Whatever was about to happen here—had
Perry’s voice echoed ominously in memory:
Silas turned right and hurried to the south elevator. It would drop him directly across from the security-room door.
He wondered who was on duty and hoped that it would be a former police officer, which most of them seemed to be. He had not always been a civil-litigation attorney. He had started out as a criminal-defense lawyer, but he hadn’t been any good at it because he couldn’t find much sympathy in himself for most of the human debris he was called upon to defend. He identified with the victims. Everyone deserved a defense, of course, even the worst rapists and murderers. So after a few years, he changed careers, leaving criminal defense to those men who had a nobler attitude and bigger—or colder—hearts than his. But during that first phase of his law career, he learned to talk to cops, nearly all of whom he had liked immeasurably more than he liked his clients.
He had never chatted with cops about time warps—or whatever this might be—nor about not-grub, not-spider monsters. He didn’t know how he was going to do that, how he was going to make the impossible sound like the truth, unless maybe he wasn’t the only one who’d had a curious experience in the Pendleton, unless even the guard had seen something that he could not explain, something that might even have raised the hairs on the nape of his neck.
As Silas reached out to press the elevator-call button, he hesitated, alerted to danger by a strange sound behind the sliding doors, within the shaft.
On the roof, standing at the western parapet, rain streaming off his insulated nylon jacket, blue jeans soaked and feet damp in his saturated boots, Witness was not afraid of the lightning that ripped the black fabric of the sky and revealed the fury on the other side. He hoped that a bolt might strike him, but he doubted he would be lucky enough to die here.
Thus far, the transitions had not occurred at the same hour and minute. He wasn’t able to time the event so precisely that he could appear, like a magician, to speak it into existence with a conjuring word. Indeed, some of the transitions were more than a full day earlier or later than others. But once the fluctuations began, the moment of change was approaching and inevitable.
The house under him now was not the same version of the house in which he lived. Most of the people here were strangers to him, though he knew a great deal about them.
One second to the next, the rain stopped. The rooftop was dry except for the pavers onto which his clothes dripped. With the rain, the city vanished; all gone, the vast wonderful expanse of lights that was the most beautiful thing Witness had ever seen.
The house under him now, under this cloudless sky, was the house he knew, in which he lived, if his existence could be called living.
A moon sailed the heavens, slowly navigating across a sea of stars. He found that lighted vault to be cold and somehow accusing. He did not care to look up, for the sky had none of the charm of the lost city.
The long, barren hill and the moonlit plain beyond were more daunting than the sky. In daylight, the waist- high grass was such a pale shade of green that it appeared almost white, but under the lunar lamp, it looked slightly greener because it glowed faintly, as though phosphorescent. The night was still, hushed, and though no breeze blew to stir the great meadow, the luminous grass swayed anyway, toward the south and then toward the north, south and north, changing direction with such precise timing that it might have been the feathery pelt of some sleeping leviathan, influenced by the sleeper’s inhalations and exhalations. The grassy plain did not appeal either in dawn’s light or in daylight, neither at twilight nor now at night. It was disturbingly unnatural in its ceaseless motion and even more unnatural if wind teased it into an arrhythmic frenzy, when it fluttered not in the manner of storm-tossed pasture but as if it were the hair of a furious medusa, every blade like a thin flat wriggling serpent.
Living in that trackless veldt were all manner of creatures, which could not correctly be called animals, though they were mobile and always seeking. They were less the work of nature than they were denizens of demented dreams, as if imagined into existence by insane gods. This legion of voracious species fed on one another but also cannibalized their own kind, and the grass devoured all of them when it wished.
The immense meadow and its inhabitants were ruled over by the trees, from the roots of which the grass shrank and under the boughs of which the ground remained as bare as salted soil. Each tree rose high and spread wide, not with grace but with tortured grasping limbs as jagged as fractures in quake-shocked stone. A few stood alone, but most were in widely separated clusters; each group grew in a circle with a clearing at the center, as any coven might convene around a cauldron. They were black from roots to highest twigs. The bark of their trunks was fissured, and in the deepest of those cracks shone a moist red tissue, like blood-rich meat under the crust of a charred cadaver. In the spring the trees did not bud and flower, nor did they produce leaves, but they fruited. In the first warmth of the season, blisters appeared on the branches, swelled, depended like teardrops, and matured until they were twelve inches long and five to six inches in diameter at their widest point, with mottled-gray peels. They were fruit not biologically but metaphorically, for they didn’t have seeds and were not sweet. When ripe, usually on a night with a fierce moon that appeared to metallize the grassland, the huge trees dropped their fruit, which in falling flew, because this was less a harvest than a birthing. For a while the sky bristled with teeth. When the weak had fed upon the strong, the remaining flock winged west, as if harried toward the darkness by the dawn. Wherever they went, whatever they did when they got there, Witness didn’t know, and they never returned to this territory.
In
One second to the next, the storm began again, the dry silence and then the rush of rain, the stars bright and then no stars at all. With the wet weather came the glimmering city, and Witness stood once more not on the roof of the Pendleton in which he lived but on the roof of the Pendleton in which mostly strangers resided. They were the same building but they were far apart in time.
The next fluctuation or the one after that, or the one after
