Dragon Tears (37 page)

Precisely in time with the silencing of traffic and vegetation, the music from the bar cut off mid-note.

Harry almost felt he had gone stone deaf. He’d never known a silence as profound in a controlled interior environment, let alone outdoors where the life of a town and the myriad background noises of the natural world
produced a ceaseless atonal symphony even in the comparative stillness between midnight and dawn. He could not hear himself breathe, then realized that his own contribution to the preternatural hush was voluntary; he was simply so stunned by the change in the world that he was holding his breath.

In addition to sound, motion had been stolen from the night. The tow truck and Volvo were not the only things that had come to a complete standstill. The curbside trees and the shrubbery along the front of The Green House seemed to have been flash-frozen. The leaves had not merely stopped rustling, but had entirely ceased moving; they could not have been more still if sculpted from stone. Overhanging the windows of The Green House, the scalloped valances on the canvas awnings had been fluttering in the breeze, but they had gone rigid in mid-flutter; now they were as stiff as if formed from sheet metal. Across the street, the blinking arrow on a neon sign had frozen in the ON position.

Connie said, “Harry?”

He started, as he would have at any sound except the intimate muffled thumping of his own racing heart.

He saw his own confusion and anxiety mirrored in her face.

Moving to his side, she said, “What’s happening?”

Her voice, aside from having an uncharacteristic tremor, was vaguely different from what it had been, slightly flat in tone and marginally less inflective.

“Damned if I know,” he told her.

His voice sounded much like hers, as though it issued from a mechanical device that was extremely clever—but not quite perfect—at reproducing the speech of any human being.

“It’s got to be him doing it,” she said.

Harry agreed. “Somehow.”

“Ticktock.”

“Yeah.”

“Shit, this is crazy.”

“No argument from me.”

She started to draw her revolver, then let the gun slide back into her shoulder holster. An ominous mood infused the scene, an air of fearful expectation. But for the moment, at least, there was nothing at which to shoot.

“Where is the creep?” she wondered.

“I have a hunch he’ll show up.”

“No points for that one.” Indicating the tow truck out in the street, she said, “For God’s sake…look at that.”

At first he thought Connie was just remarking on the fact that the vehicle had mysteriously halted like everything else, but then he realized what sight had pushed the needle higher on her astonishment meter. The air had been just cool enough to cause vehicle exhaust (but not their breath) to condense in pale plumes; those thin puffs of mist hung in midair behind the tow truck, neither dispersing nor evaporating as vapor should have done. He saw another but barely visible gray-white ghost suspended behind the tail pipe of the more distant Volvo.

Now that he was primed to look for them, similar wonders became evident on all sides, and he pointed them out to her. A few pieces of light debris—gum and candy wrappers, a splintered portion of a popsicle stick, dry brown leaves, a tangled length of red yarn—had been swept up by the breeze; although no draught remained to support the items, they were still aloft, as if the air had abruptly turned to purest crystal around them and had trapped them motionless for eternity. Within arm’s reach and just a foot higher than his head, two late-winter moths as white as snowflakes hung immotive, their wings soft and pearl-smooth in the glow of the streetlamp.

Connie tapped her wristwatch, then showed it to Harry. It was a traditional-style Timex with a round dial and hands, including not only hour and minute hands but a red second hand. It was stopped at 1:29 plus sixteen seconds.

Harry checked his own watch, which had a digital readout. It also showed 1:29, and the tiny blinking dot
that took the place of a second hand was burning steadily, no longer counting off each sixtieth of a minute.

“Time has…” Connie was unable to finish the sentence. She surveyed the silent street in amazement, swallowed hard, and finally found her voice: “Time has stopped…just stopped. Is that it?”

“Say what?”

“Stopped for the rest of the world but not for us?”

“Time doesn’t…it can’t…just stop.”

“Then what?”

