Pain screamed through every nerve in his body. Thunderous. Ubiquitous. Ravishing.

But then it was gone—gone so completely it was impossible it had ever existed at all.

For a dizzying moment, Benno’s proprioception reoriented itself from horizontal to vertical—all the more challenging given the near total darkness. Near total. There was a weak light. And two eyes. Two pared eyes. The most extreme chemosis Benno had ever seen, the pupils constricted to points inside the swollen whites. The eyes and a beige hand, holding a small heart—no, not a heart, a small red marble—between two stone-still fingernail-less fingers, were all that he could see in the weak flame from the stub of a candle on the floor. There was a stench of damp earth.

I’m in a shed, Benno thought, cradling something in his arms. I’ve always been in a shed.

The smooth hand’s fingers separated—just a millimeter—and the marble dropped the short distance into the flame, snuffing it out with a cleck, and plunging the dim space into now total darkness. But it only lasted a moment. Then there was light, vertical seams of light as the shed’s dingy walls rotated, their outsides turning inward, and their outsides were dazzling sunlight.

Benno’s eyes clenched and he lowered his face. He felt his bare feet meet warm sand. The gentle lap of waves soothed his ears. Eventually he looked up, squinting, his vision bleary.

A beach. The beach. The hale blue sky. The thick white clouds. The sparkling water. The white sand unmarred save for a few toppled beach chairs and some scattered debris crawling with rust-colored crabs, drift wood or…

How long…

There was nothing left of them but faded clothes—a tracksuit, a speedo, a NASCAR sweater, a blazer crumpled in a wind-scuffed wheelchair, part of a blue dress imprinted with gold stars, a pile of mirrors—and protruding from it all at every angle: stalks of yellow bones. The rust-colored crabs clacked and hissed at whatever scraps remained.

Six bodies.

How long…

Six skeletons.

Benno’s eyes drifted down. In his arms he cradled the other half of the blue and gold dress. The top half. There was a body in it, but unlike the bodies on the beach, this one retained more than just bare bone. There was desiccated flesh, a dark bronze, stretched taught over the skull, neck, shoulder and arms. The flesh was covered in faded green tattoos: an upside-down cross under the eye, cursive along the jawline, an eyeball on the throat. The bangs, cut low over the eyes, looked like wire. The eyes had turned into hunks of flaky yellow tissue.

A droplet of water landed on the dead girl’s withered cheek—then another—as Benno lowered her mummified body gently onto the sand. His lips quavered. His hands shook. He pulled his beard aside—which was as long as the length of his body—to avoid placing her on top of it. He noticed his fingernails, which were so long they’d started to curl like question marks an inch from the tip of his fingers.

D’doak had yet to move; they knelt on the sand a few feet in front of Benno, one hand set on their beige thigh, the other raised with two fingers outspread.

Benno looked out through his tears toward the sun-dappled sea, his trembling hands running up the length of his oily clothes, as the weight of everything—of where he’d been—reeled back into him.

A life. A whole miserable, pain-ridden life. Had he dreamed it? Had he lived it? It had been his life, some version of his life, as real as this one. More real. And he’d been with them, in all the wrong ways he’d been with his son and his wife…

Nick…

Kay…

But those weren’t their names. Those were never their names.

A shape trawled past Benno’s legs and out across the sand. Recipient. He stretched, yawned, sniffed briefly at Dante’s thigh bone, then snatched up a crab in his mouth and traipsed away up the beach while the crab squirmed and hissed.

Benno looked over at the pile of mirrors. Edda’s bones were different, somehow, though at the moment he didn’t have the presence of mind to understand how.

“What do I do?” he asked the pile of bones and mirrors.

A warm breeze ran down from the perfect sky.

“What do I do?” Benno asked D’doak.

D’doak stared, no indication that they were even alive.

There had been a smell. The smell of his son’s shampoo. It had been real. His wife’s fingers on his arm had been real. The other car swerving at the last second, opening a doorway where in this life—in his life—there was only a wall.

Benno’s nostrils filled with the salty breeze. All over again he’d lost them both.

