Five twenty-five and still no sun.

“This is impossible, Ellie. The sun’s never late, and the days are supposed to be getting longer, not shorter.”

My phone was reading five twenty-six when a crimson crescent began to peek over the horizon.

“There!” she cried, pointing. “There it is! A wonderful five minutes late! It’s begun, Mother! It’s truly begun!”

For a few seconds her spider legs appeared—not hazy and ghostly, but sharp and solid enough to click when they touched. They materialized and moved around, then disappeared, all without disturbing Blanky’s fabric. But they weren’t responsible for the wave of deep unease coursing through me—the sun’s tardiness triggered that.

“You knew the sun was going to be late? How?” But I knew the answer.

“I believe I spoke it aloud many times in my coma: It will begin in the Heavens…”

“‘And end in the Earth.’ Spoke? You’d shout it. But what—?”

She gestured again toward the rising sun. “As predicted, it has begun in the Heavens. This morning the sun rose late. Tonight it will set early. Tomorrow morning it will rise even later. Night is falling, Mother. The Change has begun. His time is at hand.”

“Who’s time?”

“Why, the One’s, of course.”

“The One what?”

She looked at the rising sun. “A long story, Mother. Come, you and I will walk the boards, as they say, and I will tell you all about it before I have to return to Manhattan.”

“‘Have to’?”

She seemed to have all sorts of frames of reference to which I had no clue—more coma learning, I assumed.

“A fraternal order will have need of my services later this morning, but we have plenty of time before I’m due there.”

HARI

Hari screamed. She’d sworn to herself that she wouldn’t, but when the shiny black tendril extruded through the windshield, the scream burst free unbidden.

They’d tried everything they could think of, even going so far as to start the engine and drive blindly, accelerating, then jerking to a halt in an effort to dislodge the tarry clumps. But no use. They’d somehow glued themselves to the doors and windows and weren’t leaving.

She’d watched with growing horror as the acid they secreted ate away at the window glass—not just the dozen or so spots on the windshield, but the side and rear windows as well. On the upside, it proved an agonizingly slow process that took hours upon hours; on the downside, the clumps seemed to have infinite patience.

Adding to the terror was the frustration of watching the clock creep toward 5:30. If, as they predicted and hoped, the passage reopened around that time, they’d have no way of knowing. And even if by some chance they did know, they wouldn’t be able to reach it driving blind.

So they sat and watched the deepening pocks on the glass. Only a matter of time before—

And then it happened. The glass thinned to the point where the outside pressure of the clumps penetrated in one…two…three places, allowing tendrils to writhe through. They undulated wildly, angling this way and that as if sniffing the air in search of prey.