An unwelcome visitor had made a home here inside this town just as it had made a home inside every town that ever was. It hid inside the walls. It hid inside the drip of a tap. The tick of a clock. Peter was so sure of it now. And that clock was waiting for him back in the apartment, or in the equivalent of their apartment in this equivalent town, and he could find out what that thing was if only he would go there. And before he knew it, Peter followed the sidewalk back down the road until he came to the door beneath the Lone Star. He took the door key from his jacket pocket and found that it fit. This town was the same. Every part of it was just the same. Every brick and every window. The same. The same. And he took the stairs up to the front door and entered, and the wood panelling on the walls with the darker patches that gave the illusion of the apartment having history like pictures that had once hung there, was exactly the same. And so was the kitchen diner and couch with the same sunken spot on the seat where another person had spent their hours. Another person. Another Peter. Finally, from nowhere, came the clock. Just as it did back in West Wranglestone, it didn’t let on at first that it was already there. It wasn’t a dog waiting at the front door for you with a wag in its tail. The clock held its presence in the room secret for a while, keeping close to the walls before its little sound crept its way inside you. But it was always there waiting for you, ready to catch you the moment you were alone.

Peter sat on the couch, feeling the springs give way beneath the seat to draw him down deeper, and the clock ticked. And the tap behind him dripped. And he saw it now. The silence of a mountain or forest brought peace. But clocks marked the kind of silence that only ever existed between walls, that of dead time passing. It was the sound of your own life ticking away. But this apartment had something his and Cooper’s didn’t. A television.