From the "Penance" section. p.57-60

An Excerpt.

The other Roaches hardly noticed him waltzing past as they were all too absorbed by their own psychosis.  Even Dewey was too preoccupied tumbling off the couch cushion when the house produced another violent jolt, and he would have remembered the man he had ordered to be put to death less than two hours previously.

“We need to talk,” the thing that impersonated my good friend told me as he lifted me with a mythical strength and shuffled me across the parlor towards the foyer.

I responded with some kind of gurgling or cough, choking on my own fear.  The world spun around me fast as the house flexed its muscles.  It was like it was prepared to catapult itself into the stratosphere-- to blast off from the confines of the city into oblivion and take us all with.

“Too late for me,” the thing that resembled Tweak told me, “but you can still make it out alive.”

“I don’t think anyone gets out alive,” I said.

“You can.  It’s not you they want.  It’s them.  And they are coming.  They don’t give a rip about you, but if you get stay, you will suffer a fate worse than death.”  A chunk of his cheek fell off and landed with a dull thud onto the floor of the foyer.  He picked it back up nonchalantly and slapped it on his face like it was play-doh.

I stared into a pair of eyes I thought seemed like Tweak’s, but they looked softer, milky, like they were only there for show and he was using something more evolved to see what he never would have if he were alive.  “Tweak!”  I exclaimed.  “Is it really you?”

“Hell to pay,” he whispered as he had been all night.

I let out a shriek of my own, but quickly covered my mouth as if it were impolite.  “You can’t be you,” I reasoned, seriously beginning to doubt my own sanity.  “You’re back on Seventh Street, I saw you, I--  no-- Tweaker--  I’m sorry.  I mean-- it wasn’t supposed to be that way.  You ain’t Tweak.  Are you?”

“Listen to me, Hadley.  Listen to me good.  Hell is coming up and there is no way to stop it.  You know the front line is already here.”

“There’s no one here but Roaches,” I shook my head.

“Look at me,” his voice changed, as did the pigment of his skin.  It turned to normal looking flesh and then back to gray, right before my eyes.

I shook my head again and buried it into the ripped sleeve of his jacket, not wanting to believe.

“LOOK AT ME!” his voice growled.  He took such a hard grip of my head I thought he had slipped it into a vice.  He aimed my face back toward the parlor where the Roaches were running around and slipping in their hot bloodbath like chickens with their heads cut off.  If the insanity of the situation was taken out of the equation, it would have looked quite comical, almost cartoonish.

But that was not what Tweak wanted me to see.  It was the cold blobs of darkness that bent the light.  They floated around the room like Chinese lanterns in a jet black sky.  One at the bottom of the stairway merged with one near Dewey on the floor.  Another bounced playfully around the kitchen area and joined forces with one that buzzed the three rolling around on the floor trying to escape the hot springs blood reservoir.

“They want you to see,” his voice sounded other worldly, like the voice of a Neptune god or a rabid demon.  “In fact, they want everyone to see,” he turned me around to face the front door.  The wall that faced Grove Street was bending and shifting its shape.  A small light blistered from the bending drywall and old planks that made up the interior and fractured into several pieces.  It emitted some kind of light, nothing like the one that blinded us before, but a light that defied all logic.  In place of the wall, the house was developing some kind of crystal clear window.  As the house creaked and groaned from the growing pains soon the entire wall on both sides of the front door was one large viewing window like the thick glass at the zoo.

“The stage has been set,” Tweak continued in his demonic register.  “The only question left for you, Hadley, is which side do you want to be on?”

It was enough for me.  I escaped his grasp hard and ran face first into the door.  I felt the bridge of my nose bend, but not break.  Blood spurted out between my fingers just as I grabbed it.  The pain was traumatic, but bearable.  After a few moments, I felt the inhuman strength of my friend once more as he practically tore the front door off his hinges and propelled me out into the city night.  I staggered a bit and fell again on the front walk, tasting curb and more blood than I cared to swallow.  When that didn’t seem satisfactory, he floated (not walked) out the front door and launched me farther up the walk until I was near the broken and uneven sidewalk that paralleled Grove Street.

The first thing I noticed besides the old familiar salty smell of the city was how much warmer it was outside, even for an October night.