THE ONLY REASON CIDE PEACE WAS there to see the dark, inky mass gathering at the edge of the ocean at four in the morning was because he happened to be three things: a newly-minted platinum rap star with a face tattoo and enough money to afford the Frank Lloyd Wrong glass-and-steel eyesore perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific; a popular enough rap star that his party had been almost two hundred attendees strong; and drunk.

Which was why he was standing on his back balcony, clutching a handle of bougie booze and swaying to the rhythmic roar and slash of the water against the beach below his new house.

All he wore was his fluffy white bathrobe (stolen from a swanky ski resort two years prior) and a pair of boxers, but the alcohol braced him against the wind’s cutting edge. He leaned against the aluminum banister, one bare foot on the kick rail, knee pressed against the glass, and watched the sea throw itself against the shore.

To be honest, on a cold, lonely night like this one, it was terrifying to look at. Intimidating, even through the prism of bourbon.

Night loomed before him and above him like a wall of starless perfect nothing, as if he lived on the edge of reality, and beyond was simply eternity, an absence of civilization and wilderness both. It was California until it wasn’t, and after that was no Hawaii, no Japan, just endless, unfeeling void.

Some wet black bulk materialized between the arcs of foam, the darkness becoming more solid with each passing wave. Reflections of his deck torches shimmered across its surface. Beached whale? Peace wondered, staring at it. He hoped it wasn’t going to rot and stink up his property. The last thing he needed was to wake up with a major hangover to the smell of decaying sea life. Fuckin’ barf city, right?

“Earth to Peace. You still there?” asked his manager. The Bluetooth piece in his ear inserted Jacquelyn Brittel’s thin, high voice into his head.

“Sorry, Jackie, what?”

“There something more pressing than this discussion?”

“No, I just—thought I saw something weird. In the water.” Peace turned away and leaned against the cold rail, letting his eyes dance aimlessly across the gleaming angles, staring without seeing at the hamster-maze monstrosity he lived in, a sprawling jumble of boxes and lights.

From out here, on the edge of his enormous back deck, the place looked like a terrarium for a dinosaur. Closer to the back door was an outdoor conversation pit, where five or six unconscious bodies glowed in the light of a guttering fire. To his right was a big peanut-shaped hot tub with an island in the middle, silently shoveling great white clouds of steam into the early morning.

A few people lingered around the periphery—three sleeping men and a woman on her belly with her top off, and a girl sitting in the corner wearing a soaking-wet T-shirt, nursing what looked like a martini.

Peace nodded what’s up at her. She replied with a toadlike belch that made his skin crawl. “Fuckin’ gross, puta.”

“Hell yeah, baby.”

“That wasn’t a compliment.”

“So if me and my girl—” she began, tauntingly, and vomited an arc of neon green into the hot water.

Peace shook his head.

By now, half of the party-goers had found their way out of the house, some of them picked up by Ubers and Lyfts, some of them in their own vehicles, wending their way through the hills back to the distant glow of L.A. Tiny motes of light carried them back to humanity and warmth and home. The remainder lay sprawled across the property in various states of undress and sobriety, many of them unconscious.

They were there to celebrate Peace’s debut album topping the charts that summer. Something about the scene made him feel like a victorious warrior, one of those Greek 300 century guys in the strappy chanclas and red capes, just back from a huge battle, drinking away the night.

“Well, I’m glad there’s something out there that can keep your attention for longer than five seconds,” said Jacquelyn. “We need to talk about your DUI before your goldfish attention span wanders somewhere else again.”

“Do we?”

“DUI.”

“That’s—that’s what I meant. Do we need to talk about that?”

“Yes,” said Jacquelyn. “You get another one, you don’t get to go on tour with Fi Fitty 6 and the Ahegao Kings. Do you understand that?”

“Yeah, yeah, bruh.”

“I’m not your bruh, Alexavier. You need to level up your dating game, by the way. You keep robbing cradles, you gonna be in the news with Diddy and Epstein. You can kiss your career goodbye. You’re out of school now—”

“Man, I know, it’s been, like—”

“Time to grow up. You’re out of school. Old enough to drink, going by the slur in your voice. You’re in the—”

“That stuff ain’t gonna hurt me, Jackie. Shit. I’m bulletproof.”

