"I hate zingers. I was told, growing up, that they are for the weak-minded. Like a 'Jedi mind trick', you know?" Detective Winters was doing something on his phone in our hotel room. His voice startled me as I lay half asleep on my own bed. He was sitting on his bed, half undressed, smoking under the fire alarm. I had no idea what he was talking about.

"Will you open a window? Cory has very small lungs." I requested.

"Cough." Cory said in perfect English. Then my talking crow imitated the hacking and coughing of Detective Winters in the middle of the night. It went on for about as long as a mummer's dance and then ended with the sound of a man spitting.

"Jesus would have sworn for a bird like that." Detective Winters applauded the performance and then used the lit cigarette in his mouth to light another and then he put the smoldering one in his mouth and used the lit one again to finish lighting the fresh tobacco. Then he accidentally scattered the rest of the brown stringy stuff all over the floor. He swept the remains of his new rolling kit off with the spill and shrugged, laid back, and puffed away.

"Goodness." Cory flitted down and inspected the stuff. He liked it too much and I told him to stay out of it.

A knock came upon the door. I already had a bad feeling. I'd read my horoscope and Detective Winters's too. We both had it coming our way. Nothing good could come from 'non-dairy starlight' and 'niche holes on the border'. Those phrases meant no sense, and yet our stars translated to those words, as they danced drunkenly across the keyboard of the starry skies.

"You get that." I stiffened.

"Uh, I always get it." Detective Winters smiled at me weirdly for being weird. He wasn't feeling the terror I felt. For a man who hated zingers: he sure took fear literally.

"One knock, my Lord. Very bad." Cory told me. I nodded, I already knew something was terribly amiss. Just because the armed and half naked policeman in my bedroom was blundering forward to grip the doorhandle without regard, didn't mean that we were safe. Only terror gripped my heart as my crow went to the bedpost and squawked in alarm, "Must go now!"

He opened the door and it was the same maid from before. She was wearing her regular street clothes instead of her uniform. She reminded Detective Winters that he was a policeman. He agreed and she asked him if, as a policeman, he could help her. He agreed to that too.

I didn't want to go, but I had no choice. Gagging and swaying stiffly like a terrified zombie I went with them; knowing this was going to be very bad, because I had read those weird horoscopes and believed them. Sweat shot out from my upper lip as I gibbered helplessly in dread:

"Where are we going?" I asked in apprehensive discernment, finally getting the words out of my sweaty lips.

"We are going to Sesame Street and Brooklyn Ave. You ever gone there before?" He accepted one of the woman's menthol cigarettes and fumbled with the book of matches from the hotel that was in the ashtray of his car. Then he put the cigarette to his lips and lit it while driving. He eventually cracked the window and let out most of the smoke.

"Why don't you open your window?" The woman asked. I was very afraid of the kind of trouble she was asking for. If I opened the window I might lose Cory in an awful way. Trembling I reached out and took the window's lever and opened the window a crack. Then I reached over and got the other one too. She smiled, like a golden devil, and cracked her window and then got her's down to about halfway. By then only the odor of the smoke remained.

"That's probably good." I gulped.

We got to her apartment and went inside to meet her husband and her son. The boy was tied to his bed and his eyes were terrifying and horrible. His face was monstrous and contorted and looked like a bad makeup special effect. Except that was his actual flesh. He struggled mightily and for a moment it was as though he would break free and rampage like an angry animal. His teeth glowed in the shade, sharp and ready to bite. He looked at us.

As his eyes met Detective Winters, the man froze. Then some of his hair started to wither and wilt. It became brittle and grey. He staggered backward and fell. I tried to avoid the gaze of whatever that was. It only wore her son, but something else was with us, watching us from within him. As Detective Winters made the communion of eye contact it had known him and known itself to him. Thus kin to its ways, he had fallen to the shock and horror of something unfathomably horrifying beyond words. The meaning of such a thing is simply instinctive, and to not know it is a blessing, and it cannot be known to someone until they have seen it, smelled the fruit-candy sweetness and the sulfur of its breath. Heard the voice of an angel, but not one from Heaven.

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"Open the window." It commanded. The voice of this creature was not made by a human-will, yet it was from the lips of a child. Horrible and deep and grinding like a thousand souls on wheels of torture, all crying out this one phrase in unison, and then as one voice together and tormented and irresistible.

I quaked and fell back against the wall, refusing to look at it. I crept along the wall until I got to the shades. Then I drew them and let in the light. I gasped at the surreal horror I could see then:

The whole city was covered in flesh. Parts of people twitched and dripped and dangled everywhere. Skinless ones dragged their feet, leaving trails of themselves as they went. I heard a rumbling, or rather saw it, sensed it somehow. The clouds convulsed and began to drip and it was then raining. The rain was blood.

