I knew it was the place when the first dingy brick buildings came into view through the trees. There were far fewer people on the street, fewer shop fronts. The streets were in good repair, but empty even of parked cars, and while the buildings weren’t dilapidated, they were clearly abandoned. It was as if the place were waiting for the spirit of some new city to wipe it away. I parked my car in the middle of the first block I came to, the only car at the curb on either side of the street. I needed to proceed slowly. I would have to peer in through windows and stare for many minutes at a time into the dark crevasses separating the buildings. I would be waiting, too.

It was already late in the day. When the sun set, the night poured into the street, flooded the buildings, and engulfed me. The streetlights did not come on. No matter where I stood, I could not see the lights of the city anywhere, and, as the stars came out—the same stars that had shone down on them when they were born, when they trembled in the sudden chill of the desert at night—the solitude of the place began to frighten me. The absence of people began to seem like a disguise, hiding the presence of many. I stopped and listened. I couldn’t hear the city roar. This was a piece of the city, empty of anyone but me, or so it seemed, come loose in time and drifting in space. I knew they were there, in a pocket of horror tucked away somewhere in one of these dead buildings, behind the portentously uncracked and transparent glass of these windows and screened from view by weather-beaten, strictly regular rows of brick and mortar. It wasn’t until I’d slammed myself into my car—with a loud crash that seemed to die away into the muffling air outside—that I realized I’d been unable to stand the exposure of that street at night. It was as if the city were watching me with bated breath, withholding its light, to see what I would do, to see me find them. I couldn’t stand it. I had to return home again. Things had changed. It was clear, by the time I’d let myself back in, that things had changed. It was because I had been right. They were still here, in town, and they were there, in that little cluster of empty blocks on the far side of the park. Tomorrow I would go there, and I would find them.