Giles stood in the run-down laboratory with a dazed smile on his face.

He was in the body of a janitor named Ed with an aching back, who had been taken over by a reporter named Robby, who was the ex of a lab tech named Mary, who was also Giles’s mother as a young woman.

And she had just said she’d meet him in a broom closet for a private chat.

The other lab techs were getting back to work, picking up clipboards, studying readouts and ignoring “Ed” like he wasn’t there.

As Giles obeyed Mary’s instruction to wait a few moments before following her, he looked around the lab for the first time. None of the equipment was state of the art. Round glass radar readouts, pencils and papers scribbling notes, keyboards with fat keys that made a loud clunk when you pressed them, green letters on the screen. Did that mean anything?

Enough time had passed. He ambled out, scratching himself as he imagined someone like Ed might.

He turned left. Worn linoleum tiles, walls smudged by too many hands over the years – and good lord, were those mimeographed sheets? That purple print, smeared and stained – who used mimeographs anymore? As he turned right into another hall, he looked at the windows on the doors – they had embedded diamond wiring.

It felt like a school. Or like bleak institutions he’d seen in pictures of Soviet-era Czechoslovakia. Had he gone that far back in time? But the sky outside had been Chaos. And the car he’d seen in the lot: that red Camry had been modern.

As he approached the broom closet door, he felt his face flush. His first sexual encounter had been in a broom closet at the end of his dorm hall. And when they finished, they’d found the door only opened from the outside. It had been an hour before a classmate had heard their quiet call and let them out, smirking knowingly.

Beet red now, he looked up and down the hall, then turned the bulbous knob and pulled the heavily resisting door. Her shadowy outline waited at the edge of the light for him to close the door.

He let the door swing nearly to but at the last minute panicked about being locked in again and stuck the toe of his shoe in the path of the closing door.

But she reached out, grabbed his suspenders (for the first time he realized that he was wearing suspenders) and pulled him in. The door hissed and clicked softly shut and he was in darkness like the frightening limbo beyond the wall at the end of an unfinished story.

That was how Killington had tried to take his life by “injecting him with sleepy dark.” The injection had been only a sedative so he couldn’t resist when ordered to tell a story which was not yet finished. He’d told the story about Cloud Rock and about young Doree who would grow up to be the demon Tiffany. When he reached the place where he’d stopped the story while telling it onstage, the blank wall had approached and he had fallen the empty place.

There he’d held a fruit which Tiffany had given him to pull him into Cloud Rock as Robby so that he could eventually reach this place. Where was Tiffany now? What was her plan? And for the first time, he wandered where he was. They’d injected him and made him tell a story which had flung his soul into the void. What had they done with his body?

The Giles who now stood on stage telling the audience this story knew. But here in the heart of the story, he could only fret. He was in darkness again but hands took his hands and they were surely the hands of his own mother, Mary Hammond.

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“Robby,” her voice whispered, and Giles reminded himself that in this story, she was Robby’s ex. “That truly is you, isn’t it? For God’s sake, tell me everything you know.”

The story solidified again. He was Robby Baker, standing in another man’s body, holding his ex-wife’s hands, wishing he could put his arms around her. But instead he spoke, telling her about his visit to old Mrs. Benz and the sureness that something evil was about to happen up on Red Rock, and how she threw him up through a ripping sky onto a piece of Red Rock which floated in Chaos. About how he’d materialized in the body of Ed the janitor, on whatever scouting expedition he was on, befriended the people reliving the same day over and over in their isolated universe. And finally how he’d befriended Doree, who fell out of Cloud Rock and would grow into a dark-haired sophisticate named Tiffany.

Her hands tightened on his at that and he heard her gasp. Robby had no idea why but Giles understood. Tiffany had been his mother’s lover at some point in time, he’d figured that out already. And Doree must have traveled back in time when she fell out into that place of upside-down trees and stars. That was necessary if the grown Tiffany knew his mother long ago.

Did he hear a voice from an infinite distance, telling the story? She probably saw me wriggle feet first out of the little hole in the bottom of the rock, so that’s why she thought I was one of the little people… This dark closet was somehow linked to the passages and somewhere Tiffany told the story to a listener. The pieces filled themselves in and he saw Doree emerge into the stone circle in his mother’s Kenmare, back when she was a teen, saw them spark, saw Doree disappear into the dark passages from which she would somehow emerge years later as Tiffany.

But he had to let go of that part of the story. Because Robby finished his narrative with the question, “So what’s happening here? I only went to see that old woman because of your tip a few days ago. What did you know?”

He felt her body cast around in confusion. “I haven’t seen you for months.”

“You invited me to lunch! I was hoping… well, anyway, you gave these broad hints about some nefarious government plot and hinted strongly I should check out rumors of something bad that had happened at Red Rock near Sedona. You don’t remember that?”

“I do not. But I’ve a very good guess. I have been gathering information for weeks now, quietly, as unobtrusively as I can. I’d had the thought that when I had something definite, I would contact you and put you on the scent it. This must be something I’ve not yet done. You’ve come back into your past, just as…” She stopped, but Giles knew she had been about to say just as my love did.

Robby shook his head. “I’m here to tell you to go meet me and send me looking for something that I’ll then come back in time and tell you? So you’ll tell me?”

Giles had an image of people circling in the dark around and around a monolith which had projections and gleaming onyx protrusions. Around and around they’d go, without ever getting inside. If Robby just left now, then Mary would find the Robby-of-a-week-ago, tell him to investigate a story and the sky would get ripped open again. There was no question, the moment when the old woman and Robby stood on Red Rock together was the moment the sky was ripped open. He’d seen this from above when he lived the same moment on Cloud Rock: a crazy man like Killington had cut reality with something like a knife. A gilt edge?

At the moment it was still in the future. He had to find a way to stop it. Amused, he thought like the Avengers going back in time to find the infinity gems and fix the present.

Robby had never heard of Avengers: Endgame. Giles, remembering a running gag in that movie, tried, like Hot Tub Time Machine?

No resonance. Like Back to the Future? No resonance.

That film was from 1985 but Robby had never heard of it. Put that together with the dittoes on the wall and the antiquated equipment and the fact that his mother was a woman in her twenties and the decade must be the 1970s.

But then how was there a modern car outside, and a Chaos-filled sky?

And just as he thought things couldn’t get any more complex, he heard a definite voice from infinitely far off in the dark.

“Unsightly beast,” it said in a dulcet, Oxford accent.

And a croaking voice answered, “Phwawt the feck…”