The hole had expanded to three hundred feet and was still growing.

“It will stop soon,” Ellie said.

And she was right. The diameter reached four hundred feet or so and stopped.

“Come to the edge,” Ellie said.

I hesitated, then followed. Hill stayed a couple of feet behind me. Ellie stood on the very precipice. Hill and I halted a few paces back. I felt a breeze against my nape. Air was flowing down into the massive hole. I saw no sign of the floating man whom Ellie had called “the One.”

“I don’t get it,” Hill said, indicating the emptiness stretching before us. “What’s the point?”

Ellie stared into the depths as she spoke. “This is the first of many. Wherever a signal strikes the Earth, a hole like this will soon appear.”

“But again,” Hill said, “what’s the point?”

“They will unleash the Change.” With that, she turned to me. “This is where I leave you, Mother.”

“What? No!”

“Neither of us can stay here, but for different reasons.”

I knew I’d been in denial. I’d sensed this coming all along, but hadn’t been able to face it. Still, I was stunned speechless.

“You have to gather up Bess and go home,” she said. “First thing tomorrow you two must be out of town and on your way back to Missouri. There will be no safe place on Earth, but that storm shelter Dad built might give you a chance.”

We’d all laughed at Ray when he dug that shelter and filled it with survival supplies.

I found my voice. “What are you saying? The shelter should be our home now?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“But—”

“The daylight hours will shrink to nothing, Mother, and I won’t be there to help you in the nightworld that’s coming.”

Nightworld…how could one word carry such menace?

“You’re staying here?”

“No.” She pointed into the abyss. “I’m going down there.”

“You can’t!” I said through a sob.

“There’s no place for us here.”

“Us?”

Just as I said that, those things, the little horrors she called her “kiddlies,” ran down the back of her legs and scurried toward the hole where they crowded along the edge.

Hill recoiled, muttering, “Jesus!”

I couldn’t help it, I began to cry, huge wracking sobs from the deepest part of me.

“Oh, Mom!” Ellie cried as she threw her arms around me, and right then I knew—I knew she was Ellie again, the real Ellie, my lost child. “Don’t cry!”

I crushed her against me and cried harder.

“It’s got to be this way,” she whispered. “I have no choice. It’s out of my hands.”

And then she pushed away and her voice changed again. “Good-bye, Mother.”

The spider legs sprang from her back then, and their tips poked the ground. They raised her off her human feet and walked her to the edge and over. The kiddlies followed.

I cried out and ran to the brink and might have fallen in had Hill not grabbed my arm. Reflected moonlight lit the upper reach of the smooth-walled shaft and I saw her walking surefootedly downward on her eight spindly legs.