Anthony Darrow had a smile on his face. He hadn’t excepted to be this excited about it, but maybe he didn’t know himself as well as he thought. True enough, he had always been bad at ignoring his impulses, often getting into trouble, or at least starting it even if he didn’t get caught, because something in the back of his head told him it would be fun.

Fun. Was that what this was about? He just wanted to have fun? Or was there something more, something with deeper and much more important meaning involved? It almost seemed like this sudden change in opinion, even in temperament, was indicative of something finally clicking into place, allowing him to overcome his awkwardness, even for one night, in order to do something profound.

It was a step in a new direction, the right direction, and all because he had asked Carol out on a date. Who knew?

Carol, the woman who had so often vexed him because of her relentless amorous advances on the poor, unwitting man had finally broken him. It hadn’t actually been that difficult, in the end: all that was needed was a change in tactics. She had not been working at the library for as long as he had, which was pushing eleven years now, having been hired only two years ago to work upstairs. She visited the Circulation desk daily and had been going through a whole list, it seemed, of pick up lines and flirty jokes, direct questions or physical efforts to get him to notice her ‘in that way’.

He had noticed, he just shirked away from it immediately.

So for two years she had been chasing him, at least fifteen minutes each day they worked together, never meeting outside the library and not really crossing paths throughout the day unless one of them ventured away from their respective desks. He had been closing one night, and she had surprised him by still being at her desk. She looked frustrated and upset, and told him all about an error one of the student workers had made that forced her into hours and hours of corrections. It was incredibly difficult and exhausting, and she looked at her wit’s end. So Tony helped her with it, being the sweet guy he was, calming her with reassuring words and taking on a lot of the work. They were there very late, but managed to get things in working order for the next day.

They smiled at each other, and that had been that. It was the longest he had ever spent in her company, and suddenly he wanted to know more about her, why she acted the way she did whenever she was around him, why she couldn’t be that woman, the one who had started laughing with him as they worked together, calm, funny, surprisingly intelligent. Someone that felt familiar in a new way, that Tony had not understood when he felt it that night.

So he asked her, to both of their surprise, to come over at the end of the week.

Frantic planning and exhaustive cleaning occupied all the time Tony spent at home after that, leading up to the scheduled ‘date’. He made his bachelor pad, a run down two bedroom apartment, presentable, shoving almost all of his paltry, rather embarrassing possessions in a closet. It almost looked like no one lived there now, and Tony didn’t know if he liked that any better than having his shields and swords and mini-fake armors out and about. At least with them it looked like he actually had a personality.

With no time left for another redecorating effort, he left the small place as it was. He had made sure to take the evening of their date off, so he could cook a fine dinner and make things comfortably romantic. Casual, he hoped, though he was trembling all the while he prepared, hoping it wasn’t too much. Worried he might embarrass himself, or her, or worse, both of them at the same time. He worried she would find him boring, that she wouldn’t like anything he talked about, that she might notice how the apartment smelled faintly of woodchips and stale hamster pellets.

When he told Booder this was entirely his fault, the hamster ran in its wheel and ignored him entirely. He took his pet hamster’s cage and put it in the living room, as far from the kitchen area of the small place as he could so the smell wouldn’t intrude on the dinner he had worked so hard for.

Carol arrived and she looked… different. Tony was wearing a nice enough suit, a black blazer over a silk shirt, black slacks and shoes. He had his hair in order and his goatee, as ever, immaculately trimmed. But Carol looked like a different person. She wasn’t wearing her usual library affair, which always seemed so frumpy and cliché for a librarian lady anyway, but rather a form fitting black dress. It was the first time Tony had ever noticed that she had a ‘form’, and he was stunned that he could have missed it. Her hair, white by design, was not up in its normal bun but loose around her shoulders. She had a blush over her cheeks and nose and he realized it was because he was staring.

He told her she looked beautiful and invited her in. Immediately she noticed Booder in his cage and the hamster stole the night, the little devil. At least the early part of it. They had dinner in his dining room, which he had gone to great lengths to make presentable and a nice place for them to spend the evening in. She was very impressed by the atmosphere he had created, and the dinner he had cooked. They spent the night talking and laughing, enjoying each other’s company and, for once, actually getting to know each other.

Dinner ended, and he proposed that she probably should be going, cautiously, not indicating that it was what he wanted. She said she had no where else to be, it was raining outside and so she stayed.

For the rest of the night.

He had never been much for the sight of blood. It didn’t make him sick, but that didn’t mean he liked to see it. It was boring. One color, which just turned to black once it was spilled. It flowed prettily but that was a fleeting pleasure, often coagulating and turning into grotesque chunks of goo, globs of life giving fluids denied their purpose, wasted in an ever expanding puddle on the floor. Or, in this case, the bed.

