Todd still hadn’t noticed him, a fact that Billy was relieved about. Todd in a fury was never a good thing.

“Why not?” Todd shouted. “Why don’t you have the book?”

The librarian smiled and gestured around him.

“Because this is a hardware store,” he said.

Todd looked around. Billy did the same. The librarian—and Billy now saw he wasn’t a librarian at all, he was the clerk from the hardware store—was right. The whole place was full of saws, and ladders, and boxes of nails and screws. There were tin kettles, and steel buckets, and a strong odor of linseed oil. It was a hardware store all right.

“You haven’t heard the last of this!” Todd bellowed—and Billy marveled how, even in a dream, Todd behaved entirely true to type—and he stormed off toward the outside world.

The store clerk turned to Billy. “Sorry about that,” he said.

“No problem,” Billy found himself saying.

“Now,” said the store clerk, “how can I help you?”

He smiled, and his teeth were the teeth of a hacksaw. They glinted, gray and steely, in the light of a bare bulb.

*  *  *

Billy screamed and woke. He turned on his bedside lamp and fumbled on the floor by the bed for the glass of Old Times he’d left there the night before in case of emergencies. His hand caught something else, knocked the glass over and sent it skittering across the floor. Billy cursed, and looked at his hand. It was bleeding after coming in contact with whatever it was he’d touched on the floor.

He put on his glasses and peered over the side of the bed. On the floor, amongst the dust bunnies, was a shiny new hacksaw blade.

Billy screamed again.

*  *  *

Todd woke with a start. His neck hurt like hell. He opened his eyes and was surprised to find himself in his office, sitting at his desk. He stretched, and as he did so, his eye fell on the neat pile of pages next to the typewriter. Todd picked up the pile and riffled through it. There were close to thirty pages here, neatly typed and, even at a cursory glance, clearly written with a sense of flow and direction that most writers would envy. Todd wasn’t sure whether he should be feeling envy or not as he was the person who’d written these pages. Although in another, equally real sense, he wasn’t.