PART ONE THE HOLLOW MEN All concerns of men go wrong when they wish to cure with evil. —Sophocles CHAPTER ONE This is how the world ends. CHAPTER TWO HARTNUP’S TRANSITION ESTATE STEBBINS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA He was sure that he was dying. It was how he imagined death would be. Cold. Darkness flowed slowly into the edges of everything. As if the shadows under tables and behind cabinets were leaking out to fill the room. Soft. Not painful. That part was odd. In his dreams—and Lee Hartnup often dreamed of death—there was pain. Broken bones. Bullet wounds. Deep knife cuts. But this … this wasn’t painful. Not anymore. Not after that first bite. There had been that one flash of pain, but even that was beautiful in its way. So intensely painful that it possessed purity. It was beyond anything in his personal experience, though Hartnup had imagined it so many times. With the quiet people with whom he worked. The hollow people, empty of life. The police and the paramedics brought him demonstrations of every kind of pain. Brutalized and beaten. Crushed in car wrecks. Suicides and murders. Even the old people from the nursing homes, the ones everyone