prequel to the boogeyman

I

The rag-dollish leaves cause the football field to look like a Halloween mask, caught in the wind and occasionally uniting to bare its teeth; barely any sunlight comes through her window. Diana wanted you to think she knew what she was doing. Watching her search determinedly for her blouse—ignoring him completely, waiting for him to recognize her; he remembers when she gave herself a tattoo with Bic-pen ink on her left thigh: it came out looking like a tooth and crossbones. She winced and strained the entire time, locked herself in the bathroom afterwards just crying loud enough so he could hear, but soft enough so that he wouldn’t be able to say anything about it.
Outside, the sky ripples and shimmers, stolen out of a fairytale. She’s still putting her clothes on, occasionally glancing over her shoulder to make sure he’s still there, resting her head on one of the bed posts. The sight of how young she looks with her naked back exposed frightens him slightly; it’s paler than the inside of his hands. He tries to close his eyes and get the image out of his head, but it seems to be tattooed under his eyelids.
“I can’t find my skirt. Is it over there?”
He sees it lying beneath the bed, pressed against one of the sheets. “No.”
“If you find it, I’ll let you put it on for me.”
Its uncomfortable when she flirts, she does it when she can’t fill the gaps of conversation with anything intelligible. The room makes daybreak feel like morning. Her hair spills down her back like a tipped gasoline tank, soaking the color off her skin.
Her cell phone rings and looks at her; she doesn’t move and stares at it as if she’s trying to make out what it is. It stops.
He wants her now, her shoulder blades swollen outwards like unfurling rose petals. If only innocence was something you could drop on the ground and pick up whenever you wanted. He wraps her scarf around his legs:
“What if I told you the world was ending.”
She twirls her head around, playfully flashing her eyes at him, then rolling back onto the bed. “I’d say lets do this one more time before my parents get home.”
Her body reminds him of a dead unicorn, each rib sighing. And he can still hear them sighing, recovering his heart from the bedside and tiptoeing out of her room as she closes her eyes.

He wanders gently from Diana’s house, making his way to the football field he had gazed out over before. He hadn’t intended to come here – the school’s not far off. The leaves are still violently throwing themselves into portraits of fall, slapping his face and sticking there for seconds before sailing down to the ground. Near the field-goal post is a group of kids not much younger than him, wearing their clothes so exotically that they probably think it represents who they are. Suddenly, one of them leans over and kisses another. The girl giggles upon receiving it. No, they’re both girls. The others surrounding them cheer and clap their hands.
“Hey you.” Diana meanders towards him, obviously having given up on trying to find her skirt, replacing it with jeans that could be mistaken for skin. “You bailed on me.”
“You’d look funny if you said that again with your hands on your hips.”
“If only I was trying to be funny…but what for? Why did you leave?”
He stares down at the ten-yard line. “I wasn’t in the mood.”
A shriek comes from the crowd across from them; the sound of bodies rocking back and forth. “You have no idea where this is going do you.”
“I never did.”
She stares down with him, trying to find exactly what’s got his attention, then wipes a mote of hardened make-up drooling from the side of her eye.
“…I’m not going to have to find someone else am I?”
“Maybe you should.”
The wind jeers. He stares back up at her, then turns away, heading in whatever direction that feels towards home.
“Rodian…Wait…” She stumbles off after him, unsure of where he’s gone or what she could possibly say to him, cursing nightfall and noticing that the group of kids by the goalpost have finally noticed her. She walks over to them, bereaving her arms and letting them dangle by her sides. The leaves have given up flailing, and rustle beneath her feet. She watches them, her beanie concealing her forehead and almost sagging low enough to cover her blank eyes. She likes the sounds they make, the crunching, the knowledge that at least she’s helping someone somewhere who’s allergic to mold. Right. What if someone took them all down, just stole all the leaves and ran away with them to some tower in the middle of the woods. All the leaves in the world, red and yellow and orange and the brownish red ones that look like bloody shit. Bloody fucking shit; her brother used to use the term all the time, staring into the toilet, bloody fucking shit, bloody fucking shit, “a bloody fucking mess we’re in Diana, just look at this. Even my ass agrees.” That was a long time ago, still is.
She stands in front of the kids, sliding off her hat and lifelessly waving her hand. They nod in approval —or was that a greeting—and she sits down next to one of the girls. Talk about boobs, boobs and pink hair and fishnet stockings torn and tied together. If that’s how you attract guys then—you’ve been doing this all wrong. Use your imagination silly. You’re not really bisexual. She wants to tell her all of this but all she does is sigh.
“Hey…you know, I should probably get going,” one of the guys croaks, pushing himself off the ground.
“Yeah, me too—”
She kisses the girl with the pink and hideous hair, gasping for air afterwards, adopting a poise she never knew she had as she wordlessly marches away.

“Have you noticed anything…unique about yourself?”
“I scare people.” Rodian is slumped before his psychiatrist in a room with the ABC’s posted on the wall. On the desk there’s a photograph of a black Labrador eating grass.
“Lots of teenagers can do that.”
“…I can make girls moan louder than you can.”
“That’s arguable.” The psychiatrist chuckles. Rob Wonderland, stitched onto the lapel of his jacket. Rob Wonderland.
“I don’t know…you look pretty old. Fifties? Sixties?”
“We’re here to work on you Rodian, not disclose information about my personal life.”
“Oh.”
“So…” he twitches his brow, taking a bite from a weight-watchers bar. “How do you scare people?”
Rodian doesn’t answer
“Hmmm…it says here that you’ve attempted suicide three times, been arrested for disorderly conduct twice.”
Suddenly the room jumps from being boring to annoying, and the dirt color of the walls remind Rodian of the dirt beneath his finger nails that he’s been trying to pick out with a pen for the last thirty minutes. The psychiatrist has probably distinguished this as anxiety.
“What makes you think you can help me? I’ve been to five shrinks before you and the only thing I’ve accomplished is being a guinea pig to whatever drug the doctor fancies.”
“I’m not here to help you. Only you can do that.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me, I thought I told you, all that’s wrong with me is everyone else.”
“I don’t recall you ever saying that.”
He glances back at the photograph, at the Labrador still eating grass. “I’m eighteen, I’m sure it explains a lot.” Outside he can hear the busses squealing, the Spanish-men conversing over cigarettes, the little children crying together. His mother drives him to the city to see this special man with a $245 price-tag over his head. “Have you ever tasted grass?”
“What?”
“Grass. They grow it in the park, Central Park. I’m sure you go there sometimes.”
“Well, yes, I’ve been there, but that’s not to say I’ve decided to bend over and sink my teeth into the soil.”
“Soil. Why not say ground?”
“Why does it matter to you?”
“It’s annoying.”
The doctor spreads open a carton of milk, spilling some of it on his lap and making that noise English men tend to make when they’re surprised. It sounds something like “Oomph.”
“So…Rodian. What are your feelings towards school? The students? The teachers? The work? I’m trying to get to know you and you seem to be distancing yourself as far as you can from me.”
“The truth is doctor…


“School is a productive waste of time…


“I only get along with certain parts of the student body…


“Why would I ever want to learn anything from someone who’s fucked up so many times during their life they were forced to become a teacher?

“…Rob, I think I’m in love with you. Can I leave now?”


