Page 3 of Serial Killer Games

My alarm clock says 4:00, or 3:47, or 5:10, or something like that, when consciousness stitches itself together. I never actually rely on my alarm clock to wake me. I don’t sleep well. I don’t think people tend to sleep well when they’re living with the sorts of things I am. Thoughts that go bump in the night. Secrets that scratch away in my head.

Sometimes I drink my coffee in the dark living room while watching the news. The housing crisis. The climate crisis. The crisis crisis. Luckily none of it affects me. Sometimes I watch the sleeping neighborhood from the balcony. Sometimes I stand in my roommate’s doorway and watch him snore as Verity lies unnaturally ramrod-straight beside him. No normal woman sleeps like that, although it’s been a while since any woman has slept next to me, normal or otherwise. I stand there and wonder what I’ll do with him. I wonder what I’ll do withher, when the time comes. We’re going to run out of rugs.

The apartment building grumbles to life, radios and TVs flick on, cars outside start, and I come alive by proxy, a robot humming awake from a pulse of ambient electrical power. When my roommate comes out, I fire a bright shit-eating grin at him, because that is what humans are supposed to do.

“Good morning, Grant,” I say.

—

The morning traffic squeezes mybus down Main. I offer my seat to the pregnant women and elderly and mumble “Sorry” and smile self-effacingly when someone steps on my foot. I’m the perfect extra in the background, with my messenger bag and glasses; my hair and clothes neat, appropriate, forgettable; a free city newspaper folded in half in one hand—which I never read. When the credits roll, my part will be Morning Commuter #6. My bus spits me out at Richeson and I catch the SkyTrain to Bylling, then walk the remaining five minutes to one of a hundred skyscrapers rearing up like late-stage capitalism’s middle finger held up to humankind. I’m a cog in the corporate machine. I’m one of a billion fruiting bodies on the capitalist fungus that permeates the globe with a fine, hairlike mycelium. I’m no one. A nonentity. I like it that way.

I work for a temp agency, which means I’m a warm body for hire. As long as I have a pulse, I have a job. At the moment, I’m a placeholder for a human with actual value. Harriet is on unpaid leave, and so that some bean counter doesn’t decide that her position can be cut since no one is performing her job or taking her salary, her supervisor, a man called Doug, who has been promoted several strata past his zone of competency, has hired me to fill her spot. Her tasks were redistributed to her team members, so my job is to sit at her desk and keep herchair warm. Iamgiven work to do: I have an intimate relationship with the photocopier, the coffee machine, the collator, and the rooftop, where I take about twelve breaks a day.

People call me Jacob and Jack and Jonathan. Quite a few people don’t bother with my name at all, althoughImake a point of learning everyone’s. I always do. A few busybodies patted me down for gossip about a week after I arrived, found me empty-pocketed, and have left me alone since. I’m a little friendless island in the workforce sea. I prefer it. I’d rather watch, and listen, and work on my list to pass the time and ease the boredom. Adding names, removing names. Adding them back again.

At the end of the day, I take public transportation home with my fellow hollow-eyed survivors of the downtown commercial hell zone. I smile vacuously at them.Good job, team! Same time tomorrow?I let myself into the apartment and find Grant and his latest consort, Verity, sprawled on the sofa watching reality TV. He cradles her against the side of his body and absently strokes her hair. I know better than to be envious of what he has.

I clean. I restore order. And then I cook. Healthy meals with expensive ingredients—organic vegetables, grass-fed meat, and things like saffron salt and truffle oil—carefully and thoughtfully prepared, all at Grant’s request and on his dime. If it were just me, it would be a bowl of cereal.I’mnot planning to live to a hundred. I make a show of inviting Verity to join us, because Grant likes for me to be polite, but of course she never accepts. Grant doesn’t date the sort of woman who eats. Instead, she watches us with wistful eyes too large in her perfect, sculpted face.

Rinse, repeat.

3

Hello, Dolly

Until Dolores.

It isn’t easy figuring out her name. My new place of work is a massive termite colony, each department compartmentalized and unto itself, and it’s difficult to find anyone who knows anything about the woman dressed like Satan’s shadow, always in black, with long sleeves and high collars; the one with the vibrant lipstick and the cruel heels, who swirls through rooms without others registering her presence. Purposeful but aloof, like a malevolent spirit with shit to do.

“Who was that?” I ask Tricia-from-Marketing after another spotting in the break room.

“Who was what?” Tricia-from-Marketing asks, attempting to eat her yogurt daintily, not realizing she has a smear on her chin.

I trail the shadow down a hallway, round a corner, and she’s gone.

Another time, she materializes in a packed elevator next to me. She doesn’t acknowledge my existence, and I certainlydon’t say anything. I watch to see which button she’ll push, but she doesn’t so much as glance at the numbers. She steps off at the sixteenth floor when it opens to let someone in, and I watch, waiting to see if she’ll go left or right, but she does neither. She dawdles, looking at her phone, and just as the doors slip shut, she looks left, then right, and ducks into the stairwell.

“Who was that?” I ask Brennan-the-Intern.

“What was who?” Brennan-the-Intern asks, swiping right ten times in a row on a dating app while waiting for his floor.

Whoever she is, she acts like a secret agent. She gets off at the wrong floor and uses the stairs to throw off anyone who might be watching. She always has her phone out or pressed to her ear to deflect conversation. There’s no way to figure out who she is. I decide she must be a consultant, or a freelancer, or maybe even a client representative. Not a Spencer & Sterns employee at all.

Several days go by without any sightings, and then at the end of the day one Thursday, later than usual, I catch the elevator by myself, down, down, down, until it stops at the fifteenth floor. The doors yawn open like the gates to hell, and there she is.

She wears a black dress with a neat white collar under her open coat, and her lipstick makes her look like she’s just finished devouring some poor man’s heart, raw. She steps into the miasma of elevator Muzak with me, presses B, and turns to face me—a slow, graceful pirouette, her arms extending as she leans back on the handrail. Her sharp nails rasp the metal of the rail and the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. Then she cocks her head to one side, exposing the bareness of her own neck, and she looks like a vampire offering herself up to her lover. The elevator doors close, her eyes meet mine, andthere’s that lurching fairground drop in the bottom of my stomach again, except the elevator hasn’t started moving yet.

“Ted Bundy,” she says.

I blink. “My name is—”

“Your Halloween costume,” she says. “You’re dressed as Ted Bundy.”

I’m not wearing a costume. I glance down at my arm in its sling. Yesterday I fell, and Grant—well, it was a whole thing. After Verity moved in, the large box she brought with her had to be carried out, and lending a helping hand is the nice, roommatey thing to do. Everyone at the office today was very solicitous. Deb-from-IT, in a disturbing cat costume, parts of which may have been sourced from an adult store, even gave me a double handful of Halloween candy.

“You’re the first to guess. But what about you? You’re just wearing your usual vampire nun getup.”

She narrows her eyes at me. “Vampire nun?”

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