Chapter One - 1:53 A.M.

Noises coming from the garage outside keep Kyle Reynolds from falling asleep...

My bed sat high off the floor thanks to an additional mattress I'd thrown onto the frame and was directly adjacent to my bedroom window; where the light from the motion-detector outside had shown through and ate away at the dark. Bright as the light was, the curtain that covered my window had muted its intensity, giving only some objects their details while others remained silhouettes. Oddly enough, it wasn't the light that woke me up, but the sound of the motion-detector clicking on that brought me out of my brief coma. I guess that's how quiet the night had been-- I'd heard it turn on through a wall and from about nine yards outside to where the garage was.

          I sat up in my bed for a moment, gazing at the lit up wall to my left and then the silhouetted landscape before me. My coffee table, where I did most of my writing, was a cluttered place-- a cemetery wherein all the headstones were all made out of Stephen King books, note pads, empty coffee cups, and what my Mom had ignorantly acknowledged as a flowerless vase, but what was really my water bong. Once upon a time I had named it Muse and we'd collaborated on much of "The Complex" together, but after the writing drought I'd been in until the garage sale that morning, I was ready to rename it, simply, "Bong." But maybe I was being too harsh on Muse; maybe it was the stuff I was packing into her that was the problem. After years of smoking Afghani Kush, Steven had introduced me to some stuff called Purple Dragon that didn't so much activate my mind as it stalled it. The only reason why I kept smoking it was because I thought it slowed the day down so that I could get more writing done. In actuality, it just slowed me down and made me waste hours more efficiently. Hindsight is always 20/20, isn't it? Maybe smoking pot, in general, be it with some other bong or with some other weed, was no longer my Muse? Maybe my new muse was the Underwood typewriter I'd bargained to not take for free from a garage sale earlier that morning?

          I pulled the curtain back to see what was going on outside and saw nothing, realizing that was probably because I didn't have my glasses on. So, I grabbed my glasses from off the dresser and slid them over my eyes. Seeing my room in HD was a scary sight. Writer's Room is the illness one might have diagnosed my bedroom with. When Amy was around, no illness. S**t was clean to the point of annoyance, but at least it was more visually appealing. Now, it looked a lot like how I imagine my mind did when not getting a story out of it and onto paper. A wasteland of literature and DVDs; an unmade bed (because, really, I'm coming back to it to do the same damn thing anyway), and clothes that were being regurgitated from the mouth of an overloaded hamper. It reminded me of my old college professor, Mr. Henley's office. He taught English Lit at a time when the only literary character I cared for was Alex Cross. After all the clutter (newspapers were stacked against the walls, all the way up to the ceiling beside shelves that were so compacted with books, you were likely to implode the place by removing one), there was nothing but closet left of his office, and a small one at that. His desk and a line of two, maybe three students were all that could fit in what many of the other kids dubbed "Mr. Henley's Taco Truck." Whatever questions we had after hours, Mr. Henley surely couldn't oblige over a dine-in experience.

          With my HD goggles on, I took another look out the window, and again, saw nothing that would have triggered the light to come on. I held the curtain to the side and waited a moment for something to expose itself, but nothing ever did. Instead, there was a noise-- a THUMP that came from the wall behind the headboard of my bed. It sounded like the lid of one of the plastic trash can bins outside had opened and closed-- a noise I'd become familiar with over the years since most of the trash I'd taken out was in the form of scrapped stories that I no longer wanted in my hard drive or in my life. Strange how the noise hadn't even aroused the curiosity of my dog though. Geezer was my five-year-old English Bulldog named after his tenacious laziness and all-white coat that took most other dogs born with color many years to acquire. He'd recently been diagnosed with a severe ear infection though, which probably had something to do with his lack of response, but still... anything that stepped into his territory was at least given a cautionary bark before he returned to his dog house inside the garage.

          GRRRRRTACK!

          Another noise from inside the house, had caught me off guard, and let the curtain slip out from my hand. I turned around in my bed and gave the double-doors of my room that led out to the living area, my full attention. I waited in my bed like a fisherman on a boat that was being circled by a shark. Only I wasn't Roy Scheider and this wasn't Jaws. This was simply, "Man-Child Scared by Noise While in Bed." A one-man, one-act play.

          TACK!

          There it was again, only the sound was less drawn out that time and more punctual. What had sounded before like someone cracking their knuckles, now sounded like the single pop of an old man's hip. The night always had a knack for exposing the kind of noise that got lost in the business of the day. It was the stillness of it, I think. The quiet that came with sleep. Not until the people in a home lay still did a house begin to relax. I mean, think of it this way: a house spends the entire day standing guard over its inhabitants; holding its foundation as the people inside of it stomp their feet across the floors and slam doors. Once it all stopped, the house finally got a chance to breathe. I'd convinced myself that that was all it was. The house letting out a sigh of relief. But then there were footsteps that followed it and the thought of a whole house, sleepwalking, did not sit well with my conscience, at least in the state it was in at that moment... which was paranoid.

          As the footsteps grew closer to my room, I carefully slid my legs out from underneath my blanket and dug my toes into the cold tile floor as if to lay root into it. If something was coming for me, I wasn't going to let it take me. I'd stand my ground and put up a fight-

          The door on the left was the first to open and as soon as it did, my courage ran right out the room. I let out a brief scream, throwing one of my pillows at Steven, who stood at the doorway without a single twitch.

          "The hell, bro? You jerking off or something?"

          "What the f**k! No! Jesus, Steven. It's two in the morning, man!"

          "Yeah, I know. I'm gonna poke some squid real quick, then pick something to-

          "You're gonna what?"

          "Poke some squid," Steven had said with his eyes blankly blinking. He proceeded to gesture a finger going into the crease of a clenched fist, then shrugged his shoulders. When I failed to respond, he offered another hint, "Beat some puss-

          "Oh, okay, okay. You're gonna, I got it. Why squid though?"

          "You ever seen a squid's beak? When it opens its legs? Just like that. Plus I like eating them, so-"

          "Yeah, okay, good day... squire. Enjoy your... squid."

          Steven nodded, took a step back, then returned back to the doorway.

          "The f**k is squire?"

          I opened my mouth, but then decided I was too tired to explain. "It's... a squire is a baby squid." I'd settled for that because any other explanation was likely to warrant a longer conversation.

          "Nice," Steven said. "Well, I'm probably gonna hit up Jack in the Crack afterward. You want anything?"

          My body had begun to lose its tension by that point. The dark, ominous noise I'd heard had been my squid-poking, Counter Strike-playing roommate all along. Once that idea had settled in, my legs swung back underneath my blanket, and I gave sleep another shot.

          "That another way of saying you're gonna poke some dude named Jack's brown star after you poke some chick's squid?" I flipped myself over and decided to continue the conversation facing my pillows.

          Steven stalled for a second before answering. "Brown star? That's gross. That's gross, but accurate. I like it."

          I heard the door close behind me and then Steven say, "I'll text you once I'm in line at the Brown Star, 'case you want anything."

          "Yeah, I'm gonna be asleep, bro. I'm good. Thank you though," I told him, much of what I said probably sounding more like "Mah-mah-roh. Mah-mooh. Mah-mah-roh," due to my lips being pushed up against my pillow like a hit man's pistol.

          It didn't take long for me to knock out after that.

          Or for the motion detector light in my backyard to go off again.