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Yes A long, long tio It wasn’t easy The reason I don’t see hi uilt It’s too hard on him

Annaed each other

I said, So, these bad guys looking for Annamaria and ht she’d be safe here with you for a couple hours, if you’re cool with that

To Annaaammon, Annamaria said Do you ever add a little vanilla to your coffee when you brew it?

Soood

Cousin Melvina--not the one married to Norman in the missile silo, the other one--she likes to add a half-teaspoon of cinnamon and a full teaspoon of cocoa to a twelve-cup pot

That sounds good to hters Melvina?

Oh, said Blosso the can of cocoa powder, they aren’t sisters They’re cousins to each other They were both naleton, as faorillas

What gorillas did she live with?

Oh, anywhere they had gorillas, sooner or later, she went there to live with theist?

No, she wasn’t any of that She just thought the world and all of gorillas, couldn’t get enough of watching theorillas didn’t seem to mind

I’d think they would mind, Annamaria said

Well, when scientists ive therief, but they didn’t object to Grandma Melvina

Shewomen in our family, said Blossom

I can see that, said Annamaria, and they sht a gorilla named Percy to write poetry

Annaine

No sane person would have paid for it, Blossohed

I wanted to hear orillas, but I needed to have a serious talk with Flashlight Guy Blossoood time, I didn’t interrupt to tell them that their Odysseus was about to set sail on his warship

Crossing the living rooht

According to my atch, the time was 7:52

At the mantel, I put one ear to the clock, but it seemed to have spent its treasure of tihout my life, when the supernatural had become apparent to h my paranorering spirits of the dead, the frustrating gift of enignetism

The stopped clock in Annamaria’s one-room apartment had not been a vision but a reality, seen not just by me, but visible to her as well I had no doubt that if I were to call her and Blossom from the kitchen, they would see what I saw on the ht is nothingand spellbound coyotes and porch swings that swung the could not be denied upon the discovery of a second timepiece with its hands fixed at the very minute of the same hour

The supernatural had entered the natural world in ways new to my experience, and this development struck me as ominous

I could think of only one interpretation to be made of broken but synchronized clocks Only a little more than four hours remained for me to prevent the many deaths and the vast destruction planned by the yellow-eyed giant and his associates

TWENTY

A DOVE DESCENDING THROUGH CANDESCENT air, a bush bursting into fire and fro froful patterns in the heavens…

Those were sons upon which prophets historically had based their predictions and their actions I received, instead, two stopped clocks

If I am not just a freak whose extrasensory perceptions are the result of a few e connections in iver other than indifferent Nature and coe of the Odd Tho ic Beach, toward the address I had found in the wallet of Sam Whittle--alias Saht Guy--I felt as if the fog drowning the town had flooded into hts were as disconnected as, in the outer world, houses on the saer to the other, in a white sea

More traffic rolled through the quiet night than I had seen earlier

So across the streets on which I traveled, that I could hts Perhaps soed upon the ht nor an evil purpose aht of any vehicle that shared a street with me, I hid behind the nearest cover and, from concealment, watched as it drifted past One after another proved either to be labeled HARBOR DEPARTMENT or to be a police car

Perhaps the police had put their entirefacilitated burglary and other crimes Call me paranoid, but I suspected the authorities were out in force only to support certain friends in the harbor departlilow of instrument panels and co the friendliness and selflessness of our public servants

I felt as though extraterrestrial seeds, coroiftly into large pods that had been busily disgorging men ere not rand enough to warrant being called an avenue, and was not shaded by oaks Formerly called Founders Street, it had been renamed in honor of John Oaks, a sports star who never lived in Magic Beach or even visited, but whose cousin--or a woman who claimed to be his cousin--served on the city council

Whittle lived in a bungalow as unreraced by no orna that embraced it The front porch was unfurnished, the yard devoid of landscape lighting, and the back porch as ehtened anyNo vehicle stood in the carport

At the back door, I took a laminated driver’s license from Sam Whittle’s wallet and used it to loid the lock The deadbolt had not been engaged, and when the license pressed back the latch, the door swung inith a faint creak of hinges

For aprecedefor the telltale sound of an iht from one foot to the other as he waited for the fly to come into the web

Warily I stepped across the threshold I left the door open for the ital clocks on the oven and the ht, but neither did the green glow of those nuloom

I smelled some kind of whiskey, and I hoped that it didn’t coun

When I heldhis breath

Finally I committed I closed the door behind me