Howard attempted to get up and follow Anita to tell her about his speech difficulties, but his bottom seemed to be firmly stuck to the carpet. Try as he might, he couldn’t free his behind from the carpet. He waved his arms frantically at Anita, but other than smiling and nodding at him as she passed by, she ignored him. Suddenly Howard was seized by an intense thirst. Howard tried again to get up from the carpet and failed. Howard found his helpless condition and thirst so disconcerting that he started to cry. That at least got Anita’s attention. She came to the sound of his wails and stood over him with that damnable knowing smile still on her face. Then she bent over and patted him on the head to comfort him patronizingly the way she would a small child and put an object in his mouth. When he removed it to see what it was, he discovered she had put a pacifier in his mouth. He threw it on the floor in front of him and glared up at her angrily. She smiled sweetly back and ignored the evil look he had bestowed upon her. As his thirst grew, he knew he had to get something to drink before he became dehydrated. When he waved his arms in a panic and pointed to his mouth to signal that he was thirsty, she reached behind herself and brought out a glass filled with a brown liquid.
Howard reached for the glass gratefully only to find it was filled with chocolate milk. Despite his hatred of the sickly sweet stuff, Howard gulped it down in a single draught. As he drank, he became aware of a vaguely defined dark figure looming hugely over the two of them in the background. The thing had no particular outline, only a fuzzily defined semi-transparent boundary where the feeling of power exuded by its presence dropped by several orders of magnitude. Howard had the strong impression that the shadowy thing was terribly amused by his predicament. Within minutes of polishing off the glass of chocolatey milk, he realized he had to pee. The sensation of the cold milk in his stomach descending through his small intestine and putting pressure on his bladder made his urgency too immediate to ignore. He knew he had to get up then and there to go to the bathroom before he lost control of himself.