Jameel avoided the sun as much as could be helped, creaking in and out of fan-generated wind streams around the bungalow he’d bought with his wife, Marta, last year. Did a big grocery buy once a month and sustained himself on Cuban rice and beans and tortillas, black coffee, and chilled box wine.
The neighborhood in northern Detroit depressed him—seventy-year old cookie cutouts jammed together, half of them habitable, the rest housing crackheads or worse behind their cardboarded-up windowpanes. A significant number had lost the battle with gravity, collapsing into pits that now harbored festering runoff water and mosquito nests. Early that summer, Jameel had attempted to mow the lawn, but two stripes in and something had jarred against the spinning blades, shot out, barely missing his neck—a hypodermic needle.
He decided to forget the lawn, and soon it knotted into a rich patchwork of clover and dandelion.
Instead, he ate, read the news, and cleaned his pump-action shotgun—and waited.
The family moved into the derelict house next door at the end of June. Mom, Dad, a boy of seven or so with a bowl cut. Dad backed the U-Haul into the garage port, so Jameel couldn’t see what furniture they brought with them or if there were more of them. He visited his shrine to Marta in the guest bedroom that night—a picture of her at her best, votive candles, some baubles meaningless to anyone but her.
“New neighbors,” he drawled. “Good-looking woman, healthy kid. What we might have expected. We’ll see what happens, but I’m going to go ahead with the preparations.”
The next day he set up a security camera behind the curtains of the second-floor slope-ceilinged bedroom, training it on his neighbors’ house, then another mounted atop the corner cabinet in the dining room, aimed at his scuffed dining room table. Both cameras linked to a monitor in the breakfast nook.
They hired an HVAC guy the day Jameel busied himself with his cameras and various cryo-snares (in the oven, underneath the sink in the half bath, etc.). Late in the afternoon the father left the house, and upon returning a half hour later, he backed into the driveway again. Wracking his brains about where he might have driven to, Jameel glimpsed through a crack of the battered venetian blinds on the first floor that the man was distributing space heaters around the house.
Lowe’s. Jameel exhaled decisively.
The man next door was handy and tall, balding the way they do, Dad-gutted the way it goes. He built a deck and three-season room in the space of two-months, singlehandedly. Professional-grade work from the looks of it. Redid the roof over the course of a weekend. Installed a bay window in the breakfast nook, a skylight in the second story bedroom. Mom was thick-legged and wide-hipped and blond, always in a straw hat, the landscaper of the pair, clearing out every offending weed and common specimen, crafting the space with swaths of white gravel skewered by scholar’s rocks shipped in from some godforsaken abyss from the look of them. By the end of the summer, their refurbished, repainted house was set amidst a pleasingly asymmetric garden of green and rock, Zen spare, without a single stray weed in sight. No matter how many times he had witnessed the transformation during his and Marta’s hunting career, he could never quite stomach the look of these resurrected structures. He looked at his spotted hands and was pleased by how old they appeared.
Vagrants snooped around the house, some entered, none of them Jameel had the pleasure of seeing again.
At times an offensive smell drifted in on the breeze.
The For Sale sign went up in August, and Jameel picked that day to finally be neighborly. He knocked on their door for a good five minutes before the woman appeared. From the other side of the screen door, a sweltering heat washed over him.
She smiled curiously at him. “You’re our neighbor, aren’t you?”
“Guilty as charged, ma’am.” He took of his John Deere cap and gripped it with two hands. “Maybe you can help me with something. My wife—she’ll be past one year this January—she was the neighborly one of us. Would’ve done this more properly, right after ya’ll had moved in. I’m more of a procrastinator …”
“What would you like?”
“Like to invite you folks to dinner. Chicken potpie. It’s all I make, and I only cook when guests come over. Baking in the oven now. I eat at five-thirty every day. I’d be honored if you could make it to table.”
“I’d have to check with my husband first.”
“Well, go on and check. Um, at your leisure. You know where I am. No need to confirm. I’ll set the table for four. If you come, you come. If not, I’ll drop off some leftovers tomorrow.”
She smiled. “I’m sure we’ll be there.”
Suckers always showed. Couldn’t help themselves.
#
He bought a Swanson family-sized, frozen potpie, ten bags of ice, and a tub of Neapolitan—that was for him, for after.
Back home, he tested the locks on the dining room doors, the ceiling fan, vents, sliding icebox doors in the cabinets, various snares. Everything was paired with an app on his phone. All it would take would be the push of a button to set the game in motion.
