This is the power that Cyrus contains, she is realizing; he has the power to destroy her college, her friends, this little town that has done nothing wrong.

Cyrus, again, seems to read her mind and he says aloud,

"Don't worry, I can't do that." He looks around at the foyer again, taking in the details of the stonework. "But you will have to say goodbye to this place. Eventually she will come."

Petra turns to him; she can tell that Sam is watching them with wide eys, listening to every word they say.

"The woman those people say was there... is that her? Is that..."

"Iia? Yes. And she we come here, eventually. In time she will have covered the whole world, touched everything that man has built, and she will return everything to its original state. She's going to dissasemble the very world you live in, so you'd better accept it now. Better now than later."

"But how will we survive?" asks Petra frantically, her voice rising painfully, screetching in the back of her throat. "If all of our industries are gone, if our economy goes? How will we live?"

"Dikyn will teach you new ways, don't worry. Those who follow us will see a new day for man, we're not going to leave you here to struggle to survive. We'll look out for you. It's our job." He raises his eyebrows and touches his nose, as if he is divulging some sort of humorous secret. Then he starts to slowly pace about the room, his hands clasped behind his back, and he waits.

Sam shakes Petra's arm.

"What the Hell is going on? Who is he?" Her eyes dart between the televsion and Petra's face. "Are you in on this? Do you know what's happening over there?"

Petra shakes her head, wriging her hands in her lap. Her notebook is still in her arms, it's pages cold and the binding freezing from hours outdoors.

"I don't know what's going on. But he has something to do with it. Something's happening. I don't know if it's terrorism, or the apocalypse... or...what. But something bad is happening, someting very bad."

Sam puts her hand over her mouth. She speaks in a hushed, barely-there whisper, but Petra knows what she says.

"Oh God Petra, are we going to die? Is he going to kill us?"

She shakes her head again, though she is not certain.

"I don't think so. Not if we do what he says. Don't worry. The media already knows, the government already knows. Someone will come for us. We'll be fine."

Sam nods nervously and takes Petra's hand, a few of the other students have overheard their conversation and are looking at eachother worriedly.

Cyrus suddenly speaks, turning towars the gathering of students and adressing each of them.

"There's no use in heading out tonight, it'll be to damn cold and dark to get much done. Plus, there's no use in hiding, going out when no one can see us. Get a good nights rest here, and gather up all of your friends, your teachers. I want everybody on this campus leaving with us in the morning; I don't want to leave anybody behind. I'll wake you up in the morning, be ready to go. I'll give you a half hour to eat and gather all of the supplies you'll need. We'll be walking a long way, so don't waste energy."

No one knows what to say, and the room is absolutely silently still except for the sound of the televsion; the news is back on, though no one is listening.

"Don't look so terrified. Nobody's going to get hurt, nothing's going to explode, I'm not going to make anything dissapear. But you do have to get out of here; we have to gather everyone we can. Tomorrow we'll go through the town and get everyone else. I want this whole city to be abandoned this time tomorrow.

"Now go to bed!" He finishes, akwardly and with a little flourish of his hands; like a mother waving her children off to bed.

Nobody moves, and Cyrus shrugs and walks outside, as if he is done with them. Before he leaves he mumbles;

"It's not my fault if you feel like crap in the morning."

Once he is outside the room explodes into commotion, someone darts for the phone on the wall and presumably calls the police, someone else runs to the door and tries to bolt it, others simply remain where they are, trying to stay as motionless as possible, as if danger won't be able to detect them if they stay still enough. Petra stands slowly and starts towards the stairs. She is going to get her winter jackets and mittens and hats and scarves; all of her novelty cold weather accesorries; she is going to get them and pack them up; prepare a bag just like Cyrus said. She is not going to try and fight.

"Petra, what are you doing?" It's Sam, who is trailing at her elbow, her blond hair shaking as she climbs the stairs, her eyes darting everywhere and anywhere.

"I'm doing what he says. He's not going to hurt us. But if we stay here, something will, someone will. The woman is real; the woman they talked about on the news. She's coming this way, she's coming everywhere. If we don't follow them we'll be left behind and we'll die, Sam."

All of the color in Sam's face drains visibly, her skin as white and lifeless as the snow sitting peacefully on the dorm roof. Her eyes are watery and wide, her lower lip trembling, her hand clinging white knuckled and red to the bannister.

