77 Shadow Street

21

Here and There

Witness

Cold rain streamed down the tall chimney stacks, which were whetstones against which the wind whistled thinly as it sharpened itself, and even here, where few would ever see them, the grand architectural details did not relent. Every chimney was capped by a fascia of carved acanthus leaves, and each of its four tall walls was decorated with an oval medallion of limestone in which were engraved the letters BV, for Belle Vista.

The glazed ceramic-tile roof of the great house appeared flat, but it was slightly sloped from the center point to all four walls of the waist-high balustrade that defined the parapet. The rain streamed away into copper scuppers that carried it to embedded downspouts in the corners of the structure.

Through the downpour, weaving among the chimneys and the vent stacks, which were as familiar to him as the patterns of his long-enduring melancholy, Witness approached the western parapet. He wore boots, jeans, a sweater, and an insulated jacket, but not a raincoat. He had come from a night where there was no rain; and he didn’t expect it here.

He stood at the high balustrade, gazing down upon the bustling traffic on the avenue and then at the sparkling sweep of the city spreading out upon the plain below. This was the fourth time he had seen the metropolis from this vantage point, and it was both brighter and larger than on the three previous occasions. If the lights of the streets and buildings hadn’t deliquesced into the shroud of rain, the city would have been even more impressive than it was.

Witness waited for sudden dryness, for darkness deep and vast.

Silas Kinsley

Returning from his informative meeting with Perry Kyser in the bar at Topper’s, approaching the main entrance of the Pendleton, Silas hesitated because the lighting was dimmer and more yellow than it should have been, obscuring the transition from the first to the second step. The first step was as wide as two, and the second was actually a broad stoop, so people who were tipsy (which Silas was not) or elderly (which he certainly was) sometimes stumbled there.

Surrounded by an architrave of limestone carved in an ivy motif, the arched bronze-and-glass doors were recessed under a bubblelike glass-and-bronze canopy by Louis Comfort Tiffany. Tucked discreetly under the canopy, the lights shone down on the steps and doors. None was burned out, but the entrance appeared half as well illuminated as usual.

Pushing open one of the doors and stepping into the lobby, Silas discovered that the lights here were also dimmer than usual. Drawing back the hood of his raincoat, he realized that the lighting was the least of the changes the space had undergone. Bewildered, he found himself not in the familiar carpetless lobby but in a reconfigured room with a fine antique Tabriz carpet over part of the marble floor and two divans where arriving guests might wait to be received. To his left, the concierge counter was gone, replaced by a solid and handsomely paneled wall inset with a single arched door. The evening concierge, Padmini Bahrati, was nowhere to be seen. On the right, instead of two sets of double French doors leading to a large banquet room that residents used for parties too big to be accommodated in their apartments, another solid arched door was set in a paneled wall. Directly ahead, the pair of French doors to the ground-floor public hall had been replaced by a formidable arched doorway with an intricately carved surround; the double doors were closed to any view of the space beyond. Rather than indirect cove lighting and recessed can lights in the ceiling, there were a grand crystal chandelier and floor lamps with pleated-silk shades and tassels.

He knew this place from old photographs. This was not the lobby of the Pendleton in 2011, but instead the reception hall of Belle Vista in a distant age, the apartment building gone, the private home returned. Back in the late nineteenth century, Shadow Street had been the first in the city to receive electric service, and Belle Vista had been the first new house to be built here without gas lamps. The lighting was dimmer than usual because these bulbs were primitive Edison products from the early days of the illumination revolution.

Sometimes, under stress or in the grip of strong emotion, Silas suffered from familial tremors of the jaw, which caused his mouth to quiver, and of the right hand. He began to tremble now, not with fear but with wonder. Time past and time present seemed to meet here, as if all the yesterdays of history were just a door, a threshold, a step away.

Directly ahead, a door opened, and the haunting began. The man who entered had died decades before Silas Kinsley’s birth. Andrew Pendleton. Billionaire of the Gilded Age. The first owner of this residence. He was no ghost, no rattler of chains looking to torment Ebenezer Scrooge, but rather a traveler out of time. He was dressed for another era: wide cuffs on his pants, narrow lapels on his suit coat, a high yoke on his vest, and a hand-knotted bow tie.

Startled, Pendleton said, “Who are you?”

Before Silas could respond, Belle Vista rippled away, as if it must have been a mirage, and the long-dead businessman shimmered out of sight with the reception room. Silas found himself standing in the brightly lighted lobby of the Pendleton, everything as it should be.

Beyond the concierge’s counter was an entrance to a walk-in coat closet used during parties in the nearby banquet room. Through that door came Padmini Bahrati, a slender beauty with enormous dark eyes, who reminded Silas of his own lost Nora.

“Mr. Kinsley,” said the concierge, “how are you this evening?”

Blinking, trembling, Silas remained speechless for a moment, and then he said, “Did you see him?”

Adjusting the cuffs of her blouse, she said, “Who?”

Judging by her demeanor, the transformation of the lobby had not extended to the coat closet. She was unaware of what had happened.

Silas strove to keep his voice steady. “A man. Leaving. Dressed as though he stepped out of the late eighteen hundreds.”

“Perhaps that’s a new fashion trend,” Padmini said, “which would be lovely, considering what you see people wearing these days.”

Twyla Trahern

As she slammed the door to Winny’s room, hoping to contain whatever malign force had tried to manifest in there, and as she hurried with the boy along the hallway toward the master suite, Twyla first thought that she would throw some essentials into a suitcase before leaving the Pendleton. By the time she reached the threshold of her bedroom, she decided it would be foolish to delay one minute longer than necessary. Reality had changed before her eyes and then had changed again. She didn’t know what was happening here, but she needed to react to it as she would have reacted if she’d seen the ghost of a decapitated man who spoke to her from the head that he carried in the crook of his arm: She needed to get the hell out.

All she required was her purse. It contained her car keys, her checkbook, her credit cards. They could buy new clothes and anything else they needed.

“Stay close,” she urged Winny as she crossed the living room toward the wing of the apartment that included her study, where she had left her purse.

