Dragon Tears

1

They took the coast highway because a tanker truck loaded with liquid nitrogen had overturned at the junction of the Costa Mesa and San Diego freeways, transforming them into parking lots. Harry cranked the Honda, weaving from lane to lane, speeding through yellow traffic lights, running the reds if no cars were approaching on the cross streets, driving more like Connie in a mood than like himself.

As relentless as a circling vulture, doom shadowed his every thought. In Connie’s kitchen, he’d spoken confidently of Ticktock’s vulnerability. But how vulnerable could the guy be if he could laugh off bullets and bonfires?

He said, “Thanks for not being like the people in one of those movies, they see huge bats against the full moon, victims with all the blood drained out, but they keep arguing it can’t be happening, vampires aren’t real.”

“Or like the priest sees the little girl’s head spin three-hundred-sixty degrees, her bed levitates — but he still can’t believe there’s a devil, so he consults psychology books to diagnose her.”

“What listing you think he looks up in the index?”

Connie said, “Under ‘W’ for ‘Weird shit.’”

They crossed a bridge over a back channel of Newport Harbor. House and boat lights glimmered on the black water.

“Funny,” Harry said. “You go through life thinking people who believe this stuff are as dumb as lobotomized newts — then something like this happens, and you’re instantly able to accept all kinds of fantastic ideas. At heart we’re all moon-worshipping savages who know the world’s a lot stranger than we want to believe.”

“Not that I’ve accepted your theory yet, your psycho superman.”

He looked at her. In the instrument-panel light, her face resembled a sculpture of some goddess from Greek mythology, rendered in hard bronze with verdigris patina. “If not my theory, then what?”

Instead of answering him, she said, “If you’re gonna drive like me, keep your eyes on the road.”

That was good advice, and he took it in time to avoid making a ton and a half of Honda jelly against the back of a lumbering old Mercedes driven by Methuselah’s grandmother and sporting a bumper sticker that said LICENSED TO KILL. Tires squealing, he whipped around the sedan. As they passed it, the venerable lady behind the wheel scowled and gave them the finger.

“Even grandmothers aren’t grandmothers any more,” Connie said.

“If not my theory, then what?” he persisted.

“I don’t know. I’m just saying — if you’re going to surf on the chaos, better never think you’ve got the pattern of the currents all figured out, ‘cause that’s when a big wave will dump you.”

He thought about that, driving in silence for a while.

To their left, the Newport Center hotels and office towers drifted by as if they were moving instead of the car, great lighted ships sailing the night on mysterious missions. The bordering lawns and rows of palms were unnaturally green and too perfect to be real, like a gargantuan stage setting. The recent storm seemed to have swept across California from out of another dimension, washing the world with strangeness, leaving behind a residue of dark magic.

“What about your mom and dad?” Connie asked. “This guy said he’d destroy everyone you love, then you.”

“They’re a few hundred miles up the coast. They’re out of this.”

“We don’t know how far he can reach.”

“If he can reach that far, he is God. Anyway, remember what I said, how maybe this guy pins a psychic tag on you? Like game wardens tag a deer or bear with an electronic gizmo to learn its migratory habits. That feels right. Which means it’s possible he can’t find my mom and dad unless I lead him to them. Maybe all he knows about me is what I’ve shown him since he tagged me this afternoon.”

“So you came to me first because…”

Because I love you? he wondered. But he said nothing.

He was relieved when she let him off that hook:

“… because we brought Ordegard down together. And if this guy was controlling Ordegard, he’s almost as angry with me as with you.”

“I had to warn you,” Harry said. “We’re in this together.”

Though he was aware of her studying him with keen interest, she said nothing. He pretended to be oblivious of her analytic stare.

After a while she said, “You think this Ticktock can tune in and hear us, see us, any time he wants? Like now?”

“I don’t know.”

“He can’t know everything, like God,” Connie said. “So maybe we’re just a blinking light on his mental tracking board, and he can only see or hear us when we can see and hear him.”

“Maybe. Probably. Who knows?”

“We better hope that’s how it is. Because if he’s listening and watching all the time, we don’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of nailing the son of a bitch. The moment we start getting close, he’ll burn us to the ground as sure as he burned down your condo.”

On the shop-lined main street of Corona Del Mar, and along the dark Newport coast where land was being graded for a new community on the ocean-facing hills and where enormous earth-moving machines stood like prehistoric beasts asleep on their feet, Harry had a crawling sensation along the back of his neck. Descending the coast highway into Laguna Beach, it got worse. He felt as if he were being watched in the same way that a mouse is watched by a stalking cat.

Laguna was an arts colony and tourist mecca, still renowned for its beauty even though it had seen better days. Speckled with golden lights and adorned with a softening mantle of greenery, serried hills sloped down from the east to the shores of the Pacific, as graceful as a lovely woman descending a stairway to the surf. But tonight the lady seemed less lovely than dangerous.

2

The house stood on a bluff above the sea. The west wall of tinted glass encompassed a primal view of sky, water, and crashing surf.

When Bryan wished to sleep during the day, electrically operated Rolladen shutters motored down to banish the sun. It was night, however, and while Bryan slept, the huge windows revealed a black sky, blacker sea, and phosphorescent incoming breakers like marching ranks of soldier ghosts.

When Bryan slept, he always dreamed.

Though most people’s dreams were in black and white, his were in full color. In fact the spectrum of colors in his dreams was greater than in real life, a fabulous variety of hues and shadings that made each vision enthrallingly intricate.

Rooms in his dreams were not simply vague suggestions of places, and landscapes were not impressionistic smears. Every locale in his sleep was vividly — even excruciatingly — detailed. If he dreamed of a forest, every leaf was rendered with veining, individually mottled and shaded. If snow, every flake was unique.

After all, he was not a dreamer like every other. He was a slumbering god. Creative.

That Tuesday evening Bryan’s dreams were, as always, filled with violence and death. His creativity was best expressed in imaginative forms of destruction.

He walked the streets of a fantasy city more labyrinthine than any that existed in the real world, a metropolis of crowding spires. When children looked upon him, they were stricken by a plague of such exquisite virulence that their small faces instantly erupted in masses of oozing pustules; bleeding lesions split their skin. When he touched strong men, they burst into flame and their eyes melted from their sockets. Young women aged before his eyes, withered and died in seconds, transformed from objects of desire into piles of worm-riddled refuse. When Bryan smiled at a shopkeeper standing in front of a corner grocery, the man fell to the pavement, writhing in agony, and swarms of cockroaches erupted from his ears, nostrils, and mouth.

For Bryan, this was not a nightmare. He enjoyed his dreams and always woke from them refreshed and excited.

The city streets faded into the uncountable rooms of an infinite bordello, with a different beautiful woman waiting to please him in every richly decorated chamber. Naked, they prostrated themselves before him, pleaded to be allowed to provide him with relief, but he would lie with none of them. Instead, he slaughtered each woman in a different fashion, endlessly inventive in his brutalities, until he was drenched with their blood.

He was not interested in sex. Power was more satisfying than sex could ever be, and by far the most satisfying power was the power to kill.

He never tired of their cries for mercy. Their voices were very much like the squeals of the small animals that had learned to fear him when he’d been a child and had just begun to Become. He had been born to rule both in the dream world and the real, to help humankind relearn the humility that it had lost.

He woke.

For long delicious minutes, Bryan lay in a tangle of black sheets, as pale upon that rumpled silk as the luminescent foam was pale upon the crest of each wave that broke on the shore below his windows. The euphoria of the bloody dream stayed with him for a while, and was immeasurably better than a post-orgasmic glow.

He longed for the day when he could brutalize the real world as he did the world in his dreams. They deserved punishment, these swarming multitudes. In their self-absorption, they had pridefully assumed that the world had been made for them, for their pleasure, and they had overrun it. But he was the apex of creation, not them. They must be profoundly humbled, and their numbers reduced.

However, he was still young, not in full control of his power, still Becoming. He didn’t yet dare to begin the cleansing of the earth that was his destiny.

Naked, he got out of bed. The slightly cool air felt good against his bare skin.

In addition to the sleek, ultra-modern, black-lacquered bed with its silk sheets, the large room contained no other furniture except two matching black nightstands and black marble lamps with black shades. No stereo, television, or radio. There was no chair in which to relax and read; books were of no interest to him, for they contained no knowledge he needed to acquire and no entertainment equal to that he could provide himself. When he was creating and manipulating the phantom bodies in which he patrolled the outer world, he preferred to lie in bed, staring at the ceiling.

He had no clock. Didn’t need one. He was so attuned to the mechanics of the universe that he always knew the hour, minute, and second. It was part of his gift.

The entire wall opposite the bed was mirrored floor to ceiling. He had mirrors throughout the house; he liked what they showed him of himself, the image of godhood Becoming in all its grace, beauty, and power.

Except for the mirrors, the walls were painted black. The ceiling was black as well.

The black-lacquered shelves of a large bookcase contained scores of one-pint Mason jars filled with formaldehyde. Floating therein were pairs of eyes, visible to Bryan even in deep gloom. Some were the eyes of human beings: men, women, and children who had received his judgment; various shades of blue, brown, black, gray, green. Others were the eyes of the animals on which he’d first experimented with his power years ago: mice, gerbils, lizards, snakes, turtles, cats, dogs, birds, squirrels, rabbits; some were softly luminescent even in death, glowing pale red or yellow or green.

Votive eyes. Offered by his subjects. Symbols acknowledging his power, his superiority, his Becoming. At every hour of the day and night, the eyes were there, acknowledging, admiring, adoring him.

Look upon me and tremble, said the Lord. For I am mercy but also am I wrath. I am forgiveness but also am I vengeance. And whatever floweth to thee shall flow from me.

3

In spite of the humming vent fans, the room was redolent of blood, bile, intestinal gases, and an astringent disinfectant that made Connie squint.

Harry sprayed his left hand with some Binaca breath-freshener. He cupped his moistened palm over his nose, so the minty fragrance would block out at least some of the smell of death.

He offered Connie the Binaca. She hesitated, then accepted it.

The dead woman lay naked and staring on the tilted, stainless-steel table. The coroner had made a large Y incision in her abdomen, and most of her organs had been carefully removed.

She was one of Ordegard’s victims from the restaurant. Her name was Laura Kincade. Thirty years old. She had been pretty when she’d gotten out of bed that morning. Now she was a fright figure from a grisly carnival funhouse.

The fluorescent lights imparted a milky sheen to her eyes, on which were reflected twin images of the overhead microphone and the flexible, segmented-metal cable on which it hung. Her lips were parted, as if she were about to sit up, speak into the mike, and add a few comments to the official record of her autopsy.

The coroner and two assistants were working late, finishing the final of three examinations of Ordegard and his two victims. The men looked weary, both physically and spiritually.

In all her years of police work, Connie had never encountered one of those hardened forensic pathologists who appeared so frequently in the movies and on television, carving up corpses while they made crude jokes and ate pizza, untouched by the tragedies of others. On the contrary, although it was necessary to approach such a job with professional detachment, regular intimate contact with the victims of violent crime always took its toll one way or another.

Teel Bonner, the chief medical examiner, was fifty but seemed older. In the harsh fluorescent light, his face looked less tanned than sallow, and the bags under his eyes were large enough to pack for a weekend getaway.

Bonner paused in his cutting to tell them that the tape of the Ordegard autopsy had already been transcribed by a typist. The transcription was in a folder on his desk, in the glass-walled office adjacent to the dissection room. “I haven’t written the summary yet, but the facts are all there.”

Connie was relieved to get into the office and close the door. The small room had a vent fan of its own, and the air was relatively fresh.

The brown vinyl upholstery on the chair was scarred, creased, and mottled with age. The standard-issue metal desk was scratched and dented.

This was no big-city morgue with several dissection rooms and a professionally decorated office for receptions with reporters and politicians. In smaller towns, violent death was still generally viewed as less glamorous than in larger metropolises.

Harry sat and read from the autopsy transcript while Connie stood at the glass wall and watched the three men gathered around the corpse in the outer room.

The cause of James Ordegard’s death had been three gunshot wounds to the chest — which Connie and Harry already knew because all three rounds had come from Harry’s gun. The effects of the gunshots included puncture and collapse of the left lung, major damage to the large intestine, nicks to the common iliac and the celiac arteries, the complete severing of the renal artery, deep laceration of the stomach and liver by fragments of bone and lead, and a tear in the heart muscle sufficient to cause sudden cardiac arrest.

“Anything odd?” she asked, her back to him.

“Like what?”

“Like what? Don’t ask me. You’re the guy who thinks possession ought to leave its mark.”

In the dissection room, the three pathologists working over Laura Kincade were uncannily like doctors attending to a patient whose life they were struggling to preserve. The postures were the same; only the pace was different. But the sole thing that these men could preserve was a record of precisely the means by which one bullet had fatally damaged one fragile human body, the how of Laura’s death. They couldn’t begin to answer the bigger question: Why? Even James Ordegard and his twisted motivations could not explain the why of it; he was only another part of the how. Explaining why was a task for priests and philosophers, who floundered helplessly for meaning every day.

“They did a craniotomy,” Harry said from the coroner’s creaking chair.

“And?”

“No visible surface hematoma. No unusual quantity of cerebrospinal fluid, no indications of excess pressure.”

“They do a cerebrotomy?” she asked.

“I’m sure.” He rustled through the pages of the transcript. “Yeah, here.”

“Cerebral tumor? Abscess? Lesions?”

He was silent for a long moment, scanning the report. Then: “No, nothing like that.”

“Hemorrhage?”

“None noted.”

“Embolism?”

“None found.”

“Pineal gland?”

Sometimes the pineal gland could shift out of position and come under pressure from surrounding brain tissues, resulting in extremely vivid hallucinations, sometimes paranoia and violent behavior. But that was not the case with Ordegard.

Watching the autopsy from a distance, Connie thought of her sister, Colleen, dead these five years, killed by childbirth. It seemed to her that Colleen’s death made no more sense than that of poor Laura Kincade who had made the mistake of stopping at the wrong restaurant for lunch.

Then again, no death made sense. Madness and chaos were the engines of this universe. Everything was born only to die. Where was the logic and reason in that?

“Nothing,” Harry said, dropping the report back onto the desk. The chair springs squeaked and twanged as he got up. “No unexplained marks on the body, no peculiar physiological conditions. If Ticktock was in possession of Ordegard, there’s no clue of it in the corpse.”

Connie turned away from the glass wall. “Now what?”

Teel Bonner pulled open the morgue drawer.

The naked body of James Ordegard lay within. His white skin had a bluish cast in some places. Black-thread stitches had been used to close the extensive incisions from the autopsy.

The moon face. Rigor mortis had pulled his lips into a lopsided smile. At least his eyes were closed.

“What did you want to see?” Bonner asked.

“If he was still here.” Harry said.

The coroner glanced at Connie. “Where else would he be?”

4

The bedroom floor was covered with black ceramic tile. Like purling water, it glistened in places with dim reflections of the ambient light from the night beyond the windows. It was cool beneath Bryan’s feet.

As he walked to the glass wall that faced the ocean, the huge mirrors reflected black on black, and his naked form drifted like a wraith of smoke through the layered shadows.

He stood at the window, staring at the sable sea and tarry sky. The smooth ebony vista was relieved only by the crests of the combers and by frostlike patches on the bellies of the clouds. That frost was a reflection of the lights of Laguna Beach behind him; his home was on one of the western-most points of the city.

The view was perfect and serene because it lacked the human element. No man or woman or child, no structure or machine or artifact intruded. So quiet, dark. So clean.

He longed to eradicate humanity and all its works from large portions of the earth, restrict people to selected preserves. But he was not yet fully in control of his power, still Becoming.

He lowered his gaze from the sky and sea to the pallid beach at the foot of the bluff.

Leaning his forehead against the glass, he imagined life — and by imagining, created it. On the sward just above the tide line, the sand began to stir. It rose, forming a cone as big as a man — and then became a man. The hobo. The scarred face. Reptile eyes.

No such person had ever existed. The vagrant was strictly a creature of Bryan’s imagination. Through this construct and others, Bryan could walk the world without being in danger from it.

Though his phantom bodies could be shot and burned and crushed without causing harm to him, his own body was dismayingly vulnerable. When cut, he bled. When struck, he bruised. He assumed that when he had Become, then invulnerability and immortality would be the final gifts bestowed on him, signaling his Ascension to godhood — which made him eager to fulfill his mission.

Now, leaving only a portion of his consciousness in his real body, he moved into the hobo on the night beach. From within that hulking figure, he gazed up at his house on the bluff. He saw his own naked body at the window, staring down.

In Jewish folklore there was a creature called a golem. Made of mud in the shape of a man, endowed with a form of life, it was most often an instrument of vengeance.

Bryan could create an infinite variety of golems and through them stalk his prey, thin the herd, police the world. But he could not enter the bodies of real people and control their minds, which he would very much have enjoyed. Perhaps that power would be his, as well, when at last he had Become.

He withdrew his consciousness from the golem on the beach and, regarding it from his high window, caused it to change shape. It tripled in size, assumed a reptilian form, and developed immense membranous wings.

Sometimes an effect could spiral beyond what he intended, acquire a life of its own, and resist his efforts at containment. For that reason, he was always practicing, refining his techniques and exercising his power in order to strengthen it.

He had once created a golem inspired by the movie Alien, and used it to savage the vagrants in an encampment of ten homeless people under a Los Angeles freeway overpass. His intention had been to slaughter two of them, lightning quick, and leave the others with the memory of his power and merciless judgment. But then he became excited by their abject terror at the inexplicable manifestation of that movie monster. He thrilled to the feel of his claws ripping through their flesh, the heat of spurting blood, the rank steaming gush of disembowelment, the crack of bones as fragile as chalk sticks in his monstrous hands. The screams of the dying were piercingly shrill at first but became weak, tremulous, erotic; they surrendered their lives to him as lovers might have surrendered, so exhausted by the intensity of their passion that they succumbed only with sighs, whispers, shudders. For a few minutes he was the creature that he had created, all razored teeth and talons, spiked spine and lashing tail, having forgotten about his real body in which his mind actually reposed. When he regained his senses, he discovered he had killed all ten men beneath the overpass and stood in a charnel house of blood, eviscerated torsos, severed heads and limbs.

He hadn’t been shocked or daunted by the degree of violence he’d wrought — only that he’d killed them all in a mindless frenzy. Learning control was vital if he were to accomplish his mission and Become.

He had used the power of pyrokinesis to set the bodies afire, searing them with flames so intense that even bones were vaporized. He always disposed of those on whom he practiced because he didn’t want ordinary people to know that he walked among them, at least not until his power had been perfected and his vulnerability was nil.

That was also why for the time being he focused his attentions primarily on street people. If they were to report being tormented by a demon who could change shape at will, their complaints would be dismissed as the ravings of mentally deranged losers with drug and alcohol addictions. And when they vanished from the face of the earth, no one would care or attempt to discover what had happened to them. Someday soon, however, he would be able to bring holy terror and divine judgment to people in all strata of society.

So he practiced.

Like a magician improving his dexterity.

Control. Control.

On the beach, the winged form leapt off the sand from which it had been born. It flapped into the night, like a truant gargoyle returning to a cathedral parapet. It hovered before his window, peering in with luminous yellow eyes.

Although it was a brainless thing until he projected part of himself into it, the pterodactyl was nevertheless an impressive creation. Its immense leathery wings fluidly fanned the air, and it easily remained aloft on the updrafts along the bluff.

Bryan was aware of the eyes in the jars behind him. Staring. Watching him, astonished, admiring, adoring.

“Be gone,” he said to the pterodactyl, indulging in theatrics for his audience.

The winged reptile turned to sand and rained on the beach below.

Enough play. He had work to do.

5

Harry’s Honda was parked near the municipal building, under a streetlamp.

Early spring moths, having come out in the wake of the rain, swooped close to the light. Their enormous, distorted shadows played over the car.

As she and Harry crossed the sidewalk toward the Honda, Connie said, “Same question. Now what?”

“I want to get into Ordegard’s house and have a look around.”

“What for?”

“I don’t have a clue. But it’s the only other thing I can think to do. Unless you’ve got an idea.”

“Wish I did.”

As they approached the car, she saw something dangling from the rearview mirror, rectangular and softly gleaming beyond the moth shadows that swarmed over the windshield. As far as she could recall, there had been no air-freshener or ornament of any kind tied to the mirror.

She was the first into the car and got a close look at the silvery rectangle before Harry did. It was dangling on a red ribbon from the’ mirror shank. Initially she didn’t realize what it was. She took hold of it, turned it so the light struck it more clearly, and saw that it was a handcrafted belt buckle worked with Southwest motifs.

Harry got in behind the wheel, slammed his door, and saw what she held in her hand.

“Oh, Jesus,” Harry said. “Oh, Jesus, Ricky Estefan.”

6

Most of the roses had taken a beating from the rain, but a few blooms had come through the storm untouched. They bobbed gently in the night breeze. The petals caught the light spilling from the kitchen windows and seemed to magnify it, glowing as if radioactive.

Ricky sat at the kitchen table, from which his tools and current projects had been removed. He had finished dinner more than an hour ago and had been sipping port wine ever since. He wanted to get a buzz on.

Before being gutshot, he’d not been much of a drinker, but when he had wanted a drink, he’d been a tequila and beer man. A shot of Sauza and a bottle of Tecate were as sophisticated as he got. After all the abdominal surgeries he endured, however, a single jigger of Sauza — or any other hard liquor — gave him intense heartburn and a sour stomach that lasted the better part of a day. The same was true of beer.

He learned that he could handle liqueurs well enough, but getting drunk on Baileys Irish Cream or crème de menthe or Midori required the ingestion of so much sugar that his teeth would rot long before he did any damage to his liver. Regular wines did not go down well, either, but port proved to be just the thing, sweet enough to soothe his delicate gut but not so sweet as to induce diabetes.

Good port was his only indulgence. Well, good port and a little self-pity now and then.

Watching the roses nodding in the night, he sometimes pulled his gaze back to a closer point of focus and stared at his reflection in the window. It was an imperfect mirror, revealing to him a colorless transparent countenance like that of a haunting spirit; but perhaps it was an accurate reflection, after all, because he was a ghost of his former self and in some ways dead already.

A bottle of Taylor’s stood on the table. He refilled his port glass and took a sip.

Sometimes, like now, it was difficult to believe that the face in the window was actually his. Before he’d been shot, he had been a happy man, seldom given to troubled introspection, never a brooder. Even during recuperation and rehabilitation, he had retained a sense of humor, an optimism about the future that no amount of pain could entirely darken.

His face had become the face in the window only after Anita left. More than two years later, he still had difficulty believing that she was gone — or figuring out what to do about the loneliness that was destroying him more surely than bullets could have done.

Raising his drink, Ricky sensed something wrong just as he brought it to his mouth. Perhaps he subconsciously registered the lack of a port-wine aroma — or the faint, foul smell of what had replaced it. He stopped as he was about to tilt the glass to his lips, and saw what it contained: two or three fat, moist, entwined earthworms, alive and oozing languorously around one another.

Startled, he cried out, and the glass slipped from his fingers. Because it dropped only a couple of inches onto the table, it didn’t shatter. But when it tipped over, the worms slithered onto the polished pine.

Ricky pushed his chair back, blinking furiously—

— and the worms were gone.

Spilled wine shimmered on the table.

He halted halfway to his feet, his hands on the arms of his chair, staring in disbelief at the puddle of ruby-red port.

He was sure he had seen the worms. He wasn’t imagining things. Wasn’t drunk. Hell, he hadn’t even begun to feel the port.

Easing back into his chair, he closed his eyes. Waited a second, two. Looked. The wine still glistened on the table.

Hesitantly he touched one index finger to the puddle. It was wet, real. He rubbed his finger and thumb together, spreading the drop of wine over his skin.

He checked the Taylor’s to be sure that he hadn’t drunk more than he’d realized. The bottle was dark, so he had to hold it up to the light to see the level of the liquid within. It was a new liter, and the line of the port was just below the neck. He had poured only the two glasses.

Rattled as much by his inability to come up with an explanation as by what had happened, Ricky went to the sink, opened the cabinet below it, and got the damp dishcloth from the rack on the back of the door. At the table again, he wiped up the spilled wine.

His hands were shaking.

He was angry at himself for being afraid, even though the source of the fear was understandable. He worried that he had suffered what the doctors would call a “small cerebral incident,” a minor stroke of which the flickering hallucination of earthworms was the only sign. More than anything else during his long hospitalization, he had dreaded a stroke.

The development of blood clots in the legs and around the sutures in repaired veins and arteries was one especially dangerous potential side-effect of major abdominal surgery of the extent that he had undergone and of the protracted bed rest that followed it. If one broke free and traveled to the heart, sudden death might ensue. If it traveled instead to the brain, obstructing circulation, the result could be total or partial paralysis, blindness, loss of speech, and the horrifying destruction of intellectual capacity. His doctors had medicated him to inhibit clotting, and the nurses had put him through a program of passive exercise even when he had been required to remain flat on his back, but there hadn’t been one day during his long recovery that he hadn’t worried about suddenly finding himself unable to move or talk, unsure of where he was, unable to recognize his wife or his own name.

At least then he’d had the comfort of knowing, whatever happened, Anita would be there to take care of him. Now he had no one. From now on, he would have to face adversity alone. If silenced and badly crippled by a stroke, he would be at the mercy of strangers.

Although his fear was understandable, he also realized that it was to some extent irrational. He was healed. He had his scars, sure. And his ordeal had left him diminished. But he was no more ill than the average man on the street and probably healthier than a lot of them. More than two years had passed since his most recent surgery. His chances of suffering a cerebral embolism were now only average for a man his age. Thirty-six. Men that young rarely had debilitating strokes. Statistically, he was more likely to die in a traffic accident, from a heart attack, as the victim of violent crime, or perhaps even from being struck by lightning.

What he feared was not so much paralysis, aphasia, blindness, or any other physical ailment. What frightened him, really, was being alone, and the weirdness with the earthworms had impressed upon him just how alone he would be if anything untoward happened.

Determined not to be ruled by fear, Ricky put the port-stained dishcloth aside and righted the overturned glass. He would sit down with another drink and think it through. The answer would be obvious when he thought about it. There was an explanation for the worms, maybe a trick of light that could be duplicated by holding the glass just so, turning it just so, recreating the precise circumstances of the illusion.

He picked up the bottle of Taylor’s and tipped it toward the glass.

For an instant, though he had held it up to the light only a couple of minutes ago to check the level of the wine, he expected the bottle to disgorge oily knots of writhing earthworms. Only port poured forth.

He put down the bottle and raised the glass. As he brought it to his lips, he hesitated, repulsed by the thought of drinking out of a glass that had contained earthworms slick with whatever cold mucus they exuded.

His hand was shaking again, his brow was suddenly damp with perspiration, and he was furious with himself for being so damned silly about this. The wine slopped against the sides of the glass, glimmering like a liquid jewel.

He brought it to his lips, took a short sip. It tasted sweet and clean. He took another sip. Delicious.

A soft and tremulous laugh escaped him. “Asshole,” he said, and felt better for making fun of himself.

Deciding that some nuts or crackers would go well with the port, he put his glass down and went to the kitchen cabinet where he kept cans of roasted almonds, mixed nuts, and packages of Che-Cri Cheese Crispies. When he pulled the door open, the cabinet was alive with tarantulas.

Faster and more agile than he’d been in years, he backed away from the open cabinet, slamming into the counter behind him.

Six or eight of the huge spiders were climbing over cans of Blue Diamond almonds and Planters party mix, exploring the boxes of Che-Cri. They were bigger even than tarantulas should have been, larger than halved cantaloupes, jittering denizens of some arachnophobe’s worst nightmare.

Ricky squeezed his eyes shut. Opened them. The spiders were still there.

Above the drumming of his own heart and his shallow noisy breathing, he could actually hear the hairy legs of the tarantulas brushing against the cellophane on the packages of cheese crackers. The chitinous tick-tick-tick of their feet or mandibles against the stacks of cans. Low, evil hissing.

But then he realized he was misinterpreting the source of the sounds. The noises were not coming from the open cabinet across the room but from the cabinets immediately above and behind him.

He looked over his shoulder, up at the pine doors, on the other side of which should have been nothing but plates and bowls, cups and saucers. They were being forced outward by some expanding bulk, just a quarter of an inch ajar, then half an inch. Before Ricky could move, the cabinet doors flew open. An avalanche of snakes cascaded over his head and shoulders.

Screaming, he tried to run. He slipped on the wriggling carpet of serpents and fell among them.

Snakes thin as whips, snakes thick and muscular, black snakes and green, yellow and brown, plain and patterned, red-eyed, yellow-eyed, some hooded like cobras, watchful and grinning, supple tongues fluttering, hissing, hissing. Had to be dreaming. Hallucinating. A big blacksnake, at least four feet long, bit him, oh Jesus, struck at the back of his left hand, sinking its fangs deep, blood brimming, and still it might have been a dream, nightmare, except for the pain.

He had never felt pain in a dream, and certainly not like this. A sharp stinging filled his left hand, and then a sharper stabbing agony shot like an electrical charge through his wrist and all the way along his forearm to his elbow.

Not a dream. This was happening. Somehow. But where had they come from? Where?

They were all over him, sixty or eighty of them, slithering. Another one struck at him, sank fangs through his shirt sleeve and pierced his left forearm, tripling the pain in it. Another bit through his sock, raked teeth down his ankle.

He scrambled to his feet, and the snake that had bitten his arm fell away, as did the one at his ankle, but the one with its fangs through his left hand hung fast, as if it had stapled itself to him. He grabbed it, tried to jerk it loose. The flash of pain was so intense, white-hot, that he almost passed out, and still the snake was clamped tight to his bleeding hand.

A turmoil of snakes hissed and coiled around him. He didn’t see any rattlers at a glance, or hear them. He had too little knowledge to identify the other species, wasn’t sure which were poisonous, or even if any of them were, including the ones that had already bitten him. Poisonous or not, more of them were going to bite if he didn’t move fast.

He snatched a meat cleaver from a wall rack of knives. When he slammed his left arm down on the nearest counter, the relentless blacksnake flopped full-length across the tile counter top. Ricky swung the cleaver high, brought it down, chopped through the snake, and the steel blade rang off the ceramic surface underneath.

The hateful-looking head still held fast to his hand, trailing only a few inches of the black body, and the glittering eyes seemed td be watching him, alive. Ricky dropped the cleaver and attempted to pry open the serpent’s mouth, spring its long curved teeth out of his flesh. He shouted and cursed, furious with pain, kept prying, but it was no use.

The snakes on the floor were agitated by his shouting.

He plunged toward the archway between the kitchen and the hall, kicking snakes out of his way before they could coil and spring at him. Some were already coiled, and they struck, but his heavy, loose-fitting khaki pants foiled them.

He was afraid they would slither over his shoes, under a pants cuff, up and under one of the legs of his khakis. But he reached the hall safely.

The snakes were behind him and not pursuing. Two tarantulas had fallen out of the snack cabinet into the herpetological nightmare on the floor, and the snakes were fighting over them. Frantically kicking arachnid legs vanished under rippling scales.

Thump!

Ricky jumped in surprise.

Thump!

Until now he hadn’t associated the strange noise, which had plagued him earlier in the evening, with the spiders and snakes.

Thump!

Thump!

Someone had been playing games with him then, but this was not a game any more. This was deadly serious. Impossible, as fantastic as anything in a dream, but serious.

Thump!

