Musty was at the back door, asking to come in. His claws scritch-scratched against the screen, and the sound was like a record player gone wonky, like a needle missing its groove. Mariah stood at her front window, her feet in cooling peppermint tea, her earbuds dead in her ears. No more rock and roll. No more Mr. Page setting fire with his guitar. Just Musty and the lawnmower and the laughing man across the street. He was having a grand time, the best time anyone had ever had. He hop-danced around his driveway, a laughing jackrabbit in black business slacks. He’d taken off his suit jacket and buttoned shirt and thrown them onto the roof of his house. His tie dangled from the rain gutter, a dark little thing, a musical note without a song.

  She didn’t know his name, but she’d seen him sometimes after he came home from work. He always seemed like a grumpy guy—Mr. Frown from Sad Town. Well, that taught her for making assumptions.

  She watched him do a hip-swinging number around his Range Rover. Its engine was on, its brake lights shimmering redly off the sweat sheening his naked torso. He snapped his fingers and shimmied his shoulders, coming on to an invisible someone: hey there, watch out, I’m headed your way and feeling frisky. Then he put on the brakes and threw his head back and laughed some more. Mariah wanted to laugh with him—wanted that very badly, in an aching, hungry sort of way—but she had a feeling that if she started to laugh, she wouldn’t be able to stop. One chuckle and the funnies would sweep her right off her feet, like a groom does to his bride on wedding day. The idea didn’t seem so bad, to tell the truth. But she wasn’t ready to give in quite yet. She didn’t even own a dress, and all brides needed a . . . all brides needed . . . what had she been thinking of again?

  Scritch-scratch, scritch-scritch-scratch.

  Musty. Of course. She needed to let in Musty—the silly dog was getting impatient. She turned away from the window, and the dark sky followed her, behind her eyes and inside her head. It shouldn’t have been dark outside. Couldn’t have been dark. But it was. Was it? She looked back to make sure. It was. Her knees began to wobble. A fishhook tugged at the corner of her mouth. She needed to sit down.

  She sat down.

  Scritch-scritch, scratch-scratch.

  She stood up and headed for the back door on a lazy, slanting course. The counter got in her way, bumping her into a standstill. It took an extraordinary effort to remember where she’d been going after that, but at last it came to her. She’d been going to bed. It was dark outside, which meant it was night, which meant she was tired—so tired—and all of those ingredients added up to sleep. Yes, she would go to sleep, and in the morning, after the sun had climbed its ladder in the clouds, she would start her day. See, she understood now. The clock on her smartphone was broken. It said that it was 8:43 AM, but it was lying. It had lost track of the time—not so smart, after all, was it?—and if she just laid her head down for a while, things would straighten themselves out. Mr. Frown would put his suit back on and go to work. The lawnmower would quit its nonsense. And Musty would be dead again.

  Musty would be dead again.

  She stopped partway down the hall. The scratching filled the house, filled her ears. And not only scratching. Panting, too. Heavy, hoarse panting, splintered by jagged whimpers. She glided into the kitchen. The back door stood there innocently, a curve of darkness captured in its small window, a black dawn where the sun should have been. Scritch-scritch-scritch. She could hear the velvety underpinnings of each scratch, the soft burr of claws shredding through mesh . . . and those claws sounded a bit bigger than Musty’s claws, didn’t they? Yes. Oh, yes, they certainly did. There came an enormous thump. The door shook. She reached for the knob, and it wasn’t her backyard outside anymore, with its rope fence laced against the woods. It was the doghouse. Musty’s doghouse, death waiting in its dark mouth. It had found her. And it had grown.

  Good God had it grown.

  Mariah took a step back. Then she took another, and another, until she stopped against the counter. Her teapot was there. Good teapot. Nice teapot. It had cured her of her nausea, just like she had known it would. She smiled at it. Stroked its side with one knuckle. The scratching at the door continued, but far off now, miles and miles away. When she was little, her father had taken her to a frozen pond up in Tahoe. She had spent a wearisome fifteen minutes attempting to stand up and walk around on the pond’s frozen surface, only to fall on her butt again and again. Eventually she had given up and decided to sit there, unmoving, until her father carried her back to solid ground. In a dim way, she understood that she was doing the same thing now. Her brain had learned that trying to stand meant falling down, so it had simply stopped trying.

  Her gaze wandered over to the microwave’s clock. It was also wrong, and that wouldn’t do. No, not at all. One clocking acting up, sure, she could let that fly. But two? A girl had to draw a line somewhere.

  The sound of laughter carried in from out front, and slowly, smoothly, her head turned to the window.

  Yes.

  Of course.

