Chapter One

His mind told him, insisted, that he was running, putting one tattered, bleeding foot in front of the other-even though the ground did not move under his feet, turned when he did not, or inclined steeply upward though he saw no slope before him. He closed his eyes, but he could still see. He screamed, but he heard nothing. The pathway became a precipice and he tumbled headlong, falling through space. He was under water. He tried to swim; suddenly his groping arms were pulling him forward through hot, dry sand. The sky above was red like a sunset, the earth below an eye-buzzing purple-then green, then gray, then red as the sky turned green.

Where he was, or why, or when, or who, or how, he could not know, could never know.

There were no days, no hours, no moments, no way of knowing, no chance for knowing how long he'd been here.

Been where?

No place, at no particular time.

He was once a fifteen-year-old boy, cocky and wayward. He once had a brother, a sister, a father and mother. He had a name, a house, a school, and a life-and he thought he knew something. Maybe he thought he knew it all.

But that boy, and that time, and that life had become ... nothing. Non-things.

There was no fifteen-year-old boy here. No knowledge, no thought, no reason. There was nothing here but terror, endlessly repeating cycles of it, layer upon layer of it-with more, more, more to come, in swirling, kaleidoscoping sounds, images, and sensations, pulsing, pounding, surging, throbbing like a swollen th