I don’t know how much longer it was before my training began. Back then I found it hard to measure time in this place where reality shifts so easily that not only can one day slide into the next, but one place can slide into another as well. Here in the land of nightmares, boundaries merge and break the way they do in dreams. You might walk into a small house and go through dozens or hundreds of rooms before you find your way out. Or you might walk through a door and find yourself in a forest—or sit down under a tree and find yourself having dinner with an army of the dead.

After a while you begin to learn to look past those things. You can move fast down here once you know the shortcuts. And you do have to move fast to do your job.

I hate my job. It works like this: Weztix rails me and I go to sit with him inside the stone skull, in a dark chamber that smells of loss and suffering, and sometimes of death. He closes one huge hand over my head and fills my brain with images.

Sometimes when he takes his hand away I realize that I’ve been screaming. So I won’t talk about those images right now. But maybe you’ve seen them anyway, maybe you’ve dreamed them. Because what I do when Weztix is finished with me is carry the things he’s poured in my head back to the real world.

Which is to say, I climb the ladders of nightmare and come up underneath your bed. Now that I’m one of Weztix’s messengers, I can cross the barrier easily. And once I’ve risen up beneath your bed, I lie there in the darkness beneath you and whisper to you while you sleep, spinning back the images that Weztix has planted in my brain.

Why don’t I try to run away one of those nights?

If I told you, you might never sleep again.

And I need you to sleep.

After all, if you don’t sleep, how can I do my job?

The only good thing about all this is the nightmares I got to take to Harold. Heh. The truth is, I took him a lot that weren’t meant for him, which is sort of against the rules. But I don’t do it anymore. I pretty much stopped after they took him away for special treatment.

I used to be a good boy. I want to be good again, but I don’t know if that’s possible anymore. Because the only way out is for me to do what Timothy did, what all the others do eventually, and find someone to take my place.