Mary Jane and her best friends, Julia and Annie, were now spies, on a secret mission, in the middle of the night.

They dressed the same, in all-black leggings, black shirts, and shoes, and brought flashlights. Annie picked them up in her car, much to Mary Jane’s dismay, because to Annie speed limits were speed suggestions.

Mary Jane stepped out of Annie’s car, knees shaking, in front of the first apartment building that she and Levi moved into when they arrived at Atlaan, wondering why she still got into a car with a woman who drove too fast.

Julia and Annie made small talk as they walked up into the apartment complex. The security code hadn’t changed in the past year, which was worrying, and they easily got inside, and up the elevator.

Mary Jane was nervous, her mind somewhere else, because the higher the elevator went, the more a feeling of unease set inside her body. It started from her shoulders, down to her stomach, and sat there, heavy, like a big meal.

A soft ding went off, the elevator doors opened, and Mary Jane didn’t know why, but something was wrong. She took one step into the hallway and looked at the floor. It looked so odd, the front of the elevator.

Someone had tried to fix the missing marble in front of the elevator, but the color wasn’t a perfect match. Julia and Annie were worried about her. She was staring at the patch of mismatched marble on the floor, darker than the grey marble of the rest of the hallway, walking around it, squatting down to touch it.

“MJ aren’t we here to break into your apartment or something,” Annie asked.

“Yeah but this is something important,” Mary Jane mumbled.

“This is just a very bad tile job,” Annie replied.

Mary Jane shook her head and was adamant that something important was there. She rubbed her hands on all the doorknobs leading up to her old apartment, and she was confused because wasn’t it supposed to be wet?

Wet with what?

Mary Jane stopped once in front of the door, and she balled her hands into tight fists, and grimaced, accidentally crushing her flashlight, bending the handle like aluminum foil. Annie gently placed her hand on her shoulder, and she flinched, turned, ready to fight, and then relaxed because nothing was wrong.

Yet something was.

“MJ, don’t worry. I can do this,” Julia said.

She went up to the door and knocked on it.

No one answered.

“Jules, we’re breaking in! Why the hell are you knocking on the door,” Annie said.

“Sorry,” she mumbled.

“What if no one is home? What if no one has been in here because of what happened,” Mary Jane asked.

“What happened inside,” Annie asked.

“I… I don’t know,” Mary Jane replied.

She dropped the crushed flashlight, grabbed the doorknob, and easily tore it off, committing a crime in the dead of night.

No one was home as Mary Jane had suspected.

The apartment had been left untouched since the day she and Levi had left it.

A strange smell exuded from the refrigerator, and a thin layer of dust was over most of the electronics. Shards of glass crinkled underneath their feet as they tried to walk over the carpet, and Mary Jane took Julia’s hand because something was telling her to run.

The wall-length windows were covered up with black trash bags, and when they turned their flashlights over the living room carpet they gasped. There was a large, bloody stain, a lot of mold, and some bones, and they covered their mouths because there was a very familiar white tuft of hair.

“MJ, why did you bring us here, ” Annie shouted.

“I thought that Levi was lying about why we had to leave the first apartment,” Mary Jane replied. “ I was right. Oh, fuck. ”

“His hair is mixed in with all the… the stuff, ” Annie whimpered. “Can we leave?”

“I wanna go, but I want to know. I am so tired of him lying to me,” Mary Jane said.

Julia and Annie hugged her, Mary Jane dropped a few tears, and then she steeled herself because she was going to finish it. She was afraid, but Julia gripped her hand tighter, and they made their way down the hallway.

They shuddered, blood streaked across the wall, and the bedroom door was left, wide open, the same as the day they had left.

“What did he tell you when you left,” Annie asked.

“He said when that creepy fire monster came, it destroyed our apartment, while we were at the beach. I was drunk, so I didn’t remember. That was a fucking lie, ” Mary Jane spat.

“You think he killed someone,” Julia asked.

“No way, wouldn’t he just get his daddy to take care of it,” Annie replied.

“Yeah. He would,” Mary Jane replied. “So they must have taken care of it, and this is...the leftovers…”

Annie moved to go into the bedroom, and so did Julia, but Mary Jane hesitated, something was telling her not to go inside. Julia and Annie told her it was okay, that they would protect her from him, but Mary Jane didn’t know what she was afraid of.

“I can’t go inside,” Mary Jane said. “I just can’t.”

So she stood, alone, in the dark hallway until they screamed, and her curiosity got the better of her.

Inside the bedroom, the ill-decorated bedroom they took the time to make just theirs, she saw the remains of her husband, his cracked, split skull, his white hair, the entire room covered in blood and mold and they looked at each other, the corpse, and left.

They didn’t say anything until inside the car, and the first person to speak was Annie.

“ What the ever-loving fuck was that, ” Annie hissed. “That was him! Who else do we know is that tall, and has white hair!”

“That could be any corpse,” Mary Jane mumbled.

“We don’t know a lot of albinos,” Annie shouted. “Even if it wasn’t him, there are corpses inside your old apartment!”

“We can just pretend we saw nothing,” Julia suggested.

They both looked at her, and it was a very appealing idea, to pretend that they had seen nothing. Who would they tell? Who would believe them? What could they even do?

Mary Jane didn’t want to pretend she saw nothing, because something happened, and pretending like nothing was wrong was what made her where she was now; in a strained marriage.

“Can I stay at your place a little longer Julia,” Mary Jane asked.

“You can stay as long as you want,” Julia said with a smile.

On the drive back to Julia’s apartment, Mary Jane said that she wasn’t going to pretend as if nothing happened, but she wasn’t going to leave Levi, which confused both of her friends.

“Aren’t you afraid he’s going to eat you or something,” Annie asked.

“He’s a ghost. An angry ghost. We saw his corpse in the apartment,” Julia said. “You have to leave him.”

“No, see, I’m going to find out what he’s lying about. Then I’m going to take Acheus’s head, stick it up Levi’s ass, and then I’m leaving him, ” Mary Jane declared.

“You need to stay away from that man. I told you he’s crazy, ” Annie said.

She turned a final corner, parked in the visitor’s space in front of Julia’s non-descript apartment, and turned to look at Mary Jane who had such a dour look on her face because she was holding back tears.

“I’m going to find out everything. There has to be more, I know it. ”