A lonesome banjo plucked and bent over makeshift percussion, a warmly disinterested voice, Burlington Northern pulling out of the world, she twists a key, shuts off engine, radio, headlights all at once. The only streetlight a ways ahead, shines mostly on the rough stone wall that steeply rises to the right, the sidewalk narrow at its base. Across the street a curve of houses, demurely lit, and each at first seems discretely different from the rest of them about, yet all of them, every one, of a size, a type, with their scraps of yard, their brief driveways, their artfully unkempt flowerbeds and shrubs, that each ends up looking much like the others.

The key tucked away in her hoodie, she opens the toolbox on the seat beside her. Lifts aside a massive cleaver and a thinly elegant honing steel to pull out a tiny knife, the blade of it maybe half the length of its handle, whittled to a wicked point. She tucks it away in her hoodie. Takes another knife, as pointed but much longer, in her left hand, blade of it laid back against her forearm, and one more item, a lumpy wad of something rubbery and brown. Snap and clack the lid of the toolbox.

Quick across the street and up the shallow curl of driveway past a garage door shut up tight to the corner where she crouches, back to the house, silently panting through her wide-open mouth. Shakes out the wad, blankly goggled, blackly crackle, and, careful of the handle of the knife, ducks to slip it on, a horse’s head, loosely floppy, a lopping wobble as she tugs it into place.

From the corner into darkness, through stiff hedge-sheaves with a minimum of rustle, then wary, sidelong steps down a steepening slope, fingertips brushing the wall beside her as the the bulk of the house lofts from the ground into darkness, just the hint of a flicker, candlelight, perhaps, ahead. When she can she ducks beneath, a step, two, criss-cross to a shadow solid enough to hold, a piling, and another, there. That weakly candlelight suggests by where it will not, cannot shine the shape of things, a sparse network of spindly piers lifting the enormity of the house above away from the falling slope, a wall there, a slender cellar of a sort, depended from that bulk, opening on an airy porch licked by that candlelight, slung out over a night sky only vaguely relieved in the distance by downtown’s glow, hidden behind a shadow-scrim of trees.

Under the house, across the slope, slither of dry dirt, till her back’s to the wall of the slender cellar, she waits out the silence. Careful steps, that wobbling snout a faint oddity in the shadows, tipped up to scan the joists and girders of the subflooring above, down to take in the cellar wall, ending abruptly to become the porch that itself takes flight, lifting in turn from the slope on piers of its own. She takes hold of the edge of that wall, breathlessly still until slowly, so slowly her other hand reaches up, candlelight glinting the blade of the knife swung away from her forearm, laid ever so carefully on the floor between two balustrades.

Nothing happens for a terribly lengthy minute.

Up and silently up her feet a-sway an elbow hooking the rail hunch and twist of hip a hoisted knee to soundless over the railing drop to the floor of the porch in a motionless crouch, arms wide, lop-muzzled head quite still.

The porch mostly taken up by one long table, thicketed with dead candles, only a handful at the far end burning, the rest of them sagged, leaned, melted in heaps of particolored slag, toppled and broken over bulwarks of filthy plates, glassware slimed with sticky dregs. Someone’s slumped by those last few burning candles, the fitful flicker of them lapping at a bald head face-down in a tipped-up bowl, pink hand limply splayed.

She takes hold of the hilt of the knife on the floor by her knee.

Quietly down the porch, around and over the chairs shoved back from the table, that knife held out, away, to float over platters piled with limply rancid bacon, with furry blackened bread, with shriveled slices of tomato and withered herbs, a haze of gnats and fruit flies twirling, disturbed by the passage of the blade. Down to the end of the table and around to loom above the figure slumped there, pink-cheeked face turned sideways, pillowed on sodden noodles, shiny with coagulated broth, more flies a-whirl about an upright goblet, still cupping a wine-dark puddle.

She turns the blade as she lifts it, switching her grip from forward to reverse, up above her wobbling head as her other hand comes up to cap her grip.

Her shoulders lift with one deep breath. The other doesn’t stir.

Thunk of blade-tip in tabletop a clinking squelch, the bowl rolling upright. The knife’s pinned a shirt-collar, detached, yellowed with old sweat, there by a pink dish glove. She lets go. Steps back. Lifts away that horse’s head, shakes out her black hair, spiky short. “Huh,” says Ellen Oh. Looks up.

Frances Upchurch stands at the other end of the table, her pearly suit, her corkscrew curls. She lifts a finger to flawlessly painted lips, shush.

Then she turns and climbs the stairs into the house.

Leaving knife, collar, glove, the candlelight, the rotting feast, Ellen races up the length of the table leaping a toppled chair to follow her up those stairs, up and out into a dark and empty room, far corners of it and the floor vaguely gleamed by city-glow through the one great wall of broken glass. She shakes out the horse’s head without stopping and tugs it back over her own, quickening her pace down a long and narrow hall, front door glancingly lit, a footfall to the left, above, a doorway enclosing a spiral staircase up to another hall, a light here and another at the end of it, past photographs hung on the walls, a rain-filled light-struck window, a twilit street of anonymous warehouses and power lines.

