Time did not slow down. It stopped.
It was not the supernatural, frozen-world stop of his birth. It was a stop inside his head.
In the cold, clear, silent country of his mind, a single, new fact was registered.
He...
The sound of Dickson's palm hitting the shoulder of Ruth's jacket. A flat, insulting thwack.
...touched...
Ruth's small, sharp gasp of surprise. Her foot scraping on the asphalt.
...her.
The world, which had been in high-definition, suddenly snapped into an impossible focus. He could see the individual fibers of wool on Dickson's letterman jacket. He could see a small, fading scar on his knuckle. He could see the way Miller, behind him, was shifting his weight, bored, waiting for the show to be over.
And then... pain.
The amulet.
It wasn't a cool, dead weight anymore. It wasn't a hot brand like in his dream.
It was a conduit.
It was as if someone had jammed a live wire into his sternum. A white-hot, chemical, searing pain. It was not a "hot coal." It was a sun. It was an ignition.
The "cold, clear" silence in his mind shattered.
It wasn't replaced by the roar. It was replaced by a single, focused, note. A sound so pure and so loud it was no longer a sound, but a command. The same command from his nightmare, the same one from the hallway. But it was not a thought. It was a law.
MAKE. HIM. STOP.
The world didn't go red, as he'd always feared.
It went black.
Not a "lights out" black. It was a "suck all the light from the air" black. A negative-image black. The world went monochrome, all grey and ash, and the only "color" he could see was Dickson, who was suddenly, terrifyingly, outlined in a faint, pulsing, dirty-red aura.
He was no longer a spectator.
He was the monster.