Just shut up, will you.

Shut up? How dare you speak to me like that? You’d better succeed quickly, nixie. My principals are anxious, and if you go wrong or slow down I’ll make certain they have their way with you.

The nixie had found his weapon. Smith. He had given him first a series of dreams. Then a hunger to know the convolutions of black magic. The bulge in the floor. The hunger of curiosity. Leading him, step by step through his life: the Black Arts Book Store, the proper volumes, the revealed secrets, the dusty little room, and at last…the power. But given not quite whole. Given in a twisted manner. The runes had been cast, and the mistake made—and Smith had destroyed the world, tearing the veil in the process. But not quite enough for the return of the Faceless Ones.

And the incubus grew impatient for his revenge. The girl.

Smith was sorry. Standing in the room to which his bat had led him, he was sorry. He hadn’t meant to do it. Smith had not, in the deepest sense, known it was loaded (nor had he been meant to know); and when it went off (in this room with half a candle and dust and books bound in human flesh, and the great grimoire) it was aimed at the whole world.

Peking, Paris, Rome, Moscow, Detroit, New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles: miles of cinders burying cold roast corpses. Checkerboard arrangements of bottomless pits and glass spires. Acres of boiling swamp. Whole cities that were now curling, rising green mist. Cities and countries that had been, were totally gone.

And in the few cities that remained…Water no longer flowed through their veins nor electricity through their nerves, and there they sat, scraping the sky, useless, meaningless, awaiting erosion. And at their dead feet, scurrying loners and human rat packs, survivors hunting and sometimes eating one another, a species in its glorious infancy with the umbilical cord a thousand ways pinhole-perforated before it had had a chance really to be born; and Smith knew this and had to see it all around him, had to see it and say, “My fault. My fault.”