He holds the light against the open space. He can’t see far but he sees there is no fog here. He leans forward and breathes the air in. It feels good. Very good. The children mimic him. One by one they experience the air in the break. While they do so Dirk steps to the other side of the corridor and sees there is a twin. A duplicate break in the opposite wall. He sets the lamppost head down for the first time since entering and grips the two sides of steel. He tries hard to widen the space. The children think he can do it. They’ve seen him tear a lamppost in half. They’ve seen him break a little girl’s arm.

But for all his might, Dirk can’t bend the wall.

He leans forward and takes in another great gulp of the outside. It fills him with a renewed vigor for getting to the end. Dirk wonders if that’s what the space is for. To give him enough strength, just enough, to keep him going.

He goes.

Things slither across the ceiling with more regularity now. Sometimes Dirk sees the entire back of a man. A woman’s profile. Toes and fingers.

Dirk reaches another break in the steel. He and the children gulp another breath before continuing. More bodies cross the ceiling. One even comes at them on the stone floor. No arms. No head. All legs. The children step aside.

Cackles ahead. Crunching. Fire crackling, too. A third break in the steel walls comes sooner than the second did. Again Dirk and the children take a breath of the outside.

The fourth one comes so soon that only half the kids breathe it in. And Dirk now understands that some of the noises are coming from the outside. He stumbles ahead. His torso feels huge, his feet are like flat paddles, the hump on his back is making it impossible to see the children. But he knows. He knows that only ten or so were there at the last break in the steel. He knows he’s lost ten or more along the way.

The fifth break comes even sooner. Then the sixth. The seventh. The eighth. There are so many symmetrical breaks in the walls now that most of the air in the corridor is from the outside and it can hardly be called a corridor anymore. But the breaks are not big enough for Dirk or the children to step through. The ninth, the tenth, the eleventh. Through the breaks Dirk sees there is a green Goblin mist…like the man said…but it is nothing like the fog. In the mist…in the darkness just past the mist…Dirk sees people. Shapes. Faces. People watching him and the children. Some snicker. Some gasp.

Dirk starts to understand what is happening. By the fourteenth space in the steel he knows it for sure.