As quickly as if he'd blinked his eyes open to a sunny morning—as quickly as waking up from a strange, heart-sickening dream—Jack found himself standing in the center of a familiar darkness. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust; this place was so dark. Hadn't he just had the sensation of falling as he'd haplessly let himself tumble into the sinkhole? Yet now, here he stood, on ground that seemed solid and yet absent at the same time, in a place he was beginning to realize closely resembled his brother's bedroom.

The last time Jack had opened Kyle's bedroom door, he'd been horrified by what he'd seen: everything eaten by a sort of parasitic nothingness, creating a space deeper and less tangible than emptiness. He'd been so disturbed that he'd broken down. Now, here he stood in the center of what had used to be Kyle's room, and although almost everything had melted into nothing, Jack saw his brother's empty wheelchair sitting next to the half-eaten bed, where Kyle appeared to by lying down, wrapped in blankets.

A silence more dead than anything Jack had ever experienced permeated the nothing. It was deafening and silent as ten million graves at the same time. It was unlike anything he'd ever heard (or not heard).

Kyle had become part of the nothing, Jack knew. His brother had let the sickness of despondency and all its blackness consume him, and he was now a part of it. That must have been why, when he'd crept into the sinkhole, Jack had arrived here instantly. The darkness of that place and the darkness in Kyle were one and the same, now. Kyle was the emptiness opened up in their backyard. It was this connection Jack had seen in his brother's eyes earlier that afternoon. The same vacuous presence, the same lack of light, of life, of luster. Jack felt that if his brother had stood and looked in a mirror, nothing but a black hole would be reflected back at him. And a fear gripped his heart.

"Kyle!" Jack attempted to say, but directly as his words left his mouth, they evaporated into the atmosphere. Startled, he tried again: "Kyle, can you hear me?" But his words seemed to hardly escape his tongue—seemed almost to stay stuck against the backs of his teeth, ready to crawl back down his throat. It was as if he had a mouth full of peanut butter.

Perhaps if he could move . . . he stepped forward. Or, at least, he tried to step forward. His feet were cemented to the ground, even though they felt light as air and hardly any floor existed for him to be stuck to.

He couldn't go anywhere. He couldn't say anything. All that he could do was stare into the haze around him. There was no movement, here. No blobs of black or globs of light. There were no whispers, no rolling sinkhole emissions, no nothing. This place was the absence of all. It wasn't merely a place of negative balances or off-balances but a place of absolutely no balance whatsoever. The continuum of equilibrium with which Jack had been comprehending everything around him since discussing it with Miss Collins didn't play a role at all here, in this room. He'd assumed that, when he finally did discover how to help Kyle, the imbalance that had been created with his brother's bitterness would have to be evened out, smoothed over. But he'd been wrong. This place contained nothing to smooth over at all; it was made up of absolute emptiness, and how could emptiness be evened out when there was nothing to pull one way or another?

Quite at a loss, Jack felt his heart begin to lose its previous courage. He'd been so sure, so determined when he'd followed his shadow into the darkness, but now, unable to move or speak in this dense gray cloud, he had no idea what to do. Absolutely no idea. Was he to remain here, stuck forever in the morass of his brother's anger and gloom? He could feel a coldness grip his insides, his mind after only mere moments in this place. Ice fingers were groping inside him, reaching in through his toes and fingertips and inward toward his heart. If he stayed here much longer, he knew instinctively this place would overcome him, too. He would stay here eternally to be eaten alive, as his brother had been.

As this realization came to the forefront of his thoughts—solidified as a real fear—his dead ear began to pick up on a nearly inaudible sound . . . something not quite a voice but also not a noise caused by an object or animal. It was more a hint of intuition, a whisper of feeling. And he knew to listen to it meant understanding.

Closing his eyes to the despair around him, curling his fingers into his palms, Jack focused only on hearing beyond the loud silence of his brother's room. He listened only to the sound originating from deep within him, reaching up to brush the insides of his deaf ear. He turned all thoughts and concern inward, beyond his mind, past his heart, to a place deep, deeper still, from where he had the intuitive impression this perception had arisen. All outside layers he stripped bare, all physical world, all personal attachment melted away, and his eyes looked into the bottomless internal world, that subterranean refuge of his being. There, he made out a hidden chamber with a barred door, behind which a struggling thing was held captive. Jack could see that struggling thing, beyond its prison, beyond its locked doors. With eyes turned inward, having left Kyle's room and presence somewhere behind, Jack was escaping the false concrete world and becoming immersed in the abstract, the surreal. And what he saw was his true self, his lost faith and his fuming frustrations, the newly-formed clouds of twisted anger and the gray sheets of rainy anguish he'd felt over his family's break-up. The lightning-flash shadows of his circling, never-ending questions and the choking figures of his tears. In the midst of all this, he saw, too, a thin beam of crystaline light illuminating this most opaque darkness, a thread of white forming an incision through the surrounding storm. That narrow chasm of light was his nature, his absolute core; the struggling thing within him was yearning for it. Striving, reaching out.

He must have been in this place, when he'd disappeared for those days and lost his hearing, when he'd crawled inside the shadow, but he hadn't been aware of it. He must have seen such things deep within himself, and it had awakened him to that new view and calmness about the bizarre distillation of the world and what parts of it he didn't share with other people. He must have been in this place, and yet, he hadn't remembered it after he came back, his hearing gone and his ear bleeding. This must be where he'd been.

The struggling thing moved like a ball of worms, writhing and in constant motion, but it didn't scare Jack. This was his shadow. The one that had projected itself out of him to resemble that black cat. It was his true self. The very nature of who he was. And it was locked up here, inside, in a core of storms and frustrations. It had called to him, it had crept out of him and reached out, asked for Jack to follow it and face this inner night—a night in the sense that it was difficult to understand, not in that it was made up of dark and evil. It had reached out to him, but had mistakenly tempted his identical twin brother as well. And Jack was supposed to have fallen. Jack was supposed to have faced that challenge, not Kyle. Kyle was not inwardly constructed for such a test. Never supposed to have fallen.

And everything had shifted off balance.

In this place, anything was possible—Jack could displace time and memory and alter reality. It was his task to put everything back where they were supposed to be. With this knowledge engulfing him, the shaft of inner light widened, blossomed, swallowed the struggling shadow, and ruptured it.