THE LEGEND OF LEFT-HAND LEWIS

By Maxwell Peterson

In the top room of an eccentric old house on Rowan Street, Lewis Light was standing on a chair with a rope around his neck. The rope ran from his throat up to the ceiling fan, and from there down to one of the legs of the neatly made bed.

            At the moment, Lewis was not killing himself. He was taking notes.

            He stood still for several minutes, observing how the room looked and smelled, and how the rope felt around his neck.

            The rope did not feel particularly dismal or desperate. Rather, it was loose and comfortable, and did not restrict his breathing at all. The room was bright, and a gentle breeze carried the smell of early summer in through wide, high windows. Lewis was disappointed.

            He had rented the room to record his first and final album. Just him and his acoustic guitar and raw emotion, to be wondered at and written about and hailed as genius after he was dead. His final poignant letter to the world. It would be found and wept over. It would inspire academics to write papers about the tragedy of his life. It would make him a legend. It would be haunting, and bleak, and utterly, unabashedly honest.

            The only problem was that Lewis couldn’t think of anything to write.

            He slipped the rope from around his neck and stepped down from the chair, crossing the room to the bed. He had purchased a small, black, unlined notebook and a fountain pen at an arts and crafts store on the way out to the house. Lewis had still not quite mastered writing with the fountain pen, and the pages he had written on so far were spattered with ink. Still, he kept at it. Lewis Light was perseverant.

            The wind, he began, in the notebook. He stared at the words for a few moments, then crossed out what he had written and began again.

            The breeze comforts me (line break) in the end. He picked up his guitar and ran the pick through a few chords, but none of them seemed to be particularly haunting or poignant. He tried humming a few lines to a chord that sounded as if it might have eventually been sad, with a little dressing up, but it always ended up sounding like an advertising jingle. He set the guitar down again.

            The man who had taught Lewis how to play guitar was a member of a polka band, and had refused to teach Lewis any minor chords, insisting that, on the whole, things were pretty good. What need would Lewis have for sadness?

            Sadness, the old man used to say, was counterproductive to happiness.

            Lewis agreed with him, but happiness was not Rock and Roll.

            A banging sound came from somewhere far below him, shaking the walls of the room slightly, and setting the strings of his guitar vibrating. Lewis listened to the sound of his guitar strings resonating with themselves. He liked it – the way each smaller note harmonized to create a larger unified sound.

            Then the banging stopped, and the sound stopped with it.

            Harlan (the owner of the house) had told Lewis that the loud, heavy banging sound was the hot water heater turning on, that it happened often, and that he should not worry about it. He had advised Lewis to avoid going down to the basement at all, as one of the other tenants in the house was a photographer, and used it as a darkroom.

            There was a shave-and-a-haircut knock at the door.

            “Coming,” called Lewis. He untied the rope from the leg of the neatly made bed, stepped up onto the chair, un-looped the rope from the ceiling fan, and tossed it into his open luggage bag. He moved the chair back into the corner, where it had been when he had arrived the day before. Then he closed the luggage bag and opened the door.

            The old man who owned the house was lying face down in the hallway in front of Lewis’s door. His white hair was messy. He was not moving.

            “Mr. Anderson?” said Lewis, quietly. There was no reply.

            He knelt and placed a hand on the old man’s back. It was cold. How fast did dead bodies cool? Lewis didn’t know. He looked up and down the hallway, but saw nothing out of the ordinary.

            Lewis gently shook the old man. “Mr. Anderson?” he said again. He wondered if he should call the police.

            The old man rolled onto his side, then creaked his way to his feet. “Sorry. I got old and died while I was waiting for you to answer your door. Had to change out of your women’s clothing, eh?” He winked at Lewis. “And if I have to tell you not to call me ‘Mr. Anderson’ one more time, I’ll fuck your eyes out and use the juice for jelly on my toast. ‘Harlan’ is fine.” The old man gave him a friendly punch on the arm.

            “You haven’t told me not to call you ‘Mr. Anderson’ yet,” said Lewis.

            “Well, consider yourself warned, then. ‘Mr.’ is for old people.”

            Lewis nodded. “Okay.” Harlan was at least sixty.

            “Good. C’mon. You can be a fairy later. Right now, you’re going to learn the ancient, manly art of cooking.”

            Lewis stepped into the hallway and closed his door behind him. He had only been living in the house for a day, but he found already that he liked it enormously. “What are we making?”

            “Minced lamb brioche.”

            “Really?”

