There were stone corridors, he thought. But there are always stone corridors.

The children laughed at something Dirk wasn’t paying attention to.

There were children, yes, but there are always children.

Dirk excavated his memory but there was nothing he hadn’t seen before, nothing to make this day any darker than any other day.

Nothing you hadn’t forgotten before, he told himself.

Was this true? Was there more to the dream he dreamed a hundred times?

“Mister Guide Man!” a child yelled, tugging on his brown pants. “You’re not doing your job!”

Dirk looked down at the boy, his eyes a foggy green. “You want to see the rest? You want to see the prize?”

“Yes!” the kids cried. “Yes!”

19

It’s just a hall really…stones piled one upon the other…something easy to make. But Dirk can’t believe how much of it there is. It seems the children have been keeping up with him for a long time now and he wonders if, when he was their age, he could have done the same. His body feels heavy. It even looks heavy and this worries him greatly. The hump on his shoulder has reached almost as high as his eyes. His feet are so large that he stumbles.

His abdomen hangs in lumps. His hands are swollen to the size of small mittens. He knows it’s the fog. He knows the bird distracted him back there on the bench so the fog could get in. And now it’s growing.

He lumbers on. The lamppost head continues to emit enough light to guide them.

Some of their number have been lost. There was the boy swiped by the huddled, clucking thing. Another, a little girl, touched her arm to the webbing and when Dirk tried to free her, her arm snapped off at the elbow. She ran screaming into the darkness from which they came. Another boy was taken when a trapdoor opened and long hairy legs pulled him into the floor.

Look! a boy says.

Dirk stops and holds the light to the ceiling where they see the leg of a man or a woman jutting out from the darkness.

Can I touch it? a boy asks.

No, Dirk answers.

He steps forward slowly and the leg slithers out of sight.

Dirk continues and the children follow.

The sounds have changed. There is still the echo of the children’s sneakers. The echo of the children’s voices. There is still the constant sound of something scurrying ahead, slithering to either side. But the scratching has been replaced entirely with the sound of steel. Not machinery. Not exactly.

Metallic echoes now.

Deformed, Dirk lumbers on. The children keep tight to him.

Something fast whisks by the pack, heading the opposite way, something large, fleshy, bloated…