"They're going to detroy everything; our businesses and our economy... everything. If we don't prepare and work with them; we'll die."

Sam is still trying to put the pieces together, the geers in her head woring almost audibly.

"But how can they do it? Someone will stop them. The army, someone."

Petra shakes her head and can't beleive the words that come out of her mouth.

"No. No they won't. No one can stop them, Sam. They're not human. We can't fight the will of God."

Every time the little bell over the coffee shop door rings, Lucas looks up, waiting for Carey to return. He isn't sure why he is so anxious about his return, but the longer he sits alone in the coffee shop, the more anxious he becomes. Carey is the only person here he knows; the only person who isn't entirely a stranger, but Lucas reminds himself that Carey is a stranger, that he doesn't know much more about him than his name and age, little more than he could pick up on an internet chat.

He doesn't know how he'll be able to move without Carey either; his arms and legs are not adjusting well to the cold and lack of medication, and a new assortment of bruises have sprung up all over his body, growing and throbbing with each passing hour. He is too embarrassed to ask someone to help him; he's never been debilitated and in a wheelchair before. Carey had just sort of popped out of the woodwork, he hadn't had to ask for help; it had been freely and unexpectedly given and there was no shame involved. And Lucas didn't want to be handed off from person to person like a burden, the idea of it was humiliating.

Again, Lucas checks the clock on the wall; Carey has been gone for nearly an hour. The extra hot chocolate that the servers gave him out of pity is nearly cold now, Lucas had been saving it for Carey when he got back, but it looks as if he might have to drink it himself; that or throw it away.

His flowers are sitting on the table in front of him, he has set them by the window in a gesture of good intentions; but the move is fruitless, the sun is gone and the window is cold. The petals are beginning to shrivel, the edges turning the lightest shade of golden brown, as if the roses have been cooking in an oven. He turns the vase around and watches the flowers rotate, listening to the soft glassy scraping of the vase on the table. The bell on the door jingles again, but when he looks up it is still not Carey who enters.

He takes out his journal; still hidden in the folds of his sweatshirt, and he lays it on the table. In his dash out of the hospital room he didn't think to grab a pen or pencil; not that he had one anyway. He isn't sure that he would have written something anyway, he isn't sure what he would say about today, he can't think of words that would do the day justice. He tries it out in his head, opening the journal to the back writing invisible words on the blank page with his mind.

Dear Diary,

You are so not going to believe this.

Today a strange naked man appeared in my dream and made me fall out of bed. When I woke up I was totally dressed and then there was an explosion and I ran downstairs. But I didn't run because I wasn't in a wheel chair, and Oh My God I'm a fucking cripple. After that the man from my dream reappeared in front of all these people who wanted to escape from the hospital. He promised us freedom and heath and then he said he was Moses and brought down the ten commandments.

Then this guy named Carey showed up and started asking me all sorts of personal questions out of the blue. He's got nice eyes but the worst sense of style I have ever seen. Not that I was caring about that because we were in a crisis, remember. So this other girl comes in and I think some people got shot, but then she went upstairs with a cop following her and it was a while before she came back, but we were all outside by then. There were hundreds of us, I don't know how so many people just appeared.

Then the girl comes back out and touches the building and POOF it's gone, just like that. Holy Crap I swear you wouldn't believe it. Then we split up and started walking for hours, except I wasn't walking because I was still in a wheelchair, because I'm still a fucking cripple. Finally we stop and everyone starts robbing this outlet center, only their not looting, their just taking things and not paying and nobody seems to give a shit; like they just gave me two coffees without blinking an eye like it happens every day.

I don't think stuff like this happens every day.

Holy shit, Carey's back, thank God. I think I'm going to marry him.

Sincerely,

Lucas.

The jingling of the bell had snapped Lucas out of his strange reverie, and when Carey starts approaching the table, he finishes his mental journal entry and then snaps his journal closed, stuffing it back into his sweatshirt. Carey looks a little confused, but doesn't say anything. The confused look stays, and Lucas realizes that he must be confused about something else, and even when Lucas waves him over he still looks slightly dazed, as if he has been hit in the face with something heavy.

"Hey, Carey? Earth to Carey."

