Today was a rude awakening. He’d locked himself in his car like normal, sleeping with the passenger seat tipped all the way back. After killing hordes of Thumper Rabbits and Mad Harry 98’s level rose to forty-five, they both went to bed, Dor in his car and Mad Harry 98 in Tuck’s Inn. That was right, Dor went to bed; he did not pass out. He went to sleep willingly tonight, eager to make amends with his captive body, and settle back into his normal routine of a gentle buzz and four hours of sleep.

What he did not anticipate was being dragged out of his car in the middle of the night.

Crash! Safety glass showered his body and a snake wrapped around his torso. Still groggy, the situation didn’t make much sense. The snake pulled. Dor hit his head. The snake repositioned. Dor smacked his shoulder. The snake really repositioned, and Dor hovered out of the shattered passenger window. A Peter Rabbit comforter with a tail stood in the kitchen. Her tail wrapped around Dor, kidnapping him from his locked car.

Other than the bumps he suffered when she tried to squeeze him out the window, she was exceedingly gentle. At least, until he regained enough wits to begin struggling. It felt like waking up to sleep paralysis—a great weight on his chest, visions of demons hovering above, and him completely powerless to move. He was scared shitless. He’d always wanted to die in his sleep, but this was over the line.

He kicked and clawed and bit and slapped and gouged. She didn’t even notice. She simply sat on the kitchen floor as her tail laid Dor’s head over her knee, pressing his cheek to the side. This was exactly the same position he woke up in yesterday when she’d saved him from choking on his own vomit, only today, he wasn’t grateful; he was terrified and powerless.

No, not powerless.

As he groggily processed the bizarre situation, one thing was perfectly clear: he needed to escape. The monster had gone too far. He needed the power to stop this abuse. His hand reached for reinforcements inside his jacket pocket. This time it wasn’t Sargent Berry he asked for help; he reached for the other pocket. Unless the flask magically summoned the power of Pert Plus, even Sargent Berry would be doomed to face this fiend. But his Glock wouldn’t be.

His fingertips wrapped around the grip. He couldn’t see the monster, but he could hear her. She hummed an airy tune, a catchy beat he’d never heard before, completely lost in her own world. He whipped out that pistol and blindly pressed it behind him until it met cold flesh. His head was turned the wrong direction to aim properly, but he could feel the barrel press into her neck. How’s it feel to be vulnerable? Apparently, not bad at all. She didn’t react.

Though his squished fish face, he snarled a threat, “you know what this does. I got your notice. Let me go, or I’ll show you what it does.”

She didn’t react, and he put his finger on the trigger, fully intending to heed Dad’s advice.

“Let me go,” he snarled.

She continued to hum her airy tune. That monster, she was so lost; she didn’t even realize the danger she was in; the danger she posed. To him, that was more terrifying than a rabid beast. A rabid beast he could put down. A clueless beauty, that was harder, much harder.

“Let me go,” he snarled, then changed his tune. “Please…really please.”

Right then, he realized he did not want to shoot her. But he would. Clueless or not, she was still dangerous.

“Please,” he begged, pressing the pistol harder to her neck. “I—I really have to pee.”

No giggles. No change.

“Fucking let me up! Please, please, please! I don’t…I don’t want to—”

He chose his next words carefully. “I need your help. And if you don’t let me go, I’ll kill you with this gun. Just like the picture in your book. Not even a beast like you could withstand that.”

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He lied on that last part, but she didn’t know that. Her tail loosened and she let him up. Dor scrambled on his hands and knees to the far wall, panting in both relief and terror. If only she were a rabid dog. His self-loathing begged him to question whether his life was worth hers. He didn’t know. Fact was, she wasn’t a rabid dog. She was a lost and clueless monster with a deadly physique. He understood that now, and that made her all the more terrifying. He couldn’t kill her and it wasn’t just because he needed her help. He simply didn’t want to kill a clueless creature, and the question his self-loathing begged made it all that much more terrifying. Is my life worth a monster’s? He didn’t know. He didn’t want to find out.

