That was a strange time for us. Not only were we punchy as hell, but things seemed to waver between encouraging (finding useful things, killing off monsters with only a few hitches) and discouraging…such as what we found when we finally made it to 105, Frank's apartment. The door was blocked in what was obviously Walter's preferred method. I admit, I felt a grim satisfaction when I saw that at least I wasn't the only one on chain detail around here.

"Of course," Eileen grumbled. "Figures that Walter would chain up the door so that we couldn't get in."

"Yeah. So, now not only do we have to figure out the eight spears thing, we also have to get these damn chains off of Frank's door."

"Six of them. You think – "

"Probably." Yeah, we were starting to get good at playing Walter's games.

The chains were old and worn, just like mine, and the locks were vintage as well. They were more loosely draped over the door than mine had been, but still they were going to keep us out for the time being. I ran through the floor plan of South Ashfield Heights in my mind.

"There isn't much left of this building that we haven't been to."

"That we know of. Unless Walter's been doing more remodeling than we've already seen."

I shook my head. "So far, he hasn't been adding on substantially. If anything, he's been either cutting things out or moving them around. This building is only so big. There can't be a lot left, one way or another."

"I hope you're right."

"Me too."

Out in the foyer, things were also very quiet. The stairs up were still blocked, and the doors out were still stuck, even though I gave 'em the old college try out of sheer pig-headedness.

When I turned back around, Eileen was standing several feet away in the middle of the foyer, with something in her hand. I peered over her shoulder to see. It was an old sketchbook. The pages were yellow and gray with age. She was holding it with her good hand and resting it on her cast. It was open to a drawing done in pencil or something like it …a drawing of a human figure. A kid's drawing. It was a stick figure, fingers and toes pointing out like little spikes, but it was the head that caught my attention. The figure's head was almost triangular in shape. It came to a point on top, and was filled in with black, like a big black iron helmet or something. Weird, huh? "Dad" was written on the bottom of the picture.

He misses his mother, and thinks his father is a…what? A monster? Can't say I'd blame him for that.

Eileen twitched in front of me, just a little. I felt a wave of heat roll off of her and through my shirt to my skin. Then, her hand loosened its grip on the book, and it fell to the floor with a thump. I realized what was happening, and stepped back a second before the red lines erupted into black blobs crawling over her skin. Her head tilted back, farther than I thought possible without

breaking her neck

and then she slowly turned to face me. Her single green eye glowed eerily bright against the blackness on her cheeks. Then, her good hand lifted, and she pointed straight at me. I was rooted to the floor. Her mouth opened, and her lips began to move.

"Hen…ry…"

Oh God. She…her voice.

"Town…shend…"

She sounds like…like…

Truth be told, I can only describe it as sounding like something out of a B-grade horror movie. It was a deep, unearthly voice, with echo effects and everything. You'd probably laugh if you heard it now, but there's a reason that all of those B-movies use that sound – because it will freak the living crap out of you. Which it did then. (No, not literally. Those of you keeping score at home will be glad to know that the boxers were still intact.)

It took me a minute to remember the two candles in my pocket. I managed to get one of them out, but dropped the lighter (yeah, my hands were shaking). So I picked it up again, lit the candle and stood it next to Eileen. For what good it might do her. And it did. The candle burned down quickly, very quickly, and it was on its last inch or so when her hand dropped and her skin cleared up…partially. Not completely. She was too far gone for that. She needed another candle.

As I approached her, she turned away from me and dropped her head into her good hand and started sobbing. Hard. I reached for her, but she threw me off, and I stepped back, confused.

"Eileen…"

"No, Henry."

"But…"

"GO AWAY!"

My lips flapped for a second, and then I found my voice.

"I have another candle…"

She spun around. "It won't do any good! Don't you see?" She shook her head violently. "It won't last forever. It can't. All it is is a stopgap. A temporary fix. Just enough for me to forget that I'm cursed, to let me limp around after you and get in the way and slow you down, to let me…until it happens again, and then I remember. No. I don't want it!"

Tears were streaming down her face, even from under the bandages under her eye, and it tore me up in ways I didn't know were possible. I reached for her automatically. "Eileen…just let me…"

"NO!" she screamed, and she put her hand over her face. We stood like that for a moment. She was breathing hard, fighting for control, and I...I was completely at a loss. I couldn't leave her like this…no. What if something came after her? She was crying too hard to fight, but she didn't want me to help. I didn't know what I should do.

She took a deep breath, then another. Her hand came down, and her expression was as composed as possible under the circumstances. "Henry, I'm sorry. But…I can't. Not right now. I – I can't. Please. Go ahead. I'll stay here." She sounded so tired…

"No, you can't. What if something comes along?"

