This is not the best part of town, yet my trail has led me here.

I’ve been on the trail of my mother’s cat, Everett. He went missing five weeks ago and at first we feared the worst – his crushed body on the street or in the yard of the Rottweiler down the street – but Mother insisted on putting up a poster and soon reports started rolling in.

Our theory is that Everett’s new veterinarian-prescribed low fat diet sent the amiable but undeniably gluttonous feline on a search for better eats.

A woman two blocks over took him in; she said she thought he was a stray. Yeah, sure, a 16 pound perfectly groomed stray. He stayed with her only one day. She said that he never developed a taste for the vegan cat food that her two tabbies ‘adore.’

Three days later he was sighted in the elementary school yard where he benefited from innumerable tuna fish sandwiches the children seemed happy to donate to his cause until the principal put the run on him.

We had to widen our poster campaign to pick up his trail after that because it turns out he hitched a ride with the woman who delivers early morning newspapers. She was certain he resembled a cat missing in her neighbourhood. Everett is so car-phobic that she didn’t really get a good look at him – not enough to know he was a ‘him.’ One minute she was holding a purring affectionate pussycat, then she slipped him into her car and he turned into a yowling furry pinball rocketing around until she’d driven him to her neighbour’s house. When she opened the door, he shot out and hid in some bushes. She woke her neighbour who took one look and declared, “No, that’s not our Pusskins,” and went back to bed.

Everett meanwhile slunk away, no doubt afraid another car ride was in the offing. He stayed on that block four days, each day taken in and fed (usually cans of human-intended salmon or tuna, once he got canned shrimp) by someone who thought he was Pusskins. Then they’d kick him out, each and every one with the apology to me that he seemed well-fed so they thought he’d find his own way home.

An old widower on the next block was Everett’s next port of call. The man had every intention of taking him to the animal shelter, but the girl who comes in to cut his toenails told him that they euthanise most of the cats and dogs, so he followed her suggestion that she take the cat to live in the factory downtown where her mother sews knock-off handbags in an attic room with 30 or 40 other women. The place is plagued with rats, so they figured a cat would be a good idea.

And so it might be, but not Everett. He’s afraid of mice. A rat would be his worst nightmare. He spent one night in the sweat shop and bolted out the door when they arrived at 5 a.m.

And now he was downtown.

And soon he was in the area of flop houses and soup kitchens, pawn shops and back alley drug deals. So I’m here too.

The people here call him ‘Boss.’ He’s been here less than two weeks, but everyone seems to know and love him. They boast about finding tasty tidbits for him in dumpsters, the ones who sleep on the street try to tempt him to sleep under their blanket and share his warmth and gentleness with them.

“Angie, she loves him best,” a social worker told me. “She really shouldn’t be on the street. She’s a 22 year old schizophrenic, pregnant with her third child. She’s such an addict, they took the first two away from her pretty much at birth. I’ve never seen her as calm and, well, normal as she is with that cat. She came by and asked if I could get her a new prescription for her meds – she’s afraid she’ll have an incident and…”

“And what?”

“She said she was afraid she’d lose that cat’s respect.”

I watched as the social worker brought a meal to Angie from the soup kitchen (no pets allowed inside). I watched her eat and share her food with Everett aka Boss.

“I found a room for her where the cat will be allowed,” she told me, and gave me a look.

Mother still has Pablo and Essie. I wonder if I can convince her to do without Everett.

StoryADay’s challenge to us today was to write a story about a quest.

After seven years on his own, the hermit came into town but there was no one there.

The doors hung open, sagging on their hinges, the walls had lost their angles, the windows were blinded by tiny pits from the eternally-blowing sand.

The hermit walked into the first house he arrived at. There were bowls on the table, each with a dry wizened mess in the bottom. There were leathery dead people on the chairs at the table, their clothing in rags and their bones poking through their desiccated skin.

The hermit walked out of that house and along the street toward the centre of the town. He didn’t go into any more houses. The wind made shushing sounds as it siphoned fine sand from one place to another. The wind made creaky metallic sounds as it worried at the ragged edges of the houses.

Dear Readers – this is just part of a story. One of the problematic aspects of Story 365 is that many of the markets to which I usually submit stories will not accept previously published stories. Stories on my blog are considered to be previously published.

StoryADay gave us the assignment today to write about a loner, and I had the first line in my head all day. I’m quite pleased with the story that resulted, and it’s a little longer than many of my stories, so I’m giving you just the first few paragraphs and I’m going to submit it to Daily Science Fiction. I’ll let you know how it is received.