“I can think of a few OGs under the yard that might beg to differ.” Jacquelyn sighed. “As I was saying, you’re in the big leagues now. It’s time to get your head in the game. Do you want to end up like one of these guys you read about halfway down your Internet home page on a Tuesday morning? ‘Lil Shitbag, dead at 23, thought he was too cool for a seatbelt and wrapped himself around a tree,’ wait, who was I talking about? Who cares, here comes the next guy.”

“Damn, yo—”

“You know you wouldn’t be my first dead client signed with a label, right? Y’all play too much.”

“Damn. That’s harsh.”

“Listen. If that’s what it takes,” said Jacquelyn. “Alex, I told you I liked your music and believed in you. And I told your mom I’d keep an eye on you. Don’t fuck it now. Dial it back. When you got gray pubes and bags under your eyes, you do what you want. But for now, I make the plays.”

When he’d made his first serious forays into exercising his talent for rhythm poetry on TikTok, he’d agonized over his rap name for months. His mother Teresa was the one that had inspired his final decision, although not quite in the way she’d expected.

“You rap about serious stuff, baby,” she’d told him one night as they sat on the back porch passing a joint back and forth. “Like, mental health, tragedy, depression and shit. Along with the money, the girls, the parties.” Gentle chuckle. She wore a ratty old T-shirt and a pair of jean shorts. “I think that mix is gonna take you far, Zavey. Little boys rap on boats about money and bitches. Your stuff is real-man shit.”

“Alpha male shit?” he’d asked.

“No,” Mom had said in disgust. “Take that alpha male Internet crap and throw it away. Throw it in the garbage where it goes.”

“All right, Mama. What do you think, then?”

“Something to do with peace.” She took a deep draw off the joint and held it for a moment. “Like, inner peace,” she added, and blew a plume of skunk into the night.

“Or a side piece,” said the boy. “I’m America’s side piece. Like—I’m fuckin’ hiding in America’s closet, you know what I mean? I’m fucking America while all those ‘rap gods’ gone at work.” He crowed laughter. “Hell yeah.”

Mom laughed. “No. Come on.”

“Peace? You talking about peace? I wanna talk about the peace you feel when you—” he began, paused, and took the pass from his mom. Suspended in thought for a second, he pinched the joint, pulled a long draw off of it, held it, coughed, let it out. “You know, when you finally decide to do it. Suicide. Heard that when depressed people figure out how they wanna do it, you know—this serenity comes over ‘em, right? They’ve given themselves permission to let go.”

“Baby, that’s dark. That’s fuckin’ dark.”

“No, that’s double Nintendo.”

“—What?” His mother squinted in confusion, and perhaps, annoyance.

“Like, when a word means more than one thing.”

“Entendre? Double entendre?”

“Yeah, that.” Peace pointed. “But like, suicide peace and side piece, put together. The same thing. ‘Cide peace.” Resolute acceptance of death—multiplied by laying pipe on the downlow, Jody-style.

Had a certain samurai somethin’-somethin’ to it.

“Still think it’s a bit much,” said Mom.

“What about ‘Menty B’?”

“Minty Bee?”

“Short for ‘a mental breakdown.’ Like when you get off work and you go cry in your car before you go home.”

Mom made a face. “I think I like the other better now.”

“I know my business.”

Two years and a lot of Internet research later, he would title his debut album Ring of Death. The cover art was an action shot of two roosters in a cock-fighting arena somewhere in the favelas, surrounded by an audience of howling fans. In a stylish juxtaposition, the title was in Japanese instead of English: messy, bold calligraphy in blood red that looked like the chickens’ claws had slashed the kanji into reality itself.

“That’s fucked up, little-man,” said Mom. She slid to her feet and got out of the chair. “But you do you, I guess. You always did.” She gave him a kiss on the forehead. “Goin’ to bed, I got a early morning. Good night. Don’t stay up too late.”

Shame and pride mixed in his chest, somehow swelling and contracting at the same time, as he realized he finally had his rap name. But it didn’t pass mustard with Mama.

