Coming up there is an iron girder in his way, blocking the path. He feels around it, and leaning out sees the ledge continues beyond it on the other side. Pulling back, he notices something right next to him on the wall—an opening, and with a square of light that he can just get his head through and peek into. He sticks his head into a concrete box the size of a studio apartment, lit by a halogen lamp propped up in the corner, unattended and disorderly. The floor is dusty and scraps lay in shadows, but one clear part was illuminated, the wall maybe just ten feet to his right, which he turns his head to face. There, writ large in red spray-painted letters against the far concrete wall is DOUBLE TROUBLE LIVES. TORTURE FOR TORTURERS. And beneath it, drawn in the same bloodred, looms large graffiti of a monkey’s face. But it is distorted, human-like and showing human teeth. The grin manages to portray in simple lines both malevolence and exultation. Exactly, in fact, the same look Mars Bars had given Kierk right before he had vibrated away the material of himself. The all-too-humanoid drawing seems a perfect facsimile of Kierk’s own memory. There is a shifting. Something huge moves in the corner of the room. Before it moved it had just been a shadowed scrapheap. Now it towers, unfurling its limbs, standing bipedal but wrong, too tall, with dangling arms, its enormous head towering above in the darkness, and Kierk rears back, almost falling off onto the tracks, then flattening against the subway wall with the small passage he had been looking through right beside his head. A thrill rushes through him, right down his spine, and in the mechanics of darkness his heartbeat is a piston and his skin a sheet of electricity. There is more movement; something is knocked over, a scraping, and then silence. Slowly Kierk goes to look again, not breathing as he does so. The room is empty of all but the graffiti.