77 Shadow Street

corpse of Vernon Klick, who didn’t have the highest standards of personal hygiene. As the lemony moisture evaporated from his fingers, Mickey felt immeasurably better.

How wonderful to be reminded that sensation was everything, that it was the only thing, the purpose of existence. Since the Pendleton had inexplicably changed, for the past half hour, Mickey had been trying to think through what might have happened, the whole cause-and-effect business. He’d been brooding incessantly about what he should do, and frankly it had all been too much, so much thinking, thinking, thinking, and no feeling. His mother could be a thinker and yet always remember that sensation was everything. Mickey simply wasn’t equipped to think a lot and still feel.

The limp and drying towelette looked sad now, mundane, nearly all the magic gone out of it, almost as dreary as this new world. He rolled it into a ball and held it on the palm of his right hand, wondering if there might be any more use he could make of it, any more sensation he could extract from it.

He supposed that it might have a lemon taste and might be worth chewing on, though he didn’t think swallowing it would be a pleasure. But then he remembered that, since he scrubbed his hands, the paper bore traces of Vernon Klick’s grime, which made it unappetizing.

As he dropped the sad-looking towelette, a new thought occurred to Mickey even though he was trying not to think so much. He wondered if he might be insane. He did feel a little bit like he had stepped off a ledge and was in slow free fall. Losing his mother had been a terrible shock, the kind of loss that might destabilize anyone, and having to kill his own brother without being paid for it stressed him perhaps more than he knew. If he’d lost his mind, that might explain why the world had changed: It might all be a delusion. The world might be exactly as it had always been; but he saw it differently now because he had slipped over the edge of reason.

This was such a big and difficult and daunting thought that Mickey became very still as he considered it.

Just as he froze, the voices in the walls fell silent. They didn’t fade away like they had faded in, but they abruptly ceased talking.

He had the impression that this entire world, whether real or illusion, had just stopped to think hard about something, had been astonished by a new thought, exactly as he had been, and was busily mapping out the ramifications if it should be true, the implications branching on and on.

Bailey Hawks

As Silas and Kirby searched one wing of the Cupp apartment, Bailey searched the other. He was half sick with dread, clearing each doorway and turning every corner with an expectation of one kind of horrific discovery or another. They should have all gone through the Pendleton together. They should never have separated, even if such a large search party would have been awkward and more vulnerable to assault. He felt that he had failed them, and the memory of his mother’s death inevitably pierced him.

By the time they returned simultaneously to the living room, they had found no trace of the missing women and children, or the cats. They had discovered nothing different from before except two piles of nanosludge.

Tom Tran and Padmini stood side by side at the western windows, fascinated by the moonlit plain of massive black trees and luminous grass.

As Bailey, Silas, and Kirby worriedly discussed what to do next, Padmini said, “It’s stopped.”

“All of a sudden,” Tom said.

At the windows, Bailey saw that the grass, always before swaying, now stood tall and stiff, utterly motionless.

“There were some flying things in the distance,” Padmini said. “You couldn’t see them too clearly, but they all fell to the ground at the moment the grass stopped swaying.”

In motion, the strange landscape had been haunting, the rhythm of the grass like the mesmerizing back-and- forth of an arcing blade in a dream of Death the harvester, like the slow-motion dancers or the languid waves of a silent sea in the time-stalled world of sleep. But this breathless stillness was haunting, too, in its completeness. Bailey had never seen nature come to such a perfect stop, as if a spell had been cast upon it, everything turned to ice and stone in the cold light of the moon.

He remembered what the undying man had said in the basement hallway: … all life has become one. The One. Many individuals, one consciousness.

This frozen vista might have suggested to Bailey that the One had suddenly gone to sleep, but there was a sense of expectation to the scene, not merely an expectation that he inferred but one that was clearly implied. The entire land, every living thing within view, seemed to have been struck by the same intention and now considered whether and how to act upon it.

The others felt it, too, for Padmini said, “Something’s going to happen.”

Tom Tran said, “Dr. Ignis?”

“I don’t know,” Kirby said. “I can’t guess.”

The One prepared itself for something.

One

I can sing or speak from within the walls in any of billions of voices, in any of numerous languages, for I contain the memories of all whom I have killed. Their souls, should they have any, are gone, but their memories are forever suspended in me, in time, in the moment of their death. Memories are data. Souls are less than vapor. I offer the only kind of immortality that matters.

Time. I pause in all my manifestations. Across my world, the killing stops and nothing is reborn. For a moment, I cannot attend to those functions as I consider the ways of time.

Time is a treacherous thing. I exist here in my time, but the steps necessary to ensure my creation have not yet been taken in your time. Although killing has always abetted my plans and has thus far ensured my dominion of the earth, I suspect that I should spare a few more of the current crop of Pendleton residents than I had intended. The boy will still be mine to devour, and the ex-marine. Perhaps a third. Even I, the prince of this world, must in this situation proceed with caution, for all is at stake.