Cell

Clay looked. They all did. A quarter of a mile or so north, Route 160 crested another hill. Standing there and looking at them, his harvard hoodie dirtier than ever but still bright against the gray afternoon sky, was the Raggedy Man. Maybe fifty other phoners surrounded him. He saw them looking. He raised his hand and waved at them twice, side to side, like a man wiping a windshield. Then he turned and began to walk away, his entourage (his flocklet, Clay thought) falling in to either side of him in a kind of trailing Y Soon they were out of sight.

WORM

1

They stopped at a picnic area a little farther up the road. no one was very hungry, but it was a chance for Clay to ask his questions. Ray didn't eat at all, just sat on the lip of a stone barbecue pit downwind and smoked, listening. He added nothing to the conversation. To Clay he seemed utterly disheartened.

'We think we're stopping here,' Dan said, gesturing to the little picnic area with its border of firs and autumn-colored deciduous trees, its babbling brook and its hiking trail with the sign at its head reading IF YOU GO TAKE A MAP! 'We probably are stopping here, because—' He looked at Jordan. 'Would you say we're stopping here, Jordan? You seem to have the clearest perception.'

'Yes,' Jordan said instantly. 'This is real.'

'Yuh,' Ray said, without looking up. 'We're here, all right.' He slapped his hand against the rock of the barbecue pit, and his wedding ring produced a little tink-tink-tink sound. 'This is the real deal. We're together again, that's all they wanted.'

'I don't understand,' Clay said.

'Neither do we, completely,' Dan said.

'They're a lot more powerful than I ever would have guessed,' Tom said. 'I understand that much.' He took off his glasses and polished them on his shirt. It was a tired, distracted gesture. He looked ten years older than the man Clay had met in Boston. 'And they messed with our minds. Hard. We never had a chance.'

'You look exhausted, all of you,' Clay replied.

Denise laughed. 'Yeah? Well, we come by it honestly. We left you and took off on Route 11 westbound. Walked until we saw light starting to come up in the east. Grabbing wheels didn't seem to make any sense, because the road was a freaking mess. You'd get maybe a quarter of a mile clear, then—'

'Road-reefs, I know,' Clay said.

'Ray said it would be better once we got west of the Spaulding Turnpike, but we decided to spend the day in this place called the Twilight Motel.'

'I've heard of that place,' Clay said. 'On the edge of the Vaughan Woods. It's rather notorious in my part of the world.'

'Yeah? Okay.' She shrugged. 'So we get there, and the kid—Jordan– says, 'I'm gonna make you the biggest breakfast you ever ate.' And we say dream on, kid—which turned out to be sort of funny, since that's what it was, in a way—but the power in the place is on, and he does. He makes this huge freakin breakfast. We all chip in. It's the Thanksgiving of breakfasts. Am I telling this right?'

Dan, Tom, and Jordan all nodded. Sitting on the barbecue pit, Ray just lit another cigarette.

According to Denise, they had eaten in the dining room, which Clay found fascinating because he was positive the Twilight didn't have a dining room; it had been your basic no-tell motel straddling the Maine-New Hampshire state line. Rumor had it that the only amenities were cold-water showers and hot-running X-ies on the TVs in the crackerbox rooms.

The story got weirder. There had been a jukebox. No Lawrence Welk and Debby Boone, either; it had been stuffed with hot stuff (including 'Hot Stuff,' by Donna Summer), and instead of going directly to bed they had danced—arduously—for two or three hours. Then, before turning in, they had eaten another vast meal, this time with Denise donning the chef’s hat. After that, finally, they had crashed.

'And dreamed of walking,' Dan said. He spoke with a beaten bitterness that was unsettling. This wasn't the same man Clay had met two nights ago, the one who'd said I'm almost positive we can keep them out of ourheads when we're awake and We might really make it, this is still early times forthem. Now he laughed a little, a sound with no humor in it at all. 'Man, we should have dreamed about it, because we were. All that day we were walking.'

'Not quite all of it,' Tom said. 'I had a driving-dream . . .'

'Yeah, you drove,' Jordan said quietly. 'Only for an hour or so, but you drove. That was when we also dreamed we were sleeping in that motel. The Twilight place. I dreamed of the driving, too. It was like a dream inside of a dream. Only that one was real.'

'You see?' Tom said, smiling at Clay. He ruffled Jordan's heavy pelt. 'On some level, Jordan knew all along.'

'Virtual reality,' Jordan said. 'That's all it was. Like being in a video game, almost. And it wasn't all that good.' He looked north, in the direction the Raggedy Man had disappeared. In the direction of Kashwak. 'It'll get better if they get better.'

'Sons of bitches can't do it at all after dark,' Ray said. 'They have to go fucking beddy-bye.'

'And at the end of the day, so did we,' Dan said. 'That was their purpose. To wear us out so completely that we couldn't figure out what was going on even when night came and their control slipped. During the day the President of Harvard was always close, along with a good-sized flock, sending out that mental force-field of theirs, creating Jordan's virtual reality.'

'Must have been,' Denise said. 'Yeah.'

All this had been going on, Clay calculated, while he had been sleeping in the caretaker's cottage.

'Wearing us out wasn't all they wanted,' Tom said. 'Even turning us back north wasn't all they wanted. They also wanted us all together again.'

The five of them had come to in a tumbledown motel on Route 47– Maine Route 47, not too far south of Great Works. The sense of dislocation, Tom said, had been enormous. The sound of flockmusic not too far distant had not helped. They all had a sense of what must have happened, but it was Jordan who had verbalized it, as it had been Jordan who'd pointed out the obvious: their escape attempt had failed. Yes, they could probably slip out of the motel where they found themselves and start west again, but how far would they get this time? They were exhausted. Worse, they were disheartened. It was also Jordan who pointed out that the phoners might even have arranged for a few normie spies to track their nighttime movements.

'We ate,' Denise said, 'because we were starving as well as tired. Then we went to bed for real and slept until the next morning.'

'I was the first one up,' Tom said. 'The Raggedy Man himself was standing in the courtyard. He made a little bow to me and waved his hand at the road.' Clay remembered the gesture well. The road is yours. Go on and take it. 'I could have shot him, I suppose—I had Sir Speedy—but what good would that have done?'

Clay shook his head. No good at all.

They had gotten back on the road, first walking up Route 47. Then, Tom said, they'd felt themselves mentally nudged onto an unmarked woods road that actually seemed to meander southeast.

'No visions this morning?' Clay asked. 'No dreams?'

'Nope,' Tom said. 'They knew we'd gotten the point. They can read minds, after all.'

'They heard us yell uncle,' Dan said in that same beaten, bitter tone. 'Ray, do you happen to have an extra cigarette? I quit, but maybe I'll take the habit up again.'