Alex spritzed the bookstore with the bergamot air spray he kept beneath the counter for just these types of emergencies. The last customer had brought a Starbucks pumpkin-spiced latte in with them that hadn’t so much fragranced the air with a scent of Halloween as it had polluted it. Made the atmopshere toxic and unbreatheable for him.

This was Alex’s least favourite day in the calendar by quite some distance. It was the day people dressed as creatures that had tormented him since childhood. As the werewolf that had attempted to abduct him from his cot, as the vampire that sunk teeth into his arm as he slept, as the beautiful gorgon that had tried to turn him into a stoner at college. Well, perhaps that last one hadn’t been a supernatural creature. And perhaps Alex should have taken a drag. But letting go of inhibitions, letting himself off-gaurd… it wasn’t easy. Maybe it wasn’t possible.

He’d liked that girl too. That had been on a Halloween as evening‘s curtain was falling. He’d told her he disliked this night and she’d promised she’d look after him. Help him relax. But of course, as always, he’d ruined it. Refused to relax and left. Never saw her again after that.

He glanced at a wall-clock hanging above a stack of discounted Stephen King books. Even in a second-hand store like this, you had to cater to what customers wanted. And today, they wanted horror.

It was 6 P.M. Another hour and he could close the store and go home and lock the doors and not answer the bell and drink heavily enough to fall into something a bit like sleep.

The bell above the door clanged and in came a young boy or girl wearing a mask that looked a bit like Gollum except it had two fanged mouths next to each other. One for the main course, one for desert, perhaps.

“Can I help?” Alex managed.

The masked-child shook their head ran their fingers along a row of horrors. Along their spines. Alex imagined a sharp fingernail running along his spine too and shivered.

“Just looking,” said the kid.

Just get out, Alex thought. You’re not going to buy anything anyway. But he said nothing, inhaling the scent of bergamot to calm his nerves.

Halloween still somehow hung in the air. The bad smell you can’t get rid of. Just a few notes but enough that he could detect the pumpkin drink’s remnants. Like a shadow still hanging after its owner left. Inside Alex’s mind the smell held hands with other bad scents: rot, blood, sewage, filth. Unwanted images flickered in his mind like an old projector flashing on a half-collapsed alley wall.

The vampire, when he’d been a kid, would have abudcted him. Alex had been bitten and was in a fugue when he’d opened his bleary eyes. He was in the creatures pale arms, lifted with ease out of his bed. His heart beat against his ribs. “Please…”

Then he heard something strange and soothing. Music but without words. Just a calming melody. His heartbeat slowed and his eyes heavied. He woke to sunrise, back in his bed. The wounds on his neck already scarred over. Mostly healed but their memory left as a tattoo-like abrasion.

Where had the kid in the mask gone?

Alex had drifted into his own world and couldn’t see the child now. But the bell hadn’t gonged so they were still in the store behind one of the stacks or shelves.

He shivered again. Felt uneasy.

”Hey, kid?” he said. “Sure you don’t need any help?”

No reply so Alex began his search. Not behind the horror shelves or the SciFi or the fantasy. Alex glanced behind a row full of tattered history books when the doorbell finally rang. The kid had left the shop.

Alex leaned back against the history books and let out a long sigh. Now he was worried about kids? How pathetic had he gotten. He was meant to be an adult. Fully functional and all that.

The truth was, everything he’d seen as a kid — the horrors that had happened to him — had only ever been in his mind. The therapists had all said so. And yet Alex couldn’t accept it. He’d turned a bad childhood, an abondement, into fantasy and conspiracy. And if he couldn’t pull himself out of the fantasy then he’d live a lonely and pathetic exis—

The kid jumped down at him from on top of the shelf. No mask now. As the nails that had become claws sunk into his face, he saw the child for what it was. An old man’s face on a boy’s body. Twisted and yellow-toothed, red-eyed, no eyelids. Like an old man’s corpse had been beheaded and stitched onto this body.

”You’ll come with me one way or another,” it rasped.

The creature’s head thudded into Alex’s. Again. And again.

The world kaladiscoped. His vision twisted like his stomach might on a roller coaster. He could taste his own blood as it rolled into his mouth.

He stumbled back, tripped, fell on carpet. The kid-creature was tearing chunks of skin off his chest. It was trying to kill him. But it wanted him alive, didn’t it?

Maybe it just wanted to cause pain.

Alex screamed but the creature’s fist connected with his chin and closed his jaw.

If it wanted to cause pain, it was succeeding. Please, just hurry and be over with it, Alex thought.

And then… Something strange… A tune he vaguely recognised: mournful, hopeful, beautiful.

The creature paused, sitting on top of Alex’s mutilated chest. It looked left, then right. Slowly. Cautiously, Alex thought. As if afraid.

Then blackness took Alex.

When he woke, lying behind the counter, he wasn’t alone. A girl he recognised was patting something like sand into his wounds.

”I would have loved to have had this done before you woke,” she said with a soft smile. “But this’ll take longer than the scar on your neck did.”

Alex didn’t speak. He could have, he thought. But what would he say? He knew this woman. He hadn’t seen her in almost a decade when they’d played music together and she’d smoked weed and tried to get him to relax. Someone who seemed protective of him — a rare thing in his life.

“You haven’t aged?” he said.

”Sirens don’t tend to,” she replied. “If we did, we wouldn’t be much good at luring sailor to rocks, right?”

”I guess not.” He couldn’t work out if she was joking. Or at least how much of what she said was joking.

”Don’t worry about your young friend, by the way. He’s gone now. And he won’t be back.”

They were silent for a while as she mended his wounds with tender fingers and the sand-like substance.

”Why me?” he said, eventually. “Why do they want me?”

“They believe you’ll eradicate us all. Us mythical creatures, or whatever you want to call us. They think that if they don’t take you captive, that’s what will eventually happen.”

”But… Why the hell do they think that? I’m… I can barely run a bookshop. I’m neurotic!“

”It doesn’t matter why. What matters is they think so.”

He took a long shakey breath. He didn’t believe it. He barely believed a siren was tending to his wounds even though that was happening in front of him. ”I don’t think I believe it,” he said.

”Maybe that’s why it’s you,” she said. “Because you refuse to believe in so much. Most especially in yourself. And we, well we all need belief to go on existing. Or maybe that’s not why they’re after you at all. Maybe you’re a cliche, like the child of a god and goddess — who can really say?”

”Do you believe it though? That I’ll be responsible for ending your race?”

“I believe you deserve your own shot at your own life. I don’t think your life should be dictated by what others believe or want. It’s your life.“

They were silent for a long while after that. Silent until he said, “Thank you.” It was only then he noticed how similar her green eyes were to his. How her chin curved gently like his. How…

She smiled. “You’re welcome.”

Then the lullaby came again, more soothing and beautiful than before, and he began to drift into a long sleep.