go about their business as they always have, to Gracie the walls tremble like skins on a beating drum, and slowly grow transparent. The walls and floor and ceiling become like gelled water, like she could pass through them with only the slightest effort if she wished. Sound begins to fall away from her, replaced by wind rushing through desert canyons, warbling, crying. The breath in her lungs is arctic; it feels as if her chest is frosting crystals with every second.
She is slipping over. She must stop it.
She shuts her eyes. Breathes deep. Holds it. Then she takes the web of her left palm in her right hand and pinches it, hard.
Gracie opens her eyes again. The rush and roil of Chloe’s have returned: someone whoops and makes a comment about the quality of the pie; Chloe herself is totaling up a large party, nearly ten people, nodding along as every charge is listed.
Gracie takes a breath, relieved.
Something happened just now, she thinks. Something triggered that.
She glances nervously out the front windows and sees she’s not done yet: for though the walls and noises of Chloe’s are back, she can still see the evening sky outside, and it is dotted with red stars. And there is no mesa beyond the town; there are peaks, but they are black and curling and strange, rock formations of a kind not found in New Mexico.
Gracie blinks again, slowly. And when she opens her eyes, the mesa’s back too.
She sighs again. The cold sensation in her loins is ebbing away. It’s an unpleasant phenomenon, one that’s been happening randomly for nearly three months now. She is being changed by her visitations, that is clear. At first she was not sure how, but the more she talks to him, the more they sit in the canyon and discuss his nature and origins, the more she realizes that in these moments she is crossing over.
She is becoming more like him. She is catching glimpses of where They are from.
There is a gust of wind out in the street, so strong and loud that all the customers look up. They hear a clattering outside, like someone’s just thrown an enormous deck of cards up in the air to let them fall on the ground.
“What was that?” someone asks.
“Something got blowed over.”
People stand up and trickle outside to see. Initially Gracie has no intention of following them, but then she remembers the cold feeling in her stomach, and wonders if its being followed by the wind is just a coincidence…
Heart sinking, she walks out of the diner to join the crowd. There are letters in the street, big black ones. They’ve been blown off the marquee signs of the restaurants and stores along the sidewalk, leaving patchy messages of gibberish behind. Someone comments that this is damn curious, which casts a pall over the crowd as they begin to suspect that this was not accidental.
Gracie carefully scans the signs, looking from one to the next. Then she walks a few steps down the street and turns around and starts walking backward, and then things just…
Line up.
The letters ME and ET remain on the garden shop sign. Then, on the mechanic’s, she can still see M E and after that T ON, and just behind that sign she can see the barber shop’s sign, which has a single lonely I, and looking down the street she can see a G on one sign, and then an H T.
“Oh, brother,” says Gracie, and she pinches the bridge of her nose.
He always does use such awkward methods of conversation. She keeps asking him to try just sending her a letter every once in a while. But he never listens. He’s never been very good at listening.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
It is night, oh holy blessed mother of God, it is night, and with night comes all the nighttime things, all the tremors and whispers, all the burning veins and teary cheeks, all the minutes (or hours, maybe months) of misery stretched out in the unblinking stare of the sodium lights. Oh, thinks Bonnie, oh my dear, oh it is night, actually night, forever night. I thought it would not come this time.
Each morning Bonnie rises and says well that’s over, that’s finally over, night is over and it will never come again. For how could night persist in the pink broiling sky of the dawn? With a sky like that, why, night cannot exist at all. There cannot be night anywhere, not with