Given that Benno’s old room had effectively become Holes’, he let himself into the room next door in order to groom.

The room was identical to Benno’s as he’d originally found it: lime-green wallpaper; a coarse, salmon-colored carpet; a single beige chair beside a low beige table in one corner; pink wall-length curtains drawn over a window; a full-sized bed, its nondescript mustard-colored sheets with distinct hospital folds at the corners; a drinking glass, upside down on the bedside table; a fire-exit floor plan affixed on the inside of the door which, pausing to look at it for the first time, he discovered showed only the one hallway lined with its eight doors, and arrows at either end pointing off in opposite directions.

There was no point in Benno changing any of it. He wasn’t going to be here long.

Holes perched on the bathroom counter, watching from its petals—if there were eyes inside, Benno had yet to see them—as Benno hunched over the toilet hacking through his bulbous nails. It took him the better part of an hour, but he managed to get his fingernails cut back and smooth enough that he could at least touch things unimpeded with his fingertips. He spent less effort on his toenails.

He stood naked at the mirror. The tip of his beard dangled around his ankles. He could just hack it off, shave it to the roots. He turned and looked at himself at an angle. It wasn’t exactly a good look, but there was something about it that Benno didn’t hate. It was well earned. Well deserved. Seven years in a shed living through a subtle and insidious nightmare. If all he got to keep from that was an ankle-length beard, then he was damn well going to keep it. He showered, giving the beard a deep scrub with an odorless shampoo Gemma provided, and then braided its length and tied it with a piece of black string, and though he’d never braided anything in his life, he was satisfied with how it came out.

Holes, who had been staring at the shower curtain since Benno emerged, finally spoke. “Aren’t you afraid?” it asked.

“Of what? Why?”

Holes’ petals narrowed toward the shower’s basin.

Benno frowned, then, after a moment, understood. “You know,” he said. “Everything you saw, about the Overlook, about Jack and Wendy and Danny, about the twins and the woman in the bath, it was all fake.”

“Fake?”

“It’s a movie. It isn’t real.”

“What is real?”

Benno considered this. “That’s a really good question.” He picked up Gemma from the counter and pressed his thumb to her cool, flat side. “I need some clothes. The usual.”

“Are there other movies?”

“Yeah, tons.” Benno tugged on his jeans. “Maybe we’ll watch some together.”

Holes’ petals widened. “Really?”

“Sure.” Benno tossed his shirt over his shoulder and stepped into his sneakers. “But not right now.”

“Why?”

“Because we have something else to do first.”

“What?”

The sneakers fit so perfect it was as if he wasn’t even wearing any at all. “We have to find Onus,” he said. “We have to find Edda’s brother.”

#

Recipient had managed, somehow, to get into Edda’s apartment—this despite the door being closed when Benno arrived. He sat on the windowsill, looking out at the empty sky. When Benno entered he turned slowly, gave Benno an irritated look, then hopped to the floor and loped off down the hall.

The apartment smelled like lilacs and firewood. The only thing out of place was a blanket—black with jagged stripes of bright orange that Benno remembered folded neatly over the back of the chair in which he’d sat speaking to Edda soon after meeting her—which was now strewn on the white sofa on which she’d sat, and which Benno assumed she must likely have slept on the night before her murder. It was a painfully humanizing picture of the formidable and guarded Edda, and one which—coupled with the aroma of lilacs and firewood—caused Benno almost to miss her—the murderous bitch.

Then again, what was he?

Benno paused beside a small table at the end of the sofa. There was a drawer in it, ajar, and through the slit he could see a familiar object. Benno slid it open and picked up the Koan, the little, seven-fingered hand Edda had stolen from the Forrorians. It was light, as light as a Gemstoke. Its surface was brittle. Benno held it up and peered at it. Edda had claimed there were buyers, that a bidding war for the Koan was underway. Perhaps she was lying. Perhaps she simply hadn’t had a chance to deliver it to the highest bidder before her death. Benno placed it gently back in the drawer and slid it all the way closed.

“Who lives here?” Holes asked from Benno’s shoulder as they headed down the hallway off the living room.

Recipient slunk inside a door that stood ajar opposite the door to the study. “One of the people we buried,” Benno said, nudging the door slightly wider and peering inside. Another large room, with a deep gold wall-to-wall carpet, black dressers, black closet doors, a crimson ceiling with a gold spiral painted across it, and an enormous bed strewn with unmade black bedding. A gigantic furry gray couch occupied a quarter of the room’s far wall, surrounded by ornate pillows. Recipient padded up to it, glanced back at Benno, and then nestled his head into its base. Then the couch stirred.

