77 Shadow Street

16

Topper’s

Across Shadow Street, half a block downhill from the Pendleton, Topper’s restaurant featured fine steakhouse food in a sleek black-and-white Art Deco environment with a richness of carved glass and stainless steel. The waiters wore black and white, and the only color was provided by the china—a Tiffany knockoff—and the festively presented food.

In the adjoining bar, Silas Kinsley sat in a booth at a window table. Here the indirect lighting, even lower and more artfully designed than in the restaurant, shaded the edges off every surface and added a luster to every reflective material.

He and Nora had come here often for the steaks, sometimes for just a drink. During the year after her death, he hadn’t gone back to any place they frequented together, certain that the memories invoked would be too painful. Now he pretty much went only where they had gone together because the memories sustained him. The more time that passed since her death, the closer he felt to her, which he supposed meant that he was quickly moving toward his own death, which would deliver him to her.

Although offices were still closing, a business crowd already gathered at the bar, perhaps seeking shelter from more than just the storm and relief from more than just the pressures of their work. Although Silas had not practiced law in many years, he remained aware of the telling details that could confirm or disprove testimony. In the current dreadful economy, in these times of rapid change and daily irrational violence, numerous subtleties in the personal style and manners of the customers suggested that they chose Topper’s because they yearned to escape not merely their workday worries but also the era in which they lived. The background music was big band, Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. The favored drinks were the martinis and gin and tonics and Singapore slings that made the 1930s buzz, rather than the weak white wine and low-calorie beer of this joyless, health-obsessed age. In defiance of the law, having brought their ashtrays, as people in the days of prohibition hid bottles of booze in brown-paper bags, some even smoked cigarettes, and neither management nor other customers complained. A mood of rebellion was as evident as the music, though perhaps many of them could not yet quite articulate what they wished to rebel against.

In his window booth, Silas faced east, uphill, and could see the lights of the Pendleton through the driving rain. Across the table from him sat Perry Kyser, who had been the site supervisor for the construction company that converted Belle Vista into the Pendleton in 1973. Kyser had just been served his martini and meant to savor the first taste before sharing the story he had to tell.

He was a big man who had not gone to fat with advanced age. In spite of his bald head and snow-white mustache, he looked like he could still work any job on a construction site. He and Silas were by far the oldest people in the room, and the only two who remembered big-band swing from their childhoods, when it had still been the dance music of choice and had dominated radio programming.

Perry Kyser was the father of Gordon Kyser, who had been an attorney in the firm of Kinsley, Beckinsale, Gunther and Fortis, back in the 1980s and ’90s. That was long before Silas retired, lost his wife, moved into his current apartment, and became obsessed with the history of the building. He had never met Perry Kyser in the days that he’d been Gordon’s senior partner, but the connection with the son had been sufficient to make the father willing to talk about some experience that until now he had shared with no one.

Their small talk was brief, about Gordon and the weather and getting old, and after his second taste of the martini, Perry Kyser got to the subject that brought them together: “Renovating an older building—theater, school, offices, a megahouse like the Pendleton, whatever—there’s going to have been a few deaths there in the past. Usually not murders. Accidents, heart attacks, like that. And often as not, with a large crew, you’ll have a couple guys, they have a thing for ghost stories. They don’t invent ’em, I’m not saying they do, but if any stories are in circulation about the project site, these guys will know ’em and talk ’em up during breaks, at lunch. In that environment, when little things happen nobody would think twice about otherwise, odd little things, then they take on a bigger meaning than they should. Even level-headed people imagine they see things … but they really believe they saw ’em. Know what I’m saying?”

“The power of suggestion,” Silas said.

“Yeah. But the Pendleton wasn’t like that. Something really happened there in ’73, late November, first of December. I lost my best carpenter, quit the job because of something he saw, wouldn’t even talk about it, just wanted out of there. Other guys, solid types, claimed to see what they called shadow people. Dark shapes crossing a room, along a hallway, even through walls, quick as cats, almost quicker than the eye.”

“Did you see them?”

“No. Not me.” Kyser surveyed the other customers, hesitating to proceed, as if having second thoughts about sharing his experience. “Not the shadow people.”

Silas pressed him: “You said ‘late November, first of December.’ Do you remember exactly how long these phenomena lasted?”

“Far as I know, they started November twenty-ninth, Thursday. The last might’ve been December first. You don’t seem surprised by this haunted-house talk.”

“I don’t believe it’s haunted, but like I told you on the phone, there’s something strange about the place. Seems like terrible things happen in the Pendleton every thirty-eight years.”

“The research you’ve done, the hours you put into it … Why?”

Silas hesitated, shrugged. “I don’t have anything else to do.”

“Retirement’s a bitch, huh?” The thinnest edge of sarcasm in Kyser’s voice suggested that he didn’t believe the answer and wanted a better one before being more forthcoming.

“Fair enough. Since I lost my wife, this is the only thing to come along that’s interested me. The usual distractions—TV, movies, books, music—none of them seems worth the time. Maybe this isn’t worth it, either. Maybe nothing is. But it’s what I’ve got now.”

