Edited paths that end in Tier F letters I-P

Tier One

John meets Mary, what happens next?

They have an affair. Mary has been married to Patrick for seven years, but one month before their eight-year anniversary, she cheats on him with John. She meets John at a train station and loves the way he says the word ‘necessity.’ Honestly, that’s it. That’s the only reason she cheats on Patrick. John says the word ‘necessity’ with a reverence Mary has never heard before, so she cheats on Patrick because she loves the way John says ‘necessity.’ She waits until the third date to sleep with him because she’s believes that decent women should wait until at least the third date before they open their legs and open their goodie jars. Besides, she already has enough sex with Patrick, anyway. Mary respects Patrick. She always leaves John’s apartment two hours before Patrick is due home so that her beloved Patrick will always finds her home. She makes sure to shower after she has sex with him so that Patrick doesn’t taste John in her mouth. She makes sure John wears a latex condom every time. Despite the philandering, Mary really loves Patrick. After two months, she decides to end the relationship with John. She gets bored with John and his sex. Even the word ‘necessity’ slipping gloriously from his tongue isn’t enough to sustain their relationship. She tells John that it’s over, but John has other ideas.

Option A: John follows Mary home the night after she tells him they’re through

Option B: Mary discovers she is pregnant 

Tier Two

Option B

Mary gives birth to an elephant seal. This is not a metaphor. A thousand pound seal, dripping in brine, emerges in the hospital to the delight and surprise of the doctors.

“You must be so proud,” they all tell Patrick. Patrick stares at the wall stoically.

The birth arouses suspicion of infidelity in Patrick.

Nonetheless, Patrick cares for the seal like he would a human child. They name the critter Albert, and like a good father Patrick follows his son with a hose to prevent dehydration. Albert learns at a slowed pace, but Mary sits at the kitchen table with him every night with flashcards.

Patrick and Mary fight over petty issues every night, filled with the stresses of raising an elephant seal. When Albert reaches his teen years, he develops a rebellious streak, consuming marijuana, spraying graffiti on the churches, the hunting the occasional penguin that walks into town.

Albert has also faked ADD to receive a regular supply of Ritalin, and is arrested and sentenced to two years in juvenile hall when caught selling the drug to classmates. His peers in the hall do not take kindly to Albert, as they harbor deep seated prejudices against elephant seals due to unflattering media portrayals in television and literary magazines.

Option C: Patrick and Mary vow to ignore their child forever.

Option D: Albert escapes, armed and angry.

Tier Three

Option C

Mary and Patrick are now a happily married couple, living young and wild and free. Mary begins to take a pole dancing class, hoping to make herself a bit more limber.  On her first day of class, she meets and falls into friendly love with Carry, the instructor. Carry and Mary sit in the park everyday after lessons, and Carry stretches Mary’s legs while they banter on philosophical and historical peculiarities. Mary feels safe with Carry when she realizes she has found a friend who says necessity just like her precious John did.

Meanwhile, Patrick joins a drinking group and makes many friends, including one very animated storyteller called John. Yes, fans, this is the same John who Mary opened that goodie jar for, and Yes, John has been trying to find Mary ever since that night when she left him. He had heard that Mary had given birth to his son, a beautiful baby elephant seal, but he had never been able to track them down.

It’s a Thursday afternoon when John finally feels the mood was right to give Patrick some advice.

“Elephant Seals need 3 fresh fishes a day and water dabbed into their fur no less than every 30 mins”, he starts.

But Patrick only looks at him as if he were crazy.

“I’m telling you this because I’ve heard that you and your wife have an elephant seal son”, John continues.

But Patrick replies “We have no such son”, and he really believed this as he and Mary had paid a psychic to completely erase the memory of their lost child.

On this very same day, Mary and Carry also have a peculiar conversation regarding the same elephant seal. It starts with Carry asking Mary what her favourite animals were.

“Elephant Seal!”, Mary replied excitedly and immediately.

“Have you ever had one?”, Carry asks.

“No”, said Mary, shaking her head solemnly.

Carry stared at her and insists “yes you have. Admit it.”

But Mary remains silent.

Carry shakes her fingers at Mary, raising her voice,  “Admit it now!”

