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15. THE NINTH HOUR
Back in the familiar dead air of the tunnel, Arthur found his canteen near where the old man had been. The old man was gone, and the canteen was nearly empty. Thirstily, Arthur held it over his open mouth and let the last several swigs of fresh water fall into his mouth. He rinsed it about in his mouth and let a few last drops fall on his face. As he rubbed the refreshing water over his tear-reddened eyes, he noticed a light on a sand dune. There stood the boy again, rattling the lantern urgently. His face was an enigma, but his large dark eyes burned with some silent message. Arthur threw the empty canteen aside and slogged up the hill.
When he got to the top, the boy had vanished. Arthur stopped and looked around. The sand, from this high vantage point, was dotted with half-buried objects: a truck with its nose pointed slightly up as if it were a whale breaching the sea surface for air; another truck angled nose-down so that its flat bed looked like another whale's flukes as it dove down. Elsewhere, a painted plaster statue of a Victorian man with mustache and Bowler hat stood beside a pillar on which one elbow rested. Hundreds of multi-colored pieces of paper money from some parlor game lay scattered about. A vase lay on its side. Two broken windows lay in a pile, and a golf club nearby, and a man's checkered pants, and a toy gun…the inventory was incalculable. But no boy, no lantern.
Holding his head with both hands, Arthur staggered down the slope intent on going forward at all costs. Yet there was a terrible gaping void in his head now. All his memories were gone, or at least the ones that meant something special. He could not remember a single soul he'd loved or who had loved him. He could only hear someone (Cuphandle, whoever that was) saying: "To get new time, you have to let go of the old time. You have to wash the slate clean before you scribble new equations and words on it. To get new, you've got to let go of old."
It was dreadful, scary, this stumbling about with Swiss cheese for memory. He seemed to be running down a hall of mirrors set up in the sand. It was like a fun house of crazy mirrors at a beach resort. It was, however, no fun at all. He staggered from one mirror to the next, holding his head. Each time he got to a mirror (or were they windows?) he'd see a scene in there but it would wink out of existence before he could register what it was. That must be his memories being erased. He began to feel a deep, intense panic. It was he himself who was being erased, one panel at a time, like wiping a hard drive clean on a computer. Further down the aisle were a number of shadowy mirrors standing upright in the sand, covered with what looked like drop cloths.
Those must be the system files, so to speak, he thought. Oh God, no, if I get down there, and they're gone, that will be the end of me. What a terrible mistake this has all been!
He was on his knees now, unable to go any further. He looked up briefly and saw scenes-a city, a woman, a mall, a girl, a boy, a brick building-fading away to leave only blank chromium-like mirror surface. Simultaneously, he felt those scenes being ripped from his mind like someone tearing paintings out of their picture frames. Holding his head for the pain, he fainted. He pitched face first in the sand. He welcomed oblivion, but oblivion was not quite ready for Arthur.
He awoke groggily as a painful ringing filled his ears. "Oh!" he shouted, twisting this way and that, holding his ears. In a minute, he realized that the pain was radiating from his trouser pocket. He doubled up in a fetal position and struggled to get the watch out of pocket. He fumbled with the knob on top. As soon as he pressed it, the waves of pain went away. The noise in his ears stopped.
Looking up, he saw again the boy standing on a sand dune ahead. Framed by the dark tiles with their occasional dull amber light-lozenge, the boy held the lantern up for Arthur to follow him.
As he rose to his feet, Arthur rubbed his ears to make the lingering pain go away. He realized that the watch had become a kind of miniature clocktower, and had just ticked off the final strokes on the hour, signaling the start of the tenth hour.
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