Walter was back out on the spiral. That meant more hurrying, more hacking at bird-bats, and more dodging bullets...the usual routine. Still, routine didn't mean safe, and I was bleeding again by the time we got to the little room on the first floor from one through the thigh and a nick on the arm. Nothing major, but they added up after a while. But it wasn't all bad, I guess. There was a funny moment when I came around the arc and saw him standing there, a floor above me, shooting...not at me or at Eileen, but at the damn bird-bats. Guess they even bugged him, too.

Luckily, this time the walls in the Hole room were free of their usual slug population, and I leaned back against one as Eileen grabbed the brown bottle sitting on the floor beside the Hole and brought it to me. Very kind of her.

"You left this here?"

"Thought that might come in handy," I said, feeling the warmth begin to spread through me.

"Looks like it did," she said. "You OK?"

"Yeah, just give me a minute," I said. I closed my eyes for just a little.

"While we're waiting," Eileen said, "I had a few thoughts while I was upstairs. About everything. Interested?"

"Shoot."

I heard her lean back against the wall, next to me.

"I was thinking about what you asked Walter...why. We still don't know why he's doing all of this, right?"

"Right."

"So, I was trying to look at what we know that we hadn't used yet. I don't know what you know, but maybe I could figure out something. I ended up thinking about little Walter. He's got to be Walter Sullivan, right? He said he was."

"Yeah. He did. They're the same person," I replied. I could see the little kid's face in my mind as if he was standing in front of me again. "We've never seen them together...maybe he's changing from one to the other or something."

"That's not possible, Henry. I have seen them together."

That made me open my eyes. Then, I remembered when that would have happened.

"He stopped him," she continued. "He stopped him from killing me. Little Walter. I was lying there on the floor, waiting for him to finish me off, and then this little boy just appeared in front of me. He was just standing there, staring at me. Then, he looked up at Walter, and," she said with a shake of her head, "I've never seen a little kid so mad in my life."

I laughed.

"Then, he just pointed at the door, and I heard Walter leave. It was right before you came in, I guess. I don't remember that. I'm sorry."

"It's OK. But you said he stopped Walter...any idea why?"

"I don't know. Did anybody else say anything about him? When they..."

"No. Cynthia and Jasper didn't. Andrew knew him, from the orphanage, but he died before I had a chance to find out more. Richard saw him in an elevator, in the buildings, but...wait."

"What?"

I could smell the smoke again, the ozone, the frying flesh…

"He was there, when Richard died. He was standing behind him, pointing out of the window, and Richard told me that he wasn't a kid. He was the 11121 man. I didn't know what that meant until a little while ago."

"So Richard knew that he was Walter Sullivan."

"Seems like it, but I don't know how he knew. But here's the clincher. When I went to Richard's room next, Walter was still there, pointing out of the window. But this time, it wasn't the little Walter...it was the man in the coat." I couldn't bring myself to tell her that he'd been pointing at her window.

She turned to look at me. "They're not the same person. Well, they are, but one doesn't change into the other. So that isn't it."

"Walter did say," I said, shifting my weight as the wrigglings in my thigh finished their repair work, "that he was doing this for him. Did he mean, for little Walter?"

"Must have. Who else does Walter care about?"

"You."

"Yeah. Me. At least, little Walter did. Big Walter sees me as..."

We both realized it at once. "Mother," we said in unison.

No, not only the twentieth sacrament. We knew that already. This was bigger than that…much bigger. What was the name of the ritual? The 21 Sacraments for the Descent of the Holy Mother. Literally. He wanted his mother, didn't he? Yes. That's what the writing said. And in the deepest part of his kingdom is his Mother.

I told her about the writing on the wall of my laundry room, that had been there before the new Hole opened. She nodded.

"When I was little," Eileen said, "my parents took me to church every week. I was way too young to understand any of it, but they took me anyway. In the front foyer was a niche with a figure of the Virgin, and she looked like my mother. I didn't understand then that there were many, many mothers in the world. I just thought there was the one, and that somehow everybody had the same mother. My mother was the mother of God too, and there was a statue of her at church. It made me feel really good. I'd look at that statue and think about it. I thought that was pretty neat."

"Are you going where I think you're going with this?"

"He did the Ritual, right? The one for the 'Descent of the Holy Mother'? Why would he do this? Why else would he go through all this hell and kill himself?"