II

Diana’s sitting cross-legged on the edge of his bed, her older sister’s lipstick dribbling down her neck. They’re eating Chinese food reheated by Americans ordered from some place where the take-out waitress sounds like a porn-star. Diana belches, swatting the air around her nose.
“Excuse me.” At least there’s light in his room. He gazes out the window: A bunch of kids across the street seem to be building a snowman without snow. He shrugs.
“I predict in the next five minutes we’re going to start talking about suicide,” she whispers, laughing at herself and spitting up milk from her nose. She loves milk, 2%; she buys him gallons of it and brings it to his house because he claims he’s deprived of the most sacred nipple. It doesn’t taste so bad, she says, you begin to like it after a while.
“Home is where you hang yourself, hah.”
“Mmmmm, that was original.” She starts randomly laughing again, coughing herself into a fit. There’s something calming about having a naked girl on your bed and not feeling obligated to do anything with them.
“You still thirsty?”
“Yes. Go get me some milk.”
“Okay sir.” He gets up and trudges down the stairs, examining each step while trying to find something to think about. The first time he complimented her outfit, she the wore the same one for a week straight afterwards, and went out to buy alternative versions with the saved up lunch money her Mom’d give her every day for school. She can hear him whistling downstairs as she imagines herself hanging off his ceiling.
After five minutes she gets up and goes down after him, nearly slipping at the top of the stairs, and there he is at the kitchen counter smoking a cigarette, his leftover hand in his hair. The TV turns on, and she waddles over to the couch, plopping down on it, hearing a piano in her head playing the end of a song she hates. But she hates it because it reminds her of the boy that introduced it to her, and constantly she’ll show the lyrics of the song to people in hopes that they’ll think it’s melodramatic. It was a famous song, she forgets the name. She plays with her hair. She picks at her nails. She tries to pretend Rodian’s not at the kitchen-counter not looking at her. He’s got a better view of the children building the invisible snowmen. Hah. Diana’s beautiful, she was a model, wasn’t she. Gives her the right to fall asleep on the phone; they haven’t talked all night in months. There’s so much to talk about when you’re trying to impress the person you’re interested in, and then when you have them, there’s really not much to talk about anymore. Starting a trivial argument is the easy way out; it’s hard to stir up the courage and tell somebody they don’t make you happy anymore but you want them to.
A rhinoceros crawls out of the television screen. Diana waves at it; it snorts and takes up most of the living-room. At least it’s not an elephant, she thinks.
Why are they so much more prettier when they’re lonely? Rodian wonders. The rhinoceros snorts again; it swings its disproportionate tail and knocks over one of the boring and expensive lamps. And then, scrunching up its already wrinkled face, lets out a noxious fart that’s so thick it’s almost visible.
“Maybe we should go back upstairs.”
“I concur.”
The rhinoceros growls, and shifts its weight to its hind-legs like a cat getting ready to pounce. In doing this it knocks one of walls over, causing a section of the roof to collapse. The snowmen kids stare.

“The moon looks like a Christmas ornament.”
“A rhinoceros crawled out of the TV and we didn’t bother paying attention to it until it destroyed half of the house.”
The silence is bitter. They’re down by the docks—a five minute sprint from his house. Rodian scans the bay, its miniature waves lapping at the pebbled shoreline. It’s too dark to see anything but the soda dispensers planted outside the nearby motel.
The cloud’s have dispersed. Diana gets up from the rock she’s on, giving him a look she’s never given him before and then slowly twirling in circles, steadying herself. The sand doesn’t sink beneath her feet.
The wind’s going to push her over, she bruises easily; they were in gym together not very long ago and some girl kicked a soccer ball into her face and the imprint of it was marked between her eyes for the rest of the week. She’s trying to dance now, wobbling while trying to erect herself on her toes – ballet. She falls over and he laughs, quickly trying to shut himself up – he gets up to help her up, but stops himself. A net in the distance billows softly.
She begins to tread towards the other end of the beach near the water, dipping her toes into it then bouncing away. He tries to follow her; a car passes on the paved road behind him, honking and swerving elastically. The road must only be six feet away from him, seven, eight. As he walks towards it the car stops suddenly, jerking and flinching as its tail-lights fade. It’s farther away than he thought it was, and as he walks he feels himself floating, only distancing himself further from the car as he comes closer.
The car begins to convulse, tipping from side to side and twitching, it’s exhaust pipe belching unintelligible syllables. A man steps out of the car, and faces Rodian. He doesn’t say a word but his eyes are screaming, and then he smirks, slowly letting his lips shrivel into a soft, helpless smile; a rhetorical question.
The car explodes, the man disappears. Three police cars siren down the road, reverberating down the beachfront, causing the to weeds sway. The wind is audible again, and he can hear himself breathing. The police cars pull over and ignore him, immediately rushing to the car, then shaking their heads and refitting their hats, pacing and sighing. Rodian turns away, remembering Diana and trudging in the direction she had been headed.
He sees her farther down the beach, holding herself on the ground with her knees up against her chest. She’s staring out at the ocean intently. When he reaches her he sits beside her, not close enough but not too far. It must be freezing but there’s a coldest day in every year and this isn’t it and her breath is salty, he can taste it from here. Her lungs expand over him, spreading open like a pair of wings and writhing nervously.
“Kiss me.”
“It’s getting darker, I can’t see you.”
“Rodian.”
“I can’t.”
“Please kiss me.”
“There’s not enough time, there’s never enough time –”
“If there is no time than time is irrelevant, Rodian.”
There’s nothing unique about her eyes, it’s comforting. She nestles her head on his shoulder, and together they listen to nothing, both waiting for the other to move first, but neither of them do. Diana falls asleep, she snores.

