The man, if he could be called a man with his sunken eye and sallow skin, continued to stare at me while the woman packed the last few items from the bed. He didn’t move, except for the slight shift of his fingers keeping the pen, my pen, in motion. He didn’t seem to blink either, though it was hard to tell. His eyes were the same color as the shadow that fell over them.

“I’m sorry I sent my friend to come get you,” the woman said and made me jump right out of my skin. I wasn’t sure if the man could smile, but I swear that that thin bastard showed me a glimpse of teeth. Sure I was spooked, damn near scared to death, but I didn’t want someone like that grinning at me even in my best moments. “I was a little preoccupied with other business.”

She tossed one of the photographs down to me on the floor. It landed face up at my knees. On it, a new man lay on a concrete floor, a pained expression over his face. At least, the portion of his face that hadn’t been obscured with duct tape.

“The ticket agent?” I said.

“That’s right,” the woman said. She’d finished packing and hopped up to sit on her case while she buckled the clasps shut on either end. “He had to be punished, too. Just like that other man. And you.”

“Me?” I tried to stand and couldn’t. Not because the man’s power had come over me again, but because I simply lacked the strength “Punished? But, what did I do?”

“That’s funny,” she said and looked over at her friend. “Every single one of them say that.”

“What did I do?” I said again, and fought very hard not to start crying.

“Take a look around this room,” the woman said and waved a hand out to the world around her. “On the dead man’s body behind you, an empty money clip. Under the helpless girl who had no way home, the case you took from her. And that’s just the past few days. We guessed you’d lived a guilty life before we had the misfortune to meet you. And now that my friend has been in your head, we know exactly what sort of person you are. He’d heard your angry thoughts, your perversions, your demons you keep in a closet. He knows exactly who you’ve hurt and even why. Your most noble moments, shrouded in fear and self-doubt and, yes, guilt.”

“That’s not fair,” I said. “You can’t judge someone on what’s in their head. You can’t.”

“Why not,” came a voice from the walls around me like a warm liquid oozing from between molded boards. It immediately made me feel groggy. I had to place a hand on the carpet before me or risk collapsing. The man in the chair spoke again. “I have been within you, I have tasted your soul and listened to the whispers that hide inside your heart. It made me sick.”

I gasped for a breath, and I nearly didn’t find it.

“I’m not a bad person, everyone has bad thoughts,” I said. This time I couldn’t fight the tears. They re-traced the lines that were made when I’d gotten my body back. I hung my head.

“See, the thing about that is,” the woman said. I felt her hand on the back of my neck. “Most people fight off the occasional urge or ill thought. Your whole head if full of them. It’s almost as though the good thoughts are swimming in a pool of bad ones. And even those good ones aren’t that good.”

“Please,” I said.

“No,” the woman said. This time I could feel her friend smile, as though it were my smile, too. I felt him inside of me again. His hands bleeding into my hands, his eyes pushing into my sockets. I was forced onto my back, where I looked up at the woman. Her friend no longer sat in the chair, no longer belonged in the room. He’d found his way inside me.

In my last moments of control, I wriggled and writhed. It didn’t hurt. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Every bit of me that he filled, I lost feeling in. I licked my lips and tasted the salt from my tears. Then nothing. The woman took out her camera again. I had no control over my eyes and could not shield them from the flash.

They didn’t kill me. At least, I don’t think they did. Think is about all I can do these days. Living a half-existence isn’t so bad, really. I don’t have to taste what he makes my body eat since he’s taken my tongue. And I don’t have to see or hear anything if I recede into myself. Alone. The darkness is comforting, until the bad thoughts find me.

She looked at me, and I shivered.

Continued to shiver. It was damn cold on that beach. Everything about this made zero sense. Her eyes, I couldn’t see them, but I could feel them on me. She moved and I stood still. My muscles were locked, my brain was locked. I felt as though something had a grip on the back of my mind, and held me in place. I tried to tell myself it was fear, shock at seeing this woman again, or just the cold.

“You can feel him can’t you?” She was close enough now that I could see the moon sitting beside her pupils. “It’s almost like a burn. You can’t feel it until you know it’s there.”

I tried to move my hands, but they stayed by my sides.

“What’s happening?” It was all I could manage, and even then it came out as a slur.

“I can’t hear you over these waves,” she motioned at the ocean behind my back. “Let’s go back to your place.”

