“You're taking time off, and that's final.” Commissioner Anderson barked at Deacon. He tried to respond, but unfortunately his face was preoccupied. His run in with Mr. Creed hours earlier had left a number of nasty wounds in his face that all required stitches. “You killed the goddamn suspect, Cole! The media doesn't like it when people are too dead to be tried for murder! The city council is going to be all over my ass because of this. And they decided already that since you've been involved in two shootings of two suspects now that you need to be evaluated, and you need to sit out a few rounds.” Deacon again attempted to throw a response out, but all that surfaced was a cartoonish “argh” as the nurse tugged his stitches shut on his lowest wound, right under his jawline. The nurse put on a smile, tilted her head and walked out of the room. “Well I know you wanna say something about this, so go ahead. It'll be your last chance for a week or two.” Deacon walked past him calmly to the other side of the room towards a mirror located next to a light box for x-rays. The stitches did look pretty bad, and perhaps some time away wouldn't be too bad.

       “Maybe you're right on this. But damn, Anderson, I honestly don't think this whole mess is going to be wrapped up on top of Creed's casket. Someone mailed me a letter that quoted the same crap the Skinny Man was saying right before I shot him in the chest.”

       “What?”

       “He was quoting 'Through the Looking Glass'. So was Creed right before he died. I think there's a bigger network here, or something like...”

        “We're getting your head checked.”

        “What? I'm not crazy, Anderson! Something is seriously wrong here in Ironside and I wa...”

        “Dammit, Cole! You realize you sound crazy? Even if you had proof, right now you sound like someone who's loosing his shit, alright? Now you've shot two suspects in less than a month! You should have been evaluated after the first one, especially since you're ranting about some conspiracy about Alice in Wonderland.” Deacon threw his hands up and began to look for his coat and hat.

       “Ugh, blood on my coat...that's so hard to get out...” He muttered to himself. “Fine Anderson, you think I'm crazy, you get a shrink to sign off on it and get me off this case like you want. But just remember, the last person you decided to put into this that wasn't me ended up dead, and I'm going to be one of the six guys walking his casket to a hole in the ground.” Anderson turned and left. Deacon knew it wouldn't be the end of this in the least, especially if the doctors decided Deacon should be removed from the case. Thankfully the evaluation wasn't for a week or so, plenty of time to rest.


________________________________________



       Deacon's break didn't last one night. His phone ringing suddenly startled Deacon back to consciousness, robbed of another chance to sleep a full night. He fumbled for a moment, still struggling from sleep until he finally flipped the phone open.

        “Murr..eu..Hello?”

       “Deacon, it's Joe, you've gotta come down to the slab now, you need to see this...I...I can't show anyone else, I gotta be sure it's real.”

       “What the hell are you talking about?” Deacon was already out of bed loosing a battle with a pair of pants laying in a neatly crumpled pile at the foot of his bed.

       “Just...It's about the Skinny Man, alright? Just come down here.” And with that, Joe hung up. He had been a coroner and a forensic anthropologist for years. The man had dealt with all manner of carnage and not once had he ever called Deacon and sounded like that. He was the guy you could depend on to do strange things to get a sick laugh, usually out of himself. Deacon tried not to think of Joe's infamous portrayal of “Hamlet” with a fresh head they found once, but beyond that Joe wasn't easily unhinged. This had to be big. Especially if something from the pile of flesh that was the Skinny Man had set him off like this.

       His house was totally still, but the dampness from outside seemed to infiltrate the walls themselves. It left him with a strange chill and a bit of an uncomfortable feeling. Even the floor felt wet. He opened his medicine cabinet and reached for his anti-anxiety meds. They would help him relax enough to deal with the early morning and the lack of sleep. He shut the mirror, still looking towards it, thinking about shaving. Maybe if he had been awake for another hour the pills would have been working, and maybe, if he had been awake for another hour, he wouldn't have seen a sudden flash of a drown victim staring back at him through the mirror. Deacon froze in terror as he looked into the pulpy, bruised, purple face of a screaming woman, once blond hair clinging to her sullen frame. The sound of her scream filling Deacon's mind, not his ears as his vision locked into the black caverns that had once been her eye sockets.

       It had to have been minutes later, Deacon had no clue how long, but suddenly he was slumped back in a corner, hand clenched around a broken shaving razor. His throat felt like it had been scraped and dried. "Not this again." He thought to himself as he scrambled up to his feet. Another night terror. The floor felt more wet now. He sighed thankfully as he figured out he hadn't pissed himself. He slowly approached the mirror again and peeked in slowly. Nothing there that shouldn't have been.

