The sky lied that day. Heavy black clouds hung low overhead, teasing a cool rain, but instead only forced heavier hotter air down upon the small crowd gathered around the polished cherry-wood casket. The weather only made everyone feel worse as they prepared to say goodbye to one Matt Hale. Deacon couldn't help but appreciate the work the mortuary had done on his friend's corpse. He had expected a closed casket funeral, but amazingly he looked...whole. It was the least they could do for his family, Deacon thought. His children were just on the verge of being considered grown up. Matt's two sons were both out of high school, with the youngest just barely out of the graduation ceremony. His wife did her best to be strong the whole morning and afternoon. Deacon wanted it to end though. His standing there with all those other cops had to be reminding her of her husband and how his life was taken. It hadn't rained since the night he died, a week earlier, and the bitter heat had began to turn the grass a weak yellow-green. The whole thing stunk to high hell, he thought. Why was Matt involved in his case like that? The only person who heard anything about it was Anderson. Deacon made a point of keeping other people out of the way in this one. If anyone else was going to get hurt, he wanted to make sure it would only be him. No one else. That clearly didn't happen.

Finally, the ceremony had ended and Matt Hale was nothing more than memories and a space hidden beneath six feet of fresh soil. Deacon attempted to get away from the whole thing before he was stopped by any of Matt's family, but that didn't end up being the case. His widow, Leah, stopped Deacon as he was entered his car.

“Deacon? I need to ask you something.” He turned away from his open door.

“Sure, anything.”

“What...what was he doing there? All I was told that he had to check something for Anderson, and then...this.”

“He said that?”

“Yes. I figure now it's pointless, but he said it was something to make sure you were safe.”

“Oh God...” Deacon leaned back against his car and removed his hat, defeated.

“Why? What do you know?”

“Anderson never should have done that. It was my case. Leah...I promise as soon as I get some answers, you'll be the first to know. All I can say is that I'm in the middle of investigating a...a cult. No one else was supposed to be involved in it. If I was going in though, Matt would have been with me. Anderson should have never sent him in on that without me. I'm sorry for all of this. I'll do what I can to make it right.”

“I know you will, Deacon. He believed in you.” With that, Deacon nodded and started the long, quiet drive home. He had only a few days to prepare for his evaluation, and none of this would help his state. He wouldn't be able to help anyone if he was locked in Rivas. And then, there was the whole thing with Joe. His wife had reported him missing a couple days ago, and thankfully Deacon wasn't attached in any way to the night of the incident. Gerard knew what would happen if he was implicated in the disappearance or death of two of his close partners in the span of a week. The Department had apparently brushed it off entirely, but who knew by that point. Deacon wasn't even allowed in the building until the headshrinker said he was stable.


________________________________________





As it had for days, the house still had the lingering odor of that horrible old pond. The writing on the wall still hadn't faded away over the days. Instead it had stained into the paint, causing Deacon to ponder how much time he'd have on his hands to paint over it if and when he got kicked off the force. Strangely it didn't show up on the pictures Deacon had taken for proof, and it didn't leave so much as an off color mark on the wash cloth he took to it. From the evidence, it wasn't there. From looking at it, it was there to stay. Throughly frustrated, he left the bathroom and hoped to rest a bit in his living room. The phone blinked on its stand next to his couch. Deacon flopped beside it and decided to check the messages.

“Hey, Deacon, it's Haley. I'm worried about you. I've been having strange dreams again and...I'm...I'm sorry about your friend. If there's anything I can do, please let me know?”

“Cole, this is Anderson. Make sure your shit is straight on Tuesday if you wanna keep your job. Just a heads up.”

“Mr. Cole. You don't know me but I've heard about what you're going through on the news. I'll call you again because I don't want this kind of thing recorded, but I know what's going on with 'the things that live between blinks'.”

“Things that live between blinks? What the hell?” His attempt to find the number was halted by a sudden rap at the door.

“Who's there?” He said as he clenched a nearby fireplace poker tightly.

“It's me, Deacon...are you holding the fireplace poker?” Haley.

“...No.” He muttered as he put it back in it's place. She always knew things. Probably wouldn't be hard to figure out, what with all the strangeness lately. He quickly let her in, making sure she wasn't followed.
“Is everything alright? I tried calling...”


