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goodbye. The road went straight to it, and so did Bone Briskett, and so did we. Drowned Cross got bigger but no lighter, jagged and sprawling across the sky. The big broken tooth over the whole place was the church spire, and the rough-edged thing it had fallen against was the town clock, stuck at five fifteen for evermore. The houses were clean and pale, with terracotta roofs. The windows were unbroken. A couple of cars were parked neatly in the main square, and one had the door open; the kind of town where you left the keys in the ignition while you bought your paper. Birds flew up out of the sunroof as we went by, grey and black pigeons with mad pigeon eyes. One of them was too stupid to dodge in the right direction and bounced off the windscreen. Or maybe the others had pushed him—it’s not hard to believe in murder among pigeons. Gonzo swore. The stunned bird tumbled away and lay in the road. If it was still there when Samuel P. came by, he’d drive right over it.
    No one really knew what had happened in Drowned Cross. There weren’t any survivors. No one showed up, addled and desperate, at the next town along the way; no lonely shepherd saw the whole thing from an adjoining hill. Whatever it was, it made no noise, in the grand scheme, and left no image of itself. Something came up out of the unreal and swallowed the place. Perhaps the hill under Drowned Cross eats villages. I heard a story once, on the radio, in which a group of sailors cast adrift came at last to an island where they moored for the night. They had not expected land, so far off course and bewildered by foreign stars; they had anticipated thirst and madness. They wept and kissed the ground and lit a fire to cook their supper, and at last fell into a fitful sleep. Of course, in the middle of the night they woke to a dreadful howling, and the isle on which they stood began to shake, and then great, boneless arms reached from the water to snatch at them, and they realised they had sought refuge on the back of some horrid monster of the deep.
    I loved cautionary tales like that when I was a child, but sitting with Gonzo and looking down on the clean, vacant houses of Drowned Cross, I kept thinking of clams slurped with garlic sauce, and the shells thrown back into the bowl. What had happened there was nasty, plain and simple, and there’d been others, since. In the still hours of the night-time in houses all around the Pipe, people woke, and listened, and were afraid of things from beyond the Border. Somebody out there ate towns, whole, and went on his way. People said it was the Found Thousand. I hoped that wasn’t true.
    The Cross itself—our road and the other one, the east–west road which went through the town and headed out into what they all figured would be the next slice of reclaimed land—was on the far side of the square. We went slowly, partly because the cobbles were slick with dew, and partly because you don’t squeal your tyres in a graveyard, no matter how much you want to leave. Something glimmered in the dust where the roads met: a silvered piece of metal engraved with what could have been a new moon or a bowl of soup with a spoon in it. It looked expensive, and I wondered how long it had sat there. Since the day Drowned Cross got its name, most likely. It could have been a cuff link, or a bracelet. It seemed sad that someone was missing it—maybe it was one of two, and he still had the other one—and then I felt guilty and crass because whoever owned it was almost certainly dead, and his missing watchstrap whojimmy wasn’t bugging him any more.
    And then, as swiftly as it had come upon us, it was gone. A small place, after all. Gonzo turned the wheel, bringing the truck in a wide, powerful turn, and the last empty cottage vanished behind us. Bone Briskett’s tank went roaring out ahead, and Gonzo rapped his hands on the wheel,
papapapahhh!
    â€œThe open road!” I shouted into