruction ended at a locked door. Here the tile floor was slick with blood, the long coils of two dead vipers strewn like discarded halyards. Cedric walked over them and picked up his sword where it lay flat on the ground. It glew like captured moonlight in his hand, before he returned it to its scabbard. Then he smashed the doorknob with the butt of his shotgun. Kylie hesitated at the smears of blood, her bare toes scrinching away from them, but when Cedric entered the next wing of the penthouse without waiting for her she tip-toed across and tried to ignore how warm and sticky it felt.

The door led into a narrow corridor, and at the end of it, they found themselves staring up a dark, spiraling metal staircase. Without hesitation, Cedric began climbing the stairs, Kylie following after. She wondered when the police would arrive. There was no way the tenants below hadn’t heard the thunder of battle raging over their heads, the wholesale destruction of the gallery. There was a timer on whatever Cedric was doing, but he scanned over every nook and cranny in the place with the keen eye of a thief. It was driving Kylie nuts.

“Cedric, what are you looking for? Maybe I can help you.”

“Her bedroom,” Cedric replied ambiguously. “Need to get something.”

“How did you find her, anyway?” Kylie asked as they began their ascent up the stairs. Now that they had left behind the dreadful hall of death, the silence was unbearable, and she was brimming with questions for her rescuer.

“It was a long op,” Cedric replied, “Stheno covered her tracks well; only a handful of people even knew this gallery existed. We knew she was in the Northeast, somewhere, but beyond that the trail went cold. Took a few years to put together enough information to nab her.”

“No, wait, go back further,” Kylie insisted, “How did you know she even existed?”

Cedric was quiet for a moment. As if deciding how much to tell her- what he was allowed to tell her. “I served four tours in Afghanistan. Navy SEALs. Found her cave by accident on an op back in 2020, right before shit hit the fan. The Taliban conspicuously weren’t using it and we wanted to find out why.”

“Was anyone there?” Kylie asked. “Anyone… stone, I mean?”

“No,” Cedric replied. “Whole place had been blown out, probably back in ‘03 when we carpet bombed the valley. She immigrated shortly after that, and didn’t wait long to start claiming victims.”

“So how did this all wind up back here?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you were a Navy SEAL, and then you come in here with a glowing sword fighting a gorgon…”

Cedric sighed. Again debating how much to tell her. Finally he spilled. “I’m a Knight of the Order of Andromeda. It’s a sovereign Order, not a government agency or part of the military. What we do is hunt down the things that shouldn’t be. Things that aren’t supposed to exist outside of myth and legend. Fairy tale monsters. The things that go bump in the night. They’re real, most of them. We hunt them and kill them, hopefully before they kill anyone else. Sometimes we recover special artifacts, like Dyrnwyn here,” he tapped the burnished hilt of the sword in its scabbard, “or those goggles. I clashed with Stheno once before, but she got away. Tonight was a rematch.”

The staircase terminated at another locked door, which Cedric again smashed in with the butt of his shotgun. Then came another short corridor, which they walked down swiftly. It was less spartan than the stairwell- an array of paintings hung on the walls, certainly Stheno’s own work. Mostly scenes of mountains and villages, memories of her native Afghanistan. Kylie looked them over and wondered how Stheno could have chosen to be so spiteful, so envious, to inflict such suffering on people, when she clearly had the power to create great works of beauty on her own. It was an alien mindset, one which she found herself grateful to have nothing in common with.

“Does any of that surprise you?” Cedric asked.

“What?”

“Everything I told you.”

“I was turned into a statue,” Kylie replied. “I’m ready to believe just about anything right now.” She shook her head. “That’s not the full story though.”

“It isn’t?”

“What were you doing at the bar?”

“Oh. Waiting for my second,” Cedric replied, “I wasn’t supposed to come here alone. But when I saw you come out of the bathroom, I knew she was active in the area and couldn’t wait. I left right after you and tailed your bus. Was hoping to get to Stheno before she found you.”

“You used me as bait?” Kylie demanded.

“Not bait. More like a homing beacon. You were already turning to stone; we had nothing to do with that.”

“You could have saved me right at the bar with one of those… whatever you threw at me!”

“Rooster eggs. Anyway, how would you have reacted if I’d come over and told you ‘Hey, stranger, you’re turning into a statue, why don’t you come outside with me so I can break an egg over your head?’”

Kylie huffed, but he had a point. That was the worst part of it, that he was completely right. She remembered how he’d gasped at the sight of her, how she’d thought he was just shocked at how sickly she looked. He knew all the time.

“I’m sorry things turned out the way they did, Kylie. I really am. I meant to head Stheno off before she even got to your apartment, but she was one step ahead of me. And I did save you in the end.”

“Barely,” Kylie sulked.

Cedric started to say something back, then just shook his head. They were at the next door. This one wasn’t locked, and it opened out into a sprawling, luxuriously furnished apartment. To the left, the parlor had a ceiling-height fountain, a curtain waterfall dripping down the fieldstone wall into a koi-filled basin on the floor. A long, sunken leather couch faced parallel to the basin, and Kylie saw behind the waterfall the black screen of an enormous television. Wrapping around the other two walls of the parlor were floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out upon the crystalline Philadelphia skyline. To the right was a fully automated kitchen, while an elegant, modernist staircase coiled itself around the division between the two rooms, right beside the door they had entered by.

“Two story penthouse,” Kylie spat, “Private gallery. A waterfall curtain for her jumbotron. She told me she’d sold everything to immigrate here.”

“It’s not your fault,” Cedric said. He glanced around the rooms and then, failing to find whatever he was seeking, began ascending the stairs.

“She told me she was just looking for a better life.”

“Aren’t we all? She was a predator, and she preyed on your good nature.”

“Do you think that’s how she got the others?”

“Probably,” Cedric replied gravely. “Good nature. Vanity, some. Love of art.” He paused. Stopped on the stairs and looked back at her. “We can never know why they were taken.”

Kylie swallowed. Looked down at the stairs. If she didn’t feel the exact kind of pain as Cedric, she felt her own to the same dreadful degree. But for the grace of God…

At the top of the stairwell was an equally luxurious bedroom. A tigerskin rug. Leopard fur blankets on a double-king bed whose mattress was sunk into a marble frame, facing an enormous firepit. The room was decorated with more statues, but not of people. Animals. Beside Stheno’s bed was a long plinth with a crouched, snarling panther. On the opposite side of it was a wolf, caught as if it had been in the middle of stalking, its head lowered, one paw held slightly off the ground. Other animal statues lined the walls in various alcoves- a seated lynx, a fox, a pronghorn, a whitetail buck, a bighorn sheep. An otter with fur so slick it could only have been petrified immediately after exiting the water.

To the left was a walk-in closet, and Cedric led Kylie towards it. “Let’s get you some clothes.”

“Oh Jesus,” Kylie breathed as she entered the room.

It was indeed a walk-in closet, but no clothes hung from the hangars. Instead, piled on the floor were heaps of unfolded garments of every kind. T-shirts and winter coats, blouses and suitjackets. Shorts and jeans, tights, slacks, trousers. One pile was just shoes- sneakers, heels, ballet slippers. The shelves on either side of the closet were the only things neatly organized- on each shelf were little rows of wallets and keys.

She stared at the heaps of clothes until finally Cedric said, “Well, find something to wear.”

“You don’t mean- ?”

“Yes,” Cedric replied. “Unless you feel like walking out of here in one of Stheno’s burqas.”

“But, this is-”

“I know what it is,” Cedric snapped. “I know it and you know it but there’s nothing we can do about it now.”

“But-”

“Kylie, I just did battle with a gorgon. Sixty-four people are dead because of me. I’ve got two broken ribs, probably my clavicle too, and the police are coming any minute. I’m all horrored out for tonight. Get dressed.”

He left her standing there naked and trudged away, still restlessly searching for something.

She tread gingerly among the heaps of hoarded clothes. The mere thought of wearing them seemed a desecration to the memory of their owners, but she knew she had to. There wasn’t another choice. She peeked at the wallets, still left as they were the day Stheno petrified their owners. Popping their buttons open to see the smiling ID photos. She thought she recognized a few of them but it was difficult to tell when she’d only “known” them as blank, gray statues, sharply contrasted against the vivid, living people in the pictures. Senseless. Senseless.

It reminded her of a museum trip with her nana, when she was a girl. They’d gone- she, her parents, grandmother, and nana- to the Titanic exhibit at the Franklin Institute. One of those traveling, two- or three-week events. A wall of rusted hull pulled from the seafloor like the door to a tomb. The shoes and shirts. Children’s toys. But what stuck with her, what haunted her dreams for years after, were the photos. The lovers. The children. The elderly couple who decided to die together on the decks. The photos in the wallets were like that. All gone now, to… wherever we go.

She sighed and knelt down to begin her search for something suitable to wear.

Heaven or Hell or a new life or something else… they are free now…

Cedric walked around the bedroom, looking at the stone animals. He’d only had four cock eggs on him, else he would have freed them all in that moment. Claws and fangs be damned, nothing that breathed deserved such hellish torment. But he only brought four eggs. Two he’d already used on Kylie. The other two, he was keeping in reserve. Nathan was supposed to have brought a couple cartons of them, enough to free a hundred petrified victims. Was bringing, currently, but no telling if he’d arrive before the police. Murphy’s Law in full effect tonight.

He looked around the room and then his heart leaped when he finally found what he was looking for. He raced over to one particular statue, positioned in one of the bay windows. A dog. It looked like a sleek Belgian Malinois, frozen mid-bark.

“Hud!” Cedric shouted, his voice strangled in relief, “Hud! Hud, I’m here buddy. I’m here. Just hold on, I’ll get you out.”

He knelt in front of the stone dog and reached back into his belt for the last two cock eggs, breaking them over the dog’s head and back. Then he lathed his fingers in the running yolks, rubbing it all over the dog’s stone fur.

“Come on, Hud. It’s okay, buddy. It’s okay. I’m here.”

Kylie stepped out of the closet. Wearing a pair of jeans and a loose, olive green top with long bishop sleeves. A good pair of sneakers. She felt safer now, more at ease. Her lingering shame over wearing the clothes of the dead vanishing with the comfort of simply being clothed. Everything fit, at least.

“Cedric, I’m-”

She stopped. Saw Cedric kneeling over the dog. Its snout was mostly thawed back to flesh and blood, and Cedric scratched the rapidly restoring fur behind the dog’s ears.

“It’s okay, buddy. It’s all okay now. Just another minute, okay?”

Kylie watched, tears welling, as the dog’s tongue started to flick out at Cedric’s face, even before it could move any other muscles in its face or neck. As the dog changed back, his fur was revealed to be a glossy black, his eyes ringed by a mask of tan. His belly white. And as his throat thawed, the dog began to whine in uncontrollable joy and excitement. Trying to move forward, to leap into Cedric’s arms despite his legs still being stone.

“Okay, okay, calm down!” Cedric implored. He hugged the dog tightly. Partly to prevent him from hurting himself as he unfroze. Mostly out of pure, truest love.

“I came back, buddy. I told you I would. I’m here now. I’m not leaving. I’m not going anywhere.”

And, as Kylie watched, the dog’s tail began to wag.

Tig ran far ahead of Kylie, down the gravel path. Taking turns chasing and being pursued by Hud. Hud was much faster, but Tig was thankful to finally have a playmate.

It was a brisk November morning, and Kylie was bundled up in a thick pair of jeans and a toad green tweed jacket. Her neck wrapped in an alpaca wool scarf she’d bought at a farm in Lancaster. But keeping her most warm was the bubbly feeling she got whenever Cedric brushed against her.

He was acting funny today, as opposed to all their other walks in Benjamin Rush State Park since he saved her life. Blurting out apologies whenever he accidentally brushed against her, like his mind was lost on another planet. And he was not very subtly fondling something in the pocket of his own grey tweed jacket, turning it round and round in his fingers. Kylie was pretty sure she knew what it was. And what her answer would be.

But until he was ready, she was quite content to simply meander through the park with him and their dogs.

It had been an eventful year. She’d finally been accepted to the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine, and was now wrapping up her first semester. The dusty old sketchbooks from her closet had been brought out of deep storage and she’d begun drawing again, and over the summer had taken up line and wash- turns out she had a natural knack for it. Inking and painting the trees, the birds, scenes of churches and farms and the many parks Cedric had driven her out to since they’d begun dating shortly after that night.

The winds whispered through the trees. The canopy painted shades of scarlet and burnished gold, elms and maples stubbornly clinging to their leaves even as winter loomed. They passed another couple with a stroller, and Kylie’s heart fluttered at the sight of it, the little onesied feet kicking up.

They smiled politely and exchanged hellos, and then Cedric suggested a rest on one of the park benches. Very unlike him. Usually he had the endurance of a wolf. Kylie obliged him, her tummy fluttering in anticipation. They sat and Cedric put his arm around her. So strong and warm. Kylie called Tig and Hud back, and they came bounding over happily to sit with their respective humans.

Cedric sighed heavily and they sat for awhile watching a hawk wheel over the wildflower meadow ahead, its coaldust feathers glinting back what little sun filtered through the cloudy sky. Kylie’s nerves bunched up until she thought maybe he wasn’t going to ask… but then he sucked in a deep breath and spoke-

“Kylie… I have something to ask you…”

The previous chapters may be read here: (I) (II) (III)

The header image is by Kizuna-chan on DeviantArt.

Tig growled. Low and mean. In the hitherto quiet room it reverberated in Kylie’s stone ears like the beating of war drums. The doorknob turned slowly, tinking and janging in its frame, and she fought ever harder to move her mineralized muscles with each pert, metallic clink.

The lock clicked.

An icy spike of terror twisted in Kylie’s gut. Tig trotted closer to the door, and when he left Kylie’s fixed line of sight she felt helpless and alone as she never had before, even though he was still right at her side, his tail still brushing reassuringly against her leg.

She felt sick. Wanted to vomit. To wet herself. To tremble and quake until she vibrated apart at the seams. But her body was made of solid stone, and so she stood rigid, literally petrified, unable to act on her fear in any way.

The door began to creak slowly open. Kylie’s stone heart lurched, and Tig barked savagely. Lunging at the door only to reel himself back in and hem close to Kylie. Fighting the conflicting instincts to protect her and to engage the threat. His barking so frantic and ferocious that Kylie was certain her neighbors would start to wonder what the hell was going on.

The intruder suddenly pushed the door all the way open. It hit the wall with a loud bang, and then… nothing. For a moment, all was still as a painting. Tig snarled fiercely, still hemming close to Kylie’s motionless stone body. She could feel his fur bristling against her legs. Ready to die for her in an instant. From behind her, she heard a clipped, contemptuous chuff of laughter. The intruder had scanned the room with the thoroughness of a military commander, and found its defenses wanting. A loud but small dog. A gun on the table. And one helpless statue.

The moment stretched- and broke.

At the bottom of her vision, Kylie could see Tig tense up. His tail curled back like a scorpion’s. Responding to some aggressive gesture by the intruder. She heard heavy boots stalking forward. One step at a time. Closing the distance to Tig. And her.

Then, the intruder charged thunderously. Tig leaped to the side. Kylie saw none of it, nothing but the counter and the floor in front of her, but she sensed his plan, the sidestep towards the intruder’s exposed flank. He landed to Kylie’s left, out of sight. A scrabble of paws as he darted in for his target.

The room erupted in desperate, thrashing battle. The noises rippling forth from each combatant’s throat like a soundboard of prehistory. Snarling. Hissing. Growling. Tig’s jaws snapped at empty air, then crunched on flesh. Blood spattered the floor in front of Kylie and she had no way of knowing whose it was until Tig withdrew back to her side with red-whetted teeth. Still hemming close to her, still trying to place himself between her and the enemy. He looked up at the intruder and snarled, and charged once more.

Kylie was totally powerless to intervene. She tried to move with every fiber of her being, every muscle screaming action, but it was like trying to drive a booted car. Her body was solid stone and she could only stare ahead and listen in stark, immobile terror, fearing for Tig’s life as he squared off with the unseen enemy. Please God, please please please help Tig, please help him please let him win. Please don’t let him die.

The fight was short and brief and ended with the sickening sound of a boot smashing into living flesh; Tig’s sudden, strangled yelp. Then the hallway closet door slammed shut and all Kylie could hear was Tig scrabbling desperately at the inside of the door, whining frantically trying to escape, to rejoin the fray. He was out of the fight, and Kylie now faced the intruder alone, as nakedly vulnerable as any lamb had ever been before the jaws of a lion.

A shiver raced up Kylie’s stone spine when she heard a familiar voice coo to the banging closet door- “Good boy. Stay.”

The heavy bootsteps approached confidently now that no resistance was left to be made, and when the intruder finally entered Kylie’s field of view she was unsurprised to find herself facing Stheno once more.

She’d traded her blue burqa for a hijab of the same color, and Kylie was dead certain that if she took it off, a roiling bolus of serpents would be exposed to the light. The hijab framed Stheno’s face as an almost perfect, moonlike circle, and for the first time Kylie had a full, unblinking view of her. Her swarthy skin looked slick and oily. Her was nose broad and fleshy, her cheeks jowly and riven by permanent scowl-lines. She wore an enormous pair of thick-framed butterfly sunglasses to shield her phosphorescent eyes. Those accursed eyes which had sentenced Kylie to this living death. She stared back at Stheno in fearful loathing through her own blank gray orbs.

At first, Stheno seemed to take no notice of Kylie, and simply strode around the room, carrying herself with the unhurried ease of a triumphant predator. Her chest thrust out, hands on her hips. She picked up the television remote and clicked it off. Setting the remote back down, she noticed the gun on the end-table and smirked at the sight of it. Then, finally, she turned to face Kylie and looked her stone figure up and down appraisingly. Her lips were like fat, purple sausages, and when she grinned they parted to reveal rotten, yellowed teeth.

“Ah, my dear, kind Kylie,” she said, “You are even more beautiful in stone…”

Fuck you, Kylie fumed behind the demure marble mask of her face, Fuck you, you monster.

Stheno’s smile was predatory, and behind the sunglasses her eyes drifted hungrily over Kylie’s stone figure. Lingering upon her slender neck, the swell of her chest. She reached out one of her gloved hands to caress Kylie’s cheek, the cold leather fingertips tickling her frozen skin. Her fingers drifted downwards along her neck, gently toying the sculpted veins and tendons of her curled hand. She tugged at Kylie’s jacket, her pajama bottoms. As if Kylie were a display mannequin clad in the new year’s apparel lineup. Then she teased down the jacket’s zipper and smiled at the sight of her unprotected chest.

“Perfect. Simply perfect. You make an excellent statue, just as I said you would. Your face is just as I envisioned. So pensive, so maidenly.”

Just change me back, Kylie pleaded silently. Her lips were forever sealed in a sad pout but she thought as passionately as if Stheno could read her mind. Please turn me back. You- you did this to me… somehow. I don’t know why you did this but you must be able to reverse it. You have to. Please. I don’t want to be a statue forever.

Stheno held up her gloved hand in front of Kylie’s face again, mere inches from her gray stone eyes, and her pointing index finger suddenly sprouted a long, black talon that punched effortlessly through her leather glove. Stheno waved the onyx claw in front of Kylie’s face and then began tracing it down along her cheek, drawing squiggles and spirals. It didn’t hurt, didn’t break Kylie’s stone skin, but still it left an electric sizzle of fear in its wake. Kylie knew what the point of the display was- I can break you. I can pulverize you if I want, and you can’t stop me.

Stheno teased the claw down Kylie’s neck all the way to her shirtline. Then Kylie felt an icesplash chill as the claw sliced the thin fabric of her t-shirt with a rending tear, exposing the shiny gray globes of her breasts. Her nipples, hardened by the cold long before being petrified, had been changed into pert pebbles. Stheno smirked again.

“You are fuller than I thought. Lovely, lovely.”

Stheno leaned her ear in close to Kylie’s bare breast and rapped the knuckle of her claw-finger against it, purring contentedly at the dull tunk it made. Then she continued dancing around Kylie’s stone body, examining her now with the critical eye of an artist.

“I am quite pleased with your pose, overall. Especially considering the lack of direction. Dainty, yet stable. Of course, you could have extended your leg more, to accentuate your calf muscle, and perhaps your chin is angled just slightly too far down. It is coy, but it does a disservice to your lovely neck. But still, a commendable pose, Kylie. You should have been a model.”

Shut up, Kylie thought, Shut up and go away. If you’re not going to turn me back, just leave me alone.