“It's nothing.”

“No, it's something...” She walked past him following the odor into his bathroom.

“Oh my God, Deacon, what's this?”

“You can see it?” He hurried behind her. “I took pictures and tried to wipe it off, and nothing happened. The pictures were even blank. It...”

“It's not like that, Deacon. I've been telling you for years that I could see things, ghosts, creatures, shadows that shouldn't be there...this is one of those things. Something left this here that doesn't belong in our scope.”

“What? No, that doesn't make any sense. It had to have been Joe pulling something on me about the...” She again cut him off

“The Queen in Red, Alice, The Jabberwocky, all that stuff?”

“What the hell? How do you know about all that, I didn't tell you anything about it.”

“You didn't have to. Matt did.”

“Matt talked to you before Creed got ahold of him?”

“No.” She said as she walked out of the bathroom and into the kitchen.

“What are you telling me? That his ghost told you that or something?”

“Yes, I saw it at the Asylum, and it warned me about what you were getting into. The same things that have been torturing me my whole life are after you now for some reason.”

“Dammit, you're not telling me something.”

“It could get worse if you know more. It's happened like that with doctors, friends...my father.” She turned away, a bit of a shake in her breath. The story of her father was always touchy, and rightfully so. Deacon had first met her when they were both fairly young. a grief councilor had put them in the same group when they were still pretty fresh from the trauma. He was still dealing with the trauma of seeing his sister drown in that pond behind the family house. They put him in due to the odd things going on around the death. Deacon had sworn that he saw her pulled under by something. He also said that after she was pulled out of the pond by the local police, he saw her turn her head and blink at him before returning to “the dead”. What made the whole thing even worse, according to the psychiatrist, was that she was his twin sister. They put him on medication to regulate some of the problems it caused him. Night terrors, sleep paralysis, and the visions. They had stopped after therapy years ago though. Seeing her again though, and the fact that Haley could see the same writing on the wall didn't sit well with him. Haley had to stay in that group for years after they cut Deacon loose though.

Her story was far worse though.

The official version from the police is that she just went crazy and stabbed her father to death with that knife. No other investigation was made. No witnesses to back up her story, and who's honestly going to listen to a little girl saying a monster killed her daddy?

Her mother didn't listen to her, or even consider the possibility of another person being the killer. She just chose to institutionalize her own daughter. There were other prints, feet, a few strange divots in the floor, but not much else at the scene, but they were small enough to be hers and the divots may have been from the knife. She once said the creature who killed her father had human-like back legs, and pronged front limbs, and no head. The part that always bothered Deacon was what she said the man told her before he left.

"Worrity, worrity! Can’t you leave a body alone?"

It sounded like something that connected to the rest of what's been popping up, the things involving Alice in Wonderland. But it wasn't either of the Alice books Deacon had researched for the case, but with everything connecting like it was, it merited further examination.

“You found something inside the Skinny Man, didn't you?” She stated suddenly.

“Joe did.”

“It was one of those things, wasn't it?”

“I don't know. It didn't have back legs or anything. Hell, I have no clue what it was. None of this makes sense. If this is all real then Joe is walking around with that thing somehow, and...”

“Huskwalkers is what the book called them. They attack people, get into their bodies and take them over. They serve something called “The Queen in Red”. That's all I was able to get from the pages you gave me though.” Deacon sat down, hands on his head.

“Are you telling me that...thing we pulled out of the Skinny Man got into Joe? It was dead! The Skinny man was dead, it can't be like that. There has to be some rational explanation.”

“It seems to me like that was what you were just telling me. What about the letter you got? Or the writing on your bathroom wall?”

“Ghosts? Monsters? The only monsters are the ones out there that look just like you and me. There isn't some magic explanation behind what makes someone go insane and cook people, or blow their own head off, or leave bodies rotting in an apartment!”

“Deacon, just listen to me. You need to find Joe before it starts again.”

“Before what begins again?”

“The Skinny Man was looking for a certain girl. What happened to the girl who got away?”

“Last I heard she'd gone into a coma.”

