Benny knew a lot of things. He knew his father was dead; he knew his mother was a lost cause; he knew his birth parents had neither expected nor wanted him; and he knew that the thing that had given him all this new knowledge hadn't wanted him, either. It'd wanted a girl, but he'd been the only option. It wasn't going to be able to hold on to him.

Moving through the park, the boy had to stop more than once when his stomach began to heave. What claimed his gut wasn't sickness, exactly; it was a pain he'd felt only once, when he'd coughed up some bloody bit of his insides after leaving Tommy in that cave.

And Tommy!

Damn Tommy. He'd somehow found his way out of the underground. That'd irked Ben beyond reason—it was another indicator he was unwanted, he was wrong, in the view of whatever dwelt in the darkness he'd discovered. It'd spoken to him, in its way, convincing him of his worth, his potential . . . or so it had seemed. He knew it hadn't meant any of that, had only settled for him. That was obvious. It'd spit out Tommy because Benny had done that for himself, for no other reason than that he'd wanted to, because Tommy had irritated him. Ben had to pay for his selfishness, now.

He paused and put his hand against a rough trunk, the bark scraping his tender palm as he dug into it. The pain within was too much to bear, even for someone as unfeeling as he'd become. Benny was certain some piece of himself had come loose inside, and his guess was confirmed when a viscous lump moved up his throat until he was forced to regurgitate it. In the darkness of the after-hours park, what he coughed onto the grass resembled a blob of black jelly.

Sweat had broken out across the boy's forehead, beaded down his neck. His small-for-its-age twelve-year-old body, approaching exhaustion, rivaled the full moon in its whiteness. Ben had never been an assertive child. He'd never been particularly affectionate with either of his adoptive parents. Most likely the thing that had recently found him hadn't quite poisoned him so much as it'd encouraged what'd already always been there. The innocuousness of Benny's youth had been more ignorance than innocence. Tommy had been his only friend, kept out of boredom, out of a desire to know something of the world which his mother kept him largely away from, but they'd not actually cared about one another. For sure Ben hadn't cared about Tommy; Ben didn't care about anyone.

But he'd been ever so flattered when he'd tapped the root of whatever dwelt in the dark and it'd welcomed itself in. The moment hadn't been ecstatic or momentous or even particularly startling . . . but it had been memorable. It'd been an awakening of sorts, a sensation of being understood and accepted for what he was, a blossoming sentience of becoming. What many young men might look back on and describe as a first moment of sexual arousal, perhaps prompted by glimpsing a pornographic image or stumbling uninvited upon a friend's mother or sister at an intimate moment, would, for Benny, be always that instant he'd peered into the void and the void had peered relentlessly into him.

A glutton, though—that's what it was. The thing hungered, and he couldn't satisfy it, which was why it was eating him from the inside.

Benny managed to steady himself again, to stabilize his legs, and he started off toward where he thought the earth dipped downward into a ravine, where the orifice had opened. He was drawn to it; whether it wanted him anymore or not, he couldn't help himself. What else was there, for him? The boy understood his future, just as he'd seen Tommy's and everyone else's. He wasn't so much clairvoyant as he was aware . . . he didn't see things; he just knew them. And he didn't know everything, but he did quite clearly realize where he himself would've been headed if he weren't going to die, tonight.

His first kill would be in three years, at the age of fifteen. It'd be a five-year-old who wandered a little way from his mother at Walmart, one he'd entice with a bag of Blowpops. Benny would have planned it, would've been planning it for a long time, though the moment itself would be opportune rather than scheduled. He'd take his chance when it occurred after hovering for days around the store entrance and exit. The child would grow frightened at a certain point, but Benny would've done his due diligence; he'd have made sure to select a particular caliber of mother, one more inclined to be on her phone, to shop at Walmart for leisure rather than because she had some list of items in mind. And the child himself wouldn't be so timid as to cling to his mother but would be the sort to trail several feet behind, asking for everything and whining when his mother ignored him. The kill itself would be easy—a stretch of warehouses and back alleys behind the building providing a maze of opportunity and the only weapon necessary his hands.

Afterward, Ben would only gain interest in his pursuits, would seek a bit of variety. An older child would be second, one not much younger than himself but mentally impaired, a classmate he'd known and disliked, and at the age of seventeen, he'd challenge himself with an older woman, a college student working as a barista at a local coffee shop. He'd by then have developed a certain corruption of sexual desire, would express it with this third kill by disfiguring the body's secret places (small mercy that this "artistic devotion" (as he'd term it in the journals he'd keep) would be carried out after the woman's death).

Benny would always be careful, even as a young boy. He'd know how to cover his tracks, and yet after three kills, he'd have to hide for a while. He would have to satisfy his urges in other ways, in more subtly tormenting those he knew, psychologically more than physically, selecting girlfriends he could pretend to love but over time escalate toward abusing and using. While this would never sate his darkest urges, his practices would heighten his deceptive abilities, refine his skill of manipulation, thereby preparing him for the years to come.

