77 Shadow Street

One

I am not what you of great faith imagined, but I am what you sought. I am the past undone in its entirety.

I celebrate death. Death makes room for new life. I die every day and rise again. Those weaker creatures who die and do not rise have done a service to the world, because a world of weaklings is a world with no future.

Ironically, my tremendous strength and immortality have their origin in a fault: a fault in the structure of space-time that lies in the heart of Shadow Hill. Periodically, when conditions are right, past and present and future exist here simultaneously, just as they exist in me. Those who live at the pivot point, where past and future meet, sometimes glimpse what once was and what will come to be. By the Native Americans who first lived here and by everyone who followed them, those presences out of time are thought to be ghosts or hallucinations or visions.

Every thirty-eight years comes an event of greater power than mere apparitions. Involuntary pilgrims journey to my kingdom and discover their fate, which is the fate of the entire world.

Arriving from 1935, the wealthy Ostock family learned to be more submissive to the One than their servants were to them. Humanity believes it is exceptional, but it is to the world as fleas to a dog, as lice to a chimpanzee. An infestation. A plague. The Ostocks and all human beings are rats on the road out of Hamelin, enchanted by a tune that leads them to drown in me.

Soon the songwriter will stand before me, and I will feed upon her heart, which she imagines is the source of emotion in her songs. The elderly attorney, who believes in the law, will learn there is no law but mine. The retired detective who believes in justice will get the justice he deserves. I will enter the boy, control his body, but allow him to be aware for a while, allow him to witness the slow corruption of his body and his innocence. Vermin born of vermin, they are the infestation for which I am the purifying fire.