She wasn’t as much of a churchgoer as maybe she ought to be, but Twyla was a believer, raised in a house with a well-read Bible, where they prayed every evening before dinner and again at bedtime. In the small town where she was brought up, as in her immediate family, most people lived as best they could with the conviction that this life was preparation for another. When her daddy, Winston, died in the coal-cracker explosion, lots of people at his funeral said, “He’s in a better place now,” and meant it. There was this world and the world after, and Twyla once wrote a song about the need for humility in the light of our mortality and another about the mystery of grace, both hits.

Whatever the next world might be like, however, she knew for certain that the walls of Heaven weren’t crumbling and stained and greasy and crawling with black mold, like the wall that changed in Winny’s bedroom. If television existed in Heaven—which was about as likely as cancer wards existing in Heaven—there wouldn’t be either spyware that made every TV a surveillance device or deadpan computer voices ordering people exterminated. That didn’t even sound like Hell, but more like a hell on earth, maybe North Korea or Iran or some other place run by madmen.

In the study, as she snatched her purse from the piano bench and turned to leave, her attention was drawn to the windows by a flash of lightning, and she remembered the brief illusion that the storm and the rain-washed panes had earlier presented to her: the city gone, replaced by an empty landscape, a sea of grass, strange trees—craggy and black—clawing at the sky. That had been part of this, not an illusion, but a glimpse of a different reality.

The knot of fear in her breast tightened.

As acutely perceptive as ever, Winny said, “What? What is it?”

“I don’t know. It’s crazy. Come on, sweetie. You go ahead of me, I don’t want you out of my sight. We need coats, umbrellas.”

Theirs was the largest apartment on the second floor, twice the size of the next biggest, and the only one with two entrances. The front doors opened into a short length of hallway, near the north elevator, and the service door opened near the south elevator. Their winter coats and rain gear were in a closet in the laundry room, near the back door.

As they crossed the kitchen, Twyla said, “Winny, wait a sec,” and snatched the handset from the wall phone. She pressed O, which in the Pendleton’s customized telecom system would ring the phones in both the concierge’s office and at the lobby reception counter.

A woman said, “Operator,” which wasn’t the standard greeting, and she didn’t sound like Padmini Bahrati, who was the only female concierge on the staff.

Confused, Twyla said, “Is this the concierge?”

“The what? Excuse me. No, ma’am. This is the operator.”

Perhaps she was some new employee who didn’t know the protocols.

“This is Twyla Trahern in 2-A. Will you please have my Escalade brought around from the garage right away?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. You’ve dialed the operator. If you’ve got a number for this concierge person, I’ll be happy to place the call for you.”

Dialed? Place the call?

Watching his mother, Winny raised his eyebrows.

To the operator, Twyla said, “Aren’t you at the front desk?”

“No ma’am. I’m at City Bell, the central exchange. Whom do you wish to call?”

Twyla had never heard of City Bell. She said, “I’m trying to reach the front desk of the Pendleton.”

“The Pendletons? Is that a residence? Just a moment, please.” She returned after a silence: “We have no Pendletons listed anymore. By any chance … do you mean Belle Vista?”

Twyla was aware of just enough of the building’s history to know that when it was a single-family residence, it had been called Belle Vista. But that hadn’t been since sometime in the 1970s.

The operator said, “That would be Mr. Gifford Ostock and family. But I’m afraid that’s a private number.”

“Gifford Ostock?” The name meant nothing to Twyla.

“Yes, ma’am. Since Mr. Pendleton … passed away … well, Mr. Ostock has lived at Belle Vista.”

Andrew Pendleton had died more than a century earlier.

“This Ostock doesn’t live there now,” Twyla said.

“Oh, yes, ma’am. He’s lived there at least thirty years.”

Twyla had never known an operator as chatty and patient as this. As nice as the woman sounded, it was nonetheless tempting to think that her unprecedented forbearance must be a subtle mockery if not something more sinister.

Although she did not realize why she was asking the question until the last word fell from her lips, Twyla said, “I’m sorry. I was confused for a moment. Could you please give me the number of the Paramount Theater?”

The Paramount, an Art Deco movie palace from the 1930s, stood at the base of Shadow Hill, walking distance from the Pendleton.

The operator didn’t tell Twyla to dial 411 for directory assistance. Instead, after a pause, she said, “Yes, ma’am. That number is Deerfield 227.”

“DE-227. That’s only five numbers.”

“May I connect you, ma’am?”

“No. I can place the call later. Could you tell me—are the letters in the same place on a touch-tone phone as on a … rotary?”

As though she had decided she might be talking to a drunk, the operator at last sighed but remained polite: “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I don’t know the term ‘touch-tone.’ ”

“What year is this?” Twyla asked, which raised Winny’s eyebrows again.

After a hesitation, the operator said, “Ma’am, do you need medical assistance?”

“No. No, I don’t. I just need to know the year.”

“It’s 1935, of course.”

Twyla hung up.

Logan Spangler

In the transformed half bath of Senator Blandon’s apartment, in the inadequate yellow glow of the ameboid form on the ceiling, Logan Spangler played the LED flashlight over the walls of sinuous, pale-green, black-mottled, serpentine fungus from which, at six locations, sprouted clusters of similarly colored and oddly shaped mushrooms on thick short stems. Logan had never seen such specimens before, and he regarded them with curiosity but also with suspicion. They were suspect less because they were unusual than because their sinuous forms and eerie coloration disturbed him on a level so deep that he couldn’t plumb it, perhaps as deep as racial memory, an intuitive sense that he was in the presence of something not only foul, not merely poisonous, but also alien, corrupt, and corrupting.

Behind Logan, someone said something that he didn’t understand, but when he spun to face the speaker, no one loomed in the doorway or in the hall beyond. Silence. Then the voice came again from behind him, in a foreign language, low and whispery and ominous, not so much threatening as foreboding, like someone delivering terrible news. He turned again as the speaker fell silent, but no one had materialized in the bathroom while he’d been distracted. He remained alone.

