The darkness sluiced into Marlow’s head, deeper than the night, worse even than the Black Pool. It filled his skull, his heart, his lungs, it occupied every cell, drowning him from the inside out. But it wasn’t a close darkness, it wasn’t suffocating. There was something different about this because he knew, somehow, that this was all there was—an endless void of nothing. The thought of it, of that gaping absence, made him open his mouth and loose a silent, deafening howl.
He could feel the poisonous arteries of the Devil’s heart burrowing into him, working their way up his arms, searching. But he couldn’t fight them, he couldn’t move. They wriggled beneath his skin, beneath his muscles, coiling around his bones, as cold as ice and as hot as molten lead. He screamed as the first of them brushed against his spine.
A voice that wasn’t really a voice filled his head—a language without words bursting inside him like a lightless firework. There was somebody there, something, a shadow against the night. Marlow understood that this thing was as old as time, older, even—a creature that had burned its way through reality before there was even a reality to explore, a creature that had created reality as it went.
The wordless voice showed him things he couldn’t even comprehend—explosions that birthed universes, played out in the blink of an eye he couldn’t actually blink, stars forming from the chaos, and planets forming around those stars. And even amid all this light, there was darkness, its darkness, that pulsing core of inverse matter that stalked the unthinkable distances between the galaxies.
And it was not alone, this thing. It was not safe—Marlow could sense an emotion that was unlike anything he had ever felt, so powerful he might melt beneath the sheer force of it. It was terror, the terror of a creature who knows that soon it will die.
More churning motion, and Marlow watched as this shape of infinite darkness split itself—not through space but beyond it, separating into seven shards of impossible light that scattered through the universes. It was the only way, the voice showed him, the only way to stay safe, and to stay hidden. Seven pieces of the same being, hiding in seven alternate realities.
Seven Strangers, that unvoice said. Because in dividing they lost one another, they lost themselves.
The scene shifted again, bringing Marlow home—to a place he knew so well now, a burning watchmaker weeping for his lost children, and one of the seven Strangers coiling out of the smoke. It had been hiding there for so long, waiting for the right time, for the right person. It had watched, it had learned, it had a language now and Marlow heard that voice again.
IT IS DONE.
And he saw the creature’s blood—blood that had boiled in its veins since the very start of everything—bubble and blister its way into the watchmaker. The man’s scream was so loud it shattered the vision to pieces but Marlow could still hear his voice, his desperate pleas.
Give them back to me. Bring my children home.
THE LOVE FOR A CHILD IS THE MOST POWERFUL THING IN THE UNIVERSE.
Marlow wasn’t sure if the voice came from the memory or from somewhere else. It was a whisper rather than a shout, sliding into his ear like a needle. He tried to turn his head but he had no control, and there was nothing to see, just that infinite void.
Until something began to swim out of it, a scene like a movie in fast-forward. He saw Ostheim, the boy who wasn’t really a boy, the boy who was born from the Stranger. Marlow saw him live in the Engine with his true father, with this serpent of smoke and shadow. He saw him feed on blood, saw him grow into something monstrous, something that wore its human face like a mask. And that face changed, losing its hair, its vitality, its youth—but never losing the darkness that swam just beneath the skin.
“I don’t understand,” Marlow said in a voice made of silence. “I don’t know why you’re showing me this.”
YOU WILL, said the voice.
Time and matter imploded again, Marlow’s stomach flipping like he’d been launched from a catapult. He fell into more light, so bright it was like a blowtorch held to his retinas. For a moment he didn’t understand where he was, then he saw the stones, arranged in perfect lines, one for each dead body resting beneath the earth, and he understood.
Arlington.
He heard her before he saw her, sobs that echoed off the stones, which rose into the sky like doves. And when he turned his head there was his mom—so much younger, so much healthier. Only her face was the same, warped with an expression of grief that she’d tried to hide in the years since Danny’s death, but which she’d never managed to remove. She was holding on to somebody Marlow didn’t recognize, somebody in full ceremonial uniform. There were dozens of people there, all clustered around a small, dark hole in the ground. Marlow knew who was inside the coffin that lay there.
His brother.