  Her neighbor would know what time it really was. Or if he didn’t, someone out there would. All she needed to do was go and ask.

  Mariah slipped out of the kitchen into the living room, where her eyes chanced on the mug she had dropped after opening the curtain. It had landed in just the right way to avoid breaking, and something about that struck her as deeply significant, almost prophetical: that a thing could fall so hard, that it could spill itself all over the floor and still not shatter . . . that seemed a lesson worth remembering.

  She sailed outside, afloat like the Led Zeppelin airship on her shirt, the wind nibbling on her bare legs. It did not cross her mind to close the door behind her, or to wonder if whatever was scratching at the back door would hear her leaving and step around to say hello. She had forgotten all about Musty’s doghouse, forgotten about the feeling that it had come for her, its mouth as big as the night.

  The time was what mattered.

  Mr. Frown bounded her way when he saw her crossing the street. He took her hand and pulled her up onto his lawn, spinning her around, laughing, laughing, his loafers shiny-wet from the morning dew that beaded the grass. But it wasn’t really morning dew, of course, because it wasn’t morning.

  “Do you know what time it is?” she asked.

  “Dance with me!” he said, whirling her like a top. The Range Rover’s exhaust coated her tongue. Its brake lights smeared bloodied slug trails across her vision. She felt dizzy, and she told him so.

  He laughed and spun her faster, faster, until finally his sweat-slicked fingers slipped free and she went twirling away from him like a blown dandelion seed. When the whirling stopped, she was in front of Mrs. Harmond’s house. Mrs. Harmond was running her lawnmower on the street. Each time she turned the machine uphill, its blades caught the asphalt and shrieked painfully.

  “Do you know what time it is?” Mariah asked.

  Mrs. Harmond marched on in her summer dress, mascara running down her cheeks.

  “Do you?” Mariah asked.

  The lawnmower swooped, throwing a brilliant spray of orange-hot sparks into the hedge that lined the curb. Leaves curled and blackened. Fine, Mariah thought, have it your way. She walked up into the yard, where Mrs. Harmond’s boys were holding hands, one in his diaper, the other in pajamas.

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  The two of them stared. A dark patch appeared on the crotch of the bigger boy’s sweatpants. She opened her mouth to ask them again (maybe they hadn’t heard her before), and she realized how silly she was being. Why would they know the time? They were kids. Kids didn’t have jobs to get to or appointments to make; kids didn’t know what it was like to wake up sick with nobody to care for you but yourself, and nothing but peppermint tea to help you feel better.

  “Sorry,” Mariah said. “Have a nice day.”

  She went down the street, her phone clasped loosely in one hand, noises swimming around her like schools of exotic fish. Some sounds she caught and held onto for a moment (the bang of a hammer inside a shut garage, the yowl of a cat through an open window), but most flitted away before she could make sense of them. Now and then she saw someone, though never more than a passing glimpse. Faces retreated behind snatched curtains. Heads ducked out of view. It was all getting to be rather frustrating, and so—when she finally spotted a silhouetted figure standing up on the rooftop of a two-story house, and when that figure did not disappear at first sight but instead eagerly returned her wave—she could barely contain her relief.

  “Hello!” she called.

  “Hello!” came a man’s voice.

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  “I do indeed!”

  His response stoked a campfire inside her heart; she could have melted with joy. Cupping her mouth, she shouted up to the rooftop, “Tell me! Please, tell me!”

  “It’s time . . . to rock!” the man said. He lifted one hand high above his head and dropped it for what would have been a blazing guitar riff, had he been holding a guitar. From there he launched into a savage—and silent—performance that culminated in a leaping swan dive. The whole show was pretty impressive, Mariah had to admit, even if it wasn’t much help. She turned away from his body, which had crunched headfirst into the driveway, then continued along until she came to a school bus sitting in the middle of an intersection. Its windows were so fogged up that they reminded Mariah of her bathroom mirror after a long shower, and the vehicle was rocking its axles like it wanted to tip over.

  As Mariah got closer, the door burst open and kids flooded out—so many kids, all of them moving with alarming speed. She took a step back.

  But these children were older than the two up the road (even if they were still on the young side) and that meant there was a chance . . .

  “Does anyone know what time it is?” Mariah asked, rushing to meet them. Next thing she knew she was on her back, staring up from the ground while the kids ran over and around her. “Does anyone? Anyone?”

  Soon they were gone, and she was alone.

  Or maybe not.

  There was another car in the intersection. It had run into the concrete post holding up the traffic light, which was now ticking rapidly between green and yellow and red. The driver, a groomed man wearing lumberjack flannels and an utterly expressionless face, was pressing his hand against the horn. HOOOOOOOOOOOOONK. With some difficulty, Mariah got up and approached his window. He didn’t respond when she knocked on the glass, so she opened the door and leaned over him to check the dashboard clock.

