Once he heard the yip of a police siren. Just once. The city was somehow thinning out, as if all the forces that tried to keep it working were shrinking to wisps of thread, laced on a wide, wide loom with giant holes in the weave. A crazy man could drive straight up the middle and never be touched by anyone who cared about saving the last scraps of the city’s sanity.

At the end of a trail of wreckage, he reached a certain bus shelter. Abandoning his most recent car in the middle of the road, Rogasz stormed up to the Adversary.

“It didn’t work,” the vampire said. “I tried to do good, but it didn’t work. I failed, I failed, I failed.”

“Of course you did,” the Adversary replied. “You can’t do good if you don’t know what good is.”

“How do I learn what good is?”

“Not my department, little brother. I give tests, not answers. You have to find your own teacher.”

The Adversary disappeared. Rogasz looked back at the street, thinking he might return to his vehicle; but a twelve-year-old boy had already shinnied through the open window and driven the car away to a chop shop.

Fifty years ago, Rogasz would not have been able to enter a church... or a mosque or a synagogue or even a museum displaying sacred Egyptian antiquities. Something had changed since then: a weakening, a diminishment. Holy water was merely wet. The Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita — just paper and ink, with no more power to harm him than the Sunday funnies. One night, only a few months past, he had choked a nun to death by making her swallow her crucifix.