I leaned against the door, catching my breath and surveying my room once again. Nothing seemed to have changed since I'd burst through the door earlier. Same old same old…the TV seemed to have turned itself off, though. Apart from that I still had Old Baldy making himself comfortable above the couch, my slippers were waiting for Godot, and the sink was still piping O-negative down the drain. The babies wailed their plaintive song above the chest just like before.

None of that mattered, though. Walter had Eileen. I knew it. Where else could she have gone? What had he done with her…what was he doing with her?

I didn't have a lot of time. No, I had no idea how time ran in this world, but I couldn't assume that things would just pick up where they'd left off when I got back to…

Where? There was nowhere else to go! We'd looked everywhere, and we hadn't found the damn spears or anything but Walter's rotting umbilical cord. I had none of the other things that the Crimson Tome had told me I needed. Nothing. I was completely at a loss.

Wait! There's one thing I can do.

I emptied my pockets into the chest as usual. The umbilical cord had stopped smelling bad, and when I opened the box to make sure that I hadn't dropped its contents along the way, I found that the thing had somehow plumped back up and looked fresh and new. It knew what I had to do, and so did I…

…except that when I pulled myself through the hole at the end of the hallway, there was nothing there. No, that's wrong. The fridge was still there, and so were the metal shelves and the tables with their weird objects, and the cross was still resting in the puddle of black goo…but that's all there was. The Conjurer's flesh had apparently decided to take a walk. I stared at the empty cross for a while before it sank in. Walter's rotten corpse had disappeared. Somehow.

Like that.

All that was left was the cross, with five bloody spikes in the middle. The blood was still fresh (even though it was ten years old), and glistening wetly. I was left holding the piece of tissue with nowhere to put it.

What now?

At least nothing in here stank any more, unless you counted my sweaty, dirty, tired butt. The stench had dissipated while I'd been out. But something else had changed, too. My eyes were drawn to the circular pool of black goo below the cross. It was completely opaque; I had no idea how deep it was. It could have been bottomless for all I knew. It looked the same as before…but now that I looked at it, it seemed to be calling me in, to enter its depths and…

…and what? What would be down there?

I knew, of course, as soon as I asked. And I smiled to myself, I think, because I welcomed it. It was so clear and so simple. The next step I'd been looking for was right in front of me. There would be no more subways or buildings or forests or anything that I'd seen before. Just this. I would lower myself into that pool of blackness, let it envelop me…and then beyond that would be whatever Walter had in store for me. I wouldn't worry about drowning. Why should I? After all, he was going to break my neck, not drown me. Then whatever was going to happen would happen, and one way or another, it would be over. The end.

It hit me then. Not like a ton of bricks...more like a lifting up, a lessening of the weight on my shoulders. This was it, then. This was it. The end of the road that I'd been waiting for for so long. The finality of it all was so liberating. I was…happy. Really happy…

Where Walter went, I was supposed to follow. That part of the overall design was clear. Still, I'd better be prepared. Time for one final trip to my storage chest. I pocketed the two little brown pointed vials, a few first-aid kits, and the red box. If my suspicions were right, I'd want to have a little pocket space left when I headed down. No guns…those ran out of bullets too quickly, and if I wasn't coming back then they'd be dead weight soon enough. No, nothing but my trusty axe would see me through that twilight. It hadn't let me down yet, and we'd been through too much together for me to leave it behind.

I grabbed a couple of bottles of brown sludge and bolted them down, then sat back down in the chair by the window to stare into the Ashfield summer night. I had no idea what time it was…probably the wee hours by now, I'd think. Morning would be coming soon, but not for me, of course…for all of those people out there fast asleep in their beds. They would see the sun rise once more, even if I never would again. If I could just make it through one more time, could just get this one last thing done somehow, they'd never have to know what happened here.

When I was in high school, tooling around with my camera, I had the standard teenage dreams of being talented and famous and rich someday. I would take a picture of a hill and imagine myself the next Ansel Adams or Galen Rowell. I knew that it wouldn't really happen, of course, just as I knew that Buffalo wings didn't really come from buffalo, but it didn't matter. It was fun back then to dream of being famous and having exhibitions of my work in fancy galleries and waves of people coming up to tell me how great I was. Fame and fortune…the simple things, right?

