77 Shadow Street

12

Apartment 3-A

Smoke in an armchair and Ashes on a footstool watched Martha Cupp as she moved impatiently from window to window in the living room, their orange eyes as bright as lanterns.

Except for the betrayals of her body, from minor annoyances like gray hair to the greater treachery of arthritis in her hands, Martha felt twenty years old. She was as quick of mind as she had been six decades earlier, sharpened by the wisdom that came from a life rich in experiences.

At eighty, as at twenty, she had no patience for nonsense. To her dismay, the world was more than ever a temple of absurdity. So many people had stopped believing in any truth that offered hope, uncritically embracing instead a belief in the animated inanimate that was computer “intelligence,” in the gleaming but hollow utopia of the Internet and all things digital, in the preposterous economic theories of envious sociopaths, in the absolute moral and legal equality of men and ants and apes and asparagus. In particular, Martha disliked the numerous denominations of End Timers who, like the odious Mr. Udell in 3-H, believed passionately in one existential threat or another, from a looming ice age to an imminent planetary meltdown, to the Rapture followed by Satanic rule and Armageddon. Nonsense.

A few days earlier, their cook and housekeeper, Sally Hollander, had been among the sane. Then suddenly she began talking about vivid and disturbing dreams. She became so distressed by the third round of nightmares that she believed they must be prophetic glimpses of a rapidly approaching doomsday. And now she claimed to have seen the devil in the butler’s pantry.

The city was real, the storm was real, and the window before Martha was real, but the devil in the pantry was rubbish and humbug. Either Sally, previously so dependable and sound of mind, was having a midlife crisis and developing a personality disorder, or the poor woman suffered from some physical malady with symptoms that included hallucinations and delusions. Because Sally was like a beloved niece, Martha didn’t want to consider the second possibility, which might indicate a brain tumor or other dire condition.

A blazing axe of lightning chopped the sky and thunder crashed like a thousand trees felled and falling as one. For a moment the entire city seemed to go dark. But that must have been just a brief blinding effect of the brilliant thunderbolt, because when she blinked twice, the city was out there again, its twinkling buildings and lamplit avenues receding in the murk.

Earlier, Smoke and Ashes, a pair of British blue shorthairs, had remained cat-calm through Sally’s outburst, languid and self-absorbed. Their ears had pricked slightly at the first scream, and their heads had turned toward the source of the sound. But their muscles had not tensed nor had their dense and ultra-plush blue-gray fur bristled in the least. As the housekeeper’s cries of terror softened into sobs, Smoke and Ashes had lost interest and had focused once more on their grooming. The behavior of the cats was for Martha proof enough that nothing demonic had paid a visit.

Edna, Martha’s older sister—eighty-two—had an affinity for nonsense. All her life, Edna believed in everything unlikely, from palm-reading to poltergeists, from the lost continent of Atlantis to cities on the dark side of the moon. At the moment, she was sitting at the kitchen table with Sally, plying the shaken woman with brandy-laced coffee to quiet her nerves and encouraging her to remember—or invent—new details of her encounter with the Prince of Darkness in the butler’s pantry.

Sometimes Martha marveled that she and Edna, being different in so many ways, had built a major business together with so few moments of friction over the years. Martha had a head for business, and Edna was the creator of ever more delicious recipes. Cupp Sisters Cakes became the largest mail-order dessert company in the nation, produced a highly successful line of frozen cakes on sale in supermarkets, and in general rode every wave in the cake business to greater success. The only thing they didn’t see coming was, ironically, the upscale-cupcake craze; none of the many franchised cupcake stores bore the Cupp name. Martha supposed they succeeded because their talents were different but complementary—and because they adored each other.

The company had been sold four years previously, and they had given away half their fortune. Thus far retirement was enjoyable, a series of luncheons and social events, volunteer work with their favorite charities, and plenty of free time to pursue their personal interests. But now this episode with dear Sally. Although Edna was the superstitious one, Martha could not shake the uneasy feeling that with this peculiar incident, her long run of good fortune—and her sister’s—might be near an end.