Meanwhile, if any of you want the entire story, I’d be happy to email it to you, as that is not considered to be publication. Just leave a comment with your address.

Allie darted through the woods, as fast as she could go. Dusk was descending, making shadows stretch across the path, as solid-seeming as fallen branches. She leapt over each one. She could not afford to trip.

The Undead were close behind her. She didn’t dare look, but she could hear their panting breath, smell their sweat. Their thudding footsteps pounded, as once her heart had pounded when she was one of them. Undead.

But now she was one of the Dead. And the Undead feared and hated her and tried to drive her from their midst.

This was not what she’d expected being dead to be like. She thought she’d be someplace else, or no place at all, or if still around, at least insubstantial. But she still had her body and it worked the way it always had, except that she couldn’t hear her heart beat and she didn’t seem to need to eat.

She didn’t think she looked all gross like a zombie, but she hadn’t had a chance to look in a mirror. Her hands, her feet, her torso – they all looked fine to her, the brief glances she’d had of them ever since she’d found herself lying in the ditch in broad daylight, in the very spot she remembered flying from her car after hitting that moose. There was no sign of her car, so she’d started walking toward town, only to have a carload of kids – kids she went to school with – stop and scream and throw rocks at her.

They threw wadded up pieces of paper too and yelled, “Go back to the graveyard!” Then they drove away.

Allie didn’t remember being at the graveyard, but the paper turned out to be a funeral notice. Her own funeral notice. And it said she was to be buried at Hilltop Cemetery.

So she headed there, and found a field of yawning holes. No wonder people were upset. Had all the dead come back to life?

She heard a commotion in the trees at the edge of the graveyard and saw a group of people beating something with sticks and shovels and baseball bats. Then someone shouted, “There’s another one!”

She ducked down, certain that they meant her, but they stampeded toward an old woman walking slowly along in the older part of the cemetery, weeping. Allie recognized her as a retired teacher from the high school who had died the year before.

Aside from her clothes, which were too dressy for anything but a party and a bit dirty, and her lack of shoes, Mrs. Gladstone looked exactly like the living. At that moment, Allie realized that she too was wearing one of her nicest dresses, not what she’d been wearing when she hit the moose, and no shoes.

She ran out of the graveyard, noticing the limp body which had been pummelled by the mob. It was a young boy who’d been killed on the train track when Allie was in junior high. There was no blood, but Allie was pretty sure he was now deader than dead.

She didn’t want to be dead again.

If she could find some shoes and make her way to another town where no one knew her to be among the deceased, she might be able to stay alive long enough to understand what was going on.

She’d felt a sense of freedom when she smashed the window of the shoe store and grabbed a pair of Nikes. I’m dead, she thought, I can do whatever I want.

But now, wearing the running shoes and running for her refound life, Allie doesn’t feel free, she feels desperate, and hunted. This is the third town she’s tried to infiltrate, but the Undead don’t trust anyone.

And then it happens – she trips. Her feet fly out behind her and the ground rushes toward her face, then a hand grabs her upper arm and a running figure yanks her along beside him.

“Keep running!” he shouts. “My friends will be here soon and we’ll chase those Undead back to their town. What were you doing, trying to stay in that town anyway?”

She gasps out, “I didn’t want to be alone.”

He pulls her down beside a stone wall. She can hear the Undead shout as a large group of the Dead come pounding toward them. Her rescuer says, “Alone? There’s more of us than them. You’ve got friends forever, girl.”

Today’s assignment was to write about someone fleeing something.

He’s so handsome with his little horns.

And he’s polished his hooves and put on his best jacket. His hair and beard are neatly combed. The corsage for his date is in his pocket.

My son, the goat boy, ready for his prom. And favouring me with a mild look, not quite a smile, but not a glare.

These last few years haven’t been easy. We thought things were bad when he was a baby. All the publicity, the outcry when we refused surgery, his first day of kindergarten and the way the other children mocked him. But puberty has been a whole new ball game.

Probably all parents of teenagers go through something like this. Probably we’re kidding ourselves (pun inevitable) that our experience is the worst possible.

Sometimes I wish the other children at school still ostracized him, instead of this popularity he has now. Of course, he’s not the only hybrid human any longer – he’s just the first.