Ricky couldn’t pinpoint the source of the pounding or even tell for sure if it came from above or below him. Windows reverberated, and echoes of each blow vibrated hollowly in the walls. He sensed that something was coming, worse than spiders or snakes, something he did not want to encounter.

Gasping, with the head of the blacksnake still dangling from his left hand, Ricky turned away from the kitchen toward the front door at the end of the hall.

His twice-bitten arm throbbed horribly with each beat of his trip-hammering heart. No good, dear Jesus, a racing heart spread the poison faster, if there was any poison. What he had to do was calm down, take deep slow breaths, walk instead of run, go to a neighbor’s house, call 911, and get emergency medical attention. THUMP!

He could have used the telephone in his bedroom, but he didn’t want to go in there. He didn’t trust his own house any more, which was nuts, yes, crazy, but he felt the place had come alive and turned against him. THUMP, THUMP, THUMP!

The house shook as if riding the back of a bucking earthquake, almost knocking him down. He staggered sideways, bounced against the wall.

The ceramic statue of the Holy Virgin toppled off the hall table that he had set up as a shrine like all of the shrines his mother had kept in her home. Since being gutshot, he had been reduced by fear to his mother’s choice of armor against the cruelties of the world. The statue crashed to the floor, shattered at his feet.

The heavy red-glass container with the votive candle bounced on the table, causing goblin shadows to dance across the wall and ceiling.

THUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMP!

Ricky was two steps from the front door when the oak flooring creaked ominously, pushed upward, and cracked almost as loudly as a thunderclap. He stumbled backward.

Something smashed out of the crawlspace under the bungalow, shattering the floor as if it were an eggshell. For a moment the blizzard of dust and splinters and jagged boards made it impossible to glimpse what had been born into the hallway.

Then Ricky saw a man in the hole, feet planted in the earth about eighteen inches under the floor of the house. In spite of standing below Ricky, the guy loomed, immense and threatening. His untamed hair and beard were tangled and dirty, and the visible portions of his face were grossly scarred. His black raincoat billowed like a cape around him as a draft whistled out of the crawlspace and up through the broken boards.

Ricky knew he was looking at the vagrant who had appeared to Harry out of a whirlwind. Everything about him fit the description — except his eyes.

When he glimpsed those grotesque eyes, Ricky froze midst the fragments of the Holy Virgin, paralyzed by fear and by the certainty that he had gone mad. Even if he had kept backing away or had turned and tried to run for the rear door, he would not have escaped, for the vagrant clambered out of the hole and into the hall as lightning-quick as any striking serpent. He seized Ricky, swept him off the floor with such unhuman power that any resistance was pointless, and slammed him against the wall hard enough to crack the plaster and his spine.

Face to face, washed by the vagrant’s foul breath, Ricky gazed into those eyes and was too terrified to scream. They were not the pools of blood that Harry had described. They were not really eyes at all. Nestled in the deep sockets were two snake heads, two small yellow eyes in each, forked tongues fluttering.

Why me? Ricky wondered.

As if they were a pair of jack-in-the-box fright figures, the snakes sprang from the vagrant’s sockets and bit Ricky’s face.

7

Between Laguna Beach and Dana Point, Harry drove so fast that even Connie, lover of speed and risk-taking, braced herself and made wordless noises of dismay when he took some of the turns too sharply. They were in his own car, not a department sedan, so he didn’t have a detachable emergency beacon to stick on the roof. He didn’t have a siren either; however, the coast highway was not heavily used at ten-thirty on a Tuesday night, and by pounding the horn and flashing the headlights, he was able to clear a way through what little obstructive traffic he encountered.

“Maybe we should call Ricky, warn him,” she said, when they were still in south Laguna.

“Don’t have a car phone.”

“Stop at a service station, convenience store, somewhere.”

“Can’t waste the time. I figure his phone won’t work anyway.”

“Why won’t it?”

“Not unless Ticktock wants it to work.”

They shot up a hill, rounded a curve too fast. The rear tires dug up gravel from the shoulder of the highway, sprayed it against the undercarriage and fuel tank. The right rear bumper kissed a metal guardrail, and then they were back on the pavement, rocketing onward without having braked.

“So let’s call Dana Point Police,” she said.

“The way we’re moving, if we don’t stop to call, we’ll be there before they could make it.”

“We might be able to use the backup.”

“Won’t need backup if we’re too damned late and Ricky’s dead when we get there.”

Harry was sick with apprehension and furious with himself. He had endangered Ricky by going to him earlier in the day. He couldn’t have known the heap of trouble he was bringing down on his old friend at the time, but later he should have realized Ricky was a target when Ticktock had promised first everything and everyone you love.

Sometimes it was hard for a man to admit he loved another man, even in a brotherly way. He and Ricky Estefan had been partners, through some tight scrapes together. They were still friends, and Harry loved him. It was that simple. But the American tradition of macho self-reliance mitigated against admitting as much.

Bullshit, Harry thought angrily.

The truth was, he found it difficult to admit he loved anyone, male or female, even his parents, because love was so damned messy. It entailed obligations, commitments, entanglements, the sharing of emotions. When you admitted to loving people, you had to let them into your life in a more major way, and they brought with them all of their untidy habits, indiscriminate tastes, muddled opinions, and disorganized attitudes.

As they roared across the Dana Point city line, the muffler clanging against a bump in the road, Harry said, “Jesus, sometimes I’m an idiot.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Connie said.

“A really screwed-up specimen.”

“We’re still in familiar territory.”

He had only one excuse for not realizing that Ricky would become a target: since the fire at his condo less than three hours ago, he had been reacting instead of acting. He’d had no other option. Events had moved so fast, and were so weird, one piece of strangeness piled atop another, that he hadn’t time to think. A poor excuse, but he clung to it.

He didn’t even know how to think about bizarre crap like this. Deductive reasoning, every detective’s most useful tool, was not adequate to deal with the supernatural. He’d been trying inductive reasoning, which was how he’d come up with the theory of a sociopath with paranormal powers. But he wasn’t good at it because inductive reasoning seemed, to him, the next thing to intuition, and intuition was so illogical. He liked hard evidence, sound premises, logical deductions, and neat conclusions tied up in ribbons and bows.

As they turned the corner into Ricky’s street, Connie said, “What the hell?”

Harry glanced at her.

She was staring into her cupped hand.

“What?” he asked.

Something was cradled in her palm. Voice quavering, she said, “I didn’t have this a second ago, where the hell did it come from?”

“What is it?”

She held it up for him to see as he pulled under the streetlamp in front of Ricky’s house. The head of a ceramic figurine. Broken off at the neck.

Scraping the tires against the curb, he braked to a hard stop, and his safety harness jerked tight across his chest.

She said, “It was like my hand snapped shut, spasmed shut, and this was in it, out of nowhere, for God’s sake.”

Harry recognized it. The head of the Virgin Mary that had been at the center of the shrine on Ricky Estefan’s hall table.

Overcome by dark expectations, Harry threw open the door and got out of the car. He pulled his gun.

The street was peaceful. Lights glowed warmly in most of the houses, including Ricky’s. Music from a neighbor’s stereo drifted on the cool air, so faint he could not quite identify the tune. The breeze whispered and softly clattered in the fronds of the big date palms in Ricky’s front yard.

Nothing to worry about, the breeze seemed to say, all is calm here, all is right with this place.

Nevertheless, he kept his revolver in hand.

He hurried up the front walk, through the night shadows of the palm trees, onto the bougainvillaea-draped porch. He was aware that Connie was right behind him and that she also had drawn her weapon.

Let Ricky be alive, he thought fervently, please let him be alive.

That was as close to prayer as he had gotten in many years.

Behind the screen door, the front door was ajar. A narrow wedge of light projected the pattern of the screen onto the porch floor.

Although he thought no one noticed and would have been mortified to know that his fear was obvious, Ricky had been obsessive about security ever since he’d been shot. He kept everything locked tight. A door standing open even an inch or two was a bad sign.

Harry tried to survey the foyer through the gap between the door and the jamb. With the screen door in the way, he couldn’t get close enough to the crack to see anything.

Drapes blocked the windows flanking the door. They were tightly drawn, overlapping at the center.

Harry glanced at Connie.

With her revolver she indicated the front entrance.

Ordinarily they might have split up, Connie going around to cover the back while Harry took the front. But they weren’t trying to keep the perp from getting away, because this was one bastard who couldn’t be cornered, subdued, and cuffed. They were just trying to stay alive, and to keep Ricky alive if it was not already too late for him.

Harry nodded and cautiously eased open the screen door. Hinges squeaked. The closure spring sang a long, low swamp-insect note.

He hoped to be silent, but when the outer door defeated him, he put one hand on the inner door and pushed it, intending to go in low and fast. It swung to the right, and he shouldered through the widening gap. The door bumped against something and stopped before there was enough of an opening. He shoved it. Cracking. Scraping. A hard clatter. The door swung all the way open, pushing debris of some nature out of the way, and Harry burst inside so aggressively that he almost plunged through the hole in the hallway floor.

He was reminded of the shattered corridor in the building in Laguna, above the restaurant. If a grenade had done this damage, however, it had exploded in the crawlspace under the bungalow. The blast had driven joists, insulation, and floorboards upward into the hallway. But he could detect none of the charred, chemical odor of a bomb.

The overhead foyer light shone down onto the bare earth below the smashed oak flooring and sub-flooring. Standing perilously near the edge of the shrine table, the votive candle in the squat red glass threw off fluttering pennants of light and shadow.

Halfway back the hall, the left-hand wall was spattered with blood, not buckets of it but enough to signify mortal combat. On the floor under the bloodstains, close against the wall, lay the body of a man, twisted into such an unnatural posture that the fact of death was grimly obvious at a glance.

Harry could see just enough of the corpse to know beyond a doubt that it was Ricky. Never had he felt so sick at heart. A coldness rose in the pit of his stomach, and his legs grew weak.

As Harry moved around the hole in the floor, Connie entered the house after him. She saw the body, said nothing, but gestured toward the living-room arch.

Habitual police procedure had tremendous appeal for Harry at the moment, even if it was pointless to search for the killer in this instance. Ticktock, whatever manner of creature he was, would not be cowering in a corner or clambering out a back window, not when he could vanish in a whirlwind or a pillar of fire. And what good were guns against him, even if he could be found? Nonetheless, it was calming to proceed as if they were the first to arrive at an ordinary crime scene; order was imposed on chaos through policy, method, custom, and ritual.

Just inside the living-room archway and to the left lay a pile of dark mud, an eighth of a ton if there was an ounce. He would have thought that it had come from under the house, geysering up with the explosion, except that no mud was splattered in the foyer or hallway. It was as if someone had carefully carried the mud into the house in buckets and heaped it on the living-room carpet.

Curious as it was, Harry gave the mud only a cursory glance before continuing across the living room. Later there would be time to ponder it at length.

They searched the two baths and bedrooms, but found only a fat tarantula. Harry was so startled by the spider, he almost squeezed off a shot. If it had run toward him instead of out of sight under a dresser, he might have blown it to bits before realizing what it was.

Southern California, a desert before man had brought in water and made larger areas of it habitable, was a perfect breeding ground for tarantulas, but they kept to undeveloped canyons and scrublands. Though fearsome in appearance, they were shy creatures, living most of their lives underground, rarely surfacing outside of the mating season. Dana Point, or this part of it at least, was too civilized to be of interest to tarantulas, and Harry wondered how one had found its way into the heart of the town, where it was as out of place as a tiger would have been.

Silently they retraced their route through the house, into the foyer, the hall, then moved past the body. A quick glance confirmed that Ricky was far beyond help. Fragments of the ceramic religious statue clinked underfoot.

The kitchen was full of snakes.

“Oh shit,” Connie said.

One snake was just inside the archway. Two more were questing among the chair and table legs. Most were at the far side of the room, a tangled mass of squirming, serpentine coils, no fewer than thirty or forty, perhaps half again as many. Several seemed to be feeding on something.

Two more tarantulas were scuttling along a white tile counter, near the edge, keeping a watch on the teeming serpents below.

“What the hell happened here?” Harry wondered, and was not surprised to hear a tremor in his voice.

The snakes began to notice Harry and Connie. Most of them were disinterested, but a few slithered forth from the churning mass to investigate.

A pocket door separated the kitchen from the hall. Harry quickly slid it shut.

They checked the garage. Ricky’s car. A damp spot on the concrete where the roof had leaked earlier in the day, and a puddle that had not entirely evaporated. Nothing else.

Back in the hallway, Harry finally knelt beside the body of his friend. He had delayed the dreaded examination as long as possible.

Connie said, “I’ll see if there’s a bedroom phone.”

Alarmed, he looked up at her. “Phone? No, for God’s sake, don’t even think about it.”

“We’ve gotta put in a homicide call.”

“Listen,” he said, checking his wristwatch, “it’s going on eleven o’clock already. If we report this, we’re going to be tied up here for hours.”

“But—”

“We don’t have the time to waste. I don’t see how we’re ever going to find this Ticktock before sunrise. We don’t seem to have a chance in hell. Even if we find him, I don’t know how we could deal with him. But we’d be foolish not to try, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, you’re right. I don’t just want to sit around waiting to be whacked.”

“Okay then,” he said. “Forget the phone.”

“I’ll just… I’ll wait for you.”

“Watch out for snakes,” he said as she moved up the hall.

He turned his attention to Ricky.

The condition of the corpse was even worse than he anticipated. He saw the snake head fixed by deep-sunk fangs to Ricky’s left hand, and he shivered. Pairs of small holes on the face might have been bite marks. Both arms were bent backward at the elbows; the bones were not just broken but pulverized. Ricky Estefan was so battered that it was difficult to specify one injury as the cause of death; however, if he had not been dead when his head had been wrenched a hundred and eighty degrees around on his shoulders, he had surely died in that savage moment. His neck was torn and bruised, his head lolled loosely, and his chin rested between his shoulder blades.

His eyes were gone.

“Harry?” Connie called.

Staring into the dead man’s empty eye sockets, Harry was unable to answer her. His mouth was dry, and his voice caught like a burr in his throat.

“Harry, you better look at this.”

He had seen enough of what had been done to Ricky, too much. His anger at Ticktock was exceeded only by his fury with himself.

He rose from the body, turned, and caught sight of himself in the silver-leafed mirror above the shrine table. He was ashen. He looked as dead as the man on the floor. A part of him had died when he’d seen the body; he felt diminished.

When he met his own eyes, he had to look away from the terror, confusion, and primitive rage that he saw in them. The man in the mirror was not the Harry Lyon he knew — or wanted to be.

“Harry?” she said again.

In the living room, he found Connie crouching beside the pile of mud. It was not sloppy enough to be mud, actually, just two or three hundred pounds of moist, compacted earth.

“Look at this, Harry.”

She pointed to an inexplicable feature that he had not noticed during the search of the house. For the most part, the pile was shapeless, but sprouting from the formless heap was one human hand, not real but shaped from moist earth. It was large, strong, with blunt spatulate fingers, as exquisitely detailed as if it had been carved by a great sculptor.

The hand extended from the cuff of a coat sleeve that was also molded from the dirt, complete with sleeve strap, vent, and three mud buttons. Even the texture of the fabric was well realized.

“What do you make of it?” Connie asked.

“Damned if I know.”

He put one finger to the hand and poked at it, half expecting to discover that it was a real hand coated thinly with mud. But it was dirt all the way through, and it crumbled at his touch, more fragile than it appeared, leaving only the coat cuff and two fingers.

A pertinent memory swam into Harry’s mind and out again before he could catch it, as elusive as a half-glimpsed fish quickening with a flash of color into the murky depths of a koi pond. Staring at what remained of the dirt hand, he felt that he was close to learning something of tremendous importance about Ticktock. But the harder he seined for the memory, the emptier his net.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said.

Following Connie into the hallway, Harry didn’t look toward the body.

He was walking a thin line between control and derangement, filled with a rage so intense that he could barely contain it, like nothing he had ever felt before. New feelings always troubled him because he could not be sure where they might lead; he preferred to keep his emotional life as ordered as his homicide files and his CD collection. If he looked at Ricky just once more, his anger might grow beyond containment, and hysteria of a sort might grip him. He felt the urge to shout at someone, anyone at all, scream until his throat ached, and he needed to punch someone, too, punch and gouge and kick. Lacking a deserving target, he wanted to turn his wrath on inanimate objects, break and smash anything within reach, stupid and pointless as that would be, even if it drew the desperately unwanted attention of neighbors. The only thing that restrained him from venting his rage was a mental image of himself in the throes of such a frenzy, wild-eyed and bestial; he could not tolerate the thought of being seen that far out of control, especially if the one who saw him was Connie Gulliver.

Outside, she closed the front door all the way. Together, they walked to the street.

Just as they reached the car, Harry stopped and surveyed the neighborhood. “Listen.”

Connie frowned. “What?”

“Peaceful.”

“So?”

“It would’ve made one hell of a lot of noise,” he said.

She was with him: “The explosion that tore up the hall floor. And he would have screamed, maybe called for help.”

“So why didn’t any curious neighbors come out to see what was happening? This isn’t the big city, this is a fairly tight little community. People don’t pretend to be deaf when they hear trouble next door. They come to help.”

“Which means they didn’t hear anything,” Connie said.

“How’s that possible?”

A night bird sang in a tree nearby.

Faint music still came from one of the houses. He could identify the tune this time. “A String of Pearls.”

Perhaps a block away, a dog let out a lonely sound between a moan and a howl.

“Didn’t hear anything…. How’s that possible?” Harry repeated.

Farther away still, a big truck started up a steep grade on a distant highway. Its engine made a sound like the low bellow of a brontosaurus displaced in time.

8

His kitchen was all white — white paint, white floor tile, white marble counters, white appliances. The only relief from white was polished chrome and stainless steel where metal frames or panels were required, which reflected other white surfaces.

Bedrooms should be black. Sleep was black except when dreams were unreeling in the theater of the mind. And although his dreams always seethed with color, they were also somehow dark; the skies in them were always black or churning with contusive storm clouds. Sleep was like a brief death. Death was black.

However, kitchens must be white because kitchens were about food, and food was about cleanliness and energy. Energy was white: electricity, lightning.

In a red silk robe, Bryan sat in a shell-white chair with white leather upholstery in front of a white-lacquered table with a thick glass top. He liked the robe. He had five more of the same. The fine silk felt good against his skin, slippery and cool. Red was the color of power and authority: the red of a cardinal’s cassock; the gold- and ermine-trimmed red of a king’s imperial mantle; the red of a Mandarin emperor’s dragon robe.

At home, when he chose not to be naked, he dressed only in red. He was a king in hiding, a secret god.

When he went out into the world, he wore drab clothing because he did not wish to call attention to himself. Until he had Become, he was at least marginally vulnerable, so anonymity was wise. When his power had fully developed and he had learned total control of it, he would at last be able to venture out in costumes that befitted his true station, and everyone would kneel before him or turn away in awe or flee in terror.

The prospect was exciting. To be acknowledged. To be known and venerated. Soon.

At his white kitchen table, he ate chocolate ice cream in fudge sauce, smothered in maraschino cherries, sprinkled with coconut and crumbled sugar cookies. He loved sweets. Salties, too. Potato chips, cheese twirls, pretzels, peanuts, corn chips, deep-fried pork rinds. He ate sweets and salties, nothing else, because no one could tell him what to eat any more.

Grandmother Drackman would have a stroke if she could see what his diet consisted of these days. She had raised him virtually from birth until he was eighteen, and she had been uncompromisingly strict about diet. Three meals a day, no snacks. Vegetables, fruits, whole grains, breads, pasta, fish, chicken, no red meat, skim milk, frozen yogurt instead of ice cream, minimal salt, minimal sugar, minimal fat, minimal fun.

Even her hateful dog, a nervous poodle named Pierre, was forced to eat according to Grandma’s rules, which in his case required a vegetarian regimen. She believed that dogs ate meat only because they were expected to eat it, that the word “carnivore” was a meaningless label applied by know-nothing scientists, and that every species — especially dogs, for some reason — had the power to rise above their natural urges and live more peaceful lives than they usually did. The stuff in Pierre’s bowl sometimes looked like granola, sometimes like tofu cubes, sometimes like charcoal, and the closest he ever came to the taste of flesh was the imitation-beef soy gravy spiked with protein powder that drenched most of what he was served. A lot of the time, Pierre had a strained and desperate look, as if maddened by a craving for something that he could not identify and therefore could not satisfy Which was probably why he’d been so hateful, sneaky, and so given to nervous peeing in inconvenient places like in Bryan’s closet, all over his shoes.

She was a demon rulemaker, Grandma Drackman. She had rules for grooming, dressing, studying, and deportment in every conceivable social situation. A ten megabyte computer would offer insufficient capacity for the cataloguing of her rules.

Pierre the dog had his own rules to learn. Which chairs he could sit on, which he could not. No barking. No whining. Meals on a strict schedule, no table scraps. Semi-weekly brushing, be still, don’t fuss. Sit, roll over, play dead, don’t claw the furniture…

Even as a child of four or five, Bryan had understood in his own terms that his grandmother was something of an obsessive-compulsive personality, an anal-retentive wreck, and he had been cautious with her, polite and obedient, pretending love but never letting her into his true inner world. When, at that young age, his specialness initially manifested itself in small ways, he was canny enough to conceal his budding talents from her, aware that her reaction might be… dangerous to him. Puberty brought with it a surge of growth not merely in his body but in his secret abilities, yet still he kept his own counsel, exploring his power with the help of a host of small animals that perished in a wide variety of satisfying torments.

Two years ago, only a few weeks after his eighteenth birthday, the strange and dynamic force within him surged again, as it did periodically, and though he still didn’t feel strong enough to deal with the entire world, he knew that he was ready to deal with Grandma Drackman. She was sitting in her favorite armchair with her feet on an ottoman, eating carrot sticks, sipping at a glass of sparkling water, reading an article about capital punishment in the Los Angeles Times, adding her heartfelt comments about the need for extending compassion even to the worst of criminals, when Bryan used his newly refined power of pyrokinesis to set her on fire. Jeez, did she burn! In spite of the fact that she had less fat on her bones than did the average praying mantis, she went up like a tallow candle. Although one of her rules was never to raise one’s voice in the house, she screamed nearly loud enough to shatter windows — though not for long. It was a controlled burn, focused on grandmother and her clothes, only singeing the armchair and ottoman, but she herself blazed so white-hot that Bryan had to squint when he looked at her. Like a caterpillar dipped in alcohol and lit with a match, she sizzled and popped and flared even brighter, then blackened to a crisp and curled up on herself. Still, he kept her burning until the charcoal residue of her bones became ashes and until the ashes became soot and until the soot just disappeared in a final puff of green sparks.

Then he dragged Pierre out of hiding and fried him, too.

It was a lovely day.

That was the end of Grandma Drackman and her rules. From then on Bryan lived according to his own rules. Soon the whole world would live according to them as well.

He got up and went to the refrigerator. It was filled with candies and dessert toppings. Not a mushroom or piece of chopped jicama to be found. He took a jar of butterscotch topping back to the table and added some of it to the sundae.

“Dingdong, the witch is dead, the wicked old witch, the witch is dead,” he sang happily.

By tampering with public records, he had given Grandma an official death certificate, altered his official age to twenty-one (so no court would appoint a trustee), and had made himself the sole heir in her will. This was child’s play, since no locked office or vault was proof against him; by the exercise of his Greatest and Most Secret Power, he could go where he wanted, do anything he wanted, and no one would know he had ever been there. After taking possession of the house, he had arranged for it to be gutted and remodeled to his own taste, eliminating every trace of the carrot-eating bitch.

Although he had spent more in the past two years than he had inherited, extravagance was no problem. He could get any amount of money any time he needed it. He didn’t need it often because, thanks to his Greatest and Most Secret Power, he could also take virtually anything else he wanted and never be caught.

“Here’s to you, Grandma,” he said, raising a heaping spoonful of ice cream and fudge sauce.

Although he was unable — quite yet — to heal his own injuries or even fade a bruise, he seemed able to maintain his proper weight and excellent body tone simply by concentrating on it for a few minutes every day, setting his metabolism as he might an ordinary thermostat. Because of this ability, he was confident that, after another growth surge or two, his power would extend to rapid self-healing and eventually to invulnerability.

Meanwhile, in spite of all the sweets and salties, he had a trim body. He was proud of his lean muscularity, which was one reason he sometimes liked to be naked around the house and enjoyed catching unexpected glimpses of himself in the many mirrors.

He knew that women would like his body. If he had cared for women, he could have had any of them he wanted, maybe even without using any of his powers.

But sex was of no interest to him. For one thing, sex was the old god’s biggest mistake. People had become obsessed with it, and all of their endless frantic breeding had ruined the world. Because of sex, the new god must thin the herd and clean up the planet. Besides, for him, orgasm was triggered not by sex but by the violent termination of a human life. After using one of his golems to kill someone, when he brought his entire consciousness back into his real body, he often found the black silk sheets wet with glistening streams of semen.

What would Grandma think of that!

He laughed.

He could do what he wanted and eat what he wanted, and where was his nagging grandmother? Burned, dead, gone forever — that’s where.

He was twenty years old, and he might live to be a thousand, two thousand, possibly forever. When he had lived long enough, he would most likely forget about his grandmother altogether, and that would be good.

“Stupid old cow,” he said, and giggled. It tickled him to be able to talk about her any way he wanted, in what had been her house.

Though he had made the sundae in a large serving dish, he ate every bite of it. Exercising his powers was extremely taxing, and he required both more than the usual amount of sleep and far more calories per day than other people. He napped and snacked a lot of the time, but he assumed the need for food and sleep might entirely vanish when he had finished Becoming and was, at last, the new god. When his Becoming was complete, he might never sleep, and take food not out of necessity but only for the pleasure of it.

After he had scooped up the last spoonful, he licked out the dish.

Grandma Drackman hated that.

He licked it thoroughly. When he was finished, it looked as clean as if it had been washed.

“I can do anything I want,” he said. “Anything.”

On the table, in a Mason jar, floating in preservative fluid, the eyes of Enrique Estefan watched him adoringly.

9

Driving north along the night coast with Ricky lying dead in the snake-infested house in Dana Point, Harry said, “It’s my fault, what happened to him.”

From the passenger seat, Connie said, “The hell it is.”

“The hell it isn’t.”

“I suppose it’s your fault he walked into that convenience store after he got off-duty three years ago.”

“Thanks for trying to make me feel better, but no thanks.”

“Should I try to make you feel worse? Look, this thing we’re up against, this Ticktock — there’s no way you can figure what he’s going to do next.”

“But maybe I can. I’m getting a handle on him, sort of. I’m starting to know what to expect. It’s just that I’m running one step behind the sonofabitch. As soon as I saw that belt buckle, I knew it was natural for him to go after Ricky. That’s part of what his threat meant. I just saw it too late.”

“My point exactly. Maybe there’s no way to get ahead of this guy. He’s something new, damn new, and he thinks a lot different from the way you and I think, from the way the average sleazebag thinks, doesn’t fit any psychological profile, so there’s no way you or anyone can be expected to out-think the bastard. Look, Harry, this is just not your responsibility.”

He snapped at her, not meaning to, not in the least blaming her for anything, but unable to contain his anger any longer. “That’s what’s wrong with the world these days, Jesus, that’s exactly what’s wrong! Nobody wants to be responsible for anything. Everybody wants a license to be and do any damn thing, nobody wants to pay the bill.”

“You’re right.”

She obviously meant what she said, agreed with him, wasn’t just humoring him, but he would not be defused that easily.

“These days, if your life is screwed up, if you’ve failed your family and friends, it’s never your fault. You’re a drunkard? Why, maybe it’s a genetic predisposition. You’re a compulsive adulterer, have a hundred sex partners a year? Well, maybe you just never felt loved as a child, maybe your parents never gave you all the cuddling you needed. It’s crap, all of it.”

“Exactly,” she said.

“You just blew some shopkeeper’s head off or beat some old lady to death for twenty bucks? Why, you’re not a bad guy, no, you’re not to blame! Your parents are to blame, your teachers are to blame, society is to blame, all of Western culture is to blame, but not you, never you, how crass to suggest such a thing, how insensitive, how hopelessly old-fashioned.”

“You had a radio show, I’d listen to it every day,” she said. He was passing slow traffic even when he had to cross a double yellow line. He had never done that before in his life, not even when he’d been in a car with a siren and emergency beacons flashing.

He wondered what had gotten into him. He wondered how he could wonder about it — but keep doing it anyway, now swinging around a van with a Rocky Mountain mural on the side, into the oncoming-traffic lane in what was essentially a blind turn, even though the van was doing five miles an hour over the speed limit in the first place.

He raged on: “You can walk out on your wife and kids without paying child support, bilk your investors out of millions, beat some guy’s brains to jelly because he’s gay or he showed you disrespect—”

Connie joined in: “—drop your baby in a garbage dumpster because you had second thoughts about the joys of motherhood—”

“—cheat on your taxes, defraud the welfare—”

“—sell drugs to grade-school kids—”

“—abuse your own daughter, and still claim you’re the victim. Everyone’s a victim these days. No one’s a victimizer. No matter what atrocity you commit, you can stake a claim for sympathy, moan about being a victim of racism, reverse racism, sexism, ageism, classism, prejudice against fat people, ugly people, dumb people, smart people. That’s why you robbed the bank or blew away that cop, because you’re a victim, there’re a million ways to be a victim. Yeah, sure, you devalue the honest complaints of real victims, but what the hell, we only go around once, might as well get your piece of the action, and who cares about those real victims anyway, for God’s sake, they’re losers.”

He was coming up fast behind a slow-moving Cadillac.

A passing lane was provided. But an equally slow-moving Jeep station wagon with two bumper stickers on the rear window — I TRAVEL WITH JESUS and BEACHES, BIKINIS & BEER — was blocking the way.

He couldn’t cross the double yellow line again because suddenly a stream of oncoming traffic appeared behind dazzling headlights.

He thought of blowing his horn, trying to make the Caddy or the Jeep speed up, but he didn’t have the patience for that.

The shoulder of the highway was unusually wide at that point, and he took advantage of it, accelerating hard as he pulled off the pavement, passing the Cadillac on the right side. Even as he was doing it, he couldn’t believe he was doing it. Neither could the driver of the Cadillac; Harry looked over to his left and saw the man staring at him in astonishment, a funny little guy with a pencil mustache and a bad toupee. A soft bank of eroded earth, hung with ice plant and wild ivy, pressed close on the right side of the Honda. It was just inches away from the door even where the shoulder was broad… and then the shoulder began to narrow. The Cadillac dropped back, trying to get out of his way. Harry accelerated, and the shoulder shrank further. A California Highway Department no stopping sign appeared directly ahead of him and was absolutely certain to stop him if he hit it. He swerved off the diminishing shoulder, onto the blacktop again, fishtailing in front of the Caddy, got control, and continued north with the Pacific vastness to his left, as black as his mood.

“Way cool!” Connie said.

He didn’t know if she was being sarcastic or approving. With her love of speed and risk, it could be either.

“What I’m saying,” he told her, struggling to keep his anger white-hot, “is that I don’t want to be like that, always pointing the finger somewhere else. When I’m responsible, I want to choke on my responsibility.”

“I hear you.”

“I’m responsible for Ricky.”

“Whatever you say.”

“If I’d been smarter, he’d still be alive.”

“Whatever.”

“He’s on my conscience.”

“Fine with me.”

“I’m responsible.”

“And I’m sure you’ll rot in Hell for it.”

He couldn’t help it: he laughed. The laughter was dark, and for a moment he was afraid it was going to turn into tears for Ricky, but she was not about to let that happen.

