77 Shadow Street

19

Apartment 2-G

Sparkle Sykes, stepping quietly out of her closet and moving cautiously across the bedroom, followed the six-legged crawling thing that might have been a mutant baby born after a worldwide nuclear holocaust as imagined in the waking nightmares of an insect-phobic, fungi-phobic, rat-crazy mescaline junkie. It wasn’t a baby. Some hybrid—but of what and what?—something cooked up from a witch’s brew of jumbled DNA. Pale-gray mottled with green, it looked like dead flesh reanimated, and she was half afraid it would turn to stare at her and its face would be so hideous that the sight of it would kill her or drive her mad.

On a Biedermeier chest of drawers stood an eighteen-inch-tall bronze statue of Diana, Roman goddess of the moon and the hunt. It weighed maybe fifteen pounds. Sparkle snared it by the neck and held it in both hands, an awkward but elegant club in case she needed one.

No sooner had she armed herself than she noticed something that bewildered her. The creeping monstrosity, which had seemed as solid as the floor on which it crawled, was now slightly transparent, so that she could see through it to the pattern of the Persian carpet underneath.

If she had been given to the use of drink or drugs, she might have thought that she was hallucinating. Although she knew too well about the varied effects of mescaline and the like, she always had been a teetotaler whose only addiction was coffee of all kinds.

Fright that made Sparkle feel light-headed now quickly acquired the greater gravity of dread, dread so heavy that she felt weighed down to the extent that she had to struggle to remain in pursuit of the creeping nightmare. She fell a couple of steps behind and then came to a halt when the six-legged miscreation veered away from the open bedroom door. Instead of crossing that threshold into the hall, it became yet more transparent, crawled through the wall, and disappeared.

She remained frozen for a second or two, and then hurried to the door. Afraid that the thing was aware of her and waiting just out of sight, Sparkle remained in the bedroom, cautiously leaned through the doorway, and discovered the hall deserted. The grotesque intruder seemed not to have passed through the wall but into it.

The wall wasn’t nearly thick enough to accommodate such a creature. In going through the wall, it seemed to have gone out of the Pendleton altogether, into some other reality or dimension.

Her hands were damp with sweat, and the statue of Diana wanted to slip through her grip. She put it on the floor, blotted her palms on her slacks, and hurried to Iris’s room, where the door stood open.

The girl was sitting in bed, propped up by a pile of pillows stacked against the headboard, reading a book. She did not react to her mother’s arrival. More often than not, behind the armor of her autism, she refused to recognize the presence of others by even so much as a glance.

Sparkle toured the room and peered in the adjacent bathroom, expecting to find some slouching beast out of a Bosch painting or risen from a Lovecraft story. All was as it should be.

Reluctant to leave her daughter alone, she sat on the edge of an armchair, waiting for her heartbeat to slow. But Iris had drawn open the draperies that her mother had closed earlier, and shears of lightning scissored the sky with blades so bright that Sparkle sprang up and left the room.

She wanted to return to the windowless closet. After the thing that she had seen, however, the master suite seemed to be alien territory, where expectations of a second visitation would fray her nerves worse than would the pyrotechnics of the storm. Besides, she wanted to be close enough to Iris to hear her if she called out.

She retreated to the kitchen, which had no view of the courtyard. During the day, the only natural light here came from a row of clerestory windows high in the south wall, set far back in a deep alcove that lay over the public hallway, which had a much lower ceiling than the rooms of the apartments. Those panes had been fitted with power shades operated by a remote, and earlier she had lowered them.

As Sparkle brewed espresso, she thought again about mescaline. Peyote. She had hard experience with its devastating potential. She wondered if someone had slipped a hit of one hallucinogen or another into her food. That seemed paranoid, and she was not an everybody’s-out-to-get-me kind of girl, but she couldn’t think of any other explanation for what she had seen.

Talman Ringhals, Tal, Tally, handsome and charismatic professor, seducer of students, knew everything about hallucinogens: mescaline, LSD, the bark of the ayahuasca vine, psilocybin and other substances derived from an array of magic mushrooms.… When he seduced Sparkle late in her sophomore year—his analysis of Emily Dickinson’s poem about lightning, “362,” won her heart—she didn’t know about his religion, in which the sole sacrament was any consciousness-altering drug. Tal raised the subject carefully, revealing his faith in chemically induced transcendence only when he felt that she would be in his thrall as long as he wished. When she declined to participate in one of his spiritual journeys, he secretly spiked her coffee with mescaline. Instead of “touching the face of God,” which Tal promised would be the effect of this sacrament, Sparkle plummeted into a hell of hallucinations, the memory of which still haunted her.

She dumped Talman Ringhals, which was a new experience for him, and soon thereafter learned that his betrayals had begun before he spiked her coffee, when he told her that she need not worry about birth control because he’d had a vasectomy. Iris was the consequence of that lie.

Now the six-legged monstrous baby seemed like a nasty drug flashback, though she had never experienced a flashback before.