They arrived five minutes early, the sun still bearing down on the cracked streets and wild lawns—they had four more hours till sundown, till the earth cooled off. Three of them standing there, they looked like any American family. Too white for this neighborhood to be sure, and perhaps a baby in the mother’s arms would’ve created a more convincing picture. They were the Mascarpones—Tony, Stephanie, and Mark. Jameel thought that was the best made-up surname he’d ever come across. They had showered recently, but he could smell their animal sweat under all the soap and conditioner.
Everyone grinned during introductions.
“Jameel King. Come on in.”
Stephanie proffered a bottle of unchilled Riesling, uncomfortably hot in his hands. “To pair with the chicken.”
“Perfect. I’ll put it on ice.” He started rambling (for their benefit) about the city, the neighborhood, his house, zooming in step by step to the topic of his late wife. “Marta passed last January. She was the neighborly one. I was telling Mrs. Mascarpone that.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that, Jameel,” Tony said. The little boy said nothing. They were all decked out in Hawaiian shirts and starched white shorts. A bit much, Jameel thought.
He led them through the living room and showed off the shotgun hanging over the mantelpiece, which was loaded unbeknownst to them, and which unbeknownst to them he was planning on using in about fifteen minutes to splatter their brains across his dining room walls.
Tony nodded appreciatively, and Stephanie put a protective hand on Mark’s shoulder. Good show, that. Everyone grinned.
“What exactly did Marta die of?” Tony asked.
“Brain tumor.”
Sympathetic nods. The boy didn’t nod. He was staring at Jameel, grinning still. The young ones had trouble with social nuance. He at least obeyed the golden rule of entry by invitation only, but Jameel had encountered plenty in his time unhindered by that convenient obstacle.
“Yessir, right in here. Ya’ll seat you’selves. Tony, why not claim the head of the table. I like to honor my guests.”
Tony beamed. “Very well.”
The Mascarpones shuffled around, seating themselves, looking about expectantly for the food. Mrs. Mascarpone sniffed. Jameel was sure she noticed. Noticed the notes missing from the potpurried air. The females always picked up on that.
“I’ll just stick this in the freezer.” He gestured towards the Riesling and backed towards the door.
Friendly nods.
“Tony, do me a favor and uncover that pie, if you’d be so kind.”
Tony leaned forward and pulled off the silver platter cover. The pie was ice cold, corsaged in flowers of frost.
The Mascarpones’ eyes went wide in unison. Jameel took a step back and activated the doors on his phone.
He hobbled to the living room and pulled down the shotgun, then donned a headset, flicked it on, and began talking.
His voice filled the dining room, along with streams of AC, and icy steam from the opened iceboxes hidden in the antique cabinets. The volume had been calibrated so it could be heard over the spinning ceiling fan. The doors were rubber-sealed, insulated steel, accessible only from the outside light switches or his phone. In his breakfast nook, he sat down in front of the monitor, through which he could see the Mascarpones. Still, he didn’t need visuals to know they were screeching and banging on the doors.
The threats devolved quickly. He and Marta had learned over time that this was because the voice box underwent a transformation before the face and the rest of the body. (He had not been wrong.) So even before their mouths began to stretch forward, foreheads jutting out and hairlines receding, their language diced up into clicking and chirping, sounds familiar to Jameel, but not so familiar that he could understand a whit of it.
Uncivil words, he guessed. These weren’t good folk, after all.
“My name’s not Jameel, but no doubt you’ve heard of me. The Ice Man, your folk call me. My wife was sick, it’s true, though not with cancer. It was some kind of poison from one of your bites. She fell prey when she was just a child, survived, but the aftereffects dogged her the rest of her life. Not sure what you took from her that first time, but when things went wrong during one of our games last summer, and she was bitten again—we were getting sloppy, I suppose; old and sloppy—the life just drained out of her so quick.”
Their faces on the crystal-clear image had now reached the droopy putty phase, as Marta had called it. Their mouths had grown long, dropping down to their waists, coiling and flopping with their wild, panicky movements. Their shoulders slumped, and the webbing had spread out from their arms, stretching out and tearing the blue hibiscuses on their sleeves. Spiny sails had begun to puncture the backs of their shirts, ripping it apart in the case of the boy’s.
“Well, I could go on and on, but let’s say we’d gotten our game down cold, if you forgive the pun—know that you can’t maintain your human shape once the temperature sinks below a certain level.”