"Then I'll deal with it. I'm sorry, Henry, but…I just can't deal with you right now. With anything. Go ahead. Give me a few minutes, and I'll be OK. I promise." She turned her back to me and put her face in her hand again.

I thought I understood, but I wasn't sure. She seemed almost embarrassed. No, more than that. Mortified…at what was happening to her. She had no reason to be, though! It wasn't her fault. And anyway, I'd seen this happen to her before. Why didn't she want me around now?

I couldn't understand it...but she clearly needed to be alone for a little while, and an empty room was as good a place as anywhere. I backed up as quietly as I could and pulled open the doors to the other side of the first floor.

There were four rooms on this side, just as there were on the floor above and the floor above that, and Walter had made sure that there was plenty to do in each one. There was a strange hanging bound figure in the corner of the hall outside the first door, but I ignored it for now and entered the first door on my right.

In 104, there was a shiny new first-aid kit lying on the floor – underneath two sliding wall men who seemed pissed off about something. Hell, if I were tied to a metal frame by my skin and stuck there till the end of time, I'd be pretty annoyed too, but at this point they weren't worth bothering with. Just down the hallway was another of those hanging bodies, suspended in one of the round metal cages that had replaced the smaller rooms in this apartment. They reminded me a little of the bird-cage back in the hospital…but that was a lifetime ago, and these didn't seem to be going anywhere.

So, I took a few seconds to look more closely at the body. It was just like the others I'd seen. It wasn't completely enclosed in the sheet that was bound around it. Its head stuck out of the top of the white cotton, and long blond hair hung to its shoulders. Hair a lot like Walter's, actually…coat-Walter, not rotting-Walter. I swiveled my neck to see if I could see its face, and bumped into it by accident. Then when it spoke, I nearly jumped out of my skin.

"I told you we shouldn't have a baby, didn't I?" it growled in a man's voice...

…and then it disappeared.

Yeah, I'll admit it. My nerves were shot (had been for hours), my patience was gone (ditto), and I ended up plastered to the wall of the cage, with my hands gripping the bars and my eyes nearly popping out of my head, wondering for the hundredth time that day what the hell had just happened. The figure looked like Walter (although I never did get to see its face), but the voice was different.

It sounded like my father.

But the words weren't his. That wasn't the sort of thing he'd say. He never panicked, never, never raised his voice like that except during our training sessions. So whose were they? The answer came to me.

Looks like Walter, sounds like a father…so…Walter's father? That means that he…that Walter must have heard him say…

The wall-men could have been transformed into goddamn circus clowns for all I knew as I stumbled back down the hall and out the door. I snapped back into alertness when the double-headed baby standing outside 103 dropped its hand and started rumbling in my direction, but I didn't care any more, and several bullets and my boot put it out of my misery.

The body hanging in the corner was still there. I stuck my gun out in front of me and prodded it. Nothing happened, so I reached forward and touched its arm. It was cold. "Oh, shut the hell up! You can't blame it all on me!" it snarled, and disappeared like the other had.

I squinted down the hallway. Off in the distance, outside 103, I could see another butthead (greeeeat…) and another Walter-father hanging from the ceiling. That made three so far.

Do the math, Henry. Three you know of…and three rooms you haven't entered yet. If each contains a body like 104 did…

Six bodies on this side, and six chains on the other side. The bodies were disappearing…

103 was infested with buttheads. The weird thing here was, I actually seemed to be getting good at dodging them, because I was able to push through to the middle of the front room, prod Walter-dad, listen to what it had to say ("Anyway, let's get outta here…I can't stand it any more…") and get the hell out without getting hit once. Maybe that dancing stuff that Eileen had taught me wasn't completely out of the realm of possibility.

102. Uncle Fester had decided to drop by. Time to take out some frustration with the axe and unload some sword-related weight from my belt. He fell under the axe almost as easily as the old lady had. It didn't even occur to me how sick that thought was…by the time it did, I'd smacked Walter-dad upside the head, listened to his spiel ("If that super hears him, we're in trouble. There's something about that guy…I just don't like the look of him…"), and pocketed the bottle of brown goodness on the counter.

Butthead time. As I approached it, I reached in my pocket to find a half-empty box of bullets. Great. Almost out of ammo. Luckily, The Powers That Be had left a brand new box by the trash in the hallway, and so my laziness didn't end up costing me more than a swipe as I was reloading. The version of Walter-dad in the corner was just as grouchy as the others ("Stupid little crybaby…"). No surprise there. That left 101, the gun-nut's room. With my luck, the guns would be real this time, and these buttheads would have figured out how to pull the triggers…

Nope. Thank God, I was wrong. Ha! Bullets in the back room, and the last Walter-dad in a cage near the front.