III

“I told you, we have no idea where it came from; it crashed down one of the walls and we started running.”
“But there are no local zoos even remotely in the area—”
“Officer, do you think I breed rhinoceroses in my basement?”
“No, but—” The investigator sighs, descending into his rickety spin-chair. His desk amplifies how overwhelmed he appears—empty coffee cups, scattered papers; the room smells similar to the inside of a taxi-cab. They were picked up almost immediately upon walking into town. “There were no traces of a rhinoceros entering your house from any direction, only trampling out the front.”
“And taking half the house with it. Who’s to say it didn’t barge in the same place it decided to exit?”
“That is highly unlikely considering the boards to the wall are only interiorly bruised.”
“Look, I’ve already told you, I’m eighteen. I worry about fidelity and my lack of a love life, not smuggling illegal animals across the border and keeping them captive.”
The investigator sighs again, exhausted after only exchanging a few sentences, gripping the arms of his chair for support. Tonight’s just going to be like every other night. His girlfriend, who’s been dating him on and off for three years is making him feel like a dove flying into a brick wall. His son is flunking seventh grade. His son’s therapist is blaming the divorce. His wife fled the country with some “Italian” she met on a beach in New Jersey. Nothing ever happens around here. There is no murder in small towns, only murderers; sometimes the local high-school students shoplift eyeliner from Rite Aid. His superintendent is a pedophile (he looks like one, he smells like one, he comments on how pretty little children are), his partner collects Beanie Babies and buys them off eBay. They’re working on a case to find out if some guy’s dog has been solely trained to bark at night, and now he’s been assigned to interrogate a boy who’s too intelligent for his own age about a rhinoceros that’s leveled half the countryside more effectively than a demolition squad.
Nothing ever happens around here. The girl’s cell-phone rings.
“May I leave the room for a second?”
“Go ahead.” She does; the light catches her legs as she walks out. “That one’s to keep.”
“Heh. We’re not together.”
“Ah.”
“What do you think of cell-phones, sir?” Rodian’s tone is surprisingly curious, and the investigator is struck by a sense of pity because of how much the boy sounds like he cares.
“You don’t need to call me sir. It’s Thomas, nice to meet you.” They shake hands. “I can’t say I’ve given much thought to cell-phones, but they can be pretty annoying at times. Nonetheless, I’m sure they give your mother sanity.”
“You hate them, don’t you.” Thomas is taken back by the question, being said with such conviction that he feels guilty of some undistinguishable crime. He gazes at Rodian. The boy’s eyes are excessively blue, forlorn and impenetrable. “Sir.”
“You really don’t need to call me sir, unless you insist. In fact, it bothers me, just call me Tom.”
“I’m sorry. It’s a habit I have.”
The investigator leans back, propping his legs up on one of the stools the cleaning crew left behind. It’s late; his son can’t cook, and tends to do foolish things when on his own for too long. Rodian hasn’t moved; he’s a handsome kid, a dirty-blonde mullet that only works because of his youthfulness. “I wouldn’t say I hate them. Hate’s a pretty strong word, I usually save it for things like car insurance, rent. Things you don’t have to worry about right now.” Thomas pauses. “Why, what do you think of them?”
“I believe they will lead to the inevitable destruction of society.” Thomas laughs at this, bringing his hands to his face and cradling his jaw. Anything that might have become accomplished with this conversation is now irretrievable; the boy was right, rhinoceroses just didn’t magically spawn, and there was no way anyone at his age would have access to methods of transporting one. “Listen.”
“Mmm?”
“Say some guy plants a bomb in a building because he’s got nothing better to do. Someone discovers the bomb three minutes before it goes off, gets on the intercom and tells everyone to get the hell out of the building, but no one hears him because—”
“That sounds highly unlikely if you ask me.”
“Okay. Now think about how many people get run over because they’re so caught up relaying gossip, tormenting their loved ones, walking through red lights.”
“I’m sure a lot do, but I don’t see how that would result in the inevitable destruction of society.” Thomas laughs again, pushing against his forehead afterwards.
Rodian tries to retaliate, but his mouth bubbles and suddenly he realizes he’s got nothing to say; his theory was cynical and unsubstantial, a means to imply he wishes Diana wasn’t as societal. And once again he’s reduced to revealing his emotional aimlessness to a stranger—a law-enforcer of all people, someone who can probably comprehend his adolescent existentialism but has left it behind long ago.
“Sometimes I miss having a girlfriend,” he says blankly, his eyes fixated on nothing.
Thomas flops his arm back down onto the armrest, exhaling in forfeit. “The only difference between having a girlfriend and not having one is being able to miss a specific person and not the lack of one.”
“At least you have a body.”
Thomas shakes his head, “you don’t need a girlfriend to have a body.”
“I don’t know what I want,” and Rodian says this with such shameless naivety that Thomas begins to lean over and give him a hug, but remembers that it’s his boss that’s a pedophile, not him. He stumbles backwards, then leans forward again and hugs him anyway. Rodian remains motionless, trying not to stare. Diana walks back in, holding her phone against her breast, causing her despair to vivify. She’s pretty when she’s happy, but beautiful when she’s sad.
Thomas looks at the two of them, and a sense of hopelessness takes over him, something he’s now too old to understand. The pride, the frustration, the enthusiasm—so impassionate with the questions he once had, but it’s all perspired with age. He ushers them to leave; his son’s probably burnt himself using the stove by now.
As they exit the precinct, Rodian lights another cigarette. The stars are out. He doesn’t remember how long ago they arrived here, but it wasn’t dark out yet. They hadn’t been arrested, just told to follow. He remembers trying to start a conversation with the officer that took them in, but his thoughts had been elsewhere.
“Your lungs are going to become dilated.”
“Will you visit me in the hospital?”
“That’s not funny Rodian.”
“Honey, I wasn’t trying to make you laugh.”

IV


They both stare at the TV absently, Rodian routinely swigging from a gallon of milk, Diana picking at her hair and complaining about something Rodian has drowned out.
“Rodian,” Diana asks, struggling with a strand of her hair.
“Yes?”
“Where do you think the rhinoceros ran off to?”
“The zoo.” There is a hole in the crotch of his flannels. “The fuck’s sake how should I know.”
“I don’t know,” Diana defers, hiding her face.
“Maybe we should move. Get out of here.” He looks up. There is a balloon floating against the ceiling. “I’ve got a bad feeling about all of this.”
“The rhinoceros?”
“All of it. The man, the car, the rhino. We should just take a train up to my cousin’s or something.”
“But your cousin…” she grimaces.
“Oh c’mon. He’s not that bad.”
“He’s absolutely grizzly! And he’s a slob.” Diana gets up, sauntering to the kitchen. “Every time we visit your cousin I end up cleaning up the entire house.”
A rumble comes from the basement. The rumble is followed by a snort. There is a dramatic pause, in which Diana and Rodian look at each other, aghast. A snort is followed by a roaring crash. Diana shrieks, ducking beneath the overhead slab of the kitchen table; Rodian rushes over to the basement door, storming down the stairs. Something isn’t right. How could the rhinoceros have broken into the basement? It’s underground.
“Rodi—Rodian wait! What are you doing!”
“Just stay there.” She runs after him, wobbling as the floor shakes.
The rhinoceros breathes heavily in the hole that it’s barged through, lethargically hanging its head, priming its horn. It stares Rodian directly in the eye. It seems to be trying to communicate something to him but he can’t tell what it is; he can feel inside him that the rhinoceros is about to do something that it doesn’t want to do, but it must, and that he must not worry. Just stand there, it seems to say, grunting.
“Rodi—!”
The rhinoceros charges at Diana as she tumbles down the stairs, passing phantasmically right through Rodian. He turns around in shock; it takes him a few seconds to register that Diana is impaled against the wall of the basement, the rhinoceros struggling to remove his horn from out of the wall.
“N…No…” Rodian pleads. He approaches Diana, her body smattered with blood and positioned as if she’d hanged herself.

“Rodian?”
“Wha—what?”
“Why are you staring at the TV so intently? You’re watching cartoons, and so dreamily. Is something wrong?” It’s Diana. Unable to comprehend or respond to the chimerical events that occurred moments ago, he takes a swig from his gallon of milk and continues watching cartoons intently, brooding necromantic, penumbral thoughts.

