I

            One sunny early afternoon in late summer, Abuse and Max were out at the back dock arguing about Tolkien and smoking cigarettes when their conversation was jarred by a great crashing sound from beyond the vented metal door across from the dumpsters.

            “Fucking mystery door,” Max muttered, looking over suspiciously for a moment before resuming the delivery of a crucial point. “Merry and Pippin start acting all giddy when they smoke it after the flooding of Isengard. How do you explain that, exactly?”

            Abuse shrugged. “That’s a Peter Jackson interpretation,” he said. “Have you even read the books?”

            “Of course I have,” Max said indignantly. “I’ve read them every couple years since I was a kid.”

            “So,” Abuse said, pausing to calculate, “you’re read them twice?”

            Max frowned. “I’m twenty-three.”

            Abuse was nodding. “And when did you begin to think that the pipe-weed was marijuana?”

            Max gripped his forehead. “I’m not saying it’s marijuana.”

            “Yeah, pretty much, you are,” Abuse insisted.

            “I’m just saying it makes them all elated, like high,” Max said, “not that it’s kind bud.”

            “And when did you start to notice this?” Abuse asked again.

            “I don’t know, man,” Max cried. “A few years back?”

            “So after the film adaptation of The Two Towers—”

            There was another crash from beyond the door, this one even more voluminous than the previous and so violent that it caused the broken tabletop leaning against the door to rattle against the vent panel. This tabletop had been there for many months, despite the “Do Not Block” warning on the plaque on the door.

            Abuse scowled at the door and stepped cautiously toward it.

            “It does that all the time,” Max said.

            “Not that loud, it doesn’t,” Abuse contended. “I think they may be increasing in intensity.”

            “Whatever,” Max said.

            Abuse leaned in and put an ear to the section of the vent paneling that was not covered by the tabletop.

            “What are you do—”

            Abuse hushed him with a frown.

            Jux suddenly emerged from the back room, lighting up a cigarette. “Got that time-for-a-cigarette-right-after-clocking-in kind of vibe,” he announced.

            “Shhh,” Max said, ticking his head at Abuse.

            Jux looked over at Abuse. “Hear any breathing in there?”

            Abuse shook his head and ran a finger along one of the metal slats that were slanted downward so that one couldn’t see through. “Almo swears that this is the trash collector for the lofts,” he said, pointing up toward the three floors of luxury apartments above them.

            “I take it you’re skeptical,” Jux said.

            “To say the least,” Abuse said, “and, no, not just because it came from Almo.”

            “The trash room is on the other side there,” Max said, “by the entrance to the fitness center. Jen used to know someone who lived up here and we actually checked it out. You remember Jen?”

            Abuse nodded. “This is definitely not a trash collection room.”

            “It’s probably just an electrical closet,” Jux said.

            “That would certainly be disappointing,” said Abuse.

            “Why’s that?” Jux asked, sucking on his cigarette.

            Max chuckled.

            “Hey, don’t forget he’s new,” Abuse said.

            “Yeah,” Jux added.

Max rolled his eyes.

            Abuse looked at Jux. “You’ve been here more than a month and you haven’t heard anything crash behind this door?”

            Jux shrugged. “Not that I recall.”

            “Let me explain something about this door,” Abuse snapped. “This door, you see, is a strange door.” He bounced his eyebrows.

            “That’s not really an explanation,” Jux noted.

            “Then allow me to elaborate,” Abuse said. “This door is always shut and locked. Nobody at this restaurant has a key to it. Truth is, most of the time nobody even takes any notice of it at all, but, every once in a while, there’s some huge crashing sound from the other side. Not like glass or anything that’s breaking so much as, well, like someone dropped an anvil on a crate of TNT.”

            Jux stared at him. “Have you been going to bed watching that Looney Tunes DVD again?”

            Abuse held up a finger. “But that’s not all,” he said. “As you just heard, Almo thinks it’s the trash chute for the millionaires upstairs, and that the crashing is them just pretty much taking out their anger at the poor by bombarding us with their trash, but, like Max said, this isn’t where the trash chute on this side of the building is. And it’s never opened, so I don’t see how anyone could be collecting the trash, if you know what I mean. No, this is something unexplained. Kieran, probably not a surprise, claims it’s a ghost.”

            “He thinks everything’s a ghost,” Max said. “One time we found him waving cilantro at the pantry.”

            “Is cilantro good for ghosts?” Jux asked.

            “Helps their digestion,” Abuse said, rubbing his belly.

            “Why was he waving cilantro at the pantry?” Jux asked.

            “Because the chef reorganized it and nobody told him,” Max said.

            “Which, to Kieran, led directly to ghosts,” Abuse added.

            Jux was nodding. “Well,” he began, “I’ve got prep to do, so, if there isn’t anyt—”

            “I haven’t told you everything, yet,” Abuse said. He took out another cigarette.

            “Oh, Jesus,” Jux said. “I mean, I don’t have that much prep, but…”

            “Another way of describing the sound,” Abuse said, “is like some crazy machine lurching to a stop—or a start. This was proposed by Natalija, just a few weeks before she disappeared.”

            “Disappeared?” Jux asked. “Who’s Natalija?”

            “She was the kitchen manager,” Abuse explained, “back in the day before Tati deemed it unnecessary to have a kitchen manager. She was the last one.”

            “And she disappeared,” Jux offered.

            “She quit,” Max said.

            “Oh,” Jux said, frowning and looking at the door. “Because of this door?”

            “No, because Tati is a son of a bitch who doesn’t listen,” Max said.

            Jux was still staring at the door. “So what does it have to do with this door?” he asked. “And has this table always been leaned against it like this? I don’t remember that.”

            Abuse was grinning. “See?” he asked. “This table has been here for a long time, and you didn’t even notice it.”

            Jux sighed. “I’m confused,” he said. “Why are we talking about an electrical closet?”

            Abuse scowled at him. “You’re not listening,” he said. “Nobody knows what it is. And I’ll tell you an idea I’ve been having lately. That noise—it’s also kind of like the sound of something trying to get out.”

            Max suddenly let rip a terrible chainsaw of a fart, eyes wide for the duration.

            “Disgusting,” Abuse muttered.

            Jux was laughing. “Dude,” he said. “Did you do that on call? That’s fucking impressive.”

