Alvin left them to argue which was more ridiculous—that the government orchestrated the accident, or that it was some new, urban chupacabra—for a few minutes. He reluctantly left his blanket nest and went to the hook by the door to dig through the pockets of his coat. 

The note was still in there, luckily. It was just a torn scrap of paper with a phone number written in messy blue pen and a name scrawled above it: Zenn, or maybe Zinn? 

If the mail lady was in on whatever happened, she was an incredible actor. Sure, she’d kept it together enough to hand out her phone number to people, but she was visibly shaken when she came over to talk to him. He’d been distracted and freaked out at the time, but he’d at least noticed that much. 

His phone pinged a few times in his hoodie pocket, and he pulled it out to see DMs from Tyra popping up on his screen.

Alvin’s stomach twisted. She was probably right, but he really didn’t have it in him to deal with it right now. Talking to the chat had cheered him up a bit, made this impossible day seem manageable. He wanted to hang on to that feeling, at least until tomorrow. 

Something crashed in Lola’s room.

Alvin’s head shot up, and he started to go deal with whatever had happened, but he paused. Lola had probably tried to get up and knocked something over by accident—it had happened before plenty of times. But something in his brain was pinging “danger, danger.” He glanced at his phone, then mashed the voice call button in his DM with Tyra before shoving it back in his pocket.

There was another, louder crash from Lola’s bedroom, like the bedside table had been knocked over, all its contents scattered. With that, he dashed over and yanked the door open. 

Lola was still in bed, sitting up and clutching at her blankets.

Over her stood a tall, oily-black monster like the one he’d seen on the subway.

Alvin screamed and grabbed the nearest thing in reach—a box of tissues—and threw it at the creature. It bounced off harmlessly, but it at least seemed to get the monster’s attention. The creature didn’t have a face that Alvin could see, but it definitely leaned toward him. It stopped like that for a long moment, and Alvin got the impression that it was studying him somehow.

Then, all at once like water let free of a dam, it oozed right at him. 

Alvin grabbed more stuff at random off the bureau and threw it at the creature—a big bottle of vitamins, a hairbrush, and finally the lamp. Everything bounced off uselessly, the lamp smashing into a million pieces on the floor. The thing was getting closer, and Alvin scrambled backward, hoping to lure it out of Lola’s room at least, but he had no idea what to do next. He dodged backward as the thing took a swing at him. He nearly tripped over his own feet, but he managed to keep his balance; he pivoted on one foot and made a dash for the kitchenette. He scrabbled on the counter and came back with a curved, stubby, oft-sharpened kitchen knife and the ancient cast-iron pan—the best weapons he could think of in the apartment.

He swung back around to find that the creature was literally looming over him, ready to strike. He hadn’t even heard it get close! It was in a tall, skinny, vaguely humanoid form, its arms too long for its body—Slenderman? his brain randomly threw out as he swung wildly with the knife and sliced right through its middle. 

It was like trying to stab smoke—the blade went right through. But…he was sure he’d managed to hit it with the tissue box back in Lola’s room! Was it only solid some of the time? Was it some RPG thing where it was immune to slashing damage? How was he supposed to fight something like this?!

He didn’t want to fight anything!

He scrambled backward into the living room, keeping it in his sights even after he tripped over the backpack he’d left on the floor. He could hear Tyra’s tinny voice from the phone in his pocket, yelling something he couldn’t make out. 

The creature was still near the kitchen counters, standing there frozen. Alvin stopped too—it felt like the thing was watching him again with its eyeless, featureless face. He held up the cast-iron pan like a shield between him and the creature, and noticed for the first time just how badly his hands were shaking.

But it didn’t come for him. It oozed out of its Slenderman form and, like a storm cloud blown by a jet stream, rushed back into Lola’s room.

Alvin didn’t think, just ran—he dashed through the door, dodged past the creature, and got between it and the bed. Lola was standing at her bedside now, holding herself up against the bedpost. 

It advanced on them slowly. Alvin got an arm around Lola’s middle, ready to haul her out of harm’s way—but this thing was between them and the only exit. He wouldn’t be able to dodge past on his own, let alone while carrying someone. He gripped his pan in the other hand and prepared to swing as soon as it got close enough. A nagging voice in the back of his head told him that this was a terrible, stupid plan, but he was all out of ideas.

He felt Lola’s papery hands grasp the one he had around her like she was trying to escape his grip. He held on tighter. In that moment all he wanted in the world was to fix this somehow; he didn’t want to fight, he didn’t want monsters to be real, he just wanted a normal life and for Lola to know who he was and for this impossible thing to stop existing. But the creature reached out, unfathomably real.

Alvin’s hands exploded in dazzling light.