She said, “Sit for eternity in a pit of dog vomit, if that’s what you think you deserve.”

Though Harry wanted to keep his rage at full blaze, it was dimming — as it should. He glanced at her and laughed harder.

She said, “You’re such a bad guy, you’ll have to eat maggots and drink demon bile for, oh, maybe a thousand years—”

“I hate demon bile—”

She was laughing, too: “—and for sure you’ll have to let Satan give you a high colonic—”

“—and watch Hudson Hawk ten thousand times—”

“Oh, no, even Hell has its limits.”

They were both howling now, letting off steam, and the laughter didn’t fade for a while.

When silence finally settled between them, Connie was the one to break it: “You okay?”

“I feel rotten.”

“But better?”

“A little.”

“You’ll be okay.”

He said, “I will be, I guess.”

“Of course you will. When everything’s said and done, maybe that’s the real tragedy. Somehow we grow scabs over all the hurts and losses, even the worst ones, deepest ones. We go on, and nothing hurts forever, though sometimes it seems right that it should.”

They continued north. Sea to the left. Dark hills speckled with house lights to the right.

They were in Laguna Beach again, but he didn’t know where they were going. What he wanted to do was keep driving toward the top of the compass, all the way up the coast, past Santa Barbara, along Big Sur, over the Golden Gate, into Oregon, Washington, Canada, maybe up into Alaska, far and away, see some snow and feel the bite of arctic wind, watch moonlight glimmer on glaciers, then keep right on going across the Bering Strait, the car handling water with all the magic ease of some fairy-tale conveyance, then down the frozen coast of what had once been the Soviet Union, thence into China, stopping for some good Szechwan cooking.

He said, “Gulliver?”

“Yeah.”

“I like you.”

“Who doesn’t?”

“I mean it.”

“Well, I like you too, Lyon.”

“Just thought I’d say it.”

“Glad you did.”

“Doesn’t mean we’re going steady or anything.”

She smiled. “Good. By the way, where are we going?”

He resisted suggesting spicy duck in Beijing. “Ordegard’s place. You wouldn’t happen to know the address, I guess.”

“I don’t just know it — I’ve been there.”

He was surprised. “When?”

“Between leaving the restaurant and coming back to the office, while you were typing reports. Nothing special about the place, creepy, but I don’t think we’ll find anything helpful there.”

“When you were there before, you didn’t know about Ticktock. Now you’ll be looking at things with a different attitude.”

“Maybe. Two blocks ahead, turn right.”

He did, and they went up into the hills, along cramped and winding streets canopied by palms and overgrown eucalyptuses. A white owl with a three-foot wingspan swooped from the chimney of one house to the gabled roof of another, sailing through the night like a lost soul seeking heaven, and the starless sky pressed down so close that Harry could almost hear it grinding softly against the high points of the eastern ridges.

10

Bryan opened one of the pair of French doors and stepped onto the master-bedroom balcony.

The doors were unlocked, as were all others in the house. Though it was prudent to keep a low profile until he had Become, he feared no one, never had. Other boys were cowards, not him. His power made him confident to an extent that perhaps no one else in the history of the world had ever been. He knew that no one could prevent him from fulfilling his destiny; his journey to the ultimate throne was ordained, and all he needed was patience in order to finish Becoming.

The hour before midnight was cool and humid. The balcony deck was beaded with dew. A refreshing breeze swept in from the sea. His red robe was belted tightly at the waist, but around his legs the hem belled out like a spreading pool of blood.

The lights of Santa Catalina, twenty-six miles to the west, were hidden by a thick bank of fog lying more than twenty miles offshore and invisible itself. In the wake of the rain, the sky remained low, forbidding any relief from starlight, moonlight. He could not see his neighbors’ bright windows, for his house sat farthest out on the point, with the bluff falling away on three sides of the rear yard.

He felt wrapped by a darkness as comforting as his fine silk robe. The rumble and splash and ceaseless susurration of the surf was soothing.

Like a sorcerer at a lonely altar high upon a pinnacle of rock, Bryan closed his eyes and got in touch with his power.

He ceased to feel the cool night air and the chilly dew on the. balcony deck. He could no longer feel the robe billowing around his legs, either, or hear the waves breaking on the shore below.

First he reached out to find the five diseased cattle that were awaiting the axe. He had marked each of them with a loop of psionic energy for easy location. With eyes closed, he felt as if he were floating high above the earth, and gazing down he saw five special lights, auras different from all other sources of energy along the southern coast. The objects of his blood sport.

Employing clairvoyance — or “far-seeing”—he could observe these cattle, one at a time, as well as their immediate surroundings. He couldn’t hear them, which was occasionally frustrating. However, he assumed that he would develop full five-sense clairvoyance when at last he Became the new god.

Bryan looked in upon Sammy Shamroe, whose torments had been postponed due to the unanticipated need to deal with the smartass hero cop. The booze-soaked loser was not huddled in his crate under the drooping boughs of alleyway oleander, not sucking down his second double-liter jug of wine, as Bryan expected. Instead he was on the move in downtown Laguna, carrying what appeared to be a thermos bottle, stumbling drunkenly past shuttered shops, leaning for a moment against the trunk of a tree to catch his breath and orient himself. Then he staggered ten or twenty steps only to lean against a brick wall and hang his head, evidently considering whether to heave up his guts. Deciding against regurgitation, he staggered forth again, blinking furiously, squinting, head thrust forward, an uncharacteristic look of determination on his face, as if he had some meaningful destination in mind, although he was most likely on a random ramble, driven by irrational ox-stupid motivations that would be explicable only to someone whose brain, like his, was pickled in alcohol.

Leaving Sam the Sham, Bryan next looked in upon the bigshot hero jackass and, by association, his bitch-cop partner. They were i n the hero’s Honda, pulling into the driveway of a contemporary house with weathered-cedar siding and lots of big windows, high in the hills. They were talking. Couldn’t hear what they were saying.

Animated. Serious. The two cops got out of the car, unaware that they were being observed. Bryan looked around. He recognized the neighborhood because he had lived all his life in Laguna Beach, but he didn’t know to whom the house belonged.

In a few minutes he would visit Lyon and Gulliver more directly.

Finally he tuned in on Janet Marco and her ragamuffin child, where they were huddled in their dilapidated Dodge in the parking lot beside the Methodist Church. The boy appeared to be asleep on the back seat. The mother was behind the steering wheel, slumped down in the seat and against the driver’s door. She was wide awake, keeping a watch on the night around the car.

He had promised to kill them at dawn, and intended to meet his self-imposed deadline. Dealing with them and two cops, after recently expending so much energy to torment and waste Enrique Estefan, would be taxing. But with a nap or two between now and sunrise, with a couple of bags of potato chips and some cookies and possibly another sundae, he believed he would be able to crush all of them in ways that would be wonderfully satisfying.

Ordinarily he would manifest himself through a golem at least two or three times during the last six hours of the mother’s and son’s lives, harassing them to bring the sharpest possible edge to their terror. Killing was pure pleasure, intense and orgiastic. But the hours — and sometimes days — of torment that preceded most of his killings were almost as much fun as the moment when, at last, blood flowed. He was excited by the fear the cattle showed, by the horror and awe that he engendered in them; he was thrilled by their stunned disbelief and hysteria when they failed in their pathetic attempts to hide or run, as they all did sooner or later. But with Janet Marco and her boy, he would have to forego the foreplay, visit them only once more, at dawn, when they would receive a bill of pain and blood for having polluted the world with their presence.

Bryan needed to conserve his energy for the bigshot cop. He wanted the great and mighty hero to suffer more torment than usual. Humble him. Break him. Reduce him to a begging, sniveling baby. There was a coward in the hotshot hero. Cowards hid in all of them. Bryan intended to make the coward crawl on his belly, reveal what a weakling he really was, a jellyfish, nothing but a fraidy-cat hiding behind his badge and gun. Before he killed the two cops, he was going to run them to exhaustion, take them apart piece by piece, and make them wish they had never been born.

He stopped far-seeing and withdrew from the Dodge in the church parking lot. He returned his full consciousness to his body on the master-bedroom balcony.

High waves tilted out of the lightless west and crashed onto the shore below, reminding Bryan Drackman of the gleaming highrises in the cities of his dreams, which toppled to the pull of his power and drowned millions of screaming people in tides of glass and splintered steel.

When he had completed his Becoming, he would never need to rest again or preserve energy. His power would be that of the universe, endlessly renewable and beyond measure.

He returned to the black bedroom and slid the balcony door shut behind him.

He slipped off his red robe.

Naked, he stretched out on the bed, head propped up on two goose-down pillows in black silk cases.

A few slow, deep breaths. Close the eyes. Make the body limp. Clear the mind. Relax.

In less than a minute he was ready to create. He projected a substantial measure of his consciousness to the side yard of the modern house with weathered-cedar siding and big windows, high in the hills, where the cop’s Honda stood in the driveway.

The nearest streetlamp was half a block away. Shadows were everywhere and deep.

In the deepest, a section of the lawn began to churn. The grass folded into the earth beneath it as if an invisible tilling machine was at work, and the dirt boiled up with only a soft, wet sound like thick cake batter being folded over a rubber spatula. All of it — grass, soil, stones, dead leaves, earthworms, beetles, a cigar box containing the feathers and crumbled bones of a pet parakeet buried by a child long ago — rose in a swarthy, seething column as tall and broad as a large man.

Out of that mass, the hulking figure took shape from the top down. The hair appeared first, tangled and greasy. Then the beard. A mouth cracked open. Crooked, discolored teeth sprouted. Lips with oozing sores.

One eye opened. Yellow. Malevolent. Inhuman.

11

He is in a dark alley, padding along, seeking the scent of the thing-that-will-kill-you, knowing he’s lost it but sniffing for it anyway because of the woman, because of the boy, because he’s a good dog, good.

Empty can, metal smell, rust. Puddle of rainwater, drops of oil shining on top. Dead bee floating in the water. Interesting. Not as interesting as a dead mouse but interesting.

Bees fly, bees buzz, bees hurt you like a cat can hurt you, but this bee is dead. First dead bee he’s ever seen. Interesting, that bees can die. He can’t remember ever seeing a dead cat, either, so now he wonders if cats can die like bees.

Funny to think maybe cats can die.

What could kill them?

They can go straight up trees and places nothing else can go, and slash your nose with their sharp claws so fast you don’t see it coming, so if something is out there that kills cats, it can’t be good for dogs either, not good at all, something quicker than cats and mean.

Interesting.

He moves along the alley.

Somewhere in a people place, meat is cooking. He licks his chops because he’s still hungry.

Piece of paper. Candy wrapper. Smells good. He puts a paw on it to hold it down, and licks it. The wrapper tastes good. He licks, licks, licks, but that’s all of it, not much, just a little sweet on the paper. That’s the way it usually is, a few licks or bites and then it’s all gone, seldom as much as he wants, never more than he wants.

He sniffs the paper just to be sure, and it sticks to his nose, so he shakes his head, flinging the paper free. It swoops up into the air and then floats along the alley on the breeze, up and down, side to side, like a butterfly. Interesting. All of a sudden alive and flying. How can that be? Very interesting. He trots after it, and it floats up there, so he jumps, snaps at it, misses, and now he wants it, really wants it, has to have it, jumps, snaps, misses. What’s going on here, what is this thing? Just a paper and now it’s flying like a butterfly. He really really really needs it. He trots and jumps and snaps and gets it this time, chews on it, but it’s only paper, so he spits it out. He stares at it, stares and stares at it, waiting, watching, ready to pounce, not going to be fooled, but it doesn’t move any more, dead as the bee.

Policeman-wolf-thing! The thing-that-will-kill-you.

That strange and hateful scent suddenly comes to him on a breeze from the sea, and he twitches. He sniffs, seeking. The bad thing is out in the night, standing in the night, somewhere near the sea.

He follows the odor. At first it is faint, almost fading away at times, but then it grows stronger. He begins to get excited. He is getting closer, not yet really close, but a little closer all the time, moving from alley to street to park to alley to street again. The bad thing is the strangest, most interesting thing he has ever smelled, ever.

Bright lights. Beep-beep-beeeeeeeeep. Car. Close. Could’ve been dead in a puddle like a bee.

He chases after the bad thing’s scent, moving faster, ears pricked, alert and watchful, but still relying on his nose.

Then he loses the trail.

He stops, turns, sniffs the air this way and that. The breeze hasn’t changed direction, still coming off the sea. But the smell of the bad thing is no longer on it. He waits, sniffs, waits, turns, whines in frustration, and sniffs sniffs sniffs.

The bad thing isn’t out in the night any more. It went in somewhere, maybe into a people place where the breeze doesn’t wash across it. Like a cat going high up a tree, out of reach.

He stands around for a while, panting, not sure what to do, and then the most amazing man comes along the sidewalk, stumbling and weaving back and forth, carrying a funny bottle in one hand, mumbling to himself. The man is putting off more odors than the dog has ever smelled on one people before, most of them bad, like lots of stinky people in one body. Sour wine. Greasy hair, sour sweat, onions, garlic, candle smoke, blueberries. Newspaper ink, oleander. Damp khaki. Damp flannel. Dried blood, faint people pee, peppermint in one coat pocket, an old bit of dried ham and moldy bread forgotten in another pocket, dried mustard, mud, grass, just a little people vomit, stale beer, rotting canvas shoes, rotten teeth. Plus he keeps farting as he weaves along, farting and mumbling, leaning against a tree for a while, farting, then weaving farther and stopping to lean against the wall of a people place and fart some more.

All of this is interesting, very, but the most interesting thing of all is that, among the many other odors, the man is carrying a trace of the bad thing’s smell. He is not the bad thing, no, no, but he knows the bad thing, is coming from a place where he met the bad thing not long ago, has the touch of the bad thing on him.

Without a doubt it is that scent, so strange and evil: like the smell of the sea on a cold night, an iron fence on a hot day, dead mice, lightning, thunder, spiders, blood, dark holes in the ground — like all of those things yet not really like any of them.

The man stumbles past him, and he backs off with his tail between his legs. But the man doesn’t even seem to see him, just weaves on and turns the corner into an alley.

Interesting.

He watches.

He waits.

Finally he follows.

12

Harry was uneasy about being in Ordegard’s house. A police notice on the front door had restricted entrance until the criminal investigation had been completed, but he and Connie had not followed proper procedure to get in. She carried a complete set of lock picks in a small leather pouch, and she was able to go through Ordegard’s locks faster than a politician could go through a billion dollars.

Ordinarily, Harry was appalled by such methods, and this was the first time he’d allowed her to use her picks since she’d been his partner. But there just wasn’t enough time to follow the rules; dawn was less than seven hours away, and they were no closer to finding Ticktock than they had been hours ago.

The three-bedroom house was not large, but the space was well designed. Like the exterior, the interior lacked sharp angles. All corners were soft radiuses, and many rooms had at least one curved wall. Radiused, extremely shiny white-lacquered moldings were used throughout. High-gloss white paint had been applied to most walls, too, which lent the rooms a pearly luster, though the dining room had been faux-finished to give the illusion that it was upholstered in plush beige leather.

The place felt like the interior of a cruise ship, and it should have been soothing if not cozy. But Harry was edgy, not just because the moon-faced killer had lived there or because they had entered illegally, but for other reasons that he could not pin down.

Maybe the furnishings had something to do with his apprehension. Every piece was Scandinavian modern, severe, unornamented, in flat-yellow maple veneers, as angular as the house was soft-edged and rounded. The extreme contrast with the architecture made the sharp edges of the chair arms and end tables and sofa frames seem as if they were bristling at him. The carpet was the thinnest Berber with minimal padding; if it gave at all underfoot, the resilience was too minor to be detected.

As they moved through the living room, dining room, den, and kitchen, Harry noted that no artwork adorned the walls. There were no decorative objects of any kind; tables were utterly bare except for plain ceramic lamps in white and black. No books or magazines were to be found anywhere.

The rooms had a monastic feel, as if the person living in them was doing long-term penance for his sins.

Ordegard seemed to be a man of two distinct characters. The organic lines and textures of the house itself described a resident who had a strong sensual nature, who was easy with himself and his emotions, relaxed and self-indulgent to some extent. On the other hand, the relentless sameness of the furniture and utter lack of ornamentation indicated that he was cold, hard on himself and others, introverted, and brooding.

“What do you think?” Connie asked as they entered the hall that served the bedrooms.

“Creepy.”

“I told you. But why exactly?”

“The contrasts are… too extreme.”

“Yeah. And it just doesn’t look lived-in.”

Finally, in the master bedroom, there was a painting on the Wall directly opposite the bed. Ordegard would have seen it first thing upon waking and last thing before falling asleep each night. It was a reproduction of a famous work of art with which Harry was familiar, though he had no idea what the title was. He thought the artist was Francisco de Goya; that much had stuck with him from Art Appreciation 101. The work was menacing, abrasive to the nerves, conveying a sense of horror and despair, not least of all because it included the figure of a giant, demonic ghoul in the act of devouring a bloody and headless human body.

Profoundly disturbing, brilliantly composed and executed, it was without doubt a major work of art — but more suited to the walls of a museum than to a private home. It needed to be dwarfed by a huge exhibition space with vaulted ceiling; here, in this room of ordinary dimensions, the painting was too overpowering, its dark energy almost paralyzing.

Connie said, “Which do you think he identified with?”

“What do you mean?”

“The ghoul or the victim?”

He thought about it. “Both.”

“Devouring himself.”

“Yeah. Being devoured by his own madness.”

“And unable to stop.”

“Maybe worse than unable. Unwilling. Sadist and masochist rolled up in one.”

Connie said, “But how does any of this help us figure out what’s been happening?”

Harry said, “As far as I can see, it doesn’t.”

“Ticktock,” said the hobo.

When they spun around in surprise at hearing the low gravelly voice, the vagrant was only inches away. He could not have crept so close without alerting them, yet there he was.

Ticktock’s right arm slammed across Harry’s chest with what seemed like as much force as the steel boom of a construction crane. He was hurled backward. He crashed into the wall hard enough to make the bedroom windows vibrate in their frames, his teeth snapping together so forcefully that he would have bitten his tongue off if it had been in the way. He collapsed on his face, sucking up dust and carpet fibers, struggling to recapture the breath that had been knocked out of him.

With tremendous effort, he raised his face from the Berber, and saw that Connie had been lifted off her feet. Ticktock pinned her against the wall and shook her furiously. The back of her head and the heels of her shoes drummed the Sheetrock.

Ricky, now Connie.

First everyone you love…

Harry got up as far as his hands and knees, choking on carpet fibers that were stuck to the back of his throat. Every cough sent a quiver of pain through his chest, and he felt as if his rib cage was a vise that had closed around his heart and lungs.

Ticktock was screaming in Connie’s face, words Harry couldn’t understand because his ears were ringing.

Gunfire.

She had managed to draw her revolver and empty it into her assailant’s neck and face. The slugs jolted him slightly but didn’t loosen his grip on her.

Grimacing at the pain in his chest, pawing at a stark Danish-modern dresser, Harry lurched to his feet. Dizzy, wheezing. He pulled his own gun, knowing it would be ineffective against this adversary.

Still shouting and holding Connie off the floor, Ticktock swung her away from the wall and threw her at the two sliding glass doors to the balcony. She exploded through one of them as if she had been shot from a cannon, and the pane of tempered glass dissolved into tens of thousands of gummy fragments.

No. It couldn’t happen to Connie. He couldn’t lose Connie. Unthinkable.

Harry fired twice. Two ragged holes appeared in the back of Ticktock’s black raincoat.

The vagrant’s spine should have been shattered. Bone and lead shrapnel should have skewered all of his vital organs. He should have gone down like King Kong taking the plunge off the Empire State Building.

Instead, he turned.

Didn’t cry out in pain. Didn’t even wobble.

He said, “Bigshot hero.”

How he could still talk was a mystery, maybe a miracle. In his throat was a bullet wound the size of a silver dollar.

Connie had also blown away part of his face. Missing tissue left a large concavity on the left side, from jaw line to just under the eye socket, and his left ear was gone.

No blood flowed. No bone lay exposed. The meat of him was not red but brown-black and strange.

His smile was more terrible than ever because the disintegration of his left cheek had exposed his rotten teeth all the way back along the side of his face. Within that calcium cage, his tongue squirmed like a fat eel in a fisherman’s trap.

“Think you’re so bad, big hero cop, bigshot tough guy,” Ticktock said. In spite of his deep and raspy voice, he sounded curiously like a schoolboy issuing a challenge to a playground fight, and even his fearsome appearance could not entirely conceal that childish quality in his demeanor. “But you’re nothing, you’re nobody, just a scared little man.”

Ticktock stepped toward him.

Harry pointed the revolver at the huge assailant and—

— was sitting on a chair in James Ordegard’s kitchen. The gun was still in his hand, but the muzzle was pressed to the underside of his chin, as if he were about to commit suicide. The steel was cold against his skin, and the gunsight dug painfully at his chin bone. His finger was curled around the trigger.

Dropping the revolver as if he had discovered a poisonous snake in his hand, he bolted up from the chair.

He had no memory of going to the kitchen, pulling the chair out from the table, and sitting down. In the blink of an eye, he seemed to have been transported there and encouraged to the brink of self-destruction.

Ticktock was gone.

The house was silent. Unnaturally silent.

Harry moved toward the door—

— and was sitting on the same chair as before, the gun in his hand again, the muzzle in his mouth, his teeth biting down on the barrel.

Stunned, he took the.38 out of his mouth and put it on the floor beside the chair. His palm was damp. He blotted it on his slacks.

He got to his feet. His legs were shaky. He broke into a sweat, and the sour taste of half-digested pizza rose in the back of his mouth.

Although he didn’t understand what was happening to him, he knew for certain that he did not have a suicidal urge. He wanted to live. Forever, if possible. He would not have put the barrel of the gun between his lips, not voluntarily, not in a million years.

He wiped one trembling hand down his damp face and—

— was on the chair again, holding the revolver, the muzzle pressed to his right eye, staring into the dark barrel. Five steely inches of eternity. Finger around the trigger.

Sweet Jesus.

His heart knocked so hard that he could feel it in every bruise on his body.

Carefully he put the revolver in his shoulder holster, under his rumpled coat.

He felt as if he were caught in a spell. Magic seemed to be the only explanation for what was happening to him. Sorcery, witchcraft, voodoo — he was suddenly willing to believe in all of it, as long as believing would buy a pardon from the sentence that Ticktock had pronounced on him.

He licked his lips. They were chapped, dry, burning. He looked at his hands, which were pale, and he figured that his face was even paler.

After getting shakily to his feet, he hesitated briefly, then started toward the door. He was surprised to reach it without being returned inexplicably to the chair.

He remembered the four expended bullets that he had found in his shirt pocket after shooting the vagrant four times, and he recalled as well the discovery of the newspaper under his arm as he’d walked out of the convenience store earlier in the night. Finding himself three times in the kitchen chair with no recollection of having gone to it was, he sensed, merely the result of a different application of the same trick that had put those slugs in his pocket and the paper under his arm. An explanation of how the effect was achieved seemed almost within his grasp… but remained elusive.

When he edged out of the kitchen without further incident, he decided that the spell was broken. He rushed to the master bedroom, wary of encountering Ticktock, but the vagrant seemed to have gone.

He was afraid of finding Connie dead, her head turned around backward like Ricky’s had been, eyes torn out.

She was sitting on the balcony floor in glittering puddles of tempered glass, still alive, thank God, holding her head in her hands and groaning softly. Her short dark hair fluttered in the night breeze, shiny and soft. Harry wanted to touch her hair, stroke it.

Crouching beside her, he said, “You all right?”

“Where is he?”

“Gone.”

“I want to tear his lungs out.”

Harry almost laughed with relief at her bravado.

She said, “Tear ‘em out and stuff ‘em where the sun don’t shine, make him breathe through his ass from now on.”

“Probably wouldn’t stop him.”

“Slow him down some.”

“Maybe not even that.”

“Where the hell did he come from?”

“Same place he went. Thin air.”

She groaned again.

Harry said, “You sure you’re all right?”

She finally raised her face from her hands. The right corner of her mouth was bleeding, and the sight of her blood made him shiver with rage as much as with fear. That whole side of her face was red, as if she had been slapped hard and repeatedly. It would probably darken with bruises by tomorrow.

If they lived to see tomorrow.

“Man, could I use some aspirin,” she said.

“Me, too.”

From his coat pocket, Harry removed the bottle of Anacin that he had borrowed from her medicine cabinet a few hours ago.

“A genuine Boy Scout,” she said.

“I’ll get you some water.”

“I can get it myself.”

Harry helped her to her feet. Bits of glass fell from her hair and clothes.

When they stepped inside from the balcony, Connie paused to look at the painting on the bedroom wall. The headless human corpse. The hungry ghoul with mad, staring eyes.

“Ticktock had yellow eyes,” she said. “Not like before, outside the restaurant when he panhandled me. Yellow eyes, bright, with black slits for pupils.”

They headed for the kitchen to get water to chase the Anacin. Harry had the irrational feeling that the ghoul’s eyes in the Goya painting turned to watch as he and Connie passed by, and that the monster climbed out of the canvas and crept after them through the dead man’s house.

1

Sometimes when he was weary from exercising his powers, Bryan Drackman grew sullen and petulant. He didn’t like anything. If the night was cool, he wanted it warm; if it was warm, he wanted it cool. Ice cream tasted too sweet, corn chips too salty, chocolate far too chocolaty. The feel of clothes against his skin, even a silk robe, was intolerably irritating, yet he felt vulnerable and strange when he was naked. He didn’t want to stay in the house, didn’t want to go out. When he looked at himself in the mirror, he didn’t like what he saw, and when he stood in front of the jars full of eyes, he had the feeling that they were mocking rather than adoring him. He knew he should sleep in order to restore his energy and improve his mood, but he loathed the world of dreams as much as he despised the waking world.

This crabbiness escalated until he became quarrelsome. Because he had no one with whom to quarrel in his seaside sanctum, his temper could not be vented. Irascibility intensified into anger. Anger became blind rage.

Too exhausted to work off his rage in physical activity, he sat naked in his black bed, propped against pillows covered in black silk, and allowed wrath to consume him. He closed his hands into fists on his thighs, squeezed tighter, tighter, until his fingernails dug painfully into his palms and until the muscles in his arms ached from the exertion. He pounded his thighs with his fists, knuckle-first to hurt the most, then his abdomen, then his chest. He twisted strands of hair around his fingers and pulled on it until tears blurred his vision.

His eyes. He hooked his fingers, pressed the nails against his eyelids, and tried to generate enough courage to gouge his eyes out, tear them loose and crush them in his fists.

He didn’t understand why he was overcome by the urge to blind himself, but the compulsion was powerful.

Irrationality seized him.

He wailed, tossed his head in anguish and thrashed upon the black sheets, kicked and flailed, screamed and spat, cursed with a fluidity and vehemence that made his tantrum appear to be the work of some spawn of Hell that had possessed him. He cursed the world and himself, but most of all he cursed the bitch, the breeding bitch, the stupid hateful breeding bitch. His mother.

His mother.

Rage abruptly turned to piteous distress, and his furious cries and hate-filled screams shivered into agonized sobs. He curled into the fetal position, hugging his pummeled and aching body, and he wept as intensely as he had shrieked and flailed, as passionate in his self-pity as he had been in his wrath.

It wasn’t fair, not fair at all, what was expected of him. He had to Become without the company of a brother, without the guiding hand of a carpenter father, without the tender mercy of his mother. Jesus, while Becoming, had enjoyed the perfect love of Mary, but there was no Holy Virgin this time, no radiant Madonna at his side. This time there was a hag, withered and debilitated by her greedy appetites and self-indulgence, who turned from him in loathing and fear, unable and unwilling to provide comfort. It was so unfair, so bitterly unjust, that he should be expected to Become and remake the world without the adoring disciples who had stood at the side of Jesus, and without a mother like Mary, Queen of Angels.

Gradually his wretched sobbing subsided.

The flow of tears slowed, dried up.

He lay in miserable solitude.

He needed to sleep.

Since his most recent nap, he had created a golem to kill Ricky Estefan, built another golem to tie the silver buckle to the rearview mirror of Lyon’s Honda, practiced godhood by bringing to life the flying reptile from the sand on the beach, and created yet another golem to terrorize the bigshot hero cop and his partner. He had also used his Greatest and Most Secret Power to put the spiders and snakes in Ricky Estefan’s kitchen cabinets, to place the broken head of the religious figurine in Connie Gulliver’s tightly clenched hand, and to drive Lyon half crazy by returning him three times to that kitchen chair in various suicidal postures.

Bryan giggled at the memory of Harry Lyon’s utter confusion and fear.

Stupid cop. Big hero. Almost peed his pants in terror.

Bryan giggled again. He rolled over and buried his face in a pillow as the giggling built.

Almost peed his pants. Some hero.

Pretty soon he had stopped feeling sorry for himself. He was in a much better mood.

He was still exhausted, needed to sleep, but he was also hungry. He had burned up a tremendous number of calories in the exercise of his power and had lost a couple of pounds. Until he quelled his hunger pangs, he would not be able to sleep.

Pulling on his red silk robe, he went downstairs to the kitchen. He took a package of Mallomars, a package of Oreos, and a large bag of onion-flavored potato chips from the pantry. From the refrigerator he got two bottles of Yoo-Hoo, one chocolate and one vanilla.

He carried the food through the living room and outside, to the Mexican-tile patio, part of which was overhung by the master-bedroom balcony on the second story. He sat on a lounge chair near the railing, so he could see the dark Pacific.

As Tuesday ticked past midnight and became Wednesday, the breeze off the ocean was cool, but Bryan didn’t mind. Grandma Drackman would have nagged him about catching pneumonia. But if it became too chilly, he was able with little effort to make some adjustments in his metabolism and raise his body temperature.

He washed down the whole bag of Mallomars with vanilla Yoo-Hoo.

He could eat what he wanted.

He could do what he wanted.

Although Becoming was a lonely process, and although it seemed unfair to be without his admiring disciples and his own Holy Mother, all was for the best in the end. While Jesus was a god of compassion and healing, Bryan was meant to be a god of wrath and cleansing; for this reason, it was desirable that he Become in solitude, without having been softened by a mother’s love, without being encumbered by teachings of solicitude and mercy.

2

So this stinky man, stinkier than rotten oranges dropped off a tree and full of squirming things, stinkier than a three-day-dead mouse, stinkier than anything, stinky enough to make you sneeze when you smell too much of him, goes from street to street and into an alley, trailing clouds of odors.

The dog follows a few steps back, curious, keeping his distance, sniffing out the trace of the thing-that-will-kill-you which is mixed in with all the other smells.

They stop at the back of a place where people make food.

Good smells, almost stronger than the stinky man, hungry-making smells, lots of them, lots. Meat, chicken, carrots, cheese. Cheese is good, sticks in the teeth but is real good, much better than old chewing gum from the street which sticks in the teeth but isn’t so good. Bread, peas, sugar, vanilla, chocolate, and more to make your jaws ache and your mouth water.

Sometimes he comes to food places like this, wagging his tail, whining, and they give him something good. But most of the time they chase him, throw things, shout, stamp their feet. People are strange about a lot of things, one of which is food. A lot of them guard their food, don’t want you to have any — then they throw some of it away in cans where they let it go stinky and sick-making. If you knock over the cans to get the food before it goes all sick-making, people come running and shouting and chasing like they think you’re a cat or something.

He is not for fun chasing. Cats are for fun chasing. He is not a cat. He is a dog. This seems so obvious to him.

