A Restaurant On The Cliff

The bus reeked of fast food wrappers and recycled air. Benjamin had been sitting in the same position for so long that his lower back had developed a dull, grinding ache he was certain would never fully go away. He shifted in his seat, pressed his forehead to the cold glass, and watched the Canadian wilderness swallow the highway. Trees. More trees. The occasional frozen creek cutting through rock. He had been telling himself for the last four hours that he was making the right call, and the telling was getting harder.

Ninety thousand Canadian. For six months. He kept doing the math in his head the way he had been doing it since the afternoon in Anchorage when the whole thing had been laid out for him.

He had found the listing on Craigslist, which should have told him something right there. “Remote location, seasonal position. Serious applicants only, chef experience required, accommodation provided, compensation negotiable. Half payment upfront, the other half paid on job completion.” He had emailed the address on a whim, not expecting anything, and two days later found himself sitting across from a man in a booth at a diner on 4th Avenue who looked like he had not eaten a real meal in several months. The man was thin in a way that went past lean, past gaunt, into something that made Benjamin think of photographs he had seen in old textbooks of diseases he couldn’t name. His cheekbones pressed against the inside of his face like they were trying to get out. His hands, when he folded them on the table, looked like bundles of sticks wrapped in paper. He had worn a collared shirt despite the cold, and it had hung off his shoulders as though it had been tailored for a much larger man.

He had spoken quietly and without much preamble. He told Benjamin about the Cliffside Diner. He showed him photographs on a phone with a cracked screen. Benjamin had looked at them and felt a complicated mixture of awe and unease. A building that seemed to grow directly out of the rock face, its timber bones old and dark with weather, a covered outdoor patio extending over the edge of a cliff with a railing that looked like the only thing standing between a meal and a very long fall. Hundreds of feet below, the Skeena River running grey and cold between the canyon walls.

“It pays well because of the location,” the thin man said. “Getting people to stay is the difficult part.”

Benjamin had asked what that meant. The thin man smiled and simply said fear of heights. Benjamin had chosen to accept that answer.

He pressed his palm over the inside pocket of his jacket now, feeling the fold of the papers he had signed that day. The smell of the bus was getting to him. He closed his eyes and thought about what forty-five thousand dollars in hand felt like, and tried to use that thought as ballast. He had gotten out of prison just under three years ago, and he still was not in a good position financially. This money was his ticket to a new life.

When the bus pulled into Terrace, Benjamin was the only one who stood up.

He hauled his duffel bag from the overhead compartment and stepped out into the cold grey afternoon. The town was small in the way that reminded him less of a place and more of an interruption, a brief arrangement of buildings between long stretches of nothing. A gas station. A hardware store. A row of houses with woodsmoke rising from their chimneys. The bus driver did not even look at him as he pulled away.

Benjamin stood on the side of the road with his bag and found the white pickup truck without any trouble, because it was the only vehicle in the parking area. It looked exactly as it had been described to him. White, or it had been white at some point, the paint now dulled and peeling along the hood and door panels. One of the side mirrors was held in place with electrical tape. The engine was running. Benjamin could see the shape of someone in the driver’s seat.

He walked over and opened the passenger door.

The smell hit him before anything else. Something unwashed and chemical underneath that, sweet and sharp in a way that made the inside of his nose prickle. The man behind the wheel was roughly Benjamin’s age, early forties, maybe a few years younger, but his face had been lived in hard. His teeth, when he grinned, were dark at the roots and broken at the edges, several of them missing entirely, the ones that remained the color of old mustard. Every visible inch of his skin, his forearms, his neck, the backs of his hands, was covered in tattoos that had no coherent theme or placement, just a dense layering of shapes and text and images that seemed to have been applied with no thought to how they related to each other. His eyes were quick and a little too bright.

“You Benjamin?” the man said. His voice sounded like gravel in a tin can.

Benjamin said yes and got in.

The man reached immediately into the center console and produced an envelope, thick and slightly bent. He held it out without looking at it. “Hide that in your sock,” he said bluntly.

Benjamin took the envelope. He could feel the rolls of cash inside it. He slipped it into his jacket pocket.

“I’m Butch,” the man said, pulling out onto the road. “Groundskeeper. Maintenance. Whatever needs doing that isn’t cooking or dealing with customers.”

Benjamin said it was nice to meet him.

Butch seemed to find this funny. He laughed for a moment, a short choppy sound, and then stopped as quickly as he had started. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and talked fast, like the words were backed up behind his teeth and needed to get out. Butch had heard people talk and act like this before in prison. This guy was definitely a meth user.

He told Benjamin about the diner with manic enthusiasm. About the patio, how it was exactly what it looked like in those pictures, bolted and cantilevered out over the cliff face, a series of wooden tables and chairs with a railing around the perimeter that Butch described as “more decorative than functional, if you ask me.” He said some people drove all the way out just to take pictures of the building. He said some people actually wanted to eat outside, on the patio, with nothing between them and the river hundreds of feet down but old wood and a railing that nobody had ever replaced. He said those people were “thrill seekers.”

“You get them occasionally, ” Butch said. “They want the story. Want to say they did it. Eat a burger over the edge of a cliff in the middle of British Columbia. Fine by me. They usually tip well.”

Benjamin asked about the staff. He said he had been told it was a small operation.

Butch nodded. The nodding seemed to use his whole upper body. “Three of us living there,” he said. “Me, you, and Victoria.” There was a bit of disgust in his words when he said victoria. His fingers stopped drumming. “Victoria’s the waitress. Hostess. Whatever you want to call it.” He paused, then spat, as if her name tasted terrible in his mouth. “Keep your distance from her. I mean that in the most practical way I can say it. Don’t try to get to know her, don’t try to talk to her more than you have to for work.”

He then told him about the generator that powered the kitchen, about the propane, about the walk-in cooler that had a door you had to shoulder hard to get open. He talked about all of it in quick successive bursts, like items being checked off a list. And then at the end, he mentioned the owner.

He smiled when he said it. It was a different smile than the others, not the quick automatic kind but something slower and more deliberate, like he was aware of it on his face and wanted Benjamin to see it.

“If you’re lucky,” Butch said, “you’ll get to meet the owner.”

Benjamin asked him what the owner was like.

Butch’s smile stayed in place. He shook his head, almost gently. “You’ll know,” he said. “When the time comes.”

They drove in silence for a moment after that, stewing in the uneasiness. Butch pointed at a green highway sign coming up on the right. Benjamin read it as they passed.

CLIFFSIDE DINER, 6 MILES.

Butch took the exit and the road changed immediately, the asphalt giving way to packed dirt and loose gravel that the truck’s tires threw against the wheel wells in a continuous rattling spray. The dirt road did not go straight. It curved and switchbacked up the side of the mountain that the highway had been running along, each turn revealing another angle of the terrain, the treeline dropping below them as they climbed, the river appearing in fragments between the rock faces, a grey ribbon far below catching what light was left in the afternoon sky.

The diner came into view around the last bend in the road.

It sat at the top of the cliff like something that had been placed there by accident and had never been removed. The main structure was a low timber building, dark with decades of weather, the logs of its exterior walls gone almost black, the roof metal and rust-streaked, the windows small, deep-set, and glinting in the light. It looked like it had been built in stages by different people working from different plans, sections of different heights and angles joined together in ways that suggested improvisation more than design. A hand-painted wooden sign above the entrance read CLIFFSIDE DINER in tall uneven letters, the paint flaking at the corners.

But it was the patio that held Benjamin’s attention.

It extended from the far side of the building directly over the edge of the cliff, framed in heavy timber beams that jutted out over nothing, the decking weathered and bowed in places, the railing a collection of wooden posts and horizontal boards that had been repaired and re-repaired over the years until it looked like a scar that had healed badly after a series of injuries. Tables and chairs sat out there as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Below them, the Skeena River ran through the canyon floor, so far down that Benjamin could not make out individual waves, only the suggestion of movement, the broad grey shimmer of a lot of water moving very fast between walls of rock.

The truck stopped.

“Get your stuff,” Butch said.

The parking lot had two vehicles in it. Benjamin’s eyes went to the van immediately. It was old and white like the truck. No rear windows. Rust along the bottom panels. A crack in the windshield that had been there long enough to spread across most of the glass. It sat at the far end of the lot and had something about it that suggested it did not move very often.

“Regular,” Butch said, without Benjamin asking. “Guy we have affectionately nicknamed Fatty. Comes up, sits at the counter, drinks. Leaves when he’s done.”

Benjamin followed Butch toward the entrance of the diner, his duffel slung over one shoulder, the envelope still reminding him of its presence. The wooden steps leading up to the front door creaked under his weight.

The inside of the diner was dim and smelled like old wood and fryer oil and something beneath both that he could not identify. A row of stools ran along a bar on the left. Booths lined the far wall. The lighting was low and came from fixtures mounted along the ceiling that gave everything a yellowish cast, like old photographs. There was a jukebox in the corner that was not playing anything. The floor was linoleum, with decayed patterns that might have once been pretty.

Fatty was at the bar.

Benjamin registered the man the way you register a piece of furniture that has been placed somewhere unexpected. He was enormous, the stool beneath him entirely invisible, his mass spreading in all directions with the settled permanence of something geological. His hands were on the counter in front of a drink he had not finished, as well as next to an empty plate that he had managed to finish. He was not looking at anything in particular. He didn’t look up when they entered. He did not move except to take another drink.

Then Benjamin noticed Victoria.

She was standing at the far end of the counter, already looking at him. She was young, mid-twenties at most, with short black hair cut close to the jaw and black makeup that had been applied with the confidence of someone who had been doing it for years. Her clothes were black. All of them, from collar to boots. She was absolutely stunning, easily the most beautiful woman Benjamin had seen in a long time. But she was looking at him with an expression that did not contain anything warm. It was not curiosity. It was not assessment. It was unfiltered disgust.