Stheno giggled. “What’s the matter? Can’t you speak? Are you embarrassed by compliments?”

She twirled around behind Kylie and unceremoniously pantsed her. A sharp chill violated her nether regions, so cold she would have gasped had her lips not been cemented shut.

“Perfect,” Stheno repeated, tracing her fingers down the small of Kylie’s back, the smooth, round curves of her buttocks. “You have an enviable figure, Kylie. I’m so glad I found you.”

Satisfied with her inspection, Stheno came back around in front of Kylie and leaned on her hips, gazing into the statue’s frozen face with a smug grin.

“Don’t be so shy, dear,” she teased, “Certainly you are better off as stone than you ever were as a person. Look at your counter- so many bills to pay. Now you needn’t worry about them ever again. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Kylie could not answer. She could only stare ahead blankly as the gorgon continued taunting her.

“Now, now, you needn’t thank me,” Stheno continued, her face contorting into a wicked sneer, “You are probably upset. Angry even. Ungrateful little bitch that you are. But I am used to it. You ignorant, condescending, ungrateful Americans. Always so willing to destroy the lives of others with your missiles and bombs, before prostrating yourselves before them to hear their tales of the horrors you inflicted, to beg their forgiveness for defeating them. It’s pathetic. I have never been more insulted than when you stood so raptly at attention to hear me tell of my life earlier. All your fake niceties, treating me like some Hollywood sob story, just a poor wretch to be pitied. You and your disgusting, contemptible pity. You think I want your pity? I lost everything when your army came to my mountains. The work of five thousand years, all reduced to ashes by one American bomber plane. My sanctuary destroyed. The one place where nobody questioned a woman who covers her head, where I was not constantly reminded of the beauty that was stolen from me by one of your goddesses. The same beauty you possess so casually, that you so easily take for granted. So white and pretty. You don’t even know all the things you have that I can never possess, Kylie. Even in stone. The world is a stage made for people like you. If I hadn’t shown you my eyes, after we parted you would have never thought of me again. You would have simply danced off to your next performative little pity act.”

That’s not true, Kylie thought, That’s not what I am. I liked you, Stheno. I trusted you. I wanted to be your friend.

Stheno paced in front of Kylie, her face a twisted mask of bitter contempt. Teeth clenched, fists balled at her sides. Her every word was pure venom, and Kylie began to fear that Stheno intended to simply shatter her fragile stone body. Despite her dread of being sentenced to permanent immobility, neither did she relish the idea of being struck and collapsing into a heap of gravel. Not that she thought this mere, blank-stare existence was worth living. But such is the will to survive.

Then Stheno sighed deeply. Her face softened, and she smiled again, the same faux, fiendish grin that Kylie saw when she first entered the apartment.

“No, your pity is useless to me, Kylie. Pity cannot rebuild what was taken from me. But you can. You, physically, Kylie. That’s how this ends. I have lost much in my long life, but I know how to lose. I know how to suffer. I know how to survive. And I am going to take everything you have to repay the debt owed to me. Your country. Your body. Your life. Even your feeble, entitled mind. They’re all mine now, Kylie. All I had to do was look into your conceited eyes, and then patiently wait for your little heart to stop beating. And while you stand still for all eternity, staring at the walls and slowly going mad, my collection will grow ever larger, and your world will belong to me.”

She crossed her arms triumphantly and tipped her head back to loose a harsh, guttural bray of laughter.

“I think we should go meet your new companions.”

With another quick swipe of her claw, Stheno tore Kylie’s shirt and jacket to ribbons and cast their tattered remains aside, leaving Kylie totally nude. Her stone cheeks grew hot as Stheno stopped and stared lustfully at her now naked body.

“We are going to have a lot of fun, later,” she teased, tracing her finger up Kylie’s inner thigh. Despite her horror the sensual touch sent a lightning rod of pleasure coursing through Kylie’s body, and she wanted to whimper.

Stheno leaned Kylie back and got a firm grip on her. One hand under her armpit, the other on her crotch. She hefted Kylie up effortlessly, despite her new form weighing hundreds of pounds, and carried her out of the apartment. Tig still howled inconsolably in the closet, but Stheno paid him no mind and carried her new statue down the hallway as if it were nothing more unusual than a dresser or bookcase. No one came out to stop or question her.

Kylie wasn’t sure what to expect upon leaving the building. Stheno carried her such that she was tilted gazing up at the ceiling, then the moon and the stars, and she could see nothing of her surroundings. She was soon set down with a solid thunk on the grass verge, propped up against the side of a vehicle. A van, judging by the sound of the rear doors being opened. Kylie realized then just how agonizingly limited her world had become. Anything she wasn’t directly facing may as well have no longer been part of the universe, so far as she was concerned. Out of sight, out of mind.

Stheno came back around and hefted Kylie up, and as she was carried around Kylie saw that the van was black. Its bed was heavily padded with foam, and buckles hung from multiple points on the walls. Stheno laid Kylie on her back and slid her stone body into the bed, where she quickly sank into the foam. She then lashed down Kylie’s arms and legs with the buckles, tugging them to make sure they were secure. Then she slammed the doors, climbed into the cab, and began driving to… wherever.

You deserve this, Kylie thought miserably. She stared up emptily at the drab metal ceiling which was illuminated only by the quick-passing glow of streetlights. Though her body was stone she felt hollow inside. You shouldn’t have ever spoken to her. Tig knew what she was, right from the start, and you didn’t listen to him. And now because you were an idiot, he’s all alone again and you’re just going to exist forever. And mom and dad? They’re going to have a funeral for you. They’re going to grieve for you, and they’ll never know… they’ll never know that you’re still alive, trapped as a stone statue. And they’re all going to move on and forget about you and you’re just going to keep existing, staring straight ahead forever until you lose your mind. The. End.

The drive lasted about forty-five minutes. Despite being unable to see anything outside the vehicle, Kylie was able to roughly chart their journey along the familiar roads. A few minutes after leaving her apartment, the van turned onto a freeway. That had to be Woodhaven Road. After awhile they turned right, onto I-95. Another right half an hour later, and back onto the street. A very busy street, judging by the sounds of traffic and crowds of pedestrians outside the vehicle. The lights illuminating the van’s interior were much brighter here. Center City?

Eventually Stheno parked the van and got out, and Kylie could only wonder what fate might be awaiting her. She heard Stheno’s heels clicking on the pavement, the van doors opening, and then a conversation began. Kylie strained her stone ears to eavesdrop.

“Ah, Miss Elapina,” a male voice greeted, “Welcome home.”

“Thank you, Mister Burton,” Stheno cooed, “It was a long, eventful trip. I am glad to be home.”

“I brought the dolly you requested.”

“Excellent, excellent. It’s in the back, if you will follow me.”

Kylie heard Stheno giving instructions, then she felt rough, masculine hands touching her legs, her arms, unbuckling the straps. A moment later she was loose, and carefully carried out of the van by two workmen. She tried to ignore them, tried shamefully to pretend that she couldn’t feel their callused hands gripping her bare skin- her arms, her ass. They weren’t fondling her. To them she was just another heavy object, a mere thing to be hoisted. They set her down as gently as they could on a metal dolly, and while they set about positioning her she was tilted up enough to see that they were on the sidewalk beside a massive skyscraper, its glass walls rearing up into the night, illuminated in mellow shades of orange cream. The straps which had secured her fragile stone body in the van were retied around her waist and thighs, tethering her firmly to the dolly. She didn’t feel quite stable on it, the metal platform just slightly uneven, and she hoped the straps would hold her up until they got to wherever they were going.

“Wow. It’s a lovely statue,” Burton said approvingly once the workmen stepped back. Kylie assumed he was a concierge. He was dressed like one.

“Thank you,” Stheno replied, grinning up at Kylie. Gone were her rotten yellow witch-teeth; they were straight and pristine white now. She must have put on a pair of dentures in the car. Indeed, her entire countenance was nigh-unrecognizable save for the sunglasses and hijab- her oily skin hidden beneath a sediment of foundation and concealer that gave her an infant’s glow. Her purple sausage lips were now red and voluptuous, and her face overall seemed a bit slimmer, her cheeks a bit higher, thanks to layers of contour and highlighter. Expertly applied, all of it. Only Kylie knew the true nature of the evil behind the mask. She stared hatefully back at the gorgon. “I think it may be my finest work.”

The workmen rolled Kylie through the building’s lobby and into an elevator. Stheno inserted a key-card into the panel, and the elevator began shuttling upwards. The name “Mandeville Place” was emblazoned in gold on the back wall of the elevator and Kylie turned that tidbit over in her head. The Mandeville was one of the ritziest high-rises in the city- a forty-three story tower overlooking the Schuylkill River, with only forty-five condos. You had to be richer than Crassus to live there.

The elevator shot up through dozens of stories in only a minute, before finally spitting them out at what must have been the top floor of the building. Stheno exited first to unlock her door, and the workmen wheeled Kylie out into a fancy foyer with Oriental furnishings. A pair of scarlet red divans and ottomans at either wall for waiting guests; between them a huge Afghan rug of matching color. The wall was papered in dreamy, garnet-and-gold arabesques. Against the wall opposite the elevator was a mahogany table with the gray stone bust of a woman atop it. Its eyes wide and sad. Kylie thought with sinking certainty that it was far too lifelike to have been sculpted.

When the condo door opened, Kylie’s enstoned heart sank at the sight of a long, beige hall lined with life-sized nude statues. A row of them against each wall, placed in shallow alcoves atop low pedestals. Most were women; she counted only three men, though far ahead the hallway forked and undoubtedly there were more stone figures in the corridors beyond.

As she was wheeled into the gallery, a chill prickled the back of her marble neck when she realized how impossibly perfect all the statues were. The subtle wrinkles and folds of their faces, their veins and pores preserved with all the fine, intricate detail of fossil leaves. And their hair was not as the hair of most sculptures, neatly carved into wavy tubes pressed down upon the scalp. The hair of these statues resembled frozen fountains, or smooth coils of hardened lava flowing down over their marble shoulders- in a word, real hair, captured in stone. Even their individual eyelashes had been sculpted into rings of tiny stalactites.

But it was their eyes which sent numbing pulses of dread shooting through Kylie’s motionless stone figure, for they lacked any of the exquisite detail of the rest of their bodies. They were merely smooth, drab gray orbs. Perfectly blank, opened wide in surprise, their gazes forever fixed straight ahead. And she knew that they, too, had once been people like her who were turned to stone by Stheno.

She redoubled her useless efforts to move, to run away. She desperately did not want to join the rest of the statues in their eternal, silent vigil. She hadn’t yet come to terms with being stone forever. Forever was an incomprehensibly long time to be trapped in complete immobility, and a small, delusionally rebellious corner of her mind held out hope that this was all merely a terrible dream from which she would soon awaken, or that if it were indeed real, rescue was surely just around the corner. To be glued down to one of those dreadful plinths would make her fate well and truly final.

She continued fruitlessly trying to squirm as the workmen hefted her off the dolly and plunked her down onto an unoccupied pedestal near the door. Stheno had them tilt her back just enough to squirt her feet with an adhesive, then they pivoted her according to Stheno’s direction- “Slightly to the right… no, no, left a bit… okay, now forward just a smidge… and… there! Perfect!”

Kylie despaired as the workmen stepped away, perfectly unaware that they were leaving her, a once flesh-and-blood woman, on what may as well have been her grave. She was positioned facing out, her head turned so that the door was just visible at the edge of her right peripheral view. Half a dozen of her petrified companions were in her line of sight. Five of them were women- some dainty, some voluptuous. All were nude, all in various elegant poses, as if they had been expecting to model for traditional sculptures, blissfully unaware that they would be holding their stances for a very long time. One of the statues was a lean, serious-looking man with hair like frosted grass, his arms held somewhat awkwardly at his sides.

Stheno thanked the workmen and saw them out to the elevator. When she pranced back into the now-empty gallery, she stopped in front of Kylie’s pedestal and gracefully mounted it. She placed one hand upon Kylie’s stone cheek, caressing a frozen skein of hair behind her ear. Staring deeply into the blank stone orbs of her eyes. She grinned widely and bit her lip, letting her fingers drift slowly down the marble curve of Kylie’s neck, to her breast. Tracing delicious circles around her frozen, permanently erect nipple. It felt good. Really, obscenely good. Stheno seemed to know it. Of course she did. The whole thing was a game to her.

“Normally, I give my new statues a more… intimate welcome to my collection,” Stheno breathed hoarsely as she continued teasing Kylie’s tit, “But tonight I am pressed for time, so that will have to wait just a while longer. Now, you be a good little statue for me, and after the party we will get to know each other a little better. I have such plans for you…”

She planted a kiss on Kylie’s cold marble cheek, then leaped off the pedestal and quickly bounded out of view. Kylie heard the elevator ding again- a different elevator, to her left. Service elevator? It must have been, for she soon heard the clatter of wheeled tables and carried chairs, Stheno directing what must have been caterers.

Who on earth throws a party at this hour? Kylie wondered, It’s gotta be around midnight now.

She heard the caterers setting up in a room somewhere to her left, but since she couldn’t see them at all she quickly tuned them out, and lost herself in her own thoughts and memories. All thoroughly tarred by a black brush of despair. Dead dreams welling up in her mind like ghosts from the abyss. Her hopes and ambitions. To be a veterinarian. To maybe try her hand at art again. To own her own home. To settle down and have children. Just two, that would be enough. A boy and a girl. Now never to be born. The images of these and a thousand other might-have-beens and never-to-bes swirled bleakly round her mind, a tempest of ashes sealed within her granite heart.

Eventually Stheno came trotting back through the gallery, her heels clicking on the tiled floor. On either side of her were two short Hispanic cocktail servers. She walked them out into the foyer, where they could immediately get to work, and then she came back into the gallery for one final check of her stone prisoners, and her own appearance. She fussed over her hijab, patting herself down and smoothing her black cotton abaya, murmuring assurances to herself as she did so. Then she stopped and took a deep breath.

“And now, ladies and gentlemen,” she announced, twirling dramatically around the silent hall of statues, “It’s showtime!

The gallery filled slowly. It was a small gathering, less than fifty, but they quickly made the narrow hall into a sea of fresh-laundered suits and elegant evening dresses, incensing the air with cologne and perfume. Kylie watched them filtering past her, turning their heads to admire her sleek stone curves as if she really were the result of meticulous chiseling by a master sculptress. She wanted to flush crimson, to cover herself, to cringe into a corner in shame as their eyes drifted appraisingly over her nude body.

She recognized some of the guests. All members of Philadelphia’s upper crust. The president of the University of Pennsylvania. The CEO of an IT company. A political activist who had recently made waves in the news. Some of them she had voted for, or against. The mayor. A handful of city councilmen and a pair of state representatives, breathlessly congratulating Stheno on breaking boundaries with her unique art installations. One of the councilmen expressed interest in bestowing her a grant for a public art gallery, a suggestion which Stheno politely chided.

To her surprise, there was even an A-list actress in attendance- Gwen Altren. Kylie had watched a few of her movies. Now Gwen was watching her, her eyes drifting over Kylie’s stone figure with the keen eye of a critic.

“You’ve outdone yourself, Miss Elapina,” Gwen said. Her wheat blonde hair was tied back in a tight ballerina ponytail, and she wore a red sequined dress which seemed sprayed onto her body.

“Thank you, so very much,” Stheno replied. “It was my most difficult work to date. Very time consuming to get the model into a decent pose. She was not my most cooperative subject.”

“Well, it was worth the struggle,” Gwen said, still scanning Kylie’s figure, lingering on the delicate features of her face, “It looks startlingly real. You even sculpted her eyelashes!”

“That is the most difficult part,” Stheno admitted, “The eyes. Windows to the soul, wouldn’t you agree?”

Gwen smiled. “Will you ever reveal how you do it?”

“My dear,” Stheno said delicately, “If I were to teach you how I make my statues, I would have to keep you locked away in my gallery forever.”

Gwen laughed politely, and the two moved on out of Kylie’s view, still discussing the marvelous craftsmanship of the sculptures. She was glad to be out of the spotlight for a moment, but it was only a pale shadow of relief. She had never felt so utterly, helplessly naked. All the public humiliations of her life- fumbling her words at a third grade recital, tripping in the high school cafeteria and faceplanting in front of everyone, the screaming match with Jake the night of their breakup- all paled in comparison to this examination. Dozens of eyes passing over her nude stone body, judging her features and her pose, intimately scrutinizing the most private parts of her anatomy, wondering aloud how Stheno had sculpted her so perfectly. None even suspecting the truth, that there was a living being trapped within the inanimate stone figure.

The night ground on in this agonizingly slow manner. Someone would come over to her plinth to admire her sculpted form. The activist, gazing hungrily over her. The CEO, asking Stheno if she would be amenable to sculpting a copy of “it” for his building’s lobby. A gay couple whispering about how if only “it” were a little taller, “its” breasts a little smaller, “it” would be the perfect sculpture. She could see them admiring the other statues too, but as the newest one in the gallery, the night’s headliner, Kylie was the belle of the ball. She hated every second of it.

God, what did I do to deserve this? she thought desolately, Why did you let this happen to me? I know I’m not a great person, but… what did I do to deserve this punishment? Can you even hear me? Are you even there?

She didn’t know how many interminable hours she stood there for. Trapped. Motionless. Naked. Her only outlet for recreation being to eavesdrop on the various conversations taking place. She learned that Comcast was soon to announce its third tower in the 30^th Street Station District. The Candlelight Institute was close to cloning a Caspian tiger, which, she was given to understand, was extinct. Gwen Altren hated the director she was working with and was going to terminate her contract with the studio after completing her present film. One of the state representatives knew that the governor was planning to endorse the other guy for president. All perfectly interesting, perfectly useless information.

She tried to resign herself to this new life as the minutes dragged into hours and the sound of the party faded to a dull background hum. Every time she felt restless and tried to fidget she was disappointingly stymied by her immobility. She tried crafting poems in her head to pass the time, brief stanzas or haikus. She thought of trees and birds. Of the warm spring sun and the fuming blaze of leaves in autumn. Of cirrus skies and breakers crashing on the shore. Of her parents. Of Tig. These and a thousand other sights she would never again set her eyes upon. Her gaze was forever fixed ahead, her entire world reduced to a narrow view of her fellow statue prisoners, her own marble breasts, and the cold tile floor. Her parents would die. Tig would die. The trees would die and come back into leaf and then die again and again and she would live through all of it, standing perfectly motionless on the plinth while the wheel of eternity spun around her.

Presently, she was aware of a small crowd forming in front of her. At some point during her reverie, Stheno had materialized at her side. Kylie stared at her bitterly, wishing nothing more than the chance to throw herself at the gorgon and bite her throat out. Her muscles failed her but her hatred remained red-hot, and she stared in bitter rage as Stheno began speaking.

“Thank you all so much for joining me tonight. I know this gathering was a bit last-minute, but you all have been such dedicated patrons of mine that I felt it was only proper to invite you over for this announcement.”

She looked up at Kylie’s impassive stone face with a knowing smirk. If Kylie’s thoughts could kill, Stheno would have disintegrated into a heap of cinders. I hate you. I want you to die. I wish you would just die, right now. And all your snobby friends, too.

“I have heard much spirited discussion over my newest sculpture. How exquisitely detailed it is, how finely posed. I am truly humbled by your compliments. But the most interesting discussions I’ve heard revolve around the title of the piece.”

At this, Kylie’s fantasies of tearing Stheno into tiny, bloody pieces ceased, and she felt quite self-conscious again. The sharp humiliation of being naked before so many strangers had gradually been dulled by the passing of the hours, and the realization that they didn’t view her as a naked woman but just as a piece of art. She hadn’t considered that she’d been renamed, though she noticed all the other statues had titles. They were engraved on copper plates fastened to their pedestals. The name of the buxom woman across from her, Excess, had garnered several fits of bawdy laughter. The taut, muscular man with the title Toxic had provoked a long discussion between Stheno, Gwen Altren, and the university president about the nature of masculinity. And now Kylie wondered sheepishly what her new name was.

“There are several reasons why I chose such a provocative title,” Stheno continued, “The model, for one, was very spoiled. Shy, but spoiled. A rich daddy, of course. She insisted to me on striking her own pose, rather than the one I thought most fitting. This caused much friction between us, and made the sculpting process rather aggravating. Why, I almost wished at times that I could simply turn her into the statue and be done with her!”

The small crowd chuckled, while inwardly Kylie seethed. You lying bitch. You callous, lying bitch. You know that’s not what happened.