            “No. Are you out of your fucking mind? We’re making hamburgers. I said ‘manly art,’ not ‘I cry myself to sleep at night.’ Jesus Christ.” The old man grinned, and punched Lewis on the other arm. “Come on.”

            Lewis followed the old man down the hallway, toward the spiraling staircase that led to the lower floors. There were Polaroid pictures in frames on the walls, at different heights, and with no discernable pattern. Lewis looked at the photograph in one of the incongruous frames.

            It was a picture of a man sitting in an office cubicle, stacks of paper like a miniature cityscape sprawled across the desk. The man had a confused look on his face, but he was smiling. There was a signature in the lower right-hand corner. Lewis couldn’t make out the name.

            “The pictures’ll be there later, Light. There’s meat to pound and play with downstairs. I’m sure you’re good at that, right?” The old man laughed. He was standing at the staircase, one hand on the worn wooden handrail.

            Lewis walked down the remainder of the hallway, glancing at the other pictures as he went. There was a fast food employee, smiling awkwardly; a homeless man; an old woman standing behind what looked to Lewis like the front desk of a library. There were signatures on all of the photographs.

            “Who are these people?” Lewis had reached the staircase. The old man moved slowly on the steps. Carefully.

            “Hell if I know.”

            “Well, who takes the pictures, then?”

            They had reached the second floor. Harlan pointed down the hallway. “Edgar does.”

            Lewis looked down the hallway. The walls were adorned with half a dozen framed Polaroids like the ones outside of his room.

            “Why?” Lewis asked, as they reached the ground floor and the kitchen.

            “Because I know everything there is to know in this world, I’m going to be an asshole, and not tell you.” Harlan leaned against the countertop and pointed to the refrigerator. “The meat is in there. Have at it.”

            Lewis opened the refrigerator and took out an oval serving platter. Three packages of ground beef were thawing on the platter. The meat sat in a small pool of dark brown blood. The liquid had soaked into the bottoms of the packets, dissolving the butcher paper.

            “So,” said Harlan, “why here?”

            “What?” Lewis was looking though the cupboards for another plate to place the meat on, out of the brown puddle.

            “Why’d you come here? I charge too much for rent, there’s no view, the other boarders are as crazy as cock-hungry nuns. Why are you here?” He ran a hand through his hair. It was sticking out at odd, unlikely angles, and as his fingers passed over it, his hair sprang back to its original position. “The plates are in the cupboard by your knees.”

            “Aren’t you going to help?”

            “Don’t worry. You’re doing fine.”

            “Well,” said Lewis, transferring the meat to the new plate, “I wanted a place to record some songs.”

            “An artist,” said a woman’s voice.

            “We’re living with an artist,” agreed a second voice. A man’s.

            Lewis turned around. He had started a pan heating on the stove, and had just begun rummaging through the drawers, looking for a knife to cut up the tomatoes and onions he had seen in the refrigerator. There was a short man standing in the doorway to the kitchen. A woman stood behind him. She was at least a head taller than the man.

            “Hello,” said Lewis.

            “He’s not an artist,” said the woman. “He is a musician.”

            “Yes. Not an artist at all,” agreed the man.

            They were both unbelievably thin. The short man was dressed in a checked waistcoat and brightly polished black shoes. His clothes hung on him like skin on a skeleton. The woman had on a black silk dress and long, black, silk gloves. There were pearls around her neck, and she wore a violently red cloche hat.

            “But is not music the noblest form of art? Of course he is an artist, Dino. Pay attention.”

            “I’m going to kill you two,” said Harlan.

            Lewis began forming the meat into flat, round patties. The tomatoes could wait.

###

            Later that night, in his room, Lewis shook a handful of breath mints into his palm.

            The click of death, he wrote into his plain black notebook. He picked up a bottle from the floor next to the bed. He had considered, briefly, buying actual alcohol, but had decided to buy sparkling grape juice instead. He had never been a drinker.

            Lewis dumped the mints into his mouth. The taste of peppermint was overpoweringly strong, but he gritted his teeth and raised the bottle to his lips. He was committed. He had come this far. He couldn’t turn back now.

            Lewis swallowed. It wasn’t difficult. He was a little disappointed: he had expected to have to choke the “pills” down. He had even pulled the chair from the corner and situated it next to the bed, in case he had begun to choke and had to perform the Heimlich maneuver on himself.

            He set the bottle back on the floor, lay back on the bed, and imagined he was dying.

