She smiled. “Bottoms up, baby.”

She picked up the funnel and began to pour.

And for Stu, things got a lot worse for a little while.

Then he was gone.

There was something strange about the rat in the corner of Jolene McAllister’s jail cell. Her cell was one of eight at the Rockville police station, and to night she was the township’s lone prisoner. She’d been grateful for the solitude in the beginning. She wanted to be away from people, away from the reality of the royal mess she’d made of her life. Here in this cell, removed from the detectives and their endless questions, she’d experienced a strange kind of peace. She could close her eyes and pretend she was in her own bed in her own home. The cot in her cell was a good deal less comfortable than her own bed, so it took a bit of imagination.

But she managed.

And she even succeeded in slipping into a blissful, dreamless sleep for a time. Until she heard the chittering of the rodent. The sound drew her back to grim reality. She heard the rodent scuttling across the floor of the cell, and the fleeting sense of peace she’d known deserted her. She was in jail. She was alone. And there was nothing at all she could do about it. She was going to spend the rest of her life behind bars. Never again would she see Trey, her best-loved son. The long-dreamed-of pilgrimage to Memphis, the city where she was born, would never occur. Her days of determining the course of her own life had come to an abrupt, irrevocable halt. The stark prospect sent her tumbling into depression, and she began to imagine ways she might kill herself.

Then her gaze went to the corner and she saw the rat for the first time.

Shit.

That’s no motherfucking rat.

Jolene’s mind whirled and her vision went blurry for a moment. The thing in the corner was an impossibility. So this could only be a dream. Except that the uncomfortably thin mattress upon which she lay felt exceedingly real. She could feel every ache in her old and creaky joints.

Her vision cleared and she risked a peek at the corner again.

Still there.

Fuck.

There were a lot of things wrong here. Scratch that. A lot of things weird here. And not just the central mind-fuck threatening to explode what remained of her sanity. For one thing, she shouldn’t have been able to see the thing in the corner at all. The corridor lights were off, rendering her cell and the others as dark as the inside of a coffin. Yet she could see the thing. Its eyes glowed like tiny specks of yellow neon, and the dim light allowed her to see the hazy outline of its little body.

Jolene whimpered. “Go away! You’re not real!”

The creature waddled closer and now she could no longer deny the reality of what she was seeing. Nor could she pretend her mind was playing tricks on her. The thing was definitely not a rat. And the sounds emanating from its tiny mouth weren’t rodent sounds. The thing on the floor was her husband, somehow reduced to rat size. He was trying to talk to her, but he was too small for his words to be intelligible from this distance. Jolene would have to get down on the floor, put her ear down close to his shrunken body, to hear what he wanted to tell her-but she had no intention of doing that.

Her mind again rebelled against the idea that Tiny Hal was real. Jolene was a junior high dropout, but she wasn’t completely stupid. She thought she had a pretty firm handle on what things were possible in the real world. What she was seeing now just wasn’t possible.

And yet…

The thing that could not be continued to stumble toward her cot. As it drew closer, Jolene was able to make out finer details, including evidence of her own handiwork, the ragged stumps where she’d cut off his fingers and cauterized the open wounds with an acetylene torch. And she could see the terror in his eyes. He was gesturing wildly and opening his mouth wide to scream at her.

Jolene closed her eyes. “This is a dream. A nightmare. I’m going to wake up now.”

Just because this felt real didn’t mean it was. She’d had dreams like that before. Some far worse than this. Real doozies, like the recurring one in which a masked serial killer chased her endlessly through a dark forest. The killer would inevitably close the gap between them, getting close enough to reach out to her with a gloved hand-and then she’d wake up with a gasp, drenched in sweat, her heart pounding. The serial killer dream always seemed so real-the danger, the rough forest floor beneath her bare feet-and so it seemed safe to dismiss this episode as mental silliness, a case of her mind weaving her tragedy into a kind of dark farce. Very vivid and compelling, but a farce nonetheless.

Jolene began to drift toward unconsciousness. She spoke again, a groggy but defiant jab at the darkness: “People don’t shrink. I’m not crazy.”

A sound close to her ear snapped her awake.

She glanced down and saw her diminutive husband attempting to climb up one of the cot’s metal legs. Jolene’s eyes went wide and she let out a yelp. Hal cringed. Her shrill shriek seemed to overwhelm his little ears, probably sounding to him like feedback from a wall of amplifiers at a rock concert.

Jolene acted without thinking.

She snatched Hal off the cot leg, sat up, and swung her legs over the edge of the cot. Hal struggled in her grip and almost got loose, but Jolene tightened her fingers around him. Maybe a bit more tightly than was necessary. Hal’s face turned red. He struggled to draw in breath. Jolene eased the pressure slightly. Hal immediately began trying to speak to her again, but she still couldn’t make out what he was saying.

“Oh, just shut up!”

She’d intentionally pitched her voice at a high level, smirking as it achieved the desired effect. Hal’s fat face crinkled, and he surely would have cupped his mutilated hands over his ears had he been able to work them free of Jolene’s grasp.

Jolene smiled.

“Well, shit, I guess this is real.” She gave Hal a slight squeeze, delighting at the way the small amount of pressure made his eyes bug out. “Have to say I like you better this way, you fat sack of fucking ugly-ass shit. You’re easier to handle at pocket size. Although you were pretty damn manageable out in that shed. That was a good time. You know what, though? This has some real nice possibilities.” She nodded. “Yeah. I think I like this even better.”

Hal tried to speak again.

Jolene made a tsk-tsk noise and pinched the sides of his head with the thumb and forefinger of her other hand. “Didn’t I tell you to shut up? I think you might want to obey me, you fucking cocksucker. Unless you want your fat little head squished, I mean.”

Hal’s mouth slammed shut.

Jolene examined the visible parts of his little body with interest, marveling at the minuscule eyes, nose, and mouth. She turned him slightly to see where she’d sliced off one of his ears. She laughed. “Jesus jacked-up Christ on a cracker, this is a fuckin’ trip.” She cast a glance up at the invisible ceiling in the darkness before returning her gaze to little Hal. “I reckon somebody upstairs must like me. I couldn’t have asked for a better present.” She shook her head. “Though I gotta say the way your eyes are glowin’ like that is a mite creepy.” She shuddered before smiling again. “You listen to me, shit stain. I’m gonna put you up to my ear, and you’re gonna tell me how this happened? Got it?”

Hal nodded.

Before she could do that a sound came from outside the cell. It was a metallic sound. A lock turning. Then the corridor lights came on and she heard footsteps clicking down the concrete floor. And voices. A flash of panic sizzled through Jolene. The very strange thing that had happened to her husband still freaked her out, but she did not want to give him up. The opportunity to torture him again, in new and previously unimagined ways, was a dream come true. It was a gift. A beautiful gift from someone, some god the nature of which she couldn’t fathom. And she would not be robbed of it. She considered ducking under the covers again and pretending to be asleep.