Butch put a hand on Benjamin’s arm and steered him left, away from the counter, toward a door set into the wall beside the bar.

“Come on, remember what I said about her,” Butch said quietly.

Benjamin followed. As he moved through the door, he heard Victoria’s voice. She was saying something to Fatty, something low, warm, and pleasant. The tone and quality of it definitely did not match the face she had given Benjamin.

The kitchen was through the door.

Butch pushed it open and stepped inside. Benjamin followed, the door swinging shut behind them. The smell changed, mustier now, with a quality to it that made Benjamin immediately think the place hadn’t been cleaned in a while. The kitchen was not small. It had the footprint of a proper commercial kitchen, the long prep surfaces, the range, the hood ventilation system, the walk-in cooler in the back corner. But the surfaces were not clean in the way a kitchen should be clean. The appliances looked intact but had the dullness of equipment that had not been run regularly. The floor had been swept at some point but not recently enough.

There was one door in and one door out, and they were the same door. No windows to the exterior. The wall that divided the kitchen from the front of the house had a single opening, rectangular, just large enough to pass a plate through. Most kitchens had them, but this one was smaller than any Benjamin had seen before. A small bell sat on the shelf of it.

Butch walked Benjamin through the systems quickly and without much concern, now that they were in here and the drive was over. He showed him the ticket printer mounted on the wall near the window. He showed him where things were stored, the dry goods, the cooler contents, the utensils, speaking in the fast clipped way he had in the truck.

“Last cook,” Butch said at one point, pausing with his hands on the edge of the prep counter, looking at the surface rather than at Benjamin. “Weird guy. I never trusted him. Some people you just know, you know what I mean? Some people, the way they carry themselves, everything about them tells you they’re not right.” His jaw shifted. “I really hated that guy. Hated him in the way where I’d think about it. Like I’d be doing maintenance work, fixing something outside, and I’d think about him and about coming in and gutting him like a fish. Just cutting right into him.” He mimed stabbing and twisting an imaginary knife. “But you seem like a cool guy. I can tell already. You and me are going to get along fine. Not like that. I can just tell about people.”

Benjamin looked at him and said he appreciated that.

Butch nodded slowly, holding the eye contact a beat longer than necessary, and then straightened up and told Benjamin he’d take his bag to his room, that he needed to check it first for security reasons, which he did not explain further. He told Benjamin to stay in the kitchen until closing and not to go out front, and not to talk to Victoria. He said “only orders for Fatty” would come in, and that Benjamin should not expect a busy night. He told him to kick anything that broke, since that usually fixed it.

Then he picked up Benjamin’s duffel from beside the door, gave a short nod, and left.

Benjamin stood in the kitchen alone for a moment. Then he sat down on a low stool near the prep counter, reached into his jacket, and pulled out the envelope.

He held it in both hands and looked at it. It was thick and slightly damp, and it did not look like anything special from the outside. He opened it and counted the bills. They were all there, forty-five thousand Canadian dollars in hundred denominations, bound with rubber bands. He sat with it in his hands and thought about what Butch’s had said when he talked about the last cook. He thought about the way Victoria had looked at him when he came in. He thought about Fatty sitting at the counter like something that had grown from the stool. Nothing he had seen in this diner made him want to stay.

Then he looked at the money again, and made himself the offer: one night. He would give it one night, and in the morning, if everything in his body still felt the way it felt right now, he would walk out. He did not have a clear plan for what walking out would look like, but he would figure that out in the morning. One night.

He waited.

The kitchen had a specific quality of silence, not the comfortable kind but the kind that presses against your sanity. He could hear the hum of the refrigeration unit, the occasional tick of the building settling in the wind, and very faintly, through the wall and the small opening, something that might have been Victoria’s voice in a register too low to make out words. He got up and looked through the opening and could see only the back edge of the counter, a section of wall, and the rear of one of the barstools. He could not see Fatty. He could not see Victoria. He went back and sat down.

He got up again after a while and walked the kitchen, opening things. The dry goods were sparse. The cooler had proteins and some produce, enough to run a limited menu but not by much. The spice rack had gaps in it. The equipment, when he looked more closely at them, the range, the flat top, the fryer, showed the residue of use, old use, the kind of grime that once was fresh but was now dried and stale.

He did not know exactly how long he had been in there when the ticket printer finally made a sound.

He stepped to it, tore the ticket off, and read it. Steak and potatoes, no spices. No additional notes, no modifications, no requests for temperature or preparation. He found the cuts in the cooler and got to work, keeping it simple, salt and a small amount of pepper, a proper sear on the meat, the potatoes roasted until they had color.

He plated the food, brought it to the window, slid the plate through, reached for the bell, and rang it.

His hand was still moving back from the bell when the plate was taken, snatched from the shelf with a speed that sent a jolt up through his chest. The bell was still making its small fading sound.

He stood very still.

Three, maybe four seconds passed.

The plate came back through the opening at breakneck speed, and hit the far side of the kitchen with the unmistakable sound of a ceramic thing breaking into a hundred pieces. The food scattered across the floor.

He had one moment of suspended quiet before Victoria’s voice came through the opening.

“Can you read, you inbred homunculous? What is this goddamned garbage? Make it again, right now! Chop chop, we have a very important customer waiting!”

Benjamin stood in the kitchen with steak on his new kitchen’s floor, the broken plate in pieces around the door to the fridge, and felt the old current move through him. The one that started in his chest and moved outward toward his hands. He knew the current. He had spent a not-inconsiderable amount of time in his life learning how to feel it and how not to follow it, mainly through court ordered anger management classes.

He slowly breathed in and out. He counted through each inhale and exhale. He looked at the mess on the floor and he thought about the management techniques he was taught, used in the space between the stimulus and the response, the idea that the response was always a choice.

He picked up the broken pieces of the plate. He cleaned the food off the floor. He found another cut in the cooler. He made the steak again, this time with nothing on it, no salt, no pepper, just the meat and the heat and the potatoes beside it. He plated it. He brought it to the window.

As he set it on the shelf he heard Victoria’s voice before he could ring the bell, very low, directed at him through the window. She said something about him being a worthless cook, about her tip, and how it was going to be his fault when the customer left unhappy. He did not respond. He set the plate down and stepped back and waited.

The plate was taken, this time without the violence.

Benjamin went back to his stool and sat down. He let out a long slow breath through his nose.

He thought about the money in his jacket pocket and the money already spent in his head on things he needed, and he thought about how one night had sounded like a reasonable benchmark not too long ago.

He was less certain about that now.

Three more tickets came through over the course of the next few hours, each of them identical. Steak and potatoes. No spices. Benjamin made each one without anything that could be construed as a personal choice imposed on the food. He plated them cleanly, set them in the window, rang the bell, and stepped back. The plates were taken each time without ceremony.

Between orders he sat on his stool and listened to the building. The wind off the cliff came through in low tones through the walls and the gaps around the trimming. The refrigeration unit cycled on and off. Somewhere in the structure above him, something shifted with the particular creak of old wood under uneven load. He did not let himself think too much about what was directly outside the building on the cliff side, about the patio, about what was below the patio. He had looked at it once coming in and that felt like enough for now.

He looked through the window. The bar was dark beyond the low counter lighting. He could not see anyone seated. The stools were empty as far as he could tell.

He waited another few minutes. Then he leaned toward the window and called out.

“Hey, any idea when we are closing up? Any ETA on last orders?”

Nothing came back. Not a word, not a sound, just the diner, empty and dim beyond the window.

Benjamin stood at the kitchen door for a moment with his hand on the push bar. He thought about what Butch had said, and about the fact that the instruction to stay in the kitchen had been delivered by a man who had just referenced gutting someone like a fish with the same tone most use to describe weather.

He pushed the door open and went through.

The bar was empty. The stools ran along the counter, every one of them vacant, the surfaces clear except for a ring where Fatty’s glass and plate had sat. The booths along the wall were empty. The jukebox was dark. The overhead fixtures had been turned down, and the only major source of light was the residual glow from the neon sign in the front window casting a thin red wash across the near tables. Fatty was gone. Victoria was gone.

Near the front, close to the entrance, a set of stairs ran up the interior wall. Benjamin had not noticed them coming in. They were narrow and steep, and the railing was a single board of pine nailed at an angle to the balusters. The stairs looked as though they had been added to the building as an afterthought by someone who had decided stairs were a necessary inconvenience.

Benjamin stood at the base of them and called up.

“Butch?”

The word went up the stairs and did not come back.

He went outside.

The parking lot was empty. The white van was gone. Butch’s truck was gone. The overhead light on the exterior of the building was on, a single bulb in a wire cage that threw a cone of yellow light over the gravel, leaving everything beyond it very dark. The tree line at the edge of the lot was a black mass against a sky that had a little blue left in it at the horizon. The road down was a pale line disappearing into the dark between the trees, switchbacking away, down toward the highway, the highway leading toward Terrace, and Terrace the gateway to everywhere that was not here.

He looked at it for a moment, deciding if a long walk ending in hitchhiking was a good idea.

Then he went back inside and went up the stairs.

The second floor was a low narrow hallway with four doors running along one side. The hallway smelled of old insulation and something else he could not name right away, something that had a faint sweetness under a layer of must. The kind of smell that lives in buildings that have held a lot of different people over a long time and never been fully cleared of any of them.

Each door had a small placard screwed into the wood at eye level. He read them going down the hallway. COOK. MAINTENANCE. WAITRESS. OWNER.

He stopped at COOK and opened the door.