            He imagined his heartbeat slowing, his breath becoming shallower as his eyes lost their hold on the walls and ceiling, the world becoming blurry and dim. He thought about the numbness in his fingers; the clumsy way they slipped off the strings of his guitar as the synapses in his brain faded to black, like a power outage in slow motion.

            In death, he wrote, I wish for wintry breath.

            Lewis picked up the acoustic guitar and tried a few chords, quietly singing the lyrics he had written down.

            He had forgotten to set up the camera.

            Lewis set down his guitar and opened his luggage bag. He pulled out a tripod, a camera bag, and a thick spring with a threaded bolt attached to one end.

            Lining up the edge of the bed in the viewfinder, Lewis set the timer on the digital camera for fifteen seconds and hit the button on the top. He tapped the camera, lightly, setting it bobbing. He walked back to the bed and picked up his acoustic guitar. He made the most pensive face he could manage, and looked at an electrical outlet, away from the lens.

            Lewis had designed and constructed the tripod himself. The spring meant that when the camera took a picture, it would be blurry – something that wouldn’t normally happen with a tripod. It would become part of his legend, he was sure: Who was with Lewis Light in the days before he died?

            The camera beeped. Lewis stood to reset the timer for another shot. As he reached the camera, he heard a whisper in the hall.

            Lewis picked up the tripod and set it in the closet. He opened his bedroom door.

            The short man and the tall woman were standing in the hall.

            “Hello,” said Lewis.

            “What is your name?” asked the short man.

            “Dino,” said the tall woman to the short man, quietly, “that was unforgivably forward.” She turned to Lewis. “Please excuse my husband. He forgets himself, on occasion.”

            “It’s fine,” said Lewis. “My name is Lewis, but people call me Left-Hand Lewis.” This was not strictly true. Nobody referred to Lewis as “Left-Hand Lewis” except Lewis himself.

            “It is a pleasure to meet you. My name” – the tall woman had placed a hand delicately on her collarbone – “is Lynnette Gravely London.”

            “I’m Dino,” said the short man.

            “Nice meeting you,” said Lewis.

            “My husband and I were conversing, earlier in the evening – well, speculating, really – on your vocation and the curious and contradictory silence which seems incessantly to emanate from behind your door, although to say it aloud now, it seems problematic to suggest that silence might emanate from anything, silence being by nature and definition the lack of emanation, I suppose.” She stared very hard at Lewis, her brow furrowed as though he himself had invented this troubling paradox. “At any rate, my husband and I decided that you might offer some satisfaction and elucidation upon the subject.”

            “Um. What was the question?” asked Lewis.

            “If you’re a musician,” said Dino, “why don’t we ever hear music from your room?”

            “Oh. Well, I’m still writing the lyrics.”

            “I see,” said the woman. “How are they coming?”

            “Wonderfully. These are songs that have been living in me for a long time. They’re going onto the page like Legion into the pigs.”

            Lewis had rehearsed what he would say if anybody asked him about his songs. He had discovered Jesus’ expulsion of multiple demons into a herd of pigs while researching famous exorcisms on the internet. When the last people who had seen Lewis alive were asked what he had been like in his final days, Lewis wanted to be sure that they would have interesting quotes to give the biographers and documentary filmmakers.

            “That’s from the bible,” said Dino.

            The tall woman nodded approvingly. “A musician and a Biblicist. Your songs are of a religious nature, then?”

            “Well, no. They’re about my life, and. Um. Other things. Haunting stuff.” Lewis was taken aback. He had not considered that people might think he was religious. This was enormously upsetting to him. Christian music was seldom successful, Christian rock especially. “It’s going to be just me and my acoustic guitar,” he said, hoping to change the subject.

            “Oh? I do so love Easy Listening. What are you going to call it?” asked the tall woman.

            Lewis was becoming increasingly distressed. His final, lingering masterpiece had been called “easy listening” before it had even been recorded. “It’s not Easy Listening,” he said. “More like letters to the world. The songs aren’t religious. I mean. Not at all. Religious.”

            “I see,” said Lynnette Gravely London. “What will you call it, then – the album?”

            “I’m calling it ‘Devil at a Dead End: The Ditchwater Tapes.’ ” Lewis was especially proud of the album title. He had been born on the third of May, which, according to an evangelical website he had discovered, was the day that the devil and his angels were cast out of heaven. Lewis didn’t believe in the devil, but he thought the title was edgy, and mysterious. It had that “Bad Boy” thing.

