Then he goes down the hall to sleep it off. He steps into his hotel room without disturbing the salt at the threshold.

But as soon as he places his foot over the line, he knows it’s too late. A chill runs through him that isn’t from the hotel air-conditioning. The hairs go up on the back of his neck. There is a sudden, staggering pain in the center of his forehead, a pressure inside his skull that tells him his third eye is open wide again.

The devil is already waiting inside.

He doesn’t look like much. There is only what appears to be a small boy, sitting on the bed, flicking through the channels on the TV. He’s a perfect blond angel. He looks like he should be asleep at the foot of a Christmas tree while waiting for Santa. Casting agents should be fighting to get him in commercials. You could wrap him in an American flag and sell anything.

Eric isn’t fooled. He looks with his third eye.

The boy — or whatever’s riding him — is crackling with dark energy, spikes of black radiating from his aura and snapping off into the air. It is almost too much. It hurts to look at him closely.

But if Eric focuses, he can see that this is only the smallest part of something else that is pushing its way into this world.

It’s familiar.

He shuts down his third eye with effort, and the pain subsides. It’s only a little boy on the bedspread again. He sits up, swings his short legs to the edge of the bed, and stares at Eric. Eric has the uncomfortable feeling that something is examining him all the way down to his bones.

“You know who I am?” the boy says. He smiles, milk-white teeth gleaming.

Eric recognizes that smile. Now he sees the skull beneath the skin. Charles Colchester: the servant of The End, the hand of darkness, the Good Man, the leader of the Followers. The enemy he thought they destroyed twenty years ago, now wrapped in a shiny new package.

Eric spent the best part of his childhood trying to avoid being murdered by this guy. He recognizes the mannerisms and the expressions. He knows the hard, ugly intelligence behind those angelic blue eyes, and hears the same antique, Midwestern twang coming out of that mouth. It’s possibly the creepiest thing he’s ever seen, and he’s watched the dead rise from their graves.

What is speaking through the boy isn’t the full measure of Colchester. It’s an echo, a ghost, mixed into the child’s own soul. But it’s unmistakably him in there, sharing space, crowding out the body’s real owner.