People can be strange.

Now the stinky man knocks on a door, knocks again, and the door is opened by a fat man dressed in white and all surrounded by clouds of hungry-making smells.

Dear God, Sammy, you’re a bigger mess than usual, says the fat man in white.

Just some coffee, says the stinky man, holding out the bottle he’s carrying. Don’t want to bother you, really, I feel bad about this, but I need a little coffee.

I remember when you first started out years ago—

Some coffee to sober me up.

— working with that little ad agency in Newport Beach—

Gotta get sober fast.

— before you moved to the big time in L.A., you were always so sharp, a real dresser, the best clothes.

Gonna die if I don’t get sober.

You’ve spoke the truth there, says the fat man.

Just a thermos of coffee, Kenny. Please.

You ‘re not going to get sober with coffee alone. I’ll bag you some food, you promise you’ll eat it.

Yeah, sure, sure I will, and some coffee, please.

Step aside there, away from the door. Don’t want the boss to see you, realize I’m giving you anything.

Sure, Kenny, sure. I appreciate it, I do, really, ‘cause I just gotta get sober.

The fat man looks behind and to one side of the stinky man, and he says, You got a dog now, Sammy?

Huh? Me? A dog? Hell, no.

The stinky man turns, looks, is surprised.

Maybe the stinky man would kick at him or chase him away, but the fat man is different. The fat man is nice. Anybody who smells of so many good things to eat must be nice.

The fat man leans forward in the doorway, with light from the food place behind him. In a people-who-will-feed-you voice, he says, Hey there, fella, how you doin‘?

Just people noises. He doesn’t really understand any of this, it’s just people noises.

So he wags his tail, which he knows people always like, and he tilts his head and puts on the look that usually makes them go ahhhhh.

The fat man says, Ahhhhh, you don’t belong on the street, fella. What kind of people would abandon a nice mutt like you? You hungry? Bet you are. I can take care of that, fella.

Fella is one of the things people call him, the one they call him most often. He remembers being called Prince when he was a puppy, by a little girl that liked him, but that’s long ago. The woman and her boy call him Woofer, but Fella is what he hears the most.

He wags his tail harder and whines to show he likes the fat man. And he just sort of quivers all over to show how harmless he is, a good dog, a very good dog, good. People like that.

The fat man says something to the stinky man, then disappears into the food place, letting the door go shut.

Gotta get sober, the stinky man says, but he’s just talking to himself.

Time to wait.

Just waiting is hard. Waiting for a cat in a tree is harder. And waiting for food is the hardest waiting of all. The time from when people seem to be going to give you food until when they really do give it to you is always so long that it seems like you could chase a cat, chase a car, sniff out every other dog in the territory, chase your tail until you’re dizzy, turn over lots of cans full of sick-making food, and maybe sleep a while and still have to wait before they come back with what you can eat.

I’ve seen things people got to know about, says the stinky man.

Staying away from the man, still wagging his tail, he tries not to smell all the smells that are coming out of the food place, which only make the waiting harder. But the smells keep coming. He can’t not smell them.

The ratman is real. He’s real.

At last the fat man returns with the strange bottle and a bag for the stinky man — and with a plate heaped with scraps.

Wagging his tail, shivering, he thinks the scraps are for him, but he doesn’t want to be too bold, doesn’t want to go for the scraps and then they aren’t for him and then the fat man takes a kick at him or something. He waits. He whines so the fat man won’t forget about him. Then the fat man puts the plate down, which means the scraps are for him, and this is good, this is very good, oh, this is the best.

He slinks up to the plate, snatches at the food. Ham. Beef. Chunks of bread soaked in gravy. Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.

The fat man squats down, wants to pet him, scratch behind his ears, so he lets that happen though he’s a little spooked. Some people, they tease you with food, hold it out to you, give it to you, make like they want to pet you, then they swat you on the nose or kick you or worse.

Once he remembers some boys who had food for him, laughing boys, happy boys. Pieces of meat. Hand-feeding him. Nice boys. All of them petting him, scratching behind his ears. He sniffed them, smelled nothing wrong. Licked their hands. Happy boys, smelling like summer sun, sand, sea salt. He stood on his hind legs, and he chased his tail, and he fell over his own feet — all to make them laugh, please them. And they did laugh. They wrestled with him. He even rolled on his back. Exposed his belly. Let them rub his belly. Nice boys. Maybe one of them would take him home, feed him every day. Then they grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, and one of them had fire on a little stick, and they were trying to light his fur. He squirmed, squealed, whined, tried to get free. The fire stick went out. They lit another one. He could have bit at them. But that would have been bad. He was a good dog. Good. He smelled burnt fur but didn’t quite catch fire, so they had to light another fire stick, and then he got away. He ran out of their reach. Looked back at them. Laughing boys. Smelling of sun, sand, and sea salt. Happy boys. Pointing at him and laughing.

Most people are nice but others are not nice. Sometimes he can smell the not-nice ones right away. They smell… like cold things… like ice… like winter metal… like the sea when it’s gray and no sun and people all gone from the beach. But other times, the not-nice people smell just like the nice ones. People are the most interesting things in the world. They are also the scariest.

The fat man behind the food place is a nice one. No hitting on the nose. No kicking. No fire. Just good food, yes yes yes yes, and a nice laugh when you lick his hands.

Finally the fat man makes it clear that there is no more food right now. You stand on your hind feet, you whine, whimper, roll over and expose your belly, sit up and beg, do your little dance in a circle, tilt your head, wag wag wag wag your tail, shake your head and flap your ears, do all your little food-getting tricks, but you can’t get anything more out of him. He goes inside, closes the door.

Well, you are full. Don’t need more food.

Doesn’t mean you can’t want more.

So wait anyway. At the door.

He’s a nice man. He’ll come back. How can he forget you, your little dance and wagging tail and begging whine?

Wait.

Wait.

Wait. Wait.

Gradually he remembers that he was doing something interesting when he came upon the fat man with the food. But what?

Interesting…

Then he remembers: the stinky man.

The strange stinky man is at the far end of the alley, at the corner, sitting on the ground between two shrubs, his back against the wall of the food place. He is eating out of a bag, drinking out of a big bottle. Coffee smell. Food.

Food.

He trots toward the stinky man because maybe he can get some more to eat, but then he stops because he suddenly smells the bad thing. On the stinky man. But on the night air, too. Very strong again, that scent, cold and terrible, carried on the breeze.

The thing-that-will-kill-you is outside again.

No longer wagging his tail, he turns away from the stinky man and hurries through the night streets, following that one scent among thousands of others, moving toward where the land disappears, where there is only sand and then water, toward the rumbling, cold, dark, dark sea.

3

James Ordegard’s neighbors, like those of Ricky Estefan, did not acknowledge the commotion next door. The gunfire and shattering glass elicited no response. When Harry opened the front door and looked up and down the street, the night remained calm, and no sirens rose in the distance.

It seemed as if the confrontation with Ticktock had taken place in a dream to which only Harry and Connie were privy. However, they had plenty of proof that the encounter had been real: expended shell casings in their revolvers; broken glass all over the master-bedroom balcony; cuts, scrapes, and various tender spots that would later become bruises.

Harry’s first urge — and Connie’s too — was to get the hell out of there before the vagrant returned. But they both knew that Ticktock could find them as easily elsewhere, and they needed to learn what they could from the aftermath of their confrontation with him.

In James Ordegard’s bedroom again, under the malevolent stare of the ghoul in the Goya painting, Harry looked for one more proof. Blood.

Connie had shot Ticktock at least three times, maybe four, at close range. A portion of his face had been blown away, and there had been a substantial wound in his throat. After the vagrant had thrown Connie through the sliding glass door, Harry had pumped two rounds into his back.

Blood should have been splattered as liberally as beer at a frat-house party. Not one drop of it was visible on the walls or carpet.

“Well?” Connie asked from the doorway, holding a glass of water. The Anacins had stuck in her throat. She was still trying to wash them all the way down. Or maybe she had gotten the pills down easily enough, and something else had stuck in her throat — like fear, which she usually had no trouble swallowing. “Did you find anything?”

“No blood. Just this… dirt, I guess it is.”

The stuff certainly felt like moist earth when he crumbled it between his fingertips, smelled like it, too. Clots and sprinkles were scattered across the carpet and the bedspread.

Harry moved around the room in a crouch, pausing at the larger clumps of dirt to poke at them with one finger.

“This night’s going too fast,” Connie said.

“Don’t tell me the time,” he said without looking up.

She told him anyway. “Few minutes past midnight. Witching hour.”

“For sure.”

He kept moving, and in one small mound of dirt, he found an earthworm. It was still moist, glistening, but dead.

He uncovered a wad of decaying vegetable matter, which seemed to be ficus leaves. They peeled apart like layers of filio dough in a Mideastern pastry. A small black beetle with stiff legs and jewel-green eyes was entombed in the center of them.

Near one of the nightstands, Harry found a slightly misshapen lead slug, one of the rounds that Connie had pumped into Ticktock. Damp earth clung to it. He picked it up and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger, staring at it thoughtfully.

Connie came farther into the room to see what he had discovered. “What do you make of it?”

“I don’t know exactly… though maybe…”

“What?”

He hesitated, looking around at the soil on the carpet and the bedspread.

He was recalling certain folk legends, fairy tales of a fashion, although with even a stronger religious overtone than those of Hans Christian Andersen. Judaic in origin, if he wasn’t mistaken. Tales of cabalistic magic.

He said, “If you gathered up all this dirt and debris, if you packed it together real tight… do you think it would be just exactly the right amount of material to fill in the wound in his throat and the hole in the side of his face?”

Frowning, Connie said, “Maybe. So… what’re you saying?”

He stood and pocketed the slug. He knew that he didn’t have to remind her about the inexplicable pile of dirt in Ricky Estefan’s living room — or about the exquisitely sculpted hand and coat sleeve sprouting from it.

“I’m not sure what I’m saying just yet,” Harry told her. “I need to think about it a little more.”

As they passed through Ordegard’s house, they turned off the lights. The darkness they left behind seemed alive.

Outside in the post-midnight world, ocean air washed the land without cleansing it. Wind off the Pacific had always felt crisp and clean to Harry, but no longer. He had lost his faith that the chaos of life was continuously swept into order by the forces of nature. Tonight the cool breeze made him think of unclean things: graveyard granite, fleshless bones in the eternal embrace of gelid earth, the shiny carapaces of beetles that fed on dead flesh.

He was battered and tired; perhaps exhaustion accounted for this new somber and portentous turn of mind. Whatever the cause, he was drifting toward Connie’s view that chaos, not order, was the natural state of things and that it could not be resisted, only ridden in the manner that a surfer rides a towering and potentially deadly wave.

On the lawn, between the front door and the driveway where he had parked the Honda, they almost walked into a large mound of raw earth. It had not been there when they had first gone inside.

Connie got a flashlight from the glove compartment of the Honda, returned, and directed the beam on the mound, so Harry could examine it more closely. First he carefully circled the pile, studying it closely, but he could find no hand or other human feature molded from it. Deconstruction had been complete this time.

Scraping at the dirt with his hands, however, he uncovered clusters of dead and rotting leaves like the wad he had discovered in Ordegard’s bedroom. Grass, stones, dead earthworms. Soggy pieces of a moldering cigar box. Pieces of roots and twigs. Thin parakeet bones, including the fragile calcium lace of one folded wing. Harry wasn’t sure what he expected to find: maybe a heart sculpted from mud with all the detail of the hand they had seen in Ricky’s living room, and still beating with strange malignant life.

In the car, after he started the engine, he switched on the heater. A deep chill had settled in him.

Waiting to get warm, staring at the black mound of earth on the dark lawn, Harry told Connie about that vengeful monster of legend and folklore — the golem. She listened without comment, even less skeptical about this astonishing possibility than she had been at her apartment, earlier in the night, when he had raved on about a sociopath with psychic abilities and the demonic power to possess other people.

When he finished, she said, “So he makes a golem and uses it to kill, while he stays safe somewhere.”

“Maybe.”

“Makes a golem out of dirt.”

“Or sand or old brush or maybe just about anything.”

“Makes it with the power of his mind.”

Harry didn’t respond.

She said, “With the power of his mind or with magic like in the folktales?”

“Jesus, I don’t know. It’s all so crazy.”

“And you still think he can also possess people, use them like puppets?”

“Probably not. No proof of it so far.”

“What about Ordegard?”

“I don’t think there’s any connection between Ordegard and this Ticktock.”

“Oh? But you wanted to go to the morgue because you thought—”

“I did, but I don’t now. Ordegard was just an ordinary, garden-variety, pre-millennium nutcase. When I blew him away in the attic yesterday afternoon, that was the end of it.”

“But Ticktock showed up here at Ordegard’s—”

“Because we were here. He knows how to find us somehow. He came here because we were here, not because he has anything to do with James Ordegard.”

A forced stream of hot air poured out of the dashboard vents. It washed over him without melting the ice he imagined he could feel in the pit of his stomach.

“We just ran into two psychos within a couple of hours of each other,” Harry said. “First Ordegard, then this guy. It’s been a bad day for the home team, that’s all.”

“One for the record books,” Connie agreed. “But if Ticktock isn’t Ordegard, if he wasn’t angry with you for shooting Ordegard, why’d he fixate on you? Why’s he want you dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“Back at your place, before he burned it down, didn’t he say you couldn’t shoot him and think that was the end of it?”

“Yeah, that’s part of what he said.” Harry tried to recall the rest of what the vagrant-golem had thundered at him, but the memory was elusive. “Now that I think of it, he never mentioned Ordegard’s name. I just assumed…. No. Ordegard’s been a false trail.”

He was afraid she was going to ask how they could pick up the real trail, the right one, that would lead them to Ticktock. But she must have realized that he was completely at a loss, because she didn’t put him on the spot.

“It’s getting too hot in here,” she said.

He lowered the temperature control on the heater.

At the bone, he was still chilled.

In the light from the instrument panel, he noticed his hands. They were coated with grime, like the hands of a man who, buried prematurely, had desperately clawed his way out of a fresh grave.

Harry backed the Honda out of the driveway and drove slowly down through the steep hills of Laguna. The streets in those residential neighborhoods were virtually deserted at that late hour. Most of the houses were dark. For all they knew, they might have been descending through a modern ghost town, where all of the residents had vanished like the crew of the old sailing ship Mary Celeste, beds empty in the darkened houses, televisions aglow in deserted family rooms, midnight snacks laid out on plates in silent kitchens where no one remained to eat.

He glanced at the dashboard clock. 12:18.

Little more than six hours until dawn.

“I’m so tired I can’t think straight,” Harry said. “And, damn it, I’ve got to think.”

“Let’s find some coffee, something to eat. Get our energy back.”

“Yeah, all right. Where?”

“The Green House. Pacific Coast Highway. It’s one of the few places open this late.”

“Green House. Yeah, I know it.”

After a silence during which they descended another hill, Connie said, “You know what I found weirdest about Ordegard’s house?”

“What?”

“It reminded me of my apartment.”

“Really? How?”

“Don’t shine me on, Harry. You saw both places tonight.”

Harry had noticed a certain similarity, but he hadn’t wanted to think about it. “He has more furniture than you do.”

“Not a whole damn lot more. No knickknacks, none of what they call decorative pieces, no family photos. One piece of art hanging in his place, one in mine.”

“But there’s a big difference, a huge difference — you’ve got that sky-diver’s eye-view poster, bright, exhilarating, gives you a sense of freedom just to look at it, nothing like that ghoul chewing on human body parts.”

“I’m not so sure. The painting in his bedroom’s about death, human fate. Maybe my poster isn’t so exhilarating, really. Maybe what it’s really about is death, too, about falling and falling and never opening the chute.”

Harry glanced away from the street. Connie wasn’t looking at him. Her head was tilted back, eyes closed.

“You’re not any more suicidal than I am,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“The hell you do.”

He stopped at a red traffic light at Pacific Coast Highway, and looked at her again. She still hadn’t opened her eyes. “Connie—”

“I’ve always been chasing freedom. And what is the ultimate freedom?”

“Tell me.”

“The ultimate freedom is death.”

“Don’t get Freudian on me, Gulliver. One thing I’ve always liked about you is, you don’t try to psychoanalyze everyone.”

To her credit, she smiled, evidently remembering that she had used those words on him in the burger restaurant after the shooting of Ordegard, when he had wondered if she was as hard inside as she pretended to be.

She opened her eyes, checked the traffic light. “Green.”

“I’m not ready to go.”

She looked at him.

He said, “First I want to know if you’re just jiving or if you really think you’ve got something in common with a fruitcake like Ordegard.”

“All this shit I go on about, how you have to love chaos, have to embrace it? Well, maybe you do, if you want to survive in this screwed-up world. But tonight I’ve been thinking maybe I used to like surfing on it because, secretly, I hoped it would wipe me out one day.”

“Used to?”

“I don’t seem to have the same taste for chaos that I once did.”

“Ticktock give you your fill of it?”

“Not him. It’s just… earlier, right after work, before your condo was burned down and everything went to hell, I discovered I’ve got a reason to live that I never knew about.”

The light had turned red again. A couple of cars whooshed past on the coast highway, and she watched them go.

Harry said nothing because he was afraid that any interruption would discourage her from finishing what she had begun to tell him. In six months, her arctic reserve had never thawed until, for the briefest moment in her apartment, she had seemed about to disclose something both private and profound. She had quickly frozen again; but now the face of the glacier was cracking. His desire to be let into her world was so intense that it revealed as much about his own need for connections as it did about the extent to which she had heretofore guarded her privacy; he was prepared to expend all of his last six hours of life at that traffic light, if necessary, waiting for her to provide him with a better understanding of the special woman that he believed existed under the hard veneer of the streetwise cop.

“I had a sister,” she said. “Never knew about her until recently. She’s dead. Been dead five years. But she had a child. A daughter. Eleanor. Ellie. Now I don’t want to be wiped out, don’t want to surf on the chaos any more. I just want to have a chance to meet Ellie, get to know her, see if I can love her, which I think maybe I can. Maybe what happened to me when I was a kid didn’t burn love out of me forever. Maybe I can do more than hate. I’ve got to find out. I can’t wait to find out.”

He was dismayed. If he understood her correctly, she had not yet felt for him anything like the love he had begun to feel for her. But that was all right. Regardless of her doubts, he knew that she had the ability to love and that she would find a place in her heart for her niece. And if for the girl, why not for him as well?

She met his eyes and smiled. “Good God, just listen to me, I sound like one of those confessional neurotics spilling their guts on an afternoon TV talkshow.”

“Not at all. I… I want to hear it.”

“Next thing you know, I’ll be telling you how I like to have sex with men who dress like their mothers.”

“Do you?”

She laughed. “Who doesn’t?”

He wanted to know what she meant when she said what happened to me when I was a kid, but he dared not ask. That experience, if not the core of her, was at least what she believed the core to be, and she would be able to reveal it only at her own pace. Besides, there were a thousand other questions he wanted to ask her, ten thousand, and if he started, they really would sit at that intersection until dawn, Ticktock, and death.

The traffic light was in their favor again. He entered the intersection and turned right. Two blocks farther north he parked in front of The Green House.

When he and Connie got out of the car, Harry noticed a filthy hobo in the shadows at the corner of the restaurant, by an alleyway that ran toward the back of the building. It was not Ticktock, but a smaller, pathetic-looking specimen. He sat between two shrubs, legs drawn up, eating from a bag in his lap, drinking hot coffee from a thermos, and mumbling urgently to himself.

The guy watched them as they walked toward the entrance to The Green House. His stare was fevered, intense. His bloodshot eyes were like those of many other denizens of the streets these days, hot with paranoid fear. Perhaps he believed himself to be persecuted by evil space aliens who were beaming microwaves at him to muddle his thoughts. Or by the dastardly band of ten thousand and eighty-two conspirators who had really shot John F. Kennedy and who had secretly controlled the world ever since. Or by fiendish Japanese businessmen who were going to buy everything everywhere, turn everyone else into slaves, and serve the raw internal organs of American children as side dishes in Tokyo sushi bars. Recently it seemed that half the sane population — or what passed for sane these days — believed in one demonstrably ridiculous paranoid conspiracy theory or another. And for the most thoroughly stoned street-wanderers like this man, such fantasies were de rigueur.

To the hobo, Connie said, “Can you hear me, or are you on the moon somewhere?”

The man glared at her.

“We’re cops. You got that? Cops. You touch that car while we’re gone, you’ll find yourself in a detox program so fast you won’t know what hit you, no booze or drugs for three months.”

Forced detoxification was the only threat that worked with some of these squires of the gutter. They were already at the bottom of the swamp, used to being knocked around and chewed up by the bigger animals. They had nothing left to lose — except the chance to stay high on cheap wine or whatever else they could afford.

“Cops?” the man said.

“Good,” Connie said. “You heard me. Cops. Three months with not a single hit, it’ll seem like three centuries.”

Last week, in Santa Ana, a drunken vagrant had taken advantage of their unattended department sedan to make a social protest by leaving his feces on the driver’s seat. Or maybe he mistook them for space aliens to whom a gift of human waste was a sign of welcome and an invitation to intergalactic cooperation. In either case, Connie had wanted to kill the guy, and Harry had needed every bit of his diplomacy and persuasiveness to convince her that forced detox was crueler.

“You lock the doors?” Connie asked Harry.

“Yeah.”

Behind them, as they went into The Green House, the vagrant said thoughtfully: “Cops?”

4

Having eaten the cookies and potato chips, Bryan briefly used his Greatest and Most Secret Power to insure total privacy, then stood at the edge of the patio and urinated between railings into the silent sea below. He always got a kick out of doing things like that in public, sometimes right out in the street with people around, knowing that his Greatest and Most Secret Power would insure against discovery. Bladder empty, he started things up again and returned to the house.

Food alone was seldom sufficient to restore his energy He was, after all, a god Becoming, and according to the Bible, the first god had needed rest himself on the seventh day. Before he could work more miracles, Bryan would still have to nap, perhaps for as much as an hour.

In the master bedroom, lit only by one bedside lamp, he stood for a while in front of the black-lacquered shelves where eyes of many species and colors floated in preserving fluid. Feeling their unblinking, eternal gazes. Their adoration.

He unbelted his red robe, shrugged out of it, and let it drop to the floor.

The eyes loved him. Loved him. He could feel their love, and he accepted it.

He opened one of the jars. The eyes in it had belonged to a woman who had been thinned from the herd because she was one of those who could vanish from the world without causing much concern. They were blue eyes, once beautiful, the color faded now and the lenses milky.

Dipping into the pungent fluid, he removed one of the blue eyes and held it in his left hand. It felt like a ripe date — soft but firm, and moist.

Trapping the eye between his palm and chest, he rolled it gently across his body from nipple to nipple, back and forth, not pressing too hard, careful to avoid damaging it, but eager for the dead woman to see him in all his Becoming glory, every smooth plane and curve and pore of him. The small sphere was cool against his warm flesh, and left a trail of moisture on his skin. He shivered deliciously. He eased the slick orb down his flat belly, describing circles there, then held it for a moment in the hollow of his navel.

From the open jar, he extracted the second blue eye. He trapped it under his right hand and allowed both eyes to explore his body: chest and flanks and thighs, up across his belly and chest again, along the sides of his neck, his face, gently rotating the moist and spongy spheres on his cheeks, around, around, around. So satisfying to be the object of adoration. So supremely glorious for the dead woman to be granted this intimate moment with the Becoming god who had judged and condemned her.

Winding tracks of preserving fluid marked each eye’s journey over his body. As the fluid evaporated, it was easy to believe that the tracery of coolness was actually a lace of tears upon his skin, shed by the dead woman who rejoiced in this sacrosanct contact.

The other eyes upon the shelves, watching from their separate glass-walled liquid universes, seemed envious of the blue eyes to which he had granted communion.

Bryan wished that he could bring his mother here and show her all the eyes that adored and cherished him, revered him, and found no aspect of him from which they wished to turn their gazes.

But, of course, she would not look, could not see. The stubborn, withered hag would persist in fearing him. She regarded him as an abomination, though it should be obvious even to her that he was Becoming a figure of transcendent spiritual power, the sword of judgment, instigator of Armageddon, savior of a world infested with an abundance of humanity.

He returned the pair of blue eyes to the open jar, and screwed the lid shut.

He had satisfied one hunger with cookies and chips, satisfied another by revealing his glory to the congregation in the jars and by seeing that they were in awe of him. Now it was time to sleep for a short while and recharge his batteries; dawn was nearer, and he had promises to keep.

As he settled upon the disarranged bed sheets, he reached for the switch on the nightstand lamp, but then decided not to turn it off. The disembodied communicants in the jars would be able to see him better if the room was not entirely dark. It pleased him to think that he would be admired and venerated even while he slept.

Bryan Drackman closed his eyes, yawned, and as always sleep came to him without delay. Dreams: great cities falling, houses burning, monuments collapsing, mass graves of broken concrete and twisted steel stretching to the horizon and attended by flocks of feeding vultures so numerous that, in flight, they blackened the sky.

5

He sprints, trots, slows to a walk, and finally creeps warily from shadow to shadow as he draws nearer to the thing-that-will-kill-you. The smell of it is ripe, strong, foul. Not filthy like the stinky man. Different. In its own way, worse. Interesting.

He is not afraid. He is not afraid. Not afraid. He is a dog. He has sharp teeth and claws. Strong and quick. In his blood is the need to track and hunt. He is a dog, cunning and fierce, and he runs from nothing. He was born to chase, not be chased, and he fearlessly pursues anything he wants, even cats. Though cats have clawed his nose, bitten and humiliated him, still he chases them, unafraid, for he is a dog, maybe not as smart as some cats, but a dog.

Padding along beside a row of thick oleander. Pretty flowers. Berries. Don’t eat the berries. Sick-making. You can tell from the smell. Also the leaves. Also the flowers.

Never eat any kind of flowers. He tried to eat one once. There was a bee in the flower, then in his mouth, buzzing in his mouth, stinging his tongue. A very bad day, worse than cats.

He creeps onward. Not afraid. Not. Not. He is a dog.

People place. High white walls. Windows dark. Near the top, one square of pale light.

He slinks along the side of the place.

The smell of the bad thing is strong here, and getting stronger. Almost burns in the snout. Like ammonia but not like. A cold smell and dark, colder than ice and darker than night.

Halfway along the high white wall, he stops. Listens. Sniffs.

He is not afraid. He is not afraid.

Something overhead goes Whooooooooooo.

He is afraid. Whipping around, he starts to run back the way he came.

Whooooooooooo.

Wait. He knows that sound. An owl, swooping through the night above, hunting prey of its own.

He was frightened by an owl. Bad dog. Bad dog. Bad.

Remember the boy. The woman and the boy. Besides… the smell, the place, the moment are interesting.

Turning once again, he continues to creep along the side of the people place, white walls, one pale light high above. He comes to an iron fence. Tight squeeze. Not as tight as the drain pipe where you follow the cat and get stuck and the cat keeps going, and you twist and kick and struggle for a long time inside the pipe, you think you’re never going to get loose, and then you wonder if maybe the cat is coming back toward you through the darkness of the pipe, is going to claw your nose while you’re stuck and can’t move. Tight, but not that tight. He shakes his rear end, kicks, and gets through.

He comes to the end of the place, starts around the corner, and sees the thing-that-will-kill-you. His vision is not nearly as keen as his smell, but he is able to make out a man, young, and he knows it is the bad thing because it reeks of that strange dark cold smell. Before, it looked different, never a young man, but the smell is the same. This is the thing, for sure.

He freezes.

He is not afraid. He is not afraid. He is a dog.

The young-man-bad-thing is on its way into the people place. It is carrying food bags. Chocolate. Marshmallow. Potato chips.

Interesting.

Even the bad thing eats. It has been outside, eating, and now it is going in, and maybe some of the food is left. A wag of the tail, a friendly whine, the sitting-up-and-begging trick might get something good, yes yes yes yes.

No no no no. Bad idea.

But chocolate.

No. Forget it. The kind of bad idea that gets your nose scratched. Or worse. Dead like the bee in the puddle, the mouse in the gutter.

The thing-that-will-kill-you goes inside, closes the door. Its scary smell isn’t so strong now.

Neither is the chocolate smell. Oh well.

Whooooooooooo.

Just an owl. Who would be afraid of an owl? Not a dog.

He sniffs around behind the people place for a while, some of it grass, some of it dirt, some of it flat stones that people put down. Bushes. Flowers. Busy bugs in the grass, different kinds. A couple of things for people to sit in… and beside one of them, a piece of cookie. Chocolate. Good, good, gone. Sniff around, under, here, there, but no more to be found.

A little lizard! Zip, so fast, across the stones, get it, get it, get it, get it. This way, that way, this way, between your legs, that way, here it comes, there it goes — now where is it? — over there, zip, don’t let it get away, get it, get it, want it, need it, bang, an iron fence out of nowhere.

The lizard is gone, but the fence smells of fresh people pee. Interesting.

It’s the pee of the thing-that-will-kill-you. Not a nice smell. Not a bad smell. Just interesting. The thing-that-will-kill-you looks like people, pees like people, so must be people, even if it’s strange and different.

He follows the route the bad thing took when it stopped peeing and went into the people place, and in the bottom of the big door he finds a smaller door, more or less his size. He sniffs it. The smaller door smells like another dog. Faint, very faint, but another dog. A long time ago, a dog went in and out this door. Interesting. So long ago, he has to sniff sniff sniff sniff to learn anything. A male dog. Not small, not too big. Interesting. Nervous dog… or maybe sick. Long time ago. Interesting.

Think about this.

Door for people. Door for dogs.

Think.

So this isn’t just a people place. This is a people and dog place. Interesting.

He pushes his nose against the little cold metal door, and it swings inward. He sticks his head in, lifting the door just far enough to sniff deep and look around.

People food place. Hidden away is food, not out where he can see it but where he can still smell it. Strongest of all, the smell of the bad thing, so strong that it leaves him uninterested in food.

The smell repels and frightens him but also attracts him, and curiosity draws him forward. He squeezes through the opening, the little metal door sliding along his back, along his tail, then falling shut with a faint squeak.

Inside.

Listening. Humming, ticking, a soft clink. Machine sounds. Otherwise, silence.

Not much light. Just little glowing spots up on some of the machines.

He is not afraid. Not, not, not.

He creeps from one dark space to another, squinting into the shadows, listening, sniffing, but he does not find the thing-that-will-kill-you until he comes to the bottom of stairs. He looks up and knows that the thing is in one of the spaces up there somewhere.

He starts up the stairs, pauses, continues, pauses, looks down to the floor below, looks up, continues, pauses, and he wonders the same thing he always wonders at some point while chasing a cat: what is he doing here? If there is not food, if there is not a female in heat, if there is not anyone here to pet and scratch and play with him, why is he here? He doesn’t really know why. Maybe it is just the nature of a dog to wonder what is around the next corner, over the next hill. Dogs are special. Dogs are curious. Life is strange and interesting, and he has the feeling that each new place or each new day might show him something so different and special that just by seeing and smelling it, he will understand the world better and be happier. He has the feeling that a wonderful thing is waiting to be found, a wonderful thing he can’t imagine, but something even better than food or females in heat, better than petting, scratching, playing, running along a beach with wind in his fur, chasing a cat, or even better than catching a cat if such a thing was possible. Even here, in this scary place, with the smell of the thing-that-will-kill-you so strong he wants to sneeze, he still feels that a wonderfulness might be just around the next corner.

