Nathan swipes his access card and the security door unlocks with the dull thud of a castle gate. Every time he fully expects the hinges to creak and groan under the massive weight and some hunch back named Igor inquiring about his business, but the door just leads to a corridor in sterile grey, and the ugly welcomer is an obese woman called Stacey. Disappointing.

As the manager for After Sales Services of Hallows’ massive appliance outlet, Nathan often needs to show up an hour before his shift to take care of small details such as employee performance reviews, making sure key performance indicators are stable, writing guidelines, handling complaint notices, employee developments and scheduling, not mentioning common projects with other departments. Sometimes talking to irate customers is the easiest part of the day.

“Hey Nathan, how was your weekend?”

Nathan turns to the open door of the coffee room with a smile and goes to shake Allan’s hand, leaving him with enough time to put back the black sludge his office calls coffee on the rec room’s stained table. Allan is short and a bit on the plump side but his smile is dentist white and Nathan thinks his impeccable hairstyle is carefully maintained in place with enough chemical agents to melt paint.

“Sorry about the Bears Allan.”

Allan has moved recently from Chicago and remains loyal to his favorite Football team. Nathan half suspects he doesn’t care that much about sports, and that it only provides him with a never ending source of conversation starters. Allan is not a bad sort though, and he has apparently mastered the ability to tell the difference between ‘Having Command Skills’ and ‘Being an Asshole’.

“Jesus Nathan what happened to your face?”

“Oh that, I was gardening and a shovel fell on my face, believe it or not.”

“Who were you gardening exactly? Because it looks like a direct hit to me.”

“Har har. No seriously I never saw it coming.”

“I can see that. Next time you garden please take a camera with you. If I’m working on Sundays I could use a good laugh.”

“You’re all heart Allan. I’ll catch you later.”

Allan nods and turns to another group that just entered the rec room, not wasting any time on his quest to connect with his fellow coworkers.

Nathan reaches his office and starts working on incident reports. An hour later his desktop phone rings.

“Hey Nate? This is Marcus. You have any news on Sarah?”

Nathan frowns, not understanding.

“I called her yesterday she was alright. Why?”

“Well it’s ten minutes into her shift and she’s a no call no show.”

Nathan feels that if you spend more than a few hours per day in a place it becomes familiar. Of course, things can happen: people meet, fuck and bicker, but is all part and parcel of every day life. Not this though. Sarah always shows up in advance, and on the rare occasions that she does not, she calls. No exception.

Nathan has to ask but the cold grip of dread in his chest tells him he already knows the answer.

“Did you try calling her?”

“Well that’s the thing, it goes straight to voicemail.”

“Ok. Ok. Have Joyce cover her I will take care of this.”

Nathan does his best to keep his speed under control, telling himself that if the Stalker came back it is already too late. Although the flimsy excuse he gave to leave early will probably hold given the circumstances and his otherwise good record, Nathan asks himself if he should not have left the police handle it. Even as the though crosses his mind, he knows that he could not have done anything but to come and see what had happened.

Nathan parks his car almost in front of the house but not directly in front of one of the windows. On a hunch, he leaves his key on the contact and the door opened, and grabs his taser. The street is deserted and his magic sense cannot perceive the sickly aura of the Stalker. So far so good. He focuses on the house and knows immediately that something is wrong. Breathing deep, he pushes back the fear and pays attention to his senses. Why does he know something is wrong? It’s the details.

First detail: the garden gate is unlocked.

Second detail: there is a parked car thirty feet down the road with a smashed window and something on the driver seat.

Nathan takes out his phone and moves forward carefully, stopping to feel the air sometimes. There is a trace of the Stalker, but it is faint. If he had not known what to look for he would never have noticed it.

Nathan reaches the car’s window and fails to comprehend what he sees.

Nathan is unaccustomed to violence. To him, Death has always been sterile and faraway with one notable exception. Funerals have always been closed casket. Someone is there and then suddenly, they are gone, leaving behind them grief but no corpse. The shock of seeing a dead body is simply too much to process for an instant, then his senses go into overdrive and hit him in waves.

The first thing he notices is the smell: blood and shit. He knows on an abstract plan that sphincters relax upon death. Smelling it first hand is another thing altogether.

The second thing is the silence, or rather, the absence of movements. Next time someone tells him that a dead person sometimes look asleep he will have to call bullshit. There is no mistaking the absolute immobility of the man in the driver’s seat.

The last bit is visual and with it, the realization that there is no dignity in death, at least not in violent death. The man on the seat is white, with black receding hair and grey eyes. In life, they would have been piercing and intelligent, now they looked at nothing. He had been handsome, if a bit overweight and his good looks and conservative clothes would have made people trust him implicitly. His face is now twisted in a repulsive grimace, his tongue lolling out like rotten fruit. A torrent of congealed blood covers the wheel and down as far as Nathan can see.

Nathan eyes set on the man’s throat and stay there. He soon has no choice but to acknowledge that it is, in fact, gone. Completely.

Well then.

“911 what is your emergency?”

Nathan lets the woman navigate him though a well rehearsed protocol. No he is in no immediate danger. No the person is not breathing. And so on. All the while he wonders where Sarah is, and where her child might be.

The first car to arrive on the scene is marked and two officers come out, hands on their weapon. The first one is a slim old man with a grim face and the second is a black man with an athletic body, more than six feet tall. When they see the body, both of them grow pale and they start talking in hushed voice. They check the house and come back to confirm that both Sarah and her baby are gone. They start the dance of setting a perimeter, taking pictures, clearing the place. During the whole process, Nathan is feeling numbed, yet he cannot help but admire the officers going through the motions with drawn faces and resigned silence as it becomes more and more obvious that the dead man was one of them.

After a few minutes, an unmarked police car arrives on screeching tires and officer Henkel himself jumps out like a bat out of hell before stopping clear of the car. Grief finally takes over, and a few of the man and women avert their faces. Nathan feels like an outsider at a funeral, awkward and useless while a community mourns the loss of a loved one. At the same time, he is choked by his own failure. He helped Sarah come home? Big deal. She got to stay free, or even alive for all he knows, for one more day. What had he expected, that the creature would leave? He called it a Stalker himself, and stalkers do not stop stalking. He should not be here waiting for questions that would lead nowhere, he should be out there finding a solution and trying his best to make up for that half assed rescue. He had made some headway and thought that he had solved the problem and now Sarah was gone. He had failed her. He…

“Sir?”

Nathan shakes his head and breathes deep. Once. Twice. Slightly centered, he turns to the detective. They have some questions. He goes through the answers mechanically, all the while his mind has already decided the best course of action. The only thing he knows about the stalker is that it’s not human, and unless there is a special paranormal police force he has never heard about, the police is not going to be of much help. Telling the exact truth will land him in a padded room, particularly because people had seemed to be unable to see Gwahin to start with and she was the only proof he had that there was something fucky in the land of reality. Ergo, he needs to talk to an expert on monster and it so happens that he has one on hand who owes him answers. After that, well, they would see.