Option E: Carry starts strangling Mary

Option F: Later that night, Carry and John meet up at the very same bar

Option D

John and Mary have been trying to ignore the news, avoiding calls from friends, simply desiring to continue a normal life. The news trickles to a stop in a matter of weeks. Police have no leads on the prison break. It appears that someone had flown a helicopter over the prison yard and lowered down a bathtub filled with saltwater, which Albert flopped into and then flew away. They simply wait for the excitement to die down and the healing to begin.
Nearly a year later, though, John comes home from work to see Albert sitting at his old spot at the kitchen table, smoking a cigar and wearing an eyepatch. “Hello, John.”
“Albert! Oh my- what are you doing here?”
“I'm here to give you and Mother the opportunity of a lifetime,” he said.
“Where have you been all this time? Albie, your mother and I– we only ever wanted you safe and happy. We made some mista-”
“This isn't the time for apologies. This is a time for action. The story deserves a more illustrious exposition but for time's sake I must condense it. I run an empire, John. A vast network that I alone have been blessed with the abilities to run successfully.”
“What...what are you talking about?”
“Meth, John. I'm talking about meth.”

OPTION A: John joins Albert's crime syndicate. The life of chaos and pain drives Mary back to the arms of Patrick, her husband, while Albert comes closer to discovering the truth about his birth.
OPTION B: A SEAL team that's been tracking Albert moves into position and takes the hit. John and Mary are both tried for Albert's crimes, as it is assumed that an elephant seal could not possibly have the skills to run a meth ring.

Tier Four

Option E

Bystanders watched with weirdly unsympathetic eyes as Cary pinned Mary down to the grass, her hands around her throat. Mary aims a swift kick to Cary's stomach and scrambled away when Cary's fingers loosened to grasp her own torso in pain.

"What the hell is wrong with you!" Mary gasps.

Cary looks miserable. "Mary I'm so sorry I should've told you I'm cursed. If anyone ever lies to me I have to immediately begin strangling them. My father wanted to create a superhero in me and my brother so he put a special chip in our brains that programs us to respond violently to wrongdoing. My brother is wired to throw hand grenades when people cheat so every board game he's played is a pretty fatal affair."

Mary narrowed her eyes. "Oh yeah? Then why ask me a question if you already know the answer? Isn't that just setting me up for failure here?"

"That's the worst part. He recently updated our chips so that if he gives us a piece of information, we have to find that person involved in the matter and confront them. This whole thing has been his set up. I don't know why, but my father is looking for something with you and your elephant seal son and if I were you, I wouldn't take that lightly."

Mary gripped her thighs. Could it be possible? Had she birthed a nonhuman mammal and just forgotten about it?

Option A: Programmed for extreme honesty, Cary goes back and tells her father what she has done. He prepares to confront Mary himself.
Option B: Mary returns to Patrick and together they go searching for a son they believe they've never known.

Option F

“Hey, Carry,” John whispers huskily, “how did it go today with Mary?”

“Horribly! That woman is a piece of work, I tell you!”

You see Carry is John’s sister. (This is why they both say the word ‘necessity’ with the reverence that Mary once fell in love with). She is trying to help John find the baby elephant seal so that they can do a paternity test and determine whether he is the real father to the baby seal.

John closes his eyes, pained at the thought of losing his one and only son forever.

“Even Patrick didn’t bite – he acted like he didn’t feel affection for any baby seals.”

Carry feels horrible for her brother, she was sure the pain of losing a child was unbearable. But she has to ask, “are you sure that the baby could be yours?”

“What?” John is shocked at her question, he shouts, “of course, Carry! I always tore the condom Mary gave me during the affair!”

The crowd at the bar turns to stare at them. John is causing a racket again today and the manager has had enough of his outbursts. The police are called.

Option A: John is sent to prison, but instead his car goes to juvenile detention where he meets the baby elephant seal

Option B: Patrick is the police office assigned to their case

Option G

John joins the crime syndicate, Mary goes back to Patrick, and Albert gets closer to understanding his birth

John has decided that it's a necessity for the meth labs to move underwater. The expansion of labs into several suburban neighborhoods in Wisconsin, Idaho, North Dakota, and Kansas have become less than subtle and John, who has taken on a life of crime with huge gusto, feeling like he's found where he belongs, thinks that the industry has got to be taken down into the next big frontier- the ocean floor.

John also sees the value in this because he can tell Albert has been acting a big weird lately and thinks a bit of natural habitat will do him some good. When he tells Albert about the idea, Albert's face gets strangely giddy for a moment and he responds with

"Yes, yes I've been thinking that's what I have to do- we have to do. I just have to know..." he trails off, furrowing his eyebrows and stroking his chin with a flipper.

