Chapter 15: Percy Finds Edmund at Four in the Morning

The nightmare ended the way it always ended — not with darkness, but with the absence of sound.

Percy had dreamed of the ocean draining before. Different versions: water pulling back from shore, from harbor, from the flat grey expanse of the Sound until the bed was exposed, ribbed and wet and wrong, the shells and the dead things and the pressure ridges of something enormous having moved through the deep recently. In earlier versions of the dream there had been panic in it, the coastal-disaster urgency of something cinematic and terrible. In this version there was nothing. The water left. The Sound emptied to its basin. And then the basin was empty too, the sediment and the bedrock exposed under a sky that was the white of old paper, and the absence was not empty — it was listening.

He sat up at 3:47 AM.