“You need to check on her! If Joe is now the carrier of the Skinny Man's Huskwalker, then what he was doing will continue! These things have been doing this for centuries!”

“Look, I couldn't do anything even if I had proof aside from two crazy people talking about seeing dead cops and monsters. I need actual proof that there's something going on here. I'll find Joe, figure out if this is his doing here, and if maybe he caught something from that thing in the body. Maybe he just went nuts after seeing too many corpses.”

“Fine, we'll start working on proof then.” She grinned with a smug sense of victory about her. It was one of the times that Deacon didn't mind being beat. There was no way he could talk her out of it now.

“Have a seat, I'll make you something to drink.” The third chair to the table set was missing. “Wait...” Deacon stood silent for a second before walking into the bathroom. “I'm an idiot. I'm a goddamn idiot. I didn't investigate a damn thing after I saw that, I just left the house.” Deacon began to slowly look the room over, noticing a sudden clean cut streak on the floor through the muddied water. A few inches beyond the clean space was a dirty bare footprint dried into the bathroom floor mat. Deacon found the source.

Sitting in the center of the tub was a chair, with two dirty footprints. “He was in here, he was in my fucking house!” Deacon snarled at the empty chair.

“That's what happened then, she was warning you. Who was in your house?”

“Joe, I think. Maybe the skinny man, I'm not sure anymore. None of this makes a damn bit of sense. What does any of this have to do with Gauge shooting himself, or with that restaurant, or with the Skinny Man killing all those people for so long.” He continued muttering to himself, trying to tie the whole thing into itself, only to keep coming to dead ends. The book. What did the book have to do with all of this? The strange thing in the Skinny Man's body was one of the things off the pages of that book, found in Gauge's rifle. Haley claims her father was killed by creatures like those on the pages and she was basically set up for the entire thing. The Skinny Man lived near the Tcho-Tcho people who owned the restaurant which had the book. Why though? What about Haley's ghost story? And why did her file appear in the stack that Creed had on his desk? There wasn't anything in particular about her other than the things she'd see. Maybe she was crazy and they were meaningless. Maybe they had some foothold on reality and she's really seeing things.

The cult though. It was the same ceremony that was in that old police film. Matt died due to one of those ceremonies. But why did it happen after Haley was asked to translate the pages?

“He couldn't read it.”

“What?”

“Creed. The cult. They didn't have a translation that worked when the page went missing. The reason they took you back to Rivas Asylum wasn't because you were having an episode. It was because you had the page and new translations. I thought they overreacted since you would normally just take medication for it.”

“We have to report it every time something happens though though.”

“Someone let them know what you were doing. That's how they were able to find you and the pages. That's why your notes were missing but I found the pages in Creed's desk. Anderson was the only person who knew about you though. I didn't even tell Matt.” Deacon turned back to Haley. “Look, I need to go to the station and talk to Anderson. He knows something about this. Head home though. If someone got in here once and was able to write that on my wall, they could again. So be careful on your way home, alright?” She nodded as Deacon lead her out.

“Deacon, seriously, there's more to this if you're seeing your dead sister, and one of those Huskwalker things. We really need to look at this together!”

“And we will, after I deal with Anderson. I swear. It was probably just a problem from my meds for sleep paralysis. I'm more concerned with the fact that Joe, or someone else, was in my house.”

“What if he's a Huskwalker now?”

“I'll get that old book back and we'll read up on it. If it's that, and not something that isn't totally batshit crazy, we'll deal with it however it says to. I'm hoping it's the non-batshit solution.”

“Fine, but I'm going with you, just to make sure things are alright, okay?” He thought for a moment before finally sighing, resigned, and nodding. Deacon felt something was wrong though, but it would have to wait. Talking to Anderson was the most important thing right now.

"We'll go in tomorrow. For now I'm going to get you home. I'll call some friends to make sure nothing happens to you. Keep your house under watch." He had to find out if Anderson had anything to do with Matt being killed. He knew though that someone was watching him. He looked the area over carefully before getting Haley into the car. A few more glances and he felt secure in the notion that no one was going to come out after him. Someone was watching though, but it was just a feeling. The feeling was correct though, like most of Deacon's hunches. Just out of sight, a new Skinny Man grinned as he watched Deacon leave his home.

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