Please allow me to introduce myself.

I am a man of wealth and taste. And I have a story to tell you. It may be the most important story never told. But this story is different from what you may think you know about the world around you.

My part in all of this is as a relative spectator. Of course, I had the honor of being involved in this epic journey. But to say that this story is only about me would be to take away from how it actually happened, and the brave men involved.

How we all got to this point.

You are living in trying times. An age where information travels faster and farther than our ability to understand it. An age that has taken us all by storm, under the guise of bringing the world together . . . but all the while separating us from each other. Hiding behind the anonymity that technology has granted Humanity, people are now farther apart than at any point in human history.

Personal connection and intimacy has been gleefully traded for efficiency. What was once becoming a global community is now a daisy chain of hubs and nodes . . . no longer needing the human contingent. A society of individuals. Lonely as a dead planet floating through space.

This world of yours, is a community of silent, hidden monsters. Some of them you see on television, some of them you read about in small, smudged print. But these are only a tiny portion of the creatures that lurk in and out of the shadows.

This story . . . this is about the monsters.

The monsters you don't know. The ones that may be nearer to you than you think. The kind of beasts that linger in the back of our nightmares, waving at us from the darkness, waiting for a chance to swim up to the surface, and do their bidding.

This is their story.

Our story.

DALLAS, TEXAS.

IT WAS ALMOST completely pitch—black in the claustrophobic stairwell. It was like being stuffed in somebody's basement, not knowing if they would ever come back to open the door. It was the kind of place that monsters dwelled in when they were hungry, just patiently filing their teeth down as they stalked around.

Shadows in the dark.

The half dead trying to die.

"I'm the only one lifting!" Pete barked as sweat started to form on his brow. His dirty blond hair was pulled into a pony—tail, tucked between the nape of his neck and his t—shirt. A blue baseball cap—turned around backwards—was seated firmly on his head. His jaw was wide and sculpted as if it had been carved out of stone. Narrow pale blue eyes were sunk deep beneath his etched forehead.

Depending on who you were, Pete's eyes would put you at ease, or send a cold shiver down your spine.

There were faded, yellow lights—struggling against both time and nature—to emit weak particles of withered light. Probably a complete waste of electrons because nobody in their right mind would be lingering around in the stairwell of the Red Top Inn, especially at this time of the night. It wasn't one of those places that you went when the sun was gone.

"You're not the only one lifting, it's just that you are on the bottom," Brent said as he, himself, struggled with his end of the body. It was ungainly. Picture a short, tanned Vladamir Lenin, with beady, curious brown eyes.

The Red Top Inn, located in Dallas' seedier south side, was a haunt for all things despicable and vulgar among men. It was only a stone's throw away from the Trinity River—comparable to the Hudson River in its near Chernobyl levels of contamination—and surrounded by everything that epitomizes moral and societal decay.

There were girls and boys, both young and old, both sterile and disease ridden, willing to part with their bodies for a few dollars. For those few coins they would offer themselves up for any manner of sexually depraved services.

The dirty parts of our life that we all agree not to mention.

Private and ugly.

Life's dirty little toilet.

All the legitimate shops had closed up hours ago, and they bore the signature signs of such an environment—rusted iron bars from the cold floor to the decaying ceiling. You could almost hear the echoes,

"Keep out!"

"You're not welcome here!"

Or most likely, something like, "Get out of here or I'm going to call the fucking cops!"

Accenting the area were the myriad adult bookstores, although very few of these neon—lit bastions offered anything that could even loosely be considered 'literature.'

"We should probably keep our voices down, fellas," Jay pointed out quietly. "I don't feel like explaining what we're doing to some inquisitive whore who just got finished servicing some Walmart Manager."

Both Jay and Brent were supporting their arms as they backed their way up the stairs. It was like moving furniture.

Dead human furniture.

Pete, the biggest of the three of them, was holding a bloated, fat, cankle in his hand. What's a cankle? That's the part of the leg where the calf and the ankle melt together with no visual delineation between them. It could be the result of a medical condition, perhaps a hypo—active thyroid or some other such genetic curiosity. But more likely, the guy had spent 22 hours a day pounding donuts, yum—yums, and other sugarcoated bullshit down his gullet. Hence, the big, pasty, white, gooey cankles that Pete was struggling to keep a grasp of.

