Kyle and Dora: Lantern Slides

"And in every narrative there are gaps: places where, although things happened and the characters spoke and acted and lived their lives, the story says nothing about them. It was fun to visit a few of these gaps and speculate a little on what I might see there."

-Philip Pullman, on "Lantern Slides", his addendum to the His Dark Materials Trilogy.

You are in a dark room. There are several other people here, but you can't see them. You hear some shuffling, the strike of a match, and…