“What do I do?”

Six bodies.

Here I am. Some iteration of a broken promise. Here I still am.

“What do I do?”

#

The door to the Inn stood alone on the beach. Benno’s beard scrrrched against his legs as he shambled toward it. The lush tropical forest hemming the beach from the inland seemed to tower over him. He glanced back at the beach, where D’doak knelt, where six bodies—five and two-halves—basked in the sun. Benno should do something with them. Bury them. Or move them. He should do something.

He touched the door—some kind of gray polymer—then placed his hand on the ochre knob. It was cool to the touch, despite the relentless sunlight. If it wouldn’t turn, if he couldn’t get into the Inn, if he was stuck out here on the beach…

The knob turned and the door opened inward. Through it, the salmon-colored carpets and vaguely genital-looking wallpaper. The orange lights inset in the ceiling. The rows of doors with their arbitrary six-digit numbers. Hallways upon hallways upon hallways. A dreary place, made all the drearier by the palpable sense that it was completely and utterly empty and had been, for some very, very long time.

His fingers worked their way into the crusty slit of his pants pocket as the door drifted shut behind him, muting the sunlight through its pane of glass. His pocket was deep, and he buried his hand to the wrist before his gnarled fingernails clicked on the metal thing there. He removed it, and held it up, where it glinted in the orange light.

“…Gemma?” he said with the inflection of a person checking on a noise in the middle of the night. “Are you there?”

A faint whirring sound—maybe Benno’s imagination, or the blood rushing through him.

GOOD MORNING, BENNO.

Benno exhaled, a reluctant grin forming in the pit of his beard.

“How are you, Gemma?” was all he could manage in that moment.

…ERROR. INTERFERENCE NUMB—

“Gemma. How long have…” Benno searched for the question. “How long have I been outside? Outside the Inn?”

The sunlight through the glass door warmed Benno’s back.

SEVEN YEARS, EIGHT MONTHS, ONE WEEK, SIX DAYS, TWENTY-TWO HOURS, FOUR MINUTES, THIRTY-ONE…

“Gemma…” Benno’s voice caught on his breath. Seven years… Seven years… “Gemma, how old am I?”

THIRTY-THREE YEARS, FOUR MONTHS, ONE WEEK, TWO DAYS, SEVEN HOURS, EIGHTEEN MINUTES…

Benno dragged his curled fingernails through the length of his oily beard.

Hide Benno, Edda had said with one of her final breaths. Then she’d turned to Benno, and said something else…

“Is there anyone else here?” Benno asked. “Is there anything else alive in the Inn?”

The faint whirring.

…DISCOUNTING YOU THERE ARE TWO COGENT LIFEFORMS INSIDE THE HILLSTUL INN’S PROVINCE.

Benno glanced back through the glass door, where, down the beach, D’doak still knelt on the sand, his hand still raised, and, further down the sand, Recipient tore through the rust-colored shell of a squirming crab.

“Take me to them.”

#

Gemma led him first to the aluminum door with the crash bar.

Benno stood outside for a long moment, steeling himself for the stench he knew would meet him when he entered. He hummed a song he couldn’t place, nervously, absentmindedly, under his breath before finally hitting the crash bar and stepping inside.

The stench was indeed as overwhelming as he remembered. He lurched and gagged as the door swung shut behind him. Then, standing in darkness, he listened as the rattling breath and the scrape of the chain on concrete issued from the dark.

“Please…” came the hoarse voice of the Haruspex. “I am so hungry…”

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Benno held Gemma between his thumb and index finger. “Light,” he said, and then the dazzling light showed forth.

The Haruspex sat on the sooty floor with her rag bunched on her lap. She looked, more-or-less, unchanged since Benno had least seen her—at least in his memory. The same cracked lips caked in a layer of spittle, the same clumps of dreaded hair, the same foggy, blind eyes refracting Gemma’s light, the same chain fastened to the collar around her throat.

She reached toward Benno with a knurled hand. “Please… Feed me…”

Benno took a step closer. “Gemma,” he said. “We need food. A sandwich—”

“No…” the old woman hissed. “No…”

“How?” Benno asked. “How do I feed you?”

