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  I cleaved off a ragged chunk of muffin with my fingers and answered, “Fuck you and all of the ancestors who led up to you.”

  “Dave? We got a missing little girl. You got a pen?”

  “If it’s a missing child, call the cops.”

  “The cops called me.”

  I closed my eyes and let out a breath that smelled like I’d eaten an entire wet dog and washed it down with sweat wrung from a hobo’s undershirt. Let me give you a tip: if you’re ever the victim of a terrible crime—like, say, your kid goes missing—and you see the cops consulting with a couple of white trash–looking dipshits in their late twenties, it’s time to worry. It’s not because John and I are incompetent at what we do—and I assure you, we are—but because you need to start asking yourself a very hard question. Not “Will I get my child back?” but “Do I want to get my child back?”

  I dipped my finger into the coffee, which already felt near boiling. I fished out the burning orb and placed it back into its container, which automatically closed around it. I took a sip, winced, and decided that the first person to ever drink coffee was probably trying to commit suicide.

  I asked, “What makes it a, you know, a Dave and John case?”

  “It’s another locked room situation, it looks like. There’s more, I’ll explain when you get here. But it looks pretty John and Dave to me. Do you have a pen? I have the address here.”

  “Just give it to me.”

  “One-oh-six Arlington Street. Next to the vape store?”

  “You thought I needed pen and paper to remember that?”

  “And hurry. I’ve heard you’ve only got forty-eight hours before the trail goes cold.”

  “You heard that in a movie. Last week. We watched it together.”

  He had hung up.

  I sighed and ate another hunk of muffin. I glanced out the window, the bottom half glowing pink from the neon sign of the business downstairs. They left that sign on day and night; the constant hum made me want to blow my brains out.

  Oh, well. It’s not like I have anything else to do.

  Still, I was going to finish my muffin first.

  * * *

  Let me tell you what’s bullshit about every supernatural horror movie. Whenever the monster or angry ghost lady turns up, everyone is skeptical for at least the first third of the running time. It’s usually between forty and fifty minutes in that the protagonists begrudgingly admit that the ominous Latin chants emanating from the walls aren’t a plumbing issue. In real life, the very second Mom sees something red oozing from the ceiling, she thinks “blood” not “water from a rusty old pipe.” I wish people were as skeptical as they are in the movies.

  This town, the name of which will remain undisclosed for privacy reasons, has been called the Bermuda Triangle of the Midwest. Or at least, I think I heard somebody call it that. I actually wish that was true, too, because there’s nothing to the Bermuda Triangle—just a bunch of routine maritime disasters that grew in the telling. A cargo ship never arrives at port and the headlines coyly say it “disappeared.” It didn’t “disappear,” guys—it sank. It’s a boat, in the ocean. Shit happens. What goes on in [undisclosed] is … different.

  My point is, it’s hard to sort out the real stuff from the superstition. So, because I’m sick of getting your e-mails asking for advice, let me just quickly run through it:

  1. If Your Home Has a Poltergeist

  We got a ton of these calls after that movie Paranormal Activity came out, panicked people saying they had rocking chairs rocking by themselves, untouched drinking glasses scooting off a table, clocks running backward, etc. If you’re in this situation, you can combat it using a technique known as “Getting the Fuck Over It.” You’re telling me you’ve got angry spirits of old murder victims or something floating around and they’re causing less of a disruption to your life than an unruly house cat? Why not worry about your high blood pressure, or take a moment to see if your smoke detector batteries are up to date? Those things are way more likely to kill you than whatever is knocking over salt shakers in your kitchen at night.

  2. If You Have Seen a Ghost

  If you’ve seen, say, a translucent old woman in a long flowing gown drifting down your hall at night, that’s almost definitely a hallucination or just a regular ol’ dream. Think about it: why would a ghost be translucent? Smoke and fog look like they do because they’re made of tiny particles suspended in the air. Are you suggesting the soul is made of tiny particles?

