Shawn had not been sleeping well.
This was not unusual in the weeks since the fire — half the village was sleeping badly, rattled by the proximity of catastrophe, by the reminder that the ordinary world could break without warning. But for Shawn, the sleeplessness had a different quality. It was watchful, alert, as if some part of him was standing guard against something he couldn't name.
He had been a sheriff for nine years. In that time he had learned to trust the watchful part. It had never, in nine years, woken him at three in the morning for no reason.
He woke at three seventeen to a sound he could not identify.
Not a sound, exactly. More like the memory of a sound — a pressure that had already passed but left a residue. He lay still in his bed for a moment, listening to the house, the street, the desert beyond. Everything was quiet. Everything was completely, absolutely quiet.
The quiet was what frightened him.
Hawthorn Creek was never silent at three in the morning. There were always sounds — animals, wind, the creak of settling wood, the distant bark of a dog. The desert was not a quiet place if you knew how to listen.
He dressed quickly and went out.
—------
The first person he found was Mrs. Harriet Boone, who lived three houses from his own.
She was standing in her yard in her nightgown, facing east, perfectly still. Her eyes were open. Her hands were at her sides. She was breathing — he could see the slight movement of her chest — but she did not respond when he said her name, did not turn when he touched her shoulder.
He stood very still himself for a moment, looking at her.
Then he heard it — faint, barely audible, more felt than heard. A tone. Continuous. Coming from no particular direction, or from all directions at once.
He walked quickly to the next house.
The Delgado family. Four of them. All standing in the yard, all facing east, all still.
Then the Winstons. Then Frank Delaney from the general store, still in his work clothes as if he had never gone to bed. Then the schoolteacher, Mrs. Albright, who had taught every child in Hawthorn Creek for thirty years and who stood now with her hands folded as if in prayer, her eyes fixed on something Shawn could not see.
He ran.
He ran through the village and the village was a gallery of stillness, people standing in yards and doorways and in the middle of the road, all oriented toward the same invisible point, all wearing the same expression — or rather, all wearing the same absence of expression. Whatever animation made a face a face had been suspended. They were present and not present simultaneously.
He ran to Miles's house.
The door was open.
—-----
He found Miles at the piano, not playing.
Sitting with his hands in his lap, looking at the floor, with the expression of a man who has just watched himself do something irreversible. The room smelled wrong — the way the air smells before lightning, sharp and overcharged, and beneath that something else, something that had no name and that made Shawn's stomach turn in a way that had nothing to do with his stomach.
There was something on the floor near the piano. Shawn did not look at it directly.
"Miles."
Miles looked up. His face in the lamplight was the face of someone much older than thirty-one. "I made a mistake," he said.
"Tell me."
Miles told him. All of it. The dreams, the figure, the instructions, the composition, the night, the cemetery. His voice was flat and precise, the voice of a man giving a statement, stripping the emotion out of it because the emotion was too large to include.
Shawn listened without interrupting. Outside, through the open door, the sound — the tone, the frequency — was slightly louder now, or perhaps he was simply more attuned to it, the way you hear your own heartbeat once you start listening for it.
When Miles finished, Shawn was quiet for a long time.
"Where is it now?" he asked.
"Out there." A gesture toward the door, toward the village. "I think it's in all of them. I think the song — the modified song — was how it spread. The frequency. I think everyone who heard it—"
"Is there a way to stop it?"
Miles was quiet for a moment. Then he said, slowly, as if working it out as he spoke: "The figure told me once that music is organization. That the right frequencies restructure whatever they encounter." He looked at his hands. "It needed the music to get out. To spread. It's in the music now — it's the music, almost. And the people—"
"Are receivers," Shawn said.
"Yes. The notes are in them. The beat is in them. And the—the main pattern, the central frequency, it's in whatever is out there wearing her—" He stopped.
"The main frequency dies, the rest dies with it," Shawn said.
Miles looked up.
"Is that right?"
A long pause. "I think so. The music controls everyone. The source is the source. Kill the source—"
"The notes die too."
Miles nodded slowly. "But you'd have to get close. And they—the people—they'd try to stop you. Protect it. They'd all—"
"I know," Shawn said. He was already moving, already calculating. "I need you to play."
"Play?"
"Not that song. Something else. Something real. The best thing you have." He looked at Miles steadily. "You said the figure was drawn to your music. That it came from far away because of what you could do. So you play. You play everything you have, and if the thing is in these people, and the people are drawn to honest music—"
"They'll come," Miles said slowly.
"They'll come."
Miles stood. His legs held this time.
"And then?" he said.
Shawn picked up the rifle leaning against the wall by the door. "And then," he said, "I do my job."