“Come closer…” The woman’s leathery fingers felt around the damp air.

Don’t touch it. A little voice crept through Benno’s mind. And don’t let it touch you.

Benno took another step forward. “What’s going to happen?”

The Haruspex’s fingers groped. “Please…”

What could possibly happen—at this late stage—that would cause Benno any more grief than he already carried? He would not die. Physical pain would be an impossible blessing. A deeper level of psychic anguish did not exist. He had made it all the way down.

He took the Haruspex’s hand.

She gasped, and her foggy eyes widened. For a moment Benno felt nothing but the clammy grasp of her leathery skin. Then there was a feeling, deep in Benno’s hand, his arm, up into his shoulder and neck, like a tickle inside his bones. It wriggled up the side of his face and burrowed into the folds of his brain.

“Yes…” The Haruspex breathed. “Like a little bird…”

Benno grimaced and shivered as the tickle worked deeper, a sensation like fluttering wings beating in the pale tissue of his mind.

“Like a little bird…” The Haruspex shuddered. “…to a worm…”

A spate of random images flashed behind Benno’s eyelids: a pod of dolphins racing through murky water; a menorah adorned in rainbow lights, its base on fire; two cardboard boxes in an attic; a beetle scurrying into an open wound on the rump of a cow; the letter H in bold pink against a black curtain; a little boy in overalls holding a sword, standing at the mouth of a dark cave in the woods; the strange angle of a…

“This.” The Haruspex’s hand tightened suddenly around Benno’s, and Benno felt a new sensation, a pinch, deep in the center of his head, like a beak nipping something free. Then the Haruspex released his hand.

Benno stepped back, rattled, and opened his eyes. “What was that?” he asked.

The Haruspex took a slow, raspy breath, her jowls churning, then swallowed—nothing, perhaps, but a lump in her throat. “Thank you,” she said. “I do not know how much longer I would have lasted.”

Benno touched the top of his head gingerly, as if it hurt. He felt no different. If something had happened to him, it was unclear.

The Haruspex adjusted the rag in her lap and gazed vaguely in Benno’s direction. “Is Edda dead?”

Benno nodded, then remembered the woman was blind. “Yes.”

The Haruspex lowered her face, the deep wrinkles around her eyes deepening. “That is a shame,” she said finally. “Was it your fault?”

We are what we repeatedly do.

“Yes,” he said, then: “You enjoy pointing fingers, don’t you.”

The Haruspex shrugged a bony shoulder. “I am merely interested in consequence. Consequence is the only truth of this and every world.”

“You told me I would do what Edda asked. You told Edda I would do what she asked. But I didn’t. I didn’t know I wouldn’t but I didn’t. You were wrong. And now she’s dead.”

The Haruspex shook her head. “I told her you would do what she needs.”

“What’s the difference?”

“You’ve changed.” The Haruspex’s cracked lips were shiny with spittle. “I see things in you that weren’t there before…” She leaned forward, and the chain rattled. “There’s less of you. And your luck has changed.”

Benno wiped his eyes, which had at some point filled with tears. “Last time I was here, you asked me about the accident… About the accident that killed my wife and son. You asked what came to me. What it offered. I didn’t know what you were talking about back then. I didn’t remember. But I just woke up from a dream—or another life—where the accident didn’t happen. It almost happened, but… right before the cars hit, or didn’t hit, something came to me. It offered me safety. It offered me safety forever. It left before I could accept, because it wasn’t needed, because the cars missed each other. But the first time, the real time—in this life—just before the moment of impact… it was there too. It offered me safety. And I accepted it…” He wiped more tears from his face. “That’s where this all started. That’s why I am the way I am. Whatever it was, whatever it gave me or took from me and for whatever reason, it’s why I’m here. It’s why I’m still here.” He looked up from the floor. “Do you know? Do you know what it was that did this to me?”

The Haruspex watched Benno from blind eyes. “Only you know for sure.”