She hadn’t screamed yet, which was surprising. Such a sweet, fragile looking girl, but more capable than he had assumed. All the more pity for her, in the end, as he showed his respect for her diligent tenacity by increasing the torture she suffered. Of course, he had made it impossible for her to successfully scream, though she certainly was trying. She was tied to the bed, a gag in her mouth to prevent any sounds she did make from leaving the room. She had a neat little pile of bloody fingers sitting on her bare stomach, six of them if they were whole, and Booder was sitting just beside them, contentedly eating like they were carrots.

Perhaps he thought they were.

Her hands were secured to the bedpost behind and above her, blood running down her arms, staining the pillows beneath them. Each hand was sorely maimed, each missing three fingers, though not the same ones, while the remaining ones had been split down their centers, to the bone, by a fillet knife. Tony was sitting beside her, a pair of tweezers in his hand, slowly pulling off the last of her fingernails on that side. It was a slow process, first pinching the end of the nail, since she had grown hers out rather than investing in fake ones, and pulling with just enough strength not to break it. He jerked the tweezers, gently enough for his purpose, to snap each little sinew, every sharp, electric little nerve that connected the nail to flesh one by one, blood flowing slowly at first, then more with each tiny modicum of progress he made. He had been playing with her for hours on end, and had only focused on her hands so far. Imagine, he had told her, what he could do with the rest of her. Carol writhed and screamed into her gag, but he didn’t count those noises as anything because the gag sufficiently took care of them. If she wanted him to stop, she would have to do a better job of telling him.

She failed in that, disappointing Tony by falling unconscious. He frowned thoughtfully, but let her rest for now. She would need her energy, if he was going to start on her toes next. Smirking, he put the tweezers down next to the collection of nails he had pulled from her, resting on the bedside table. He picked up one of the nails, which had been freshly painted for the evening, with a little flower design to boot. It was very pretty, he thought, turning it over and admiring the pattern of flesh and blood that still clung to it. That was more decoration that he appreciated, rather than the frilly stuff.

He put it down and offered his hand to Booder, who, carrying a finger in his mouth and one in his little paws, hopped on to the man’s palm. Tony smiled, the hamster seeming to offer him the finger, which was just the top joint of one of her pointers, though he imagined the little animal wanted nothing else but to eat it all himself. Still, Tony took the small chunk of flesh, looking it over as Booder continued to chew on the one in his mouth. The librarian had cut each one off at the knuckle in each bend, each finger save the thumb taking three cuts to remove completely. Tony felt good. He felt alive, like this was the change he had really been needing, to step out of his lonely little box and find something to fulfill himself. He had never felt so good, so perfectly happy with himself, so confident. So dangerous. He looked at Booder, smirked, and popped the finger into his own mouth to join the hamster in tasting the spoils of their labors.

Abruptly, he lost his balance and slammed into the floor. Jarring pain split through his head and he thought for a moment that he had bashed it in from the fall, though he had not even hit it on anything. Sputtering and coughing, he tried to spit the finger out before he choked on it, only to find there was nothing in his mouth. Gasping, hand clamped over his face, he looked around while trying to swallow down his thundering heart to keep it from escaping his chest. His stomach lurched and he scrambled across the floor to his desk, leaving over the trash bin and emptying the contents of his stomach inside it. Collapsing away after a moment, shutting his eyes because he didn’t want to look at the blood and finger he knew would be in the bin among the mess, he fell to his back and stared up at the ceiling. Dull, though painful, fluorescent lamps hummed above him, flickering.

It took him a very long moment to realize he was not in his bedroom, but the library. His head was killing him, and he gripped it as he tried to sit up, inhibited by the sling over his arm. He hadn’t even noticed it was missing for most of the night, and wondered dumbly how he had gotten it back on. Panic struck him and he felt his stomach flip again. Where was Carol? Pushing himself to his feet, wobbling half drunkenly, he stumbled to his desk and grabbed the phone. He dialed Carol’s number and, unable to breathe, listened to the phone ringing.

She didn’t pick up.

Letting out a grief stricken cry, he slammed the phone down and picked it up again, dialing once more. It rang and rang until it clicked over to her voice mail. Twice. Three times. Four times. Finally a very angry voice barked a ‘what do you want’ with a few colorful words thrown in, and Tony slammed the phone down once more, his hand stinging from the force. She was alive. She was able to pick up a phone. She wasn’t at his apartment. Or in the hospital. She was at home, and had been sleeping. So they hadn’t gone on a date? Or spent the night working on that error, perhaps. He frowned, unsure.

But he knew how to check, he hoped.