These lesser evils he'd engage in until the period of waiting died down, until he moved out of town, out of the Midwest altogether, until he made his way to a small western town, somewhere in the midst of Nevada, where he would spend the next two decades of his life sporadically kidnapping, torturing, and murdering women and children alike. Once his patterns were recognized, the media would dub him The Draw-and-Quarter Killer (or, colloquially, the DQ Killer, even at the protest of the well-known fast food chain) for his tendency to mutilate the intestines and genitals of his victims before at last strangling them and cutting their bodies into pieces.

He'd marry. He'd have children. He'd treat them well, for the most part, his methods of control insidious so as not to draw attention to himself.

But he would eventually be caught, tried, imprisoned, and, breaking decades of moratorium in Nevada, executed.

At his time of death, he'd be forty-seven.

All this Benny knew of his future self, and its veracity rang deep within. He'd always had some inclination of what he was, what he had the potential to become, even before this thing had prematurely piqued his desires, but he'd never known quite how to piece it together, to form a coherent image. There was the trajectory of his life, right before him, now, but he was aware, too, that none of it would ever come to fruition.

The boy was again forced to pause in deference to the crippling pain that seared through his gut. There were no nearby trunks, this time, so his trembling form sank to the ground. Vertigo set in, and the boy closed his eyes against the ensuing nausea as another piece of himself worked its way up through his throat and onto his tongue before he could disgorge it. Whatever it was (though he knew what it was, didn't he?) it plopped onto the hands he'd placed on the earth before him as he crouched there like a birthing barnyard animal. The grass between his fingers began to move curiously, wriggling in thin threads against his skin as if he were clutching pinworms, and when Benny against his better judgment reopened his eyes, he found that the vitals he'd spat out were crawling with white things.

Too pained, too exhausted to do more than stare at them, Ben took deep, shuddering breaths. He'd no idea what dying might feel like, and yet he felt certain this was it, for surely his body was taking itself apart from the inside. The tortuous spasms precluded further movement. The boy's desperate desire to reach the cave wouldn't be enough to get him there. It was his own frailty that held him back. He was an unworthy vessel; it didn't want him.

Benny spent several uncountable moments heaving, retching up dark material and spittle, until there was a rather large, repulsive pile on the ground. Stars burst within his strained brain; he knew little more than his own suffering, until an abrupt respite took him by surprise, and the pain dulled enough for him to raise his head and look around himself.

What he saw first (other than what sat immediately beneath his head) was a deathly pale array of pearly toes belonging to feet no more than perhaps a yard away, and as he lifted his gaze, scarlet saliva running from his lower lip and from his nostrils, he saw they belonged to a phantasmal figure, a girl whose bluish veins branched beneath translucent skin. She was entirely nude, her pubescent features hinting at an age not much beyond Ben's own; in fact, he'd not have known she was a girl except for her lack of what most males possessed. There was an utter coldness about her, as if the blood vessels he could see bifurcating beneath her flesh had turned to ice. When his eyes reached her face, he saw that she watched him with crystalline intensity, and comprehension seeped through his knotted brain. It's her, he all at once knew. The worst part of what I found, there . . . the anger . . . the cold . . .

And yet . . . no, it hadn't exactly been her. She herself wasn't that cave and the cave, the darkness, wasn't her. It was more that—that the void moved with her, for surely here it was at that moment, the thing he'd wished to return to! He need not reach the cave, for that cavernous nothing had opened right before him! Benny wanted to speak to her, to communicate somehow, but some supernatural hand had internally dissected him, and while the pain had abruptly abated, his ability to speak was no less destroyed. He stayed where he was, bowed down as if in worship of this ethereal, macabre specter, and he waited only because he could do nothing else.

His wait wasn't long. As he watched, the girl's skin began to change; black words and images began to shimmer across her arms, her legs, her stomach, diabolic tattoos inked by a fiend's invisible and uneven hand: "slut," "whore," "skank," "bitch," "ugly-ass ho," "free BJ's," "rape me here" next to an arrow drawn from her bellybutton toward her crotch, penises and cartoonish faces and stick figures apparently engaged in indecent acts . . . it was the artwork of cruel and envious amateurs. The girl turned her body around, slowly, offering Ben a full view, and he saw that in biggest boldest writing across her back were the words "Fuck me up, Kitty."

Benny didn't grasp the importance of it all, and yet the rage emanating from her made ripples of the surrounding space.

By the time she'd turned all the way, faced him once again, the boy had resumed heaving, the tortuous inner agony having returned. He was sure his very organs pulled away from his body's walls, pushed into his core. Flesh ripped; muscle cleaved from bone; tissue and sinew fought against itself. This was it. This was the moment he died. Ben was done for; he was sure of it. Excruciating torment was all he knew.

And then, breaking through the unmitigated misery, a chilling ice-cold pressed against his face, and in his anguish, the child knew the girl had put a hand to his cheek. With her thumb, she wiped the water running beneath his strained, bloodshot eye before pressing it backward into its socket, and with a cry of everything empty and terrifying and cruel, she shoved her other hand past his lips, through his teeth, and down into his innards, taking for herself whatever was still left within.