>>5310399>>5311054You turned to a large closet: a place with enough space to hide the eery thing and near enough to keep an eye on it behind heavy firmly shut doors. With no time to think, you reached for it with your hand only to have it bounce off the rubbery slime as if you tried to push it against a spring mattress. You stood closer to it after, and with its “eyes” staring down at you, it seemed disturbed by the way you touched it. Lashless eyelids swallowed its eyes and then freed them. This-isn’t-the-right-moment shout upset it; it made both you and it turn your heads again. You couldn’t imagine dealing with it all hangover; luckily for you, your hangover was magically absent.
You pushed your way to the closet doors, flinging both of the old-fangled doors open halfway. You pointed inside, but the cocktail of orange slime and liquid outpaced your thoughts; its gelatinous slurry formed a female form, with human-like appendages of legs and arms that it moved. Each of them was unstable like butter melted for frying. It knew to step inside in haste, and you knew to close the doors. The key was somewhere close but such did not narrow it down for you. You hoped it would not open the door in the middle of your private conversation.
You opened the door; the little door chain jittered but hung securely. Outside, past the figure, there was a car, a … Tudor sedan? Your sister knew better. The mysterious stranger stepped to block your view in full as if he was intentionally clad in black clothes. It was hard to see, or specify, but he dressed well. Despite the showering rain—trees' canopies hanging like a cracked barrel—the man was parched like his lips. He wore a black suit, a grey collared shirt, and a chalk-white tie. His leathery gloves and boots were likewise charcoal black, and so was his—crown folded to form a teardrop—fedora. He lowered two of the fingers with which he knocked; the only other white thing in his getup was the shirt's white sleeves.
“You took your time, Elmer Briant." His lips moved as if his words were whispered, but he spoke at loud.
“Yes, you woke me up.” You preferred half-truths to lying. “Are you with the Bureau of Prohibition?”
He shook his head, barely. A heavy stone slid and fell off your neck. “I hope you are not as distrustful as the Bureau says, Elmer Briant.”
You looked inside the dimness of your cottage, then back at him. “I-I’m not. … do you want me to wake up my sister as well?”
He shook his head, barely. “ … and I will also ask you to warmheartedly invite me inside some other day.”
Damn, your empty bottles were right next to the threshold. “You knocked very long and hard … ”
