Two sisters, it was said, had pieces of string. From their homes in the stars, they would dangle their strings down to earth, travel down those paths they'd wrought, and make people sick. (Guess they must've been busy last March.) In our lives, they are invisible. Sickness comes seemingly without warning or cause, but it's not true. In the great dreaming, their crocodilian forms are plain to see.
There is a man behind every curtain, a reason behind every event. Vampires, zombies, Locke seems to take them in stride but after darkness, he stares restlessly and angrily at block concrete walls in the basement of ex-someone else's house. It makes no sense, but it must.
At the beginning of a new world, the greatest of spirits walked, their meandering and deadly-straight paths gave rise to matter and life. As air passing through a speaking throat becomes meaning, so too was the world sung into being. Not molded like clay or carved like wood, the form of the land was the perfect impression of the very lives the spirits lived with every single word.
Some days, the world hardly seems changed at all. Young people gather at the bar, empty homes have been occupied again, a holiday rolls around and someone gets a knuckle sandwich. Traditions are necessary links in the chain, and a healthy knot in the line between sanity and otherwise, and yet... after everything has been reset, is this the patterning they're supposed to be doing?
Why is he here? To feed them? Perhaps. There's certainly no safely edible meat left from before the plague. And years down the road, if they make it that far, they'll need to know how to fashion tools from what the land provides, guidance he could give them. Security, he can do that as well. There are several fierce opponents that anyone tangling with this town would dread dealing with, and he intends to be one of them. But he knows, he's so certain in his heart, that though these things are among the stones, there must be something that balances atop the arch. There is something...
There must be something.
Locke can't see the real monsters, on the earth or in the stars. He presses his head into his hands, closes his eyes and whispers to his dead empty house, "So show me where to walk."