77 Shadow Street

18

Apartment 1-C

Earlier, before she met the demon in the pantry, Sally Hollander made dinner for Martha and Edna, and now she wanted to leave for the day. Everything was in the refrigerator and needed only to be heated. The creature—or spirit, whatever—that she’d seen might not be limited to haunting the Cupp apartment; it might appear beside her after she’d gone to the farthest end of the earth to escape it. Nevertheless, she would feel better in her own place. After she had time to think about what she’d seen, without Edna’s explanations, one more far-out than the next, her nerves would most likely mend so that she would have the courage to return to work in the morning.

Bailey Hawks offered to escort her to the apartment in which she lived, at the back of the Pendleton, in the north wing of the ground floor. That unit was owned by the Cupp sisters, and she lived there for free. They took good care of her, and she couldn’t imagine what she would do without them; therefore, in the comfort and solitude of her rooms, she needed to get her mind right about what had happened.

Sally wasn’t a weak sister. She had endured worse frights than the thing in the pantry. But she accepted Bailey’s offer with relief and gratitude.

In the elevator going down from the third floor, they didn’t say a word about her extraordinary encounter, but talked of the Cupps with mutual affection. Nearly the same age, she and Bailey had always been easy with each other, like old friends from the start. She was fond of him and thought he was fond of her.

Occasionally she wondered what they would be like together, but it wasn’t her nature to initiate a romance. She wasn’t fainthearted, though she admitted to being a bit of a wallflower. And because the Cupps were Bailey’s clients, Sally figured that he felt it would be inappropriate to date her.

That was just as well. Romance had failed her before, and she had done without it happily enough for twenty years. Falling in love could be like falling off a cliff, no water below but plenty of rocks.

She had once been married. Her husband, Vince, was a musician, a guitarist with a combo that enjoyed steady employment playing in nightclubs and at private parties. Sometimes Vince started drinking during the band’s breaks, continued pouring down his favorite poison after the performance, and came home fully boiled. He wanted sex but was too inebriated to be capable of it, and in his frustration he turned to what he called “the next-best thing,” which proved to be a nightcap of physical and emotional abuse.

The first time she had been taken by surprise. He seized a fistful of her hair, pulled it hard enough to bring tears to her eyes, slapped her repeatedly and viciously, using his body to jam her into a corner so hard that she thought her spine might snap if he didn’t relent. As he worked on her, Vince called her the vilest names, intent on administering as much humiliation as pain, and in her shock and rapid disorientation, she failed to fight back.

She was embarrassed to recall how, for a while, she had thought that half the blame for that episode must have been hers. The sober Vince, a gentle and soft-spoken musician, seemed to have no fault except jealousy, for which he often apologized; but the drunken Vince was Mr. Hyde on steroids, and he apologized for nothing. The second time it happened, she resisted—and learned that he was much stronger than she had thought and that resistance only inflamed him. Slaps became punches, and he reveled in the assault. When he was finished and she lay bruised and bleeding at his feet, he said, “I should have been a drummer, I sure can beat some crazy rhythms on the skins.” He promised her that he would kill her if she ever left him.

She eventually escaped from Vince, divorced him, and started a new life. The Cupp sisters not only provided a fine salary but also a sense of family. Sally had gone from profound despair to contentment in a matter of months, from self-loathing to self-respect, such a long journey in such a short time that she would always remain aware that life could change for the worse as suddenly as it had changed for the better.

At her apartment door, as Sally turned the key in the lock, Bailey said, “Would it make you feel more comfortable if I came in while you check your rooms just to be sure there’s nothing … out of order?”

The question reminded her of how seriously he had listened to her story in the Cupp sisters’ kitchen, with not a word of disbelief, with not the slightest expression of doubt or amusement. Now she saw in him a tension she hadn’t noticed before, a not fully concealed wariness of the hallway around them, of the threshold they crossed, of the foyer into which they entered, as if he believed implicitly in the possibility of a threat in this safest of residences.

If that was the case, she was not foolish enough to think that her story of the demon in the pantry had been so electrifying that it had convinced a rock-steady investment adviser and former marine that something supernatural was afoot. He would be wary only if he’d had an experience of his own that was supported by her tale.

“That’s nice of you, Bailey. And I’ll take you up on it. I’m still a little … shaky.”

Once in her apartment, he subtly took the lead, staying at her side, maneuvering her through the rooms not in the way she would have chosen to proceed but instead perhaps according to strategies he had been taught in the military. He didn’t appear to believe that he was conducting a dangerous search, pretty well maintained the attitude of a friendly neighbor concerned more about her peace of mind than about any genuine peril she might face, but Sally nonetheless perceived the seriousness with which he conducted the task.