Kyser considered that answer for a moment and then nodded. “I’ve still got Jenny. I can see how, if I didn’t have her, I might want a project of my own.” Again, he studied the people at the bar, as if he expected to see someone he knew.

Returning to the purpose of their meeting, Silas said, “You told me the phenomena ran from Thursday the twenty-ninth through the first of December. That was a Saturday. You worked Saturdays?”

Kyser’s attention shifted from the crowd gathered at the bar to his martini, into which he gazed as though the future could be read in the crystal clarity of the vodka. “The first twelve months we worked a big crew six days to meet our deadline. But by the end of ’73, we were on a five-day schedule with the finish work. I was there that Saturday morning, making a punch list, hundreds of small items we needed to get done to wrap the job by Christmas.”

Beyond the window, torrents overflowed gutters and blacktop shimmered with runoff. Shadow Street rose like a great storm swell on a night sea, and at its crest loomed the Pendleton, not stately and welcoming as it had seemed before, but as ominous as a colossal warship with massive guns loaded for battle.

“Our painting-crew chief, Ricky Neems, he was there that same Saturday, making his own punch list upstairs. Because of this”—he hesitated—“well, because of this thing that happened, I left early, didn’t finish my list. Ricky … we never saw again. Good painter, the best, but a few times each year, he’d fall off the wagon, go on a drinking binge, disappear for three days. Every time he came back, he’d say it was the flu or something, but we knew the truth. He was sober most of the time, and he was such a good guy when he was sober, we just worked around his benders. But Ricky never came back after Saturday. No one saw him again. Police took it as a missing-persons case, but they figured he got drunk, picked a fight with the wrong guy, got killed and dumped somewhere. I knew different. Or thought I did. My opinion is they didn’t break a sweat looking for Ricky, him being single, no family to push for answers. But even if they worked hard, they might not have found him.… I think Ricky was snatched up and taken, soul and body, straight to Hell or someplace like it.”

This declaration of damnation seemed out of character for a construction supervisor who spent his life working with his hands and building on solid foundations. Again Perry fell silent, avoided Silas’s eyes, and studied people at the bar as he sipped his martini.

While taking any deposition, moments arose when a good lawyer knew a question might inhibit revelation, when patience and silence were required to extract an embedded splinter of truth. Silas waited.

When at last Perry Kyser met the attorney’s eyes, there was resolution in his unwavering gaze, an intensity and a challenge that suggested he anticipated encountering skepticism but that he also intended eventually to be believed.

“Anyway, I’m in the basement that Saturday, in what was going to be the gym, making my punch list. This noise comes from under the building, like a kettledrum, a timpani. Then it grows into a rumble, vibrations in the floor. I think earthquake or something, so I go into the hall … and it’s not like it should be, not clean and bright like we made it, but damp, dirty, musty. Half the ceiling lights are out. Mold on the walls, ceiling, some of it black, but some patches glowing yellow, brighter than the overhead lights. At each end of the hall these video screens, suspended from the ceiling, rings of blue light pulsing in them. Some floor tiles cracked. Nobody’s done any maintenance for a long time. Doesn’t make sense. So I think it’s me, something wrong with me, hallucination, seeing the hallway like it isn’t. Then I see this … this thing. It’s no trick of shadows, Silas. It won’t sound real, but it was as real as you sitting there.”

“You said on the phone you’ve never told anyone about this.”

“Never. I didn’t want people looking at me that way, you know, like you’d look at some guy says he’s flown on a UFO.”

“From my point of view, Perry, your silence all these years makes you all the more credible.”

Kyser finished his martini in one swallow. “So … I’m at one end of the hall, outside the gym. This thing is at the halfway point, near the doors to the heating-cooling plant. It’s big. Big as me. Bigger. Pale as a grub, a little like a grub, but not that, because it’s kind of like a spider, too, though not an insect, too fleshy for a spider. Now I’m thinking—who put what kind of drug in my coffee thermos? Nothing on Earth looks like this. It’s moving away, toward the security room, hears me or smells me, and it turns to me. It looks like it can move fast, but maybe it can’t because it doesn’t.”

Given the history of the Pendleton and the eerie nature of Andrew Pendleton’s journal scraps, Silas had expected Kyser to reveal a strange experience, which on the phone he’d hinted that he would. But this was more bizarre than anything Silas could have imagined.

Perry Kyser continued to meet Silas’s eyes and seemed to search them ceaselessly for signs of disbelief.

Lawyer’s intuition told Silas that this man wasn’t lying, that he couldn’t lie, not about this, maybe not about anything important.

“This voice comes out of the blue screens—‘Exterminate,’ it says, ‘Exterminate.’ The thing starts toward me. Now I can see how lumpy it is, not like any animal, lumpy flesh, pale skin. And wet, maybe wet with sweat, but milky wet, I don’t know what. A kind of head, no eyes, no face to speak of. What might be rows of gills along the neck, but no mouth. I’m backing toward the north stairs, hear myself saying very fast, ‘who are all good and deserving of all my love,’ so I’m halfway through an Act of Contrition, but I don’t even realize I started it. I’m sure I’m dead. As I back into the stairwell door and finish the Act of Contrition, the thing … it speaks to me.”

