grass!”
“Honey, oh, for God’s sake!”
The footprints came closer and closer.
Then he reached out, and he touched the air where one of them must be. He felt a shoulder, part of an arm.
And then he saw them. Where he touched them, he could see a knit shirt, part of a neck, then a muscular forearm. “My God, look, look!” He reached, he touched the face—and saw glazed, empty eyes, a slack mouth— male—but the man went on, the man did not seem to be aware of him at all. “Winnie,” he cried, “Lindy! Trevor!”
Then he heard Martin, heard him close, heard him whispering “baby, baby please, please wake up baby —”
He reached out—and there, under his hand was a khaki jacket, then a face—Martin, richly alive, totally there! “Martin! Martin, you can’t help them, you were all tricked, you should hide, you need to hide! Oh, Christ, somebody in the government is on the dark side, Martin, can’t you see that, they want this to happen!”
But Martin was gone. All around him, the wanderers continued passing, and he kept reaching out to them. He touched Mrs. Sweet from the drugstore, her gaping face, and the old pastor Reginald Todd, and then Doctor Willerson—the town doctor, reduced to this. “Oh, Jesus, Jesus—”
Then Brooke was there, and she slapped him so hard there was a flash and pain.
He grabbed her wrist. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”
“With me? You’re naked in the back yard, for God’s sake, and look, you have an audience—”
There, face pale in his bedroom window, stood Nick, staring down on the scene. His expression was grave, like a judge at a sentencing. Martin took the robe she’d brought and covered himself, and went in through the shuffling sounds of the wanderers, and Martin’s cries, and the pleading, praying voices of the followers, and the last thing he heard was a child’s voice calling for his mother and his father to stop, in the choked tones of a twelve- year-old trying to be brave.
“Get in here, Wiley, you’re scaring me!” She tugged at him and he went with her. As they returned to the house, he waved up at his son. Inside, she threw her arms around him. “Wiley, what is it? What’s happening to you?”
“The story’s got me. It’s drowning me.”
“Wiley, you were warned.”
“I can’t stop it!”
“I want you to see Doctor Crutchfield. I want you to see him today.”
“He’s a wanderer.”
“A what? What does that mean?”
“No, of course not, that’s Doctor Willerson in the two moon world, I’m sorry. I’ll call him.”
“What in hell is a two-moon world?”
“A place of great beauty, my wife, that is being raped by creatures without mercy.” He grabbed her shoulders. “And they are coming. They are coming here.”
She stepped back. She went pale.
“In your heart,” he said, “you know.”
“I do not know!”
Then Nick came downstairs. He looked up at them. “I dreamed awful things,” he said, “then I woke up and it was worse.”
“What was your dream, son?”
“I dreamed we left, Dad. You tried, but you couldn’t go where we were going, and we couldn’t stop, and then I woke up and you were in the yard, and what’s wrong, Dad?”
Brooke gave Wiley a hard, hard look, and coming from his gentle Brooke, that meant a lot. It meant she thought he had hurt her boy.
Then Kelsey came down, flitting along in her pink nightie, her curls bobbing. She looked just as darling as the most wonderful little girl picture ever taken, and he opened his arms and lifted her to him. “I had a bad dream,” she said, “I dreamed me and Mommy got leashes put on us and we had to walk all night and forever and I got so tired but I couldn’t stop, and you ran along behind us praying and he had a bottle of Ayers water. I thought we didn’t get bottled water. I thought it was too expensive.”
“Now, see,” Brooke said, “that proves it was just a dream, because there’s Evian and Perrier and Ozark and lots of other kinds of water, but there is no Ayers water.”
“There isn’t?”
“Not in this universe,” Wiley told her, and kissed her button nose. As best he could, he concealed what was almost a sickness of fear. In the other universe they had Ayers water, he’d seen bottles among peoples’ provisions in the church.
But how had Kelsey known about it? How indeed, unless the wall that separated the two human universes was also breaking down, just as he had feared it would, and hell was getting closer fast.
They all went into the kitchen, and he turned on the radio and he and Brooke made breakfast. His mind was completely focused on one thing—how had Kelsey known? What might be about to happen?
“You’re staring,” she said.
He shook his head. “Don’t be mad at me.”
“No.”
“It’s not even a big deal in physics. Parallel universes are real.”
“I’m sure they are. I’m also sure that they don’t cause people—just generally speaking, I mean—to leap around naked in their backyards. Your appointment with Crutchfield is at eight-thirty, so you’d better get rolling.”
“Eight-thirty? You’re kidding.”
She looked at him, and the fire in her eyes actually reassured him. He wanted to feel like somebody was in control, because he was not in control.
He gobbled down the last of his eggs and went up to dress. Maybe this would be actually be good, maybe all that was happening here was that he was losing his grip—which, frankly, would be a hell of a lot better than what he feared.
Moving fast, he managed get to town just in time.
As he drove along the familiar streets, he kept expecting to see little knots of tragic people, but all he did see was a small Kansas community in its mild prosperity, a gentle bustle in the streets, even a recent addition, the Starbucks. Nobody seemed strange, nobody had a vacant look.
He drove past Third Street Methodist. The church was closed, but it looked perfectly normal. Sylvester was on the walkway with a trowel, turning soil in a flower bed. Wiley slowed down and waved. “Hey there, Syl.”
Syl waved back. Nothing unusual.
Of course not, you fool. Things are fine in this universe—for now.
When he arrived at Crutchfield’s office, which was a walk-up above the Danforth Meat Market, one of the few small businesses hanging on in downtown, it was twenty to nine. “Sorry I’m late, Marla.”
“Brooke says you’ve gone around the bend.”
“That would be true.”
“Then I’ll remind you that I’ve got Mace.”
He’d come on to the girl with the porcelain skin and the bright green eyes. But all in fun, of course. He would never cheat on Brooke. But with that black hair and that creamy skin, Marla did inspire.
Crutchfield looked normal, also. White hair, tiny glasses, a sense of therapeutic fog clinging to him.
“So you were capering around in the back yard naked. What say we start there?”
“Look, I’ve got—oh, Christ. I’ve got something happening that I can’t even begin to understand.”
“I think Brooke is having exactly the same problem.”
“It feels to me as if something enormous is happening that has to do with what I am writing, and it is not good, this huge thing, but I cannot stop writing about it even if I want to. I’m a sort of infernal machine.”
“You’re a machine?”
“Not in control of my own body. Not channeling, it’s not like that. I sit there and I type. Automatic typing.
