The siege is worse when I drive by secluded walking paths, dirty alleys and abandoned lots — dark zones that breed and shelter violence. In these places, the voices come faster and louder — a combination of TV static and a dental drill set on high.

I manage the cacophony jarring my skull most of the time, but occasionally, a single ghost’s voice breaks through the rest — someone exceptionally persistent, stubborn, demanding. A hint of relief comes only when I listen, really listen, to whatever I’m meant to hear.

It doesn’t help that I inspect condemned buildings for a living. I wanted to be a dentist ever since Dr. Wilson yanked my wisdom teeth that summer I turned sixteen. I smiled around wads of gauze jutting from my mouth when he handed me a clear container displaying the enormous, sharp cusped teeth — my trophy after the pain. But I couldn’t pass the entrance exam for dental school and landed a crappy City job instead.

***

My afternoon inspection route leads me to a dilapidated apartment complex. I pull my city-issued pickup against the curb and grab my hardhat. The single-story building is weathered and graffitied, the windows boarded; though I can see holes big enough to climb through as I unlock the door to apartment one.

Inside, the place looks and reeks like all the rest. Dark, dank, dusty — the stench of urine and mold seeping from filthy carpets and gutted kitchens. My nose burns enough to make my eyes sting. I leave the front door open and click on a flashlight, my silhouette an eerie projection against the blood spattered wall opposite me. Violence rings in my ears as the constant voices spike to a deafening pitch. Pain! Pain! Pain!

Summoned into the bathroom, my pulse shrieks the horror my voice cannot. I can’t breathe as I absorb the cruelty staining the porcelain fixtures — every crimson streak evidence of heinous  torture.

The tattered shower curtain surges out, squeezing me in an angry grip. Mildew crusted vinyl strains against my skin, choking me. Floundering, I manage the words, “I can’t help you if I’m dead. Let go.”

The curtain slackens, limp. This one really wants my attention. My breath levels while I watch a name and address take shape on the dusty mirror. Dried blood distorts some of the letters. I blink, and nearly miss the added image of a teenage boy, his face hidden within the shadows of his blue hoodie. His rage crackles inside the tiny bathroom, heightening into a palpable friction. The light bulb above my head explodes. I duck against the shower of glass. “Easy, kid. I know the address.” Strange… I know all of the addresses the voices direct me to.

Twenty minutes later, I park beside a chain-link fence and cut the pickup’s engine. Mid-day, and the city dump stinks worse than the apartment I just left. I nod at the attendant and follow the voices urging me toward a hollow landfill south of the main gate. A rusted piece of sheet metal serves as a makeshift shovel. I dig where he tells me to, the other voices echoing his in a riotous frenzy. Here! Here! Here!

The sleeve of a blue hoodie catches the edge of the metal. An arm. It scarcely registers before the cops descend, guns aimed at me and dogs restrained on jerking leashes. “Get on the ground!” an officer yells.

I submit in a shocked daze. What’s going on? I’m not a criminal.

I’m cuffed, Miranda’d and hauled into the police station. I flinch when the detective slaps a picture of Cory’s dead body onto the table in front of me. Cory… the boy in the blue hoodie. The voices swell to an excruciating fervor when Cory’s photo is followed by a dozen others. The gruesome images are identical. I can’t look at them anymore.

“Took us a while to realize our killer always returned to dig up the corpses after enlightening us with anonymous tips.” The seasoned detective leans in to meet my eyes. “Some kind of sick thrill twice?”

I swallow. There’d been a lot of bodies to unearth lately. The voices …

“They were missing — I found them.”

“Is that what you call it? Mr. Addler, you murdered kids! Thirteen teenagers to be exact.”

“No! I see their ghosts, hear their voices, they come to me for help.”

The detective’s brow tightens. “Try revenge, Mr. Addler. They come to you for revenge and reparation. Hell, you should see ghosts, because it’s you that created them.”

Thirteen pale faces crowd me, accusation and vengeance in their milky eyes. Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Their chant claws my gut — worms through my soul. I shut them out. All of them.

Too much stress… I’m suffocating. My eyes twitch and my voice deepens. “Those kids… they’re all I hear!” My hands shake. “I want a lawyer.”