No one believes us when we say that all we were trying to do was fiddle with the human digestive system a little, biohack a way for us to be able to eat more things, ideally to eat our own garbage instead of filling the land with landfills. I didn’t know I was pregnant. I certainly didn’t know the modification would affect my son the way it did.

Billy (we didn’t name him that – we named him Bradley – he chose that for himself) lost his driving license last week and he says he’d be mortified to have us drive him, so Ashleigh, his date, is picking him up in her car.

And here she is and the few moments of unaccustomed peace in our house end as he yells across the yard “I’ll be right out, Ash!” and turns to us with a scowl, “I suppose you think that even tonight I should come home by a certain time.”

“No, son,” my husband says, “You go out and have a good time. This is a special night for you and we’re really proud of you for graduating.”

“Surprised you, hey?” he says, hovering in the doorway. “Maybe you should have been tinkering with a way to make people smarter all those years ago instead of aiming for a human trash compactor.”

He’s off then, trotting across the yard, and I am filled with so much love for him. He never shows us how much his differences have brought him pain. He always seems to revel in his individuality. I’ll cherish this night for many reasons, but most of all for this rare moment of candor.

I wasn’t able to get on the internet earlier today, and so I wasn’t able to find out StoryADay’s prompt, therefore I didn’t have a chance to think about it prior to logging on this evening and discovering I was to write a love story. And I totally went blank on it. Then I looked out the window and saw a deer stroll by in the pasture, with short little horns. So I wrote the first line and carried on from there. And I was able to put in something about biohacking, which I heard about on CBC this morning and thought would work well in a story.

In the beginning there were two tribes of men – short, fast men and large, slow men. But they did not live at peace with each other.

The short, fast men were always thinking of new ways to catch animals to eat but the large, slow men would just wander into their camp and take what they wanted. They would leave pretty stones in exchange for the meat and berries that they took, but what good were pretty stones?

Sometimes, if all the short, fast men were off chasing animals and the large, slow men came into the camp and the women were struggling to carry water in baskets or reach fruit down from the tall trees, the large, slow men would help them, but this only made the short, fast men angry. They did not like the idea of the large, slow men spending time with their women and doing jobs the women ought to be doing themselves.

The large, slow men built sturdy woven houses out of large leaves and vines. The women of the short, fast men saw these woven houses one time when they were foraging far from the camp and soon they began to clamour for their men to build such fine houses for them. But the short, fast men had no free time left after chasing down animals and lying around the fire while they ate, so they refused to build woven houses. Caves and depressions in the dirt were good enough for them.

The large, slow men collected snail shells from the lake and made small holes in them and strung them together on vines and wore them around their neck. When they came by the camp of the short, fast men to take food, the women pointed to these strings of shells and indicated that they wanted to have them in exchange for the meat and berries. So they had strings of shells around their necks when their men returned from hunting. And the short, fast men were angered.

The men threw the bodies of the animals they had killed to the ground and the women skinned and gutted the animals and threw the meat into the fire. While the men ate their meat, the women danced and the shells made a pleasing sound but still the men were angered by the large, slow men.

As the night descended, the men’s stomachs were full of meat and they allowed the women to eat and when the women’s stomachs were full, they threw the scraps to the bold wolves who hovered just outside the perimeter of the fire’s flickering light.

“How can we stop the large, slow men from coming into our camp while we are off chasing animals?” one of the men asked.

They asked this question of each other every night, but not one of them ever had an answer.

However, on this night, the youngest of the short, fast men, who only recently had been a boy to be left behind in the camp and not invited on the hunt, answered the question.

“I think the large, slow men are afraid of wolves. I saw them running once, when wolves were chasing them.”

“You saw the large, slow men running?” The other short, fast men were very surprised by this.

“We should make the wolves stay here during the day so that the large, slow men will be afraid to come into our camp.”

“But how can we make the wolves stay here?”

The young man answered, “We must give them more meat and make them come close to us to take the meat right from our hands. And when they are no longer afraid of us, we should put a vine around their necks and bind them to a tree near our camp.”

And this is how Brother Wolf became Brother Dog, and how the short, fast men overcame the large, slow men who vanished from the face of the earth and were never seen again.

StoryADay suggested that we write a fairy tale today. I wrote a fable inspired by a headline about dogs helping homo sapiens overcome the neandrethals.

I took a wrong turn and ended up in the Get-O, surrounded by Get&Fetchits.

Or, to be more politically correct, surrounded by Digicerians. But who calls them that?