“Good night,” he said, kissing her knuckles like a knight. “Soon, you won’t have to get up early no more. You can sleep in all you want. In your big bed, in your big house.”

“Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.”

Two and a half years after the birth of his moniker, Peace chuckled into the chilly Pacific night. Hot tub steam wreathed his body like the breath of a dragon. “That’s what I like about you, Jackie. That’s what my mama liked about you. You don’t give a shit, do you? You a rough rider, ain’t you?”

“Already I can see that’s what it takes to keep your arms and legs inside the roller coaster,” said his manager. The sound of rustling, and the rhythmic chime of an open car door. “Look, I’ll call you tomorrow—err, later today I guess—when you’re more sober. We need to make a game plan.”

“Yeah, sure, okay. I’ll call you when I get up.”

“No, I’ll call you.” Jackie amended herself. “And you better keep your phone on and your ringer on. If you don’t pick up, I’m going to assume you’re OD’ed or something. And I’m sending the police to do a wellness check.”

“Fuck no,” wheezed Peace. “I don’t want no pigs up in here. 1312 all day.”

“Then stay your ass home or call an Uber.”

“All right. Damn.”

“Congratulations and good night.” She hung up on him without waiting for an answer.

“Good night to you too,” he said into a dead phone.

Turning back to the banister, Cide Peace peered into the darkness once again, looking for the shiny black mound he’d seen wash up on the beach. But to his mild surprise, only the tide lurked there, pushing cascades of pale foam onto the fudgey brown sand.

Must have imagined it. He went into the house.

“Where you going, Peace?” asked a redheaded girl lying on the leather couch watching something on his big flatscreen and sipping a White Claw. She wore a pretty green sarong.

“To take a piss.”

“Take a Peace,” the girl said, slurring.

“What’s your name?” asked Peace. “Hey, you’re fuckin’ hot. You look like that Disney bitch with the bow and arrow.” He glanced at the TV. “Star Trek? Yo, that nerdy shit is all right. You smart or something?”

“That’s what my friends say. Mina.”

“That’s your name? Mina?”

“Yeah.” She seductively tugged her sarong up to reveal that she wasn’t wearing a bottom to go with her bikini top. “You into girls like me?”

Peace recoiled. “Oh shit, you Steen’s trans friend, ain’t you? Burger said you might be coming to the party.” He shook his head, trying to project good will as well as he could through his alcohol-induced haze. “Naw, baby, I ain’t into that,” he said, walking away with an awkward grin over his shoulder. “Don’t get me wrong, trans rights and all, just ain’t my game. You all right though.”

“Aww,” said Mina. “Cool, cool.” She covered herself and went back to watching TV. “Is it okay if I crash here? I’m too drunk to drive home.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Peace climbed a few stairs out of the hardwood living room, bare feet swishing across the lush carpet.

“Thanks,” said the girl.

Down the hallway, he passed an open doorway leading into one of his four guest rooms and spotted a guy and a chick passed out in each other’s arms, naked and swaddled in a haphazard nest of blankets. He took a moment to be a gracious host and pulled the door shut, and continued on.

Some surfer-lookin’ guy he didn’t recognize lay on his back outside the master bedroom, dressed in purple swimming trunks and one sock. Peace didn’t have to check to see if he was still alive, because he was snoring loudly and had both legs bowed up like a baby waiting for a diaper change, his heels touching.

“Bro,” said Peace disdainfully, gently kicking his leg.

“Is it good,” murmured the man. “Bring it down. Put it in a box.”

“Bro,” said Peace, taking his arm and turning him on his side. “Sleep on your side, bro, I don’t want you to puke and choke to death, okay? Look out.”

“Mmh,” said the man. He shrank into the fetal position and went back to snoring.

Luckily, no one had commandeered his bed. He had a California King memory foam mattress, a simple slab of soft foam on a skeletal steel platform frame the size of his childhood bedroom. The room itself was enormous, easily the size of his family’s old apartment. He plugged his vape into the USB cable snaking out from behind the nightstand, and stepped into the bathroom.

