Following the instructions Nickie gave me, they led me to an apartment in Metcalfe Park, specifically to a set of stairs that led to a below-ground apartment. A motorcycle, one I recognized as Jack’s beloved ‘Miss Missy,’ sitting idle along the sidewalk was signal enough to me that this is where Jack lived. The building itself was intimidating and severely industrial, rustic but lacking charm, a shell of a factory, warehouse, mill, or failed brewery that had been hollowed out by the parasites known only as landlords and their tenants. 

The concrete steps leading down to a doorstep were cracked, and several open cans of cat food were scattered along them - all in organized rows, not just someone’s careless mess. At the base of the stairs, eating from one of the cans was a cat, its grey-white fur mangey and partially missing across its lithe body. It paused from its meal to look up at me with a flattened face, and the left side of its face was mangled, its eye and part of an ear missing, most likely from a scrap with a fellow nighttime critter. Its remaining amber eye regarded me with a piercing judgment, though it licked its flat muzzle lazily. It was in no mood for fighting today, it seemed, and casually strutted up the steps until it butted its head against my leg. There was a horrible rattling sound that I only assumed was the thing’s version of purring.

To shake the cat away, I stepped further down the step, but it continued to follow me, which urged me to move down another step, and then another, and another, until I stood at the apartment’s door.

The cat sat patiently on the step, its ratty tail flicking around its paws as it watched me with its one eye, seemingly intent on me knocking on the door, refusing to let me escape even if I wanted to. So I was left to stare at the door, and, I prayed, Jack on the other side. I didn’t realize I’d get this far, if I were being honest with myself, and I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I should’ve been back home, back in the shop, back helping Mom-

No. Helping Jack. This is to help Jack.

I held my breath and knocked my knuckle against the door.

Nothing.

After a few moments I knocked again, hitting the peeling, cracked door with more force.

“Fuck off, Jared! I’ll have your rent next week!” It was obviously Jack’s nasal shrill, but it was an aggressive snarl that startled me.

I cleared my throat, clearing the lodged fear away. “Jack, it… It’s me. It’s Temperance.”

Silence, and I was growing to fear that maybe I’d only imagined his voice to begin with. 

Then there was movement on the other side of the door, the rattle of locks being undone, it opening ever so slightly until, from the ajar crack, was the sliver of an eye regarding me. The eye squinted, crinkled at its corners. It glistened too wetly. “Temp?”

“I came to see if everything was okay between us. I… I was just worried about you since I never heard from you, and I went to the autobody to get your address…” I trailed off as that eye broke away from my gaze and the brow above it lowered. “Sorry, I-I should’ve just called. I can go-”

“No, wait. Temperance, I-” he cut himself off with a heavy sigh. “Just… I’m sick, and I don’t want you to catch whatever it is I got.”

“What is it that you have?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well… can I see?” Please, I want to help you, if I can.

“I don’t want you to. I mean… I don’t think it’d be safe, for you.”

My heart dropped, and I tried to think of what Jack would do in this situation… what would he do if this were me, holding myself up in my house, refusing to see him?

I looked down at the one-eyed cat as it groomed itself on the step behind me.

“Well… I don’t know if this mangey thing will let me leave,” I said and looked back at him peering from the sliver of darkness. “Jack, please, I’ve been worried about you. We’re friends, aren’t we? Can I not be a friend and help you?”

Heavy silence followed, and I was terrified at the possibility that he would turn me away again. Then, he sighed.

My heart stuttered upon the sound of him undoing that final lock, and the door opened inwards, into the apartment’s belly of darkness. The one-eyed cat audibly meowed and skittered past my feet to cross the threshold first. 

There was a smell. One that wasn’t rancid or rotting, but the reek of bile and a defunct body. The stench of pestilence, and my nose wrinkled as I stared into the unlit void of the apartment.

Hesitantly, I stepped into the darkness as well.

I felt bad calling Jack’s apartment an ‘apartment.’ It was obviously a portion of the basement for whatever mill or brewery this building once was, consisting of one large concrete-walled room containing a living space stuffed with a couch unfolded into a bed and kitchen, and a small broom-closet-turned-bathroom where some laundry hung from a line strung inside the shower. There was the smell of cigarette smoke, unwashed laundry, and dampness that made my nose crinkle further. The place was dim, the only light being one that flickered in the bathroom every other heartbeat.

I looked around hesitantly, and the one-eyed cat rubbed against Jack’s legs with audible mews and more of its rattling purrs as he closed the door behind me.

And upon seeing Jack, my blood ran cold and my heart stopped. Against my own control, I gasped, hands flying my lips to stifle it too late.

