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I put my hands over my face for a second. "It's a rotten answer but I believe you could be right about the timing being off after everything that’s happened today."

I go and stand in front of the creature over his counter, because the alternative is looking at him.

It hasn't changed in three hours. Head, shoulders, one arm reaching. The mouth open. The eyes come around to me when I get close, wet and yellow and interested.

"Don't touch it," Gage says.

"I put it there."

"Maren."

"If anyone can finish it, it should be me."

I don't ask him again. I just lift my hand.

Finishing it doesn't work. There's nothing to push. It isn't a thing you can burn, because half of it isn't in the room to burn, and when I reach for the line I closed I can feel it sitting exactly where I left it, tight and stupid and permanent, like a knot I pulled without looking.

So I do the thing I know I shouldn't do.

I follow it.

Past the knot, past the creature, out the other side, where there's a place there. Not a void. A place, with a floor to it and a cold that has a direction, and it goes back and back and it’s not empty.

It's full.

Something in it turns around.

There's nothing to see. It just registers to me the way you register a light coming on in a house across a field, and it begins, without any hurry at all, to come.

I rip my hand down.

The kitchen comes back. The tap. The dead bulb. Gage's arm across my chest, holding me up, because my knees have buckled and there's blood running out of my nose onto his sleeve.

"Out," he says. "Out, right now, don't go back in there."

"I wasn't in there."

"Your eyes were open and you weren't behind them."

I get a hand on the counter. The room tips once and settles.

"There's a place on the other side of that," I say. "It's not a hole. It's a room, Gage, and it goes on, and there are things standing in it."

That is not a...

Sid's voice, dry as a struck match, the first thing he's said to me since the loaf split.

Then he stops.

He goes rigid on the floor with his claws out and his eyes flat, three full seconds of it, and when it lets him go he sags where he stands like something set him down.

"I know," I tell him. "I know. It's all right."

He walks off into the dark of the hall and doesn't let me touch him.

The night goes long and quiet.

Gage puts a chair in the kitchen doorway and sits in it, facing the counter, which is his way of saying he'll be watching a monster all night so I can sleep, without having to say anything.