"Hurry up – get packed!"

And he was gone…and I was done. Right?

Time to check on Eileen.

When I pushed open the doors to the foyer, Eileen was still facing away from me. She'd picked up the sketchbook again, and was just closing it when I came through. She didn't seem to have heard me, and I didn't want to startle her.

"Eileen?"

Her head shook back and forth. "It's terrible," she said. "That poor little boy…his parents just threw him away, right after he was born."

I said nothing, just kept walking slowly toward her in case…in case of what? I don't know.

"Poor thing." She sighed. "He really thinks that Room 302 is his mother."

"But, Eileen," I said, "he knows better. He knows that his parents left him after his birth. He told me so. Remember?"

She didn't seem to have heard me. "I've gotta…I've gotta help him."

I moved to stand in front of her and took her hand, as gently as I could.

"Eileen, what can you do? What can we do? It's too late. That little boy grew up to be a serial killer. He's killed nineteen people already, including himself, and he nearly killed you."

I brushed her hair back off of her face, and her eye opened and stared into mine. Crying had made it shine even more brilliantly green than before.

"He wants to kill us both," I continued. "Whatever happened, we can't do anything. It's too late. It's been too late since…since before either of us was born."

She smiled.

"Henry, can I ask you a question?"

"Of course."

"How old are you?"

That was unexpected. It took me a while to switch gears, and I blanked. I ended up doing the math. "Um…I'm twenty-eight."

She nodded. "I'm twenty-four. Guess I'm still too soft to say no to him like that."

No, that's not it…There's no way that anyone could ever call Eileen soft. Not after what she'd been through, what she'd done that night. She was as tough as they come, and she'd proven it time and time again. It wasn't softness…but whatever it was, I couldn't put words to it just then. It was…it was something that she had in her that I'd never had. Should I have?

There was a tear building up in her eye now. She looked away from me and tried to blink it away. "There's got to be something we can do," she said. "Something." Why?

"What?"

"I don't know." She shook her head. "You're right. It's probably too late."

Time to get going.

"The chains should be gone now," I said. "Let's go."

I squeezed her hand, and we passed through the doors and walked toward Frank's room. The door was clear now, and unlocked.

"Hold your breath," I said, and turned the knob.

The room stank like before, but this time I was prepared for it, and so it wasn't as bad. Eileen blinked and sputtered, though, and started coughing so hard that I knew that we had to get out of there, and fast. The small red wooden box was still there on the bookshelf, and I reached for it…

…and Eileen cried out, and I turned just in time to see her collapse to the floor. Black and red, all over, writhing like snakes across her skin. I had one last candle, and I lit it and put it by her feet and moved to lift her up and hold her steady while the candle did its work.

Too late. She grabbed the nightstick from her belt and started flailing around. I got a few hard blows to the face before I was able to take it from her and throw it across the room, well out of her reach. I pinned her arms as best I could and waited for it to end. It seemed to take forever, and the heat from her skin felt as though it would burn me. I pulled my shirt cuffs over my hands and gritted my teeth and hung on.

Finally, she was still, skin back to its original pink-and-bruised color from hours ago. She took a deep breath, then started sputtering again.

"Can you stand up?" I asked.

"Yeah" – cough – "I think so." She looked up at me, and her fingers traced the places where she'd hit me, but she said nothing.

I helped her to her feet, and grabbed the red wooden box. "This is it," I said. "Let's get the hell out of here."

"Are you sure?"

Well, what the hell else could it be?

"Sure enough. Come on."

"You should check. So we don't have to come back in here again."

I was getting pretty impatient by this point. "Fine," I said, and opened the box. Sure enough, inside was a tiny little string of withered tissue, set on a square of stained fabric. As I watched, though, the brown tissue began to turn red, and

GAAAAAAAAAGH!

Redness flooded my vision. Redness, and a blinding pain that made ghost auras seem like a stone in my shoe and my persistent headache just a happy memory. My skull was full of white-hot, sharp pain, thousands of needles driving through the bone, and I couldn't see or hear or feel anything. The only thing that was in my head was the feeling that my brain was about to blow my head open, and

A dark room, with windows at the side. Empty but for old carpet and a living, breathing thing on the floor with a huge, melon-shaped body and tiny little arms and legs and a snout and ears like an elephant…and a length of tube running from its navel. An elephant baby, lying alone on a single thin blanket, crying, always crying…

Across the room, two people huddled by a doorway. The taller one, a man with short hair and an overcoat, bending toward the shorter one, a woman with long blond hair in a coat and dress. He was talking quickly, hissing at her, and she didn't look well at all…

I must have dropped the box then. I'm not sure. I do know that I ended up on my knees, head in my hands, trying to push my forehead back into my head where it should be and hoping that, by the grace of God, I would have just one more second to…

To do what?

