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Sometimes you close your eyes to a nightmare, and sometimes you wake up to one.
Case in point. Last night I woke up from a restless dream where large, swooping shapes chased me through a nightmarish version of the Neverglades: gutted storefronts, dead grass, inhuman beasties crawling out of cracks in the street. It freaked me out, and I was glad when I finally opened my eyes and escaped from that hellscape. It took me a few seconds to realize that my bedroom had turned purple.
I rubbed my eyes, still a bit delirious, and waited for the illusion to clear. I hoped I hadn’t popped a blood vessel or something. But my eyes felt fine, and the room stubbornly remained its unusual color. There were little specks floating in the air, too - larger than dust motes, but just as wispy. I took a breath in and accidentally inhaled a cloud of the tiny things. They tasted like shreds of charcoal.
“Ruth?” I whispered. “I don’t mean to wake you, honey, but...”
I reached out to touch her arm, but found my hand sinking into a sticky puddle. I looked over and my stomach did a somersault. Right where my wife had been lying, an angular globe of light hovered a few inches above the bed, dripping viscous black tendrils onto the sheets. The light had the same purple sheen as the rest of the bedroom. I withdrew my hand quickly and wiped it on my pillowcase, my heart pounding.
“Shit,” I muttered. “Shit shit shit.”
A thought struck me, and I leapt out of bed. I hurried down the hall to the boys’ room. When I flung open the door, there were two more dripping orbs floating in midair where Rory and Stephen were supposed to be. I slammed the door and leaned back against it, trying to gather my thoughts.
The Inspector, my brain insisted. Get the Inspector.
I scrambled back to my bedroom. Yesterday’s jeans were draped across the dresser, so I rummaged through the pockets until I found my lighter and the Inspector’s calling card. I didn’t want to stay in this room - just glancing at that globe of light made my skin crawl - so I took my stuff and headed downstairs. Swaths of purple light gave the kitchen a sickly glow. I retreated to the sliding window and flicked the beaten-up lighter.
The tip lit up with a feeble spark, then went out.
“Come on, come on,” I mumbled. I tried over a dozen times, but the lighter only gave off a few more pitiful sparks before dying completely. I chucked the useless thing into the corner. It rattled off the stove and disappeared underneath the fridge. Desperate, I placed the Inspector’s card on one of the oven burners and turned on the heat. Nothing. The coils didn’t even glow.
“Inspector,” I said. I cleared my throat, then raised my voice - who was I going to wake, anyway? “Inspector, you’d better get your pasty ass over here, because my family’s turned into a bunch of alien lava lamps and everything’s gone purple -”
I stopped. For the first time, I’d caught a glimpse of the night sky through the back window, and I stepped closer so I could see it better. The moon had swelled in size, and its crater-riddled surface had turned as smooth as a sand dollar - except it was a vivid purple. There were no stars surrounding it. The sky itself wasn’t black, or blue, or even that distinct shade of violet; it was just a void. A high-pitched ringing filled my head as I stared into it.
“I’m not in the Glade anymore,” I said numbly.
Or maybe, a nasty voice whispered in my head, you’re just seeing it for the first time.
* * * * *
IF THE INSPECTOR WASN'T going to come to me, I would have to go to him. My first instinct was to check the station. I had no idea how widespread this was, but if the world had turned purple and all the townsfolk had been replaced by those sticky orbs, surely the Inspector would be on the case. I pulled on some clothes, grabbed a jacket from the closet, and headed out into the night. It was colder than it had been yesterday. The air out here was full of those little specks, which floated past my face on a breeze I couldn’t feel.
After five minutes of struggling with the engine, I had to begrudgingly accept that my car wasn’t going to start. I yanked my old mountain bike off the wall in the garage, praying the tires weren’t completely shot; it had been years since I’d given the thing a whirl. But the bike stood steady, so I resumed the old stance, my fingers gripping the handlebars with a little more force than necessary. I kicked off and sped down the road.
The Glade didn’t quite look like the hellscape from my dream, but the similarities were there. The purple light made everything seem slightly off and turned perfectly innocent cars and houses into grotesque shadows of themselves. I stared at them and not the void overhead, which threatened to give me a migraine if I looked at it for too long.
