"When you're looking at life in a strange new room, maybe drowning soon. Is this the start of it all? When you're looking at life, deciphering scars. Just who fooled who? Sit still in their cars. The lights look bright when you reach outside, time for one last ride, before the end of it all."

~ Exercise One, Joy Divison

The fly buzzes. Clink. Clink. Clink. Its minuscule head meets glass again and again. Nothing else matters in its pursuit. Not the ever-present damp. Not the irreversible fact that the window will never open. The urge for freedom is too strong a draw, and it crawls in constant loops—thinking the twisted vines and night flowers beyond the window pane actually bloom beneath the sticky hairs of its many feet. But try as it might, the fly goes no further.

Clink. Bzzzz. Bzzz. Zz.

In a day, it'll die. Its raisin-esque body desiccating into a tiny corpse left on the stone sill until time turns it to dust. So many others rest in peace already. Rest. In. Pieces.

But the fly still buzzes, loud. Its incessant struggle engulfs the room, matched only by the invisible, silent, zing of raw nerves.

Jude picks up the gun.

His Bakewell tart sits nearby. Uneaten.

There is one bullet in the chamber, as promised. He counts it. Then he counts it again.

One win.

Five misses.

He counts the bullet a third time because his vision is blurry and he doesn't trust the Cheshire cat in the purple corduroys to have disseminated it fairly.

Across the table, smoke swirls from the lit fag lazing at the corner of J's mouth. The skin of his bare chest is nearly translucent in the aura of the overhead light bulb. The edges of the cottage's kitchen are dark. Shadows eat the ancient appliances whole, nipping bits of brick flooring as they try to reach both sets of feet tucked under the table top.

A pair of scuffed combat boots, sprawled and steady.

A pair of glossy, thin-nosed oxfords smudged in garden soil.

The fly buzzes, intermittent and aggravated. Jude snaps the cylinder closed. His nerves are intermittent. Aggravated. His blood thumps in his ears. "Ready, mate?"

J takes one last drag and smothers the cigarette in the Bakewell tart; scrunching the bent paper and weed, leaving a smushed dent in the frangipane. "Okay," he says, raising his gun he aims it at Jude's forehead.

"Let's play a fucking game."

ONE HOUR EARLIER

The entrance to the maze is a fissure. Unhinged like a snake's jaws, opening, opening, opening. Stretching away into nothingness. In the artificial light of the headlamps, the first row of the carefully landscaped bushes are visible. Over-exposed like an x-ray.

Jude stands, ready to enter. The beams cut out his figure, pasting a flat, black copy on the ground in front of him; illuminating the droplets of port wine that splatter in bloody dots on the gravel, dripping from his wet coattails to land between his feet. His breaths pummel the air. In, out, in, out—punching above the grumbling Jaguar and the chorus of a David Bowie song playing on the turntable.

Behind him, the world is slashed red. Broken bodies. Gouged grass.

Mother's voice repeats in his head:

"Don't ever enter the maze."

Don'teverdon'teverdon'tever.

Dumping what's left of the wine over his head, Jude exhales, spitting alcohol. Twisting on his heel, he hurls the empty bottle at the Jaguar's windscreen—a wind-up pitch worthy of an American baseball team—smashing a spider web pattern into the convex glass. Bowie skips in the background. A jagged scrape from the blunt needle. Staggering to the car's cherry-colored side door, Jude leans in. The soft top is turned down to allow access to the pristine interior, and there's a torch on the floor. A relic he found with the vinyl and the cassette tapes. The ones in worn jackets, pencil-marked with his initials:

J.E.

But they weren't his initials. How could they be? He never wrote them.

He wasn't even alive in 1973.

Jude gives the torch a shake to wake the batteries. Thumbing the switch he shies away from the bright glare, accidentally pointing the business end at his face.

"Fuck. "

With spots like stars in his eyes, Jude walks into the maze. At the fuzzy edges of his mind, a second voice clamors for his attention, suffocating Mother's words under an allure he can't escape.

"Amaze, amaze, amaze—

"Amaze me, you bastard."

TWO HOURS EARLIER

Jude has a thing about forks. A recent thing. He never had it before his adoption. Now, whenever he beholds one—a good silver one, lying vulnerable on the folded linens beside its gimpy brother at dinner—he wonders what it would feel like to stab himself in the eye with the tines.

