"Oh, Lord!" Dermitt wailed. "Let me think, let me think!" His face contorted as a spasm passed through his body. Then he relaxed again and opened his eyes. "You get out," he said. "That's it. Get to the typewriter as fast as you can ... rewrite this ... mark out the part where you shoot me ... make it a miss ... or a flesh wound.... It's the only way. But hurry, for Godsake!"
"Okay," Fleetwood said. "I've got to get Kitty, though, and take her with me."
"No," Dermitt put in quickly. "Write her out, too, when you get there. It'll be faster. Hurry, Cassidy, hurry! I can't stand too much more of this."
"All right." Fleetwood said. He whirled about and ran for the door. He turned back once, just before leaving, to look at Kitty, but the room was already in a state of half-dissolve and she was only a dim, grey figure in the distance. He hurried outside.
As he ran forward into the swirling blackness ahead, the house quickly evaporated behind him....
He didn't know how he had gotten back to Dermitt's Towers apartment. It seemed that he had been there all along. He was sitting in the same chair, as though he'd merely dozed there for a time. He shook his head to clear it. Then he remembered.
He turned and saw Dermitt slumped over his typewriter, his hands clutched to his abdomen. Fleetwood frowned. So that was the way of it; the writer had managed to project himself into two separate dimensions simultaneously, a dangerous undertaking even for a sane man. Fleetwood shoved himself out of the chair and hurried to the alcove.
As he approached, Dermitt stirred weakly and opened his eyes and twisted them in his direction. There was no blood, no wound—no visible, physical wound—but still Dermitt was dying.
"Hurry!" he whispered. "I ... I blacked out. I guess I went a little crazy for a while. Please save me."