  In reality, your whole idea of what a ghost looks like comes from Victorian era photos, when long-exposure cameras required the subject to sit still for several minutes due to the primitive technology. If the subject left halfway through, you’d get that ghostly image instead. Fun fact: this is also the reason nobody is smiling in those old pictures—try holding a smile for seven straight minutes. If you’ve actually seen a ghost—and I assure you that you probably have, within the last month—it would have just looked like any real, solid person. It’s likely nobody saw that person but you and no, you can’t photograph them. You’re not seeing them with your eyes.

  3. If an Evil Spirit or Demon Has Confronted You

  If said entity appeared before you and started speaking, the good news is you’re not losing your mind. Contrary to what TV and movies have told you, it’s nearly impossible to have a hallucination that you can both see and hear—the mentally ill either just hear voices, or just see things, due to how the brain is wired. If you can both hear and see it, you’re either just having a dream, or you have an actual demon in your home.

  If it’s the latter, you shouldn’t bother listening too closely to what it has to say. It may sound really important—prophecies of future doom, that sort of thing—but I assure you, it’s just toying with you. If you ignore it, it’ll eventually get bored. The odds are it’s not strong enough to possess you, kill you, or do serious damage to your property. If it tries, feel free to pray or put up lots of crosses in its field of vision; I’ve seen that work before. You don’t have to go with Christian symbolism, but not all religions work (for reference, at the end of this book I have included an index of which religions are true and which are false—there are some real surprises). Also, try playing lots of 1980s era power ballads, they hate that. I think because it’s the closest earthly approximation of the music they play in Heaven. I don’t know, we’re just guessing here. Conversely …

  4. If an Angel Appears and Speaks to You

  Here, the risks are different—if a messenger from the Almighty actually bothers to contact you, it’s probably not the best idea to just ignore it. So, obviously, the first step is to make sure it’s an actual entity and not a dream you’re having, which is surprisingly simple: just ask the angel a question that you yourself don’t know the answer to but that you can verify later (like, “What’s the square root of 123,456,789?” or “What will be the final score of every football game this Sunday?”). If their information is good, well, then you know you weren’t dreaming and whatever prophecies or advice they gave you could indeed be valid. Of course they, too, could be imposters, so if they ask you to do something morally questionable—like stab your own child or something—you’ll need to use your own judgment. Let’s face it: if there is a god and he’s the type to think it’s unreasonable to refuse such a request, we’re all screwed anyway.

  5. If You Have Been Abducted by an Alien

  Cases like this are almost always simple sleep paralysis—a sort of wakeful dreaming during which it is common to see or sense strange visitors. Another fun fact: the typical “gray” aliens, with their bulbous heads and big almond-shaped eyes, didn’t show up in abduction stories until 1964—about two weeks after similar aliens appeared in an episode of the sci-fi horror series The Outer Limits. The phenomenon of abductees claiming to have been probed anally didn’t start until 1969, the year colonoscopies became common. What I’m saying is, the creatures that visit you in the night are either manifestations of your own anxiety o
r are making your anxieties manifest just to screw with you. Either way, the call is always coming from inside the house.

  6. If You Have Seen a Monster

  I’ve never understood the panic over monsters. I mean, which would bother you more, finding out your grandfather had died in a painful industrial accident, or that his head had been neatly snatched off his body by some giant, leathery winged horror? Dead is dead and in the latter case, he didn’t feel a thing. So why should the monster be the one that gives you nightmares, aside from the miniscule chance that one day your grandad’s chewed-up eyeballs might get shit onto your windshield on your way to work? Also, what if you kill your “monster” and it turns out it’s like a werewolf situation, where the thing transforms back into a human as it dies? Your ass is going to jail.

  If it’s not threatening you, just let it be.

  7. If You Have Seen a Man-Shaped Figure Made of Inky Blackness with a Pair of Eyes that Glow like the Embers of Two Smoldering Cigars

  Congratulations! You’re one of the few humans to have ever seen the universe as it truly is.

