He stopped. After a moment’s hesitation, he veered to the right, following my original tracks into the room. He scuttled to the arm where I’d first paused. At a noise across the room he leapt to his feet. He looked around, head low, sniffing the air. Another noise—the click of teeth. With a roar, he lunged forward and kicked the head into the wall. It hit with a splat, but rolled back again, spine still jumping. He kicked it again, still bellowing, frustrated by his inability to end its life.

After a few more kicks, rage sated, he looked around the room, then strode out. He’d forgotten me. Thank—

Grunts drifted from the main passage, near the entrance, as he tried to move the boulder. He hadn’t forgotten me, he’d just changed tack and gone to see how I’d gotten in…and whether he could get out.

How long had he been in this cave? How long had this other thing—this head—I couldn’t think of it as a man, that just started my brain spinning—how long had it been here? Like that?

This was the true hell of this dimension. Not the thing on the cave floor, but the never-ending possibility of it. Trapped for eternity in a world of other killers, any of whom could, at any moment, do this to you. All you can do is trust that they won’t, trust that if you don’t touch them, they won’t touch you, rely on honor and decency from men who have none. And when they do exactly what you fear they’ll do, you band together and lock them up with their victim, barricade them in and leave them there, alone…until some goddamn idiot walks up, goes, “Hmmm, what’s this boulder doing here?” moves it, and barricades herself inside with them.

I squeezed my eyes closed and chased the thoughts away. Panic. So that’s what it felt like.

After a few shoves on the boulder, the man gave a snarl that resounded through the cavern. Those dragging footsteps resumed and, seconds later, he appeared at the room entrance. He stepped inside and peered around, head low, snuffling and muttering. Then he wheeled and strode out the door, heading for the tunnel depths. Thank God. Now I could—Wait. Shit! When he’d turned, there’d been something in his hand. It was still too dark for me to see more than shapes, but I knew he hadn’t been carrying anything earlier, and the only long, narrow object he could have picked up on his way to the entrance was the tree limb I’d left there—the one I needed to get out of this place.