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[Out of Milliways: Major Briggs has a bad feeling, and Harry Truman gets bad news.]

His black eye is fading, and the cut just under his eye is healing. On its own.

Cooper has a chess set at a table, and he's brooding over it.

If, of course, by 'brooding' you mean 'eyeing it while he drinks his coffee'.

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Cooper reaches out one hand and touches the pawn. Steadying it.

"There's a song about you."

The pawn bleeds on his fingers and rolls slightly to the side against them. Blood and fluids that were once organs, delicate organs, slip out and re-coat his flesh.

There's silence that spans almost a minute on the tape.

Then his voice sounds weirdly in between laughter and choking.

"You're made of plastic."

Is it?

Audrey's skin is black and slick with blood and the effects of a hollow-point, three of them, through flesh. She clings with tiny hands to the ridges of his fingers and whimpers in a voice too small to hear.

"Shh."

She's -- it's --

Cooper cradles Audrey-not-Audrey in the palm of one hand. Whether it's real, whether it's not --

Does it make a difference, in the end?

Who's not a pawn in this game?

She whimpers again, clutching him, and then sighs one of those sighs that is just too big to fit inside a body before relaxing and going still.

Another pawn pushes Harry S. Truman's hat back on his head and glances around the chessboard in confusion.

"I'm not God," he says to Harry, Audrey still in the palm of his hand. "I'm not."

It doesn't occur to him to wonder why he's talking to a pawn.

Harry looks up toward Dale's face and begins to speak. His voice is tiny, not tinny, just tiny and distant.

Its a long way from a dream to waking life. Its a long way from Milliways to Twin Peaks. Its a long way from dream to nightmare.

It is, unfortunately, not so long a way from waking to Nightmare.

Harry's head slides off his neck and bounces along a line of black squares in much the way a bishop might move. A flower of red blossoms each time it touches down.

"We're supposed to keep this from happening."

To the listener this sounds the most calm and rational of anything he's said thus far.

Right now Cooper is leaning forward and down, looking very closely at the flowers.

The forms are that of the Napthalot, which once adorned Moiraine's hair like a crown of stars caught by loving hands, shining in her hair and letting a sweet smell that holds the secrets of midnight in it into the air.

Deputy Hawk bends down to examine one of the flowers as well, frowning slightly.

He's seen these before.

"But not in San Francisco," he tells Hawk, confiding in him.

Hawk looks at him with confusion and rubs the blood between his finger tips. He says something about the path, and something about a door, but the quietness of his voice when compared to Dale's ears makes most of it fade into nothing.

Then he rises, slowly, and his hands clutch at the air near his neck as he kicks in frantic appeal.

Urgent:

"You're not sinking."

Of course he is not. He's choking. And hanging limp in the air before falling back to the board.

The other pawns take shape. Lucy. Andy. Major Briggs.

He looks down at the Major, returns his salute.

Looks at Andy and Lucy, as he reaches out to Hawk.

Whispers, "You can't sink. You don't have any reason to sink."

The limp body doesn't respond. Lucy wraps her arms around her stomach and keens as her womb (baby) is ripped from her and Andy holds her while his black plastic lips foam with reaction to whatever poison he was fed.

The Major takes a step forward, into a black square which grows red curtains and starts to swallow him whole.

He can't save them all.

He can't save them all.

To Major Briggs: "Safe journey."

When he's gone: "That's a lie."

He can't, apparently, save any of them.

Caroline Earle as the black queen. Ed Hurley as a knight. Windom Earle; a rook. The other bishop is Norma Jennings. The other knight, Pete Martell. Jean Renault is the second rook.

The white queen has dark hair, and holds white flowers in her arms.

"They called you the hyacinth girl."

His head turns to Jean Renault.

And Cooper says, apologetically, "I think we are in rats' alley where the dead men lost their bones."

And then, at the last, with love -- a sigh --

"Caroline."

Caroline died by a knife, of course. Pete drowns in the white square with his fishing hat floating above him. Norma is burned, as though in the ovens that her pies come from.

The deaths happen faster, as though with every movement that Dale fails to make an exponentially larger number of people suffer.

Jean Renault falls. Ed Hurley's shield is smashed and he is impaled by an unseen lance.

Windom Earle takes flight and beats black wings on his path toward Dale's eyes.

The White Queen takes a step forward, and she scatters flowers white and blue when she does.

"No -- "

His hand flies in front of his eyes.

"This. Isn't. Happening."

He's angry.

The bartender Eddie Dean falls from his place as white knight, bleeding from a wound in or above the eye. River Tam looks at him curiously from her place six squares over before she slumps as a sword is pulled from her chest and used to behead Anthy, who stands as pawn before her.

The rook marked by Arithon s'Ffalenn is cut at the back of the neck; his fall broken by the body of Avar s'Ffalenn who bleeds out from an arrow to the side of his neck.

Merriman stands with robes of an Oxford don on a Bishop's square, and sends light into the blackness which eats him from the bottom up as Tom Riddle, touched by that same darkness, laughs in a manic joy while his body warps away from human and his hard-won soul is lost..

On the black square, the angel's wings take on that tint and his eyes stripe like a snake's. Jack Bauer, rook, writhes in the grasp of some disease that cracks his joints with the fierce spasms; it can only be a creation of man.

Mordred's life bubbles away at the end of a crystal sword held by Bran, even as the albino boy's sweater is stained by his brother's matching weapon. They cry with the angry tears of young men; disgusted by their weakness even as they fail to stop what they do.

Faith stares down at the stake in her chest with a bemused and uncomprehending look; this is what she did, not what should be done to her.

And Raven. Raven is made of dust and dreams and Raven does not remember much of what he is. Perhaps this thing is better that way. Raven remembers. It seems he would rather be dead.

Those are

(birds)

pearls that were his eyes.

"Shantih." (The word is almost cold.)

That corpse you planted last year in your garden, has it begun to sprout?

"Shantih."

Will it bloom this year? Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

(With finality.)

"Shantih."

The black king is Dale, his fingers still surrounding the cool black body of Audrey Horne are stiff and plastic.

A white claw caresses the white Queen's hair, lovingly, and he says,

And the pieces are chess pieces broken and tattered while Dale's black skin falls from him in chunks to become fine black dust. Audrey Horne still curls in his hand, begging silently for protection from what killed her.

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