V

“Rodian! Rodian wake up!”
He shrugs her off, flailing his arm blindly above his head. Flustered and terrified, Diana shakes him until he’s at least half-awake.
“I had such a terrible nightmare…oh Rodian, the rhinoceros crashed into, I mean busted down the wall and you ran downstairs and against your imploring me not to I ran after you and you were standing in front of the rhinoceros and it…you were…talking to it? And then it charged forward, right through you, and just as I was about to—I woke up.”
Rodian flings himself off the bed, slamming himself upright against the wall.
“What is it?”
“No…nothing.”
“It’s something. You’re afraid, I can tell. But why? Why are you afraid of my dreams.”
“I think I had the same dream, except—”
“Except what?”
“Except it was a daydream.”
Diana chuckles, tugging him back into bed. “Stop making fun of me!”
“No, Diana, I swear—”.
“Would you stop? Now kiss me.”
He turns his head away. He gets up from the bed and throws on his flannels then walks out of the room, shutting the door behind him. Knees cross-eyed, Diana stares at the door, hurt, but perplexed.
They’re at her house and he could walk to the coffee maker blindfolded. He pours too much ground in. It tastes like salt-water. He doesn’t know what to make of the…uncanny coincidence. He’s read of the manifest and latent content of dreams, but that’s about all he knows.
Diana tiptoes down the stairwell, trying as best she can to appear like she’s not trying to attract his attention. Tucked up her sleeve is a switchblade. Rodian glances up at her; she smiles affectionately. He feels an aura of holiness about her, and as she winds herself around his back, placing her elbow on his shoulder, he nestles himself in her tendrilous ensconce. When he closes his eyes she surreptitiously slips the switchblade into her hand and presses it against his neck, clicking the button and jutting the blade into his throat. Blood squirts out like a sawed off faucet, streaming and then spewing in fish-out-of-water spurts.

Diana tiptoes down the stairwell, trying as best she—
“Stop. Don’t move or I’ll—”
“Rodian?”
“Take off your gown.” She giggles, role-playing along. “Take it off.”
“She, arms crossed, pulls her nightgown over her head. Rodian snaps off her bra and circles around her.
“Take off your—”
“Rodian…?”
“Do it.” She rolls her eyes. “Now.”
She plays along, teasing him, pulling the strap of her panties and snapping them back, slowly easing them off with her thumbs.
“Look just hurry up, I don’t care about the theatrics. Take them off this isn’t a fucking joke.”
Uneasy, she recoils, letting them perfunctorily drop to the floor, coiled around her feet, staring him directly in the eyes, apprehensively naked and self-conscious of her body due to his humorlessness. He circles around her again, searching to find some kind of weapon to prove he’s not a lunatic. Scrutinizing her head to toe, even between her toes, sniffing for poison.
“Rodian, what…exactly are you doing? I know you’ve always been on the sexually eccentric side but—”
“Just shut up. Just shut up please.” He backs off her, wincing; turns around, helplessly tying together the truant loose ends.
“Rodian…Rodian what is it?”
“You just killed me,” he shivers.“You just killed me. You killed me you killed—you came down the stairs, just like you just did, walked behind me and wrapped yourself around me and then somehow killed me. I died I was dead I—”
“Rodian…”
“I’m not on anything okay. I swear on—yesterday, yesterday that dream you had well, well it actually happened, to me. I was serious, earlier, when I said I had that daydream, that daydream it wasn’t a dream it was real I saw you die. And now, now this—”
“Rodian, it was just a dream. Calm down…” she eases towards him, “it was just a dream. Here, there, now no—”
He lashes her arm off his shoulder. “It was motherfucking real. I don’t care if you believe me. Something’s going on, something I don’t understand. Maybe I’m going crazy, but if I was crazy then I wouldn’t be aware of it.
“Just please, Diana, believe me here. I’m telling you the truth. It happened.”

VI

She sighs incredulously. “Since you’re so adamant about this fantasy of yours…say I were to believe you. Are you insinuating that I am now going to have a nightmare of me killing you?”
“Possibly.”
“But, Rodian, then even if you’re…dreaming such horrid; daydreaming such horrid things; even if I then dream them in my sleep, they are still only dreams.”
They’re sitting on opposite ends of the couch. Diana is practicing knitting, swearing under her breath every couple of minutes. Rodian is hunched over, head in his hands, racking his brain for an explanation.
“I think I’m going to go out. Get some air. I’ve got to get out of this house.”
“Where are you going to go?” she asks, implicating that she wants to accompany him.
“I don’t know. I think I’m going to visit that detective that interrogated me. He had some sense about him.”
“What about your parents?”
“Are you serious?”
Worried, she haphazardly peruses other options.
“What about the…what about the librarian? She’d know a lot about mythology, wouldn’t she, I mean—”
“Diana?” Instantly, she stops rambling and comes to her senses. “Are you going to come with me or not?”
“Of course of course I just don’t think it’s such a good idea you, for you, I mean, to see that man.”
“Meh. What harm could he do. He’s just a detective and it’s not like I did anything wrong.”
“Yes, in that case we did nothing wrong, but—”
“Yeah yeah, I know. C’mon, let’s go.

Thomas looks at both of them. He closes his eyes and exhales cigarette smoke. He looks at them again, unaffected. He’s been working a thirty hour shift and his boss is still being a little shit.
“So, you premeditate your girlfriend, your, your girly-friend’s dreams.”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”—“We’re not together yet.”
He taps on his cigarette, ashing into the garbage can. Finishing it and putting it out on his desk, he clasps his hands together and leans forward. He really, really has to pick his nose. This thought causes a chain-reaction—he snorts. Rodian jumps in his chair, Diana reaches out to him; he’s on edge, and she’s getting sick of having to calm him. So what if he had the same daydream as her dream? It could’ve been a completely different rhinoceros, or even a once-in-a-lifetime human freak accident. Rodian picks his nose. He regrets contacting Thomas, who thus far has been skeptical and of no use. He’d have rather drugged Diana and waited for her to wake up and tell him that she had the same exact dream as his daydream. Except it didn’t have the surreal quality of a daydream, rather, the visceral quality of watching snuff video-clips online.
“There has been no info gathered from the rhinoceros incident,” Thomas says drearily. “As for the phenomena that you both had the same dream, or, you, Rodian, daydreamed your girlfriend’s succeeding dream; mere coincidence is not out of the question. I also don’t see how it is any relevant to this case.”
“Thomas, I’m wouldn’t just make this up. Diana seriously tried to kill me.”
“I did not!”
“Don’t listen to her, she did. She came up from behind me and, did something, and then I died, and then before I knew it I was alive again.”
Thomas has an appointment with his psychiatrist in two hours. Rob Wonderland. Jesus, what a name.
“Okay kids, I think I’ve heard enough,” he slaps his hands on his knees.
“Wait. Wait you can’t be telling me that you believe that a rhinoceros did not raze half of my house last week, and you cannot, you cannot tell me that rhinoceros didn’t come stampeding out of my TV, because it did, and I was there, just like I was there, corporeally and mentally, when she came up to me and, I don’t know, she was the one that—”
“I believe you, alright. I believe a rhinoceros that no longer exists came stampeding out of your TV. Sometimes things just happen in life and you can’t always resort to two plus two equals four.”
“You can’t tell me it’s plausible that a rhinoceros came stampeding out of my TV. I mean—”
“Enough. I just did. I’m sure the ARF is chasing that rhinoceros down right now and there’s a happy family in Africa that’s ready to adopt it right this second. Now if you’d excuse me I have other matters to attend to.”
“What could possibly be a more important matter than a rhinoceros stampeding out of my TV.”
“In case you haven’t heard, Miss Angeles, the third grade teacher at the local elementary school, was murdered today in front of the supermarket, her head shoved into basket of oranges today.”
“Oh c’mon people die all the time.” Diana, taken back by the conversation, crosses her arms in aversion.
“Excuse me? Your ignorance disgusts me. I order you to leave my office right this moment.” Thomas gets up to open the door.
“Fucking pigs,” Rodian mutters, the door slamming behind him. Diana glares at him.
“Well that was an absolute display of charismatic new urbanism in there. You certainly won him over.”
“Oh will you shut up.” Diana stamps her food on the ground.
“I’m going home. You can drag out your temper tantrum here without me, because you never know, I might just kill you,” she snaps, whirling around tempestuously and trotting off.
Rodian slouches onto a nearby bench in the precinct, changing the song on his iPod every thirty seconds or so.

