Keep seeing, she said. Because we’re just getting to my fee.

Fee. Yes. A top promoter would need a fee, of course.

A cut.

New, odd visions replaced those that were like ecstasy to Emperor. No longer onstage, now he was digging. His back ached as he tossed shovelfuls of dirt over his shoulders, sending it into the blackness of night. He dug and he dug until he reached a body. Then he shoveled the body out of the hole piecemeal, too. And beneath this body, another. And another, until the piles of dirt behind him were rivaled by the piles of rice paper skin and bone. Roman looked up and saw hundreds, no, thousands of bodies lifted from their graves, a chorus of corpses sitting up.

The dead, he saw removed…taken from their places of rest. And Roman himself was doing the removing.

A graveyard custodian, he thought, but he did not know what it meant yet. What she wanted. Her cut.

I need help, too, kid, she said. And Roman saw she was now sitting on the ground at his feet. I need…turnover.

Turnover?

She coughed and this time images escaped her, rising in the space between them. Roman raising his arms to the sky, sending the corpses nightward. Then Roman carrying new bodies to the empty graves.

Turnover.

He understood.

Kill for her. Bring her bodies. Her cut.

That’s it, kid. Kill for me.

Because even Death needed to clean house. Even Death found the stench unbearable.

Suddenly he felt shame. Not for considering this swap, saying yes to the thing in his apartment, but because he had ever doubted such a day would come.

Roman had no doubt that he deserved this. That he put in the time, the work, the care.

Yes, he said. And the woman melted into black shadows in the carpet.

Brace yourself, kid, she said, leaving him. You’re going to be big.

Her voice trailed off, the tail of an animal in the dark.

There was another knock at the door.

Roman leapt from the wood and turned to face it.

The promoter again? Why? Did she knock on the way out as she had on the way in?

Or was it perhaps the neighbors, coming to ask if he was okay. Or maybe the landlord after all.

Did you just sell your soul, Romie? Are you FUCKING NUTS?

Roman looked through the peephole, expecting to find an empty hall again.

But the hall was not empty.

A blond woman, pale and strange, stood facing him. From what Roman could see, she was naked.

He opened the door slowly.

She was indeed naked, her white pockmarked body like a bumpy dirt road under the hall’s half-dead light.

What…Roman started. Who…

I’m Maggie, she said. I’m your act.

Roman reached out and took hold of her wrist.

Then he brought his fingers back and looked at them.

Frostbite! he thought.

Come in, he said. Before someone sees you…undressed…in the hall.