Page 35 (1/2)

His troll, Ticktock stepped off the far curb and started to cross the street diagonally coht toward them

"What’s the plan?" Connie asked

"What plan?"

"There’s always a plan, damn it"

Indeed, Harry was surprised to realize they had stood waiting for the goleht to a course of action They had been cops for so h, that they kne best to respond in every situation, to virtually any threat Usually they didn’t actually have to put their heads together on strategy; they just acted instinctively, each of theht moves as well On the rare occasions when they needed to talk out a plan of action, a feord sentences sufficed, the shortspeak of partners in sync However, confronted by a nearly invulnerable adversary made of bloodless mud and stones and worhter as but one of an endless army that their real enemy could create, they seemed bereft of both instinct and brains, able only to stand paralyzed and watch hiht, and was about to take his own advice when the towering golem stopped in the ole Harry had seen before

Not just luas flaes of flickering blue fire on his cheekbones and made the frizzy ends of his beard look like thin filaments of blue neon

Ticktock spread his arms and raised his enormous hands above his head in theon a es fro a hunoied coenerous raincoat

"In one hour of real tiain," Ticktock said

"I’ll count to fifty A head start Survive one hour, and I’ll let you live, never torain"

"Dear sweet Jesus," Connie whispered, "he really is a child playing nasty gaerous as any other sociopath

More so

So children, in their innocence of empathy had the capacity to be extremely cruel

Ticktock said, "I’ll hunt you fair and square, use none ofblue sockets, "my ears," and he pointed to one of those, "and my wits" He tapped the side of his skull with one thick forefinger "No tricks No special powers

More fun that way One twobetter run, don’t you think?

Three four five"

"This can’t be happening," Connie said, but she turned and ran anyway Harry followed her They sprinted to the alley and around the side of The Green House, al with the bony hobo who had called himself Sammy and as now frozen precariously on one foot insounds on the blacktop as they exploded past Sammy and raced deeper into the dark backstreet, al footsteps but not quite The echoes, too, were not precisely like echoes in the real world, less reverberant and too shortlived

As he ran, wincing at a hundred separate pains that flared with each footfall, Harry struggled to devise soht survive the hour But, like Alice, they had crossed through the looking glass, into the kingdoic would work in that land of the Mad Hatter and Cheshire Cat, where reason was despised and chaos embraced

"Eleven twelve you’re dead if I find you thirteen"

Bryan was having so much fun

He sprawled naed on the black silk sheets, busily creating and gloriously Becolass reliquaries

Yet a part of hi

He had constructed the creature bigger this ti shot hero and his bitch Its immense shoulders were his shoulders, too, and its powerful ar the inhu that he could barely contain his excitehteen"

He had iven its body the appearance of flesh, and aniod had created Adah his destiny was to be a more merciless divinity than any who had come before him, he still could create as well as destroy; no one could say that he was less a god than others who had ruled, no one No one

Standing in the azed out upon the still and silent world, and was pleased hat he had wrought This was his Greatest and Most Secret Power the ability to stop everything as easily as a watch the casing and applying the proper tool to the key point in the mechanism

twentyfour twentyfive"

This power had arisen within hies when he was sixteen, though he had been eighteen before he had learned to use it well That was to be expected Jesus, too, had needed time to learn how to turn water into wine, how to multiply a few loaves and fishes to feed multitudes

Will The power of the will That was the proper tool hich to re of time and the birth of this universe, there had been one will that had brought it all into existence, a consciousness that people called God, though God was no doubt utterly different from all the ways that humankind had pictured Hialaxies like grains of sand If the universe was a perpetualmotion machine created as an act of will, it also could be altered by sheer will, remade or destroyed All that was needed to od’s creation was power and understanding; both had been given to Bryan

The power of the atoly brilliant power of the ht and desire, he found that he could es in the very foundations of existence

thirtyone thirtytwo thirtythree"

Because he was still earnestly Becood, Bryan was able to sustain these changes only for short periods, usually no rew impatient with his limits, but he was certain the day would arrive when he could alter current reality in ways that would be permanent if he so wished

In the meantime, as he continued to Beco alterations that teated all the laws of physics and, at least for a short while, tailored reality to his desire

Although it would appear to Lyon and Gulliver that tiround to a halt, the truth was more complicated than that By the application of his extraordinary will, al out the candles on a birthday cake, he had reconceived the nature of ti river of dependable effect, he transforeysers with a uariery of effects This world now lay in one of the lakes where tily slow rate that it appeared to have stopped flowingyet, also at his wish, he and the two cops interacted with this new reality es in y,a birthday wish, as if wishing on a star, as if wishing to a fairy god with all his considerable ame of hideandseek And so what if he had bent the universe to make a toy of it?

He are that he o people of widely disparate natures

On the one hand he was a god Beco, exalted, with incalculable authority and responsibility On the other hand, he was a reckless and selfish child, cruel and prideful

In that respect he fancied that he was like humankind itself only more so

fortyfive