Biblical Read Free Page A

before it began. Strange accounts from distant places:
    A man in New York died of malnutrition in a luxurious Central Park apartment empty of food but filled with vitamin pills. There was an inexplicable epidemic of suicides: twenty-seven young people jumping in unison from the Golden Gate Bridge; fifty Japanese students camping out deep in the huge Aokigahara forest – the Sea of Trees at the foot of Mount Fuji – sharing food and singing songs around campfires before wandering separately into the dark of the forest to open their arteries; four notable suicides in Berlin on the same day – three scientists and a writer. A Russian physicist turned neo-pagan mystic purported to be the Son of God. A French teenager claimed to have had a vision of Joan of Arc being burned at the stake. A middle-aged woman calmly sat down in the middle of the road at the entrance of the CERN complex in Switzerland, then just as calmly doused her clothing in kerosene and set fire to herself. A Hollywood effects studio was firebombed. A fundamentalist Christian sect kidnapped and murdered a geneticist.
    Then there was the graffito
WE ARE BECOMING
appearing in fifty languages, in every major city around the world. On government buildings, on bridges, sprayed over advertising hoardings.
    And people started to talk about John Astor.
    No one knew for sure if he really existed or not, but there were rumors that the FBI was after him. And, of course, there was the spreading urban myth about the manuscript of Astor’s book,
Phantoms of Our Own Making
, that drove mad anyone who found and read it.
    All of these things happened before it began.
    But it really began with the staring.

2

JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
    Psychiatrists deal in the weird. In the odd. The very nature of their work means they encounter the aberrant and the abnormal on a daily basis. They are in the business of confronting skewed perceptions of reality.
    So the fact that the entire world was changing – that everything he’d held up to that point to be true about the nature of things was about to be turned on its head – had pretty much passed Dr John Macbeth by.
    But the world did change. And it began with the staring.
    Like with the news stories, it was only in the weeks and months that followed that Macbeth began to piece together the clues that had been there all the time. But there had been other clues that he had missed, that had not registered on the scope of his professional radar. But afterwards he remembered just how many people he had seen, without really noticing them: in the streets, on the subway, in the park.
    Staring.
    There had been only a few in those first days: people gazing into empty space, faces blank or creased in frowned confusion or flashed with unease. They had the same effect on others that cats have when they stare past you, over your shoulder, at something you turn around to see but cannot. Unsettling.
    Of course, at the beginning, at the beginning of the staring, no one had come up with a name for it, medical or otherwise. The starers were yet to be called Dreamers.
    It was only afterwards that Macbeth remembered the first one he had encountered, an attractive, expensively dressed woman in her mid-thirties. It had happened on his first day back in Boston: he had been walking behind her in the downtown street on that sunny but cold late spring morning. She had walked with city-sidewalk purposefulness, just as he had, but then she had suddenly, unaccountably, come to an abrupt halt. Macbeth almost walked smack into her and had to dance-step a dodge around her. The woman simply stood there, at the edge of the sidewalk, feet planted, gazing at something that wasn’t there across the street. Then, as she pointed a vague finger towards the nothing that had caught her attention, she stepped off the curb and into the traffic. Macbeth grabbed her elbow and hauled her back and out of the way of a truck that flashed past with an angry horn blast.
    “I