“Troy?”

A silence. In the far distance, beyond the man in the dark, she heard a thick insect drone, the faint rumble of a large engine.

“No,” the man said, and she recognized the voice as Dylan Whitley’s, though it lacked all of his Friday swagger. Instead he spoke almost in a whisper. “There’s not much time. You need to be ready, Officer. Both of you need to be ready.”

Odd, she thought—her eyes refused to adjust to the blackness that surrounded her.

“Ready for what?” she said.

“The big game.”

She heard her phone ringing, chirpy and distant, and a single strand of white Christmas lights stuttered to life above her bed. They revealed that she wasn’t in her childhood room after all. She had somehow been dropped into a black box with nails jutting from its walls, pale floorboards, a little kitchen. She recognized the droning. A mass of writhing flies glittered above her, gleaming like the garnet shawls her mother had always worn.

Clark went cold at a sight past the end of her bed. She and Dylan weren’t alone. There, in a dark corner, she could make out the leathery shape of another man. A man, but not a man: its fingers too long, its arms bent with too many joints. The man-shape, a blackness where its face should be, was coiled in a ball on the floor and rubbing itself, slowly.

Clark didn’t dare to move. She’d seen this shape’s work before but never the shape itself. It was death, she thought at first. Death, pleasuring itself with a little whimper.

No, her dream-self said. It was something much worse than death.

“Dylan,” she whispered, because now Dylan Whitley, standing at the end of her bed, had turned to study the thing with her. “Dylan, what is that?”

The droning mass of flies above them began to cheer, the engine outside sputtered and when the black man-shape in the corner rose to its feet, a stench of rot filled the room: a smell that was putrid and sour and old. A low whisper escaped the void of the thing’s face.

Dylan Whitley smiled at her. Where his right arm should have been there was nothing but a single piece of collarbone jutting from his jersey, the wound weeping blood onto her floor.

“That’s only the best years of my life right there, Officer,” he said with a laugh, and the man-shape forced its hand inside the boy’s open mouth.

She startled awake. The phone stopped ringing the moment she grabbed hold of it: 6:02 a.m. The smell of rot lingered in her dark room. After some of the things her crazy mother had told her as a girl, Clark couldn’t help but crawl to the end of her bed where Dylan had been standing in the dream and reach out to ensure that her floor was dry.

The phone began to ring again. Investigator Mayfield.

She was at the intersection of South Street and the highway when she heard a siren behind her. Deputy Jones pulled into the oncoming lane and rolled down his window.