  It was wrong, too.

  Oh well.

  A low, ugly smell crept into her nostrils—a smell with warmth and texture—and Mariah saw that the lumberjack had soiled his corduroys. She retracted her head from the car, but not quite quickly enough. The foul air inside stirred up thoughts of Musty’s doghouse, and thinking of Musty’s doghouse made her feel like she was standing on ice again, the whole world slippery and black beneath her feet. She carried on down the road until there was no road left, only a gas station and the highway beyond. A thought occurred to her—where am I going?—then she spotted the crowd gathered outside the station and the thought slipped off like smoke into a clear sky.

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  A police officer stood at the head of the crowd, his hands raised into the air. Everything about him, from his boots to his belt buckle to his squared black face, spoke of sturdiness, dependability. One look at the guy, and Mariah knew. He would have answers. She crossed the sidewalk and entered the parking lot, coming up on him from behind. All the people lined against the wall in front of him were holding something: water, food, flashlights. One woman cradled a load of Huggies in her arms, while another lady was hugging enough towels to cover a front lawn. She kept saying something about “keeping warm as long as she could,” to which the cop responded with things like, “that doesn’t give you an excuse to steal,” and “if we start this way then soon there’ll be nothing left for anyone.” It was a lot to take in, so Mariah didn’t try.

  She tapped him on the arm and he twisted around like his body was full of coiled springs that wanted to snap free. “Shit,” he said. “You have any idea how close you came to getting your head knocked off?”

  “Hello, sir. Do you know what time it is?”

  “What time . . . I . . .what does that matter?” His eyes had dropped halfway down her body and gotten stuck, as if in glue. They freed themselves and returned to her face. “You shouldn’t be out. You need to go home.”

  “But the clocks aren’t right at home.”

  The crowd gave a tentative, testing shift behind him. He spun around. “None of you move—not until you drop whatever it is you’re holding.”

  “You don’t tell us what to do,” said a man so thin and rundown he called to mind a chicken bone chewed to the gristle. His voice was one part leather and one part cigarettes, with a little leftover for the nameless muck that collects and hardens on the bottom of shoes—the kind of voice that made you wish it would shut itself in a box and never come out again. But he was just getting started. He stepped forward, shouting this and that and stabbing his finger angrily at the air. Mariah didn’t catch everything that came out of his mouth, but he called the cop a thug more than once, and the way he said it suggested he wanted to use a different word—a worse word. The cop, meanwhile, was inching his gun out of its holster. He was holding the butt so tight that his knuckles bulged, and up under the cuff of his sleeve . . . was that a watch on his wrist?

  Mariah leaned over for a closer look—nope, no watch, just a spot where the cloth had bunched up—and then the skinny man grabbed at something tucked inside his belt and all the noise in the town gathered itself into one enormous, echoing, wordless command. The man stumbled back against the wall and slid down onto his butt, looking tired all of a sudden.

  “Hey,” he said. “What was that for?”

  As the cop lowered his gun, the crowd ripped apart at the seams and scattered in every direction. Engines roared. Tires screeched. In the ensuing silence, Mariah heard the skinny man breathing. He sounded like someone coming up from a pool for air, except no matter how much oxygen he took in, it was never enough. Pretty soon his head slumped, and he stopped making any sound at all.

  Reaching forward, Mariah set her hand softly on the cop’s shoulder. “So . . . you don’t know what time it is?”

  When he didn’t answer, she left him standing in front of the gas station and started off again, toward the highway.

  She had almost arrived at her destination.

  Even if she didn’t realize it yet.

  ???

  Mariah crossed the Trotter’s wide parking lot, not quite sure where she was. All she knew was that this place was somewhere familiar . . . and that she needed to rest her legs, had been walking for too long. She didn’t notice the scarred Harley sitting in the gravel, or the broken window by the front door. Nor did she wonder why the alarm was going off. It all seemed perfectly normal. She went inside and turned on the two big overhead lamps. Then, without thinking, she typed the code to shut off the alarm and took a seat at the bar. It felt good to sit there. Sitting there, she felt almost okay not knowing the time.

  Almost.

  She set her chin in her hands and stared at the shot glasses stacked beneath the shelves. The glasses were bright, and so were the liquor bottles and beer taps, everything polished to a shine. But behind her, in the back corner of the Trotter, one booth remained dark. And in the dark, under the table where no lamplight could reach, something that had been sleeping since she first looked upon the night from her front window now began to move about slowly, tentatively, like a dog stirring inside a dog house.

