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He closes his eyes and he counts slowly, one-two-three, and Fiona (a deer shivering flies off her coat, shaking her head and her ears, flicking her tail, hide rippling in agitation at every landing insect) quietly suggests that he move. There is no real reason to move, no sense of direction or aim, no sense of purpose or hope, but neither is there any reason to remain still and she is restless, so restless, and so he does her a favor and he moves, shuddering as though the images she sends him are somehow contagious.

He finds the crossroads and there is no way of knowing which way Lawr has gone, or whether it is a bad or a good idea to follow him, or whether following is even possible when the walls keep putting themselves into new configurations whenever he turns away. He chooses, at random, a direction: he turns left. He does not think that Leona Tavish would think this worthwhile.

And again: he closes his eyes and he counts, one two three, but he counts quickly this time in pace with the shallow rapidity of his breath because having his eyes closed seems so ******** inadvisable, but everything has been: leaving Lawrence, finding the door, deploying to the Sahara, power games against his own body, desperation, Deus, a bottle of pills once and a gun another time, left untouched when the courage wasn't there. Closing his eyes is nothing, in comparison.

He opens his eyes, and he takes a breath, and by the light of his flashlight he scans the glisten of the blood looking first for crisp white clothes and then for a weapon tablet, perfunctorily going through the motions of work while Leona Tavish's words buzz around in his head and tell him he should run, run, because if he doesn't run he's as good as dead already.

He has no conscious thought that he should shift his flashlight to his right hand and summon his weapon: she is simply there, a weight in his hand that fails to be reassuring, and he takes a single step backwards.

Of course. Of course it would. Numb and strange and looking at the situation through the dispassionate eyes of a remote observer behind a television screen, Taym hefted the knife in his unshaking fingers, short-circuited with dread, and he waited, suspended in the empty space between fight or flight. Behind his eyes a pale-browed stag tossed its head, impatient, imperious, and vicious.

He took another step backwards, and he spoke out loud for the first time since he'd walked into the door. The dead level in his voice was dimly surprising, inasmuch as he was capable of surprise in the weird dreamlike state he found himself in.

"Don't you ******** dare," he said quietly, and he was not referring to its attempts to touch him.

This one was easier. The knife--not Taym but the knife, the weapon, seemingly of its own accord--swung in without hesitation.

He had a sudden, vivid, hysterical memory of succumbing to the first wave of shadowlings he'd ever faced while Clerise hyena-laughed in the background at his ineptitude, and his stabs at the thing latched onto the end of his arm--the thing that wasn't him, that wasn't anyone, the thing--became frantic.

He fumbled backwards, dropping the flashlight to throw a beam uselessly in a single direction, and the dim light of Fiona's blade was strobed and staccato as it sank again and again into the nauseatingly gelatinous body.

He did not want to die here, this way: he did not want to become a leering, clawing obstacle for the next poor b*****d to stumble into the door.