And don’t forget the woman, the boy. They’re nice. They like him. So maybe he can find a way to keep the bad thing from bothering them any more.

He continues to the top of the steps into a narrow space. He pads along, sniffing at doors. Soft light behind one of them. And very heavy, bitter: the thing-that-will-kill-you smell.

Not afraid, not afraid, he is a dog, stalker and hunter, good and brave, good dog, good.

The door is open a crack. He puts his nose to the gap. He could push it open wider, go into the space beyond it, but he hesitates.

Nothing wonderful in there. Maybe somewhere else in this people place, maybe around every other corner, but not in there.

Maybe he can just leave now, go back to the alley, see if the fat man left out more food for him.

That would be a cat thing to do. Sneaking away. Running. He is not a cat. He is a dog.

But do cats ever get their noses scratched, cut deep, bleeding, sore for days? Interesting thought. He has never seen a cat with a scratched nose, has never gotten close enough to scratch one.

But he is a dog, not a cat, so he pushes against the door. It eases open wider. He goes into the space beyond.

Young-man-bad-thing lying on black cloths, above the floor, not moving at all, making no sound, eyes closed. Dead? Dead bad thing on the black cloths.

He pads closer, sniffing.

No. Not dead. Sleeping.

The thing-that-will-kill-you eats, and it pees, and now it sleeps, so it is like people in many ways, like dogs, too, even if it isn’t either people or dog.

What now?

He stares at the sleeping bad thing, thinking how he might jump up there with it, bark in its face, wake it up, scare it, so then maybe it won’t come around the woman and boy any more. Maybe even bite it, just a little bite, be a bad dog for once, just to help the woman and the boy, bite its chin. Or its nose.

It doesn’t look so dangerous, sleeping. Doesn’t look so strong or quick. He can’t remember why it was scary before.

He looks around the black room and then up, and light glistens in a lot of eyes floating up there in bottles, people eyes without people, animal eyes without animals. Interesting but not good, not good at all.

Again he wonders what he is doing here. He realizes this place is like a drain pipe where you get stuck, like a hole in the ground where big spiders live that don’t like you sticking your snout in at them. And then he realizes that the young-man-bad-thing on the bed is sort of like those laughing boys, smelling of sand and sun and sea salt, who will pet you and scratch behind your ears and then try to set your fur on fire.

Stupid dog. Stupid for coming here. Good but stupid.

The bad thing mumbles in its sleep.

He backs away from the bed, turns, tucks his tail down, and pads out of the room. He goes down the stairs, getting out of there, not afraid, not afraid, just careful, not afraid, but his heart pounding hard and fast.

6

Weekdays, Tanya Delaney was the private nurse on the graveyard shift, from midnight until eight o’clock in the morning. Some nights she would rather have worked in a graveyard. Jennifer Drack-man was spookier than anything Tanya could conceive of encountering in a cemetery.

Tanya sat in an armchair near the blind woman’s bed, silently reading a Mary Higgins Clark novel. She liked to read, and she was a night person by nature, so the wee-hour shift was perfect for her. Some nights she could finish an entire novel and start another one because Jennifer slept straight through.

Other times, Jennifer was unable to sleep, raving incoherently and consumed by terror. On those occasions, Tanya knew the poor woman was irrational and that there was nothing to be afraid of, yet the patient’s angst was so intense that it was communicated to the nurse. Tanya’s own skin would prickle with gooseflesh, the back of her neck would tingle, she would glance uneasily at the darkness beyond the window as if something waited in it, and would jump at every unexpected noise.

At least the pre-dawn hours of that Wednesday were not filled with shouts and tortured cries and strings of words as meaningless as the manic babble of a religious passionary speaking in tongues. Instead, Jennifer slept but not well, harried by bad dreams. From time to time, without waking, she moaned, grasped with her good hand at the bed rail, and tried without success to pull herself up. With bony white fingers hooked around the steel, atrophied muscles barely defined in her fleshless arms, face gaunt and pale, eyelids sewn shut and concave over empty sockets, she seemed not like a sick woman in bed but like a corpse struggling to rise from a coffin. When she talked in her sleep, she didn’t shout but spoke almost in a whisper, with tremendous urgency; her voice seemed to arise from thin air and float through the room with the eeriness of a spirit speaking at a séance: “He’ll kill us all… kill… he’ll kill us all….”

Tanya shivered and tried to concentrate on the suspense novel, though she felt guilty about ignoring her patient. At the least she should pry the bony hand off the railing, feel Jennifer’s forehead to be sure she was not feverish, murmur soothingly to her, and attempt to guide her through the stormy dream into calmer shoals of sleep. She was a good nurse, and ordinarily she would rush to comfort a patient in the grip of a nightmare. But she stayed in the armchair with her Clark book because she didn’t want to risk waking Jennifer. Once awakened, the woman might slip from the nightmare into one of those frightening fits of shouting, tearless weeping, wailing, and glossolalic shrieking that made Tanya’s blood turn to ice.

Came the ghostly voice out of sleep: “… the world’s on fire… tides of blood… fire and blood… I’m the mother of Hell… God help me, I’m the mother of Hell….”

Tanya wanted to turn the thermostat higher, but she knew the room was already a bit too warm. The chill she felt was within her, not without.

“… such a cold mind… dead heart… beating but dead…”

Tanya wondered what the poor woman had endured that had left her in such a dismal state. What had she seen? What had she suffered? What memories haunted her?

7

The Green House on Pacific Coast Highway included a large and typical California-style restaurant filled with too many ferns and pothos even for Harry’s taste, and a sizable barroom where fern-weary patrons had long ago learned to keep the greenery under control by poisoning the potting soil with a dribble of whiskey every now and then. The restaurant side was closed at that hour.

The popular bar was open until two o’clock. It had been remodeled in a black-silver-green Art Deco style that was nothing like the adjacent restaurant, a strained attempt to be chic. But they served sandwiches along with the booze.

Midst stunted and yellowing plants, about thirty customers drank, talked, and listened to jazz played by a four-man combo. The musicians were performing quirky semi-progressive arrangements of famous numbers from the big-band era. Two couples, who didn’t realize the music was better for listening, were gamely dancing to quasi-melodic tunes marked by constant tempo changes and looping extemporaneous passages that would have thwarted Fred Astaire or Baryshnikov.

When Harry and Connie entered, the thirtyish manager-host met them with a dubious look. He was wearing an Armani suit, a hand-painted silk necktie, and beautiful shoes so soft-looking that they might have been made out of a calf fetus. His fingernails were manicured, his teeth perfectly capped, his hair permed. He subtly signaled one of the bartenders, no doubt to help give them the bum’s rush back into the street.

Aside from the dried blood at the corner of her mouth and the bruise only beginning to darken one whole side of her face, Connie was reasonably presentable, if slightly rumpled, but Harry was a spectacle. His clothes, baggy and misshapen from having been rain-soaked, were more wrinkled than an ancient mummy’s shroud. Formerly crisp and white, his shirt was now mottled gray, smelling of smoke from the house fire he’d barely escaped. His shoes were scuffed, scraped, muddy. A moist bloody abrasion as big as a quarter marred his forehead. He had heavy beard stubble because he hadn’t shaved in eighteen hours, and his hands were grimy from pawing through the pile of dirt on Ordegard’s lawn. He realized he must appear to be only a treacherous step up the ladder from the hobo outside the bar to whom Connie had just delivered a warning about forced detoxification, even now socially devolving before the scowling host’s eyes.

Only yesterday, Harry would have been mortified to appear in public in such a state of dishevelment. Now he didn’t particularly care. He was too worried about survival to fret about good grooming and sartorial standards.

Before they could be ejected from The Green House, they both flashed their Special Projects ID.

“Police,” Harry said.

No master key, no password, no blue-blood social register, no royal lineage opened doors as effectively as a badge. Opened them grudgingly, more often than not, but opened them nonetheless.

It also helped that Connie was Connie:

“Not just police,” she said, “but pissed-off police, having a bad day, in no mood to be refused service by some prissy sonofabitch who thinks we might offend his effete clientele.”

They were graciously shown to a corner table that just happened to be in the shadows and away from most of the other customers.

A cocktail waitress arrived at once, said her name was Bambi, crinkled her nose, smiled, and took their orders. Harry asked for coffee and a hamburger medium-well with cheddar.

Connie wanted her burger rare with blue cheese and plenty of raw onions. “Coffee for me, too, and bring both of us double shots of cognac, Rémy Martin.” To Harry she said, “Technically, we’re not on-duty any more. And if you feel as crappy as I feel, you need more of a jolt to the system than you’re going to get from coffee or a burger.”

While the waitress filled their orders, Harry went to the men’s room to wash his grubby hands. He felt as crappy as Connie suspected, and the restroom mirror confirmed that he looked even worse than he felt. He could hardly believe that the grainy-skinned, hollow-eyed, desperation-lined face before him was his face.

He vigorously scrubbed his hands, but a little dirt stubbornly remained under his fingernails and in some knuckle creases. His hands resembled those of a car mechanic.

He splashed cold water in his face, but that didn’t make him look fresher — or less distraught. The day had taken a toll from him that might forever leave its mark. The loss of his house and all his possessions, Ricky’s gruesome death, and the bizarre chain of supernatural events had rattled his faith in reason and order. His current haunted expression might be with him for a long time — assuming he was going to live beyond a few more hours.

Disoriented by the strangeness of his reflection, he almost expected the mirror to prove magical, as mirrors so often were in fairy tales — a doorway to another land, a window on the past or future, the prison in which an evil queen’s soul was trapped, a magic talking mirror like the one from which Snow White’s wicked stepmother learned that she was no longer the fairest of them all. He put one hand to the glass, warm fingers met cold, but nothing supernatural happened.

Still, considering the events of the past twelve hours, it was not madness to expect sorcery. He seemed to be trapped in a fairy tale of some kind, one of the darker variety like The Red Shoes, in which the characters suffer terrible physical tortures and mental anguish, die horribly, and then are finally rewarded with happiness not in this world but in Heaven. It was an unsatisfying plot pattern if you were not entirely sure that Heaven was, in fact, up there and waiting for you.

The only indication that he hadn’t become imprisoned in a children’s fantasy was the absence of a talking animal. Talking animals populated fairy tales even more reliably than psychotic killers populated modern American films.

Fairy tales. Sorcery. Monsters. Psychosis. Children.

Suddenly Harry felt he was teetering on the edge of an insight that would reveal an important fact about Ticktock.

Sorcery. Psychosis. Children. Monsters. Fairy tales.

Revelation eluded him.

He strained for it. No good.

He realized he was no longer lightly touching his fingertips to their reflection, but was pressing his hand against the mirror hard enough to crack the glass. When he took his hand away, a vague moist imprint remained for a moment, then swiftly evaporated.

Everything fades. Including Harry Lyon. Maybe by dawn.

He left the restroom and walked back to the table in the bar where Connie was waiting.

Monsters. Sorcery. Psychosis. Fairy tales. Children.

The band was playing a Duke Ellington medley with a modern jazz interpretation. The music was crap. Ellington simply didn’t need improvement.

On the table stood two steaming coffee cups and two brandy snifters with Rémy glowing like liquid gold.

“The burgers’ll be a few minutes,” Connie said as he pulled out one of the black wooden chairs and sat down.

Psychosis. Children. Sorcery.

Nothing.

He decided to stop thinking about Ticktock for a while. Give the subconscious a chance to work without pressure.

“I Gotta Know,” he said, giving Connie the title of a Presley song.

“Know what?”

“Tell Me Why.”

“Huh?”

“It’s Now or Never.”

She caught on, smiled. “I’m a fanatical Presley fan.”

“So I gathered.”

“Came in handy.”

“Probably kept Ordegard from throwing another grenade at us, saved our lives.”

“To the king of rock-‘n’-roll,” she said, raising her brandy snifter.

The band stopped torturing the Ellington tunes and took a break, so maybe there was a God in Heaven after all, and blessed order in the universe.

Harry and Connie clinked glasses, sipped. He said, “Why Elvis?”

She sighed. “Early Elvis — he was something. He was all about freedom, about being what you want to be, about not being pushed around just because you’re different. ‘Don’t step on my blue suede shoes.’ Songs from his first ten years were already golden oldies when I was just seven or eight, but they spoke to me. You know?”

“Seven or eight? Heavy stuff for a little kid. I mean, a lot of those songs were about loneliness, heartbreak.”

“Sure. He was that dream figure — a sensitive rebel, polite but not willing to take any shit, romantic and cynical at the same time. I was raised in orphanages, foster homes, so I knew what loneliness was all about, and my heart had some cracks of its own.”

The waitress brought their burgers, and the busboy refreshed their coffee.

Harry was beginning to feel like a human being again. A dirty, rumpled, aching, weary, frightened human being, but a human being nonetheless.

“Okay,” he said, “I can understand being crazy for the early Elvis, memorizing the early songs. But later?”

Shaking ketchup onto her burger, Connie said, “In its way, the end’s as interesting as the beginning. American tragedy.”

“Tragedy? Winding up a fat Vegas singer in sequined jumpsuits?”

“Sure. The handsome and courageous king, so full of promise, transcendent — then because of a tragic flaw, he takes a tumble, a long fall, dead at forty-two.”

“Died on a toilet.”

“I didn’t say this was Shakespearean tragedy. There’s an element of the absurd in it. That’s what makes it American tragedy. No country in the world has our sense of the absurd.”

“I don’t think you’ll see either the Democrats or Republicans using that line as a campaign slogan anytime soon.” The burger was delicious. Around a mouthful of it, he said, “So what was Elvis’s tragic flaw?”

“He refused to grow up. Or maybe he wasn’t able.”

“Isn’t an artist supposed to hold on to the child within him?”

She took a bite of her sandwich, shook her head. “Not the same as perpetually being that child. See, the young Elvis Presley wanted freedom, had a passion for it, just like I’ve always had, and the way he got total freedom to do anything he wanted was through his music. But when he got it, when he could’ve been free forever… well, what happened?”

“Tell me.”

She had clearly thought a lot about it. “Elvis lost direction. I think maybe he fell in love with fame more than freedom. Genuine freedom, freedom with responsibility not from it — that’s a worthy adult dream. But fame is just a cheap thrill. You’d have to be immature to really enjoy fame, don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t want it. Not that I’m likely to get it.”

“Worthless, fleeting, a trinket only a child would mistake for diamonds. Elvis, he looked like a grownup, talked like one—”

“Sure as hell sang like a grownup when he was at his best.”

“Yeah. But emotionally he was a case of arrested development, and the grownup was just a costume he wore, a masquerade. Which is why he always had a big entourage like his own private boy’s club, and ate mostly fried banana sandwiches with peanut butter, kids’ food, and rented whole amusement parks when he wanted to have fun with his friends. It’s why he wasn’t able to stop people like Colonel Parker from taking advantage of him.”

Grownups. Children. Arrested development. Psychosis. Fame. Sorcery. Fairy tales. Arrested development. Monsters. Masquerade.

Harry sat up straighter, his mind racing.

Connie was still talking, but her voice seemed to be coming from a distance: “… so the last part of Elvis’s life shows you how many traps there are…”

Psychotic child. Fascinated by monsters. With a sorcerer’s power. Arrested development. Looks like a grownup but masquerading.

“… how easy it is to lose your freedom and never find your way back to it…”

Harry put down his sandwich. “My God, I think maybe I know who Ticktock is.”

“Who?”

“Wait. Let me think about this.”

Shrill laughter erupted from a table of noisy drunks near the bandstand. Two men in their fifties with the look of wealth about them, two blondes in their twenties. They were trying to live their own fairy tales: the aging men dreaming of perfect sex and the envy of other men; the women dreaming of riches, and happily unaware that their fantasies would one day seem dreary, dull, and tacky even to them.

Harry rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, struggled to order his thoughts. “Haven’t you noticed there’s something childish about him?”

“Ticktock? That ox?”

“That’s his golem. I’m talking about the real Ticktock, the one who makes the golems. This seems like a game to him. He’s playing with me the way a nasty little boy will pull the wings off a fly and watch it struggle to get airborne, or torture a beetle with matches. The deadline at dawn, the taunting attacks, childish, as if he’s some playground bully having his fun.”

He remembered more of what Ticktock had said as he had risen from the bed in the condo, just before he’d started the fire:… you people are so much fun to play with… big hero… you think you can shoot anyone you like, push anyone around if you want….

Push anyone around if you want…

“Harry?”

He blinked, shivered. “Some sociopaths are made by having been abused as children. But others are just born that way, bent.”

“Something screwed up in the genes,” she agreed.

“Suppose Ticktock was born bad.”

“He was never an angel.”

“And suppose this incredible power of his doesn’t come from some weird lab experiment. Maybe it’s also a result of screwed-up genes. If he was born with this power, then it separated him from other people the way fame separated Presley, and he never learned to grow up, didn’t need or want to grow up. In his heart he’s still a child. Playing a child’s game. A mean little child’s game.”

Harry recalled the bearish vagrant standing in his bedroom, red-faced with rage, shouting over and over again: Do you hear me, hero, do you hear me, do you hear me, do you hear me, DO YOU HEAR ME, DO YOU HEAR ME… ? That behavior had been terrifying because of the hobo’s size and power, but in retrospect it distinctly had the quality of a little boy’s tantrum.

Connie leaned across the table and waved one hand in front of his face. “Don’t go catatonic on me, Harry. I’m still waiting for the punchline. Who is Ticktock? You think maybe he actually is a child? Are we looking for some grade-school boy, for God’s sake? Or girl?”

“No. He’s older. Still young. But older.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because I’ve met him.”

Push anyone around if you want…

He told Connie about the young man who had slipped under the crime-scene tape and crossed the sidewalk to the shattered window,of the restaurant where Ordegard had shot up the lunchtime crowd. Tennis shoes, jeans, a Tecate beer T-shirt.

“He was staring inside, fascinated by the blood, the bodies. There was something eerie about him… he had this faraway look…and licking his lips as if… as if, I don’t know, as if there was something erotic about all that blood, those bodies. He ignored me when I told him to get back behind the barrier, probably didn’t even hear me… like he was in a trance… licking his lips.”

Harry picked up his brandy snifter and finished the last of his cognac in one swallow.

“Did you get his name?” Connie asked.

“No. I screwed up. I handled it badly.”

In memory, he saw himself grabbing the kid, shoving him across the sidewalk, maybe hitting him and maybe not — had he jammed a knee into his crotch? — jerking and wrenching him, bending him double, forcing him under the crime-scene tape.

“I was sick about it later,” he said, “disgusted with myself. Couldn’t believe I’d roughed him up that way. I guess I was. still uptight about what had happened in the attic, almost being blown away by Ordegard, and when I saw that kid getting off on the blood, I reacted like… like…”

“Like me,” Connie said, picking up her burger again.

“Yeah. Like you.”

Although he had lost his appetite, Harry took a bite of his sandwich because he had to keep his energy up for what might lie ahead.

“But I still don’t see how you can be so damn sure this kid is Ticktock,” Connie said.

“I know he is.”

“Just because he was a little weird—”

“It’s more than that.”

“A hunch?”

“A lot better than a hunch. Call it cop instinct.”

She stared at him for a beat, then nodded. “All right. You remember what he looked like?”

“Vividly, I think. Maybe as young as nineteen, no older than twenty-one or so.”

“Height?”

“An inch shorter than me.”

“Weight?”

“Maybe a hundred and fifty pounds. Thin. No, that’s not right, not thin, not scrawny. Lean but muscular.”

“Complexion?”

“Fair. He’s been indoors a lot. Thick hair, dark brown or black. Good-looking kid, a little like that actor, Tom Cruise, but more hawkish. He had unusual eyes. Gray. Like silver with a little tarnish on it.”

Connie said, “What I’m thinking is, we go over to Nancy Quan’s house. She lives right here in Laguna Beach—”

Nancy was a sketch artist who worked for Special Projects and had a gift for hearing and correctly interpreting the nuances in a witness’s description of a suspect. Her pencil sketches often proved to be astonishingly good portraits of the perps when they were at last cornered and hauled into custody.

“—you describe this kid to her, she draws him, and we take the sketch to the Laguna police, see if they know the little creep.”

Harry said, “What if they don’t?”

“Then we start knocking on doors, showing the sketch.”

“Doors? Where?”

“Houses and apartments within a block of where you ran into him. It’s possible he lives in that immediate area. Even if he doesn’t live there, maybe he hangs out there, has friends in the neighborhood—”

“This kid has no friends.”

“—or relatives. Someone might recognize him.”

“People aren’t going to be real happy, we go knocking on their doors in the middle of the night.”

Connie grimaced. “You want to wait for dawn?”

“Guess not.”

The band was returning for their final set.

Connie chugged the last of her coffee, pushed her chair back, got up, took some folding money from one coat pocket, and threw a couple of bills on the table.

“Let me pay half,” Harry said.

“My treat.”

“No, really, I should pay half.”

She gave him an are-you-nuts look.

“I like to keep accounts in balance with everyone. You know that,” he explained.

“Take a walk on the wild side, Harry. Let the accounts go out of balance. Tell you what — if dawn comes and we wake up in Hell, you can buy breakfast.”

She headed for the door.

When he saw her coming, the host in the Armani suit and hand-painted silk tie scurried into the safety of the kitchen.

Following Connie, Harry glanced at his wristwatch. It was twenty-two minutes past one o’clock in the morning.

Dawn was perhaps five hours away.

8

Padding through the night town. People in their dark places all drowsy around him.

He yawns and thinks about lying under some bushes and sleeping. There’s another world when he sleeps, a nice world where he has a family that lives in a warm place and welcomes him there, feeds him every day, plays with him anytime he wants to play, calls him Prince, takes him with them in a car and lets him put his head out the window in the wind with his ears flapping — feels good, smells coming at him dizzy-fast, yes yes yes — and never kicks him. It’s a good world in sleep, even though he can’t catch the cats there, either.

Then he remembers the young-man-bad-thing, the black place, the people and animal eyes without bodies, and he isn’t sleepy any more.

He’s got to do something about the bad thing, but he doesn’t know what. He senses it is going to hurt the woman, the boy, hurt them bad. It has much anger. Hate. It would set their fur on fire if they had fur. He doesn’t know why. Or when or how or where. But he must do something, save them, be a good dog, good. So…

Do something.

Okay.

So…

Until he can think what to do about the bad thing, he might as well look for some more food. Maybe the smiling fat man left more good scraps for him behind the people food place. Maybe the fat man is still there in the open door, looking this way and that way along the alley, hoping to see Fella again, thinking he would like to take Fella home, give him a warm place, feed him every day, play with him anytime he wants to play, take Fella for rides in cars with his head sticking out in the wind.

Hurrying now. Trying to smell the fat man. Is he out in the open? Waiting?

Sniffing, sniffing, he passes a rust-smelling, grease-smelling, oil-smelling car parked in a big empty space, and then he smells the woman, the boy, even through the closed windows. He stops, looks up. Boy sleeping, can’t be seen. Woman leaning against door, head against window. Awake, but she does not see him.

Maybe the fat man will like the woman, the boy, will have room for all of them in his nice warm people place, and they can play together, all of them, eat when they want, go for rides in cars with their heads sticking out windows, smells coming at them dizzy-fast. Yes yes yes yes yes yes. Why not? In the sleep world, there is a family. Why not in this world, too?

He is excited. This is good. This is really good. He feels the wonderful thing around the corner, wonderful thing coming that he always knew was out there somewhere. Good. Yes. Good. Yes yes yes yes yes.

The people food place with the fat man waiting is not far from the car, so maybe he should bark to make the woman see him, then lead her and the boy to the fat man.

Yes yes yes yes yes yes.

But wait, wait, it could take too long, too long, getting them to follow him. People are so slow to understand sometimes. The fat man might go away. Then they get there, the fat man is gone, they’re standing in the alley, and they don’t know why, they think he’s just a stupid dog, stupid silly dog, humiliated like when the cat is up in the tree looking down at him.

No no no no no. The fat man can’t go away, can’t. Fat man goes away, they won’t be together in a nice warm place or in a car with the wind.

What to do, what to do? Excited. Bark? Don’t bark? Stay, go, yes, no, bark, don’t bark?

Pee. Got to pee. Lift the leg. Ah. Yes. Strong-smelling pee. Steaming on the pavement, steaming. Interesting.

Fat man. Don’t forget the fat man. Waiting in the alley. Go to the fat man first, before he goes inside and is gone forever, get him and bring him back here, yes yes yes yes, because the woman and the boy are not going anywhere.

Good dog. Smart dog.

He trots away from the car. Then runs. To the corner. Around. A little farther. Another corner. The alley behind the people food place.

Panting, excited, he runs up to the door where the fat man gave out scraps. It is closed. The fat man is gone. No more scraps on the ground.

He is surprised. He was so sure. All of them together like in the sleep world.

He scratches at the door. Scratches, scratches.

The fat man doesn’t come. The door stays closed.

He barks. Waits. Barks.

Nothing.

Well. So. Now what?

He is still excited, but not as much as before. Not so excited that he has to pee, but too excited to be still. He paces in front of the door, back and forth across the alley, whining in frustration and confusion, beginning to be a little sad.

Voices echo to him from the far end of the alley, and he knows one of them belongs to the stinky man who smells like everything bad at once, including like the touch of the thing-that-will-kill-you. He can smell the stinky man really well even from a distance. He doesn’t know who the other voices belong to, can’t smell those people so much because the stinky man’s odor covers them.

Maybe one is the fat man, looking for his Fella.

Could be.

Wagging his tail, he hurries to the end of the alley, but when he gets there he finds no fat man, so he stops wagging. Only a man and a woman he’s never seen before, standing near a car in front of the people food place with the stinky man, all of them talking.

You really cops? says the stinky man.

What’d you do to the car? says the woman.

Nothing. I didn’t do anything to the car.

There’s any crap in this car.; you’re a dead man.

No, listen, for God’s sake.

Forced detox, you scumbag.

How could I get in the car, with it locked?

So you tried, huh?

I just wanted to nose around, see were you really cops.

I’ll show you are we really cops or not, you hairball.

Hey, let go of me!

Jesus, you stink!

Let me go, let me go!

Come on, let him go. All right, easy now, says the man who isn’t so stinky.

Sniffing, sniffing, he smells something on this new man that he smells on the stinky man, too, and it surprises him. The touch of the thing-that-will-kill you. This man has been around the bad thing not long ago.

You smell like a walking toxic waste dump, says the woman.

She also has on her the smell of the thing-that-will-kill-you. All. three of them. Stinky man, man, and woman. Interesting.

He moves closer, sniffing.

Listen, please, I’ve got to talk to a cop, says the stinky man.

So talk, says the woman.

My name’s Sammy Shamroe. I got a crime to report.

Let me guess — somebody stole your new Mercedes.

I need help!

So do we, pal.

All three of them not only have the touch of the bad thing on them, but they smell of fear, the same fear he has smelled on the woman and the boy who call him Woofer. They are afraid of the bad thing, all of them.

Someone’s going to kill me, says the stinky man.

Yeah, it’s gonna be me if you don’t get out of my face.

Easy. Easy now.

The stinky man says, And he’s not human, either. I call him the ratman.

Maybe these people should meet the woman and the boy in the car. All of them afraid separately. Together, maybe not afraid. Together, all of them, they might live in a warm place, play all the time, feed him every day, all of them go places in a car — except the stinky man would have to run behind unless he stopped being stinky enough to make you sneeze.

I call him the ratman ‘cause he’s made out of rats, he falls apart and he’s just a bunch of rats running everywhichway.

But how? How to get them together with the woman and the boy? How to make them understand, people being so slow sometimes?

9

When the dog came sniffing around their feet, Harry didn’t know if it was with the bum, Sammy, or if it was just a stray on its own. Depending on how obstreperous the vagrant became, if they had to use force with him, the dog might take sides. It didn’t look dangerous, but you never could tell.

As for Sammy, he appeared to be more of a threat than the dog. He was wasted from life on the street and from whatever had put him there, worse than skinny, spindly, Salvation Army giveaway clothes hanging so loosely on him that you expected to hear bones rattling together when he moved, but that didn’t mean he was weak. He was twitchy with excess energy. His eyes were so wide open, the lids seemed to have been stretched back and pinned out of the way. His face was tight with tension lines, and his lips repeatedly skinned back from his bad teeth in a feral snarl that might have been meant to be an ingratiating smile but was alarming instead.

“The ratman, see, is what I call him, not what he calls himself. Never heard him call himself anything. Don’t know where the hell he comes from, where he’s hiding his ship, he’s just all of a sudden there, just there, the sadistic bastard, one scary son of a bitch—”

In spite of how weak he appeared to be, Sammy might be like a robotic mechanism receiving too much power, circuits overloading, on the trembling verge of exploding, disintegrating into a shrapnel of gears and springs and burst pneumatic tubes that would kill everyone within a block. He might have a knife, knives, even a gun. Harry had seen shaky little guys like this who looked as if a strong gust of wind would blow them all the way to China; then it turned out that they were stoned on PCP, which could transform kittens into tigers, and three strong men were required to disarm and subdue them.

“—see, maybe I don’t care if he kills me, maybe that would be a blessing, just get totally drunk and let him kill me, so wasted I’d hardly notice when he does me,” Sammy said, crowding them, moving to the left when they moved in that direction, to the right when they tried that way, insisting on a confrontation. “But then tonight, when I was deep in the bag, sucking down my second double liter, I realized who the ratman has to be, I mean what he has to be— one of the aliens!”

“Aliens,” Connie said disgustedly. “Aliens, always aliens with you dim bulbs. Get out of here, you greasy hairball, or I swear to God I’m gonna—”

“No, no, listen. We’ve always known they’re coming, haven’t we? Always known, and now they’re here, and they’ve come to me first, and if I don’t warn the world, then everyone’s going to die.”

As he took hold of Sammy’s arm and tried to maneuver him out of their way, Harry was almost as leery of Connie as he was of the bum. If Sammy was an overwound clockwork mechanism ready to explode, then Connie was a nuclear plant heading for a meltdown. She was frustrated that the vagrant was delaying them from getting to Nancy Quan, the police artist, acutely aware that dawn was rushing toward them from the East. Harry was frustrated, too, but with him, unlike with Connie, there was no danger that he might knee Sammy in the crotch and pitch him through one of the nearby restaurant windows.

“—don’t want to be responsible for aliens killing the whole world, I’ve already got too much on my conscience, too much, can’t stand the idea of being responsible, I’ve let so many people down already—”

If Connie thumped the guy, they would never get to Nancy Quan or have a chance to locate Ticktock. They would be tied up here for an hour or longer, arranging for Sammy’s arrest, trying not to choke to death on his body odor, and struggling to deny police brutality (a few bar patrons were watching them, faces to the glass). Too many precious minutes would be lost.

Sammy grabbed at Connie’s jacket sleeve. “Listen to me, woman, you listen to me!”

Connie jerked loose of him, cocked her fist.

“No!” Harry said.

Connie barely checked herself, almost threw the punch.

Sammy was spraying spittle as he ranted: “—it gave me thirty-six hours to live, the ratman, but now it must be twenty-four or less, not sure—”

Harry tried to hold Connie back with one hand as she reached for Sammy again, while simultaneously pushing Sammy away with the other hand. Then the dog jumped up on him. Grinning, panting, its tail wagging. Harry twisted away, shook his leg, and the dog dropped back onto the sidewalk on all fours.

Sammy was babbling frantically, now clutching with both hands at Harry’s sleeve and tugging for attention, as if he didn’t have it already: “—his eyes like snake eyes, green and terrible, terrible, and he says I got thirty-six hours to live, ticktock, ticktock—”

Fear and amazement quivered through Harry when he heard that word, and the breeze off the ocean seemed suddenly colder than it had been.

