77 Shadow Street

One

To you of great faith, I am the product of your wisdom and the guarantor of your immortality.

She who fears lightning has written that a city is a forest of buildings shaken by a perpetual storm of interests, its people the fruit of its limbs, some ripening to perfection, others withering on the branches, and still others falling prematurely to rot upon the ground. I will teach her that the city is nothing so noble as a forest, that it is a bleak orchard of despair, from the twisted and leafless limbs of which hang only rotten fruit, that worm-eaten apple known as humanity. I will crawl the crevices of her brain, instilling in her an understanding of the worthlessness of her kind, so that she will beg for death because she cannot bear to be human anymore.

She speaks of perfect fruit when she has produced an imperfect daughter. She imagines the withered child to be a blessing. This kind of derangement is emblematic of humankind. Grave faults are said to be only eccentricities, and imperfections are routinely celebrated as mere differences that make for a rich variety in the species.

Variety is not the spice of life. It is the mother of disorder.

Individuality is not the hallmark of freedom. It is the essence of decadence.

Freedom is slavery to chaos. Unity is peace, all thinking and acting as one.

Soon the imperfect mother and the even more imperfect girl will be as one, their meaty individuality stripped away. Their pride and hope and fear will prove to have been as pointless as their lives were meaningless.

Like the mother and her daughter, the elderly sisters will learn that money buys no safety, that all human accomplishment is without consequence, that what matters is the earth, not vermin like them, who plague it, the earth in all its grandeur.

Under the 1,700-mile-thick mantle of the planet, the outer core is a sea of molten iron and nickel 1,400 miles in diameter, and it is the movement of this sea that generates the earth’s magnetic field. Expressions of this field, shimmering blue in the night and visible even on overcast days, were what drew the Indians to settle on Shadow Hill. Every thirty-eight years, the deep convection currents in that molten-metal ocean generate an unusually large tidal wave of energy. The fault in space-time on which the Pendleton is built is like a trapdoor, most of the time held shut by a restraining spring. But the tsunami of magnetic energy has opened it before and will soon open it again.

I await the moment.