He switched on not just ceiling fixtures but also lamp after lamp, and when they found no intruder in the final room, he said, “You might want to leave all or most of the lights on until your nerves settle down and you feel completely comfortable. I would if I were you, it’s only natural.”

In the foyer once more, as Bailey put his hand on the doorknob, Sally said, “What have you seen?”

He looked at her as if about to say that he didn’t understand her question, but then his expression changed. “Not what you saw. But something … strange. I’m still thinking about it, processing it. Listen, are you really sure you want to be here alone? Martha and Edna would be happy to put you up in their guest room for the night.”

“I know they would. But I’ve lived in this apartment almost twenty years. If I’m not safe here, then I wouldn’t be safe anywhere. All my things are here, the best of my memories. Right now I just need to feel everything’s as it should be—normal, ordinary. I’m okay. I’ll be fine.”

He nodded. “All right. But if you need anything, call me. I’ll come straight down.”

She almost asked him to sit with her for a while; however, alone with Bailey, she might not be able to conceal that she was attracted to him. Might not want to conceal it. All these years on her own, she hadn’t been lonely; but at times she wished for tender companionship. If he became aware of her interest and failed to respond, she’d feel foolish, mortified. On the other hand, if he did respond, she wasn’t sure that she would be capable of committing to more than a deeper friendship. Her romantic experiences before she married Vince had been few and innocent, and after surviving him, she perhaps would always find any prospect of physical love tainted by the possibility, however remote, that a seed of violence lay waiting to be fertilized in the relationship.

She thanked Bailey for his kindness, shut the door, and engaged both deadbolts. She was home, in her nest, a nest for one, and she was pleased to be there, where everything was known and carefully tended, where no one who had promised to cherish her was waiting to break his vow.

She needed to steady herself, and the most calming thing she could do was make a fine dessert. In the kitchen, having decided to bake a chocolate Battenberg loaf cake wrapped in white marzipan, she went first to the sink to wash her hands. As Sally turned on the water, she was assaulted from behind, seized by a twisted handful of hair, also cruelly by her left arm, and forced to turn away from the sink to confront her assailant. In the turn, she thought Vince, assuming that he had found her after all these years. But it was the demon from the pantry: that almost-human hairless head, lead-colored skin, those terrible gray eyes with black irises like bottomless wells, stronger than a man but somehow sexless. Its ashen lips skinned back from pointy gray teeth, and as it hissed, it struck quick as a snake, biting the nape of her neck before a cry could escape her.

An instant paralysis came with the bite, cold flooding through her body, followed by a loss of feeling in her limbs. Her suddenly rigid face felt as if it were encased in the plaster of a death mask, and she had no voice for a scream or even for a whisper. She could smell and hear, she could move her eyes, her tongue, could breathe, and her heart raced; but if the creature stopped supporting her, she would collapse to the floor, limp and immobile.

Her terror was so intense that it might have paralyzed her if the bite had not already done so. The past twenty years of nights alone had been for the most part a sweet, peaceful solitude. Only now was Sally Hollander overcome by desperate loneliness, by an awareness of the fearsome abyss that lies under life and threatens at every moment to yawn wide and swallow everyone, everything. Imminent death didn’t terrify her as much as did the prospect of having lived a life in perpetual retreat, a life that would amount now to so much less than she’d ever hoped, a life that would end without a witness, in the arms of this creature whose eyes were gateways to a pitiless void.

A tongue thrust from between its pointed teeth, neither like a human tongue nor, as she expected, like that of a serpent. Gray and glistening, tubular, hollow, resembling a length of highly flexible rubber tubing almost an inch in diameter, it fluttered in the air before her, then slithered back into the mouth, as if it were not a tongue after all but, instead, another creature that lived in the larger one’s throat.

At least six and a half feet tall, the demon held Sally in its strong arms and bent forward, its face descending toward hers as if it intended to chew into her and devour her alive. She realized that her mouth sagged open, but she remained powerless to close it or to scream. She was repulsed when the creature’s open mouth closed over hers not in a kiss but as if to draw from her the breath of life. Disgusted beyond tolerance when the tubular tongue slid across her own tongue, she was driven to the edge of sanity when the impossibly long appendage pushed to the back of her mouth and down into her throat, where something cold and thick and foul gushed from it, overwhelming her ability to swallow.