Startled, Connie stopped trying to get at Sammy. “Wait a minute, what’d you say?”

“Aliens! Aliens!” Sammy shouted angrily. “You’re not listening to me, damn it.”

“Not the aliens part,” Connie said. The dog jumped on her. Patting its head and pushing it away, she said, “Harry, did he say what I think he said?”

“I’m a citizen, too,” Sammy shrieked. His need to give testimony had escalated into a frenzied determination. “I got a right to be listened to sometimes.”

“Ticktock,” Harry said.

“That’s right,” Sammy confirmed. He was pulling on Harry’s sleeve almost hard enough to tear it off. ” ‘Ticktock, ticktock, time is running out, you’ll be dead by dawn tomorrow, Sammy.’ And then he just dissolves into a pack of rats, right before my eyes.”

Or a whirlwind of trash, Harry thought, or a pillar of fire.

“All right, wait, let’s talk,” Connie said. “Calm down, Sammy, and let’s discuss this. I’m sorry for what I said, I really am. Just get calm.”

Sammy must have thought she was insincere and merely trying to humor him into letting his guard down, because he didn’t respond to the new respect and consideration she accorded him. He stamped his feet in frustration. His clothes flapped on his bony body, and he looked like a scarecrow shaken by a Halloween wind. “Aliens, you stupid woman, aliens, aliens, aliens!”

Glancing at The Green House, Harry saw that half a dozen people were at the barroom windows now, peering out at them.

He realized what a singular spectacle they were, all three of them bedraggled, tugging and pulling at each other, shouting about aliens. He was probably in the last hours of his life, pursued by something paranormal and incredibly vicious, and his desperate fight for survival had been transformed, at least for a moment, into a piece of slapstick street theater.

Welcome to the ‘90s. America on the brink of the millennium. Jesus.

Muffled music filtered to the street: the four-man combo was playing some West Coast swing now, “Kansas City,” but with weird riffs.

The host in the Armani suit was one of those at the bar windows. He was probably silently berating himself for being fooled by what he now surely believed were phony badges, and would go any second to call the real police.

A passing car slowed down, driver and passenger gawking.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid woman!” Sammy shouted at Connie.

The dog took hold of the right leg of Harry’s trousers, nearly jerked him off his feet. He staggered, kept his balance, and managed to pull free of Sammy, though not the dog. It squirmed backward, striving with canine tenacity to drag Harry along with it. Harry resisted, then almost lost his balance again when the mutt abruptly let go of him.

Connie was still trying to soothe Sammy, and the bum was still telling her that she was stupid, but at least neither was trying to hit the other.

The dog ran south along the sidewalk for a few steps, skidded to a halt in the downfall of light from a streetlamp, looked back, and barked at them. The breeze ruffled its fur, fluffed its tail. It dashed a little farther south, halted in shadows this time, and barked again.

Seeing that Harry was distracted by the dog, Sammy became even more outraged at his inability to get serious consideration. His voice became mocking, sarcastic: “Oh, sure, that’s it, pay more attention to a damn dog than to me! What am I, anyway, just some piece of street garbage, less than a dog, no reason to listen to trash like me. Go on, Timmy, go on, see what Lassie wants, maybe Dad’s trapped under an overturned tractor down on the fucking south forty!”

Harry couldn’t help laughing. He would never have expected a remark like that out of someone like Sammy, and he wondered who the man had been before he’d wound up as he was now.

The dog squealed plaintively, cutting Harry’s laugh short. Tucking its bushy tail between its legs, pricking up its ears, raising its head quizzically, it turned in a circle and sniffed at the night air.

“Something’s wrong,” Connie said, worriedly looking around at the street.

Harry felt it, too. A change in the air. An odd pressure. Something. Cop instinct. Cop and dog instinct.

The mutt caught a scent that made it yelp in fear. It spun around on the sidewalk, biting at the air, then rushed back toward Harry. For an instant he thought it was going to barrel into him and knock him on his ass, but then it angled toward the front of The Green House, plunged into a planting bed full of shrubbery, and lay flat on its belly, hiding among azaleas, only its eyes and snout visible.

Taking his cue from the dog, Sammy turned and sprinted toward the nearby alleyway.

Connie said, “Hey, no, wait,” and started after him.

“Connie,” Harry said warningly, not sure what he was warning her about, but sensing that it was not a good idea for them to separate just then.

She turned to him. “What?”

Beyond her, Sammy disappeared around the corner.

That was when everything stopped.

Growling uphill in the southbound lane of the coast highway, a tow truck, evidently on the way to help a stranded motorist, halted on the proverbial dime but without a squeal of brakes. Its laboring engine fell silent from one second to the next, without a lingering chug, cough, or sputter, though its headlights still shone.

Simultaneously a Volvo about a hundred feet behind the truck also stopped and fell mute.

In the same instant, the breeze died. It didn’t wane gradually or sputter out, but ceased as quickly as if a cosmic fan had been switched off. Thousands upon thousands of leaves stopped rustling as one.

Precisely in time with the silencing of traffic and vegetation, the music from the bar cut off mid-note.

Harry almost felt he had gone stone deaf. He’d never known a silence as profound in a controlled interior environment, let alone outdoors where the life of a town and the myriad background noises of the natural world produced a ceaseless atonal symphony even in the comparative stillness between midnight and dawn. He could not hear himself breathe, then realized that his own contribution to the preternatural hush was voluntary; he was simply so stunned by the change in the world that he was holding his breath.

In addition to sound, motion had been stolen from the night. The tow truck and Volvo were not the only things that had come to a complete standstill. The curbside trees and the shrubbery along the front of The Green House seemed to have been flash-frozen. The leaves had not merely stopped rustling, but had entirely ceased moving; they could not have been more still if sculpted from stone. Overhanging the windows of The Green House, the scalloped valances on the canvas awnings had been fluttering in the breeze, but they had gone rigid in mid-flutter; now they were as stiff as if formed from sheet metal. Across the street, the blinking arrow on a neon sign had frozen in the ON position.

Connie said, “Harry?”

He started, as he would have at any sound except the intimate muffled thumping of his own racing heart.

He saw his own confusion and anxiety mirrored in her face.

Moving to his side, she said, “What’s happening?”

Her voice, aside from having an uncharacteristic tremor, was vaguely different from what it had been, slightly flat in tone and marginally less inflective.

“Damned if I know,” he told her.

His voice sounded much like hers, as though it issued from a mechanical device that was extremely clever — but not quite perfect — at reproducing the speech of any human being.

“It’s got to be him doing it,” she said.

Harry agreed. “Somehow.”

“Ticktock.”

“Yeah.”

“Shit, this is crazy.”

“No argument from me.”

She started to draw her revolver, then let the gun slide back into her shoulder holster. An ominous mood infused the scene, an air of fearful expectation. But for the moment, at least, there was nothing at which to shoot.

“Where is the creep?” she wondered.

“I have a hunch he’ll show up.”

“No points for that one.” Indicating the tow truck out in the street, she said, “For God’s sake… look at that.”

At first he thought Connie was just remarking on the fact that the vehicle had mysteriously halted like everything else, but then he realized what sight had pushed the needle higher on her astonishment meter. The air had been just cool enough to cause vehicle exhaust (but not their breath) to condense in pale plumes; those thin puffs of mist hung in midair behind the tow truck, neither dispersing nor evaporating as vapor should have done. He saw another but barely visible gray-white ghost suspended behind the tail pipe of the more distant Volvo.

Now that he was primed to look for them, similar wonders became evident on all sides, and he pointed them out to her. A few pieces of light debris — gum and candy wrappers, a splintered portion of a popsicle stick, dry brown leaves, a tangled length of red yarn — had been swept up by the breeze; although no draught remained to support the items, they were still aloft, as if the air had abruptly turned to purest crystal around them and had trapped them motionless for eternity. Within arm’s reach and just a foot higher than his head, two late-winter moths as white as snowflakes hung immotive, their wings soft and pearl-smooth in the glow of the streetlamp.

Connie tapped her wristwatch, then showed it to Harry. It was a traditional-style Timex with a round dial and hands, including not only hour and minute hands but a red second hand. It was stopped at 1:29 plus sixteen seconds.

Harry checked his own watch, which had a digital readout. It also showed 1:29, and the tiny blinking dot that took the place of a second hand was burning steadily, no longer counting off each sixtieth of a minute.

“Time has…” Connie was unable to finish the sentence. She surveyed the silent street in amazement, swallowed hard, and finally found her voice: “Time has stopped… just stopped. Is that it?”

“Say what?”

“Stopped for the rest of the world but not for us?”

“Time doesn’t… it can’t… just stop.”

“Then what?”

Physics had never been his favorite subject. And though he had some affinity for the sciences because of their ceaseless search for order in the universe, he was not as scientifically literate as he should have been in an age when science was king. However, he had retained enough of his teachers’ lectures and had watched enough PBS specials and had read enough bestseller-list books of popularized science to know that what Connie had said did not explain numerous aspects of what was happening to them.

For one thing, if time had really stopped, why were they still conscious? How could they be aware of the phenomenon? Why weren’t they frozen in that last moment of forward-moving time just as the airborne litter was, as the moths were?

“No,” he said shakily, “it’s not that simple. If time stopped, nothing would move — would it? — not even subatomic particles. And without subatomic movement… molecules of air… well, wouldn’t molecules of air be as solid as molecules of iron? How would we be able to breathe?”

Reacting to that thought, they both took deep and grateful breaths. The air did have a faint chemical taste, as slightly odd in its way as the timbre of their voices, but it seemed capable of sustaining life.

“And light,” Harry said. “Light waves would stop moving. No waves to register with our eyes. So how could we see anything but darkness?”

In fact, the effect of time coming to a stop probably would be infinitely more catastrophic than the stillness and silence that had descended on the world that March night. It seemed to him that time and matter were inseparable parts of creation, and if the flow of time were cut off, matter would instantly cease to exist. The universe would implode — wouldn’t it? — crash back in on itself, into a tiny ball of extremely dense…well, whatever the hell dense stuff it was before it had exploded to create the universe.

Connie stood on her toes, reached up, and gently pinched the wing of one of the moths between thumb and forefinger. She settled back on her heels and brought the insect in front of her face for a closer inspection.

Harry had not been sure if she would be able to alter the bug’s position or not. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the moth had hung immovably on the dead-calm air, as fixed in place as a metal moth welded to a steel wall.

“Not as soft as a moth should be,” she said. “Feels like it’s made out of taffeta… or starched fabric of some kind.”

When she opened her fingers, letting go of the wing, the moth hung in the air where she had released it.

Harry gently batted the bug with the back of his hand, and watched with fascination as it tumbled a few inches before coming to rest in the air again. It was as motionless as it had been before they had toyed with it, just in a new position.

The ways in which they affected things appeared to be pretty much normal. Their shadows moved when they did, though all other shadows were as unmoving as the objects that cast them. They could act upon the world and pass through it as usual but couldn’t really interact with it. She had been able to move the moth, but touching it had not brought it into their reality, had not made it come alive again.

“Maybe time hasn’t stopped,” she said. “Maybe it just slowed way, way down for everyone and everything else except us.”

“That’s not it, either.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I can’t. But I think… if we’re experiencing time at such a tremendously faster rate, enough faster to make the rest of the world appear to be standing still, then every move we make has incredible comparative velocity. Doesn’t it?”

“So?”

“I mean, a lot more velocity than any bullet fired from any gun. Velocity is destructive. If I took a bullet in my hand and threw it at you, it wouldn’t do any damage. But at a few thousand feet per second, it’ll punch a substantial hole in you.”

She nodded, staring thoughtfully at the suspended moth. “So if it was just a case of us experiencing time a lot faster, the swat you gave that bug would’ve disintegrated it.”

“Yeah. I think so. I’d have probably done some damage to my hand, too.” He looked at his hand. It was unmarked. “And if it was just that light waves are traveling slower than usual… then no lamps would be as bright as they are now. They’d be dimmer and… reddish, I think, almost like infrared light. Maybe. And air molecules would be sluggish….”

“Like breathing water or syrup?”

He nodded. “I think so. I don’t really know for sure. Hell’s bells, I’m not sure even Albert Einstein would be able to figure this if he was standing right here with us.”

“The way this is going, he might show up any minute.”

No one had gotten out of either the tow truck or the Volvo, which indicated to Harry that the occupants were as trapped in the changed world as were the moths. He could see only the shadowy forms of two people in the front seat of the more distant Volvo, but he had a better view of the man behind the wheel of the tow truck, which was almost directly across the street from them. Neither the shadows in the car nor the truck driver had moved a fraction of an inch since the stillness had fallen. Harry supposed that if they had not been on the same time track as their vehicles, they might have exploded through the windshields and tumbled along the highway the instant that the tires precipitously stopped rotating.

At the barroom windows of The Green House, six people continued to peer out in precisely the postures they had been in when the Pause had come. (Harry thought of it as a Pause rather than a Stop because he assumed that sooner or later Ticktock would start things up again. Assuming it was Ticktock who had called the halt. If not him, who else? God?) Two of them were sitting at a window table; the other four were standing, two on each side of the table.

Harry crossed the sidewalk and stepped between the shrubs to examine the onlookers more closely. Connie accompanied him.

They stood directly in front of the glass and perhaps a foot below those inside the barroom.

In addition to the gray-haired couple at the table, there was a young blonde and her fiftyish companion, one of the couples who had been sitting near the bandstand, making too much noise and laughing too heartily. Now they were as quiet as the residents of any tomb. On the other side of the table stood the host and a waiter. All six were squinting through the window, leaning slightly forward toward the glass.

As Harry studied them, not one blinked an eye. No face muscles twitched. Not a single hair stirred. Their clothes draped them as if every garment had been carved from marble.

Their unchanging expressions ranged from amusement to amazement to curiosity to, in the case of the host, perturbation. But they were not reacting to the incredible stillness that had befallen the night. Of that, they were oblivious because they were a part of it. Rather, they were staring over Harry’s and Connie’s heads, at the place on the sidewalk where the two of them had last been standing after Sammy and the dog had fled. Their facial expressions were in reaction to that interrupted bit of street theater.

Connie raised one hand above her head and waved it in front of the window, directly in the line of view of the onlookers. The six did not respond to it in any way whatsoever.

“They can’t see us,” Connie said wonderingly.

“Maybe they see us standing out there on the sidewalk, in the instant that everything stopped. They could be frozen in that split second of perception and not have seen anything we’ve done since.”

Virtually in unison, he and Connie looked over their shoulders to study the dead-still street behind them, equally apprehensive of the unnatural quietude. With astonishing stealth, Ticktock had appeared behind them in James Ordegard’s bedroom, and they had paid with pain for not anticipating him. Here, he was not yet in sight, although Harry was sure that he was coming.

Returning her attention to the gathering inside the bar, Connie rapped her knuckles against a pane of glass. The sound was slightly tinny, differing from the right sound of knuckles against glass to the same small but audible degree that their current voices differed from their real ones.

The onlookers did not react.

To Harry, they seemed to be more securely imprisoned than the most isolated man in the deepest cell in the world’s worst police state. Like flies in amber, they were trapped in one meaningless moment of their lives. There was something horribly vulnerable about their helpless suspension and their blissful ignorance of it.

Their plight, although they were almost certainly unaware of it, sent a chill along Harry’s spine. He rubbed the back of his neck to warm it.

“If they still see us out on the sidewalk,” Connie said, “what happens if we go away from here, and then everything starts up again?”

“I suppose, to them, it’ll appear as if we vanished into thin air, right before their eyes.”

“My God.”

“It’ll give them a jolt, all right.”

She turned away from the window, faced him. Worry lines creased her brow. Her dark eyes were haunted, and her voice was somber to an extent not fully attributable to the change in its tone and pitch. “Harry, this bastard isn’t just some spoon-bending, fortune-telling, sleight-of-hand, Vegas lounge act.”

“We already knew he had real power.”

“Power?”

“Yes.”

“Harry, this is more than power. The word just doesn’t convey, you hear me?”

“I hear you,” he said placatingly.

“Just by willing it, he can stop time, stop the engine of the world, jam the gears, do whatever the fuck it is he’s done. That’s more than power. That’s… being God. What chance do we have against someone like that?”

“We have a chance.”

“What chance? How?”

“We have a chance,” he insisted stubbornly.

“Yeah? Well, I think this guy can squash us like bugs any time he wants, and he’s just been stalling because he enjoys watching bugs suffer.”

“You don’t sound like the Connie Gulliver I know,” Harry said more sharply than he had intended.

“Well, maybe I’m not.” She put one thumb to her mouth and used her teeth to trim off a full crescent of the nail.

He had never seen her bite her nails before, and he was almost as astonished by that revelation of nervousness as he would have been if she had broken down and cried.

She said, “Maybe I tried to ride a wave too big for me, got dumped bad, lost my nerve.”

It was inconceivable to Harry that Connie Gulliver could lose her nerve over anything at all, not even over something as strange and frightening as what was happening to them. How could she lose her nerve when she was all nerve, one hundred and fifteen pounds or so of solid nerve?

She turned away from him, swept the street with her gaze again, walked to some azalea bushes and parted them with one hand, revealing the hiding dog. “These don’t feel quite like leaves. Stiffen More like thin cardboard.”

He joined her, stooped, and petted the dog, which was as frozen by the Pause as were the bar patrons. “His fur feels like fine wire.”

“I think he was trying to tell us something.”

“So do I. Now.”

“Because he sure knew something was about to happen when he hid in these bushes.”

Harry remembered the thought he’d had in the men’s room of The Green House: The only indication that I haven’t become imprisoned in a fairy tale is the absence of a talking animal.

Funny, how hard it was to break a man’s grasp on his sanity. After a hundred years of Freudian analysis, people were conditioned to believe that sanity was a fragile possession, that everyone was a potential victim of neuroses or psychoses caused by abuse, neglect, or even by the ordinary stresses of daily life. If he had seen the events of the past thirteen hours as the plot of a movie, he’d have found it unbelievable, smugly certain that the male lead — himself — would have cracked from the strain of so many supernatural events and encounters combined with so much physical abuse. Yet here he was, with aches in most of his muscles and pains in half his joints, but with his wits intact.

Then he realized that perhaps he could not assume his wits were intact. Unlikely as it was, he might already be strapped down on a bed in a psychiatric ward, with a rubber wedge in his mouth to keep him from biting off his tongue in a mad frenzy. The silent and unmoving world might be only a delusion.

Sweet thought.

When Connie let go of the azalea branches that she had moved, they did not fall back into place. Harry had to press gently on them to force them to drape the dog once more.

They rose to their feet and scrutinized the visible length of Pacific Coast Highway, the shoulder-to-shoulder businesses on both sides, the narrow dark gaps between buildings.

The world was a huge clockwork mechanism with a bent key, broken springs, and rust-locked gears. Harry tried to tell himself that he was growing accustomed to this weird state of affairs, but he was not convincing. If he’d gotten so mellow about it, why was there a cold sweat on his brow, under his arms, and down the small of his back? The totally becalmed night exerted no tranquilizing influence, for there was spring-taut violence and sudden death under its peaceful facade; instead, it was deeply eerie and growing more so with the passage of each non-second.

“Enchantment,” Harry said.

“What?”

“Like in a fairy tale. The whole world has fallen under an evil enchantment, a spell.”

“So where the hell is the witch who did it? That’s what I want to know.”

“Not witch,” Harry corrected. “That’s female. A male witch is a warlock. Or sorcerer.”

She was fuming. “Whatever. Damn it, where is he, why is he toying with us like this, taking so long to show his face?”

Glancing at his wristwatch, Harry confirmed that the red second indicator had not resumed blinking and that the time on the readout was still 1:29. “Actually, how much time he’s taking depends on how you look at it. I guess you could say that he hasn’t taken any time at all.”

She noted the 1:29 on her watch. “Come on, come on, let’s get this over with. Or do you think he’s waiting for us to go looking for him?”

Elsewhere in the night, there arose the first sound, since the Pause, that they had not made themselves. Laughter. The low, gravelly laughter of the golem-vagrant who had burned like a tallow candle in Harry’s condo and later reappeared to hammer on them in Ordegard’s house.

Again, out of habit, they reached for their revolvers. Then both remembered the uselessness of guns against this adversary, and left their weapons holstered.

South of them, at the uphill end of the block, on the other side of the street, Ticktock turned the corner, wearing his all-too-familiar vagrant identity. If anything, the golem seemed bigger than before, well over seven feet tall instead of six and a half, with a greater tangle of hair and wildness of beard than when they’d last seen him. Leonine head. Tree-trunk neck. Massive shoulders. Impossibly broad chest. Hands as big as tennis rackets. His black raincoat was as voluminous as a tent.

“Why the hell was I so impatient for him?” Connie wondered, voicing Harry’s identical thought.

His troll-mean laughter fading, Ticktock stepped off the far curb and started to cross the street diagonally, coming straight toward them.

“What’s the plan?” Connie asked.

“What plan?”

“There’s always a plan, damn it.”

Indeed, Harry was surprised to realize they had stood waiting for the golem without giving a thought to a course of action. They had been cops for so many years, and had worked as partners long enough, that they knew how best to respond in every situation, to virtually any threat. Usually they didn’t actually have to put their heads together on strategy; they just acted instinctively, each of them confident that the other would make all the right moves as well. On the rare occasions when they needed to talk out a plan of action, a few one-word sentences sufficed, the shortspeak of partners in sync. However, confronted by a nearly invulnerable adversary made of bloodless mud and stones and worms and God-knew-what-else, by a fierce and relentless fighter who was but one of an endless army that their real enemy could create, they seemed bereft of both instinct and brains, able only to stand paralyzed and watch him approach.

Run, Harry thought, and was about to take his own advice when the towering golem stopped in the middle of the street, about fifty feet away.

The golem’s eyes were different from anything Harry had seen before. Not just luminous but blazing. Blue. The hot blue of gas flames. Dancing brightly in his sockets. His eyes cast images of flickering blue fire on his cheekbones and made the frizzy ends of his beard look like thin filaments of blue neon.

Ticktock spread his arms and raised his enormous hands above his head in the manner of an Old Testament prophet standing on a mountain and addressing his followers below, relaying messages from beyond. Tablets of stone containing a hundred commandments could have been concealed within his generous raincoat.

“In one hour of real time the world starts up again,” Ticktock said. “I’ll count to fifty. A headstart. Survive one hour, and I’ll let you live, never torment you again.”

“Dear sweet Jesus,” Connie whispered, “he really is a child playing nasty games.”

That made him at least as dangerous as any other sociopath. More so. Some young children, in their innocence of empathy, had the capacity to be extremely cruel.

Ticktock said, “I’ll hunt you fair and square, use none of my tricks, just my eyes,” and he pointed to his blazing blue sockets, “my ears,” and he pointed to one of those, “and my wits.” He tapped the side of his skull with one thick forefinger. “No tricks. No special powers. More fun that way. One… two… better run, don’t you think? Three… four… five…”

“This can’t be happening,” Connie said, but she turned and ran anyway.

Harry followed her. They sprinted to the alley and around the side of The Green House, almost colliding with the bony hobo who had called himself Sammy and who was now frozen precariously on one foot in mid-stride. Their feet made curious, hollow slapping sounds on the blacktop as they exploded past Sammy and raced deeper into the dark backstreet, almost the sound of running footsteps but not quite. The echoes, too, were not precisely like echoes in the real world, less reverberant and too short-lived.

As he ran, wincing at a hundred separate pains that flared with each footfall, Harry struggled to devise some strategy by which they might survive the hour. But, like Alice, they had crossed through the looking glass, into the kingdom of the Red Queen, and no plans or logic would work in that land of the Mad Hatter and Cheshire Cat, where reason was despised and chaos embraced.

1

“Eleven… twelve… you’re dead if I find you… thirteen…”

Bryan was having so much fun.

He sprawled naked on the black silk sheets, busily creating and gloriously Becoming, while the votive eyes adored him from their glass reliquaries.

Yet a part of him was in the golem, which was also exhilarating. He had constructed the creature bigger this time, made it a fierce and unstoppable killing machine, the better to terrorize the bigshot hero and his bitch. Its immense shoulders were his shoulders, too, and its powerful arms were his to use. Curling those arms, feeling the inhuman muscles flex and contract and flex, was so thrilling that he could barely contain his excitement over the hunt before him.

“… sixteen… seventeen… eighteen…”

He had made this giant from dirt and clay and sand, given its body the appearance of flesh, and animated it — just as the first god had created Adam from lifeless mud. Although his destiny was to be a more merciless divinity than any who had come before him, he could create as well as destroy; no one could say that he was less a god than others who had ruled, no one. No one.

Standing in the middle of Pacific Coast Highway, towering there, he gazed out upon the still and silent world, and was pleased with what he had wrought. This was his Greatest and Most Secret Power — the ability to stop everything as easily as a watchmaker could stop a ticking timepiece merely by opening the casing and applying the proper tool to the key point in the mechanism.

“… twenty-four… twenty-five…”

This power had arisen within him during one of his psychic growth surges when he was sixteen, though he had been eighteen before he had learned to use it well. That was to be expected. Jesus, too, had needed time to learn how to turn water into wine, how to multiply a few loaves and fishes to feed multitudes.

Will. The power of the will. That was the proper tool with which to remake reality. Before the beginning of time and the birth of this universe, there had been one will that had brought it all into existence, a consciousness that people called God, though God was no doubt utterly different from all the ways that humankind had pictured Him — perhaps only a child at play who, as a game, created galaxies like grains of sand. If the universe was a perpetual-motion machine created as an act of will, it also could be altered by sheer will, remade or destroyed. All that was needed to manipulate and edit the first god’s creation was power and understanding; both had been given to Bryan. The power of the atom was a dim light when compared to the blindingly brilliant power of the mind. By applying his will, by intently focusing thought and desire, he found that he could make fundamental changes in the very foundations of existence.

“… thirty-one… thirty-two… thirty-three…”

Because he was still earnestly Becoming and was not yet the new god, Bryan was able to sustain these changes only for short periods, usually no more than one hour of real time. Occasionally he grew impatient with his limits, but he was certain the day would arrive when he could alter current reality in ways that would be permanent if he so wished. In the meantime, as he continued to Become, he satisfied himself with amusing alterations that temporarily negated all the laws of physics and, at least for a short while, tailored reality to his desire.

Although it would appear to Lyon and Gulliver that time had ground to a halt, the truth was more complicated than that. By the application of his extraordinary will, almost like wishing before blowing out the candles on a birthday cake, he had re-conceived the nature of time. If it had been an ever-flowing river of dependable effect, he transformed it into a series of streams, large placid lakes, and geysers with a variety of effects. This world now lay in one of the lakes where time advanced at such an excruciatingly slow rate that it appeared to have stopped flowing — yet, also at his wish, he and the two cops interacted with this new reality much as they had with the old, experiencing only minor changes in most of the laws of matter, energy, motion, and force.

“… forty… forty-one…”

As if making a birthday wish, as if wishing on a star, as if wishing to a fairy godmother, wishing, wishing, wishing with all his considerable might, he had created the perfect playground for a spirited game of hide-and-seek. And so what if he had bent the universe to make a toy of it?

He was aware that he was two people of widely disparate natures. On the one hand he was a god Becoming, exalted, with incalculable authority and responsibility. On the other hand, he was a reckless and selfish child, cruel and prideful.

In that respect he fancied that he was like humankind itself — only more so.

“… forty-five…”

In fact, he believed he had been anointed precisely because of the kind of child he had been. Selfishness and pride were merely reflections of ego, and without a strong ego, no man could have the confidence to create. A certain amount of recklessness was required if one hoped to explore the limits of one’s creative powers; taking chances, without regard for consequences, could be liberating and a virtue. And, as he was to be the god who would chasten humankind for its pollution of the earth, cruelty was a requirement of Becoming. His ability to remain a child, to avoid spending his creative energy in the senseless breeding of more animals for the herd, made him the perfect candidate for divinity.

“… forty-nine… fifty!”

For a while he would keep his promise to hunt them down only with the aid of ordinary human senses. It would be fun. Challenging. And it would be good to experience the severe limitations of their existence, not in order to develop compassion for them — they did not deserve compassion — but to enjoy more fully, by comparison, his own extraordinary powers.

In the body of the hulking vagrant, Bryan moved from the street into the fabulous amusement park that was the dead-still, whisper-less town.

“Here I come,” he shouted, “ready or not.”

2

A dangling pinecone, like a Christmas ornament suspended by a thread from the bough above, had been arrested in mid-drop by the Pause. An orange-and-white cat had been stilled while leaping from a tree branch to the top of a stucco wall, airborne, forepaws reaching, back legs sprung out behind. A rigid, unchanging filigree of smoke curled from a fireplace chimney.

As she and Harry ran farther into the strange, unbeating heart of the paralyzed town, Connie did not believe that they would escape with their lives; nonetheless she frantically conceived and discarded numerous strategies to elude Ticktock for one hour. Under the hard shell of cynicism that she had nurtured so lovingly for so long, like every poor fool in the world, she evidently treasured the hope that she was different and would live forever.

She should have been embarrassed to find within herself such a stupid, animal faith in her own immortality. Instead, she embraced it. Hope could be a treacherous kind of confidence, but she couldn’t see how their predicament could be made worse by a little positive thinking.

In one night she had learned so many new things about herself. It would be a pity not to live long enough to build a better life on those discoveries.

For all of her fevered thinking, only pathetic strategies occurred to her. Without slowing, between increasingly ragged gasps for breath, she suggested they change streets often, turning this way and that, in the feeble hope that a twisting trail would somehow be harder to follow than one that was arrow-straight. And she guided them along a downhill route where possible because they could cover more ground in less time if they weren’t fighting a rising grade.

Around them, the inert residents of Laguna Beach were oblivious to the fact that they were running for their lives. And if she and Harry were caught, no screams would wake these enchanted sleepers or bring help.

She knew why Ricky Estefan’s neighbors had not heard the golem exploding up through his hallway floor and beating him to death. Ticktock had stopped time in every corner of the world except inside that bungalow. Ricky’s torture and murder had been conducted with sadistic leisure — while no time at all was passing for the rest of humanity. Likewise, when Ticktock had accosted them in Ordegard’s house and had thrown Connie through the glass sliding door onto the master-bedroom balcony, neighbors had not responded to the crash or to the gunshots that had preceded it because the entire confrontation had taken place in non-time, in a dimension one step removed from reality.

As she ran at her top speed, she counted to herself, trying to maintain the slow rhythm in which Ticktock had been counting. She reached fifty much too soon, and doubted they had put half enough ground between them and him to be safe.

If she had continued counting, she might have reached a hundred before, finally, they had to stop. They leaned against a brick wall to catch their breath.

Her chest was tight, and her heart seemed to have swelled to the point of bursting. Each breath felt searingly hot, as if she were a fire-eater in a circus, exhaling ignited gasoline fumes. Her throat was raw. Calf and thigh muscles ached, and the increased circulation renewed the pain in all of the bumps and bruises she’d gotten during the night.

Harry looked worse than she felt. Of course, he had received more blows in more encounters with Ticktock than she had sustained, and had been on the run longer.

When she could speak, she said, “Now what?”

At first each word puffed from him explosively. “What. About. Using. Grenades?”

“Grenades?”

“Like Ordegard.”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember.”

“Bullets don’t work on a golem—”

She said, “I noticed.”

“—but if we blew the damn thing to pieces—”

“Where we going to find grenades? Huh? You know a friendly neighborhood explosives shop around here?”