The room was small enough that he could touch both side walls without fully extending his arms. The window was a single pane looking out toward the cliff side, and through it he could see nothing but black and the faint suggestion of the canyon opening below. On the floor was a mattress. Not a bed frame with a mattress, just a mattress, directly on the boards, with a stain across one corner that he looked at once and then did not look at again. In the corner was an old metal bucket, with the word “toilet” scribbled across it in white paint.

His duffel had been opened and the contents thrown across the room. His clothes were on the floor. His toiletry bag had been upended and his things were scattered across the boards near the far wall. His book was against the baseboard spine up with several pages bent. A photograph he kept in the front pocket of the duffel was on the mattress, face down.

He stood in the doorway and felt the current come back, stronger this time, moving from his chest outward, and this time he did not manage it as cleanly. He crossed the hallway in three steps and put his fist against the door marked MAINTENANCE. He hit it four times and heard the sound fill the hallway.

“Butch. Get out here. Right now.”

Silence.

“Butch, I am not asking you, I’m telling you to come out of this room.”

The door did not move. Nothing behind it moved.

From outside came the sound of a truck door closing.

Benjamin turned and rushed back down the stairs, through the bar, and out the front door into the parking lot, where Butch’s truck was now sitting with the engine running, the headlights throwing two white columns across the gravel. Victoria was walking away from the passenger side toward the entrance of the diner. When she saw Benjamin come through the door she stopped walking and looked at him, her face arranging itself into the same expression he had seen when he walked in the first time, that flat settled contempt, except this time it had something additional in it, something that might have been anticipation.

Benjamin went straight for the driver’s side of the truck.

“What the hell did you do to my stuff? Was that really necessary?” he said. His voice was louder than he intended and he did not correct it. “Everything I own is thrown across that disgusting room. My things are all over the floor. Who gave you the right to disrespect my stuff like that? Hello? I want an answer right now.”

He stopped, and put his hands up. “Woah, woah….”

Butch had gotten out of the truck.

He was holding a shotgun in both hands, not raised, not pointed, just held, barrel down, in the loose practiced way of someone for whom the object was an extension of habit rather than a statement. He looked at Benjamin with a clear look of anger.

“Why are you out of the kitchen?” Butch said. “The diner is not closed. You do not leave the kitchen until the diner is closed. I was very clear about that.”

“I want to talk to the owner,” Benjamin said. His voice had changed. He could hear it changing and he could not stop it. “I want out. I will give every dollar back, I don’t care, I will hand it over tonight and I want out of this job. Get me the owner.”

Victoria started to snicker, while Butch smiled. The smile showed off his rotten teeth.

“You,” Butch said, with a kind of tired amusement, “are too much of a goody two shoes to meet the owner.”

Victoria started laughing.

“You’re free to leave,” Butch continued, and his voice was pleasant now, the irritation gone, replaced with something almost generous. “I want to be clear about that. You can walk right now.” He turned his head slightly toward the dirt road leading down the ridge, the pale line of it going into the dark between the trees. “I’ll give you five minutes.” He worked the action of the shotgun, the sound of it enormous and flat in the cold air, and then his hand darted out and caught the ejected round as it came out, fingers closing around it with the ease of long practice. He held it up between two fingers for a moment, then reloaded it into the gun. “A five minute head start, then I get to do my favorite job, hunting.”

Benjamin looked at the road.

The dirt track went down the ridge in a series of curves he could not see past, into tree cover that was complete and black in the dark, toward a highway that was miles down and a town that was even farther than that. He was wearing shoes that were not made for running, he did not know this terrain to any extent, and Butch was looking at him with hope that Benjamin would take him up on his offer.

“Run it through your empty head,” Victoria said. She had brought the laughter down to something lower and intermittent. “He’s actually considering it. What a moron.”

Benjamin turned back to Butch.

“So what happens if I stay?” he said. “Walk me through it. Because from where I’m standing, it seems like you’re going to kill me, or worse, torture me, regardless of what I decide. So tell me why I should stay.”

Butch tilted his head slightly. “We need a cook,” he said, simply and directly, as though this were the most self-evident thing. “The owner gets very unhappy when there’s no cook. And the owner gets even unhappier when someone hurts the cook. So as long as you’re behind that range, you’re not my problem to deal with.” He paused, and something shifted in his expression, a small movement around the eyes. “Now Victoria, on the other hand… The owner has a real soft spot for Victoria. A real particular fondness. Victoria might be able to get away with hurting you a little. Just a little.”

Victoria started laughing even harder.

What came out of her this time was not quite the same thing that had been coming out of her before. It was louder and it climbed past the register of laughter into something else, something that had the shape of laughter but carried other things inside it, other sounds layered under and over the central sound, voices that were not quite hers, or were hers in different states, laughing and crying and something beneath both of those that had no name he could comfortably apply to it. It filled the parking lot, went out over the cliff, and into the dark above the canyon. Benjamin felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand at attention.

Butch looked at him calmly.

“Get back in the kitchen,” he said. “Stay there until closing. I’ll get you when it’s time.” He reached back and closed the truck door. “And Benjamin. Don’t make me have this conversation again.”

He went back inside.

He went back through the bar, through the kitchen door, and stood at his prep counter in the yellow kitchen light.

The ticket printer made no sound.

He stood there for a long time.

Butch came to get him a little while later. He had the shotgun on his shoulder now, barrel up, and he looked at Benjamin with a deep annoyance.

“Come on,” he said.

He led him through the bar without a word, past the dark counter and the empty stools and up the narrow stairs. At the top he stopped and pointed at the door marked COOK with two fingers.

“In there until I come get you in the morning,” he said. “Don’t open your door. Don’t walk around. Just sleep.” He held Benjamin’s eyes for a moment to make sure the information had transferred. Then he turned and went back down the stairs.

Benjamin went into his room, closed the door behind him, and stood in the dark for a moment before finding the light switch. A single bulb in a fixture on the ceiling came on and showed him the room in the same condition he had left it. He got down on the floor and started collecting his things, refolding his clothes, placing them back in the duffel in the order he preferred to keep them. His toiletry bag he repacked item by item. He found the photograph face down on the mattress, turned it over and looked at it for a moment, then put it in the front pocket of the duffel where it belonged.

He sat on the edge of the mattress and thought.

The highway was six miles down. He had not counted the turns on the way up but there had been enough of them that the drive had taken some time, and Butch drove fast. On foot in the dark on a dirt road he did not know, in the early spring cold, with whatever head start he could manufacture, not a great scenario. Maybe if Butch fell asleep he could have enough time to get to the highway before Butch noticed. Maybe. It was definitely risky.

He turned off the light and sat on the mattress in the dark and listened.

The building gave him sounds but not useful ones. The wind through the walls, the structural creaking, the refrigeration unit cycling downstairs. A few times he got something that sounded like a cabinet opening and closing. A few times he heard what might have been footsteps, but the floor plan of the place was strange enough that he could not locate them directionally with any confidence. He pressed his ear to the door. At one point he heard nothing additional and went back to the mattress.

He waited what he estimated to be three hours. The diner had gone quiet in a way that felt sustained, the kind of quiet that accumulates when a building has stopped being occupied by people. He had not heard any of the other doors in the hallway open or close at any point, which meant either that Butch and Victoria were extremely quiet about it or that they had not come upstairs at all.

He checked the door handle. Unlocked.

He opened it slowly, distributing the motion across enough time that the hinges made no sound. The hallway was dark. The doors along the wall were all closed, and there was no light visible in the gap under any of them. At the top of the stairs there was a quality of light that was not steady, that moved in a slow irregular way, brightening and dimming without pattern.

Benjamin moved to the stairs in his socks and started down them, keeping his weight to the inside edge where the boards were less likely to flex, one step at a time, until he was halfway down and could see the bar through the gap in the railing.

Butch was at one of the tables near the window.

He had pushed the table’s chairs aside and was sitting in his own chair, the shotgun laid across his thighs, his upper body bent slightly forward over the table surface. On the table in front of him was a small glass bubble pipe, clouded and discolored from use, and a lighter that he kept turning over and over in his left hand. As Benjamin watched, he applied the lighter to the bowl of the pipe and drew on it slowly. The material inside the bowl liquefied, vaporized, then the vapor moved through the glass and into him. He held it in for a moment before letting it out in a thin stream that gently caught the light from the window before dispersing. A gentle cough escaped his throat. He did this over and over again with the methodical repetition of someone maintaining a state rather than seeking one. The thin sweet smell of burning plastic reaching the stairs in faint traces. The shotgun stayed across his lap.

Benjamin looked at him for a long time before turning around to go back up the stairs.

Victoria was standing at the top of them.

She was completely still, both feet flat, her arms at her sides, looking down at him with the same expression she had been wearing every time he had seen her face. Pure and settled hatred. She had made no sound coming into the hallway. He did not know how long she had been there.

“You’d better get back to your room,” she said.

Benjamin came up the last few stairs and moved to go past her in the narrow hallway, turning sideways to fit, his shoulder brushing the wall on one side and passing close to her on the other.

The pain came suddenly, a sharp clean line of it across his left side below the ribs, there and then done, localized and specific. He stopped moving.

He looked back.

Victoria was facing towards him still, looking at him with a sadistic smirk while she folded a small knife and placed it back in her pocket.

“Oops,” she said.

Benjamin put his hand against his side, pressed, and felt the warmth of fluid. He went into his room, closed the door, sat on the mattress, pulled up his shirt, and looked at the source of pain in the light. It was about half an inch deep. A clean horizontal cut, several inches long, bleeding steadily in the way surface wounds bleed more than they need to. He pressed his shirt against it, held pressure, and sat on the mattress staring at the wall, turning his two options over in his mind, the road tonight with what he had, or the kitchen tomorrow with what tools of defense he could find within it. He could not make either one of them feel like a good answer.