II

            Later that week, on a bright morning, Abuse was the first to arrive at the restaurant. He unlocked the back gate and stopped short as soon as he began to open it. The strange door was slightly ajar and the yawning darkness beyond it seemed to suck greedily at the ambient sunlight like a thirsty child. Abuse looked across the patio toward the back door, which was shut, and entered the dock carefully, eyes darting around in suspicion. He walked past the dumpster and the tall space heaters and the broken furniture toward the back door, keeping sight of the open slatted door as often as he could without risking a trip over something on the ground. When he reached the back door, he tried it and found it locked, so he pushed the key into the handle lock and opened the back door, still eyeing the slatted door at the other end of the patio. The storeroom was dark as usual and the kitchen lit only by the calm safety lights. That didn’t necessarily mean that nobody was in the restaurant; it was far from strange that a server or the owner would arrive early for something and proceed directly to the computer at the bar and leave the kitchen sleeping. The fact that the back gate had been locked, though, was strange. Abuse left the back door open and went toward the slatted mystery door with one hand gripping the strap of his black backpack.

            As he approached the ajar door, he couldn’t see inside because it was opened away from him, so he stepped cautiously and listened carefully.

            “Anyone in there?” he asked. No answer. He reached the door and gripped it and drew it wide open.

            The slant of daylight fell onto a wedge of concrete floor that looked no different than that of the patio, though it was considerably less grime-stained. There was nothing else to see at first and the room seemed cavernous. Abuse peered into the darkness and picked his phone out of his pocket and turned on the flashlight. Directly ahead, at a distance of about ten feet, was a metal container not unlike the dumpster on the patio. Abuse glanced behind him at the dumpster and then again at the container in the room. This second look was quite different: it no longer seemed near to the size of the dumpster. It wasn’t like anything he’d ever seen, really, and he grunted and pointed the flashlight around the room. To the immediate left was the brick wall of the building, unadorned, so nothing strange there. When he flashed the light in the opposite direction, however, he was met by a narrow hall-like space that stretched farther than the light of his phone could illuminate. Everything was bare except for a moldering, crumpled brown sack near the exterior wall. He extended his phone a bit to take a closer look and found that it was a fast-food sack with a 1990’s era logo.

He was about to investigate further when he heard someone shriek from what he perceived to be inside the restaurant. He’d only taken a couple of steps into the strange room, so he was out quickly. He stuck an empty crate against the door jamb to keep the door open and hurried through the storeroom and kitchen and then out into the front, where Kieran was gripping his forehead and staring at the floor.

            “I knew somebody was in here,” Abuse said.

            “I just got here,” Kieran said.

            “What were you screaming about?” Abuse asked. “Are you okay?”

            “There is a cockroach as big as my hand in here,” Kieran said. He pointed toward the front door. “Right when I came in, it was right there and went off into the banquet room.”

            Abuse smiled grimly. “You want me to kill it?”

            Kieran nodded.

            Abuse looked around near the computer station at the bar. “Got anything big I can use to brain it?”

            “I don’t care,” Kieran said, trembling.

            Abuse picked up a fat heavy paperback that was tucked between the register and a desk organizer overflowing with miscellanea: capless pens, a broken stapler, a frayed pad of sticky notes, an air pressure gauge. “This’ll work,” he surmised, slapping the girth of the volume with a palm.

            Kieran gasped, his face filling with shocked anger as if Abuse were tearing up his NRA membership card. “Not that,” Kieran insisted, snatching the book from him.

            “What?” Abuse asked. He leaned in to study the cover of the book, now tightly in Kieran’s grip. It was titled Explore the Cheeses of the World! and among several unappealing images of various cheeses was a stout mustachioed man in a red checkered jacket and a bowtie holding out a cane like he was a vaudeville star in middle of his act. “Who the fuck is this clown?” Abuse asked.

            Kieran scowled at him. “Clown?” he asked. “He’s no clown. That’s Geoffrey Bulaine, North America’s premier fromager.”

            Abuse was staring at him. “A cheese sommelier, then?”

            “They just don’t get the respect they deserve,” Kieran lamented.

            Abuse shook his head. “I’ll just use my shoe.”

The small private dining area was adjacent to the main front. The curtains were usually collected up into bundles at either side when nothing special was going on, but, of course, they were fully extended now, and he couldn’t see more than a few inches of the space under the dangling fringes. With a clean swipe he drew back the right curtain, sending its rings clattering together across the pole from which it hung. The room was well-lit by the rising sun, just like the main room, and with no cockroach immediately visible. Abuse investigated the space, occupied as it currently was by high-top tables and bar chairs, and found nothing. He went back to Kieran, who was now staring at the computer screen in total confusion.

            “You just put in your number,” Abuse said, “and then hit ‘clock in.’”

            “I know that,” Kieran said irritably.

            Abuse waited for him to do it, and then he clocked himself in. Then he remembered the strange door and strode quickly back through the kitchen and storeroom and out into the back patio only to find, unsurprisingly, the door shut and the crate that he’d used to prop it open completely disappeared. He immediately pulled a cigarette from the pack in his pocket, lit it, and smoked it while staring at the door. The light rail passed, braking to a stop, and a car horn blared somewhere nearby. When he was finished with the cigarette, he flicked it toward the can in the corner by the gate. It ricocheted off the gate and fell into the can.

            “Score,” Abuse said.

III

            Lunch was set up and served without a hitch, as usual. Around two, when the evening crew started arriving, Abuse swiftly finished up switching out the stations and then went outside for a smoke. Before he lit up, he looked at the slatted door and then went to the bar.

            Beneath the clock-in computer at the bar was a cardboard box that contained miscellaneous things: unused shelf brackets, a screwdriver, rolls of different-colored tape, old menus. He was digging around in there when Kieran asked him what he was doing.

            “Do we have a tape measure?” Abuse asked.

            “Check the bottom shelf of the cabinet at the server’s station,” Kieran said. “Below the teas.”

            Abuse went there and opened up the tall cabinet and knelt down to pull out another cardboard box that had the word “tools” written upon in in black sharpie. Once he’d got it out onto the floor, he looked at the rear of the cabinet and leaned in to touch it, thinking about how just on the other side of the wall there was the weird metal container in that old dark room. What was that thing?

            He didn’t find a tape measure in the “tools” box, so he put the box where he’d found it and thought about what the longest thing around was that he could use as a measure.

            About ten minutes later, Jux arrived at the back gate and found Abuse holding the long white-handled cheese knife against the brick wall halfway between the slatted door and the door to the storeroom and kitchen.

            “What the fuck is this?” Jux asked, unflapping his bag to pull out a cigarette.

