Harley Higgins hadn’t gone to bed until 5:20 Monday morning. Even then he lay in the grip of such anguish and dread, exhaustion could not bear him into sleep. Although his parents weren’t dead, they were in some nameless condition that consigned them to lives conducted according to the direction of someone or something else. If there was no way to undo whatever had been done to them, they were lost to him forever, and he might as well be an orphan.
In two years, when he was made like them, he might be returned to their house to live, but he would not be truly Harley, and they would lead shadows of the lives they might have lived. They wouldn’t be the walking dead, because they wouldn’t be rotting and falling apart and all that, but they wouldn’t really be living, either. And judging by the available evidence, they wouldn’t know that they were changed, which was the most terrible thing of all.
His captors must have realized he was unable to sleep, because Noreen came at 6:30 with “a little special breakfast” that consisted of a bear claw, a cinnamon-pecan roll, and a glass of ice-cold milk. She insisted that the milk would help him sleep. There was probably a sedative in it. Harley didn’t care. He had no interest in the pastries, but he drank the milk.
He dreamed of a city where no one appeared to live: abandoned office towers and apartment buildings without tenants, broad avenues deserted, stalled cars unoccupied in the streets, the silence of death blanketing all. But the people who didn’t seem to be there anymore could still be seen reflected in store windows as they passed, in the polished-steel façade of a trendy shop, in the surface of a pool in the park. Their presence was attested to by mirrors, but the people who cast those images could not be seen. Harley gazed out from a hotel-lobby mirror, but he was invisible to himself when, standing before that reflection, he looked down at his body. When he understood that he lived only within the mirror, that he could no longer touch the world or be touched by it, his habitation limited to the thin plane between the glass and its silvery backing, he cried out in despair, but his cry produced no sound, as meaningless as the hopes of the dead and the desires of the never-born.
Ten hours after drinking the milk, at 4:30 Monday afternoon, Harley woke and sat up and threw aside the covers and got out of bed and knew that he must try again to escape, keep on trying no matter how often he failed, until he died trying or they locked him away.