"I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit —————————————————————— and wanted to shoot myself."

~ Søren Kierkegaard

"It took you long enough, but I thought I was supposed to find you, not the other way around," Zandra says after the blindfold comes off.

It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust, but she sees that she's sitting on a chair inside a residential garage. Decaying grass clippings, accented by the sweetness of pine sawdust and musk of gasoline, perfume the air. Her skin feels damp. Zandra looks to her left and sees a riding lawnmower. Four out-of-focus faces stare back at her from a few feet away. She licks her lips and says, "You owe me a cigarette."

I assume I'm tied to this chair. Kidnappers do that, right?

Zandra struggles to break her wrists free from her side. To her surprise, nothing resists her hands, and she salutes the open rafters of the ceiling.

They didn't find the lawnmower knife, either. Where the hell is Sunglasses?

Zandra slips the knife out from her sleeve.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, no need for that. We can explain," a male voice says.

Zandra rubs her eyes with the backs of her hands. The figures come into focus, and the four figures condense into three: a young woman, a young man, and what might be a human-lizard hybrid. They look like they just came off a three-day bender of cold medicine, energy drinks, and blue light.

College kids?

"Explaining would be a good idea," Zandra says. She remains seated, knife in hand, but her eyes run laps around the garage. It's a three-car garage, minus the cars. A service door not far away might lead to a yard. Concrete steps leading up to a door likely head into an attached house. Mundane outdoor supplies, tools, and hardware line the walls on eyehooks.

Mundane until used in less-than-mundane ways.

"Look, I, I, I know this is going to sound crazy, and maybe it is, but hear me out. We didn't think there was any other way to do this," the male voice says.

Now Zandra can see that the voice belongs to a young man wearing a leather jacket with no shirt underneath. Greasy strands of hair coil down to his hips. Coke-bottle glasses frame his face.

He's free of tattoos, unlike the young woman standing next to him. The tattoo sleeves on her arms offer more attire than the T-shirt ripped too neatly to not have been purchased that way. The sweatpants show stains in the shape of orange fingerprints.

Their companion leans against the wall of the garage with his tree-trunk arms crossed. Through tattoos, body modification, and contact lenses, he looks like a human-lizard hybrid ready to eat either Zandra or flies.

On second thought, you have to graduate high school before you can go to college.

"We're already past crazy," Zandra says, the lawnmower knife still in her hand. "If you're going to kill me, get to killing me. Otherwise, I've got other things to do."

"Kill you? Oh, no, no, no, Zandra, we're, no, we're not going to kill you. We're the opposite of wanting to kill you," the young man in the leather jacket says. "My name's Chad, by the way. It's really, it's, the pleasure is to meet you. I mean, I'm...sorry. Just a little star struck here. I can't believe you're really sitting in my garage."

"Neither can I," Zandra says.

Chad grins to his female companion.

"Let me explain. We're all big fans of yours," Chad says.

"The biggest, really," the young woman says. She extends her hand for a shake. The move goes unrequited. "I'm Bexley."

"Yeah, ever since the Soma Falls thing, where you found the dead body of your husband floating in the water through a vision you had after the police couldn't find him. That was so wild. Original fans. Big, big fans. Following you ever since," Chad says. He crams the words into three or four excited blurts.

Were they even alive 25 years ago?

"Hey, that's probably not a nice thing to say in the way you said it," Bexley says.

"Oh, shit, yeah, right, so, uh, sorry-sorry," Chad says.

"We went to Sneak Peek a lot and bought all sorts of stuff. Maybe you remember us?" Chad says.

Unless they spent their paychecks, I wouldn't remember them if they sprouted wings and fucked on the ceiling.

"No," Zandra says.

Back when Sneak Peek still had a serviceable mailbox outside the front door, she received fan mail from around the world. Zandra never liked email. Digital records of conversations left her open to scrutiny by skeptics looking to make names for themselves.

"We were there all the time. Like you never did a reading or anything, but we were fans. You could probably tell we were into it," Bexley says.

Zandra points the tip of the knife toward the lizard man and says, "I think I'd remember your pet iguana."

Through yellow eyes sliced with vertical pupils, the man says, "I am The Crocodile. Crocodile. Not a fucking iguana."

"No one cares," Zandra says, although it's more misdirection than maliciousness. There's something distinct about The Crocodile's voice. Something familiar.

Wait. Is that...?

"See? I told you," Bexley says under her breath to Chad.

Chad waves her off, "No, no, this is fine, it's just fine."

"You know I can hear you, right? No need to whisper," Zandra says. She reaches down and rubs the hurt out of her ankle. "Can I leave or is there a point to this?"

Chad, eyes wide behind thick glasses, raises a single finger and whispers into Bexley's ear. Bexley leaves the garage through the door with the concrete steps.

"This will be worth it, it will be, I promise," Chad says to Zandra.

Better be. My nose is living in whatever died between your teeth.

Might as well poke around in the meantime.

Zandra nods to The Crocodile. She says, "There's a spirit standing next to you. It's trying to communicate."

The Crocodile's expression doesn't change.

Chad lets out a quiet, "Wow."

"It wants you to talk about the car thing," Zandra says. "Someone or something about the letter R or E, I can't tell."

This is cold reading, a topic the books at Sneak Peek never covered because it didn't make any sense to sell the antidote to my poison. Take a group of saps and throw statistically probable queries at them. Something will connect. If it doesn't, move on to the next person.

The eggheads call this "conditional probability." Pay attention in math class, kids.

"Mm hmmm," The Crocodile says in a cold growl.

"Come on, man. You're not out anything if you play along," Chad says to The Crocodile. Turning to Zandra, he says, "Sorry. He's the skeptic in the group. He's here for shits and giggles."

The guy with body modifications and tattoos to make him look like a crocodile is the rational one?

"Show some respect, child. The spirit is trying to communicate with you. It could be important," Zandra says.

The Crocodile doesn't react. He just stands and stares, arms crossed.

I want to hear The Crocodile talk again. Let's try this.

"There's a murder weapon in this very room," Zandra says.

Nothing registers until a moment later, when Bexley returns to the garage with a bloody meat mallet in her hands.

I hate being right.