As though in prophetic confirmation of that thought, the sky swung another series of bright blades. The city, like a chopping block, seemed to shudder from the impacts, the countless briefly silvered raindrops stuttering down the dusk in a stroboscopic dazzle.

In the window glass, Martha’s reflected image flickered, as if the life force in her might be near the end of its wick. She suffered from a fear of death that she struggled always to repress, a dread that dated from the night that her first husband, Simon, passed away, when she had been forty-one. The inspiration for her fear was not Simon’s death but an incident that occurred shortly thereafter, which for the past thirty-nine years she had been able neither to explain nor forget.

When the doorbell rang, Smoke and Ashes turned their heads but did not deign to leave their cushioned perches to welcome the caller.

In the open doorway, Bailey Hawks greeted Martha with a kiss on the cheek. As he crossed the threshold into the foyer, her anxiety diminished. He was the kind of man to whom she’d never been attracted in her youth: quiet, competent, a good listener, a steady ship in any storm. For reasons she had never quite understood, even into middle age, she had been drawn to weak men with sparkling personalities, who were always entertaining and, in the end, always disappointing. Well, she had done all right in spite of having married one man-child and then another; but it was comforting to have a friend like Bailey when your housekeeper started ranting about seeing the devil between the china cabinets and the silver closet.

“I don’t know whether to call a medical doctor or psychiatrist,” she said to Bailey, “but I refuse to call an exorcist.”

“Where’s Sally?”

“In the kitchen with Edna. By now my sister will have convinced herself that she, too, saw the apparition and that it had a forked tongue just like a snake.”

Edna cared about decor far more than did her sister, and so Martha lived with the consequences of Edna’s passion for all things Victorian: chesterfield sofas upholstered in midnight-blue mohair, side tables draped with velvet and crocheted overlays, étagères full of porcelain birds, floral-fabric walls in original William Morris patterns, everything trimmed with ornate gimp, tassels, fringes, lace, and swags.

Although the kitchen had touches of late-nineteenth-century style, it appeared more modern than the rest of the apartment because even Edna preferred gas and electric appliances to wood-burning iron stoves and hulking ice lockers. The most Victorian thing in this roomy space was Edna’s outfit, a faithful re-creation of actual day wear from the period, which her seamstress had made according to a drawing in a catalog published in that era: a lilac silk afternoon dress covered with white-spotted lilac chiffon, featuring a lace yoke with rucked silk, a matching hip basque, elbow-length pleated sleeves, and a pleated and gathered floor-length skirt.

Martha was so accustomed to Edna’s ways that most of the time she was hardly aware that her sister’s fashions were unusual, but once in a while, like now, she realized that these dresses might be more accurately described as costumes. Sitting at the breakfast table with Sally Hollander, whose self-chosen uniform consisted of black slacks and a simple white blouse, Edna looked eccentric, sweet and dear, pleasingly fanciful, but undeniably eccentric.

Declining an offer of coffee with or without brandy, Bailey sat at the table, across from Sally, and said, “Will you tell me what you saw?”

Previously, the housekeeper’s broad, freckled face had always appeared to be aglow with soft reflected firelight, her green eyes often merry but seldom less than amused. Her skin was ashen now, the fire banked in her eyes.

The tremor in her voice seemed genuine. “I was putting away the luncheon plates. The ones with the pierced rim and the roses. From the corner of my eye, I saw something … something quick and dark. At first it was a shadow, like a shadow, but not a shadow. It came from the kitchen into the butler’s pantry, went past me toward the door to the dining room. Tall, almost seven feet, very fast.”

Easing forward in her chair, arms on the table, Edna lowered her voice as if concerned that the forces of darkness might learn she was aware of them. “Some say this place is haunted by Andrew Pendleton himself, ever since he committed suicide back in the day.”

Leaning against a counter, Martha sighed, but no one noticed.

“Maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t,” Edna continued. “But even if 77 Shadow Street is as full of restless shades as any graveyard, this wasn’t one of them. Nothing as innocent as lingering spirits. Tell him, Sally.”

“God help me, I’m half afraid to talk about it,” the housekeeper said. “Talking about such things can be an invitation to them. Isn’t that what they say, Miss Edna? I don’t want to invite that thing back, whatever it was.”