A padlock’s bolted to the door at the end of the hall, but the shank of it’s undone, hung loosely from the hasp. She reaches to lift it away, but something’s clung to the rubbery felted stuff of her sleeve, a feather, long, a puff of white about the quill, vanes of it grimly barred with brown.

The goggled eyes of the horse head scan the hall, the walls, the darkness of the stairwell at the end. The feather drifts to the floor. She undoes the hasp, turns the knob, opens the door.

The room within’s almost entirely walled away behind a canopy of netting. A single lamp is lit, and shadows lop and flutter, small and flimsily clumsy about a tall still silhouette. “Marfisa is the Horse,” a light clear voice pitched low, “but you are not Marfisa.”

“She said,” says Ellen, a hand coming up to the cuff of the mask, “if I wore this, no one would stop me. But no one’s, here,” she says, horse-head turning away, dim hall barely visible between the light at this end, and at that. “Except,” she says.

The silhouette steps closer to the netting, light shifting, shadow-scraps a-whirl. “What have you done.”

Ellen lifts the mask from her head. “I killed him,” she says.

“No.” The silhouette steps back, and back again. “No, you didn’t,” she says, a darkness looming over the lamp. “Close up the door,” she says, “and run.” She shuts it off.

“Where did,” says Ellen, looking away from the dark room to see the dimness trembling a blur that tumbles her prone to the dull carpeting. Bracing she kicks back but uselessly through a scribbled chiaroscuro that writhing grips and yanks, flipping her onto her back hands up that mask a-dangle to kick out again her free foot through air that ripples, whips away, resurges. Another kick at the shivering knot of light and shadow that’s gripped her other foot. A howl roars the trembling length of the hall, displacing air to swell by yanks and jerks a monstrous weight that crumpling drops on her strangled grunt the dust that jumps from the carpet, and a wrinkled crease of light surrounds her head, wrenching up to slam her gasping back. Those are eyes now above her, burning beneath brows of guttering smoke, and that hole punched in the space beneath them becomes a mouth that yawning growling clenches in a sneer to drop a single word like a bullet, “You.” The weight of the other above her blurring pulls from air and shadow and dust a torso, unfurls the arms that end in fists that hold her down, spins up a crown of wild white light to whirl above those eyes. “Who are you,” words chiseled from the sound of grinding stones.

“Phil,” she manages to say.

That weight rears up, improbably stretching those arms. “Phil?” and then, “Dr. Kilo?” Collapsing, floorboards groaning with the sudden burden, those fists squeezing her shoulders, that fizzing, hissing, sparking face too close. “Berlin,” says the other, and that scramble of light and shadow sloughs away from pale lips licked by a grey-pink tongue, peels from ruddy cheeks below gimlet eyes, boils away from a crown of wild white hair adrift about a bald pink pate, the whole set oddly atop that trembling bolus of tight-wound light and air, dust and shadow. Those lips part, revealing sharp white teeth. “You aren’t candy floss,” says the other, leaning almost tenderly to bite, there, where her black-inked shoulder turns into her throat.

Her hand leaps up for one sharp blow.

A thunderclap lashing light that head snaps back, chin dark with blood but also the hair now lank about the temple, the once-pink ear, the hand that’s slapping uselessly at the hilt of the tiny knife she’s jammed into the side of that skull. The air, the light, the shadows unsprung, whipped free, wild blows that shiver photos from their hooks and crumple sheetrock, rake the carpet, knock her kicking knees askew and drive the breath from her as she manages to scramble out from under just as all of it implodes, a great intaken breath, swallowed away. Her feet under herself, a hand coming across to cup the blood that wells from her throat as the mewling other scrabbles the carpet strewn with feathers, a pinkly naked body much too small.

“You’re alive,” says the woman in the darkness behind the netting.

Ellen upright leaned trembling against the wall looks down at the other sat up on the carpeting, belly a swelling eructation pinkly plumped that pushes, pop! those arms now long enough to cradle a wailing, bleeding head. “I’m not done,” she says.

“You’re not enough.”

Her one hand still clamped about the shoulder of her hoodie already heavy with blood, wincing as her other hand shuts the door between them. Closes up the hasp, fits the padlock to it. Snaps it shut. Turns back to the other but one of those arms too long too thin for the great swollen paw of a hand at the end of it swiping at her, she takes a skipping step away to stumble catch herself back braced against the wall. “Jyidshe,” a sound that struggles from those lips, and she lifts a foot to aim a kick at that head, but the one great hand’s being dragged back scuttling across the carpet, and the other’s lifted, fingers spread to catch, to hold, to twist, and with a groan she pushes herself away, unsteady steps away, still leaned against the crumbled wall, smearing a trail of blood and gypsum in her wake as she heads for the darkness of the stairwell.

Feathers crackle as those hands flop to the carpet, grab and pull that body after her, tiny feet kicked uselessly, too slow, too slow, that swollen head the hilt of the knife still jutting from it lifting itself, a horrible sludgy wail of rage and frustration that manages to shape a word, “Midch!”