And Evil.
Because somewhere in there was all the bad stuff as well, the stuff that makes otherwise sensible people hurt one another. There’s a little of it in all of us, and the best that we can do is to try not to let it govern our actions too often.
But just as the planets began to take on a certain shape, and the asteroids, and the whales, and the budgerigars, and you, so too, in the darkest of dark places, Evil took on a form. It did so while the residue of the Big Bang spread across the Universe,
Yet it could not reach us, for the Universe was not ordered in its favor, or so it seemed. But the thing in the darkness was very patient. It stoked the fires of its fury, and it waited for a chance to strike…
II In Which We Encounter a Small Boy, His Dog, and Some People Who Are Up to No Good
ON THE NIGHT IN question, Mr. Abernathy answered the door to find a small figure dressed in a white sheet standing on his porch. The sheet had two holes cut into it at eye level so that the small figure could walk around without bumping into things, a precaution that seemed wise given that the small figure was also wearing rather thick glasses. The glasses were balanced on its nose, outside the sheet, giving it the appearance of a shortsighted, and not terribly frightening, ghost. A mismatched pair of sneakers, the left blue, the right red, poked out from the bottom of the sheet.
In its left hand, the figure held an empty bucket. From its right stretched a dog leash, ending at a red collar that encircled the neck of a little dachshund. The dachshund stared up at Mr. Abernathy with what Mr. Abernathy felt was a troubling degree of self-awareness. If he hadn’t known better, Mr. Abernathy might have taken the view that this was a dog that knew it was a dog, and wasn’t very happy about it, all things considered. Equally, the dog also appeared to know that Mr. Abernathy was not a dog (for, in general, dogs view humans as just large dogs that have learned the neat trick of walking on two legs, which only impresses dogs for a short period of time).