VII

“Rob, I’ve been over this with you already. You can’t just blame that his mother running off with some wop is why Dam is flunking seventh grade. I know he probably smokes marijuana. What, and you don’t? I have no control over what he does; I don’t know where he gets his money from. For all I know he’s dealing the stuff. He leaves whenever he wants to and he comes home usually when I’m pretending to be asleep. I’ve tried talking to him about it but he doesn’t listen; just goes on about how I’m a detective, not his Dad. I try to tell him, tell him that—no matter what he did, I wouldn’t turn him in if I knew; I’d never arrest him; I’d call my partner to do it if it came to that.
“And yes he still blames me for his mother running off, and sometimes, I don’t blame him either. I’m sure you know what it’s like being a detective—well, I know, you don’t, but I’m sure you’ve watched Law & Order before and see how stunted the relationships are between the co-workers. Think about when I’ve got to work overtime and I come home and dinner’s waiting, cold or spoiled, on a plate on the dining room table; they’re both already asleep or she’s out, probably at the bar or bowling with her chummy guy friends. What am I supposed to tell her? That I can just let this pedophile on the loose keep going at it and pay more attention to her?
“ Damian, Dam, there’s nothing I can do to interfere without him only thinking I’m out to betray him or sap even less of his trust in me.”
“What dosage of Abilify did I last prescribe you?”
“Rob, Rob I don’t know. I forget to take the damn pills most of the time. Fifteen milligrams I believe? Ten? Ten twice a day? Something like that.”
“Okay.” He goes over his diagnostic notes, flipping through the scribble on the yellow pages as if he can’t even find Thomas’s file. “Ten milligrams, twice a day. How about we up that to fifteen milligrams, twice a day.
“Oh, and the Xanax; if you don’t mind, I’d like to up that to ten milligrams, twice a day. That should help.”
“Rob, don’t you think that’s a little…much?”
“Oh no, you’re a heavyset man, you’ll be fine. I see that you’re undergoing a lot of stress right now and your anxieties seem to be leading to a hopeless outlook on life and depression.”
“If…you say so. Thank you Rob.”
“No,” he flicks the pages back into place, “problem.”
“Do you have any advice…about my boy? I don’t want him to do anything stupid, you know. He’s starting to really hang out with the wrong people and he’s becoming more and more irrationally angst-ridden.”
“Thomas. You can’t help your son without first helping yourself; and in the state your in, I don’t think it’s best to interfere with your son’s teenage jaunts. He’ll come to. If anything happens, just give me a call.
“Oh, and you mentioned, you wanted to schedule appointments with your son and I.”
“Yes, if that’s possible…”

VIII

“What do you want,” Diana snarls.
“Can I stay at your place. I don’t care if you—”
“You have the nerve to ask me if you can stay at my house after how you treated me today?” She reconsiders. “You can sleep in the basement. My parents aren’t home.
“But don’t try any funny things. You know what I mean.”
“Right,” he rolls his eyes as she turns around. He turns around himself, at the sounding of a swooshing sound. The leaves behind him seem to have formed into a serpentine spiral, whooshing up up and up into the sky.
Inside Diana hollers from the stairwell railing that she’s going to bed.
Rodian lies down on the couch, flipping on the TV. He turns the channel to Cartoon Network; Adult Swim is on. There’s a commercial for hot-sauce. He can’t stop obsessing about his day-night terrors; a much better description than daydreams. Before lying down on the couch he grabbed a chef’s knife from the kitchen counter. He hides it beneath one of the mats on the couch. Every now and then his eyes flit in the direction of the stairwell; waiting for Diana to come down in her nightgown again.
Hours pass. He wonders if Diana is actually asleep. Probably on the phone with some other guy. Rodian goes out onto the porch and sniffs a Valium he stole from his parent’s medicine cabinet. Rolling his head back, lolling it on his shoulder; he hears a shriek come from upstairs; the light in her room sparks out. The Valium having already slithered up into his brain, his reaction is delayed; he falls out of the chair, knocking it over with him.
As soon as he steps into the living-room the lights go out as well. He grabs another knife from the kitchen counter, thinking it best to wade his steps over to the couch and get the other knife. To his astonishment, it’s no longer there. He creeps over to the light but as he forecasted, it’s blown out. Suddenly he feels a gruff hand on his shoulder; he whirls around and plunges the knife into the intruder. Immediately the lights flicker back on. Diana is staggering backwards, in front of him, the knife dug into her abdomen and having perforated through the small of her back. Blood begins to dribble from her mouth, then in droves; Rodian, benumbed, stands absolutely still, staring at her as she gurgles and teeters like a newborn fawn trying to stand for the first time to her death.

IX

“Rodian!” Distantly he hears the ardent concern of Diana’s voice. “Rodian, please, please wake up.”
“Wha…what?” He can’t open his eyes; the brightness above burns his eyes. He swats her away as she tries to hug him to death. He’s lying on her living-room floor. “Are you okay?”
“Rodian don’t be silly I’m fine, I’m fine. But you, you; what happened I’m so sorry I was asleep I woke up a couple hours ago and I tried to shake you awake I even poured freezing water on you but you wouldn’t wake up you were breathing but I still thought you were dead and oh Rodian I didn’t know what to do I thought about calling the police or your parents or—”
“What did you dream. Tell me what you dreamt”
“I…I—”
“You dreamt it, didn’t you. You dreamt of killing me, exactly the same way I told you that you would. You—”
“Came down the stairs and—oh Rodian, I should have believed you; I never thought; it didn’t make any sense.”
He flops back onto the floor. “Well it’s not like a rhinoceros barging out of a TV is very easy to comprehend either.”
She flings herself onto his chest. “Rodian, what’s going on? What the hell is going on?”
“Next, you’ll dream of me, killing you,” he grabs her by the arm. “There will be a shriek from upstairs and the lights will go out. You’ll go downstairs; the living-room lights will also go out. You’ll see me, grab my shoulder, and I’ll plunge one of the kitchen knives into you.”
“I can’t control my dreams,” she whimpers. “You’ll live them vicariously until we find a means to stop all of this.”
“What happened to me last night anyway?” Rodian asks, sitting up reluctantly.
“I don’t know. I watched you snorting something outside of my window, and then you went inside. I went to bed after that; it bothers me to watch you do drugs.”
Rodian disregards this, pressing his forehead against his knees. “What I want to know is…what happened to my dreams.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t dream anymore; at least, ever since I had that day-terror of you getting impaled by the rhinoceros.”
They lie on the floor together in silence for a good fifteen minutes. She open and closes her hand on his chest. Rodian remembers the knife he had hid beneath the couch mat; he gets up, kissing her scalp. He lifts up the mat and the knife is still there, spattered with dried blood.
“Fuck.”
“What…what is it?” Diana surges over to him, “Oh my, oh my—” The wind knocks out of her.
“Neither of us are dead,” Rodian ominously remarks.
“Then who is?”
“I think I…have an idea.”
“What is it?” Rodian sprints over to the phone and takes Thomas’s number out of his pocket.
“Thomas, it’s Rodian. Wait, wait—I just want to ask a question, it’s urgent. Miss Angeles, how did she die; with a her face full of oranges I know, I know, but how—oh, oh Jesus, I think I—Thomas I think you should see this. I believe the murder weapon is under my couch.”
Rodian hangs up. He saunters back over to Diana. When he looks up he sees her on the floor, her intestines spilling out of her stomach like maggots, the knife pinning her to the floor. Rodian vomits on her body, then scampers out of the house, grabbing as many of his belongings he can feasibly carry with him; he forgets to filch money from her parents room, races back; sets off to the only place he knows that no one knows.