Benno exhaled through his teeth and smeared snot across his mustache. “So what do I do now?” he asked.

The old woman chuckled, a phlegmy bark. “Do what comes next.”

“Do you want me to free you?”

“I have nowhere else to go. Just remember to feed me now and then.”

“You’re not my responsibility.”

The Haruspex’s knobby hands folded into her rag. “Inheritance is a burden.”

Benno didn’t like the sound of that. “What exactly do you eat, anyway?”

The Haruspex chewed her lips into something like a grin and shrugged her bony shoulders. “There is only one thing in a mind.”

Benno frowned.

“You should know this, son of Harold Haim, renowned Professor of semiotics.”

Benno thought this over. “I don’t notice anything missing.”

“And you never will.”

#

Benno was nervous.

Upon leaving the Haruspex’s room, Gemma led him to the second of the two remaining cogent lifeforms inside the Inn. It was both a shock and not that Benno found himself standing outside the door to his own room. 266362.

It was possible, of course, that Gemma was confused. She was confused about his age, for example—off by, at this point, fourteen years. Of course it was just as possible, Benno accepted, that he was the one who was confused. In fact it was more likely. With this acceptance came a swarm of thoughts—a tangle of clarity he couldn’t parse in that moment—which he shook away as he pressed his ear to the door.

There was a voice, muffled, that Benno recognized but couldn’t place. A man’s voice.

He took a slow breath, and entered.

Wide green leaves and thick green stems crowded him as he stepped inside. A sweet smell of chlorophyll and soil filled his nostrils. The air was humid. The plants—or single plant, it was impossible to discern—filled every inch of the room so thickly that Benno had to reach out and part the leaves and stems back from the linoleum walls, the folding table, the pile of dirty laundry in the corner, to confirm that this was, in fact, his room.

He pressed deeper. The enormous plant appeared to be growing from the single small clay pot on the table, a thuck of stems spilling over its rim and branching into dozens and hundreds of additional stems that widened off through the entirety of the room. With his eyes, Benno followed one particularly thick braid of stems, that trailed off into the bathroom, where they had, over the force of years, wrested their way up the sink’s faucet and into the cracks around the handles.

The voice was coming from the TV on the dresser: The Shining played, the scene where Jack, bleeding from his head, negotiated his freedom from the walk-in pantry with some unseen entity outside. A few feet from the screen, a stem sagging under its weight, was a big blue flower, roughly half the size of Benno’s head.

Benno surveyed the jungly condition of his trailer, momentarily forgetting the pretense under which Gemma had led him here in the first place. He would need to deal with this, trim it back or remove it completely. On the other hand, the could just change rooms. He had the whole Inn to himself, after all. Let the plants have this one.

“Gemma,” he said. “What kind of plant is—”

The blue flower turned.

Benno gasped and stumbled back.

The flower—its folds of blue petals curling like a startled brow over the eyeless cluster of its anthers—seemed to recoil, then to strain forward and widen.

“Tony?” it said in a monotonous, genderless voice.

Benno stared, his shock paralyzing him until he remembered that everything about this place—everything about his life—was as strange and shocking as a talking flower.

“No,” he said. “No I’m not Tony.”

The flower moved—scurried—up the length of its stem, jumped from one to another, and half-concealed itself on the opposite side of the room. “…Jack?” it asked, its monotonous voice betraying a bray of fear.

Benno leaned around the bulk of the plant to glance at the TV. “No,” he said, then thought for a moment. “I’m not Jack. I’m not going to hurt you.”

The flower peeked out.

“My name is Benno.” Benno pushed aside a stem and took a step forward. “I’ve been away awhile, but this is my room. We’ve actually met, I think. A long time ago.”

The flower’s petals narrowed, uncertain. “Are you the caretaker?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“What’s your name?” Benno asked.

The flower crept out a few inches along a stem, then stopped. “I don’t know.”

Benno fingered his beard free from a leaf. “Well, what would you like to be called?”

The flower was silent for a long moment. “Not Jack. Or Lloyd. Or Grady.”