He was still working through it when the knock came.

Three sounds, soft and evenly spaced, knuckle against wood. He looked at the door.

He did not move.

The knock came again. Three sounds, same interval, same softness.

He looked at the door while he felt something begin in his stomach that was unmistakably the start of a deep seated fear.

The knock came a third time.

Benjamin got up and opened the door.

She was very small. Six years old, or perhaps seven, standing in the hallway in the dim light with her hands loosely at her sides. Brown hair. A plain shirt and plain pants. Completely and utterly ordinary in the way that only made the fact of her being here, in this hallway, in this building, at this hour, feel more wrong with each passing second. She looked up at him with an open and uncomplicated expression.

“Are you the new cook?” she said.

Her voice was quiet, clear, and entirely calm.

Benjamin looked past her down the hallway. The doors were closed. The hallway was empty in both directions.

“Yes,” he said.

She considered this. “Do you know how to make cookies?”

He looked at her face. There was nothing in it that did not belong there. She was a child asking about cookies.

“Yes,” he said.

“Do you think,” she said, and there was a careful politeness in her voice, the kind that children use when they have been taught to ask for things properly, “that maybe tomorrow you could make some? Please?”

Benjamin said that he could do that.

Her eyes moved downward and settled on his side. The shirt was dark there where the blood had come through.

“Does that hurt?” she said, pointing at his wound.

He said yes, it did.

She reached into the pocket of her pants and produced a small bandage, the kind that comes in a paper wrapper. She held it out to him. He took it from her hand.

“That’ll help,” she said.

He looked down at the bandage in his palm. It was much too small for his wound, and had a cartoon character with a silly grin plastered on the top.

When he looked up she was already moving, turning away from him down the hallway, skipping, her steps barely audible on the boards, and then she was going down the stairs. He leaned out of the doorway and watched the top of her head descend and disappear below the floor line.

He stood in the doorway.

He stood there for a period of time he could not have measured if someone had asked him to. The hallway was empty and the doors were all closed. The diner below was silent except for the click of Butch’s lighter, which came up through the floor at irregular intervals.

He stepped back into his room and closed the door.

Benjamin woke up soaking wet.

The water hit him all at once, cold enough to stop his breath, soaking through the mattress in the half second before he was upright, gasping, and already looking for the threat. Butch was standing over him with an empty metal bucket, looking down at him with the expression of a man who had just completed an unremarkable task.

“Shift starts now,” Butch said.

Benjamin sat on the wet mattress in his wet clothes pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. He stayed that way for a count of ten, making sure to keep his growing anger at bay. Then he got up.

The kitchen was the same as he had left it. He stood at the range, got his bearings, and found the rhythm of it again, the way you find the rhythm of any kitchen, the particular logic of where things are and what order they want to be done in. Through the bar he could already hear the sounds of the morning. The stool creaking under Fatty’s weight as he settled in. Victoria’s voice coming from somewhere near the front, low and sweet, saying something he could not make out but that had the cadence of greeting. He pressed his forehead to the top of the window and could see only the back of the counter and the familiar geometry of the bar, so he pulled back and waited.

The tickets came through in the same pattern as the day before. Steak and potatoes. No spices. He made them without variance, plated them clean, rang the bell, and stepped back. Victoria took them without commentary. The morning moved in a grey and repetitive way, one ticket following another with long silences between. Benjamin worked, the whole while thinking many thoughts, the two options he had been turning over the previous night had not resolved themselves into anything cleaner in the interim. The kitchen had knives. But how well would they work against a shotgun?

The bell hanging above the entrance to the diner rang, announcing the front door had been opened.

He heard it from the kitchen, the ambient sound of the room changing slightly as the outside came briefly in. And then voices. Multiple pleasant voices. A man’s voice, a woman’s voice, and beneath them, higher and intermittent, a young child’s voice.

“Welcome in, hi, hello, welcome to the Cliffside Diner, my name is Victoria, let me tell you a little bit about us.”

He could hear her moving, guiding them somewhere, her voice carrying the full performance of a charming and enthusiastic hostess. She told them about the diner, about the history of it, about the view. She told them about the patio, about how some of their guests liked to dine outside, right over the edge, nothing between them and the Skeena River but a railing and a sense of adventure.

The man’s voice said that they would stay inside, thanks, and that the view through the windows was adequate.

Benjamin pressed close to the window and looked out. He could see nothing useful from this angle, only the back of the counter, the stools, the wall.

His hand was already on the kitchen door.

He thought about Butch. He thought about where Butch was right now, which he did not know, which was the central problem. He thought about the shotgun, about the parking lot, about the family on the other side of this wall who had a car, a phone, and no idea what was happening to the man twenty feet from where they were standing deciding what to order.

Then he heard the child’s voice more clearly. He instantly recognized it. It was a young girl’s voice.

He was certain enough about it that his body responded before his mind figured it out. The same register, the same particular quality of it, clear and light and unhurried. She was asking her father something. She was asking if she could have cookies. Her father said no.

Benjamin stood at the prep counter with both hands flat on the surface and stared at nothing while his mind moved with haste. The girl from last night had been in this building, alone, at two in the morning, in a hallway where she had no business being, and now she was here with her parents ordering lunch. He turned this over several times and could not make it resolve.

The ticket printer ran.

He looked at the ticket. A burger. A deli sandwich. A kids chicken strip meal.

He read it again. It was the first order he had received that was not steak and potatoes.

He went to the dry goods first and checked what he had. Flour, sugar, butter kept cool in the walk-in, eggs, vanilla, baking soda, enough. He worked quickly, keeping one ear toward the window, measuring without measuring, the proportions coming from a place below conscious recall. He mixed the dough, got it onto a tray and into the oven. Then he turned to the rest of the order, moving faster now, the burger on the flat top, the sandwich built on the board, the chicken strips down in the fryer basket.

The smell of the cookies came up out of the oven, filled the kitchen, floated through the window and out into the diner. He heard the girl’s voice rise with recognition and pleasure as she said something to her mother about it.

A minute later he heard the mother’s voice talking to the father, gently, reasonably, the way parents negotiate small indulgences.

The ticket came through shortly after. One cookie, added to the children’s meal.

Benjamin plated the orders. He tore a strip from the thermal receipt paper at the edge of the roll, a short piece, and found a pen clipped to the shelf, pressed the paper flat, and wrote one word on it. HELP. He folded it once and placed it under the cookie on the girl’s plate.

He put the plates in the opening one at a time and rang the bell.

He stayed at the window with bated breath, listening intently.

He heard Victoria’s footsteps cross the floor. He heard her voice, bright and warm, distributing the plates, asking if everything looked good, if they needed anything else. He heard the family settle into the sounds of eating. He waited for a change in the atmosphere, a shift, a voice, anything.

Nothing came.

He waited longer. He heard the ordinary sounds of a family finishing a meal. Chairs pushing back. The man’s voice calling for the check. Victoria producing it and thanking them for coming, telling them to drive safe, saying it had been so wonderful to have them in.

The front door opened and closed.

Benjamin crossed the kitchen to the exit door and pushed on it.

It did not move, it was barred from the outside.

He pushed harder, putting his shoulder into it, but to no avail.

He went to the window and put his face close to it.

“Hey!” he shouted as loud as he could muster. “Call the police! Somebody call the police, I’m being held here, call the cops, please for the love of god!”

Victoria’s voice came back immediately, close, directed at the window, quiet enough that only he could hear it.

“Shut your mouth,” she said, “before I come in there and cut your tongue out of your head.”

Through the window he heard the family’s car start in the lot, the sound of tires on gravel, eventually diminishing down the road, and then nothing.

He stood at the window, feeling that old current move through him. He was unable to control his rage any longer.

“You think you’re so goddamned pretty, but you’re not, you ugly clown faced bitch,” he sneered through the window.

Victoria said nothing.

“You’re not a goth, you’re a goddamned poser,” he said. “You’re an immature little punk who wears a costume because she’s got nothing real underneath it. You’re a child playing dress-up and you’re not frightening, you’re embarrassing.”

He heard her laugh before returning the favor in a snarky, jagged tone. “Your mother should have aborted you. Would have saved her a lifetime of disappointment.”

“Say it to my face,” Benjamin roared. “Come in here and say whatever you want to say to my face. Stop hiding out there and come in here.”

She laughed more while throwing insults from the safety of the front of the house, some of which were inventive, some of which were crude, all of which were delivered with the ease of someone who was genuinely enjoying herself. No insult Benjamin could come up with brought her through the door. He could hear the pleasure in her voice, the entertainment of it, and it sent his anger over the edge.

He picked up a sheet pan and hit it against the wall.

He hit it again. The sound rang through the kitchen. He hit something else, a pot off the hook above the range, and it clattered to the floor. He put his arm across the shelf above the prep counter and cleared it, seasonings and utensils clattering to the floor.

The door flew open.

Butch came through it with the shotgun up, the barrel pointed at Benjamin’s face. His eyes were burning with anger, and his voice when he spoke was enormous in the small kitchen.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?!?”

Benjamin looked at the barrel of the shotgun from a distance of four feet and felt the rage finish the job it had started. He lunged forward.

Both of Benjamin’s hands locked on the barrel of the gun and pulled with all his might. Butch was not a large man. He was wiry and damaged-looking, his teeth were mostly gone, and he smelled like chemicals and sweat. Benjamin was a head taller, twice as wide, and fueled by unadulterated rage. However, their differences did not matter. Despite his leverage and weight advantage, Benjamin could not move the shotgun and inch.

Butch brought the stock of the gun around in a short arc and hit him across the brow with it.