Benno startled.

The couch sighed and rolled over, exposing two parallel rows of obtruding nipples down its underside. Its upper half raised off the floor and looked over at Benno from a pair of austere orange eyes. A cat. A cat the size of a rhinoceros. One chair-sized paw dragged a pillow underneath its table-sized head before it blinked once—slowly like a tree swaying in the wind—lowered its head onto the pillow, and took a deep, sleepy breath. Recipient got down prostrate on his stomach, scooted closer to one of the long nipples, and started to drink.

Benno, suddenly embarrassed, closed the door most of the way and continued down the hall.

Blue curtains were drawn tight across the window in the study. Benno traced a few of the scattered papers on the table on his way to the bookshelf. The books themselves—all the same height and width—had no writing on the spines, and when he took one down and opened it he found every page cramped with Edda’s careful handwriting, which, after a moment of attempting to read, he discovered was in an alphabet that was not his own.

“Gemma,” he said. “Can you translate these?”

…ERROR. INTERFERENCE NUMBER 61.

LANGUAGE UNKNOWN.

Benno eyed the hundreds of books on the shelves. Language unknown. If Gemma didn’t know it, that probably meant Edda had invented it herself—an impressive insight into the scope of her paranoia.

He stroked his beard, combing his mind for some clue of how to proceed. “Gemma,” he said finally, setting the journal back on the shelf. “Where is Onus?”

…ERROR. INTERFERENCE NUMBER—

“Gemma. Where is Edda’s brother?”

…ERROR. INTERFERENCE NUMB—

“Gemma, stop.” Benno pinched the bridge of his nose. Three days ago—seven years, rather—Edda had remarked to Benno that she was excited for him to learn about all the wonderful things Gemma could provide besides whiskey. So far, Benno wasn’t sure Gemma had provided him anything that topped that.

“Well I guess that leaves us with one option.” Benno straightened up, hoping that assuming a more confident posture might instill a bit of confidence, though if anything it made him feel like an imposter. “Gemma, take me to…” he trailed off and turned toward Holes, remembering the flower was perched on his shoulder. “Maybe we should get you back to the room,” he said. “Where I’m going, it might be dangerous for you.”

Holes looked at Benno from the folds of its petals. “Will it be dangerous for you, too?”

Benno shook his head slowly, a gesture that faded into stillness. “I don’t know.”

The blue petals of Holes’ head—body?—shrugged. “You’ll protect me, right?” it asked.

Benno noticed that Holes had a scent, floral and faintly synthetic. Not like anything Benno had smelled before, and yet deeply and inherently familiar.

“I will protect you,” he said.

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“Then let’s go.” Holes’ threads nestled against Benno’s shoulder. “I want to see things.”

Benno nodded, his beard pendulating against his shins. And see things you will, he thought, raising Gemma to his lips. “Take us to Edda’s Realm of origin.”

#

Benno noticed two things right away:

The first was the torrential, dark rain bleeding from the low, rufous sky.

The second was the overwhelming conviction that he was being watched.

He shielded Gemma from the rain as he raised her to his lips. “I need a raincoat,” he said, then pulled the yellow raincoat from the air and threw it over his head and shoulders, foregoing the sleeves.

“What’s happening?” Holes nestled against Benno’s cheek, peering out from its petals into the curdling red glow of the sky.

“It’s raining, is all,” Benno said, then added: “It’s like snow, except warmer.”

Holes chewed this over.

Benno surveyed the black brick walls of the alleyway in which he and Holes stood. They rose up on either side, disappearing into the low clouds. On the wall behind him, painted in garish yellow letters, someone had graffitied:

THE EYES OF HORUS WATCH YOU FUCK

Benno lifted one sneakered foot from the thin rivulet in which it stood. The rivulet essed down the length of the alley and burbled into a drain near where the alleyway opened onto a street, from which vericolored lights percolated through the heavy rain.

There was a sound, a distant roar that distinguished itself in Benno’s ears as the chatter of traffic—tires cutting through puddles, engines whirring, the squeal of a slammed brake. A blur of movement swept past the alley’s mouth—a vehicle, going fast—and then, a second later, moving in the opposite direction, a dark figure hurried past, stooped in the rain.

It was hard to say for certain from his distance, but if he had to he’d say the figure couldn’t have been shorter than ten feet tall.

“I think we’re in the right place,” Benno said, glancing once more back at the graffiti before heading toward the street.

Holes watched from the shelter of the raincoat’s hood.

