Thomas [the protagonist] shrugged. “Why? For starters. Don’t you want to know why he did this to you?”

The man [Gyges, a billionaire kidnapped and brainwashed by the antagonist] turned back to the drinks. “Oh, I know why.”

…“You do?”

“But of course. I’m being punished.”

Thomas nodded carefully. For some reason he said, “For your sins . . .”

“Yes. For my sins.”

“And what sins are those?”

Gyges gave the Scotch a curious swirl, as though soaking the ice cubes. “Are you a priest?” he asked as he handed Thomas his drink. For the first time Thomas noticed how assiduously the man avoided looking at either of their faces.

“No”, Thomas replied.

…The billionaire finally looked her full in the face. His eyes reflected a peculiar horror. “Argument? What kind of argument?”

Sam [the FBI agent collaborating with the protagonist to find the antagonist] glanced at Thomas. “That nothing has meaning”, she said. “This might sound hard to believe, but [the anatagonist] Neil Cassidy believes that there’s no such thing as . . . as . . .”

“People”, Thomas finished for her. “He thinks that much of what we believe, things like purpose, meaning, right and wrong, are simply illusions generated by our brains.”

Gyges’s eyes glistened with tears. “Well he’s certainly wrong there, isn’t he?”

“Wrong where?” Thomas asked.

“About none of this having meaning.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Of course not”, he snapped without explanation. He shook his head. “Just what is it you want?”

“Three strangers”, Gyges said with a calm that seemed frightening given the savagery of moments before. “Do you know what it’s like, Dr. Bible, to live nowhere? To look and look and find yourself nowhere?”

In a curious sense, Thomas did, but he wasn’t about to say so. “You’re standing right here, Mr. Gyges.”

“Am I? I’m not so sure.” A contemplative scowl. “But you don’t realize what it’s like, do you? You think I see you, that I know you, that the problem is that every time I look away I forget who you are. But it’s not like that. Not at all. When I stare at you—like this, like I’m staring at you right now—I don’t recognize you from one second to the next. And it’s not like your face becomes something new every moment, something that I’ve never seen before. [ie. not prosopometamorphopsia, but an agnosia] It’s just unknown. Unknowable . . .”

Gyges turned from the mirror to Thomas.

“When I look into the mirror, Dr. Bible, I’m not there. But the kicker is that you aren’t either. For me, there is no you. Just a voice. A voice from the dark.”

For a moment Thomas could only stare at him. “You’re suffering a brain injury”, he said lamely. “You need to underst—”

“Brain injury?” the bearded man replied. “Brain injury? Is that what you think this is?” Shaking his head, he strode past them and yanked open one of the oak-stained doors.

Thomas turned as he crossed the threshold. “Then what is it?”

“You’re not a priest”, Gyges snapped.

The door pounded shut, swallowed the world before Thomas’s face.

…“Did you notice how he behaved around us? The utter absence of any eye contact. His body language. Almost cringing from our presence.”

“So?”

Thomas breathed deeply. “So, we were monstrosities to him. Faceless monstrosities.”

“What are you saying?”

Thomas found himself looking at his hand, at the missing wedding band on his ring finger, thinking of all the neural machinery churning away underneath, making this experience possible. That was where Neil was striking. Not at the heart, but at the soul.

“That Theodoros Gyges lives in a world of boogeymen.”

…Sam frowned in the exhaust-stained gloom. “I don’t get it.”

“Think. Without recognition, there’s nobody, just like Gyges said. There are no people, only buzzing brains bumping into buzzing brains.”

…He was still screaming when Theodoros Gyges appeared at the very edge of seeing.

…You get your family”, the man said. “Then you leave.”

“I-I do-don—”

“You leave!” Gyges barked. “You do not want to hear . . . to see . . .”

He turned from Thomas, pulled a long knife from a sheath strapped to his left calf. He kneeled, placing his right knee in the small of Neil’s back. He used the knife to scratch an itch on his bearded cheek. Thomas saw dried blood marring its sheen.

He felt no surprise. He lacked the neurotransmitters.

“The spine is the door, the connection . . .” Gyges said, looking at the task before him. He turned to Thomas, his piggish eyes rounding in a kind of wonder. “Cut it and the soul is preserved, kept safe, wrapped in a box . . .

“Don’t you see?” Gyges hissed, staring down his cheeks like some ancient chieftain. “I only f—k the meat.”

Thomas backed away from the madman, knowing there was no reason, no connection . . .

He was just noise. One more senseless output.

“I only f—k the meat!”

Thomas glanced at Neil’s face, saw the brain behind it reaching for him through the pose of facial musculature, clutching with primeval visual cues. He could see it looking, peering through keyhole eyes, buzzing with anguish and information, trapped by the severing of a single cord.

It pulled Neil’s lips into a rueful smile, pinned his face into a pathetic grimace.

Goodbook, it mouthed.

Please . . .

“They can’t feeeeeel what I do”, Gyges gasped with coital intensity. “That means it’s not a sin, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?”

Untouched, Thomas turned to free his ex-wife. In his periphery, he could see Gyges hunched over Neil’s broad back. But he dared not look. The billionaire had become a thing of blood and sawing shadows. A monstrous tabloid horror, murmuring as he worked . . .

“I will fill you like a cup . . .”

“Like something holy.”

The false premise in Neil’s argument.

After freeing her, Thomas held Nora’s face to his chest so that she too would not see. “Look at you . . .”

The Chiropractor [media name of the serial villain] brooked no witnesses.

…“Gyges was the Chiropractor”, he whispered to her image in the rearview mirror. “Neil made him . . . A diversion, a way to strangle the resources devoted to finding him.” Not that explanations mattered anymore.