There wasn’t a single soul out on the streets. I had never heard such utter silence before; no birds chirping, no distant cars, no rustle of leaves along the pavement. Even the clatter of my bike seemed muted. Was I the only one left?
The thought had barely crossed my mind when I felt a sudden buzzing in my pocket. The sensation scared the hell out of me and I almost took a tumble off the bicycle. Gliding to a stop in the closest driveway, I yanked the phone from my pocket. The screen was dark and dead, like everything else in this place, but somehow a call was still coming through. I held the black screen up to my ear.
“Hello?” I breathed.
“Hannigan?” said the voice on the other end. “Sweet Christ, is that really you?”
“Marconi!” I tucked the phone against my shoulder and glanced around the empty neighborhood. “God, I’ve never been so happy to hear your voice. Where the hell are you?”
“I’m at home. Where the hell are you?”
“Trying to find the Inspector. Are you seeing this?”
“I’m not sure what I’m seeing, Hannigan.”
A low moaning floated down the street, like a wheezing foghorn, and I nearly dropped my cell. I ducked behind a peeling fence and peered through a crack in the wood. The flecks in the air had grown agitated, and there were... things... slithering along the pavement. I’m not even sure what to call them. They had too many scuttling legs to be snakes but were far too big to be centipedes. I cringed a little, my fingers curling around the phone, but the wriggling little beasts didn’t get anywhere near me. They twisted down the road for a few feet before fading into a purple vapor and blowing away.
“Hannigan? You still there?”
“Quiet!” I hissed. “Something’s coming!”
Marconi went silent in my hand, and good thing, too, because barely a second later another creature appeared on the stretch of road. It hadn’t come from around the corner or anything; it had just folded out of the air, like an invisible origami starfish. I say starfish because the creature had several drooping limbs on all sides of its roundish body, and no eyes to speak of, but otherwise... well, the resemblance ended there. It trembled a bit, like a dog sniffing at the ground, then floated down the street in my direction. I pressed my back against the fence and tried to quiet my breathing.
The starfish drifted past me, still quivering, until it reached a house a little ways down the block. Like everything else, the house was washed in purple, but in a saner world I thought it might have been a pale green. The starfish veered sharply to the left and floated up the driveway. Its slimy limbs dragged behind it, leaving a faint trail of gunk on the pavement.
The creature phased through the front door as if it wasn’t even there, then vanished. I waited half a minute to make sure the coast was clear. Not sure how the beastie would have spotted me, having no eyes and all, but I wasn’t taking any chances this side of the looking glass. I lifted the phone to my ear and tiptoed over to my fallen bicycle.
“I’ll call you back,” I whispered. “Let me just find the Inspector first and I’ll -”
A loud crunching filled the air, followed by a sickening squelch, and the phone went dead in my hand. I shoved the thing in my pocket and ran for the mountain bike. Leaping aboard, I kicked off the ground and pedaled down the street as fast as my out-of-shape physique could carry me.
The wet crunching slowly faded into the background, but the memory of it followed me, and I could feel the blood burning in my ears. I hadn’t seen teeth on the alien starfish - hell, I hadn’t even seen a mouth - but I’d seen enough nature documentaries to know what it sounded like when a predator gnawed on a dead carcass.
Whatever that thing had been, it was feeding.
* * * * *
THE STATION WAS EMPTY when I finally arrived, barring a single floating orb at the desk where Abigail Shannon usually sat. The rest of the night crew was nowhere to be seen. I ran through the halls, shouting the Inspector’s name until I went hoarse, but it became pretty clear that I was on my own. Fear started to trickle in, but I told it to shut the hell up and made a beeline for the weapons locker instead. The room was protected by an electronic lock with a four-digit password. I typed in the usual numbers, but the screen remained dark. No beeping either. The dregs of fear slowly churned, giving way to panic.
Driven by desperation, I grabbed a paperweight from the closest desk and smashed the glass above the fire extinguisher. For the faintest of seconds I thought I heard the blip of an alarm overhead, but the sound - if it really had been a sound - bled away into that eerie silence. I reached in through the broken glass, seized the canister, and carried it back to the weapons locker. Then I got to work bashing at the lock.
