Tom, however, has found his limit. Badly out of breath, he stops running and drops to his knees, clutching his sides and heaving for air. The floor carries him backwards ten or fifteen feet more and then for no apparent reason stops. Only the walls and ceiling continue their drunken dance around him, stretching, bending, even tilting.

When Navidson returns to the window, he cannot believe his brother is standing still. Unfortunately, as Tom demonstrates, whenever he takes one step forward, the floor drags him two steps back. Navidson quickly begins to crawl through the window, and oddly enough the walls and ceiling almost instantly cease their oscillations.

What happens next happens so fast it is impossible to realize just how brutal the closure was before it is already over. Only the after-effects create an image commensurate with the shutter like speed with which those walls snapped shut and shattered all the fingers in both of Tom's outstretched hands. Bones "like bread sticks" (Reston's words) [145] now jut out through the flesh. Blood covers his arms, as well as pours from his nose and ears.

For a moment, Tom looks like he is going to slip into shock as he stares at his mutilated body.

"Goddamn it Tom, run!" Navidson shouts.

And Tom tries, though his effort only sweeps him farther away from his brother. This time when he stops, he knows he has no chance.

"Hang on, I'm coming to get you," Navidson yells, as he squeezes himself all the way onto the kitchen counter.

"Aw Christ," Tom mutters.

Navidson looks up.

"What?"

Whereupon Tom disappears.

In less time than it takes for a single frame of film to flash upon a screen, the linoleum floor dissolves, turning the kitchen into a vertical shaft. Tom tumbles into the blackness, not even a scream flung up behind him to mark his fall, Navidson's own scream ineffectually scratching after him, his twin, stolen and finally mocked in silence, not even the sound of Tom hitting the bottom, which is how it might have remained had not some strange and unexpected intrusion, out of the blue, returned Tom's end in the shape of an awful gasp, heard by Reston, perhaps by Karen who suddenly groaned, and certainly by Chad who crouched among the trees, listening and finally watching over the sobs of his father and little sister until something dark and unknown told him to find his mother.