Alone with the fungus. The voice came a third time, delivering another foreign sentence or two, very near, to his left, where the wall was entirely covered with the green-and-black growth. What sounded like the same chain of syllables at once came from the wall directly ahead, and yet another repetition from somewhere near the half-draped toilet. As Logan tried to follow the elusive voice with the LED beam, he found the light focusing on cluster after cluster of the mushrooms that swelled from the undulant snakelike base forms.

When he began to suspect that the voice came from the fungus—or whatever the hell it was—Logan drew his pistol. In all his years as a homicide detective, he’d drawn his piece perhaps a dozen times, and in his six years at the Pendleton, he had until now left it in his holster. Furniture vanishing around him, rooms falling into ruin but then magically restored: He sensed no immediate threat in those bizarre events, perhaps because the criminals with whom he’d dealt his entire life were mostly uninspired brutes and fools who resorted to violence to solve their problems and, therefore, didn’t require him to develop a rich imagination in order to find them and bring them to justice. But though his imagination might be impoverished, it wasn’t penniless, and now it paid out a bounty of anxiety.

The disembodied voice, deep but whispery, suddenly swelled to a chorus of voices, each of them saying something different from the others, all of them still low and murmurous and untranslatable, but more urgent than before. They seemed to be talking not to Logan but to one another, conspiring toward some action. As the flashlight beam stabbed here, there, elsewhere, he was convinced that if he could see the undersides of the mushroom caps, the fragile gills would be vibrating like vocal cords.

He had swung away from the fungus when he thought someone had spoken from the doorway behind him; but he was loath to turn his back on it again. Pistol in his right hand, flashlight in his left, he eased away from the grotesque organism—and the door slammed shut behind him.

A part of him argued that this was a dream, hallucination, that if he woke or got a grip on himself, he could make it all stop or fade away as the vision in the master bedroom had faded. But he had never before hallucinated, and no dream had ever been a fraction this vivid. He’d read once that maybe if you died in a dream you died for real, you never woke up, which was a theory that made sense to him, one that he didn’t want to test.

Logan set the small flashlight on the filthy vanity, beside the cracked and stained sink. Not daring to take his eyes off the many-voiced colony, his pistol ready, he reached blindly behind himself for the doorknob, put a hand on it, but discovered that it would not turn. He felt for a latch button. It wasn’t engaged. Bathroom doors didn’t lock from the outside, yet it was immovable, no play in it at all, as if it were nailed to the jamb.

On the ceiling, the luminous yellow disc, which hadn’t been there when first he searched this room, grew dimmer, dimmer. Logan snatched his flashlight from the vanity.

The vision of ruin and abandonment in the master suite had endured less than one minute. This fungal apparition had already lasted longer than that; surely it would soon relent, too, reality returning like a tide.

In the fading light, he saw the snake-form fungi begin to throb, not every row in unison, but first some and then others. A wave motion, like the peristalsis that forced food down the esophagus and through the digestive tract, pulsed in these tubular organisms as though they might be swallowing live rodents or as if these were the intestines of a great beast.

Logan’s previously fallow imagination was blossoming moment by moment. If the fungi were capable of internal movement so radically different from anything else in the plant kingdom, perhaps they were ambulant as well, able to crawl or slither. Or coil and strike.

Something was happening to the clustered mushrooms on the walls and on the half-draped toilet. The puckered formations at the crowns of the caps began to open and peel back, each resembling a foreskin receding from a swelling glans. As if from vents in the caps, small clouds of pale vapor plumed into the air, like exhalations on a wintry morning.

The glowing form on the ceiling went dark. In the crisp beam of the flashlight, the drifting particles glimmered as if they were diamond dust. Not vapor, after all. These particles were too big to be the components of a mist, as big as—some bigger than—grains of salt, yet evidently light because they remained airborne. Spores.

Instinctively, Logan Spangler held his breath. Rapidly modifying his perception of the threat, no longer concerned that the serpentine forms might unravel from the walls and reveal tentacles and abruptly snare him, he worried that the cloud of spores would do what spores always sought to do: colonize. He holstered the pistol and turned to the door, examining the three hinges in the flashlight beam.

Vernon Klick

In the security room, Vernon Klick divided his attention between only two of the six plasma screens. One was a full-screen view of the short north wing of the west hall on the third floor, outside the north elevator, the other a shot of the north hall on the same floor.

He had watched the senile flatfoot, Logan Spangler, ring the bell at the jackass senator’s apartment, watched him phone someone—probably the kiss-ass superintendent, Tom Tran, who dressed like the guest of honor at a geek convention—and then watched him enter the apartment with a passkey. Vernon had been waiting ever since for Spangler to come out of 3-D, where he was probably stealing old slop-bucket Blandon’s ninety-year-old Scotch, sucking it out of the bottle with a straw.

Vernon Klick was not a patient man. He was thirty years old and on his way to the top, and anyone who delayed his rise to riches and fame, even for so much as five minutes, earned a place on his enemies list. The list was long, filling twelve pages of a lined legal-size tablet. The day was coming when he would have the resources to screw each of those people, one way or another, in such a fashion as to let them know exactly who had paid them back.

If not for the powers that be and their numerous despicable toadies, Vernon would have already gotten to the top. But the game was fixed against guys like him. He had to work three times as hard as those for whom the game was rigged and be ten times more clever in order to achieve the success he deserved. Even to get where he was now, he had needed to push past countless obstacles that were put in his way by the Jews, the Wall Street bankers, the Wall Street bankers who were also Jews, the oil companies, the Republicans, all the New York publishers who conspired to keep truth tellers of exceptional talent out of the marketplace, the scheming Armenians, the state of Israel—which was, no surprise, run by Jews—and not least of all, two stupid high-school guidance counselors who really deserved to be fed alive to wild hogs, even thirteen years after their treachery.

Vernon was so close to attaining his long-held dreams that this would be the next-to-last night he spent as a security guard in the Pendleton, this cesspool of greed and privilege, among all these snotty bitches and smug bastards, not to mention old hags like the Cupp sisters and ancient freaks like Silas Kinsley, who for years had nothing to offer society yet continued to suck up its resources instead of doing everybody a favor and dying. Only two apartments remained that Vernon needed to explore and to photograph, and the residents were out of town through the coming weekend.