Physics had never been his favorite subject. And though he had some affinity for the sciences because of their ceaseless search for order in the universe, he was not as scientifically literate as he should have been in an age when science was king. However, he had retained enough of his teachers’ lectures and had watched enough PBS specials and had read enough bestseller-list books of popularized science to know that what Connie had said did not explain numerous aspects of what was happening to them.

For one thing, if time had really stopped, why were they still conscious? How could they be aware of the phenomenon? Why weren’t they frozen in that last moment of forward-moving time just as the airborne litter was, as the moths were?

“No,” he said shakily, “it’s not that simple. If time stopped,
nothing
would move—would it?—not even subatomic particles. And without subatomic movement…molecules of air…well, wouldn’t molecules of air be as solid as molecules of iron? How would we be able to breathe?”

Reacting to that thought, they both took deep and grateful breaths. The air did have a faint chemical taste, as slightly odd in its way as the timbre of their voices, but it seemed capable of sustaining life.

“And light,” Harry said. “Light waves would stop moving. No waves to register with our eyes. So how could we see anything but darkness?”

In fact, the effect of time coming to a stop probably would be infinitely more catastrophic than the stillness and silence that had descended on the world that March night. It seemed to him that time and matter were inseparable parts of creation, and if the flow of time were cut off, matter would instantly cease to exist. The universe would implode—wouldn’t it?—crash back in on itself, into a tiny ball of extremely dense…well, whatever the hell dense stuff it was before it had exploded to create the universe.

Connie stood on her toes, reached up, and gently pinched the wing of one of the moths between thumb and forefinger. She settled back on her heels and brought the insect in front of her face for a closer inspection.

Harry had not been sure if she would be able to alter the bug’s position or not. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the moth had hung immovably on the dead-calm air, as fixed in place as a metal moth welded to a steel wall.

“Not as soft as a moth should be,” she said. “Feels like it’s made out of taffeta…or starched fabric of some kind.”

When she opened her fingers, letting go of the wing, the moth hung in the air where she had released it.

Harry gently batted the bug with the back of his hand, and watched with fascination as it tumbled a few inches before coming to rest in the air again. It was as motionless as it had been before they had toyed with it, just in a new position.

The ways in which they affected things appeared to be pretty much normal. Their shadows moved when they did, though all other shadows were as unmoving as the objects that cast them. They could act upon the world and pass through it as usual but couldn’t really interact
with
it. She had been able to move the moth, but touching it had not brought it into their reality, had not made it come alive again.

“Maybe time hasn’t stopped,” she said. “Maybe it just slowed way, way down for everyone and everything else except us.”

“That’s not it, either.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I can’t. But I think…if we’re experiencing time at such a tremendously faster rate, enough faster to make the rest of the world appear to be standing still, then every move we make has
incredible
comparative velocity. Doesn’t it?”

“So?”

“I mean, a lot more velocity than any bullet fired from any gun. Velocity is destructive. If I took a bullet in my hand and threw it at you, it wouldn’t do any damage. But at a few thousand feet per second, it’ll punch a substantial hole in you.”

She nodded, staring thoughtfully at the suspended moth. “So if it was just a case of us experiencing time a lot faster, the swat you gave that bug would’ve disintegrated it.”

“Yeah. I think so. I’d have probably done some damage to my hand, too.” He looked at his hand. It was unmarked. “And if it was just that light waves are traveling slower than usual…then no lamps would be as bright as they are now. They’d be dimmer and…reddish, I think, almost like infrared light. Maybe. And air molecules would be sluggish….”

“Like breathing water or syrup?”

He nodded. “I think so. I don’t really know for sure. Hell’s bells, I’m not sure even Albert Einstein would be able to figure this if he was standing right here with us.”

“The way this is going, he might show up any minute.”

