John stepped out of the room, noticing the newfound strength filling his chest. He received a note from his manager, instructing him to return to his apartment and retrieve the satchel that had been left behind. He walked down the street to the bus stop and hopped on the cross-town express, which, for a daylight ride, was sporadically filled. The people looked at him with a gaze that unnerved him, chilling him to the core as he flexed his fists and took a seat toward the front. Across the aisle sat a small child clinging to their mother’s arm. The look within the eyes of the child seemed to be one of fear as John shifted his eyes to the rest of the bus. A man with a large overcoat and a knit cap pulled close over his eyes, the skin that was exposed appeared… translucent. John narrowed his eyes and affirmed the truth, skin that looked like it shimmered in the light.
The bus driver called out his stop, and he readied himself to alight from the bus. Looks followed him as he made his way to the rear exit, like the dimly glowing eyes of a hundred unseen predators. He stepped off the bus and walked down the eerily quiet gray street, turning the corner down the block, for what felt to John like hours to reach the stoop of his apartment. The sensation of the gaze of a thousand eyes fell back on him as he searched his pockets for his keys. John turned, looking out behind him to find the emptiness of what should have been a busy street. The quiet buzz of a passing car kept him from entering the building as he turned his head and watched it pass by. In the haze of his vision, John swore that the driver had tentacles coming from his face.
A sensation compelled him up the stairs to his apartment, like the pull of a siren to the door he opened a thousand times, yet it felt like opening a long-sealed vault. His heart pounded as the darkness of the hallway began to creep into his mind, as the sounds of silent stares whispered about his presence. As he opened the door, the flood of dread came over his chest like a tidal wave crashing into the shoreline. The sharp pangs of fear radiated through his body as he took the steps into the apartment. The light that came in from the window with the blinds drawn radiated an ethereal turquoise, the likes of which, to him, oddly, felt like the bright sunny day in the park. He turned to the bed from which he was found, on it lay a letter, with what he thought was a strange language written on the front, only he could understand the scribble being his name. Pulling at the edge to open it, John felt the sensation of pain as the paper cut his finger. The sensation stung, then burned for a little bit as he opened the letter to only reveal a strange symbol drawn on the page. A few drops of his blood absorbed onto the strange drawing, which he thought nothing of, before he crumpled it and tossed it into the waste basket.
He looked under the bed and found the suitcase that had been given him the night of his fight. Popping it open, he found that it was filled with the money that had been bet on him, and against him, that night. Closing it back up he quickly changed, into a fresh set of clothes, and threw on an over coat with a flat cap, and made his way out of the apartment. As he made it to the stairwell, he felt the same siren pull back, this time a strange sensation, pulled him back to the dark of the hallway. The sounds around him began to grow louder. Then a familiar voice came from the blackest part of the shadow at the end of the hallway.
“Hello there champeen, I been waitin’ for ya, ever since you got let out of the hospital, I been waitin, and watchin,” His coach’s voice started to distort “Listen, champeen, I gonna level with ya, that case, it ain’t got nuttin’ in it, at least, nuttin’ you will need, that case is just a vessel champeen, just a hollow being awaiting a purpose,” The voice trailed into an echo. John’s world faded to black, drifting into a grand ambient sea of darkness, floating listlessly among a strange cosmos. John saw the grandeur of his coach’s design, his body was the shell and the universe was the hermit crab, filling the vessel as he began to feel at one with the current of space and time.
The bell rang as Don d’Arcy was pulled away by the referee, John lying on the mat, quivering from d’Arcy’s left hook. The ring doctor stepped in and examined The Windy City Wonder for only a few seconds before declaring him dead. A hush fell on the crowd like a freshly fallen snow as the coaches and staff covered John with a sheet. In the coming days it was announced that Dapper Don d’Arcy had given John Charles Miller an acute subdural hematoma, which resulted in his demise. His coach was seen shortly after the match, leaving the stadium with a briefcase and hopping on a bus headed toward the pier.