But then, dessert comes, and he forgets the impulse; lost between the layers of a Bakewell tart crafted especially for him.

Jude eats a Bakewell every night. He only said he liked them once. And even then, he'd meant the packaged in kind. The finger-tarts crimped in cellophane and sold at the petrol station. But mother dotes.

Mother coddles.

Mother eats fruit for dessert. Oranges, mostly. Her false teeth aren't suited for anything else. She cannibalizes her fat citrus like a child at snack time. Pinching the vellum skins on each wedge between her gnarled fingers, she unzips them, pushing the bisected flesh inside-out to suck the juice like marrow from softened bones.

It's noisy.

The dining room is the size of a Man City football field and shit echoes. Jude sits at one end of the long, long mahogany table. Mother sits at the other end. Both beacons; not related, but united by negative causality. Jude can't wait to die. Mother looks dead already.

He stands and lets the fork drop in a loud clatter. Mother must have recharged her hearing aid, because she stops slurping, surprised, and watches him leave—tossing his crumpled napkin over his shoulder and onto the parquet floor. She doesn't see him flip off years of her family history in the hallway. Grazing the wall of hundred-year-old portrait paintings with contempt on his way to the study.

Snagging the letter opener off the desk as he passes, Jude pauses to assess his reflection in the mirrored panels of the liquor cabinet. He straightens the cuffs on his crisp shirt, gold cuff links wink in the moonlight leaking in the windows. Black suit and tails. White bow tie. Every stitch out-dated. He smooths his deep, deep brown hair back, jaw flexing.

"Happy birthday, mate." He sniffs, and jams the letter opener between the clamped lips of the double doors.

The lock pops open after a twist or two, littering wood curls on the Persian rug. Jude kicks several maple ribbons off his fancy, flawless shoes.

Red wine,

White wine,

Whiskey,

Schnapps...

Jude grasps the biggest bottle sitting on the middle shelf, wringing the sleek neck. Slicing the paper seal with the edge of the letter opener, he uncorks the champagne, letting a stream of froth spatter the carpet and a tapestry chair.

He guzzles straight from the bottle; the bubbles soothe his chin and trickle down the curve of his throat. The room temp makes the champagne thick and disgusting. Tugging at the bow tie, he pulls the knot and unbuttons his stiff collar, meandering to the nearest window. The snow-white moon blanches the windowpanes, casting shadowy impressions of the grid-like muntins halfway across the room. Jude stands at the center. The cross-bar silhouette divides his face.

He drinks more champagne and stabs the letter opener into the painted wood windowsill. It stands. Crooked.

Outside, the garden is monochrome. Blue and silver in the night. The shrubs are trimmed within an inch of their lives, conformed into perfect squares or cones, not a leaf gone astray. A gravel footpath leads the eye through the jumble of boxwoods and foxglove, past solemn statues on lime-worn pedestals.

The garden is a moat surrounding the villa. Mother's villa. Fortified in the country, alone on a hill, with several dozen windows and a chunky, stone veranda, Eaton House is the stateliest sight Jude has ever seen. The first time he laid eyes on his new home, chauffeured up the crunchy driveway in a red and chrome 1970's Jaguar, he'd felt like Alice: dropped through a mirror into a bizarre new world where up was down and suddenly he was important.

He was a somebody in a world of ambiguity. A moneyed Eaton. Not a faceless pauper in dirty, canvas trainers. The ink had barely dried on the adoption papers, and his strange, new, signature already had a title.

The Honorable...

Over five hours by train and he was home.

From the moment he stepped out of the car, Jude never missed the overcrowded Orphan House in Bristol. He didn't miss the anonymity of being one in a hundred faces. He had a warm feeling of contentment in his belly. Excitement, maybe. Hope—? Jude would never call anything hope. The moment you named something that important, or that big, it always vanished. Poof. Gone. No, the warmth he carried into the great front foyer wasn't Hope, but it was bloody close to it.

And the driver carried his suitcase, which was thrilling.

Jude had aspirations now that he was rich. Box seats at football games. Private cinemas. Concerts. A horse.

But that was before Mother.

