The starfish had begun to explore the crook of Duncan’s arm. Its rejuvenated cilia shone wetly, a thousand minute moving jewels among the windless reeds of his arm hairs.

“It’s so hard,” he said. “Half of what you see seems like a hallucination, or a dream, even while you’re living it. You are so unsure about what’s real that you take all kinds of stupid risks. As if it can’t hurt you. You float along, like a spore. You sit for days in caverns as large as cities, let the fungi creep up and devour you. The stars that can’t be stars fall in on you in waves. And you sit there. An afternoon in the park. A picnic for one.

“Things walk by you. Some stop and stare. Some poke you or hit you, and then you have to pretend you’re in a dream, because otherwise you would be so afraid that nothing would stop you from screaming, and you’d keep screaming until they put a stop to you.”

He shivered and rolled over on his side. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he whined, the starfish on his shoulder a golden glimmer.

“Was it worth it?” I asked him, not unkindly. “Was it?”

“Ask me in fifty years, Janice. A hundred years. A thousand.” (It didn’t take that long. Within five years, I began to recognize that my sojourn underground was akin to one more addict’s hit of mushrooms. It took ten years of these adventures for me to realize that I could only react to such journeys, never predict. Always absorbing, but mostly in the physical sense.)

He twisted from side to side, holding his stomach.

“I thought I could get it out of me if I talked about it,” he said. “Flush it from my brain, my body. But it’s still in there. It’s still in me.”

Again, he was talking about two things at once, but I could only bear to talk about what I might be able to help him with right then.

“Duncan,” I said, “we can’t wash it off of you this time. I think it’s inside of you, like some kind of poison. Your pores are clogged with black spores. Your skin is … different.”

He gasped. Was he crying? “I know. I can feel it inside of me. It’s trying to change me.”

“Talk about it, then. Talk about it until you talk it all out.”

He laughed without any hint of humor. “Are you mad? I can’t talk it out of my skin. I can’t do that.”

I joined him along the wall, moving Sonter’s portrait to the side. The starfish had splayed itself across the side of his neck like an exotic scar.

“You’re due north,” I said. “Its arm is blue. And you’re right, Duncan. It’s beautiful. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”

He moved to pull it off, but I caught his arm. “No. Don’t. I think it’s feeding on the spores embedded in your skin.” It left a trail of almost-white skin behind it.