The stairs wound around the side of the hill, railroad ties for steps set into a path carved out of the steep slope. Halfway up, Tim could see over the trees and into the stadium, and he felt gravity reaching for him again, its invisible hand beckoning him over the nearly sheer drop to his left. He was never sure if he was attracted or repelled by it, the idea of falling, but it made his knees weak all the same.

He turned away from the stadium and continued up. His ankle protested with every step, but it would have to wait.

At the top of the stairs there was a dirt path set with stepping stones, which led to a gap in a low wall demarcating the perimeter of the concrete apron that surrounded the Gertrude & Max Wheeler Science Building. Benches, tables and planters were dotted about the common area, which here in the middle of the night reminded Tim of what he imagined public squares in Soviet Russia must have looked like: gray, industrial, haunted. There was a statue of a woman in the center of the plaza directly in front of the building's entrance. Tim assumed it was Gertrude Wheeler herself, though it didn't help that she bore more than a passing resemblance to Lenin.

"This way," said Alex. He led Tim around the west side of the building, to an unmarked steel door tucked in a corner on the back of the building, near the dumpsters. Alex tested the knob. It was locked. "Give me your credit card."

"I don't have a credit card," Tim said.

"Driver's license, whatever."

Tim pulled out his wallet and thought for a second. The picture of him and Christy, he in the too-big rented tux and her in the navy blue dress, was still in the little photo insert. He should take it out.

"Dude, come on. This isn't a test. Just give me something thin and plastic."

Tim selected his Blockbuster card and handed it over. Alex slid the card between the door and the jamb, his other hand on the knob, feeling for release.

This is not how you envisioned your first night of college. You pictured a leisurely walk around the magnolias and stately buildings of West Campus as multicolored leaves swirl about your feet (never mind that it's August in Georgia and still so humid you practically need gills), or a conversation with other excited freshmen at a downtown coffee house. You imagined staying up late getting to know your roommate, maybe even having an honest-to-god bull session, if in fact bull sessions are real things and not just something that avuncular weirdos say on TV. You've never heard anyone use the term in real life.

What you did not picture is breaking into the Gertrude & Max Wheeler Science Building in the wee hours of the morning. Nor did you envision sprinting away from an all-girls dorm while an enraged volleyball player in what appears to be a Victorian-era nightgown shouts to anyone listening, which is hopefully very few people, that you are a "tree-climbing pervert" who will "get wrecked" if you ever dare to show your face around Mary Rutherford again. And you certainly never imagined engaging in this much cardio at such a late hour with a broken ankle, or at least a sprained ankle, or at the very least an ankle that hurts very badly.

After your tumble from the magnolia, you and Alex run a quarter of a mile down Suttledge, almost to the Wheeler Science Building sign and its King Milo. Alex takes a few more flailing steps and comes to a stop. He bends over double, hands on his knees, wheezing. "Dude. Sorry I slapped you."

You collapse into the soft grass on the gently sloping hill on the north side of the road. "It's okay." You lost consciousness when you fell out of the tree, and you woke up to Alex sitting on top of your chest, slapping you on both cheeks. They still sting. Maybe you have a concussion too, to go with your definitely probably broken ankle. "How do you know if you have a concussion?"

"Do you have to throw up?"

You do, kind of, but that might just be because you're thinking about it. "No. I think I might have a broken ankle."

"Does it hurt?"

"Yeah."

"Well, that's not a great sign." Alex finds a stick on the ground and pokes your ankle with it. "Does that hurt?"

"Like, it already hurts. That doesn't make it hurt more, really."

"I think you'll live, dude." Alex hurls the stick across Suttledge, into the woods. It spins end-over-end and smacks into the trunk of an oak tree. "Did you ever play Swords & Daggers?"

"Is that like Dungeons & Dragons?"

"Xander must have made it up. There were always a bunch of sticks in the yard. Long ones were swords. You hit each other with those. You know, like a sword. Short sticks were daggers. Those you could throw." Alex leans over you and points to a pinkish scar half an inch below his left eye. "He got me with a dagger there one time. He could just whip those things. Idiot nearly blinded me."

"How do you win the game?"

"Swords & Daggers isn't the kind of game you win." Alex stares off into the woods, listening for something.

Then you remember. You raise yourself back to your feet. "We left the Gatorade."

"Dude, I'm starting to think they didn't really need any Gatorade after all."

Finally it sinks in. You have been played by Joanie's friends. They don't want or need your help. You are an interloper, no matter what it may say elsewhere in these pages. You can't even get into your own dorm room without intruding on someone else – why would you think that Joanie's life is something you can enter as you please?

Alex slid the Blockbuster card up and down in the crack. His head inched closer and closer to the knob, his ear cocked, like a dog to a whistle. "Dude, do you hear that?"

Tim's spine straightened. He looked around the empty hilltop, spinning on his heel in a slow circle, a paranoid pirouette. "The cops?"