"Hold on for a second," Pete said through clenched teeth as he tried to readjust his grip. He was starting to get extremely frustrated. "Fucking fat mother—fucker!" he hissed under his breath.

He curled his forearms under the dead man's cankles, burying the lifeless bluish—gray feet under Pete's. "Explain to me how a dead body can sweat? Really . . . what's the science behind that?" He clenched his arms tightly, establishing a better grip. "Okay, I'm good."

The three of them began to move up towards the last flight of stairs that led to the roof access door.

"Smells like piss in here," Brent said as he whiffed the burning stench of the stairwell deep into his lungs. "It's got a little burn to it."

"It's more like a mixture of things. Ammonia, Pine—Sol cleaner, decomposing paint, and a kind of . . . ah, ambient odor of, like, human copulation," Jay professed. Picture an athlete trying desperately to hold onto his youth. Dark brown eyes, thick neck, and a thin frame. His brown hair was cut short, with sprigs of gray migrating slowly.

Though it was dark, and they could barely see each other, Brent and Pete stared across the cumbersome, necrotic corpse.

"Piss!" they both said in unison.

Jay shrugged as Pete and Brent shared a schoolboy giggle. As far as Jay was concerned, Pete was more than a bit gruff on the outside, possibly bordering on uncouth. He was cut from middle—class, working stock, so it couldn't be held completely against him. But he liked Pete's brutal honesty.

Jay had run a successful psychology practice in Austin, Texas, and sheer luck had forced him into early retirement. Well, sheer luck, an addiction to psycho—pharmaceuticals, and a Medicare—Fraud indictment.

He was a cerebral man, often consumed with the categorization and classification of everything and everyone in his environment. Perhaps psychologically 'complex' is a more fitting term. He was his own jigsaw puzzle.

"What you two village idiots are smelling could easily be mistaken for urine, but it has much too fruity and metallic an aroma."

"Like you're a goddamn piss connoisseur, or something," Brent hissed. "And anyway, people eat fruit . . . even poor people," he said as he steadied himself halfway between steps.

"Especially poor people," Pete added.

"So why wouldn't their piss smell like fruit?" Brent posed, like a true officer of the court. He wasn't really concerned with the subject matter of the conversation, he just wanted to argue about something. He was still licensed to practice law in Kentucky, and at the Federal level. Even in the Supreme Court, he would not hesitate to remind you

Although, he would admit that there was, most likely, a dusty disbarment notice taped to the door of his condo in Colorado, along with all the other mail he'd never get to read

.

Why wasn't he ever going home? Because he claimed that his house was haunted ever since he had started getting visions. Something to do with screaming children in the attic, and eyes that would appear outside the kitchen window at 3 am. It was hard to ever get the whole story out of him. But something happened that sent him off the edge of sanity, and that's all anyone other than Brent knew.

He saw things differently than other people did.

"It doesn't work like that," Jay explained in the tone one uses if teaching a first—grade class something like coloring with crayons. Jay turned his head up and squinted, "One more flight of stairs and we're there."

We are who we think other people think we are. We all become pieces of dead human furniture, wilted and abused. Discarded for convenience. Our impressions of ourselves come from the echoes of how we imagine other people to perceive us.

"Why doesn't it work that way?" Pete asked as he stabilized the lower half of the body.

Jay sighed audibly, as if explaining this was so rudimentary and beneath him that he would rather pull out all of his fingernails with a pair of rusty old pliers. He actually glanced down at his fingers for a moment. "In your kidneys," he started, "Water and other useful blood components, like glucose—that's sugar—"

"I know what fucking glucose is!" Pete reminded him in his own eloquent way.

"Right," Jay continued, ". . . So, glucose, water, amino acids, and other nutrients too, all of these things are reabsorbed into the bloodstream and the by—product is a kind of concentrated waste material called 'final', or . . . ah, bladder urine."