This seems to temporarily snap him out of it, because he looks up and finally seems to register Lucas in the corner of the coffee shop, and he walks over, a pile of coats and hats and mittens in his arms. he sits down in the booth, his body making a comfortable whooshing noise and it settles down into the leather.

"I got us some gear." He dumps his spoils onto the table, sorting through it as he explains each item, showing them off like some strange version of a television home shopping host.

"A nice, lined jacket for you; it's got really nice fabric on the outside, like kevlar. I think it was expensive. And gloves, I got waterproof ones for when the snow really starts. And I got hats; they're sort of dumb, but they'll keep your head warm." He hands over a blue coat and gloves and a black knit hat. "I got you a fleece blanket-sort of thing too, for your legs, until you can walk again." He hands that over, and Lucas wraps it around his lap, the weight and heat of it instantly gratifying.

"Thanks," He says, rubbing his hands over the soft fleece lining of the jacket. "This stuff's nice."

Carey shrugs.

"It'll keep us warm, anyway."

Lucas passes him the cold cup of cocoa.

"You can have this; I think they gave it to me out of pity. It's cold, but I bet it still tastes like chocolate, which is all that really matters anyway." Carey takes the cup and gulps a fair portion of it down.

"We need to eat. I completely forgot."

"You forgot?" Lucas had been expecting some food in the very least, especially after it took him such a long time to come back. "What have you been doing all this time?"

"I talked to that guy. Dikyn." After he says this he seems to fall back into his confused, hazy state, and Lucas has to reach across the table and give his arm a shake in order to get him to wake up again.

"And? What's got you so..."

Neither of them can come up with a word to describe his mood; Lucas because he can't really place a name on the blankness, and Carey can't because he isn't sure exactly what he is feeling; it is more like a lack of emotion than any particular thing.

"I asked him what they were, the Olanaiia things. And he took my hand," Carey holds out his palms and studies them as if they are totally new, as if he has never seen t hem before. "And I swear to God, it was like I traveled the world in an instant and I suddenly had all this... knowledge of things." He slowly turns his head from side so side, breathing in and out, trying to find his bearings. "I don't know how to explain it. I wish I could."

Lucas is still for a moment, remembering his dream and the moment that Dikyn had touched him, when he had seen the strange creatures and the boy being knocked back. As he watches Carey studying his hands he suddenly realizes that Carey was the boy in his dream.

"Carey," says Lucas loudly, almost loud enough for everyone in the room to hear, "Did you get knocked over this morning. Like blasted over? While a bunch of people were shouting at you?"

Now it is Carey's turn for silence, and the two boys stare at each other for a few long moments while the busy chatter of the coffee shop continues around them.

"How do you know?" Carey finally asks, his eyes frozen on Lucas.

"I had a dream this morning, and Dikyn was in it. And he touched me, just like he touched you and the same thing happened. It was like a flew all over the place and saw all these...things, and one of them was you being knocked back as a bunch of people screamed 'WE WANT OUT!' or something. I didn't figure out it was you until just now." He takes a breath and presses his hands to his temples. "It must have been real; the whole thing must have been totally real..."

"You saw the Olanaiia, like I just did. You must have seen me because I was with Iia this morning; she just popped out of nowhere after this car crash..." Carey stops and suddenly starts to laugh, almost silently, but he doubles over and nearly puts his face in his cocoa, his shoulders moving up and down as the laughter comes out in silent spurts, his breath puffing across the table and dancing on Lucas' hands. He finally stops himself and leans back in his booth, putting a hand across his face. "God, today has been insane."

Lucas doesn't say anything, because he figures Carey is speaking for both of them, and after a moment Carey lowers his hand and leans into the table, his eyes sparkling.

"I've got to tell you about this morning, I've got to tell somebody or I'm going to explode." He makes an expansive gesture with his arms. "Maybe if I hear myself say it it'll seem more real."

Lucas nods and waits for Carey to begin.

Carey wets his lips and moves a bang from his eye, and then begins.

"...and then we ended up in the hospital and I just went over to you; I couldn't figure out why. It was just like I felt like you knew me, or knew something about all of this, especially since you spoke up about all of it."

Lucas nods as Carey winds into the end of his story, and he props himself up on his elbows, leaning across the table.

"Maybe it was because of the dream," says Lucas ponderously. "I mean, maybe I was really there and you knew it." He squints his eyes closed and tries to make sense out of it. "I don't know. That sounds insane."

