I had liked it immediately, and loved our house above the creek, hidden away in the trees. We’d been happy there, me, my little brother, my mom, and when he could get away on leave, my dad.

Then he had died. And that was when I began to feel that I had stories to tell. That was when I started to feel the urge to write. My teachers praised me. It was what I had that made me special, a talent.

And then, Samantha Early had leaped past me. Suddenly Spazmantha was the real thing, a soon-to-be published author, and I was . . . a kid with promise.

“I was jealous,” I said.

“Yes,” Messenger said.

“I knew. Did you see that when you looked into my soul? That I knew Samantha was troubled? I had seen her washing her hands, I’d observed her doing counting rituals. I knew she had a problem. I knew what it was called. I knew how serious it was.”

For once I was grateful for his silence.

“I knew and I used it. I knew what I was doing was wrong. I was mad at my mom for . . . I guess, for going on with her life. I was mad at the world for taking my dad. I couldn’t stand that . . . that I should lose him, and then lose the one thing I had come to care about. I did just what you said. I knew. I knew what I was doing.”

I listened to the waves. I breathed deeply of salt air.

“There’s one thing missing from my memories,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I need to see it.”

The beach faded as the mist flowed from the water, from the sky, from the sand beneath my feet.

I was alone. I had been alone. Back when the mist had first come for me.

“What the . . . Is this fog? What is—” I had stopped talking then when I glimpsed a figure coming toward me from that sickly yellow mist. I had squinted to see clearly, to discern first the shape and then the detail of that gaunt, pale face framed by long black hair.

I had noted the coat, the shirt, the boots, the buttons of death’s heads. The rings on his hands, one a symbol of life, the other a representation of agony.

I had looked into the blue eyes, searching for an explanation. And he had said to me, “I am the Messenger of Fear. I offer you a game.”

He had explained my very limited options to me. I could choose to play the game, and if I won, I would go free. And if I lost, I would be punished for my deeds. I would be scourged for the death of Samantha Early. I would endure my worst fear.

I had chosen to play the game. It had been grueling, all but impossible. I had been made to cross a desert wasteland and tasked to collect seven objects that would be visible, but just barely.

Seven objects, scattered on sun-blasted rocks and barely peeking out from rattlesnake holes.

A pen.

A pad of paper.

A combination lock.

A folded flag.

A gun.

A skull.

A tattered brown teddy bear.

There had been no time limit set, except that hunger and thirst applied their own unique pressures. It had taken me many hours, or at least I had experienced them as hours. Hours of wandering beneath a blistering sky, denying as I walked that I understood the significance of the objects.

But when I was done, when I held all seven objects in weary fingers, I knew.

Memory faded away and I once again beheld the beautiful Pacific, the waves gentling now as the sun turned all the world pink and orange and gold.

“I won the game,” I said.

“Yes,” Messenger said. “You were free to go. You did not.”

I shook my head, recalling that last as well, but Messenger told it to me as if it was a story I had never heard.

“I told you that you had won. That you were free to go on. And you said, ‘No.’ That you did not deserve to walk free. That you deserved to be punished.”

“Daniel was there,” I said.

Messenger displayed one of his rare, fractional, fleeting smiles that never quite became a smile. “Daniel generally is.”

“He said he had a way. He said it was not a punishment he could impose, but rather one I could choose to accept. But once I accepted . . .”

“You would be bound. You would be bound until your penance had been completed.”

I nodded. I wondered if Messenger had come to this same duty by a similar path. I believed he had. I doubted he would ever tell me the how and the why of it, but in that I proved to be mistaken. It would be a long time coming, but in the end I would know all.

“I am to be the Messenger of Fear,” I said, and my voice no longer quavered as I spoke, though this terrible truth would have left me whimpering before.

“When you have learned,” Messenger said. “When you are ready.”

I suppose I should have been accustomed to sudden changes of venue, but it still came as a surprise when I blinked, opened my eyes, and saw that I was in a place like no place I had ever known or imagined.

It was both an open and a closed space, at once vast and intimate. I felt myself to be at the bottom of a well, a cylinder driven deep into the earth. Hundreds of feet, maybe even thousands. Looking straight up, I could make out a flattened circle of stars, and even the melancholy lights of a passenger jet miles above.

The sides of this well were lined with dull golden rectangles, each perhaps ten feet tall and half as wide. All that I could see—and most were too far above me to be seen clearly—seemed to have been inscribed in careful, ornate calligraphy.

There was no other visible source of light that I could see, no lamps or sconces or torches. But there was a glow greater than could possibly have come from the cold stars, and of far warmer hues. It seemed almost that the gold itself was glowing softly.