            “Ah, yes. Very clever.” The tall woman was beaming at Lewis. She nudged her husband with an elbow. “Did you hear, Dino? Mr. Light is working on a record hailing the end of the devil and the inevitable and glorious second coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

            “Hallelujah,” said Dino. “All hail Jesus, Destroyer of Worlds.”

            Lynnette Gravely London stifled a yawn. “Well, Mr. Light, Dino and I really must be getting to bed. We wish you well in your work. You’ll join us for breakfast tomorrow morning, of course?”

            “Of course,” said Lewis. He did not know what else to say.

            “Goodnight, then,” said the tall woman and the short man, in unison.

            Lewis watched as they disappeared down the staircase to the second floor.

            Back in his room, Lewis scanned through the pictures on the digital camera. He had taken a few dozen the first morning he had been there, from different angles around the room while he pretended to write, or to play his guitar. None of them were particularly good. At any rate, they didn’t look haunting, mysterious, or bleak. Mostly, Lewis thought, they looked blurry.

            He set down the camera and picked up the small, black notebook. He stared for a long time at the handful of words he’d written there.

###

            At six o’clock the next morning, Lewis woke up and took a shower. After he got out, he shaved. He left a patch of scruff around his mouth, black and bristly. Lewis did not like the facial hair, finding it itchy and not particularly attractive, but it added to his “tortured artist” edge, and besides, all the virtuosos – Cobain, Morrison, Hendrix – had all had facial hair in their final days.

            Lewis pulled on a clean, black tee shirt and a pair of black jeans with the knees cut out.

            There was a knock at the door.

            “Don’t pretend you’re not awake in there,” said Harlan, through the door. “I can hear you masturbating.”

            Lewis opened the door. “Good morning, Harlan,” he said.

            “Come on. We’re going grocery shopping. I’m out of gin.”

            “It’s six-thirty in the morning.”

            The old man’s mouth dropped open, and his eyes opened wide. He clutched at his chest.

            “What? What’s wrong?” Lewis was worried that the old man might be having a heart attack.

            “You can tell time.” Harlan was still holding his chest, but he was smiling now. “There’s a place in town. Come on. You’re carrying the groceries back.”

            “Okay,” said Lewis.

            “Meet me downstairs in ten, or I’ll come back up with a gun,” Harlan said as he made his way down the stairs.

            Lewis lifted his leather jacket off the back of the chair in the corner. He had purchased the jacket at a consignment shop in northern Kentucky. It had several buckles, and was so worn that it was really more gray than black. He did not particularly like leather, and he’d cleaned the jacket thoroughly before he had worn it. Lewis did not hold well with dirty or unsanitary things.

            Downstairs, Harlan was waiting by the door. He was wearing a red and black flannel shirt.

            “I like your shirt,” said Lewis. “Very nineties. Seattle.”

            “I like your jacket,” said Harlan. “Very homeless drug addict.”

            It was a fifteen-minute walk to town. The early June morning was clear and cold and bright. The dew made the grass on the edges of the road shimmer like the sea.

            “Beautiful morning,” said Lewis.

            “Gorgeous as God’s balls,” said Harlan.

            They walked in silence for a while.

            “So,” said Harlan, “how’s the album going?”

            “You’re interested?”

            “Not really. The sexually charged silence was giving me a hard-on,” Harlan said. “And that would just be awkward.”

            Lewis laughed, and the old man smiled.

            “Well, honestly,” said Lewis, “I’m having some problems with it.”

            “How’d you mean?”

            “I can’t really think of anything good to write. I mean, I’ll start a song, or some lyrics, or. Anyway. They just all seem to be...” Lewis shrugged.

            Harlan thought for a moment. Then he said, “What kind of music do you play?”

            “Punk Rock and Alternative,” Lewis said, proudly.

            Harlan looked blank.

            “Rock and Roll,” Lewis tried.

            The old man shook his head. “No you don’t. You’re too polite to be a rock star.”

            Lewis laughed. “Go to hell.”

            “Watch your mouth.”

            “Sorry.”

            “See? My point exactly. I’m more of a rock star than you are,” Harlan said. “Just ask your mother.”

            They had reached the town. It was small and cheerful.

            The girl behind the counter at the grocery store was pretty and blonde. Harlan bought two bottles of Gordon’s gin, two dozen eggs, and three packages of bacon. She put the groceries in a paper bag and handed the bag to Harlan, who handed it to Lewis.

            There was a television behind the counter. A man with very black hair was reading the news.

            “Authorities say no progress has been made in the search for local librarian Nancy Wyndham, who was first reported missing nearly three months ago,” the man said.