“Maybe a National Guard armory, someplace like that.”

“Get real, Harry.”

“Why? The rest of the world isn’t.”

“We blow one of these damn things to smithereens, he just scoops up some mud and makes another.”

“But it’ll slow him down.”

“Maybe two minutes.”

“Every minute counts,” he said. “We’ve just got to get through one hour.”

She looked at him with disbelief. “Are you saying you think he’ll keep his promise?”

With his coat sleeve, Harry wiped sweat off his face. “Well, he might.”

“Like hell.”

“He might,” Harry insisted.

She was ashamed of herself for wanting to believe.

She listened to the night. Nothing. That didn’t mean Ticktock wasn’t nearby.

“We’ve got to get going,” she said.

“Where?”

No longer needing to lean against the wall for support, Connie looked around and discovered they were in the parking lot beside a bank. Eighty feet away, a car was stopped near the twenty-four-hour automatic teller. Two men stood at the machine in the bluish glow from an overhead security lamp.

Something about the postures of the two was wrong. Not just that they were as still as statues. Something else.

Connie started across the parking lot toward the odd tableau.

“Where you going?” Harry asked.

“Check this out.”

Her instinct proved reliable. The Pause had hit in the middle of a robbery.

The first man was using his bank card to get three hundred dollars from the machine. He was in his late fifties with white hair, a white mustache, and a kind face now lined with fear. The packet of crisp bills had begun to slide out of the dispenser and into his hand when everything had stopped.

The perp was in his late teens or early twenties, blond, good looking. In Nikes, jeans, and a sweatshirt now, he was one of those beach-boy types who could be found all summer long, on every street of downtown Laguna, wearing sandals and cutoffs, flat-bellied, with a mahogany tan, white-haired from the sun. To look at him as he was at that moment or as he would be when summer came, you might suspect that he lacked ambition and had a talent for leisure, but you would not imagine that anyone so wholesome in appearance could harbor criminal intentions. Even in the act of robbery he appeared to be cherubic, and had a pleasant smile. He was holding a.32-caliber pistol in his right hand, the muzzle jammed against the older man’s spine.

Connie moved around the pair, studying them thoughtfully.

“What’re you doing?” Harry asked.

“We’ve got to deal with this.”

“We don’t have time.”

“We’re cops, aren’t we?”

Harry said, “We’re being hunted, for God’s sake!”

“Who else is going to keep the world from going to hell in a handbasket, if we don’t?”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he said. “I thought you were in this line of work for the thrill, and to prove something to yourself. Isn’t that what you said earlier?”

“And aren’t you in it to preserve order, protect the innocent?”

Harry took a deep breath, as if to argue, then let it out in an explosive sigh of exasperation. It wasn’t the first time during the past six months that she had elicited that reaction from him.

She thought he was sort of cute when he was exasperated; it was such a pleasing change from his usual equanimity, which got boring because it was so constant. In fact, Connie even liked the way he looked tonight, rumpled and in need of a shave. She had never seen him this way, had never expected to see him this way, and thought he seemed more rough than seedy, more dangerous than she would have believed he could look.

“Okay, okay,” he said, stepping into the robbery tableau to inspect the perp and victim more closely. “What do you want to do?”

“Make a few adjustments.”

“Might be dangerous.”

“That velocity business? Well, the moth didn’t disintegrate.”

Cautiously, she touched one finger to the perp’s face. His skin felt leathery, and his flesh was somewhat firmer than it should have been. When she took her finger away, she left a shallow dimple in his cheek, which evidently would not disappear until the Pause ended.

Staring into his eyes, she said, “Creep.”

In no way whatsoever did he acknowledge her presence. She was invisible to him. When time resumed its usual flow, he would not be aware that she had ever been there.

She pulled back on the perp’s gun arm. It moved but with stiff resistance.

Connie was patient because she worried that time might begin to move forward again when she least expected it, that her presence might startle the reanimated gunman, and that he might accidentally pull the trigger. Conceivably she could cause him to blow the older man away, although his original intention might have been only to commit a robbery.

When the muzzle of the.32 was no longer pressed against the victim’s spine, Connie slowly pushed it to the left until it was not pointed at him at all but aimed harmlessly into the night.

Harry carefully pried the gunman’s fingers off the pistol. “It’s like we’re kids playing with life-size action figures.” The.32 stayed precisely where it had been when the perp’s hand had encircled it, suspended in midair.

Connie found that the gun could be moved more easily than the gunman, although it still offered some resistance. She took it to the man at the automatic teller, pressed it into his right hand, and closed his fingers tightly around it. When the Pause ended, he would find a pistol in his hand where none had been a fraction of a second previously, and would have no idea how it had gotten there. From the pay-out tray of the machine, she removed the banded packet of twenties and put it in the customer’s left hand.

“I see how the ten-dollar bill ended up magically back in my hand after I gave it to that hobo,” she said.

Surveying the night uneasily, Harry said, “And how the four bullets I pumped into him ended up in my shirt pocket.”

“The head of that religious statue in my hand, from Ricky Estefan’s shrine.” She frowned. “Gives you the creepy crawlies to think we were like these people, frozen in time, and the bastard played with us that way.”

“You done here?”

“Not quite. Come on, help me turn the guy away from the machine.”

Together, they rocked him around a hundred and eighty degrees, as if he were a garden statue carved from marble. When they were finished, the victim not only had the pistol but was covering the perp with it.

Like set dressers in a wax museum handling extremely realistic mannequins, they had redesigned the scene and given it a new kind of drama.

“Okay, now let’s get out of here,” Harry said, and started to move away from the bank, across the parking lot.

Connie hesitated, examining their handiwork.

He looked back, saw she wasn’t following him, and turned to her. “Now what?”

Shaking her head, she said, “This is too dangerous.”

“The good guy has the gun now.”

“Yes, but he’ll be surprised when he finds it in his hand. He might drop it. The creep here might get hold of it again, probably will, and then they’re right back where we found them.”

Harry returned, an apoplectic look on his face. “Have you forgotten a certain dirty, demented, scar-faced gentleman in a black raincoat?”

“I don’t hear him yet.”

“Connie, for God’s sake, he could stop time for us, too, then take however damn long he wants to walk up to us, wait until he was right in front of us before letting us back into the game. So you wouldn’t hear him until he tore your nose off and asked you if you’d like a handkerchief.”

“If he’s going to cheat like that—”

“Cheat? Why wouldn’t he cheat?” Harry demanded exasperatedly, though two minutes ago he had been arguing that there was a chance Ticktock would keep his promise and play fair. “We aren’t talking about Mother Teresa here!”

“—then it doesn’t matter whether we finish our work or run. Either way, he’ll get us.”

The keys to the white-haired bank patron’s car were in the ignition. Connie took them out and unlocked the trunk. The lid did not pop up. She had to lift it as if she was raising the lid on a coffin.

“This is anal-retentive,” Harry told her.

“Oh? Like you might ordinarily be expected to handle it, huh?”

He blinked at her.

Harry took the perp under the arms, and Connie grabbed him by the feet. They carried him to the back of the car and gently lowered him into the trunk. The body seemed somewhat heavier than it would have been in real time. Connie tried to slam the lid, but in this altered reality, her push didn’t give it the momentum to go all the way down; she had to lean on it to make the latch click into place.

When the Pause ended and time started up again, the perpetrator would find himself in the trunk of the car with no memory whatsoever of how he had wound up in that unhappy position. In the blink of an eye he would have gone from being assailant to prisoner.

Harry said, “I think I understand how I wound up three times in the same chair in Ordegard’s kitchen, with the barrel of my own gun in my mouth.”

“He kept taking you out of real time and putting you there.”

“Yeah. A child playing pranks.”

Connie wondered if that was also how the snakes and tarantulas had gotten into Ricky Estefan’s kitchen. During a previous Pause, had Ticktock gathered them from pet shops, laboratories, or even from their nests in the wild, and then put them in the bungalow? Had he started time up again — at least for Ricky — startling the poor man with the sudden infestation?

Connie walked away from the car, into the parking lot, where she stopped and listened to the unnatural night.

It was as if everything in the world had suddenly died, from the wind to all of humanity, leaving a planetwide cemetery where grass and flowers and trees and mourners were made from the same granite as the tombstones.

At times in recent years, she had considered chucking police work and moving to some cheap shack on the edge of the Mojave, as far away from people as she could get. She lived so Spartanly that she had substantial savings; living as a desert rat, she could make the money last a long time. The barren, peopleless expanses of sand and scrub and rock were immensely appealing when compared to modern civilization.

But the Pause was far different from the peace of a sun-baked desert landscape, where life was still a part of the natural order and where civilization, sick as it was, still existed somewhere over the horizon. After only about ten non-minutes of silence and stillness as deep as death, Connie longed for the flamboyant folly of the human circus. The species was too fond of lying, cheating, envy, ignorance, self-pity, self-righteousness, and Utopian visions that always led to mass murder — but until and if it destroyed itself, it harbored the potential to become nobler, to take responsibility for its actions, to live and let live, and to earn the stewardship of the earth.

Hope. For the first time in her life, Connie Gulliver had begun to believe that hope, in itself, was a reason to live and to tolerate civilization as it was.

But Ticktock, as long as he lived, was the end of hope.

“I hate this son of a bitch like I’ve never hated anyone,” she said. “I want to get him. I want to waste him so bad I can hardly stand it.”

“To get him, first we have to stay alive,” Harry reminded her.

“Let’s go.”

3

Initially, staying on the move in that motionless world seemed to be the wisest thing they could do. If Ticktock was faithful to his promise, using only his eyes and ears and wits to track them, their safety increased in direct proportion to the amount of distance they put between him and them.

As Harry ran with Connie from one lonely street to another, he suspected there was a better than even chance that the psycho would keep his word, stalking them only by ordinary means and releasing them unharmed from the Pause if he could not catch them in one hour of real time. The bastard was, after all, demonstrably immature in spite of his incredible power, a child playing a game, and sometimes children took games more seriously than real life.

Of course, when he released them, it would still be twenty-nine minutes past one in the morning when clocks finally started ticking again. Dawn remained five hours away. And while Ticktock might play this particular game-within-a-game strictly according to the rules he had outlined, he would still intend to kill them by dawn. Surviving the Pause would only win them the slim chance to find him and destroy him once time started up again.

And even if Ticktock broke his promise, using some sixth sense to track them, it was smart to keep moving. Perhaps he had pinned psychic tags on them, as Harry had speculated earlier; in which case, if he did cheat, he could find them regardless of where they went. By remaining on the move, at least they were safe unless and until he could catch them or get ahead by anticipating their next turn.

From street to alley to street, across yards and between silent houses they ran, clambering over fences, through a school playground, footfalls vaguely metallic, where every shadow seemed as permanent as iron, where neon lights burned steadier than any Harry had ever seen before and painted eternal rainbows on the pavement, past a man in a tweed coat walking his Scottie dog and both of them as motionless as bronze figures.

They sprinted along a narrow stream bed where runoff from the storm earlier in the day was time-frozen but not at all like ice: clearer than ice, black with reflections of the night and marked by pure silver highlights instead of frost-white crystallization. The surface was not flat, either, like a frozen winter creek, but rippled and runneled and spiraled by turbulence. Where the stream splashed over rocks in its course, the air was hung with unmoving sprays of glittering water resembling elaborate sculptures made from glass shards and beads.

Though staying on the move was desirable, continued flight soon became impractical. They were already tired and stiff with pain when they began their run; each additional exertion took a geometrically greater toll from them.

Although they seemed to move as easily in this petrified world as in the one to which they were accustomed, Harry noticed that they did not create a wind of their own when they ran. The air parted around them like butter around a knife, but no turbulence arose from their passage, which indicated that the air was objectively denser than it appeared subjectively. Their speed might be considerably less than it appeared to them, in which case movement required more effort than they perceived.

Furthermore, the coffee, brandy, and hamburger that Harry had eaten churned sourly in his stomach. Acidic flares of indigestion burned through his chest.

More important, block by block as they fled through that town-size mausoleum, an inexplicable inversion of biological response increased their misery. Although such strenuous activity should have left them overheated, they grew steadily colder. Harry couldn’t work up a sweat, not even an icy one. His toes and fingers felt as if he had slogged across an Alaskan glacier, not a southern California beach resort.

The night itself felt no colder than before the Pause. Indeed, perhaps not quite as cool, since the crisp breeze off the ocean had fallen into stillness with everything else. The cause of the queer internal chill was evidently something other than the air temperature, more mysterious and profound — and frightening.

It was as if the world around them, its abundant energy trapped in stasis, had become a black hole of sorts, relentlessly absorbing their energy, sucking it out of them, until degree by degree they would become as inanimate as everything else. He suspected it was imperative that they begin to conserve what resources they had left.

When it became incontrovertibly clear that they would have to stop and find a promising place to hide, they had left a residential neighborhood and entered the east end of a canyon with scrub-covered slopes. Along the three-lane service road, lit by rows of sodium-vapor arc lamps that transformed the night into a two-tone black and yellow canvas, the flat ground was occupied by semi-industrial businesses of the type that image-conscious towns like Laguna Beach carefully tucked away from primary tourist routes.

They were walking now, shivering. She was hugging herself. He turned up his collar and pulled the halves of his sportcoat tight together.

“How much of the hour has passed?” Connie asked.

“Damned if I know. I’ve lost all time sense.”

“Half an hour?”

“Maybe.”

“Longer?”

“Maybe.”

“Less?”

“Maybe.”

“Shit.”

“Maybe.”

To their right, in a sprawling recreational-vehicle storage yard behind heavy-duty chain-link fence crowned with razor wire, motor homes stood side by side in the gloom, like row after row of slumbering elephants.

“What’re all these cars?” Connie wondered.

They were parked on both sides of the road, half on the narrow shoulders and half on the pavement, squeezing the three-lane street to no more than two lanes. It was curious, because none of those businesses would have been open when the Pause hit. In fact, all of them were dark, and had closed up seven to eight hours earlier.

On their right, a landscape-maintenance company occupied a concrete-block building behind which a tree and shrub nursery was terraced halfway up the canyon wall.

Directly under one of the pole lamps, they came upon a car in which a young couple was necking. Her blouse was open, and his hand was inside, marble palm cupping marble breast. As far as Harry was concerned, their frozen expressions of ardent passion, tinted sodium-yellow and glimpsed through the car windows, was about as erotic as a couple of corpses tumbled together on a bed.

They passed two automobile-repair shops on opposite sides of the three-lane, each specializing in different foreign makes. The businesses fronted their own parts junkyards heaped with cannibalized vehicles and fenced with high chain-link.

Cars continued to line the street, blocking driveways to the businesses. A boy of about eighteen or nineteen, shirtless in jeans and Rockports, as thoroughly gripped by the Pause as everyone they had seen thus far, was sprawled across the hood of a black ‘86 Camaro, arms out to his sides and palms up, staring at the occluded sky as if there was something to see up there, a stupid expression of drugged-out bliss on his face.

“This is weird,” Connie said.

“Weird,” Harry agreed, flexing his hands to keep the knuckles from growing too stiff with the cold.

“But you know what?”

“Familiar somehow,” he said.

“Yeah.”

Along the final length of the three-lane blacktop, all of the businesses were warehouses. Some were built of concrete block covered with dust-caked stucco, stained with rust from water pouring off corrugated metal roofs during countless rainy seasons. Others were entirely of metal, like Quonset huts.

The parked cars grew more numerous in the final block of the street, which dead-ended in the crotch of the canyon. In some places they were doubled up, narrowing the road to one lane.

At the end of the street, the last of all the buildings was a large warehouse unidentified by any company name. It was one of the stucco-coated models with a corrugated steel roof. A giant for rent banner was strung across the front, with a Realtor’s phone number.

Security lights shone down the face of the structure, across metal roll-up doors large enough to admit big tractor-and-trailer rigs. At the southwest corner of the building was a smaller, man-size door at which stood two tough-looking guys in their early twenties, steroid-assisted physiques bulked up beyond what weight-lifting and diet alone could achieve.

“Couple of bouncers,” Connie said as they approached the Pause-frozen men.

Suddenly the scene made sense to Harry. “It’s a rave.”

“On a weekday?”

“Must be someone’s special party, birthday or something.”

Imported from England a few years ago, the rave phenomenon appealed to teenagers and those in their early twenties who wanted to party nonstop until dawn, beyond the eye of all authorities.

“Smart place to hide?” Connie wondered.

“As smart as any, I guess, and smarter than some.”

Rave promoters rented warehouses and industrial buildings for a night or two, moving the event from one spot to another to avoid police detection. Locations of upcoming raves were advertised in underground newspapers and in fliers handed out at record stores, nightclubs, and schools, all written in the code of the subculture, using phrases like “The Mickey Mouse X-press,” “American X-press,” “Double-Hit Mickey,” “Get X-rayed,” “Dental Surgery Explained,” and “Free Balloons for the Kiddies.” Mickey Mouse and X were nicknames for a potent drug more commonly known as Ecstasy, while references to dentistry and balloons meant that nitrous oxide — or laughing gas — would be for sale.

Avoidance of police detection was essential. The theme of every illegal rave party — as opposed to tamer imitations in the legitimate rave nightclubs — was sex, drugs, and anarchy.

Harry and Connie walked past the bouncers, through the door, and into the heart of chaos, but a chaos to which the Pause had brought a tenuous and artificial order.

The cavernous room was lit by half a dozen red and green lasers, perhaps a dozen yellow and red spots, and strobes, all of which had been blinking and sweeping over the crowd until the Pause stilled them. Now lances of colorful, fixed light found some partiers and left others in shadows.’

Four or five hundred people, mostly between eighteen and twenty-five, but some as young as fifteen, were frozen in either the act of dancing or just hanging out. Because the disc jockeys at raves invariably played highly energized techno dance music with a rapidly pounding bass that could shake walls, many of the young celebrants had been Paused in bizarre poses of flailing and gyrating abandon, bodies contorted, hair flying. The men and boys were for the most part dressed in jeans or chinos with flannel shirts and baseball caps worn backward, or with preppy sportcoats over T-shirts, though some were decked out all in black. The girls and young women wore a wider variety of clothes, but every outfit was provocative — tight, short, low-cut, translucent, revealing; raves were, after all, celebrations of the carnal. The silence of graves had replaced the booming music, as well as the screams and shouts of the partiers; the eerie light combined with the stillness to impart an anti-erotic cadaverous quality to the exposed curves of calves, thighs, and breasts.

As he and Connie moved through the crowd, Harry noticed that the dancers’ faces were stretched in grotesque expressions which probably had conveyed excitement and hopped-up gaiety when they were animated. In freeze-frame, however, they were eerily transformed into masks of rage, hatred, and agony.

In the fiery glow produced by the lasers and spots, and by the psychedelic images that film projectors beamed onto two huge walls, it was easy to imagine that this was no party, after all, but a diorama of Hell, with the damned writhing in pain and wailing for release from their excruciating torment.

By seining out the rave’s noise and movement, the Pause might have captured the truth of the event in its net. Perhaps the ugly secret, beneath the flash and thunder, was that these revelers, in their obsessive search for sensation, were not truly having fun on any fundamental level, but were suffering private miseries from which they frantically sought relief that eluded them.

Harry led Connie out of the dancers into the spectators who were gathered around the perimeter of the enormous vaulted chamber. A few had been caught by the Pause in small groups, in the midst of shouted conversations and exaggerated laughter, faces strained and muscles corded in their necks as they had struggled to compete with the thunderous music.

But most seemed to be alone, disengaged from those around them. Some were slack-faced and staring vacuously into the crowd. Others were as taut as stretched wire, with unnervingly feverish stares. Perhaps it was the Halloween lighting and the stark shadows, but in either case, whether hollow-eyed or glaring, the petrified ravers on the sidelines reminded Harry of movie zombies paralyzed in the middle of some murderous task.

“It’s a regular creepshow,” Connie said uneasily, evidently also perceiving a quality of menace in the scene that might not have been so obvious if they had wandered into it before the Pause.

“Welcome to the nineties.”

A number of the zombies on the periphery of the dance floor were holding balloons in an array of bright colors, though not attached to strings or sticks. Here was a red-haired, freckled boy of seventeen or eighteen, who had stretched the neck of a canary-yellow balloon and wrapped it around his index finger to prevent deflation. And here was a young man with a Pancho Villa mustache, firmly pinching the neck of a green balloon between thumb and forefinger, as was a blond girl with empty blue eyes. Those who didn’t use their fingers seemed to employ the type of hinged binder clips that could be bought by the box at stationery stores. A few ravers had the necks of their balloons between their lips, taking hits of nitrous oxide, which they had bought from a vendor who was no doubt working out of a van behind the building. With all the vacant or intense stares and the bright balloons, it was as if a pack of the walking dead had wandered into a children’s birthday party.

Although the scene was made infinitely strange and fascinating by the Pause, it was still drearily familiar to Harry. He was, after all, a homicide detective, and sudden deaths occasionally occurred at raves.

Sometimes they were drug overdoses. No dentist would sedate a patient with a concentration of nitrous oxide higher than eighty percent, but the gas available at raves was often pure, with no oxygen mixed in. Take too many hits of the pure stuff in too short a time, or suck too long on one toke, you might not merely make a giggling spectacle of yourself but induce a stroke that killed you; or, worse, one that was not fatal but caused irreparable brain damage and left you flopping like a fish on the floor, or catatonic.

Harry spotted a loft overhanging the entire width of the back of the warehouse, twenty feet above the main floor, with wooden steps leading to it from both ends.

“Up there,” he told Connie, pointing.

They would be able to see the entire warehouse from that high deck — and quickly spot Ticktock if they heard him enter, no matter which door he used. The two staircases ensured an escape route regardless of the direction from which he came at them.

Moving deeper into the building, they passed two bosomy young women in tight T-shirts on which was printed “Just Say NO,” a rave joke on Nancy Reagan’s anti-drug campaign, which meant these two said yes to nitrous oxide, NO, if not to anything else.

They had to step around three girls lying on the floor near the wall, two of them holding half-deflated balloons and Paused in fits of red-faced giggles. The third was unconscious, mouth open, a fully deflated balloon on her chest.

Near the back, not far from the right-hand stairs, an enormous white X was painted on the wall, large enough to be visible from every corner of the warehouse. Two guys in Mickey Mouse sweatshirts — and one of them in a mouse-ear hat — had been frozen in the middle of bustling commerce, taking twenty-dollar bills from customers in return for capsules of Ecstasy or for disco biscuits saturated with the same stuff.

They came to a teenager, no more than fifteen, with guileless eyes and a face as innocent as that of a young nun. She was wearing a black T-shirt with a picture of a shotgun under the words PUMP ACTION. She had Paused in the process of putting a disco biscuit into her mouth.

Connie plucked the cookie from the girl’s stiff fingers and slipped it out from between her parted lips. She threw it to the floor. The cookie didn’t have quite enough momentum to carry it all the way down, halting inches above the concrete. Connie pushed it the rest of the way with the toe of her shoe and crushed it underfoot. “Stupid kid.”

“This isn’t like you,” Harry said.

“What?”

“Being a stuffy adult.”

“Maybe someone’s got to.”

Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or Ecstasy, an amphetamine with hallucinogenic effects, could radically energize the user and induce euphoria. It could also generate a false sense of profound intimacy with any strangers in whose company the user happened to be when high.

Although other drugs sometimes appeared at raves, NO and Ecstasy were far and away predominant. NO was just nonaddictive giggle juice — wasn’t it? — and Ecstasy could bring you into harmony with your fellow human beings and put you in tune with Mother Nature. Right? That was its rep. The chosen drug of ecologically minded peace advocates, well consumed at rallies to save the planet. Sure, it was dangerous for people with heart conditions, but there was no recorded death from its use in the entire United States. True, scientists had recently discovered that Ecstasy caused pin-size holes in the brain, hundreds or even thousands of them from continued use, but there was no proof that these holes resulted in diminished mental capacity, so what they probably did, see, was let the cosmic rays shine in better and assist enlightenment. Right?

Climbing to the loft, Harry could look down between the steps, which had treads but no risers, and see couples frozen in makeout postures in the shadows under the staircase.

All the sex education in the world, all the graphic pamphlets on condom use, could be swept aside by one tab of Ecstasy if the user experienced an erotic response, as so many did. How could you remain concerned about disease when the stranger you’d just met was such a soulmate, the yin to your yang, radiant and pure to your third eye, so in tune to your every need and desire?

When he and Connie reached the loft, the light was dimmer than on the main level, but Harry could see couples lying on the floor or sitting together with their backs against the rear wall. They were making out more aggressively than those beneath the stairs, Paused in tongue duels, blouses unbuttoned, jeans unzipped, hands seeking within.

Two or three of the couples, in an Ecstasy rush, might even have lost such complete touch with where they were and with common propriety that they were actually doing it in one fashion or another, when the Pause hit.

Harry had no desire to confirm that suspicion. Like the sad circus on the main floor, the scene in the loft was only depressing. It was not in the least erotic to any voyeur with minimum standards, but provoked as many somber thoughts as any Hieronymus Bosch painting of hellacious realms and creatures.

As Harry and Connie moved between the couples toward the loft railing where they could look down on the main floor, he said, “Be careful what you step in.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“Only trying to be a gentleman.”

“Well, that’s unique in this place.”

From the railing, they had a good view of the frozen throng below, partying eternally.

Connie said, “God, I’m cold.”

“Me, too.”

Standing side by side, they put their arms around each other at the waist, ostensibly sharing body heat.

Harry had rarely in his life felt as close to anyone as he felt to her at that moment. Not close in an amorous sense. The stoned and groping couples on the floor behind them were sufficiently anti-romantic to assure against any romantic feelings rising in him just then. The atmosphere wasn’t right for it. What he felt, instead, was the platonic closeness of friend to friend, of partners who had been pushed to their limits and then beyond, who were very probably going to die together before dawn — and this was the important part — without either of them ever having decided what he really wanted out of life or what it all meant.

She said, “Tell me not all kids these days go to places like this, saturate their brains with chemicals.”

“They don’t. Not all of them. Not even most of them. Most kids are reasonably together.”

“Because I wouldn’t want to think this crowd is typical of ‘our next generation of leaders,’ as they say.”

“It isn’t.”

“If it is,” she said, “then the post-millennium cotillion is going to be even nastier than what we’ve been living through these last few years.”

“Ecstasy causes pin-size holes in the brain,” he said. “I know. Just imagine how much more inept the government would be if the Congress was full of boys and girls who like to ride the X-press.”

“What makes you think it isn’t already?” She laughed sourly. “That would explain a lot.” The air was neither cold nor warm, but they were shivering worse than ever. The warehouse remained deathly still. “I’m sorry about your condo,” she said. “What?”

“It burned down, remember?”

“Well.” He shrugged. “I know how much you loved it.”

“There’s insurance.”

“Still, it was so nice, cozy, everything in its place.”

“Oh? The one time you were there, you said it was ‘the perfect self-constructed prison’ and that I was ‘a shining example to every anal-retentive nutcase fussbudget from Boston to San Diego.’”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did.”

“Really?”

“Well, you were angry with me.”

“I must have been. About what?”

He said, “That was the day we arrested Norton Lewis, he gave us a little run for our money, and I wouldn’t let you shoot him.”

“That’s right. I really wanted to shoot him.”

“Wasn’t necessary.”

She sighed. “I was really up for it.”

“We nailed him anyway.”

“Could’ve gone bad, though. You were lucky. Anyway, the son of a bitch deserved shooting.”

“No argument there,” he said.

“Well, I didn’t mean it — about your condo.”

“Yes, you did.”

“Okay, I did, but I have a different take on it now. It’s a screwed-up world, and we all need to have a way of coping. Yours is better than most. Better than mine, in fact.”

“You know what I think’s happening here? I think maybe this is what the psychologists call ‘bonding.’”

“God, I hope not.”

“I think it is.”

She smiled. “I suspect that already happened weeks or months ago, but we’re just getting around to admitting it.”

They stood in companionable silence for a while.

He wondered how much time had passed since they’d fled from the counting golem on Pacific Coast Highway. He felt as if he had surely been on the run for an hour, but it was difficult to tell real time when you were not living in it.

The longer they were stuck in the Pause, the more inclined Harry was to believe their enemy’s promise that the ordeal would only last one hour. He had a feeling, perhaps at least partly cop instinct rather than entirely wishful thinking, that Ticktock was not as all-powerful as he seemed, that there were limits to even his phenomenal abilities, and that engineering the Pause was so draining, he could not long sustain it.

The growing inner cold that troubled both him and Connie might be a sign that Ticktock was finding it increasingly difficult to exempt them from the enchantment that had stilled the rest of the world. In spite of their tormentor’s attempt to control the altered reality that he had created, perhaps Harry and Connie were gradually being transformed from movable game pieces to permanent fixtures on the game board itself.

He remembered the shock of hearing the gravelly voice speak to him out of his car radio last evening, when he had been speeding between his burning condo in Irvine and Connie’s apartment in Costa Mesa. But until now he had not realized the importance of the words the golem-vagrant had spoken: Gotta rest now, hero… gotta rest… tired… a little nap…. More had been said, mostly threats, the raspy voice gradually fading into static, silence. However, Harry suddenly understood that the most important thing about the incident was not the fact that Ticktock could somehow control the ether and speak to him out of a radio, but the revelation that even this being of godlike abilities had limits and needed periodic rest like any ordinary mortal.

When Harry thought about it, he realized that each of Ticktock’s more flamboyant manifestations was always followed by a period of an hour or longer when he didn’t come around to continue his torments.

Gotta rest, hero… tired… a little nap….

He remembered telling Connie, earlier at her apartment, that even a sociopath with enormous paranormal powers was certain to have weaknesses, points of vulnerability. During the intervening hours, as he had seen Ticktock perform a series of tricks each of which was more amazing than the one before it, he had grown more pessimistic about their chances. Now optimism blossomed again.

Gotta rest, hero… tired… a little nap….

He was about to share these hopeful thoughts with Connie when she suddenly stiffened. His arm was still around her waist, so he also felt her shivering abruptly stop. For an instant he was afraid that she had been too deeply chilled, surrendered to entropy, and become part of the Pause.

Then he saw that she had tilted her head in response to some faint sound that he, in his woolgathering, had not heard.

It came again. A click.

Then a low scrape.

A much louder clatter.

The sounds were all flat, truncated, like those they themselves had made during their long run from the coast highway.

Alarmed, Connie slipped her arm from around Harry’s waist, and he let go of her as well.

Down on the main floor of the warehouse, the golem-vagrant moved through iron shadows and revealing shafts of frozen light, between the zombie spectators and among the petrified dancers. Ticktock had entered through the same door they had used, following their trail.

4

Connie’s instinct was to step back from the loft railing, so the golem would not look up and see her, but she overcame that reflexive urge and remained motionless. In the fathomless stillness of the Pause, even the whispery friction of shoe sole against floor, or the softest creak of a board, would instantly draw the creature’s unwanted attention.

Harry was also quick enough to slam a lock on his instinctual reaction, remaining almost as still as any of the ravers caught in the Pause. Thank God.

If the thing looked up, it probably would not see them. Most of the light was below, and the loft hung in shadows.

She realized she was clinging to the stupid hope that Ticktock really was trailing them only with ordinary senses, keeping his promise. As if any sociopathic serial killer, paranormally empowered or not, could be trusted to keep a promise. Stupid, not worthy of her, but she clung to the possibility anyway. If the world could fall under an enchantment as profound as any in a fairy tale, who was to say that her own hopes and wishes did not also have at least some power?

