David’s supernatural visions intensify. He sees a grotesque hallucination of a Ronald McDonald sign eating its own intestines, hears terrible racist, bigoted song lyrics on the radio change to taunt him personally, and Molly runs away. The stress contributes to Jennifer leaving him. 

One day, John’s uncle, a police officer named Drake, calls them to a crime scene. Local weatherman Ken Phillipe has been killed, and the culprit appears to be David’s dog, Molly.

They arrive to find Molly possessed, floating in the air. She speaks, saying, “I serve none but Korrok” (183). David destroys her by feeding her a candy imprinted with Bible verses called a TestaMint, causing her to explode and confirming that she was possessed by a demon. He notices a symbol on the pad of her paw, something like the mathematical symbol for pi, but sideways. A witness, Krissy Lovelace, explains that Molly went berserk a second after sports reporter Danny Wexler petted her and drove away; Krissy said Wexler was wearing a black, shadow-like mask when he first drove up, though it appeared he took it off by the time he stopped. That night, David and John see Wexler on the news; his face is a void of pure shadow, and he delivers a bizarre, racist tirade that concludes with, “All hail Korrok” (191).

David and John decide to investigate Wexler. At his empty apartment, they find a vial of soy sauce under his bed, mailed to Channel 5 reporter Kathy Bortz by the late Big Jim Sullivan; the reporter apparently discarded it, and Wexler fished it out of the trash. They also find a video Wexler made, confessing that a malevolent entity has possessed him. 

As they watch, David’s car is stolen by a swarm of cockroaches that forms into a man. The creature telepathically taunts David about the powerful entity Korrok before driving off. With Krissy’s help, they chase the car and cause it to crash. A black shadow figure emerges from the wreck and disappears.

Immediately after, Molly reappears alive and apparently unharmed and leads them to the local abandoned shopping mall. Inside, they find mutated, monstrous creatures. David kills a deer-like beast, which dissolves, leaving behind a box of shotgun shells. Moments later, John finds a shotgun in a nearby crate.

David, John, and Krissy fight and kill two fire-breathing coyotes. One of the creatures drops a key. They soon find Danny Wexler, who is gravely ill. He begs them to let the entity repossess him, then kill him and burn the mall to destroy the “doors” he claims are hidden there. He collapses before he can explain further. 

Using the key, they enter the mall’s food court and find a large, abstract mural painted like the one in Robert Marley’s trailer. A shadow entity flies into David and possesses him.

Under the entity’s control, David advances on Krissy with a utility knife, then spins and shoots John in the head when John runs toward him. Krissy uses a taser to incapacitate David.

Krissy places her Christian cross necklace on David, which forces the entity out of his body and into hers. Unlike David, she is able to fight it off. The entity’s violent expulsion causes the entire food court ceiling to collapse. They all escape outside, and paramedics arrive and take Wexler to the hospital. Krissy says that Wexler told her to go to his house and watch a videotape.

Later, at Wexler’s apartment, they watch his videotape; the recording of Wexler responds in real time to Krissy’s spoken comments and addresses David directly, his eyes following David when he moves across the room. He tells David that he’s “under the eye” (226).

The narrative returns to the frame story, in which David and reporter Arnie Blondestone are parked in the abandoned mall parking lot. Arnie still doesn’t believe David, but he continues to listen.

David tells Arnie about how he became paranoid after the incident with Wexler at the mall, convinced that he is being watched through his television. One night, he came home after a double shift to find the drawer where he kept his gun open. He searches the house but finds no one, and he is shocked to discover the gun in his hand. He realizes that he is colder than he should be, and he realizes that he has been outside for about a half hour but doesn’t remember it. 

His confusion turns to dread when John calls to report that Amy Sullivan, Big Jim’s sister, is missing. John tells David to come to Amy’s house.

When David leaves his house, he notices a bizarre, looping trail of his own footprints in the snow. He counts his bullets and realizes that one is missing. 

David drives to Amy’s house, which is in a neglected part of town next to a large manufacturing plant. John is there with his uncle Drake, who called when some strange things happened at the house when he responded to the call about Amy missing. Drake leaves, and they go inside, where David is shocked to see Molly the dog. John shows David a jellyfish-like being that is floating around the ceiling light fixture. There is also what looks like a bag of fat in the bathroom.

As they investigate the house, they notice that Amy set up cameras in her bedroom, as if she was scared. John starts watching the webcam footage to see who took Amy, and David begins to worry that he did it during the half-hour of missing time. He puts his hand in his pocket and finds the key to his toolshed and worries about what he might have put in there.

John decides to try to get information from the jellyfish creature, and David leaves to find out what is in his toolshed (although he doesn’t tell John the real reason he is going home). While he is driving, a hand reaches from the backseat and puts a large, leech-like creature on David’s neck. 

A voice tells him to keep driving, and the man in the backseat introduces himself as Robert North. He asks David why he is going home, but instead of answering, David presses the lit cigarette lighter into the leech creature and throws it out of the car. They stop, and David finds his gun. He gets out to stomp the leech, and when he gets back in the car, North is gone.

David goes home and goes into his toolshed. He sees a body wrapped in a tarp. He is sure that he killed Amy, but instead of unwrapping the body and looking, he relocks the shed.

Looking back on the events of that night, the narrator, David, states that if he had actually opened the tarp in his toolshed to see what was inside, he would have been so horrified that he would have immediately killed himself.

When he returns to Amy’s house, David plans to tell John about the body in his toolshed, but they quickly realize that someone else is in the house. They discover that Amy is there and ask her about the webcams. She tells them that she has been missing time, and this most recent one was the longest yet. Relieved that Amy is alive but still burdened by what he believes is a corpse in his shed, David confesses to John that he killed someone. Amy then leads them to the basement, where they discover her late brother, Big Jim, had built an extremely realistic monster prop and compiled extensive research on shadow people and an invasion from a parallel dimension.

That night, David has a vivid dream in which Robert North paralyzes him and forces him to eat a large spider. The next day, he meets John at Denny’s. John hands him a printout of the chat log from Amy’s computer—obtained from Amy that morning—from the night she vanished. As David reads it, he is overcome with the feeling that a final, terrible confrontation is imminent.