Then I notice the kid in the doorway.

“Hello,” I say. “Can I help you?”

“Hi. Yeah.” She’s a rather androgynous she, wrapped in a beetle-black knee-length thermal jacket with a few unmelted snowflakes on her shoulders; shaven-headed, Asian-eyelidded, and a puffy, marshmallow complexion. Can a gaze be both intense and vacant? A medieval icon’s can be, and so is hers. She doesn’t move.

“Come in,” I prompt her. “Have a seat.”

“I will.” She walks as if distrustful of floors, and sits down as if she’s had some bad experiences with chairs, too. “Soleil Moore.”

She says her name as if I’ll know it. Which, maybe, I do. “Have we met before, Miss Moore?”

“This would be our third encounter, Mr. Hershey.”

“I see—remind me which department you’re in.”

“I dislike departments. I’m a poet and a seer.”

“But … you area student at Blithewood, right?”

“I applied for a scholarship when I learned you’d be teaching here, but Professor Wilderhoff described my work as ‘delusional and not, alas, in a good way.’ ”

“That’s certainly a frank assessment. Look, I’m afraid my surgery hours are only for students who are actually enrolled at Blithewood.”

“We met at Hay-on-Wye, Mr. Hershey, back in 2015.”

“I’m sorry, but I met a lot of people at Hay-on-Wye.”

“I gifted you my first collection: Soul Carnivores.”

Bells are ringing, albeit faint, underwater, and off-key.

“… and attended your event at the Shanghai Book Fair.”

I didn’t believe this hour could possibly get trippier, but I could be wrong. “Miss Moore, I—”

“Miss S. Moore.” She says it like it’s a clever punch line. “I left my second book in an embroidered bag on the door handle of your hotel. Room 2929 of the Shanghai Mandarin. Its title is Your Last Chanceand it’s the big exposй.”

“An exposй”—I sense a fragility here—“about what?”

“The secret war. The secret war waging around us, insideus, even. I saw you take Your Last Chanceout of the bag. You’d spent an hour with Holly Sykes, up in the bar, flipping coins. You remember, Mr. Hershey. I know you do.”

Twin facts: I have a stalker, and she is batshit crazy. “Proof of?”

“Proof that you’re written into the Script.”

“What script are you talking about?”

“ TheScript.” She appears to be shocked. “The first poem in Your Last Chance. You didread it, Mr. Hershey. Didn’t you?”

“No, I did not read your poetry, because it isn’t my sodding—”

“Stop!”She lets out a corroded sob and sinks her fingers into the arm of the chair until they whiten. She tilts her head back and tells a face that isn’t there on the ceiling: “He didn’t even readit! Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn!”

“Young lady, you have to see things from—”

“ Youdon’t get to ‘young lady’ me. Not after,” Soleil Moore’s fingers writhe individually, “all that time! Money! Blood!”

“Why is it my job to get your poetry published?”

“Because Soul Carnivoresexplains about the apex predators; because Your Final Chanceexposes the Anchorites’ methods; because the Anchorites have a door to anywhere and can abduct anyone;and because you, Mr. Hershey, you are of the Script.”

“Look, Miss Moore— whatsodding script?”

Her eyes flip open wider, like a mad toy’s: “You’re init, Mr. Hershey. As am I. And Holly Sykes—the Anchorites took her brother. You do know that. You wrote yourself into the Script. You describe it in ‘The Voorman Problem.’ What you wrote, in that story, that’s what the Carnivores do. You can’t deny it. You can’t.”

“ ‘The Voorman Problem’? I wrote that years ago. Apart from the prison doctor and Belgium vanishing, I barely remember it.”

“It no longer matters.” Soleil Moore calms down, or appears to. “Plan A was to alert the world through poetry. That failed. So we’ll have to resort to Plan B.”

“Well,” I want her gone, “the very best of luck with Plan B. Now I really must get back to work and—”

“You gave me Plan B yourself, at Hay-on-Wye.”