For months, Vernon worked first the graveyard shift and then the evening shift, using the security team’s universal key to go anywhere he wished to go in the building. In his large briefcase were a camera and spare memory sticks, a laptop computer, and a pocket recorder on which he could dictate notes as he conducted his explorations and collected his evidence.

Toward the end of his eight hours, he always hacked into the security-camera video archives and deleted the portions of the recordings that showed him walking hallways and entering vacant apartments when he should have been manning the guard desk here in the basement. No one noticed the editing because no one reviewed the boring video unless there had been an incident—a medical emergency, a false fire alarm—during that shift. Besides, Logan Spangler was an old crock who knew even less about computers than the Dalai Lama knew about big-game hunting; the geezer assumed the video archives were immune from tampering simply because they had been designed to be safe. Old Flatfoot Spangler wasn’t prepared for someone as brilliant and skilled and destined for greatness as Vernon Klick.

But until Spangler stopped sucking down Scotch in the idiot senator’s apartment, returned with the precious universal key, put it in the drawer where it was always kept, and went home to his withered hag of a wife and his flea-bitten cat, Vernon had no way to complete his secret work. He stared intently at the plasma screen, watching that north hall, waiting for Spangler to leave 3-D. He muttered, “Come on, come on, you stupid old fart.”

At the farther end of that hallway from the Blandon apartment, Mickey Dime stepped out of 3-F, closing the door behind him. He walked toward the camera, past the thieving senator’s apartment, turned the corner, and boarded the north elevator.

Vernon had no interest in Dime. Weeks earlier, he inspected the man’s apartment and found nothing of interest. Dime didn’t indulge in appalling luxuries other than having an immense bathroom with an illegal high-pressure showerhead that wasted immense quantities of water and a sauna that was likewise an unnecessary drain on the city’s power supply. His furniture was modern, with clean lines, probably expensive but not shamefully so. On the walls were several large ugly paintings, but ugly in a way you had to like them because you looked at them and said, Yes, that’s how life is. And after checking out the artists online, Vernon found that their work wasn’t horrendously pricey; Dime wasn’t squandering fortunes that could be better used by society; in fact two of the artists had committed suicide years previously, perhaps because they sold too few of their paintings. There was a safe that Vernon couldn’t get into, but given the evidence in the rest of the apartment, it probably didn’t contain anything embarrassing.

Dime kept a small collection of fancy women’s panties and other lingerie in a black-leather carryall on a high shelf in his master closet. But there were no photos of him wearing those garments and no reason to think that he did anything particularly strange with them. No doubt he liked to smell them and rub his face in them, as did Vernon with his own somewhat larger collection, but that wasn’t aberrant behavior and didn’t come close to the kind of outrage that he could use for the book he was writing and for the associated website. Probably most men had such collections, which explained why lingerie was always a profitable business, even in the worst of times, because both genders were buying it.

Where the hell was Logan Spangler, what was he doing so long in the moron senator’s apartment, was the geezer gumshoe collecting information for his own best-selling book and scandal website?

Mickey Dime

In the basement, Mickey Dime stepped out of the elevator. He turned away from the gym. He walked past the two pairs of double doors to the heating-cooling plant, past the security office, past the entrance to the superintendent’s apartment.

He liked the click-click-click of his heels on the tile floor. A purposeful, no-nonsense sound. The way the footsteps echoed off the walls pleased him. Except when he needed to be stealthy, he wore only shoes with leather soles and heels because he liked to hear himself going places with authority.

Although the swimming pool was at the north end of the enormous basement and behind closed doors, the air everywhere on this level had a faint chlorine scent. Others might not notice. Mickey’s senses were highly refined. All six of them.

Mickey’s mother had helped him to refine his sixth sense: the ability to detect almost instantly the degree—and precise points—of physical and emotional vulnerability in others.

He turned left into the corridor that served the twelve-foot-square storage units, one per apartment.

At the end of the corridor, to the left of the freight elevator, an equipment room contained, among other items, various sizes of hand trucks and wheeled carts and moving blankets that residents used to transport items from their apartments to the storage lockers or vice versa. Mickey chose a large hand truck with a deep cargo ledge and three adjustable straps to hold the load in place.

The nearby freight elevator served only the south side of the building. Because Apartments 2-A and 3-A were large and had both front and back entrances, the west hallway on those levels did not go entirely across the building to connect the other two, parallel wings. And the north freight elevator only served the three aboveground floors because of the swimming pool that occupied that side of the basement.

Mickey wheeled the hand truck back to the main north elevator in which he had descended. The mural of bluebirds joyously soaring through a sky full of golden clouds made him uneasy. He didn’t know why. This was pure kitsch. Art that was consciously pretty usually just annoyed him. But this mural always made him … apprehensive.

In his apartment once more, he wheeled the hand truck into the study, where the bundled corpse of his brother, Jerry, awaited disposal.

Mickey missed his mother terribly, but he was glad that she had not lived to see how easy Jerry had been to kill. She would have been disappointed in him for being taken so unawares. Of course, that disappointment would have been balanced by her pride in Mickey.

Sparkle Sykes

As Sparkle left the study, the television behind her said again, “Exterminate. Exterminate.”

In Iris’s room, the girl still sat in bed, reading. She didn’t look up. She remained, as usual, in her autistic bubble.

Sparkle hurried to the first window and then to the second, to pull shut the draperies that her daughter had earlier opened. As the last set of panels drew together, the sky flared twice, three times, and in that shuddering fall of storm fire, the courtyard landscape lighting blinked off, as did lamps in all the windows in the north and west wings, although the lights remained on in her apartment. In fact, following that bright barrage, the golden glow of the city that usually silhouetted the chimneys and the parapet balustrade at the top of the house was also extinguished, as if the metropolis had lost all power except in these rooms.

