Malice slithered up my spine and danced in spiteful shivers over the back of my neck. I could sense the thing’s hostility—not the mindless anger of a fellow boy I’d needled beyond self-restraint, or Justin’s cold, logical rage. This was something different, something vaster, more timeless, and deeper than any ocean. It was a poisonous hate, something so ancient, so vile, that it could almost kill without any other action or being to support it, a hate so old and so virulent that it had curdled and congealed over its surface into a stinking, staggering contempt.

This thing wanted to destroy me. It wanted to hurt me. It wanted to enjoy the process. And nothing I said, nothing I did, would ever, ever change that. I was something to be eradicated, preferably in some amusing fashion. It had no mercy. It had no fear. And it was old, old beyond my ability to comprehend. It was patient. And if I proved too disappointing to it, I would only break through the veneer of that contempt—and what lay beneath would dissolve me like the deadliest acid. I felt… stained, simply by feeling its presence, stained as if it had left some hideous imprint or mark upon me, one that could not be wiped away.

And then it was behind me, so close it could almost touch, its outline towering over me, huge and horrible.

And it leaned down. A forked tongue slithered out from between its horrible shark-chain-saw teeth, and it whispered, in a perfectly low, calm, British accent, “What you have just sensed is as close as your mind can come to encompassing my name. How do you do?”

I tried to talk. I couldn’t. I couldn’t make the words form in my mouth. I couldn’t get enough air to push my voice up out of my throat.

Damn it. Damn it, I was more than some terrified child. I was more than some helpless orphan preparing to endure what someone vastly older and more powerful than me was preparing to inflict. I had touched the very forces of Creation. I was a young force of nature. I had seen things no one else could see, done things no one else could do.

And in a moment like that, there was only one thing I could ask myself:

What would Jack Burton do?

“I’m f-f-f-fine,” I said in a hoarse, hardly understandable voice. “That’s a mouthful, and I’m busy. D-do you maybe have a nickname?”

Its smile widened.

“Little Morsel, among those whom I have disassembled,” it purred, its tone wrapping lovingly around the last word of the phrase, “I have several times been called by the same phrase.”

“O-oh? W-what’s that?”

“He,” purred the thing, “Who Walks Behind.”

Chapter Thirty-two

“He Who Walks Behind?” I said, fighting a losing battle to keep from trembling. “As scary names go, that one kind of isn’t. I’d stick with the first one. More evocative.”

“Be patient,” purred the creature’s disembodied voice. “You will understand it before the end.”