Before the tapes and the Voice recorded on them.

Living in Eaton House, after awhile, Jude felt transplanted. Plucked and settled into a pair of shoes that weren't his. The mirror lied, too. Showing him a boy with his name but not his face.

And Mother—at first glance, a benign old lady with a perm and coral lips—Mother gave him everything. Food. Clothes. Monogrammed heirlooms with his name carved or imprinted on impossible places. Like a tarnished-silver, first place cricket cup with the date filed off.

The way she treated him, it bordered on a fetish.

His clothes.

His food.

Even his favorite color was predetermined.

Jude had no say in any matter: not in books, movies, or hygiene preference. And he hated the scent of the mint soap that permeated even the threads of his bed sheets.

Soon, he didn't want everything.

When he tried to hang himself from the second-floor balcony, Mother wasn't angry. She said she knew he would do it again.

Jude didn't know what the hell she was talking about.

But the Voice on the tapes was inside him somehow. And it made him see...things.

It made him hate her.

Up until three days ago, he rattled when he walked. But that was before he flushed every anti-depressant pill in his prescription down the luxury loo.

The warmth is gone.

Dragging his sleeve across his mouth, Jude glares at the garden. Mother loves that garden. Sitting for hours on the wrought iron benches with her sketch book. A pencil trapped betwixt the knots of her arthritic fingers.

She wears pearls like she's the Queen.

She even has a corgi. A little shit of a dog that messes where it pleases and has a maid to clean up when it does.

Jude belches. Drinks. And belches again.

Tucking a hand into the closure of his vest, he sighs, "My heart leaps up when I behold, a rainbow in the sky. So it was my life began. So is it now I am a man. So it be when I shall grow old—or let me die. The Child is the father of the Man, and I could wish my days to be, bound each to each by natural piety...

Sod it."

Jude digs in his trouser pocket for the car keys, clutching the champagne bottle under his elbow. Tonight is his nineteenth birthday.

Tonight, he will leave some lasting impressions for Mummy.

Tonight. The Voice wins.

  ✵  

There's a can of red auto paint in the garage. And a gloppy paint brush.

Jude remembers to take them with when he steals the Jaguar from under the protective canvas tarp, releasing the brake and rolling it silently past the driver's cottage. The top is down, and once he is clear of the old knob's earshot, he hops over the low door and starts the engine. The tires chew pebbles up the road.

Parking outside one of Eaton's many, many doors, Jude leaves the car idling long enough to load each object collected from the house into the boot.

A cricket bat.

Booze.

The turntable he ordered from Selfridges.

A box of old vinyl records.

A plastic bullet torch with a rusty switch.

More booze.

The garden grows at the bottom of a grassy knoll. Jude revs the engine and plunges the accelerator, ripping a swerve-y path in the soft turf all the way to the bottom. The wheel wells are choked green when he gets out and looks.

Jude smiles.

The night is quiet, undisturbed. In the brilliance of the headlamps, the garden statues are stiff corpses, coated in cement and staged in unhappy poses. Cupids, princes, muses...all hollowed eyed and hungry. Their shadows are inordinately long. Distorted and stretched across flowerbeds and hedge liners.

Jude swigs from the champagne bottle, dragging the bat after him as he approaches the nearest statue—A woman with a pitted face in a chiseled stone robe.

He lobs the bottle at her weathered head. The olive glass explodes on contact, falling apart in a glittering shower.

"Yeah, baby! Wooo!" Jude hollers and lifts the cricket bat with both hands.

The woman's hand crumbles under his swing, the collision vibrating up his arms and into his chest. Exhilarated he moves on, twisting his grip, readying himself—

Chips of plaster and stone spatter, shrapnel flying. Arms. Legs. Heads. WHACKWHACKWHACK. Jude stops battering to catch his breath. His chest is heavy with exertion, rising and falling like a thoroughbred chaser on the green. He tips his head back, his heartbeat swelling in his ears, breath vapor in the cool night air.

In the brilliance of the headlamps, the garden statues are amputees. Wounded soldiers on the battlefield. Jude whoops, catcalling the moon. His palms are bleeding when he drops the bat, but he ignores it. Too energized to care. Finding his cigarettes in the breast pocket of his jacket, he pulls one loose from the metal case, and testing the weight in his raw palm, he tosses the cigarette into his mouth, catching it easy as a blink.