The impact felt like a freight train. Benjamin went down to one knee. The kitchen tilted, then righted itself as he put a hand on the floor.

Butch stood over him, breathing hard, and began to yell about the damage. He talked about it in the voice of a man cataloguing an injustice done to him personally; the dented pot, the scattered sheet pans, the things on the floor, all the work he was going to have to do, all the time it was going to take, his voice rising and filling the kitchen. Suddenly, in the middle of his sentence, he stopped.

Butch turned his head slowly. He turned it toward the wall that faced the interior of the building, toward the direction of the stairs, and he held very still. From somewhere in the structure of the diner, rising through the floor and the walls and the bones of the building itself, came a sound that was not wind, not the refrigeration unit, not anything Benjamin could name, a deep and sustained hum that Benjamin felt in his teeth and his sternum.

Butch turned back to Benjamin, a wicked smile slowly creeping onto his face.

“Well, well, well…” Butch said softly, “the owner would like to speak with you.”

Butch gestured with the shotgun barrel toward the kitchen door. Benjamin went through it ahead of him, back into the bar.

Fatty was still at the counter. He had not moved in any way that Benjamin could detect from the previous day, or from that morning, or from any point since Benjamin had first registered his existence. He did not acknowledge the three people now moving through the room behind him. He reached forward, picked up his glass, drank from it, and set it back down.

Butch paused at the base of the stairs and looked back at Victoria, who had been following a few paces behind Benjamin with her hands in her jacket pockets.

“Bring the owner some food,” Butch said. “The owner’s probably hungry.”

Victoria looked at Butch with a disdain for being told what to do, but quickly her expression shifted into the one she kept for other purposes, the warm and attentive one. She reached into her jacket and produced the small folding knife, opening it with the ease of someone uncapping a pen. She moved toward the counter.

Benjamin watched her approach Fatty from the side. She was talking as she moved, her voice dropping into that particular register, low and melodic and sweet, the same voice she used with him in the mornings, conversational and gentle, as though she were discussing something pleasant and inconsequential. She was saying something about how well he looked today, about how she appreciated his patience, about what a good regular he was. Fatty continued to look at his glass.

She reached out and took the hem of his shirt in one hand and lifted it slowly, folding it up over the lower portion of his back and midsection, still talking, her voice never changing in tone or pace.

What was underneath made Benjamin’s throat close.

The skin of Fatty’s abdomen and sides was a record of sustained and repeated damage spanning a period of time that Benjamin could not estimate and did not want to. There were scars that had gone white and smooth with age, raised and settled, the oldest ones nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding tissue except for their geometry. There were newer ones in various states, pink and still resolving, some of them sutured with what looked like ordinary thread and some of them not. And there were wounds that were neither old nor healing, open and glistening in the low light of the bar, one of them with a crust at the edge that had the color of early infection, another that was still producing a thin line of blood that had dried in a streak down his side. Sat on top of the grotesque blob of wounds, Fatty’s face gave no indication that Fatty was registering any of it at all.

Victoria selected a location on the left side of his abdomen, in the space between two older scars that had fully resolved, and drew the knife across it in a single practiced motion, not deep, a controlled cut, a portion. She worked the knife beneath the separated edge and lifted it free, a piece of him, carried it to the counter to slide it onto a small plate. She folded his shirt back down over the wound with the same care she had used to lift it. She said something else to him, something warm and grateful, and picked up the plate.

Fatty reached forward, picked up his glass, and took another swig.

Benjamin turned toward the stairs, stomach welling. He had to turn toward something, and the stairs were the only direction that did not contain what he had just seen.

They went up in single file, Butch first, Benjamin behind him, Victoria behind Benjamin with the plate. The hallway at the top was the same, the low ceiling, the four doors, the dim light. Butch went to the door at the end marked OWNER and stood in front of it for a moment. Then he raised his hand and knocked on it gently, with a consideration Benjamin had not seen him apply to anything else.

From inside the room a strange voice told them to enter.

Benjamin would think about that voice later, in the way that certain things demand to be thought about after the fact because they cannot be fully processed in the moment. It was old in a way that is difficult to describe, kind of in a way that suggests a duration behind it that ordinary human timelines do not comfortably accommodate. It was thin and it came out in sections, each word separated from the next by a small labor, as though the act of producing sound required a continuous renewal of effort. But it was also precise, each word landing exactly where it was placed, and it filled the small hallway with an authority that had nothing to do with volume.

Butch opened the door, and the smell came first.

It was the smell of a process, organic and advanced, the smell of tissue in a state of transition between dead and decayed. The smell had to have been present in this room for long enough to saturate the walls, the floor, and the air inside it completely. It hit Benjamin at the threshold. His body’s response to it was immediate and involuntary, a deep recoil that started in his stomach and moved upward. He covered his mouth.

The room was dark. There were no windows. The same dimensions as his own room, the same low ceiling, the same bare boards. A single mattress on the floor. The walls from floor to ceiling were covered in paper, clippings and pages and pieces of things, overlapping and layered, some of them curling at the edges with age, some of them more recent; a continuous wallpaper of text that covered every inch of the surface and gave the room the feeling of the inside of a mind rather than the inside of a building.

On the mattress was the owner.

Benjamin looked at him closer than he wanted to. His eyes moved across what they were seeing without being able to organize it into anything his mind was willing to accept. The owner was a horrible sight, the dimensions of a thin and elderly man, arranged on the mattress in a posture of extended repose, limbs settled, head turned now away from the door. But there was no skin, total and complete absence of it across the entire visible surface of his body, as though it had never been there or had been removed with a completeness and care that left everything beneath intact. The musculature of his neck moved visibly as he turned his head, the fibers shifting and sliding beneath the membranous tissue that covered them. His jaw and the structure of his skull were visible where the muscle coverage was thin, the bones of his orbital ridge standing out in clear relief above eyes that had nothing to hold them in shadow, eyes that protruded from their sockets, catching the thin light from the hallway and holding it. His hands on the mattress were a medical diagram, every tendon and vessel distinct, the bones of his fingers visible at the knuckles where the tissue thinned. His chest rose and fell in the small increments of someone for whom breathing was a diminished and ongoing negotiation.

He looked at Benjamin.

Benjamin felt the dread come up through his feet and move through him like a change in temperature. He felt it in the same place he had felt the hum from the building, somewhere below his sternum, somewhere that did not have a name in ordinary anatomy.

Victoria stepped past him, carried the plate to the mattress, crouched, and set it before the owner with a deference that was the most genuine thing Benjamin had seen her do.

The owner looked at the plate. The muscles around his exposed jaw moved. He reached for it.

He ate with the focused urgency of profound and longstanding hunger, the flesh from the plate gone in a series of motions that Benjamin could see in full anatomical detail on the owner’s face; the jaw muscles working, the tendons of his throat moving with each swallow, the visible structures of his face engaged in the mechanics of consumption. Benjamin watched the owner’s eyes, which remained fixed and bulging and attentive throughout. The owner’s eyes did not look like the eyes of something that was suffering or diminished. They looked like the eyes of something that openly planned unforgivable evils.

Benjamin’s stomach turned itself completely over.

Everything came up. He was dimly aware of Butch’s hand on his collar pulling him aside so that he was facing the hallway wall when it happened, his hands against the boards, the smell of the room behind him making it worse.

Butch dragged him back through the door by the arm.

“Hold it in,” Butch hissed into his ear, as if he was correcting a table manner.

Benjamin straightened up, swallowed, and started to breathe through his mouth.

The owner looked at him. The muscles of his face shifted in a way that might have been an expression.

“You have been insubordinate,” the owner said. Each word came out of him on its own breath, with the effort of a bellows that had developed a leak. “You need to straighten yourself out.” A pause, the chest rising and falling twice. “I do not want to find another cook.” Another pause, longer. “Do you understand me.”

It was not phrased as a question. Benjamin said yes.

The owner’s eyes held him for a moment and then moved away, releasing him the way a hand releases something it has been gripping. He settled back against the mattress.

Butch cleared his throat. He was standing slightly forward of his full height, his shoulders curved in, his chin angled down. He said, without quite looking at the owner directly, that he wanted to ask for the blessing.

The owner did not move for a moment. Then the muscles of his face shifted again.

“You haven’t earned it today,” the owner said.

Butch’s jaw tightened. He nodded at the floor.

Victoria stepped forward. Her voice when she spoke to the owner was different from every other version of her voice that Benjamin had heard, softer and more genuinely deferential, the performance quality of it gone, replaced with something that seemed to come from a place she did not otherwise show.

“May I have it?” she said.

The owner’s expression moved. “Of course,” he said. “Anything for you, my beautiful girl.”

Victoria gently lay down beside him on the mattress, arranging herself with the ease of familiarity, and the owner turned his exposed face toward her. His arm lifted from the mattress in increments, the shoulder muscles visibly laboring, the tendons of his elbow and wrist shifting under their thin covering as he extended it, trembling with the effort, until his hand was directly above her face. His index finger descended and came to rest on her forehead, the bone of the fingertip pressing softly against her skin.

Victoria’s eyes went back in her head.

The shaking started immediately and completely, her whole body taken by it at once, her hands rigid at her sides, her jaw set. Blood appeared at the corner of her left eye first, a thin line that ran down her temple and into her hair, and then from her right eye. All of it ran slow and dark and continuous while the shaking continued without variation or pause. Her eyes remained rolled back, showing only white. Her body moved against the mattress without going anywhere, held in place by the single finger pressed to her forehead.

And then the moan began, something that rose from inside her and came out of her open mouth in a sustained note. It had pleasure and pain in it, like ecstasy born in suffering.

Butch watched her intensely, absolutely seething with jealousy.

