He heard about the murders. One morning and had spent the good half of that morning pacing in and out of rooms, with his hands to his chin as he contemplated. Then, at around noon almost, he looked at the nun with newfound confidence and said: "I'm going out to work."

•

He had to break three men to finally get the answer and even then had to make the last one, some poor slob on a corner street selling heroin, suffer as he shuffled for a translators dictionary. The man lost four fingers for waiting and struggling for Apollo to find the words he was pleading with.

Carcosa, the junkie explained, Carcosa. He had heard that somewhere, in some old literature, perhaps. It didn’t take much more after the ruined hand for him to get directions.

He came in at dawn. When the sun barely broke through the tops of the glowing evergreens surrounding the city. The lights were still on, sputtering sparks and hanging loosely from fickle nails. It was somewhere deep, past the Christmas trees and festive cornices and vibrant decorative lights. Somewhere in the annals of the town where the people walked quickly past from, where they spoke in quiet tones and in murmurs and in stuttered fear. It was that part of town. It was funny to think too that this was where Apollo was most comfortable.

No one was awake yet, he noticed as he crept along, against the brick walls with his hands crawling along the chipped stone. There were apartments near him, but no one bothered to ruffle their curtains to watch the strangeness about to occur. He could see trails of smoke outside immediately, bonfires from the sleep hazy homeless.

He stopped at a door. He looked behind and around himself, it seemed engraved into a giant graffiti infested wall. Like a cavern within a gloomy, flat mountain. There was nothing near him, save for a late train. The apartments were far now, far enough not to hear a scream or two. This explains a lot, he thought.

He pressed his ear against the door. Nothing. He grabbed the handle. It stuttered and shut. He put his foot against it and pressed down. The steel frame bent long before the lock broke. He had to dig his foot out the door.

It shut behind him with a loud bang. He flinched, braced for the noise and upon the sound, he took out his flashlight and scanned across from him.

It looked like a desecrated field. The light bulbs were scattered about the floor like a field of glass, he could feel it in the heel of his shoes, the jagged teeth of glass. There were no lights. Bottles spilled sitting on their sides. The tables were bruised, scratched, in pieces. The stools were broken, the legs laid interred through the cabinets of liquor. Apolo grabbed one of the legs and twisted it. Rum or whiskey spilled from the hole like an open wound. He ran his finger under it and let it drizzle onto the floor.

A ruffle. He turned. The scope of the flashlight came late, he looked around. He must have scanned the whole room searching for that noise, under the tipped tables, around the beaded curtains, through the bone-dry glasses. He searched the stage where a lone microphone spun as if just grabbed. The speakers were blown out, they looked like geysers. He flashed inside and felt through the material that was torn and ripped, the mesh. He removed his hand, disgusted by the texture and rubbed whatever had caught on him. Dried blood scabs, he looked at them with curiosity almost, apprehension too. He put the blood against the light and raised it high to inspect it, thinking (stupidly) that the angle would make a difference and in this intense examination he had ignored everything. Sight and sound.

He ignored it all until he heard the noise. A bang.

He flinched. Some was scurrying, crawling. It came from the staircase. He heard someone hanging on the metal handrail, it had that kind of reverberation to it. A ringing, a stepping. Apollo ran towards it, the glass broke underneath his boots. He turned the corner. He held his breath. The light flashed up the stairs. His spine tingled. His legs slacked. He saw the shadow elongated against the wall, just the shadow.

Fuck, he thought, a good time to have weapons. His flashlight rattled.

He hesitated to step, but took a deep breath again (for it had been a while since he breathed). He didn’t know what seized him, fear or excitement, a second voice or his own, both screamed at him at once. It made him stiff legged, even as he moved forward.

He stepped onto a wood plank. It broke and he almost fell through. He recovered, grabbing the guard rails and shook his head.

The thoughts formed, visualization of the enemy.

He can’t be that tall, Apollo thought, he would have made more noise, the son of a bitch. It’s gotta be smaller than me, at least.

His heart beat faster. He hadn’t felt a thrill like this in a while, not even the court case was this thrilling. Maybe the fight with Astyanax, maybe even further back when he was still a young man with young hopes and young desires. He had to hold his hands together to stop them from shaking. His head felt split down the center, both wrestling for control, to run or to flee. He swore he heard a different voice from his own, he swore it. Right?

Go on, kill it.

He kept skipping steps as he went up the stairs. To the left, only a few steps left. A large hallway, with the bulb blown out and the copper coil still warm. There were rooms in this hallway, dozens of them leading to an end which hosted a darkness to hard for even him to figure through, too dark for his flashlight to reach. He looked to each side, some doors were closed, others creaking. One the fourth door he smelled something. Terrible, he cursed his heightened sense of smell. He put his shoulder against the door. Another metal frame. And the thing was still around, he had to be careful and looked at each of his sides before he tried working at the door. With a quick punch, he made a socket through the door, like a rivet gun. He looked inside the keyhole, briefly, he only needed to look at it for a second anyways. A second was enough. He held his breath. The smell rushed him. The decomposing bodies were overwhelming. He lifted his head to check his surroundings again. He looked back through with his nose pinched, trying to analyze how they died. The way the victims laid around the small room, as if they hadn't struggled, almost willfully died. As if they had died sleeping on the bed and carpet, sprawled out. Eerily peaceful.