“The statue you see before you is not what I wanted to sculpt. My vision was, initially, quite different. The sculpture here is the result of incessant tug-of-war games with the stubborn model. Unfortunately, many of my models throughout the years have had similar chips on their shoulders. I select them for their looks, naturally. It is a shame that physical beauty does not often translate to a pleasant personality. I have meditated for a long time on this issue, why my models feel so entitled to disagree with me on the direction of the piece. I am the artist. I am the one with the vision. Yet, they think they know better. Sometimes they even think they’re being helpful, and offer unneeded and unwelcome ‘advice’ to me. As if I am just a naive foreigner who doesn’t know her own trade. And worst of all, they are not even aware of how condescending they are. They simply do it, unconsciously, no different than breathing. This is why I chose the title. This one word summarizes precisely the problem with this model, with all of them. It is a systemic scourge, a pestilence, which needs to be ripped out of the heart of this country like the tumor that it is.”

Stheno paused dramatically. The little crowd applauded, and Kylie could only think of how much she wanted to tear all of their throats out. You stupid snobs. You worthless, seal-clapping prigs. You’re cheering for a monster. She doesn’t care about any of you. She’d turn you all to stone too if she wanted, and she wouldn’t feel an ounce of pity. She doesn’t have a soul.

“And,” Stheno continued, “though I am pleased that all of your remarks about the statue’s title have been quite positive, I doubt the public’s would be so enthusiastic. There would be controversy, shaming. ‘Bad press.’ However, recently I have come to the conclusion that such a gauntlet would be worth running, in order to excise this infection from society. That is why, as Councilman Johnson suggested earlier, I have decided to open a public sculpture gallery. Thanks to your donations and good will, I’ve managed to procure a parcel on the Parkway for this gallery, right across from the Rodin Museum and Barnes Foundation. I’ve already had the blueprints drafted, and aim to begin construction by the fall of next year. Controversy or not, I want the public to discuss and enjoy my sculptures, as they so dearly deserve to be. I will be very busy in the coming months, as this new public gallery will be filled mostly with all new sculptures, as well as select pieces from here- including this newest one.”

The little group applauded, and Stheno grinned smugly at Kylie. “I think it deserves to have the eyes of the world upon it.”

I am not an ‘it’, Kylie thought despondently, looking out over the clapping crowd of high rollers. She wanted to scream at them, to tear their heads off. To kill Stheno. To run away. To hug her parents. To be back home with Tig. More than anything, she wanted to cry. But she could do exactly none of these things, and so she simply stared ahead in sepulchral silence as the party wound down around her.

My name is Kylie McKenna.
I was born in 1998.
I am a Gemini.
I went to UPenn.
My favorite book is Little Women.
My hobbies include art and astrology.
I’m a waitress. Temporarily. Want to be a vet someday.
Tig is my dog.

I am not a statue.
I am not whatever is chiseled on my pedestal.
Please let me out.

Sometime late in the night the last guests filtered out. Kylie’s inner clock told her it had to be past two, though of course she had no way of knowing for sure. She hoped Tig had escaped the closet somehow.

Stheno followed the last drunken couple out to the elevator, leaving just a pair of caterers to clean up. One of them bent down in front of Kylie to pick up a dropped napkin, and when she rose she looked over her frozen stone figure. Her eyes wide, as if amazed and disconcerted by the level of detail in the sculpture. She crossed herself, muttering some oath in Spanish, and quickly shuffled out of Kylie’s view.

After the caterers left, Stheno disappeared for awhile. Kylie stared ahead at her fellow statues, those she could see, and wondered what they were thinking. They all had their own stories, stories which had ended weeks or months or years before. They may have been through dozens of such parties already, while she was just Stheno’s latest victim.

With the exception of the lone man, the other statues’ poses were all more graceful and deliberate than her own, more obviously posed, and she wondered how Stheno had lured them in. Probably they thought they were just going to be regular models, unaware of the nature of the trap until it was too late, until they felt their flesh changing into cold stone and they realized they could no longer move. She thought of Venus flytraps, of anglerfish, of spiderwebs and wolves dressed as sheep. Stheno’s guise was more abominable than them all, for at least the victims of such deceitful predators died. She and the dozens of others in this marble mortuary had been sentenced to a living death, their minds locked away forever behind blank, unmoving eyes in a prison of their own immobilized flesh.

There was a loud clap at the other end of the gallery.

“Excellent performance tonight, everyone!” Stheno announced, suddenly twirling into Kylie’s field of view. “All of you standing so perfectly still for my guests. You’ll be happy to know that the party was a smashing success. I know you all heard my little announcement; the councilman said the grant is as good as mine, so some of you will be rehomed soon. Temporarily, of course; you’ll be rotated around. I loathe to part with any of you for long, my dears. Still, you must be excited for the change of scenery.”

She wandered about the gallery as she continued speaking to her captive audience. Occasionally she stepped up to a pedestal to brush some perceived blemish from the gray stone body mounted atop it, or to deliver some taunting missive. In this way, Kylie finally learned some of the other sculptures’ real names. Curvaceous Excess had once been known as Rebecca. The dainty, ballerina-poised girl directly across from her, titled Standard, was formerly Stephanie, and Stheno lingered in front of her for a long time, planting kisses up and down her slender stone leg.

“My little dancer,” she cooed, “Your performance that night at the Kimmel Center still plays in my head. Watching you twirl, graceful as a gazelle… I had to have you. A risk, of course. You were a rising star. So natural that they came looking for you. The interview with the police detectives was such fun, wasn’t it? Ah, but how could they have known they were walking right by you? That’s the beautiful thing about this age, Stephanie. None of you believe in magic anymore. It makes my job so much easier.”

She danced away from the ballerina, and looked around the gallery, as if undecided about who she intended to tease next.

“And yet, despite my precautions, sometimes, someone catches on. Right, detective?”

She trotted over to the only male statue in Kylie’s line of sight- the one called Toxic. Stheno mounted his pedestal in a single bound and began caressing his broad marble shoulders, his stone muscles taut as hawser. His face frozen forever with slightly raised eyebrows. One hand reaching at his hip, like he were trying to draw a holstered sidearm. As if in his final breath he’d realized the true nature of his enemy.

“Poor, poor Detective Sullivan. You were so close to figuring out my secret. My own fault, of course. I shouldn’t have claimed Kristina. I really shouldn’t have, but I simply couldn’t help myself. Such a pretty, prissy little socialite. She fairly jumped at the opportunity to pose for me. So eager to be immortalized in stone.”

She laughed shrilly, then left the detective to his solitude and bounded over to one of the statues beside Kylie, out of her field of view. She thought it was her immediate neighbor, judging from the nearness of Stheno’s breathing, the sound of her lips planting a fusillade of kisses on the statue’s marbleized flesh. If it was her neighbor, Kylie had caught a glimpse of her when she was carried in, before the workmen secured her to her plinth. A stone Venus, cutting a provocative pose with her arms stretched high behind her, thrusting her ample chest out. Still smiling impishly, like she’d been changed so suddenly she hadn’t any time to be alarmed before she was petrified.

“Oh, Kristina, my dear, jabbermouth Kristina. How your family searched for you. You were much loved, dear, despite what you told me. The police, the journalists, our poor private detective just across the way… I thought they would never give up. And though you were nearly the end of me, I’ve no regrets about granting your wish. No regrets.”

Presently, Stheno leaped back to Kylie’s plinth and smirked up at her. “Though of course none were so risky as you, Kylie, you little show-stealer,” Stheno teased, sauntering over to her. As soon as she ascended her pedestal she began tracing her fore and ring fingers up the smooth marble curve of Kylie’s leg. “The new girls always are, though. I’m sure you enjoyed all the attention you received tonight, hmm? Such beauty captured in you. Such a melancholy expression. You are my first attempt at a candid sculpture. Thankfully, you posed perfectly, else I would have been carting your rubble down to the river.”

For a long minute, she just stared deeply into Kylie’s blank gray eyes. Her sultry breath fogging her stone face. She leaned in close and kissed Kylie’s cold, pouting lips, and cupped her hard breast in one hand while the other drifted down south to her mound. Kylie would have moaned. She wanted to squirm, to push Stheno away. But she was solid stone, and her muscles refused to obey her. All she could do was stand in rigid torment while Stheno played with her.

There was a knock at the door.

Click Here To Read Chapter Five

Chapters One and Two may be read here: (I) (II)

The header image is by EliseEnchanted on DeviantArt.

There was a bus stop right on the other side of the train station parking lot. Kylie shuffled towards it like a cripple. Some nights she walked home; it was a straight shot up Bustleton, less than a mile, but it was all uphill and she knew she’d never make it in this condition. Or this humidity. Her clothes began to cling stickily to her skin mere moments after exiting the bar. At least you’re not cold anymore, she thought ruefully.

Thankfully there was a bench at the stop, and she slumped down onto it with a hefty sigh more befitting a woman thrice her age. Her stomach churned and the incessant tingling seemed to penetrate all the way to her bones. She chewed at the inside of her cheek impatiently and drummed her still-numb fingers on the bench like a frostbite victim as she sat there waiting, waiting. The first stars were just twinkling into being, while behind her the fuming red evening sank below the horizon.

Finally the bus came chugging up the little hill towards her. Its doors shuttered open and Kylie groaned to her feet to board whilst fumbling for a few bills in her wallet.

“Fare’s up to five now,” the driver said, surly, when Kylie handed him the money. She huffed and switched out her four ones for a five, parting with it jealously and thrusting it rudely at the driver. He turned to face her, ready to say something, but when he saw her he just stared in surprise. Then he shook his head and took the bill, muttering under his breath.

The bus was packed and Kylie shambled down the aisle, wanting a seat near the back so the other passengers couldn’t gawk at her. Though most of them paid her no mind the few quizzical sneers she did notice were enough to make her feel like they were all staring at her, wondering- what the hell is wrong with her?

The only empty spot was right behind the back door and she slumped down into it as the bus shifted into gear. She stared vacantly out the window at the streetscape racing by, buildings and parked cars standing still as stars while the bus sped up the hill.

She refused to think about her rent. Damn her rent. Damn her landlord. Damn whoever invented the first rental apartment and brought that infernal idea to America. She thought about her bed. Her warm bed and a warm shower, to soothe her aching… everything. She wasn’t yet sure if she’d go right to sleep or stay up for a bit watching a feel-better movie.

No matter what she chose, Tig would be happy to see her. He always was, but her coming home this early would be a real treat. Kylie’s head hurt, her chest and her arms and her shoulders and her legs but the thought of Tig was a soothing salve and she sighed contentedly at the mere idea of him. His soft silky fur. His deep amber eyes, warm as hearths. She soon lost herself in a memory of walking with him last autumn along the edge of a creek in the big park on the other side of the Boulevard. Letting him off leash and playing fetch on the gravel bank, watching him bolt after the ball, ears flopping in his wake. When he finally caught it he skidded to a stop and just stood there panting under the shimmering golden hemlocks, watching the leaves fall around him in wonderment. A ruined bridge the backdrop to their game, its stone arches yawning in darkness while all around the canopy susurrated in the breeze. The perfect day.

A cold chill shook her from the reverie. She looked out the window and saw her reflection against the blur of streetlights. Sickly. Ashen. Her eyes dull as cinders. Then she realized in a surge of panic that the bus was shuttling by Leo Mall and she’d missed her stop. She shot out of her seat and yanked the bell.

“Stop, stop, stop!” she pleaded, rushing to the front of the bus.

The bus lurched to a halt and Kylie reeled back, groping at the air for a handrail that was just out of reach. She stumbled forward and careened into the wheelhouse, finally catching herself and getting a grip on the pole. Not that her fingers wanted to uncurl anyhow. She blew a noticeably gray lock of hair out of her eyes and turned to the driver.

“Thank you,” she said breathlessly as the doors wheezed open. She stepped down gingerly onto the pavement. Her right side ached horribly after hitting the wheelhouse.

“Damn junkies,” the driver chuffed indignantly, slamming the doors in her face.

Her gratitude crumbled to dust and was carried away on the sultry breeze with the bus’s exhaust fumes. She wanted to cry. Just slump down on the sidewalk and pour her goddamn heart out to anyone who would listen. The pavement or the streetlights. It must have been what everyone on the bus was thinking. Maybe even Joe and Sarah. Just another junkie. Ignore it and maybe it’ll go away. Her skin, her stuttered gait, her vacant gaze… well, drugs did all of those things too.

She didn’t fall to tears. Knew that it would be pointless, would accomplish nothing. So she gathered herself up and looked around. The driver had discarded her at the corner of Bustleton and Hendrix. It was a mere two blocks back up to her missed stop, but to her aching body it seemed as far away as the stars. She could have tried walking home by way of Hendrix, but that was an even longer journey. So, with wet eyes and only least-bad options to choose from, she stuffed her hands in her pockets and started up the street.

The entire block was one long strip mall. Kin Wha Garden takeout. The Vatan halal market. Little Istanbul, a restaurant. A couple of beer distributors. Nothing that smelled even a little decent. Small groups of mostly men loitered in the parking lots and Kylie passed well abreast of them, a world unto herself as she trudged along. Her ankles protested each footfall, as if she had been transported to a planet with thrice the gravity of Earth, and her joints could only suffer under the burden of her own weight. Visions of her bed danced alluringly in her mind’s eye and kept her chugging along at a fair pace beneath the harsh fluorescent streetlights.

After awhile she left the bustling strip mall behind. Passing in front of the PNC bank, closed at this late hour, she stopped to lean against one of the lightpoles for just a moment to catch her breath. Leo Mall was right across the street, the drab beige walls of the Home Depot at the bottom of the brightly illuminated parking lot. Her gaze drifted over towards the ledge-path, the trees now reduced to stark black smears against the deep twilight sky. Despite the humidity a chill tickled her spine. She was suddenly stricken by the uncanny sense that she was being watched. The same feeling, to be sure, which had pervaded her the entire evening, only now that she was well and truly alone on the street it was crushing.

She took a deep breath and tried to tell herself she was being silly again, but on the lonely sidewalk the tension was insurmountable and she looked around warily. No one was walking towards her from either direction, nor was anyone behind her in the bank’s lot, but nevertheless she was troubled by the inescapable feeling that something was out there, watching her every move, carefully observing her from the shadows and held at bay only by its knowledge that she, too, was aware of its existence. Unable to bear it any longer, she shoved off from the light pole and trotted jag-legged away.

Finally she made it back to her intended stop and turned left onto Somerton Avenue, away from the hustle and bustle of Bustleton and back into her familiar residential area. The same streets she casually walked with Tig during the day took on a decidedly different character by night. The streetlights dim as salt lamps, those few that were even on. Tall oaks and spruces cast the unlit portions of the lane into inky blackness. Appropriately, Somerton Avenue was one of the oldest streets in Somerton, and Somerton was very, very old. Most of its buildings were new but the neighborhood was old, and on this street stood some of the last relics of a more ancient town. The houses sordid and musty. Moldering, ivy-festooned porches rearing out of the darkness like phantoms, as if the town itself were a ghost that groaned to life at the witching hour to mourn its gone-by glory days.

It was easy to feel haunted on such a lonely street, though if indeed the neighborhood were possessed of some genius loci which had been beaten into the ground by modernity, it would have found a kindred spirit in Kylie. Her chest felt leaden and she was tempted to stop and sit for a minute beneath one of the towering oaks shading the lawn of Saint Andrews in the Field. It was a pretty red-brick church with a green copper spire. Episcopal, but they also held Orthodox services for the neighborhood’s burgeoning Russian immigrant population. Services offered in Malayalam, too, whatever strange tongue that was.

She stared at the oak as longingly as if it were her own bed and sighed wearily. If she laid down against its trunk now, she would fall asleep and would not get back up again, and whatever supernatural force was pursuing her would find itself presented with a simple, undefended target. So she continued limping down the quiet street as quickly as she could, feeling a thousand unseen eyes boring into her from every shadowed corner as she hobbled along. Her heart throbbed dully in her chest, straining at the effort of what just last night would have been a quick, ten minute stroll.

Jesus, Kylie thought wryly, trying to soothe her frayed nerves, You really have become Nana. Remember how she used to have to stop and sit every fifty feet whenever she went with you on a walk?

Finally she turned onto Depue Street. A cool flush of relief washed over her at the sight of the apartments. Hers was near the bottom of the hill and she glanced back over her shoulder as she entered the lot, still unable to shake the inexplicable feeling of being watched. No. It wasn’t just being watched. She was used to that. Being looked at, the up-and-down gazes from men. This was different. Categorically different. It was an unbearable presence upon her. Like a tiger skulking in the shadows, watching her. Hunting her. Scrutinizing her every move and waiting for the right moment, for her to trip or stumble or become distracted for even an instant before pouncing upon her. She dearly wished for her gun but she’d left it on the nightstand while getting ready for work, and as she limped up the stairs to her apartment block raw pulses of primal dread raced up and down her nerves, intensifying to a terror-stricken crescendo as she neared the safety of the building.

When she arrived at her door she jabbed her hand into her purse and fumbled for her keys. A moment of blind panic as her fingers seized again. She looked wildly down into her purse, trying to will the treacherous digits to move. They curled sluggishly around the key, and once she had a halfway decent grip on it she jabbed it into the lock and shoved her way into the apartment.

Tig was right at the door. Must have come trotting over at the sound of the lock twisting. Not barking, just curious. Like- who could this be? He began whining excitedly when he saw Kylie, thumping his tail against the wall, and she was barely able to get in the door before he started jumping up on her.

“Tig, let me in,” Kylie protested sharply, the open door and empty hallway behind her seeming like so many fathoms of shark-infested water.

She slammed the door and quickly double-locked it. Trembling, she put one eye up to the peephole, certain there would be someone or something out in the hall, some nameless terror she had only just narrowly avoided.

Through the distorted fisheye lens she saw… nothing. Nobody was in the hallway.

Her nerves fell to pieces. She slumped down with her back to the door and cried. Buried her head in her knees and just sobbed. Sobbed because she was scared and didn’t know what the hell was happening to her. Sobbed because she’d been repeatedly humiliated throughout the day. By the bus driver. By Joe. She’d made a fool of herself in front of Sarah and Cedric and Stheno. She was dreadfully ill and she had no insurance and no car and no idea what was even wrong with her. And forget about rent. She could see the eviction notice in her head as clearly as if it had already been delivered.

She cried herself out. Rung herself dry like a rag. After awhile she was aware that she had curled up into a fetal position, hands draped limply over her knees. Her cheeks red hot from the burning cascade of tears. Tig was seated beside her, ears flat against his skull, and he started licking the salty runnels away. His tongue tickled and she laughed despite herself. A sad, amused sigh as she pushed him away. The apartment seemed silent as snow now that she had poured out all of her sorrows onto the floormat.

She wiped her nose ungracefully on her sleeve and rose shakily to her feet, hobbling towards her bedroom. Actually hobbling. Her knees didn’t want to bend fully, like her joints had solidified. She remembered a commercial she’d seen when she was younger, a Children’s Hospital ad raising awareness for multiple sclerosis. Children her age at the time hobbling around, legs bound up in braces like medieval knights, minus any of the honor or dignity. But still they smiled.

Kylie didn’t feel like smiling. She was tired and scared. She entered the bedroom and stripped out of her work clothes. Tossed her shoes into a corner, her purse onto the bed. She saw the gun sitting on her nightstand where she’d left it and she grabbed it and cradled it like it were her favorite stuffed animal. She checked that it was loaded, even knowing that it was, and then carried it with her into the bathroom. Never before had she felt the need to carry a loaded pistol with her around the house, but tonight she placed it on top of the toilet, muzzle facing the sink so she could lean out to grab it from the shower if necessary.

Her nude reflection stared back at her from the mirror like a daguerreotype but this time she didn’t startle. Her whole body was the same sickly shade of ashen gray, excepting a few darker patches. Her nipples, the veins of her arms. Only her hair still retained most of its natural, dark brown sheen, though it too had begun to take on an aged, silvery hue at the roots. A few errant locks of lead. She stepped into the shower and cranked the water piping hot. It felt damn good to wash away the salt-rime of tears and sweat, to soothe her tight, sore muscles under the warm cascade. As she cleaned herself, she rubbed every inch of her body with the coarse washcloth, trying to itch away the tingling sensation. After she had finished washing off all the suds she just stood under the jet of water and massaged her back and her shoulders.