Benjamin took one step backward.

Butch did not move.

Benjamin took another step, and another, moving his weight carefully from foot to foot the way he had on the stairs the previous night, keeping each transfer slow, deliberate, and silent, his eyes on Butch’s back, watching the set of his shoulders for any change. Butch remained fixed on the mattress, on Victoria, on the owner’s shaking finger, on all that was happening without him.

The hallway was behind Benjamin now.

He took the stairs one at a time, the same inside edge technique, the same distributed weight, and reached the bottom. Turning around, he found the bar in front of him, Fatty at the counter, the front door at the far end of the bar with the grey daylight coming through the dirty glass.

Benjamin ran.

He hit the front door with both hands. It opened. He was through it, across the porch, and down the steps into the parking lot in the blink of an eye. He was running before he had decided to run, his body having made the decision without consulting him.

He screamed as he ran, the word help extended and repeated at full volume, not because he thought anyone was within range of it, but because it was the only thing he could think to do besides run.

The road curved and he followed it, the tree cover coming in on both sides, the daylight reduced to what came down through the canopy, the gravel sliding under his feet from the downhill angle. He was going to reach the highway and someone was going to be on it.

From behind him, Butch’s voice came through the trees. Benjamin quickly turned around to see where he was. He was right behind him.

The sound of the shotgun rang through the trees, and for Benjamin, everything went black.

Benjamin came back to himself through layers of pain.

The first thing was the burning. It was in his chest, and it was the kind of pain that does not permit distance or perspective, the kind that fills every available space in the mind and crowds out everything else, thought and memory and orientation all displaced by the single enormous presence of it. He could see, but what he was seeing was not resolving into anything he could use. Light and shape and movement, the geometry of a ceiling he did not immediately recognize.

Then another wave of flame moved through him from the center outward, a spreading fire that reached his fingers and his feet simultaneously. His body responded to it before he could, tensing against it, the tensing making it worse.

Something was above him.

He blinked. The ceiling became the ceiling of his room, the same bare boards, the same single fixture. The shape above him became Butch, crouched over him, his face close, his jaw moving. Butch was looking down at him with the expression of a man performing a task he finds distasteful, his eyes moving over Benjamin’s chest with the practical attention of someone assessing work in progress.

Benjamin looked at Butch’s jaw. At what was in his mouth.

He recognized it. He recognized the color and the texture of it. The recognition connected immediately to the image of Victoria at the counter with her knife, the plate, and Fatty sitting with his drink. Benjamin’s stomach would have responded if there had been anything left in it to respond with.

Butch leaned forward over the open wound in Benjamin’s chest, and what was in his mouth was spat into his palm, shaped quickly between his fingers with a molding motion, before Butch’s hand descended and pushed it into the hole in Benjamin’s chest.

The fire went through every nerve Benjamin had at once. His body locked, every muscle contracting simultaneously, his back coming off the mattress, his hands seizing at nothing.

Then it receded. Partially. Incompletely.

Butch sat back and began the process again. His jaw worked. He looked at Benjamin’s chest with that same practical expression. He was talking, Benjamin realized, had been talking throughout, in the low continuous way of someone thinking out loud without much concern for an audience.

“Don’t understand what the owner sees in this one,” Butch was saying, turning the material in his mouth, working it. “Don’t understand it at all. Look at him.” He shook his head slightly. “Hoping this one jumps off the patio sooner rather than later. Like all the rest of them did. Be a lot simpler for everyone.”

He leaned forward again and the second application went in.

Benjamin pulled a breath.

It came into him like something physical and foreign, air moving into a system that had stopped expecting it. With it came everything else, consciousness assembling itself rapidly around the central burning feeling in his chest. He sat up without deciding to sit up, and started coughing, bent forward, his hands on the mattress, each cough sending a new pulse of agony through the wound. Butch, satisfied with his work, got up and left.

Benjamin looked down at his chest.

The hole from the shotgun blast was there, but it was full of something that pulsed. He could see it moving, the glistening borrowed flesh packed into the wound.

He pulled his eyes away from it while drawing his knees up, fighting the pain the only way available to him, which was to hold himself very still, breathe very shallowly, and wait for the worst of it to pass.

It passed by degrees. Not completely. The burning reduced itself over the course of what felt like minutes into a deep and constant throb that lived in the wound. It sent regular pulses outward through his chest into his arms and throat. His heartbeat, which he could feel plainly now in a way he had never been able to feel a heartbeat before, moved with no discernible rhythm, lurching and stuttering. Every time it beat, the blood it moved felt wrong, heavier than it should be, moving through him with a viscosity that did not belong to blood.

He laid on his side, and could not think in any linear way. What occupied the space where thinking should have been was a war between two enormous forces, anger and fear, each of them too large to be processed and each of them preventing the processing of the other. He lay between them, held very still, and breathed.

Three knocks on the door. Soft. Evenly spaced.

Benjamin lay still for a moment. Then he got up.

She was there in the same way she had been there before, standing in the hallway in the dim light with her hands at her sides, looking up at him with that open and uncomplicated expression.

“I wanted to thank you for the cookie,” she said. “It was really yummy.”

Benjamin felt the corner of his mouth move. He felt his eyes go warm in a way that surprised him, a sudden pressure that he blinked against. He told her he was glad she had liked it.

She looked at him with the careful attention of a child noticing something that adults have tried to make invisible. “Are you okay?” she said.

He told her he was fine. He told her not to worry about him.

She looked at him for another moment. Then she said, “I got your note.”

Benjamin went still.

“I gave it to my mommy,” she said. She seemed to be remembering the sequence of it, putting it in order. “Mommy looked scared. She talked to daddy in the other room but I could still hear. Daddy said he was going to call the police about it.” She looked up at him with the matter of fact delivery of a child reporting something she does not entirely understand the weight of.

Something moved through Benjamin that displaced the anger and the fear for a moment, not eliminating them, but pushing them aside. It was a flicker of something he had not felt since the bus, since before the bus, since before Anchorage, the thin man, and the photograph on the craigslist page.

He crouched down in front of her, carefully, the wound in his chest registering the change in position with a firm pulse of objection. He looked at her face and said thank you.

She smiled at him. Then she turned and went down the hallway in her unhurried way, down the stairs, and was gone.

Benjamin closed the door and lay back on the mattress, holding the flicker carefully in his mind, the way you hold a flame in the wind with your hands cupped around it, holding it while the throb in his chest continued its irregular percussion.

Benjamin was awake before Butch arrived, sitting on the edge of the mattress when he heard footsteps in the hallway. The door swung open, and Butch stood in the frame with the metal bucket in his hands. He looked at Benjamin already upright and something moved across his face, brief and specific, the look of a man who had been anticipating a small pleasure and found it already gone.

He lowered the bucket.

“Kitchen,” he said. “Now.”

The bar was the same. Fatty at the counter with his drink, the same stool, the same posture, the same absolute remove from the room around him. Victoria leaning toward him from the other side of the counter, her voice at that low sweet frequency, talking to him about something that Benjamin could not hear and did not try to. She did not look at Benjamin as he passed through to the kitchen.

The kitchen was the same, except his tantrum had been cleaned up. He stood at the range and felt the wound in his chest with every movement, a specific and localizing pain that reminded him of its presence every time he reached, turned, or lifted, which in a kitchen was continuously. He worked around it. He made what the tickets asked for (steak and potatoes, no spice), plated it, rang the bell, stepped back, and waited patiently for the next ticket. The morning moved the way mornings had always moved in this kitchen, in slow and repetitive increments.

The throb in his chest did not worsen. It did not improve. It simply continued, his irregular heartbeat marking time in its own chaotic way, the blood moving through him with that strange density, his body conducting its mysterious business around the packed wound and whatever was happening inside it.

Around the midpoint of his shift he heard the front door.

He heard Victoria’s footsteps cross the floor toward it in a hurry. The change in the room’s atmosphere was immediate, meaning people had entered. Victoria’s voice shifted into its warmest and most attentive register, the one she reserved for guests she wanted to keep comfortable, the one she had used with the family.

“Hello, officers,” Victoria said, the warmth in her voice as complete and seamless as if it had always been there. “How can I help you today?”

Benjamin moved as quickly as he could to the window, opened his mouth, and tried to scream.

What came out was almost nothing. A dry and pressureless exhalation, the ghost of a sound, the shape of a scream with no volume behind it. He pressed harder, trying to force air up from his lungs. The thing in his chest responded to the attempt by contracting, a slow and deliberate tightening around his breathing apparatus. The air stopped. Not reduced, stopped, as though a valve had been closed.

He pressed his face to the edge of the window and listened.

The officers were talking to Victoria, their voices carrying the professional courtesy of people accustomed to managing interactions that might go in any direction. They said they needed to speak with all the staff. Just a follow-up on something, nothing to worry about.

Victoria said of course, absolutely. Her voice was everything it needed to be, warm and cooperative and faintly puzzled in the way of someone who cannot imagine what this could possibly be about. She said it was just the two of them, herself and Butch, and she would get Butch right away.

Benjamin tried again. He built the air from the bottom of whatever capacity the thing in his chest was leaving him, and pushed it upward with everything he had and aimed it at the window.

The thing closed him off from his lungs completely.

Not just the sound this time but the breath itself, the passage sealed, and the air that had been in his lungs stayed in his lungs. His body began its immediate and escalating inventory of what that meant. His vision started its retreat from the edges inward. He grabbed the prep counter with both hands trying his best to hold himself upright. Butch’s voice joined the conversation out front, producing his own version of cooperative puzzlement, slower and rougher than Victoria’s but serviceable.

The edges of the kitchen went black.

Something inside Benjamin stirred.

