“Sure can.” He stopped two feet before us. “Gimme your fancy red cape and I’ll guide you there myself.”
It occurred to me that he was seeing the red cape I’d seen in flashes throughout our trip.
“I’m afraid I can’t give up Blanky.”
“We ain’t hagglin’, little girl.” A knife with a nasty-looking blade appeared in his hand. “Hand it over.”
I wanted to run but I couldn’t leave Ellie.
“I’ve had Blanky all my life.”
He waved the blade toward me. “This looks like your mother. You’ve had her all your life too, right? How’s about I cut her and we see if you still wanna keep your cape?”
Ellie tsked. “Well, since you put it that way.”
She untied the blanket from around her neck and handed it over. I noticed that her back was clear of the creatures. I glanced at Blanky and saw its entire underside massed with kiddlies.
“Ellie…”
“Mother…” A warning tone.
I zipped my lips.
The man had slipped the knife into his belt and was swinging Blanky over his shoulders, then knotting it around his neck.
“You know, I used to be quite the fashion plate. I had a stable of the finest girls on the street. Then everything went south for me. But I can still look sharp, right? I can—”
His expression suddenly changed—to puzzled, then concerned.
“What the—?”
He started twisting and clawing at his back. He staggered in a circle as he tried to untie Blanky but his fingers fumbled futilely at the knot.
When he turned back to us his eyes were black with crawling things and wriggling legs. He opened his mouth but it was filled with the same. His hands fell to his sides as he dropped to his knees; he swayed back and forth once or twice, then he toppled face-first onto the sidewalk where he lay still. Not a twitch, not a groan. He looked shrunken inside his clothes. His right eye socket—empty now—was visible.
I stared in open-mouthed shock. No doubt he was dead.
“Ellie?” I said when I found my voice, a voice that sounded like someone else’s. “What happened?”
“The kiddlies defended us. It just so happened they were hungry as well. They have no taste for skin and bone, but they like everything else.”
I closed my eyes and swallowed a surge of bile. She was telling me that he was—quite literally—little more than a bag of bones now.
A couple of commuters hurried by, barely looking at him. Ellie removed Blanky from his corpse—I couldn’t help but notice the black, writhing mass clinging to its underside—and retied it around her neck. I shuddered at the thought of those things against my own back.
“Come,” she said. “The sunrise awaits.”
3
I barely remember the trek up Stillwell Avenue to the boardwalk. Vague images of Nathan’s signs and that grinning Steeplechase Face everywhere, a rollercoaster to my left, the bright orange height of the defunct Parachute Jump looming to my right, and finally a locked-up pavilion overlooking the beach and the sparkling water.
“Excellent!” she said, spreading her arms toward the limitless expanse of pristine sky. “A beautiful morning for the show.”
I was too numb with shock and, I confess, sick fear to appreciate the weather. A man had died back there. A scum-of-the-earth man, a former pimp from what he’d said, but a human being nonetheless, and he’d been devoured from the inside by Ellie’s kiddlies.
And Ellie herself…in the pre-dawn light I could see how her face had filled out and her cheeks now showed a rosy glow.
I realized to my horror that the kiddlies had shared their bounty. Ellie had fed too.
She pointed west, past the Parachute Jump. “See that purplish sky just above the horizon? That’s called ‘Earth shadow,’ which is exactly what it is—a shadow cast by the curve of the eastern horizon before the sun rises above it. And see that pink band above that? That’s the sun lighting up the higher levels of the atmosphere. It’s called the Belt of Venus.”
“Did you learn this in your coma too?”
“No, Mother,” she said, her tone arid. “In Mister Benson’s astronomy class. What time on your phone?”
I checked. “Five twenty.”
She pointed east. “The sun is supposed to appear in one minute.”
We waited. A minute passed, then two, then three…and no sun.
“Well, Ellie, either my phone’s wrong or your information is wrong.”
“Before I woke you, I checked with the U.S. Naval Observatory. Using Eastern Standard Time, it lists today’s sunrise at this latitude and longitude at four twenty-one. Since we’re in Daylight Saving, I had to add an hour.”
Five twenty-five and still no sun.
“This is impossible, Ellie. The sun’s never late, and the days are supposed to be getting longer, not shorter.”
My phone was reading five twenty-six when a crimson crescent began to peek over the horizon.
“There!” she cried, pointing. “There it is! A wonderful five minutes late! It’s begun, Mother! It’s truly begun!”
For a few seconds her spider legs appeared—not hazy and ghostly, but sharp and solid enough to click when they touched. They materialized and moved around, then disappeared, all without disturbing Blanky’s fabric. But they weren’t responsible for the wave of deep unease coursing through me—the sun’s tardiness triggered that.
“You knew the sun was going to be late? How?” But I knew the answer.
“I believe I spoke it aloud many times in my coma: It will begin in the Heavens…”
“‘And end in the Earth.’ Spoke? You’d shout it. But what—?”
She gestured again toward the rising sun. “As predicted, it has begun in the Heavens. This morning the sun rose late. Tonight it will set early. Tomorrow morning it will rise even later. Night is falling, Mother. The Change has begun. His time is at hand.”
“Who’s time?”
“Why, the One’s, of course.”
“The One what?”
She looked at the rising sun. “A long story, Mother. Come, you and I will walk the boards, as they say, and I will tell you all about it before I have to return to Manhattan.”
“‘Have to’?”
She seemed to have all sorts of frames of reference to which I had no
