What is the difference between good and evil? It's not the same as right and wrong. To be right means to follow the law, but to be good means to do what's right. On the other hand, if the law is unjust, isn't doing right the evil thing to do? But how can it be good to do what is wrong? Is there even a difference? Do good and evil even exist? Or was it simply perspective?

It has been said that Hitler thought he was doing the right thing when he began the Holocaust. That was an undoubtedly evil event in the world's history. But if he thought he was doing the right thing, then he thought he doing good. And if he thought he was doing good, then by his own perspective, he was good.

So if being good or evil only depended on someone's perspective, maybe it didn't matter what everyone else thought. Maybe it was okay to do bad things as long as you did them in the name of good. But that didn't seem right either. There was nothing good about demolishing two buildings full of people and destroying thousands of lives, no matter that it was done in the name of good. But…

Danny's confused thoughts wound down as he happened upon a metal door. He looked at it uncomprehendingly for a few seconds, wondering what it was doing there. He vaguely remembered walking into another cave; the sight of rock all around confirmed that. So what was a metal door doing in a cave?

He put his hand to the knob to try the lock, and the thing slipped from his fingers and fell backwards to floor, along with the rest of the door. Danny blinked, then slowly smiled and chuckled a little.

"Guess I don't know my own strength," he joked, trying at last to rouse himself from the mood Haight had put him in.

Inside was some kind of concrete bunker. Boxes of ammunition lined the walls, implying that it had been an armory at one time. A set of stairs to the left led up to a metal catwalk that, in turn, led to a hallway. Halfway down the hall, there was a door on one side, and another set of stairs on the other. The stairs were destroyed, so he tried the door first. He thought he heard a voice.

"Hello?" he called tentatively, entering the room. He glanced around, and time suddenly came to a halt. There was the sound of a gunshot, and Danny saw a man in military attire slumped back in a metal folding chair. He held a gun in one hand, and his head was…

Then the moment was gone, leaving an old headless skeleton in an ancient office. Danny yelped and stumbled backwards into the wall across from the door, then slumped to the ground, breathing heavily. For as long as he lived, he thought he would never get that image out of his mind. The sight of the colonel's head…

Danny shook his head and tried to force the vision away. He stared at the open door; he couldn't see the cadaver from here, fortunately, but part of him kept expecting it to come shuffling into view. As desperate as he was to get away, his didn't think his legs would support his weight. His whole body was shaking with fear, and he wanted nothing more than to be violently ill.

Eventually, he managed to get shakily to his feet and sidled two steps along the wall to the alcove with the broken staircase. Still not daring to take his eyes off the door, he continued backing away until the backs of his legs hit metal and he went tumbling head over heels into the ruined stairs. He lay there, breathing heavily for a few seconds, then the whole situation suddenly became hilarious, and he started to laugh.

Part of him knew he was having hysterics, but it was overruled by the rest, which didn't seem to care. He was a kid who had been thrown into this psychotic game of cat and mouse with a psychic who was threatening his family's lives, and he had just seen a vision of a guy whose head had been sp-

Well, anyway, he deserved the chance to be hysterical for a while.

He pulled himself to his feet, still snickering quietly, although he was trying to stop. The edge of the stairs was only a foot or two above his head, so he jumped up to catch it and pulled himself up. They swayed alarmingly, but held his weight fairly well. The door at the top opened onto another hall. He was met by torn poster hanging cock-eyed on the wall. It featured a dark, human-shaped mass with yellow eyes, and the words "He's Watching You." Danny shuddered and headed left down the hall.

A voice from behind a door yelled, "We had nothing to do with it!" Danny paused for a fraction of a second, and decided he didn't really want to know. One vision had been more than enough.

He turned a corner and nearly jumped out of his skin at the sight of the girl in white standing at the end of the hall. "I used to love it here," she said vaguely.

"I can't imagine why," the boy muttered.

"So quiet…so peaceful…"

Ironically enough, the stairs Danny had climbed took that moment to give way. He shouted at the crash and held one hand over his rapidly beating heart. As though oblivious to everything, the girl continued speaking. "We used to play here, when we were kids, until his dad caught us. He got such a thrashing for that. But his dad couldn't stop me from coming back."

Danny had been slowly creeping forward during the entire monologue. She didn't seem aware of his presence, as such. She didn't seem to have noticed the stairs falling. In fact, now that he really looked at her, she didn't even really seem cognizant. What was it Haight had said? Old memories? But if she wasn't a ghost and she wasn't aware, how could she be helping him?