Marconi would have flipped a shit if she saw me now, but I was too far gone to care. The fire extinguisher left a few dents in the metal lock but didn’t seem to damage it much. Not at first anyway. After a particularly hefty swing that threatened to pop my shoulder out of its socket, I felt the keypad give - less than an inch, but it was a start. I ignored the aching in my limbs and continued to bash at the pad until the dented hunk of metal finally came loose. It fell to the floor with a muted clatter.
There would be hell to pay in the morning, I knew, but until then I had to focus on survival. As I grabbed a pistol and shoved ammo into the pockets of my jacket, I ran through my priorities: Find the Inspector. Find Marconi. Get my family back. And stay the fuck away from Starfish and its little minions. Easy enough, right? Except item one on that list was already proving more difficult than expected, and if I couldn’t accomplish that much... I tried not to finish that thought.
I holstered the gun and inched past the dripping orb at the welcome desk. Then I pushed open the doors and strode out into the night. The moon overhead had somehow shrunk while I was inside - it was now crescent shaped, as if a cosmic spoon had swooped in and carved out a chunk off the top. My skin prickled, and I ran a thumb along the handle of the gun.
Find the Inspector. So far that mission was a bust, and I was officially out of ideas. Maybe Marconi would know where to go from here.
* * * * *
MY PHONE BUZZED AGAIN when I was half a mile away from Marconi’s house. I yanked it out of my pocket and held it up to my ear, trying to keep the bike steady.
“Marconi?” I said. “Tell me you have good news.”
For a few seconds the line was quiet, and I wasn’t sure Marconi had heard me. Then her shaky voice came floating out of the speaker.
“Janine’s not here,” she said. “There’s this... I don’t know. Some kind of alien light bulb where she was sleeping. I got back from my shift and found it floating there. Hannigan, what the fuck is going on?”
“Hell if I know,” I said. “The same thing happened with Ruth and the kids. I can’t find the Inspector so I’m as in the dark as you are. Just stay put and I’ll come find you. We can figure something out.”
Marconi coughed. Not a little cough, but a hacking wheeze that sounded staticky over the phone connection.
“I don’t feel so hot, Hannigan,” she said.
“Just stay put,” I repeated. “I’ll be there in a minute - Marconi?”
There was a thump on the other end of the line, like a body hitting the floor. The phone went silent.
“Marconi!” I shouted, my heart racing.
Nothing. I swore and pedaled faster, taking corners a little sharper than necessary. As I drew closer to Marconi’s house, I heard that same low moaning echo through the neighborhood. Little shadowy wisps scuttled along the ground, fading in and out of existence. I pedaled over them and burst them like balloons full of purple smoke.
I pulled up to Marconi’s home and dropped my bike onto the lawn, making a beeline toward the front door. The house was a compact two-story affair, with a simple blue paintjob and gray-shuttered windows. The skittering shadows seemed to be on the same trajectory as me. I stomped through them and raced up the front steps, where I tried the doorknob. Locked. Dammit. I jiggled the knob half a dozen times before giving up and pounding on the door frame.
“Marconi, it’s me!” I shouted. “Open up!”
But the door remained stubbornly closed. I remembered that awful thump on the phone and barreled into the wood with my shoulder, hoping to break it open. I lacked the immense strength of the Inspector, however, and I only succeeded in bruising my shoulder. Pain shot down my arm and I took a staggering step back.
The low moaning cut out, and I turned to face the driveway. The air rippled a bit as a tentacled blob folded out of nothing, its many limbs drooping onto the ground. I stood stock still as the starfish creature quivered, floating a few inches toward me. I pulled the gun from its holster and brandished it cautiously in front of me.
The starfish stopped quivering. In the folds of its viscous skin, a flap lifted, and a blood red eye squinted out at me from the center. It had no pupil, no iris. Just a blank red patch. But I knew it was staring at me. I could feel the prickle of its gaze on my skin.
move human i have come to end
I nearly dropped my gun. “You talk?” I said.
i am many humans purple man i gather humanspeak
The words didn’t issue from any mouth I could see but I could hear them clear as day, and they felt invasive in my eardrums, like the burrowing of that hive mind back at the old Glade radio station. I had to resist the urge to clap my hands over my ears.
