Freddie keeps one eye trained on me for the rest of class. At least he stops calling attention to me, spending his time instead going back over all the rules he’s added into the professor’s syllabus once someone breaks one. If you take more than thirty seconds to answer, you are either lying or making it up.Even if you’re right, it still counts as a lie.You can’t eat anything, and you can drink only as long as it’s in a campus water bottle.

  All assignments have to adhere to the Arkham Manual of Style when every other course in the humanities department adheres to the Miskatonic Language Association handbook. Again, there seems to be no real reason for the change other than trying to make his courses more difficult than they need to be.

  Then of course there’s a whole section on his office hours. They literally change from week to week, and spark an entire conversation about how busy and glamorous his life as a grad student is. So much so that in weeks 1, 3, and 4, he will only be available from 11:30 PM until 1 AM on Thursday evenings. Week 2 his only open slot is Sunday morning from 4 to 6 AM. On and on, though I’m pretty sure he’s picked the times at random and has no intention of actually showing up.

  Going through the syllabus takes the entire forty minutes, and by the time even the most interested students are glassy eyed and lethargic. Since that’s my only class for the day, once it’s over I bike into town. My next appointment with Dr. Malphas is today, and he texted me the address for our next appointment. Only when I pull up, it’s at a run down old cemetery on the edge of town. Half of the wrought iron fencing has started to collapse, though the points at the top of each fence post still look sharp enough to give someone tetanus at the same time they shear off a limb.

  The address is right, but there’s no sign of the doctor until I push open the gate and stride down the main path. Towards the center of the cemetery is a circular grassy area, and Dr. Malphas has spread out a bright red blanket and set out something that looks quite like a picnic. There’s a large woven basket lying open at his side, and smaller plastic containers spread out along the fabric.

  Again he’s dressed in a cardigan, this one a particular mix of gravestone gray and dead grass brown. He matches his environment extremely well.

  The cemetery spreads out in a circular pattern from the center, with paths extending outward like a child’s drawing of the sun, only the paths are a black and white gravel, and what grass is there is weedy and struggling. Nearest to the paths are a ring of graves marked by a rusted metal…. gate, or cage, that has been set over them. Wide and long enough to have trapped a body, should a body attempt to dig its way free. The rust coats each of them thoroughly, and I carefully count them as I approach. Seven graves. Seven caged graves.

  I would almost think the Morecrofts were buried here, and caged in by the town, except I know there’s a mausoleum in the back of my property where the entire Morecroft family is buried.

  “Theo, my boy, what a day we are having. What a day indeed,” Dr. Malphas calls cheerily to me, waving a hand in beckoning.

  My approach is slow and careful and I set the kickstand on my bike before I leave the path. There’s no one else that I can see in the cemetery at this hour, but I still don’t want to leave my bike if I can help it.

  “You’re not his boy,” Wrath whispers irritably from my back. “Why are you still seeing this whackadoodle anyway? A picnic in a graveyard? Paging Dr. Edgelord, this is as basic as you get.”

  “Be nice,” I mutter under my breath.

  “What’s that?” Dr. Malphas says brightly as I approach.

  “It’s nice out,” I say, pretending to repeat myself. I take a seat across from him, at the edge of the blanket and smooth my hands down over my legs. Wrath and I had a long talk after the last session about boundaries, and I’ve practiced what I’m going to say.

  “I thought today we could—“

  “— I don’t want to talk about my parents,” I say, trying for firm and ending up somewhere a little more like pudding. “I don’t need to talk about what they’re up to, or where they’ve gone, or how they made me feel. It’s not important to me right now.”

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Dr. Malphas seems nonplussed. “So what is important to you right now, Theodore?”

  I start to answer out of habit, but the name diverts my attention. He’s never called me that before. “That’s not my name,” I respond.

  “And what about the new neighbor,” he presses. “Did you go over and introduce yourself like I requested? He’s not from around here, is he? Has he been poking his nose around, asking all sorts of questions?”

  “What? Nico? No. I mean, I don’t think so.” Nico asked a few questions, but it’s not like he was nosy about it. He seemed to know more than I did in some ways. At least about the Doom Clock. Maybe not about Hollow Hills. But that part he didn’t seem too interested in.