She sat across from him, separated by a long stretch of kitchen tiling. Her back propped against the passenger door to his Trans-Am while her head bopped back and forth, humming a catchy tune. The part that really slayed his emotions was that she was crying, silently crying. Tears streaked down her face, all the way to her smiling lips, and he wanted to run over and give her a hug, but the thought of getting twisted back up in her tail stopped him.

He stood up and edged over to the stove. Patterned kitchen mitts hung above it and Dor grabbed two of the prettiest ones. From across the way, he tossed them both over to her. They landed at her feet and she didn’t even wince, just kept humming and crying and smiling.

Dor pointed to them. “Those are special gloves,” he told her. “Magic gloves that keep your claws dull.”

Her eyes flashed, but she didn’t react otherwise.

“Never come near me again,” he told her. “Never come near me again unless your claws are dull.”

Still nothing.

“Answer me, stupid!” He yelled.

She never did. Unable to find a safe place to sleep, Dor left the restaurant, leaving her all alone in her near comatose state. He wandered all through downtown until early morning when a refurbished store caught his eye, ‘Minnie Binnie’s Haberdashery’. They charged an exorbitant amount of money after all money had only just begun to spend again, but he bought all the colored yarn he could afford and returned home.

Mid-morning he arrived back in the parking lot of the seedy Chinese restaurant. Adding to the disarray of Lulu and Jimmy’s vandalized cars and the boards over the window, a new feature stood out. The tin foil over Lulu’s bedroom window gleaned like a sore thumb. Dor still hadn’t recovered from this morning’s shock. The whole sequence of events from then until now played out like a bad dream, one he awoke from paralyzed in terror. He was scared, but it was a different kind of fear. He was scared to hurt the monster not just for his sake, but for hers as well.

That dazed him most of all. He did not want to hurt the monster and feared ever having to.

He entered the restaurant to greet the nostalgic ambiance of cooling fans and red lighting. Cut-screens of death flashed across all the monitors save one; exactly the scene he’d left this morning in fear. Looking to the kitchen, both the monster and the oven mitts were gone. She must have retreated upstairs. He didn’t believe the oven mitts would truly dull her claws. They cut through solid steel, after all, but he needed her to recognize just how sharp they really were. She appeared lost in her own world and he needed her to face reality, both for her own benefit and his.

He trudged into the walk-in freezer and grabbed a bag of doggy treats. She’s starving. With a sack full of colored yarn in one hand and doggy treats in the other, he faced the daunting task of walking up the back stairwell, scared shitless.

At the top, red light glowed at the far end of the hall. Rattle, rattle. Rattle, rattle. He made his intentions known and walked to Lulu’s room. Knock, knock. His fingers twisted the knob, the latch clicked, and he creaked open the door. Stars twirled across the room and a Peter Rabbit comforter sat on the bed, fiddling with something or other under there.

He dumped the treats on the mattress, set the bag of yarn next to it, and sat on the kitchen chair in the corner of the room, the one she'd dried herself off on earlier.

The events of this morning still blurred together, but Dor needed to face them. If the two of them were ever going to come to some understanding, they needed to understand one another. He crossed his arms and legs, took a big swig, and said, “let’s talk.”

The comforter wiggled and a star twirled across a pitch-black eye, likely the only response he was going to get.

“I need your help, beast,” he said, trying to drive home her situation as well as his own. “My friends disappeared and, right after that, you appeared. That’s not a coincidence. It can’t be.”

She neither confirmed nor denied that allegation.

“They weren’t the only ones,” he continued. “Thousands of others vanished, too. But the shit of it is, it only happened here in Colinbach. Everywhere else is going on like normal and no one has noticed us. We haven’t completely disappeared from the map. People can leave. But no one ever comes back. Leaving this city is a one-way trip, and you are related whether you know it or not.”

Through the blanket, her hollow stare was less a denial than it was utter cluelessness. He realized that.

Dor rubbed his temples.

“How about cross-stitch,” he asked. “Tell me about your pictures.”

The blanket fell off her body, her eyes lit up, and she opened her mouth. That was the first time he’d ever heard her speak.