Eileen was lowering herself to the floor next to me, so, so slowly. Poor Eileen. She put her hand on my back, gently, and then said the single best thing she could have said at that moment, although I'm sure she had no way of knowing that:

"Henry? Are you OK?"

What do you think? Obviously I'm NOT!

Then, I remembered just how stupid a question that had been when I'd asked it of Cynthia ages ago, as she lay dying in my arms. It was just as pointless now as it had been then. Through the white-hot agony I could feel a little tiny bit of laughter bubble up in my throat, and I knew that I was going to be OK.

The pain was slowly dissipating, and Eileen's hand rubbing circles on my back was doing wonders. I'd be OK in a minute or two…sorry, but this wasn't a job for the brown-bottle elixir of life. This would have to pass on its own.

Keep your eyes shut, and hold it together, and take it a second at a time…

Eileen was talking again. "It's Walter…he's crying…" I strained to listen, but my ears were filled with the sound of my own pulsing blood. Surely, I'd have been able to hear that? Her hand was still moving on my back, but more distractedly now. "Even finishing the twenty-one sacraments…it won't help that boy."

Nothing will, I wanted to say, but opening my mouth would let my brain fall out, and I needed my brain…it was important…

She moved behind me, and I realized with horror that she was pulling herself to her feet. I dropped my hands and turned to look. My eyes didn't bulge out of my head, my forehead didn't blow off and scatter gray matter all over the room, and the redness was fading to a light pink hue.

"I'm going back, Henry," she said. "To the room where he is."

I felt her lips touch my hair, and in my haste to turn around I nearly smacked my nose into her chest. She stood up and bent over me, stroking my hair.

"See, we're the only ones," she said slowly. "The only ones that can stop him."

She smiled at me, and that smile held fatigue and sadness and resignation and just a little bit of hope. I wanted to tell her no, but no words would come out. I wasn't fast enough then, either, and before I knew it she was gone and I was left in the room with only a red wooden box in my hands and the feel of her lips on my scalp. Alone, again. I sat there for a moment, too confused to move, collecting my thoughts.

I knew what I'd seen, of course, in those images. I'd seen Walter, or his mental image of himself, newly born and lying on the floor of Room 302 as his parents walked out of his life forever. There was no other possibility. What was going on in his head, though, to make him look so malformed? Did he really see himself that way? As some sort of half-human monster?

I couldn't figure that out now. I…I had to get back, to find Eileen, to stop her. She might be able to make her way back to my room, if by some miracle nothing got her first, but when she went inside the hauntings would eat her alive…

Then, I saw the nightstick, lying alone and forgotten where I'd thrown it. She'd gone back unarmed. She didn't stand a chance.

That cleared my head as quickly as anything could have. I shoved the box into my pocket, grabbed the nightstick and ran for the door.

As soon as the door of 105 closed behind me, I knew that something had happened. What, I didn't know. It's like when you step outside on a day near the end of summer and realize suddenly that the air is less heavy and humid, the breeze is cooler, and that you'd better remember to bring a jacket next time, because fall is on the way. It's more than just a change in the weather. You feel the shift.

Everything looked the same, but a bell was tolling, and the place smelled…expectant. I knew as well as you do now what that bell meant. There was nothing to do but to try to get back to my room as quickly as possible.

On the floor outside Frank's room, there was a piece of paper. It looked as though it might have been torn from that sketchbook. On it, drawn in the same childish style, was another stick figure, sprawled across the whole paper, but with weird concentric circles drawn around its middle. Splotches of red erupted from the circles like blood.

…like blood…is this…

The figure's spiky hair was dark and long, almost shoulder-length.

…is this Eileen?

No time to waste. Back through the maze of rooms to my place. There were double-headed babies and buttheads on the way, but I shoved past them and ran for it as fast as I could.

The signs in 201 had changed.

It has…begun…
It's finally begun.
The time has finally come!
It's here!!!
It has commenced!
It has begun…
The Show is about to begin!

Even Little Walter pounding at my door disappeared as I approached and hurried inside.

"Eileen!" I called. No response. She wasn't there. I looked everywhere, even called through the hole into the back, but she was nowhere to be found.

That goddamn murdering bastard...

Walter had taken Eileen!