"Have to know what?" John asked

Albert didn't seem to hear him. "Do you think mother would come with us? I just feel like if she birthed a seal she might want to understand why, and the answer could be somewhere down there under the surface." He was referring to the bay where Mary had grown up.

John shook his head violently. "Listen, if there's anything I know about Mary, it's that she's sworn never to go underwater again. But Albert, I don't think you're focusing on the right things here...the expansion of the industry my boy!..."

Option A: Albert decides to swim down in the bay to scope out good places for meth lab development. What he finds shocks him and he realizes he has to get answers from Mary about his birth.
Option B: John goes scuba diving in the bay to scope out good places for meth lab development. He doesn't return...why?

Option H

Even the bang of the front door being kicked open couldn’t divert Patrick’s incredulous gaze from his son’s cold, black eyes. This was not the Albert he once knew, the fun-loving pup that would giggle during bath time when Patrick would loofa his not-yet gigantic nose.

“ON YOUR KNEES! HANDS ABOVE YOUR HEAD!”

Patrick’s fatherly instinct, even after all this time, resurfaces as effortlessly as a humpback. “Excuse me, sir. My son has neither knees nor hands. Let’s try to keep our language a little more inclusive, please.” They had been dealing with this kind of insensitivity as a family ever since Albert was born. Maybe that’s what drove him to a life of crime, thinks Patrick. The world’s intolerance to those that look slightly different.

“No funny stuff or we’ll shoot! ON YOUR KNEES!”

Patrick realizes the guns we’re being pointed at him, not the 7,000 pound, self-confessed drug kingpin that he is sitting across the table from.

“What the hell did I do?” The SWAT team, realizing that he was unarmed circles closed to him. He feelsa boot land on the small of his back, pushing him off the chair and onto his knees on the ground.

“We have multiple informants saying that Berto Elefante, the largest supplier of methamphetamines in the western United States would be in this house at this time. Seeing as the only other person here is this woman,” Patrick sees Mary struggling in the arms of two SWAT members in the next room. “you are coming with us to answer a few questions.”

“Whaaat?” Patrick gasps. “Do I look like a meth kingpin to you?” He gestures to his neatly tucked in flannel shirt and well-pressed slacks. Unfortunately for him, due to the incredible popularity of the AMC original series Breaking Bad he looks exactly like what every TV viewer in America assumed a meth kingpin looked like. Evidently, the rigorous training of the SWAT team members didn’t prevent them from watching TV's most popular programs.

“Come on, sir. Let’s go.”

Patrick looks pleadingly to his son. “Albert, please, help me out. Tell them the truth.”

Albert looks at his father’s face and then let out a thunderous roar, a seal noise that he had always been ashamed of using in front of his parents.

Patrick hears one of the SWAT guys mutter to his comrade. “Jesus, these drug guys and their pets. Now we we’ve got to find an aquarium that will take that thing.”

It takes Patrick a moment to realize what had happened. His son had let him take the fall for his own heinous crimes. He and Mary were going to prison.

Option A- Albert tries to save his parents

Option B-Patrick and Mary escape, vowing revenge on their traitorous seal son.

Tier Five

Option I

There is a darkness in the world. A darkness far larger than the darkness that is inside of every man, that includes these smaller shadows and feeds on it. One man controls this darkness. And only one seal can stop it.

Cary reports back to his father, a creature of shadow, the utter privation of goodness. “Thank you, my son,” he growls. “There shall be actions taken.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it!” Cary and the supreme incarnation of evil turn swiftly around. It's Albert! In his years abroad he's trained in, like, ninjutsu, I guess? Tae kwon do? Some crazy seal martial art. Anyway. He crashes through the window that's in the volcano lair. I don't know why there's a window. Just. Go with it please.

“No! Go after him, my son!” The Darkness shouts. Action! Excitement! Danger! Think about how crazy this fight scene would be in a movie and not being read piecemeal by a bunch of people who want to contradict those who came before them. So, like, Alfred (is it Albert? Fuck) somehow gets the better of Cary, even though he's an elephant seal, and have you seen how crazy those dudes look? They've got noses like summer squashes. And then he's standing over the being of supreme darkness, with a katana between his flippers.

“Your nefarious meddling has seen its end, Volkazar!” Albert shouts.

