More of that joyless, automaton laughter. “This is the best thing that could ever happen to you. You’ve been chosen. And the world will praise your name.” The Solomon I know speaks with a nervous stammer. He’s an anxious little slug. The person I was talking to now sounded like Solomon, but it was as though his voice box had been borrowed and was being used by someone else.

My mouth opened, but I couldn’t conjure a word.

“Surrender yourself,” Solomon said. “Your identity. Let it go. The more you resist, the worse you will suffer. You’ve already died. Now be reborn.”

Solomon is the only member of the band who has never written a song. He’s much more eloquent banging on drums. And here he was reciting some Eastern spiritual nonsense like a wannabe mystic.

That goddamn, soulless laugh. So close and intimate it felt wet inside my ear. “Sacrifice for the greater self,” he said. “Release.”

I could hear him breathing. Hear the smugness of his breath. A vacancy of humor. Then I heard what I wanted to believe was static interference, a clicking on the line as we drove farther away from the cell towers of the city. But it was an organic sound, born of vocal chords. A clucking of tongue within a cavernous mouth.

A red ball of light formed in the center of my mind and began to expand. Eating my awareness as it grew. Devouring my thoughts like a dwarf star. Sucking me through a worm tunnel to a graveyard in space. Time dilated as I left my body behind, and I felt something enter from the other side. My vacated mind a receptacle for it. An overwhelming sense of murderous rage that—

My head rocked to the side as Al struck my face with the back of his hand. He had already slapped the phone to the ground, where it now lay.

“Hand it to me,” he said, once I’d come around. I could still hear that mechanical clucking sound emanating from the speaker, faint and impotent from its place on the floor. My body felt brutish. A cumbersome anchor for my conscious mind that had just wandered to who knows where. “Shut it off, first. And don’t bring it anywhere close to your ear.”

And that other presence I’d sensed, replacing my conscious awareness as it drifted off. Coming, it seemed, to inhabit my body. The voice on the phone had been Solomon’s, but that wasn’t his personality.

I reached down, holding my head as far from my hand as possible. Grabbed the phone and ended the call, silencing that perverse noise.

What had we just been talking about? Where the hell were we going?

“Friend of yours?” Al said, taking the phone from me and making sure it was shut off.

“I don’t know who that was.”