City at the end of time

Squinting, Jack could just make out the rectangles of three doors on the opposite wall. His eyes adjusted. The sounds outside seemed to fall from the sky, softened, less important. Jack walked across and to his left and stood in that corner, considering the way the high walls and beamed ceiling in the long room joined. Normally, he could reach out and grab world-lines the way Tarzan grabbed vines, great clumps of them. But all the possible paths had been cut away or converged to I enter, I do not enter—an angular choice.

He had reached his zero point. The zero moment.

He took a step away from the safety of the corner. Laughed to himself, uncertain, but the laugh died and he almost stopped breathing. The between room was empty, but he was not alone. Something waited for a choice to be made. Waited, measuring the beats of his heart with infinite patience, and yet…

“What do you want me to do?” Jack whispered.

Three doors, six decisions.

But still—only two fates. Not really an answer, and it didn’t make sense. What each of them did seemed disco

Still, he took the two steps necessary to stand before his door. The knob was crusted with verdigris. He inserted his key. Old brass—hard to turn. He gripped it tight, twisted from his shoulder, and after several attempts something let loose, the old mechanism broke free, and his door opened with just a small scrape.

Remarkable that there had been so little change all these years.

He could barely hear the dead or dying city outside, could almost believe he was on a ship sailing over a far, soft ocean, listening to a radio playing in someone else’s cabin, tuned to an obscure indie station—he managed a grin—KRAK, Ragnarock AM.

Peace welled up, and all his guilt, indecision, worries, and fears vanished, leaving behind just Jeremy Rohmer. No need even for the pretense of Jack.Jeremy, the name his mother had given him. The room behind the door was narrow, long and high. Bidewell had divided this end of the warehouse into three equal rectangles. High in the wall at the far end, a single window let in wisps of uneasy light. The way the light fell contradicted the angle of the source in the between-room. Jack approached the plain white chair, thick-daubed paint on its flat seat and back cracked with age. He turned around, looked up, then slowly sat.

Folded his arms.

Raised his eyebrows at the high corners.

After a while he yawned. The sound of his ears hummed with the pressure of the yawn, and his jaw popped, obscuring a sound, a voice deep in his head.

—your first memory?

Jeremy jerked, wondering if he’d dozed off. But he was still alone, the door shut tight. He jerked again at the sensation of fingers brushing down his arms. Then he pressed back in the chair. He could feel it begi

water.

Jeremy’s father was driving them from Milwaukee, in search of a new place to live—six months after his mother died, three months after a brief and, as it turned out, final gig at Chuck’s Comedy Margin—one month after Jeremy had broken his leg trying to juggle while riding a unicycle. He had been fifteen.

“You ever hear of the Bleak Warden?” his father asked.

“What’s that, a band?” Jeremy asked.

“Nope.”

The land unrolled outside the windows: flat desert and low brown desert towns, sunsets tan and pink, afternoon sky dazzling with thunderheads, and between the storms, sheeplike clouds grazing on endless blue fields.

Broke my leg?

In the empty room, his leg suddenly ached. He reached down to rub it. Bidewell opened the door for the second time, and Gi

Bidewell closed the door behind her. With a short breath, almost a hiccup, she walked slowly to the right, inserted and turned the key, and grasped the knob, but hesitated before entering her room. Odd that she accepted that possessive without argument.

No one else had been through this door for a hundred years. What waited inside must be hers. Outside, the low, hollow destruction continued to grind time and the Earth like wheat beneath a stone mill, and she did not care. In this room, she thought, it might soon be over. What she knew—the nightmare that her otherknew—could not be reconciled, not even by a master muse or whatever Mnemosyne was supposed to be. God. Goddess. Demiurge. Housewife of the creator, sweeper-up of unresolved messes. Kindhearted sister to the awful Chalk Princess, who was white but should have been black: Kali, kala—Sanskrit for time, both bleacher and blackener. Gi

Memory begins and ends with time.

These words or impressions, less than words but more deeply felt, suddenly made Gi

Instead of turning to run, however, she again grasped the knob to her door, forced it around—it stuck, she grimaced—and then the door opened and she looked across the length of the room beyond, perpendicular to the hallway, stretching to the back of the warehouse. A window mounted high in the rear wall showed a curling, flaring lick from the broken sun that had eaten the dying moon.

In the middle of the room stood the old white chair, as Bidewell had promised. The paint on its seat and back had cracked after a century of quietly heating and cooling.

Gi

A shade made way, removed itself from the chair…trick of the eyes. She was the shade.

She sat.

Bidewell opened the door.

“Hurry,” he told Daniel. Around them the entire warehouse rattled with the stuttering havoc outside. Daniel felt supremely confident. Never more so. He could beat this. He could even beat Terminus. Someonewould get through—otherwise, why would they all be gathered here, what would the point be of this rigmarole?

There were the two young people—younger than Fred—and in a pinch there was always Glaucous, ageless in his way, and no doubt a tough subject. But Daniel knew instinctively he could not transfer to Bidewell whatever happened. He did not want to be stuck in the warehouse, and Bidewell would not leave this place and likely would not survive its destruction.