He left the knife engorged in her body. Thomas, if he actually even bothers to show, will most likely assume that Rodian is the murderer of both Diana and Miss Angeles. He’s rummaged through his mind and read quite a few books in his life, and he has a suspicion that he’s the—but he first wants to confirm it from the only…reliable source.
Stumbling around in the forest, swatted at by sneering branches; caught in vines. He’s searching for a TV. A house he can break into. Thoughts of Diana are only further benumbing. Seeing her body, splayed open like that, in person—
He trudges on.

X

Rodian passes out on a patch of flustered leaves. Whatever the rhinoceros was trying to say to him…well, there was only one way to find the rhinoceros. In his dreams. He thought of Diana occasionally but only to his disbelief. He couldn’t resort to his parents; knowing them, they’d only reproach him. The evidence against him was beyond incriminating. He passed out after exhausting himself from losing himself in the forest as best he could. He’d hiked for miles; he doubted he was even in the same state anymore. He curls up into a fetal position before closing his eyes. Even if a wild animal were to attack him in his sleep, it would be irrelevant; Rodian had the notion that this would probably be the last dream he’d ever have; at least, a dream that he had no tangible influence.
In his dream, or more so, his new reality, he awoke on a dark plane somewhat similar to what the astral plane has been described like. His head was against a fogged, glass surface, and when he arose to stand there was nothing but darkness around him as far as the eye could see, except for the opaque, fogged surface he was standing on. He walked forward and felt the settled mist brush against ankles and swirl up and around his legs. He kept on walking, shrouded by umbra, until he thought it best to somehow summon the rhinoceros instead of floundering around aimlessly.
…How does one summon a rhinoceros?. He was grabbing at straws. The only definite thing he believed in was that whatever was happening had to do with his own dreams, and that he had some kind of…that he could mold his dreams, perhaps even to the point of bringing Diana back to life. There was obvious and incomprehensible gaps regarding his instinct, and the rhinoceros never came. He fell asleep on the glass surface and awoke tussled in a the same patch of leaves.

Not long after Rodian fled Diana’s house the the police arrived, hastily followed by Thomas; her neighbor happened to be a voyeur. Thomas arced his head and stared at the body for a good five minutes or so.
“This makes no sense.”
His glances over his shoulder and realizes his partner is in the other room. He stares back at the body; the frozen look on her face. The killer would have had to stab her in the stomach, and then precisely stab her again with the same knife against the floor to pin her against it. There were no abrasions other than those of the initial stabbing.
He recollected Miss Angeles’s autopsy; the abrasions and entry wounds were nearly identical. Not only, but one shade of the blood appeared to be more recent in color than the other, far dried. He remembered Rodian’s dithyramb about the dreams. The dreams. Wasn’t he…he mentioned Diana murdering him, but not—what if he was afraid of another night terror episode and prepared himself beforehand? Was it in self-defense? There was nothing indicative on the body that Diana intended to attack Rodian; quite the contrary. The look on her face was one of someone…it seemed to question her murder. As if she’d been murdered my an apparition.
Why would have Rodian left the murder weapon behind? Perhaps because now he was the obvious culprit? It didn’t take much brooding that if he was to prepared to defend himself against another attack, he’d have taken the knife with him; or some means of protection.
Nothing made any tangible sense, much like the case of the rhinoceros. This was the only connection between the two aside from Rodian being involved.

XI

As Thomas was on the trail of Rodian, Rodian was tracking down an illusory rhinoceros. He’d made it out of the woods and now was trekking down what seemed to be an abandoned back road, lined with dilapidated shacks. He looked into the fogged windows of some of them; no one seemed to live in any of them anymore. There was something eerie about how they were all lined up; twelve on each side, replicas of each other.
What the fuck: am I going have to buy a TV and wait for a rhinoceros to barge out of it, Rodian thinks. He’d found an indelible place to hide; the rhino is a strange animal. He’s not sure if they’re naturally violent or if only when provoked. What would have provoked it to impale Diana? What was it trying to communicate to him? Perhaps it was trying to forewarn him about the forthcoming events; her death. If it did then, why not now? He could use some guidance at the moment.
He moseys down the rifted street, superstitious, stepping over the cracks. It’s okay to sedate ourselves as long as we pay for it, but if it’s not legal or not backed by doctors or brand names, it’s not okay. Painkilling, Rodian thinks, chuckling. He pops another Valium stolen from his parents. He’s slowly coming to conceive that Diana is actually dead, and that most likely, there’s nothing he can do about it except cry over her body and beg her back to life. Why do they bother doing that in the movies anyway; you can’t beg someone back to life. Without her…unemployed, no lovers no friends, no hope, living off his parents. Can’t go back to school; students haywire with themselves, teachers unpredictable and usually a waste of credits. He’d end up locking himself in his dorm, popping pills and backwashing it with espresso and cough syrup.
He drifts on, gazing into each rift he passes. The houses all seem to diffuse and pinch into a magnifying glass he can walk into. He wanders forth, despairing over Diana, popping another Valium, musing over thoughts of suicide, his head hung. As he trudges on the rifts seem to emit an angelic, golden-white glow. He looks up and the shacks are beginning to stretch and merge into arcs; water spilt on a painting. They form into viscous overpasses, roped ooze dangling from their undersides. The light from the rifts suddenly burst forth from the ground, walling him in on both sides; a passageway alit by the light from the rifts.
He feels like he’s sleepwalking, drowsy now. Deserted by his only companion when he needs her the most: where the wild things are. Nothing makes any tangible sense, in coalition with this world at least. Apparitions pass by him, chatting without any recollection. Whatever he was in search of he’s found something otherworldly nonetheless. It might not be a rhinoceros but it’s a, he stops at the maw of an abstruse, arcane tor.
“Hello,” a polite, young-woman’s voice chirps.
“Hi.”
“You’re probably wondering where you are right now, aren’t you?” she chimes, quirky and obsequious in appearance as well as personality.
“You could say that,” Rodian mutters.
“Come this way; everything will be explained to you. No need to mope!” She races off, down a pathway leading down the tor that…wasn’t there before. “Follow me!”
He steps onto the pathway and immediately he’s plummeting straight into the maw of some clockwork, absurd plain, much different than the fogged, glasslike plain he encountered before. First of all, the sky is filled with royal purple smog and stars hung by…strings, from some unperceivable source. They twirl around slowly, like…puppets. Everything here is made from art supplies. Paper mache meteors floating not that far off, wiring, oil and water paints, brushes floating by him like on assembly lines. Puppets. Everywhere.
Up ahead there’s another pathway, floating, bellied by stalactites leading to a…castle. A castle built out of erector-sets, bathtub blocks, and paper-mache. There is a gigantic clay crane at the castle’s pinnacle.
“Hi there! So happy you made it…oh! I’m just so happy you’re here,” the elfish woman squeals.
“Made it…how; are there other methods of making it?”
“Why…well…you know, some people that make it this far—they, they have a fear of heights and often—”
“Gotcha.”