Closing the draperies, turning away from the window, Sparkle told herself that she’d briefly been blinded to the courtyard and the other wings of the great house by the fear of being for an instant face-to-face with lightning. But she knew that explanation was self-deception. She had seen something—the absence of everything—that was related to the monstrous baby that vanished into a wall and to the voice coming from the pulsing blue rings on the TV. None of it was mescaline flashback all these years after her one experience of that hallucinogen. None of it was illusion. All of it was real, impossible yet true, and she desperately needed to understand it.

She turned to the window once more, hesitated, pulled the panels of fabric apart, and saw the courtyard as it should be. Backlighting the chimneys was the glorious radiance of a sprawling civilization that no storm or human folly had yet been able to extinguish. As she let out her pent-up breath in relief, she became aware of a presence on the outside of the window, creeping up from the sill, across the French panes and the thick bronze muntins.

Revealed somewhat by the rising lamplight from the courtyard but mostly by the light in this room, the creature on the casement window was even more alien than the monstrosity that had earlier crawled past the closet door. The shape and size of a platter for serving a fish, as pale and putrescent-looking as some dead drowned creature bleached by sun and seawater, it progressed on four crablike legs that terminated not in claws but in feet resembling those of a frog, with sucker pads allowing it to cling confidently to vertical surfaces. She could see only the ventral aspect of it, but she sensed that it was thick, perhaps five or six inches.

The most disturbing aspect of the apparition was the face in its underside, where a face should never be: a deformed oval countenance that in spite of its twisted features appeared more human than not, distorted in an expression that seemed half rage and half anguish. The horror was even more compelling than it was repellent, so that Sparkle found herself leaning toward the window in spite of her fear, driven to confirm that the face was no trick of light and shadow. The eyes were closed, but as she stared at the tortured visage, the pale lids peeled back, revealing milky orbs. Although those eyes appeared to be veiled with heavy cataracts, she felt certain that they fixed upon her through the window, that she was seen by this miscreation—a conviction that seemed to be confirmed when the thin-lipped mouth opened and a pale tongue licked the glass.

Bailey Hawks

He felt uneasy about leaving Sally Hollander alone, though she insisted she wanted the comfort and seclusion of her apartment. The quick dark figure he’d seen and the menacing swimmer in the pool were surely manifestations of the same “demon” that rushed her in the Cupp sisters’ pantry. Whatever was happening in the Pendleton, whether supernatural or not, suggested that solitude wasn’t advisable.

On the other hand, though he had been snared by the ankle as he fled the pool, Bailey easily kicked loose. And Sally hadn’t been injured, only frightened. These phantasms seemed to have malevolent intentions but perhaps not the power to commit the violence that they desired, which seemed to put them in the company of ghosts that haunted but could not harm.

Bailey didn’t believe in ghosts, but he had no other template by which to understand this situation: spirits, ghosts, specters, things that go bump in the night. If it wasn’t something like that, he could not imagine what else it might be.

After leaving Sally in 1-C, he took the north stairs, rather than the elevator, to the second floor. He often avoided elevators as part of his fitness regimen. The enclosed circular stairwell was original to Belle Vista; it hadn’t been added during the conversion to the Pendleton in 1973. The honed-marble treads were wide, and the ornamental bronze handrail attached to the inner wall was an example of the finest nineteenth-century craftsmanship that, today, would be prohibitively expensive to re-create. Climbing these stairs, Bailey was reminded of a French chateau he had once visited.

Because the staircase was circular, there were landings only at each floor, none mid-floor. As he reached the landing and put a hand to the exit door, he heard quick descending footsteps and a child in song:

“Sing a song of sixpence, a pocketful of rye, four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.…”

The voice was so clear and melodic that Bailey paused to see the singer. There were few children in the Pendleton.

“When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing …”

On the stairs above him, a girl appeared, perhaps seven or eight years old, as pretty as her voice, with lively blue eyes. She wore what appeared to be a costume: a sky-blue cotton dress with a ruffled skirt and gathered sleeves, overlaid with an eggshell-white linen apronlike garment trimmed in simple lace, and white leggings. Her white-leather ankle-top shoes were buttoned instead of laced.

When she saw Bailey, she halted and performed a half-curtsy. “Good afternoon, sir.”

“You must have gotten that dress from Edna Cupp,” Bailey said.

The girl looked puzzled. “It’s from Partridge’s, where Mummy buys all our clothes. I’m Sophia. Are you a friend of Daddy’s?”

“I might be. Who’s your father?”

“The master of the house, of course. Anyway, I should hurry. The iceman’s delivering to the kitchen any minute. We’re going to shave some off one of the blocks and cover it in cherry syrup, which is ever so good.”

As she slipped past Bailey, off the landing and onto the stairs, he said, “What’s your last name, Sophia?”

“Pendleton, of course,” she said, and broke into another song as she followed the curving stairs out of sight. “Old King Cole was a merry old soul, and a merry old soul was he …”

The girl’s footsteps and voice faded to silence more quickly than the turning of the stairs explained.

Bailey waited to hear a door open and close, but the quiet of the windowless stairwell became a profound hush.

Without knowing quite what he intended, he descended to the ground floor and then to the basement, expecting to find the girl waiting below. The heavy fire doors could not be opened and closed soundlessly. Yet she was gone.

Twyla Trahern

Having just spoken on the phone either to a City Bell operator in 1935 or to a hoaxer who was part of a bizarre conspiracy with an inscrutable purpose, Twyla hurried Winny out of the kitchen, into the laundry room. She retrieved a raincoat and an umbrella from the corner closet, and Winny slipped into a hooded jacket.

The lightless plain that she had glimpsed earlier still fresh in her mind, she got two flashlights from a utility drawer and jammed them in her coat pockets.

They left by the back door, she locked the deadbolt, and they hurried along the short hallway to the south elevator, where she pushed the call button.

Winny said, “How could it change like that, the wall?”

“I don’t know, honey.”

“Where was that place, the grungy place that faded in and out?”

“I don’t know. I write songs. I don’t write sci-fi.” She pushed the call button again. “Come on, come on.”

