It was a five year stint of keeping my ass to the wall and never dropping the soap. It was five years of greasy guys giving me the once over - five years of learning to have eyes in the back of my head. Five little years for selling blotter acid to the wrong person. Five years I would never get back. When they let me out, I was 26 and the only place to go was my grandmother's house. Things could have been a lot worse.

Grandma was happy to have me. She was happy to see me out, to see me getting back on my feet. I got a job at the hardware store and helped Grandma pick up all of the prescriptions she needed. When night fell, she was too doped up to hear the things that I heard. And I heard it every night. Above me, in the attic, there were sounds of someone or something moving about. Sometimes the sounds of weeping. I would fall asleep to these sounds, thinking of the nights in prison, when my only sexual release had been in dreams. The sounds would invade my dreams and I couldn't tell what I heard from the attic and what I heard from my own inner consciousness.

Then one night, around 11:30, when I was just getting to sleep, the noise in the attic was so raucous I decided I had to either go up there and see what the hell was going on or get dressed and head down the block to Beltane's Bar for a drink.