“What do you mean, you’re ‘many humans’?” I asked. “You’re a fucking starfish monster from outer space, you couldn’t be anything less human.”
The creature gyrated, its entire body spinning in a slow vertical so that its tendrils slapped wetly on the pavement.
purple man dares utter fuck against i the ender i who come to snuff all things
My thoughts turned to Marconi. I had no idea what had happened to her during our phone call, but snuff all things was pretty damn clear, and there was no way in hell I was letting this ball of ugly get past me. I lifted the gun and aimed it straight at the blank red eye.
i end all things big and small i even end you purple man
My finger tightened on the trigger, but there was no kickback, no blast of gunfire; the weapon sparked a bit and went dark. Like every other mechanism I’d tried since waking up in this nightmare, the gun was dead here. I reared back and lobbed the useless hunk of metal like a baseball. It struck the Ender next to its crimson eye and sank, burbling, into the folds of flesh.
purple man fears the end but i am not here for him
The creature drifted closer, its tendrils coiled up at the ends like curls of dripping black hair.
not yet not tonight
I could hear my heart pounding. “Stay the fuck away from Marconi!” I shouted, but the air swallowed my voice, made it sound thinner and more pitiful than I’d intended. The Ender hovered toward me, and I stepped backward, but soon I had backed up against Marconi’s front door and there was nowhere left for me to go.
Run, Ruth whispered in my ear. But Ruth wasn’t here, she was a fucking globe of light dripping onto our bedsheets back home. Ruth was gone and Marconi was gone and the town was gone and the Inspector was in the fucking wind. I had never felt angrier. Or more alone.
I looked up at the purple moon. The void hurt my eyes, but I looked up at it anyway, letting that awful ringing fill my head. The moon had shrunk again, this time to the faintest sliver of a crescent. If I stared at it long enough, would my mind start to crumble? Or had it already crumbled? Was I comatose in a hospital bed somewhere, and this was the fucked up purgatory my brain had constructed to torture me?
The sliver of moon grew smaller, vanishing bit by bit, until there was nothing left in the sky but the blankness of the void. I lost all awareness of the Ender, of Marconi’s house, of the ground beneath my feet; gravity seemed to come undone, and I got the sense that if I jumped, I would float endlessly up into the sky, leaving purple streams of color in my wake.
Then the moon reappeared.
It was gradual at first, the sliver widening until it was rounder and more polished, as perfect as a sand dollar; then it shrunk again. It repeated this process, getting faster each time, until the movement became so rapid I could only describe it as blinking. And that’s when the realization rushed through me like ice in my veins.
It’s not a moon. It’s an eye.
No sooner had the thought crossed my mind than I became aware of a shape looming in the void: a dark, hulking thing, outlined by stars, vaguely humanoid but larger than a planet. Even the Ender paused to look up at it. I felt the vague sensation of urine trickling down my leg as a six-fingered hand materialized in the sky above us. It was translucent, turning the air behind it into a purple smudge. And as it fell toward us, I could feel blood gushing from my ears and nose, could feel my lungs tightening as some invisible pressure squeezed them and turned every breath into utter agony.
NO IT IS NOT HIS END TIME YOU DARE YOU DARE
The Ender’s voice had taken on a needly sort of whine, but I could barely hear it over the ringing that jostled back and forth inside my skull. I closed my eyes and clapped my hands over my bloody eardrums and roared - not at the sky, not at that giant falling hand. I just roared. I could feel the trembling in my throat but I couldn’t hear a sound. I curled up and screamed and felt hot tears streaming down my face, tears that felt thick like blood, and I was afraid that if I opened my eyes my sight would be gone forever, but it didn’t matter now, I would never open my eyes again, not with that planet-sized hand plummeting down to crush me into the barest of molecules -
“Mark. Open your eyes, Mark.”
I did. At first I thought the world had shifted again, because everything was red now, and turned on its side. Then I realized I was keeled over on Marconi’s front step. I tried to wipe the blood from my eyes but my hands refused to obey me, and when I looked down at them I saw they were shaking. My jeans were wet and streaked with blood and urine. The ringing had stopped, and when I looked up, my eyes burning and red and swimming with blood, I saw the reason why.