            Abuse frowned at him.

            “What?” Jux asked.

            “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Abuse asked.

            “Ah, yes,” Jux said conclusively. “I should clock in before smoking this cigarette.”

            Abuse shook his head. “What kind of dishwasher are you, having to be reminded?”

            “The kind that’s on the cold side tonight,” Jux said. “Danny called out, so they’re bringing in some new kid for the dishpit and I’m making salads.” He was beaming as he sauntered into the kitchen.

            Just a few seconds later, Jux was back on the patio standing next to Abuse, who still had the cheese knife. They were both smoking cigarettes.

            “I swear that room in there is longer than it should be,” Abuse said.

            Jux looked at the closed mystery door. “You got in there?”

            Abuse nodded. “When I came in this morning,” he said, “it was open.”

            Jux’s eyes widened. “What’s in there?” he asked. “Electrical junction?”

            “Not that I could see,” he said. “There’s some kind of big metal container, but that’s it. And a Wendy’s bag with a logo from the early nineties.”

            “Like when the locations all had those curved windows at the front?” Jux asked excitedly.

            “Exactly,” Abuse said. “The weirdest thing was that along this side here there was like a long room, which I couldn’t even see the end of because it was so dark.”  

            “So you’re measuring with that big-ass knife?” asked Jux.

            “No tape measure to be found,” said Abuse. “The wall here is about twelve or thirteen knife lengths. The room in there has got to be at least that long, but then there’s the storeroom.”

            “That’s an eighteen-inch knife, right?” asked Jux.

            Abuse shrugged.

            “So, if that’s eighteen inches,” Jux said, getting out his phone, “so that’s times thirteen… 834… divided by twelve… nineteen point five.”

            “Nineteen point fucking five,” Abuse concurred, smoking and nodding at the wall.

            “Right,” said Jux. He sucked at his cigarette and put his phone away.

            “I’m losing my mind, obviously,” Abuse said.

            Jux shook his head. “No,” he said. “We can use science to figure it out.”

            “Aha,” Abuse said.

            They stood silent for a few moments.

            “So what’s the nineteen point five?” asked Abuse.

            “Feet, I think,” Jux said, unsure. He pulled out his phone. “I mean, the storeroom here is at least fifteen feet long, right? Or should we do it in metric?”

            “We’d better measure,” Abuse said, holding up the cheese knife. “And none of your meters from Spain around here, please.”

            After a patently unscientific measurement was made in the cluttered storeroom, they took their results back outside and began new cigarettes.

            “So that was six cheese knives long,” Jux said, fumbling at his phone, “which is 18 times six is… 108… divided by twelve… nine. Nine.”

            “Fucking nine, dude,” Abuse said. “Here it is again.”

            “Round two for nine,” Jux concurred.

            “More like round nine,” Abuse corrected.

            “Right,” Jux said, nodding. “Sorry. Got it all mixed up.”

            They were quiet for some time but for the sucking at their cigarettes.

            “Is that feet?” asked Abuse.

            Jux nodded. He stared at the slatted door. “Oh, shit,” he said. “We have to apply the knowledge.”

            “Agreed,” said Abuse.

            “The storeroom is nine feet long,” Jux said, “and this wall here is nineteen-point-five feet long.”

            “Right,” said Abuse.

            “So that means that the room there is a little bit longer than the storeroom,” said Jux.

            “No way,” Abuse said. “It was way deeper than that.”

            “Maybe it just seemed like it because it isn’t cluttered with bullshit,” Jux opined.

            Abuse shook his head. “No way,” he said. “It was deeper by far. My phone’s light wasn’t strong enough to show it… I couldn’t even see where it ended.”

            “Why didn’t you just keep walking, then?” Jux asked.

            “Kieran started shrieking, so I went inside,” Abuse said. “He said there was a sewer roach in the annex, but I didn’t see anything when I went to check. Then, when I came back out here, the crate I used to prop the door open was moved and the door was shut.”

            Jux scanned the dock. “Where’s the tabletop?”

            Abuse inhaled. “I didn’t even think about that,” he said warily.

            Jux looked at his phone. “I suppose we could use science,” he said. “Diffusion of light and all that. I’d have to figure it out, though.”

            “Fuck it,” Abuse said.

            Jux nodded.

            They took turns flicking their cigarettes at the can in the corner past the slatted door. Abuse’s cigarette landed on the cement to the left and skidded under the closed part of the gate and out into the parking lot. Jux’s cigarette hit the wall near the mystery door and landed on a puddle-stained section of the patio.

            “I win,” Abuse said happily.

            Jux grunted and fetched the butt and pressed it out against the rim of the can before depositing it with the countless others. He was right next to the slatted door and tried to look up through the slats. Seeing nothing, he shrugged and shook his head.

            “Crazy fucking door, man,” he said. “Did you switch out the lines?”

            Abuse nodded.

            “Good,” Jux said. “I need to get on the crostinis.”

IV

            That evening, just as the dinner push was starting up—three tables were seated in quick succession and two happy hour tops had decided to stick it out for a full-priced meal—Jux was removing a full sheetpan of golden-toasted crostinis from the oven, his eyes watering from the heat as well as from the emotions he was feeling at finally having completed a batch of toast, when there was a sudden sonorous boom and crash from the other side of the wall at the ranges. The shock was enough to shake the tall cooler and dislodge a stack of to-go styros that was placed up there for quick access. This sheaf of light containers fell, knocking against the edge of the sheetpan and sending half of the fresh crostinis to scatter across the rancid rubber mats on the floor. The Styrofoam containers themselves ended up on one of the hot burners of the range and quickly shrunk and began to produce thick, acrid, black smoke.

            “Motherfucker,” Jux said, setting the tray with the remaining crostinis on the cold side line.

            Chef Jessup quickly slapped the burning containers away from the range. “That was some monster of a shit,” he said, smiling dumbly and shaking his head. “I didn’t know Almo was still here.”

            “That wasn’t Almo,” Jux said, staring at the wall.

            Two tickets printed.

            Jessup was nodding. “I know,” he said. “Bathroom’s past the other wall, over there.” He collected the carbon-copy tickets.

            Jux was still staring at the wall. “You know that door outside? With the vent?”

            Jessup cocked an eyebrow. “Is this a ‘yo mama’ joke?” He slid one of the tickets into the cold side line’s strip and peeled apart the other so that one copy could go on the cold side and the other before him at the hot side.

