Getting more information out of Wrath proves difficult. Like pulling teeth… from your grandfather while he’s asleep in the recliner on Thanksgiving.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say! It’s a clock, it’s also doom incarnate. It’s counting down to the utter extinction of all living things and it will leave the world a dry and empty husk. And it clashed dreadfully with the living room wallpaper. What else would you need to know?”

  He leaves and heads to the drawing room.I follow.

  “Tell me what it is. Why you’ve never mentioned it before.”

  Wrath turns at the question and scurries from the drawing room, heading for the stairs.I somehow manage to lose him between the third floor and the first.He just turns a corner and… gone.Eventually he turns up in the parlor, plucking at the keys on the grand piano.The tones it emits are sonorous and low, more like an organ straight from the underworld.

  “Why are you following me?”

  “Why are you avoiding me?”

  Trying to talk to him is useless. When Wrath doesn’t want to do something, he shows an awful lot of demonic patience. Eventually, though, dawn arrives. I hear Wrath stumble towards the kitchen. Even as I approach, I hear the low, rumbling sounds of conflict. I enter the room to see him in a quiet argument. I can barely keep my head up at this point, but the strange thing is that the coffee maker is giving Wrath a hard time.

  “Why do you think I know anything?” Wrath says over his shoulder then goes back to his heated conversation with the machine.

  “You mentioned the Doom Clock. You clearly know something.”

  He spins around, the coffeemaker emits something like an aggrieved huff, and a chortle of laughter trickles up from the kitchen sink.

  “Not now,” Wrath snaps towards the sink, which immediately goes quiet. He takes a calming breath. “I can’t tell you about what that monstrosity is doing. It made me…” he shudders, “promise.”

  “The Doom Clock made you pinky swear,” I say skeptically.“You’re a demon.”

  “And it’s a Doom Clock!” Wrath replies, as though that means anything to me. The floorboard rumble in agreement and his patience slips because he snaps, “Hush!”

  It’s not the fact that Wrath won’t answer the question that gets to me, it’s the fact that he’s annoyed. Wrath doesn’t get annoyed. He’s practically the most well-adjusted person I know, which is ironic because he’s not a person at all. So that’s not the problem, but there is a problem.

  “You can’t tell me anything about the Doom Clock,” I say slowly as I start to understand.

  Wrath looks miserably towards me but his head drops and he slinks back towards the coffeemaker, which has brewed him…a cup of hot water.He drops a tea bag into it, and the machine whistles, high pitched and scandalized.

  “You hate tea,” I say.“What gives?”

  “Coffee is a privilege,” and sure enough the coffeemaker is chugging away at a second cup, this time packed full of crushed beans and aromatic harmony. That cup he slides across the counter to me before staring miserably down at his own cup.

  I laugh to myself, and then reach out and switch out cups.“You deserve coffee, dingbat.Just make it more obvious next time if you can’t tell me something.And why can’t you tell me?Can you tell me that?”

  “Because the Doom Clock cheats,” Wrath pouts, though he drains the coffee in a single pour.“You’re not going to like it.” There’s an undercurrent to his words that I can’t quite understand.Almost like he wants that last sentence to be true.

  I already don’t like the fact that this Doom Clock has created a wedge in between me and my best friend.At this point, the only thing that I can do is research.

  There is not a single book in the Morecroft library that is younger than the War of 1812, or at least that’s the way it seems. The shelves are filled with books like I Summoned the Great Evil and All It Gave Me Was Herpes, by Aleister Crowley, and Sexing Up the Watery Merman God by Howard Philip Lovecraft, and of course, the seminal classic I Touched Ghost Boob by Sir John Dee, court astronomer to Queen Elizabeth.

  Several hours later, morning has come and gone, and I am no further in my quest to learn about the Doom Clock than I was when I woke up from that dream about my mother. The doorbell sings its funeral dirge again, and I head for the door without thinking. Part of me is still traumatized after only getting a couple of hours of sleep and a heavy dose of nightmare-fueled adrenaline, and the rest of me is mind-numbed after reading thinly veiled mediocre white guy ramblings.

  Nico is on the doorstep with his hands behind him.Today instead of the tee shirt and jeans, he’s in a blue button-up and a pair of chinos with white tennis shoes on.His hair is pushed down today, and the fringe hides some of the sharpness of his eyebrows.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Maybe it’s because I haven’t slept, or maybe yesterday was just a fluke, because I manage a coherent sentence. “What do you want?”

  Okay, maybe not the most genial sentence but it had a subject and a verb, so it’s progress.

  “I borrowed your flashlight yesterday,” he says stiffly, as if I’ve somehow forgotten. “I came to return it.” His hands emerge from behind his back, the flashlight held casually in his left hand.

  “Okay. Do you want to come in for some coffee?” I… cannot believe I say that out loud while this Doom Clock nonsense is going on. While I deal with my own audacity, Nico nods gratefully and steps past me and into the entryway.

  “Oh wow, yours is in much better repair,” he says over his shoulder.“But the designs are totally different.This is…homey, and mine is more of a termite funeral parlor.”

  “Uhm, thanks?” Is he making fun of me? Wouldn’t the Manor be in better shape, seeing as how it hasn’t been abandoned for the last twenty years?