Wobbling from his desk, he wondered why he was so unsteady on his feet before remembering, very vaguely, a night of drinking with Suri at the local dive bar. Had that been last night? It felt like years ago, really, but his memory of that evening was spotted and that contributed to his lack of ability to properly define what had happened when. Shaking his head, then regretting it because his brain seemed to be rattling around in his skull, he dug around in his drawers to find that bottle of advil he always kept around, downing a handful without counting and gagging when he remembered he couldn’t take pills dry. Fumbling for a cup of painfully disgusting coffee that had been sitting on his desk since he had gotten off work early the evening before, he choked down the pills and coughed.

It was going to be a miserable day, if this was how the morning started.

Trying his best not to throw up again, he escaped the front desk and dragged himself upstairs, using his key to unlock Carol’s office and going inside. He booted up her computer and logged in, pulling up the work they had been doing in his dream. He checked the records, but none of them were there. It hadn’t happened. He had left the library at closing, Carol had gone home before him as she always did, and he had gone to the bar to recover from a bad week. He got too drunk, came back to the library and fell to sleep on the much-too-comfortable couch. He had a vivid nightmare, and now was hungover at work at five in the morning.

Feeling a bit more sturdy, his fears receding, he closed down the computer and left the office, locking the door behind him. It was a relief, to be certain that he had only been dreaming, though he was still very aware of every little detail from that dream, and wondered how he could possibly have been able to feel, smell, and taste everything. Even the echoes of her muffled screams were still in his ears. It had been so real…

He looked up, standing in the hall lost in thought, and glanced around. The back of his neck had tingled, each hair taking a moment to stand up as a shock of cold slithered down his spine. He looked toward the shelves nearby, half thinking he saw a shadow slinking between them. Heart beating a little faster, he moved toward the shelves, searching between them, but there was no one. However, there were also no culprits that might have cast a shadow around, either. Thinking he was going mad, unsettled by his dream undoubtedly, he went to go back downstairs and change from yesterday’s clothes. They felt heavy and dirty, rumbled and clingy. And they smelled like the bar, which was not a scent he wanted to carry around with him all day.

He kept a spare change of clothes in his office, a couple in fact, ‘just in case’ he might need them. He was always doing strange things like that, his life seemingly guided by the idea of ‘just in case’ or other similarly flimsy justifications for acting against what was normal. Like robbing people or stealing cars was justified by ‘to see if I still can’ these days. Though, he was working on remedying that ever since the run in with Adira and the hoodlums that nearly hurt her.

Pulling on a new jacket over a fresh button up shirt, he paused with only one sleeve draped over his injured arm, the other arm half way in to the sleeve on the other side. The coat slipped from his shoulder as he paused, but he didn’t notice, staring off across the area in front of the Circulation desk. He thought he had spotted someone standing in line, waiting to be helped, but he had been glancing down to check his shoes and when he did a double take the figure was gone.

His heart was in his throat now. Was someone here? Following him?

Telling himself not to be paranoid, he finished changing, shoving his old clothes into a bag and storing them under his desk so he could take them home for a wash at the end of his shift. His head was only mildly throbbing now, thanks to the advil, and he rubbed his eyes as he moved to the front Circulation desk. Glancing around furtively, feeling foolish, he mumbled to himself as he turned on the computers for the day and got the check out system running. After that he went to check all the printers, to make sure they had enough paper, and found one of them humming. It must not have been turned off the night before. He checked the tray, but nothing had been printed, opened up the paper tray and filled it, then shook his head and left it be. Behind him, something clicked and he got that strange sensation in his ear of something electronic being on nearby. He turned and saw a monitor glowing passively, nothing on the screen because the computer tower hadn’t been turned on. Just the screen.

“Is someone here?” Tony couldn’t help but call out, convinced everything had been off when he came into the room. Someone didn’t answer, however, and he hurried from the computer area and retreated behind his desk for a moment. His computer monitor, he noticed, was also on. Chest tightening, he rushed from the desk and grabbed a cart from the back, intent on going to do a pick up from around the library to keep his mind off of things like nightmares and creepy happenings. It was all in his hungover mind.

That became a small mantra as he rode the elevator up to the third floor. It stopped, however, at the second floor, though he hadn’t told it to. The only reason for that would be if someone had pressed the button on the second floor.

Stepping from the elevator, leaving the cart inside, he looked down the hall and around the area for the culprit. Someone must have gotten in when he had been stumbling back. Maybe he hadn’t locked the front door in his drunken stupor. Maybe it was Suri herself, playing a game on him. Though he knew that couldn’t be right. He swallowed hard, but found it blocked by a lump in his throat. His heart, no doubt, pounding away like it wanted out of his body and away from whatever danger was looming.