First my feet lifted, and set back down into the sand. Then my body leaned forward to pick up momentum. My arms swung casually at my sides. She grabbed my hand and held it as we walked back the way I’d come. I’d lost control.

Something aside from my own will had taken the strings, and I’d become a puppet. Its icy grip stung in my skull.

And still, one foot after the next. I new then that she wasn’t holding my hand. She was holding her friend’s. The person, thing, pulling my strings leading me back to the hotel room that had that man’s body in it.

I could barely think. If I started to struggle to hard the edges of my vision would start to turn white. All I could manage to do was watch as the beach moved past me. I had no power over my limbs. I couldn’t even feel the cold breeze on my cheeks anymore. I couldn’t hear the waves properly, as if someone had turned the volume down on the world. On my senses.

Eventually, we made it up the beach and to the hotel. As if from a mile away I heard my own voice greet and then thank the hostess at the front desk when she wished us a good night. Nothing out of the ordinary, just a couple coming in from a night out on the beach.

In the elevator I fought my hand as it raised to push the button that would bring us to my floor. There was no resistance shown in my physical form. I watched, horrified as my own hand carelessly, effortlessly pushed the button.

And we began to rise.

If my mind was still connected to my body, I’m sure my heart would’ve been racing in my chest. But the thing in my head even had control over that.

The doors opened to my floor. She walked with me to my room. And my own hand opened the door with the key from my pocket.

Inside, the man still lay on the floor. He hadn’t been moved. The money clip still sat on his stomach.

The rest of the room looked the same, too. All of her things sat on the bed. My feet took me into the room and my hand closed the door behind me, even though I willed them not to. The white fuzz edged into my vision and I tried to scream, tried to cry, but my body stood quite still. I couldn’t turn my head as I passed the mirror to see if my eyes were still my eyes.

She dropped my hand and when she did a weight left me. I instantly felt empty and I fell to my knees. Hot tears moved over my cheeks and into my mouth. I used my tongue to catch them. I ran my hands over my face, I felt my neck, my chest, my own thighs. With a huge effort I lifted my head.

She’d taken a seat on the bed beside her suitcase, already put most of her things back into it. I watched her methodology, and the appreciation she showed for each and every bit she got back. Even the sand-and-sea-water-ruined shirt she lovingly folded and tucked into the case.

Movement in the corner drew my attention. Someone else had joined us in my room. He sat in my desk chair with his legs crossed and a pen wiggled between his fingers. He looked unfriendly in a dangerous way and thin in an unhealthy way and he was staring right at me.

I decided to clear my head. At least, that’s what I thought I was doing. I looked back along the beach and saw my footprints in the sand as far back as I could see in the dark. Other people had walked on this beach, left their own footprints. Some had faded, others mingled with my own on their way to the water.

Ahead of me, the moonlight caught on some wind chimes that hung in the windows of little driftwood huts. You could rent one for the night, if you really wanted. I’d looked into it. Kept my options open, but hadn’t thought to much of the fact that an abnormally high tide could wash the shack, with me in it mind you, out to the horizon.

People come to the beach to walk all the time, with the intent to clear their heads with the sea air and chilly, ocean spray. But something was bugging me more than this salty mist could cure.

How did I get on this damn beach?

I’d been drunk in my hotel room. There was a dead man on the floor. The man from the picture I’d found in the girl’s suitcase. Then… what?

I picked up a shell. I had nothing else to do. My legs were tired and my bare arms burned, the hair on them matted to my cold skin. The ridges on the rough shell dug into the pad of my thumb. It hurt, but it felt nice in an odd way.

Suddenly I was blinded by a flash of white light. Then, just as the reddish hue had begun to fade from my vision, the light flashed again. At first I thought I’d stumbled upon a lighthouse, stupidly oblivious to the fact that it had turned its light on when the sun set. But then the noise behind the flash made sense. A snap followed by a rapid clicking.

I rubbed my eyes with numb fingers, managed to get the red out of the way this time. No third flash came after the clicking. I focused and found a silhouette before me, against the lights coming down from the balconies and hotel rooms lining the beach. Then I heard her laughing.

As laughs go, this one was fairly innocent. She’d gotten a kick out of momentarily blinding me. So I waved and walked over to her.

“Where did you come from?” I asked her.