  He peers through the rooms, muttering “Kitchen, kitchen,” under his breath, but correctly following the scent of Wrath’s coffee.He makes his way through the dining area, the cordials room, and through the galley into the kitchen.

  I follow him in a bit of a daze.The ease at which he made himself at home in my house is off-putting, and disturbing, and only a little hot.Then I remember that there’s a demon hanging out in the kitchen, and I try to rush into the lead, but Nico’s shoulders are too broad and he doesn’t give me many opportunities to pass him.

  He steps into the kitchen and stops abruptly, but when I follow him in I don’t see a seven foot tall demon staring down at us. The kitchen is empty. Nico’s eyes are trained on the coffeemaker, though, and for the first time I see something like worship in them.

  “This is… amazing.You have the Diabolos Kaffe DK-1?”Nico runs his hands along the top of the coffee maker, which I shit you not begins humming, and turns to look at me.“Do you know how rare this is?There are only like a hundred of them available.”

  “You know coffeemakers?”

  “This is not a coffeemaker,” he says fervently, “this is an experience.”

  Said experience is nearly vibrating in pleasure.“That’s great,” I interject, “but I don’t actually know how to work it, and my roommate isn’t here to—“

  The coffeemaker begins whirring away, and there’s a cup in the basin that wasn’t there a moment before, slowly percolating fresh, aromatic brew.

  I’m going to dismantle you, I swear to Beelze— I mouth to the machine, stopping only when Nico whirls back around to me. Suddenly he’s much friendlier than he was at the door. Or yesterday when he stopped over. Or when he glared at me from the street.

  “I didn’t even see you push anything,” he says with surprise.“With a coffee set up like this, I’ll have to come by more often.” My heart thuds in my chest so loud I can’t hear any warning bells.

  “Wireless,” I manage to choke out. “You’d never believe how smart technology has gotten.” As soon as his back is turned, I drag my thumb across my neck at the coffeemaker.

  “Oh, but you don’t have a cup.”

  “No, I’m okay—“

  Nico grabs a coffee cup from the shelf and then sets it down under where his was brewed.He studies the machine intently for a few moments before he presses a button towards the side.“It’s right here, right?”

  “That’s—“

  But instead of engaging the doomsday protocols the way I did the last time I tried to brew a cup of coffee, the machine begins to resentfully brew me a cup as well.I can tell it’s resentful because instead of the happy chirping noises it was making when Nico’s cup brewed, now it sounds much more disgruntled.

  Maybe it’s not that bad after all.

  As the foam begins to form at the top of the cup, though, somehow it takes the shape a hand with the middle finger raised, which is impressive.A fact that Nico also seems to notice.“That almost looks like—“

  “—yes, I can see what it looks like.”

  I point Nico to the cream and sugar, which he ignores, while I add heaps of both to my cup before we each take a spot on opposite sides of the kitchen island.

  “So, you’ve lived here for a long time?”

  “Grew up here. What’s up with you moving in across the street? I didn’t even know the house was still for sale.” There’d been a sign, of course, but it had been there for years and no one ever updated it.It didn’t list an agent, or an agency, or anything.It was just a simple FOR SALE sign that only a few weeks ago saw any attention at all, just in time for the SOLD sign to be hung from it.

  While I’m busy making my coffee, Nico moves to the refrigerator, and taps at it.“Is this you?”

  I wince, whirling around and trying to cut in front of him. He moves, but only after he pulls the photograph with him. It’s a picture of me as a child, small even for my age and painfully shy, curled up behind a stuffed creature bigger than I was. Even back then, I’d hidden behind Wrath whenever I could. The animal in the picture is a mix of reds and whites, and it would look like a tiger except for the pointed ears, the bright yellow eyes, and the cloven hands and feet. There was a name tag stitched into the animal’s chest, but a piece of masking tape covered it. The name WRATH is written in careful, childish letters. It was the first word I learned to write.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Stop,” I respond, reaching for the photograph, but Nico lifts it up out of my reach to study it further. It feels too real, letting someone else see the image of the small boy with only his imaginary friend looking out for him.

  “Come on, you had a stuffed animal.It’s nice.”

  The way Nico says it, the simpleness of it, contrasts with my memories of that time, of waiting for someone - anyone - to come back for me.I take a deep breath. “You’ve returned the flashlight, and you had coffee.You can go now.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says immediately, his moment of amusement becoming more serious.He lowers his hand and hands me the photograph.“I thought I was being neighborly.”

  I don’t even know what that means.

  Unfortunately, I don’t have a chance to get Nico out of my house. I don’t have a chance to do anything. Something like an inhale comes through the house, a moment where everything gets just a tiny bit lighter for a moment. Where all the lights brighten. Where even the voices from the kitchen drain quiet down. A moment of pure, infernal silence settles over the entire house.

  Interesting, I have enough time to think, followed by a more curious moment.

  Where is Wrath? Why isn’t he here, spying on us?

  A shockwave rips through the house.

  I’m blasted off my feet and thrown back against wall cabinets. The pain of impact rocks through my body. Nico is thrown into the refrigerator. And the coffeemaker? The coffeemaker shrieks like a machine going down the trash compactor before cutting off abruptly.

  Everything goes black.