The previous morning’s nightmares were coming true. It made me sick to think my beloved characters had turned against me, were the very thing that let Krystal back in. Though it was my own mistake, letting someone else in on this project in such intimate ways. The very word “intimate” now made my face burn hot with melting regret and shame, which reflexively turned to the surest cure: anger. Holed up and desperate, my truest Stanley Roper self was realized.

If only they would leave! I would have done anything just to have them leave.

Apartment 201 was dark and remained dark. When the power surged the night of the storm, it had taken the television with it, and all that magical computer programming had been wiped from its innards. Rita had tried to fix it but failed. I could turn it on but there was only static now. Before Rita and I moved down to the Ropers’ place, we had carried the other television, the one compatible with the DVD player, back to 205. All of the chairs and dressers and bookcases populating the bedrooms and kitchen had gone toward the barricading of the door, and the empty spaces they left were full of desolation. Jack, Janet, and Chrissy had left the premises. They were out wandering in the dark, haunting some other place I couldn’t reach.

The dream was mortal. It was all coming apart, little by little, and me with it. Each evening during my siege I fell asleep on the couch, a guest, and the television was turned on, its snow the only thing keeping me company.

In the middle of the night on the eleventh day, the static woke me, until I realized it wasn’t the television, it was a whisper.

“Bonnie!” it said. Krystal.

She was speaking to me through the front window. I had the curtains drawn, but the panes were so thin and the night so quiet that I could hear her clearly.

I crept toward her voice. I also whispered, but it was angrier, more like a hiss. “What the fuck do you want?” I said to her. “I don’t know what Rita’s told you, but I want you gone.”

“You can come back now,” she said. “I miss you.”

When I didn’t reply, she said my name again.

And then, in an even lower, meaningful tone, she whispered, “They’re all dead, you know.”

I knew something like this was coming, but my breath caught, anyway. A flash of floor tile, of a coffeepot shattering. I snorted, trying to shake it off. “No shit, Krystal,” I said. I thought around the memory, concentrating on my anger. “I was there, remember? I should have grabbed the pickle jar? We’ve been over this.” I actually rolled my eyes, annoyed. She had come all this way, and she couldn’t come up with some original material? “I think I made myself clear. I want you G-O-N-E.”

For a moment all I heard was the white noise on the TV behind me. A headache was forming at the top of my head. I waited for her response, anxiety building. After several moments of silence I felt a second of relief, that she had given up and gone away.