Elias sat on the edge of his bed and waited for his own name to mean something again. It had been weeks since it last did. The word came at him like a knock on a door he no longer answered. He worked twelve-hour shifts and came home to a quiet apartment, and somewhere in those hours he had started wishing, in a small way he barely admitted, that he could simply stop. He did not want to die. He wanted to be unmade. He was trying not to want that. He was not sure he was winning. The digital clock on his nightstand clicked from 3:16 to 3:17. Outside, the streetlight stuttered three times and held. Elias watched the floorboards near his Pikachu slippers begin to bow inward, drawn toward a single point as if the wood were water. The point darkened. Cracks ran out from it in a clean ring. A hole opened where the floor had been, lipped with broken planks, deep in a way that had nothing to do with the apartment below. A hand came over the rim. Then another. The shape that climbed out was his shape, his height, his slouch, but black all the way through, edges fraying into the dark of the room. The Pikachu slippers were on its feet now, too. Elias reached for the lamp. The bulb popped. Glass rained on the bedding. "You kept calling," the shadow said. Its voice was flat and close, like a thought he had not spoken. "Every time you turned off the lights. Every time you wished the world would go quiet." Elias opened his mouth to argue. Nothing came. He had wished it. He had wished it last night, and the night before, in the small bright square of his bathroom mirror, looking at a face that felt borrowed. "Let go," the shadow said. "You are tired. I will carry the rest." Elias meant to say no. Instead, his shoulders dropped. The shadow took his hand. The grip was cool and exactly the size of his own. Elias felt the want rise in him before he could stop it, that small awful relief of being lifted out of his life. The room tilted. The hole in the floor rose to meet his face. He fell without falling. He landed on his feet in a place with no light. No walls, no ceiling, no ground he could see. Behind him, a single arch stood upright in the dark, framed in crackling blue static, the only thing he could make out in any direction. It hummed like a bad television. Through it, he could just see his bed, the green blanket, the empty slippers. The shadow was not beside him anymore. Elias understood, with a clarity he had not felt in months, that he had agreed to this, and that he wanted to take it back.

Elias turned back toward the arch. It still hummed behind him, a square of blue static framing his bedroom, his green blanket, the empty slippers on the rug. He lunged for it. His fingers stretched, and the dark pulled sideways instead of down. Gravity here did not want his weight. It wanted him. He felt something thin in his chest stretch toward the doorway and snap loose, and then he was falling away from the only light he could see. Through the shrinking square, he watched his own body on the floorboards. Eyes open. Mouth slack. A black shape climbed in through his ribs and settled there. The body twitched once, then sat up. It smiled with his mouth. It stood and walked out of the frame, and the frame kept shrinking. Elias screamed. No sound came. His throat worked and gave him nothing. He fell through a dark with no floor and no top. Far off, taller than anything had a right to be, a black tower stood in the nothing. Its outline was sharper than the dark around it. He could feel it noticing him. He could feel it had noticed many before him and would notice many after. The attention did not feel cruel. It felt patient, the way a stone is patient with rain. Something inky uncurled below his feet. A path, smoke-edged, drawn in wet black across the dark. He hit it shoulder first. It held. He lay there breathing air that tasted like nothing and felt his hands shake against the surface. A hand touched his shoulder. Small. Steady. He had not heard anyone approach. "Shhh, child," a woman said. "It gets easier." She crouched beside him with a lantern in her free hand. Her face was only an outline, like a shape cut from paper. The lantern's flame was warm and yellow and wrong for this place. Through the lantern's small light he could still see the arch, far above now, the size of a coin. Inside it, the thing wearing his body sat at his mother's kitchen counter. It lifted a cinnamon bun to his mouth and bit. He watched his mother's hand brush its hair back. She smiled at it. She did not look for him. "I have to go back," Elias said. His voice came back here. That was something. "No," the woman said. She did not soften it. "Not that way. The door closes from your side now." She stood and held the lantern higher. "Get up. The smoke things come for ones who lie still." Elias pushed himself up onto the black path. His knees held. The arch above him shrank to a pinprick and went out. He had footing. He had a stranger with a light. He had lost the way he came in. He took his first step along the path, away from where his life had been, toward the watching tower.