“The train station,” she said and I might have heard a click again, this time in my own head.

“You’re the girl I bought the case from,” I said. I’d stopped about four feet down the beach from her. Her face was in shadow, but she looked familiar. She continued to wind the camera in her hand. “And you took my picture.”

“I want my case back,” she said and raised her camera for another picture. I raised my hand to protect my eyes from the flash, but I was too late. The spots bloomed in my vision.

“Can you knock that off?” I said.

“Sure,” she said, but I heard her thumb working away to wind the camera again.

“Look,” I said. “You can have the case back. I just want to know a couple of things.”

“You want to know who that man was in the picture,” she said. “And you want to know how you got to this beach.”

“I want-” I stammered. Lost for words I took a step backward instead. She didn’t move toward me. In fact, she hadn’t moved at all throughout the whole conversation except to wind her camera.

“I took the picture of that man,” she said. “I found him rooting around my kitchen one day looking for something expensive.”

“Then how the hell did he end up in my hotel room?” I said. My legs felt like cement.

“That was my friend,” she said. Fresh waves crashed behind us, closer than they’d been when we started talking.

“Your friend,” I said. “And was it ‘your friend’ who brought me out to this beach?”

“That’s right,” she said. “He helped me find you, then he helped you find us. He’s very good at finding people.”

Hours, maybe even days, later I sat at the hotel bar. The place was crowded, and I mean crowded. About ever damn seat was filled. Next to me on my right sat a tourist in a Hawaiian shirt. His hair had faded away to a couple of white poofs around his temples and he drank from a bent straw that stuck out of his pina colada like a periscope.

On my other side, a fat woman in an unflattering muumuu designed to make the sun itself look dim and drab.

I said the courteous hello when they each showed up, but made sure they knew that’s all they were getting from me.

I sat there and I drank. First a Malibu and coke, then a vodka cranberry. I didn’t know what the hell to drink. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing in that hotel bar. Hadn’t I been in my room?

Hadn’t I been looking at something?

“Another?” The bartender asked me. He looked like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, if Shaggy wore board shorts and an untucked polo shirt. I counted the dandruff flakes around the front of his collar as I shook my head and put my palm over the rim of my glass. No more for me, thanks.

I downed the last of the watery vodka and cranberry juice and looked behind me. I could almost make out a path through the throng of people grinding on the dance floor. I’d have to chance it.

I stood on uneasy feet. Wobbled, and caught myself on the shoulder of the fat woman.

“Sorry,” I said and looked at her forehead.

“That’s ok,” she said through a heavy giggle. “I came down tonight figuring one of these young men would end up groping me.”

She laughed then at her own drollery.

“What?” I looked into her eyes.

“I was hoping to get a little action from someone tonight,” she said and showed me her messy teeth.

“Right,” I stammered. Maybe I’d had more to drink than I thought. “Sorry again.”

I about faced and nearly ran into everyone on the dance floor on my way to the door.

In the quiet of the hotel hallway I could hear my head pounding. I looked down at my hands. A few of my knuckles were bruised and my middle finger had a black nail. I stuck my hands into my pockets, ashamed and worried someone might see the state of them, and headed off in the direction of my room. That’s when I felt something in my pocket. I pulled out what I thought at first was a folded piece of paper.

Turned out to be a photograph. It’d been folded in half twice. When I unfolded it, the picture of a man wearing a white wife-beater in a small, filthy kitchen had been divided into four quadrants. In the top left quadrant his ugly face had been caught in a snarl.

I walked down the hall and stared at the picture. Before I realized where I’d been walking, I found myself outside my room. My hand instinctively snuck into my back pocket and found the plastic card key. It took three tries, but the door eventually opened.

Inside a man lay on the floor. The man from the photograph. My new case still sat open on the bed, and all the woman’s clothing and even the other pictures were still there, where I’d set them before I stepped outside. The door to the balcony had been left open and the sea breeze came at me over the man’s body. It carried a heavy odor of fresh death. A sweet smell that complimented the sea air. I coughed trying to hold back vomit. His face looked almost the same, just as scrunched and pained. He had a button-up, silk t-shirt on over the wife-beater. I rummaged through the pockets on his jeans, found twenty-dollars in a money clip, but nothing else. I pocketed the twenty and dropped the clip on his belly. The hollow sound it made when it landed made my skin crawl. That and the fact that his eyes were still open, for Chrissakes.