            “No, it’s a question,” Jux said. “That’s not even how yo mama jokes work. Look, do you know the door I’m talking about? At the dock? Had a tabletop leaning against it for months?”

            “Oh,” Jessup said as he squatted down to start digging around in the hot side station’s cooler, “I got a good one.”

            “Huh?” Jux asked.

            “Yo mama’s so fat,” Jessup said, “when she hauls ass, she got to make two trips.”

            “Ah, yes,” Jux said.

            Another ticket printed. Jessup stood up, placed a stainless sixth on the cutting board, and took the ticket. “Another one for you.”

            Jux sighed and looked over at the door to the back room.

            “Oh,” Jessup said. “Here’s one. Yo mama so fat, when she wore a Malcolm X t-shirt a helicopter tried to land on her.”

            Jux gripped his forehead. “I really don’t think you should tell that joke,” he said. “Besides, it doesn’t even make sense. Helicopter landing pads are big circles with the letter H in them. Everyone knows that.”

            “Have you ever been in a helicopter?” Jessup asked.

            Jux looked at him. “Have you ever seen that door out back with the vent?”

            “Changing the subject,” Jessup said. He palmed a mound of mac and cheese out of the container with a bare hand and plopped it into a service bowl.

            “No gloves, eh?” Jux noted.

            Jessup shrugged. “It’s just Teatree,” he said. “If he wants me to put on gloves, he shouldn’t order his staff meal during the dinner rush. Besides, my hands are clean.”

            “Not that one,” Jux observed.

            Jessup used his uncheesy hand to sprinkle diced onions and chunks of Italian sausage over the bowl before sliding it into the oven and walking over to the rinsing station.

            “How long before you’re going to have that blackened duck in the window for G291?” Jux asked.

            Jessup was rinsing his hand. “Probably eight minutes.”

            Jux walked to the back room, undoing his apron along the way. “I’ll be right back.”

            “Where you going?” Jessup called after him. “You got to sweep up these crostinis.”

            “Just crunch them into the mats and I’ll get them out with the sprayer later,” Jux said.

            The dock was still shimmering with the day’s heat, and everything looked orange. Jux went straight to the strange door and found that the tabletop was again leaning against it. He clenched his lips together and stared at it for a few moments before leaning in to listen at the door’s slats. There was a faint hum, like air moving through a cavity or a ceiling fan spinning on high in another room. He swallowed. Then there was a sound like crumpling paper, but, again, faint, almost impossible to determine if it was, in fact, something that he was actually hearing. He was frowning and trying not to breathe and putting all of his energy into listening.

            “Probably need you back in here,” Chef Jessup’s voice rang from the kitchen.

            Jux tore himself away from the door and went back in, only to discover about fifteen tickets in the cold-side clip and Chef Jesse powering through the searing of six different meats all at once. Four orders were already plated and steaming in the hot side window. One of them was blackened duck breast for G291.

            “What the fuck is going on?” Jux asked.

            “Dinner,” Jessup said. “No more smoke breaks during the rush. You should already know that.”

            “I didn’t have time to smoke,” Jux complained as he started studying the orders. “I was only out there for like two minutes.”

            Jessup looked up at the clock. “More like fifteen, at least.”

            “What?” Jux cried. He shook his head and started frantically building salads, as tall as the greens would allow themselves to be piled, garnishing them with seared fennel, crumbles of blue cheese, julienned tomatoes, chiffonade basil, farm-style croutons, halved red grapes, dried cranberries, roasted tomato wedges, toasted pine nuts, chunks of mango, globs of goat cheese, slivers of marcona almonds, noodles of nopales, shafts of hearts of palm, halved kalamata olives, shattered hard-cooked eggs, fanned slices of spice-wine poached pears. Not all of these ingredients went on each salad, of course; he was sure to adhere strictly to recipe for each order, including dousing them with squirts from squeeze bottles of the appropriate dressing, whether it be the creamy tangerine vinaigrette, the blue cheese, the rosemary parsnip wine reduction, or the herb balsamic vinaigrette. After a few hectic moments, he’d loaded the cold-side window to capacity with towering salads.

            “I’ll let it slide this time,” Jessup said as he ladled tapered ovals of garlic cream sauce onto a pair of otherwise empty plates, “but, just so you know, we have to mix the greens in the dressing first now, before plating and topping.”

            Jux looked at the salads for a moment and then frowned over at the dish station, which, he realized in that moment, was overrun with dirty service. “But that means a fresh mixing bowl every time, doesn’t it?”

            “More or less,” Jessup said. He was now nesting wads circular cakes of crispy risotto into the sauce on the plates. “You can do like three or four at once if you have that many orders of the same salad at the same time.”

            Jux sighed. “Got it,” he said. He reached over and pressed one of the call buttons on the panel between the hot and cold side. “So when’s the new guy coming in?”

            Jessup gave him a side-eye. “New guy?” he said with an awkward little chuckle. “What new guy?”

            “Kieran said that since Danny called in sick, and that meant I was on cold side, there was a new guy coming in to run the dishpit,” Jux said. “I’m sure he told me that.”

            Jessup shrugged and topped the risotto with chicken breast and little pinch of microgreens for garnish. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “Maybe he meant you, for some reason?”

            “I’ve been here for weeks,” Jux said, assembling several large cheese plates all at once. Each of the huge square plates had a scoop of herbed cheese spread right in the middle, into which were jabbed crostinis that stuck out like wolverine claws. The artisan cheeses themselves would be added up at the bar, so he left ample space between the dried cherries and nuts and sliced apples and olives and—

            “It’s kind of like double-duty when this happens on a slow night,” Jessup explained. He was now on the other side of the line, gripping two fat wads of raw filet mignon in one ungloved hand while navigating a messy, unwieldy handful of frozen shoestring fries into the fryer with the other. The hissed as he dropped the tray into the oil. “Tati’s word. Don’t worry, I’ll chip in over there when this is over.”

            Jux eyed the accumulation of dishes at the dishpit with suspicion and winced as several more tickets buzzed out. He was sorting them, splitting them when necessary for placement at their respective positions on the clips, when Lyle walked briskly into the kitchen.

            “Sorry, sorry,” he muttered.

            “You must be busy as hell out there,” Jux opined. “This isn’t like you.”

            Lyle gave him a pathetic and appropriately subservient look. “I’m on every table except the bar,” he said as he studied the tickets accompanying the various orders lined up in the window. “Max was supposed to be here, but he didn’t show.”