The lighter is gold and worn smooth, matching the case. His name is inscribed on the backside, but the script is all but illegible now. Jude's fingers tremble as he startles the flame into existence, cupping the fag's tip in his hand to light it.

Flipping the lighter's lid closed, he gives it one last contemplative look before chucking it over a hedge.

"Time for some music," he mumbles, hauling the record player from the boot. Selecting a vinyl from the water stained storage box, he crouches on the grass, laying the grooved record in place.

Closing his eyes, Jude listens.

The beats lace through him, a string from his toes to his scalp. It tugs him upright and pulls at his hips and his head, finding the rhythm in the chorus. Jude sways at first. Bobbing a little. And then, he's dancing.

The lilt from the champagne carries him. Strutting and twirling in the car lights, black jacket open and flapping. He kicks at the gravel—a spray of tiny rocks pings off the shiny bumper—and hits the air-guitar in sync with the song.

"Jean Genie, let yourself go, oh whoa!"

Shuffling up to the passenger's side door, Jude snags a wine bottle from the front seat. Smashing the neck on a statue's base, he stains his white cuffs burgundy as the wine sloshes out. Toasting the house on the hill, he guzzles carelessly, cutting his lip on the jagged edge.

"Go!" The bottle detonates when he drops it, bleeding out on the gravel

Flicking the cig into oblivion, Jude liberates the paint can and brush from the backseat. Still swaying, he slings arcs of paint at the statues, screaming into blank faces and deaf ears:

"I'm not him!"

He murders another wine bottle. Drenching most of himself in the process. This one, he keeps. Drinking swallow after swallow. Jude dances along the rose beds, splattering the closed petals in paint. Mother has an entire garden, but this is the part she dotes on. Everyday. Rain. Shine. Mother prunes the roses, talking to them like children. Fussing over the serrated leaves. Weeding the mulch at the roots—

She has the healthiest roses in all of Cheshire. But only on the south side. Only here.

And for reasons unknown, Jude hates them the most.

When the paint can empties, Jude jumps back in the car and slams the accelerator. The Jaguar lunges forward, shedding gravel, and snapping the open boot lid up and down as the wheels chew into the grass and dirt, mowing over the red-painted roses.

He doesn't stop driving until he reaches the end of the wide path. A wall of evergreen shrubs looms ahead like a cancer shadow, a spot on nature's lung. Here, a maze fringes the garden. The only part of the property he's not allowed to roam. Abutting a national forest reserve, the maze is a twist of corridors. Sculpted bushes that never change shape. Where it goes or why? Mother won't say.

Jude slams on the brake, skidding.

The day he arrived, shaky and excited—excited in a different way than now—Mother led him on a tour of the manor, his new home. On a balcony overlooking the grounds, he'd asked her about the pattern of symmetrical greenery disappearing under the tree line.

"You can do what you like, Jude," she said. "But don't ever enter the maze."

He wanted to. The maze, silent and obtuse, called to him, singeing his brain with possibility. But he was too grateful to disobey. Then, one morning, a stack of shoe boxes appeared outside his bedroom door. In the boxes were the tapes. Hundreds of them. Cassettes in scratched plastic sheaths with delicate brown filaments wound-up tight inside. Guts waiting to spill.

The voice on the tapes changed him. It made his curiosity too insufferable to resist. The Voice told him to jump; a minty-sheet wrapped around his neck and secured to the balusters.

He carries the Voice with him now.

Heart pushing, pushing, pushing, Jude steps out of the car. A gap in the hedges peels apart before his eyes. Or maybe it was always there? Hidden. But as Jude stares into the center of the tall blackness he knows two things:

Tonight he'll disobey Mother.

Tonight, he won't be coming back.

David Bowie sings in the distance, lonely. Jude reaches into his trouser pocket. Wrapping his fingers around the portable cassette player, he presses Play. The tape rolls forward. The Voice wears into life again, faint and crackly.

"Amaze me, you bastard."

There's a click on the audio. Like a lock shutting.

