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hunched over him. “Mom?” he screamed ... no, not Mom ... this one was different. The other figure was larger like his father, but that one too felt different. He looked down and he saw a third person lying on the floor. Someone dressed in black, with big black boots covered in white dust.
    Sudden blackness descended and then intense movement. He was moving at the speed of light. Trees and houses flickered by. Below him appeared two men standing in a dark living room. The shorter one buttoned up in a yellow cardigan and bent over to slide his feet into a pair of slippers. But the other didn’t feel like a man at all. It felt more like a shadow pretending to be a man: something terrible hidden inside a shroud of blackness. The shadow turned and seemed to look up at him. A lump of charcoal without a single distinguishing feature ... except its eyes. They were milky white and cold, like two distant stars in the vastness of space. A glimmer of light was refracted from the shadow’s inside pocket. There was something there. Something metallic and shiny. The handle of a knife? Lysander wondered, a sharp chill shooting through his veins.
    The shorter man in the yellow cardigan motioned and walked into the kitchen. The shadow followed, leaving part of a shoe print behind, as if it had stepped in mud outside and was tracking it through the house. Panic gripped Lysander. Couldn’t this guy see he had let a monster into his house? It wasn’t trying to sell him a subscription to Sports Illustrated or get him to change his long-distance carrier. This thing, whatever it was, meant to kill him and Lysander was powerless to do anything about it.
    The kitchen door swung open and the two men walked into the living room laughing, the thin man with the cardigan first. They stopped by the fireplace. Then the dark man cupped the other’s face. The man in the cardigan squirmed uneasily and then settled, his eyes blinking with mute expectation. They’re about to kiss, Lysander thought, puzzled. Then suddenly, the smaller man’s eyes grew wide with terror and he reached for the shadow, only to have the shadow slip away and crumple to the ground. Now only the man in the cardigan was standing, but there was something different about him. Even from far away Lysander could see the difference, but didn’t quite believe it. His eyes had become milky white. Somehow, the shadow had snuck into him like a fox in a henhouse. Cardigan leaned over the shadow-man, fell into his coat and removed a long blade. Lysander watched with morbid fascination, utterly perplexed by the display. The thin man rolled up his sleeves and brought the blade to his wrists. He began sawing viciously. A stream of blood gushed out and the man screamed, but the sound was not one of pain, but one of orgasm. He moved to his other wrist. The top button of his shirt was undone. He reached up with both bloody hands and ripped six buttons off so that his shirt flapped open. With the edge of the knife, he carved something into his chest, something Lysander couldn’t quite make out.
    The floor at his feet was now slick with blood. He shuffled over to the table, careful not to slip on any of it and reached for a strange-looking bust. Lifting it in the air, he paused for a moment, admiring it, and then brought it arcing down onto his own face, crushing the bridge of his nose, releasing a fan of blood and bone. The bust rose and fell, again and again, until there was nothing recognizable of the man left. A stranger was destroying himself before Lysander’s very eyes. He was utterly disgusted by the spectacle before him. But Lysander couldn’t turn away.
    There was a crater now where the man’s forehead once was. Shrieking, the man staggered and then collapsed to his knees. It was finally over, Lysander hoped, but he was wrong. The thin man’s fingers crawled up his face to where he could look at them and plunged them into the soft tissue between his eyeball and what remained of his