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Hans turned towards the woman’s voice. He had the impression that the radio had just been switched on and the music had just begun. But that was impossible.

There’s nobody in the car. I must have been so preoccupied looking for the driver that I didn’t notice the music
.

The car radio must have been on the entire time, Hans told himself. When he peered through the open door into the driver’s seat, he noticed that the keys were in the ignition and the car was vibrating slightly. There was nobody inside and yet the radio and the engine had been left running, it seemed.

Hans continued to take stock of the situation. A woman’s cardigan and handbag sat on the passenger seat, and two open cans of Cola stood in the cup-holders in the console box between the front seats. There was no smell of cigarette smoke; in fact, the car smelled more like milk. The smell seemed to emanate from the child’s car seat installed in the back. A fluffy towel and a cup had been abandoned there, and the entire back seat smelled of milk as if a small child had been there just moments earlier. The cup itself was still half full of milk.

From the looks of it, Hans was quite sure there had been either three or four passengers in the car. Accounting for the driver, the woman in the front passenger seat, and the small child in the rear, there was only room for one more.

But where had they gone? All three or four of them seemed to have vanished into thin air, though the evidence suggested that they had been there just moments earlier.

Hans stepped back from the car and once again scanned the horizon, where the last sliver of sun was just disappearing, but there was no sign of the missing people. It seemed as if the red glow of the horizon was stronger than it had been a moment earlier, as if time were moving backwards.

Before setting out on this road trip, Hans had read about a number of urban legends that were currently generating buzz in the U.S. One of them popped into his mind now.

They were short vignettes, passed along by word of mouth among the younger generation who held them to be true. There were lots of variations, but they all conformed to more or less the same basic structure. Hans found himself recalling one such tale now:

This is a true story I heard from a friend at my school. My friend’s dad was driving on Highway 168, between Big Pine and Oasis. It was dusk. There were no houses in between the towns out there, no cars even. My friend’s dad was driving along, bored, when all of a sudden he saw three people walking along on the opposite side of the road. This is in the desert, way out in the middle of
nowhere. A guy and a woman carrying a small child were just walking along the highway. The man and woman had this stupefied, blank look on their faces, and for some reason the man was carrying a crushed Coke can
.

My friend’s dad slowed down. He figured these people were trying to hitch a ride, right? I mean, what else would they be doing out there? And how did they get out there to begin with?

But none of them even glanced at my friend’s dad’s car. They just kept on walking, staring straight ahead, with no sign of trying to hitch a ride. My friend’s dad found that pretty strange, but he kept going. But after a couple of miles he just couldn’t forget about those people, so he pulled a U-turn and went back. He figured he should at least try to talk to them. He figured he had a duty to at least ask them what they were doing out there and if they needed help. He wasn’t in a hurry or anything, so it wasn’t a big deal if he had to go out of his way a little bit
.

But when he got back, the three people were gone. It didn’t make any sense. Just a few minutes ago, they’d been wandering down the side of the highway. The land was totally flat and empty, with just the highway cutting through it, so where could they have gone? My friend’s dad drove another two miles before he gave up and turned around again, this time searching extra, extra carefully. But the three people were nowhere to be seen. They had vanished into thin air. So then, when my friend’s dad had driven onwards about five miles from where he’d seen those people, he came across a car totally flipped over onto its roof. There were black skid marks on the road, and the car was totally smashed up. Steam was rising up from the radiator and black oil was pooling on the road like blood. The smashed-up, upside-down window on the driver’s side was half open, and a man’s arm dangled limply out of the window. The hand was clenching a crushed Coke can, and it swayed gently back and forth, as if beckoning to my friend’s dad
.

There were a number of variations, and Hans had read similar stories in a number of books. Families of ghosts wandering the highways …

The sight Hans beheld now was different. Everything about the Pontiac suggested that it had held passengers just moments earlier. But somehow, they had vanished from sight, as if swallowed up by the desert. In fact, it brought to Hans’ mind the image of a ghost ship at sea.