            “Come on,” said Harlan. “You can help me make breakfast.”

###

            That night, Lewis took more pictures. He didn’t think any of them looked particularly legendary.

            He had considered, briefly, writing lyrics in black permanent marker on the walls, but had decided against it. Someone would have to clean it up afterwards, and Lewis hadn’t wanted to cause trouble for anyone.

            There was one that he liked. It was a picture of the room. Lewis wasn’t in the frame – it had been taken when he had accidentally pushed the shutter button before he had set the timer.

            The picture showed one corner of the bed, and the sunflower-print wallpaper. Lewis had been holding the camera, so the frame wasn’t blurry. He especially liked how the sunflowers on the wall looked, in the dim light of the single bedside lamp. The center of each flower was pale brown, each petal pale yellow. They looked overexposed, as though before they had been sure of what they were, the sun had come along and dazzled them, and they had been washed away in the flood of what they aspired to be.

            Lewis turned the camera off and set it on the bedside table.

            A muffled sound came from somewhere lower in the house. It was a steady creaking, too quiet to be the sounds from the basement.

            Lewis got out of the bed and turned off the lamp on the bedside table. Out in the hall, the sounds were louder. He locked his door and started down the staircase. The sounds grew louder as he went down the stairs.

            They stopped as he reached the kitchen. He looked around, but couldn’t see anything in the darkness. He thought the sounds might have been coming from Harlan’s room, down the hall. Lewis groped along the wall for the light switch. His fingers brushed against it, and he flipped it on. A single bulb flickered to life, dimly illuminating the kitchen and casting long shadows on the walls.

            There was a man sitting at the kitchen table.

            “Having trouble sleeping?” said the man. His voice was very quiet.

            Lewis nodded. “What was that noise?”

            The man smiled. He had gray hair with streaks of black in it, and he wore a gray knit sweater. His eyes were very dark, and Lewis could not guess his age. “You’re the new boarder, yes?”

            “Yes.”

            The man chuckled. “It really isn’t my place to say, but you would have learned for yourself eventually, and I think my telling you will save both Mr. Anderson and yourself considerable embarrassment.”

            “Harlan?” Lewis sat down at the kitchen table, across from the dark-eyed man.

            “Yes. He and his lover, Charles, are –” The man paused. “How best to put this? Doing the dog’s rig.”

            Lewis thought he knew what this meant. “What’s your name?”

            “Edgar St. Clair.” There was a glass of water on the table in front of the man. He picked it up.

            “You’re the photographer,” said Lewis.

            “Yes. And you’re the musician.”

            “Oh, sorry. My name’s Lewis Light,” said Lewis, and he extended a hand across the table. “But everybody calls me Left-Hand Lewis.”

            The man took Lewis’s hand in his and shook it. “Do they?” he said. He was smiling.

            Lewis looked at the man a moment.

            “No,” he said after a while. “But they will when I’m gone.”

            “I see,” said the man. He raised the glass to his lips, but did not drink. “And when will that be?”

            “I don’t know,” said Lewis.

            “‘But of that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven nor the son, but the Father alone.’” Edgar had closed his eyes, and set the water glass back down on the table. He opened his eyes and looked at Lewis. “May I ask you a question?”

            “Sure.”

            “What’s the worst thing you have ever done?”

            Lewis was quiet for a moment. “I don’t remember,” he said after a while. “I was three years old. I remember police, and my Mom and Dad crying, and I know that they were crying because of something that I did, and that it was really bad, but I can’t remember what.”

            “Are your parents still alive?”

            Lewis sat back in his chair. “Yes. I mean, I think so. I don’t really know where my Dad is, but my Mom lives up in Maine.”

            Edgar took a drink from the water glass. “Would you like something to drink? I believe there’s gin in one of the cupboards, and soda in the refrigerator.”

            “Just water, thanks,” said Lewis. Edgar stood and filled a glass with water from a carafe. He set the glass in front of Lewis.

            “Thanks.”

            “You’re welcome,” Edgar said. “You know, I can hear you playing your guitar sometimes, during the day.”

            “I came out here to record some songs.”

            “How’s that going?”

            Lewis took a drink of his water. The creaking bang had begun again, down the hall. “It’s going good.”

            “Going well,” Edgar corrected. “How nice. Are you nearly finished?”

            Lewis paused. Then he said, “No. The songs aren’t coming along at all. I can’t think of anything to write.”

            “But your playing is quite good. Very engaging.”