"Cult people are devoted, by definition, but that's above and beyond. He had to think he was getting something more than that out of this. He had to be getting something for himself, too. Something personal."

"Had to be important."

I nodded. "Mom."

Light was streaming through the grates high on the wall, gray and misty, and I could hear the wind blowing past outside the little room. I thought about my own mother. It had been a long time since I'd talked to her last. I don't even remember what we'd talked about. Whatever it was about, it probably ended awkwardly. Our conversations usually did. Our relationship was ultimately a lot of water that hadn't quite made it under the bridge yet. Plenty of fault on both sides, of course. It was so complex and screwed up that I didn't know if it could ever be straightened out. But here was Walter, who had taken the subway for hours each weekend just to stand outside a door in an apartment building in hopes of being able to glimpse a mother that he knew deep down didn't really exist. That little kid had grown into a man who would have done anything to get his mother back...and that's exactly what he had done, it seemed. Or was in the process of doing.

A boy and his mother. He'd do anything for her. He'd even killed himself just so he could bring her back. Food for thought.

For later.

"You said that you found something for me," she said hopefully.

I stared at her for a moment, then remembered and reached to my belt. "This looked like it might be your sort of thing," I said, handing over the nightstick. She weighed it in her hand, then swung it a few times.

"Definitely."

Just then, a slug decided to make its entrance. It slithered through one of the grates onto the opposite wall. It was a big, fat one, and Eileen and I watched for several seconds as it made its slimy way along.

"Whatcha think?"

I shrugged. "Go for it."

She hobbled over to the slug and watched it move toward her. As it drew closer, she lifted the nightstick and slammed it down straight across the slug's back. The thing fell to the floor and wriggled. But there was no way that she could stomp it to death with those little heels of hers.

"You need me to?"

"No. I've got it."

"But – your shoe – "

Her shoe was down through the slug before I could finish, and slug ooze splashed up all over her foot. She looked down slowly, and examined the slime that stuck wetly to her skin. That shoe was ruined now, if it hadn't been before anyway.

"Doesn't it sting?" I asked.

"No, actually," she replied. "It's just nasty."

She put her foot down again, and the stuff squelched out from the exposed sole and under her instep. Then, she grinned.

"That was really disgusting," she said. "But dammit, if I'm going to have to deal with all of this crap, I'm going to get to stomp on slugs too."

"What about Andrew?" she asked as I opened the door to the stairwell.

"Out of commission," I replied.

He was still writhing when we passed him by, moaning and turning his head from side to side. Eileen stared down at him for a moment, then turned away and kept moving. We ran into some more mushrooms, and she took them out pretty effectively with her new nightstick.

"Wow," Eileen said when she caught sight of the waterwheel. "That thing's huge." She walked to the edge of the wall around it, and stood under the spray and watched it go around and around. I scanned the area for bird-bats, but it seemed clear, so I joined her there. The spray was cool and refreshing, and she turned her face up to it and closed her eyes.

Then, this long thing dropped down from the ceiling and hung there right in front of us. It looked like the worm-tube that we'd seen in the subway, and dangled there purple and throbbing. It wiggled around for a little while, and then a second one popped up from the pool of water and swayed back and forth for a few seconds before dropping back down. We watched them for several seconds, as they moved around and popped up and disappeared randomly.

Eileen shifted next to me. She seemed upset somehow...her mouth was constricted and her eye was huge. Then, she sensed me looking at her, and turned to me. Her lips quivered, and I thought she was about to cry, but then I looked in her eye again and realized that she was...

The look on my face must have done it. She burst out laughing right there.

"What's so funny?" I asked.

She stared at me for a moment, and then she lost it completely. Tears were running down her cheeks, and she bent forward and gripped the short wall and started howling with laughter and gasping for breath. She ended up coughing so hard that I had to smack her on the back, and after several seconds she managed to stand up again, wiping the moisture from her eyes and gasping again. What the hell could possibly be that amusing?

"Oh my God," she said. "Oh my God."

"What is so damn funny?" I was completely baffled.

"What, you don't see it? Look at the thing." She grabbed my arm and jerked her head in the direction of the hanging monstrosity. I obediently looked. It was long, and pale, and rippling, with purple and red lines along its length. It ended in a conical or egg-shaped tip, with a little hole in the end and a line along the...

Oh.

