[...] Danny had a creepy feeling of watching himself: a gimping, head-injured guy with a right foot full of big white toes anyone could reach out and grab, stumbling through a rotten garden outside a castle full of strangers in a country he didn’t know the name of. A guy at the end of the line is what Danny saw, with no options left. A guy with nothing, or why would he be here?

Another squirt of cold. Danny talked to himself: Get it together. Get. It. Together.

This was how the worm got in. You opened yourself to that kind of thinking and the worm crawled inside you and started to eat and didn’t stop until nothing was left. You saw yourself as a weak powerless guy and it was only a matter of time before everyone agreed you were that guy. Danny had seen it happen. The worm ate people up the way years had eaten away this castle: caving in ceilings, chewing through walls, tunneling under floorboards until even a perfectly renovated hallway with varnished doors and fake candles on the walls had a thousand bugs crawling around a few floors underneath it.