That’s what it felt like. Something imminently dangerous. His skin was crawling, now the hairs on his arms standing on edge, making him shudder and his flesh raise into little bumps. He hadn’t successfully pulled his jacket on downstairs, so he had to hug his good arm around himself in an effort to stay the tremors moving through him.

Compelled, against his will, to explore the second floor, he let the elevator slide close and continue its journey up without him, walking slowly from the doors and out into the shelves. There were no lights on, the aisles dark and looming. Everything was passive, serene even, but sinister all the same. Shadows cast from unknown sources seemed to stretch just too far, curling wickedly over desks and chairs in strange shapes. They seemed to be groping, clinging, searching. Behind him, something shuddered and three books fell from a shelf with three thuds to accompany them. The sounds were like steady beats on a drum, long, deep, resonating. The shadows shivered in response, an eagerness about them. Tony turned a full circle, standing in the middle of the aisles, and each time his back seemed to line up with a shelf he heard a book drop, another beat on the drum, slowly increasing in pace as he turned. A beat. Another beat, faster. Another beat, faster. Faster. Beat. Beat. Beat. They came without him moving now, all around him, filling the area, beat after beat, faster than his heart could race though it tried to keep up, his head filled with the noise, beating against his skull, rocking his body, making him tremble and cry out, but the sounds consumed the cry, beating relentlessly, everything falling and constantly beating.

He turned and everything stopped as suddenly as it started, leaving him gagging and breathless, gripping his chest as his heart suddenly refused to do anything more. He dropped to his knees, unable to make a sound, unable to draw a breath, everything silent as he slumped forward, his one good arm supporting his weight as the other escaped the sling just to grip at his empty chest. He gasped hoarsely, the one sound to penetrate the silence, a desperate rattle that made everything ache and burn. His eyes, color fading, sight diminished, rested on one spot in front of him. A pair of men’s shoes and a shadow.

Jolting awake, Tony gripped his chest in terror, but immediately felt his pulse beating rapidly under his palm. He gasped and choked, filling his lungs with more air than he needed, sweat pulling down his face. He looked around wildly, expecting something strange, something evil, expecting to be some place else. He saw his window. His dresser. His closet and bookcase. His bedside table. His bed. All the same, clean, innocent. His head wasn’t pounding and he wasn’t hungover at all. Looking at the clock, he found it to be nearly 8 in the morning, a dim light filtering in through the window shades. His glance next went to the calendar on the wall. According to that, he had been out drinking two nights ago, not last night. His eyes fell as confusion settled over him, and he spotted the pillow next to him. There was blood on it.

Panic seized him and he all but flew from the bed, standing in his boxers all the way across the room, staring wide eyed at the bed. It was just one spot of blood on one side, the left, and not copious amounts dripped down onto both like in his dream. Was it a dream? Which one? He gripped his head, trying to clear the fog, reality seeming impossible to discern from the images that had assailed him over the course of the night. Two nights? His shoulder ached and he felt a small trickle of blood running down from a stitch he had pulled. It was enough to distract him, and he mindlessly went into the bathroom to clean it. He was in there far longer than he thought, cleaning his shoulder and then taking a shower. After he was dressed he thought about breakfast, not glancing at a clock.

Moving into the living room, he saw Booder sitting in his cage on the coffee table, where he had put him in his dream. Going to the cage and kneeling in front of it, he filled Booder’s food bowl and checked his water, then watched as the hamster nibbled. He couldn’t help but imagine the little animal chewing on bloody flesh.

The phone in the kitchen rang and he nearly swallowed his tongue in surprise. He grabbed the phone, dropped it, picked it up and found it had disconnected. Replacing it on the hook, he was much more prepared when it rang the second time, picking it up on the first ring.

“H-hello?” he stammered, voice strange.

“Tony? It’s Carol. It’s almost ten and we need to open. How come you’re not here yet? It’s not last night… is it? I thought we had fun…”

“W-we… aahh, ah, yes! No! We did. P-please, I was just… I’m having a very strange… morning… I-I’ll be right there, I’m sorry!”

He hung up after that, baffled further. They had gone on a date? But obviously he had not tortured her. The line where what had happened and what hadn’t was unfathomably thin, and he could not yet trace it. He grabbed a coat and pulled on some shoes, two that unfortunately did not match but he was not destined to notice until his lunch break that day, and took off running from his flat.

The library opened a few minutes late that day, but it wasn’t that big of a deal. A couple of people waiting outside, but they didn’t ask, just assuming that things had taken longer than normal. Tony avoided Carol before she retreated upstairs to her desk while he sheltered at his, letting student workers handle the patrons. He had a lot to think about, to figure out, and to gather courage for. He had to talk to Carol, but, of everything he had seen in his head or experienced in waking life recently, that terrified him the most.