They found the children thrown like luggage across the floor of a spare bedroom. The heads of both were dressed, Ripley with gauze clotted with small spots of blood, Frankie with the original bandages from the hospital. Feeling the flutter of their pulses, Thomas wanted to weep, but there was a gaping hollow where his joy and anguish should have been. He gathered his unconscious son in his arms instead, rocking him the way Nora rocked Ripley.

Both were sedated.

They took Nora's car, which Neil had pulled out back. Thomas was too numb to care that she had willingly brought their daughter to her monster lover.

The way he had brought their son to his monster friend.

She sat in the back with both their children, gently weeping. It seemed fake, somehow. Thomas drove, entranced by the apparitions that swept up and around his sensorium.

The headlights illuminated too little road, a wedge of gravel rimmed by bracken and flailing trees. They rolled into the black. Everything flying outward, into the black beyond and behind them.

'Gyges was the Chiropractor,' he whispered to her image in the rearview mirror. 'Neil made him… A diversion, a way to strangle the resources devoted to finding him.'

Not that explanations mattered anymore.

'How?' Nora croaked.

Everything would be shadows after this—simulations. No fear, no pain, no joy or love would be as profound, as true, as what Mary had shown him. Neil was gone, and the world was back behind the controls. Only the familiarity of the things Thomas thought and felt set them apart. He was the difference, which meant he was nothing at all.

Like this very moment.

'Mommy?' a little girl's voice whispered.

Thomas heard the sharp intake of Nora's breath.

'I love you, Mommy.'

'I love you too,' she rasped.

'Yesss,' Ripley said. 'I really, really, love you…'

The words were right, but the world that gave them meaning was so very wrong. Soon, Thomas realized, his son would awake also.

Then the screaming would begin.

'I luvvvvvv…' his daughter cooed in a smiling, teary-eyed voice.

'Shhhh,' Thomas croaked. 'Time to sleep, honey.'

Experience, unspooling like a movie, qualms for color, hopes for shape, decisions for the illusion of movement, waiting for the bulb to burn through, for the celluloid to boil into black rings, so that it all could vanish into the hidden frame, leaving only catcalls and white light on a white screen.

'So much it hurts, Mommy.'

AUTHOR'S AFTERWORD

AUTHOR'S

AFTERWORD

Since this book turns on an intricate

combination of fact and

fiction, I thought I should try to clarify, at least in general terms, which is which. In so many ways writers are the least trustworthy of sources, not only because of the sheer breadth of the ground they cover, but because they spend so much time alone with their opinions.

Love affairs are inevitable.