Danny, he said, reaching out for him with a hand he didn’t possess. He scanned the crowds, looking for himself. He didn’t remember the funeral, he’d been too young, surely. Or maybe it was because he hadn’t been there, because he couldn’t see himself. His mom wouldn’t have let him go, he realized. It would have been too traumatic. He reached back into the fog of his memory but he couldn’t recall her even talking about it. There was nothing there at all.
The scene scrubbed forward, his mom alone now, inside their house—the walls freshly painted, the carpets clean, photographs hanging on every wall. He tried to make out who was in them, seeing his mom, seeing Danny.
But no photographs of Marlow.
He squirmed against the memory, wanting to go to his mom as she opened up a grocery bag, as she pulled out a bottle of Bacardi, sobbing uncontrollably as she unscrewed the cap. And in the moments that followed—a hundred days bunched into one awful, endless swallow—he saw her age, saw her deflate into herself, saw her home crumble into ruin.
And there was still no sign of him.
It didn’t make any sense.
The memory shuddered back into real time with the sound of a knock on the door. And even here, bodiless and alone, Marlow felt that pinch of terror at the base of his spine. He wanted to tell her not to open it, just to sit in the dark and wait for the caller to leave. But his mom wobbled to her feet and called out a word that broke Marlow’s heart.
“Danny?”
She rushed from the room, down the hall, bouncing off the wall. A silhouette filled the glass panel, something that looked too big to be a man, shadows squirming there like they were trying to find a way in. But they didn’t need to, because his mom wrenched open the door, letting them flood forward, drowning the house in darkness.
A man stood there.
A man with an impossible face.
A man who pushed lank strands of hair back over his balding head and flashed his mom a vicious smile.
Sheppel Ostheim.
No, said Marlow, trying to pull the memory inside himself, trying to rip it away from the man at the door. But he was powerless here, and all he could do was watch as Ostheim strode into his mom’s house, walking into the living room like he owned the place. And his mom just followed him. She didn’t call the cops, she didn’t ask him to leave, she just trod in his shadow like a beaten dog, collapsing onto her knees before him.
Leave her alone! Marlow screamed, watching Ostheim run a hand down her face, cup her chin. His fear was like an ocean in a storm, enough to pull him to pieces. But he couldn’t fight the paralysis, couldn’t help his mom, couldn’t even turn away. He could only watch as Ostheim leaned in, brushed his mom’s greasy hair from her ear, and whispered.
“I can give you back a son.”
No, Marlow said.
“I can make you a mother again.”
No.
“It won’t be the one you lost, of course, but he will be just as good, and just as kind.”
No, please.
“And you will love him as if he were real.”
Please, God, no.
“All you have to do is say yes.”
Please, Mom, don’t.
“All you have to do is say yes, and your house will no longer be empty, it will no longer be sad.”
Mom!
“All you have to do is say yes.”
Say no! Marlow screamed, but it was pointless because all of this had already happened. It was pointless because he already knew what his mom had said. Hadn’t he always known it, somewhere in the very deepest part of him? Because there had never been any memories, there had never been any childhood. There had only been that one, awful word.
“Yes.”
Ostheim lifted his head and howled his laughter out into the memory, shattering it. When it reformed Marlow saw a bedroom—his bedroom—the floorboards bare, wallpaper hanging like peeling skin. One corner was shrouded in darkness, sinkhole-deep, but something was walking out of it—a boy, maybe five or six, his eyes two black marbles. They were doll’s eyes, looking like they might just roll out of their sockets.
His mom ran into the room, her sobs the loudest sound in the world. She dropped to her knees before the child and swallowed him up in a hug. The boy didn’t react, he just rolled those dead eyes to where Marlow floated and smiled.
Nononononono, Marlow screamed, fighting the memory, watching him as he watched back and feeling the fury like a cold, dense explosion inside him.
THE LOVE FOR A CHILD IS THE MOST POWERFUL THING IN THE UNIVERSE, said the voice, that scalpel-sharp whisper.
There was no escaping the truth, it sat in Marlow’s head like a beacon. But the Stranger spoke it anyway.
YOU ARE MY CHILD.
The boy was him.
YOU ARE MINE.
And the creature that had begun its life before the universe had been formed, before the stars, before worlds, before time.
The creature whose blood had corrupted countless souls, whose touch had reduced men to monsters, and children to something even worse.
The creature who was tearing its way through the world, who wanted to turn the living to dust, who wanted to make this place into hell.
It was his father.