OH.

I felt my cheeks go from zero to burning in five seconds, and I knew that I was probably beet red from head to toe. Eileen saw this and started laughing again, and this time all I could do was stand there like an idiot. I didn't know where to look, but wherever it was it sure as hell wasn't going to be at that enormous thing waggling at me as if it had something to say. Despite everything that had happened up to that point…well, that stuff still got to me.

Eileen took pity on me and squeezed my arm. "Henry, I'm sorry," she gasped between laughs. "But...well, I guess when you're as big a momma's boy as Walter is...you've gotta have issues. You know."

No kidding.

But what got me was...well, I couldn't help but wonder whether Walter was trying to get into my head just a little. I really don't want to talk about this. But I guess I don't have a choice. I'm being as honest as I can with you, here. It's too easy to blame my father for everything that went wrong in our family, and I'm well past the age where that would be even a feeble excuse, but one thing that really has stayed with me is what he used to say to me when I did badly at the shooting range, or couldn't do a hundred push-ups, or whatever crap he wanted me to do that day to see if he could break through what he called my "artsy-fartsy wussy bullshit" to turn me into a good little soldier. "You're"...

This is tough.

He'd say, "You're never going to be a man. You're nothing but a useless pussy." Or, "God, you're girly. Do you have to sit down when you pee?" He said other things, too, things that I really don't want to talk about here. He did that, and I swallowed it because I wasn't old enough or big enough to do anything about it when I was younger, and when I was older and bigger he could still turn me into that little kid just by calling me girly. It always seemed to work, no matter what, and I hated it. Hated him for doing it, and as I grew older I came to hate myself for letting it get to me.

One day when I was in high school, I came home from school to find a heavy rope tied to a branch of the biggest tree in the back yard, and a note on my bed.

Climb.

That was his way of telling me that he'd be watching, and that I'd better do damn well or I'd hear about it after dinner. So I dropped my books off in my room, changed into my gray sweats that I always wore for these events and that I'd grown to hate too, walked out into the back yard and dutifully tried to climb. For once, it actually worked. I was fifteen by then, and I hadn't filled out yet, but I'd gotten big enough and strong enough to haul myself up the rope, and after a lot of huffing and puffing and gritting of teeth I managed to pull myself up onto the branch and sit down on it. Yeah, I was just as surprised as you probably are. I caught my breath, surveyed the view from up there (it was amazing), and spent a minute or two just feeling what it was like to be sitting in a tree that far above the ground. It was almost like flying. Then, I turned to the dark window of his study, and yelled at the top of my lungs, not caring who heard me.

"ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?"

I stared daggers at the window for a few seconds, because I knew that he was watching as surely as he knew that I was sweating buckets. Then, I took a deep breath, lowered myself from the branch, and climbed back down the way I'd come. Could have just jumped down a few branches and dropped down and rolled, or gone down the trunk, but I had a point to prove.

That night, he was silent over dinner. Mom was nervous, but I just pretended that I didn't notice and had myself a double helping of lasagna. Climbing ropes is hard work, after all. I had won that battle, if not the war, and I knew that there was nothing he could do about it. I thought that he resented my doing what he'd challenged me to do, because I figured that he'd given up on me going into the military a long time ago and was now just torturing me on principle. I didn't know any better back then.

At the end of the meal, he stood up and folded his napkin and placed it on the table as usual. That was usually the signal for all three of us to clear the table, but that night I just leaned back in my chair, reached over to the lasagna dish and helped myself to an extra big forkful of cheese. I took my time rolling it around in my mouth. Mom's lasagna had always been one of my favorites, and I knew that she'd made it just for me that night. It had never tasted better. He watched me as I chewed and swallowed, and then I stood and folded my napkin just like he had and laid it next to my plate, just like he had.

He fixed me with his eyes, and for once I stared back just as fiercely. We were the same height by then, so I looked neither up nor down, just across. I heard Mom clearing the dishes, her glossy black head moving well below our mutual eye level, and soon she was gone into the kitchen and we were alone at the table.

He lifted his head, and raised his eyebrow. Then, he turned and began to walk away. He stopped after a few steps, though, and turned his head just far enough to say in his best gruff voice:

"I see that there's a dick down there to go with those balls. Careful, Henry, or you might just lose it one of these days."