            “Yeah, we’re down one back here, too,” Jessup said, wiping cow’s blood onto his apron with both hands as the filets sizzled in a pan.

            “I see that,” Lyle said, sending Jux a kind smile. “How’s it feel on the line?”

            Jux returned the smile and gave a little nod. “Not bad at all,” he said, “despite the, you know, circumstances.”

            Lyle nodded a few times and began collecting plates.

            “What about Teatree?” Jux asked. “Can’t he at least come back here and help you deliver some of those plates before they get cold? The hot ones, I mean.”

            Lyle had three plates tucked securely over one arm. “He’s busy.”

            “But we haven’t sent anything out for the bar in a while,” Jux noted. “A couple of cheese plates, maybe, but…”

            “He’s slammed,” Lyle said, somehow balancing five orders across his arms and nonetheless managing to execute a shrug. “Some kind of pub crawl, I guess. A few minutes ago, he was having a panic attack by the freezers.” He raised his eyebrows sagely and turned to leave, calling corner clearly as he did.

            Jux filled the empty spaces in the window with the cheese plates and set into another batch of salads. There were four in total this time around, and three of them were the same, so he stepped over to the dishpit and collected two stainless steel mixing bowls from the high rack, one large and one small. The small one was the last of its kind on the rack, so he frowned and scanned the dishpit.

            “You know where the small mixing bowls are?” he asked.

            Jessup shrugged, his flabby upper body ghostly in the haze emanating from the pans on the range.

            “But there are like ten small mixing bowls,” Jux said as he set the bowls on the cutting board and donned latex-free service gloves, “and there’s only one of them over here.”

            Jessup jerkily flipped the contents of two pans of stir-fry at the same time. “I don’t know about your mixing bowls, Jux,” he said, focused on sauté. “Maybe they’re dirty.”

            Jux loaded the large bowl with spring mix and the small with arugula, looking occasionally up from the task to examine the cluttered dishpit as carefully as he could. “I don’t see them on the counter.”

            Jessup was plating the stir fry. “Let’s just get through E6 and B49,” he said intensely, “and then we’ll look for the bowls. Should be smooth sailing after that.”

            Jux continued on the orders, first lightly coating the greens in the bowls and then transferring them handful by handful onto the plates, where he began sculpting and decorating. When they were done, there was no room on the window for them, so he left them on the board and went to the dishpit to clean the bowls. On his way there, however, he noticed that the tall cold-side cooler was a few inches away from the wall and its wheels had pushed up a corner of the black rubber traction mat on the floor. He shouldered into it, but it didn’t budge, so he just stepped around the upturned flap of perforated rubber and washed the bowls and set them to dry. Before resuming the line work, he squeezed himself between the dish counter and the cooler to try to see what was back there keeping it from moving back into place. By the time he’d got himself in far enough to see that there was nothing but a few inches of empty space back there, Teatree stormed into the kitchen, grinning like a maniac.

            “I will eat Max’s ears,” Teatree swore as he scanned the windows, poking at tickets.

            “What?” Jux asked. He tried to unsqueeze himself and turn at the same time, but in the process his shoulder clipped one of the mounts of the dishpit rack and a huge clear-plastic tub toppled into the rinsing sink, sloshing murky water all over the floor.

            “Why are you behind the refrigerator, Jux?” Teatree asked.

            “Shut up,” Jux snapped.

            “Come on,” Teatree said, tilting his head to the side. “It’s a fair question.”

            “The goddamned cooler got moved away from the wall,” Jux said. He tried to push it again, but, again, it didn’t move.

            “You have those beef salads for A12?” Jessup asked.

            “What?” Jux said, scrambling to the cold-side and looking at the tickets in the clip. “What beef salads?”

            “For A12,” Jessup repeated.

            “None of these are for A12,” Jux said, “and none of these are beef salads.”

            Jessup frowned and looked up at the hot-side clip. “Oh, snap,” he said. “I didn’t split them. I need two beef salads to go with these beefs. Pronto.”

            “On it,” Jux said, gathering the large bowl from the drying rack and giving it a wipe with paper towels.

            “Hey, Teatree,” Jessup said. “Your mama’s so fat, when she runs around the house—”

            “She runs around the house,” Teatree said in unison. “Love it. Thanks for sharing.”

            “Oh,” Chef Jessup said as he tossed a couple of dirty pans into the bin under the range, “I’ve got way more.”

V

            “So here’s the thing,” Jux explained to Abuse and Ogre on the loud patio at Gloomy’s later that night. “Jessup had every single one of those missing bowls over at the hot side in his bin of dirty pans. Every single one of them, except for the last one, which I had to then use and reclean on the spot every time some fucker decided they wanted a different salad than the person whose order came in before them.”

            Abuse exhaled knowingly. “Got to keep an eye on that hot side bin,” he advised.

            “But I was on the cold side, making salads,” Jux complained. “How am I supposed to just drop everything and slow down service to go over there and collect his hoard of filthy shit?”

            Abuse shrugged. “It’s what you do.”

            “Sounds to me like Jux is bitching about having a job,” Ogre said.

            “Yeah, whatever,” Jux muttered.

            They all sipped their gin and tonics, which were tall.

            “Oh, and you know what happened right at the beginning of dinner?” Jux asked. “The fucking wall by the hot side shook so hard that some to-go containers fell, knocked half my perfect crostinis onto the floor, and started burning up on the, you know, burners. Half a batch! I screwed up like four batches before that, so you can probably understand my frustration.”

            “The hot side wall?” Abuse asked. He slipped a cigarette out of the pack on the wooden table. “Almo usually drops his bombs on the other side of the kitchen, since that’s the wall that’s opposite the bathroom.”

            “It wasn’t the same,” Jux said. “When Almo drops a deuce, the paneling shakes over there because the toilet pipes or whatever are in the wall between the bathroom and the prep table. That’s not a mystery. What happened tonight was that the other wall, behind the range, vibrated like something was pounding on it like a motherfucker and as a result I lost half my crostinis.”

            “You need to stop making crostinis,” Ogre said.

            “Yeah,” Jux said. “You’re not the first to suggest it, let me tell you.”

            Abuse had his unlit cigarette punched between his lips. “I don’t like it.”

            “It’s just an honest suggestion,” Ogre said.

            Abuse was looking at Jux. “You know what’s on the other side of that wall?”

