As Edmond Margot wrote, the stars went out. He did not need them. A page lay on his desk. His fingers held a pen. With these tools he built a world. Perhaps the world he built lived behind his eyes and was transmitted to the page by the instrument of ink, or else it lived beneath the page somehow, his pen’s progress sculpting form out of a purer white than sculptor’s marble. He coughed blood into a handkerchief. His illness worked angrily inside him, drawing him close to the beyond. He gloried and dissolved in the heat of his blood and heart and brain.
He lost the stars, first. Then the sky around them, and after the sky the borders of the horizon. He lost the waves next, and beaches, and the vast and lucent sea. The mountain too faded. Wind stilled. The universe compressed to his block, his house, his apartment, all trees wind leaves and stone, all human life and structure, all bars and fiddle-players and dancers and drinkers, all lovers and friends and gamblers and back-alley muggers and red-faced priests fallen away until only he remained, and then he even lost himself. Pen met paper, and paper and pen fading left, at last, the line. Not even the line: the point of contact, a wet green moving dot in a space without time or dimension.
But this space was not empty. Emptiness collapsed, while this stretched, defined by relations between invisible enormous beings who swam like whales in the deep. Closer than these eminences, small by comparison, hovered snowflakes of light, snowflakes such as he had not seen since in childhood he first caught them on the fine hairs of a wool mitten. Snowflakes, very like, but made of bone. Skeletons hanging in the night, tied to one another by strings of dried skin and muscle. Flayed crystal corpses, bodies human and animal and every mix of both, skyscraper horns and suspension bridge wings, rib cages thick as magisterium trees. The skeletons twitched, mocking life.
A skull the size of a small moon turned to him, a massive hand extended, a mouth moved. No sound could carry in this absent space, but still he heard someone speak.
We have missed you.
He recognized the voice.
Then the door burst open behind him.