It started below thought, below fear, below the physical emergency of no oxygen, in a place that the last several days had been exposing against Benjamin’s wishes. It started with the owner’s face, the bulging eyes and the exposed musculature of him eating, moved to Butch over him on the mattress, chewing Fatty’s flesh, to Victoria’s knife sliding back into her pocket after cutting him, to the shotgun sound on the road and the darkness that had followed it. All of it compressed, concentrated, and became something with heat, pressure, and direction.

He hated them. He hated them with true completeness. He hated the owner most, the ancient terrible thing on the mattress in the dark room, the voice of an ancient, unspeakable evil. He hated that voice. He hated the thing in his chest that the voice controlled.

His anger pushed against it, and it started to give way.

The kitchen came back around him. He was already on his feet, the hatred having moved him without his conscious direction.

He could hear Victoria out front, talking to the officers. She was saying that the note was strange. Wasn’t it? Since it was just her and Butch, she had no idea where it could have come from, it was a little unsettling honestly.

Benjamin turned toward the dishes.

Each step was a battle. The thing in his chest fought for ground with every movement, tightening and releasing in response to his exertion. Benjamin fought for each breath separately, and the wound throbbed with the increased demand being placed on whatever was packed inside it. He reached the dish shelf, took a plate from it, and turned back toward the window. The room tilted under him but he corrected and kept moving until the plate rested on the shelf of the window.

The owner’s voice came through the inside of Benjamin’s skull, echoing through the mass in his chest with a cold and precise authority.

“Don’t you dare.”

Benjamin ignored it and pushed the plate through the window.

He heard it hit the floor on the other side. Heard it break. There was a brief moment of silence before one of the officers asked what that was. The other one said they needed to see the kitchen.

Benjamin was out of energy. His legs went out from under him without warning, and he went down to the kitchen floor. He laid against its cold embrace while the thing in his chest took his breathing away again; this time there was no reserve of hatred and rage available to push against it. He had spent what he had, and the darkness came back in from the edges. He let it come because there was nothing left to stop it with.

The kitchen door opened.

Benjamin heard them come in, the rush of it, footsteps and voices elevated past professional courtesy into something urgent. It was followed immediately by the flat enormous sound of the shotgun, then the sharper and faster sounds of the pistols responding. Something heavy hit the floor, and all of it was accompanied by Victoria’s ear piercing screaming.

Then nothing.

He woke back up to the pain in his chest. The kitchen floor was pressed against his face, and he could not move, not meaningfully, not in any way that would translate to standing or crawling or anything with purpose or direction. He had no energy left for movement of any kind.

One of the officers was slumped against the kitchen door, holding it open with the weight of him. Benjamin could see him without turning his head.

From beyond the open door came frantic sounds.

Butch’s moaning, low and intermittent, the cadence of someone in pain being unable to produce any words. Victoria’s voice over his, continuous and sharp, using her normal cold register full of loathing.

She was telling him to suck it up. She was telling him this was why the owner liked her more. She was telling him how he was worthless, and that they had a great deal to accomplish, but very little time in which to accomplish it. There was a sound under her voice that it took Benjamin a moment to identify, a wet and rhythmic sound. She was chewing.

Butch pulled some words together. He returned her animosity by telling her that he hated her. He said it and let it sit there for a moment. Following the brief silence, he said he would handle the cops car and bodies, and that she needed to clean the place up.

Victoria agreed. She said she would ask the owner what to do with the cook’s body. Then she told Butch to leave the shotgun.

Butch’s response had an immediate and involuntary quality to it, resistance before consideration, the response of a man asked to set down a part of himself. She told him she needed it to protect the owner in case anything happened while he was gone. He said something else Benjamin couldn’t hear, a pause followed, then the sound of the shotgun being set on a surface. Butch said he would take one of the officers’ guns then.

His footsteps came toward the kitchen. Benjamin closed his eyes and played dead.
Butch came through the door and stopped. Benjamin could feel the pause, the assessment of it from above him, Butch looking down at what was on the floor and making a determination. Whatever the determination was, Butch moved past him.

He heard Butch drag the bodies of the cops through the diner and out into the parking lot.

All the while Victoria cleaned, while she offered her assessment of Butch’s character and capabilities, her voice following him from room to room. Butch said nothing back, which seemed to be either acceptance or something that had learned to function as acceptance.

The front door closed.

An engine started in the parking lot. It idled for a moment and then moved away, the sound of it diminishing down the road, the gravel under the tires going silent as it reached the distance. Victoria cleaned for a while longer. Benjamin laid still and listened to her move through the bar, patiently waiting for a moment he could not foresee. Her footsteps finally went to the stairs and up them. Silence crept into every crevice of the diner. The peacefulness of it seemed to slightly settle the pain in Benjamin’s chest.

Victoria’s footsteps came back down the stairs with unhurried confidence. She entered the kitchen, and stopped near him. He could feel her attention on him. Then she crouched, took hold of his ankle, and began to drag him.

The floor moved under him in sections, the linoleum of the bar giving way to the boards near the stairs. She pulled him to the base of the stairs and then stopped.

He felt her try to get a better grip, heard her effort, the change in her breathing, the adjustment of her position as she tried to work out the geometry of pulling a grown man up a narrow staircase. She tried once, getting him perhaps halfway up the first step before his weight settled back. She tried again with the same result.

She let go of his ankle. It dropped against the floor.

She cursed under her breath before returning to the kitchen. The sounds of cleaning resumed, accompanied by her recounting to herself her hatred for everyone except the owner.

Benjamin laid at the bottom of the stairs, looked at the ceiling through his nearly closed eyes, breathed his shallow permitted breaths, and listened to her work.

Fatty was at the counter.

Benjamin could see him from this angle, the enormous back of him on the stool, both hands on the counter, the drink and empty plate in front of him. The same as every other time.

Fatty’s head turned.

Slowly, with a thick effortful quality of movement, his head came around on the column of his neck. He looked at Benjamin on the floor.

His eyes were the first fully human thing Benjamin had seen in this building since the little girl. Not human in appearance, they were buried in the uncanny topography of his face, recessed and small, but human in what they contained, which was pain of a specific and longstanding kind.

Victoria was still talking to herself in the kitchen, her voice filling the diner with the comprehensive catalog of everyone else’s failures.

Fatty tried to stand.

The process of it was immense. His hands came to the edge of the counter, pressed down, and his body began the work of lifting itself from the stool. The work was enormous, requiring a sustained and complete commitment from every available system he had. His breathing changed, becoming something labored and audible. He got partway up when the sweat began to roll off of him in putrid streams.

The fat rolls at his sides and stomach, as Benjamin watched, began to move in a way that fat does not, softening past their usual consistency into something that ran, dripping from him in heavy slow drops that hit the floor. The flesh of him was coming loose, the exertion rendering it. Fatty stood all the way up.

He stood beside the stool, breathed heavily, sweated, dripped, and then he began to move toward Benjamin.

Each step was a separate project. He breathed between them in great laboring pulls. The dripping continued, and the distance between the stool and the base of the stairs closed in small but meaningful steps. Benjamin laid still and watched him lumber over like a shuffling boulder.

Fatty reached him.

He stood over Benjamin and wheezed for a moment, recovering from the crossing. Then he reached down with one hand and pressed it into his own abdomen, into the layered flesh of it. His face contorted with the effort and the pain of it. The sound that followed was the sound of tissue giving way.

He brought his hand back up with a fistfull of his own flesh.

Fatty crouched, brought what was in his hand to Benjamin’s mouth, and pressed it there. Benjamin mustered the last slivers of his energy to open his mouth, and chew. His stomach turned before he even tasted it.

The thing in his chest beat harder. The pain spiked, clarified, went to every nerve ending simultaneously and then began, very slowly, to transmute into something else. Not disappear. Not ease in the way of pain that is healing. But change in character, becoming less the pain of damage and more the pain of something powering up, of systems coming back online under load.

His muscles found a renewed sense of vigor.

Fatty straightened up, one movement at a time, turned, moved back across the diner floor to his stool, and returned to his previous state of being.

Benjamin laid on the floor and fought his stomach with everything the newly returned strength gave him to fight with. He held it down, despite its rancid flavor and oily consistency.

He put his hands flat on the floor.

Victoria was still talking in the kitchen, her voice carrying the comfortable rhythm of someone who has been talking to themselves for long enough that the talking has become its own company. She was saying something about the owner’s patience, about how it had limits, about how both Butch and Benjamin represented a quality of problem that she specifically should not have to keep solving.

Benjamin pushed himself to his knees.

The pain in his chest objected in a sustained and comprehensive way, but he pushed through the objection and got one foot under him, then the other, and stood, listing slightly to the left before finding his center of gravity. He stood at the base of the stairs, breathed, and let his vision clear.

The shotgun was on the table where Butch had left it.

He crossed the bar and picked it up. The weight of it in his hands was exhilarating. He checked to see if it was loaded. Of course it was.

He raised it towards the kitchen door, and waited.

Victoria came through the door with a bloody mop.

She stopped. Her eyes went to the shotgun and stayed there for a moment, reading the situation with the speed of someone accustomed to reading situations quickly. When Benjamin heard her voice, he instantly recognized the warm affection that she usually reserved for customers.

“Hey,” she said softly. “Everythings okay, please put that down.”

It flowed into his ears like a soothing medicine. Like the specific feeling of being in a room you have known since childhood, a smell that reminds you of home, a quality of contentment that means you are somewhere safe. He felt his shoulders drop slightly, felt the diner change around him, the dark wood of it becoming familiar rather than threatening, the aura of it taking on a quality that meant home in a way he could not source to any particular memory but that was convincing in its entirety.

She took a step forward.