“It was the same wall but different, like the Pendleton on some other world. You know, like parallel worlds in stories?”

“I don’t read those kinds of stories. Maybe you shouldn’t read them, either.”

“I didn’t make the wall-thing happen,” he assured her.

“No, of course you didn’t. That’s not what I meant.”

She didn’t know what she had meant. Her confusion dismayed her. Most of her life, she had known how to cope with anything that came her way, allowing herself no doubts and no excuses. Since she’d been eleven, whenever anything scary or painful happened, she composed a ballad or a spiritual or a torch piece or a country boogie-woogie number about it, and the fear and the hurt were cured by the writing of the lyrics, by the singing of the song. But painful events like the loss of her sweet father and frightening developments like the recognition that her marriage to Farrel was collapsing … Well, those were common human experiences for which music could be a medicine. In these weird circumstances, however, melody and poetry failed her. She wished that she possessed as many guns—or at least one!—as she had musical instruments.

With a ding the elevator arrived at the second floor.

Winny slipped through the doors even as they were sliding open.

On the threshold, Twyla halted when she saw that the elevator car had changed. Gone were the bluebird mural and the marble floor. Every surface in there was brushed stainless steel. Translucent panels in the ceiling cast an eerie blue light, the same blue that had pulsed from the TV and heralded the words “Exterminate. Exterminate.”

“Get out of there!” she ordered Winny, and the doors began to slide shut.

Logan Spangler

In the threatening darkness, the peristalsis pulsing through the snakelike fungus made a wet, disgusting sound, and the obscene mushrooms wheezed softly each time they exhaled their salt-grain spores.

In the tight LED beam, Logan could see that the pivot pins in the knuckles of the barrel hinges might be worked loose with the blade of the pocketknife that he carried. Before he could set to work, however, the lights in the half bath came on, not the yellow thing on the ceiling—which had vanished—but the can lights overhead and the soffit lights above the vanity, which earlier had been broken and corroded. The entire room was restored to its former condition, and the pale-green, black-mottled fungi, both the serpentine and mushroom forms, were gone as if they had never existed.

When he tried the previously locked door, it opened. He rushed out of the little bathroom, into the hallway, relieved to be free.

He sneezed, sneezed again. He pinched his nose between thumb and forefinger to stop a tingling in his nostrils. His lips felt dry, and when he licked them, they were crusted with something. He wiped one hand across his mouth. On his fingers and palm were perhaps a hundred tiny white spores.

Martha Cupp

After Bailey Hawks left with Sally, Martha decided to put all this demon-in-the-pantry nonsense out of her mind by perfecting her bridge game. She sat at the computer in the study, playing with a virtual partner named Alice, against a virtual team named Morris and Wanda. She selected MASTER LEVEL from a menu that offered five degrees of difficulty, but within a few minutes she regretted her choice. She’d been playing real bridge, with flesh-and-blood people, only for about a year. No matter how hard she pushed herself to improve, she wasn’t ready for master-level play. She became so frustrated so quickly that she accused Morris of cheating, although he was only a software character and incapable of hearing her. As for Wanda—well, she was a smug little tart, so annoyingly sure of herself.

From the open doorway, Edna said, “I’ve decided the situation calls for immediate action.”

To her virtual partner, Alice, Martha grumbled, “I’m sorry I’m no help. I should have selected dementia-level play.”

“First thing tomorrow,” Edna said, “I’ll call an exorcist.”

When Martha looked up from the computer, she saw that her sister had already changed costumes. Instead of the lilac-silk day wear, she wore a dinner gown: black silk covered with spotted-black chiffon, black-and-gold lace edging the neckline and repeated on the train of the skirt, gathered sleeves with abundant frill, and a black-velvet cummerbund. Bedecked with both a long rope of pearls knotted at the bustline and a diamond necklace with pendant, as well as small drop earrings, wearing long white gloves, she looked as though she was dressed to attend a banquet with the queen, rather than to share a previously prepared, microwaved meal with her sister, the rotten bridge player.

“And once all evil spirits have been exorcised, I’ll have the apartment blessed,” Edna declared.

“But where will you find an exorcist, dear? Father Murphy knows all about your belief in ancient astronauts, shadow people, witches among us.… He doesn’t approve, no priest would. He’s not going to put the dignity of the Church on the line by bringing in an exorcist, because he knows that by the time they show up, you will have decided it wasn’t a demon, after all, but a troll.”

Edna smiled and shook her head. “Sometimes I think you never listen to me, Martha. I don’t believe in trolls. Trolls are the stuff of children’s fairy tales, nothing more.”

“You believe in gremlins,” Martha reminded her.

“Because gremlins are real, of course. Do you know where our gremlin hid my reading glasses this time? I finally found them on the bottom shelf in the refrigerator next to the fruit yogurts. The little scamp.”

“Maybe you left them there yourself.”

Edna raised her eyebrows. “Whyever would I? I certainly don’t curl up in the refrigerator to do my reading.”

From elsewhere in the apartment came a squealing and squalling that certainly sounded like a cat fight, although Smoke and Ashes never quarreled.

“Whatever are they up to?” Edna wondered. She turned and hurried away, the short train of her dinner gown swishing along the floor.

Sparkle Sykes

When the tongue licked out of the contorted countenance on the underside of the creeping monstrosity and slid along the rain-slick glass, Sparkle knew it wasn’t tasting the cool water or doing anything other than taunting her. The face initially seemed to be twisted as much in anguish as in rage, but its expression darkened into fury unalloyed by anything but mockery as the mouth curled in a thin, obscene sneer.

Certain that the cataracted eyes saw her, she nevertheless left the drapery open because as long as she could see the horror, she knew where it was. As it angled up the window, the thing seemed less interested in making progress than in exploring along every junction of bronze muntins and glass with its sucker-pad toes, as if seeking some breach or weakness that it could exploit to gain entrance.

Sharp lightning scored the sky, and for the first time since Sparkle saw her father seared and slain, she failed to cringe in fear of its lethal potential. The hideous thing upon the window merited her terror more than did Nature’s bright fury. In fact, the flaring night seemed to caress the creature as if it were a child born from the storm.

