Twilight shone through the spaces between these structures and illuminated their soaring peaks with an amber light, the hue of setting suns and fading worlds.

The particular night that followed would have one hour removed from it, as the time zone in which I lived had “daylight savings” forced upon it, which for me only meant that I would spend the rest of that spring, all of summer, and five weeks of fall trying to recover a lost hour of sleep. This scheme for saving daylight — for creating the illusion that we could manipulate the clockwork movements of our solar system — was once justified to me as being “good for business”. Before returning to my apartment, I stopped by the Metro Diner to put this matter before Lillian.

“Good for business?” she repeated with the emphasis of a skeptic. “That’s news to this old gal. You see anyone else besides you sitting at my counter?” (Lillian commonly referred to the diner as a whole with the synecdoche of “her counter”.) “You think another hour of sunshine is going to make any difference to me? Maybe it does to other folks, I don’t know.”

[…]

I wiped Perry’s blood off the knife and onto the right leg of my black denim pants. I noted with annoyance that it was darker than it ought to have been at that hour of the morning due to the “daylight savings” time-change.

[…]

By what power, though, would my finger have pulled the trigger of that Glock, or Firestar? I knew that my Brain would ultimately give the command to shoot, shouting out, in so many words, “OK, Finger — ready, set, fire.” But I also knew that my Brain took its orders from my Body, while at the same time functioning as an integrated part of my Body. In addition, both my Body and my Brain (as an integrated part of my Body) were reacting to pressures placed upon them by other Bodies and other Brains, such as that of Sherry in her capacity as an individual Body-Brain unit, or those of The Seven acting as a group of Bodies and Brains… not to mention the sundry other pressures exerted by objects and events that were without a human Body or a human Brain, including the weather, Daylight Savings Time, insects — the entire nonhuman world in general.

[…]

Or so I told myself, even though the whole picture was not mine to see…and somewhere in the darkness of that October night, Richard was still hiding from me in some dark spot where I could not find him, as I had so easily tracked down Kerrie to this hole-in-the-wall hangout. And I needed to find him — to finish up my work — before everything became for me one great world of darkness. Yet I continued to believe that my calculations were correct — the damage that was given to me to do was compounded at a fixed rate. And there remained enough principal in my account of worldly existence for me to complete the task I had started — none of The Seven (or myself) would ever see another sunrise; none of us would reclaim that hour which had been stolen by the daylight savings of the previous spring and was not scheduled to be returned for approximately another twenty-four hours or so. But what was an hour… a day… a year or ten? There’s always plenty of time for the worst. Everyone is old enough to face their fate.

Thomas Ligotti, My Work Is Not Yet Done

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