“Wait! The prophecy!” Evil Incarnate shouts.

“Prophecy this, motherfucker!” Albert shouts, plunging his katana into the heart of darkness.

Patrick and Mary and John all live happy and fulfilling lives now that a goddamn elephant seal has saved the world.

Kyle does a magic trick! 

Option J

Option B: Mary returns to Jorge and together they go searching for a son they believe they've never known.

They go to the bay, searching for elephant seals. In the process of looking for them, Mary slips on a banana and hits her head on a moving ship. When she wakes up, she remembers their son, the elephant seal Albert! Incidentally, she then remembers that Albert had a red birthmark on his tail that she could use to identify him. 

So, Mary and Jorge continue their search to find their son, Albert. They search for three years but have no luck. Saddened and depressed, they settle for staying in and watching episodes of The Bachelor and Jersey Shore. They eat out occasionally at their favorite restaurant, Foods of Necessity.

One day, they are served a variety dish that comes with many different sea creatures. Mary notices something strange on one of her portions - a large, rough and red mark.

Worried about the sanitation of her food, Mary asks the waiter what was in her dish.

The waiter replies, "Oh, that dish has crab, salmon, and of course, our very own specialty . . . elephant seal." 

Mary bends over and throws up.


THE END

Option K

John enters his freezing cell to see his cellmate, a pile a blubber, almost like a walrus... 

It is Marijuana Mike, the most obese man in Brine Penitentiary. Rather than say hello, Mike scoops John up in his folds of fat. John almost chokes in the sweaty corners, surviving only by finding a pocket of air in Mike's navel. 

This was prison, and they played by different rules. 

In comes Albert, King of Brine and Tusken glory. 

"Let him go, Mike." 

Mike drops John out, who is now shriveled like a raisined infant. 

"What's your name?" 

"My name is John." 

"No. Your name will be Starbuck," says Albert. 

Starbuck looks up in horror as Albert tramples him to death, unaware that the man is his actual father. 

"Who da' man?" 

The prison cheers. Albert waddles around the room, giving high fives and barking testosterone fueled barks. His mother, Mary enters to visit her lover, John. She sobs when she sees his trampled body on the floor and enters the cell. 

"Ma'am?" It is Albert. Mary does not remember him because she wiped her memory. Albert does not remember his mother because she looks so darn old. 

"Would you care to procreate?" he asks boldly. 

She looks up at Albert's well toned muscles. 

Both parts of the Oedipal prophecy are completed. 

Option L

Patrick rolls up in his slick Victoria cruising car and strides purposefully into the bar.  He has received so many calls from Andrew, the bar manager, that he doubts this one will be serious.  When he sees that his friend John is the one in the doghouse this time, he of course doesn’t want his friend to suffer any harm.  Like a true honest policeman, he goes through all the actions of handcuffing John and marching him to the car.  As he straps the iron cuffs around John’s wrists, he whispers in his friend’s ear, “play along.”

As soon as the duo is out of sight around the street corner, Patrick pulls the car over and removes John’s handcuffs, inviting him into the front seat.  He figures the two friends will just go on a nice drive, perhaps end up at another bar. Patrick’s police shift is almost over anyway, and he doesn’t have to return the car until the morning, so he’s ready to enjoy being a free bird. Plus, adventures with John are always more interesting than his typical end-of-shift coffee-and-doughnuts run. 

This particular adventure does prove to be eventful, but not in the way Patrick was expecting.  John, more inebriated than Patrick realized, leaps onto his lap, then shoves him out of the seat and before Patrick knows what’s happening, John is behind the wheel and driving breakneck speed, siren blaring.

“Where are we going?!” Patrick, despite the gun in the holster of his uniform, feels helpless and powerless in the midst of his friend’s drunken intensity.

“Just hold on tight, ok?” John drives faster.  In truth, he has no idea where they’re going, but he has always wanted to drive a police car and decided to seize the opportunity.

They careen around corners, run red lights, zigzag between lanes.  “Thank god there aren’t many cars out this late,” Patrick thinks to himself as he sits plastered to his seat.

Suddenly, John he gets what he thinks is a brilliant idea.  He pulls a U-turn in the middle of the highway and a few minutes later, they’re pulling up to one of his favorite spots, the flashing neon sign startling him sober.

“Patrick, lose the uniform or they won’t let you in!”  Without waiting for a reply from his still-shaking-in-his-boots buddy, he yanks Patrick’s outerwear off and pulls him out of the car and into the strip club.

