15...

“What,” Frank mumbled.
The bell continued to ring despite Frank’s questioning. The fourth ring died off in the middle somewhere. The machinery inside the phone, shocked into inactivity, couldn’t help a little jittery sound. Frank listened to the room settle back into relative silence.
Voicemail. He wasn’t sure if he actually said that out loud, and frankly didn’t care. Somewhere, he was blessing the invention of voicemail as he tumbled back into the dark.
With the ringing of the bell, his eyes snapped open completely this time.
“Are you kidding me?” His tongue was still thick from sleep, he sounded a little drunk.
The phone again ignored all questioning and kept ringing out to the room. Frank could almost see it shaking like a cartoon with each brittle ring. Again, somewhere amid the fourth ring, the monster was snuffed out. God in voicemail yanking the call out of this life.
The imaginary voices he thought of speaking into the voicemail void became thicker and somewhat bluish, they whispered soothingly down a lengthening pass. They suddenly shifted to screams with the ringing of the phone.
“NO!”
Frank, for nobody’s benefit in particular, dramatically threw a pillow over his head in a halfhearted attempt to block out the sound. And yeah, the ringing now sounded like asylum laughter.
“Leave a voicemail!”
Again after the fourth ring, it stopped. Frank didn’t even bother to close his eyes this time. He held his breath and stared, listening to his heart beat, waiting. He could feel that dull anger throbbing in his head, and he was ready to pounce.
Silence, broken by the occasional sound of motorcycles on the street outside, held sway. Frank could feel sleep coming at him again, but he wasn’t quite ready to quit his watch on the phone. Three times, the magic number, the number of times the devil is asked before he enters. Of course, somebody tried three times and when they couldn’t reach somebody, they gave up.
“Quitters,” he mumbled as he slowly closed his eyes.
The telephone jumped to life again. Frank threw back the covers and ran his naked form to the telephone.
“Who the fuck is it?” he screamed into the receiver.
He heard nothing and we would swear on it that he could feel his eyes about to pop.
Then there was a low laughter that shut everything down.

14...

Bryan considered waking up Frank when he left for his run; it was going on eleven, and Frank got all out of sorts if he slept too late. But there was that test of facing a freshly waken Frank, he was liable to punch you in the balls before you even realized what was happening. Being he hadn’t seen him in almost two days, it was probably a good thing to go ahead and let him sleep it off.
He could hear the deep bass buzzing of Frank’s snoring as he walked past the bedroom and towards the back door. Opening the back door, Bryan took a deep breath of the morning city air. It was cooled from the fog the night before and the smell of damp grass came across from the park. The sky was one of those amazing blues that you had better take advantage of while it was still there. Bryan grabbed his left foot and held it back, stretching his leg.
“Shit yeah, what a beautiful morning.”
The cool breeze blowing in seemed to push him with a purpose towards the front door. He grabbed his walkman off of the kitchen table. As he opened the front door he thought once again of waking Frank.
“Fuck it,” was the piece of wisdom he left for the ages as he dramatically jogged out the front door.
For a moment you could hear a fuzzy Halo Benders song coming all tinny and small from Bryan’s walkman. Then you could hear the front door of the Victorian open and close. Then you could hear the near silent sounds of the house settling around itself.
Frank was in the void, somewhere else all together, and he probably would have remained there for a few more hours if the phone hadn’t suddenly begun ringing. It’s shrill tone forged cracks in the air, pushed onto Frank’s ear.
The void was broken, and Frank’s head swept slowly off the pillow, trailing a fragile bridge of drool.

13...

A thick shroud of fog poured in over the city from the ocean, carrying with it the faint smell of ghosts. When the sky hung that low, it threw back the city’s sodium arc lamps and bathed the streets in an orange glow like sickness, like bad memories.
Uncle Eddie charged the streets of the Mission without fear, the clicking of his low-healed boots a steady staccato as they bounced off the dirty walls. The few people wandering the sidewalks gave him room and forgot him as soon as they passed.
At the corner of 18th Street he stopped dead still. He stood there for a full minute and a half before removing his hat and holding it to his chest. He turned his face towards the cold mass that floated above and it would almost appear that he were trying to divine what this fog was made of if you didn’t notice that his pale eyes were closed. He stretched his neck out towards the hill and sniffed the air; quick, almost delicate pulls at first, then long intakes that made his body shake.
He dropped his head and smiled. His mouth seemed to hold far too many teeth.
As he turned away from Mission Street, walking his assured steps right up the filthy sidewalks of 18th, a cab driver roving the narrow streets of North Beach suddenly jerked the wheel to the right. His old time metal bumper made a quick mess of a Jetta’s rear panel and he nearly gave himself a neck injury quickly looking around for witnesses before squealing away.
Frank twitched in his twin bed, biting his lip with such sudden ferocity that he awoke with a cry. The lack of sleep caught up with him soon enough though and he was asleep again before noticing the blood running down his chin.
Somewhere near the corner of Turk and Van Ness, a mess of woman sat in the mess of her car and held herself, shaking. She glared out the caked windshield, focusing on nothing, her eyes suddenly narrowing. She punched the steering wheel. She punched it again with a banshee’s wail. She punched it again, chipping off a piece of decorative plastic and breaking her hand in four places.
And in a car speeding away from a mess and into the brilliant haze of the unknown, a girl sometimes known as Alexis suddenly burst into tears.