On the one hand you had the vast ocean, on the other, a North American desert. The setting was different, but the common thread was the theme of an empty vessel, its inhabitants absent but the traces of their existence still very much apparent.

Then again …

Perhaps there was a much simpler explanation, Hans reminded himself. Maybe the car had broken down and when the family had pulled over, another car had happened by and given them a lift. Perhaps they had grabbed only the barest of necessities and headed back towards Route 58.

That was probably what had happened. Hans had almost convinced himself when the scent of citrus reached his nostrils. The tangy, lemony scent hit him full force.

Maybe some sort of desert plant gives off this scent
, he mused. But the fragrance was so fresh and juicy. He breathed deeply, his nostrils twitching and his eyes widening.

Perhaps it was just his imagination, but he thought he felt the earth vibrate ever so slightly. Not like an earthquake, really, more like something bubbling up from underfoot. Like when you stand above a subway vent and a train goes by below, sending up gusts of warm, humid air.

Hans was dressed casually in a t-shirt and shorts, leaving much of his skin exposed. The breeze ruffled his leg hair and the hem of his t-shirt as it blew up his back to the nape of his neck. He took a step backwards, and then another.

There was no need to look up; Hans knew there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. This was no ordinary wind. It was absolutely localized, gusting suddenly straight up from the ground in just one spot.

He recoiled and raced back to his car. Less than a minute had elapsed since he’d parked his car and gone to investigate the Pontiac, but it felt like much longer. He opened the door, slid into his seat, and released the parking break. “All right, let’s go,” he said to his wife.

There was no reply. Hans didn’t need to glance towards the passenger seat. Even staring straight ahead, he knew.

His wife wasn’t there.

“Claudia!” Hans cried, almost shrieking. His body turned to stone. Where was his wife? Even if she’d gotten out of the car and run as fast as she could, she couldn’t have gone far. Hans looked left and right, but Claudia was nowhere to be seen.

But more than the terror of his wife’s disappearance, Hans was paralyzed by something he sensed behind him, an unidentifiable presence that seemed to grow ever closer. He had never experienced anything like it. The hairs at the nape of his neck stood on end. Hans knew Claudia hadn’t snuck into the back seat to give him a scare. This was nothing so innocent. In the dark stillness, he could feel the air waver ever so slightly,
like the warm clamminess of someone breathing slowly in the back seat. The air flowed over the console box. Not from the air vents, but from behind. Slow, rhythmic breathing …

“Clau …”

Hans tried to call his wife’s name again, but his voice stuck in his throat. He knew he could catch a glimpse of the back seat through the rearview mirror, but he lacked the courage to look. Of course, he knew there was nothing there. But what on earth was going on? Hans had no idea what to do. Should he open the door and dive out of the car? Or step on the gas and speed off?

As if trapped in a nightmare, he found himself rooted to the spot. He was finding it harder and harder to breathe. He tried to inhale and began to choke, tears welling in his eyes as he coughed and sputtered. In just a few brief moments, the world had gone mad. But he didn’t even know what it was that was strange. Outside, Soda Lake glowed ever redder in the chasm between the mountains.

As if in response to the reddening surface of the lake, Hans felt a hand reach out from behind him and tickle his earlobe, whispering sweetly in his ear. Indescribable seduction. Hans knew what the thing wanted. It wanted him to turn around. It wanted him to see once and for all what was in the back seat.

Come on. Look back here. Hurry
.

Hans struggled desperately, but he knew it was inevitable. In a matter of ten seconds—no, less, probably—he would have to turn and look.

9:34 p.m., December 13, 2012

Summit of Mauna Kea, Island of Hawaii

Even in Hawaii, where summer was said to reign all year long, at 4,200 meters above sea level the temperatures were below freezing. Mark Webber, a member of the Hawaii outpost of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, had just returned from the dome that housed the Subaru Telescope and was taking a seat at the monitors in the adjacent control building. He hadn’t walked far, but the frigid air had chilled him to the bone, and he was still shivering.

