Prologue: Krundo the Clown

When a pale streetlight begins to spread its frail illumination across your van and immediate area of the road, a thankfully empty road at the moment, you watch with a sense of gratitude that you will not be facing a nitwit with a Buick-sized chip on his shoulder for your final showdown; you are reassured in death's stretching shadow by a formidable opponent. The twilight and ugly surrounding exterior setting do nothing to dispel your hopes about a good fight and a good death, though the exact method of your death remain hard to judge. Ripped to ribbons by Masamoto-sharp fingerblades? Face chewed off and swallowed? Spools of stomach roped around a thorny tongue? The demonic premonitions are endless.

Walking towards your van you see another vehicle pull up, a dinged-up Corolla, and its driver lays on the horn:

"Buddy, move this shit, c'mon!". His head full of long blonde hair like glossy strands from a doll sticks out his window, his face transforming into a magnetic punching bag. You imagine his teeth pouring down his mouth like broken porcelain into a trash basket.

You are counting on another West Coat blowhard follow-up when a black wave pitches from above and turns the road rage into a harrowing, sepulchral scream. The beast's atramentous hide blocks the movie but you've seen horror flicks like this before.

A formerly testy human head bowls past and gutter balls. Eyes blue and dead, petrified kyanite.

There is a knock at the door. Your subjective reality twists the knob and answers: the terror steps through the celluloid or you step back into the corporeal world. Turning blood-soaked, imbrued and gory, the werecatmonsterthing center frames. Headlights highlight steak knife talons.

The Corolla's a faded blue. Its engine, perhaps in a state of immeasurable shock, purrs on. The sky is gorgeous tonight, maybe my last sky. Blinding asterisks bear witness the beauty showing up at the Grim Reaper's verge. So many stars - the rain has packed up and gone. Someone take a picture. I want proof I was killed by a Rick Baker knockoff.

Smith and Wesson goes off like gangbusters, multiple rounds chipping away at the creature's Halloween head, microtransaction after microtransaction of gibs aspray. The killer in you, let's say most of you, shivers in schoolgirl glee - as it always has at the sight of skull and face matter scattering by forty-four rounds, followed by a light, localized, precipitating crimson mist.

And while you figure it's true that the child is a seventeenth century invention (thank Christ for educated exes) - they were not, it turns out, considered singular from the world of adulthood in the days of Macbeth and King Lear - you have a hard time believing that any man of any time period was never a child, who felt in full command of their youthfulness, qualified boyishness, after slaying some kind of beast, whether in the physical or in the head, say, like beating a tough math problem, or tricking the slum bully into leaving you alone, or bringing sword-death to a minotaur mad in a maze (that's history, right? Myths are history. You're sure of it).

Or in your case snuffing out a satanic mutant cat in the middle of the night in the middle of Redondo on an empty stomach and parched liver. Surely they were happy children even in their minor successes, even for those brief dying moments? Unquestionably you are a grinning happy boy. One yellow teeth has landed on your boot.

Unfortunately the killing joy is fleeting. As soon as the creature hits the pavement it starts to rise again, bullet blundered melon and all.

In a savage sprint you dive bomb for the open door of your van, clutching at the Nephaliad Revanche and more dragon breath makings from your belly, almost dog-paddling on land, limbs desperately flailing. Your brisk fumbling is interrupted by an osmium grip on your ankle. Snarl, the evil says. Snarl.

Once more unto the breach. One more dance with a demon. On the mountain precipice of thrashing death.

You pull the trigger three times. The pistols fires three times. Three times you miss by virtue of the piss-eyed black-furred monster evading at a supranatural speed, although you and your own bladder are more than elated to have your ankle free. Reflexively you slam the driver side door shut and scour to reload, in a panic to find a generic brand striped sock whose guts contain a couple of shells.

It's unbelievable. You've gone insane. This damned night has sent you round the bend, into nighty-night horrorland, along with guys who wipe their excrement on white padded walls. You still can't believe what you have seen since the break-in, since the book swipe. A shapechanging house cat toothlicking. Paws like blender blades. Mouth of sawteeth. The creature engineered from Hell, technically all your doing. If you weren't so desperate, so hard up for cash. You implemented your dark and grisly fate. And this is it.

It is bad. Bet on black bad. Hasn't got any better since the first encounter. Close calls stacked on close calls. Now you swish rubbing alcohol in your trap, frying your gums, holding a bubblegum pink BIC lighter not six inches from your mouth dribbling in ethyl, waiting for a sky fall or a sideswipe or a pounce by Satan's Claw.

From the teary corner of your eye you can see the rigid body of the poor ignorant sap who lost his head. His hands, heavily beringed and tanned through his baby blue hoodie, still grip the wheel. The car still idles, the keys in the ignition chuck.

Movies, like people, have a centre of gravity, a frozen point around which everything else, the "cogs" revolve. You are shifting - not literally like that abyssal supercat - and into this transformation were dragging kicking and fucking screaming all those around you: Micky, Liza, this poor headless fuck. The moment, the frozen point, is not yet completely here, but you know it's close. It seems all your sins are finally home to draw blood. Go ahead, man. I ain't unprepared. You think I wasn't prepared to die?

A headless body hitting the middle of the street is almost demotic in contemporary America. It's almost more alien when guns and deathly caterwauls are strictly relegated to the speakers of someone's flatscreen.

Elsewhere (Somewheres East)

"Johnny, go see how many," says the boss, Toscano sticking from between his mackerel lips like a pinched torpedo. Giggling nervously, Joe being half-crazy, he heads for the basement safe. The man with greased back hair and square shades turns around before the boss' men can bother to frisk him to find something hard and cool as steel that can split the pressure by pull of a trigger, hold back tides of made men, slamming their pasta belies against the big boss' floor, slam them dead. Some kind of specialized gun. With a name. Miss Whiskey. God help the goons if they touch her. Make them perforated plywood, all bone and flesh splinters all over the place.

The man with greased back hair and square shades has been up all night on the deck of the Robbie Davies, imported from not-so-jolly Blighty, teacup-slinging England, not smoking or drinking or doing much of anything besides standing dead silent in a cone of ever-frightening silence, the women and kids aboard can certify that. Somewhere in his great black eyes (they were assumed to be black though the shades we never removed) there had to be the devil's doer, one elderly Polish woman had said to her equally elderly and Polish cohort.

"Gorky, go tell Joe never mind the blue and hurry up with coin," says the boss, his eyes never quite leaving the man with greased back hair - black hair, in a flashy grey suit. Some killers dress like killers, want to dress like killers. There's a fat hand that reaches into a suit pocket, cigar smoke veils the space between the boss and the man with dramatic brevity. Out comes a duodecimo book in leather and it cracks open in the sausage fingers of the boss. Names and notes are scrawled within. It is alleged the boss' memory's fading and that he keeps everything in this compact book.

"You come recommended by a mutual associate of ours. Says you're top of the food chain. Says you're quick and don't bother to take trophies."