When she got out she changed into a pair of pajama bottoms and a t-shirt. Her hair was still damp but she was too exhausted to blow-dry it, so when she went back out into the living room and slumped down on the sofa it slapped wetly against the upholstery. She set the gun down on the end-table beside her and tipped her head back towards the ceiling, staring into the constellations of stippled spackle without really seeing them because she was totally lost in thought. She’d already cried herself out, and now she tried to think seriously about what was happening to her.

She didn’t know much about medicine. No doctors in her family she could call. All she had was what she’d learned acquiring her biology major, and that wasn’t much. A good deal of animal physiology, some molecular biology. Nothing useful to her predicament. So she simply made a mental list of all her symptoms, to compare them to illnesses she knew about. Analytical, like a doctor ought to be. You want to be a vet? Fine, here’s patient zero, suffering from malady unknown. Species, Homo mckenna. Age 26. Symptoms…

Her fingers could be carpal tunnel syndrome. That wasn’t a lie, what she’d told Cedric. She really did have it, at least the early stages. Maybe it was progressing with shockingly abnormal quickness?

All of her internal aches- the fever, headache, lightheadedness, the cough and chest pains and weak limbs, all of it- matched with classic flu symptoms. The main difference was she didn’t feel her sinuses were congested at all, when every time she’d had the flu previously she’d gone through a box of tissues a day until it passed. So it would be a very aberrant flu.

But still, it was explicable as the flu. The heart issue- she was still reluctant to think of it as an attack- she’d suffered at the bar? Well, that was less easy to explain. She had zero prior history of heart problems. She was in peak physical condition, the prime of her life. She knew people who sometimes suffered severe chest pains with the flu, but they were all in their fifties or older. Not their twenties. So, put that in the “maybe” column- maybe it was related to the flu.

And the most anomalous symptom of all was her skin turning gray. And the tingling. She understood innately that they were causally connected, though she wasn’t sure how she knew this. Either the tingling caused her skin to turn gray, or her skin tingled because it was turning gray, but she knew they were inseparable. And that was where she ran out of explanations, and her subconscious dredged up the terrible idea- you’re turning to stone, genius.

She shook her head and sighed heavily, brushing the thought away like it were an annoyingly persistent fly. Another shiver rattled through her. The shower-warmth was fading and the room felt frigid again. Kylie rose from the couch, her joints making a sound like crunching snow, and went to check the thermostat. It read 72. Unprecedented. Ideally she liked the room at a cool 68, and couldn’t sleep a wink if the temperature rose half a degree above 70, but now her teeth were chattering. Damn flu, she thought as she turned the air conditioner off entirely. Just the flu. That’s all.

As she headed back to the couch, she glanced at the window and considered opening it, to let the sultry summer air pour in. Immediately she stamped out the idea. No way. Not with… whatever it was, out there. The intangible something that had followed her home. She could still feel it, as if it were standing just beyond the glass, leering in at her. It was impossible, of course. She was up on the third floor. No way for anyone- or anything- to enter. But still, her gut told her no, and she’d ignored it enough today to know better.

Instead, she returned to her room- gun reassuringly in hand- to retrieve a hoodie from the closet. When she opened the bedroom door it felt as if she’d opened a freezer and she half expected to see her own breath, even knowing the room was as warm as any other in her apartment. She thumbed through the hoodies on the rack and selected a gray zip-up one. Then she tipped her head back and looked at the fleece blankets she’d stored all the way up on the top shelf, folded neatly until she needed them again in the winter. Or tonight.

She had to stand on her tippy toes to reach them, and never before in her life had it been such an agonizing effort to do so. Her very bones crackled and groaned in protest as she stretched up.

“Oh, Jesus,” Kylie grunted, her gray fingers brushing against one of the blankets, the dark green one. Her favorite, even though they were all identical except for their colors. She got a tenuous grip on it and yanked it off the shelf, letting it fall to the floor. She heaved out a sigh of relief and fell back onto her heels with a creaking groan, like a house settling. Squatting to pick up up the blanket was just as painful, just as noisome. As she rose, blanket in hand, her whole body crackled ominously, like a crumbling scree-slope.

She felt it simultaneously throughout her entire being, as if she were indeed undergoing some dread metamorphosis. And if when she rose she was fresh out of Nana jokes, it was because of this- she knew now for a fact that the impossible had been made manifest, and she was, in fact, turning to stone.

There was no other explanation. No known medical condition that conformed to her symptoms. She was turning to stone, and that was all.

And as she walked stiffly back out to the sofa, holding her blanket limply under one arm and her gun in her other hand, she had but one bleak thought- What the hell do I do now?

She wasn’t hungry but wandered into the kitchen anyway after she set the blanket down. Grabbed some saltines and poured herself a ginger ale. Sick food, comfort food. All on mechanical impulse- this is what you’re supposed to do when you’re sick. Then she sat back down on the sofa- God it felt good- and covered herself in the blanket, staring blankly at the television. She barely registered Tig trotting over to her, nuzzling his face into her legs, the fabric of the blanket. She impulsively reached out her hand to rub his head, lightly because her fingers had seized up once more, and scratched at the spot between his eyes that he couldn’t reach.

He whined. Tig. She came back slowly, from the trance of despair. Looked into Tig’s wet, imploring eyes. He put his paw up on her leg. Urging her to… what? What was there to do? He whined again.

“What, Tig?”

He glanced at the door.

“No, Tig. Not now.” Kylie said glumly. She lifted her leg to nudge him away, but he sat stubbornly and kept looking from her to the door. “Not now, Tig!”

He flattened his ears apologetically and glanced at the door one more time. Then he slumped down solidly as an anchor beside her.

Kylie swallowed tightly on nothing, her mouth dry as a bone. She sipped weakly at her ginger ale, relishing the fizz as a sensation that finally wasn’t unpleasant or foreboding, and stared into the wall. Her rational mind still arguing against what she knew to be true in her heart-

You’re turning to stone.

No, I can’t be. That’s impossible.

It is. But it is happening anyway.

Should I go to a doctor? Would they even be able to help?

Well, it’s worth a shot.

But then I’m toast with rent. Sarah might still come through with those tips.

Maybe. But you need to be alive to pay your rent.

She hadn’t thought about it like that. Up to this point, she had simply been weighing the financial end of her predicament, trying to decide if a trip to ReadyCare was worthwhile against the certainty of being put out onto the street and having to beg Sarah to crash with her for a bit until she got sorted out, or maybe move back in with her parents upstate and try her luck out there. But she needed to be alive to do any of that. And for the first time she considered the possibility of this being a fatal illness.

Death. It wasn’t something that crossed her mind very often. She was young, and death only happened to other people, old people, or unfortunates who were killed in accidents or murdered. Not to her. Not at twenty-six. But here it was, slowly changing her living flesh into stone before her eyes. Death, and then… what?

She stared into the black abyss of the television screen and finally decided to turn it on. Banish such sepulchral thoughts to her subconscious and nail them back in their coffin under the sweet spell of some sappy romance or a Disney movie. She didn’t feel like she was dying and couldn’t believe she was. She just felt sick, and the best thing to do when you’re sick is to get comfy under a blanket, drink some ginger ale, and watch a Disney movie.

The television was tuned to Animal Planet. A documentary about Komodo dragons. Big, ugly lizards with gaping pink maws that, as a green computer graphic helpfully showed, concealed rows and rows of curved, serrated needleteeth. Kylie snuggled up under her blanket and watched in morbid fascination as one of the reptiles lunged at a deer, tearing a ragged gash into its thigh. Leaping and kicking and braying, the deer escaped, landing a wild blow on the dragon’s snout with its back hooves.

“But,” the very British narrator explained dramatically, “it’s already too late. The doe’s fate was sealed from the moment the dragon’s teeth pierced her flesh. Komodo dragons have a septic bite. Along with neurotoxin venom, which paralyze the victim’s nerves, and anticoagulant saliva, which prevents the blood from clotting, with one bite, a cocktail of deadly bacteria is transferred to the prey, infecting it. The doe has at best a week to live.”

Kylie shuddered watching the stricken deer limp away, craning its head back to lick its wound, while a few paces behind, safely out of kicking range, the giant lizard followed.

“The Komodo dragon will follow the doe’s blood-scent for days, until the infection finishes her off. Then, the dragon and its comrades feast.”

The camera lingered for a long moment on the deer’s face. The wide, brown eyes, the nostrils that flared with each precious breath. Then the scene changed abruptly to a ravenous buffet, a dozen dragons sloppily devouring a deer- the same deer, she knew- in a muddy pit. Ripping off pink chunks of flesh, uncaring of the filth and mire around them and unheeding of their fellows.

Kylie watched one of the dragons flick its tongue at the camera, its mouth coated in blood. It seemed to make direct eye contact with her and she quickly changed the channel. She looked back over her shoulder, at the door. Checking to see that the lock was still twisted tight. Tig also looked up alertly and stared at the door, as if he could see right through it. He ruffed once.

“It’s okay, Tig,” Kylie said, her voice shaking, “It’s fine. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bother you.”

Tig ruffed once more and glanced sidelong at Kylie. As if to say- No, it isn’t fine. It isn’t fine at all. Then he laid back down and sighed heavily, still facing the door.

Kylie swallowed tightly and readjusted her position so she could keep an eye on the door while watching the TV. Sleeping Beauty was just starting on the Disney Channel. Good. Her favorite movie. She snuggled against the armrest, tucking herself in under the blanket and tossing and turning trying to get comfortable. As comfortable as she could, anyway. She was still freezing even under the blanket, and the tingling sensation remained incessant. While Maleficent placed her curse upon the infant Aurora, Kylie scratched at her face, raking her fingers down her cheeks, her neck. When she got down to her shirt collar she stopped and looked at her palms. Still gray as ashes. Grayer than before, if anything.

I don’t understand, she thought. She sat up and looked at Tig again. He perked his head up inquisitively and she decided to babble her stream of thought to him.

“It just doesn’t make sense. I don’t get it, Tig. I think I’m turning to stone, even though it sounds completely ridiculous to say it out loud. And it is ridiculous. It can’t be true. Like, it’s impossible in principle, right? You can’t transform a living thing into stone, into a statue. That only happens in myths and fairy tales. Not in real life. Okay, well maybe in a lab, but it doesn’t just happen! I didn’t do anything to cause something like that- I didn’t fall into toxic waste or walk in front of an X-ray machine or anything like that. All I did today was take you for a walk, and we talked to Stheno, and-”

She stopped. Her mouth suddenly felt quite dry again, and her heart and lungs and stomach all seemed to compress into one heavy lump.

“And I looked into her eyes.”

Her mind reeled back to the myths she had been so derisive of earlier. Medusa. Basilisks. The cockatrice. All turned their victims to stone via eye contact. She thought of Medusa. Tried to imagine a face so hideous it could turn a person to stone. Eyes so terrible they could fossilize living flesh as surely as heat curdles milk. Stheno’s were those sort of eyes. In the myths the transformation was instant, though. Not this slow, drawn-out affair she was experiencing.

Then she realized that she hadn’t seen Stheno’s whole face. She’d only seen it through the burqa. Her features all half-obscured in shadow. Her eyes had been visible- how could such searing blue rings not be?- but even they had been viewed through the thin filter of the burqa’s grille. She hadn’t ever received the full brunt of Stheno’s visage.

Wouldn’t it make sense for an eye-contact induced transformation to take longer, if she had only been subjected to Stheno’s gaze indirectly?

It required some suppositions. To put it mildly. One, gorgons actually exist. Two, Stheno was one. Three, when Kylie looked at Stheno, she began to turn to stone.

“Yeah, once you get past the whole ‘imaginary creature’ part, it makes perfect sense!” she fumed. She huffed heavily and saw that Tig was still looking at her curiously. “I’m losing my goddamn mind, Tig. I gotta put the bogeyman back under the bed.”

And, so saying, she pulled the blanket up to her chin and tried to snuggle up to enjoy the rest of the film. Her mood was quite ruined by her demented train of thought, and she mentally repeated the defiant mantra over and over again- It can’t be true…

Eventually, while Aurora sang about dancing with her true love once upon a dream, Kylie drifted off into a nightmare.

She stood in the blue predawn atop a hill, overlooking a vast battlefield. In the valley ahead of her, tanks and infantry were staggered out in a skirmish line, firing everything they had at a towering wall of stone that was slowly grinding towards them. The wall stood at least a mile high, its length extending from as far as Kylie could see to the left to as far as she could see to her right. It reminded her of the white cliffs of Dover. Continuously illuminated by pinpricks of light which she knew were the explosions of artillery rounds slamming into it, trying futilely to halt its advance.

Squinting, Kylie could see the trees and roads at the foot of the wall as it lumbered forward like some dreadfully fast tectonic plate. A perfectly idyllic rural scene of red maples and trim cottages. They weren’t pulverized by the impossible cliff. Instead, as it approached, the grass several yards ahead of it turned white. Then, from the ground up, the brown tree trunks and red brick walls rapidly began to pale as well, until they were all fully petrified, preserved as marble effigies which were absorbed seamlessly into the cliff-face.

The military line slowly retreated from the wall. The tanks and humvees backpedaling up the hillside until Kylie was standing right in the center of the frontline. The noise was deafening. A constant rattle of machine gun fire, punctuated by the earsplitting boom of cannons firing. Men screaming and shouting- HIT IT AGAIN! SABOT UP! ON THE WAY! Above it all, the sounds of the wall advancing up the valley, the groaning of its weight upon the land loud as an avalanche.

One tank lurched up the hill right beside Kylie and fired before it even settled into position. To her surprise, Sarah was seated in the turret, manning a machine gun. She’d traded her French twist for a green camouflage helmet, and fired with the gusto of any other soldier. Sarah peered down into the tank, yelling to the driver- NO EFFECT ON TARGET!

The white cliff came closer and closer until finally it was a mere half mile from the hillside. Kylie clasped her hands over her ears, unable to bear the din anymore. Three tanks fired all at once to her left, their rounds smashing into the wall, and Kylie could see as they hit that even the smoke plumes left by the impacts were converted into a white crystal powder that fell soundlessly onto the valley floor.

The wall was right in front of her now. She craned her head back and couldn’t see the top of it. Taller than any skyscraper, any mountain on Earth. Then she cringed and held her hands over her head as an explosion sent a hail of rock fragments raining down on her.

The tank beside her, Sarah’s tank, roared, revving its engine and lurching forward. It and the other vehicles throwing themselves at the inexorable cliff in a desperate, final charge, knowing full well that their destiny was to be callously converted into just another block of the unstoppable enemy.

Kylie jolted awake. Panting, looking around wildly make sure the terrible cliff hadn’t followed her back to waking reality. Tig was already on his feet by the time she noticed him, looking at her in wide-eyed concern, begging for directions- What’s going on? Where’s the problem? How can I help?

“It’s okay,” she panted. “It’s okay.”

She was very thirsty and reached over for her ginger ale, chugging it wolfishly. It had gone flat and she wondered how long she’d been asleep; she certainly didn’t feel rested. She glanced at the television. The kingdom had just been put to sleep by the three good faeries, and Kylie realized that her right arm was still sleeping too. No, not asleep. She could feel it just fine. The warmth of her sleeve and the blanket covering it. Her fingers brushing against the cushions. It no longer tingled, like the rest of her body. But it felt heavy and cold. A shiver tickled the back of her neck, and she pulled the blanket aside and rolled up her sleeve.

Acid fear splashed over her.

Her arm was completely, uniformly gray. More ominously, it shined, casting back a dull reflection of the TV glare. When she gingerly poked it with her left hand, it was hard and cold and smooth to the touch.

Stone.

Her arm had turned to stone.

She rolled out from under the blanket like a creature ensnared and scrabbled to her feet. Her legs were sluggish to respond, and the lag made her panic even more. She leaned on her left arm, in slightly better shape than her right though it too felt hard and was rapidly taking on a polished stone sheen. When she sat up her back cracked like a calving iceberg. Looking down into her shirt, she could see veins of smoky marble engulfing her breasts.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she stammered, over and over again, “Fuck this. Fuck this.”

She lunged up, throwing the blanket to the floor and startling Tig, who shot upright and darted out of Kylie’s way as she rose. All worries about her rent were forgotten. She could only think- Hospital. Now. You need to go to the hospital now right now.

Her plan coalesced in mere seconds out of vague, half-formed ideas she’d had before, about what to do in an emergency. Call 911. Then Sarah, to ask if she could look after Tig. Then wait for the ambulance. And figure out how in the hell to pay for it all later. Simple.

She’d left her phone on the counter when she’d come in, with her wallet and keys. She stumbled, her legs as heavy as if they’d been weighed down with ball and chain. She took one big step towards the counter. Pivoting her leg forward at the hip, because her knee had locked up and she knew it too must have become solid stone beneath her pajama bottoms. Her thighs creaked like the wooden hull of a ship straining under heavy seas. She swung her other leg forward. Her foot landed on the hardwood floor, and she heard an ominous crackling sound emanating from somewhere in her lower back. Then, despite her most frantic efforts, neither leg would move any further. She stood rooted to the parlor floor.

Her mouth fell open. For a moment, she actually found it amusing. Trying to jolt herself forward, as if she’d gotten stuck in quicksand. But this quickly passed into the blind panic of a snared animal.

“No, no, no-no-no…” she stammered, over and over again, shaking her head. Flatly denying the reality of what she was experiencing.

She reached down with her still-good left hand to her waistband and tugged it out to inspect herself. Her navel and thighs were rigid stone. Casting back a dull pewter sheen. Before she could reach in to touch herself and confirm the dread reality, her left hand seized up and she released her waistband like it was a hot pan. She held her hand up towards her face, to cup her mouth, but the paralysis quickly extended up the whole length of her arm and it was halted as her fingers brushed against her throat.

She wept openly. The racking, terror-stricken sobs of the condemned. Tears of panic and grief wetting the hardwood floor below her. She’d waited too long, had denied the obvious. And now… now she was stuck as firmly as if she’d grown roots, and all she could do was wait for the end.

“No, no, no no no no!” she pleaded, over and over, as if her terror-chants had the power to reverse the petrifying tide sweeping across her body. She shook her head until her stony hair became a whipping froth of grayish brown.

Tig was barking frantically. She turned slowly, slowly, to face him, and then her entire torso made a sound like gravel crunching underfoot, and she realized with fresh despair that she could no longer move anything below her neck. She was stuck forever twisting her upper body to the left, one stone leg trailing on tip-toe behind the other, like a ballerina frozen mid-performance. The sounds her body made as it continued to petrify were like an avalanche or rockslide in progress. Every muscle and tendon groaning in protest at its impending permineralization.

Tig trotted over to her side and whined piteously. Rubbing his head against her legs with enough force that, if they were still flesh, Kylie would have stumbled back, maybe even fallen over. She realized in a lightning bolt of terror that if she toppled in her current state she would simply shatter into a million pieces, and suddenly preventing such a dreadful fate became the most important thing in the world to her.

“No, no no no, Tig! Down! Off!” she pleaded, choking on her tears and terror alike as he nuzzled her, pawing at her pantleg. Trying futilely to help her move. Finally he heeded her desperate, panicked cries and gave up, and simply laid down at her feet. His continued whining wrenched her soul.

“Okay, okay,” she said to herself, trying to get a grip. Panic would not save her. She needed to think. She looked around the room. Her phone was on the counter. Too far away to reach. Too high for Tig to get at, even if she could somehow impress the idea upon him to fetch it. Could try shouting. At least one of her neighbors might be sufficiently annoyed to call the police. She took a deep, rattling breath, as deep a breath as her mineralizing lungs could manage, and heaved out a scream- “HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELP!!! ANYONE!!! PLEASE, HELP ME!!!”

No response. Well, be specific, Kylie. They might think it’s the damn TV. She sucked in another racking breath.

“HEEEEEEEEEEEELP!!! MY NAME IS KYLIE MCKENNA, I’M IN APARTMENT 3B AND I NEED AN AMBULANCE!!!!”

This time she received a reply. An undefinable banging below her, probably the tenant hitting the ceiling with a broomstick handle. An acknowledgment, at least. Her hopes were dashed when she strained her ears to hear a muffled shout from her neighbor below- “SHUT THAT DOG UP LADY!”

She sucked in another breath, meaning to renew her efforts, to scream for help down at the person below her, since at least he was able to hear her. But when she inhaled, her neck crackled and stiffened, and her next attempt to scream came out as a strangled wheeze. The tide of stone finally beginning to crystallize her vocal cords.

There was nothing more she could do. She was fixed facing the counter, her phone taunting her just out of reach. And even if it had been in reach, or if she were holding it in her hand, it still wouldn’t have helped. She couldn’t dial 911 with stone fingers.