The Inspector had arrived.
Except I’d never seen an Inspector like this. Easily twenty feet tall, his skin prickling with little bright specks - stars - his cigar fuming like a chimney over our heads. The Ender’s single red eye stared up at him with something like abject horror. High up above, the moon had vanished again from the sky. This time I suspected it wasn’t coming back.
step aside purple king i must end it is my purpose
The starfish had started to spin in an angry circle, its eye blinking furiously. I pulled myself to a sitting position and stared at it.
“This is my domain,” the Inspector said. His voice should have boomed across town, given his height, but the sound was oddly subdued. “I have given you permission to wander as you will and carry out your purpose. Touch this human, or either of the humans in that house, and I will revoke that permission. You can wander the netherwastes, scrounging for what little scraps you can find. Do I make myself clear?”
The Ender cowered, but its voice seemed no less bitter.
clear as crystal in humanspeak a great injustice this is for i the ender
“Don’t talk of injustice to me, worm,” the Inspector said. “You may speak the human tongue but you are little more than a parroting beast. Now go. Leave this place, or test the limits of my mercy.”
The starfish made a series of psychic sputters before pivoting and folding out of existence. I blinked the redness out of my eyes, although behind it the world continued to remain as purple as ever. The Inspector stood there for a few minutes and stared at the spot where the Ender had been. Then he turned to face me. In that one motion, he went from being twenty feet tall to his usual seven feet, his skin becoming flat and gray once more.
“Mark,” he said. “Oh Mark, I’m so sorry.”
“Get the fuck away from me,” I said, except blood dribbled from my tongue as I did, and it came out more like “Gedda fug way fromme.” I scrambled backward and collided with Marconi’s front door again. The Inspector knelt down, his trench coat spilling over his feet, and looked at me with those inscrutable purple eyes.
I spat a glob of blood into the grass. “You’re not just some monster,” I said, clearer this time. “Jesus fuck, you’re bigger than this planet, one of your eyes is the size of the fucking moon! DON’T FUCKING TOUCH ME!”
The Inspector ignored my hysteria and placed a hand on my shin. I tried my best to kick him away, but one touch from him turned my whole body to jelly and sent me sprawling on the front stoop. I could feel a pleasing euphoria sweep through me, but I fought it. This wasn’t me. This wasn’t how I wanted to feel. The man in front of me was the farthest thing from a man it was possible to get and I wanted nothing to do with him. Not anymore.
“Please relax, Mark,” the Inspector whispered to me, his comforting voice as false as everything else about him. “I need to tell you something. You can judge me when I’m finished.”
“NO!” I screamed, but it was too late - his influence was working its way through me, pouring down every vein, tickling every nerve. I closed my eyes and found myself drifting. The pain squeezing my lungs lessened. The blood in my ears was gone. I took in a breath, and it was smooth, and easy, and warm.
“I want you to picture this, Mark, if you can,” the Inspector said quietly. “Picture a world in its infancy. A world where the only life wriggles under volcanic rocks or burrows in caves at the bottom of the ocean. You cannot truly imagine such a world because it is not a world for humans. But I was there. I am not human.”
Behind my eyelids, the world took shape, exactly as he had described: a wasteland of flowing lava and pits of boiling water. I shifted where I was lying but didn’t open my eyes.
“The world was not created for me, but I inherited it, in a sense. I became its watcher. The being who birthed it was a fickle thing, a perfectionist, who took one look at its creation and abandoned it for other projects. Nobody except me took interest in this lump of rock. I found it fascinating. I watched as life grew, as tiny organisms became complex plants and creatures. I watched as the beasts you call dinosaurs took over the earth, and I watched as they died in agony from a fragment of space debris. I watched the rise of your race in its earliest stages, and perhaps that was the most fascinating era of all, because you were so different from everything that came before. You developed tools. You formed a society. You described your world through stories on cave walls. I watched all this unfold with the eye of a curious observer, like one of your scientists examining a specimen. But I watched from afar. I wanted to get closer. I wanted to interact with these beings I found so delightfully peculiar.”