       “...Rebbecca?” He shook his head, and started back on his way. Perhaps if he had stayed longer he would have noticed the water dripping off a hand print on the ceiling.

_________________________________________

       It was way too early. Deacon hadn't even looked at a clock but the streets just had that feeling. The abnormal chill in the air, a bit of fog still rolling around despite the weather being fairly mild, and the pitch blackness of a sky with no moon. The street lights were incredibly harsh, making him wince as he came to each stoplight, and making him shift his head slightly as the large street lamps whipped by as he drove through the dampness. He had a grand total of 7 hours of sleep over the last 3 days. Even by his poor sleep standards, that was rough. He didn't feel sleepy though, just slow. Too slow for his own liking. Anything that would cause Joe to react like that is grounds for a swat team normally.

       He turned on the radio to see if there was anything to distract him, ease him up and help him rouse his mind and body out of the sluggish state they were in. As usual though, all there was to listen to was a handful of pompous idiots talking about why their political beliefs were better than the other pompous idiots on the other stations, a couple bible shows, a few that seemed to be nothing but commercials, and the oldies station playing “Blueberry Hill”. Looked like that was it.

       The parking lot looked more gray than it should, mostly due to the fog, the poor lighting, and the lack of vehicles taking up space. It wasn't hard to see where Joe was, only one light aside from the lobby was on. Gerard, the night guard, waved Deacon in. He'd seen him a number of times over the years at strange hours so it was pretty much standard procedure by now. The sound of his shows tapping the false-marble floor and echoing off the walls of the empty building was the only sound to keep him alert as he headed to the “slab” as they called it. The morgue, the meat-shack, “the last bus stop” were other names it'd gotten over the years, but the slab stuck with Deacon for some reason. Seemed a fitting place to keep meat. The florescent lights flickered a bit as Deacon walked through, finally reaching the cold, steel doors of the Slab.

       “Joe?” Deacon said as he carefully opened the door. “Joe, you in here?”

       “Deacon!” Joe said in a hushed voice. “I didn't know who else to go to, no one would believe this...I don't know what the hell to make of it myself!” Joe hurried towards Deacon and grabbed him by the arm, suddenly yanking hard, dragging him towards a table with a blanketed form resting on top of it.

       “Look, I've had a really strange morning, I'm not sure if this is a great idea right now.”

       “Deacon, just trust me on this. I need someone here to see this before it disappears, or gets 'disappeared'. Do you follow me?” Deacon nodded as he looked around the room. Sure enough the security camera had been tilted towards another table.

       Joe stood over the sheet for a moment, staring down at it. He wasn't a hard man to read. He was about five and a half feet tall, balding, thin, large nose complete with a mustache. But he was never good at hiding what he thought about things.

       “This is him, isn't it?”

       “Yeah...I'm still putting people together this guy had been chopping up. But, there's something wrong with him.”

       “Seeing as I blew a hole in him and he fell a few stories, I'd say so.”

       “No!” Joe hushed himself after he raised his voice. “No, it's...something physical, internal. You just need to see this.” Joe closed his eyes and took a deep breath before folding the sheet down. Despite the fall, the Skinny Man hadn't been completely crushed, but the hole in his chest was still pretty obvious, even with his rib cage, what was left of it, being open. “That, right there.” Deacon stepped closer, looking into the cavity of the corpse. “What the hell is that?” Deacon studied what it was that had startled Joe so bad. Just below the neck in the chest cavity was a mass of yellow and brown tissue that seemed to have it's own body structure. A number of veins lead up into the neck.

       “I thought it was a tumor at first, but...but tumors don't have connective tissues like that typically. Those things lead all the way into his brain. There were...I guess hooks that were actually linked into it.” Joe gestured to a side-cart with the crushed brain resting in a pan, complete with a number of long cords of tissue and a number of bony, screw-like hooks leading into the brain. A few extracted ones were next to it, awaiting further exploration. “It gets worse, Deacon.” Joe tugged gently at one of the arms. It was heavily damaged in the fall itself, almost totally loose. It made a strange sucking sound as it slid away from the body. Like a sheath, it unveiled a strange bony point connected to a strange arm-like extremity of the odd mass. “This thing wasn't part of his body originally. The tests show it didn't have blood, but it seemed to carry impulses. It moved inside his arms like this. There's a lot of old scar tissue throughout the...more intact bones here that show this thing forced it's way into him somehow.”