"Nothing could sound insane after today."

Lucas snorts and nods, playing with a folded up straw.

"What did you see, when Dikyn touched you?" he asks. "You said you whisked all over the world, but then you said you had this 'knowledge'. Did he tell you what the Olanaiia were?"

Carey looks out the window and suddenly spots the roses. He reaches into his the pocket of his undercoat, a thin autumn thing made of grayish wool, and pulls out the flower that Lucas had given him earlier, replacing it in the vase among its fellows. As Lucas watches him do this he becomes unexpectedly emotional, and he turns away and rubs his itching eyes.

"He didn't exactly tell me what they were," he starts, still looking at the roses. "But it was like he sort of explained it without words. It was as if all the sudden I just... knew."

"So what are they? Are they people?"

Carey looks very distant, and he shakes his head slowly.

"No. They're not even alive." He pauses and sighs with frustration. "It's weird to explain."

Lucas raises an eyebrow.

"Try anyway."

"They're ideas. Well, not ideas, really. They're embodiments of real things, like physical manifestations of abstract, non physical things." He grits his teeth and tries to find a better description.

"Then how can they talk, and touch people?"

"They can't. It's all in our heads. We see them, and we can't quite understand what they are, so we create bodies and voices for them in our minds. So when you touch them you encounter this... lack of substance and things happen. Like when someone touches Iia... they die."

"They DIE?"

"Yeah, I saw it happen to a woman. And if you try to hurt them, or affect them with something, the damage will only fly back and hit you, because you're really only affecting yourself because they don't actually exist..." Carey rubs his forehead. "Does this make any sense?"

"It makes a little." Lucas smirks. "Don't worry about it, relax. You look like you're about to explode."

Carey laughs and sits back, relieved that he doesn't have to try and go into any more detail.

"If you want to know a little more about it later ask me, I'll try to come up with a better description."

"Let's go and find some food," says Lucas, and he slides out of the booth and lifts himself into his wheelchair, squinting with the effort.

"Are you okay?" Carey follows Lucas out of the booth and takes the handles of the wheelchair, pushing him along as he slides on his jacket and readjusts the blanket around his legs.

"I'm bleeding a lot... I haven't gotten any of my meds in a while."

"What's wrong? I mean how bad did you hurt yourself?" Carey steers them towards the door and tries to spot a restaurant, or a grocery.

"It's not that. I'm hemophilic. Which is a real pain in the ass when you throw yourself down a flight of stairs."

"Hemophilia... is that where you can't like... stop bleeding?"

"Yeah, but it's internal bleeding that's really more of a problem. My joints have swelled up and I bruise like crazy. It was starting to go down in the hospital, but they were giving me clotting factor. I've just got to take it really easy..." He settles into the chair, deceptively calm, "and hope for the best."

"Holy shit, Lucas. Are you really going to be okay? Do I need to get you somewhere?"

"I don't want to go near a hospital. I want to see this almighty healer person, and I die on the way, well that's just Natural Selection at work and it's too damn bad."

Carey stops and feels a chill go down his spine.

"Hey... don't give up." Carey knows that the sentiment is weak, but it's all he has to give and he means it sincerely. "You'll make it."

"I probably will. It'd just be too damn ironic if I died of natural causes."

Carey tries to laugh it off and stay upbeat. "Hey, lighten up. Where do you want to eat?"

Lucas shrugs. "Anywhere that serves hot food."

Carey steers them into a buffet-style Chinese restaurant. It's crowded, but most of the people seem to have come and gone already. The owners are gathered behind the front counter; a dark lacquered desk covered in cheap but charming golden monkeys and dragons, and they look equal parts terrified and accepting.

When they see Carey and Lucas a waiter springs fourth out of nowhere and guides them to a table, laying out their silverware and plates as if they were the most upstanding of paying customers. He moves aside the chairs so that Lucas can sit at the table in his wheel chair, and though he is humerously low, he looks far more comfortable. Carey offers him his coat to sit on and helps him adjust in the chair; he looks as if he is getting weaker and more sore with each passing moment; though it could just be Carey's imagination.

"What do you want? I'll get it for you."

A very faint smile flits across Lucas' mouth before disappearing again.

"Anything. MEAT. God I need protein. Nothing spicy, I guess. I couldn't take the shock."

