Stealing a glance behind him in the dark, observing the distance between himself and the faraway platform—what had he just seen? He needs to know. Looking around he notices, on the other side of the iron girder, a larger opening created by another giant steel X, which looks big enough for Kierk to squeeze through into this back room. But to get there he must cross the iron girder. Pulling his head out of the box, he feels around, leans out into the air of the track. Groping forward with one arm he maneuvers his way until he is stretched out, with one foot and arm on each side of the girder, ready to swing to the opposite end, clinging to it like a fruit bat in the reddish glow. And it is then that a voice speaks to him from inside his skull. But it is not in his own lighter-than-air internal voice but rather the deep and real voice of a man, a stranger, speaking directly to him from a place inside, but slightly left-of-center and above where the me of Kierk is normally spatially located.

The man says—“What you are doing is very stupid.”

A pause in action. The girder digging into his dress shirt. The reddish glow. A laugh out loud. What the fuck was he doing? Withdrawing his limbs he swings back to the side where he had come from. Panting, he withdraws. What is he withdrawing from? He doesn’t know. Maybe it had just been a homeless man whose sleep Kierk had disturbed. And the light had changed the angles, made him seem . . . enormous. His head spinning, he begins retracing his steps.

About ten feet away from the girder and thirty feet from the barely visible lit curve of the platform, he hears it . . . another threatening rumble, but this time from farther down in the tunnel, definitely on his side. Far earlier than he had calculated it out to be, at least two standard deviations too soon, a statistically unlikely event whose likelihood was irrelevant because it is happening, which he verifies by grabbing onto a metal lip with one hand and hanging all the way out, a scarecrow in the dark. There it is, vibrating toward him, a great slug half-tunneled back, a metal worm of the earth coming in a long shriek and with hateful momentum, slowly turning the corner but he knows really it is speeding along, closing even now, in these few seconds of thought. Then he’s off, running toward the platform down the ledge he had just crept carefully on, feet pounding on that thin shelf, eyes on where it drops into oblivion. He spares a brief moment to glance back and there it is, a bright monstrous cyclopean eye pursuing him; it captures him in its light, it roars a greeting, it is upon him . . .