"No, dude – do you hear Van Halen?"

Tim did not hear Van Halen, though he suspected Alex heard something very much like Van Halen on a near-constant basis. "Are you sure this is legal?"

"What 'legal,' dude? This is a college campus. The boys in blue have no jurisdiction here. We pay our tuition so we can use the facilities—" With a click, the door popped open. Alex grinned and handed the card, its laminate now notched and peeling, back to Tim. "For legitimate educational purposes."

Alex stepped inside, and Tim followed.

Audrey and Sarah and Kenya have absconded with Joanie for parts unknown. Surely they are trying to help her. Surely they want what's best for her. No one is disputing that. But Alex has an idea. He takes the stage again.

"Milo doesn't speak to me. He never has, really. Whatever wavelength he's broadcasting on, I just don't pick it up." Alex taps his temple with a black fingernail. "But that doesn't mean there's radio silence up here. I get AM. I get FM. I get frickin' ham radio. Pirate stations. So no, I don't hear Milo. I hear other voices."

Alex pauses, waiting, perhaps, for a response. You remain silent.

"The muses, Tim. That's who I'm talking about, mostly. They speak to me. They speak through me. I am but a vessel to be filled with their divine transmissions. Do you know 'Dollhouse Blues?'"

You do not. Alex zeroes in on his forehead with his finger, accompanied by a whistle and an approximation of an explosion. "Like a bolt of lightning, dude. I could hear them in surround sound. Fucking THX. It was beautiful. A shaft of the godlight.

"So if you're receiving guidance from a higher power, then let not Alexander Henry Pratt be the obstacle that stands in your way. Let not me be the thing that lurks in your doorway.

"Can I ask you a question?"

Alex pauses again. This time it seems he requires a response. "Okay," you say.

"Are you the boy in the tunnel?"

Yes, your heart says, but your mind is not so sure. "Rip me out of your book," Joanie said. On previous pages we told you some things about the girl on the bus, some things that made you feel as though you were destined to meet her, possibly even to love her. We made the intertwining of your futures feel inevitable. We gave you a hope you haven't felt in three months, a hope you wouldn't need to feel if you hadn't been such a coward there, not ten steps from Christy's door. You waited for an invitation, like a vampire, and like a vampire you sulked back to your grave alone.

We told Joanie some things too, some things about the boy in the tunnel. The question you can't help asking now is: What does her Handbook say? Does the boy belong in the tunnel?

"Yes," your mouth says.

"And what do you want to do about it?"

"I want to find Joanie."

"Then here's the deal. Joanie is communing, but she's stuck. If you can commune too, maybe you can go to wherever she is and find her."

This doesn't sound right. This sounds like something with no rules. "You mean take whatever drugs she took?"

"Not exactly, dude." Alex produces, from where you're not sure, the bottle of Lemon Ice Gatorade, still a quarter full. "You just have a drink. It's not quite the same thing. But it's the best I've got."

Alex marches toward the stairs up the hill, and you fall in line behind him. As you pass the sign at the foot of the stairs, you look to Milo for guidance, but he remains silent.

Only one light was lit on the fourth floor of Wheeler, down at the far end of the L-shaped hall Tim now found himself in. Alex was already walking down the other arm of the hall, into the darkness. "Come on," he said.

Halfway down the hall, Alex stopped in front of another dark steel door. A placard on it said "OBSERVATORY. Behind the door there was a spiral staircase, which they climbed, up into the dome atop Wheeler, where those with patience could search for glimpses of the godlight themselves.

Everything was red in the dome. The telescope messed with Tim's sense of scale: a huge articulated arm holding aloft a structure of black trusses and expensive-looking optics. The sound of snoring came from a desk against the far wall, where a rangy, bearded guy in a black T-shirt dozed in an office chair. A desk lamp fitted with a red bulb provided the illumination.

"Russell," said Alex. The bearded guy snorted and opened his eyes. He fished around on the desk for his glasses – round John Lennon frames. Even once he got them on, it took him a second to recognize his visitor.

"Alex?" Russell rose from the chair. He was tall and lanky, and with his bushy beard and long brown hair he reminded Tim of Chewbacca. He looked older, maybe in his thirties. "Didn't expect to see you so early in the semester." Russell turned his sad, kind eyes to Tim. "Who's this?"

"This is Tim. He needs to commune."

Russell pulled at his beard. Tim tried to look like he knew what he was doing, like he "communed" all the time. "What for?"

"For love," Tim said. The words died quick in the airless space, and Tim felt ridiculous and small. Tim thought the presence of the telescope might enhance the grandeur of his statement, but it undercut it instead.

Russell smiled in a way that made him look like he was going to cry. "Of course," he said. His tone was right on the edge of condescension and compassion.

Alex held up the Gatorade bottle. "I brought this for the Catalyzer."

Russell waved him off. "No need," he said. "I've been working on something."