Uneasy about leaving Iris alone but still rattled by the lightning, she sat at the kitchen table, her back to the clerestory windows in the high alcove. When the storm sky blazed, she couldn’t see it throbbing around the edges of the shades. But when thunder shook the night, the kitchen lights flickered, and this faux lightning proved sufficient to bring into her mind’s eye the memory of her mother’s death dance.

The central theme of Sparkle’s existence was lightning, both the kind that the sky threw down and a series of metaphorical bolts—like Tal and mescaline poisoning and Iris—that suddenly changed her life forever, often for worse but sometimes for better. The second real lightning strike that burnt a new path for her to follow came at dusk one year to the day after her father, Murdoch, had perished before her eyes.

Sparkle loved her dad as much as life itself, but her mother, Wendeline, loved him even more than she loved life. For a year, her grief did not mellow into sorrow as time usually ensured, but instead sharpened into anguish, and she lived in despair that isolated her from her daughter. On the first anniversary of Murdoch’s death, when Nature chose to mark the occasion with another storm that rolled in from the sea, Sparkle sought her mother for comfort, at first without success. After climbing the spiral stairs of the shingled tower at the northwest corner of the house, she found Wendeline outside, in the rain, on the widow’s walk, the highest point of the structure, gazing at the thunderheads that had gathered in the last light of the day. Her mother wore a blue dress that Daddy had particularly liked, and she stood barefoot on the wet deck, holding an umbrella that provided little protection from the wind-driven rain.

Nine-year-old Sparkle Sykes pleaded with her to come back into the house. Wendeline seemed unaware of her daughter, intent on the fierce lightning that, far out at sea, stitched the darkening sky to the darker water, and on nearer bolts that struck the Maine shore and appeared briefly to set the foaming waves on fire. She seemed to be in a trance of anticipation, half smiling, as if she expected her husband, like a descending angel, to come down to her, back to her, from out of the storm.

A moment after Sparkle realized that her mother gripped the umbrella not by its wooden handle but by the metal rod above the handle, lightning was drawn to the steel ferrule, followed the rod, found the hand, pierced the woman. The umbrella burst into flames as it flew from her, twirled away into the rain, and she twirled, as well, not struck down but lifted by a million volts, lifted and spun into a brief loose-limbed dance like the capering scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. Her arms swept up as if she were reaching in ecstasy for another hit of flying flame. Powered by the storm that for an instant entered her, Wendeline whirled into the railing and over it, out into the rain and the dusk, dead before her fall began, a fall that ended in a holly hedge that both embraced and pierced her, holding her faceup to the violent heavens.

Young Sparkle in her rubber-soled shoes, on the wet deck of the widow’s walk, orphaned now and traumatized, standing motionless in a state of shock, understood instantly that this world was a dark place and hard, that life was best for those who refused to be broken by it, that being happy required the strength and courage to refuse to be intimidated by anyone or anything. She wept but she did not sob. She stood there for a long time until the tears stopped flowing and the rain washed the salt from her face.

For the past twenty-three years, she had cowered from nothing other than lightning, neither from any human being who crossed her path nor from fear of failure in any task. She did not shrink from the dangers and risks that worried other people. Only the swift sword of the storm could inspire her retreat, and she sensed now, as she finished the espresso, that the time had arrived when she must overcome that phobia, too, if she were to survive whatever unprecedented peril the crawling six-legged vision represented.

In the absence of thunder, the kitchen lights flickered again, and Sparkle realized that if the power failed, she dared not be caught even for a moment in pitch blackness when it might be shared by something like the otherworldly crawler. For emergencies, she had stashed a flashlight in each room of the apartment. Now she took one from a drawer near the ovens.

The power did not go off, but she decided that, regardless of the lightning at the windows, she must remain with Iris until she understood what was happening. And in the current circumstances, she could not risk disturbing the easily agitated girl by forcing her to move from her room to the kitchen or to some other space where windows were less prominent. In an emergency, keeping Iris calm would be the key to keeping her safe.

On her way to her daughter’s room, glancing through the open door to the study, Sparkle saw concentric circles of blue light throbbing from the center of the television, which had been off when last she passed this way. Iris wouldn’t have turned it on. The girl didn’t like TV because its ceaseless stream of changing images struck her as chaotic, first made her nervous and then frightened her: “You don’t know what’s coming next, it’s always just coming at you.”

Sparkle stepped into the study and stared at the eerie blue rings. Apparently it was a test pattern of a kind she had never seen before.

She tried to switch off the TV, but the batteries in the remote seemed to be dead. Approaching the set to use the manual controls, she halted when an uninflected—perhaps computerized—voice spoke.

“Adult female. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Five feet two.”

Having heard herself described, Sparkle frowned.

“Adult female. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Five feet two. Aboveground. Second floor. South wing.”

“What the hell?”

The TV said, “Exterminate. Exterminate.”