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irresistible need to scream until his lungs burst, because now he knows something else. Cavemen did not need prior knowledge or textbooks or common sense to know when they were being hunted. They felt it on an instinctual, primal level. And that, he concludes, even as his composure threatens to collapse like a shoddily built wall, is what he felt as soon as they stepped foot into the clearing.
    “Hello?” he hears his wife ask, and knows it is not directed at him. The sound of that word paints a picture of what he’s going to see when he turns around and his body goes rigid. Because even though what he has just found is not sufficient evidence to identify the tent as the source of the danger he feels crawling all over him now like an army of fire ants, instinct tells him it is, and it is on this instinct he realizes he should have relied.
    “Emma,” he says. “Don’t.”
    “I found the opening,” she replies.
    His paralysis breaks and he turns, his flashlight sweeping an arc of luminescence through the rain. “Emma, no!”
    She is down on her haunches, pulling back a large leathery flap at the far end of the tent, the end that was hidden from them when they entered the clearing. The look on her face as she does so does nothing to assuage his dread. It is a look of repulsion, one he has come to know very well for all the wrong reasons during the course of his marriage to this woman, and when she releases the flap, it remains connected to her fingers by long thick translucent strands of mucous. And although he feels himself running to her, reaching out to grab her and yank her away from there, he can’t move. In what is perhaps a sign of impending insanity, the voice inside his head becomes that of the marriage counselor, that enviably handsome Doctor White, with the perfect teeth and expensive clothes, who probably never had problems with a woman, or a man, for that matter, in his whole damn life, saying words he never would have said out loud:
    You’ve wanted to run for years, haven’t you Mike. You’ve just never had the courage.
    No, that isn’t—
    And now you can. Because this situation doesn’t require courage. Just the opposite. All you need to do here is give in to your instinctual need for self-preservation, and run. Problem solved.
    No. I won’t. I ca n’t.
    Sure you can. Because as much an outsider as you may have always felt, you’re out of your element for real right here. This isn’t your world. People are forbidden from coming here for a very good reason. And right now, you’re looking at it. This, Mikey, is most definitely Not Your Department.
    Mike drops the flashlight and , screaming his wife’s name, runs toward the tent, his heels and shins raging with pain, the panic in his throat threatening to strangle him. And as he closes the distance, he sees Emma, the woman he knows he loves despite her doubts, the counselor’s doubts, and even his own, look up at him in confusion, her hands still held out before her in disgust, the glistening mess dripping from between her fingers. In an instant, at the sight of him, his primal terror is transferred to her eyes. Swallowing, unwilling to wait to find out why her husband is hobbling toward her in insane panic, she starts to stand.
    “Mike, what —?”
    The back end of the tent deflates as if crushed under the foot of an invisible giant. At the same time, the ridged spine, so like a thorny branch, arches itself and the flaps at the front snap open like batwings, partially obscuring what happens next.
    Emma screams; Mike stumbles over a knotted mess of branches and goes down, badly scraping his hands and knees, and the tent begins to shudder.
    Up on his tortured feet again and he’s alongside the thing, almost within grabbing distance of his wife, close enough now to see that the soft light inside the tent-that-is-not-a-tent is glowing like a sun, close enough to see the network of thin, dark blue veins threading like worms through its