After a horrifying experience in the park, Mike Roberts takes refuge in the dark of a movie theater:

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My mother used to say that if I lost a foot halfway to the store, I'd hop the rest of the way there, buy my groceries, and hop back home before giving my missing foot a second thought. She said I had a 'steadfast mind,' and that nobody with a compass had ever stayed a truer course than me. I don't know if that's true, but after the incident with Charlie and Friend, I found a drinking fountain to wash down my antibiotics. My stomach felt like a bowl of fruit that had gone bad and become a feast for flies, but I took my medicine anyway. Because that was the next step. That was what came after the bagel. What came following that, though, I had no idea. Cassie had suggested I take a 'me' day and see a movie, and right then a dark place where I could turn myself off for a while sounded like a good idea. I walked to the AMC on the Common, bought a ticket for the loudest offering, and for the next two hours I listened to explosions and gunshots and didn't think a single thing. When the credits began to roll, I stayed in my seat.

I was losing my mind.

There it was.

Over the course of three and a half years, I had watched my mother's herselfness drip out of her like water through a sieve, so I was familiar with the process. The fact that it was now happening to me was worrisome. I tried but could not attach any other emotion to it than that. I was still attempting to fit my mouth around the idea, I think; things like this can't be swallowed all at once. They have to be nibbled down and digested bit by bit. What I knew was this: losing my mind would make work harder and eventually impossible. Then I would not be able to pay Cassie. Then I would not be able to support my mother. Finally, I would not be able to take care of myself. The timeline could be short, long, or anywhere in between. There was also the possibility of drugs to slow down the progress, not that drugs had helped my mother much, but insanity came in many different flavors and perhaps there would be something out there to treat my own special brand. There was even the possibility if I allowed myself the hope, and oh how I wanted to, that my episode in the Common had been a one-off, a false alarm brought on by stress and an overworked, under-rested brain. Hell, I'd done LSD in college, and people always talked about acid flashbacks. As long as nothing else happened, I didn't have to worry. I didn't have to worry.

The theater was empty and had been for a while, but the lights hadn't come back on yet. That was strange, considering these places usually brightened after the film ended. Far stranger was that I could no longer see the movie screen. At all. I looked up from my seat in the back row. Light shined ghostly white through the small window above my head. The projector was still running, which meant that the credits should have been rolling as well. I looked back down. My heart began to pound. The bottom few rows were gone. Where the backs of the chairs had been, there was nothing, not even an outline. The aisles ended at the same point, and so did the walls and ceiling. The last visible steps glowed a faint orange, their edges delineated by lightstrips. Those edges might have belonged to a cliff. It was as if the whole front of the theater had fallen into a pit, and now, past the new front of the theater, something was coming into focus. Something as large as the figures that had not so long ago occupied the screen. The projector's beam traced an immense shape with outstretched arms. Arms like those on a crucifix, spanning the gloom.

My heart had crawled up into my mouth and was hammering on the wall of my clenched teeth. My hands gripped the armrest. I swallowed, and my spit was thick, gruelly. I felt as if I were tasting my brain run down the back of my throat in a soup.

One of the crucifix's wide arms creaked, bending under some unseen weight. Around its body—its trunk?—there was movement. Slow, sinuous, unwinding movement. The projector shut off, and from the dark came a sound like plaque being scraped off of an enormous tooth . . . or leathery scales rubbing against smooth bark.

I got up and made for the door in the back of the theater. My shoes stuck against the sticky floor, and hearing that familiar sound alongside the sound coming from below undid my sense of place in the world. It unmoored me.

I stumbled out into the hall and narrowly avoided the garbage can that a clerk was pushing toward the theater.

“Whoa,” he said. He caught the door, groaned in annoyance, and mumbled into his walkie-talkie. “Will somebody hit the lights in seven? They're bitching up again.” As I walked the other way, I heard him go inside the theater. I did not hear anything else from him—no shout, no scream—and I didn't know whether to be relieved by that or terrified.

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Thank you for reading! The release is still a ways out, but I'm looking to pass along some advance digital copies for review, so if you're interested, please let me know!