"Fuck. Maybe next time. Where were we? Oh, yeah. Life. Life's pointless, innit? One in a million faces and no one bloody cares in the end. A lamp. I want to be a lamp. A lamp is useful. Turn it on and you can see in the dark. Scared? It fights the monsters with a flip of a switch. People —

"People are the monsters.

I'm a People.

Are you?"

Jude walks into the maze.

  ✵  

"Why do I exist? Exist —exit is only a letter different. Funny, that. What do we exist for? Toiling away in a myopic pretense of living, satisfying the egotistical whims of a yet undetermined deity, until we die, alone, and then what? What's next? Mother won't let me die, though. She says if I ever left it would kill her. So, I guess I'll never know..."

  ✵  

The ground squishes underfoot.

Jude flashes the torch, back and forth, searching for the next turn. The next dead end. The world smells wet. Damp dirt and rotting leaves. Sap secretion. Stale rain water.

It's cold.

Folding his jacket collar up, Jude walks on and on and on. The bushes grow increasingly closer together on either side. Impenetrable walls that narrow the path and sponge the light from everywhere. Jude can't see two feet in front of him, even with the torch.

The tape unwinds in his pocket.

"Sometimes, I get to thinking about crustaceans," the Voice says. Behind the words, metal jingles.

Left turn.

"They're giant bugs living in the ocean, but no one wants to talk about that over cocktails. Denial. Who needs more proof it exists?"

Right turn.

"I heard once about a Second War plane that was dragged off the bottom of the Channel. The body of the pilot was still inside the cockpit — all preserved and shit because of the cold water — and, do you want to guess what was clinging to him? Eating him? Lobsters. Goddamn lobsters the size of small dogs. People pay thousands to eat lobsters that goddamn big.

"So it gets me thinking, right. I'm thinking — if everyone's eating lobsters. And lobsters are eating people off the ocean floor, then...are we really eating people? Is cannibalism actually cannibalism if you're an accidental participant. Is life that same way? Are we all just accidental participants because our parents got jiggy one night and BAM..."

Jude flinches at the sound of a hand smacking a table top. He turns left. No. Right, again.

"...welcome to Wonderland. I mean, did anyone really want us? Or was the idea of mummsy and daddsy and baby makes three better than the reality?"

Jude pauses the tape. Reaching blindly, he grabs a fistful of bushes, the waxy needles crunch in his palm. The beam from the torch points at his toes, highlighting the pattern of mud and leaves clinging to the expensive leather.

How many nights?

How many nights had he lain awake in a new foster home, in a strange room, in a strange bed, wondering why?

He hadn't queued up for life. He didn't ask to be here. Why had his parents abandoned him? What was it about him that wasn't worth keeping?

Why didn't Mother want him? The real him.

Pain sears his temple. Jude hisses and grabs his head, closing his eyes against the flashes—red and white—that assault his vision.

DIE.

DEATH.

DO IT.

The words appear and vanish. Flipping in and out as fast as surfing telly channels by remote.

"Jude. Do it Jude. Do it," the Voice whispers from his pocket; distorted and stretched. "Do it."

Fumbling in the fabric, Jude yanks the tape recorder from his trousers. It's off. Quickly, he hits the fast forward. Several ticks and he presses Play, waiting.

Static silence.

Licking his dry lips, Jude tastes blood. His thumb hovers over the triangular button as the tape rewinds. He tries to breathe steadily but his nerves make it impossible. He presses Play again.

"..."Happiness is a Warm Gun" was the title of a gun magazine if you can believe it. What psychotic nutter wrote that down and felt proud? Well, Lennon liked it, so I guess they were on to something. He said, and I quote, " I just thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say. A warm gun means you just shot something." The prick. He's never held a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, that's for certain. A warm gun means the game is over. What's fantastic about that?"

The Voice sounds normal once more. Like it has a hundred times before. Jude keeps walking through the twist of passages, passed dried-up fountains and lichen-blotched statues. The Voice rattles on; song lyrics and poems and one-sided conversations. An audio diary left on his doorstep, and this is the last entry. With each turn, the maze grows darker. The torch dimmer. Pieces of the Voice snatch at him in chaotic succession—

Quiet.

Then screaming.

Then quiet again.

And always the click, click, click of metal.

Jude starts to run.

"I hate this house."

