I believe it was Rimbaud who once put to paper (and don’t ask how I knew that, I never really paid attention in English class, and we definitely weren’t covering people like him in my French elective in high school), “I will tear the veils from every mystery: mysteries of religion or of nature, death, birth, the future, the past, cosmogony, and nothingness. I am a master of phantasmagoria.” Night in Hell.

  Yeah, this was definitely shaping up to be something like that.

  I carried Nyarla to her room and opened the door. Apparently, she kept it unlocked (no wonder someone committed a murder in there) because she was too lazy to keep a key on her when she went outside. I set her down on the floor where she sat with her legs spread out underneath her in a childish way of sitting.

  Lo and behold, a body. The corpse was floating upside down…not suspended by any sort of rope or pulley mechanism, just floating upside down as if they were a resident from a world where gravity was the opposite of what it normally was (and maybe, principles and every other force of nature would be the opposite for them too, boundaries of existence violated and turned in-and-outside of itself like an unfortunate creature’s skinned hide or the metallic underbelly of the plastic top to an artificially-flavored yogurt cup…but that’s just speculation) and were just crashing for the evening.

  “Why is he on the ceiling.”

  “I don’t know! That’s for you to figure out, stupid.”

  “I’ve been in this place for a grand total of MAYBE an hour and you expect me to decipher whatever messed up fantasy-video-game-world-bullshit your world has going on.”

  “Fantasy? What are you talking about? Fantasy stories are like, about people in weird and unwrinkled shirts manipulating the world with big numbers and papers and all that head-hurty clerical stuff.”

  “You guys write office fantasies? Talk about a total inversion…” Self-reminder to never read any of the fiction that they had in this world.

  “???”

  “Anyway…”

  “Yes, anyway! You should be doing your job, thrall! Don’t make me order you again…it uses up a lot of power…”

  “What kind of Dark Lord even were you?! I can see why you got fired.”

  “I did NOT get ‘fired’…um…I just got displaced, that’s all. Things shift around in companies like that all the time in fantasy stories.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “It’s the truth! Big brother just—agh! You’re trying to distract me again. You’re so mean…”

  “Thought you wouldn’t figure it out…”

  She dabbed the oversized sleeve of her cloak against her eyes to dry out the tears that had started to form. Seriously, how did this girl ever rule over anything? She looked like a little kid who had just scraped their knee while playing outside. For some reason, I had started to feel a little sorry for her?

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  Was that just her magical influence talking, or…

  “Anyway…if I’m gonna solve this thing, I need details.”

  “Details…?”

  “Yup. Details, evidence, that sort of thing. I’m just going off of the cop shows my mom likes, but usually a gumshoe needs to know about the case to be able to do anything about it.”

  “Gumshoe…? That’s a silly word…”

  “Er, a detective.”

  “Ohhh.”

  “So, yeah, tell me everything you know.”

  “Well, um…I fell asleep when the sun was up and it was around mid-day…and then when I woke up, it was really cold and the body was there….”

  “Was he on the ceiling already when you woke up? Or was he on the floor when you first saw him?”

  “Uh-huh. He’s just like how he was when I woke up, there on the ceiling. Right after I saw him I dashed out of here as fast as I could to find someone to help me…then I found you, and…”

  Why didn’t she just rely on her brother? Wasn’t he supposed to be the current Dark Lord? Maybe I should’ve kept that thought to myself.

  “He doesn’t like me…not one bit! He’s a big meanie.”

  “I see…well, I’m going to check out the body now. You got a ladder?”

  “Um, no…”

  “Well, that’s gonna be an issue.”

  The room was just like a studio apartment back in my home world, except maybe twice as tall. Maybe a little taller than that. The corpse was on the north side of the room, and the door joining the room with the hallway and the rest of the building (which was, from what I could gather, a pretty cheap-looking apartment complex) was on the south side. The floor was made of wood or a woodlike material and the walls were wooden as well. There was no bed to speak of, only clothes on the ground, and there were books and paper spread haphazardly all about the place.

  I tried to walk over to the corpse and accidently stepped on some of the papers, which Nyarla got angry at me for.

  “W-wait! No! Don’t stomp on that! That’s my manuscript, I worked really hard on that! It’s about a charming and awesome and cool young lady named Rosa who gets whisked away to a fantasy world where she has to go to a place called High School…but stuff from her normal world keeps getting sucked into the other world too and it messes up her fantasy life…”

  “Spare the synopsis. You should make your things more organized if you don’t want them to be stepped on! Jesus.”

  “I don’t want you stomping around here in general! You think I asked for someone to get killed in my room?”

  “For all you know, he could have killed himself in here.”

  “Nuh-uh…why would you kill yourself in someone else’s room?”

  “Good point…”

  Anyway, I made it over to the body to get a closer look. Well, as close as I could get from my vantage, anyway. I described him as floating earlier, but that was kind of inaccurate. It would have been more accurate to have said that he was sort of standing on the ceiling, hands swung down underneath (swung up above?) his head like he were trying to swim to the floor in midair.

  He and I were about of average height and the tips of his fingers brushed the tips of mine when I stretched my arm out to see if I could reach him, to give some scale of the room’s height. There was a broken window right by where he was standing and I couldn’t very well see what could have killed him from such a low vantage point as mine.

  “Broken window, upside-down body…hey, Nyarla.”

  “That’s Lady Nyarla Paporplastic to you! What?”

  “No. Anyway, is there someone you can go to and see if they have a ladder? I’m not gonna make much progress if I can’t look at the corpse up close.”

  “Umm…there’s the building owner, but…”

  “But?”

  “He doesn’t like me very much (pouting)…what if I get in a lot of trouble and he decides to kick me out for good this time?”

  “I’ll handle it, I guess. You would make me handle it.”

  “That’s true…”

  “Go and find him, get that ladder.”

  “But whyyyyy do I have to be the one to do it…I’m tired…so, so tired…”

  “Because I’m the one investigating the corpse. Come on, get to it.”

  “Fiiiiiiiiiiiine…”

  She padded off dejectedly as I peered up at the corpse some more. I sighed, patted around my pockets. I still had my vape, at least. No idea how I was going to charge it when it died or fill up the tank when I ran out of juice, but I tried not to think about that as I took a hit and blew the cloud of smoke all over the body in the sky.

  A night in hell. Well, my life had definitely turned upside down, at least.