I slept most of the way. Even so, every other bump in the track or abnormally large raindrop that smacked into the window of my compartment shook me from a deep sleep to a light doze. That’s probably why I was so tired when we wheeled into the station.

That’s probably why I forgot my luggage on the rack above my seat and had to go back onto the train after everyone else had cleared out.

My second disembarking carried less weight. I remember being more awake, more aware. Ironically, I did have my bag in my hand this time. I couldn’t remember what I’d packed. Couldn’t remember packing at all.

A few feet away from where I landed on the platform a conversation had been taking place. A young woman in a vest and tight jeans was holding some kind of grudge against what looked like a disgruntled ticket agent.

I drew closer because I’m nosy as fuck.

“I have to be on this train,” the woman said. Her blond hair had come out of the purple headband she wore about an inch above her forehead. A forehead currently wrinkled above angry eyes.

“The you should have bought a ticket this morning,” the ticket agent said. His hairless head glistened, wet with the rain. His portly belly tested the limits of the gold buttons down the front of his black uniform.

“I wasn’t here this morning,” she said, the emphasis all on the last word. That’s when I noticed her bag. A really lovely teal hard case with brown straps and a silver clasp. She’s cluttered it with stickers of flags and a collection of seemingly random stamps. During the argument she’d accidentally kicked it over. It lay on its side in a puddle. One of the stickers near the handle had begun to peal, but not due to the rain. It looked as though even the exposed underside of the sticker was aged.

The conversation came back into focus.

“Two-hundred dollars?” the woman shouted.

“That’s the cost for a last minute ticket,” the ticket agent said. He looked like he was trying very hard to be calm, though his cheeks were flushed.

“I don’t have two-hundred dollars,” the woman said. She’d been defeated. I could see it. Not by this conversation, not by anything in particular. This had been the culmination of a difficult few weeks, or even months. The poor dear.

“I do,” I said and I approached them.

“What did you say?” the ticket agent asked.

“I have two-hundred dollars,” I said again and set my own suitcase at my side where I stood beside them both.

“And you want a ticket, then?” the agent asked me. There are some people in this world who make you spell things out, even though you both know the answer.

“No, I want to buy your case.”

I looked pointedly at the suitcase beside the woman’s feet.

“You want to give me two-hundred dollars for a suitcase full of dirty clothes and a toothbrush?” the woman asked.

“I want to buy your case from you. I am prepared to go as high as two-fifty. That should get you home and a meal.” I felt generous.

The woman looked at her case. I felt the decision being made in her mind rather than getting to see it. When she looked from it back to me, I knew where we stood.

“Two-hundred and fifty, and I get to clear out my things,” she said.

“Two-hundred and fifty, and I take it as is,” I said.

Again she went back into her head. It took only slightly longer than it did for her to make her first decision.

“Fine,” she said. I opened my wallet and handed her five fifties. I took my new case, and my old case, and I walked away.

About an hour later I sat on the bed of my hotel room. I could hear the ice machine just down the hall through the thin walls and somewhere even farther down the hall an elevator chimed.

Next to me on the bed I’d laid out every item from the suitcase. Three shirts, all short sleeve. Two had been embroidered with a band’s name, and the third looked as though it had been worn when the girl had gone swimming at the beach. A pair of jeans with cherry Chapstick in the pocket. Five pairs of socks and three pair of panties.

And photographs.

The pictures looked as though they had been developed out of a very cheap disposable camera. Several of these were taken from various hotel rooms or tourist sites and showed only the woman from whom I’d bought the case.

A few others showed scenery that seemed less than spectacular. I was about to put the photos down when I found the last one in the stack. This photo contained neither scenery nor the woman. I stared at it in a somewhat shocked awe. The man in the photo wore a dirty wife-beater and appeared to be upset about his picture being taken, as he could be seen reaching for the camera. He stood in a kitchen that looked as though it belonged in a trainer from the 1970’s, complete with pealing, yellow wallpaper.

I let the other photos drop onto the bed, but I held onto the one of the man. I walked out to the balcony with it in my hand. Outside the rain had stopped, but only recently and no one had come out yet. I watched the clouds for a bit and spun tales in my head about who this man could be. After God knows how long, a knock at the door shook me from my brooding.