Door 2:  Night is hunger

Every night is exactly the same as this one—and it is endless. She walks a path she’s walked many times before, her feet leaving a faint trail like unanswered love letters. The streets are wet and empty at this zero hour, the cobbles glistening with the slime of passing monsters, and almost every window black as a burnt-out tumor.

There is the sound of a ship announcing itself at harbor, but, hearing it, one wonders if any harbor really exists in this part of the city. She’s been to this area many times before—a neighborhood where she has no business being—and yet. What’s left of the leaves on the diseased trees give a little epileptic shake, and the hard grit of a post-midnight rain hits her in the face. She smells fish and roses and mortuary glue.

In the doorway of a murky brownstone, Xie spots her right exactly where she expects. The woman is sitting on the topmost stair, just out of the rain, holding an open cell phone and sobbing, her narrow shoulders shaking under the fitted denim jacket and her face crumpled like a carnation. Is she calling someone inside the abandoned-looking building, a lover, perhaps, who is inside with someone else, or has she only stopped here by chance to make her call after coming to some other kind of despair?

It’s irrelevant, but Xie can’t help but being touched by the question, pausing for a moment to consider the woman who, in another lifetime, could have easily, and fatally, been mistaken for herself. In the blue gloom of the cell phone light, the woman’s face is touched with an otherworldly gentleness like a weeping Madonna of vaguely Asiatic origin.

Several seconds pass and the cell phone light has gone out. Xie is suddenly standing directly behind the woman now, as if she’d just come out of the bombed-out brownstone. From this vantage she can see the cotton skirt stretched thin over the woman’s lap, her long musician’s hands, palms-up, lying useless on the taut fabric, still holding the dead cell phone. The woman’s bare knees are resting against each other as if unconsciously protecting her genitals and the light from a streetlamp twenty-five yards away is shining off the polished toenails of her pale feet.

Leaning forward, Xie runs a red nail along the scar-like part in the girl’s rain-soaked hair. There’s a sharp intake of breath, a little stifled cry, and she looks up into Xie’s angelically impassive face as the blade chews its way across her exposed throat.

Xie feels like she’s sawing through a washing machine hose except the pressure built up inside the ribbed tube is blood and breath. Both start spewing out of the slice in the woman’s windpipe with a terrible hiss, along with mucous and chunks of vomit.

The filth sprays out of the woman and plops onto her lap and around her feet which are now slipping ineffectually on the grue-covered stair below her, providing a stark contrast to her rapidly whitening face. Death perfecting, as is its tendency, at least in the first few moments after it arrives. Words bloom in frothing blood around the woman’s mouth—a language all its own. The woman’s hands stop making those annoying and ineffectual fluttering motions and drop to her sides on the stoop as her arms suddenly flop down.

Hugging her now, Xie leans close, as if to tell her a secret or to breathe in her last breath, but she’s doing neither. The body in her arms is shuddering violently as if it were packed in ice and rapidly freezing to death with a staccato series of wet lumpy farts and the intermittent sizzle of scalding urine, which jets through her silk panties.

This is food for Xie, not the toxic fluids and spastic bloody spray paint, per se, but the energy bathing her as the light radiates off the dying woman, cocooning them both with a brief intimacy that excludes the world of good and evil.

Afterwards, Xie drags the woman into the brownstone, which is a trap from which no one ever emerges, and bounces her up the stairs to a room empty except for the mouse droppings along the baseboards and canopied with dust like an Arabic caravan going nowhere. There she quietly strips the corpse and dons the soiled clothes as much to soak up and surround herself with whatever’s left of the dying girl’s essence as to obscure her own nudity, not that it’s visible to anyone until she chooses to reveal it, usually in the last seconds of her target’s life, that’s how good she is.

She thinks of the one she’s hunting now and knows that no matter how good she is, she won’t be good enough. She can already sense that she’s been spotted, that the night is metastasized with his countless eyes and ears, a terminal night, with no hope of cure. The darkness is his flesh and his flesh responds to her and when she at last arrives to kill him, he will be ready for her, as he always is, tonight and every night for a thousand and a thousand and a thousand years.