He was relatively close when her eyes snapped into focus on his face. "I think that's why he hated me so much," she said in a low voice.

Danny stared at the place she had been standing for several minutes. She was older than he had originally thought. She had seemed almost childlike in mentality the first time he saw her. The second time, he had only seen her for a few seconds, but he thought she was only a little older than he was. This time, he had been able to really study her, and had come to the conclusion that she was at least Kat's age of close to thirty. It didn't give him any insight into who she was, but at least he knew "girl" in white wasn't the appropriate term.

His thoughts were disturbed by a door opening off to his right. He threw himself against the wall, irrationally certain that the colonel was about to come out, hands stretched before him like a mummy. He laughed with relief to see that it was only a pair of slayers and made quick work of them before continuing.

Beyond the door was an office that looked disturbing like the one the colonel was in. Danny forced himself to step into the room, if only to reassure himself that there was no headless corpse sitting in a folding chair. The far wall had been broken down at some point to reveal a shrub and the lowest branches of a tree. The boy sighed gratefully at being let out and walked the rest of the way into the room.

Suddenly, a memory, frozen in time, appeared between him and freedom. An older man with a baseball bat threatened a young boy while a child he recognized as the Lady in White stood by in quiet fear. A voice yelled, "How many times have I told you not to come here, boy?" The image vanished. Danny ran through the hole in the wall as fast as his legs could carry him.

He finally stopped when something erupted from the ground in front of him and knocked him down. It took him a few seconds to realize that he was looking at a marksman as it ripped itself free of the stake that bound it. It took aim and just barely missed the ghost boy.

He sighed and rolled his eyes from the cover of a tree. They weren't that difficult to beat, but it took forever. He waited until the creature stopped firing and leaned out to throw an energy blast at it. Behind it, another erupted from the ground. This could take a while. At some point, a pack of slayers appeared to render some inadvertent help. In the end, he fought four marksman, eight slayers, and a pair of burrowers. Carnate Island really seemed to have a thing for even numbers.

Danny picked his way through the carnage and tried not to think too hard about it. Most of the damage had been done by the monsters battling each other. They seemed to have no problem with their own kind, but any other was fair game. The burrowers were the only ones that didn't seem to care about the other monsters. They looked like a person that had been wrapped up in a gunny sack and bound with chains. They burrowed beneath the ground, hence the name, until they came upon their prey, whereupon they exploded out of it with the chains flailing. They weren't the most disturbing monsters on the island, but they were still pretty bad.

Now, this is one of my favorite outlooks, Silver piped up

"Leave me alone!" Danny yelled.

Completely ignoring him, she continued, You want to watch out around here. Lots of marksman. This is where the colonel shot three innocent men for treason. Mala épocasniño. Bad times.

The boy was not surprised to see, as he stepped into the clearing on the bluff, that it was his family tied to the three posts where the men had been executed. He stared at his feet as he walked by and closed his ears to their pleas for help. They weren't real. When the shots rang out, he cringed and faltered, but didn't turn.

"…Now, what kind of a son are you?" asked Haight's disembodied voice. He sounded amused. "Turning a blind eye to your poor family…"

"Go…away…" Danny growled from between clenched teeth.

The green haze that made up Haight's incorporeal body appeared to pace alongside the boy. "I'm really very curious," he murmured. "How does it feel to know that their lives depend on you?" When no answer was forthcoming, he slid over to Danny's other side. "I've been there, you know…I was the executioner here for a long time. Even now, I'm the executioner…It's a powerful feeling, isn't it? To know that you hold someone's life in your hand…"

Danny stared straight forward and tried to ignore Haight until he finally reached solid road again. On one side, there was a collapsed tunnel, so he followed the road away from it. Haight was still quietly pacing him; he was getting sick of it. "Why are you still here?" he demanded at last.

The executioner laughed breathlessly. "I'm waiting…for you to ask me…"

"Ask you what?"

"…What I'm doing here…"

Danny stopped and turned to face the smirking toxic gas. He was angry, worried, and tired, and he was well beyond sick of this place. He very nearly snapped that he had just asked that question, but decided to humor him on the off-chance that he might learn something of note. He narrowed his eyes. "Okay. What are you doing here?"

Haight shrugged. "Even sadists like me get lonely sometimes…Horace usually sleeps now…Killjoy is a moron…and Silver is seldom any company…There's no one else here, Danny, except you and me. I'm bored…"

"Oh, go talk to yourself," Danny grumbled. He turned smartly on his heel and started walking again. He could sympathize with the attitude; he was getting lonely himself. But he certainly wasn't desperate enough to accept Haight as company.