Benno paused at the end of the alley and peered out. A wide boulevard, awash in relentless rain, stretched in both directions for as far as Benno could see. Lining it, the dark, gothic facades of what appeared to be apartment buildings, their ornate iron doors covered by black awnings. The buildings themselves were windowless—at least as far as Benno could see before their black exteriors were swallowed up by the low clouds. Gold lights from lampposts on the boulevard’s corners trellised in the soaking air. A pair of white lights—a vehicle—approached along the boulevard, then veered left and disappeared with a squeal.

Other than its sheer scale—the building’s entrances were easily twenty feet high, the boulevard itself perhaps fifty yards across—it could have been a city in Benno’s Realm. The building’s that lined Central Park, for example, were also ornate, and the few times he’d been there at night—though not necessarily in the rain—there had been a similar gothic grandiosity. The same was true of Madrid, or of Prague—both of which Benno had visited during a gap year from college. Again he considered what he’d considered back in Middle Forest as he’d approached the library to confront Simon Hausmann and the Baba’ba’ksum: material itself had a preference. From Realm to Realm, there was similarity. This dark city was ominous and austere, but it was more familiar than alien. Despite a few obvious qualities—the absence of parked cars, for example, or the buildings’ windowlessness—it could have been anywhere. It could’ve been…

Benno’s thoughts trailed off as his gaze wandered up into the sky.

“Where do we go now?” Holes asked, its plasticky petals brushing Benno’s cheek.

Benno stepped out from the mouth of the alleyway and into the middle of the sidewalk, staring up, raindrops landing in his open mouth.

At some distance up the boulevard—a mile or more—and at some bewildering height, scores of neon lights smoldered and flashed—signs, it seemed, obscured by the clouds—casting shadows of reverberating light. But higher still than the neon lights was a section of sky from which the cloud cover was entirely devoid in a near perfect circle. And in that empty swatch of black sky, suspended over what appeared to be the spire of a skyscraper just visible from the clouds below, a pair of enormous disembodied eyeballs—the bloody braids of their optics nerves dangling—stared from orange irises down, it felt, directly at Benno.

#

Benno walked for nearly thirty minutes—his sneakers scrrrching with water—before he saw another person.

As they approached through the gloom, hurrying with their head down and their hands buried in the folds of their long coat, Benno’s first instinct was to hide. There was a building entrance nearby, its door inset in the black brick—granite? marble?—inside which Benno could easily conceal himself until they passed. But this instinct was an unreasonable one, a primordial impulse with no bearing on the situation at hand. He was not here, in this Realm, with any nefarious intentions. Sooner or later he would need to make his presence known to someone. Nor was he in any danger. Despite this, his heart rate kicked up as he slowed to a stop in the path of the approaching person.

They strode quickly, their face downcast, oblivious to Benno, and would have walked right past him if he didn’t speak up.

“Excuse me?” he said, his voice muffled by the rain.

The person—a woman—stopped dead and looked up, blinking over Benno’s head for several seconds before noticing him down near her waist. She was easily two feet taller than Edda, her black eyes caked in black shadow, her lips black, her black hair tucked into the high collar of her brass buckle-adorned coat, and sopping wet. For a moment she stared, expressionless. Then a frown dug into the crease between her eyes.

“What are you?” Her voice was deep, with an accent Benno had only heard once before.

“Um, I’m Benno.” Benno nudged the hood of his raincoat back from his eyes.

Holes cowered against Benno’s neck.

The woman wiped water from her forehead with a long hand that immediately disappeared back into her coat. “And?”

Benno pointed up the boulevard toward the pair of orange eyes glaring from the sky. “Who lives there?” he asked.

The woman did not turn around. She peered at Benno, her eyes narrowing. “A shrunken wittol has some business with the Eyes of Horus?”

“Uh, no,” Benno said. “I’m actually here to see Onus.”

A moment unfurled in which the woman stared deeply at Benno, her brow furrowed so deeply her eyes appeared like two shadowy pits, and Benno became convinced she was going to admonish him, or strike him.

Then her frown broke into a wide grin, which spread into uproarious laughter. “My…” She cackled, her face rising toward the wet sky. “Oh my… Brilliant.”

Benno grinned, uncertain.

“My. Oh my…” The woman wiped rainwater and tears from her face. “Very, very good. Whoever and whatever you are, rest assured that you’ve made my night. Here to see Onus…” She threw her head back again and laughed anew as she strode around Benno and off down the street. “Brilliant!”

Benno watched her as she disappeared into the gloom, her laughter swallowed by the susurrus of the endless rain.

“Can you explain the joke to me?” Holes asked once she was gone.

Benno turned back up the boulevard, tenting a hand over his brow to peer up at the eyes and the neon lights. “No,” he said, resuming his trek.