Carey takes their plates and heads over to the buffet. The restaurant reminds him of his grandmother; of her beautiful carved glass goblets, of that afternoon when she took them out and fed them all the Chinese food they could eat, trying to help ease the pain of their guilt. He smiles to himself and loads up with food; the smell and the bright colors of the sauces filling his memory; making him laugh. He hasn't eaten Chinese food in years.

He sits back down and hands Lucas his meal; surprised when he whips out a set of wooden chopsticks from the table and breaks them apart, using them expertly to pick up all of the chicken and pork and noodles on his plate.

"I never could figure chopsticks out," comments Carey, picking up a fork. "This place reminds me of my Grandma, she used to take us out to a place like this."

Lucas is too busy eating to speak, but he nods and makes a strange full-sounding noise in his throat. Soon they are both full and warm and contented, their stomachs stretching over all of the delicious comfort food.

"Where do we sleep?" wonders Lucas randomly, his mind still practical. Carey is still drifting in an out of childhood memories, a strange, distant smile plastered on his face.

"I guess anywhere we want." He looks around. A few groups of people have already made camp here, laid out on their jackets and sweatshirts, under tables and in corners. The waiters and walking around handing people fortune cookies and telling off-color jokes, trying to lighten the mood. "This place isn't too crowded."

Lucas stares at Carey and then scratches his eye, trying not to laugh.

"You want to sleep in a Chinese Restaurant?"

"Well, we could try for the mattress factory but I bet everyone had that idea already."

Lucas tries to hold the laughter in but it breaks out of him in a few quick bursts.

"Okay." He throws his hands up as if in surrender. "Okay, we'll sleep in the Super China Buffet."

After the waiter busses their table, they settle down next to it by the wall. Carey lays out all of the coats and hats and helps Lucas to lie down, making sure his body is cushioned from the Berber carpet. He is afraid to give Lucas any new bruises; almost afraid to touch him. He takes off his own woolen undercoat and uses it as a pillow, adjusting his body to the hard, flat floor.

They are silent for a few moments; watching people move about the restaurant. Carey wonders if there are people here who actually just came here to eat; who didn't traipse in with the crowd following Dikyn. He wonders if they will stay and leave with them when they take off again, or if they will simply drive away in their cars, unwittingly going off to their deaths. He hopes for their sakes that tomorrow the crowd is bigger by several hundred people.

"What time is it?" Lucas asks suddenly, turning over on his mat of jackets to look at Carey.

"I have no idea. I didn't bring a watch." Carey is not as disturbed by this as he might have been only 12 hours ago; his notion of time has changed quite dramatically in a very short span.

Lucas looks around for a clock and when he unable to find one he settles back down and lays on his back, his arms crosses elegantly over his stomach, his hands loosely clasped. "I bet its like... only seven. You know how it gets dark really early."

Carey nods, his body sinking into the floor, his eyes drooping. He has barely been on the ground five minutes and he is already dozing off; the day of walking has worn on him. He will be sore in the morning. Before he is totally asleep he hears Lucas ask,

"Why are you doing this? You don't even know me"

Carey might have answered but he isn't sure what he says, and before he knows it he is asleep.

The restaurant is dark now, the lights have finally been switched off and everyone has settled down to sleep; even the owners and the waiters have laid down across the floor. Lucas knows that everyone is asleep, or at least they are pretending to be, and the room is silent except for the strange metallic white noise that comes from the heating system and the occasional snore.

Lucas can hear Carey breathing slowly beside him; he's been asleep for nearly three hours to Lucas' estimation, and he can't blame him. He actually feels guilty; Carey pushed him all the way here, through grass and up hills and without a single complaint. He knows that given the reversed situation he would never have done it, and a shameful feeling creeps over him as he listens to him breathe, each exhalation a selfless blessing to the world.

Lucas cannot sleep; he is afraid that if he closes his eyes and tries to dream that Dikyn will reappear and knock him around again, or make him see things again. So instead he sat up after Carey fell asleep, watching the restaurants business wind down until finally people were only coming inside to sleep. The room is full, bodies sprawled everywhere like some sort of demented sleepover, and Lucas watched all of them from his sideways view on the ground, trying to figure out who they where, why they were all here.

