Peter Winters rolled over in his bed, kicking the covers off and flopping face down, his pillow held in a death grip. He was in what he'd always called the Slumber Valley, that point between fully asleep and fully awake that he'd always hated, but was too lazy to pull out of. His lips smacked wetly, and he felt something cold and slimy brush against his smooth chin; a puddle of drool had accumulated atop his sheets, and he rolled again, onto his back. He nuzzled his chin against his shoulder and wiped the stuff off, and faded back into the Valley.<br/><br/>As he lingered in his own personal morning purgatory, his thoughts ran wild. The last few weeks had been more than passing strange, and even asleep he couldn't shake the memories that plagued him. For more than a month he'd been hearing voices. Not the harmless, amusing kind that just spouted random, weird things from the depths of his subconscious, and not the probably-not-so-harmless kind that told him aliens were taking over the world through subliminal messages in the newspapers. No, these were the kind that told him to run into a burning building and save a kitten, or walk into a fast food restaurant and go to town with a pick axe.<br/><br/>OK, OK, so they hadn't<em>actually </em>told him to do those things, or anything even remotely like it. Yet. But they had been trying to make him do things, things that often quite clearly went against his nature. Several times in the last couple weeks, he'd had to fight off the urge to shoplift, or play some mean-spirited prank on one of his neighbors, or donate the money in his wallet to a children's charity that he passed on the street, or buy a sheath of get-well cards and send them to strangers staying in hospital. Peter realized the latter two were probably strange urges to resist, but he rationalized that if he started giving in to the good urges, there might be nothing to stop him from giving in to the bad ones, as well.<br/><br/>Peter just wasn't the kind of guy this sort of thing happened to. He was a quiet guy, an average guy. No close friends, no real enemies. Not very bright, not too dim. Not quite estranged from his family, but not very close, either. But he was at least certain that mental illness had no place in his family history. No great uncles that turned out to be serial killers, no long-lost distant cousins that claimed to be Shakespeare or Lincoln or whoever was in vogue among the crazy folks these days. He clambered out of bed and shuffled to the bathroom, his eyes still squinted shut, blissfully unaware of the presence of the two figures that followed mere inches behind him.