#

The boulevard continued onto a long suspension bridge. The bridge’s towers, like the city’s buildings, disappeared overhead into the clouds. Benno walked alongside the high railing. Below, a chasm of dark mist. He listened for running water, but could not distinguish the rain from anything else. Looking back, he found the buildings ended flush with the chasm’s edge, and the chasm’s walls appeared made of black, sooty concrete.

The source of the neon lights seemed to be directly on the bridge’s far side, looming so high that Benno needed to crane his neck all the way back to look at them. The swatch of cloudless sky from which the eyes gaped down had not once filled in, implying that its presence was more than simple climatic coincidence.

Benno was also convinced that the eyes were following him.

“Has she seen the movie?” Holes asked.

“What movie? Who?”

“The Shining. That woman.”

“The one we just spoke to?”

Holes nodded against Benno’s cheek.

“I don’t know,” Benno said. “That movie’s from my Realm. They might have their own movies here. Then again, I bet Edda had seen it. If I had to guess.”

“Why?”

“Why do I bet she’d seen it?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. This is a strange line of questioning, Holes.”

“Are you mad at me?”

“No. Of course not."

A roar rose up. Benno stopped and turned, peering into the dinge. From back the way he’d come, a white light raced down the middle of the boulevard and onto the bridge. Before Benno could make sense of it, a horn blared, and the light revealed itself as the headlamp of an enormous black train, its fender bared like a grimacing mouth. It hurdled down tracks along the boulevard’s middle that Benno hadn’t noticed until then, trailing a plume of black smoke from its tall chimney and dragging tens—dozens—of black passenger cars.

Benno clung to the railing as the bridge shook with the train’s momentum. It let out another deafening blare as it blurred by, and as soon as it appeared it had vanished into the mist.

#

On the far side of the chasm, the bridge opened up onto a wide square. More buildings lined the square’s perimeter—at least the parts Benno could see before the mist thickened them into obscurity—but the architecture was different. The building’s exteriors were of the same black brick, but these had windows at street level, wide windows displaying dazzling tableaus: scenes of golden pyramids standing over dense jungles; valleys of yellow crops basked in red sunlight and silos casting long shadows; mountains capped with snow; a coral reef teeming with strange fish and alien creatures. It all twinkled in the drenched air. Storefronts? Art installations? Benno looked up, where the neon lights glowed and flashed in the mist directly overhead—likely from points on these same buildings.

Whatever they were—the neon lights and window displays—their strangeness was amplified by the sheer absence of people. The wet square yawned into the gloom in all directions, and there was no one to be seen. If it hadn’t been for the woman Benno spoke to, the other person who’d passed quickly in front of the alleyway, the two vehicles and the locomotive, Benno would be forgiven for assuming that this city was as lifeless as a cemetery.

Except, of course, for the eyeballs, nearly directly overhead.

Benno cut through the square. The train tracks ran through deep grooves in the black cobblestone. He followed them while maintaining some distance, images of cars coiled alongside tracks, flames crackling, black smoke…

“Look,” Holes said, drawing Benno’s attention from his own intrusive guilt.

Up ahead, piercing through the curtain of unyielding rain, a tall, quavering light. It swam into fruition as Benno approached, and soon he was standing before it. A tremendous fire, burning in an enormous mantle built into the face of a black brick building—the same, Benno determined, looking up, over whose spire the eyeballs floated. The mantle was easily fifty feet high, and its fire cast breaths of heat that seemed to dry Benno’s saturated clothes even as he continued to stand in the rain. The train tracks disappeared into the flames.

To the right of the mantle was a door. It was, like the doors of the buildings on the other side of the bridge, decorated with ornate ironwork—knots and braids like ivory—before panes of glass. But unlike those other doors, this had a discernible shape in the iron: a pair of eyes. Lidless, faceless eyes.

Benno looked up. The break in the cloud cover around the giant eyeballs in the sky allowed him to see the entire length of this particular building. There were windows, he discovered, starting above the top of the mantle, filled with golden light. The building tapered as it rose, coalescing in a point. Above that, the eyeballs stared straight down.

“Here goes nothing,” Benno said, going to the door.

“Where goes nothing?” Holes asked.

“It’s a figure of speech.”

“…A person made of language?”

“Huh? No. I mean… It’s just something people say.”

“Here goes nothing,” Holes tried out. “Here goes nothing…”

The door had no handle or knob. There was, however, a scuffed plate welded to it at Benno’s eye level. He put both hands against the plate and pushed. The door sighed, and opened, and a rush of dry heat breathed out and enveloped him.