metimes they find a crack and peek through at us. When your skin goes cold and you feel like youre being watched, but no one is there, its them. Were their drive-in double feature, with a Cherry Coke and free refills on popcorn.
Thirty Three
The Killer Inside Me
The plaza was full of papers, kicked up by sluggish cross-winds. The papers were pages from old books and yellowed newspapers. Spyder stood at the bottom of a mountain of books taller than the highest ziggurat in Berenice.
He picked up a leather-bound volume embossed in gold Cyrillic on the cover. Inside the book were equations, a swamp of calculus problems and diagrams. He tossed the book back on the pile and picked up a paperback copy of The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson. It had the same cover as the edition hed read as a teenager. Spyder hadnt seen a copy in years. He read a page at random and felt the same tingle at the base of his spine that hed felt when hed first run across Thompsons spare, hardened-steel prose at fifteen. Spyder wondered what would happen if he put the book in his pocket and just walked away.
"An interesting choice," said a man around the far side of the pile. "Considering the choices available. "
Spyder craned his neck to see a short, round man in a kind of leather khaftan. Over the khaftan yards of barbed wire had been looped, encasing the man in spiny metal. On his face, the man wore a wooden mask depicting some grinning Japanese demon. Spyder remembered that Shrike had said something about masks. Some of the humans in Berenice wore masks, shed said, to keep lost memories from attaching themselves to them and becoming false memories of a life theyd never led.
"I had this book
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