She needed to call security. She didn’t know what she could say that wouldn’t sound crazy. Just tell the guard there was something he had to come and see for himself. Tell him it was urgent.

Iris’s room lacked a phone. No matter how pleasant the ringtone, it always irritated her.

Keeping her eyes on the freak at the window, Sparkle eased backward to her daughter’s bed. She spoke softly, with no note of alarm that might trigger one of the girl’s anxiety attacks. “Honey, Iris, it’s treat time. Ice cream, honey. Ice-cream time in the kitchen.”

The girl neither replied nor moved.

As the abomination quested from one pane to the next, its suctorial feet squeaked on the glass.

She couldn’t leave the child here alone, not even just long enough to get to the nearest phone and call security.

Autism was a ruthless censor that denied Iris the ability to communicate. Having memorized large portions of the beloved novel Bambi, the girl found a way to use quotations from the book as a kind of code that now and then enabled her to slip a thought past her oppressor by cloaking it in the words of another.

Hoping to build a bridge between herself and her psychologically isolated daughter, Sparkle had read and reread the novel. Sometimes the girl listened to familiar lines from Bambi and acted upon them, though if the same request was made with different words, she ignored it or responded temperamentally. Sparkle had identified and memorized numerous lines that proved to be useful.

“ ‘He is in the woods, and we must go,’ ” she said, referring to the hunter who terrified the deer in the woods by the River Danube.

Iris looked up from her book, though not directly at her mother, as eye contact pained her.

“ ‘Don’t be frightened,’ ” Sparkle said, quoting the old stag, Bambi’s father, from the next-to-last chapter of the novel. “ ‘Come with me and don’t be frightened. I’m glad that I can take you and show you the way.…’ ”

Again, the famous novel worked its magic. Iris put aside the book she was currently reading, got off the bed, and approached her mother, oblivious of the crawling horror seeking entrance at the casement window.

Sparkle wanted to take the girl’s hand, but that contact would shatter the mood, put an end to cooperation, and perhaps inspire a violent physical reaction. Instead, she turned and went to the open door, as if confident that her daughter would follow her as any fawn would follow the doe that brought it into the world. Crossing the threshold into the hallway, she glanced back and saw Iris shuffling after her.

Sparkle thought she heard an inhuman cry, a shrill expression of intense craving, frustration, and rage, muffled by window glass. But the sound was so alien and so chilling that she wanted to believe it was only the voice of the skirling wind, blown into the thinnest falsetto.

Winny

When Winny slipped through the opening elevator doors, he right away realized that the bird mural was gone, that all the surfaces were stainless steel, and that the usual cove lighting and crystal ceiling fixture were gone, replaced by circles that rained down a moody blue light. A second later, he made the connection between this blue light and the luminous rings pulsing on the TV set in his room—which was just when his mom said, “Get out of there!”—and the doors started to slide shut.

These doors were supposed to stop closing if you stepped between them, it was a safety feature, but they clamped on to Winny as if they were jaws. They weren’t sharp, they couldn’t bite him, but they were maybe powerful enough to slowly squeeze the breath out of him or to snap his ribs and force the broken ends inward to his heart. As his mother grabbed him by his jacket, in his mind’s eye, Winny saw blood squirting from his nose, trickling from his ears, and that scared him enough to writhe and twist in the grip of the doors until he wrenched free.

Almost free. The doors closed on his left wrist, tight enough to hurt, and he couldn’t skinny down his hand enough to slip it loose. His mom hooked her fingers in the narrow gap, trying to pull the doors apart just enough to allow Winny to liberate himself, but she couldn’t do it because the doors were crazy powerful. She was grunting from the effort and cursing, and his mother never cursed.

Then maybe he imagined it or maybe it really happened, but in the elevator car, something crawled onto his imprisoned hand and began to explore it.

“There’s a bug!” Winny cried out, violating his rule against doing anything wimpy, opening himself to the charge of being a sissy, but he couldn’t control himself. “In there, on my hand, a big bug or something!”

Its legs or antennae quivered between all his fingers at the same time, simultaneously across the palm and the back of his hand, gross, disgusting, maybe a big centipede so flexible it could twine ceaselessly, busily through his fingers or maybe a swarm of smaller insects. He clenched his teeth and choked back a scream, waiting for the thing—or things—to bite or sting, shaking his hand to cast it off, trying to pull loose, the doors pinching his wrist tighter, his mother straining at the doors, her face red with the effort, the cords in her neck like taut ropes, and suddenly he was free of both the door and the bug.

Winny shot past his mom, across the hallway, turned, his back pressed to the door of the Dai apartment, certain that something radically weird must be coming out of the elevator. But the doors had slid shut. His mother was scared but not hurt, beads of sweat on her forehead, no bug climbing up her raincoat toward her face.

They were just thirty feet from the south stairwell, the only way out if they couldn’t use the elevator. His mom scooped her purse off the floor, didn’t bother with the dropped umbrella, pushed Winny ahead of her, and said, “Come on, the stairs!”

Maybe it was true instinct or maybe it was just a full-sissy moment that would live in infamy, but as he approached the fire door, Winny thought that the stairwell was a trap. Something was waiting for them along that spiral, and they would never get to the ground floor alive.

His mother must have felt it, too, because she whispered, “Winny, no. Wait.”

Vernon Klick

Vernon was so intent on watching the third floor for old saggy-assed Logan Spangler to stagger out of Senator Foghorn Leghorn’s apartment that the knock on the door startled him up from his chair. Before he could say “Come in,” the door opened, and Bailey Hawks entered as if he owned the room and was here to collect the rent.

Vernon disliked Hawks as much as anyone in the Pendleton and more than some of them. Logan Spangler, in his best bootlicking mode, said Hawks was a hero, apparently just because he was a marine and went to war and was given a chestful of stupid medals, which were probably awards for things like killing ten thousand innocent civilians and straddling a thousand third-world whores and torching orphanages. Real heroes were men like Vernon, who dared to reveal the private lives and sick secrets of holier-than-thou greed demons like the parasites who lived in this building.

