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257 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1999
“Morning. A hot August sun was smoking up over a wavering treeline. Such drunks as were still about struggled up beneath the malign heat slowly and painfully as if they moved in altered time or through an atmosphere thickening to amber. The glade was absolutely breezeless and the threat of the sun imminent and horrific.”
“As dusk drew on, the square of yellow light the bedroom window threw deepened and the dog approached and stood in it as if it fostered warmth.”
"Get your last look at this world... It shore looks dark in the next one.:
Slipping out would be easier than openly defying Dallas Hardin. Experience had taught her that. Defying Dallas Hardin was something best done from as great a distance as possible.
He knew that the world was wide in its turnings and it was fraught with dark alleyways and pastoral footpaths down which peril lurked with a patience rivaling that of the very old.
The dark oppressed him. This dark house of stopped clocks and forfeit lives and seized machinery. Here in the the weary telluric dark past and present intersected seamlessly and he saw how there was no true beginning or end and all things once done were done forever and went spreading outward faint and fainter and that the face of a young girl carried at once within it a bitter worn harridan and past that the satinpillowed death's head of the grave.
In the molten fire where he lay he could watch the sow machinations of eternity, the cosmic miracle of each second being born, eggshaped, silverplated, phallic, time thrusting itself gleaming through the worn and worthless husk of the microsecond previous, halting, beginning to show the slow and infinitesimal accretions of decay in the clocking away of life in a mechanism encoded at the moment of conception, withering shunted aside by time's next orgasmic thrust, and all to the beating of some galactic heart, to voices, a madman's mutterings from a snare in the world.
Hardin lived in a world he manipulated day to day, you never knew when a piece of information might have a use. Life was a jigsaw puzzle someone had kicked apart on the day Hardin was born and he was still putting it back together a piece at a time, turning each section this way and that to see where it fit.
A thousand lives woven like threads in a patternless tapestry and if he died here on the highway it would alter the design not one iota. The world was locked doors, keep-out sign, guard dogs. He figured to just ease through unnoticed and be gone.
He guessed wherever he was was better than sleeping, these days he had come to feel that life was spinning past him, leaving him helpless. Sleep only accelerated this feeling of impotence. While he slept the world spun on, changed, situations altered and grew more complex, left him more inadequate to deal with them.