It's good that she's here, he thinks. So she can see. She'll have the proof. It strikes him; he should have had her come here all along, to stand as witness to his glory and his cruelty.

Louis sees her with his one good eye. Perfect.

"Miriam?" he asks, but Ingersoll already has the knife out and is stabbing it into the trucker's second eye and brain.

It happens so fast. After all this, it feels like it should happen leisurely, in slow motion.

Things don't seem right.

The gun in her hand feels warm.

She smells something bitter, acrid. Smoke stings her eyes.

Ingersoll holds the knife tight. His hand starts to shake.

He turns and reaches up to touch the hole in his temple. A thin rivulet of blood dribbles down from the entry wound, like rusty water from a busted spigot.

Louis blinks his good eye.

He's not dead, Miriam thinks.

This isn't how it happened in her vision. This isn't how it's supposed to play out.

Her heart skips a beat. She feels sick. Woozy. Queasy. Greasy.

The gun is in her hand. Her arm is extended.

She drops the gun and it clatters against the floor.

"I–" she starts to say, but she's truly at a loss for words.

Ingersoll teeters.

And then he lunges like a tiger, knife in hand.

He's on her, his one hand closing on her throat with fingers like mandibles, and she's carried backward with the momentum. She slams against the metal steps, and she feels him go up over her, and then she goes up over him, and the world goes topsy-turvy. Black bricks and white lines smear into an abyssal spiral, and again and again she's greeted by a face full of hard yellow metal –

Her muscles cry out, her bones feel chipped and cracked, and she thrusts each limb out from her body as hard as she can, and it slows her tumble –

She comes to a stop about thirty feet down.

Fresh blood marks the wall next to her.

Beneath her, Ingersoll's eyes stare up.

His head is cocked at an impossible angle, the chin tucked over the shoulder, the vertebrae pressing so hard against his hairless flesh that it looks like his neck will split like an overripe fruit. His dead gaze seems affixed to her. A painting whose eyes always watch.

Miriam almost laughs.

But laughing – even almost laughing – hurts. Real bad.

She looks down and finds a rusty fishing knife sticking out of her chest. It goes clean through her left tit, right to the hilt.

Miriam tries to draw a breath. It's like sucking in a lung full of fire.

"Shit," she says.

Darkness takes her, and she continues her tumble down the lighthouse spiral.

INTERLUDE

The Dream

"Do you get it now?" Louis asks, walking alongside her.

Together, they cross a black sand beach, each granule catching the sun in a way that makes it shimmer. The sand is warm beneath Miriam's feet. A tide licks at the shoreline. The air smells salty, but not briny or fishy.