The detective straightens. “You can see a lawyer. And you can see these too.” He produces a Ziplock bag filled with wisdom teeth and holds it to the light. “What do you bet these are perfect matches?”

My pulse pounds in my ears. I close my eyes, pushing the haunting, leering faces of thirteen children further away. Sweat beads my forehead.

“Background check showed you couldn’t make the cut. You started a private practice?” The detective shakes the bag. “That’s right, Mr. Addler; our search warrant paid off. Dental records are on their way. I’ll take any statement you want to give.”

I clench my jaw, fighting vivid, brutal memories. I’m not a murderer!

I start to speak, but the bag shifts. Each polished tooth glints under the fluorescent lights. My breath hitches. I can’t look away. The detective’s voice fades.

Beautiful teeth…

Beautiful trophies.

Catherine Olaso lives and writes in Boise, Idaho. A compulsive reader and writer, she enjoys exploring multiple genres, though YA is her favorite. She loves stories with vivid imagery and unexpected twists. When she isn’t editing for Fiction Vortex – an online speculative fiction magazine – she turns her craft toward her own writing goals. To access some of her short stories, or for information on her latest novel, visit her website at www.catherineolaso.com or check out her Blue Rain Facebook fan page.

After taking a few moments to process what she has said, I enter the living room and find Professor Bigglesworth frozen to her favorite spot near the hallway junction, walleyed, head tilted inorganically, paw before mouth, sandpaper tongue mid-lick. Near her on the otherwise pristine carpet is a bizarre, moist glob.

“Wh-what is that?” I ask.

My wife, reclining onto the settee by the garden window and placing cucumbers over her eyes, says, “How should I know, dear? Just call a mechanic and have them handle it.”

“Maybe I’ll check the manual. This sort of thing might be in the troubleshooting section.”

“Don’t meddle, dear,” she sighs, decidedly adjusting her neck into a less stressful position. “Let a professional handle it.”

I make the call and am told thirty minutes to an hour. Afterwards, I pace the living room, keeping a safe distance from our cat and the foreign mass. In good time the bell rings, and I go to let the mechanic from Perfect Pet Co. in: a stocky, smooth-headed fellow wearing a white jumpsuit just like in the commercials, and a nametag that reads “Hopkins”. I shake his hand vigorously with both of mine, directing him towards the problem.

“Well, who do we have here?” he says, kneeling down and stroking her rigid back. “Cute little kitty. Looks like there’s a problem with her anterior expulsion portal. Luckily, the posterior one is still calibrated correctly.”

“And that?” I ask, pointing towards the gray pile.

“That, sir, is what we in the business call a hairball.”

“You hear that, honey? It’s called — ”

“I’m right here, dear. No need to shout.”

“So you mean that’s made of Professor Bigglesworth’s hair?”

“Don’t really know. Could be hers, could be Another Professor Bigglesworth.”

“I see… We’re not going to have to move, are we?”

“Nah. Just send it out your trash portal and let some Other You deal with it. Anyway, the real problem isn’t the mess. It’s little Professor Bigglesworth here,” he says scratching behind her ear. She twitches slightly.

Hopkins turns to his toolbox and rummages through. The box stretches into another dimension full of an infinite variety of tools.

“I suspect the portal wires have grown into her neural network, which means your cat here, whether she’s aware of it or not, is sending instructions to open, close, or reverse the portal flow.” He chuckles a bit, his voice echoing in the toolbox. “Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem, but we have discovered that by some freak chance gag reflexes in binary language are identical to the override signal of the latest portal model, so you do tend to see this kind of thing with kittens — Ah! Here we are!”

Hopkins pulls a large gauge out of his toolbox, with a slender, flexible spidery probe at one end and a complex series of knobs and dials at his end. Once activated, the device begins to emit a periodic Geiger-counter-like clicking and flexes its long appendages, as if awakening from a long slumber. He forces the tube down Professor Bigglesworth’s throat and checks the measurements.

“Um, what’s that exactly?”

“Dear, let the man work in peace,” my wife objects.