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He reached his hand inside to open it from within. He got one finger in before he heard the sixth door down open. Immediately, he pushed himself off and against the wall and looked to each side. His light caught only a glimpse of the creeping door coming in and out, the hinges whining into the silent hall.

I should call Dion, he thought. Yet he moved. He couldn't help himself but move. What would Dion do anyways? He reasoned. He’s already messed up in the head, why make it worse?

He inched closer, each step cracking glass, each step sloshing through the coagulated pools of blood like mud, each step a brief heartache as his chest throbbed tighter and tighter. God, I wish I had my sword. He thought.

His head rose high, a defiant expression against all his fear and anxiety. He broke the door. His muscles flexed, his legs extended out for better balance. The flashlight scanned the room. Left to right! Top to bottom!

It had to be here. He heard the window curtains drape around something. He looked towards it, there was sunlight there, and a shadow behind the greenish-red curtains. It climbed upon the ledge. Apollo ran.

“Stop,” He screamed. He tried to jump after it. He saw the shadow fall, dropped and plopped (the sound was loud). He came to the ledge himself and looked below to a hooded figure running across the street, he stuck his body out. That was a mistake.

For the sun of a dawn only protected him, only insured him for a brief section of the room. The rest was dark. A complete blackness. Even for his red eyes. So dark, so hidden, so caught in the action, Apollo didn’t hear the creeping parasite. The sleek, black tentacled goop. The creature with the single yellow eye and the baby’s teeth who rustled atop a corpse. The corpse of Günther.

He couldn’t hear it - let alone see it. His heart was too loud, his screaming too overwhelming. He had one foot out into the open air. And suddenly the other stuck inside. A pain shot up his leg.

“What the fuck,” He screamed out. A dark spike, a prod almost, had stabbed into his leg, through his bone. He grit his teeth to stop himself from screaming.

The parasite grabbed him by the foot, then climbed his leg. A tendril drilled deep through his calves. A little thing no bigger than a child’s doll, black and formless, a glob of sorts. Its yellow eye skid around sporadically and zero-inned on Apollo. His body went cold. He saw something on the spike stabbed through his leg, something that looked like a swelling liquid being passed through, as if the tendril was a kind of syringe. The knot rode up, nearing his veins. He was injecting something into him. Apollo punched the spike down immediately to try and cut off the injection. His fist went deep into the floorboard, the creature did too. Gripping the pressured limb, Apollo yanked the parasite closer to him. He felt funny, odd. Not dead, not yet. He grabbed the parasite by the body (if it had a body) and crushed it, the only thing he could say firmly was material, the eye. The creature screamed, cried out. Its sound fizzled into bubbling blood. It died, but not in vain.

Apollo felt odd.

We feel odd, he heard the voice in his head.

His legs had a strange weight to it, as if one was heavier than the other. He ripped part of his pants for a tourniquet and tied off the end of the injected spot. He looked to where the incision was, the part of his leg still stabbed through. Apollo removed the stake and threw it on the wall. His throw was weak. He shook his head, his vision not necessarily fading, but becoming more colorful, strange. Warm. The sunlight breaking through seemed warmer, at least. More inviting.

He looked at his wounded leg, smiling. Why am I smiling? He thought. Why not?

He shook. It was time to deal with the wound, he had to stop the poisoned blood from flowing. He stuck his finger inside his leg, searched for vein and severed it. A forceful bleeding out, one his superhuman body did not understand. For he kept healing, regenerating. And he kept cutting, on and on, tiring himself, bleeding himself.

“Stupid, stupid.” He slapped himself with his other hand (the other was siphoning blood still, maybe for ten minutes now). He caught himself smiling. “Stupid!” He couldn’t even form sentences now, he couldn't even think. He slammed his head against the wall. Scared, happy, scared of his happiness. He didn’t know what wrong with him, what had caused all of this. He stopped bleeding himself and ran for a corner of a room, grabbing his flashlight along the way (who knows when he threw it, in the heat of things you tend to forget those small details). What he did know, though he could not vocalize it because his mouth became slack and his thoughts dumber and dumber, what he did know was that he felt safe in the corner, with his flashlight, bundled into a ball.

“If they come.” He struggled to talk. He laughed. “I’m dead,” He repeated, heckling. “Stupid, stupid.”

None of it made sense, the poison, the ecstatic joy in him. None of it. He looked around the room, at last, he had the opportunity to.

It looked like a mural, blood everywhere. A few bodies here and there, on the soft fur rugs below. He kept laughing, though he was terrified. Lightheaded, funny, eerily pleasant. He looked at the walls painted with the blood of the corpses laying lazily. He saw the symbols, the strange spiral, and the trident.

He laughed, he knew he shouldn’t have. But he felt so good, so good as his memories tried hard to remember what those images were. Who they worshipped, what this all was.

His stomach hurt. His rubs were pained, he gasped at least and killed his laughter, the foam appeared at the edges of his mouth. He understood everything, the poison and the creature running on the streets, the bodies, the symbol in blood.

He remembered, only briefly, before he succumbed to the ecstasy once more.

“Asmodai,” He said. “Lord of pleasure, seducer of kings, Asmodai.”