“I can take all of it away,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper and sweeter than honey, close now, closer than she had been, the words coming with a gentleness that had a physical texture. “All the pain. All of it. You don’t have to carry any of it anymore.” She looked at him with those dark, beautiful eyes. What was in them was warmth, care, and a promise of rest. “Let me take care of you. Let me make you feel how you’re supposed to feel.”

She took another step.

He longed for her. The longing was total and immediate, and he understood even inside it that it was not his, that it had been placed inside him by something external. She was beautiful beyond measure in a divine way, and the diner around him felt like home. His arms began to relax, lowering the gun.

Then the thing in his chest beat.

Once, hard, arrhythmic, sending the thick blood through him in a single violent pulse. With it came the heat of anger. It came up through the warmth she had placed in him, burning through it the way fire burns through paper, fast and total, leaving nothing behind.

He saw Victoria’s face clearly, the face that had looked at him with flat settled hatred from the first moment, the face that had said oops while the knife went back into her pocket, the face that had laughed its impossible layered laugh in the parking lot in the cold. He saw all of it clearly, the longing gone, replaced by an all too familiar feeling that was clear, simple, and had a motive.

He pulled the trigger. The shotgun barked.

Victoria was on the floor. The beauty of her face remained, unchanged and complete. She lay on the linoleum of the bar with that beautiful face looking at nothing.

The wind off the canyon hit him the moment he pushed through the patio door, cold and continuous, coming up the cliff face from the river far below and moving through him without apology. He stood on the patio and felt the boards shift slightly under his feet, a gentle flex in the old timber that reminded him with each step that the space beneath him was several hundred feet of open air.

He looked down through a gap between the boards.

The river was a grey ribbon at the bottom of the world, moving fast between the canyon walls, catching the last light of the afternoon in broken pieces.

He dragged Victoria’s body out by the ankles, across the boards, to the railing at the far edge.

He did not look at her face again. He rolled her to the edge and pushed her through the gap in the railing. She went over without ceremony and was gone, taken by the distance and the dark water below.

The voice of the owner came from inside his skull again.

“You insolent fool. She was worth a thousand of your lives. Now follow her down. Like all the rest of them. Follow her down.”

The urge came with the words, immediate and physical, not a thought but a pull, like a current in water that you feel against your legs before you understand its direction. His feet moved him toward the railing. He looked over the edge. The river was down there, and the pull said it was simple, it was just a matter of going over, it was what the patio was for, it was what all the cooks had done before him.

The rage simply said no. He turned around and went back into the diner.

Fatty was standing. Not at the counter, not near the stool, but standing in the center of the bar, facing the front door, both hands at his sides. He was moving toward the entrance with the same immense and laboring effort Benjamin had watched him expend earlier, each step a sustained commitment. The dripping resumed, the breathing audible from across the room. He crossed the bar floor in his own time and reached the front door before stopping. Benjamin went around him, and pushed the door, holding it open for him.

Fatty went through it without looking at him. He crossed the porch and descended the steps one at a time. He crossed the gravel lot to the white van and got in. The van sat for a moment before the engine turned over, the lights came on, and it moved out of the lot and down the road. Benjamin watched the tail lights go around the first curve and disappear into the trees.

The lot had Butch’s truck in it and nothing else. Benjamin considered driving it away from this terrible place. Once again, the rage simply said no.

The owner was still upstairs on its dirty mattress, in its dark room, with its bulging eyes and its ancient terrible voice. The road going down wasn’t going to stop being there. The rage was very clear about the order of operations.

He went back into the diner and found a place behind the bar where he could see the front door without being seen from it, and he sat down on the floor and waited.

He heard Butch before he saw him, the footsteps on the gravel lot coming up to the door before the figure appeared. He reached the front door and called out for Victoria as he stepped inside.

Benjamin stood up from behind the bar. He was twenty feet away from butch when he fired the shotgun.

Butch went forward and down, hitting the floor boards with a heavy thud. Benjamin worked the action and waited. Butch was on his hands and knees. He stayed there for a split second before he began to get up, the process of it wrong due to the circumstances. Butch looked at Benjamin.

Benjamin fired again.

The second shot took him at the shoulder and the arm went wrong, hanging from what remained of the joint by a margin that should not have been sufficient to keep it attached. Butch looked at it with an expression of irritation, turned back toward Benjamin, and continued to move toward him.

Benjamin fired again.

And again.

And again.

Butch went to his knees. His limbs were too damaged to stand, but not too damaged to continue to crawl towards Benjamin. Half of his head was missing, but that made no difference to Butch.

Benjamin fired until the gun was empty. He reversed it and used the stock. He kept pummeling until there was nothing left that resembled Butch in the slightest. Just a pile of bloody meat and bones on the floor.

He straightened up.

The owner’s voice came from inside his chest, from deep within the wound, from the pulsing thing packed into it. “You will never be able to kill me.” It said it with patience rather than fear, the patience of something that has been here long enough to know how things go.

Benjamin went into the kitchen and took the longest knife from the rack before heading back out and up the stairs.

The hallway. The four doors. The smell coming from the last one, unchanged, permanent. He pushed the door open.

The owner was on the mattress, the same arrangement of exposed sinew and visible bone, the same bulging eyes catching the light from the hallway. It turned its head toward him, the muscles of its face shifting and arranging themselves into a smile.

The rage came up through Benjamin completely, filling every available space, displacing everything else, and he went to work with the knife.

He did not stop for a long time.

When he was done he straightened up and looked at what was all over the mattress, all over the walls, all over the floor, and all over himself. He didn’t care anymore. He turned, went down the hallway, and down the stairs.

When he reached the bottom step, the owner’s voice spoke through his chest again.

“I cannot die.”

It said it simply and without emphasis, a statement of fact rather than a threat.

“I am a part of you now. We are one.”

He felt himself beginning to change in a way he could not describe and could not stop. Pure evil pumped itself through his veins like a dark, thick, icy oil. Benjamin hung his head and clenched his teeth. His sanity began to fray.

“Are you okay?”

Benjamin looked up.

She was standing in front of him, her hands at her sides, looking at him with a child’s worry. The same plain shirt and plain pants. The same clear and uncomplicated eyes looking at him from beneath her brown hair.

He said no. He said it was bad. He said he was afraid of what he was becoming, of what was filling the space inside him, of what the owner had said about being part of him now. He said he was afraid he was going to become what the owner had been. The thing in his chest brought him to his knees.

She looked at him with a patience no child should be able to achieve.

She asked him if he remembered her.

He said yes. He said he had seen her here in the diner, on the two nights before this one. He said he had made her cookies.

She said to think further back.

He looked at her face and thought back and found nothing, no connection, no context, the face remaining the face of a child he had first seen in a dark hallway. He said he didn’t know, he didn’t remember her from before that.

She lifted the hem of her shirt.

The scar on her belly was small and long healed, the pale resolved mark of an old wound, just below the line of her ribs on the left side. He looked at it and the memory came up before he could prepare for it.

The courtroom. The fluorescent light, the wood paneling, the faces filled with contempt. The judge reading from the papers. Three years. The things he had thrown in the mall that day when his anger had come up out of him and he had not been able to stop it, the rage going past what he could manage, the shelf displays and the products and the things within reach all becoming expressions of it. Then came the cry, the mother’s face, the small thing in her arms, the blood of an innocent dripping from her arms.

The baby had been rushed to the hospital. It had survived, but there was no way his deed could go unpunished.

She stood in front of him and let him look at her face, look at the scar, and put it all together.

He felt the evil in his chest grow with the memory, feeding on what the memory brought with it; the guilt, the history, the specific darkness of knowing the outcome of one of your own terrible actions. It spread through him like ink dropped in water, blooming outward through everything the evil blood touched.

He looked at her face, and everything became clear.

“I forgive you. I know you didn’t mean to.”

Tears filled his eyes.

He pushed himself to his feet.

There was only one thing left to do.

The Skeena river was waiting for him.

The wind off the canyon was steady and cold. The man standing at the edge of the parking lot had his hands in his coat pockets and his eyes on the building.

It was something to look at. He would give it that. The dark timber of it against the sky, the way it sat on the rock like it had grown there rather than been built, and the patio extending out over nothing, over the sheer drop and the river far below catching the morning light in long grey pieces. He had seen the photographs online but photographs had not prepared him for the scale of the canyon or the particular feeling of standing near the edge of it.

He heard the footsteps of the man behind him come up alongside him.

He did not look at the sickly man directly at first. He had met him in Terrace two hours ago in the parking lot of a gas station, and the impression he had formed then was the same impression he was forming now, that this was a person who carried illness the way some people carry height or eye color. He was thin past the point of health, his hands when he had shaken them were dry and very light.

“How much?” the man asked, still looking at the diner.

“A hundred thousand,” the sickly man said. “Even.”

The man looked at the patio. At the railing along its edge. At the tables and chairs still out there, weathered and patient.

“What did it make?” he said. “While it was operating?”

The sickly man made a small sound, something between a laugh and a clearing of the throat. “Not a great deal, honestly. The previous owner never advertised. Never made any effort to bring people in.” He paused. “But the location is singular. There is nothing else like it. You put this in front of the right people, the right publications, you market it properly.” He let that sit for a moment. “You could make it a destination. People will drive a long way for something they cannot find anywhere else.”

The man looked at the patio. At the drop beyond it. At the river below, moving fast and grey and permanent between the canyon walls, the same river it had always been.

The white van sat in the lot behind them and said nothing.

The man looked at the building for another long moment, at the old dark wood of it, the rusted roof, the sign above the entrance with its uneven letters, at the patio over the cliff, the canyon beyond the patio, and the river at the bottom of everything.

“I’ll take it.”

Credit: Grant Howard

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