Surprised, Silas said, “It spoke? In English?”

“No mouth I could see, but it spoke. Such misery in that voice. Can’t convey the misery, despair. It says, ‘Help me. For God’s sake, someone help me.’ The voice is Ricky Neems. The painter who’s up on the third floor right then, making his punch list. I don’t know … is it Ricky for real or is it this thing imitating Ricky? Is this thing somehow Ricky? How can that be? All my life … I never scared easy. Never had anything worth being scared about after Korea, the war.”

Their waitress stopped at the table to ask if they wanted a second drink. Silas needed another round, but he didn’t want it. Perry declined as well.

“Korea was my war, too,” Silas said. “Living with that fear day after day, eventually you’re inoculated against it.”

“But in that basement hall, Silas, I’m so terrified the strength goes out of me like it never did in Korea. One hand on the doorknob to the stairs, can’t seem to turn it. My legs are weak. Only reason I’m still on my feet is I’m leaning against the door. Then everything changes. The lights get brighter. The dirty floor, the mold, the blue screens, everything that’s wrong—it fades out. The hallway like it’s supposed to be, clean and fresh—it fades in. And the thing coming toward me fades away, too, like it was all a dream. But I’m awake. It wasn’t a dream. It was sure something, but not a dream.”

Perry stared out at the rainy night for a moment before he continued: “After that, I go upstairs, looking for Ricky, and he’s there, he’s all right. He heard that rumble, like the timpani, but nothing else happened to him, and I didn’t know how to tell him what I saw without sounding nuts. But I should’ve told him. I should have insisted he get out of there, do his punch list Monday. I did try to get him to call it a day, he wouldn’t, so I left him there to die.”

“You didn’t. You couldn’t know. Who could?”

“The next day, Sunday, I go to church. Hadn’t gone in a while. Felt the need. Monday, went to work with a pistol under my jacket. Didn’t think a pistol would do the job. What else would? A pistol was something. But … that was the end. No more shadow people, and nothing like what I’d seen. Maybe stuff happened Saturday, no one but Ricky Neems there to see. During the next month, we finished the job.”

Silas’s right hand was cold and wet with condensation from his Scotch glass. He blotted his fingers on a napkin. “Any theories?”

Perry Kyser shook his head. “Only what I said earlier. I got a glimpse of Hell. That encounter changed me. Frequent confession and regular Communion suddenly seemed like a good idea.”

“And you never told your son, your wife?”

“I figured … if I was given a glimpse of Hell, it’s because I needed the shock. To change me. I made the change but didn’t have the courage to tell my wife why it might have been necessary. You see?”

“Yes,” Silas said. “I don’t know about Hell. Right now, I don’t know for sure about much of anything.”

The waitress returned and left the check on the table.

As Silas calculated the tip and took cash from his wallet, Perry again studied the customers at the bar. “What’s wrong with them?”

Surprised, Silas said, “You sense it, too?”

“Something. Don’t know what. What’re they—mostly twenties and thirties? For their age, they’re trying too hard.”

“Too hard at what?”

“Being carefree. Should come natural that young. They seem, I don’t know … anxious.”

Silas said, “I think they come here for the Deco, the music, the atmosphere, because they want to escape to a safe time.”

“Never was such a time.”

“Safer,” Silas corrected. “A safer time.”

“The thirties? War was coming.”

“But there was an end to it. Now … maybe never an end.”

Still focused on the bar crowd, Perry said, “I thought it was just me being old.”

“What was?”

“This feeling that everything is coming apart. More like being torn down. I have this nightmare now and then.”

Silas put away his wallet.

Perry Kyser said, “Everything torn down, every man for himself. Worse. It’s all against all.”

Silas looked out at Shadow Street, the Pendleton looming through volleys of rain.

“All against all,” Perry repeated, “murder, suicide, everywhere, day and night, unrelenting.”

“It’s just a nightmare,” Silas said.

“Maybe it is.” Perry looked at him. “What now?”

“I’m going home, sit and think awhile.”

“Home,” Perry agreed. “But I’m gonna try not to think.”

“Thanks for your time, for being so frank with me.”

As they got up from the booth, the big man said, “Thought talking about it at last would take the chill off. Didn’t, though.”

The bar crowd sounded louder, edgier. Their laughter was shrill.

In the small lobby, as they waited at the coat-check window, Perry said, “You have kids?”

“We never did.”

“We have kids, grandkids, great-grandkids.”

“That alone should take the chill off.”

“Just the opposite. I’m old enough to understand I can’t protect them. Not from the worst. Not from much of anything.”

Silas protested when Perry Kyser insisted on tipping the coat-check girl for both of them.

Outside, under the awning, in the cold breeze, they put up the hoods of their raincoats. They shook hands. Perry Kyser walked away downhill. Silas went uphill toward the Pendleton.