The television is on, and although the screen is overgrown with byrus, a ghostly black-and-white image comes straining through. A man is dragging the corpse of a dog across a concrete floor. Dusty and strewn with dead autumn leaves, it’s like a tomb in one of the fifties horror flicks Jonesy still likes to watch on his VCR. But this isn’t a tomb; it is filled with the hollow sound of rushing water.

In the center of the floor there is a rusty circular cover with MWRA stamped on it: Massachusetts Water Resources Authority. Even through the reddish serum on the TV screen, these letters stand out. Of course they do. To Mr Gray-who died as a physical being all the way back at Hole in the Wall-they mean everything.

They mean, quite literally, the world.

The shaft-lid has been partly pushed aside, revealing a crescent shape of absolute darkness. The man dragging the dog is himself, Jonesy realizes, and the dog isn’t quite dead. It is leaving a trail of frothy pink blood behind on the concrete, and its back legs are twitching. Almost paddling.

Never mind the movie, Henry almost snarls, and Jonesy turns his attention to the figure in the bed, the gray thing with the byrus-speckled sheet pulled up to its chest, which is a plain gray expanse of poreless, hairless, nippleless flesh. Although he can’t see now because of the sheet, Jonesy knows there is no navel, either, because this thing was never born. It is a child’s rendering of an alien, trolled directly from the subconscious minds of those who first came in contact with the byrum. They never existed as actual creatures, aliens, ETs. The grays as physical beings were always created out of the human imagination, out of the dreamcatcher, and knowing this affords Jonesy a measure of relief. He wasn’t the only one who got fooled. At least there is that.

Something else pleases him: the look in those horrid black eyes.

It’s fear.

“I’m locked and loaded,” Freddy said quietly, drawing to a stop behind the Humvee they had chased all these miles.

“Outstanding,” Kurtz said. “Recon that HMW. I’ll cover you.” “Right.” Freddy looked at Perlmutter, whose belly was swelling again, then at Owen’s Hummer. The reason for the rifle-fire they’d heard earlier was clear now: the Hummer had been shot up pretty good. The only question left to be answered was who had been on the giving end and who on the receiving. Tracks led away from the Hummer, growing indistinct under the rapid snowfall, but for now clear enough to read. A single set. Boots. Probably Owen.

“Go on now, Freddy!”

Freddy got out into the snow. Kurtz slid out behind him and Freddy heard him rack the slide of his personal. Depending on the nine-millimeter. Well, maybe that was all right; he was good with it, no question of that.

Freddy felt a momentary coldness down his spine, as if Kurtz had the nine leveled there. Right there. But that was ridiculous, wasn’t it? Owen, yes, but Owen was different. Owen had crossed the line.

Freddy hurried to the Hummer, bent low, carbine held at chest level. He didn’t like having Kurtz behind him, that was undeniable. No, he didn’t like that at all.

As the two boys advance on the overgrown bed, Mr Gray begins to push the CALL button repeatedly, but nothing happens. I think the works must be choked with byrus, Jonesy thinks. Too bad, Mr Gray-too bad for you. He glances up at the TV and sees that his film self has gotten the dog to the edge of the shaft. Maybe they’re too late after all; maybe not. There’s no way to tell. The wheel is still spinning.

Hello, Mr Gray, I’ve so much wanted to meet you, Henry says. As he speaks, he removes the byrus-splotched pillow from beneath Mr Gray’s narrow, earless head. Mr Gray tries to wriggle toward the other side of the bed, but Jonesy holds him in place, grasping the alien’s child-thin arms. The skin in his hands is neither hot nor cold. It doesn’t feel like skin at all, not really. It feels like-

Like nothing, he thinks. Like a dream.

Mr Gray? Henry asks. 7his is how we say welcome to Planet Earth. And he puts the pillow over Mr Gray’s face.

Beneath Jonesy’s hands, Mr Gray be ins to struggle and thrash.

Somewhere a monitor begins to beep frantically, as if this creature actually has a heart, and that it has now stopped beating.

Jonesy looks down at the dying monster and wishes only for this to be over.

Mr Gray got the dog to the side of the shaft he had partially uncovered. Coming up through the narrow black semicircle was the steady hollow rush of running water and a waft of dank, cold air.

If it were done when “tis done, then “twere well it were done quickly-that from a box marked SHAKESPEARE. The dog’s rear legs were bicycling rapidly, and Mr Gray could hear the wet sound of tearing flesh as the byrum thrust with one end and chewed with the other, forcing itself out. Beneath the dog’s tail, the chattering had started, a sound like an angry monkey. He had to get it into the shaft before it could emerge; it did not absolutely have to be born the water, but its odds of survival would be much higher if it was.

Mr Gray tried to shove the dog’s head into the gap between the cover and the concrete and couldn’t get it through. The neck bent and the dog’s senselessly grinning snout twisted upward. Although still sleeping (or perhaps it was now unconscious) it began to utter a series of low, choked barks.

And it wouldn’t go through the gap.

“Fuck me Freddy!” Mr Gray screamed. He was barely aware of the snarling ache in Jonesy’s hip now, certainly not aware that Jonesy’s face was strained and pale, the hazel eyes wet with tears of effort and frustration. He was aware-terribly aware-that something was going on. Going on behind my back, Jonesy would have said. And who else could it be? Who else but Jonesy, his reluctant host?

“Fuck YOU!” he screamed at the damned, hateful, stubborn, just-a-little-too-big dog. “You’re going down, do you hear me? DO YOU-”

The words stopped in his throat. All at once he couldn’t yell anymore, although he dearly wanted to; how he loved to yell, and pound his fists on things (even a dying pregnant dog)! All at once he couldn’t breathe, let alone yell. What was Jonesy doing to him?

He expected no answer, but one came-a stranger’s voice, full of cold rage: This is how we say welcome to Planet Earth.

The flailing, three-fingered hands of the gray thing in the hospital bed come up and actually push the pillow aside for a moment. The black eyes starting from the otherwise featureless face are frantic with fear and rage. It gasps for breath. Considering that it doesn’t really exist at all-not even in Jonesy’s brain, at least as a physical artifact-it is fighting furiously for its life. Henry cannot sympathize, but he understands. It wants what Jonesy wants, what Duddits wants… what even Henry himself wants, for in spite of all his black thoughts, has his heart not gone on beating? Has his liver not gone on washing his blood? Has his body not gone on fighting its unseen wars against everything from the common cold to cancer to the byrus itself? The body is either stupid or infinitely wise, but in either case it is spared the terrible witchery of thought; it only knows how to stand its ground and fight until it can fight no more. If Mr Gray was ever any different, he is different no longer. He wants to live.

But I don’t think you will, Henry says in a voice that is calm, almost soothing. I don’t think so, my friend. And once more puts the pillow over Mr Gray’s face.