When Mary got the job, she didn’t tell anyone.  Not Carry, because she was worried her instructor would be jealous.  Not Patrick, because she was worried he wouldn’t like the idea of her showing so much of her goodie jar to other men.  And of course not John, because she had stopped talking to him after ending the affair.

So, both men were pretty surprised when they saw Mary, winding and grinding up on that pole.  As you already know, neither was very pleased to find her there. 

“Mary, get down from there!” Patrick shouts.

“Now!”  John adds for emphasis.

In unison, they cry, “It’s a necessity!”

Option M

Albert swims along the coast, looking for a cave with sufficient structural integrity to support the industrial size meth lab they had envisioned. Behind a school of stingrays, he catches a glimpse of large cave opening. It glows soft yellow, pulsating with the currents of the ocean.

He swims towards the hole, and to his surprise the stingrays do not scatter as he approaches. He pushes through the crush of spiracles and fins, and enters the cave. It is warm, surprisingly so.

“Hello, Alfred. I’ve been waiting for you.”

Alfred spun around looking for the owner of the booming voice.

“I’ve been watching you, Albert. Ever since you were born. I’m proud of you, Alfred, my son.”

Alfred flicked his tail wildly, traversing through the cave to locate the voice.

“Over here, my son.”

And that’s when Alfred saw it coming towards him, an amorphous darkness rushing towards him. He was seized by panic as the darkness surrounded him, holding him tonic. His lungs began to burn and stars exploded in his vision. Then, he felt a strange calmness envelop him as the darkness swallowed him.

Six months later

John sits on the soft sand of the beach, watching the red orb of the setting sun descend beneath the water. He had been coming to the beach everyday, searching. In his quest to find his missing son, his meth business had fallen to shambles, and he was now living out of a Winnebago parked by the side of the 101. As the sun drops below the horizon and darkness ascends, he packs up his tools into a beer cooler, and walks towards the car, his feet sinking in the sand with each step.

He hears a familiar bark, and he looks back. He sees something moving in the distance.

“Albert?” John calls.

The shape pauses for a second, before diving into the water.

Option N

John disappears underwater. Albert waits a week, as annoyed at the delay in business development as he is about the apparent drowning of his father, and then goes to Mary's house to inform his mother of Patrick's death.

"No!" Mary sobs. "How could this have happened? How could I have been such a fool?"

Albert has had enough. "What are you talking about! Who's my real father?"

"I am." A man steps into the room, soaking wet. It is John.

"John!" Mary screams. "Where is Patrick? How could you—"

"I killed him, Mary. He dove down to my habitat, and I killed him. I've been an elephant seal all along."

Albert stares at John with hatred. "You killed my father!" he shouts.

"No," John says. He looks Albert square in the eye. "I am your father."

Albert collapses in utter disbelief. "No. No! That's not true! That's impossible!"

John shakes his head. He looks almost sad. "Look into your heart. You know it to be true."

Albert rises up on his haunches, his good eye filled with rage. John takes a defensive stance.

They fight. John, reared as he was in his natural habitat, with plenty of penguins to eat, was the stronger of the two. But Albert's years in the prison yard had served him well. He knows how to fight on land. The battle ends when Albert traps John's head under a roll of fat, and lays there until the kicking stops.

Mary sits crumpled and sobbing in the wreckage of her living room. "Why'd you have to kill him?" Mary asks.

Albert rolls off of John's squished body and looks off into the sunset, his destiny fulfilled, and the future of his underwater meth empire secure. He looks at Mary.

"Necessity," he says. "Necessity."

Option O

Luckily (or unluckily, depending on who you were), their town is generally devoid of crime (aside from the graffiti and occasional hunting of penguins), and the jail is tiny and somewhat pathetic, not unlike one of those two-celled units patrolled by one sleepy man portrayed in Westerns. Patrick and Mary are placed in adjacent cells, but they reach for each other and clasp hands through the iron-wrought bars.

Mary presses her head against the cool metal, “I can’t believe this is happening to us. Baby, I’m so, so, so sorry.”

Patrick shakes his head, caresses her knuckles: “No, no. I’m sorry. I should’ve been a better father.”

Mary starts to cry. Everything comes out now. The affair with John, the beautiful way the word necessity slipped out of his mouth, the curse he placed upon Mary’s belly as she left him forever, how Albert was raised with a confused identity, not because he was an elephant seal but because he somehow knew, in the back of his mind, that he had multiple fathers.