            Jux shook his head. “I know where you’re going with this,” he said, “but the way you described the mystery room, I don’t see how it could physically be right beyond the wall of the hot side. Didn’t you say it was L-shaped?”

            “I didn’t get to explore the whole thing, though,” Abuse said. “We know only one thing about what’s definitely along the hot side wall, and that’s a ventilation shaft. There’s a huge grate right behind the ranges.”

            Jux frowned. “Ventilation shaft,” he pondered. “It’s obviously not tall like a proper room.”

            “No, you have to crouch to get in there,” Abuse said. “Pretty much crawl. Some Half-Life shit.”

            “Wait,” Jux said. “Are you saying that something was in the ducts?”

            Abuse held up his hands. One of them was gripping the lighter that, assumedly, he would use at some point to fire up his cigarette. “I am not saying that.”

            “Here,” Jux said, going for his sling bag. “Let’s sketch it out.”

            Ogre immediately went into his own fast bag and produced a spiral sketchbook.

            Abuse frowned. “The pages in my sketchbook are all spoken for.”

            “We’ll use mine, then,” Jux suggested, sliding a canvas-bound sketchbook across the rough wood of the table. “Need a pen?”

            Abuse eyed him. “Do I look like I need a pen?” Before Jux could answer, he slipped a fine point black ink implement from a pants pocket.

            Ogre was already working his own pen on a page of his book.

            While Abuse began sketching, Jux observed Ogre’s work. “What have we got here?” he asked. “That doesn’t look like a mystery room.”

            “This,” Ogre said, tapping the page, “is a monkey.”

            “That’s a cool-looking monkey,” Jux admitted. “Nice shades.”

            “I don’t know anything about this mystery room you’re all going on about,” Ogre explained.

            “Fair enough,” Jux said. He sipped his gin and tonic and looked over at Abuse’s drawing. “What’s that?”

            Abuse leaned back and squinted down at what he’d drawn. “You don’t see it?”

            “It looks like you’re drawing a bare room,” Jux said. “Is this what the mystery room looks like?”
            Abuse nodded and lit up his cigarette. “View from the vented door.”

            “I like the title,” Jux said, “but it doesn’t really help us, does it? I meant we should sketch, like, a floorplan.”

            “Can’t do it,” Abuse said. “I have made it pretty clear that I didn’t get much further in than this. Also, I don’t do floorplans.”

            Jux took back his notebook with an abrupt, clumsy swipe that almost knocked Abuse’s drink over.

            “Watch it,” Abuse warned.

            “Look,” Jux began. “We just have to try to do basically reliable geometry here. I mean, it’s pretty freaking strange that there’s that room there, but, if you think about it, there’s maybe a pretty large area on that end of the building that’s unexplained.”

            “I told you ten times,” Abuse said, “I didn’t see how far the room went, because it stretched into darkness.”

            “In the direction of the back storage room, though,” Jux said. “That’s already weird, sure, but, unless that hallway or whatever you didn’t explore makes a turn and opens into another expanse, then there’s a whole section of the building that we don’t know anything about, and it’s literally bordering like a third of the restaurant’s perimeter.”

            “Fuck you and your ‘perimeter,’” Abuse said, rolling his eyes.

            “Come on,” Jux said. “You’ve got to know what that means.”

            “Of course I know what perimeter means,” Abuse grumbled. He ticked his head at the sketchbook. “Go ahead. Start the floorplan.”

            While Abuse and Jux went about recalling the numbers they’d previously worked with and Jux used the edge of a pack of cigarettes to estimate regular lengths, Ogre kept drawing monkeys. There were like five monkeys, variously accessorized and all quite handsome, on the page when Jux finally set down the pen and took a sip of gin and tonic.

            “See what I’m saying?” Jux asked. “You got the areas we know: The dock, the back room, the kitchen, the dining room, the front storage area, and then the parking lot along the side here. See what I’m talking about? Is there, like, a stairwell or anything along the parking lot side, or another door, like a utility door?”

            “Not that I’ve ever seen,” Abuse said.

            “So what’s in here, then?” Jux asked.

            Ogre looked up from his monkey sketches. “That’s a big-ass unexplained space.”

            “Exactly,” Jux said. He looked at Abuse. “Tell me again about the space you did see. When you first enter through the door, how far away was the wall to the left? Like, was it far enough to conceivably go all the way to the end of the dock, where the parking lot is?”

            Abuse shrugged. “Maybe,” he said.

            Jux inhaled. “Okay, we can work with that,” he said. “It wasn’t obviously not that far to the left, right?”

            “What?” Abuse said, squinting.

            “Never mind,” Jux said. “So there was the first area, which was deeper than the extension at the right, right?”

            “Right,” Abuse said.

            “So just right in front of you,” Jux offered.

            “Yes,” Abuse snapped. “Right in front, right when you walk in, there’s a space maybe about the size of the back room.”

            “And that’s where the container is,” Jux said.

            Abuse nodded.

            “What kind of container?” Ogre asked suspiciously.

            “No time for speculation now,” Jux insisted. Back to Abuse, he asked, “and, if I remember correctly, you said that the area to the right, which you did not even have the chance to get to the end of, was definitely longer than the back room.”

            “Had to be,” Abuse said.

            “Because it’s hard to make sense of that,” Jux said, frowning down at the crude blueprints. “Let’s assume you’re overestimating the depth of this corridor. Just let’s assume.”

            “Just let’s,” Ogre repeated.

            “Even if it’s only slightly longer than the back room,” Jux continued, “if it isn’t just a weird empty hallway to nowhere, then it’s strange that you wouldn’t have been able to at least see a corner or something to whatever it leads to. Does that make sense?”

            “I think you need to lay off the gin,” Ogre said. “Getting you all charged up.”

            “Shut up,” Jux barked. “This is fascinating. There’s no other entrance to this entire area here, and you can’t possibly get me to believe it’s just a big useless maze of ventilation ducts.”

            “What about something connected to the lofts?” Ogre asked.

            Abuse shook his head. “No dice,” he said. “There have been not a few regulars over the years who lived in the PhLoft, and one of them actually owned the place directly above the restaurant. His back window is right above the dock and his living room window looks out over the parking lot. And I don’t think these lofts have basements.”

            “That would be absurd,” Jux said. “This isn’t Sweden or some shit.”

            “What does that even mean?” Ogre cried.

            Jux scowled at him. “There aren’t enough monkeys in your drawing.”

            “I’ll be the judge of how many goddamned monkeys belong in my drawing,” Ogre said, “thank you very much.”