He is here by chance; he would probably be dead if Carey hadn't wheeled him out of the hospital. He hadn't really had any intention of leaving the lobby and going anywhere. But it was as if Carey had picked up on some subconscious yearning he had to leave, and Lucas had found that he wasn't as apposed to leaving as he thought he should have been.

The room is full of people, and every other place must be the same, people all over the floor, shop owners and cashiers and waiters and stock boys staying over night with their customers, waiting to be rescued or waiting to leave. He wonders how many of these people actually came from the city, from the hospital, how many of these people were next to him on his floor.

As he watched them settle down for the night, Lucas noticed that the most astonishing thing about the crowd was the fact that nobody seemed to be alone. People traveled in small groups, sometimes just two, like him and Carey, and sometimes as many as nine or ten people would come in together. With some groups, you could tell that they had known each other before the event; people who were friends, who were going along their business together when Dikyn or Iia or someone came along and made them follow. Some are couples; husbands and wives, girlfriends and boyfriends, children and parents.

Others, it is clear, have never met each other before, and for several hours the air was filled with introductory conversations; people getting to know one another in these extraordinary circumstances, whispered life stories, new friends being made right before his eyes. It made him want to turn around and shake Carey out of his sleep; ask him more about his brother, ask him what his favorite color is. Why hadn't he bothered to ask before? Why hadn't it mattered? Why had everything been so focused on the fear and the uncertainty. Carey was a good guy, Lucas was unbelievably lucky to have had him pick him out of the crowd; he couldn't have hand picked a better traveling companion.

But now the room is silent, and everyone seems to be asleep except for Lucas. His large blue eyes are wide open and staring vacantly at the far wall; the wallpaper smattered with twirling, winding dragons, little cartoon temples and exotic plants flowering all over the scene. In the darkness it is revealed by little spots of light that leak in from the parking lot and the flickering signs over the shop doors, the faces of the creatures on the wall coming and going as cars pass by.

Lucas feels inexplicably alone, the lone sentient in a room full of sleeping bodies. He is the only one who has eyes and ears, and mouth to scream with, should something happen in the dark. He is sure that if Carey was awake now he would be carefully guarding everyone, but Lucas doesn't have it in him, and the longer he stays awake the more cowardly he feels, shrinking back towards the wall until his body is pressed to Carey's back, trying to seek out another human life in the stillness, in the black.

He tries to focus on something else, on the fog on the windos, on the wheelchair, on the feel of his journal pressing warm and firm into his stomach, still tucked into his sweatshirt. He tries to focus on his sister's roses, but he realizes that they're not here; he left them in the coffee shop, and he feels much more alone now; knowing that even the memory of his sister isn't with him anymore.

Carey rolls around in his sleep and throws out one of his arms. Lucas can't see his face in the dark, but the weight of his arm over him is comfort enough, and he turns towards him, Carey's chin just level with the top of his head. He folds up his arms by his chest and folds his legs and leans his head into Carey's chest, hoping he won't stir. Lucas whispers 'sorry,' before closing his eyes, finally able to drift off, able to turn away from the solidarity of the room and into something warm and human, his own breath bouncing off of Carey's chest and warming his face, the world sheltered and dark and safe.

Dikyn is standing in front of an empty field, the grass blowing in undulating waves; like a great green ocean. Lucas walks to his side and he glances down at him; his elegant neck turning to peer down at the human at his side.

"Are you afraid?"

Lucas nods and sits down, his fingers moving through the grass blades. His body is free of pain, and as he looks down he sees that it isn't his body. He's inside his sister's skin, and for some reason it doesn't seem unusual at all.

"Yes."

"What is it that you fear?"

"Death." He lays down, and his sisters beautiful curly hair sprawls out around his face. "Lonliness."

"You do not need to be afraid of these things. You will never be alone, even in death."

Lucas closes his eyes and when he opens them he is somewhere else, back in his own body. He is standing, without the wheelchair, at the top of his sister's stairs. She is standing behind him, her hands on his shoulders. Joseph and Abigail are at the foot of the stairs, their hands outstretches as if they want to catch him. His brother-in-law is behind them, looking at Lucas with an unreadable expression.

"Where's Dikyn?" says Lucas, turning around to look at his sister. He is very short now, very small, and his sister is a tall, heavenly giant looking down on him, her hands still gigantic and heavy on his shoulders.

