In the night room Page 0,57

seems somehow dull, the colors of his walls and bedclothes a tone darker than they had been. The big round clock on the table beside his bed says 6:10, so his parents are still asleep. Teddy wonders what his mom and dad will make of this peculiar change, which now that he has been taking it in for a minute or two seems not to be merely a matter of color and tone but of substance itself. Maybe the change doesn’t go very deep, maybe it’s more a matter of perception than anything external. In that case, Mom and Dad won’t notice a thing. Teddy sort of hopes it will turn out that way. He has always been sharper, better at noticing things, than anyone around him, and he has noticed that in time people get so accustomed to new situations, new contexts, new furniture that they no longer register them, and life eventually seems unchanged all over again.

On the other hand, if his first impression is right, and the actual substance of the world has somehow changed, become quieter, duller, softer, less vital, Mom and Dad are going to notice it, too, and then something will have to be done. Mom is going to go around the house polishing and waxing like a demon (for although most of his friends’ mothers have jobs that take them into downtown Haleyville every weekday, Mom, although once a famous stage actress in New York City, has settled down as an old-fashioned homemaker, albeit one with a lot of glamorous friends who drop in all the time), and Dad will charge down to the offices of the Haleyville Daily, where he is both editor and star reporter, and try to get to the bottom of this strange phenomenon.

Ordinarily, Teddy would feel that any new disturbance that enters his universe is bound to wind up in his hands. That’s how it has always been: no sooner does something shady rear its head in Haleyville than Teddy Barton’s fabulous intuition catches wind of it, and he’s off like a shot, let the wicked beware! But it is a sacred law of life that disturbances enter Haleyville either one at a time or in secretly joined pairs, and for the past two weeks, Teddy has been working full-time on a baffling puzzle involving an enormous truck with the words MOON-BIRD painted on its flanks that has been appearing out back of the Time & Motion building at odd times of the day and that building’s newest renter, a man named Mr. Capstone, who late at night goes out of his house on Marymount Street and digs a big hole in his backyard. This case already involves two elements, and they are obviously connected. There isn’t room for a puzzle involving a sudden and universal decrease of energy.

Because that’s what this feels like, Teddy realizes. It’s as though electricity started running backward through all the wires in the world and went dribbling out of all the world’s empty plugs.

He gets out of bed to look through his window, and it’s true: everything in his neighborhood seems slightly drained of color and energy. He is looking at a weeping willow and wondering if the tree is saggier than it was yesterday when a tremendous reality, an enormous fact, occurs to him—that in some sense the world around him just died, and he must return to a previous world, one that until this moment he had always assumed to be identical to this and separated from it by only the passage of time.

In fact, Teddy realizes, nothing new is ever going to happen to him again. He will never figure out what Mr. Capstone was up to in his backyard, and the Moon-Bird truck will go forever unexplained. That door, and those beyond, are forever closed to him. From now on, he can go only backward, through older worlds, solving mysteries that have already been solved, and as if for the first time.

20

From Timothy Underhill’s journal

Quivering with shock and terror, Willy is on her way across the Upper West Side of Manhattan, vibrating on one of the two back seats in the boxy Sienna piloted by Kalpesh Patel, a native of Hyderabad who refuses to stop or find a policeman because 1) he’s scared and excited by the obvious connections between the FBI dudes and those guys who came running down West Sixty-first Street, shooting at his previous fare, and 2) well, Kalpesh Patel was borderline crazy to begin