            “I need another beverage,” Abuse suddenly said, dismounting the stool.

            “Make it three,” Jux said.

            “I think you’ve had enough,” said Ogre.

            “Three,” Jux told Abuse. “Put it on my tab. And get it quick, because we’re onto something here.”

            Abuse nodded skeptically and squeezed through a cluster of smoking alcoholics to exit into the bar.

            “What’s the big idea with all this crazy room stuff, anyway?” Ogre asked.

            Jux lit a cigarette. “It’s fucking weird, man,” he said. “I mean, I thought it was a bunch of paranoid nonsense at first, mostly, but then I thought about it more. There’s literally no explanation for this whole section of the ground floor, and it’s right across the wall from where we’re working. We don’t know what’s in there. Nobody’d even been in there until Abuse managed to get in the other day, and, of course, some weird shit happened that kept him from fully exploring. It’s pretty creepy, really.”

            “How is it creepy?” Ogre asked. “It’s probably just a utility room or something.”

            “Have you been listening?” Jux cried. He waved away a couple of drunks who were looking with sweaty, red-eyed interest from a nearby table and then took a drag from the cigarette. Then he leaned toward Ogre and whispered, increasing intensity as it went on, “Something is banging in there. Not just, you know, the kind of boom you hear when an electrical system powers up or the air conditioning shuts off. This is like violent crashing, and nobody knows how to explain it. Add to that the fact that there’s a fucking strange container of some sort right in front of you when you enter, like some fucking offering box, and then there’s a dark passage that fucking light doesn’t even penetrate the way it should, a passageway that as far as we know might lead deeper into the space, to whatever’s in there, maybe trying to get out, maybe trying to get our attention—”

            “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,” Ogre said, now the one waving off a drunk, Jux specifically. “Calm the fuck down. Have you been listening to Kieran again?”

            Jux was trembling slightly, the ice clattering in his glass as he lifted it to his lips. “I mean, I heard about what he thinks, but…”

            “You know he’s crazy, don’t you?” Ogre pressed. “I worked two shifts at the dishpit last spring, and, over just those twelve hours, I think I heard him talk about twenty different crazy conspiracies and other preposterous shenanigans. Don’t take no stock in all that.”

            Jux stared at him and began crunching some ice in his mouth but almost immediately winced and slammed the glass on the table. “Fuck,” he muttered, dribbling a pink slurry as several patio patrons looked on in gruesome amusement. “Fucking bit my tongue. Shit.”

            “See, look,” Ogre chided. “You’ve gone and got yourself all in a tizzy. There’s no monster in the PhLoft walls. There’s no ghost haunting the restaurant. When the wall shakes by the prep table, it’s just because someone flushed the toilet.”

            “This was on the other side of the—”

            “I know, I know,” Ogre said, smiling and shaking his head. Then he caught a glimpse of Abuse entering the patio from the bar, three highball gin and tonics clustered together between his hands. “Here he is. Abuse, talk some sense here.”

            Abuse settled the cocktails on the wooden table and gave Ogre a nod. “Took a minute to get Jondo’s attention, so I had a moment to think.”

            “Good,” Ogre said. “Goddamn.”

            “We have to be serious about this,” Abuse said.

            “Agreed,” Ogre said. He looked sidelong at Jux and then drained his old gin and tonic with a grimace and immediately sipped from the fresh one.

            “We have to seriously consider the possibility that there is something powerful and beyond our understanding lurking beyond the walls of the restaurant,” Abuse announced.

            Ogre coughed and wiped his lips with a wrist. “What?” he asked. “Have you been listening to Kieran?”

            Abuse leaned back. “Kieran’s a crackpot.”

            Ogre sighed. “Are you going to try to convince me that Cthulhu lives on the other side of the kitchen wall?”

            Abuse sniggered. “Cthulhu’s way too big to fit in there,” he said. He chuckled again. “Come on, dude, be serious.”

            “What are you suggesting?” Ogre pressed.

            Abuse shrugged. He warily picked a cigarette out of his pack and lit it, smiling falsely at some guy who was standing kind of a little too close to their group but staring blankly at the flickering sign of the Chinese restaurant across the street while he swayed, lukewarm beer in hand. Abuse returned his attention to Ogre and Jux and shrugged again. “All I know is that little room I saw was pretty fucking strange,” he said. “I shit you not. I didn’t think about this until just now waiting at the bar, but it was like the antechamber to some kind of fucked-up shrine. That bin in there was kind of like where you’d deposit the carcass of the goat you’d sacrificed, or whatever—”

            “Aha,” Jux interrupted. “I just told him the same thing. Like an offering box.”

            “You weren’t in there,” Abuse said.

            “Yeah,” Jux said, “but you told me about it, and I, just now, while you were in there getting this round of these delicious libations, thank you, by the way, told him, Ogre here, that it seemed to me like it was some kind of offering box. I said it.” He nodded punctuation.

            They all smoked their cigarettes, even the weird dude still swaying and staring at the restaurant sign.

            “They serve goat over there?” this dude suddenly asked.

            Ogre narrowed his eyes at him. “Who are you? Why are you standing here talking to us?”

            The dude briefly directed his blank gaze at each of them and then looked over toward the door to the bar and walked off without a word.

            “Fucking weirdos around here,” Ogre said, shaking his head.

            Abuse bounced his eyebrows. “They’re everywhere.”

            “I’m talking about the two of you,” Ogre snapped. “What do you think’s going to come of all this nonsense talk? Do you intend to break in there and investigate? I think not.”

            Abuse and Jux, admonished, were silent. They each sipped their gin and tonics.

            “I mean,” Jux began.

            “Seriously?” Ogre cried.

            “Dude, do you work tomorrow?” Abuse asked.

            “I’m not working,” Jux said. “And it’s Thursday, so I don’t have classes either.”

            Abuse nodded. “I’m not on tomorrow, either.”

            “Jesus Christ,” muttered Ogre.

            “We can probably pop that vent off the door with a prybar,” Jux said. “I have one in my car with the flat kit. You have a flat kit in your trunk, right?”

            “If that doesn’t work,” Abuse added, “we can lure the beast to a frenzy by banging on the vent.”

            “What good will that do?” Ogre asked. “You sound like a couple of goddamned lunatics.”

            “We have to try,” Jux said. “Come on, can’t you drive us over there? You can stay in your car. We’ll do everything if you don’t want to come in.”

