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blackened lips and felt the teeth rip it out. His mouth filled with blood and rot. He swallowed, gagged, swallowed again.
     
    A head rolled out from under the bed, pushing itself by frantic motions of jaw and tongue. The severed ends of the neck muscles twitched, trying to help it along. Its nose and left eyebrow were pierced with silver rings, its empty eyesockets crusted with blood and greasy black make-up. It reached Justin and bit deep into one of his thighs. He kicked once, in surprise, then bent his leg so that the teeth could more easily get at the soft muscle of his groin. He felt his flesh peeling away.
     
    The upper half of a body was pulling itself out of the closet. Its black-lacquered nails dug into the carpet. Ropes of intestine trailed behind it, coming apart, leaving a trail of shit and ichor on the rug. This one had been, possibly, a Mexican boy. Now its skin was the colour of decaying eggplant, and very few teeth were left in its gaping mouth. Dimly Justin remembered extracting them with a pair of pliers after the rigor mortis had slackened.
     
    It tore Justin’s belly open with its hands and sank its face into his guts. He arched his back, felt its fingers plunging I deep, its mouth lapping at the very core of him.
     
    The small pleasures of his life - reading, listening to the music of another time, choking the life out of boys and playing with their abandoned shells - were nothing compared to this. He wanted it to go on for ever.
     
    But, eventually, he died.
     
    The corpse from the bathtub chewed at Justin’s throat and chest. Half-chewed pieces of Justin slid down its gullet, into the great scooped-out hollow of its abdomen, out on to the floor. The corpse from the closet sucked up the liquor and partly digested meat it found in Justin’s stomach.
     
    The head bit into Justin’s scrotum and gulped the savoury mass of the testicles like a pair of tender oysters.
     
    They seemed to know when to stop feeding, to refrain from pulling him completely apart, to leave enough of him. When he came back, Justin knew exactly what to do.
     
    After all, he had been doing it long before most of the others.
     
    * * * *
     
    Suko stumbled out of the bedroom and slammed the door behind him. Something was rolling around and around in the refrigerator, banging against the inside of the door. He almost went over to open it, only caught himself at the last second. He wasn’t thinking very clearly. His head felt wrong somehow, his brain caught in a downward spiral. He did not understand what he had just seen. But he knew he had to get out of the apartment.
     
    No problem , a voice yammered in his head. Stay cool. Chill out. Don’t have a cow, man. He barely knew the meaning of the words. The American voice seemed to be receding down a long black tunnel; already it was so tiny and faint he could hardly hear it. He realized he was thinking in Thai for the first time in years. Even his native language was strange, a flurry of quick sharp syllables like little whirling razorblades slicing into the meat of his brain.
     
    He fumbled with the complicated series of locks, yanked the door open and nearly fell into the hall. How had he entered the building? . . . Up a metal staircase, through a door at the end of the long dark hall. He reached it and let himself out. The hot October night seared his lungs. He could smell every poisonous particle of exhaust blanketing the city, every atom of shit and filth and blood baked on to the streets. Not like the ripe wet kiss of Bangkok, but so arid, so mercilessly dry. He felt his way down the fire escape and around the corner of the building.
     
    The empty street seemed a mile wide. There was no sidewalk, only a steep curb and a long grey boulevard stretching away towards some other part of the city. There were no cars; he could hear no traffic anywhere. Even with his head feeling so strange, Suko knew something was wrong. LA streets were often empty of people, but