All she could do was tilt her chin down so she could look to where Tig was faithfully curled up at her stone feet. He sighed mournfully. She could still feel his warmth despite her feet and legs being entirely stone, and she wondered how the nerves were still working, still transmitting the sensation of heat through what she assumed was solid marble.

“You knew, didn’t you Tig?” Kylie said. Her voice scarcely a whisper. Each breath was slow and shuddering, and she knew it wouldn’t be long now until her lungs were also solid stone. “You tried to warn me, and I didn’t listen.”

At the sound of her voice Tig looked up at her. His eyes so wide, so wet. The same forlorn look he’d had when she first met him at the shelter. She hoped her parents would take him in. Couldn’t bear the thought of him going back to another pound, surrounded by vicious bully-dogs seven times his size.

There was nothing to be done for it. She didn’t have a last will and testament. Didn’t even think to write one yet, not at her tender age. But as far as final moments went, she supposed this was okay. If she was to die tonight, to have her body left behind as a concrete cadaver, then let her final act be to gaze into the eyes of her one steadfast friend and tell him how she loved him.

The realization of what she was doing, what this really was, hit her like a gunshot and she started to cry again. Hot tears flowing down her gray cheeks. Senseless, she thought. Now that the cold fingers of the Reaper were dancing upon her flesh, all she wanted was more time. A few more precious seconds of life. Isn’t that all any living thing ever wants?

“I’m sorry, Tig. I’m so, so sorry,” she sobbed, even as she felt the muscles of her face slowly immobilizing. The crackling sound her flesh made as it changed to stone was deafening, like the groaning of a glacier. Not much longer to go. “You’re a good boy. I’m so, so sorry. I love you, Tig. I hope you know how much I love you. I… I loved you from the minute I first saw you. I love you more than I love anyone.”

She sucked in a deep, rattling breath and knew it would be her last. Her chest felt tight again. Not painfully so. It was just. Solid. Each beat of her heart slower than the one that came before. As she listened to her body slowly petrify, a wave of calmness washed over her. Acceptance? Not quite. But. Something close. Close enough that she stopped crying, and let her face relax as the transformation subsumed her.

“I love you like the Moon loves the stars,” she said. A moment later her lips were sealed in stone, and she could speak no more.

She tried to close her eyes, as the dying do, but found that she could no longer blink. So she accepted that her last sight would be of Tig, and hoped that the love in her eyes would still mean something to him after she had gone.

The crackling began to quiet down and the tingling sensation dissipated as the transformation completed. She heard her heartbeat slow… slow… stop…

Death did not come.

A tsunami of raw, acid terror flooded over Kylie. She tried to move. Her arms. Her legs. Any part of her body. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t fidget. Couldn’t blink. Couldn’t even breathe. All she could do was stare straight ahead at the floor.

Oh Jesus God, I’m a statue! her mind screamed. I’m a LIVING statue!

Panic devoured her. She tried to gasp, to hyperventilate. She needed to breathe, but her throat and lungs were solid stone. Her mouth, her nostrils- just sculpted details of her delicate marble face.

All she wanted to do was run. Not just to the phone but out of the building entirely. Away, away back to her mother’s arms. She tried desperately to flee, to budge even an inch, but it was pointless. Her limbs were solid stone, the envy of any sculptor. No snared animal had ever been so thoroughly trapped as she, and Kylie’s mind was electrified by stark, primal terror as she writhed within herself.

God, God, please please please help me, please don’t leave me like this. This can’t be real. Please just let me die, please! I don’t wanna be a statue forever!

God did not answer her, and as the seconds dragged out into minutes, she realized that He wasn’t coming. She would be trapped as a stone statue, a conscious, living statue, for the rest of time. Her mind eternally entombed in the prison of her own rigid stone body.

Tig looked up into the blank, stone orbs of Kylie’s eyes and loosed a long, mournful howl that echoed through the apartment like he were beseeching Heaven to come to the aid of his lady. Just as with Kylie’s own silent pleas, it went unanswered.

I should have known, Kylie thought miserably, All the pieces were there. I just… I didn’t believe it was possible. How could I have? This… this is the kind of thing that only happens in myths. In fairy tales. In nightmares.

She stood frozen while Tig lay at her feet. She could still feel his weight, his warmth. He shuffled occasionally, trying to curl even closer to her. So close she thought he might knock her over. He whined pitifully and Kylie would have cried had she still been able to. Her eyes were now completely dry, refusing to release her cataracts of sorrow from behind their smooth marble dams, and so the grief simply swirled within her, gray and desolate as any winter storm.

The minutes dragged out and as her initial terror began to subside, an even worse malignancy started to eat at her- boredom. Her field of view presently was composed chiefly of the hardwood floor in front of her. She had a full view of her own stone body, and Tig curled up at her feet. In her upper peripheral vision she could make out the countertop, her phone and wallet and keys just out of reach. The TV was still on, though completely outside of her view, and she listened to it for awhile like it were a radio drama. The ending of Sleeping Beauty, Prince Philip riding to the rescue of Aurora. She’d seen it so many times she could picture it perfectly in her head- Philip slashing his way through the thicket of thorns, battling Maleficent after she’d transformed into a dragon. Through it all Aurora slept dreamily, and now Kylie only wished she could join her. Even a permanent, dreamless slumber would be better than the living, immobile hell she had been consigned to for all eternity.

The movie ended with its triumphal reprise of “Once Upon A Dream” but Kylie remained frozen in her waking nightmare. The floor creaked beneath her and she realized she must have put on several hundred pounds of weight in a matter of minutes. She wondered how long it would take for someone to find her. She didn’t call her parents often, so a week or two without contact wouldn’t be anomalous to them. Her coworkers would notice when she didn’t show up to work after several days. Sarah would try to call or text her, might stop by and knock and receive no response. Maybe a week until a missing persons report was filed. Or even sooner. Rent was due tomorrow, after all, so she at least expected her landlord to come knocking at some point in the day. Won’t that be something, she thought wryly, Coming to collect rent and finding nothing but a dog and a stone statue in residence. Congratulations, Kylie. You’ve pulled off the most creative way to getting out of paying rent ever conceived.

The joke consoled her, just a little. She was trapped within herself, but at least her sense of humor hadn’t been turned to stone too. And she realized that was how she would have to survive, from this point on. She had to keep her humor. Fall into despair and madness isn’t far behind. So joke about it, have an inward laugh at the absurdity. Don’t forget- you’ve got all eternity.

She wasn’t sure how long she stood there. Tig was still curled at her feet. She could tell from his deep, slow breathing that he’d fallen asleep against her, and she wondered if he too was hoping to escape from what could only be described as a waking nightmare.

The television was still on, now airing a rerun of Hannah Montana, but Kylie paid no attention to it. She wasn’t the slightest bit bored anymore. She heard footsteps out in the hallway.

With nothing to do but listen, Kylie could tell that every one of the individual’s steps was carefully weighed and measured. Each coming two or three seconds after the one before, as if the stranger were stalking ahead on tiptoe, trying to approach as silently as possible. Approaching her apartment, she knew. If he’d wanted to visit her neighbor, the stranger would have turned right. But the footsteps were in her hall, drawing ever closer to her door, and a primitive terror welled up within Kylie’s motionless stone body. The same terror, she thought, that a snared fox must feel at the sound of a trapper’s boots crunching on nearby snow.

The door was at her back. Her gaze was locked ahead on the floor. She couldn’t see the door, couldn’t look behind her to check for the telltale shadows of feet in the gap between the door and the floor. Her petrified gut twisted round and round and she could only stare at the floor and listen to the sound of the footsteps ringing in the stony folds of her ears. A mere second’s glance would have cured her. Just one glimpse to confirm that the door was still shut, still locked, that she and Tig were safe and the intruder was at bay. But she couldn’t see it. She couldn’t do anything. All she could do was stand in rigid, unmoving terror and wait.

And she knew then, knew on a deep, primal level, that the intruder was the same malign presence which had been harrying her all night. It was ancient, and evil, and… familiar. Some quivering, superstitious instinct whispered from the murky depths of her subconscious- You know who is on the other side of that door.

Kylie waited breathlessly- quite literally- as the footsteps approached, and then ceased in front of her door. For a minute the room and the hall were silent.

Tig awoke suddenly with a little ruff. Before he had even finished blinking the sleep from his eyes he was on his feet, hemming close to Kylie’s stone legs and staring at the door behind her. His body held straight and taut as a strung arrow. His hackles bristled in a way that made it hard to believe he was the same dog who played keep-away with his own leash. But deep in the heart of every dog, no matter his size, a wolf still howls quaveringly into the night.

The knob started to turn.

Click Here To Read Chapter Four

Chapter One may be read here.

The header image is by EliseEnchanted on DeviantArt.

Kylie felt like her head was going to explode. The grating screech of barstools like so many nails on a chalkboard. The roaring, wavelike murmur of a hundred patrons talking, laughing, arguing, all at once. The pert tink of ice in glasses. The harsh light cast forth by the wall-mounted TVs airing the Phillies game. The middling rendition of Eric Clapton coming from a local band up on the stage. The constant squeak of the heavy entrance door opening and closing, its hinges in desperate need of oiling. All combined into a maelstrom of searing, unbearable noise.

She wanted aspirin. Another barstool scraped the floor. Needed aspirin. Some drunken fool leaned his head back and loosed a harsh bark of laughter at an inanity spouted by a makeup-caked blonde. She couldn’t bear it much longer. But she had seven tables to cover and no time to run back to her purse to retrieve any painkillers. All of her customers, every single one she would wait on the entire evening, required her best performance. Tonight was make-it-or-break-it for her rent.

It was a grave task, made all the more difficult by the fact that she couldn’t stop staring at the door. Every time it wheezed open her breath hitched and her wide eyes darted towards it. And every time, it was just another customer. She couldn’t figure out why she was so jittery. Why she couldn’t shake the completely irrational fear that, at any moment, something terrible was going to walk through that door.

“Did you hear me?”

Kylie flushed as she was roused from her migraine reverie, and slapped on her best PanAm smile. “I’m sorry. Could you repeat that?”

The customer scoffed. A forty-something receptionist, her nametag still clipped to her collared blouse and her business-casual boyfriend seated across from her. She drummed her fingers impatiently on the dark, polished wooden table. “I said I wanted the ten-piece boneless wings with mild sauce, a pretzel basket, and a gin and tonic.”

“Right, okay!” Kylie said, her voice cracking a bit as she jotted it down, below the boyfriend’s order she’d already taken, “No problem. I’ll be right back.”

She walked away briskly, her high ponytail bobbing after her. Silently, she wrote off the possibility of a decent tip from that table. And yet, despite the financial pressure, the thought didn’t bother her greatly at the moment. She glanced over her shoulder as she walked back to the kitchen. At the door again. She shivered from more than just the cold as it opened a crack, and turned away stiffly before she could see who was coming in. Just another customer, she told herself. Nobody’s coming to get you. You’re paranoid, Kylie. You’re off your damn rocker.

She was still shivering when she walked into the kitchen to pin the order up, and she leaned against the wall to catch her breath. Relishing the warmth radiating from the ovens, rubbing her arms and holding her ice-chilled hands out over one of the fryers like it was the world’s last campfire. And as she stood there in the delightful heat, she felt a hushed sough riffle through her body, as if her muscles were all flexing like a sheet of lake-ice on a sunny winter morning. Her tummy grumbled at the swirl of delicious scents wafting from the kitchen and she decided she was definitely going to pinch a few boneless wings later on; they were just too good to resist.

As she leaned, Frank turned deftly from one of his skillets to pluck the order off the wall. Lucky timing, that. Frank looked, reassuringly in an odd way, exactly like a cook was supposed to. Fat and jowly, but pleasant and bright-eyed. Quick to anger only when his food was critiqued. Otherwise he was a jovial tub of jello.

“That was fast,” Kylie said. She coughed dryly. Her throat felt tight. Her chest, too. Definitely some kind of illness, even if for the first few hours she’d chalked it up to nervousness over her rent, the eviction notice looming over her head. Felt like the flu, but August would be a weird time to come down with it.

“Thanks. Give me ten minutes for the grinder and seven for the wings,” Frank said. When he smiled his face mushed like bread-dough. “You feelin’ alright?”

“Yeah,” Kylie fibbed. She shook her head. “Just tired. Why?”

“Look a little pale,” Frank shrugged, before pirouetting back to his cooking. Almost in the same motion, he dumped another load of wings onto an oven tray. Had to work fast. Friday night happy hour was in full swing at Sweeney’s Saloon, and being right next to Somerton Station meant that every twenty minutes another trainload of people walked into the bar looking to wet their whistles. “Don’t wander too far, I got your ten and twelve orders coming up in two minutes.”

“I’ll just hang around then,” Kylie replied, welcoming the chance to continue her brief respite from the cold. Normally the saloon, though air-conditioned, was kept tolerably warm by the heat generated from the kitchen and lots of warm bodies in close quarters, but tonight the barroom floor was tundra cold and she felt like her bones were made of ice. She wore a thin gray cardigan over her red work shirt, but this helped little and she longed for a hoodie.

And her skin… it wasn’t just cold. It tingled. The odd sensation had begun almost imperceptibly on her bus ride in, gradually increasing in intensity as the day dragged on. Now it was impossible to ignore. It felt like some low-voltage electric current was coursing through her whole body, buzzing along every nerve all at once. It didn’t hurt. Just felt strange. Unsettling. She’d never felt anything like it and didn’t know what to make of it. But there was nothing to be done for it, and since it wasn’t anything she couldn’t work through, she did. Not like she had any other choice.

“Alright Kylie, here’s ten and twelve,” Frank said.

Kylie reluctantly pushed off the wall and held out a platter in each hand, which Frank loaded up with a Cajun chicken sandwich and a twenty-piece order of wings for the married couple table five, then two orders of bang-bang shrimp and smoked baby pork ribs with a side of fries for the college guys at table six. Her arms sagged under the load as Frank piled on sauces and coleslaw onto each tray, and the cook eyed her warily. “You sure you got all that?”

“Yeah, no worries. I need the workout,” Kylie joked.

She turned to go and immediately regretted taking both platters. Normally she could handle two with ease, but tonight her arms felt weak. Like she’d just finished a heavy exercise session. The tingling sensation intensified into a cold itch where the rims of the platters pressed into her arms, and she felt a difficult-to-resist urge to to drop them so she could scratch it away. As it was, she allowed it to drive her mad until she reached table five and dropped off the first order with what she thought was a slightly unhinged smile. She rubbed her itchy, now-freed arm against her shirt as she took the second tray over to the college guys. Then she went to collect the bill from table eight, a group of older gentlemen who tipped her a handsome thirty bucks before heading out.

Thirty bucks. That was damn fine. She was only short a hundred and forty now. The bar was open til two… plenty of time. Plenty of customers. She’d make it. She scratched at her tingling cheek, her brow. Then she took a deep breath to get back into “the zone.” It rattled in her chest, as if her lungs were thick with phlegm. She suppressed another cough and walked over to the bar to get the prissy receptionist her gin and tonic. One for her poor boytoy, too.

As Kylie approached the bar she saw Sarah leaning on the counter, busily chewing gum while waiting for the bartender to fill up her own drinks tray. Sarah was a walking tip jar. Clad in a pair of black tights and a red t-shirt that was two sizes too small, her honey blonde hair done up in a voluminous French twist. She smiled at Kylie right before blowing a huge, pink bubble that she popped skillfully and then returned to her cherry red lips.

“Hey,” she said wryly, nodding ahead, “Total boat at table nine.”

“Boat?” Kylie asked, drumming her fingers on the counter trying to warm them. The tingling was starting to become a nuisance. It reminded her vaguely of the slow thawing sensation she’d feel if she’d just entered a warm building after being outside for a long time on a bitter winter day, only in reverse- instead of warming her, she grew ever colder as the tingling continued. She wanted to pull Joe out of his office and ask him what the air conditioner was set to, because this was obscene.

“You know…” Sarah said, rolling her eyes at Kylie. “Dreamboat. He just came in, all alone. I’ve got my hands pretty full,” she gestured to her drinks tray, “and Emily is busy waiting on some college guys, so he’s unattended at the moment.”

“Oh. Oh, I see.”

“Your call,” Sarah shrugged innocently, before taking her drinks platter from the bartender and prancing back out onto the floor.

“Okay then,” Kylie murmured to herself. She watched Sarah strut away, swaying her hips just right to earn a whistle and a dozen stares after her. The tights really did flatter her figure, Kylie thought ruefully as she looked down at her own faded jeans. She turned to the bartender. “Shane, I need two gin and tonics.”

The door squeaked open loudly behind her. Kylie inhaled sharply and twirled to face it like it were the roar of a lion. Just a twenty something guy and his girlfriend. They didn’t notice her, but she flushed anyway. At her own silliness. Stupidity, more like. She leaned back against the counter and huffed out a sigh of relief. Gripping the laminate as if reassured by its firmness. The one thing in the place that seemed stable. Not the patrons, not the televisions or the glasses or the stools or the pool tables, not even her own mind, but the firm Formica bar she could trust.

“G’ an’ T, coming your way.”

Sliding glasses brought her back to the hustle and bustle of the bar. She reached her hand out and caught them on reflex, and when she glanced at the bartender who’d sent them over he was already facing away from her and pouring shots for a middle-aged couple.

She trotted off, the two gins in hand, and she brooded and chided herself as she took them back to the receptionists. Stop it, Kylie. You’re embarrassing yourself now. You know the exact reason why you’re so damn jumpy, and it’s an insane reason. You’re still stuck on Stheno. You think she’s coming to get you or something. Well, guess what? Stheno’s not coming. Why do you think she’s coming? She’s. Not. Coming. She was just a fucking weirdo. A weirdo wearing black contact lenses or something. It was a one-off meeting, and you’re never going to see her again. Stop thinking about her. Jesus, what’s wrong with you?

Kylie thanklessly left the receptionists their drinks, then headed for table nine, still mentally immolating herself as she went. She passed the bandstand- the band, some local group, had switched from desecrating Eric Clapton to an original song that better suited them- and wove her way through an obstacle course of patrons as she went. The bar was at full capacity, and would be for the rest of the night as people cycled in and out. The tipping waters were rich. As she walked, she shrugged off her cardigan down below her shoulders like a fur stole and fussed over her collar, her buttons. Did her best to make it look like her chest was straining against the red fabric of her shirt. A universal truth- your tips were directly proportional to your tits.

Table nine was tucked away in the furthest corner of the back bar, under a dim pink neon light. The chill got worse as Kylie left the more crowded part of the bar, and the thin fabric of her sleeves was no help. She shivered openly, her skin breaking out in goosebumps. As she walked she felt men’s eyes upon her. They didn’t want to order anything, just wanted to look, drinking in the sight of her. She was used to it.

When Kylie finally reached table nine, her mouth fell to the floor. Seated before her was a demigod.

He had a tall face with the squared, chiseled jawline of a sculpture. His cheeks were stubbled in shadow and engraved with the long, intense etchings of a man who’d spent much of his life outdoors. A strong brow framing small, deepset eyes. Hard eyes, the kind of eyes that could judge a man’s character in an instant, and had found many wanting. All crowned by a short, bristly crop of tawny brown hair. He wore a brown suede motorcycle jacket and was leaning on the table, hands clasped together at his chin, staring at the distant wall. Brooding deeply over something. She almost didn’t want to interrupt his thoughts.

The queer tingling that buzzed across her whole body intensified as she looked him over, and then she realized it wasn’t the same sensation at all. She just thought he was hot. She bit her lip. Yeah, he’s hot. But, she recalled the old advice, you don’t get your honey where you make your money. And speaking of, his jacket looks expensive. If you play this right, you can make up for the loss incurred with Miss Bitch over there, with interest.

So Kylie gathered herself up, pretended she wasn’t slowly freezing to death, and strutted over to his table.

“Hi there,” she beamed as she approached. Well, tried to beam, anyhow. She thought her voice sounded strained. Her throat still tight. Also just plain nervousness. She bounced back deliberately on her heels when she stopped. Just the right amount to make her breasts bob. Her joints creaked in the motion, like a house settling. She ignored it and smiled broadly. “I’m Kylie, I’ll be your waitress tonight. Can I get you something to drink?”

The man broke out of whatever deep thought he’d been lost in and looked up at her. Not her chest. Her face. Her eyes. His were startlingly green. He scanned her with that hard emerald gaze, looking for something, and it only took a split second before he found whatever it was he was searching for. Then his hard cheeks mellowed out into a smile, revealing a slight cleft in his chin.

