But he could see the snow falling only a few paces behind him, and it was falling at its usual pace. So time didn’t pass especially slowly here, though he supposed it might pass differently… and he took another step forward.

His vision was obscured. The eye didn’t like this environment. Nor did the other senses; he felt dizzy, awkward, alternately too hot and too cold. Most confusing, though, was this refusal of any solid object to hold still and be seen. Images curved and lost proportion as if the act of seeing them challenged their reality.

Observation, Howard thought, was a kind of quantum guillotine: it sliced uncertainty into this or that, particle or wave. Here there seemed to be no such effect. The collapsing wavefront, the moment of isness, was imprecise, too fluid, as if he were experiencing time a fraction of a second before anything happened. For instance, this asphalt under his feet. Glimpsed briefly, it was the lab parking lot, spaces marked with whitewashed numbers, 26, 27. Stare too long and it became granite or glass or grains of crystalline sand. And the temptation to stare was immense.

He understood why the firefighters had beat such a hasty retreat: too much exposure to this would surely affect more than the senses. Madness must look like this, Howard thought.

But he took another step and another after that.

The light around him was bright but sourceless. It wasn’t daylight. It pervaded everything; everything was lit up from within. Colors were divided, split as if by a prism into countless bands. Every motion was a blur.

He took another step and another, though his stomach was churning. There was a turbulence all around him. The air itself seemed to solidify and take form, as if translucent bodies were moving through it. More ghosts, he supposed. Maybe they really were ghosts, the restless remains of the men and women who had died in these bunkers the night of the explosion.

But Howard doubted it. There was something purposive in the way they crossed his path, circling the laboratory buildings as if they were trapped here, and perhaps they were: maybe these were the creators of the fragment, still attached to it, orbiting it a helpless half step out of time.

He shook his head. Too much speculation: that had been Stern’s downfall.

Stern, who was calling him onward. Set aside the rationalization and that was why he was here: Stern had called him. And Stern was calling him yet.

You might be as smart as your uncle, Howard’s mother used to say. It was a compliment, a suspicion, a fear.

Stern had always loomed over him like a monument, stony and unapproachable. In Howard’s family no-one talked much about the important things. But Stern always came with a baggage of big ideas and he always shared them with Howard. Teased him with them: You like this morsel? Then how about this? And this?

Howard remembered his uncle leaning forward from the cane chair on the porch, on a summer evening alight with stars and fireflies, his voice obscuring the faint rattle of china dishes on a faraway table: “Your dog sees the same world we do, Howard. Your dog sees those stars. But we know what they are. Because we can ask the right questions. And that’s knowledge the dog can never share. By his nature: never. So, then, Howard—do you suppose there are questions even we can’t ask?”

Fireflies here, too: sparks in his vision.

He was approaching the central building. Its roof had collapsed, but the concrete-block frame was intact. A crack ran through the steel door. On closer inspection, the brickwork was filleted with jewels; diamonds clung like barnacles to every wall. There was something seductive about these faceted surfaces and Howard was careful not to stare too long. There were other horizons here, not his own.

He touched the door. It was hot. This was real heat, and he was probably close enough to the core event that he was being bathed with real radiation. Enough to kill him, probably, but that was of no concern any longer.

He had used the word awestruck in the past without knowing what it meant, but now he understood it. He was stricken by awe, consumed by it; it obliterated even his fear.

This was the place where his uncle had crossed the border of the world.

If Stern had brought them all here, did that make Stern a Demiurge?

Had he found this world or actually made it? Constructed it, consciously or unconsciously, with the aid of the Turkish fragment, from his own fears and hopes?

If so… then, like Sophia, he had made an imperfect thing.

Everything he had wanted from his ancient books, a key to the pain and the longing he felt, a cosmogony beyond physics, here in the world of the Proctors it was all transmuted into something base: a lifeless dogma. Everything noble in it had grown calcified and oppressive.

Maybe Stern was lost, Howard thought. Trapped in his own creation and helpless to redeem it. Am I prepared to face a god? He shuddered at the thought. But he opened the cracked and jeweled door.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

With daylight, the town surrendered to panic.

Fire broke out in the Beacon Street business district and there was no one to control it; Tom Stubbs had headed west, along with most of the Volunteer Fire Department. Flames swept through the Emily Dee Large-Size Fashion Shop, the New Day Bookstore, and an empty corner property with boarded windows on which the faint words COMING SOON! ANOTHER FRY CASTLE FAMILY RESTAURANT were still faintly legible.

Refugees approaching Coldwater Road encountered a roadblock manned by a detachment of soldiers—word of the escape attempt had leaked—but the lead cars, including Calvin Shepperd’s, each carried three sharpshooters and the cream of Virgil Wilson’s collection of semiautomatic rifles. The gunfire began before dawn and continued sporadically through the morning.

Three truckloads of soldiers, turned back from the road to Fort LeDuc by steel gabions and a skirmish line of tanks, passed through town at high speed.

One truck made it nearly to Coldwater Road before a rear guard of armed civilians caught it in a crossfire. The driver was killed instantly and spared the knowledge that his last act had been to steer the vehicle over a barricade and down a vertical embankment into the shallow ice of Powell Creek.

The second truck headed north in a vain attempt to cross the firebreak and reach safety; it broke an axle in a snowy hydroelectric right-of-way. Twenty-five soldiers without winter clothes or adequate supplies formed a line and marched into the dark woods, hoping to outrun the angel Tartarouchis.

The third truck turned over in front of City Hall, spilling a cargo of angry draftees who fanned out and began to empty their rifles into the unblinking facades of these alien houses, in this town on the edge of the Abyss, this Temple of Grief.

Dex started a turn onto Municipal Avenue when he saw the soldiers among the trees on the City Hall promenade—and the soldiers saw him.

Taken by surprise, he twisted the steering wheel hard right. The road surface was too slick for traction. The car slid at a skewed angle toward the sidewalk and Dex fought to keep the wheels out of a drainage ditch. Something pinged from the hood: he saw the new dent and a gleam of steel where the paint had been scoured by a bullet.