The snow landed on the windshield in a mystifying pattern. It mapped out a chart of transient stars. Each isolated puff of white plotted a position, before slowly melting crystal by crystal and trickling down the glass.

At the end of the street, framed by two buildings, Market Square stood in the soft night. Hundreds of fairy lights glittered through the lazy flurries. Christmas shoppers returned to their cars with bags overloaded with presents; office workers crossed the park heading to a restaurant and dinner; young lovers walked arm in arm, their bodies held close together; parents clutched tiny hands in mittens; and the wide eyes of their children eagerly tried to capture all the magic around them. Everyone in the Square walked unhurried, basking in the beauty of this perfect winter evening.

The storefront on the left-hand corner was outlined in old-fashion red and green Christmas lights. They reflected off a mercury glass bowl on display atop an antique sideboard. The plate glass windows opposite were lit with a warm amber hue reminiscent of fire light. A couple sat down at one of the small tables looking out on 7th Avenue. They shrugged out of their winter coats, before easing into their chairs. The woman's smile flashed so wide, it was evident from twenty feet away.

Denton sat in the car with the engine running. He wanted to throw up. Anxiety was playing skip rope with his guts, but that wasn't the reason he wanted to vomit. He just wanted to purge all the bad thoughts in his head. Logically, he knew that emptying his stomach wouldn't change anything, but the faint hope that it could lingered on the edge of his mind.

When he was young, around nine or ten, Denton spent a weekend sick on the couch watching TV with his father. It was a rare thing for his father to sit still and spend time in front of the TV, but the man had a weakness for old movies. That weekend the local PBS station ran a Hitchcock marathon as part of a fundraising drive. It was in the thick of a cold February, and under an old wool blanket, Denton flitted in and out of fever and sleep as the movies rolled past. Days later, when the flu had broken, the two movies that stuck in his mind were Psycho and Spellbound. And along with them was a morbid fascination with insanity.

To his young mind, the question of madness seemed so beguiling: how could a person see a reality that was so different from everybody else? How could Norman Bates be two people? How could John Brown not know who he really was? There was something both mystical and horrible about it. Like black magic, it could accomplish amazing feats, but was also capable of robbing the victim of his own self.

It haunted him for several weeks, until something else came along that piqued his interest, and it faded from thought as things do when one is young. The wonder and dread of insanity drifted to that same dark corner of his brain that housed a fear of ghosts and creatures under the bed.

Years later, when it came time to pick his major, he chose Psychology. Not because of that long ago curiosity of the slippery darkness of madness, but simply because of a dynamic professor who taught an introductory course his freshman year, and a lack of interest in chemistry and biology.

When he informed his father of his decision, he reminded Denton of the childhood obsession. By that point Denton couldn't recall it at all and had to take his father's word for it. And as the young man rebuilt the memory from his parent's brief story, the fear and the foreboding disappeared. It was no longer a juvenile fixation, but instead a serious scientific interest that had consumed him as a boy. He took it as a sign he was on the correct career path.

"I have always been interested in insanity," he'd tell people on the rare occasions they asked why he was majoring in Psychology. And if they pushed him further, he'd cite that weekend on the couch as the start of his lifelong passion. Over time, his mind drew upon scraps of other memories and cobbled together a hazy recollection of those two days, which he took for reality.

But even so, it was a lie. Insanity didn't interest him in the least. Analytics and diagnostic theory were at the forefront of his mind. He had no interest in dealing with troubled people. And the thought of extreme versions of psychosis seemed more a fantasy than reality. On his few onsite visits to psychiatric clinics, he never encountered any patients with multiple personalities or complete amnesia. There wasn't anyone who thought they were Henry the Eighth or who believed they were in a different world. The patients he observed merely suffered from crippling neurosis and chemical imbalances.

But staring at the restaurant, as the snow drifted down, those old childhood questions and fears came back to him. How could anyone perceive reality so differently? What would it feel like? If you were lost in a delusion, how would you know? How could you know if you lost your reason?

He knew that an entirely rational person would get out of the car and go and meet his wife for dinner. But he sat there, frozen—petrified.

If there were a chance—even a one in a trillion chance—he was infected with some strange mind corrupting virus, and if there were a chance he might pass it to Linda, he couldn't go in there.

If he were going crazy, he was still sane enough to dismiss the thought that the disease could be alien in nature. But there were countless articles theorizing that schizophrenia could be caused by an infection. Scientists had been studying that possibility since the '70s. Although, the virus they hypothesized was something a person contracted at a young age and developed years later in adulthood, not some disease that could spread like a pandemic.

It could be possible there was a new pathogen loose on the populace. A new mutation perhaps. It could be something carried by animals or birds. Completely harmless to them, but once in humans... It might even be manmade. Would it really be so hard to believe someone had come up with something like that as a biological weapon? Could this obsession with eights have escaped from a military lab or some terrorist cell?

Again, he traced the thread from the homeless man all the way through to the literature student.

Of course, there were flaws in the theory—gaps in the victims. How was Gary Meyers linked to Maggie? Meyers visited bars and clubs; could that be the connection? Or was the link one of the people found in Aikman Field? He knew so little about them.

Denton shook his head and turned off the engine. He couldn't entertain these ideas any longer. He couldn't just leave Linda sitting at the table waiting for him to show up. Waiting and wondering. Especially after what happened in the lodge, he wouldn't put her through that again.

He opened the car door.

He pictured himself walking into the restaurant, apologizing for being late, and kissing her. Then the image of Linda's studio filled with paintings of stars and planets flashed into his head.

Cold air infiltrated the car through a six inch gap. He stared down at the slush on the street. He could hear the blood pulsing in his ears. Seconds turned into minutes, as he watched white flakes turn gray and wet on the pavement.

Very calmly, he shut the door and started up the car. When there was a pause in the traffic, he pulled out and made a U-turn.

The world around him seemed to float. His heart was seized by ice. Of all the options open to him, he had chosen to be irrational. Although, he had an idea—a plan. There might just be a way to confirm his fears and hopefully lay them to rest.

Denton drove to an old internet cafe a few blocks from campus. It had been a popular place with students before the age of Wi-Fi and smart phones. Now, every time he drove past it, he wondered how it managed to stay in business. U-Brew drew large crowds from Milton, but JavaNet sat empty and deteriorating in a strip mall next to a carpet store.

The sign on the wall said that the rate was five dollars an hour or ten for three.

Denton fished a five dollar bill out of his wallet and paid the bored looking kid behind the counter sitting next to a pot of stale coffee.

"You can use terminal eight." The boy pointed to a desk at the end of the first aisle.

"Of course."

If the clerk were curious about Denton's tight lip remark, he didn't show it. He just entered the keystrokes to unlock the old PC. "Can I get some water too?" When the kid didn't move, he added an impatient, "Please."

The clerk took a small Styrofoam cup and filled three quarters of the way with lukewarm tap water.

Once seated at the station, Denton took the vial of pills out. The one he had taken earlier had barely done anything to ease the pain that wracked his body. He popped two in his mouth and emptied the cup.

The first thing Denton did was access his email account. He sent Linda a short message saying there had been a problem and he couldn't make it to dinner. He told her he'd be home in a couple of hours. As he typed out the words, he hoped he wasn't lying.

Next, he logged into the Milton Student Information System. Two minutes later, he was walking back to the car with Stephen Kaling's address on a piece of paper.

Stephen Kaling was the litmus test. Maggie Biscamp had been his girlfriend. If there were a contagious virus, he should be infected. Perhaps he was drawing eights in his apartment at that very moment. If he were, Denton would have his answer. And if he weren't, Denton might have the chance to make a different choice.