You don’t deserve to feel good. You lost your keys. You’d lose your own head if it weren’t attached, you stupid, clumsy—

“Shut up, Ma,” Calhoun muttered, unaware that he was even talking out loud. “Just shut up, okay?”

Just like he was. Woozy with booze. All those bottles at the end of every week and the trashmen would stand there shaking their heads, laughing—

He felt nauseated, feverish. What you saw up there must have done this to you, Steve. When that door had slammed shut behind him and Walker and Frank Snow, and Calhoun had looked down and seen…seen…

He let his gaze stray off into the dark, as if there might be a place he could look and not see that other room exactly as it had been. In the end smoke had blackened everything, blinding him, and he only wished it had come sooner, much sooner.

It had been some kind of children’s hospital room. There was a little bed inside and a little table and chair and some old toys on the floor that nobody had played with for a long time. Calhoun remembered a yellow duck on a string, sticking halfway out from underneath the bed. They had rolled Snow’s stretcher in and Dr. Walker had started speaking all weird, saying words that hadn’t made any sense. He’d only gotten a few of those words out when Snow had—

—sat up straight on that stretcher with his eyes wide open and that grin ripping across his face, and it happened so fast—

But the speed of the initial events hadn’t really interfered with Calhoun’s recall. If anything they’d only seared the salient details more deeply into his brain. He remembered how he’d backed up and knocked something over behind him, probably that tray of tools, and when he’d looked up again, Dr. Walker had gone pale and still.

What had happened next in that children’s hospital room, what Steve Calhoun had seen before the smoke blocked it out, he never intended to speak of to anyone. Partly because he couldn’t believe it himself, but mainly because he was afraid.

What, that actually happened? You saw those things?

He sucked harder on the cigarette, brightening its tip from orange to a lurid cherry-red.

Then he stopped.

Across the room, twenty feet away, another orange light floated in the dark.

“Shit!” Calhoun said and jumped bolt upright, his own cigarette almost falling from his lips. His eyes fixed on the glowing cherry. Someone else was standing here in the dark, smoking and watching him.

Unless—

Slowly, he brought his hand up and took the cigarette from his mouth, lowering it. The other orange speck obediently followed suit. Calhoun raised his cigarette again. The other speck came up.

Ah.

He almost chuckled at his own foolishness. It was his own reflection he was seeing, shining off something, a sheet of glass or some polished surface in the dark waiting room. He brought the cigarette back to his lips and the orange speck did the same. Nerves, he thought again, shakily, and started to inhale. Fucking nerves are running away from me.