“I’m Cedric,” he introduced himself, as if he were meeting the Queen of England and not simply addressing a random waitress, “I’m not from around here; just hit me with something light and local, on the rocks.”

“Light?” Kylie teased. Pen and paper already out, she jotted down ‘Yuengling lager’ on her pad. “You look like you’d be a bit more adventurous.”

“Usually am,” Cedric replied, “But I have some business to attend to later on. Don’t want to be too out of it.”

“Ooh,” Kylie mouthed, nodding. “Gotcha. Are you expecting anyone else, or…?”

“Just me tonight.” he replied, “Drink and a quick bite, then I gotta hit the road.”

“Let me guess- motorcycle?” She pursed her lips and scrunched her face in the coyest look of curiosity she could muster. Leaned into one hip to complete the effect. Cedric smiled. If she was reading him right, it was working perfectly so far.

“No, no,” he laughed, “Masserati.”

If Kylie were a cartoon character, her eyes would have turned to dollar signs. Hell, if you play this right, he might pay your rent all by himself.

“Ooooh,” she replied, “And is this ‘business’ you’re attending to a car show?”

“An art show,” he said, still smiling, “Down in Rittenhouse Square.”

“No kidding!” Kylie declared, so immediately interested that the miserly corner of her mind only barely noted Rittenhouse Square was one of the most opulent neighborhoods in Philadelphia. “What kind of art? Paintings?”

“I wish,” he replied. “You sound like you enjoy painting.”

“Umm, I don’t paint myself,” Kylie said, “But I could look at them forever.”

“You ever think about trying it?” he asked. His eyes twinkled as he spoke, like he was pleased to be in the warm, familiar currents of a subject he loved.

“Oh, I’d love to at some point,” she replied, swaying slightly on the ball of her foot. “Line and wash seems like a lot of fun.”

“Line and wash? That’s a fine medium. Do you draw at all?”

“Not really…” she said, thinking about the stack of unused sketchpads collecting dust in her closet. “I used to, but I’ve got a million other things going on that get in the way of it now.”

Cedric nodded. “I get that. But, it’s never too late to start, you know.”

“That’s true,” Kylie said, shuffling back a pace as she suddenly remembered where she was. He was honey… she needed money. Time was passing quickly, and she could hear Frank calling out orders from the kitchen.

She didn’t want to stop talking to Cedric. Wanted nothing more than to sit down and talk for the rest of the night about painters and painting and the whole realm of art. Over drinks, of course. Have someone serve her, for a change. And maybe back to his place afterwards, once she got to know him a little better, because Sarah was right he really was a “boat”… but that dreaded four-letter word reared out of her subconscious to drag her away from the fantasy- R-E-N-T.

“I- I’ve got some other tables that need refills,” Kylie stuttered, pointing her thumb lamely behind her.

Cedric nodded. His mouth turning down in a little, disappointed frown. “Right, right.”

“So here’s a menu, and…”

“Already got one,” he said, holding up the green slip, “Last guy must’ve left it here. I’ll have a London Broil Grinder.”

“Okee dokee,” Kylie said, raising up her pen and paper again.

She went to click the pen, and… couldn’t.

Her thumb seized, right as she had it half-cocked over the button. A spasm of red pain shot up her arm and she winced. She could still feel her thumb- indeed, it was tingling intensely. It just wouldn’t move. She stared down at her hand, trying to flex it, and realized with a splash of fear that all of her fingers were immobilized. Only in her right hand; her left was fine, and with it she hastily grabbed the pen out of her right’s rigor mortis grasp.

“Everything alright?” Cedric asked.

Kylie glanced at him, flushing. He was looking at her with a mixture of curiosity and concern. She chuffed nervously, then shook her right hand lazily on the air, trying to beat the feeling back into it as if it had merely fallen asleep. “Yeah, yeah. Just carpal tunnel. It acts up like that sometimes.”

“Oh,” he replied, “Sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” she said. She balanced the notepad on her unresponsive right hand and sloppily jotted down Cedric’s order, trying to will her fingers back to life all the while.

“Well, I’ll be right back with that ‘light and local.’” Kylie said, smiling weakly as she gathered herself up. There was no way Cedric couldn’t see the fear dancing in her eyes. His own expression was muted. A faint twitch in his cheek. Concern? She couldn’t tell.

She winked as she turned to go but felt her heart sinking faster than a sack of bricks. Her inner voice castigated her as she walked morosely back to the bar. Way to blow it, retard. Really nice impression. I’m sure he’ll tip you just swell. You suck at everything, why the hell do you even try anymore?

In the midst of this mental reproach, she suddenly felt an explosion in her chest. Like her ribcage was buckling inwards, crushed by an intangible pressure. Jagged pain knifed her heart, starbursting out to her ribs and beyond. She inhaled sharply and staggered into the bar counter, holding onto the edge for dear life. Acid terror ate down her synapses. Christ, Christ. I’m too young to have a heart attack. Jesus God in Heaven please don’t let me have a heart attack.

“You okay, Kylie?” That was the bartender. Shane. New guy. She pieced together information like that. Short little fragments. As if brevity of thought could help her to focus, to exert control over her burning heart.

“No,” she replied feebly, unable to even look up yet. Fearing that any movement at all would cause the pain to return, to take her life. The sharpness of it had finally ended. Each heartbeat was a dull concussion of agony, but the stabbing pain was gone at least. “Need a lager. Yuengling.”

She slowly looked up and saw Sarah approaching, carrying a tray of empty glasses in her right hand which she carefully propped against her shoulder for balance. She smiled mischievously at Kylie. Probably expecting some smashing success story with the “boat”, but when she got close enough to see Kylie’s expression she blanched.

“My God, Kylie, what the hell happened?”

“What do you mean?” Kylie asked weakly, trying halfheartedly to pretend she was fine even as the lingering terror continued to dance up and down her nerves.

“You look awful,” Sarah said, her eyes wide, blue wells of concern.

“I feel awful,” Kylie replied.

“Did he throw an ashtray at you or something?”

“What?” Kylie said, unsure where the question even arose from. “No?”

Sarah set down her platter and nodded an I got this to the bartender, who had been watching Kylie with the shuffling, uncertain attentiveness of a bystander. She put her hand on Kylie’s forehead and rubbed it like she were trying to scrub a stain off. Her brow furrowed when her hand came away clean. Then she pressed her palm back to the same spot and held it for a moment. “You’ve got a fever. Go splash some water on your face; I’ll cover your tables for you.”

Her tone was decisive and left no room for protest. Not that Kylie wanted to. The thought of cool water was blissful. And she could finally take an aspirin while she was back there.

“You’ll do that for me?” she asked, gratefully. She only prayed that Sarah wouldn’t run off and tell Joe while she was back there.

“Of course,” Sarah replied, “And any tips from your tables are yours. Scout’s honor.”

She held up a solemn hand to swear by. Kylie smiled weakly. “Scout’s honor. Give me five minutes.”

After quickly pointing out her tables to Sarah, Kylie pushed weakly off the counter, her arm wobbling, threatening to falter under her own weight. Sarah started to reach out, then stopped herself. She asked, “Can you walk?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Kylie said, trying to sound more okay than she felt.

She shuffled to the washroom. Slowly. On top of not wanting to resurrect her chest pains, she felt terribly lightheaded. Her breaths were long and labored, like she had emphysema. Pulses of the rabid tingling sensation shot numbly up her legs with every elderly step, and she had to focus her whole mind on each individual footfall to make sure she didn’t keel over. She passed in sight of Cedric’s table, ahead of the little corridor leading to the washroom. If he saw her, Kylie didn’t notice.

She made it to the corridor and leaned against the wall for a moment to catch her breath. Stared pensively at the shamrock and “Fightin’ Irish” décor typical of all Philadelphia bars. Then she bent to retrieve her purse from her locker. God she needed aspirin. Her right hand still felt stiff, but she was able to flex her fingers again and turning the dial on the locker wasn’t an issue.

She entered the employee washroom and threw the switch, and when she turned to face the sink her blood iced over.

A ghost was staring at her from the mirror.

Its skin was gray. Ashen. Like a charcoal sketch of a young woman. Slate-gray wisps of hair dangled down low over its forehead, just above a pair of enormous, startlingly blue eyes that bored holes straight through Kylie and drilled her to the wall.

She stumbled back and gasped. Staring breathlessly at the mirror for a moment before realizing the ghost had leaped back with her. Its hand shot up to cover its pale, gaping mouth in tandem with Kylie’s own. And she realized with another icesplash of terror that the phantasm was her very own reflection.

Impossible. But impossible, too, to deny it.

Kylie’s skin and hair had turned gray.

Dazedly, she held her trembling hand up in front of the mirror. As if she had never encountered one before and wondered if the reflection would indeed copy her. It followed her every move, and when she touched the tip of her finger to the mirror to meet her carbon-paper doppelganger’s, she recoiled as though she’d pricked her finger on a needle.

Still staring at her reflection, she ran her hand through her gray hair. It felt brittle and broken-ended. Stiff, too, like she’d used too much hairspray. She moved her fingers down across her cheeks and brushed her lips, then slid her hand down along her throat. All gray as thunderheads. Some parts of her skin were grayer than others, dark veins and splotches on her arms, her throat, and the grayest parts were cold to the touch.

She felt sick. Obviously, but. Not like that. Lightheaded. Black curtains dancing at the edges of her disbelieving eyes. From the shock, the impossibility of it all. She leaned against the sink, lowering her head almost to the bottom of the basin. Her stiff right hand groped for the cold water handle. Maybe Sarah was right. Maybe it was ashes, or cigarette smoke. Maybe it would wash off. She hadn’t the slightest idea how she could’ve gotten so soiled, had no recollection of walking through a dense wall of cigarette smoke or falling face-first into an ashtray, but what else could it be?

After thoroughly soaking her face and running wet fingers through her hair- damn if it mussed, that was better than it being gray- she slowly rose from the sink, leaning precariously on the porcelain basin, and looked back into the mirror.

Her skin was still totally gray. Grayer than before, even. Like how rain darkens concrete, darkens stone.

Stone.

Her stomach dropped like lead at the realization.

She was turning to stone.

It made too much sense. The tightness in her chest, the inexplicable stiffening of her fingers, her limbs. The low, unsettling bruits trembling through her body like the shifting of tectonic plates… and now her flesh itself was turning gray. She was turning into a statue.

She swallowed tightly and backed away from the mirror. It was spinning. The whole room seemed to spin. She felt the door at her back and slumped down onto the cool tile floor as if she were falling into the sea with an anchor tied to her ankles and she sat there for awhile staring at her slowly petrifying hands.

Then she laughed. Actually laughed. A trifle hysterically, perhaps, but a laugh nonetheless.

A statue. Ridiculous. How completely ridiculous. It was something that could only happen in stories. Myths and fairy tales. Not in the real world, to real people. Real people didn’t get turned into statues.

You’re just sick, she thought, That’s all. No fairy tale curses. No magic spells. Those don’t exist. Only in books. You’re not turning into a statue, like the ones at the museum. That doesn’t happen in real life.

The more she tossed the idea around in her head, the sillier it seemed. Turning to stone was as likely as her turning into gold, or a frog. At least the former would take care of her rent, she thought wryly. It brought out a trace of a smile. The dark humor calming her just a bit.

Kylie massaged her temples, hard, like they were grindstones with which to mill her thoughts from the maelstrom of emotions swirling within her. So she wasn’t turning to stone. Now what?

Rent. Start there. Due tomorrow. Promise of eviction unless it was paid on time, in full, along with all her back-rent. And she was still short… how much? Over a hundred something. So no matter how sick she felt, she couldn’t leave.

Nor could she stay. Not in this condition. She wasn’t at all certain she could work through the odd malady, especially if another chest-quake hit her, but even if she could, nobody would want someone who was turn- someone who was sick, her rationality swiftly corrected- serving them food and drink. Plus, what if it was contagious? Graying skin. Graying hair. Was that contagious? Was it curable? No- she stopped herself. Mustn’t fall into that sort of panic. The symptoms were undeniably weird, but they had to be treatable, right? She’d worry about it later, after work.

Kylie rose to her feet again, shakily. Steadfastly refusing to look into the mirror as she splashed more water on her face, relishing its coolness. Then she unlocked the door and walked woodenly out of the washroom.

As she turned to exit the little hall and head back out to the barroom floor, Joe swung around the corner and intercepted her. He was a head shorter than her, a hundred and fifty pounds heavier, and bald as a stone. His face was drawn taut, the look of a man peeved at being interrupted from important business. Great.

When he saw her, his face tempered slightly. Just slightly. A minute thaw of the cheeks, at most. A quick, subtle recalculation. She knew what he was going to say before he even started speaking.

“Kylie. You feelin’ alright? Sarah said you didn’t look too good.”

“I’m good to work,” she replied, her heart picking up nervous speed, not quite racing because she didn’t have it in her anymore. Trotting, more like. Maybe loping.

“She said you’ve got a fever.”

“Just a little one,” Kylie said quickly, “It’s really just a headache. I just need to take an aspirin, that’s all.”

“Kylie,” Joe replied sternly, “Whatever the hell you’ve got going on is no headache. Can’t have you serving food like this. You look… sick.”

She lowered her head morosely. Stared down at her shoes. She couldn’t even think. Could see the eviction letter in her mind as clearly as if she were holding it in her hands.

“Joe, please,” she begged. Knowing already what his answer would be. Go home. The dive business was viciously competitive. The last thing Joe needed was a negative review on Yelp. Zero stars because of the sick waitress. Gray skin flakes in someone’s wing sauce. The beer was good and cheap, but the waitress turned into a statue. 2 stars.

She fumbled, sputtering over her words. “My rent…”

“I can’t help you, sweetie,” Joe said. She thought he sounded smarmy, but then his face really did thaw. He hefted out a sigh and said, “I can drive you to ReadyCare if you want, but you have to go home.”

She thought about that. Maybe she could go to a doctor. Frame it to her landlord as a medical emergency. Almost as soon as the thought occurred to her she shot it down. She was uninsured. Adding to her already sky-high mountain of debt was the last thing she needed. And the landlord probably wouldn’t care anyway. Grubby bastard. At this point, all she wanted to do was curl up in bed with a heat bottle, some saltines, and a glass of ginger ale, and try to sleep off the bizarre malady.

“No, that’s alright Joe,” she replied glumly. “Thanks anyway.”

“Go home,” he repeated, “Get some rest. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

She slumped against the wall and watched Joe waddle back to his office. Then she unzipped her purse, retrieving a tiny water bottle and the blessed vial of aspirin. She took three. Meant to take them back in the washroom, but the sight of herself in the mirror had canceled out all rational thought. She chewed the pills and swallowed the powder with a swig of water. Her dad had told her that once before; if you ever think you’re having a heart attack, chew the aspirin, don’t swallow it.

She zipped her purse back up and sighed raggedly. Her joints ached. All of her muscles were stiff and sore. And there was the ever-present tingling sensation buzzing her skin. That was the most unsettling thing. The chest pain, that was stark terror, but at least she could identify it. She’d never experienced anything like the tingling before.

Jesus, Kylie, you’re like Nana now, she thought wryly. Ailments on top of ailments.

When she walked back out onto the barroom floor, she felt a little better. Aspirin worked fast. No pep in her step, but she wasn’t worried about keeling over now. She looked in the direction of Cedric’s table. Sarah was dropping off his sandwich. Leaning over the table, giving the man an eyeful of her bust. Despite how ill she felt, an arrow of jealousy shot through Kylie.

Sarah turned to leave him almost the same instant Kylie walked out. Strutting her hips expertly as she went. Her eyes lit up when she saw Kylie, and she trotted quickly over to her.

“He’s a hoot,” Sarah said, smiling, “Looked me right in the eyes like it was nothing. Totally immune to my ‘feminine charms.’”

Kylie looked at the ground. When she glanced back up she caught Cedric’s eye. She thought for a moment that he was staring after Sarah- and who wouldn’t?- but then she realized he wasn’t. He was looking at her. A strange expression on his face. Eyes wide. Mouth slightly agape. She didn’t blame him- your waitress suddenly changing color wasn’t an every day occurrence- and she felt a flush of embarrassment wash over her. But then she realized he wasn’t gawking at her. It was a shocked gasp of recognition.

She thought about going over and apologizing to him, but before she could think of anything to say she felt Sarah’s hand on her shoulder and she spun around to follow her, even though she could still feel Cedric’s gaze on her back as they went.

“How ya feelin’?” Sarah asked. If she’d noticed the mood of Kylie’s eyes change to monstrous green, she didn’t let on. Walking and talking, chewing her gum as she headed back to the bar for more drinks.

“Crummy. Joe’s sending me home.” Kylie replied dejectedly. She leaned against the bar again for support. The pain was dulled by the aspirin but her legs still felt stiff.

“Ah, nuts,” Sarah said. She turned to the bartender and rattled off a machine-gun litany of drinks so fast Kylie wondered how the guy kept up with her, but he started pouring right away and didn’t ask Sarah to repeat herself. Sarah didn’t even bother watching him. She blew a big, pink bubble and then promptly popped it. “Oh, before I forget- the tips!”

She fumbled around in her pocket- where the hell was she hiding pockets on those tights?- and withdrew a fistful of bills.

“Eighty-five. All yours.”

Kylie’s eyes widened like she were a child and Sarah was holding up the last candy bar on Halloween. Any lingering, juvenile jealousy she felt evaporated in an instant. It didn’t solve her crisis, not even close, but it was eighty-five bucks she didn’t have to worry about now. The remaining fifty-five… she’d figure it out somehow.

“Oh, Sarah,” she said giddily, totally unable to contain her joy, “Sarah, thank you!”

“I’ve still got our dreamboat back there, too, plus three of your other tables. If you’re well enough to come in tomorrow I’ll give you their tips then. If not, I’ll stop by and slip it under your door.”

“Sarah, I…”

Sarah held up her hand tenderly. “My word is my bond. Now go on home.”

“Thank you,” Kylie said, from the bottom of her heart. Her gratitude alone was enough to warm her a little, and she slowly made her way to the front door. Then she stumbled out of the bar and into the humid August evening.

Click Here To Read Chapter Three

The header image is by EliseEnchanted on DeviantArt.

Kylie McKenna opened her eyes to bright noon light filtering through her curtains. She mumbled a half-formed curse against the day and rolled over towards the wall to get back into some semblance of darkness. She didn’t need to check her phone to know she had slept through her alarm once again. She no longer cared. All she wanted was more sleep- permanent sleep, preferably.

A metallic jingle from the other side of the room told her that Tig was up too. His collar sounded like chimes as he roused himself. Kylie sighed heavily and rolled out from under the covers, looking over to Tig’s bed by the closet. It was empty. She blinked in surprise as he suddenly vaulted up onto her bed, whining happily and rubbing his coffee-and-cream face against her legs, the long fur of his ears soft as silk on her skin. He climbed up on her, assailing her face and protesting hands with a fusillade of licked kisses despite her giggling, halfhearted objections. Then, his little “good morning” dispensed with, he sat back on his haunches and looked at her expectantly.

“Okay, buddy. Give me a minute,” Kylie said, still smiling. She stretched her stiff back and arms in a wide arc and as she did so she finally glanced at the clock. 12:28. They’d be cutting it close. Had to be back in an hour to get ready for another long night of work. Your most important night of work maybe ever, she reminded herself. But she owed Tig a walk.

Kylie climbed out of bed and Tig leaped off after her, and then she haphazardly pulled the rumpled blankets back up over her pillow to “make” it. She shuffled zombielike past the prints of stormy shorelines by Peter Graham and William Huston hanging on her wall, past her framed bachelor’s degree, past the unrepaired dent Jake had left on the night of their breakup, and into her bathroom. Looking into the mirror, she saw a sleep-deprived stranger with a witch’s thicket of bedhead and eyes laden with heavy bags. Dismally, she wondered where her yearbook portrait and this haggard crone had diverged on the paths of life.

A quick shower later, she once again resembled an average twenty-six year old, though her spirit still felt wearily past forty. She tied her wet hair back into a loose, moppy ponytail, and while she was still pulling her faded jeans up with one hand she grabbed Tig’s leash from atop her bureau, midst a clutter of unpaid bills and empty Zoloft bottles.

At the sight of the leash, Tig whined and shook himself again. His face a marbled blur of chocolate and vanilla for a moment, ears flopping around like windmill blades. Then he settled, and his head was once again divided into even hemispheres of dark brown bisected by a white stripe that ran from the top of his head down to his mousse-speckled snout. He was an eighty-pound English Springer Spaniel. Thirty pounds heavier than average, but he wasn’t obese or anything. Just big-boned. The vet told Kylie he was the biggest Springer Spaniel he’d ever seen.

