The Sawyers fade and reappear, are reborn and die. His maniacal tune reverbs through the school, amplified sixteen times—a stadium music box blowing out a deceptive melody.

“Come out, come out, wherever you arrrrre!”

He’s in terrible flashes, supercuts, everywhere I look. The lights flicker to reveal him with the rifle stock pressed against a boy’s cheek and dim to the sound of him kicking a classroom door open. There’s a pandemonium of shrieking, lockers vibrating like thick sticks on snare drums.

A police siren blares, sending shock waves across the floor, turning the whole foundation into rippling water. The floor disappears from underneath me, and I plummet, slamming into the tiles beneath, head and joints exploding as if this were real life.

I’m on a solid bathroom floor, in between blue stall doors and white sinks, one of which is exploding from the pipes, shooting out water like a busted hydrant.

There’s a boy in a button-down and slacks on the other side of that stream, rolling up his sweater sleeve and raising a needle to his elbow. He pauses to look at me. “Who are you?” He pushes the plunger into his skin and sucks in a huge gulp of air. His boots fold sideways underneath him, and he tips. The walls tip with him, throwing the whole room sideways like a cube.

I hit the floor on my back, and face up at a ceiling of stall doors, which are closed one moment but open the next, like a nest of bats sprouting from a slumber.

A boy’s body falls out from a toilet, and he hits the floor beside me, hard.

The doors shriek on their hinges as I push myself up in the river of water, becoming pink from stall boy’s blood. His eyes are open and staring at nothing. My clothes are soaking, a light bursting, sparks shooting across the endless fountain. I clamber for the exit, the dead boy’s dissolving, sweeping starlight across the room.

The hallway is a spinning disk of lockers, like a funhouse tube—a carnival thing I never had a desire to go through, since I knew it would make me as queasy as I am right now.

“I’ve seen enough.”

The mist hisses shhhhh, like a living entity calling the shots. It somersaults me up through the ceiling and through another wall, where I’m greeted by a factory of noise.

POP! CRASH! CLINK! BOOM! Sink units. Cabinets with test tubes and vials. A rack for lab coats. A snap of flame. A cork popping off a test tube stand. A phantom hand floating above a flask. Explosions—BSSHHH! Freak accidents happening free of human involvement.

A rumble reaches me through the noise. A familiar rumble, because I hear it so often in my world.