He left the room then, leaving me as confused as I'd ever been. I realized much later that that was his way of showing his respect for what I'd done, by climbing the rope and by standing up to him, but that was years later. All I knew was that a couple of months after that he was gone, and Mom and I were left alone, and I knew deep down that it was because I hadn't been man enough to be his son.

So that thing bobbing up and down in front of me, insanely huge as it was, was getting into my head for reasons that are probably pretty clear but which I couldn't articulate then and still can't now. Then, my blood ran cold as the obvious question finally came to me. Did Walter know? About...all of that? Was this here just to mess with my head? How could he have, though? Maybe I'd better not worry about that yet...

I don't know if any of that makes sense. I'm sorry. That was more about me than you probably wanted to know. It doesn't matter, anyway. Probably just me being paranoid. But after what I learned later…

Eileen was pulling at my sleeve. "Henry? Are you OK?"

I shook myself out of it. "Yeah, I'm fine. Sorry."

"I'm sorry too," she said, and I could hear it in her voice. "I didn't know you were so...shy about these things. I should have guessed."

"What's that supposed to mean?" I said, before I could stop myself.

She looked at me oddly. "Nothing, Henry, nothing. Just that...well, you're not like other guys. You're not always thinking about...you know."

No, I wasn't. I prided myself on that. That wasn't who I was. My ego was never going to live in my pants, never. It was my way of turning what he hated about me around and shoving it in his face, I guess. Metaphorically.

"I'm glad," she said. "I feel safe with you." I shouldn't have felt a little disappointed when I heard that, but I did anyway. Whatever. We had other things to worry about. I opened the door to the generator room and ushered her through.

The enormous generator was still there, humming and whirring now. But the huge door was far off in the distance now, further away than before, and down the long hall between here and there were...

"How many?" Eileen said, squinting.

"Looks like six," I said. "You've still got that nightstick?"

"Armed and ready," she said.

"Good. We may get swarmed, and you saw just how fast those things move."

"Fastest hands in the undead world."

Right now, all six of them were just standing there, pointing at us. I heard them whispering to us... "Receiver...Receiver..." Yeah, that's me. Come and get it. Childish as it was, I wasn't about to let this place get to me any more than absolutely necessary.

"Stay back," I said to Eileen. "I'll do what I can, but if they get past me hopefully you won't get mobbed."

"OK," she said. "Don't worry about me."

"I do anyway."

"I know."

Then I stepped forward, and they rumbled toward me...and I lifted the pistol and started shooting. I'd found out while I was cleaning out things upstairs that if you got just the right angle, you could hit two of them with one bullet, and so I shot carefully and took a few hits, but managed to save a lot of ammo. The problem was getting to them in time to stomp them to death. You'd knock down two, stomp one, and the other one would be back up in your face before you could do the same to it. That was the more painful part of the process.

At one point, two of them shoved past me and set off toward Eileen. I fired as rapidly as I could, but they kept going. Another bullet or two would do the job, but I didn't have that kind of time. Eileen couldn't limp fast enough to get out of the way. "DUCK!" I yelled. She did, and one moved in front of the other, and I thanked God and dropped them with two shots. She stomped one as I stomped the other, and then we looked around for the next...

...and there were none. Six bodies lay at our feet. It was done.

Eileen took one look at me and shoved her hand into my pocket and grabbed the first-aid kit I'd found just outside by the Hole by the wheel. I stared at it for a moment before I realized that I was about to fall over. She popped it open and went to work, and soon I was patched up and good to go again.

"Door," she said, pointing. We were the ultimate masters of the obvious by then.

"Door. Let's get out of here."

This time, the door was actually smallish, and the hall tapered down to it so that the ceiling was barely two feet above my head. It opened readily, and we were back out on the spiral.

We stared out over the foggy gray expanse suspended in the middle of time and space.

"They kept little kids there, didn't they?" she asked. She knew the answer, but I nodded anyway.

"Yeah."

"Could you feel them there, too? In the cells?"

"Yeah." Guess I'm not the only one.

She put her hand on my back and rubbed it in circles...God only knows how she knew, but yeah, I needed that just then.

After a while, I put my arm around her shoulders. I squeezed a little, and she turned to me.

"You going to be OK?" she asked.

"Yeah. You?"

"Yeah. Let's do this thing."

I couldn't help grinning. She was really unstoppable. "Yeah."

We walked down the stairs, side by side.