77 Shadow Street

14

Apartment 2-G

To distract herself from the prospect of imminent death by electrocution as well as from a memory of blazing hair and smoking eyes, Sparkle Sykes decided to take an inventory of her dress shoes, of which she had 104 pairs. Sitting on a padded stool in her roomy walk-in closet, she took her time with each item of footwear, enjoying the taper of the heel, the roundness of the counter, the arch of the shank, the slope of the vamp, the smell of leather.…

For the past twenty-four years, since her beloved daddy was struck by lightning and killed when she was eight years old, Sparkle Sykes had been afraid of thunderstorms. They were not just weather to her. They were thinking creatures, the electricity in their clouds serving the same cognitive function as the milder current that wove ceaselessly through her brain, from synapse to synapse. Like armadas of alien starships, they appeared on the horizon and conquered the entire sky, oppressing the land and the people below them. They were ancient gods, proud and cruel and demanding of sacrifices, beings of pure power, entering the world from outside of time, with the evil intention of inflicting suffering on mere mortals.

Sparkle supposed that, on the subject of thunderstorms, she was a little bit crazy.

Hours before the storm arrived, she had drawn heavy draperies across the windows of her apartment, which overlooked the Pendleton’s grand courtyard. When passing through rooms with a view, she did not glance at the windows, for fear that she would glimpse flashes of the storm’s fury pulsing behind the pleated panels of brocade.

Between three hundred and six hundred Americans were killed by lightning each year. Two thousand were injured. More people were killed by lightning than by any other weather phenomena, including floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes. The current in a lightning bolt could run as high as thirty thousand amperes with a million or more volts.

Some people thought that Sparkle’s encyclopedic knowledge of lightning must be a sign of obsession, but she thought of it as nothing more than a part of her family history. If your father had been a railroad engineer, no one would be surprised that you knew a great deal about trains. A ship captain’s daughter would likely be steeped in seafaring stories and the lore of the oceans. The child of a man cored through by the million-volt lance of a storm would surely be disrespectful of her father if she cared to know nothing about the instrument by which his fate was delivered to him. And then there was her mother’s horrific end.

Less than half an hour into Sparkle’s inspection of her footwear collection, she remembered one of hundreds of death-by-lightning cases that she had read in the press. Just a few years earlier, somewhere in New England, a bride outside a church, moments before her wedding, was struck down by the first bolt of a storm before even a drop of rain had fallen. The entry point had been her silver tiara, the exit point her right foot. She wore white-satin pumps with spike heels; the left shoe exploded into several pieces, but her right flash-burned and fused with her flesh.

An inventory of shoes no longer distracted Sparkle from the thunder that crashed down upon the Pendleton. Suddenly the sight of shoes reminded her of her own mother’s barefoot death dance.

She hesitated to leave the closet because it had no windows. Here she could not see the storm—or the storm see her. And here the cannonades of thunder were more muffled than elsewhere.

For a minute or two, she stood there, trying to decide where else to take refuge—and then Iris appeared in the doorway. At twelve, the girl was like Sparkle in two respects—petite in stature, with delicate facial features—but otherwise different. Sparkle was a blonde, but Iris had hair as black as raven feathers. Sparkle’s eyes were blue, Iris’s a curiously luminous gray. Mother had fair skin, daughter an olive complexion.

Iris looked at Sparkle directly but only for a moment, and then turned her attention to the floppy plush-toy rabbit that she cradled in one arm as if it were a human infant.

“Does the storm frighten you, sweetie?” Sparkle asked, for she worried that her anxiety might infect this highly sensitive child who already found the world almost more abrasive than she could tolerate.

On a good day, Iris spoke fewer than a hundred words, and on many days none at all. She had a particular aversion to answering questions, which were often such a painful intrusion on her privacy that her face clenched with anguish.

In a voice as sweet as it was solemn, the girl said, “ ‘We’re going to the meadow now to dry ourselves off in the sun.’ ”

No meadow lay along the length of Shadow Street, nor was any sun to be seen on this dreary day. But Sparkle understood that the girl meant she’d at first been frightened but wasn’t afraid any longer. Iris’s words were from the novel Bambi, spoken by the famous fawn’s mother after the terror of a thunderstorm; she’d read the book dozens of times—as she did all her favorites—memorizing whole scenes.

Gazing solemnly at the toy bunny, Iris tenderly stroked its velveteen face. The rabbit’s fixed stare seemed, to Sparkle, only slightly less expressive than the lustrous eyes with which her daughter had so briefly regarded her.

