26.

The next moment was beyond belief. Tom saw it happen with his own eyes and still couldn’t take it in, couldn’t get his mind to grasp it.

“Dr. Cameron,” said Karen Lee—and Tom’s double straightened in surprise. Dr. Cameron? Marie’s father! The double began to step back . . . and then stopped. No, he didn’t stop. He froze. He froze completely in mid-step, his foot half lifted off the floor. Before Tom fully comprehended what he was seeing, his gaze shifted to Karen Lee and he saw that she, too, had gone utterly motionless. She was standing unblinking, with her lips still parted on the name of Marie’s father.

Tom looked around him. The apartment was silent. It was not an ordinary silence. It was complete. Nothing disturbed it. The refrigerator wasn’t humming. There were no voices from other apartments or from outside. The air itself seemed to have stopped moving entirely.

Tom stared at Karen Lee. He stared at his double. He moved to his double and looked right into his face—right into his own face—and yet the doppelgänger did not budge. Quickly, Tom went around him. He went to the glass doors that led out onto the balcony. He looked through.

The rain was motionless in the sky. It streaked the air but didn’t fall. Stupefied, Tom looked down the hill. He saw the cars on the town’s main street. They were no longer moving either. Beyond that, he saw the ocean, saw that the Pacific itself had ceased all motion. Its waves did not rise and fall but were frozen at their crests, reaching up toward the low clouds, which likewise did not so much as shift in the sky.

His eyes wide, Tom spun back to the scene in the apartment. It was just as it had been. Tom’s double stepping back in shock. Karen Lee locked in the instant after she had spoken. A scene so uncanny, it filled Tom with a sense of helplessness, not to mention fear. A million explanations began to form in his mind, but each trailed off unfinished. Because nothing explained it. It was impossible.

Tom glanced out the glass doors again. The rain still hung midair, forever falling from motionless clouds onto a still ocean. But something was different. Something had changed. It took Tom a moment, but then he realized what it was.

The sky was darker now than it had been a moment before. The whole scene was darker. The light had faded. And as Tom stood there staring at the bizarrely motionless view, the scene grew even darker still.

He faced the apartment again and, yes, here, too, the light was going out. It was as if night was falling. Every second that passed, the frozen world turned a deeper gray. Soon, Tom realized, very soon, all the light would be gone. There would be blackness.

Tom took a slow, hesitant step away from the glass doors, back toward his own frozen double. Now, finally, an idea was beginning to take shape in his mind, the beginning of an explanation. Maybe this, he thought—this frozen moment—was the place where his memory ended. He’d heard that happened to people sometimes when they were in an accident or got injured—or got shot. The memory of the trauma was erased. The shock was too much to bear and the brain shut down. Maybe this was that moment. Maybe, in fighting his way to the school, he had unlocked everything that remained in his memory, and this was as far as he could go.

He had come this far through the dangerous world of his imagination, but he had reached the end. The darkness was falling now because there was nothing after this. Only blackness. Unconsciousness. Coma—endless coma until his heart stopped and his life was over.

Unless . . .

Unless what? What could he do? Moment by moment, the apartment grew even darker. Already it seemed a sort of dusk had settled over the scene. When the darkness was complete there would be nowhere else to go, nothing to think about . . . nothing.

Tom lifted his hand uncertainly. It was growing dim in front of him. He himself was fading into the darkness. Slowly, tentatively, he reached out toward his double. He extended his hand toward the doppelgänger’s shoulder and then—then, holding his breath, he pushed it through.

As if it were made of smoke, his hand seemed to dissipate and vanish in front of Tom’s eyes. It went right into the double’s shoulder, and Tom gave a groan as he felt the beginning of that horrible nothingness again, that sensation of atomizing he had felt out in the hall.

And yet maybe there was a chance, just a chance, that that was exactly what could save him.

An even deeper darkness than evening now folded over the scene. Tom knew his wounded mind could not remember anymore.

But what if, he thought—what if instead of remembering, I could relive it?

It might work. It might. If he could enter his doppelgänger before the darkness fell—lose himself in his double as he had for that one second out in the hall—maybe he could relive the events that had plunged him into this coma-world in the first place. Somewhere in his brain those events were recorded, after all, even if his memory couldn’t access them. But if he could become his memory, then maybe he could force himself to face the thoughts and feelings and events—the suffering—that had brought him here, and that were keeping him from making his way back into the light of life.

It was a frightening prospect. He knew if he went through with it, the Tom he was now would vanish. If he entered into the doppelgänger, if he became one with his memory, he would no longer know that he was in a coma. He would no longer know that this was his imagination. He would be back in the life that had brought him here, and he would no longer know what was going to happen next.

He was going to have to relive the worst moments of his life—the last moments of his life—as if they were happening for the first time. It was the only way he could overcome his mind’s resistance and discover the whole truth.

He was going to have to see it with his own eyes.

The double stood frozen. Karen Lee stood frozen. The world stood frozen. And night fell steadily. The darkness was almost complete.

Tom had to choose—and fast. He had to decide right now which he wanted more, the painless comfort of unconsciousness or the agony of knowing.

It’s like the Bible says, he remembered Lisa telling him. Find the truth—and the truth will set you free.

Well, he answered in his mind, the truth is what I’m here for.

And as the darkness fell around him, he stepped forward boldly. He walked into the body of his doppelgänger. Directly into nothingness. Directly into the moment of his own destruction.