"I'LL KILL HER!"

"Tonight, my dog died."

"PISS OFF."

"I want to leave."

"It's not fun anymore."

"I CAN'T LEAVE."

"Amaze."

Click.

"Amaze."

Click.

"Amaze."

Click.

"...the Child is the father of the Man...bound each to each, by natural piety."

"Amaze me, you bastard."

A gunshot shreds through the speakers.

DIE.

DEATH.

DO IT!

"Hey, Jude. Nice life?"

Jude tumbles out of the maze.

  ✵  

"We're all dead. Think about it? We eat dead food. We wear clothes made from dead plants. We sit on dead trees. We stuff our pillows with the remains of birds —We murder those we view as socially inept. And although it's not a violent crime, no axes or guns or blood, we can end lives with a single word, an unwanted photo, a humiliating memory. A man can beat his friend to death and go to prison but call someone a fat ugly twat. Poor or disgusting. Call someone by a name not their own...

"Murder a soul and no one cares."

Silence.

"John, if you're listening...you're glasses are fucking stupid, mate."

✵ 

Fog rolls through the trees.

Jude lies on his side, eyes closed. Decayed leaves cling to his cheek, slimy, but the pain in his head paralyzes him. He can only wait until it fades. It's not physical pain, though. It's the thoughts that hurt. In his head, they are too big, too dark. Mushrooming inside his skull like Alice, growing too tall for the house until he can't stand to have them inside any longer. Expelling them means giving in. Jumping off the balcony stopped the pain the first time. It strained his larynx, but the thoughts shrunk away when the blackness folded in and his air vanished. Relief. The pills have nothing to do with making him better. His decisions do.

DIE.

DEATH.

DO IT.

Jude huddles, half hidden under his jacket. The words keep coming, blazing behind his eyelids over and over, repeating fast as a typewriter on speed. Clack. Clack. Clack.

Why? Why? Why?

The Voice made sense of these urges but it's silent now. When Jude finally uncurls his knees and sits up, he finds the cassette player smashed open. The cassette gutted. In the weak light of the fallen torch, brown tape is strewn about in knots and shiny tangles. Jude stands, taking the torch with him, and looks around. He's in the forest. Behind him, the maze is a blank wall scraping against the sky. Ahead of him, more brown tape than the reels could ever hold, quivers in the low tree branches like party streamers, beckoning.

Beneath the branches a path unravels, unencumbered by roots, disappearing into the fuzzy night.

Jude follows it.

His breaths punch the silence. In out, in out—The torch beam trembles, illuminating the fog as he walks, sweeping along the ground where his feet bruise the forest's rotting carpet. Moonlight slants between the black, black trees, casting crooked shadows across Jude's path. He shivers when he steps through them. Each intangible striation steals a little more of his warmth. By the time the cottage appears in the mist, his lips are blue. His blistered hand frozen, clutching the edges of his jacket close to his chest.

The cottage looks abandoned. Thatched roof and plaster walls, an overgrown garden that's eaten its own restraints—it is wild, alone. But there's a light on in the window and Jude climbs over the vine-tangled gate.

This is why he is here.

A line of regimented stone markers leads him to the door. Switching off the torch, he raises it in his fist and knocks. On the first push, the door creaks wide open.

"Hello? Anyone?"

A lightbulb hangs naked by its neck above a kitchen table. Inside, there is only shadows and flagstone and wavy glass.

A fly buzzes on the window sill.

For a moment, Jude is disappointed. He doesn't know why, but the Voice, the things it said—the things he said—has drawn him here. He'd hoped for more than an empty house with out-dated furniture and rusty, retro appliances.

Jude turns to go, and then he smells it:

Mint.

The door slams shut on its own. Jude jumps in surprise and grabs for the handle. He pulls and pulls and pulls but the iron latch won't budge.

Behind him, the Voice sighs, "You offend me, mate."

Jude goes still, his heart patters rapidly in his chest and he feels he might pass out. He knows who is speaking, but he can barely say the name, "Jude Eaton."

"Call me J," says the Voice.

Jude hears a lighter spark, he counts to three and turns around. "Jay? Like the bird?"

"No, J like the letter you twat. Sit down."