“Miss Moore, please don’t make me call security.”

“Your role is to bring my work to the world’s attention. I prayed and prayed that you’d do it by endorsement, but I didn’t grasp the magnitude of the sacrifice necessary. I’m sorry, Mr. Hershey.”

“That’s quite all right, young lady. But please leave.”

Soleil Moore stands up … in tears? “I’m sorry.”

A SUPERNATURAL FORCE flung Hershey backward and off his swivel chair. Soleil Moore stood over him. Five more shots followed, so shocking, so close, they didn’t even hurt. Hershey’s cheek is against the rough carpet. His ribcage is punched open. Holy buggery. Shot. Really actually bloody shot, me, here, now. The carpet’s drinking up blood. Mine. Copiousquantities. COPIOUS. Seven-letter Scrabble score. Can Hershey move any part of his body, dear reader? No, he cannot. Snow boots. Inches away. Sno boots. No w. Listen. A voice. Loving, ebbing, flowing. Mum? Don’t be so Disney. Soleil Moore. Miss S. Moore. Ah, of course! Esmiss Esmoore. E. M. Forster’s best book. His best character. “You’re famous, Mr. Hershey, so now they’ll read my poems. The news, the Internet, the FBI, the CIA, the UN, the Vatican—not even the Anchorites can cover it up … We’re martyrs, you and I, in the War. So was my sister. They lured her away, you see. She told me about them, but I thought it was just her illness talking. I’ll never forgive myself. But I can wake up the world from its ignorance. Its deadly ignorance. Once humanity knows we are the Anchorites’ food supply—its salmon farm—then we can resist. Rise up. Hunt them down.” Soleil Moore’s mouth continues to move, but the sound is gone. Reality’s shrinking. It was up at the Canadian border; now it stops at Albany; now it’s smaller than Blithewood Campus. The snowy woods, the library, the bunker, the bad cafeteria, all gone, all snuffed. Death by lunatic. Who would have thought it? Carpet of dots. Not dots. Spirals. All these weeks. Treading on spirals. Look. In the crack. Filing cabinet and skirting board. Spider. All dried out. Desiccated. Where the vacuum nozzle won’t go. A spider, a spiral, a … what? The fifth Lego Man. Inches away. On his side. Like me. Look.

A pirate. Funny.

An eye patch.

One-eyed.

Lego Man

sodding

pirate.

Holly

tell

her

…

..

.

April 1

MY OLD HOUSE LOOKS haunted tonight, silhouetted against Toronto’s smeary glow. Stars are caged like fireflies in the interlacing twigs. I tell the car, “Headlights off, radio off,” and Toru Takemitsu’s From Me Flows What You Call Timestops in midphrase. 23:11, says my car clock. I’m too weighed down to bestir myself. Are we mutants? Have we evolved this way? Or are we designed? Designed by whom? Why did the designer go to such elaborate lengths, only to vacate the stage and leave us wondering why we exist? For entertainment? For perversity? For a joke? To judge us? “To what end?” I ask my car, the night, Canada. My bones, body, and soul feel drained. I rose before five this morning to catch the six fifty-five flight to Vancouver, and when I arrived at Coupland Heights Psychiatric Hospital I found not a patient presenting Messiah Syndrome and acute precognition, but a press pack besieging the main entrance. Inside, my ex-student and friend Dr. Adnan Buyoya was enduring the worst day of his professional life. I sat in on a meeting with Oscar Gomez’s wife, her brother, their lawyer, and a trio of senior managers. The representative from the hospital’s private security company was “unavoidably absent,” though their lawyer was taking notes. Mrs. Gomez’s face was a mess of tear streaks. She swung from misery to fury: “There are TV cameras outside our house! The kids saw their dad on YouTube, but they don’t know if he’s a miracle worker or a criminal or a lunatic or … or … We daren’t switch on the TV or go online, but we can’t help it, either. Where ishe? You’re a secure unit—it says so on the signs! How can Oscar just vanish into thin air?”