Father Dewey Woychek climbed up from the fog of trance and read in the flickering candle light what he'd written.
In the spaceless, timeless Void, he read, they gathered, formed a circle, and silently joined hands. They closed their eyes and concentrated their imaginations on the center of the circle in that nowhere, nowhen. Slowly, a form appeared at the focus of their concentration. It was a physical reality, separate from the nonphysical Void. It was small, hand-sized, black and ovoid. It looked like a stone.
They had imagined a Universe.--
The priest shuddered and gulped in a dry throat. He pushed the pages away from him across the desk, an act of revulsion and fear. The handwriting was his but the words were not. Just like the night before, and the nights before that.
He'd tried staying awake, but that didn't work. He'd tried sleeping pills, tried sleeping in a motel across the Bay, tried hypnosis, tried everything. Nothing stopped the dreams, nothing stopped him from writing down--taking dictation--from the voice in the dream, a voice like an icy wind, frightening yet compelling. Write, the voice commanded, and Dewey wrote. Witness, the voice invited, and Dewey witnessed.
--They channeled Time into a linear flow, he'd written. It jelled, becoming the glue to give the reality coherence. They reduced dimensionality within the stone to a few easily controlled spatial parameters.
Nonsense.
They imagined an atom into existence within the space. The first matter. They set the atom spinning, giving it energy. Then they repeated the process with a second atom. They did it again. And again.
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