Larry was tall and thin, with a stubbly beard and thick black hair that was always in need of a trim. He wore T-shirts, jeans, and sandals, regardless of the weather, and tonight his shirt was black with the iconic red Rolling Stones lips on the front. His battered guitar case was propped up in the corner next to the couch, where he usually kept it. He tended to practice when she was at work, and it had been a long time since she’d heard him play. She was surprised by how sad this realization made her feel.

Larry unlocked and opened the door to reveal a pair of uniformed police officers, one man, one woman. The man spoke first.

“We got a call that someone broke into your apartment.”

Both officers looked Larry up and down, and the woman wrinkled her nose. After a night of performing, Larry always smelled like sweat, alcohol, cigarette smoke, and marijuana. Not exactly the best first impression to make on a couple of cops.

“Yeah,” Larry said.

He opened the door all the way and stepped aside so the officers could enter. They did so, immediately noting Lori’s presence, as well as sweeping their gazes around the apartment to take everything in. Once the officers were all the way inside, Larry closed the door. He didn’t lock it again, though.

The male officer looked to be in his thirties. He was stout, broad-shouldered, and his head was shaved. His facial features were unremarkable, his expression emotionless, almost bored. The female officer was about a decade older than her partner, as well as a few inches taller, and she possessed a runner’s build – lean and strong. Her brown hair was straight and cut short, and she wore minimal makeup and no jewelry.

“I’m Officer Rauch,” the man said. He nodded toward his partner. “And this is Officer McGuire.”

Lori and Larry gave the officers their names. McGuire took a notebook from her shirt pocket and wrote down the information.

“Which of you called to report the incident?” she asked.

“I did,” Lori said. She didn’t rise from the couch. She felt weary, although less so than she had earlier. But that wasn’t the reason she didn’t get up. She still wore only her oversized T-shirt and panties, and she’d pulled the shirt over her bare legs as far as she could to cover them. She felt uncomfortable at the idea of Officer Rauch staring at her legs, and he was bound to notice she was braless if she started moving around. Maybe she was being foolishly modest, but she didn’t care.

“As calm as you both seem to be, I take it that the intruder is no longer on the premises?” McGuire asked.

“I don’t think so,” Lori said.

“I got home right after she called,” Larry said. “I didn’t see anyone.”

McGuire nodded. “Okay. It doesn’t hurt to be thorough, though.” She looked at her partner. “Ralph?”

“On it.”

Officer Rauch gave the living room another once over before heading for the small kitchen. Larry looked at Lori and mouthed, Ralph Rauch? She knew what he was thinking. It sounded more like the name of a cartoon character than a police officer. She smiled briefly at the thought.

As Rauch headed for the kitchen, McGuire said, “Lori, tell me what happened here tonight.”

Lori nodded and began talking. Larry stood off to the side, listening, brow furrowed. She’d already told him a short version of what had occurred, but this was his first time hearing the details. Not that Lori provided all of them. She knew if she told the officers everything that had happened, they’d write her off as a kook, or worse, haul her in for a psych eval. She told McGuire about hearing the thumps, but she omitted any descriptions of the shadow creatures, and instead spoke of ‘someone’ who’d been in the living room when she’d left her bedroom to check if Larry had come home yet. As for the rest of her story, she told a modified version of the truth. The ‘intruder’ had chased her to her bedroom and broke through the locked door. She’d then hid inside the master bathroom, and the intruder had tried to break through that door as well. The next thing she knew, Larry was knocking on the door and asking if she was all right.

As she told the edited version of her story, Officer Rauch headed down the hall and into her bedroom, continuing his search of the apartment. She was uncomfortable with the idea of a strange man inspecting her bedroom and bathroom, but she knew he was only doing his job. Still, it was in its own way as creepy as the shadow things that had come after her.

Officer McGuire made notes on a pad as Lori spoke, stopping her a couple times to clarify some points. When Lori was finished, Rauch returned to the living room.

“The bedroom door was forced open,” he said. “Caused some slight damage. I’m going to look at the patio door, see if there are any signs it was forced open too. Then I’ll check the deck and take the stairs down to the ground, see if I can find anything.”

McGuire nodded, and Rauch walked toward the open patio door. As he passed the couch, Lori noticed two things about him. One was that there was a trio of lines on the side of his neck. At first she thought they were wrinkles of some sort, although the man seemed too young for that. But when he drew in a breath, the lines parted, and she realized they were openings in his flesh, like a fish’s gills. They closed once more when he exhaled. The second thing she noticed was that the nail on the pinky finger of his left hand had been painted red.

She’d taken Fiorinal while she and Larry had waited for the police to arrive, but now she felt a sharp, stabbing pain between her eyes. She began trembling, shaking so hard that tea sloshed over the side of her mug. She tried to put the mug down on the coffee table, but her hand was shaking so badly that Larry rushed forward to help her. He gently removed the mug from her hand and placed it on the glass surface of the table. A small pool of spilled tea gathered around the base of the mug, almost as if it were leaking. Or bleeding, she thought.