No one had gotten out of either the tow truck or the Volvo, which indicated to Harry that the occupants were as trapped in the changed world as were the moths. He could see only the shadowy forms of two people in the front seat of the more distant Volvo, but he had a better view of the man behind the wheel of the tow truck, which
was almost directly across the street from them. Neither the shadows in the car nor the truck driver had moved a fraction of an inch since the stillness had fallen. Harry supposed that if they had
not
been on the same time track as their vehicles, they might have exploded through the windshields and tumbled along the highway the instant that the tires precipitously stopped rotating.

At the barroom windows of The Green House, six people continued to peer out in precisely the postures they had been in when the Pause had come. (Harry thought of it as a Pause rather than a Stop because he assumed that sooner or later Ticktock would start things up again. Assuming it was Ticktock who had called the halt. If not him, who else? God?) Two of them were sitting at a window table; the other four were standing, two on each side of the table.

Harry crossed the sidewalk and stepped between the shrubs to examine the onlookers more closely. Connie accompanied him. They stood directly in front of the glass and perhaps a foot below those inside the barroom.

In addition to the gray-haired couple at the table, there was a young blonde and her fiftyish companion, one of the couples who had been sitting near the bandstand, making too much noise and laughing too heartily. Now they were as quiet as the residents of any tomb. On the other side of the table stood the host and a waiter. All six were squinting through the window, leaning slightly forward toward the glass.

As Harry studied them, not one blinked an eye. No face muscles twitched. Not a single hair stirred. Their clothes draped them as if every garment had been carved from marble.

Their unchanging expressions ranged from amusement to amazement to curiosity to, in the case of the host, perturbation. But they were not reacting to the incredible stillness that had befallen the night. Of that, they were oblivious because they were a part of it. Rather, they were staring over Harry’s and Connie’s heads, at the place on
the sidewalk where the two of them had last been standing after Sammy and the dog had fled. Their facial expressions were in reaction to that interrupted bit of street theater.

Connie raised one hand above her head and waved it in front of the window, directly in the line of view of the onlookers. The six did not respond to it in any way whatsoever.

“They can’t see us,” Connie said wonderingly.

“Maybe they see us standing out there on the sidewalk, in the instant that everything stopped. They could be frozen in that split second of perception and not have seen anything we’ve done since.”

Virtually in unison, he and Connie looked over their shoulders to study the dead-still street behind them, equally apprehensive of the unnatural quietude. With astonishing stealth, Ticktock had appeared behind them in James Ordegard’s bedroom, and they had paid with pain for not anticipating him. Here, he was not yet in sight, although Harry was sure that he was coming.

Returning her attention to the gathering inside the bar, Connie rapped her knuckles against a pane of glass. The sound was slightly tinny, differing from the
right
sound of knuckles against glass to the same small but audible degree that their current voices differed from their real ones.

The onlookers did not react.

To Harry, they seemed to be more securely imprisoned than the most isolated man in the deepest cell in the world’s worst police state. Like flies in amber, they were trapped in one meaningless moment of their lives. There was something horribly vulnerable about their helpless suspension and their blissful ignorance of it.

Their plight, although they were almost certainly unaware of it, sent a chill along Harry’s spine. He rubbed the back of his neck to warm it.

“If they still see us out on the sidewalk,” Connie said, “what happens if we go away from here, and then everything starts up again?”

“I suppose, to them, it’ll appear as if we vanished into thin air, right before their eyes.”

“My God.”

“It’ll give them a jolt, all right.”

She turned away from the window, faced him. Worry lines creased her brow. Her dark eyes were haunted, and her voice was somber to an extent not fully attributable to the change in its tone and pitch. “Harry, this bastard isn’t just some spoon-bending, fortune-telling, sleight-of-hand, Vegas lounge act.”

“We already knew he had real power.”

“Power?”

“Yes.”

“Harry, this is more than power. The word just doesn’t convey, you hear me?”

“I hear you,” he said placatingly.

“Just by willing it, he can stop time, stop the engine of the world, jam the gears, do whatever the fuck it is he’s done. That’s more than power. That’s…being God. What chance do we have against someone like that?”

“We have a chance.”