Now, I was older, and a much different person from that skinny kid (hell, a much different person from the Henry that had woken up with a headache and no ibuprofen five days ago). I took a moment, just a little one, to lose myself in the soft, warm summer night, and I dreamed a different dream. I dreamed that I would do a strange thing, something no one had ever done before, but this time I would be so damn good at it that nobody would ever know what I'd done. People's lives would continue on as usual, but because of me, not in spite of me. I dreamed of anonymity, even as I longed for that something bigger that now would never come. It was a blanket that I wrapped around myself and let myself float in, for just a little while. My purpose was more clear than ever before. All of life's complexities and ambiguities and difficult decisions had fallen away, and I knew what I had to do. It was all so simple now. I was finally at peace after twenty-eight years, and it was the most amazing thing I've ever felt.

I couldn't hear the bell tolling any more, but that didn't mean that time wasn't passing. I had to go. I treated myself to one more look out over South Ashfield, and then I got to my feet and turned away from the world forever. It felt good.

I checked myself to make sure that I had everything I needed (and nothing I didn't), and lowered myself to the floor in front of the open refrigerator, cross-legged. The blackness was seductive. I poked a finger into the hole, and drew out a string of the black goop. It was like mucus, or…well, I don't know. Slimy and shiny, but just a little sticky, too. Like nothing I'd ever seen. But then again, this whole day – this whole week – had been like nothing I'd ever seen.

I was ready. I could feel it. Still, I couldn't help wanting to stare at my strange, dusty surroundings one last time. I didn't know what lay on the other side, but I did know this, even just a little. This was my apartment, but as I'd never seen it. Everything was just as it had been a few minutes before, except now I was seeing it with different eyes.

Eyes…and flesh.

Would I die when I passed through the blackness? Was that the reason it was there? To kill me? Was Eileen already dead, and Walter just waiting impatiently somewhere for me to get it over with? That was possible. I could have not gone through, stayed hidden in my apartment, but sooner or later the things coming in through the walls would have gotten me anyway. Just like they'd gotten Joseph. Neither of us could have held them off forever. That way was certain death; this way, less certain.

My hands seemed strangely pink and large. I'd seen plenty of dead hands today, and mine were definitely not dead. But would they be in ten seconds? Two days? Three years? Fifty? How long would it take? What would they look like after they died? I hadn't seen phantom-Henry's hands when he came to my door, so I didn't know. I turned them over and over, trying to imagine them green and rotting.

Even the most familiar, everyday, welcoming things look very different when your future is counted in seconds, not decades.

Suddenly, I was terrified, more terrified than I'd ever been. This was it. This was really it. I was leaving everything behind, every part of the life I'd known, and I was probably never going to see any of this again. I'd never wake to another dull morning, never eat another plate of pasta at Fuseli's, never again fall asleep in front of the late late movie on Saturday night TV. I'd never do or feel those things that I'd taken for granted every day of my life. Oh my God…I wasn't ready for this, I'd never be ready for this, how could anybody ever really be prepared for…

I dug my nails into my palms to calm myself.

Enough of that. Get on with it, Henry. Eileen's waiting. And so is Walter.

It was time. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, leaned forward, and toppled headfirst into the hole.

Suspended…

Warm and comfortable, curled in on myself. In midair, with no walls or floor in my way…just the warm happiness. My panic was gone. I felt loved and protected. I could stay here forever…

Am I…

Red light was filtering through my closed eyelids. At first, it was just a gentle illumination, then it got brighter and annoying. I blinked once, then again. Then, I was conscious, and I lifted my head to look around.

I was in a round room. The walls and ceiling were a hazy red, and it took me several seconds to realize that it wasn't my eyes that couldn't focus…it was that everything else was hazy. I was floating. My knees were under my chin, and my arms were crossed over them, hands on either side of my face. Carefully, I uncurled myself. One foot down, then the other, and I was standing on solid ground. I looked down at the floor below me, and then at my hands. They weren't green and rotting…they were still the same thick pinkness that they'd been before, but more so in the red light. So, I was still alive. It felt strange.

All around me were figures in the wall. They were life-size and dressed in red, and seemed to be crucified against panels of bright white light mounted at irregular intervals on the cylindrical wall. I couldn't count them, because every time I tried, I'd lose track of where I'd started. Ten, maybe? I don't know. In the middle of the floor several inches away was a round hole, eight or nine feet wide. I couldn't see the bottom. Who was to say whether there was a bottom, anyway?

Now, looking back on it, I understand what that room symbolized, what it meant to Walter and to me, and why I had to pass through it. Hindsight is 20/20 (ugh…I hate clichés), like they say. But, I wasn't thinking too clearly just then. I was still drowsy from whatever unconscious state I'd been put into before I woke up there, and my attempts to find another exit were fruitless, just as they were supposed to be.

There was nothing left to do but jump down the hole.

So I did.