Russell led them back down to the second floor. "I called it the Crystal Catalyzer. A mixture of Lemon Ice Gatorade, Southern Comfort, triple sec and this new high-caffeine beverage from Europe, Red Bull. If you ingest, say, eight ounces of the Catalyzer while simultaneously exposing yourself to an array of low-quality fluorescent tubes flickering at a certain frequency, you may experience a sensation quite similar to the effects of gunpowder. I take it you're familiar with gunpowder?"

Russell produced a key and opened the door to a chemistry lab. "The problem with the Catalyzer is that the communing experience it provides is less than ideal – a bit like a third-generation dub of a VHS tape. Communing can be a disorienting experience to begin with, and for some the Catalyzer trip can be quite, ah, emotionally harmful. Plus it's a real pain in the ass to get the damn tubes to flicker just right. So I figured there had to be a better way. This is what I've been working on for the past year."

With another key he unlocked a locker at the back of the lab, and pulled out a small vial of semi-translucent crystals. It looked to Tim like kosher salt.

Alex stared at the vial, entranced. He practically licked his lips. "Is that..."

"Synthetic gunpowder. A clean, crisp communing experience, without the need for external visual stimuli."

Tim's stomach felt hollow. This was not what he had envisioned at all. "What do I do if I find her?"

"I don't know, dude. You pull her out." Alex's eyes hadn't left the vial. He was hungry for it. "This is the door, dude. Open it up. Step through."

Russell opened the vial and poured out the contents on the black countertop of a lab workstation. He pulled out a University ID card and used it to cut the little pile of crystals into two lines and a pea-sized circle. "Just taste it first," he said. "To acclimate yourself."

No, his body said.

Just Say No is bullshit. Just Say No is bullshit. Tim understood that, intellectually, but the D.A.R.E. assemblies and scared-straight talks had always worked on him, in a way he didn't like to admit. He didn't want to be so gullible. There was some skit they always did at those, this weird silent kabuki play of a kid overdosing, choreographed to "Total Eclipse of the Heart," and every year it found the soft spot inside Tim and squeezed until he submitted. Don't be a coward. Do it for Joanie.

Tim licked his pinky finger, like a cool drug dealer from a movie. He touched the wet fingertip to the circle of crystals, and then brought it to his tongue. It didn't taste like salt.

He wasn't in the lab anymore. He was in a parlor of some kind. The floor was covered in a huge carpet with an intricate design of intertwining purple flowers, which was echoed in the floral wallpaper. Portraits of various uncomfortable-looking men and women were hung on the walls. A stuffed bear loomed in a corner. Light cascaded from a crystal chandelier. There was no furniture.

Each of the room's four walls had a door in its exact center. The doors were made of dark, heavy oak, with crystal knobs. The wall Tim was facing actually had double doors, and they were opened a crack. Tim padded silently closer and peeked through. There seemed to be a library or office on the other side. There were two men in there, talking quietly in front of massive wooden desk. One was slender and severe in a gray flannel suit, his hair Brylcreemed into a static black wave. The other was solid and thick, a beer gut poking out from his navy blazer and starting to lap over his khakis, and his hair was shorn in a military high and tight. Tim kind of recognized him.

Tim heard a creak. He turned to his right and saw that the door in that wall was open, and now starting to slowly close. As he walked toward it, he saw someone in there – Audrey, in the R.E.M. T-shirt. She was soaking wet, as if she had jumped in a pool with all her clothes on.

Tim started to call out to Audrey, but he stopped when he saw behind her, at a door at the far end of the room she was in, Christy, wearing the navy dress she had worn to prom. She stood there, at the door, waiting for Tim to do something, to say something, but his legs wouldn't move. She extended no invitation. The door closed.

"What does it say, Tim?" Tim turned around and Joanie was there, holding her Handbook out to him, open to page 56. "The Boy in the Tunnel" was printed at the top of the page. Joanie's eyes were still solid black. "I can't read it," she said. "What does it say?" Her fingers gripping the book were blue and shivering. Don't read it, Tim's mind said. The words on the page gained dimensionality as his eyes tried to focus. They went deep. Tim wavered on the edge of the page.

He fell in. He read it.

The parlor dropped away and he was back in the lab. A bead of pain throbbed, right between the eyes. Alex was giddy. "Dude! How was it?"

Tim looked at the two lines of crystals still on the counter. "For the full experience," said Russell, "I recommend taking both in quick succession."

"No," said Tim. "I'm going home."

Before Alex could stop him, Tim walked out of the lab and out of Wheeler and back down the stair of railroad ties. He didn't look at Milo as he passed the sign. He walked back up Suttledge to Wintertree, and he wound his way through the halls till he came to the security gate, and he answered Dragan's question "Yes," and he opened the door to room 79, which by a miracle was unlocked. The room was dark and silent, with only the faint red glow of a clock radio lighting the way to the rope ladder. He climbed up and into 79A and crawled into the terrible bed, and he tried to forget what he read in Joanie's Handbook.