Across his face, shoulders, arms, and chest, flesh was split open and dappled with crimson-red scabs that resembled scales, glistening like exposed muscle. His eyes no longer matched, one remaining normal while the left one part-way bulged from its socket and ogled at me with a slitted pupil like that of a viper’s, and the flesh around it was warped and red, textured like gored tendons. The skin pulsated as his eye shifted to look down and away from me. He wore a wife beater, and the white of the shirt was stained pink where more scaled growths grew across his chest.

A hand covered with similar scaly rashes and fingertips with claw-shaped growths budding through the flesh of his raw, reddened nail beds, splitting through half-rotten nails, ran through his hair, undone and hung around his face in dark tendrils. Patches along his airline were gone, instead replaced by more of those scales and undulating growths that made me want to gag - but I couldn’t look away.

“I see you met Princess,” he mumbled, gesturing to the one-eyed cat at his feet. His throat bobbed several times with forceful swallows.

“Princess?” I asked, failing to mask its tremor.

“Mm-hmm… I like leaving food out for cats, helping the little guys, y’know? Sometimes it attracts other animals, unfortunately. Princess was unlucky enough to meet a possum; lost her eye and ear to the little bastard.”

Then there was an awkward silence, and I was unsure of what to say as my hands fretted with the hem of my windbreaker, the fabric already growing damp from the sweat slicking my palms.

When the silence was broken, we both spoke at the same time, but interrupting one another led to yet again more stiffened quiet. He didn’t look at me, and, God, I wanted him to, I wanted to see him, I wanted him to see me.

Jack, please… look at me, let me help you…

“What happened?” I asked in a whisper, growing infected beneath the venom of this silence.

Jack sighed and moved over to the kitchen area to sit at the table, Princess following him, and he ran his hand through his greased hair again. When he brought it away, in his palm lay clumps of hair, still clinging to discharged chunks of his scalp, and it took everything within me to resist a gag as he dismissively rubbed the mess off on his jeans.  

“I think I’m sick.” he said at last, his mis-matched eyes scanning the floor for an answer that would never come to him. His hand, mangled and strange and still damp with this arcane gore, lightly pet Princess as she pressed her head against his shoulder. When he looked back up at me, I wanted to look away, but I refused to. “So you might as well just leave. I… I don’t know what is happening to me, and I don’t want this to affect you, too.” As he talked, the flickering light in the bathroom revealed something white and pointed budding from the spot where he was missing his left canine.

I showed him my palms, as if gesturing to all of him, the apartment. “And you want me to leave you like this?”

He pursed his lips, and his good brow furrowed.

I continued, “I thought I scared you away, I just … I was worried about you. I was scared that you found me boring and you wanted to get rid of me. I just need to know if this is true, and… and if I can help you. I won’t leave until you give me an answer, Jack.”

He sighed and dropped his head into his hands where he let loose a strangled sound that hinted at a cry. “No, you did nothing, Temp… I was worried about hurting you," he ran his tongue over half-marred lips, doing everything he could to avoid my gaze, "I like you, Temperance, I like you a lot, and I can trust you. I just-” He flexed his hand, and sighed before running it through Princess’ balding scruff. A chunk of his rotted nail caught in her fur, ripping free of the nail bed before falling to the floor with a hollow, sharp plink. Jack regarded it, regarded himself, with a seething snarl. “I didn’t want anyone to see me like this, I don't want anyone to be like this.”

For a moment, I was terrified. This all felt so wrong. Not because of how this infection was warping my friend, but because Jack was completely and utterly broken. He wasn’t supposed to be like this. He was meant to be smiling and joking and bragging and telling me about his bikes or telling me anecdotes of people almost meeting their deaths after being tricked into eating peppers, not being bent and broken.

Slowly I shifted towards the table and moved to put my hand on his shoulder. But upon being reminded of the festering infection peeling his skin open and revealing those scaly growths, I went into the kitchen, ran a wash cloth beneath the tap, and used it to lightly cup his chin. He flinched beneath my touch, like a wounded animal, but he otherwise remained the same.

With a cautious hand I angled his gaze upward to meet mine. His eyes glistened with tears, or what I thought were tears because he cried a red fluid, too thick to be blood but too thin to be an ooze. With the cloth, I gingerly dabbed at the red tears, at the bloodied mess of those scales, my touch lingering over his lips. I only stopped as the cloth stained and the heat of infection began to bleed into my fingers. I dropped the cloth on the table, a shudder crawling across my shoulders as I wiped my hands with the edge of my coat.

He stared at me, lips pressed tightly and a single red tear slowly leaking from his infected eye, tracing through the grooves of exposed scaly scabs.

“I’d never abandon you, Jack, but I’ll go. If you ever need help or…” Or what? What could I ever provide for something like this? Nothing. My throat burned. I wanted to say more. But what more was there to say? “You know where to find me. Okay?”

Feeling a need to say nothing more and yet so much, I stepped away from him before I’d the chance to embarrass myself. The end of my windbreaker’s sleeve was stained pink with blood.

And I left, eager to rid myself of the smell of pestilence and pus.