“You saw a glittering light on his face … like the reflection off some trinket?”

“Yes.”

“And that light is what made you do it?”

“The light showed me who it needed doing to.”

“Thank you, that’s all I needed.”

“Do you believe me?”

“I do. That’s why there are no lights in your cell and we have our equipment set up. The darkness also serves to punish you, of course.”

“It’s honestly a relief.”

“Why?”

“Ever since they started showing me things, I haven’t had any privacy. They’re just sitting up there in orbit, waiting to show me who’s next.” 

“Why does someone have to be next, Angie?”

“Because if I don’t deliver, they’ll put the light inside my head.”

“What’s so bad about that?”

“They did it to me once, so I’d understand. It gets loud when it’s in your head.”

“That sounds horrible, Angie.”

“That’s why the dark feels private, like there’s no way for them to put the light in if there is only dark.”

“You said they’re watching you from orbit … do you think they’re alien?”

“What else could they be?”

“That’s what the equipment is for. But forgive me, my dear, that really is all I needed. I hope you’ll get some rest. And if you see any glittering on my cheek, know I’m only checking my watch, and keep it to yourself.” 

“Thank you, Doctor Neighbour.”

“Please. Call me Leslie.”

#

He was getting a migraine. 

The aura was setting in—his body far away, the tube lights of the lab far too bright, the scurrying of the lab techs suddenly hard to track and overwhelming. 

He ducked into his office and turned off the light. He took one of the donkey pills prescribed him by a doctor with more mundane concerns than himself. His concern was the girl, and what was following the girl.

He had some time before the test, and he took it, breathing through the nausea and waiting for the medicine. 

#

Spit waited at the observation deck. She was passive-scrolling—-the tinny sounds of music whining from her phone speaker. She sat at a control panel and above that was the all-black frame of a two-way mirror that looked into Angie’s room.

“Is she asleep?”

“Yes, Doctor Neighbour.”

“Shut that fucking music off. What do the readings say?”

“Readings are normal. We’re ready to proceed.”

Without another word, Doctor Neighbour undressed. Spit put her phone down with some reluctance and did the same. Standing naked, she collected an unmarked white tube with a black cap. She unscrewed it and squeezed a generous helping of lavender-beige cream on her palm, then covered every inch of Doctor Neighbour’s body with it. Even his scalp. She did this in the same manner you’d repaint an old house you were trying to flip. Rubbed deep into his pores, the cream resembled a foundation on Doctor Neighbour’s skin that made him look ill. Then he did the same for her. 

They pulled on goggles that were blacker than the darkness inside Angie’s room. The goggles were necessary because the cream was an irritant. If they could have made the cream safe for their eyes, they were the kind of people who would have coated each other’s eyes right there—tapping each other’s irises with enough finger-painted coats until they were fully protected. It would have been cheaper than the goggles too. Those were single use.

“Execute,” said Doctor Neighbour. 

Spit’s bare feet slapped on the sterile floor tiling as she approached the panel and flipped the switch.

A light flashed in Angie’s room. A light generated from a bulb that Doctor Neighbour spent thirty of his forty-year career perfecting. A light that in one instant turned the cream coating from lavender to rust yellow, concentrated in rust-colored rivulets of powder that ran down the curves and wrinkles of their skin. The goggles turned from black to fluorescent magenta, and these they removed and threw in a small trash bin beneath the console. 

There was a whirring from the panel, and a thin line in the console regurgitated a polaroid that began to resolve. Spit tore it free and flapped the photo while she checked her phone. Doctor Neighbour watched the darkness beyond the mirror. He gathered some of the dust that had collected in his belly button and rubbed it between his fingers absent-mindedly. It didn’t cross either of their minds to put their clothes back on, not while they were waiting for the photo. Once satisfied, Spit handed the polaroid to him for inspection. 

In the photo, they leaned over the subject’s bed, as they always did, and there were so many of them. They were all crammed in that small cell. This was comforting. That confirmed they obeyed some law of space—thank God—but he still wasn’t sure about time. They were tall, and though the flash from the bulb traced their outline quite well, they were still nondescript in an aching sort of way. It was the warbling, woding noise that made up their bodies in every photo that left Doctor Neighbour wanting. It left him wondering if there was more to perfect in the bulb’s design. Perhaps there were more colors to capture on the skin of these strangers. Perhaps it was the colors that made Doctor Neighbour, a scientist, feel like—God help him—an artist for producing such a photo. 