  ???

  Rick Lot was on his way home after a long night of drinking and debauchery when the sun packed its bags. He leaned through the curves of Highway 2, the wind cool on his bare head, his fingers loose on the handgrips. His mouth tasted like the inside of a cafeteria toilet on Sloppy Joe Friday. His eyes, which had grown used to dim stages and shadowed backrooms, appreciated the honest morning light about as much as a sidewalk appreciates a jackhammer. It was hard enough just keeping his peepers open, let alone putting them to any real use, so it almost came as a relief to him, that first breathless moment as the sky zipped up like a suitcase and shut the world in darkness. For one full stunned second, he rode on, no sound or sensation but the purr of the Harley between his legs. The highway, gone. The yellow line, gone. The steep, rising embankment to his left and the sheer drop to his right . . . all gone. He forgot about the diesel coming down the opposite lane, had barely registered the truck in the first place. Its ghost roared past, unseen, and maybe the draft rolling off it caused what happened next, or maybe it would have happened regardless.

  Rick lost control.

  He didn’t realize he was crashing right away. There was an impression of tipping—not him, but everything around him, as if the road and the mountain were items on a dinner plate that had slowly begun to tilt. After that came a shuddering, jarring bounce, and again he could not attribute what he felt to something that was happening to him personally. Sparks hissed and spit off the tarmac, and he watched his bike slide away in a waterfall of molten light. Then his own slide became a tumble, and he began to understand that he was going to be hurting very soon. The suitcase that had closed around the world was full of hard, rough things, and it had been kicked down a cliff, with Rick at the gravelly center of it all. When the rolling finally stopped, his head didn’t know the difference. He lay in the road, looking up into the dark leather sky, and his thoughts drifted back to their suitcases, the suitcases of his so-called brothers, packed and sitting by the door.

  They hadn’t even told him they were moving on. They’d just up and walked out, and the leaving was bad enough, but the fact that they hadn’t bothered talking to him beforehand was worse. It had hollowed him out, left him with this ugly little avocado pit of shame, this feeling like all the good, rich stuff inside him had been scraped away. But they didn’t understand. They hadn’t seen what he’d seen at the Trotter that night. Rick had done his time, had met his share of intimidating personalities. You had your hardcases, also known as your tough guys. Then there were your nutcases. Those you had to be careful with, even if you could put them down, because a nutcase never quit without first chewing off an ear. And last, you had your killers. Rick had come to recognize them quick, the cold, dead way they stared at you. But he had never seen someone with a stare as cold as that man at the bar. Looking into that man’s eyes had been like looking into the eyes of winter itself. And in that same moment, rising from his stool, Rick had known: if he got up, the man would kill him. It didn’t matter that Pete could be shifty as hell in a scrap, or that Bill could damn near bench his bike, or that there were three of them. The man in the blue denim jacket would have killed them all.

  Lying in the road, coming back to himself in slow, uneven waves, Rick Lot blinked up at the starry night. That it was night made him feel funny. Not bad funny, just funny, the way a powerful high feels setting into the bloodstream. He sat up and discovered he could make out the general shape of things around him. The dark had warmed up to dear Rick, old friends that they were. A dozen feet away, he saw what might have been his bike or a fallen buffalo. It had been a while since buffalo roamed these parts, so he’d put money on the bike, which reminded him of the leftover cash in his pocket and all the good fun he’d had not so long ago. Amazing, what the tickle of a dollar bill did to some women. Simply amazing.

  Sitting up was becoming a struggle, and lying back down sounded no better, so Rick decided to try his luck with standing. He hauled his feet under him, and from there he went vertical… more or less, anyway. The night had a curious lean to it, an off-kilterness that couldn’t be undone no matter how high or straight he raised his head. One of his ears—the left one—was bubbling warmly. He worked his thumb inside its canal, hoping to clear things out, but he might as well have been trying to dig the mud out of a mud hole. Then there were his clothes. His leather jacket hung from his shoulders in flaps, and his jeans had big tears all over them. It looked as if a pack of wild dogs had used his body for a game of tug-of-war. But most concerning was his face, which did not feel like a face, at least on the left side. The skin of his cheek had rolled up like an enchilada. He picked at it, and his fingertips came away with a piece of grit.

  “Well, that’s not good,” he said, walking over to his bike. It was a bitch to pick up. It was a bigger bitch to ride. He kept tipping and having to start the whole process over again, and each go-around was harder than the last. He never thought about leaving it behind, though. His bike was just about the last thing he had left on Earth, except for his dignity, and sometimes he wasn’t so sure he even had that anymore. Not since—

  Thought you never turned down a free drink.

