Giles weighed half a leaden ton as he swam through swampy fever back to consciousness, a shrill peal in his ears, a black-grey throb on the back of his skull.

He was being dragged into a dim room; even the green fire of the stenciled exit sign seemed muted. He fought and scrabbled for some background detail he could change as beefy hands pushed him into an office chair that bounced under his weight.

“You’re maggot meat,” a thick voice breathed with self-righteous menace. It was the sunglasses-handlebar moustache security guard with the pentagram on his tee-shirt, the one Giles thought of as the Wiccan Beef. Tiffany sat, pale and grimacing, in a chair across from him, held down by the Christian Beef, the guard with the He Is Risen shirt that made Jesus seem like Jason or Freddy Kruger.

Savage hands swiveled his chair, and room spin wildly for a minute. There’s a fire extinguisher in a corner that’s got a defective valve, he thrust wildly. No, there’s a message for Killington, someone’s about to knock on the door.

For of course Killington, the Chief Planner, was the man they were both spun to face.

Beside him sat Jerry, the organizer of the old storytelling festival, his bulky body in his awkward grey suit looking shrunken and humbled.

Killington tilted his bald head, his shallow grey eyes looking them over with detached interest. But underneath was a surge of excitement, like caffeine addict with a large frosted mocha in front of him, untouched yet.

Someone knocked discretely at the door! A message for Killington…

With a squeal the latch turned and the door pushed open.

“Get out and stay out or I’ll peel your skin from you as you scream.” Killington spoke with his usual attention-demanding softness and the door clicked hastily shut.

Jerry looked up, miserable. “Vah—” he said, stopped himself and said, “Roger, I’m begging you. I don’t want this. Please do not do this for me.”

He had started once before to call Killington something that began with “Vah.” But this time Giles knew what he’d been about to say.

“Why don’t you go ahead and call him “Vater?”” he asked, in spite of a hammer of pain when he moved his head.

There hadn’t been any sound in the room before. But somehow it got even quieter now, as though the guards and the two men had stilled their breathing or their hearts.

“You’re Mrs. Benz’s husband, the guy who backed off the cliff,” Giles said directly, naming the unnamable. He turned his eyes gingerly to Killington. “And you’re that father of his that wouldn’t let him take a picture of a naked woman. You tore the sky open trying to find him. You cut Cloud Rock away from the world so he wouldn’t smash his skull when he landed. I saw him on Cloud Rock, lost and outside. And you found your way on to Cloud Rock and grabbed him. I saw you do that too.”

The silence in the room was so tightly wound it was about to snap. Tiffany’s voice was like a knife.

“I shall never see my parents or my friends again. And it is because of you. To save one man you threw others into Chaos.” It was an act. Giles had felt how little Tiffany thought about parents or friends from Cloud Rock. But her voice had cut the bow string.

Jerry sobbed, “I never asked for any of this! I did not want this!”

Killington motioned to the guards to silence Giles but Jerry roared “Let them be!”

They froze, looking to Killington for instruction.

Quick as thought, Giles threw in five softly spoken words. “That got through to him.”

Killington looked like he’d been stabbed in the heart. His face was helpless as he looked at the son he had torn the world apart to rescue. He did not order the guards to kill. Instead, he said like a tired old man, “Gerald, mein Sohn.”

Had Giles changed something so major in the story? He would never know. But something had been set in motion with the speaking of Jerry’s German name, “Gare-old.”

Jerry spoke and it was like emotions buried for long ages, pressed tightly in layers of stone, gushed out, splashed everywhere. “I ran off and settled where you could not find me and married Dilyéhé because she was kind and she loved me without a dozen tasks to perform first and I never wanted to see you again, not if I lived to a thousand!” That was the first time in any story that Giles had heard Mrs. Benz’s first name.

“And still you controlled me and killed me, Vater, even so! I was a good photographer but I could not take a photograph of my beautiful wife without trying to please you.” Every time he said “you” he nearly spat, nearly vomited.

Killington sat stunned and the guards watched their two masters, eyes twitching back and forth like rabbits. “Even as I felt air under my foot and fell screaming, the thought with which I was to die was this: Vater will be pleased with the photograph!” In his rage and fury, his verbal tic of pronouncing “the” to rhyme with “tree” and “a” to rhyme with “hay” vanished. “The” became a Germanic “zeh.”

“But even my death was not enough, even that! I’m sure I should not have felt the pain. I should have passed out on the way down, perhaps woken up in heaven, perhaps not. I do not know. But I found myself back at the edge of the cliff with full memory of the splitting head as my skull was crushed, memories of lying feebly moving as the light faded.

“And back at the edge and only air under my foot and falling helplessly again. I have the memory of a thousand such cycles, a thousand deaths. Until at last came the one where the agony did not come. I fell further and further until I landed like a feather on rock which fell beneath me just a bit slower than I fell.”

“That was how I saved you!” Killington cried.

“But did you know how I would feel her loss again and again? Do you know what dying from a life ripped short feels like, the desperate desire to continue and the knowledge like a fresh grief every time that you will not continue? Every time I went through your monstrous loop, I remembered a little of the last one. When at last the fall came where I did not strike, an age of time passed before I dared to stand.

“Then I wandered half alive through that shadow world on that rock, eternally outside, eternally alone.”

Killington’s jaw clenched, muscles rippling in his face. He had always justified his cruelty with the thought that he was saving his son. Now he heard with naked clarity that he had hurt even that person.

The crystal moment would pass. Killington would rally quickly.

Giles had only moments but the story opened up before him and he plunged in, looking for the precise place where he could stick his fork into the pot.