From the Blog of Drake Marshall, Summer of 2020:

I have to tell you what happened in Peoria. We were all Goths and we had heard of this place called the Blue House, down in Peoria. It was the ultimate Goth hangout, we found out later that it was condemned, overrun with mice, insane mice that had bred into mutants from the pesticides and thronged through the walls like locusts. This high school girl had run away from home, her father was a creepy, corrupt cop, and she had squatted there in this little Mouse House, but she was an artistic genius and really into goth so she got these aquariums from an abandoned pet store or warehouse or something and filled them with fish and then put blue lights behind them, some of them moved like disco lights, and then she would have these insane parties where everyone would trip and listen to the Cure or whatever. Her boyfriend moved in and he was a psycho bitch who would literally throw people who pissed him off down the stairs, so at the start the parties were very well behaved and became quite popular. People heading down to Carbondale and Saint Louis would stop there – including touring bands so it became a known spot you could get invited to if you were cool. Everyone wound up there, even some celebrities. I heard Duran Duran was there one night. Somebody said they saw Stiv Bators with Vaclav Havel. The problem was, my father knew who the boyfriend was, the son of an intel officer he’d known in Vietnam, and it was causing huge problems for the girl’s father, who was in on the local heroin trade, which was being amped up by Chicago street gangs. In a town of 100,000 people, it became a total hotspot and the girl was killed under mysterious circumstances. There were rumours she’d been a witch, with a coven there. My father knew about it and told me never to talk about it. Later that summer the most prominent columnist for the Peoria Journal Star died in a car accident when his brakes failed on the McClugage bridge and his RV flipped over. The coroner said he had an illegal level of alcohol in his blood at 2 in the afternoon, but none of us believed it. That coroner had been working in that town with those heroin-dealing cops for decades.

We saw things there we can’t tell you about. But if you keep reading you’ll get a hint about a lot of things.

I had Claude rewrite this:

Like Scheherazade’s labyrinth twisted through the arteries of the Midwest, this story bleeds blue light and rodent shadows across the map of memory. (How curious that we speak of mice when really we mean the scratching behind walls that could be anything, anything at all…)

Let us say, for the sake of documentation, that there was a house. Not the house you live in, with its mundane certainties of morning coffee and evening news, but The House – the kind that appears in a town like a bruise appears on skin, with no one quite remembering the impact that caused it. Blue House, they called it, though “blue” described less its color than the way it made you feel, like jazz at 3 AM or the moment before crying.

The girl (let’s not name her – names have power in stories like these) didn’t so much live there as haunted it preemptively. Her aquariums glowed like prophecies, fish moving through them like thoughts through a fever dream. The boyfriend – ah, but he wasn’t really a boyfriend, was he? More like a gravitational force, the kind that bends not just light but truth around itself.

Your father knew (fathers always know, especially when they’ve worn uniforms in jungles far away) that the house was less a place than a convergence, a point where all the lines of power and corruption in a small American city knotted themselves together like snakes in winter. The heroin, the cops, the intel officer’s son – these are just the visible threads. Behind them writhed others: witch covens, underground networks, celebrities appearing like hallucinations in the aquarium light.

(I keep returning to those mice, mutated by poison, running through walls like thoughts through nightmares. Were they really mice? Were they really there at all?)

The columnist’s death – we say “death” because “accident” is too neat, too finished – came later, like an echo of something that hadn’t made a sound. The coroner’s report reads like fiction written by committee, each lie carefully measured and administered like morphine.

But you were there, weren’t you? You saw… but no, we don’t speak of what was seen in the Blue House. Some stories can only be told by their absence, like those fish swimming through cobalt light, casting shadows of things that couldn’t possibly exist in a town of 100,000 souls.

(Unless, of course, they did.)