1
Someone was shaking my shoulder.
“Wake up, Mother. We don’t want to be late.”
I opened my eyes, blinked a few times, and Ellie came into focus, leaning over me where I must have dozed off on the living room couch. She wore the same clothes as when she’d entered the passage on Monday and—I blinked again—no spider legs in sight.
I rubbed my eyes and looked again. No…no spider legs.
Had I dreamed all that? I couldn’t believe my mind capable of concocting such a scenario, even in a nightmare, yet here she was, looking like her old self.
No, not her old-old self. This was the pre-passage Ellie, with the stranger who called me “Mother” looking out through her eyes.
“Ellie…you’re all right?”
“As well as can be expected. But come on—rise and shine or we’ll be late.”
“Late for what?”
“Something momentous: the sunrise.”
“That happens every day.”
“Not like this, it doesn’t. It’s scheduled to rise at five twenty-one.”
“Good Lord, what time is it now?”
“Three-thirty. We have trains to catch if we’re going to reach Coney Island in time.”
I rose from the couch and stretched. My back ached from sleeping in an odd position.
“Why Coney Island? That’s a long way.”
I’d never been there but remembered it lay at the far end of Brooklyn.
“Because standing on a shore and watching the sun rise over the water will allow us to appreciate the full impact.”
“Ellie, you’re not making any sense.”
“Everything will make sense when we’re there, Mother. But we can’t dilly-dally. The trains are few and far between at this hour. Grab a coat because it’s chilly before dawn. And bring your phone because we’ll want to watch the time. I’ll get Blanky.”
“Blanky?”
She turned away and I saw her back. No spider legs, but…
“Oh, God! Oh, dear God!”
My knees gave way and I dropped back onto the couch. Her back was a seething, wriggling black mass of those little…things. They clung to her and to each other, bulking from the base of her neck to her waist.
She glanced back over her shoulder. “What?”
I pointed. “Those…those…” Words failed me.
“Oh, the kiddlies are coming along. They need to get out for a while.”
2
For a child—okay, teenager—who’d been to New York only a couple of times, and had never been on the subway, Ellie possessed an uncanny knowledge of its workings. I didn’t ask her how. I knew she’d say she’d learned all about it during her coma.
She’d tied Blanky around her neck where it hung over her back like a cape, mercifully concealing her horrid “kiddlies” from me and the few other people scattered on the streets at this hour. As she led me to the Lexington Line station at Seventy-seventh Street, I’d glance at her and catch faint flashes or ghost images of spindly spider legs arching from her back, but they’d be gone before I could focus. Also…Blanky…at times Blanky flickered and transformed into a long, flowing, high-collared red cape like a Disney princess might wear, and then reverted to ratty old Blanky again.
“Where are the…extra legs?” I said.
“Here and not here. Tucked elsewhere. Don’t want to attract too much attention, do we?”
Part of me wanted to run—screamed to run from her—but another part, the mother part, couldn’t leave. This was my child, my baby, and I had to stick by her in this time of trial. She’d changed for the worse—no, I shouldn’t say worse. She hadn’t done anything bad, hadn’t hurt anyone. She’d changed to the strange, the uncanny, the bizarre, the frightening. But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t change back to who she’d been, and I had to be there when she did. Because she’d need me. She didn’t seem to need me now, but she’d need me then.
Down in the subway station, after what seemed like a long wait, we caught the six train downtown. We shared our car with a couple of drowsy drunks and a homeless woman stretched out on a bench surrounded by the plastic bags she’d filled with her earthy possessions. I hadn’t noticed at the apartment or on the street, but here under the fluorescents of the subway car, Ellie looked pale and drawn. Her cheeks were sunken.
“When did you last eat?” I said.
A wan smile. “Been a while.”
But was it more than simply not eating?
“Those…things…they aren’t biting you, are they?”
I imagined them sucking her blood like ticks.
“No. They’d never bite me. And they know not to bite you either.”
“Well, you need to eat,” I said. “At the next stop we’ll get out and find an all-night coffee shop and get some nourishment into you.”
She gave her head an emphatic shake. “No, Mother. This is a big day. I have to stay on schedule.”
“For the sunrise? It will happen whether you’re watching or not.”
“Sunrise isn’t the first stop on the schedule.”
“What is?”
“All in good time, Mother.”
At Bleeker Street we switched to the D train and continued to the end of the line at Coney Island. Once the D left Manhattan, it stopped being “sub” and traveled on elevated tracks.
After an uneventful trip on two largely uninhabited trains, we reached the end of the line at Coney Island. Ellie led us down to street level where we found ourselves in a rough, seedy neighborhood.
“I don’t like it here,” I said.
“It’s necessary,” she said. She was in enigmatic mode now. “What time on your phone?”
I checked. “Four fifty-seven.”
“Good. We have time.”
“Hey, Red Riding Hood,” said boozy male voice. “I dig the cape.”
An unshaven man in a short jacket and a fedora set at a rakish angle stepped out of the shadows and approached us.
I tugged on Ellie’s sleeve. “Let’s go.”
But Ellie stood firm, muttering something that sounded like, Right on schedule.
“Good evening, sir,” she said. “Could you direct us to the boardwalk?”
“Sure can.” He stopped two feet before us. “Gimme your fancy red cape and I’ll guide you there myself.”
It occurred to me that he was seeing the red cape I’d seen in flashes throughout our trip.