XII

The dogs have lead the tracking team to…where Miss Angeles was murdered. Thomas sighs. The blood on the knife was indeed the blood of her, but why would Rodian return to the scene of his first crime? He wraps it up; calls the team off. Some of the guys offer him to accompany them to the 181 Club for some drinks, but he waves them off with a wistful grin. He walks off smiling as they chase after him shouting “C’mon old man!” “First round’s on me!”
He’s got a great bunch of guys. But the drinks are cheaper when they’re coming from your own bottle, if not straight from it. Nothin’ on his mind except to keep it that way. Opens the front door; son’s not home; nope, he is, the bed-springs are composing love poems. Guess it’s that time of year. He mopes into the kitchen, eyes already on the liquor cabinet through the living-room wall. Grabs a used glass from the sink; washes it off half-heartedly. Scatters ice all over the floor; picks up each piece with precision. Pours himself a full glass of Skyy.
And when his son finally realizes he’s home; been listening to the love-birds sing their song; he rushes down the stairs half-naked, the girl rushes to get dressed.
Pours himself another glass.
“I’m fucking sick of this kid,” he thinks. His boy, grinning toothily as if his dad should be proud he just scored another coked out slut, runs towards him to give him a sex-high bear-hug. Thomas hits him in the face with his glass, vodka bespattering the walls like blood with it. He kicks the kid to make sure he’s down and rushes to shut the kitchen door.
“Get out you fucking cunt and if you come back I’ll file for a restraining order.” She screams, crying hysterically.
“Get the fuck up you lousy—” but before he finish his sentence, his son has smashed the bottle of vodka over his head, chasing after the girl.

XIII

Rodian ogles and admires the clockwork, the machinery; the “artisan plain”, he’s coined it. He’s followed the obsequious nymph up to the castle; she flirts with him the entire way. He pops another Valium; two, three. She’s off running ahead; he’s awestruck. She takes him by the hand; he stumbles, she drags him with her up to the front steps of the castle.
Inside, the rhinoceros nods its head. Inside, the castle is ornate and marbled, with chandeliers and stained glass windows; the whole works.
“You’ve made it, I see,” the rhinoceros bellows, chuckling mildly.
“I made it? By accident maybe, or with half my mind left.”
The rhinoceros laughs heartily. “Would you like a drink?”
“Yes; your finest on the rocks.”
“So be it; Titalia, get the man his drink.” He notions towards the nymph with his horn. “So. Your lover is dead.”
“She’s not my—”
“Your only friend in life is dead.” Rodian doesn’t respond. The rhinoceros begins to laugh. “And you really think she’s dead?”
“I…killed her. I saw her, her, her body. So yes. I believe so.”
“I have horrible news!” The rhinoceros roars merrily. “She is…still alive. Very much so.”
“How is that horrible news?”
The rhinoceros. “I’ve been looking for someone like you for quite some time now, you know.
“There are not so many…candidates, per say, that could replace the prestige and meticulousness of the boogeyman.”
“The…who?”
“The boogeyman. But you—but you; I’ve been watching you. It’s only a hundred thousand years or so that your type comes around. Usually misanthropes or dipsomaniacs. Nevertheless: you began vicariously experiencing episodes of Diana’s dreams before they happened. Then, you gradually progressed to infiltrating her dreams. By then, I was on the edge of my seat, you could be the on! That you are, but let me continue anyway—
“When you ran from her dead body and fell asleep in the woods, I knew right then and there it was you. You had infiltrated your own dreams.
“Now all you have to do is learn how to control them, and after that, others’.”
Flabbergasted yet unflappable, Rodian digests the explanation he’s entertained all along. Aside from the part about him being the boogeyman.
“So,” Rodian peruses.
“So.” The rhinoceros yawns, reaching out for his bowl of cocaine. “It’s probably best if I tell you what happened to the last boogeyman.”
Huffing nearly half a bowl of the stuff, he begins. “The former boogeyman, well, to sum it up within seconds: he murdered himself within his own dreams. His own nightmares sinuated into the one’s he’d conjure. He was weak, at heart; susceptible to nightmares. He was crawling out of the closet one night…overtired, you know, exhausted from the high he received off of scaring others. And the nightmare, an actual murder he had planned, backfired; he had it; he ended up killing himself.
“Titalia attempted to revive him…and did. Not as a human, though. Only as a phobia.
“A rhinoceros.”

XIV

“So you’re…the boogeyman.”
“Oh, no, not anymore. I’m retired. I can’t say I haven’t tried; people just aren’t very afraid of rhinoceroses, especially when they…”sneak” out of your TV, closet, shower drain, etc. My point is, I can’t do the job anymore and someone’s got to do it.
“I stumbled upon you as I was attempting to…resuscitate my profession. I soon discovered that you are, let’s say, one of a kind.”
“And you want me…to be your apprentice.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I want you to be the boogeyman.”
Rodian’s thoughts stammer. “How does one exactly…become the boogeyman. And, on second thought, what does the boogeyman even…do?”
The rhinoceros snorts wistfully. “This generation: they are so stubborn and adamant. No one’s allowed to be afraid of the dark. They’re inured to it, or they’ve adapted to it. Sleeping with headphones on. Comforting things.” The rhinoceros shakes his head. “You, you don’t even know the boogeyman!”
“Well…I know of the boogeyman.”
Dogmatically enthusiastic, the rhinoceros continues, “but you don’t know the…you don’t know what it takes to be the boogeyman; what the boogeyman even does! It’ll split your soul in two.”
“Wait,” Rodian puts his arms out, “You can’t actually expect me to—I never agreed to being the boogeyman. I’m standing here, in front of a rhinoceros, in a paper mache castle. I’m still trying to take all this in. You can’t just expect me to—”
“But yes I can. You can not train to become the boogeyman, no matter how hard or long you try to mime his adroit, au fait, consummate ingeniousness! Becoming the boogeyman…not so much ‘becoming’ as being gifted; you were born my successor. I have been searching for you my entire life. You are the only progeny I have.”
Rodian stares at the rhinoceros unresponsively, awed, and yet, skeptical, despite what he’d already endured.
“This place…that Titalia has taken you, is called the Lunacy Fringe. It was here long before predecessor and I’m sure his own.” Rodian gazed around him, stunned albeit intrigued. “This is your new home. You can never go back to the life you once lived, unless you want to live behind bars for the rest of your life…until, of course, you dreamed.
“Your dreams…,” the rhinoceros’s belly, prickled with hair, swayed back and forth as it talked in its guttural tremor. “They are where you exist. They are now your reality. You will weave through your own dreams, those of others, and ultimately, those of your prey.”
“My prey?”
“Ah.” The rhinoceros chuckles. “I suppose I haven’t yet fully elaborated on the vocation of the boogeyman.
“You see, your craft is that of,” the rhinoceros pauses, apparently disgusted remembering what it was like when he was initiated as the boogeyman. “Assassinating those afraid of the dark.” The rhinoceros says this with specific emphasis on those afraid of the dark.
Rodian, his mouth half-agape, raises one eyebrow, slightly wincing. “So what you’re trying to say, or what you did say, a little euphemistically, is that you want me to fucking murder children.”
“No; not just children. You’ve got it all wrong. Yes, children are more susceptible of being afraid of the dark and therefore the boogeyman as stereotyped as only killing children; however, there are many, many adults afraid of the dark. In fact, you are more of an…enforcer of justice. You don’t have to murder children. That’s your choice. It’s a generalization to say children are afraid of the dark; it’s people like us that make them afraid. So if you stay away from them, or are inclined to stay away from them for personal reasons unbeknownst to me, so be it.”
“People…like us?”
The rhinoceros sighs, shaking his head. “Yes, the boogeyman is an actual person. What his pretty perceives of him is their worst fear; whatever they are most terrified of. Of course, this gets complicated when someone is terrified of something more abstract, such as themselves, or losing a loved one. In those cases, particularly in those afraid of losing a loved one, you will appear as the said loved one—they are, in a sense, losing their loved one if they themselves die.”
“You know, I’d respond with something plausible, like, ‘you’re a seriously sick fuck’, but—”
“You have realized that having come this far, there is no going back,” Titalia interrupts.
Rodian turns to look at her; her eyes are a silvery, ameliorating blue.
“I am the…I am the…”
The rhinoceros lowers his horn, drawing back.
Rodian lolls his head in thought. He notices his shadow; the light from one of the revolving chandeliers causes it to spin around him. Gazing at it dizzies him. There is a twinkle in that shadow, he tries to trace its source.
“How do I bring her back to life.”