It was never a complete victory. It was always a tainted viewing. The bulb revealed them, yes, but at the same moment it killed the patient. Spit once floated the idea of covering one of the patients in the protective cream, so they might live through it and relay their experience.

What good would that do? They would still have the light in their head, wouldn’t they? They would still be a killer, and not only that, a killer who has just had their delusions completely validated.

Doctor Neighbour wasn’t heartless. He had to review the photographs for his research, and he found them terrible to behold. The worst part of this photo in particular was that he could see the last thing Angie saw was them seeing her, seeing them, seeing her. 

Spit leaned over one of the keyboards and watched a small monitor. 

“Readings are … normal … for what just happened in there … based on what’s happened before. What now, sir?”

Lost in the readings, it took Spit a moment to notice the silence in the room.

“Doctor Neighbour?” she asked.

He stepped towards her with buckling knees, catching himself on the control panel and her shoulder, and she did her best to catch him right back. It was the migraine feeling again, but he had taken his pills, so he knew it couldn’t be true. This was something else. He had completely skipped the aura stage, and now a lateral eruption in his forehead above his left eye released a lethal slurry of pain like a wound. He saw three dots burned onto Spit’s cheek, or rather, his own retina, like the oracular illusions he sometimes caught while driving to work before taking his pills. No, it couldn’t be his retina. These three dots didn’t move from her cheek and follow his vision. They stayed right where they were, and they made him feel sick.

What was I looking at? Was something looking at me?  

“They’ve put the light in my head,” he choked, “like they did Angie, and all the others.” 

He reached out and caressed her cheek.

“Oh, Spit … I’m finally going to get a good look at them.”

#

“Will you become homicidal?”

They stood in Angie’s room. The body was removed, the bedding replaced. Spit was fully clothed, preparing Doctor Neighbour with the cream. A fresh bulb lay on the bed in a nest of blankets. 

“I don’t know. Not all of them went that way. Only Angie and a select few. There was no way of knowing whether it was an influence, or simply a suggestion, but I should know after this.” 

Spit finished rubbing the last of the cream between his toes and stood up.

“I’ll try to let you know if I get a hankering or not,” he said.

She smiled.

“I’m going to go wash my hands now.”

She turned to leave, and Doctor Neighbour pulled his goggles on. He looked at himself in the mirror, the observation deck hidden behind his reflection. His reflection looked very silly, and he hoped he wouldn’t go homicidal. He noticed behind his reflection that the reflection of Spit had opened the door to leave but had not left. 

“Yes?” he asked.

“How will I be able to trust you, Doctor Neighbour? You will survive this, correct? Why should I let you out?”

He sighed and sat on the bed. The room was freezing and even the sheet covering the mattress was frigid on his buttocks. He looked down at the bulb, cradled like an egg.

“I had an early interview back when I was public, before you could count on algorithms and a twenty-four-hour news cycle to bury someone in obscurity. The company that owned me wanted me to appear trustworthy. Now I own the company, and I prefer not to appear at all. But in those days, I was forced into an interview where I was asked about my work. I told them I had an imaginary friend as a child, and that I wanted to prove its existence. I told them that’s what led me to create the bulb. I did make the first prototype when I was twelve, that much is true, but the rest is nonsense, of course—nothing but a yarn to paint me in a sympathetic light, if you’ll permit me to mix metaphors. I had no need of friends as a child, real or imaginary. After all, it was that first prototype that made me an orphan. There’s your sympathetic light right there. Or rather, a very unsympathetic light, regarding the prototype … get it? Ha ha. Ha ha ha. HAHAHA—”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

She was focused. And clever. That was why she would inherit this kingdom once he was gone.

“Send Fennis to collect me once it’s done.”

She smirked. Then she wiped down the touch points on the door and took the handle with the disinfectant wipe. 

“Good luck, Doctor Neighbour,” she said and closed the door.

#

He stood on the bed, on his tiptoes, and he screwed the fresh bulb into its perch in the top corner of the ceiling. He wobbled a little bit as he stretched upward and had to steady himself.

“How many Doctor Neighbours does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” Spit’s voice crackled through a hidden speaker.

“Shut the fuck up,” he called back, not taking his eyes from his work.

Once secured, he stepped off the bed carefully, trying to go easy on his knees.

He faced the bulb.

“Ready when you are,” she said.

And he was ready. And he was terribly excited. 

“Execute,” he said.

The lights went out. The bulb whined briefly, then the flash, then they are on him all at once.

