As expected, the land had kicked the Golly brothers’ asses. He couldn’t remember exactly when they had given up, sold out, and left the Bad Axe. Not until after Ronald Rickreiner got his throat slit, for sure, because Sheriff Gibbs had included the Gollys on a list of suspects who were debtors to Babette’s husband and Barry’s—

“That property is owned by James and Jonathan Golly,” interrupted Ms. Torkelson.

“I’m sorry?”

“They hold the deed on that land.”

“But they’re long gone,” Fanta informed her. “Back to Florida, I think. A decade in the Bad Axe, they decided hurricanes weren’t so bad after all. I recall an Amish family taking over their old homestead.”

He twisted on his car seat.

“But that’s around the other side of Liberty Hill. Anyway, that can’t be right.”

The other end of the call went quiet, even the keyboard. He had just accused Vigdis Torkelson of speaking in error.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. T,” he corrected himself. “Really? This land is still owned by the Golly brothers?”

After the call, Fanta sat through another cigarette, watching the sky singe red and remembering FROM HELL HOLLOW’s recorded voice.

Could he be looking for Jim Golly? He felt his favorite thrill, his writer’s hunger for a complex character. He had never liked Jim Golly—who could?—but the man’s fabricating mind had fascinated Fanta. Yes, Jim Golly had gabbled poetry and song lyrics. Yes, he had been strident, ahead of his time, about melting polar ice caps fomenting stronger hurricanes and destroying coastal livelihoods. Jim Golly had impressed him as one of those larger-than-life characters with no niche in polite society—Paul Bunyan with his blue ox, plowing out riverbeds and eating flapjacks the size of football fields—a well-read braggart whose modest twin, Jon, seemed to be less a separate person than he seemed to be Jim’s doppelgänger, Jim’s representative in the small and mundane world where the rest of us lived.

Now the voice from the telephone message came back to Fanta.

Noon is our new midnight.

If FROM HELL HOLLOW was Jim Golly, Fanta mused, then with that one phrase Jim Golly had shucked the known universe inside out like an old paper sack. Day devolves into night, night into day.

That’s what poets did. Yeats. Milton. Lorde. Oliver. Mrs. T had taught him that. Poets knocked you down. Poets lunged into the road, made you hit them with your car, made you stop and back up to see what you hit.

Prions Spirochetes. Ehrlichiosis.

Poets infected you, triggered fever dreams that showed you the truth. Poets crawled under your skin and made you tear yourself open to bleed them back out. Poets were often massive assholes too.

You work for Koyaanisqatsi, Incorporated.

Fanta grinned and said aloud, “The hell I do. But nice try.”