Lee and Mouse were waiting on the soundstage under the gate. They moved in on either side of him and his world dissolved into hands and mouths and flesh that felt like clammy rubber and wouldn’t let him breathe. When the gate opened, they separated and it drew them up one at a time; first Lee, then Mouse, then him. Through light, through pain, into a room with blackboards covered in patterns that might have been words that might have been illustrations, that might have been mathematical notion; it was impossible to tell because two of the three boards had a body crucified against it and the third had clearly been prepared for a body of its own.

Their eyes were open and their expressions suggested they’d been alive for a very long time after they’d been nailed to the walls.

There was a man—he knew there was a man, was as certain of it as he’d ever been of anything in his life— but he could only see a formless shadow stretching out dark and horrible along the floor. He felt his body move toward it, as unable to stop itself as he was to stop it. His heart raced. If he touched the shadow, he’d be absorbed the way Lee and Mouse had been absorbed. He’d lose the self he’d found. Become nothing more than a part of the darkness. He couldn’t let that happen. Not again.

But the compulsion was everything.

Greater than terror.

Greater than the need to be.

Darkness.

The room through different eyes. An instant of being himself and someone else. An instant of cold cruelty. Arrogance. Impatience. Why was such a simple task taking so long?

And a voice. A loud, obnoxious, unignorable voice. “It’s 8:30 on a beautiful Sunday morning and you’re listening to CFUN and another forty-five minutes of commercial free music. Let’s start things off with a little Av . . .”

Tony was out of bed, across the room, and slapping off the radio before he was truly awake—a total aversion to so-called soft rock and Amy’s suggestion of putting the radio where he couldn’t reach it from the bed was the only thing he’d ever found guaranteed to get him up. Eyes squinted nearly shut, he wondered for a moment why it was so bright in the apartment and then remembered that for the second night in a row, he’d gone to sleep with all the lights on.

Not that it had helped much.

His skin prickled under a fine sheen of sweat as the terror returned and a glimpse of his shadow lying on the grubby carpet drove him two stumbling steps back into the wall.