  “Nico…” he muses and then writes something down in his file. “So you’ve met. Angry looking boy, isn’t he. Probably very difficult to deal with. Hard to trust that sort. Chip on their shoulder, expecting the world to prove itself all the time, isn’t it. It’s good that you’ve chosen to stay away from him.”

  “I… what?”

  Malphas looks curiously at me. “Did I misunderstand? You normally don’t gravitate towards new people. Or any people, really.Do you think this is wise, Theodore?”

  “I told you that’s not my name.”

  There’s something sharp in his expression, but it fades after a moment. Almost like a flash of victory? “Then what is your name, my boy? Your file doesn’t say anything about a different name than what we have on record.”

  “Well if the name you have on record is Theodore, then please cross it out. You can call me Theo.” I don’t talk to people about my real name. It’s weird. Wrath was the one who started calling me Theo.

  “What an asshole,” Wrath says. “Can I stab him? Just a little.”

  I shake my head but don’t look at him and don’t respond.

  Dr. Malphas’s eye twitches, and for a moment his expression goes blank.Then he looks abashed, and scrubs his hands in front of him. “My apologies, of course, Theo.”

  “I don’t like the way you’re talking about Nico. He’s my friend.”

  “I’m not trying to get in the way of a neophyte friendship, of course. My only concern is for you. You’re my client, Theo. I want to make sure that you’re taking care of yourself, that’s all.” He claps his hands together. “How about we try something different today. Let’s talk about dreams.”

  “Dreams?”

  “Do you have any recurring dreams? Things that always manage to pop up no matter how much time passes? The same kind of dream that repeats over and over again? Anything like that?”

  The questions catch me off guard. Malphas does that quite often. I think we’re talking about one thing only for him to swerve into the oncoming traffic of a different subject.“No,” I say slowly.“I don’t think so. I dream about normal things. Forgetting my homework, taking a test, drowning in an ocean of dark water, dragged into a never-ending abyss where the oldest beings live after slumbering since the dawn of time waiting for the end of all things. You know, the usual.”

  “Good, good,” Dr. Malphas says, writing more down in his journal. “And what about any other sorts of dreams? Dreams where you crush the nearby insects under your feet? Maybe lay siege to the world around you until it is a broken and barren place? Or what about the dead? Do you dream about dying?”

  “I never dream of dying,” I say simply. “I never think about dying at all.”

  “Everyone thinks about dying, Theo. It’s all a part of the natural order.”

  “There is nothing natural about the order of the world,” I remember my mother saying to me when I was very young. Maybe a few months after she introduced me to Wrath. She couldn’t hear him, so we talked amongst ourselves most of the time. She may have been talking to me, or she may have been musing to herself. It was never really clear if I was an audience or an accidental eavesdropper. “There is no death for us who haunt at the door of the Broken Hells. We who are faithful will embrace when death will die.”

  “I never really needed to think about death,” I respond honestly. “I guess it just wasn’t something we talked about at my house.”

  He hums, low and thoughtful, like he’s savoring the sound of my discomfort.

  “What is this guy’s deal?” Wrath says. “Do you think he’s got a crush on you or what?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What was that, Theo?”

  “Oh, maybe I should think about it,” I lie. “Death, I mean. It’s supposed to happen to everyone, right? It’s probably a good conversation anyway. One of my classes this semester deals with zombies, and they’re a kind of dead.”

  “Yes, but zombies are really just a metaphor for the worst of the human condition. The idea that we can be wiped out by a plague, that our neighbors can turn against us, that people aren’t deserving of the life they’ve been given. What all zombie tales are really missing is that next elevation. Something for the zombies to worship, something that will take them over and lead them into a new future, don’t you think? I’ve always wondered about what god the zombies would serve. Isn’t that curious?”

  “I suppose.”

  “There isn’t a proper god or devil for the zombies, of course. Not in our limited thinking. Zombies are creatures unified in purpose. They hunger, they need to sate that hunger, and every last one of them will do whatever they can to make that happen. It’s a version of a utopia, if you really think about it.”

  I feel like Malphas has the makings of a research paper in his argument, and I make a mental note to think about this later. Even Freddie won’t be able to mark me down too low for this.

  “I imagine zombies know their way towards a savior better than anyone else,” he says simply. “It almost makes you hope for a future in which society’s utter collapse leads us towards a new enlightenment. Don’t you think?”