Lights flowered into being, triggered by a motion detector. Drunkenly brushing his teeth, Peace admired himself in the huge mirror, studying his physique.

Twenty-two-year-old Cide Peace—real name Alexavier Barrera—was tall and stick-thin, a gawky jumble of elbows and knees. His tan body was covered in dozens of cheap tattoos, his head shaved into a cottony black mohawk framed by twin tattoos of a bird wing. Thanks to the cover art and the tattoos, people were already calling him ‘Birdman of Rap-catraz,’ painting him as this tortured Ghost Dog-style warrior poet cloistered away in the tower of a prison, penning lyrics and tending to his birds.

Cheesy, but it worked. He leaned close to the glass and inspected his teeth. “Maybe get a grill. Is that still a thing?” he murmured to himself. “I should buy a sword. Where you get a sword?”

“Mmmllehhhgh,” said the thing in the corner.

Adrenaline arrowed through his heart as Peace’s eyes refocused over his shoulder, where a bizarre figure crouched in the background. Water still ran into the sink as he spun and backed against the marble counter in horror.

Hunkered down in the shadows on the far side of the toilet was a creature Peace could only describe as “an alien with body herpes”—a short, but still somehow spindly humanoid with a pot-belly and skin like a half-ripe tomato, bilious green mottled with dull demon-red.

Its face was a parody of a man’s, with leering bloodshot eyes, a flat nose, puffy cheeks, and a mouth that stretched rubbery lips from ear to ear. Crusty blisters and open sores littered its nude goblin body in slow agony.

Nestled in a Spanish-mission-style alcove, the toilet was one of those expensive Japanese-style affairs with a bidet and a control panel by the rim. Shared space with a short shelf full of books he’d never read and probably never would, unless the Internet went down.

Uncoiling from between the goblin's teeth was a fat, serpentine tongue with which it seemed to be cleaning the basin of Cide Peace’s fancy new toilet, slopping that long wet sliver of pink meat all over the piss-speckled rim and curling underneath the inside.

Looked like a pervert eating yogurt without a spoon.

Speechless, Peace’s first thought was, did somebody slip me acid? He didn’t remember seeing any. But then he thought, I ain’t never had no trip like this. This some weird-ass Labyrinth shit.

“What?” he managed to say, finally, in a high, breathy squeak.

“Eeeeggghhh,” said the toilet-licker.

“What the fuck?” Peace elaborated, his initial panic beginning to subside. He crept closer, the travertine tiles warm under his cold bare feet. “Bro. What the hell is this weird shit? What are you? Why are you licking my toilet? Bro, that’s gross as fuck. What’s wrong with—”

Still making a feast of the inside, the creature embraced the rim of the bowl like a drunk. “Grrelllllgh,” it replied with a guttural moan, and gurgled something in a language he didn’t understand.

“Bro. Is that Chinese?”

Before he could say anything else, the toilet-licker burst out of the alcove and rushed toward him in a scuttling all-fours chimpanzee run, ass high in the air.

Falling, Cide Peace screamed shrilly and pedaled backward, pushing himself away as the thing clambered over him and pinned him with cold, waxy hands; that fat, slimy, blue-stained tongue threw itself at his face and whipped across his cheeks, wrapping around his skull. To his surprise, despite the suspicious grit on its taste buds and the abhorrent texture of its gluey saliva, there was no smell of anything other than the fresh, clinical tang of the chemical bowl cleaner.

Like doing Jiu Jitsu with a third-grader in an airplane lavatory, interjected his frantic caveman brain, and he fought maniacal laughter.

With his eyes and lips clamped shut, Peace shoved at the creature, fighting its rigored, slippery old-man hands, and peeled its tongue from around his head. One last kick and it sailed across the bathroom, smacking the tile floor with a boney crash.

“Eeeeuuughh!” it cried in its pitiful, froggy voice, tongue thumping wetly between the two of them.

“Fuck!” screamed Peace, and the lights went out.

Every bit as enthusiastic as the fans at his shows, he began clapping frantic applause, trying to trigger the motion detector. “Nooo! Come back on! Noooo!”

Stuttering back to life, the lights flashed on and off and on in seizure-inducing bursts. He stopped clapping, but they continued to flash, giving him a frenetic view of the bathroom, chopped into a series of moments.

