He looked at Suzie with a kind of pleading on his face. "It wasn't real!"
"You believed."
"It was just a trick!"
"But you believed it was real," Suzie said quietly. She was staring at the floor. "Maybe because my mother was moving, taking me away from you, you believed so hard that you made it real." She looked up at him. "Maybe that's why it hasn't gotten us—because you did it."
She went to him and held him, stroking his hair with her long, thin fingers.
"Maybe you did it because you love me," she said.
Jerry looked up at her, his eyes still wet with tears. "I do love you," he said.
They ate all the food in the house after a week, and then moved to the Myers' house and ate all their food, and then to the Janzens' next door to the Myers'. They ate their way, uninvited guests, down one block and up the next. They ran from house to house at twilight or dawn. The ropy thing never came near them, busy now with catching all the neighborhood's dogs and cats.
Even when they did see the ropy thing, it stayed away, poking into a house on the next block, straining up straight, nearly touching the clouds, black and almost oily in the sun, like an antenna. It disappeared for days at a time, and once they saw a second ropy thing, through the telescope in the house they were living in, so far away from their own now that they didn't even know their hosts' names. They were near the edge of town, and the next town over had its own ropy thing curling up into the afternoon, rising up like a shoot here and there, pausing for a moment before bending midriff to point at the ropy thing in their own neighborhood. Their own ropy thing bent and pointed back at it.
Suzie looked at Jerry, who wanted to cry.
"Everywhere," she said.
As the summer wore on the squirrels disappeared, and then the birds and crickets and gnats and mosquitoes. Jerry and Suzie moved from house to house, town to town, and sometimes when they were out they saw the ropy thing pulling dragonflies into the ground, swatting flies dead and yanking them away. Everywhere it was the same: the ropy thing had rid every town, every house, every place of people and animals and insects. Even the bees in the late summer were gone, as if the ropy thing had saved them for last, and now pulled them into its jelly body along with everything else alive. In one town they found a small zoo, and paused to look with wonder at the empty cages, the clean gorilla pit, the lapping water empty of seals.
There was plenty to eat, and water to drink, and soda in cans, and finally when they were done with the towns surrounding their town they rode a train, climbing into its engine and getting the diesel to fire and studying the controls and making it move. The engine made a sound like caught thunder. Even Jerry laughed then, putting his head out of the cab to feel the wind like a living thing on his face. Suzie fired the horn, which bellowed like a bullfrog. They passed a city, and then another, until the train ran out of fuel and left them in another town much like their own.
They moved on to another town after that, and then another after that, and always the ropy thing was there, following them, a sentinel in the distance, rising above the highest buildings, its end twitching.
Summer rolled toward autumn. Now, even when he looked at Suzie, Jerry never smiled anymore. His eyes became hollow, and his hands trembled, and he barely ate.
Autumn arrived, and still they moved on. In one nameless town, in one empty basement of an empty house, Jerry walked trembling to the workbench and took down from its pegboard a pair of pliers. He handed them to Suzie and said, "Make me stop believing."
"What do you mean?"
"Get the ropy thing out of my head."
Suzie laughed, went to the workbench herself and retrieved a flashlight, which she shined into Jerry's ears.
"Nothing in there but wax," she said.
"I don't want to believe anymore," Jerry said listlessly, sounding like a ghost.
"It's too late," Suzie said.
Jerry lay down on the floor and curled up into a ball.
"Then I want to die," he whispered.
Winter snapped at the heels of autumn. The air was apple cold, but there were no more apples. The ropy thing spent the fall yanking trees and bushes and late roses and grass into the ground.
It was scouring the planet clean of weeds and fish and amoebas and germs.
Jerry stopped eating, and Suzie had to help him walk.
Idly, Jerry wondered what the ropy thing would do after it had killed the Earth.
Suzie and Jerry stood between towns gazing at a field of dirt. In the distance the ropy thing waved and worked, making corn stalks disappear in neat rows. Behind Jerry and Suzie, angled off the highway into a dusty ditch, was the car that Suzie had driven, telephone books propping her up so that she could see over the wheel, until it ran out of gas. The sky was a thin dusty blue-gray, painted with sickly clouds, empty of birds.
A few pale snowflakes fell.
"I want it to end," Jerry whispered hoarsely.
He had not had so much as a drink of water in days. His clothes were rags, his eyes sunken with grief. When he looked at the sky now his eyeballs ached, as if blinded by light.
"I...want it to stop," he croaked.
He sat deliberately down in the dust, looking like an old man in a child's body. He looked up at Suzie, blinked weakly.
When he spoke, it was a soft question: "It wasn't me, it was you who did it."
Suzie said nothing, and then she said, "I believed. I believed because I had to. You were the only one who ever loved me. They were going to take me away from you."
There was more silence. In the distance, the ropy thing finished with the cornfield, stood at attention, waiting. Around its base a cloud of weak dust settled.
Quietly, Jerry said, "I don't love you anymore.”
For a moment, Suzie's eyes looked sad—but then they turned to something much harder than steel.
"Then there's nothing left," she said.
Jerry sighed, squinting at the sky with his weak eyes.
The ropy thing embraced him, almost tenderly.
And as it pulled him down into its pulsating jelly body, he saw a million ropy things, thin and black, reaching up like angry fingers to the Sun and other stars beyond.
The Only
When you meet Harbor Road, turn south. Now I can almost hear your footsteps. Walk until the breakers on your left seem about to wash up around you over the boardwalk, and the shop lights become dimmer, more secret. The shadows hug themselves here. Your footsteps are tentative now, but you are close—when you pass under a dull yellow streetlamp that hums, blinking out and then flaring on again, on the verge of an extinction never achieved, look up. There is a sign in a window, of three letters, and inside and upstairs, as they told you, you will find me. This is what you must do.
I can hear you coming.
Bill was drunk when they met him at the bus terminal. When Paul held out his hand, a lopsided smile of welcome on his face, Bill only grinned widely and put a half-empty pint of Jim Beam into his palm. "There's one or two more of those somewhere," he said, patting at his drab green coat. He grinned again, an elfin thing from this small man, smaller-looking under the army crew cut that was beginning to fill out on his head.