The Inspector went quiet. I opened my bleary eyes and saw him sitting on the stoop, facing away from me, his cigar puffing pure white smoke into the night.
“One day I decided to make myself known to them. They didn’t know how to react. I don’t think they even had a concept of gods, let alone beings like me. The strain of my presence broke them. Their brains collapsed, their bodies gave in, they fell to the ground writhing and foaming at the mouth. I did not fully understand the concept of death, not then, but I knew I had caused something that could not be undone. This filled me with what you might call shame, or regret, and I retreated. I resumed my watch from afar. The human race picked itself up and continued, and I stayed in my distant perch, afraid to step in again.
“But it became increasingly difficult. The more you grew, the more death I saw: some perpetrated among your own kind, some by the will of nature itself. I couldn’t escape what I had done all those millennia ago, and yet it pained me to watch as so many bright lights dimmed and went out forever. I wanted to do something. But I feared that I could only bring destruction, that intervening again would only make things worse. So I watched. And waited. And all the while, I worried that I was watching you fascinating creatures inch closer and closer toward extinction.
“But you weren’t the only ones occupying this world. Long ago, the empathic giants had torn open a rift from my world to yours, and a few cruel, hungry entities had taken the opportunity to slip through. They fed on your kind - some on your body, some on your spirit. And the more I watched, the more unease I felt. This was my jurisdiction, my responsibility. I may not have been able to stop the natural order of your world from killing humans, but I could very well prevent my own kind from doing the same. So I stopped being a watcher. I became the Inspector instead.”
The Inspector turned to look at me. I stared into those eyes of his and tried to find a trace of humanity, something to make him less alien, but I couldn’t. I looked into those pupils and all I could see was the moon.
“I am not like you,” he said. “I squeezed myself into this body but my essence can only be contained so much. You saw what a little piece of me is capable of, back in the old radio station. You have no idea what it’s like to walk around with a thousand nuclear bombs inside of you.” He exhaled, letting out a single smoke ring. “My very presence is a danger to you, and Sheriff Marconi, and your family. The only reason you and the sheriff are here right now is because enough of my influence has rubbed off on you. You’ve spent so much time around me that all it takes is a little slip -” He made a gesture with one of his slender hands. “And you’re behind the veil.”
The Inspector turned back to face the sky. Something contorted in his profile, and for the first time that night, I thought I detected a trace of human emotion - the mask of a person hiding a deep well of misery.
“I just want to make a difference, Mark,” he said. “Am I making a difference?”
I couldn’t answer him. I was starting to come back to myself, minus the hysteria, but the Inspector still seemed to be in this unreachable place. I had glimpsed his true self before. Tonight I had seen it in its entirety. How was I supposed to take that? This man, this entity I had taken to be my friend, could crush me with a single flick of his finger. He could probably squeeze the entire world until it popped like a watermelon. And I was supposed to trust him? How could we possibly go back to the way we were before?
I turned away from the Inspector and glanced around the purple-hued neighborhood. So this was the world beyond the rift. After the bizarre dimensions created by the wendigo, I’d expected something a bit more... exotic. Not the same world I knew with a color filter. Plus it was a lot emptier than I’d anticipated. Given the number of entities we’d dealt with so far, I’d thought the place would be swarming. But aside from the Ender and its scuttling minions, this world felt utterly lifeless.
Then I felt it. A tremor. It was barely perceptible, but I could see it in the shivering blades of grass, the skittering of pebbles across Marconi’s doorstep. The flecks of light swirled in an agitated spiral. Instinct drew my gaze upward, and in the depths of the empty sky, far, far in the distance, I saw a vast black shape stirring in the void.
The Inspector was suddenly at my side. “Time to go,” he said. “I’ll get the sheriff.”
There was something off about his voice - fear? Could a being like him even comprehend the concept of fear? I rose to my feet as the Inspector barreled into Marconi’s door and sent it crashing inward. He disappeared up a flight of stairs, his coat billowing behind him.
My eyes slid up to the sky, like a sailor searching for the North Star. The vast shape was still there. It was bulky, but long, like a whale with the body of an eel. As I watched, a forked tail swept lazily through the void. Ten seconds later a gust of wind blasted across the yard, whipping a cloud of those tiny specks in my face and forcing me to shield my eyes.
