A dank hallway halves the instincts of the wanderer. The guiser, Holloway, stands by his final mutters, a wanderer in sable. His only sensation of safety faltered when the others fell away. He stood and scented the blood, the sanguine, of his first and final glory- the spelunkicide of his compatriots- and he held his own, he stood and shot the Doe. Holloway was alone, he is alone, and he stands by a towering epithet- his Pyrrhic salvation, but bullets remain- his Arriflex retains something for companionship- and the Growl resonates throughout the House. He remains with the nature of the absent Zephyr; he howls with embittered buffo, his sonder aware only that they are gone, they are beyond his range, the deer, the damned Navidson and his flaxen wife, his nostrum with his photography, his little ones safely tucked away in their morbid miniature rooms, those crayon voids, those childish abominations gamboling about the center… His rations have vanished. He shivers, his fingers benumbed by a taunting stagnation- these halls, and nothing more, these stagnostric folderols without outside- the layers lonely, creeping, lorn with the claustrophobia- no Great Hall, no distant Growl, but the walls predating inward, concentric, ever inward, his own weakening cries smothered by whatever, just beyond-

Holloway cachillows and fires, the shot ricocheting near, grazing a breath- but the torchlight reveals only another passage, not leaping forward, not falling upon him- he imagines a pale pelican or ibid, bursting forth, any sign of organic awareness, any sentience against the steep eidolons of charcoal stone- his fingers trail a hew of incarnadine whence he fumbles, desperation to impress any sapience, no neon arrows remaining- he hales a rank mildew onto his numbed joints- the temperature dropping? He stumbles onward into a conniption of fearsome uxoriousness, if only the Doe, Elizabeth, had remained for only a micromillimeter more, if she had stayed-

Nihil is so poisonous because it deprives the crusader of any response, of any object to aggression. The rifle cannot bind it, the shot cannot expand within it, and the uxorious man cannot there find his Doe. He recalls lectures given at Wis, he recalls the meals given in his vainglorious honor- milk, sweets littering collegiate tables, his place of honored oration at a blank banquet cloth, linen- and this texture yet excoriates his fingers.

Tenebrophilic fingers of nothingness, of putrescent lethe, brush the torchlight. His flashlight is degrading into mutters of rusted battery, and the camera only- his respiration is interrupted by a sensation of vertiginous tumble, a somersault of solace- into death, into the quietus of lethefold finally revealed- necrophagic eagerness awaiting and awakening in the audient, silent void-

But he does not know if he slept, if his interludes of brevity in sensory deprivation have altered his perceptions of temporality. His lips are rawed by gnawing, his mouth is parched and ferrous- God?

A wanderer in darkness.