  If it happens again, run.

  2. A SCREAMING CLOWN DICK

  I stepped out into the rain that had been hammering us relentlessly since Columbus Day. After a month of it, everything that wasn’t pavement was a squishy muck that with every step squirted through the hole in my right shoe and soaked my sock. Drainage ditches were advancing menacingly across yards and parking lots, day by day. Over in what was left of the good part of town, they were putting down sandbags. No army of volunteers was coming to sandbag the dildo store.

  Yeah, my apartment is above a sex toy shop, called the Venus Flytrap. Our neighbor on one side is the skanky Coral Rock Motel (which is convenient for the clientele there) and next to it is one of those tiny used car lots where the stock is surrounded by a high fence with barbed wire, bearing signs offering weekly payments and no credit checks (they don’t mention the cars come with remote gadgets that can disable the engine if you miss a payment). On the other side of us is a tiny burned-out shop with a bashed-in front window exposing its charcoal guts to the world. I remember when that used to be a candy store, back when I was a kid. It always had this warm caramel smell, the scent of melted butter and sugar and holidays. No idea what happened to the kindly old couple who ran the place, all I know is that now raccoons nest in the blackened old display case and raindrops plink off the broken beer bottles that drunks have flipped through the window as they stumbled past.

  I’ve always wondered what it would be like to live in a town that was actually growing, where vacant lots give birth to trendy restaurants and old warehouses are torn down to make room for brand new housing developments. A city like Seattle or Austin, where you can actually feel like human civilization is advancing forward, progressing toward some kind of goal. I bet it just changes your whole attitude.

  My car, which I got for free because the previous owners thought it was possessed (the groans were actually from a defective power steering pump), carried me past a permanently closed Walmart—yes, even our Walmart went out of business—and into a neighborhood of large Victorian homes that had probably been the fancy part of Undisclosed back in the old days. Several of the houses had been turned into somewhat shady businesses—a consignment shop, a gun dealer, and the aforementioned vape store were all in a row, next to a blue Victorian home that was still a residence. At this hour, it was the only one with lights on inside. As I pulled over, my headlights flashed across a cop SUV parked out front, with John’s Jeep right behind it. I sighed, checked my hair—it looked like a wig that had been flushed down a toilet and recovered in the sewer six months later—and dragged myself out into the rain.

  When I got close to the SUV, I found there was an officer in the driver’s seat, eating a McMuffin and playing a game on his phone. A kid with a square jaw and wavy movie-star hair. It wasn’t somebody we’d dealt with before. He rolled down his window just a crack as I approached, enough to talk through it but not enough to let the rain splatter in.

  I said, “Excuse me, is this where the missing girl is?”

  “No, sir. If she was here she wouldn’t be missing.”

  “Uh … okay, I got a call from John, I’m—”

  “I know who you are. He’s inside, with Herm.”

  I went up and found the front door was standing open. I didn’t want to just let myself in, since people lived here and I wasn’t police. I just sort of stood there awkwardly until the detective appeared a minute later. An older guy, face was mostly mustache—I felt like I’d dealt with him before but couldn’t remember where. Clothes were more casual than what you see detectives wear in movies—khakis and a polo shirt under a windbreaker, looked more like a guy the landlord would send to repair your furnace, the type who’d bend your ear about filter maintenance on the way out. He let me inside just enough to get out of the rain, then put up a hand to stop me.

  I said, “I’m David Wong—”

  “I know. I remember you from your involvement in every single horrible thing that has happened in this town for the last several years.”

  “What about the mayor’s bestiality scandal? I wasn’t involved in that.”

  “That we know of.”

  John walked up from behind the detective, wearing a black overcoat and under it, a gray suit and tie. He yanked off his reading glasses and said, “Dave, this girl is just missing as fuck.”

  He handed me a photo. I asked, “Why are you wearing that?”

