Page 41 (1/2)

And then I was no longer falling but walking,with arhtened, unsteady wanderer in a black cave I became aware of a presence At first it seeit It was darkness at the center of darkness, a hollowness in the fabric of the air arounders

And then an electric thrill shot up ain the wet and heaving heart, the slick bone, and deeper stillinvisible, a writhing beast, and I cried out but made no sound, and this cry of mine seemed to still the frantic contortions of this unseen monstrosity

I felt it It was not large, no bigger than a large cat or s out tendrils, craters, some surfaces slick and wet, others like scabs

There was a crease in it, a slight indentation that I suspected went the circuh how I knew, I could not say, that I was meant to pry the halves apart In obedience to this instinct I dug ers into the crease, and to ht have had to exert to split apart a cracked egg

And then And then Oh, God, how can I put into words the brutal i, panicked, running in sheer limpsed nor outrun

I saw hi flat, tied down to a crude wooden table, as above hie hypodermic needle descended slowly, slowly toward his abdomen

I saw hi toward a head-on collision

There were snatches of inized

There were ies of one-armedcampfire

I knehat I was seeing as I plowed helplessly through the haunted house of Derek’s i his fears, his darkest terrors, the stuff of his nighthtened him from earliest childhood until this moment

And worse, far worse than seeing these things, I felt theainst theh me They were like infections that, once touched, I knew I could never fully shake off

And I knew then, oh, with such soul-deadening dread, that this hat I had felt froer I understood then that he had absorbed some part of the terrors of so many tortured, twisted minds I understood that he had never, could never, fully erase them from his own consciousness and that these terrors had made his touch toxic

And that the sa now To me

I don’t kno h the accumulated horrors of Derek’s mind Maybe no time passed at all Maybe it was a thousand years Tiood was time, how could it be measured, when all you could think to do was to scream?

Slowly then, slowly the unbearable intensity weakened Slowly, like a person rising froht, I floated up and away fro , nothing was forgotten