To his surprise and relief, the toilet goblin had vanished.

“Jesus,” said Peace, scrambling to his feet. Unconvinced, he remained that way, fists clenched, just waiting for another attack.

None came. He was alone.

Letting out a shuddering breath, he stepped over to the sink and began cupping water all over his face and arms, trying to wash off the thing’s disgusting saliva. Had he imagined all that? He wanted to think so. Peace glanced over his shoulder at the toilet and felt mild shock to see no wet spots, no puddle of toilet water, no blue stains, nothing.

“Bro,” he said, leaning down to cup water into his face with both hands, again and again, splashing it all over the floor. He didn’t give a damn. “Bro.” He tore a towel from the nearby towel rack and held it against his cheeks, burying his face in the clean softness of terry cloth. “Bro.”

Looking up from the towel, he realized he was still not alone. The toilet goblin had only been the opening act.

Standing behind him was the tallest human being Peace had ever seen, a towering man in ill-fitting slacks and a crimson button-up T-shirt, so tall he could not see the man’s face in the mirror, easily eight feet tall. The arms jutting out of the oversized red sleeves were long and thin, impossibly long, pale thin branches, with fingers that hooked back into their palms like the legs of a dead spider.

The man’s enormous spider-hand rose, dipped into his red shirt pocket, and brought out some sort of colored paper. The other hand came up and separated the paper into two distinct pieces of what appeared to be Kleenex—one a deep arterial red, one a rich, oceanic blue.

These he held out to Peace’s reflection, and grunted a soft, low question in another language. Some part of Peace’s mind registered it as Japanese, although he couldn’t tell you how.

Slowly, excruciatingly slowly, the rapper turned around to regard his new guest. The first thing his eyes landed on were the twin sheets of tissue paper.

Second thing Peace witnessed, as his eyes traveled upward, tracing the slender, cadaverous limbs into the frayed sleeves of the man’s old, threadbare, blood-red work shirt, was the man’s face: his upper lip had been wrenched around the side of his head so that his mouth was stretched paper-thin across his left cheekbone, revealing a row of jagged yellow molars. His left ear was somewhere behind his head, and his right ear lay sideways across his temple.

Through his right eye-hole, Peace could see the cartilage of the man’s nose, a glint of white mired in the red-brown of old carrion. The other eye-hole was pulled like taffy into a thin three-inch slit along the side of his skull.

Unseen eyeballs rolled sightlessly, underneath the skin.

The dead man asked his inscrutable question again, gazing blindly down at the owner of the house. His bottom front teeth stuck up out of the comical ruin of his mouth in an underbite of dirty piano keys.

“I don’t know what you want,” Peace said, his heart pounding. “I don’t speak that. I d-don’t speak Japanese, bro. What do—”

The dead man reiterated his question, his voice susurrant but stony, like a shovel sliding gently into dirt. He held out the red and blue tissues a bit more insistently. His fingernails were filthy, chipped spades.

“I don’t—” Peace shrugged, terrified, now half-screaming in an exaggerated stage-whisper. “You want me to take one?” He snatched the blue one. “Fine, okay, we’ll go Crip. Look, I picked Crip. You be Blood.” He studied that warped, diabolical dead face. “Are we—did I do the right—the right thing? Are we cool?”

For what could have been a full minute, the dead man stood there holding the red napkin, and then he tucked it back into his shirt pocket.

Cold relief washed across Peace’s scalp. “Was that right? The right choice? Okay. Cool.”

Not cool. The dead man’s hands rose, titanic clutching hands, slow and then slower, to frame the boy’s face as if to say how beautiful you are, and the dead man inserted gentle thumbs into the corners of Peace’s mouth. Dirty, foul-tasting thumbnails scraped across back teeth with a hollow, blood-curdling rattle.

Then he began to rip them apart, to split Peace’s face and tear the skull free like the rind of an orange.

Down the hall, the screaming woke up the man and woman in the guest room.

"Christ,” grumbled the woman, sandwiching her head between two pillows. “Fuckin’ tweakers.” ​🧻