The kitchen table is old wood and scarred and there's a chair drawn out for him. Jude sits. Across the way, J lounges against the wall, half in shadow.

It's strange. Putting a face to the Voice. Jude had tried to find a picture of him, but Mother didn't have any. And if she did, they were well hidden. J is porcelain and bruises. His black hair is shaggy, brushing his forehead and the tops of his ears. There's a look in his eyes that screams addiction, but Jude can only guess to what. Blue powder streaks J's eyelids and black liner deepens the edges. He stares straight back, unblinking. After a second or two, Jude glances away. Uncomfortable.

J slips the gold lighter into the pocket of a pair of flared, plum corduroys that cling to his hips. His chest is bare. The dull light glances off his body and keeps going right through. A women's denim jacket trimmed in fur covers his shoulders like a capelet. He plays with the cigarette, burning sooty dots into the brittle wallpaper.

After a long pause, he says, "Alright, let's have it."

Jude tries to ignore the buzzing fly, ordering his foggy thoughts. It's inconceivable, but he says it anyway. "You're him, aren't you? The voice on the tapes? You're Mother's son."

"I thought you were Mother's son," J says, smirking.

"She adopted me when I was seventeen, but I'm not her son."

"You got that right. Did you listen to my tapes?"

Jude nods. The tapes were old. Each one marked with dates that began with '73. But J—Jude swears he's not a day over twenty-five.

"All of them?"

"Yes."

J grins. A Cheshire cat grin, darkening his already smudgy eyes, "Do you know how the world ends, then, Jude boy?"

Jude runs stiff fingers through his damp hair. It takes him a moment to gain the courage, and even then he only half-looks J in the face. "Between the idea, and the reality. Between the motion, and the act. Falls the Shadow," he recites. "This is how the world ends not with a bang, but a whimper."

"Oh, it's with a bang."

Jude startles as J places a plate and teacup on the table, but he doesn't remember seeing the man move. The china clinks. The fork rattles. The wallpaper where J was standing is unmolested. No burn marks where a moment ago there'd been nothing but dark circles.

A Bakewell sits near his elbow. Jude raises his hand, "Please no. I hate these things."

J sucks filling off his thumb and shrugs, "Your loss, mate." Grabbing the chair opposite, he sits.

Jude taps his fingers on the table's edge, glancing from the steaming teacup to the rest of the ancient cottage, "Do you live here?"

"No," J says. "Not since I died."

There's something about the way he says it, and Jude doesn't think it's a lie. But J is smirking again. His lips turning up on one side.

"Why am I wearing your clothes?" Jude blurts out.

"And there it is, the reason you've come." the chair creaks as J slouches, crossing his arms and twisting the cigarette slowly between his lips. "Have you had the thoughts yet? The ugly ones."

Jude hesitates, "Yeah."

"You can thank Mother for them."

"Mother? How?"

"I don't rightly know how she does it, mate," J says. "I've heard people call her eccentric, but Mother isn't eccentric. She's a nutter. She sucks the life right out of ya and puts something else in its place. She does this. Every so many years, whenever there's a boy named Jude, she adopts him and brings him back to Eaton House. Tries to make him live up on that hill. Tries to make him like me. That's why you're wearing my clothes."

"Why?"

"Because I left her and she broke, somehow."

Jude can smell the mint. It emanates from J in waves, but what Jude smells is himself. Lost under the heady scents of dirt and booze, the mint survives. Sewn into his clothing. His skin. "How many boys?"

"Six or seven. They never last long. Not when they discover the truth."

"The truth? Do you mean the tapes?"

J exhales smoke.

"You left them outside my door?"

"How else could I warn you—all of you? How else could I get you here?"

"What happened to the other boys?"

"Dead. Didn't you see them on your way in?"

"What? No."

"Jaysus, Jude!" J laughs. "You practically tripped over them. They all die, and then Mother plants their remains like one of her beloved rose bushes out front of this cottage."

"Why?"

"Because she's taunting me. She thinks I'm replaceable but I'm not. This is my life and it's not over!"

The fly buzzes.

Jude stares. He forgets his nervousness and the way his eyes can never quite focus on the androgynous man. "This is insane."