  He shivered. Then a sign for Wrightwood slipped by and he shivered a second time, hard enough to shake his Harley.

  He would pass the Trotter soon. In a little while the road would straighten out, and there it would be, waiting for him, as it always did. The thought made Rick swallow—a thick, slow swallow that tasted of blood—and for a moment it was as if he were in the Trotter again, sitting at the bar with the man in the blue denim jacket standing over him. He twisted the throttle, telling himself that he would be okay. But he didn’t feel okay. He felt . . . strange. Like his whole body was full of tingling thorns that were preparing to grow right out of his skin. Oh God, what was happening? What was going on?

  He continued through the mountains, wind stinging the parts of him that were wet and raw. He heard nothing but the Harley’s engine and the underwater ringing in his ruined ear. He saw even less, as he’d neglected to turn on his headlight. The ground leveled out on both sides of the road, and trees filled in the empty space. These trees did not stand straight; they leaned to the left in staggered, crazy rows. It was like passing through a pop-up book whose pictures hadn’t popped up all the way. Nervous, Rick found himself riding the yellow line so the trees to his right couldn’t reach down and snatch him with their branches. The tingling in his bloodstream was taking on a new and terrible form, tied somehow to the idea of trust, the same way trust had been tied into Pete and Bill’s decision to abandon him. Rick had been the leader of their merry little band, and the moment he’d been stood down by the man at the bar, their trust in him had crumbled. If something like that could happen to Rick Lot, their Rick Lot, then it could happen to them too.

  Anything was possible.

  Terror spread prickly black roots through Rick’s veins and arteries, took possession of him suddenly and completely. He clenched and bared his teeth. His nose, which had never been quite the same since it broke, whistled from the exploding force of his outgoing breath. He was forty-three years old, and every one of those years was built from days in which the sun had risen to the east and fallen to the west. Even in the days he’d spent in a cell with only a small window, Rick had been able to count on the sun. It had never occurred to him not to count on it. The sun was the sun. And now the sun wasn’t. It had been torn away, which meant that anything was possible.

  Anything.

  Anything at all.

  The Rick Lot who rode into Wrightwood was a haggard, broken thing. He hunched over his handlebars, bent over by the night. His flayed leather jacket rustled and flapped, along with what remained of his cheek. He had forgotten all about his house in Big Pines, his crash, his injuries. He wanted nothing but a hole to crawl into, and so he steered toward the first building that formed up ahead. Its shadow loomed over the road, hulking and sinister to his lopsided mind. He knew this place, although he could not quite remember how or why. It was a bad place.

  But outside was worse.

  Rick stole up on the Trotter, riding so slowly that his bike began to wobble and he was forced to get off and push it. He held his breath as he inched along, like a kid tiptoeing through a stranger’s house. When he reached the far corner of the parking lot, he put down the Harley’s kickstand.

  The town—whose name had also escaped him—was screaming and hollering from a thousand throats. The more he listened, the less he cared for what he heard, so he turned his deaf, drippy ear toward the commotion and blocked things out the best he could. Moving backwards now, he slunk to the bar’s front door. He tried the handle. It didn’t budge. He was locked out, and being locked out was the same as being locked in.

  With the night.

  Panic flared off the match-tip of his fear. He fell to the ground and scuttled back to his Harley. The key was still in the ignition; he could hop on and ride away. But where? Where could he go that the night wouldn’t be? He began to cry. He closed his fists in the gravel and sobbed until there were no tears left, then he opened his hands and looked at the rocks gathered in his open palms. Lifting his head, he saw a transparent, shadowy version of himself staring back from the window above his bike—a Rick Lot with holes for eyes. He got up. Thought for a moment. No. This one was too narrow. He might get stuck if he tried to climb through . . . but who said he needed to climb through anything? Holding his pile of gravel, he went to the window beside the bar’s front door.

  The first rock made a dimple.

  The second made a crack.

  The third turned glass into rain.

  Careful not to snag his arm on the frame, Rick reached in and unlocked the deadbolt. He opened the door. Things were better inside. Inside, the dark wasn’t so big and he wasn’t so small. It didn’t even matter that it wasn’t quiet. The noise, which swooped and shrilled like bats in the rafters, coated him in velvety black layers of sound. He bumped through tables and chairs, and in the back of the building, deep underneath a booth, he found his hole. Where he curled up into a ball, content.

  And when the lights turned on sometime later and the woman walked in, he watched her from his hiding spot, pleased to see a familiar face.

  Mariah.

  Lovely Mariah.

  Just the sight of her, why, it was enough to make a man feel like himself again.