All Mark had to do was descend the mountain into the town of Hilo, and he could stand on the beach in the summery sun. When he returned to the summit it would be winter again. Mark had now been living in this summer-winter dichotomy for five years. Of the two, he preferred the warm sunny beaches, but with Christmas approaching, the mountaintop
scenery certainly had its charms. His plans to spend Christmas vacation with his fiancée Miki were coming along smoothly, and the very thought made him hum a cheerful melody. They would make a long overdue return to the mainland and stay in Las Vegas for a week, taking in as many shows as they could. The plan had been in the works since last year, and Mark had managed to obtain tickets to everything they wanted to see. It was finally really going to happen. He buzzed with excitement anticipating his last prenuptial Christmas.

Leaned all the way back in his computer chair, he reached for a sandwich on a nearby cart. When he sat back up again, the motion brought into view a section of the distant sky. The monitors he sat before displayed light patterns gathered by Subaru’s 8.2-meter-wide lens, the largest single one on the planet.

Mark had peered into countless telescopes since junior high school, when he’d first taken an interest in astronomy, and each time he was utterly enchanted by the glittering views of space they contained. At an altitude of 4,200 meters, with air pressure two-thirds that of sea level, the sky was usually clear and dry at Mauna Kea’s summit. The conditions here were ideal, and the Subaru was one of the world’s most sophisticated telescopes. Not surprisingly, the view in the monitors was breathtaking. It bore almost no resemblance to the sky he’d viewed through the telescope he’d gotten for Christmas as a boy.

As Mark finished his sandwich and reached for his mug of hot coffee, his hand froze in mid-air. It was an unconscious response, and for a moment he didn’t even know what it was that had made him freeze. Probably some slight disturbance in the monitors before him. The telescope was currently pointed at the Sagittarius constellation, towards the Milky Way bulge. He was investigating the electromagnetic waves surrounding the black hole thought to be at the center. Had he spotted one such wave? No, that wasn’t it. It was something more basic, something even a child could notice.

Mark entered a command to set the images back in time by one minute. The view was automatically recorded by a separate device, so he could rewind the footage without causing any problems. He stared intently at the images, trusting himself to pick up whatever it was that had given him pause.

“What?” Mark said aloud, leaning in towards the monitors. He rewound the footage by two seconds, then played it back again, in slow motion this time.

A tiny dot of light vanished quietly from the screen. As clear as day, the footage showed a magnitude-three star on the opposite side of the Milky Way’s center that was there one moment, and the next, gone. And almost exactly one second later, a nearby star also vanished. Two stars located fairly close to each other had disappeared, one after the other.

Stars gave off light due to the nuclear fusion reaction taking place at their core, and the lifespan of a star depended on its size and the amount of matter it contained. That was not to say that a star with greater mass had a longer lifespan. In fact, in a star with more mass, the greater gravity would accelerate the process of nuclear fusion, causing it to burn out sooner. Stars with less mass underwent fusion more gradually and were therefore longer-lived. Our sun was somewhere in between, with an estimated lifetime of around ten billion years. When we see a star disappear from our vantage point on Earth, it had actually met its demise long, long ago.

The first possibility that popped into Mark’s mind was that the stars had met their end by way of a supernova explosion. He couldn’t say for sure without analyzing their non-infrared electromagnetic profiles. In any case, it was extremely rare to witness a star’s death, and he could barely contain his excitement. On the other hand, deep inside, Mark harbored a flickering doubt. The stars had vanished so suddenly, without any final flare up. They didn’t appear to have been enveloped in some enormous astral phenomenon. Rather, they had simply, spontaneously and irrevocably, ceased to exist.

If he could pinpoint the location of the missing stars and their distance from Earth, he would know how long ago the event had taken place. He had probably just witnessed phenomena that had taken place thousands or tens of thousands of years ago.

Quickly, Mark reported what he had seen to the Hilo Base Facility, making mention of the fact that the electromagnetic waves required analysis. The Hilo Base Facility in turn fiber-optically transmitted the report of two successive star disappearances to NAOJ headquarters in Mitaka, Tokyo.