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this his body was calm and relaxed. He unlatched and opened the door.
    His demeanor changed at once.
    He and his new guest exchanged greetings, and Peter Hume invited his guest in for tea. Peter closed the door behind him and turned the lock. He was thinking about what excuse he might use to save himself from a long drawn-out visit.
    His guest’s eyes were shining.
    The odd, expectant look on his guest’s face did not go unnoticed. Observation was Peter’s strong suit: his job at Zellermann’s demanded it.
    Once in the living room, the warning bells became stronger. Not sure what to do, Peter went to the kitchen, where he put a kettle on the stove and waited for it to boil. With his guest sitting at the kitchen table, things didn’t seem so bad. No more flashing red lights, no sirens. That was one of the kinks with being alone all the time. Your mind was left to wander and the longer its leash, the wilder the ideas it stuck in your head. A few minutes later, they returned to relax in the living room. His guest was examining one of the breast rippers when Peter caught sight of Jesus’ face. But this wasn’t the face he knew. The face he had gazed at while they spoke for hours on end. No, this face was twisted and angry. Something had done away with the Jesus he knew and replaced it with this new one. This demented one.
    His guest said something and Peter tried to force a laugh through his bubbling fear, a skittish kind of laugh that hung in the air.
    When his guest approached and laid his hands on Peter’s face, his body tensed. Jesus’ mouth opened, and through the gaping hole came crackling static.
    The room around him began to dim and with it Peter was suddenly outside himself, looking on like a voyeur through a foggy window. On the floor laying still was his guest, but it was clear, even to Peter that some part of this man had come slithering inside him.
    “I did what you said,” he thought frantically, looking at Jesus’ twisted face on the table behind him. “I laid low like you said, but he found me.”
    And then the realization slowly began to dawn that his guest had known all along. That he had only been bidding his time until that final critical piece had fallen into place. A piece that had come rolling into town only days before. A piece by the name of Lysander Shore.
    Peter saw something gleaming from his hand—his physical hand. A knife, its blade long and sharp, winking shards of light at him from the breast ripper’s display case. The blade touched the flesh of his left wrist and to Peter’s surprise he felt the cold steel waiting to bite him just as though he were doing it himself. The knife rocked back and forth splitting the flesh so that it looked like a bloody eye staring back at him. But his real eyes, the ones controlled by that thing that were watching with sick delight, were white bulging orbs.
    Blood ran down his forearm and fell to the floor in a thick stream. The pain was unbelievable as the blade sawed through first tendon and then bone. Peter was shrieking now, not just with agony but with the certainty that he was about to die and the sound of his screams were flat and dead in this new place. When he felt the blade begin cutting his other wrist, Peter could only hope that it would all be over soon. He had no idea that it was just beginning.

Chapter 7
     
     
    Derek was having trouble getting the lantern going.
    “This thing have any gas?” Derek said, striking a match against the side of the box. The match burst into flame.
    That was when Lysander heard a loud click and the room became shrouded by a deep orange haze.
    There was a swooshing sound and then Lysander was swimming, an astronaut through a vast expanse of empty watery space. The feeling was strangely familiar. The thought of death crossed his mind quickly and then vanished ... he knew he wasn’t dead, he could still think. Where am I? The corridor, he thought. The last thing I saw was the corridor…Two figures were