She watched Rauch push the vertical blinds aside with the back of his hand, probably to avoid leaving fingerprints. He examined the lock on the patio door for a moment, and then stepped out onto the deck. When he released the blinds, they swayed back and forth, clacking softly against one another. She heard the heavy tread of his boots on the wooden deck, followed by the sound of him going down the stairs.

McGuire said something then, but her words didn’t register on Lori’s consciousness. She was still staring at the swaying blinds, thinking about Rauch’s opening and closing gill slits, and especially about his red pinky nail.

“Ms. Palumbo?”

McGuire spoke louder this time, and Lori’s head jerked in her direction.

“I’m sorry. What did you say?”

“I asked if there are any details you can give us about the intruder. Gender? Race? What the person was wearing? Did the person say anything?”

It wasn’t one intruder. It was at least a half dozen, and they weren’t human. They were monsters made entirely out of shadows, with multijointed limbs and clawed hands. Oh, and they made these weird whispery sounds, like they were talking, but if they were, I couldn’t understand anything they said.

“None of the lights were on,” she said, “so I didn’t get a good look at whoever it was, and the person didn’t say anything. Sorry.”

McGuire’s lips pursed, as if she was irritated by Lori’s answer, but she dutifully jotted it down on her pad.

Lori regretted calling nine-one-one now. She’d done so in a panic, but now that she wasn’t gripped by mortal terror, she could think more clearly. What good could the police possibly do? If she’d hallucinated the shadow creatures, she needed a psychologist, not a cop. And if the things had been real, what could human police officers do to protect her? But that wasn’t the worst. The worst part was the gills on Rauch’s neck and his crimson pinky nail. By calling nine-one-one, she’d invited one of them into her apartment. She had no idea who they were, exactly, but she knew they were connected to the shadow creatures somehow.

Her eyes narrowed as she scrutinized McGuire. Was she one of them too? She looked the woman over from head to toe, trying to ascertain if there was anything odd about her. One of her nostrils was larger than the other, and she had a small scar at the right corner of her mouth. Neither feature was on a par with neck gills in terms of weirdness, though. It didn’t appear that McGuire was one of them. Unless she was simply better at disguising her true nature than Rauch was. But if she wasn’t one of them, wouldn’t she have noticed her partner’s gill slits? They weren’t the sort of feature that was easily overlooked. Maybe you didn’t have to be one of them to work with them.

McGuire turned to look at Larry.

“And you didn’t see or hear anything when you came in?” she asked.

“That’s right. I put my guitar down and headed for the hall bathroom. I thought I heard Lori crying. Her bedroom door was open – which I thought was strange since she never leaves it open when she sleeps – so I went inside. The bedroom was empty, so I knocked on the bathroom door. A moment later, Lori came out.” He shrugged then, as if to say he had no idea what had happened here tonight.

“And your relationship to Ms. Palumbo is…?”

“I’m her ex-boyfriend. We’re just friends now, and I’m staying with her for a while until I can get my own place.”

McGuire made a few more notes on her pad. She then looked to Lori once more.

“How would you describe the way your relationship to Mr. Ramirez ended?”

Lori frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Was it a mutual thing, or did one of you bring up the subject first? Would you say the breakup was civil or was it acrimonious?”

Lori exchanged a puzzled look with Larry before answering.

“Like Larry said, we’re friends now. Good ones. I know that’s rare, but….” A thought occurred to her then. “Are you asking if Larry was the intruder?”

“Not necessarily,” McGuire said. “But if Mr. Ramirez does harbor any resentment toward you, he might’ve been tempted to scare you as a way of getting back at you. And it could have had nothing to do with your breakup, could simply have been a practical joke that went too far.” She faced Larry once more. “Maybe when you discovered she’d already called nine-one-one you were too embarrassed to tell her you were the one who scared her. If it was you, this is your chance to confess before this goes any further. Admit you did it, apologize to Ms. Palumbo, and we all call it a night. What do you say?”

Lori wanted to defend Larry, to tell McGuire that he’d never play such a cruel joke on her, no matter how much anger and resentment he might have felt. He wasn’t that kind of person. But she couldn’t speak. Something that McGuire had said – one word, actually – had stopped her cold. That word was confess. McGuire hadn’t put any special emphasis on the word, but it had stood out to Lori nevertheless. She remembered what the woman – Goat-Eyes – had said to her. Confess and atone – or suffer.

Larry looked at her as if he expected her to stick up for him. When she didn’t, his expression fell, and he faced McGuire once more.

“I wouldn’t do anything like that to anybody, let alone a friend.”