You always need more light, when you're lost in here.

 

But once he saw the way I lived, he decided to take this opportunity to get in touch with me to see if things were back to normal for him.

"No, the way he was living wasn't anything that we'd ever experienced, let alone on the scale of a human war, and we had no real idea of what we might be dealing with, but he told us he hoped we'd be hearing from him again soon or that it might be possible to bring him home, because a lot of people I'd known for years had gone out of their way to please him. "

I didn't really want to believe the story. I mean, why would a ghost come crawling inside a person without the slightest hint of a desire to be alone? Then we all walked out the front door. The girl was carrying the baby.

They were running. She seemed to have run from the last person she saw and to have gone down the street. One of the boys looked back. The girl saw that they were following, probably for the sole purpose of making themselves invisible for as long as they could.

I'd thought that this was what people always said about this, but at the time, I didn't ask a question about it.

We started running up a narrow alley. There were a few things about this that didn't add up. I walked towards the end that seemed so obviously like the same place as before, the dark streets, the little windows. So far all the lights were off. But the girl must have gone a bit faster, because she didn't stop until she reached something light on the other end. There was a doorway here, I guess; the glass was barely open. It just seemed to let in no light whatsoever.

That might mean we were walking into a maze, that somebody must have come through the glass and gone back there now that the lights were all on again. Or perhaps I should call it a 'ziggurat', because it was really just an open courtyard, and a large, open, circular building; the whole time the girl was making her way across it.

I looked at the girl's feet: they were covered in blood, and that was probably how she got in and out of the room, even though I just assumed it was somehow important. The other boy probably had some sort of knife, and I wonder if he felt the need to stab her. I could swear that he never saw a person hurt.

What