Beyond her, Sammy disappeared around the corner.
That was when everything stopped.
Growling uphill in the southbound lane of the coast highway, a tow truck, evidently on the way to help a stranded motorist, halted on the proverbial dime but without a squeal of brakes. Its laboring engine fell silent from one second to the next, without a lingering chug, cough, or sputter, though its headlights still shone.
Simultaneously a Volvo about a hundred feet behind the truck also stopped and fell mute.
In the same instant, the breeze died. It didn’t wane gradually or sputter out, but ceased as quickly as if a cosmic fan had been switched off. Thousands upon thousands of leaves stopped rustling as one.
Precisely in time with the silencing of traffic and vegetation, the music from the bar cut off mid-note.
Harry almost felt he had gone stone deaf. He’d never known a silence as profound in a controlled interior environment, let alone outdoors where the life of a town and the myriad background noises of the natural world produced a ceaseless atonal symphony even in the comparative stillness between midnight and dawn. He could not hear himself breathe, then realized that his own contribution to the preternatural hush was voluntary; he was simply so stunned by the change in the world that he was holding his breath.
In addition to sound, motion had been stolen from the night. The tow truck and Volvo were not the only things that had come to a complete standstill. The curbside trees and the shrubbery along the front of The Green House seemed to have been flash-frozen. The leaves had not merely stopped rustling, but had entirely ceased moving; they could not have been more still if sculpted from stone. Overhanging the windows of The Green House, the scalloped valances on the canvas awnings had been fluttering in the breeze, but they had gone rigid in mid- flutter; now they were as stiff as if formed from sheet metal. Across the street, the blinking arrow on a neon sign had frozen in the ON position.
Connie said, “Harry?”
He started, as he would have at any sound except the intimate muffled thumping of his own racing heart.
He saw his own confusion and anxiety mirrored in her face.
Moving to his side, she said, “What’s happening?”
Her voice, aside from having an uncharacteristic tremor, was vaguely different from what it had been, slightly flat in tone and marginally less inflective.
“Damned if I know,” he told her.
His voice sounded much like hers, as though it issued from a mechanical device that was extremely clever — but not quite perfect — at reproducing the speech of any human being.
“It’s got to be him doing it,” she said.
Harry agreed. “Somehow.”
“Ticktock.”
“Yeah.”
“Shit, this is crazy.”
“No argument from me.”
She started to draw her revolver, then let the gun slide back into her shoulder holster. An ominous mood infused the scene, an air of fearful expectation. But for the moment, at least, there was nothing at which to shoot.
“Where is the creep?” she wondered.
“I have a hunch he’ll show up.”
“No points for that one.” Indicating the tow truck out in the street, she said, “For God’s sake… look at that.”
At first he thought Connie was just remarking on the fact that the vehicle had mysteriously halted like everything else, but then he realized what sight had pushed the needle higher on her astonishment meter. The air had been just cool enough to cause vehicle exhaust (but not their breath) to condense in pale plumes; those thin puffs of mist hung in midair behind the tow truck, neither dispersing nor evaporating as vapor should have done. He saw another but barely visible gray-white ghost suspended behind the tail pipe of the more distant Volvo.
Now that he was primed to look for them, similar wonders became evident on all sides, and he pointed them out to her. A few pieces of light debris — gum and candy wrappers, a splintered portion of a popsicle stick, dry brown leaves, a tangled length of red yarn — had been swept up by the breeze; although no draught remained to support the items, they were still aloft, as if the air had abruptly turned to purest crystal around them and had trapped them motionless for eternity. Within arm’s reach and just a foot higher than his head, two late-winter moths as white as snowflakes hung immotive, their wings soft and pearl-smooth in the glow of the streetlamp.
Connie tapped her wristwatch, then showed it to Harry. It was a traditional-style Timex with a round dial and hands, including not only hour and minute hands but a red second hand. It was stopped at 1:29 plus sixteen seconds.
Harry checked his own watch, which had a digital readout. It also showed 1:29, and the tiny blinking dot that took the place of a second hand was burning steadily, no longer counting off each sixtieth of a minute.
“Time has…” Connie was unable to finish the sentence. She surveyed the silent street in amazement, swallowed hard, and finally found her voice: “Time has stopped… just stopped. Is that it?”
“Say what?”
“Stopped for the rest of the world but not for us?”
“Time doesn’t… it can’t… just stop.”
“Then what?”
Physics had never been his favorite subject. And though he had some affinity for the sciences because of their ceaseless search for order in the universe, he was not as scientifically literate as he should have been in an age when science was king. However, he had retained enough of his teachers’ lectures and had watched enough PBS specials and had read enough bestseller-list books of popularized science to know that what Connie had said did not explain numerous aspects of what was happening to them.
For one thing, if time had really stopped, why were they still conscious? How could they be aware of the phenomenon? Why weren’t they frozen in that last moment of forward-moving time just as the airborne litter was, as the moths were?
“No,” he said shakily, “it’s not that simple. If time stopped,
Reacting to that thought, they both took deep and grateful breaths. The air did have a faint chemical taste, as slightly odd in its way as the timbre of their voices, but it seemed capable of sustaining life.
“And light,” Harry said. “Light waves would stop moving. No waves to register with our eyes. So how could we see anything but darkness?”
In fact, the effect of time coming to a stop probably would be infinitely more catastrophic than the stillness and silence that had descended on the world that March night. It seemed to him that time and matter were inseparable parts of creation, and if the flow of time were cut off, matter would instantly cease to exist. The universe would implode — wouldn’t it? — crash back in on itself, into a tiny ball of extremely dense…well, whatever the hell dense stuff it was before it had exploded to create the universe.
Connie stood on her toes, reached up, and gently pinched the wing of one of the moths between thumb and forefinger. She settled back on her heels and brought the insect in front of her face for a closer inspection.
Harry had not been sure if she would be able to alter the bug’s position or not. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the moth had hung immovably on the dead-calm air, as fixed in place as a metal moth welded to a steel wall.
“Not as soft as a moth should be,” she said. “Feels like it’s made out of taffeta… or starched fabric of some kind.”
When she opened her fingers, letting go of the wing, the moth hung in the air where she had released it.
Harry gently batted the bug with the back of his hand, and watched with fascination as it tumbled a few inches before coming to rest in the air again. It was as motionless as it had been before they had toyed with it, just in a new position.
The ways in which they affected things appeared to be pretty much normal. Their shadows moved when
