He laid a credit card on the table to signal that he was ready for his check.

When the server picked up the card, however, he paused, glanced at it somewhat nervously, and then said, “Excuse me, I don’t know how to say this. I was wondering if it was you when I saw you earlier.”

“If it was me?”

“Timothy Sabian.”

“Yes. I’m Timothy.”

You did something. Something wrong. He’s not going to take your credit card. Maybe he’s—

“I’ve read all your books, Mr. Sabian. I’m a huge fan. I loved The Nesting Dolls. Thought it was amazing.”

Timothy heard the words, but they were distant. Fuzzy. Staticky. AM instead of FM. Coming from somewhere beyond where he was.

Do not scratch your arm. Don’t do it. Not here. Not in front of him.

“Thank you,” Timothy heard himself say.

Go. Get moving.

“I especially liked how, in that last scene, everything gets turned on its head and we find out the villain wasn’t the person we thought it was all along.” The man shook his head in sycophantic admiration. “I love twists like that.”

“Okay.”

“Do you ever do book signings?”

“I’m signing at the Mystorium on Monday night. It’s a bookstore over in Manhattan.”

“Wow. Yes. Of course. I’ll be there. Um . . . Do you mind if I get a selfie with you?”

The bugs wouldn’t leave him alone.

Would not.

Leave him.

Alone.

“No photographs, please. I was just on my way out.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” The man already had his phone out. “I didn’t mean to—”

Timothy pulled cash out of his wallet. The meal with drinks and dessert had been less than forty dollars, but he laid down three twenties, retrieved his credit card, told the server to keep the change, and hustled out of the restaurant.

He didn’t see the man snap the photo of him as he was hurrying out the door.

++++

Rather than ride the A train, which would have taken as long as forty-five minutes depending on how the lines were running, Timothy flagged down a taxi to take him back to his place in Ozone Park.

Get home.

Just get home.

No one knew exactly what Morgellons syndrome was, and the first record of it was tough to pin down. Some epidemiologists believed it was first identified in France in 1674 when Sir Thomas Browne noticed inexplicable clumps of hair protruding from children. He described them as “endemial distemper of little children in Languedoc, called the morgellons, wherein they critically break out with harsh hairs on their backs.”

Morgellons meant “black hairs.”

Timothy knew all of this, had researched it years ago when he first started feeling the bugs crawling across his stomach and when the fibers first started protruding from the tender sores on his arm.