  “Which thing?”

  “All of it. I didn’t even know you owned a suit.”

  “Oh, I have to be in court later. That public indecency charge. I’m going to fight it, lawyer dug up some good case law where they found that body paint counts as clothing.”

  I glanced at the picture. It was a little girl, all right. Elementary school age, long blond hair. The type of missing kid the news media actually notices.

  John said, “I think this case is a screaming clown dick. The girl’s name is Margaret Knoll, they call her Maggie. Parents are Ted and Loretta. She went missing a few hours ago.”

  I handed the photo back to John and said, “That’s all the time it took the cops to decide it was Dave and John territory?”

  The detective said, “How many bites do you have to take out of a shit sandwich before you figure out it’s shit? Follow me. And wipe your shoes.”

  * * *

  The house’s interior was as depressing as the magazines at a Laundromat. It looked like maybe they’d just moved into it a couple of weeks ago, like they’d been there long enough to get the chairs and sofa in the right spots, but hadn’t hung any pictures or otherwise decorated. The place just seemed lifeless.

  The father of the missing girl was a tiny little guy with a mighty blond beard, kind of seemed like a character out of a fantasy novel to me. He had a tattoo on his right bicep that looked like it was from some military unit, a skull in front of an ace of spades. Probably no more than five years older than John and I but with a lot more miles on him. I figured there had been a tour in Iraq or Afghanistan or both, and it looked like he’d returned to a job of manual labor. He was on the sofa, rough hands clenched between his thighs, one knee bouncing. A caged animal. Seemed like the kind of guy who’d have a whole detailed routine for how to make up with his wife after he got rough with her.

  Ted Knoll looked me over. What I was wearing could best be described as the opposite of a tuxedo.

  He said, “You’re the guy? You look like a bag of smashed asshole.”

  “Thank you for the feedback. So it’s been explained to you? Who we are?”

  “I asked for you. If it was up to me, cops wouldn’t be here at all.”

  “Okay. Sure. So, what’s going to happen is, I’m going to ask you a series of questions and it’s not going to be at all clear why I’m asking them, some will seem random or even cruel. All I ask is that you simply answer those questions as best you can, and don’t interrupt to ask me why I’m
asking. If you don’t know an answer, just say you don’t know. Okay?”

  He nodded.

  “Is Maggie’s mother here? I’d prefer to not have to go through this twice.”

  “She don’t live here, we’re separated. She don’t know I’m talkin’ to you and we’re gonna keep it that way.”

  “Ah. All right, when did you notice your daughter was missing?”

  “Got up in the middle of the night, don’t know why, happened to walk past her room and saw there was no lump in the blankets. Went in to check, bed was empty, no sign of Maggie anywhere. Front and back doors of the house were both closed and locked. All the windows locked, too. We got an alarm system, either they figured out how to disarm it, or they managed to not trip it. Got security cameras front and back, looks like they went dark at around two in the morning, stayed off for an hour, just a black screen, like somebody knew exactly what they were doing. Like they’d planned it.”

  “All that aside, we’re one hundred percent sure your daughter’s not hiding in a closet, anything like that? We’re not going to find her in the attic, or crawl space, or garage? Under a bed? In a kitchen cabinet?”

  “I’ve torn this fuckin’ place apart. She ain’t here.”

  “In the days or nights leading up to this, did you have any strange dreams?”

  “No.”

  “Did you see any shadowy figures, like maybe out of the corner of your eye, but when you turned to look, nobody was there?”

  “No.”

  “Do you ever have memories of events that never happened? A presidential election that turned out differently than the newspapers say, a famous person you was sure was dead, turning out to be alive?”

  “No. I’m not crazy, if that’s what you’re gettin’ at.”

  “Did you see anything else unusual leading up to Maggie’s disappearance?”

  “Five days ago, a man named Nymph showed up and said he was going to abduct her soon.”

  John and I exchanged a look. John said, “I think that might be our first lead.”