I’d been around them before, but usually at a distance. In an eatery, for example, where they would be wearing aprons and clearing tables, or at some wealthy person’s estate where they would be wearing coveralls and raking up leaves.

I’d never been afraid of them before, but I was now. For one thing, they were naked. I should have expected this. I know they wear clothing for our sensibilities, not for theirs. Their home planet is quite cold, so they find our preferred temperature oppressive.

For another thing, they seemed taller. I realized that they are always slumped when serving us, and I guess I’d thought that was their regular posture, but in their part of the city, they stood much straighter. In fact, most of them were taller than I am.

They didn’t act threatening toward me, but they bunched together and jabbered in their strange-sounding language and looked at me with their odd eyes and I couldn’t help but recall the circumstance of their being among us.

The first intelligent species we encountered when we began to colonize other planets, and we destroyed their home world. It’s no excuse that we didn’t know they were there, that we didn’t know harvesting oxygen would destabilize the atmosphere; we turned a green forest world into an airless wasteland. And so we brought them to live on our planets.

Our biggest fear when we set forth into the universe was that we’d meet a race superior to us. Some hoped such advanced beings would elevate us, but most expected them to despise us and enslave us. And now we have done that to the Digecerians. That we’ve done it more through accident than intent does not excuse it.

And coming face-to-face with them in the Get-O, confronting my fear which arose from my guilt and not from their loud outcries which might have been anger, I ultimately felt sorry for them. They were in the wrong place through no fault of their own, and no right place for them existed among the known planets. We had ruined the world they call Earth in their tongue, and halted the progress which may have brought them a future as bright in knowledge and technology as our own.

StoryADay gave us the suggestion to write about someone in the wrong place at the wrong time.

All she wanted to do was stop walking.

“No, Mom,” her son said, pulling her by the wrist. “We have to keep walking.”

They’d spent half an hour deciding what to take, twenty minutes driving until the highway snarled into a standstill, another five minutes deciding what to carry, and now they’d been walking for five hours. The only ones who’d stopped walking were the very old or the sick. No one else felt they were far enough away to be safe.

Safe from what she didn’t know, nor did anyone else. There had been explosions, that was undeniable. There were planes in the sky. The power had gone off, halting the radio announcements of ‘possible terrorist activities’ and ‘potential contamination of the water system.” She hadn’t seen anything that looked like the mushroom cloud she associated with a nuclear bomb, but some people walking near them had spoken of ‘suitcase bombs’ and ‘dirty bombs’ which might not make such a huge blast but were just as dangerous, maybe more.

She remembers when people had bomb shelters. Downtown there are still some buildings with the radiation sign indicating that a safe haven is found someplace within, presumably in the basement or subway. But out in the suburbs, the only potential safety was found in distance.

She stopped walking. “I’m tired and really thirsty,” she told her son. They had finished the water they were carrying over an hour ago.

“Just wait a minute.”

He tried the doors of several of the nearby abandoned cars, finding them all locked, just as they’d left their car locked, as if the world was still a place where people had possessions they protected. He found a rock beside the highway and hurled it through a window, then reached inside and grabbed one of the bottles of water those strangers had planned to take with them as they drove to their sanctuary.

She drank and after that, her son expected her to start walking again. She did, thinking sourly that ‘I’m tired,’ had been the first and most important fact she spoken.

They walked through the night, taking only short breaks which were not restful due to the constant speculation fermenting among their fellow travellers. Some imagined that they felt ill with symptoms of radiation poisoning, others fretted that it was all a hoax perpetrated by master thieves who were even now stripping entire neighbourhoods of all their valuables, others spoke of strategic targets in the direction they were moving, proclaiming that no place was free of whatever contamination had been visited upon them.

They took food from cars, they took water. When the night became cold, they took blankets and sweaters. Her son broke the window of one car and opened a pet carrier to set a small dog free. She couldn’t imagine why the owners had left it in there.

And still they walked.

Her son walked and every hour he tried his cell phone again, but there was no signal.

Dawn was a faint blush behind them, studded with bright explosions as the night had been, when she told him she would not go one step further. He allowed her to rest, sleeping fitfully in the front seat of a truck which had been left unlocked. After a time which seemed very brief to her, he returned with a cane.

“Surely someone didn’t leave their cane in their vehicle,” she told him.

“No, they didn’t,” he replied, and wouldn’t discuss it further. “We have to get to Aunt Sally’s house. It’s an older house and I think it has a bomb shelter.”

