Meat centipede head had wondered out of the trailer park. His gaze wild, he searched for the mechanic as he stumbled. Through the blizzard Kayden ran, and even the other trailers were only pale visages. He loped, carried upon terror, out into the road.

Shadows past at the edges, people appeared and disappeared. They pushed through the blizzard. Streets turned, twisted, and bent. No cars dared the road, reduces to white hulks. Every flake of snow had weight, tossed upon howls of wind. The entire world felt sewn into nerves. Even the slightest mote plucked the nerve, strummed the heart. The placid island of his mind drifted into the pandemonium of the infinite. Eyes saw too much. Tastes assailed and sensations assaulted. I can feel every particle, Kayden's besieged mind moaned. Battered by endless sensation, he could only stagger forward in the blinding white. Each spec of particle was counted by the eye. All senses rose higher and higher, until everything was within him, and he reduced to nothing thereby.

Beyond mere yards, the whiteness that devoured the world was eaten by uneasy light. Eldritch blue and bruised hue of purple painted all beyond the fleck of ground beneath Kayden. Alien stars, already dead, swept across a strange sky. The blizzard raged, but it was a speck in the boundless sea of infinite. All pressed upon the mind. Finite was man. To see, to feel the fathomless, filled every atom till even the senses of gods fell short, stupid and insufficient. Better to be blind than be blinded, the Intellectual observed. More profitable for one to be dead than numbed by sensation this voice knew. Deafened by the chaos left one hollowed out, mind obliterated. Every facet of taste became one until indivisible, but nothing in the lack of definition. Overwhelmed, the specific was lost in the endless. Kayden wailed under the assault, but heard the echoes of the hungry void raised its voice in his.

The unabashed truth crashed down upon Kayden, all of it. It hollowed out all of him. Inside it filled, spilled, and drowned anything else. Naked before and through him, awful as the revelation, truth was relentless. Layers upon layers were bound together. Stupid senses failed to capture it. Joined together, each surrounded by a gulf and nothing, its absurd reality of incongruities defied logic. Laws of existence were broken, yet held in a paradox unfathomable. Sane and insane bound this reality as the rules of attraction and repulsion. In every universe, galaxy, and each cell this pulled and pushed, warred. Kayden covered his eyes, prayed this would stop.

Like the crash of a tsunami, it eventually fell back into the sea. Truth receded. Although it left him, he was left touched. Kayden sat, body drawn up. He sobbed, a child. Beech wood-brown eyes felt heavier, older. Away he retreated from any thought or sense. Better to be empty than to be filled unto bursting, destruction.

You can stay here, mourn your wife, the Intellectual voice observed, unmoved by these revelations. Or, you could talk to William, Sheila, and Brian. They have responsibility for Jillian's fate too. An invisible hand lifted Kayden's chin. A new day had come morning sun blazed across the fields of white. The Plant Manager stood out front of the building, beside Kayden's old Supervisor and HR Manager.

"A new plan," Kayden whispered, smiled at all his knowledge, "it is time to tell them some of what I know." He stood, as razor thin cuts sealed over his body.

After a short walk, smile unrestrained, Kayden walked up to William. The Plant Manger asked him to come inside, for things had changed. Brian and Sheila already waited in her office. They had called his house, since laying off others on the list. A light hearted smile greeted them, and disquiet built into their hearts.

The Human Resources Manager fingers tapped rapidly on the desk, eyes flew from the other two men. "Mister Stone, Kayden, yes," she smiled, mascara ran, "we've been trying to get in contact with you!" She covered her mouth, coughed, "I mean: we have been trying to speak to you."

"The names on the list included all the women Brian had tormented," Kayden said, though his voice was pensive and detached. "Those women were laid off," his eyes locked onto hers, and she swore a strange light lived in them of a bruised purple. "Now, you have no power over them, and it is reasonable to deduce that they are very mad." The Plant Manager, Supervisor, and Human Resources Manager blinked in unison, face paled and then reddened. "To further guess, they've had gotten together to exchange stories."

"We have a no sexual harassment policy!" Sheila blubbered, and the other two nodded like bobble heads.

Kayden's expression remained placid. "Anyways, you are all shaking, because they talked to someone," his words flowed like an intellectual at a presentation. "It isn't the home office, because you could all just cover the other, buffalo them like good-ole-boys. No, I think it is most likely the Van Lear Family." All three of them recoiled from the evocation of the family atop Swannanoa. He smiled with eyes flat, "They are Lear County. They are this community's aristocracy." A mechanical laugh boiled out, "The queen of Lear Mountain will come down, because she won't have such in their kingdom, especially from a New Money project." He looked at Brian, "I hear Miss Van Lear is very swift to bring low any, who treat their people with a lack of propriety."

"They have no proof," Sheila moaned, and the other two nodded again in idiot agreement.

Kayden looked at her, until Sheila's gaze moved away. "The Queen won't care about your bureaucracy," he said, lines in his skin were razor thin and spread. "Now, you have brought me here silence me," he felt the fragility of reality.

"We want to bring you back," she spoke in a rush, "but first, you have to sign this." She pushed a Non-Disclosure Agreement.

Thin tendrils slithered across the floor, and then gripped the steel doors. Kayden turned his eyes, which filled with bruised purple light, upon them. They stared into his alien gaze. "I think it is time to talk about what I know," lines spread up his face, and his body unzipped to reveal the truth.