I screamed and fell back. Cory flapped around the room and the demonic thing with us was laughing. I clawed my way to the door, frantically. Detective Winters got up suddenly, and with a wild look in his eyes. His head was struck upon the shelf and a clacking monkey doll with chimes fell free onto my back as I crawled out the bedroom door.

The vision of ultimate horror burned the landscape into my memory. Once it is seen, it cannot be unseen. As I looked around I could still feel its presence on everything. I clawed at the floor, slick with the butcher's offal, but it was just the carpet. The fear was real, and as I held myself and cried in terror: I knew the carnage was still all around me, invisible. There were bodies hung from ropes, and chopped apart, and torn, and there were dead staked to the ceiling, and vivisectioned. Only I knew they were there, even if I couldn't see them. I had seen them and knew they still remained. My heartbeat slowed and I felt the clacking of the monkey on my back. I shook myself free of it and went and hid in a corner.

"My son, he is feeling better! You two have cured him! How do you do this? No exorcism? Nothing?" The father was in tears and holding up his son for us.

"Let's get out of here." Detective Winters helped me up. Cory rode on my outstretched left arm, nervously. I kept lowering my arm to which he would click his disapproval, each time. Detective Winters helped my shocked frame into the car and tossed the toy monkey onto the seat next to me. It had most likely followed us out of the apartment, or else he had carried it. Certainty is for the weak-minded, I concluded, as I stared at its malevolent glass eyes.

We got back to the hotel room and one of us put the monkey on top of the television.

"Time to get some sleep." Detective Winters stated. He laid down stiffly, like some kind of rigid corpse.

"Must go now." Cory hid behind my head on the pillow and softly called.

I watched sleeplessly as the horrible thing sat there atop the television. I could only speculate that it was the cause of the child's malady and that removing it had made everything better. I stared at the infinite evil in its dark glass eyes. Suddenly it started to chime its little chimes, clashing them loudly in the darkness.

"Oh, gawd! It's awake!" I yelled and sat up. Cory fluttered around on the bed, flapping frantically.

"What! What's happening?" Detective Winters woke to a start.

We laid back down and I started to fall asleep. As my eyes slowly started to close the absolute terror I had felt since the beginning was starting to subside just enough to catch my breath. Maybe I would not get left forgotten in the starry skies. Perhaps the wall of sleep had an unlocked door for me to get through safely to the other side. My eyes were fluttering shut when suddenly the monkey chimed again, evilly and terrifyingly in the dark.

"That thing!" I shrieked in gross terror as I woke suddenly.

In the darkness its shape sat there ready to pounce on the sleeper. It was watching our eyes close with its own eyes always wide open and staring, shining in the darkness. The toothy grin of the diabolical creature anticipated this third calamity upon our dying nerves.

My sleep brought the image of the mirrored eyes. I stared into a mirror, seeing its marble glass amid the tufted spiky hair. The monkey in the mirror wanted out; as I dreamed in a delirious fog. My dreams told me of its true nature in the true world. The one we shared alongside it.

The doll was merely where its existence met ours, like a kind of intact vortex. The space between the walls of the whirlpool, as it drains into the darkness, gurgling. I was staring too deeply into that darkness and there it was. I could see its true form there. It clambered up out of the darkness, held back only by the glass of the mirror.

Enraged, the monkey glared and snarled at me. It showed its sharp teeth and then it began hitting the glass. It threw itself against the glass over and over. As the glass fractured and broke, it began the crawl through, shrieking and snarling in terrifying rage. Its flesh was cut to the bone and it peeled off its own face coming through the broken glass like that. Then it came crawling across the floor to get to me, its hate-filled eyes glimmering over its vicious teeth.

Sleep was not a safe place to be. The chime blasted again, clanging loudly and diabolically. I jerked to my feet with a start, the image of the nightmare still clinging to what I thought I was seeing.

Except as I blinked away the nightmare I could see the dark liquid of its true form writhing back into the shape of the doll. Its shadows scattered across the wall like animated flames with no color. The foul smell of sweet and rotting things filled the air. I could hear its growl from the doll and from all around and from within my own mind, echoing from the memory of Dream.

Then without warning there was a loud detonation and blinding flash. The doll exploded into thousands of tiny sticks that were painted in red stripes. Detective Winters put his gun back into the holster.

"Perhaps now, we can get some sleep." He had a bent rolly in his mouth with bits of tobacco sticking out of it every which way. He managed to get it lit without setting it on fire and smoked it for a minute before he snuffed it out.

"I am too afraid to." I yawned.