“I’m afraid I can’t give up Blanky.”
“We ain’t hagglin’, little girl.” A knife with a nasty-looking blade appeared in his hand. “Hand it over.”
I wanted to run but I couldn’t leave Ellie.
“I’ve had Blanky all my life.”
He waved the blade toward me. “This looks like your mother. You’ve had her all your life too, right? How’s about I cut her and we see if you still wanna keep your cape?”
Ellie tsked. “Well, since you put it that way.”
She untied the blanket from around her neck and handed it over. I noticed that her back was clear of the creatures. I glanced at Blanky and saw its entire underside massed with kiddlies.
“Ellie…”
“Mother…” A warning tone.
I zipped my lips.
The man had slipped the knife into his belt and was swinging Blanky over his shoulders, then knotting it around his neck.
“You know, I used to be quite the fashion plate. I had a stable of the finest girls on the street. Then everything went south for me. But I can still look sharp, right? I can—”
His expression suddenly changed—to puzzled, then concerned.
“What the—?”
He started twisting and clawing at his back. He staggered in a circle as he tried to untie Blanky but his fingers fumbled futilely at the knot.
When he turned back to us his eyes were black with crawling things and wriggling legs. He opened his mouth but it was filled with the same. His hands fell to his sides as he dropped to his knees; he swayed back and forth once or twice, then he toppled face-first onto the sidewalk where he lay still. Not a twitch, not a groan. He looked shrunken inside his clothes. His right eye socket—empty now—was visible.
I stared in open-mouthed shock. No doubt he was dead.
“Ellie?” I said when I found my voice, a voice that sounded like someone else’s. “What happened?”
“The kiddlies defended us. It just so happened they were hungry as well. They have no taste for skin and bone, but they like everything else.”
I closed my eyes and swallowed a surge of bile. She was telling me that he was—quite literally—little more than a bag of bones now.
A couple of commuters hurried by, barely looking at him. Ellie removed Blanky from his corpse—I couldn’t help but notice the black, writhing mass clinging to its underside—and retied it around her neck. I shuddered at the thought of those things against my own back.
“Come,” she said. “The sunrise awaits.”
3
I barely remember the trek up Stillwell Avenue to the boardwalk. Vague images of Nathan’s signs and that grinning Steeplechase Face everywhere, a rollercoaster to my left, the bright orange height of the defunct Parachute Jump looming to my right, and finally a locked-up pavilion overlooking the beach and the sparkling water.
“Excellent!” she said, spreading her arms toward the limitless expanse of pristine sky. “A beautiful morning for the show.”
I was too numb with shock and, I confess, sick fear to appreciate the weather. A man had died back there. A scum-of-the-earth man, a former pimp from what he’d said, but a human being nonetheless, and he’d been devoured from the inside by Ellie’s kiddlies.
And Ellie herself…in the pre-dawn light I could see how her face had filled out and her cheeks now showed a rosy glow.
I realized to my horror that the kiddlies had shared their bounty. Ellie had fed too.
She pointed west, past the Parachute Jump. “See that purplish sky just above the horizon? That’s called ‘Earth shadow,’ which is exactly what it is—a shadow cast by the curve of the eastern horizon before the sun rises above it. And see that pink band above that? That’s the sun lighting up the higher levels of the atmosphere. It’s called the Belt of Venus.”
“Did you learn this in your coma too?”
“No, Mother,” she said, her tone arid. “In Mister Benson’s astronomy class. What time on your phone?”
I checked. “Five twenty.”
She pointed east. “The sun is supposed to appear in one minute.”
We waited. A minute passed, then two, then three…and no sun.
“Well, Ellie, either my phone’s wrong or your information is wrong.”
“Before I woke you, I checked with the U.S. Naval Observatory. Using Eastern Standard Time, it lists today’s sunrise at this latitude and longitude at four twenty-one. Since we’re in Daylight Saving, I had to add an hour.”
Five twenty-five and still no sun.
“This is impossible, Ellie. The sun’s never late, and the days are supposed to be getting longer, not shorter.”
My phone was reading five twenty-six when a crimson crescent began to peek over the horizon.
“There!” she cried, pointing. “There it is! A wonderful five minutes late! It’s begun, Mother! It’s truly begun!”
For a few seconds her spider legs appeared—not hazy and ghostly, but sharp and solid enough to click when they touched. They materialized and moved around, then disappeared, all without disturbing Blanky’s fabric. But they weren’t responsible for the wave of deep unease coursing through me—the sun’s tardiness triggered that.
“You knew the sun was going to be late? How?” But I knew the answer.
“I believe I spoke it aloud many times in my coma: It will begin in the Heavens…”
“‘And end in the Earth.’ Spoke? You’d shout it. But what—?”
She gestured again toward the rising sun. “As predicted, it has begun in the Heavens. This morning the sun rose late. Tonight it will set early. Tomorrow morning it will rise even later. Night is falling, Mother. The Change has begun. His time is at hand.”
“Who’s time?”
“Why, the One’s, of course.”
“The One what?”
She looked at the rising sun. “A long story, Mother. Come, you and I will walk the boards, as they say, and I will tell you all about it before I have to return to Manhattan.”
“‘Have to’?”
She seemed to have all sorts of frames of reference to which I had no clue—more coma learning, I assumed.
“A fraternal order will have need of my services later this morning, but we have plenty of time before I’m due there.”