The jail is silent but for the sound of Mary’s sobs. Patrick doesn’t know what to say- had never even questioned the origins of Albert- so he just stands there with Mary, stroking her fingers and her hair through the bars. The sound of crickets rings in his ears, and he becomes highly aware of the dripping of water, somewhere in the jail, or maybe outside.

Suddenly, the silence is ruptured by an explosion underground. The ground starts to cave in. As the sleepy sheriff jumps to his feet and bursts through the door, Mary and Patrick are dropped into a capsule and, with dirt and concrete chunks and startled worms swirling around them, they are thrust through a hyperloop. Their brains rattle inside their skulls, they feel the skin on their cheeks being pushed back on their cheekbones like a sort of twisted smile, but they are aware, according to some tiny, rational, calm voice in the back of their brains, that they have been dropped- quite literally- into an elaborate prison break plot.

They emerge on the other side of the hyperloop, covered in debris. They are temporarily blinded by the sunlight, but soon they are greeted by a smug-looking Albert and an equally smug-looking John, accompanied by the strong scent of the sea. They shake hands, like satisfied business partners, and pulls Mary and Patrick out of the capsule.

A trembling Mary first speaks: “Did we really have to travel by hyperloop?”

John smiles: “But of course. It was of the utmost necessity.”

Option P

Many years have past and Patrick and Mary are mere shadows of their former selves.

Patrick is gray and balding, with hard lines like dark parentheses around his mouth and arms flecked with prison tattoos. An infected tat left a mottled scar on his thigh last year.

Mary has changed her makeup scheme to go with the color orange, but her caked-on foundation only accentuates the smoking lines around her eyes.

Prison has turned the pair into hollow, stony people. The judge sent them down for twenty years, but they’re both getting on in eight for good behavior. Eight years rattling around in maximum security penitentiaries, breaking bread with murderers, addicts, and sneering three-strike offenders. Eight years writing haggard love letters and clichéd poems to one another from opposite ends of the state. Eight years taking the rap for a crime they did not commit, a crime they’d been framed for—framed by their elephant seal son.

Mary’s eyes go steely whenever the other inmates ask about her family. She glowers if she even hears the name Albert. She seethes and bites her lip if anyone dares to turn the channel to Animal Planet, where happy seals frolick on beaches. SHE should be the one lounging on a beach, not slumped in a chair in a baggy orange jumpsuit. Some of the inmates think the seals look cute, but Mary sees the glint of evil in their puppy-dog eyes.

At last, eight years after Albert walked and his parents went to the stocks, Patrick and Mary are free.

They meet in a shady bar exactly halfway between their respective prisons, dressed in faded jeans and oversized t-shirts. They say nothing; nothing need be said. They know what has to be done.

Albert’s latest drug lair is in San Francisco, close to the docks. He runs his newest drug empire from a grimy basement that smells like sea water and fish treats. It isn’t hard to track him down—his old contacts squawk as soon as Patrick steps into the room, sharpened toothbrush in hand. He became quite nifty with a shank during his time in prison, and they can see it in his eyes.

Patrick and Mary stake out the pad, armed with baseball bats. They pause outside the door. Eight years of planning, and now they will do it. They will take the seal pup they'd raised and loved and eject him from the world. Their eyes meet. They have no regrets—not anymore.

On the count of three, they kick down the door, brandishing weapons, mouths foaming.

“ALBERT!” Patrick snarles. “ALBERT! Daddy’s home.”

The room is empty except for a desk and a chair at one end. The chair swivels, slowly.

It is not Albert. Though this is hardly surprising since Albert could never squeeze his bloated aquatic body into a tight leather chair. And Albert never had use for desks, as he could never sign papers with his flipper-hands.

Instead, Patrick and Mary are facing a man, a human man. A slightly graying, yet oddly familiar human man.

“Well well well,” John purrs. “The darling parents have returned. What do you think, Al? You always wished we shared a hobby.”

The door slams behind them. Albert lumbers into view, barking and grunting in wet, guttural tones. The baseball bats drop from Patrick and Mary’s numb hands.

“What do you think, Mary?” John says. “Our son rather takes after your side of the family, doesn’t he? Sorry about all this but… seeing as you’re too great a threat… it IS a necessity.”

THE END