“What if I don’t want to?” Only there’s really nowhat-if about it. He’s never wanted to go anyplace less. Suppose he asks this fellow to let him go and try to catch up with those wavering specks? What if he tells the man in black, “That’s where I’m supposed to be, where what you call ka wants me to be”? He guesses he knows. Might as well spit in the ocean.

As if to confirm this, Walter says, “What you want hardly matters. You’ll go where the King decrees, and there you will wait. If yon two die on their course— as they almost certainly must— you will live a life of rural serenity in the place to which I send you, and there you too will die, full of years and possibly with a false but undoubtedly pleasing sense of redemption. You’ll live on your level of the Tower long after I’m bone-dust on mine. This I promise you, faddah, for I have seen it in the glass, say true! And if they keep coming? If they reach you in the place to which you are going? Why, in that unlikely case you’ll aid them in every way you can and kill them by doing so. It’s a mind-blower, isn’t it? Wouldn’t you say it’s a mind-blower?”

He begins to walk toward Callahan. Callahan backs toward the stable where the unfound door awaits. He doesn’t want to go there, but there’s nowhere else. “Get away from me,” he says.

“Nope,” says Walter, the man in black. “I can’t go for that, no can do.” He holds the box out toward Callahan. At the same time he reaches over the top of it and grasps the lid.

“Don’t!” Callahan says sharply. Because the man in the black robe mustn’t open the box. There’s something terrible inside the box, something that would terrify even Barlow, the wily vampire who forced Callahan to drink his blood and then sent him on his way into the prisms of America like a fractious child whose company has become tiresome.

“Keep moving and perhaps I won’t have to,” Walter teases.

Callahan backs into the stable’s scant shadow. Soon he’ll be inside again. No help for it. And he can feel that strange only-there-on-one-side door waiting like a weight. “You’re cruel!” he bursts out.

Walter’s eyes widen, and for a moment he looks deeply hurt. This may be absurd, but Callahan is looking into the man’s deep eyes and feels sure the emotion is nonetheless genuine. And the surety robs him of any last hope that all this might be a dream, or a final brilliant interval before true death. In dreams— his, at least— the bad guys, thescary guys, never have complex emotions.