The moment their fingers touched, Jenny felt a surge of something — like electricity, but not quite — flow between her and her grandmother. The room started to fade away. She tried to look over at Josh, but it was as though she was seeing him from a great distance. The little dog he was cradling in his arms was somehow, impossibly, huge. Her mind could not make any sense of it.
She turned to find Mr. Symarian. But where their teacher had been, she now saw something — something unspeakable. It was as though her brain could not reconcile the unearthly shape that stood before her. She could feel her mind trying to match it to something, anything, from her experience, and failing utterly.
Jenny quickly looked away, and attempted to turn her gaze back toward her grandmother, but the directions were all wrong. She was somehow staring downward, into a long dark spiraling tunnel. She felt herself start to tumble forward, and then she was falling. Somewhere in the back of her mind she realized she was screaming.
The last thought she had, before losing consciousness, was about how odd it was that her scream didn’t seem to make any sound. No, she decided, just before everything went black, not any sound at all.