77 Shadow Street

17

Apartment 3-D

In Senator Earl Blandon’s apartment, where luxury and order had for a moment vanished behind a bleak vision of vacancy and decay, Logan Spangler turned in the now restored bedroom, hand on the grip of the pistol in his swivel holster, seeking the source of the hiss that, although brief, had been as hostile a challenge as any sound he’d ever heard, reminiscent of serpents and jungle cats and nameless things in dreams.

He saw a figure, tall and lean and quick, little more than a silhouette but definitely not the senator, as it sprang out of sight into the hallway. From that brief glimpse, he couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman—and he had the strangest impression that it might be neither, though it had been erect rather than on all fours like an animal.

A lifetime of police work habituated him to a responsible handling of firearms. He never drew a gun merely because there might be a potential for violent confrontation, but only when the potential hardened into a high probability. Once a weapon was drawn, it was more likely to be used, and not always as wisely as you might expect to use it. Logan was confident of his policing skills but remained acutely aware that he was only human and therefore capable of stupid mistakes. As he approached the door, he kept his right hand on the holstered .45.

No one waited in the hall. At the far end, past an archway, lay the living room. Between here and there, a door on the right led to the study; a door on the left served a guest room with its own bath and a second door led to a half bath, all of which he had previously toured in search of the senator.

On the threshold of the hallway, Logan paused, listening. After a silence, a great wheel of thunder rolled across the sky, muffled here because the hallway had no windows, and when it traveled to a far horizon and out of hearing, he continued to heed the deep quiet, which seemed to him to have an air of menace.

First he ventured into the guest room on the left, from there into the adjacent bath, where all was as it should be. Having opened the closet door earlier, he could see that no one lurked within.

Directly across the hall from the guest room, the study was also deserted. He went no farther than the threshold. Beyond the tall windows, landscape lighting rose from the large courtyard below, illuminating wind-billowed sheets of silvery rain like the tattered shrouds of something that crouched on the ledge and sought entrance.

Logan turned from the study and angled across the hall to the half bath, where the door stood ajar two inches. He remembered leaving it entirely open, but perhaps he was mistaken. Seen through the narrow gap between door and jamb, the quality of light was not what it should have been: yellower and dimmer than before.

The quiet after the thunder now deepened into a sea of silence in which not one sound swam. An oppressive quality to the stillness, a foreboding of violence, felt like a weight on his chest.

Using his left hand, Logan plucked the small aerosol can of pepper spray from his utility belt.

With one foot, he pushed on the door, which swung inward, and the half bath was not as it had been before. The two recessed lights in the soffit above the vanity no longer functioned, and the socket of one trailed out of its can on a length of wire. All light came from an eighteen-inch disc with irregular edges in the ceiling, which had not been there previously. The space felt damp, smelled of mold.

On part of the wall to the left of the door and on the entire back wall, draping over most of the toilet, grew what might have been two varieties of fungus, neither of a kind that Logan had ever seen before. Ceiling to floor, row after row of serpentine forms as thick as garden hoses conformed to one another’s curves like a sensuous sculpture, pale-green but mottled here and there with black. At a half dozen points, from between those snugly grown rows, clusters of mushrooms of the same coloration sprouted on thick short stems. They ranged in diameter from perhaps three to six inches, each with a puckered formation at its crown.

As the master bedroom had transformed around him, so this small chamber had changed in his absence. He doubted neither his sanity nor the proof of his eyes; with an alacrity that somewhat surprised him, he had adapted to the idea that in this place and at this moment of time, the impossible might be possible. He was as determined to understand these phenomena as he had always been committed to solving any homicide case assigned to him.

Before the bathroom might return to its previous condition, he inserted the can of pepper spray into the holder on his utility belt and traded it for his small flashlight. Playing the crisp white LED beam over the fungi, he crossed the threshold into the half bath.