       “Joe...that's...none of that makes any sense. Look, we gotta call the CDC or the head of biology at...”

       “Deacon! Since I found this thing I've been hearing things that aren't there and seeing things that aren't possibly real! This isn't...it's not of this world. I know this all sounds insane, but I think there's a whole lot more to this than just a psycho that's killed a bunch of people. It's gotta be part of something!” Deacon's mind exploded with the images of the letter he received after the Mansion Raid. 

       “Huskwalker. Huskwalker...”

       “What?”

       “It's something that was on the page I found in the barrel of the rifle that Gauge used to shoot himself. That cult had been performing a 'summoning ritual' and there was a drawing of something like this. Haley told me it was called a Huskwalker. Look, Joe. You need to get ahold of someone to look into this before it gets more strange. I can't touch this case for at least a week though. Do not tell anyone that you're hearing things or seeing things, you'll get yanked from this like their trying to yank me.”

       “Are you seeing things too?” Deacon stood silent for a moment. With a irritated sigh he continued.

       “It's not important. Had to have been a dream or something. Look, just do what I say, alright? And keep this thing under wraps. I need to get out of here before I get busted trying to work while being on leave. Gerard will cover my ass so I'm not worried there, but if anyone manages to catch on them I'm in hot water. When does your shift end?”

       “A few hours. I'll call you after I'm done and I'll find out who we can talk to about this. Hell, this could be a major scientific discovery. Think they'd let me name it?”

       “If it's responsible for that piece of garbage right there, I wouldn't want any part of naming it.”

_______________________________________

       Deacon's home still had that strange wet feeling. Just a moist feeling in the air that wasn't natural. He waited in his living room for Joe's call. The hours crept by, his mind still racing from the vision earlier. It had been nearly 20 years since he pulled Rebbecca out of the pond on at the old family house in Dietert Creek. Even then, he could have sworn she was screaming silently as she was drug into the canoe. That thing in the mirror though. It was her. He'd seen things like that in the middle of the night at times, or during the occasional bout of sleep paralysis. From what he'd been told his whole life the pills were supposed to suppress things like that. But he'd never actually felt like the things he saw were physically there.

       A drip startled him back into reality just before his phone rang. He debated going to investigate the bathroom or checking on Joe. He flipped open the phone instead.

       “Joe?” There was nothing, just silence. Then a strange, gurgle. Then silence again. Deacon again  screamed into the phone to no avail. It didn't take long to get back to the station and to the slab. “Joe! Joe, where the hell are you?” Deacon found the phone, laying in the chest cavity of the Skinny man. It sat in the place once taken up by the growth. Deacon charged back out to the lobby, finding Gerard still sitting at his desk.

       “Hey, Deac, what's going on?”

       “Do you know where Joe is?”

       “He left about 10 minutes ago. Said he had work to do.”

       “Did you see anything on the camera from the slab? I think he was attacked.” Gerard looked puzzled as he sat up and reached over to the monitors, hitting rewind on the one labeled “Morgue One”. It showed nothing but Joe slipping at the corner of the camera, laying there for a few moments, and then getting up and leaving.

       “Hmm, the camera angle is all wonky, guess he moved it on accident or something maybe shook it loose. He looked a bit pale though, said he wasn't feeling well before he left though. But he stopped before he left and asked if you got a letter?” Deacon felt the ice run through his veins as he heard that.

       “I...I gotta get back home. I have visitors coming. Take care, Gerard.” Deacon slowly walked back to his car. He tried Joe's house, the station, and came up with nothing. His hands were tied to do anything else. Running into the station saying Joe was attacked at the morgue with no proof would without a doubt cost him his job. His house felt strangely hollow when he walked in, yet there was the sound of dripping coming from the bathroom. He walked in, and slowly looked around for the cause.

        Water was all over the ceiling, dripping down across the wall parallel to the mirror. Perhaps there was a reason for that. Deacon's eyes went wide with horror as he glanced towards the mirror and saw clear as day a phrase spelled out in dirty water, drying into the wall filling the air with the stench of that pond from all those years ago.

       When the feast's over, we'll go to the ball -- Red Queen, and White Queen, and Alice, and all!

       The skinny man wasn't done.