She thought it actually was a root cellar, but she said nothing. It was a goal. When they got there, she could stop walking.

StoryADay suggested today that we write a story in which the protagonist wants something. The long hike I took today was inspiration, though hardly a forced march.

Click.

I woke up.

I was with many others of my kind, moving. Each one experienced the click, the final piece and each one woke, each one found itself travelling in a single direction, but we knew not where.

We moved to darkness, shut into a coffin tailored for our shape, woken and put into limbo from one moment to the next.

When next I woke, the others were not with me, but others of similar shapes and others of different shapes but similar intentions surrounded me, some in glass cases, some attached to walls. It was bright and noisy.

I was taken from my box and handled by shapes complementary to my shape, but not like me, not hard and deadly but soft and vulnerable. I understood that my purpose was to protect them.

I was taken from my box and handled, then returned to my box, taken out again, returned, many times. More times than I have deadly thoughts.

But at last, one of the soft shapes fit me perfectly. Although I was returned to my box, when I was taken out again, that shape held me again and encased me in a supple case that strapped to him. After that, I was with him almost constantly, although during the night my case was not attached to him, but set on a table near by.

With him, I unleashed my deadly thoughts frequently, but they flew not toward danger but toward an education of how to fly single-mindedly. I don’t know if I was meant to learn this, or my deadly thoughts, or my soft shaped handler, but I do know that we did learn.

And at last the day came when I was called upon to hurl my deadly thoughts at danger, and my handler’s satisfaction let me know that we had been successful. And I felt proud.

But my handler had a soft companion who didn’t like me, and one day she said to him, “Can’t you leave that in the car? Tonight of all nights we don’t want to make my parents nervous about your profession.”

A shattering of glass and a new handler grabbed me. He sheathed me in darkness and brought me out after a time, presenting me to a new handler. This new handler kept me next to his body, but without a supple case, just jammed between his clothing and his damp skin.

Tonight we are moving in the darkness, and his hand keeps clutching me, fitting his shapes into the perfect recesses of my shape, pressing almost hard enough to release my deadly thoughts. The target of my thoughts is not a danger to my handler.

I fear that my handler is a danger to the target, who is small and unsuspecting.

I wish, when the time comes, that I could hold back my deadly thoughts.

StoryADay challenged us today to write a tale with a non-human protagonist.

The body lay in the doorway to the snake house at the zoo.

“He’s the snake custodian,” Romero said. “Maybe he got bit.”

“No,” Dixie countered, lifting one of the man’s hands with her pen. “Look at this note. I think he was trying to write ‘murder’ but ‘murd’ was as far as he got.”

“Okay,” Ellery said, “we have three hours until the old man gets here. Let’s see if we can solve one on our own.”

Working under one of the most insightful homicide detectives in the country was educational for them but rarely satisfying. Usually he arrived when they were just beginning to form an impression of the facts, then he’d look around briefly and put together all the clues they’d seen and some they hadn’t to come up with a brilliant and correct solution.

When the coroner arrived, he wouldn’t give them any suggestions as to cause of death, other than to note that the deceased had not been shot, stabbed or beaten.

“What about those two puncture marks on his wrist?” Romero asked. “Are they from a snake bite or could they be from a needle? Someone might have wanted it to look like a snakebite.”

“Could be a snakebite, could be a needle. I won’t know until I get him to the morgue.”

The three junior detectives divvied up the investigation. Ellery went to interview the man’s co-workers to see if any of them could be considered to be a suspect. Dixie went to check out the man’s basement suite in his mother’s house to see if she could find any clues there. Romero was to go over the snake house with a fine toothed comb.

Two hours later they met outside the snake house. “He had recently bought a gun,” Dixie reported. “Perhaps he was afraid of someone.”

Ellery said, “The elephant custodian said our vic had recently had an affair with the red panda girl, who used to date the grizzly man. Maybe he was jealous. What did you find, Romero?”

“All the snake boxes are closed and I could see a snake in every one, so I don’t think any of them got out. Only half of them had fresh water, so I think he stopped halfway through, or was stopped. His water pail is on the floor and a bit of water has slopped over the edge. Not exactly signs of a struggle, but he didn’t spill water anywhere else, so I assume it is significant. The back door is propped open. Anyone could have come in.”

“They all come in at five to feed their animals and prepare them for the day,” Ellery said. “But no one admits to seeing anyone besides our vic around the snake house. The grizzlies were still eating their raw meat but the elephants had no food in their enclosure. The elephant guy says they don’t get fed until the visitors are here to see it.”