“I’ve got Olivia!” the Inspector shouted from behind me. I turned to see him dragging a half-conscious Marconi on his shoulder. His fedora tilted but remained stubbornly on his head as the winds continued to whip around us. I swayed where I was standing. A low bellowing filled the air, and I looked up to see the void whale opening its mouth, a gaping maw with no tongue and no teeth.
“Don’t look at it, Mark!” the Inspector barked. I felt his slender hand wrap around my arm, and suddenly the world jerked away, and all my senses went dead. Then excruciating pain shot through me. It felt like my body was turning inside out, like all my blood and viscera and searing nerve endings had swapped with my skin and turned me into some grotesque anatomy dummy. I opened my mouth to scream, but my vocal chords were gone, and nothing came out but agonizing silence -
And then it was over. I broke free from the Inspector’s grip and stumbled, gagging, onto Marconi’s front lawn. It took me a second to realize: the grass was green again. The sky was blackish-blue and riddled with stars. All the purple had washed away, and even though I felt like I was about to heave up my insides, I couldn’t help but let out a strangled laugh.
I got unsteadily to my feet and took in a deep breath of the crisp, piney air. Somewhere in the distance, I saw a pair of headlights cutting through the forest. The trees rustled and the wind felt cool on my face. An owl hooted, a cat yowled in some faraway yard, water burbled distantly through a series of waterfalls. I thought I even heard the blare of the alarm in the police station, several miles away.
Pacific Glade is alive, I thought. I’d never stopped to appreciate that before.
The Inspector knelt and placed a hand on Marconi’s forehead. She shuddered a bit, but otherwise didn’t react. Her glazed eyes stared out across the yard.
“The air beyond the rift didn’t agree with her,” the Inspector said. “Breathing too much of it put her under. She’s conscious now, but it’s going to take some time to get her back on her feet again.”
He straightened up and stared at me. The fedora shielded his eyes, which I was grateful for. I didn’t want to stare into those tiny moons again. I tried to force a smile but it didn’t even reach the corners of my mouth.
“You are making a difference, you know,” I said. “The Neverglades may be a blip in the scheme of things, but people are alive because of you. That’s not small to me.”
The Inspector’s smile was thin. “But?” he said. “I’m sensing there’s a caveat.”
My pitiful attempt at a smile faded. I looked away from him, turning my eyes to the grass. “I just - I can’t go back,” I said. “To the way things were. Not yet at least.”
The Inspector was quiet. “I understand,” he said. He stepped past me onto the driveway, his cigar smoke billowing around his face. He stopped in the middle and just stared down the stretch of road. I was glad his back was turned. I didn’t want to look at his face right now.
“I’ll call you when I’m ready,” I said. “But until then, I think we should get a little distance. Work our own cases. Marconi and I have been through enough to handle what goes bump in the night. I think we’ll be okay for now.”
“I’m sure you will,” he said. He turned his head slightly, as if meaning to look back. But then he tilted his hat and walked down the length of driveway instead. The smoke from his cigar sank to the ground as he walked, enveloping each footstep in an acid green cloud.
I watched the Inspector go, then helped a dazed Marconi up the steps into her house. As I sat her down on the bed, I looked at Janine sleeping peacefully on the other pillow, and I thought of Ruth. I knew when I got home I’d find her safe and sound - no more dripping globes of light - but I couldn’t shake that initial sinking I’d gotten in my gut when I’d seen what she’d become. Right then I just wanted to go home, slip under the covers, and hold her close. I needed that touch. I needed to remember what it meant to be human.
Marconi settled in, nestling up against Janine almost unconsciously, and I turned my eyes to the bedroom window. The moon was rising. Small and white, it hovered in the darkening sky, a little sliver of a crescent in all that darkness. In the light it cast, I could make out the Inspector’s slender form wandering down the streets of town, hands shoved in his pockets.
I watched him go, stark in his loneliness, until he disappeared into the tangle of houses down the block. Then I headed downstairs and grabbed my bike from the front lawn. I pedaled home in the other direction, tires whirring, the moonlight guiding my way.