And wasn’t that an odd idea coming from her of all people, who had given up hope as a child, who had never in memory wished for any gift or blessing or surcease?

Everyone can change, they said. She had never believed it. For most of her life, she had been unchanging, expecting nothing from the world that she did not earn twice over, taking perverse solace from the fact that her expectations were never exceeded.

Life can be as bitter as dragon tears. But whether dragon tears are bitter or sweet depends entirely on how each man perceives the taste.

Or woman.

Now she felt a stirring within, an important change, and she wanted to live to see how it played out.

But below prowled the golem-vagrant, hunting.

Connie breathed through her open mouth, slowly and quietly.

Moving among the fossilized dancers, the massive creature turned its burly head left and then right, methodically scanning the crowd. It changed color as it passed through frozen lasers and spotlights, red to green, green to yellow, yellow to red to white to green, gray and black when it moved between shafts of light. But always its eyes were blue, radiant and strange.

When the space between dancers narrowed, the golem shoved aside a young man in jeans and a blue corduroy jacket. The dancer toppled backward, but the resistance of all Paused things prevented him from completing the fall. He stopped at a forty-five-degree angle to the floor and hung there precariously, still poised mid-dance, with the same celebratory expression on his face, ready to complete the fall in the first fraction of a second after time started up again, if it ever did.

Moving from front to back of the cavernous room, the hulking golem shoved other dancers aside, into falls and spins and stumbles and head-butting collisions that would not be completed until the Pause ended. Getting out of the building safely when real time kicked in again would be a challenge, because the startled ravers, never having seen the beast pass among them while they were Paused, would blame those around them for being knocked down and shoved. A dozen fights would erupt in the first half-minute, Pandemonium would break out, and confusion would inevitably give way to panic. With lasers and spotlights sweeping the crowd, the throbbing bass of the techno music shaking the walls, and violence inexplicably erupting at every turn, the rush to get out would pile people up at the doors, and it would be a miracle if a number of them were not trampled to death in the melee.

Connie had no special sympathy for the mob on the dance floor, since defiance of the law and policemen was one of the motivations that brought them to a rave in the first place. But as rebellious and destructive and socially confused as they might be, they were nonetheless human beings, and she was outraged at the callousness with which Ticktock was bulling through them, without a thought for what would happen to them when the world suddenly shifted into gear again.

She glanced at Harry beside her and saw a matching anger in his face and eyes. His teeth were clenched so tight that his jaw muscles bulged.

But there was nothing they could do to stop what was happening below. Bullets had no effect, and Ticktock was not likely to respond to a heartfelt request.

Besides, by speaking out, they would only be revealing their presence. The golem-vagrant had not once glanced toward the loft, and as yet there was no reason to think either that Ticktock was using more than ordinary senses to search for them or that he knew they were in the warehouse.

Then Ticktock perpetrated an outrage that made it clear he fully intended to cause Bedlam and leave bloody tumult in his wake. He stopped in front of a raven-haired girl of twenty, whose slender arms were raised above her head in one of those rapturous expressions of the joy that rhythmic movement and primitive driving music could sometimes bring to a dancer even without the assistance of drugs. He loomed over her for a moment, studying her, as if taken with her beauty. Then he grabbed one of her arms in both his monstrous hands, wrenched with shocking violence, and tore it out of her shoulder socket. A low, wet laugh escaped him as he threw the arm behind him, where it hung in the air between two other dancers.

The mutilation was as bloodless as if he had merely disconnected the arm of a mannequin, but of course blood would not begin to flow until time itself flowed again. Then the madness of the act and its consequences would be all too apparent.

Connie squeezed her eyes shut, unable to watch what he might do next. As a homicide cop, she had seen countless acts of mindless barbarity — or the consequences of them — and she had collected stacks of newspaper stories about crimes of positively fiendish brutality, and she had seen the damage this particular psychotic bastard had done to poor Ricky Estefan, but the fierce savagery of the act he committed on the dance floor rocked her as nothing had before.

The utter helplessness of this young victim might have been the difference that knocked the wind out of Connie and left her shaking not from any inner or outer chill but with icy horror. All victims were helpless to one degree or another; that was why they became targets for the savages among them. But this pretty young woman’s helplessness was of an infinitely more terrible nature, for she had never seen her assailant coming, would never see him go or know his identity, would be stricken as suddenly as any innocent field mouse pierced by the razor claws of a swooping hawk which it had never seen diving from on high. Even after she had been maimed, she remained unaware of the attack, frozen in the last moment of pure happiness and worry-free existence that she might ever know, a laugh still painted on her face though she had been forever crippled and perhaps condemned to death, not even permitted to know her loss or to feel the pain or to scream until her attacker had returned to her the ability to feel and react.

Connie knew that, to this monstrous enemy, she was as shockingly vulnerable as the young dancer below. Helpless. No matter how fast she could run, regardless of the cleverness of her strategies, no defense would be adequate and no hiding place secure.

Although she had never been particularly religious, she suddenly understood how a devout fundamentalist Christian might tremble at the thought that Satan could be loosed from Hell to stalk the world and wreak Armageddon. His awesome power. His relentless-ness. His hard, gleeful, merciless brutality.

Greasy nausea slithered in her guts, and she was afraid she might throw up.

Beside her, the softest hiss of apprehension escaped Harry, and Connie opened her eyes. She was determined to meet her death face to face with all the resistance she could muster, useless as resistance might be.

On the floor of the warehouse below, the golem-vagrant reached the foot of the same set of stairs up which she and Harry had climbed to the loft. He hesitated there, as if considering whether to turn and walk away, search elsewhere.

Connie dared to hope that their continued silence, in spite of every provocation to cry out, had encouraged Ticktock to believe that they could not possibly be hiding anywhere in the rave.

Then he spoke in that rough demonic voice. “Fee, fie, fo, fum,” he said, starting up the stairs, “I smell the blood of hero cops.”

His laugh was as cold and inhuman as any sound that might issue from a crocodile — yet contained an eerily recognizable quality of childlike delight.

Arrested development.

A psychotic child.

She remembered Harry telling her that the burning vagrant, in the process of destroying the condominium, had said, You people are so much fun to play with. This was his private game, played by his rules, or without rules at all if he wished, and she and Harry were nothing but his toys. She had been foolish to hope that he would keep his promise.

The crash of each of his heavy footsteps reverberated across the wood treads and up through the entire structure. The floor of the loft shook from his ascent. He was climbing fast: BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!

Harry grabbed her by the arm. “Quick, the other stairs!”

They turned away from the railing and toward the opposite end of the loft from where the golem was ascending.

At the head of the second set of stairs stood a second golem identical to the first. Huge. Mane of tangled hair. Wild beard. Raincoat like a black cape. He was grinning broadly. Blue flames flickering brightly in deep sockets.

Now they knew one more thing about the extent of Ticktock’s power. He could create and control at least two artificial bodies at the same time.

The first golem reached the top of the stairs to their right. He started toward them, ruthlessly kicking a path through the tangled lovers on the floor.

To their left, the second golem approached with no greater respect for the Paused people in his way When the world started up again, cries of injury and outrage would arise from end to end of the wide loft.

Still gripping Connie’s arm, pulling her back against the railing, Harry whispered, “Jump!”

BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM, the thud of the twin golems’ footsteps shook the loft, and BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM, the pounding of her heart shook Connie, and the two sounds became indistinguishable from one another.

Following Harry’s example, she put her hands behind her on the railing, pushed up to sit on the handrail.

The golems kicked more viciously at the human obstacles between them and their prey, closing in faster from both sides.

She lifted her legs and swung around to face the warehouse. At least a twenty-foot drop to the floor. Far enough to break a leg, crack open her skull? Probably.

Each of the golems was less than twenty feet away, coming toward her with all the irresistible force of freight trains, gas-flame eyes burning as hot as any fires in Hell, reaching for her with massive hands.

Harry jumped.

With a cry of resignation, Connie pushed with her feet against the balusters and her hands against the handrail, launching herself into the void—

— and fell only six or seven feet before coasting to a full stop in midair, beside Harry. She was facing straight down, legs and arms spread in an unconscious imitation of the classic skydiving position, and below her were the frozen dancers, all of them as oblivious of her as they were of everything else beyond the instant when they had been spellbound.

The deepening chill in her bones and the rapid depletion of her energy as they fled through Laguna Beach had indicated that she was not making her way through the Paused world as easily as it seemed, certainly not as easily as she moved through the normal world. The fact that they did not create their own wind when they ran, which Harry also noticed, seemed to support the idea that resistance to their motion was present even if they were not conscious of it, and now the arrested fall proved it. As long as they exerted themselves, they could keep moving, but they could not rely on momentum or even the pull of gravity to carry them far when exertion ceased.

Looking over her shoulder, Connie saw that she had managed to launch herself outward only five feet from the loft railing, though she had shoved away from it with all her might. However, combined with a five- or six-foot vertical drop, she had gone far enough to be beyond the reach of the golems.

They stood at the loft railing, leaning out, reaching down, grasping for her but coming up only with handsful of empty air.

Harry shouted at her: “You can move if you try!”

She saw that he was using his arms and legs somewhat in the manner of a swimmer doing a breaststroke, angled toward the floor, pulling himself downward by agonizing inches, as if the air wasn’t air at all but some curious form of extremely dense water.

She quickly realized she was unfortunately not weightless like an astronaut in orbit aboard the space shuttle, and enjoyed none of the motive advantages of a gravity-free environment. A brief experiment proved she couldn’t propel herself with an astronaut’s ease or change direction on a whim.

When she imitated Harry, however, Connie found that she could pull herself down through the gluey air if she was methodical and determined. For a moment it seemed even better than skydiving because the period of the dive when you had the illusion of flying like a bird was at comparatively high altitudes; and with features on the ground rapidly enlarging, the illusion was never fully convincing. Here, on the other hand, she was right over the heads of other people and airborne within a building, which even under the circumstances gave her an exhilarating sense of power and buoyancy, rather like one of those blissful dreams of flying that too seldom informed her sleep.

Connie actually might have enjoyed the bizarre experience if Ticktock had not been present in the form of the two golems and if she had not been fleeing for her life. She heard the BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM of their heavy hurried footsteps on the wooden loft, and when she looked back over her shoulder and up, she saw they were headed for opposite sets of stairs.

She was still ten or eleven feet from the warehouse floor and “swimming” downward at an infuriatingly slow speed, inch by grinding inch through the colorful fixed beams of the spotlights and party lasers. Gasping for breath from the exertion. Getting rapidly colder now, colder.

If there had been something solid for her to push against, such as a nearby wall or roof-supporting column, she’d have been able to achieve greater propulsion. But there was nothing besides the air itself off which to launch — almost like trying to lift herself entirely by her own bootstraps.

To her left, Harry was about a foot ahead of her but making no better time than she was. He was farther along only because he had started sooner.

Kick. Pull the arms. Struggle.

Her sense of freedom and buoyancy swiftly gave way to a feeling of being trapped.

BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM, the footfalls of their pursuers echoed flatly through the huge chamber.

She was perhaps nine feet off the floor, moving toward a clear space among the dancers. Kick. Pull. Kick and pull. Keep moving, moving. So cold.

She glanced over her shoulder again, even though she was afraid that the act of doing so would slow her down.

At least one of the golems had reached the head of one set of stairs. He descended the steps two at a time. In his cloaklike raincoat, shoulders hunched, burly head lowered, leaping down in the rollicking manner of an ape, he reminded her of an illustration in a long-forgotten storybook, a picture of an evil troll from some medieval legend.

Struggling so fiercely that her heart felt as if it might explode, she drew herself within eight feet of the floor. But she was angled headfirst; she would have to pull herself laboriously all the way to the concrete, which would provide the first solid surface against which she could regain her equilibrium and scramble to her feet. BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM.

The golem reached the bottom of the stairs.

Connie was exhausted. Freezing.

She heard Harry cursing the cold and the resisting air.

The pleasant dream of flying had become the most classic of all nightmares, in which the dreamer could flee only in slow motion, while the monster pursued with terrifying speed and agility.

Concentrating on the floor below, seven feet from it now, Connie nevertheless saw movement from the corner of her left eye and heard Harry cry out. A golem had reached him.

A darker shadow fell across the shadow-layered floor directly below her. Reluctantly, she turned her head to the right.

Suspended in midair, with her feet above and behind her, like an angel swooping down to do battle with a demon, she found herself face to face with the other golem. Regrettably, unlike an angel, she was not armed with a fiery sword, a bolt of lightning, or an amulet blessed by God and capable of knocking demons back into the fires and boiling tar of the Pit.

Grinning, Ticktock gripped her throat. The golem’s hand was so enormous that the thick fingers overlapped the fat thumb where they met at the back of her head, completely encircling her neck, though it did not immediately crush her windpipe and cut off her breath.

She remembered how Ricky Estefan’s head had been turned backward on his shoulders, and how the raven-haired dancer’s slender arm had been ripped so effortlessly from her body.

A flash of rage burned away her terror, and she spat in the huge and terrible face. “Let go of me, shithead.”

A foul exhalation washed over her, making her grimace, and the scar-faced golem-vagrant said, “Congratulations, bitch. Time’s up.”

The blue-flame eyes burned brighter for an instant, then winked out, leaving deep black sockets beyond which it seemed that Connie could see to the end of eternity. The vagrant’s hideous face, writ large on this oversize golem, was abruptly transformed from flesh and hair into a highly detailed monochromatic brown countenance that appeared to have been sculpted from clay or mud. An elaborate web of hairline cracks formed from the bridge of his nose, swiftly spinning in a spiral pattern across his face, and in a wink his features crumbled.

The giant vagrant’s entire body dissolved, and with a shattering detonation of techno music that resumed full-blast in mid-note, the world started up again. No longer suspended in the air, Connie fell the last seven feet to the warehouse floor, face-first into the moist mound of dirt and sand and grass and rotting leaves and bugs that had been the golem’s body, cushioned from injury by the now-lifeless mass but gagging and spitting in disgust.

Around her, even above the pounding music, she heard screams of shock, terror, and pain.

5

“Game’s over — for now,” the golem-vagrant said, then obligingly dissolved. Harry dropped out of the air. He sprawled on his stomach in the remains, which smelled strongly of nothing more than rich damp earth.

In front of his face was a hand formed entirely of dirt, similar to— but larger than — the one they had seen in Ricky’s bungalow. Two fingers twitched with a residue of supernatural energy and seemed to reach toward his nose. He slammed one fist into that disembodied monstrosity, pulverizing it.

Screaming dancers stumbled into him and collapsed across his back and legs. He scrambled out from under the falling bodies, onto his feet.

An angry boy in a Batman T-shirt rushed forward and took a swing at him. Harry ducked, threw a right into the kid’s stomach, planted a left uppercut under his chin, stepped over him when he fell, and looked around for Connie.

She was nearby, dropping a tough-looking teenage girl with a karate kick, and then swiveling on one foot to drive her elbow into the solar plexus of a muscle-bound youth who looked surprised as he went down. He obviously thought he was going to polish his shoes with her and throw her away.

If she felt as rotten as Harry did, she might not be able to hold her own. His joints still ached with the cold that had seeped into them during the Pause, and he felt tired, as if he had carried a great weight on a journey of many miles.

Joining up with her, screaming to be heard above the music and other noise, Harry said, “We’re too old for this crap! Come on, let’s get out of here!”

For the most part, on every side, the dancing had given way to fighting, or at least to vigorous pushing and shoving, thanks to the tricks that Ticktock had played earlier on his way through the Paused crowd. However, not all of the partiers seemed to understand that the rave had devolved into a dangerous brawl, because some of the pushers and shovers were laughing as if they believed they had merely been caught up in a boisterous, relatively good-natured slam dance.

Harry and Connie were too far from the front of the building to make it out that way before an understanding of the true nature of the situation swept the crowd. Though there was nothing as immediately threatening as a fire, the tendency of a panicked crowd would be to react to the violence as if flames had been seen. Some of them would even believe they had seen fire.

Harry grabbed Connie’s hand to keep them from being separated in the turmoil, and led her toward the nearer rear wall, where he was sure there would have to be other doors.

In that chaotic atmosphere, it was easy to understand why the revelers would confuse real violence for make-believe, even if they hadn’t been on drugs. Spotlights swung back and forth and swooped across the metal ceiling, intensely colored laser beams slashed complex patterns across the room, strobes flashed, phantasmagoric shadows leaped-twisted-twirled through the energetic crowd, young faces were strange and mysterious behind ever-changing carnival masks of reflected light, psychedelic film images pulsed and writhed over two big walls, the disc jockey pumped up the volume on the manic music, and the crowd noise alone was loud enough to be disorienting. The senses were overloaded and apt to mistake a glimpse of violent confrontation for an exhibition of high good spirits or something even more benign.

Far behind Harry a scream rose unlike any of the others, so shrill and hysterical that it pierced the background roar and called attention to itself even in that cacophony. No more than a minute had passed since the Pause had ended, if that long. Harry figured the new screamer was either the black-haired girl coming out of shock and discovering that her shoulder ended in a gory stump — or the person who had suddenly found himself confronted by the grisly detached arm.

Even if that heart-stopping wail didn’t draw attention, the crowd would not party on in ignorance much longer. There was nothing like a punch in the face to dislodge fantasy and snap reality into place. When the change in the mood penetrated to a majority of the ravers, the rush to the exits would be potentially deadly, even though there was no fire.

A sense of duty and a policeman’s conscience encouraged Harry to turn back, find the girl who had lost an arm, and try to administer first aid. But he knew that he would probably not be able to find her in the churning throng, and that he wouldn’t have a chance to help even if he did manage to locate her, not in that growing human maelstrom, which already seemed to have reached the equivalent of hurricane force.

Holding tight to Connie’s hand, Harry pushed out of the dancers and through the now-clamorous onlookers with their bottles of beer and balloons of nitrous oxide, all the way to the back wall of the warehouse, which was deep under the loft. Beyond the reach of the party lights. Darkest place in the building.

He looked left, right. Couldn’t see a door.

That wasn’t surprising, considering a rave was essentially an illegal drug party staged in a deserted warehouse, not a chaperoned prom in a hotel ballroom where there would be well-lit red exit signs. But, Jesus, it would be so pointless and stupid to survive the Pause and the golems, only to be trampled to death by hundreds of doped-up kids frantically trying to squeeze through a doorway all at once.

Harry decided to go right, for no better reason than that he had to go one way or the other. Unconscious kids were lying on the floor, recovering from long hits of laughing gas. Harry tried not to step on anyone, but the light under the loft was so poor that he didn’t see some of those in darker clothes until he’d stumbled over them.

A door. He almost passed by without spotting it.

In the warehouse behind him, the music continued to thump as ever, but a sudden change occurred in the quality of the crowd noise. It became a less celebratory roar, darkened into an uglier rumble shot through with panicky shrieks.

Connie was gripping Harry’s hand so tightly, she was grinding his knuckles together.

In the gloom Harry pushed against the door. Pushed with his shoulders. Wouldn’t budge. No. Must be an outside door. Pull inward. But that didn’t work either.

The crowd broke toward the outer walls. A wave of screaming swelled, and Harry could actually feel the heat and terror of the oncoming mob that was surging even toward the back wall. They were probably too disoriented to remember where the main entrances were.

He fumbled for the door handle, knob, push-bar, whatever, and prayed it wasn’t locked. He found a vertical handle with a thumb latch, pressed down, felt something click.

The first of the escaping crowd rammed into them from behind, Connie cried out, Harry shoved back at them, trying to keep them out of the way so he could pull the door open—please God don’t let it be a restroom or closet well be crushed smothered—kept his thumb down hard on the latch, the door popped, he pulled it inward, shouting at the crowd behind him to wait, wait, for God’s sake, and then the door was torn out of his grasp and slammed all the way open, and he and Connie were carried outside into the cool night air by the desperate tide of people behind them.

More than a dozen ravers were in a parking area, gathered around the back of a white Ford van. The van was draped with two sets of green and red Christmas-tree lights, which operated off its battery and provided the only illumination in the deep night between the back of the building and the scrub-covered canyon wall. One long-haired man was filling balloons from a pressure tank of nitrous oxide that was strapped to a handtruck behind the van, and a totally bald guy was collecting five-dollar bills. All of them, both merchants and customers, looked up in amazement as screaming and shouting people erupted through the back door of the warehouse.

Harry and Connie separated, bypassing everyone behind the van. She went around to the passenger-side door, and Harry went to the driver’s side.

He jerked open the door and started to climb in behind the steering wheel.

The guy with the shaved head grabbed his arm, stopped him and pulled him out. “Hey, man, what do you think you’re doing?”

As he was being dragged backward out of the van, Harry reached under his coat and drew his revolver. Turning, he jammed the muzzle against his adversary’s lips. “You want me to blow your teeth out the back of your head?”

The bald man’s eyes went wide, and he backed up fast, raising both hands to show he was harmless. “No, hey, no man, cool it, take the van, she’s yours, have fun, enjoy.”

Distasteful as Connie’s methods might be, Harry had to admit there was a certain time-saving efficiency when you handled problems her way.

He climbed behind the steering wheel again, pulled the door shut, and holstered his revolver.

Connie was already in the passenger seat.

The keys were in the ignition, and the engine was running to keep the battery charged up for the Christmas lights. Christmas lights, for God’s sake. Festive bunch, these NO dealers.

He released the handbrake, switched on the headlights, threw the van in gear, and tramped hard on the accelerator. For a moment the tires spun and smoked, squealing like angry pigs on the blacktop, and all the ravers scattered. Then the rubber bit in, the van shot toward the back corner of the warehouse, and Harry hammered the horn to keep people out of his way.

“The road out of here’s going to jam tight in two minutes,”

Connie said, bracing herself against the dashboard as they rounded the corner of the warehouse not quite on two wheels.

“Yeah,” he said, “everyone trying to get away before the cops show up.”

“Cops are such party poopers.”

“Such numbnuts.”

“Never any fun.”

“Prudes.”

They rocketed down the wide driveway alongside the warehouse, where there was no exit door and therefore no panicked people to worry about. The van handled well, real power and a good suspension. He supposed it had been modified for quick escapes when the police showed up.

Out in front of the warehouse, the situation was different, and he had to use the brake and the horn, weaving wildly to avoid fleeing partiers. More people had escaped the building more quickly than he had imagined possible.

“Promoters were smart enough to roll up one of the big truck doors to let people out,” Connie said, turning in her seat to look out the side window as they went past the place.

“Surprised it even works,” Harry said. “God knows how long the place has stood empty.”

With the pressure inside so quickly relieved, the death toll — if there was one — would be substantially smaller.

Hanging a hard left into the street, Harry clipped a parked car with the rear bumper of the van but kept going, blowing the horn at the few ravers who had made it that far and were running down the middle of the street like terrified people in one of those Godzilla movies fleeing from the giant thunderlizard.

Connie said, “You pulled your gun on that bald guy.”

“Yeah.”

“I hear you tell him you’d blow his head off?”

“Something like that.”

“Didn’t show him your badge?”

“Figured he’d have respect for a gun, none at all for a badge.”

She said, “I could get to like you, Harry Lyon.”

“No future in it — unless we get past dawn.”

In seconds they were past all of the partiers who had left the warehouse on foot, and Harry tramped the accelerator all the way to the floor. They shot by the nursery, body shops, and recreational-vehicle storage lot that they had passed on the way in, and were soon beyond the partiers’ parked cars.

He wanted to be long gone from the area when the Laguna Beach Police arrived, which they would — and soon. Being caught in the aftermath of the rave debacle would tie them up too long, maybe just long enough so they would lose their one and only chance at getting the drop on Ticktock.

“Where you going?” Connie asked.

“The Green House.”

“Yeah. Maybe Sammy’s still there.”

“Sammy?”

“The bum. That was his name.”

“Oh, yeah. And the talking dog.”

“Talking dog?” she said.

“Well, maybe he doesn’t talk, but he’s got something to tell us we need to know, that’s for damn sure, and maybe he does talk, what the hell, who knows any more, it’s a crazy world, a crazy damn night. There are talking animals in fairy tales, why not a talking dog in Laguna Beach?”

Harry realized he was babbling, but he was driving so fast and recklessly that he didn’t want to take his eyes off the road even to glance at Connie and see if she was giving him a skeptical look.

She didn’t sound worried about his sanity when she said, “What’s the plan?”

“I think we’ve got a narrow window of opportunity.”

“Because he has to rest now and then. Like he told you on the car radio.”

“Yeah. Especially after something like this. So far there’s always been an hour or more between his… appearances.”

“Manifestations.”

“Whatever.”

After a few turns they were back in residential neighborhoods, working through Laguna toward the Pacific Coast Highway.

A police car and an ambulance, emergency beacons flashing, shot past them on a cross street, almost certainly answering a call to the warehouse.

“Fast response,” Connie said.

“Someone with a car phone must have dialed 911.”

Maybe help would arrive in time to save the girl who had lost an arm. Maybe the arm could even be saved, sewn back on. Yeah, and maybe Mother Goose was real.

Harry had been buoyant because they had escaped the Pause and the rave. But his adrenaline high faded swiftly as he recalled, too vividly, how savagely the golem had torn off the young woman’s slender arm.

Despair crept back in at the edges of his thoughts.

“If there’s a window of opportunity while he rests or even sleeps,” Connie said, “how can we possibly find him fast enough?”

“Not with one of Nancy Quan’s portraits, that’s for sure. No time for that approach any more.”

She said, “I think next time he manifests, he’ll kill us, no more playing around.”

“I think so, too.”

“Or at least kill me. Then you the time after that.”

“By dawn. That’s one promise our little boy will keep.”

They were both silent for a moment, somber.

“So where does that leave us?” she asked.

“Maybe the bum in front of The Green House—”

“Sammy.”

“—maybe he knows something that will help us. Or if not… then… hell, I don’t know. It looks hopeless, doesn’t it?”

“No,” she said sharply. “Nothing’s hopeless. Where there’s life, there’s hope. Where there’s hope, it’s always worth trying, worth going on.”

He wheeled around another corner from one street full of dark houses to another, straightened out the van, let up on the accelerator a little, and looked at her in astonishment. “Nothing’s hopeless? What’s happened to you?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s still happening.”

6

Although they had spent at least half of the hour-long Pause on the run before they had wound up in the warehouse at the end of that canyon, they didn’t need nearly as long to get back to where they had started from. According to Connie’s wristwatch, they reached the coast highway less than five minutes after commandeering the nitrous-oxide dealers’ wheels, partly because they took a more direct return route and partly because Harry drove fast enough to scare even her.

In fact, when they slid to a stop in front of The Green House, with some still-unbroken Christmas lights clinking noisily along the sides of the van, the time was just thirty-five seconds past 1:37 in the morning. That was little more than eight minutes since the Pause had both begun and ended at 1:29, which meant they had taken about three minutes to fight their way out of the crowded warehouse and seize their transportation at gunpoint — though it sure had seemed a lot longer.

The tow truck and the Volvo, which had been frozen in the southbound lane, were gone. When time had started up again, their drivers had continued on with no realization that anything unusual had happened. Other traffic was moving north and south.

Connie was relieved to see Sammy standing on the sidewalk in front of The Green House. He was gesticulating wildly, arguing with the permed host in the Armani suit and hand-painted silk tie. One of the waiters was standing in the doorway, apparently prepared to help the boss if the confrontation got physical.

When Connie and Harry got out of the van, the host saw them and turned away from Sammy. “You!” he said. “My God, it’s you!” He came toward them purposefully, almost angrily, as if they had left without paying their check.

Bar patrons and other employees were at the windows, watching. Connie recognized some of them as the people who had been watching her and Harry with Sammy and the dog, and who had been frozen there, staring fixedly, after the Pause hit. They were no longer as rigid as stone, but they were still watching with fascination.

“What’s going on here?” the host asked as he approached, an edge of hysteria in his voice. “How did that happen, where did you go? What is this… this… this van!”

Connie had to remind herself that the man had seen them vanish in what seemed to him a split second. The dog had yelped and nipped the air and plunged for the shrubbery, alerting them that something was happening, which had spooked Sammy into sprinting for the alley. But Connie and Harry had remained on the sidewalk in full view of the people at the restaurant windows, the Pause had hit, they had been forced to run for their lives, then the Pause had ended without them where they originally had been on the sidewalk, and to the onlookers it had seemed as if two people had vanished into thin air. Only to turn up eight minutes later in a white van decorated with strings of red and green Christmas lights.

The host’s exasperation and curiosity were understandable.

If their window of opportunity for finding and dealing with Ticktock had not been so small, if the ticking seconds had not been leading them inexorably closer to sudden death, the uproar in front of the restaurant might even have been funny. Hell, it was funny, but that didn’t mean she and Harry could take the time to laugh at it. Maybe later. If they lived.

“What is this, what happened here, what’s going on?” the host demanded. “I can’t make heads or tails out of what your raving lunatic over there is telling me.”

By “raving lunatic,” he meant Sammy.

“He’s not our raving lunatic,” Harry said.

“Yes he is,” Connie reminded Harry, “and you better go talk to him. I’ll handle this.”

She was half afraid that Harry — as painfully aware of their time limit as she was — might pull his revolver on the host and threaten to blow his teeth out the back of his head if he didn’t shut up and get inside. As much as she approved of Harry taking a more aggressive approach to certain problems, there was a proper time and place for aggression, and this was not it.

Harry went off to talk with Sammy.

Connie put one arm around the host’s shoulders and escorted him up the walkway to the front door of his restaurant, speaking in a soft but authoritative voice, informing him that she and Detective Lyon were in the middle of important and urgent police business, and sincerely assuring him that she would return to explain everything, even what might seem to him inexplicable, “just as soon as the ongoing situation is resolved.”

Considering that it was traditionally Harry’s job to calm and placate people, her job to upset them, she had a lot of success with the restaurateur. She had no intention of ever returning to explain anything whatsoever to him, and she had no idea how he thought she could explain people vanishing into thin air. But he calmed down, and she persuaded him to go inside his restaurant with the bodyguard-waiter who was standing in the doorway.

She checked the shrubbery but confirmed what she already knew: the dog was not hiding there any more. He was gone.

She joined Harry and Sammy on the sidewalk in time to hear the hobo say, “How should I know where he lives? He’s an alien, he’s a long way from his planet, he must have a spaceship hidden around here somewhere.”

More patiently than Connie expected, Harry said, “Forget that stuff, he’s no alien. He—”

A dog barked, startling them.

Connie spun around and saw the flop-eared mutt. He was uphill, just turning the corner at the south end of the block. Following him were a woman and a boy of about five.

As soon as the dog saw that he had gotten their attention, he snatched hold of one cuff of the boy’s jeans, and with his teeth impatiently pulled him along. After a couple of steps he let go, ran toward Connie, stopped halfway between his people and hers, barked at her, barked at the woman and boy, barked at Connie again, then just sat there looking left and right and left again, as if to say, Well, haven’t I done enough?

The woman and the boy appeared to be curious but frightened. The mother was attractive in a way, and the child was cute, neatly and cleanly dressed, but they both had the wary and haunted look of people who knew the streets too well.

Connie approached them slowly, with a smile. When she passed the dog, he got off his butt and padded along at her side, panting and grinning.

There was a quality of mystery and awe about the moment, and Connie knew that whatever connection they were about to make was going to mean life or death to her and Harry, maybe to all of them.

She had no idea what she was going to say to them until she was close enough to speak: “Have you had… also had… a strange experience lately?”

The woman blinked at her in surprise. “Strange experience? Oh, yes. Oh my, yes.”