The two of them clashed blades as if a kitchen cleaver and an army knife were built for clashing. Rebecca managed to avoid each swipe or lunge that the girl made, a kind of accuracy that only fearful adrenaline could fuel. She failed to dodge but one, an upward swing near her right side that nicked her arm and her cheek. For her trouble, she almost accidentally got a decent-sized stab to the girl’s right torso.

The girl grunted, taking a couple steps backward to admire the cut. “You are good.”

“And you are crazy.”

The girl brought her free hand to her side and pressed down against the cut, smirking. “The swan chose someone who can fight. Someone who’s willing to draw blood. It’s almost as if destiny is no fool.”

“… what–”

“I wonder if destiny wants me to slit your throat or not.”

“Ohmygodohmygodohmygod—”

Rebecca grabbed Adrienne by the shoulders, gazed intensely into her eyes. “Calm. Down.” Then, she glared at Darren. “What the fuck did you bring us into?”

Darren raised his head from inspecting the bloody portions of the man who once was, presumably, Mr. Muzzio. “I don’t know!” he whispered. “This was just about–”

“—about a book! Exactly! About a fucking—”

“Shh!”

Adrienne was shaking, her eyes darting, trying to find at least one thing that wasn’t slick with blood. The room didn’t have an answer for her. Even a drop, it was all over. Speckled against the curtain, pooling on one corner of the bedsheets, hardening against the fabric of Muzzio’s houndstooth blazer.

Darren drew a slip of paper from the blazer’s inside pocket, squinted at it, and held it up silently for Rebecca. When she wouldn’t take it, he turned to Kevin, who had his arms folded anxiously, pacing along one side of the room. “Will anyone take this fucking thing and look at it?”

Rebecca sighed, reaching across to grab it, unfolding it slowly into a long typewritten sheet. Dozens of lines of text starting from the top had been crossed out in neat black ruler-drawn lines of black and blue pen. Near the bottom of the list, between other blacked-out lines, were four untouched ones, made up of what looked like jumbles of numbers and letters separated by pilcrows in a way Rebecca imagined wasn’t random.

“What is it?” Adrienne’s voice choked. “What does it say?”

“Fuck if I know,” Rebecca replied, tossing it away. “Are you gonna be good?”

“No?!” She shook her head. “We’re in a crime scene in the middle of the night! Why would I be okay?”

‘Hægl’

He looked at his daughter Joan, his darling daughter, lying on the floor, shaking her head for him not to go. Then he looked back up at Olga Pastukova.

“You’re sure? It has to be me?”

Olga Pastukova nodded.

“Alright. I’ll come. But, all throughout, you have my word that I won’t fucking like it.”

– ‘Hope Has A Sailor’s Tongue’, Derek Merriman, in The Tilleton Weird Reader: Volume 3

He was having problems coming up with an answer. They were both crowds made up of wanderers. A chatroom, at its core, is just a bar without drinks – the same losers coming in and out, mingling without consequence with someone they will barely know at all by the time they’re done.

Maybe the only difference with a bar is that you can find someone you like here and be lucky enough to leave with them. This was, for some, the literal reason they went to bars – to find someone they like, tell them they could no longer be in the bar, and… leave the bar. Together. Get in their car and head off to their semi-messy apartment where they’ll enjoy each other’s sloppy company till the early morning. That drinking was just foreplay, prologue, an appetizer.

He shrugged and brought his second bottle of stout to his lips, still mulling over the question silently. Doesn’t that mean, he thought, that being here was like… leaving a chatroom… for a chatroom?