Chapter 16: The Fold's Hour

[Last Hour, Level 3. XP: 2,500 of 3,000.]

[Carried: 8 hours. Capacity: 12.]

At 1:09 a.m. there was no light, and I had no thickness.

I was laid flat between other flat things, pressed on every side, and nothing in me needed air.

A hum ran through the whole dark, so deep that it was the floor and the walls and the sound of being.

The first thing I understood was that I was a man, because he thought so.

He held his own name tight and said it over and over inside himself, and I had it by the third time.

It was a plain name, and I will not set it down until his wife has heard it from me.

All around him, in the press, other names were being held the same way.

I could not hear them as voices, only as a crowd at a gate, hundreds of people each gripping a single name.

He drove a school bus in Bourbonnais, Route 14, thirty-one stops.

Somebody had made him do the route in his head, or he had made himself.

Each stop had a child standing at it in a winter coat.

He ran it stop by stop, because it was the only road he had left.

The dark had gone on so long that he no longer knew how long.

I felt it in his body as months.

At 1:31 the press changed, and a pull began upward, slow and steady.

The crowd thinned around him, and one name at a time went out of the dark, each with a small cold shock.

Far ahead, something was counting.

It had no voice, only a tone that climbed one step for every name that left, and the steps never hurried and never lost count.

Whatever it was, it was not afraid of the dark, and he was afraid of it more than of anything else down there.

He held his name tighter, and the second thing he held was his wife's.

At 1:51 the thickening started.

I had no word for it then and I have none now.

A body was poured into him from the inside, until he had a front and a back.

He had four legs he did not know how to stand on, and a mouth with plates in it.

Under his jaw a hard cold weight swelled where no weight had ever been.

He knew it did not belong to him, and he could do nothing about it.

His thumb went looking for the ring on his left hand, out of habit, and there was no thumb.

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