He paused to let his students process the information.

"And?" Brent pressed as they struggled up the stairs.

"Well, urine consists of water, urea—which is from amino acid metabolism—creatinine, some organic salts," Jay thought for a moment, "Urochrome—which is what gives urine that yellowish color—and . . . drum—roll, please . . . ammonia."

Jay cleared his throat and continued, "But, what we are smelling," he reached his left hand out in the darkness to feel for a lever or door handle, " . . . is hints of ammonia in the cleaning chemicals, so our mind just jumps, assuming the worst."

"Bla, bla, bla, it smells like piss," Brent admonished. "And I could find you at least a few jurors who would back me on that. Perception is reality."

"That's not enough to convict, though," Pete said.

"I'm a defense attorney," Brent shot back. "I don't need twelve jurors. I only need one for a mistrial. Just one impressionable mind."

The door screeched open a few inches as Jay leaned against it. A shaft of brightness from the Dallas night poured in like fingers from God, illuminating all sorts of cancer causing dust in the air.

Brent thought about all the neon that goes into making all of those 'XXX' signs. Where in the hell do they get all of that? Cavemen would probably shit their pants if they saw all of this stuff we take for granted.

"Open the door, goddammit!" Brent said between grunts. "We need to hurry." He was struggling for breath. His tanned, cleanly shaved head was glistening from the combination of sweat, and the unseasonably high humidity level of the Texas night. Made even stranger because it was December.

What is wrong with Texas . . . don't they have seasons?

"Why hurry?" Pete asked sarcastically as he tightened his grip on Harold's legs. "It's not like you guys are doing anything, anyway. I'm carrying all the weight."

In the strange mixture of colored light and odd shadows, Pete looked a lot like one of those old Viking warriors that you might see in bad movies.

The veins on Brent's neck and forehead were thick and protruding as if they were actually worms crawling across his face and body. They were made even more surreal by the strange lights and relative moisture floating through the air. He looked a lot like a zombie from those European villages that are always getting damned. Strained, he said, "I'm about to drop this slippery piece of shit."

"Have some respect for the dead," Pete said calmly.

"Fuck you!" Brent spat back. "I didn't choose this fat mother fucker . . . asshole doorknob expert over here did. What is the problem with that fucking door, anyway?"

"I'm doing my best," Jay said, as he slammed his hips and backside into the door to open it further. "This door hasn't been opened since the Reagan administration." Every time his butt smashed against the thick door it would open an inch or two with a loud, terrible screech—like geese getting stepped on by golf cleats. And with each agonizing inch more psychedelic light would shine in on them, drenching the stairwell in geometric shapes and forms.

A carnival ride in Hell.

It would have seemed that having two able—bodied men supporting the upper half of the obese man's body would have been more than sufficient . . . but, Harold was simply not cooperating.

A deficit of sorts was being created as Jay was attacking the rusted old door with the backside of his Dockers.

Brent was now forced to support nearly all of Harold's bulk, and it had driven the once prominent defense attorney to a point of near collapse.

The former Houston—based attorney had led an odd life, split between representing the underbelly of society, for next to nothing, and taking on high—profile clients that no attorney in their right mind would represent. Brent's theory was that: good or bad, everyone deserves an attorney who won't bend over and let the prosecutors break it off in their ass. 'Public Pretenders' was his term of endearment for the habitually lazy and consistently ineffective lawyers that worked for the public defender's office.

So, against his colleagues' advisements, he would take on the bad ones. Serial killers, mafia gangsters, corrupt politicians—one and the same, really.

There's an old saying that goes something like, 'Hang out with the Devil long enough and you'll start to grow horns.'

Brent wouldn't be what you would consider a 'physical specimen' in any athletic sense, and the weight of Harold was pulling at him in ways he could no longer bear. Gravity was taunting him with slippery, salty, sweaty tugs.

"A couple more steps," Pete offered like a high school football coach motivating his team. "Don't quit on us, now."

"Ahhh, shit!" Brent grunted. "He's going down." He turned his head, "Jay, are you going to open that fucking door?"

"Door's open."