She sat back down on her lumpy bed to lace up her sneakers, and while she did so Tig mewled impatiently and nuzzled his head against her legs, trying to prod her along. His wide hazel eyes got even wider when she bounced to her feet and looked down at him with a quick smile, and finalized the affair by asking the sacred question- “Do you want to go for a walk?”

Tig answered her in the only way he knew how. He leaped back up onto the bed in a single bound and grabbed the handle end of the leash in his soft, bird-dog mouth. His tail wagged furiously as Kylie reached for it, then he bowed low and vaulted off the bed, taking the leash with him.

Kylie sidestepped and beat him to the bedroom door, quickly shutting it to block his escape. She stood with her back against it, putting her hands on her hips and grinning impishly down at him. “Come on, Tig. Do you wanna go or not?”

Tig’s tail wagged even harder as Kylie slowly bent down to retrieve the leash. Then he twirled and ran back to the other side of the bedroom, the long line of leather trailing on the floor behind him. Kylie gave merry chase, pursuing him round and round until finally they wound up back on the bed, playing tug-of-war with either end of the leash. Kylie leaned back against the bedboard, pulling and laughing, but Tig’s grip was too strong for her and she was plainly losing.

So she switched tactics. She leaned in close and carefully reached out a brave hand to grab at the leash’s handle where it protruded from Tig’s mouth, while still holding on tightly to the clip with her other. Mightily, she tugged at the handle. The leash roped through Tig’s strong teeth like an anchor chain, until Kylie wound up with two even sections of leash in either hand, with Tig’s mouth still latched onto the middle of the U-shaped curve. Then she pulled back hard, and with both ends of the leash in hand she found herself able to pull Tig towards her until finally he surrendered and let it go. The sudden release of tension sent her sprawling back onto her pillow in a fit of laughter, and when she looked up Tig was sitting back on his haunches, panting happily. Magnanimous in defeat.

Still laughing, Kylie grabbed the leash and promptly clipped it onto Tig’s collar to prevent a renewal of the game. She leaned in and kissed him on the top of his head, the cream white spot, and ran her fingers down through the long, silky brown fur of his ears, his neck.

“Good boy,” she whispered into his fur, “Good boy. C’mon, we gotta go.”

There was only one more thing to do before they left. Kylie reached up onto her cluttered bureau again, and her slender fingers wrapped around the drab black holster of a Smith & Wesson 340PD. A snubnose, startlingly light for its stopping power. She tucked it discreetly into the back of her jeans and flared her white tank-top around it. Then she opened the door, and Tig pulled her out down the empty, echoing hallway.

When Kylie and Tig stepped out into the parking lot, the midday humidity slammed into them like a wet blanket. August was the worst month of the year. She felt bad for Tig, with his thick fur coat. But his jowls were curled back into a broad, panting smile, so she figured he was just happy to be outside at all, no matter the weather. Still.

“I promise I’ll get up earlier tomorrow,” she said, looking down at him with a sad smile.

Tig gave her a sidelong glance- as if to say, yeah right- then tested the air. For squirrel scent, probably, or maybe one of the stray cats that haunted the parking lot by night. Kylie took a deep breath herself and immediately regretted it. Hot soup tinged with exhaust fumes. She glanced up and down the lot for signs of other people but no one was in sight. Just parked sedans and SUVs, their hoods sizzling and casting back blinding sunglare. A reeking dumpster. The chainlink fence clad in drooping ivy, separating the apartment blocks from the backyards of single-family homes over on Byberry Road. Tig, nose buried in the asphalt, dragged her over towards it. It was where the cats hung out. Kylie was only too happy to oblige him, squeezing her dainty frame into the weak shadows cast by second-growth box elders and hawthorns on the other side of the fence. The three-story brownstone they’d just left offered no shade whatsoever at this time of day, and it and its dozen identical siblings stood like cyclopean monoliths on their grassy green squares.

They walked uphill- Somerton was all uphill- out of the parking lot, and already sweat was beginning to bead on her forehead, gluing slick strands of dark brown hair to skin that glinted like bronze in the sunlight. That was her only begrudging praise for summer- she didn’t burn. Her skin was always richly tanned by June. People sometimes thought she was Italian or Hispanic because of the tan but she wasn’t, she was mostly Welsh.

When the parking lot finally spit them out onto Depue Street, she looked up and down the road as if she were an astronaut searching for signs of life on a scorching desert world. No one was out today. Far too hot. Mid nineties, she reckoned. The asphalt sizzled up ahead, and she knew this would be a short walk for the sake of Tig’s paws. A shame, because they both relished the outdoors. Tig escaping the four walls of the apartment; Kylie escaping from… well, her life. The bills. Her student loan debts. Her unpayable rent. The eviction notice. Her ex. Her job. None of that mattered outside. Whenever she walked Tig, she was able for a brief moment to lose herself in the formless rhythm of her shoes and Tig’s paws clicking upon the street.

Eventually they arrived at the wide, sunbaked playa of Bustleton Avenue. Traffic wasn’t terrible, and between the lights they darted across like outlaws. Trotting quickly through one parking lot after another. Kylie worrying about the hot asphalt on Tig’s paws, Tig just happy to be running with her, as they passed by a confusing jumble of immigrant businesses- Russian, Uzbek, Indian, Syrian, Italian. She’d never been in any of them. Their destination was Leo Mall. Mall in the strip sense; ninety-five percent parking lot with a few widely spaced big box stores. The credit union. Dunkin’ Donuts. Netcost. A Georgian cafe. The whole complex was anchored by a Home Depot that sprawled across the bottom of the lot, which is where they were headed.

To its left, the Home Depot was bordered by a narrow strip of woods. The parking lot curved away abruptly at a little black gate, beyond which was a lonely trail that wrapped around the back of the complex. Kylie considered it her secret haven, a tiny green wonderland hidden in the deep shade of elms and oaks. The gate was open, as always- she had no clue who had originally placed it there, but extended endless gratitude towards him- and she and Tig set off down the narrow path, their steps softened by the moss underfoot. To their right, the parking lot’s brick retainer wall reared up sharply like the ramparts of a slighted castle. On the left, the ground fell away about fifteen feet into a dense vale of second-growth forest. Kylie felt as if she were an adventuress skirting the edge of a cliff, Tig her faithful squire.

“Tig, get away from that,” she ordered. He was sniffing a mucky-looking Target bag that had something which had once been food spilling out of it. He looked up at her guiltily and veered away from the bag, and a moment later happily started snufflng at an anonymous patch of moss.

Kylie sighed. The little trail was strewn with littered cans and wrappers. The nearest tree branches festooned in plastic bags, an anthropic simulacra of Spanish moss. Propped against the wall an obscene smelling mattress that they carefully sidestepped. She told herself once more that she should come back on a cooler day with a trashbag to clean it up some, but knew the chances of her ever having the time to do so were slim. She used to, on the weekends. Before the rent raise turned her life into a constant struggle of working ever longer and ever harder just to stay financially in place. She looked down at a candy wrapper and sighed. Even when she did used to clean it, the place was always a landfill again inside of a week. So it went.

She ducked under a low-hanging, bone pale branch that was pocked with the arachneous scars of Dutch Elm disease. Looking around for birds but she saw none- too muggy out to even sing, she supposed. Tig was busy snuffling at the mossy ground, his claws occasionally clicking over some exposed stones. At least back here she didn’t need to worry about his paws.

His full name was Tigger. Like the Winnie the Pooh character. She’d adopted him from a shelter. A morose, forlorn place down in Mayfair. Every other dog was a pitbull discarded by its owner after some unknown act of aggression. All slobbering and barking at her as she walked down the long line of cages, hurling themselves at the chainlink gates trying to get at her. But in the very last cage, curled up in the corner, was a little English Springer Spaniel. When she stopped in front of his enclosure he’d looked up at her without moving, like a prisoner resigned to his fate. His eyes the saddest pools of caramel she had ever seen. Her heart melted at the sight of him. His original name was Blaze. He’d wound up there after his owner died in a car accident and no one in the family wanted him. So Kylie eagerly signed the papers, and rechristened him Tigger. Because he was the only one.

She ducked under another branch, so low to the path she thought it might be better to simply climb over it rather than crouch under. The tree to which it belonged was rooted far down below the path, so far down that they were actually walking through the upper reaches of its canopy. This wasn’t any maintained trail. You weren’t supposed to walk it. To their left, a deer path led down into the woods at a perilously steep angle, right into a raincarved gully. Kylie had taken Tig exploring down there before. There was a spring tucked away back in the thickets, from which a little creek burbled up and flowed promptly into a culvert. In the mornings the woods teemed with deer and foxes and songbirds but it was quiet now save for the leaves whimpling in the slack, muggy breeze. Tig wanted to go in. He stared intently at the green wall, and Kylie heard the telltale crash that signified a deer startled by the sight of them.

She shook her head. Didn’t feel like risking ticks today, and they had to be home soon. She tugged Tig along and kept to the ledge, continuing on towards the corner where the path curved away ninety degrees to the right and opened out into a wide, grassy field hemmed in by the retainer wall on one side and tall backyard fences on the other. Oftentimes she’d let Tig off-leash to play fetch back here, something they couldn’t really do in the apartment. Kylie thought of the whole place as a kind of secret passage, a hidden meadow tucked away midst the hustle and bustle of northeast Philadelphia.

She gazed down into the woods, trying to keep an eye on the deer but losing it in the thick undergrowth. When she looked back up, her breath hitched. Someone was standing right in front of her.

The stranger stood at the corner of the ledge, right where Kylie meant to turn to access the little field. She was in the middle of painting- bent over a canvas propped up on a wooden easel, brush in hand, busily bringing out the leaves of a maple in the green vale below. Of the woman’s appearance, Kylie knew nothing, for she was clad from head to toe in a light blue burqa that concealed every inch of her skin.

Tig saw the woman a moment after Kylie did. He skidded to a startled stop, and the jingle of his collar sounded like a bell on the quiet greenway.

The woman stopped painting mid-stroke and held her brush up high and away from the canvas so as not to mar it. Then she turned slowly to face the pair, scrying them from behind a hexagonal cross-stitch grille that was her only window to the outside world.

Tig’s nose wrinkled as he cautiously tested the air. Unsure if the woman was a threat or not. Kylie felt oddly uneasy herself. It wasn’t just the sudden appearance of a stranger on the hitherto lonesome path. Kids played back here sometimes, and she’d never felt bothered by one of them. Some wary nerve, deep in her gut, urged caution. Lacking obvious facial expressions to go by, she tried to discern any emotion in the woman’s poise- surprise equal to her own? Annoyance at being interrupted?- but she was an enigma beneath the burqa.

Her eyes darted between the painter and the wide, grassy field to her right. She teetered back on her feet, unsure what to do next. Just keep walking? She glanced at the painting again. It was beautiful, despite being half-finished. The beginnings of a green canopy lapping at the sky like seafoam. A wide blank space in the lower left corner which she presumed was to be infilled with more greenery.

She decided she was being silly. She wasn’t even sure why she was perturbed in the first place. Just shyness? Or maybe it was the burqa? Some unconscious reaction to the sight of it? Her mind swirled with half-remembered platitudes from her college days about biases and prejudices. Stupid, Kylie, she thought. Real stupid. It’s just a veil. No matter how strange it looks, there’s still a normal woman under it. A normal woman probably not too different from yourself.

She cleared her throat.

“I like your painting!” she said amiably. And loudly, as if her volume would have some impact on the obviously foreign woman’s comprehension. Odds were the woman didn’t know a lick of English- nobody in Somerton spoke English anymore- but the painting was so captivating Kylie wanted to try anyway. She pointed at the canvas to emphasize her point.

“Thank you,” the woman replied in- to Kylie’s pleasant surprise- pristine English, with only the faintest trace of an accent. She turned her hidden head back toward the painting and sighed, “It is a work in progress.”

“Are you an artist?” Kylie asked, dropping her voice back to a normal decibel, now that she knew the woman could understand her.

“Of a sort,” the woman replied cryptically. She sounded younger than Kylie had initially presumed. Her timbre high. A bit shrill. Slightly muffled by the burqa. Kylie thought with pity that she must be sweating to death under the thing, in this humidity and under the harsh noon sun. The fabric looked breathable, at least. Cotton, perhaps?

The woman set her paintbrush down on the easel and turned towards Kylie, regarding her from behind the grille with her head cocked slightly to the side. She had to crane her neck up to meet Kylie’s eyes, for Kylie stood a full head taller than her.

“Paints are not my natural medium, I fear,” she continued, “I struggle to make it real.”

“I think it looks wonderful,” Kylie replied sincerely. She hesitated. Glanced down at Tig. He was still standing rigidly. Still staring at the woman. Leaning forward, like he wanted to inspect her more closely without actually approaching any closer. Well, he’s probably picking up on your own dumb anxiety, nitwit.

She took a step forward, and another. Tig went willingly enough to a point. His own steps measured and reserved. Never taking his eyes off the woman. A few feet away from the woman he stopped and would go no further, despite a gentle tug on the leash. Fine, let him be stubborn, she thought. There was enough lead.

Up close the painting was even more beautiful. Impressionist style, the larger details of the trees and clouds devolving into fine, individual brushstrokes, like the fuzziness of a dream half-remembered. Masterful work. Kylie glanced over at the woman, who gave no indication of being upset at her nearness, and she started pointing out elements on the canvas, careful not to let her finger actually touch and possibly smear it. “The clouds look lovely, and the trees are so realistic.”

“Tsush,” the woman rasped, shaking her head in disapproval. She pointed an accusing finger at the painting. “This is not real. Sculpting, that is real.”

“You sculpt, too?” Kylie asked, glancing quickly at the woman before diverting her attention back to the painting. Her initial nervousness was all but gone now that she’d broken the ice, but the sight of the burqa still made her nerves tingle. Maybe it’s because you can’t see her face, she thought. Humans are built to read facial expressions and you’re getting a static screen. That’s probably all it is. There’s nothing wrong. Underneath that thing, she’s just a normal woman like you.

Tig must have felt the same way about the burqa. Still standing erect, his tail out straight. Not stiff or bristly, but out. Alert. She saw his ears twitch slightly, like he were straining to hear. His nose wrinkled as he continued testing the air. Kylie slackened her grip on the leash, hoping to calm him, then forced herself to look directly into the burqa’s inscrutable maw.

“That’s cool. Must take a lot of patience. Chiseling everything so precisely, I mean.”

Whatever qualms Kylie had about looking at her, the woman did not share in kind. She was facing Kylie squarely. Staring, it seemed. The hairs on Kylie’s arms stood up at the sensation of being watched, though she had no way of knowing if the woman was really looking at her. She swallowed and looked back quickly at the painting.

“Yes,” the woman replied, “But it is good for the soul. It is the purest joy, to immortalize the human form in stone. I was once quite famous for it, back in my home country.”

“Really? Where are you from?” Kylie asked, entranced. A sculptress-cum-painter was intriguing enough, but a female Muslim sculptress, probably coming from a country where women were treated as some kind of lower lifeform? Now that was interesting. She glanced discreetly back at the woman, wishing she could get a glimpse of the face behind the veil. This was going much better than she’d expected. The fact that they were even having a conversation at all was no small marvel, given her prior attempts to converse with foreigners always running headlong into an apparently insurmountable language barrier. She smiled, friendly but also partly because she was amused by the sudden, uncouth realization that the burqa vaguely resembled a bedsheet ghost. It didn’t seem nearly as unnerving when she thought of it like that.

The woman regarded Kylie again, cocking her shrouded head from side to side, almost like a cat.

“My name is Stheno,” she said finally. “I am from Afghanistan.”

“I’m Kylie. Nice to meet you.” She didn’t offer her hand; wasn’t sure if it would be taken as an insult. Weren’t Muslims obsessed with cleanliness? Unsure of what else to do, she simply held up her hand in a half-wave. She looked back to the canvas. “Do you paint often?”

“Not as much as I would like. That is probably why I am terrible.”

“You’re not terrible!” Kylie insisted. “I like it, anyway. It reminds me of Monet.”

“Ah, Monet. One of my biggest influences. The way he painted the light, making his subjects so distinct from afar, yet diffuse when viewed too closely… it speaks to me. I almost envy his cataracts, which allowed him to see the world so.”

“You seem to be doing fine without them,” Kylie smirked, while continuing to examine the painting. Her eyes lingered on the painted trees. In the foreground, the just-so veins of an elm leaf stood out darkly against the lighter sunlit blade. “I can see some Sisley here, too. The branches, I mean.”

“You know your painters well,” Stheno remarked, “Still, I am nothing compared to them. I only wish I could devote more effort to mastering the craft.”

“I suppose you spend more time sculpting?”

“No, not that so much either,” Stheno sighed. “My art is just for- how calls it? Pastime.”

“Why?” Kylie asked, flabbergasted, “This looks like it should be in an art show! When it’s finished, I mean.”

“You are kind, Kylie,” Stheno replied. She shook her head, the blue burqa swishing softly as she did so. “It is difficult for outsiders such as myself to enter American art circles. The barriers are very high. Knowing important people matters more than the quality of one’s art. I have no patronage here; I came to this country very poor. It is difficult, being an immigrant in this country.”

It’s difficult being born here, too, Kylie thought ruefully. But as soon as the thought formed, her conscience smacked her. This woman had fled to America from God only knew what, in search of a better life, and here she was moping to herself about a bad landlord and a sleep schedule of her own making. She looked down shamefully at her shoes.

“You can tell me about it, if you want,” Kylie said.

Stheno was quiet for a long time. Deciding what to tell, how much to tell. Kylie wondered again about the face behind the burqa. What she must have been through over there. When Stheno finally spoke, Kylie leaned back on one leg and simply listened without interrupting. Who knew, she might have been the very first person Stheno had ever talked to about any of this.

“Afghanistan is a land of suffering,” Stheno said finally. Her voice sounded far, far away. “It has suffered for a very long time. First under the English, then later the Soviets, then finally with the Americans and Taliban fighting, tearing what was left to pieces. My family was divided. I had two sisters. One was killed, and I have not seen or spoken to the other in a very long time. I used the last of my money to come to America, and left everything behind. All of my most precious artworks, my statues. Perhaps they are still there, in my empty gallery. Perhaps they were destroyed. I will never know.”

She looked off into the trees for a long while. Kylie didn’t interrupt her. Wasn’t sure what she was seeing at the end of that distant gaze. Her heart swelled with sympathy for the woman- even as she studiously continued to avoid looking directly at her, she reminded herself guiltily.

Stheno sighed deeply before continuing.

“When I arrived in Philadelphia, employment was difficult to find. I had no workspace, so I could not practice art again for a long time. I taught English to other immigrants, and opened a small business. I learned to paint in my spare time. I try sometimes to sell these paintings, but it is difficult. The market is very harsh.”

“I know the feeling,” Kylie replied bitterly. She’d stuffed her hands into her pockets and rubbed her fingers up and down against the tough grit of the jeans.

“You make art as well?”

“No, no,” Kylie replied, “I’d like to, someday, if I ever have the time. I mean that I understand tough job markets.”

She glanced down bashfully at Tig. He’d finally decided to sit, at least. But there was something wrong with his expression. He was just staring up at Stheno, unblinking. And he wasn’t panting either, despite the heat. His mouth was shut tight, so tight he almost seemed to be holding his breath. Odd. But he showed no animosity either. It had to be the burqa setting him on edge. He’d never seen someone wearing a burqa before. Maybe Stheno’s hidden face was as unsettling to him as it initially was to Kylie, only he didn’t have the propriety to be subtle about it. Indeed, seeing him behaving like this made Kylie’s gut tighten again. Resurrecting that itch that told her something wasn’t quite right. And once more she suppressed it. Maybe the heat was getting to him. To them both. She’d break this off soon, return to the air-conditioned apartment to get ready for work. Stheno probably didn’t really want to be interrupted from her painting, anyway.

“What sort of work do you do?” Stheno asked.

Veterinarian, in some better place, Kylie thought ruefully. “I’m a waitress right now. I have a degree in biology from Temple. Was trying to get into veterinarian school, but none of my applications were successful.” She looked down at the grass and shrugged.

“So far,” Stheno supplied.

“So far,” Kylie agreed, and in that moment she loved Stheno. “Haven’t sent any out in awhile. Probably should get back on that.”