“Okay so those are off the table,” Benno said, some busy, background part of his brain trying to piece together how this had happened. Gemma had materialized the plant. The plant had thrived and produced a cogent flower with Gemma’s voice. And that was about where Benno’s understanding of the situation fell off pretty steeply. It would have been a good question for Edda, though knowing Edda, her answer would have left something to be desired.

The flower crept out further along the stem, then tumbled to another, and another, leapt over the width of the table, and rested on a nest of leaves a few feet from Benno. “I don’t remember you,” it said.

“Yeah, you were just a baby.” Benno ignored the nagging sensation in his mind mocking him for talking to a flower. “It’s been seven years.”

“Seven years?” The flower’s petals scrunched, calculating. “Where have you been?”

“Outside,” Benno said, his stomach sinking at a torrent of faces and failures.

The flower widened. “Outside the Overlook?”

“Um, no. Outside the Hillstul Inn. The Overlook is just in the movie.”

The flower’s petals frowned. “Movie?”

“Do you want to come outside and see?”

“Outside?” The flower crept nearer, and Benno noticed the dozens of thin black threads extending from its base that appeared to propel it. “Is it snowing?”

“Not here.”

“Is there a maze?”

Benno thought this over. “Sort of.”

The flower hopped from its perch and landed on Benno’s shoulder, the black threads gripping his shirt. “What are we gonna do?” it asked, its monotonous voice clipping into excitement in a way Gemma’s never could.

“Well first,” Benno said. “We need to dig some holes.”

#

Edda’s bones were black. Her bones were black and if Benno remembered correctly, her blood was red worms. It was a peculiarity that meant nothing now. Her bones were black and her blood was worms, but she was dead. Just like everybody else.

As the sun set out over the water, Benno noticed something about himself he was embarrassed he’d never noticed before.

While exertion—like, for example, digging six graves in the sand—left him winded and sweating, there would come a point, a plateau, past which it stopped worsening. This of course made sense: since Benno could not die or get injured, the usual progression into exhaustion, soreness, sprain, breathlessness, dehydration, and heart attack could not arrive. So Benno could dig, and dig, and bury and dig and dig again, panting and sweating through his clothes, without ever needing to slow or rest. This allowed him to finish burying the crew before it got dark.

He patted the final grave—Hermann’s—with the underside of the shovel, his beard coiled around his neck like a scarf, and looked back down the row. He’d buried them facing the ocean, and placed an article of remembrance atop or leaning against the lengths of metal he’d torn from the rusted beach chairs and impaled in the sand: Edda’s cracked mirror carapace, which reflected the sea in jagged fractals; a strip of the little girl’s blue and gold dress—whoever she was; Isaac’s gold necklace; Helen’s NASCAR sweater; Dante’s speedo; and a wheel from Hermann’s chair. He realized too late that he could have just as easily requested proper headstones from Gemma, but after a moment of consideration he decided this was better. This was more in line with the spirit of the crew.

The flower perched on Benno’s shoulder, watching silently. D’doak was gone, and Recipient was nowhere to be seen. Benno tossed the shovel away, watching from the corner of his vision as it vanished before hitting the sand.

“Are you done?” asked the flower.

Benno nodded slowly, looking out at the sun over the glittering water. “With this part.”

“What are we doing next?”

In Benno’s dream—or whatever it was he’d experienced in D’doak’s shed—there had been no yawning Hell of inescapability. Benno had gotten to die. At least for a moment. He’d gotten his death, the same that everyone else got. Why should he be greedy? Why should that not be enough?

“I like holes,” said the flower.

“What do you mean?”

“It sounds nice. Holes."

Benno shrugged. “Well that’s your name then.”

“Really?”

“Sure.”

Holes the flower smiled, satisfied, out at the orange sun.

Something leapt from the water in a burst of silver droplets, then splashed back down in silence. A pair of birds or large insects darted from the tree line of the thick forest and flew together down the length of the beach. Benno and Holes watched as the sun sunk lower into an idyllic haze of red and gold so mesmerizing that it was nearly dark before Benno realized the abominable Coil—Edda’s burden and hers alone—was gone.