No great loss. Not to you, and certainly not to your family, because you have none.

Nor to the world; the world would be delighted to see you go.

He opened a file on his computer titled HARTSFIELD CEREBELLIN TRIALS. There were nine of these trials in all, spread over a fourteen-month period in 2010 and 2011. Babineau saw no change. He might as well have been giving his human guinea pig distilled water.

He gave up.

• • •

The human guinea pig in question spent fifteen months in the dark, an inchoate spirit who at some point in the sixteenth month remembered his name. He was Brady Wilson Hartsfield. There was nothing else at first. No past, no present, no him beyond the six syllables of his name. Then, not long before he would have given up and just floated away, another word came. The word was control. It had once meant something important, but he could not think what.

In his hospital room, lying in bed, his glycerin-moistened lips moved and he spoke the word aloud. He was alone; this was still three weeks before a nurse would observe Brady open his eyes and ask for his mother.

“Con . . . trol.”

And the lights came on. Just as they did in his Star Trek–style computer workroom when he voice-activated them from the top of the stairs leading down from the kitchen.

That’s where he was: in his basement on Elm Street, looking just as it had on the day he’d left it for the last time. There was another word that woke up another function, and now that he was here, he remembered that, as well. Because it was a good word.

“Chaos!”

In his mind, he boomed it out like Moses on Mount Sinai. In his hospital bed, it was a whispered croak. But it did the job, because his row of laptop computers came to life. On each screen was the number 20 . . . then 19 . . . then 18 . . .

What is this? What, in the name of God?

For a panicky moment he couldn’t remember. All he knew was that if the countdown he saw marching across the seven screens reached zero, the computers would freeze. He would lose them, this room, and the little sliver of consciousness he had somehow managed. He would be buried alive in the darkness of his own hea—

And that was the word! The very one!

“Darkness!”

He screamed it at the top of his lungs—at least inside. Outside it was that same whispered croak from long unused vocal cords. His pulse, respiration, and blood pressure had all begun to rise. Soon Head Nurse Becky Helmington would notice and come to check on him, hurrying but not quite running.

In Brady’s basement workroom, the countdown on the computers stopped at 14, and on each screen a picture appeared. Once upon a time, those computers (now stored in a cavernous police evidence room and labeled exhibits A through G) had booted up showing stills from a movie called The Wild Bunch. Now, however, they showed photographs from Brady’s life.