            Ogre tapped a fingernail against his glass. “This is,” he said, “I think, my fifth. Why don’t you just drive yourself if you’re so charged up about it? Wait. How did you get here?”

            “I walked from my parents’ house,” Jux admitted.

            “So you drove home from the restaurant,” Ogre articulated, “and then walked here so that you wouldn’t have to drive back home. Okay. Well, why don’t you walk back home and get your car and drive down there yourself? The walk will sober your ass up a bit, maybe.”

            Jux glanced apprehensively at the street. “I don’t want to walk around here this late.”

            Ogre eyed him. “Then how were you going to get home?”

            Jux swallowed.

            “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Ogre muttered. “Look, I’ll take you home, and then I’ll take him home on my way to my home, but not until a few minutes after I’m done with this drink and maybe only after we cram down a few handfuls of carne asada fries over at Berto’s. Deal?”

            Abuse and Jux exchanged looks.

            “Do we have a deal?” Ogre asked. “I feel like it’s pretty generous.”

            “I mean,” Jux said, “this mystery isn’t going to solve itself.”

            “There’s no mystery,” Ogre said. “I’ll drive you home after food, but I am not driving all the way across town in this state so that you two jackasses can commit breaking and entering. I mean it.”

VI

            It was about 2:45 in the morning when Ogre’s compact sedan pulled into the parking lot of Tati’s restaurant. He maneuvered the car around to the PhLoft guest parking spots just beyond the brick wall of the restaurant’s dock so that it wouldn’t be visible to the pig rigs prowling the streets. Once they all got out, Ogre dug through the trunk for a minute until producing a tire iron and then they approached the gate. Abuse was gripping a plastic bag containing the bulky foam tray with the remnants of his carne asada fries.

            “What the fuck are you bringing that for?” Ogre hissed.

            Abuse inclined his head toward the restaurant. “It is a hearty offering.”

            Ogre grumbled and shook his head.

            The light rail was out of service for the night, but the sound of a passing car, often with clubby, bass-heavy music pouring out of its opened windows and twist-shifted by the relative motion of the sound’s source, occasionally accompanied them from the avenue as they slipped between the unlocked gates and shined the lights of their phones at the concrete and the dumpsters and the doors. The door near the southern wall led into the restaurant. A fat padlock with a long rectangular body hung from a rod of a nearby storage fixture, itself bolted to the wall and the ground. On the shelves were gallon drums of various non-edible substances used for the keepup of the restaurant’s façade. The only other door was the slatted one, the mystery one, the one about which there was the whisper of a thought of a fancy that maybe, somehow, perhaps impossible but who are any of us to say, maybe none other than Cthulhu was dozing somewhere deep on the other side, waiting to be stirred.

            “I don’t think it’s possible to do this without waking up the entire block,” Ogre said as he handed the tire iron to Jux.

            Abuse was already leaning against the wall near the vented mystery door, cupping his ear. “Nothing,” he whispered with a furtive glance back at them. “I can’t even hear the ice machine.”

            “I’ll be quiet as a mouse,” Jux promised. He approached the door and waited while Abuse and Ogre moved the tabletop away and leaned it against a dumpster. The shifting of the edge against the concrete was briefly overwhelming, and the low clunking noise the tabletop made when it connected to rest against the metal of the dumpster made them all take slow steps back and hold their breaths and look around at the dim fixtures.

            “Wait,” Abuse finally said. He fumbled in his pocket for a moment, the plastic bag in one hand making things difficult.

            “What is it now?” Ogre hissed.

            Abuse pulled out and unfolded a knife.

            “Why do you have that?” Jux asked.

            “It’s a,” Abuse said, “self-defense weapon.”

            “You’re going in armed?” Ogre asked. He looked at the sack. “I thought you were coming with an offering.”

            Abuse smiled. “Whatever this is,” he said, risking an almost boastful volume, “will surely appreciate both a gesture of generosity and a gesture of power.”

            Jux shrugged. “I mean,” he said, “leftover carne asada fries aren’t exactly a generous—”

            “Shut up,” Abuse commanded, voice harsh and low.

            Jux inhaled sharply and turned to begin positioning the end of the prybar, gently working the beveled point into the small recession where the molding of the frame was tucked in to receive the slats of the ventilation grate. “It’s pretty tight,” he said, trying at several spots, click-ringing just a little bit every time. “Nothing but metal against metal here.”

            “Did you think it was going to be easy?” Ogre asked.

            Jux grunted as he wedged the prybar in. “If there’s one thing I learned at church youth group,” he said, struggling, “it’s that there’s always a weak spot.”

            Ogre and Abuse exchanged looks.

            Jux grunted again, now wrenching down on the prybar. After a few passes, his grip faltered and the misplaced pressure of the slip sent his upper body bashing into the door’s ventilation panel. Somehow the prybar remained stuck in the crevice, wobbling like a sturdy erection.

            “You know what they say about church youth groups,” Abuse said.

            Jux was gripping his cheek and glancing about dazedly. “What do they say?”

            The tire iron finally dislodged on its own and rang against the concrete of the dock, so they all froze and looked fearfully at each other for a moment until a couple of windows lighted up in the loft towers near the center of the complex.

            “It’s about to get real,” Jux whispered.

            Abuse stepped forward and tried a pull at the door’s handle. “Locked.”

            “Unfettered genius,” Ogre muttered, collecting his tire iron from the floor of the dock. “Are we done here?”

            Jux was staring at a patch of concrete near a dumpster that was considerably soiled with greasy residue that gave off the look of rough texture in the ambient light of the parking lot’s lamps. “Fucking lizard face,” he whispered, voice hoarse.

            Ogre gripped his forehead. “Not that,” he said. “No lizards, and no Cthulhu.” He started toward the dock exit.

            “I didn’t say it was a lizard alien,” Jux said. “I just said it looks like a lizard face.”

            “Where?” Abuse asked, scanning the concrete. “Let me see that motherfucker.”

            “And I,” Ogre clarified, “didn’t mention aliens at all.”

            Then there was a tremendous crash from beyond the door, ending with a metallic rattling.

            “It’s loosing its chains!” Abuse hollered.

            Jux gave the oily lizard face a final look and followed Abuse to catch up with Ogre, who was already getting in his car.

            “Dude,” Abuse began.

            “Yeah, yeah,” Ogre said, cranking up the engine. “I heard it. Sounded like one hell of a crash. But we’re drunk, and I’m driving, so fucking get in and let’s go before we all get arrested.”

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