"He's in your mind," she says, and she hands him a rosary. "You forgot me, you forgot the flowers."

"I'm sorry," he says, in a tiny, lisping voice.

"Why do you make us hate you so much, Lucas?" she says, and she releases him. When her hands leave his shoulders he falls back, tumbling down the stairs and reliving that horrible pain, his head splitting against the wall as he falls down, down, down, crashing into his niece and nephew and watching the world implode as he suddenly lands somewhere else; his body unfolding on a soft, white matress.

Carey is sprawled under the sheets, and he turns to Lucas and says in a voice that is not his,

"You're bleeding." He points to Lucas and when Lucas looks down his entire body is shining and black and red, inverted on itself; all the muscles and intenstines exposed to the air. He screams and jumps out of the bed, but his feet don't hit the floor and he falls back again, tumbling back down the stairs and landing at Dikyns feet again, his body mercifully right-side-out again.

"Fear is universal to all living things," he says. "Fear propels you, fear evolves you, fear keeps you alive." Lucas is seeing everything upside down, his legs and feet still laid out on the stairs. "It is the ability to ignore fear that makes you human. It is the ability to question fear that makes you real."

"I don't understand." Says Lucas. "Everything's upside down."

"To see the world you must realize that there is no up or down. There are no concepts and no perceptions. There is truth and that is all there is. You must learn to see the world as truth, you must learn to see."

"I can't see!

"You can. Close your eyes and it will help."

Lucas closes his eyes and everything turns a specacular shade of red, and a Chinese dragon lopes across his eyelids before he opens them again, and he is back in the field, watching the stange, effervescent watery girl approaching from a distance. From her feet spring flowers and trees that burst up and roar forth, their branches spinning out from the root until they tower over everything.

The sun is drifting down warmly across the field, and Lucas looks up into the sky and falls up into it, his body spinning as he lifts up and away before his feet turn round and affix magnetically to the other side of space, and he is looking at the world as if walking on the ceilng. Then the world turns into his sister's basement, and the sky turns into the floor and he is upright again.

The phone on the desk is ringing, so loudly and violently that it is actually releasing visible waves of sound, and Lucas takes it off the wall mount, the caller id screen blinking 'GOD' in liquid crystal green calculater letters.

He holds the reciever to his ear and waits for a response, but there isn't one, and something falls out of the phone and hits the floor; his rosary. Someone is shaking his shoulder and he turs around to see who it is.

It's Carey, and the sun is streaming in and hitting the garish Chinese wallpaper. Lucas realizes that he is awake just as soon as he realizes that he had been dreaming, and he squints over at Carey.

"Get up, we've got to get out of here."

(this is the hypothetical end of the novel; very, VERY out of context)

The silence stretches out over the world; a thick blanket of stillness, a held breath, a stare. Spread out over the endless grassy field are hundreds of thousands of people, and not one of them speaks. Hardly any of them breath, and some of them will t heir hearts to stop, to end the ceaseless, mindless drumming that echoes in their veins and their throats and their brains, pulsing and throbbing and strangulating them beat by beat by beat.

Hundreds of thousands of people stand silent and still, and there is not a single sound to penetrate the emptiness. It is so unendingly, unyieldingly silent, that every breath seems to fill a sort of void; to start a sort of conversation, to imbue a kinds of life into the air. the sounds of everything are new, sounds that have never been listened to, sounds that have been heard but always ignored, lost in the haze and the din of everyday noise.

Joints creak and eyes blink, clothes rustle and feet squeak on the grass. the wind lifts gently into the ears, whipsering across the eardrums, playing with the brain. The trees shuffle and flutter their leaves, and the flowers gently rock back and fort; their bodies leaning into the breeze.

The silence lasts for seconds, or hours, or several thousand years. It lasts for an amount of time that suddenly has no name, the silence is a thing and a time and a place all to itself, something entirely new and never experienced.

Hundreds of thousands of people are silent, waiting for the answers to all of their unvoiced questions.

The sound of everything is gone; the sound of airplanes roaring overhead, the sound of hundreds of care engines humming into the earth, the sound of shoes on hard concrete pavement, the sound of doors, the sound of alarms, the sound of computers and phones and radios, the sound of the world has disappeared, lifted like so much dust into the wind, vanished like the cities and the building s and the people, hidden somewhere in the void, in a memory, in a world out of reach.