Dr. NoSleep

They could climb up the ladders and the drain pipes, up from balcony to balcony, and press their noses against the glass and see nothing.

He stood up and adjusted the plastic, cautiously peering out through the space between the opaque cover and the fly-stained glass.

There below was the road.

Blood cell cars clotting bumper to bumper on asphalt veins, vomiting exhaust and belching oil.

They crept along slowly, an inch every five minutes, and the snorting buses and semi-trucks rolled like lumbering brutes on the passing lane as much as they could, nearly plowing through the standstill if they merged a little too early.

The cloudless sky offered little protection from the sun, and the rays jabbed down like shimmering knives into the eyes and lungs of the crowd below.

It nearly made them vomit to see the public, that surging, shifty crowd half-naked in tank tops and jean shorts shuffling below, in and out, out and in, milling around the parking lot or wandering down the sun-scalded sidewalks, pretending they had a purpose in mind.

A woman, barely dressed in low shorts and a cut-off shirt, looked up in his general direction, and he recoiled, only just closing the shades before she could glimpse his face.

They were masters of disguise, he knew, and he knew this very well.

They were smart enough to hide among the populace, those drooling, slack-jawed apes.

But that was akin to a professor outsmarting an elementary school.

No, no, he had picked them out long ago, back as a young man, and for that, they hated him.

Since then, they'd taken on many forms to get to him, to seduce him and terrify him, sometimes in equal measure.

Last week, it had been the man walking up the block with the bag of letters, marked to him, no doubt, and each one laced in a toxin.

Anthrax?

Lye?

Should his bare skin touch the envelope?

The other day one of them, with the body of a snake and the head of a cockroach, had slithered down from the air vents and ranted to him in the voice of W.C.

Fields until he had suffocated it with a pillow.

And that wasn't getting into the heavy, thudding thing that nuzzled the door to the neighboring room and that slipped its spindly gray legs through the cracks like a proboscis.