“Oh, he’s not a bother, ma’am.” Then to me: “This here’s a portal calibrator. If I can change the override code, she won’t recalibrate every time she gets something caught in her throat.”

The cat shows no sign of being ruffled, her voice box and consciousness having been desynchronized with today, neurons signaling cross-dimensionally to other unsuspecting Professor Bigglesworths. Other sounds pop into the room or phase in and out: the Doppler-shifting hisses and mews of cats, bursts of conversation and television ads erupting out of pockets of disconnected space.

“Now comes the tricky part,” Hopkins shouts, his voice coming into focus over the confusing soundscape.

Then she begins to change, first blurring out of focus, then cloning in twos and threes, multiple, superimposing replications of Professor Bigglesworth, all walleyed, paws up to mouth. With the turn of one dial, infinite Professor Bigglesworths blossom out horizontally, growing more and more transparent as they split apart. A reverberating cacophony of distressed meowing burbles out of the calibrator.

“Hold on there, kitty,” Hopkins reassures her with a pat.

Her mouth stretches impossibly wide, wide enough to welcome in the portal calibrator and Hopkins’s beefy arm, inside an unfathomable cavern of gaping Professor Bigglesworth jaws and an endless spinning vortex of feline throats.

Hopkins shouts something to me, but his voice is sucked down the widening throat of the cat, like light crossing an event horizon.

He hones the dials, the clicking of the calibrator beginning to quicken its pace. The house starts to shake as the many Professor Bigglesworths expand and contract tenuously. Hopkins twists the dials to their extreme, the clicking intensifying. The cats grow more substantial, materializing out of various odds and ends — heads tilting out of walls, tails rearing out of the floor, paws drooping from the ceiling. The clicking blurs beyond a gallop, spiraling down an aural suction.

Professor Bigglesworths pop up everywhere, crowding the living room, one on top of the other, walleyed heads mushrooming out of backs, tails raying out of heads, legs porcupining out of bodies and into other ones, forming lipid-chain-like cat molecules, surging so quickly across the room, I am nearly pummeled out of the window by a flurry of kitty paws –

– when suddenly all is still, only one Professor Bigglesworth remaining.

“That should do it,” Hopkins says, removing the device and packing up his things. “Her hairballs are someone else’s problem now.”

He strokes her head, and she purrs contentedly, rubbing against his leg, as food eaten by Another Professor Bigglesworth bought by Another Me in Another Today fills her belly.

On his way out I tip Hopkins handsomely.

Tim W. Boiteau is a psychology research assistant at University of South Carolina. Other works of Tim’s have appeared in Write Room, Work, Farther Stars Than These, and eFiction Horror.

As she sat hunched against the bookshelf, a librarian pushing a metal cart full of worn old paperbacks passed, giving her an odd glance as she went.

No doubt the bruises were starting to show, or maybe it was the split lip; she could taste the blood in her mouth, warm and metallic. She supposed that she could have gone home instead of coming here, they were about the same distance after all, but if she went home then she would have to face her mother’s looks of pity and concern as she hurried to patch her up. She didn’t want to see those looks on her mother’s face; the poor woman already had enough to deal without adding an injured daughter to the list.

She plucked a book off the shelf above her head in a poor attempt to try to ignore the pain. It was number three of a series, but that was okay; she would figure it out as she went along. On the cover was a picture of a dragon; not the friendly sort that helped wizards and carried children on their backs, but a mean, nasty-looking one, all black and red and sitting on a pile of pilfered treasure. It reminded her of her pursuers, the way their eyes glinted maliciously, the way they stole others’ treasures, even when they had so many of their own. Mostly though it was the way that both of them, the dragons and the bullies, seemed to enjoy the pain and chaos that their actions caused. There was an underlying evil that seemed to motivate their every action.

But if they were the dragons, then what would that make her? Was she the damsel in distress? Or had she been the knight when she had told off the dragons for beating up that middle-schooler whose name she didn’t even know? If that was the case, then she was a terrible knight, running off as soon as she could no longer take the pain. She looked at the book again. It might not help her with her problems, but now more than ever she needed a reminder that it was possible to slay the dragons.

Rachel Baxter-Green writes in New Jersey, USA.