"Is it? You wear my clothes, you eat my favorite foods. You sleep in my bed. We share the same goddamn name! Crustaceans, Jude. I am you and you are me, we devour each other. Caught up in her sick fantasy. Smothered under one woman's perception of reality. It's not real. She can't win. You came here to escape. I can help you like I helped the others."

"How?"

J leans forward, setting two revolvers on the table. "Let's play a game."

THE PRESENT

The hammer falls with a hollow click.

Nothing. No explosion. No bullet. Empty.

J shrugs, "Beginners luck. Your turn."

The gun is misshapen and too large in his palm. Jude studies the grooves; the cylinder, the muzzle, the wood handle—he doesn't like this. He thinks of the fork and the tines. It's different when he only wants to hurt himself.

His hand is shaking. "I can't."

"Yes, you can," J says. "We each get six tries. One pull of the trigger per turn. Do it."

"No."

"DO IT!"

Jude raises the gun, but the action isn't his. His forefinger compresses the trigger, the muzzle pointed at J's eager face.

Click.

Empty.

His arm collapses on the table jogging the teacup in its saucer, sloshing. The strength washes out of Jude. His heartbeat scatters everywhere, falling from his chest to scramble around in his veins. Sweat trickles into his collar, spreading down his back. He closes his eyes and tries to breathe.

The damn fly buzzes.

"My turn," J levels his gun. "Interesting fact, mint is a common plant used in exorcisms."

Jude opens his eyes, confused. "Why would you say that?"

"You asked."

"No, I didn't."

DIE. DEATH. DO IT.

J grins, pulling his face in too many different directions. "Ah, but you've been wondering, mate. I know what you're thinking."

The barrel is a perfect circle, the sight rising from it's back like a shark's fin. Jude can't keep his eyes away. The world is blurry, undefined, but every metal edge in J's hand is in sharp focus. Jude's breaths fill the spaces between his drumming heart. Salt stings the cuts on his lips. The night started with a clear objective: piss off Mother.

Kill himself.

Now, as Jude watches the revolver, neither of those goals makes sense. And he realizes, they aren't his goals. He looks down at the old tuxedo, lovingly preserved, but not quite fitting. How long? How long has he been living J's thoughts, seeing J's world, feeling J's jealousy and adrenaline-laced desires—absorbing a whole person through the parts of his mind he never knew existed?

Jude's stomach pinches, "There's something wrong with you."

"There's something wrong with everyone," J screams. "HAVEN'T YOU BEEN LISTENING?"

Jude slams his hands down on the table top and tries to push away, but an invisible force stops him. He is rooted in place, unable to resist. Across the table, J recovers, clearing his throat and smiling.

"Sorry. You can't leave the game. It's my turn," J cocks the hammer.

"Oh, God," Jude murmurs. The reflection in J's eyes is madness. Blackness eats at the iris like fungus on a rose petal.

Whatever part of the real J.E. remains—the J.E. that played records at midnight, smoked weed, wrote poems on his skin, and kept an audio diary—it's not the good parts. J isn't himself.

Jude swallows, but his mouth is too dry. He can't stop looking at the gun.

"February 27, 1973," J says, "my twenty-fifth birthday, I sat here, like you. But I was alone, steadying the muzzle in my own goddamn ear. Luck. I was lucky. Until I wasn't. How many times did I try, spinning the cylinder, click, click, click." He grins. "The thrill of it makes your skin crawl and your pulse race. I just want to feel something real, Jude. I want to feel alive. To be amazed. You can help me do that. They all did."

He tilts his head into the light. For the first time, Jude sees what the shadows kept hidden: a ragged hole where J's right ear should have been, a path that goes all the way through. Vacant space where his brains are blown out.

"This is the truth, Jude, the one they all discover...I'm already dead.

"I always win."

J pulls the trigger. The revolver pops once, a sharp tap. Luck. Jude's head snaps back on impact, and he falls forward onto the table. Dead eyes stare out the window as the fly scrabbles against the glass. Blood drizzles from the fresh hole in his forehead.

J sighs, "Happy birthday, mate."

A/N: Happy Birthday, LeighWStuart

♫ And if anyone would like to have a listen, I've included an "external link" below to the playlist for this story. This is the final contest entry for Nyhteride The Glamour of Grotesque. Thank you and goodnight.