XV

Rodian no longer dreams when he sleeps. He’s turned them off. When he is awake, he is in a constant world of interchangeable dreams, that of which he can mold and pass through from one to the next. Whenever he needs, he can dream himself back to the Lunacy Fringe. He often catches himself daydreaming, except that now he can’t prevent himself from intruding on them. The only time he returns to reality is when he invades the dreams of others; much like the mythological boogeyman, he teleports into their closet, creeps out, and enters into their personal dream world through the ear canal.
With toying and manipulating dreams he can eventually twist reality. Through ‘dream gaps’ of the depressed who are fixated on the past, he can go back in time, and even to some extent, accelerate it, from those who consistently dream of the future. Everyone has their own ‘dream world’, but he’s able to mix them: take one prop or characteristic of one person’s dream and place it in another’s, or completely combine the two dreams; often what bubbles to the surface from the latter process is a grotesque machination that abhors both dreamers, effecting their realities in calamitous, sometimes dire, ways. Night terrors, amplified by the diurnal.
Titalia often accompanies him on his experiments with dreams. She tries to deviate him from the path of abomination and iniquitousness that is notoriously sirenic of his profession, particularly to those who are still enchanted by its novelty.
“Rodian…” she whimpers, as he constructs his fifth zombie of the day, attempting to resurrect Diana. The zombies, infused with his frustration and rage, then festinate off in a contortionist manner, preying on the living to satiate their quenchless hunger.
“What am I doing wrong?” he pleads, falling to his knees. She glides over, sitting down cross-legged next to him.
“The dead don’t dream, Rodian.”
“Then how can I…?”
“You must enter the daydreams or dreams of a person who is dreaming during a period in which Diana is still alive.”
“That sounds easy enough. Can’t I just do that myself?” Rodian scoffs. “That’s what I have been doing; it’s not working.”
“You are overwhelmed with guilt; it taints your dreams.”
Nearby a couple wades into the graveyard Rodian’s been pouting in. The young-man, handsome, leads the girl by the hand; she’s wearing a polka-dot skirt and a ruffled romper. Rodian snickers; the girl is trembling. Titalia tries to distract him by sharing with him her personal life; some ex who’s obsessed with her, won’t stop calling, “shits bats”, etc. but Rodian is already overcome with mindless vengeance.
“He was such an asshole, he…” Titalia covers her mouth, biting down on her lip until it bleeds to prevent herself from screaming.

Lieutenant Hall taps Thomas on the shoulder. “Sir, we’ve found the girl’s…lower intestines, wrapper around a tree about three yards from the…”
“Good, good. Have you identified what’s left of the bodies?”
“No…sir; there isn’t much to go on.” Lieutenant Hall swallows the trickle of vomit spilling into his mouth. “Who would…”
“I don’t know, Hall,” Thomas shakes his head, eyeing the young man’s head; not just decapitated but sundered in two equal halves, brain uprooted, half-masticated, and pancaked against the graveyard gates. “I just don’t know.”

XVI

The rhinoceros chuckles, shaking his head in amusement.
“It’s not funny, Elliot,” Titalia twitters.
“He’s just getting his rocks off. I was the same…back then.”
“No, you weren’t. Not like this.” She stares up ominously, as if Rodian is creeping his way into her dreams. She’s been forcing herself not to have any since—since the graveyard incident. “He didn’t just, kill them. And he killed the boy too, who obviously wasn’t afraid of the dark.”
The rhinoceros nudges her gently. “We all get carried sometimes. And, he’s just getting started. He is…allowed as many mistakes as he wants. He is, after all, the boogeyman.”
“But he’s breaking tradition…he’s, lusting after a way to redeem himself; to rid his guilt.” Titalia shivers.
“You were once an apprentice, yourself. You know what it’s like not to let your emotions become involved. You, of all people, would know.”
Titalia hangs her head. When Elliot first recruited her, she could never get past the fear of her capabilities. She had killed…once; a newborn. Ever since, she’s remained stunted; traumatized, unable to weave herself through dreams, even her own. The term boogeywoman, bothered her, anyway. Sounded like some seventy’s roller-skate waitress. The one from that movie; she can’t remember the name of it. Boogie Nights. That’s what it was called; she taps her temple.
“I wonder if they know to shoot the zombies in the head.” She huddles against Elliot’s leg; they’re both sitting on one of the floating meteors lined around the pathway to the castle.
“What?” Elliot inquires.

Thomas is lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling fan; the lights in his room are off. He’s got a bottle of Georgi looking down upon him with disappointment on his nightstand. Dam hasn’t returned home yet, and he hasn’t called it in. The killer’s moved onto couples. Thomas has dismissed the possibility of Rodian; no…one so young, let alone human, could have mauled the couple, and their corpses afterwards, in such a macabre way. It was something that would make a fan of gore flicks piss down his leg. If he hadn’t been so drunk himself, he probably would have vomited on the spot.
He took another swig from the bottle, unearthing a bag of “evidence” from his pocket. Dialudid, swiped from a pharmaceutical drug bust a couple days ago. He poured most of the contents into his hand, popping them all and washing it down with another gulp-full of vodka. Single detective turned besot pill-popping junkie with an unruly, derelict son. Could the situation be any more stereotypical? His thoughts fluttered himself to a sleep he would never wake from.
Minutes later, Rodian slithered out of the closet. The man wasn’t dreaming. Rodian approached his body, pinning up his eyelids. He’d overdosed. Rodian slumped down in a chair nearby the bed, head once again in his hands. Looking up at the man’s nightstand, he skimmed over a framed picture of the man’s son. He got up to take a closer look, chugging what was left of the bottle of Georgi. He looked from Thomas to his son, then hunched off back into the closet he came from, the picture in his hand.