Three a.m. and the knocking starts on the wall above my headboard. It’s old Mr. Cromartie again. It’s not what you’re thinking. I’m alone, minding my own business, and until ten seconds ago I was sound asleep. It’s Mr. Cromartie who is wide awake, causing the ruckus. I scooch out from under the covers and get up on my knees.
There, in the cored out hole of the cardboard-thin wall between our apartments,
Aleister Lately had come to count on these roughly biweekly itinerant sojourns to the yawning crevasse in the Deep South. The sigil of Tiamat, primordial chaos incarnate, suitably byzantine and baroque, called him crowing over to the Whore of Babylon, taking his flexible days off when needed, hoping beyond any reasonable measure that his proverbial parole officer wouldn’t come lurking, skulking behind beady eyes and avuncular brows to lift him from degeneracy.