“We know what it was,” Edna said.

Martha expected Bailey to glance at her knowingly, but he remained focused on the housekeeper. “You said it was like a shadow at first.”

Sally nodded. “It was ink-black. No details. But then I turned to look after it passed me … and I saw it as clear as I see you now. About eight feet away, turning toward me as if it hadn’t noticed me until it flew past and was surprised to see me there. Like a man but not a man. Something different about the shape of the head, something wrong, I can’t say for sure what. But no hair at all, no eyebrows. Skin as gray as lead. Even the eyes gray, no whites to them, and the irises black, black and deep like gun barrels.” She shuddered and resorted to her spiked coffee for comfort. Then: “He … it … it was lean but looked strong. It opened its mouth, those terrible gray lips, its teeth gray, too, and sharp. It hissed and it meant to bite me, I’m sure it did. I screamed, and it came at me so fast, faster than a cat or a striking snake, faster than anything.”

Although Martha remained determined not to be as credulous as Edna, neither her insulating skepticism nor her sensible pantsuit prevented a chill from prickling her spine. She told herself that what disturbed her was the change in Sally, this uncharacteristic claim of a supernatural experience, rather than the possibility that the encounter might have been real.

“Demonic,” Edna declared. “A creature of the Pit. No ordinary spirit.”

To the housekeeper, Bailey said, “But it didn’t bite you.”

She shook her head. “This sounds so weird … but as it came at me, it changed again, from something very real to just a black shape, and it flew past. I could feel it brushing past me.”

“And how did it leave the butler’s pantry?” Bailey asked.

“How did it leave? Well, just like that. Whoosh and gone.”

“Did it pass through a wall?”

“A wall? I don’t know. It was just gone.”

“Oh, walls mean nothing to demons,” Edna assured them.

“Demons,” Martha said derisively enough to make it clear she considered such talk nonsense.

Sally said, “I don’t know if it was any demon, ma’am. I didn’t conjure it, for sure. But it was something, all right. As real as me, it was. I don’t nip at a bottle when I’m working, and I didn’t hallucinate it.”

As earlier, a rumble arose from underfoot, and this time the Pendleton shook sufficiently to rattle glassware in cabinets and flatware in drawers. Dangling from a rack over the center work island, copper pans and pots swung on their hooks, although not enough to clang against one another.

The shaking persisted longer than previously, ten or fifteen seconds, and halfway through the tremors, Bailey pushed his chair back from the table, getting to his feet as though anticipating calamity.

Sally Hollander warily surveyed the kitchen, as though she expected that cracks might zigzag up its walls, and Martha stepped away from the counter when upper cabinet doors rattled behind her.

Seemingly amused by her companions’ alarm, toying girlishly with the rucked silk at the lace yoke of her dress, Edna said, “I spoke earlier with sweet Mr. Tran, and he’s quite sure these quakes are just because of bedrock blasting to carve out the foundation for that new high-rise on the east side of Shadow Hill.”

Tran Van Lung, who had legally Americanized his name to Thomas Tran, was the building superintendent. He lived in an apartment in the basement, next to the security center.

“No. That went on too long, much too long, for blast waves,” Bailey insisted. “And the first one I felt was in the pool room this morning, about four-fifteen. They wouldn’t be starting construction work at that hour.”

“Mr. Tran is the finest superintendent the Pendleton’s ever had,” Edna said. “He knows everything about the building. He can fix anything or knows who can, and he’s as trustworthy as anyone I’ve ever met.”

“I agree,” Bailey said. “But even Tom Tran can sometimes be operating on misinformation.”

When most young men of Bailey Hawks’s age squinted, they had but two or three small darts at the outer corners of their eyes. His years at war had stitched the memory of worry into his face so completely that when he was alarmed, his smooth skin folded into an array of pleats that aged him and gave him the aspect of a formidable man of fierce intentions.

When Bailey had sprung up from his chair, Martha Cupp glimpsed something even more revealing of his state of mind. Under his sport coat, he carried a gun in a shoulder holster.