She nodded, staring thoughtfully at the suspended moth. “So if it was just a case of us experiencing time a lot faster, the swat you gave that bug would’ve disintegrated it.”
“Yeah. I think so. I’d have probably done some damage to my hand, too.” He looked at his hand. It was unmarked. “And if it was just that light waves are traveling slower than usual… then no lamps would be as bright as they are now. They’d be dimmer and… reddish, I think, almost like infrared light. Maybe. And air molecules would be sluggish….”
“Like breathing water or syrup?”
He nodded. “I think so. I don’t really know for sure. Hell’s bells, I’m not sure even Albert Einstein would be able to figure this if he was standing right here with us.”
“The way this is going, he might show up any minute.”
No one had gotten out of either the tow truck or the Volvo, which indicated to Harry that the occupants were as trapped in the changed world as were the moths. He could see only the shadowy forms of two people in the front seat of the more distant Volvo, but he had a better view of the man behind the wheel of the tow truck, which was almost directly across the street from them. Neither the shadows in the car nor the truck driver had moved a fraction of an inch since the stillness had fallen. Harry supposed that if they had not been on the same time track as their vehicles, they might have exploded through the windshields and tumbled along the highway the instant that the tires precipitously stopped rotating.
At the barroom windows of The Green House, six people continued to peer out in precisely the postures they had been in when the Pause had come. (Harry thought of it as a Pause rather than a Stop because he assumed that sooner or later Ticktock would start things up again. Assuming it was Ticktock who had called the halt. If not him, who else? God?) Two of them were sitting at a window table; the other four were standing, two on each side of the table.
Harry crossed the sidewalk and stepped between the shrubs to examine the onlookers more closely. Connie accompanied him.
They stood directly in front of the glass and perhaps a foot below those inside the barroom.
In addition to the gray-haired couple at the table, there was a young blonde and her fiftyish companion, one of the couples who had been sitting near the bandstand, making too much noise and laughing too heartily. Now they were as quiet as the residents of any tomb. On the other side of the table stood the host and a waiter. All six were squinting through the window, leaning slightly forward toward the glass.
As Harry studied them, not one blinked an eye. No face muscles twitched. Not a single hair stirred. Their clothes draped them as if every garment had been carved from marble.
Their unchanging expressions ranged from amusement to amazement to curiosity to, in the case of the host, perturbation. But they were not reacting to the incredible stillness that had befallen the night. Of that, they were oblivious because they were a part of it. Rather, they were staring over Harry’s and Connie’s heads, at the place on the sidewalk where the two of them had last been standing after Sammy and the dog had fled. Their facial expressions were in reaction to that interrupted bit of street theater.
Connie raised one hand above her head and waved it in front of the window, directly in the line of view of the onlookers. The six did not respond to it in any way whatsoever.
“They can’t see us,” Connie said wonderingly.
“Maybe they see us standing out there on the sidewalk, in the instant that everything stopped. They could be frozen in that split second of perception and not have seen anything we’ve done since.”
Virtually in unison, he and Connie looked over their shoulders to study the dead-still street behind them, equally apprehensive of the unnatural quietude. With astonishing stealth, Ticktock had appeared behind them in James Ordegard’s bedroom, and they had paid with pain for not anticipating him. Here, he was not yet in sight, although Harry was sure that he was coming.
Returning her attention to the gathering inside the bar, Connie rapped her knuckles against a pane of glass. The sound was slightly tinny, differing from the right sound of knuckles against glass to the same small but audible degree that their current voices differed from their real ones.
The onlookers did not react.
To Harry, they seemed to be more securely imprisoned than the most isolated man in the deepest cell in the world’s worst police state. Like flies in amber, they were trapped in one meaningless moment of their lives. There was something horribly vulnerable about their helpless suspension and their blissful ignorance of it.
Their plight, although they were almost certainly unaware of it, sent a chill along Harry’s spine. He rubbed the back of his neck to warm it.
“If they still see us out on the sidewalk,” Connie said, “what happens if we go away from here, and then everything starts up again?”
“I suppose, to them, it’ll appear as if we vanished into thin air, right before their eyes.”
“My God.”
“It’ll give them a jolt, all right.”
She turned away from the window, faced him. Worry lines creased her brow. Her dark eyes were haunted, and her voice was somber to an extent not fully attributable to the change in its tone and pitch. “Harry, this bastard isn’t just some spoon-bending, fortune-telling, sleight-of-hand, Vegas lounge act.”
“We already knew he had real power.”
“Power?”
“Yes.”
“Harry, this is more than power. The word just doesn’t convey, you hear me?”
“I hear you,” he said placatingly.
“Just by willing it, he can stop time, stop the engine of the world, jam the gears, do whatever the fuck it is he’s done. That’s more than power. That’s… being God. What chance do we have against someone like that?”
“We have a chance.”
“What chance? How?”
“We have a chance,” he insisted stubbornly.
“Yeah? Well, I think this guy can squash us like bugs any time he wants, and he’s just been stalling because he enjoys watching bugs suffer.”
“You don’t sound like the Connie Gulliver I know,” Harry said more sharply than he had intended.
“Well, maybe I’m not.” She put one thumb to her mouth and used her teeth to trim off a full crescent of the nail.
He had never seen her bite her nails before, and he was almost as astonished by that revelation of nervousness as he would have been if she had broken down and cried.
She said, “Maybe I tried to ride a wave too big for me, got dumped bad, lost my nerve.”
It was inconceivable to Harry that Connie Gulliver could lose her nerve over anything at all, not even over something as strange and frightening as what was happening to them. How could she lose her nerve when she was all nerve, one hundred and fifteen pounds or so of solid nerve?
She turned away from him, swept the street with her gaze again, walked to some azalea bushes and parted them with one hand, revealing the hiding dog. “These don’t feel quite like leaves. Stiffen More like thin cardboard.”
He joined her, stooped, and petted the dog, which was as frozen by the Pause as were the bar patrons. “His fur feels like fine wire.”
“I think he was trying to tell us something.”
“So do I. Now.”
“Because he sure knew something was about to happen when he hid in these bushes.”
Harry remembered the thought he’d had in the men’s room of The Green House: The only indication that I haven’t become imprisoned in a fairy tale is the absence of a talking animal.