Chrissy pushed against me and we moved on quickly. My foot nudged something so solid I almost tripped. I looked down, cursed, stepped back right into Chrissy. Together, we looked down at the still form, half-hidden by the stacks. When the figure didn’t move, I inched forward, nudged it again. Then I got my foot under it and pushed the shoulder back far enough to reveal the face of the warehouse sentry. Blood leaked from a gash over his eye. He was either asleep or dead. I took my foot away, let the body slump back, and we stepped over it and carried on.

Ahead of us, around the next corner, another light flickered, and I heard the sound of a helicopter’s rotor blades before it was replaced by synthesiser music. I recognised it immediately as the theme tune to Airwolf. Keeping the gun out in front, I led the way to an old TV with rabbit ears and terrible reception, the same TV that I had sat in front of, cross-legged in my living room, when I was a kid. We’d had that TV until the day my brother and I were throwing around the baseball indoors, and the ball bounced off the wall and hit the screen and cracked it. Our mom was not happy that day. Our dad was furious.

Even as this memory swam through my head, the crack appeared on the TV in front of us. The screen bulged slightly and retracted, like it was breathing. Every time it bulged, the crack would widen a little, and then it stopped retracting, it kept bulging, and black liquid (blood) started to drip from the screen, and then flow like an open wound. Then the screen burst open and the black liquid gushed out in a torrent that hit me square in the chest, forced me back, splashed into my mouth as I cried out.

Chrissy slipped and I fell over her and the black liquid covered us, drenched us, and then the torrent weakened, and went back to being a trickle, and then it stopped altogether and there was nothing except the busted TV.

I went to wipe my eyes clear, but I was dry. I was clean. I looked at Chrissy. There’d been no black liquid. No gushing blood.

“Playing games,” I said.

We got up. Ahead, we heard voices. Children’s voices.

We reached another clearing in time to watch myself, aged eleven, drop down from the narrow window into the basement.

“Oh my God,” Chrissy whispered.

I was so small. So tiny. So young. I stared.

“See anything?” a voice asked from the window. Tyler’s voice.

“Junk,” my younger self said.

“Any black magic stuff?”

My younger self shone his flashlight right into my face and then moved it on without seeing me.

“Just old lamps and furniture. A table. Sofa.”