It was like witnessing the creation itself, glorious and horrifying. The birth of Kevin's universe.
In the valley beneath them, space stretched and rippled until it tore open, and from the breach were born creatures of splendor and terror, angels and demons escaping haphazardly out of Kevin's imagination. It all seemed somehow familiar, all these miscreations from Kevin's mind—things Kevin must have seen in movies or comic books. Josh could even swear he saw Godzilla stomping by on the horizon. My God, thought Josh, are these the things that go on inside your mind, Kevin? How could you live with them? How could you stay sane? But even as the thought occurred to him, Josh knew that the insides of his own mind must have looked pretty much the same. If I had gotten to the mountaintop first, he thought, I could be the one trapped on the other side of those glasses now. He didn't know which was worse, being the dreamer or being the dream.
If there would ever be rules again—if the world was ever going to be pulled back out of Kevin's mind—then the glasses had to be destroyed now. So Josh leapt into the center of the chaos, right into the eyes of Kevin Midas.
Josh threw his hands before him, grabbed on to the glasses, and the moment he began to pull, he felt something happen to him. What he had feared—what he had sensed from the very beginning was happening! The glasses were pulling him in! Josh felt himself withering—collapsing in upon himself until the glasses seemed to loom like an immense wall of glass.
"Kevin, no!" But Kevin had no control.
With nothing to grab on to, Josh fell through the glasses as if they were made of water rather than glass, and he screamed as he plunged down to the crushing core of Kevin's mind, where he would become nothing more than a figment of Kevin's imagination and be blotted out forever.
Josh screamed a single thought as he fell into Kevin's mind. "Break!" he cried to the glasses, praying that, for once, his wish would be stronger than Kevin's.
And then, a moment later, Josh Wilson ceased to exist.
Deep in his mind, Kevin felt Josh's wish ringing in his head. Then he felt the moment when Josh was gone, and the agony was too much to bear.
"Stop!" Kevin wailed, just as the glasses split in half and blew off his face. The force of the explosion threw him to the ground.
His head was spinning as if he had just leapt from the Vomit Wheel at the amusement park. Everything was peaceful and calm. No wind, no sound. Nothing.
I'm dead, thought Kevin. I have to be.
When he dared to open his eyes, he knew the glasses were truly gone from his face, for everything was fuzzy and out of focus.
What Kevin could see of the town below was not a pretty sight. It was still there, but it looked distorted, as if it had been squeezed through a fun-house mirror. It was not daytime, nor nighttime, but both at once. Through dense clouds of many colors, Kevin swore he made out not one but three different sources of light, as if the sun had multiplied itself.
And nothing was moving.
As once before, the silence that filled the air around him was unnatural.
"Josh?" he called, hoping beyond hope that he would be there. He wasn't.
Fragments of the shattered glasses were strewn everywhere, the powerful lenses useless at last. Kevin listened for a sound, any sound that would break the stillness, but there was nothing.
And then it occurred to him what his last command to the glasses had been.
Oh no! Of all the stupid, moronic, idiotic things I could wish for, this was the worst
Just before the glasses had exploded from his face, Kevin had yelled, "Stop!" and they had obeyed their final order. The glasses had put the emergency brakes on, stopping time in its tracks, and freezing everything forever like a snapshot.
Everything, that is, except for Kevin Midas.
16
9:42
Nothing moved.
Leaves and bits of paper that had been spinning in the wind now hung in the air, and gravity was too lazy to pull them down. They stirred slightly as Kevin brushed past, but otherwise they had no more reason to move than all those clocks frozen at forty-two minutes past the hour.
The air was scentless and flavorless as Kevin toured his neighborhood. The people he came across were fixed in their places like mannequins, with eyes open but unseeing, hearts frozen between beats.
All this belonged to Kevin now: a kingdom stretching out in all directions, with no one to threaten Kevin's dominion. Yet as he strolled through the wealthiest mansions in town, he knew there was nothing to be found here that he really wanted. It had been that way ever since his first experiments with the glasses. It seemed the more he had, the more he felt was missing, and now that he had everything, he felt as if he had nothing. An overwhelming sense of emptiness cried out from inside him. I need . . . I need ..., but he didn't know what he needed anymore.
The sickness had already begun to come on—that sickness of need that always took over when the glasses were off his face.
By the time he reached his house, it was already turning him inside out. His head pounded like never before, his temperature was climbing, his teeth already ached from chattering, and if anything had been in his stomach, it wouldn't have stayed there very long. Kevin lay down upon his bed, and as he did, a vision came to him like a mirage in a parched desert.
The glasses were already healing.
They had exploded, but the pieces were already drawing themselves together on the top of that hill—for they could be disabled, but never, never destroyed. Even as he thought it, Kevin knew it to be true.
If you went back up the hill, Kevin told himself, and held the shattered fragments in your hand, they would come together right there before your eyes, and then you could put them on. Perhaps they couldn't set time back in motion again, undoing what Kevin had done, but they could do many more wonderful things that would ease Kevin's lonely existence. Most of all, they would take away the sickness. They would take away the need.
But Kevin clamped down his chattering teeth and uttered a single word to his empty room.
"No!" he said.
He would honor Josh's memory. He would resist the powerful pull.
No!
This time he would suffer through whatever awaited him here at the end of time, and he would face it without the glasses.
Kevin closed his eyes and lay like that, in the midst of the sickness, barely able to think or move, until, in the timeless silence, he heard someone knocking on a door.
Kevin thought it was some sort of hallucination. His droopy eyelids lifted part way, and he waited until he heard it again. Knock-knock-knock! It came from somewhere inside his house.
Kevin hauled himself out of his bed and into the hallway of many doors. Knock-knock-knock!
It came from the second door to the right—a heavy whitewashed oak door that rattled each time it was rapped upon.
Kevin had sparked out quite a few entrances to many places, and he had no idea where this particular door led.
Knock-knock-knock!
If Kevin was the last soul on earth, then who was knocking on the door? The terror of the thought did battle with Kevin's curiosity.