“I think we should take the grizzly guy, the elephant guy and the red panda girl in for questioning,” Dixie stated.

“Not so fast.” He had arrived.

While the three junior detectives stood near the doorway, he stalked around the room, looked at all the snakes, looked at the note just inside the chalk outline of the body. He didn’t even go into the back where, according to their theory, the vic had been attacked and given some kind of toxin through two needle punctures.

“It was an accident,” he told them.

“But what about the note – he was trying to write ‘murder’ so that we’d know it wasn’t an accident.”

“He wasn’t writing ‘murder.’ He was trying to write “Murderajee.”

“What’s that?”

“The name of the King Cobra who bit him – it’s on the cage over there. He wanted us to know what kind of anti-venom to use, in case we got here in time. Too bad we didn’t.”

For today’s StoryADay prompt, we were encouraged to bring our protagonist in late in the story. I thought it was a good chance to bring my brilliant murder investigator back into play.

The guests at the Mount Solomon Lodge became aware of his presence gradually. When Doreen and Jessica were doing yoga before breakfast, just as they were finishing off with savasana, lying prone and relaxed with their eyes closed, the room’s door creaked open.

“We’re just about done,” Doreen said softly, hoping not to break the peaceful feelings washing over her.

Jessica sat up. “There’s no one there,” she stated. She jumped up and walked over to the door, looked down the hallway. “No one at all.”

“That’s weird.” Doreen rolled over and sat up. “Must have been a draft.”

At breakfast, they joked about their ghostly yoga-mate. Camille reported that she’d heard a knock on her door in the middle of the night, but no one was there when she opened it.

Crystal, the co-ordinator of their meeting, had had her own nighttime experience. “I heard footsteps going by my room, but when I looked outside, I couldn’t see anyone.”

“Oh, I don’t like this.” Camille shivered.

Doreen suggested, “Let’s ask at the front desk if this place is haunted. At least then we’ll know.”

The hotel clerk said, “Oh, you’re very lucky. Not many of our guests have seen Solomon, our ghost.”

“We didn’t actually see him.”

“Well, you might, but don’t worry. He’s completely harmless. We think he’s an old guy, a trapper, who died in this valley and loved this valley, so he’s hanging around.”

That evening, they saw Solomon, or thought they did. At dusk, they were enjoying cups of hot chocolate while sitting in the gazebo and watching glorious autumn leaves toss around in gusts of warm wind.

“Someone’s walking across the field,” Jessica announced.

“Where?”

Jessica pointed.

“I think I see something,” Camille said.

“He’s gone now.”

“It was kind of a fat guy, with a leather jacket, right?”

“That’s what I saw.”

“I didn’t see anything,” Doreen complained, aware that she had somehow felt a sense of ownership of the ghost, having been the first to hear him knocking and the only one to think of asking hotel staff about him. Why hadn’t he revealed himself to her?

Over the next two days, many people in their group had encounters with Solomon. More doors received late night knocking, things in rooms were moved around (although the strong wind could possibly be blamed for moving lighter objects), he was seen in the yoga room (by Camille who’d been looking for Doreen and who fled upstairs in a panic) and on the balconies.

“This is so strange. Months and months can go by without any sign of Solomon. You guys are really lucky,” one of the waitresses told them.

On the last night of their stay, Doreen was woken at 4 a.m. by a knock on the door. “At last,” she thought, and rushed to open it, expecting to look out and see his portly form walking away. Instead, it was Camille, in pajamas with pink teddy bears. She was crying.

“He knocked and he knocked,” she told Doreen. “I’d get up and answer and no one would be there, then I’d go back to sleep and it would happen again. All night long! I know they say he’s harmless, but this is just mean. I have a long way to drive tomorrow.”

“Come in – there’s two beds. You can have the other one. He never knocks on my door.”

But as Doreen stepped outside to take Camille’s arm and lead her into the room, she smelled something. “Is that smoke?”

The fire was small, in some trees next to the parking lot, but it could have been quickly spread to the Lodge by the wind if they hadn’t raised the alarm.

“Solomon was just protecting his namesake hotel,” Jessica said to Doreen as they were driving away the next day.

“And us,” Doreen added.

The May 10 suggestion from StoryADay was to write a story with a ‘hidden protagonist.’  My thanks to our guests at the Black Cat Guest Ranch for suggesting the ghost theme.