            “But it isn’t haunting.”

            “Why must it be haunting, Mr. Light?”

            “You can call me Lewis.”

            “Lewis.”

            Lewis spun his water glass against the table. “Because these songs will make me a legend, when I’m gone.”

            “I see. Your final aria, to cement your place in the musical pantheon.”

            “Yeah. I mean. Look at the legends. Kurt Cobain. Jim Morrison. Jimi Hendrix. These guys died young, and they left behind these songs that –” Lewis paused. “I don’t know. Had so much more meaning after they were dead.”

            Edgar nodded. “Sylvia Plath. Virginia Woolf. I see your point.” Edgar folded his hands on the table in front of him. “Why do you want to be a legend, Lewis?”

            Lewis thought for a moment. “I’ve never told this to anyone,” he said, “but when I was little, I wanted to be a dinosaur.” He laughed. “Not because they were big, or ferocious, or – well, maybe for those reasons too. But really, I wanted to be a dinosaur because there weren’t any left.” He paused. Edgar said nothing.

            “We don’t know anything about them. Nothing real, or substantial,” said Lewis. “All we have are the bones. They might’ve been boring, but that doesn’t matter, because they died before anybody knew that they were boring. People are dying to know about them, because now they can’t find out anymore.” He scratched at a stain on the dark wood of the table. “People are fascinated by them. Love them.”

            “All of the legends are dead,” said Edgar, and something in his voice made Lewis look up. “The love and adoration and interest don’t do them any good. Tell me, Lewis, those people you mentioned before – were they happy, when they died?”

            “No,” said Lewis. “That was sort of the point. They were tortured visionaries. The tragedy was what made them so famous.”

             “I think, sometimes,” said Edgar, “that our fascination with pain is the greatest tragedy of all.”

            Neither of them said anything for a long time.

            “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” Lewis said, eventually.

            Edgar St. Clair smiled, politely, and said nothing.

            There was a muffled sound at the end of the hall, then silence.

            Edgar stood up, slowly. “It’s getting late. I think I will retire for the evening. Good night, Mr. Light.”

            Something had been bothering Lewis.

            “Mr. St. Clair?”

            Edgar was at the base of the staircase at the far end of the kitchen. “Yes?”

            “Why do you take those pictures? Who are those people?”

            Edgar smiled. He looked at Lewis with his dark eyes. “I’m making the ordinary legendary,” he said. “Those people. They were all happy.” He started up the stairs. “That’s something worth remembering.”

###

            Later that night, Lewis sat hunched on the bed in his room. He was writing in his black notebook with a blue ballpoint pen he found in one of the drawers in the kitchen. Occasionally, Lewis would pick up his acoustic guitar from the stand next to the bed and strum C major, or E, or D, humming along. Then he would set the guitar down and resume writing.

            The camera and the tripod sat on top of the tee shirts and underwear in his luggage bag.

###

            The morning was cold. Harlan looked out the window between the second and third floors as he climbed the staircase. The sky was clear and bright.

            Harlan walked down the hallway, quietly. He paused outside Lewis’s door, checking that the fake blood was convincingly applied to his body. He was wearing an old white tee shirt, and had cut holes in the stomach earlier in the morning. With any luck, Lewis would still be asleep.

            He pounded on the door, then lay down on the cold wooden boards in front of Lewis’s room.

            Harlan waited for a few seconds. Silence. He pounded again, moaning loudly for good measure.

            Silence.

            He got up and rapped on the door with his knuckles. “Light? You in there?” He tried the handle. It turned, and Harlan opened the door.

            One of the windows was open, and the apple-scented early-morning air filled the room. The wooden chair was in the corner. The bed was neatly made.

            The room was empty.

            “Light?” said Harlan, but even as he said it he knew Lewis Light was gone. He stepped into the room. There was a white cassette tape on the bed, in a clear plastic case. Harlan picked it up.

            “Sunflowers and Dinosaurs” was scrawled in black marker across the face of the tape.

            There was an envelope on the bedside table. The word “Rent” had been written on it with a fountain pen, in a neat, spidery hand. The amount due was written beneath it, and the envelope bulged, slightly.

            Harlan wondered where Lewis had gone. Back to the city? Back to his job, and his life?

             A banging sound came from the basement far below him, shaking the walls of the room, slightly.

            He stood for a moment, next to the bed. The fake blood was drying on his shirt and across his brow.

            Then Harlan placed the cassette tape in his pocket and left the room, closing the door behind him as he went.