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he hauled the last box from the truck. "You building a rocket ship or something?"
    "Oh no." Spearz said as he closed his eyes. "It's more than that." He smiled broadly, imagining the future.
    "Something that will change the world."

    Tom Manning came awake with a gasp, his cheek resting on the rough weave of the small area rug around his desk. Immediately his thoughts went to those fears that men, as they grow older, often have.
    Am I all right? Did I have a stroke? He was afraid to move, fearing that he'd be unable to, but gradually he came to realize that he was, indeed, fine.
    But am I really?
    He struggled to all fours, looking around his office, wondering how he'd come to be on the floor. He saw the time and felt a twinge of panic. He was late for work.
    Using the corner of the desk, he climbed carefully to his feet. His body was shaking. Again he looked about the room, and everything appeared to be in order. Then he saw the notebook.
    The Director of Field Operations for the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, still wearing his bathrobe and pajamas, sat down heavily in his leather desk chair, staring at an open notebook on the desk before him, and felt long-established defenses beginning to crumble.
    He read the words on the open page, and suddenly felt dirty. Defiled. His heart fluttered uneasily as he gazed at his hands--hands stained black. He picked up a Magic Marker that lay beside the notebook. The tip of the thick pen had been pressed nearly flat. He dropped it into the trash barrel beside his chair.
    Something had happened to him, something worse than a heart attack or a stroke.
    He'd always suspected that the world was a much stranger place than it seemed, even before he went to work for the BPRD, while he was still with the FBI. He remembered his first encounter with the Bureau, and its best field agent, Hellboy. It was a serial killer case out of Columbus, Ohio, and the primary suspect had proved to be something far less than human.
    That was when everything had changed for him. Manning remembered how it had felt, the fearful realization, and found himself again reading the words scrawled in the notebook.
    Working with Hellboy had confirmed his worst suspicions, testing the bonds of reality, driving home the fact that there really were things that went bump in the night, monsters under the bed, things that would eat you alive if given the chance. And with that knowledge confirmed, he had no choice but to adjust how he dealt with the world. It was either that or go completely insane.
    Tom had established a kind of bizarre-free zone around his personal life. It was his way of not letting the job consume him. He would handle the strange and horrible things he saw with the FBI, and then with the BPRD, with full efficiency and professionalism. But when it came time to call it a day, he would raise the barrier and the weirdness of the world would be locked out until it was time to go back again.
    This worked quite well for him--or at least it had.
    Manning pulled his eyes from the notebook and looked around his office disdainfully, as if it had somehow betrayed him. He was supposed to be safe here. It was meant to be a place where he could trick himself into thinking that the paranormal was nothing more than rich fodder for popular entertainment. Here was where he could be blissfully ignorant. But not anymore.
    It had broken through his defenses.
    He allowed his gaze to fall back to the open book, where a message had been left in a handwriting not his own.
    Manning had gone to bed shortly after Leno's monologue, checking the alarm clock settings, as he did every night before shutting off the light and falling asleep almost immediately. He'd never had any difficulty sleeping, thanks to his free zone. But now he had to wonder if sleep would ever come so easily again.
    He had no recollection of leaving his bed, and certainly none of coming downstairs to the office, removing the notebook from the desk drawer and