“Ah, don’t worry. You are young,” Stheno said. “There is plenty of time for you to find good work. Besides, you are beautiful. A lovely girl like you must have a man, a husband, no?”

“Oh,” Kylie smiled bashfully. She stuffed her hands into her pockets and glanced down at her toes, smudging the tip of her shoe into the grass. “No, not now. Not yet, I mean.”

It had been over four months since she and Jake had their last argument. In her apartment. His face contorted in a blind red rage. Because Kylie, after finding some blonde hairs on his motorcycle jacket, had the audacity to check his phone, and discovered the existence of Laura. It was infuriating. How stereotypical it all was. He’d denied it vehemently, frothing and fuming. He’d thrown a plastic plant at her head, took a chunk out of her wall instead, and stormed off into the night. She hadn’t thought much about men since.

Stheno cocked her head again. “You will find one. You are kind, and so beautiful… if we were back in the old country, I would ask you to pose for me, so I could make a statue of you.”

Kylie felt her face flush cherry red. Involuntarily, a little chuff of laughter escaped her. She looked up from under her eyes and met Stheno’s invisible gaze. “You think I would make a nice statue?”

“An excellent one,” Stheno nodded vigorously, her burqa bobbing like a puppet’s head. “That is the hardest part of sculpting- finding the right model. It is much more difficult than sculpting itself, to find someone who truly deserves to be immortalized in stone.” She paused, then leaned in towards Kylie. “Tell me, do you believe in divination, Kylie? Astrology? Fortune and destiny?”

“A little,” she lied. In truth, she believed in all of it, with all of her heart. She followed her horoscope avidly, and could ramble for hours about astrology to anyone willing to listen. “I’m a Gemini.”

“Ah, a Gemini. Soulful, but always wandering. Like a bird of the air.”

Kylie blinked. She’d had exactly the same thought yesterday, while walking Tig. A falcon had swooped down right in front of them, pulling up hard once it realized the squirrel in its sights was a long-dead victim of the automobile. Its broad, veined feathers black as coal against the sunglare. Watching it wing away into the blue yonder, all Kylie wanted to do was join it in flight, in the freedom of the sky. And Stheno, somehow, knew exactly how she felt. It was the most validating thing anyone had said to her in the past four years.

Stheno held out her hand, and Kylie noticed for the first time that she wore black silk elbow-gloves. Not a trace of her bare skin was visible. “Come, let me read your palms. I told you I run a small business- I am a fortune-teller. It is how I make most of my money, but for one so sweet I will do it for free.”

“Gosh, I… I don’t know. I mean…” She fumbled over her words. She wanted her palms read, so very badly. She was certain that Stheno- exotic, talented Stheno- knew things about divination she hadn’t even dreamed of herself. She also felt damn guilty about accepting such a service for free. If she’d any money to spare she would’ve forked over however much Stheno asked, but she was barely in a financial position to afford her bus fare. And once more, in the furthest recesses of her brain, some tiny little lizard instinct whispered apprehensively that something wasn’t quite right about any of this.

“Tsush!” Stheno dismissed, waving her hand, “It is nothing. I insist, please.”

“Well, okay,” Kylie replied, swallowing all her misgivings and cautiously proffering her palm to Stheno. “Gosh, you can do anything, can’t you? Painting, sculpting, divination…”

“When you have lived as long as I, you learn much,” Stheno replied, reaching out her black gloved hand to inspect Kylie’s white palm.

Just before Stheno’s fingers brushed against Kylie’s, Tig growled. Low and mean.

Startled, Kylie jerked her head rigidly towards him. He was back on his feet. Tense. Legs taut. Hackles bristling. Tail curled like a scorpion’s. He looked wound up like a spring. But there was no imminent danger. He was just staring. At Stheno.

“Tig, it’s okay,” Kylie reassured him. She turned back to Stheno apologetically, then started once more to offer her hand.

This time Tig barked savagely and rushed forward, putting himself between the two women and forcing Kylie back a step. He faced Stheno squarely, snarling up at her shrouded face. Teeth bared bright against the noonday sun. His tail was now tucked protectively between his legs. Kylie grabbed the leash with both hands in a blind panic and pulled hard, but his strength was far beyond hers. He snapped once more at Stheno, then yielded to Kylie’s pull and hemmed close to her legs, forcing her back with him as he began to cede the ground between them and Stheno, growling all the while.

“No, Tig! Bad!” Kylie shouted ineffectually, as he continued pushing her back, “Bad dog! Knock it off!”

He forced Kylie to stumble back about three paces away from Stheno, then yanked her back towards the ledge path hard enough to twirl her whole body around. Kylie dug her heels into the dirt and held the leash like she were a waterskier, so that for a moment Tig simply ran in place, his paws scrabbling desperately at the mossy ground to get nowhere at all.

“No, Tig!” Kylie snapped. “Bad dog! Bad!”

She twirled back to face Stheno, her face red from exertion and embarrassment. She wanted to apologize, to say he’s not usually like this, to beg forgiveness and fumble and flubber over herself trying to excuse Tig’s unprecedented behavior. But she didn’t do any of that. When she looked back at Stheno her eyes went wide.

Something was very wrong.

Kylie couldn’t place it. There was nothing obvious to be concerned about. Stheno was still standing perfectly normally. But deep in her brain, that lizard instinct once again reared up and hissed a warning that something was deeply, deeply wrong about all of this.

Despite her sudden, lurching alarm, she had no time to pay it any mind. She was still focusing all her little might on getting Tig back under heel. He seemed to have completely lost his mind. Pulling and pulling, now trying to get away from Stheno after snapping at her so viciously.

“I’m so sorry about this,” she stammered, “He’s usually so friendly.”

“It is nothing,” Stheno replied. Her tone did not at all match the occasion, and that dim, reptilian warning light began to flash urgently. She could hear Stheno breathing heavily. She sounded. Hungry. “Do you still wish me to read your palm? It will take only a moment.”

Kylie’s pulse quickened. Finally she realized what was wrong with Stheno. It was precisely how normal she was behaving. She was still standing in the same spot. The same exact spot. She hadn’t moved or even flinched at Tig’s sudden aggression. Her feet were still rooted firmly in place, in front of the canvas. Her posture totally open and relaxed. Not defensive in any way. Unafraid of the dog and his gnashing teeth. And suddenly Kylie realized how terribly close she was to Stheno.

Tig pulled on the leash with increasing desperation. Now whining in naked fear. The shaded avenue back to the parking lot seemed a path to salvation, from some nameless horror dangerous beyond all reckoning.

Kylie glanced back at Stheno. She’d taken a step away from her easel, towards Kylie. There was something wrong with her burqa. It was… shifting. Undulating all over, like she were trying to shake it off. Or like something were hidden beneath it, squirming to escape. Like… Kylie didn’t know. And, muffled beneath the burqa, she could now plainly hear an uncanny rattling sound, like a cicada. Or a snake. The warning light in her head was a wailing klaxon now. Her amygdala screaming at her- DEFCON ONE! DEFCON ONE!

“I-I don’t think now is such a good time,” Kylie said, trying unsuccessfully to play off her mounting fear with a laugh. “Maybe tomorrow? You’ll be here, right?”

She finally yielded to Tig’s desperate pulling and started to follow him down the path, with absolutely no intention of returning tomorrow, nor indeed for a very long time to come.

Her eyes flew wide open and an ice splash of terror raced up her arm when Stheno’s hand shot out and grabbed her wrist.

“Just one little peek,” Stheno rasped, dragging Kylie towards her with shocking strength, overcoming even Tig’s mighty pull. The dog yelped at being pulled so suddenly back.

Kylie yelped too. Stheno’s grip was iron. Impossibly strong for a woman her size. Her fingers were long and knobby, and even through the silk glove her nails felt sharp as claws and dug into her skin. Kylie spun around in anger and fear, to demand Stheno release her. But when she twirled, Stheno was already right in her face. The grille of the burqa mere inches from Kylie’s eyes. Kylie looked deeply into that cross-hatched window, unable to help herself, and gasped.

She saw Stheno’s face. Indistinct and shadow-veiled. Certain features stood out starkly in the dim light that filtered through the grille. Her bushy unibrow. The deep scowl-lines carved into her paunchy, brown cheeks, and her plump, frowning lips.

But these were all mere notations next to her enormous eyes. They seemed too large for her head, close-set and angling up queerly towards her ears. Where the whites ought to have been, they were pitch black. Black as inkwells, black as the abyss. Deeply, impossibly black save for a thin, glowing ring of turquoise where her irises ought to have been. Set deep in the tarpits of her eyes, they made Kylie think of NASA photographs of nebulae. Only they weren’t pretty in the slightest. An eldritch blue glow radiated forth from them, and as Kylie stared deeply into them the light quickly intensified to a painful, searing white.

She couldn’t look away. She wanted to. Desperately. But she couldn’t. Couldn’t wrench her eyes away from the soul-scorching sight. Couldn’t move a single muscle in her body. She was paralyzed. Forgotten was the pain of Stheno’s grip on her arm. All she felt now was the searing intensity of those horrible eyes. Even through the grille, the light they gave off was burning, like staring into the sun. A cold chill began to tickle Kylie’s skin. She heard a sound like fracturing ice, and a thin, pitiful whimper escaped her throat.

Tig’s savage bark released her from the hypnotic trance. She was vaguely aware of her hand rising up into the air, seemingly in slow motion, even as her gaze continued to be locked onto the twin nebulae of Stheno’s eyes. Then, with a pained hiss, Stheno broke the gaze. Suddenly Kylie’s wrist was released, and she fell to the ground with a solid thud.

It took her a moment to reorient herself. Things came back to her in pieces, like awakening from a coma. She felt herself being dragged forward even as she tried to remember where she was. The blue sky. The woods. Mossy ground. Brick retainer wall. Wooden easel. Blue burqa. Stheno. Tig’s tail and hindlegs dangling off the ground. She blinked.

Tig was biting Stheno’s forearm. He growled fiercely, his teeth sunk deep into her flesh. Bright splashes of blood painting the mossy ground beside the easel. His ears flopping from side to side as Stheno swung her arm trying to get him off.

Kylie blinked the lingering dark spots from her eyes while she watched Tig fighting Stheno. She sat up, cradling her sore wrist close to her chest. It took another half second before she registered that her dog was in fact attacking a stranger.

“Down, Tig! Off!” she yelled weakly.

To her surprise, Tig released Stheno immediately. He hit the ground on all four paws, leaping out of the way of an errant kick from Stheno as she reeled back, and darted over to Kylie. He licked her face and whined frantically. Then he wheeled around to stand protectively in front of her while she struggled back to her feet, barking and snarling at Stheno all the while.

Kylie pushed up from the ground on her left arm and groped for Tig’s leash. She tried to grab it tightly in both hands, only to wince when a sharp pain raced up her right wrist. She let go like she’d grabbed a hot pan off the stove, then frantically pulled the leash taut as she could with just her left hand, holding her right in close to her chest like a broken wing. Tig continued pacing in front of her, trying once more to shepherd her away while keeping his eyes- and teeth- facing Stheno.

Kylie stumbled back yieldingly against the pressure of Tig’s body. She was so thoroughly dazed by the whole incident that when she looked back at Stheno, her eyes still wide in frightened confusion, the first words to escape her lips were, “Are you okay?”

Stheno was looking down at her bitten arm. Unlike Kylie, however, she wasn’t cradling her injury. She looked at the wound as though it were an annoying curiosity, no more than a papercut nuisance. In shock? The burqa made it flatly impossible to tell what she was thinking. She looked up from the bleeding wound and replied with unsettling composure, “Yes, Kylie. All is well.”

Kylie stared at her, her right arm throbbing and her left quickly tiring from fighting Tig’s ferocious pull but she didn’t dare loosen her grip on the leash. She feared that if she slipped for even an instant he would attack Stheno again. Calm, composed Stheno.

Stheno didn’t seem concerned in the slightest about getting away from the mad dog. She was simply staring at her open wound. That wasn’t surprising. But when Kylie looked for herself to where Tig’s cutlery had struck home, she couldn’t believe her eyes. Stheno wasn’t bleeding anymore. Indeed, there was no trace of a wound at all. The blue fabric was torn in several places. But there wasn’t a drop of blood. All Kylie saw was a small patch of mocha brown flesh, exposed where the fabric had torn. What the hell?

“D-Do you want me to call an ambulance?” Kylie asked.

“No, dear,” Stheno replied sedately. Her tone was unnervingly calm, as if she were swimming in a sort of postcoital relief. She covered the patch of exposed skin with her gloved hand, then looked over at Kylie again. “There is no need. It’s only a scratch.”

Kylie’s inner klaxons began wailing again. This time she obeyed them. She swallowed tightly and started to back away, an action Tig rewarded her for by pulling her headlong back down the ledge-path.

“Okay,” she called back, her voice high and warbling, “Well, it was nice meeting you!”

“I’ll be seeing you,” Stheno replied enigmatically, before picking up her paintbrush once more and continuing to work on her canvas as though she’d never been interrupted.

Kylie cantered away and didn’t look back. Her mind swam as she replayed the confusing events just passed over and over again in her head. Her heart thrummed in her chest and adrenaline pulsed icily through her veins in post-traumatic euphoria as Tig pulled her relentlessly back down the trail. He kept looking back, head and tail held up alertly, to make certain they weren’t being pursued. It was something he only ever did this if there was a person walking behind them. Reliable enough that Kylie turned her head back with him, half expecting Stheno to be right behind them, arms out like some B-movie monster. No one was there. Stheno was already out of sight, lost in the dense greenery. But Tig kept pulling. Kept looking back.

On one of her glances back, she nearly whacked her head against a low-hanging branch and she cursed herself for being so ridiculous. She was losing her nerve and she knew it. Tig’s inexplicable behavior rubbing off on her already rattled soul. She took a deep breath and tried to think rationally about it. She’s not chasing you, Kylie. You’re not in a slasher movie. She was just a weirdo. You meet them every day.

But still she could not shake the penetrating, icicle tingle of being pursued.

Under any other circumstances, she would have questioned the whole reality of the incident. Stheno’s eyes, the cuts, the fall, all of it could have been imagined by a heatstroked imagination. But she did not think, as they jaywalked back across Bustleton Avenue, that she had hallucinated it. It was inexplicable, no doubt. Not one bit of it made sense. But it was far too vivid to merely be imagined. And she had a witness- Tig. His lingering alarm, the continued desperation with which he pulled her, was what kept her from believing she’d temporarily, unexplainably lost her mind.

She arrived at that thought right as a city bus honked its horn and came within three feet of sending her ruminations to another dimension. She and Tig, each distracted for their own reasons, leaped skyward at the blaring banshee wail.

“Watch where you’re going, you fucking idiot!” the driver screamed out the window.

“Sorry! Sorry! I’m so sorry!” Kylie apologized profusely. Her legs felt like jello as she and Tig stumbled across the five remaining lanes of traffic.

Once they had safely scurried across Bustleton, Kylie tried to think about anything besides what had just happened. Keeping a more wary eye on the road, she thought about watching a movie when she got home from work later. She thought about what book she intended to read next. She thought about calling her parents and laughing about the “crazy Arab lady” she’d just run into. She thought about work, crunching numbers in her head, how much she’d need to make in tips to break even on her rent even though she’d already wargamed it out a dozen times. She even started thinking about what she’d do if she didn’t make enough tonight and the landlord kept his promise of eviction, a subject she’d steadfastly avoided since he’d confronted her about it two weeks ago. But no matter what she tried to distract herself with, her mind kept wandering back to Stheno and her searing eyes.

Well, maybe Stheno was just a weirdo. Pity, that, since she’d seemed so nice. But there was no possible way the eyes she’d seen were real. No living thing had eyes like those. She shuddered at the memory of them. Tried to think of rational explanations. Contact lenses? Like they used for vampires sometimes in movies? But that wouldn’t account for the glowing, or why she’d been so totally transfixed by them…

Her apartment door seemed to materialize right in front of her face. She only dimly remembered even entering the building. Tig pawed at the door, whining and mewling. She unlocked it, then stooped to unclip his leash with one hand while opening the door with the other. Tig rushed in swiftly, using his head to push the door open even faster, and pulled Kylie in after him. He quickly turned his head to make sure she had followed. His eyes wide and imploring. As if to say, Get in, quick.

When she turned to close the door behind her, a sudden fluttering impulse compelled her to double-lock it from the inside. A rush of nerves dancing up her spine like the whispers of a ghost. That inexplicable sense of being watched, of knowing a predator is directly behind you, eyes boring into your back, lustily licking its chops from the cover of darkness.

Once the door was safely shut and locked, though, the nameless dread dissipated into thin air. She stared down at the lock, feeling silly. A clipped huff of laughter escaped her. Her taut nerves untwisting all at once, leaving her giddy.

She shook her head and chalked it all up to lingering shock from the encounter. Not even just from Stheno’s impossible eyes. More from the scare of Tig biting Stheno. Thank God it was only a scratch. Stheno was fine. No numbers or- God help her- insurance information had been exchanged. So probably no charges would be pressed. She didn’t have to worry about some clinically-worded court order to “destroy” Tig. He’d just lost his cool for a minute. Because of the burqa, probably. Tig was maybe a little racist- dogs were allowed to be- and got jumpy. Just a little nip. Even though Kylie had plainly seen blood gushing from an open wound, bright and crimson in the noonday sun…

Kylie remembered she was still holding Tig’s leash and placed it back atop the bureau with a dull tink. She stared accusingly at the empty Zoloft bottles. The shrink said hallucinations were one of the potential side effects and to stop taking them immediately if anything of the sort happened. Well, had it? The encounter seemed far too structured for a hallucination. Donald Duck hadn’t floated out of the sky to sing to her. The grass and trees hadn’t melted into psychedelic waves. Everything had progressed in a logical sequence, and she couldn’t escape that no matter how many times she replayed it in her head. Aside from Stheno’s eyes, and the wound disappearing, everything about it made sense.

She heard Tig’s claws scraping on the hardwood floor out in the kitchen, then the sound of him eagerly lapping up his water. Well, it was hot out after all. Maybe the heat had impacted her worse than she thought. Stheno’s eyes… a hot flash?

She bent down to unlace her shoes. Something cold and hard pressed into the small of her back and suddenly she remembered the gun. Funny, she hadn’t thought about drawing it at all when Stheno grabbed her arm. She reached around and gripped the holster, meaning to put it back up on the bureau beside the leash and traitorous antidepressants. Then she hesitated. For a moment, her fingers were suspended in a limbo of indecision. One part of her said this was all quite silly, irresponsible even, carrying a loaded firearm around the house; that there was no danger to warrant such an act. The other part- smaller and more primitive, but thoroughly, instinctively convincing- spake in sepulchral tones, You may need it.

Finally she decided to keep the gun on her. The cool feel of the stock on her skin was reassuring.

Kylie went out to the kitchen to pour herself a bowl of cornflakes. It was all she’d eat before midnight, most likely, unless she got hungry at work and stole a few of Frank’s boneless wings. Holding the spoon was a pain- her right wrist still smarted right where Stheno had grabbed her. She knew that had happened. Her arm still bore a red impression of the woman’s firm grip. Firm. More like a vise.

But that didn’t mean anything, if she’d been in the midst of a hallucination or a hot flash. The more she thought about it, the more the idea that she’d simply fainted made sense. Stheno’s burqa billowing and pulsating could have been the start of it. And her eyes- maybe she’d fainted then? Maybe Stheno had tried unsuccessfully to catch her fall. She remembered it differently- Stheno grabbing her arm, then everything else- but what if that was just a sequence her mind had stitched together after the fact? She wasn’t sure she could trust her own memories. Not on Zoloft, anyway.

Regardless of whether her treacherous brain had made up the whole incident, her wrist hurt. Every third bite she would clink her spoon back into the bowl and rub it for a few seconds to soothe it, so that by the time she finished the cereal was annoyingly soggy.

She was tipping the bowl back to drink the dregs of it when her phone alarm went off. Kylie groaned, a guttural sound with her mouth still full of milk and cereal. She set the bowl back down- too hard, an ejecta-ring of milk splashing out onto the counter- and fumbled in her pocket to turn off the alarm.

The legs of Kylie’s stool grated against the hardwood floor as she slid out. She leaned back and stretched, relishing the muscle-warmth it generated. The room felt a bit chilly, and as she stretched her neck and back cracked satisfyingly.

Tig glanced up at her from his food bowl, his eyes wide and shining as polished amber. She sighed.

“Time for work.”

Click Here To Read Chapter Two