He stopped speaking for a moment. The sound of scratching had attracted his attention, coming from the back porch. He listened, trying to hear beyond the clicks and pops yammering out of the creature’s mouths. Then turned fully, half-conscious that something had appeared in the window by the door. Whatever it was he thought he had heard had stopped now. He stood to look out the back door, but his yard was empty. He was a moment too late to see the dog flap lifting and the small, semi-translucent hand flashing inside. He reeled backwards, but the thing had already attached itself to his leg, its proboscis latched to his calf with a horrendous, searing pain. He crashed down onto the tiles, mind a blank.
#
Jameel remembered as if in some parenthetical aside from his consciousness how Marta had described the bites to him.
They’d been in the bedroom, of this house in fact. December, and the Suckers were nowhere to be seen. They were migratory creatures, and Michigan winters were anathema to them, but they grew bored of the tropics and headed north in the summers for some variation in diet and scenery, turned houses for profits and feasted on the lower tiers of society, people that wouldn’t be missed, deaths that wouldn’t make the news. Like anyone else, they wanted to see the world before they kicked it.
Marta’s hair had gone torpid and clear as glass vermicelli. Her skin exuded decay—a grayish patina. She reeked of death, the same odors that would settle over the neighborhood later that summer, but beneath this moribund, crinkly cast, he saw the same beautiful girl he’d met at college, the one that had accidentally stood him up because her brain always flipped numbers around.
He held her frail hand, ruminating on the crumbs of toast on the breakfast plate he’d brought her. “It’s like a bite out of your mind. Something disappears from you all of a sudden.” Her voice was a heart-rending croak. “But you can’t say what, because whatever piece it is, it took its memory of itself along with it. Maybe … maybe if I live long enough, you’ll notice what’s gone missing.”
He hadn’t wept then. Not in front of her. But when he went out to shovel the snow, he at last broke down. Pre-mourning tears.
“Plus, it burns like hell,” she had said.
Now, he knew what she meant about a piece of the mind vanishing. Hard to separate it from the acid that seemed to be washing, sizzling, bubbling across his body, but he sensed that the smoking landscape of his psyche had been diminished.
The creature that had bit him, no bigger than a housecat, too small to have learned how to shift into human form, too unsophisticated to know the rules barring entry into a stranger’s house, chirped at him through its snake of a mouth. Its body was powdery white, veiny, and had the form of a hairless flying squirrel. Jameel had never seen them fly, but he suspected their massive wings were better suited for gliding. They were arboreal creatures, some strange offshoot of man, with an injection of crazy shot through the veins of their genetic tree.
It scrabbled away from his body, obsidian claws clicking on the chessboard tile, tracking the sounds of its screaming family. It disappeared around the corner. Jameel shivered. Out of sight it was somehow more horrifying.
He gave himself a half minute to act. Dragged himself across the floor towards the breakfast nook, eyeing the shotgun, jutting out over the edge of the table, directly across from the oven.
He heard the whoosh of the doors being opened. The thing was smart, even at that delicate age.
He clawed and kicked and wormed forward, and pulled himself up the chair as if it were a ladder. It teetered, and he realized there was nothing he could do. The chair clattered down on top of him, and he squeezed his eyes shut. Cursed.
He heard footsteps. Calm, collected footsteps.
When he opened his eyes, the Mascarpones were standing over him. Tony was dangling the shotgun just out of reach. The adults’ jaws had fixed themselves, but the boy still had that strange stretched out noodle face, his mouth a lump of grinding teeth at one end, dangling in front of his chest. Hungrily. Mrs. Mascarpone held the baby in her arms.
Now the family portrait was complete.
Good enough for a picture, he thought, bringing up his phone and tapping on one of the snares. The oven exploded and liquid nitrogen sprayed down on everyone, bubbling and gassy.
Jameel, ice-burned, a piece of shrapnel jutting out of his leg, struggled to his feet to face the Mascarpones, now fully transformed. The kitchen had momentarily been plunged into a smoky arctic tundra, drawing out the hibernating instinct in their species. He yanked the shotgun out of Tony’s icy, inhuman hands.
May be old and sloppy, he thought, but I’m not done with this game.
—
Tim Boiteau lives in Michigan with his wife and son. He is a Writers of the Future winner, with short fiction appearing in Deep Magic, Dream of Shadows, LampLight, and other stories at Theme of Absence. His first novel, The Drummer Girl, is out now.
Creepy shape-shifting and unexpected twists. Very unique and very enjoyable.