As Iris turned from the open closet door and drifted across the master bedroom, toward the hallway, Sparkle longed to go after her, to touch her face as Iris petted the face of the rabbit, to put an arm around her and hold her close. The touch would not be welcome; she could bear to be touched only when in certain moods, and she could never tolerate a cuddle. An embrace would inspire the girl to shrink away, to thrash free, perhaps even to shriek and to lash out angrily, though she had fewer tantrums than some autistic children.

Only one-sixth of such kids were ever able to live any kind of independent life. Although Iris had a unique gift, she might not be that one in six. Only time would tell.

Sometimes an autistic child possessed one isolated special skill, perhaps an astonishing rote memory or an intuitive grasp of mathematics that enabled dauntingly complex mental computations to be made in but a second or two, all without a day of education in the subject. Some could sit at a piano and at once play melodically, even read and understand sheet music the first time they saw it.

Iris was that perhaps rarest of autistic savants: one who had an intuitive grasp of the relationship between phonemes, the basic sounds by which a language was constructed, and the printed word. One day when she was five, Iris picked up a children’s book for the first time—and quickly began reading, having had no instruction, because when she looked at a word on the page, she heard the sound of it in her mind and knew its meaning. When she had never encountered a word before, she searched for its definition in a dictionary and thereafter never forgot it.

These seven years later, Iris’s vocabulary was larger than her mother’s, though she rarely used it in speech. But her strange gift was her hope, or at least it was her mother’s hope for her. Books greatly enlarged Iris’s world, offered her a door out of the narrow room that was autistic experience, and no one could say where that might lead her.

As Iris moved out of sight, thunder broke so loud that even in the windowless closet, it sounded less like weather than like a bomb blast. The storm was at war with the city.

Sparkle Sykes heard herself saying her name, over and over, as if it were a two-word charm to ward off harm. Her earliest memories were of her mother, Wendeline, telling her that this was a magical name for a special child. Syke was an old Scottish word for a small, fast-moving stream. Sparkle Sykes, therefore, was surely a power to be reckoned with: many quick streams, rushing always forward, clear and sweet and sparkling, with the power to dazzle and bewitch.

For a while when she was eight, Sparkle thought she killed her father with love-triggered magic.

Murdoch Sykes, tall and strong and handsome, with thick hair that went white before his thirtieth birthday, enjoyed photography and counted himself more than an amateur but less than professional. On Sundays, he went for long walks through the Maine meadows and woods, taking nature photos of things anyone could have seen on the same walk but that seemed intimate and revelatory, as if Nature had opened herself to him as she did to no one else.

On his last day, he came home early because the pending storm marshaled its forces hours ahead of predictions. As he strode out of the woods, crossed the paved country road, and came toward their home on a bluff above the sea, tanned and muscular, snow-white hair stirring in the breeze, leather camera bag slung over one shoulder, T-shirt as white as his hair, khaki pants tucked into hiking boots, he seemed to be not a mere man but instead a courageous adventurer returning from the farthest end of the world—or a god.

Sparkle had been waiting for him on the front porch. At first sight of her daddy, she leaped up from the rocking chair and waved enthusiastically. She would have run to meet him at the end of their front yard, where it bordered the shoulder of the road; but just then thunder cracked and rolled, and the sky threw down the first fat drops of rain, which shattered off the blacktop, danced through the grass, and rattled against the wooden porch steps with a hard sound reminiscent of beads falling from a broken necklace.

Instead of increasing his pace, Murdoch Sykes crossed the long yard as though he welcomed rain as much as sunshine, and he seemed not just to love Nature but also to command her. He didn’t even bother to take off the rain-spattered steel-rimmed eyeglasses that made him look as wise as he was strong.

The sight of him thrilled young Sparkle. She knew that as usual he would have tales of the forest and all its creatures, which he would recount with such humor and style that no storybook could be half as entertaining.

Although she loved his stories, she wished that he would never again go for a Sunday walk, that he would stay home with her. Indeed, she wanted him to stay home every day, never leave again, at least not without her. She wanted him with her, here, now and forever.

Dancing from foot to foot with delight, Sparkle called out—“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!”—intending to jump on him when he reached the top of the steps, knowing he would let the camera bag slide to the floor and catch her in his arms.

But Murdoch Sykes never arrived at the steps. The first bright blade of the storm preceded the second explosion of thunder, its serrated edge slashing through the darkling day, scorching air and vaporizing raindrops, making contact with his eyeglasses, which for an instant glowed as if the frames were neon tubing.