No, not time. They don’t obey time. It takes far longer than the flash of the bulb for it to be over. He realizes too late that maybe he should have laid on the bed, like Angie did. They had crowded over Angie, and it was and is the bulb that had and did kill her, but he chose to stand in the middle of the room, and he isn’t sure if they’re killing him, but it sure feels like it. 

It’s a crush. 

It’s a full crowd suddenly upon him, but the violence of it doesn’t feel purposeful. It feels like a misunderstanding. It would feel and will feel like they are had will been be expecting him to appear in the bed like the others and were are will be just as surprised as he is to feel his touch and for them to be touching him. Their skin is so strange. Not the texture or taste of it. Just the liveliness.

Toomuchtoomuchtoomuchhelphelphelppleasepleasepleaseenoughenoughenough. 

Especially after so long, such a drought, it really is too much.

Poor Doctor Neighbour.

His shoulders are instantly dislocated, this is certain, and his ribs are breaking, maybe all of them. He will be purple and blue for weeks if he survives this. The pressure on his chest had been suffocating him and he gasps for breath. It was not at all what he expected. 

But here they are, and he is thrilled, and they look at him with eyes that glitter like the light they put in his head, and he feels himself coming back, and he feels the true pain waiting for him, the one that comes after the rush has faded and everyone has gone away.

He smiles wide open with a mouth full of blood, because in that long, glorious moment, he doesn’t care what’s next.

#

Doctor Neighbour stood in the middle of the room, the bulb flashed, then he was laying limp and contorted on the ground. This was all Spit saw in real time. 

The polaroid released and she waited to get a look at the exact moment whatever just happened, happened. 

She could hear him wheezing in there, and it pained her to leave him that way as she waited for the photo to resolve. But she knew the plan, and she would stay the course.

She checked her phone to take her mind off it.

Soon the photo was ready. It was hard to make him out in all the noise, but the moment of impact was terrible. She hoped he had learned something from this. He would certainly be thrilled by the photo once he was out of intensive care.

She set her phone down and took up the lab’s chunky landline, punching in Fennis’s extension.

#

The pain had arrived, and he was starting to care a bit. 

But he absolutely could not wait to see his photo.

The fluorescent lights jittered on, and the door opened.

A shadow crossed him, and then Fennis was squatting at his side.

“Sir?” he asked. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

This fucking kid.

He felt no extraordinary urge to kill Fennis, just the usual urge. That was good.

“Call a medic,” he wheezed, “and tell Spit that when I wake up she better be there with my photo or she’s fired.”

#

He woke and Spit was there. There was also a cluster of balloons, cards, and flowers on his bedside table, which he found ridiculous. 

Without a word she held up the photo for him to see. He couldn’t raise his arms or turn his neck, and his torso was wrapped up tight in an attempt to set his ribs.

The photo was disgusting. He looked like a noodle, lifted clear off the ground at the moment of the crush. They might have carried him off if they could. He wondered if they knew him, after all these years. If they had watched his progress and knew his face like an old friend, the way a biologist might keep up with the same family of crows. The crush hardly seemed intentional, based on their body language. One of them might have even been trying to fish him out. One of them looked like it was covering its mouth with its hand in shock. 

Mouth? Hand? How the fuck should I know? How the fuck can I ever know what I’m looking at, ever again?

This was far too much interpretation for his liking. He slowed his thoughts. He would have to sit with this data for some time. He would have to compare it to the others. 

“That was fucking awesome,” Spit said. “Was it worth it?”

“Totally,” Doctor Neighbour creaked.

“It’ll be weeks till you recover. And you were in no position to murder Fennis when he came to collect you, so we still can’t be sure. I’m glad I’m not your nurse.”

“I didn’t feel like killing Fennis when he came in and I don’t feel like killing Fennis now.”

“That’s great sir, but I can’t know that. We’ll just have to wait and see.” She leaned back in her chair and started scrolling. It took her a moment to realize he was watching her.

“What?”

“You have it. Right now. On your cheek.”

She went stiff. She kept her eyes on him and freed up her hands, even though his body was useless and there were plenty of people just down the hall.

“Well? Waddya think?” she asked.

He thought about it. 

He really thought about it. 

Then he answered even though he knew she wouldn’t believe him until he was recovered and hadn’t killed anyone for a while. At least, no one who he didn’t usually kill. He prayed they would be comfortable again—comfortable enough to cover each other from head to toe in lavender-beige cream, and onto their next freak experiment. Spit was a good friend. He would never kill her, even with the light they put in his head.

“I think Angie had some issues,” he groaned. “Now leave me the fuck alone. I’m gonna try to get some sleep.”