“Come on!” Sadie shrieked, opening the door.

Lou snapped back into her body. She grabbed Cal’s wrist and pulled him along the aisle, toward the ramp. Looking over her shoulder, she noticed the creature’s snout pushing out of the movie screen. In moments, the giant creature would be in the screening room with them.

Sadie held the door as they rushed past her, then slammed it shut.

CHAPTER 10

WHAT HAD HAPPENED was this: Jason had been stepping through the house’s mirrors like Connie had shown him, until, peering out through the projector lens in the screening room, he’d found Lou chatting with a couple of other kids. “Lou!” he shouted out, trying to get her attention. “It’s me! It’s me! It’s me!”

Then she turned. She saw him. For a brief moment, something lit in her eyes, as if she finally understood. He was here. But he could feel the creature close by.

He needed to tell them to run. Now.

He felt a shifting inside himself, as if a small animal were crawling through his guts. Panic set in as he imagined a creature moving his liver out of the way, pressing past his lungs as it came upward, slithering up his esophagus into his throat and into his sinuses. He tried to focus on his sister, tried to open his mouth to warn her, but his jaw froze. Suddenly, his eyes were on fire. The image of the screening room blurred, then black smoke churned into his vision, and he couldn’t see anything anymore.

The creature had found him, just like Connie had said it would, and it was pushing him out of the way. Stopping him from speaking to these kids. He tried to shout out to Lou, but before a scream could burst from his throat, he was flying through darkness, unable to see which way was up. He flailed his arms and legs. Any second he might hit the bottom of a bottomless pit. SPLAT. Instead, he found himself tumbling and bouncing across scorched ground—the way a stone will skip upon the surface of a lake—until he skidded to a stop in the middle of a black nothingness.

He was in the void again. Connie’s warning had come true. He’d only wanted to warn Lou, but he’d led the creature straight to her. His eyes stung, and he felt like a fool. “Lou,” he whispered. “No. Please, I hope you ran …”