How fast it happened, in less than half a second, yet how slow it played in memory. The lenses burst into sprays of glass quills, portions of the steel frames melted to his skin, and he was in the same instant lifted and thrown forward six or eight feet yet somehow remained standing as he stumbled to a stop, arms flailing as if he were a poorly manipulated marionette, the camera bag stripped from him and left behind, his hair on fire, that white mane suddenly a clown’s orange wig. Incoming immediately behind the lightning, a fierce volley of thunder rattled the house windows, trembled the porch floor, and seemed to knock Murdoch down, though in fact he was already dead weight in the grip of gravity. Scalp stubbled and black, he fell on his back and lay staring at the sky with smoking eyes, mouth open, clothes smoldering even in the rain, the blackened toes of his right foot poking out of the missing end of his torn hiking boot because—as the autopsy would report—the lightning had entered through his left eye and exited through the toe cleat.

That vivid mind movie stole from Sparkle the courage to leave her closet. Glued to the stool again, she wished that her name really might be magical, because then she’d use it to charm away the current storm.

She happened to be staring at the open door when in the bedroom the thing crawled past. It came from the direction of the bathroom, following the path that Iris had taken toward the hallway.

The lamps and ceiling fixture were on in the bedroom, to ensure that storm light behind draperies would be less noticeable. Sparkle could see the creature clearly, but it nevertheless defied belief.

If it resembled one thing more than any other, it looked like a naked baby with an unnaturally large head, about twelve or thirteen months old, still just a crawler, not yet a toddler, single-mindedly creeping forward, but it wasn’t a baby. For one thing, it was too big, the size of a three-year-old, perhaps thirty-five pounds or more, and for another thing, its skin wasn’t pink and healthy but pale-gray mottled with green.

Sparkle neither cried out in fear nor leaped to her feet at the sight of this nightmarish intruder. Her response to any shock or threat had been programmed when lightning struck down her father so many years earlier. She went rigid that day on the porch, paralyzed with guilt and horror. Having wished her father would never leave home again, would stay there forever, she was wretchedly certain that her magical power had called down the lightning, which answered her wish in a way that she never could have imagined. Not only guilt had frozen her but also fear, for young Sparkle believed that, if she moved, surely another spear of lightning would strike her down, considering that she had wished, as well, to be with her daddy forever.

Her guilt had passed in a few weeks, though not her grief, and she had not believed in magic for a long time. But now she responded to the hideous crawler as to her father’s corpse: paralyzed by the conviction that she was safe only if she didn’t move or make a sound.

The large misshapen head, the size of the creature, and the gangrenous color of its skin were not the only details that argued against it being either an infant or human. Although its plump legs and small feet resembled those of a baby, it had six of them. It did not use its hands to crawl, but held its arms out in front of it, as if reaching for something, its stubby fingers ceaselessly raking the air. The thing was lumpy, too, as if it were riddled with tumors. In locomotion, it moved not with the rhythmic flexion and contraction of efficient muscles but in repulsive swellings and deflations occurring at multiple points across its body. For reasons that Sparkle could not explain, she thought it must be as much fungus as flesh, a weird hybrid of plant and animal.

As this beast from an acidhead’s delirium passed the open doorway and crawled across the bedroom toward the hallway, she rose from the stool, suddenly shaking with fear, swallowing repeatedly to force down a scream that swelled in her throat almost with the substance of a vomitous mass. She looked around for a weapon, but she saw nothing in the closet that would give her courage. Nevertheless, she stepped to the open doorway, in quiet pursuit, convinced that the hellish creature was on Iris’s trail and that it was a predator.

Witness positioned himself to ensure that the next fluctuation would take him to the third place he hoped to see, which was the study belonging to Sparkle Sykes. Here were even more books than in the attorney’s apartment. They were not law books but volumes used for research, poetry, and mostly novels.

He knew about this woman because he knew about all things, but also because in his youth, when he had not merely looked like a man in his twenties but also had been exactly that, he had read what she’d written.

Later, when he was required to kill, he had done so with what now seemed inexplicable enthusiasm. The only time he had hesitated was when a young woman named April, thinking him a friend, had taken from her backpack a book by Sparkle Sykes, one he had read long before, and wanted to share it with him. He repeated for her passages from memory. She had been thrilled to find, in such grim circumstances, one who shared with her the love of this enduring light. He gave her the mercy of killing her quickly with an iron bar to the back of her skull.

His bottomless memory was his greatest curse, for it was dark water, an abyss, in which drifted the bodies of April and so many men and women and children, not just those whom he had killed but uncountable others who perished when the great blade of monstrous history cut them down. He passed his days now on the floor of that ocean of death, where the feeble yellow illumination illuminated nothing, and when he sometimes walked in daylight, he still felt drowned.

His time in Sparkle Sykes’s study, as it had been when she wrote to shape the world, was much shorter than Witness hoped. But then he supposed it was more than he deserved. He faded from the room, the room from him.