During his search of Hawks’s apartment, Vernon had not been able to find any shockingly sick secrets of the kind that would help put his book at the top of best-seller lists and make his subscription website, when he created it, the place on the Internet. But just because he failed to find scandalous material about Hawks didn’t mean that such secrets did not exist. It meant that the orphan killer was extraordinarily clever at concealing evidence of his vicious crimes and disgusting perversities.

Anyway, Vernon did find lots of circumstantial evidence that Hawks was far from the hero old Logan Spangler thought he was. For one thing, Hawks subscribed to nine financial publications, which revealed a demented obsession with making money. He had a wine cooler full of high-dollar Cabernets, several expensive tailor-made suits, each of which cost six times as much as a perfectly serviceable off-the-rack garment, plus a collection of rare Bakelite radios from the Art Deco period. A decent man would not have spent all that money so selfishly or on such frivolous items. Although Vernon knew a lot about safes and how to crack them, Hawks’s free-standing model proved to be impenetrable, which must mean it contained scandalous material. And although Vernon knew a lot about computer hacking, he couldn’t get at Hawks’s client files because they were so well protected; he even began to think they were kept on a separate computer that was locked in the safe each night, no doubt because Hawks and his clients were engaged in stock fraud, commodities manipulation, and worse.

As Hawks came into the security room, he said, “Mr. Klick, I just now saw someone in the north stairwell who I don’t think lives here.”

Sitting down once more, peeved that he was called mister instead of officer, Vernon said, “Someone who?”

“I don’t know who she was. But I wonder if you could check your video record to see if she left the stairs on the first floor or the basement. She passed me going down when I was at the second-floor landing.”

“If she does live here, letting you track her movement would be a violation of her privacy.”

“I don’t think she lives here.”

“But you don’t know for sure.”

“Listen, something’s wrong here.” Hawks hesitated. His eyes were shifty, just like you’d expect a crooked financial adviser’s eyes to be. “These odd things have been happening. This one happened like three or four minutes ago, but maybe she won’t appear on the video. That wouldn’t surprise me.”

Frowning, Vernon said, “So Spangler told you about the missing twenty-three seconds. Well, I’m the one said there must’ve been a heist or maybe somebody killed somebody. If that’s the way it turns out, he’ll say he suspected as much from the start, but it was me, not him, who did all the suspecting. If you’re saying there’s another intruder and maybe more funny stuff with the security video, they’re not going to get away with it on my watch. Let’s have a look.”

Vernon opted out of real-time images on the center screen and accessed archived video. As there were no cameras in the stairwells, he first called up the basement hall outside the north stairs, going back five minutes to watch for someone to come out of that door. If there was a heist going on, or a murder, or another murder, or some other kind of sick criminal shenanigans among the privileged vermin of the Pendleton, his book was going to be not just a hit but also a huge best-seller. A juicy multiple murder would be wonderful, especially if it involved sexual mutilation or cannibalism, which was probably asking too much, but on the other hand, you never knew what depravity these moneyed elites might indulge in next.

Mickey Dime

In the study, blanket-wrapped dead Jerry stood on the cargo ledge of the hand truck. Three tightly pulled straps bound him to the frame and held him erect.

Mickey considered the corpse from different angles. From every perspective it looked like a stiff in a blanket.

He retrieved two spare pillows from the linen closet. He kept them in a plastic bag with a lemon-scented sachet. He paused to bury his face in each pillow, savoring the fragrance of lemony goose down.

Using duct tape, he fixed the pillows to the microfiber blanket in the area of the dead man’s lower legs to disguise the limbs. He liked the strength, flexibility, and feel of duct tape. Duct tape was sexy.

From a cabinet under the kitchen sink, he fetched a bucket. He jammed the bucket over Jerry’s head and secured it with the tape.

In his bedroom closet were several book boxes containing his beloved mother’s correspondence with other famous intellectuals. Mickey was going to put them in order and donate them to Harvard, where she would be immortalized.

One of the boxes was only a third full. He tenderly removed the letters—which carried a vague trace of her signature perfume, Nightshade—and set them aside. He took the empty carton into the study, where he duct-taped it to Jerry’s chest.

He got another microfiber blanket from the closet. He draped it loosely over the bundled corpse and all of its taped-on accessories. Now dead Jerry looked like nothing more than a precarious stack of junk.

Mickey tipped the hand truck backward, onto its wheels. He rolled it out of the study and through the living room. In the foyer, he parked it near the front door.

In the bedroom, Mickey shrugged into a shoulder holster. He tucked the .32 pistol, with its sound suppressor, into the rig and put on a sport coat tailored to conceal a weapon. He studied himself in the full-length mirror. He looked sexy.

He looked so good, in fact, that he thought he might not have to confine his erotic encounters with Sparkle Sykes to his imagination. If he came on to her, she might find him irresistible. Many women found him irresistible and not because he paid them. They often said that with him it wasn’t only about money, and he knew they were telling the truth. The risk was rejection, which he didn’t handle well. If she turned him down without being polite about it, he would as a matter of pride take what he wanted and clean up afterward. Better to restrain his affair with Sparkle to his imagination.

Mickey left Jerry on the hand truck, in the foyer. He stepped into the hall, locked the apartment, and set out to kill the guard in the security room.

Logan Spangler

In the kitchen of Earl Blandon’s apartment, Logan gargled repeatedly with some of the senator’s whiskey supply and spat it in the sink, hoping that it would destroy—or at least wash out—any spores that might have gotten into his mouth and throat. He blew his nose so often and so hard that he risked rupturing a blood vessel, hoping to purge most of the tiny seeds from his tingling nasal passages and sinuses.

Logan worried that the spores might be toxic. Perhaps not a lethal poison, but in some way disabling. There were fungi that, when eaten, produced hallucinations and even lasting psychological damage. The bizarre fungi in the half bath seemed like something Alice might have found if she went through a looking glass so dark that the land beyond was nearer to Hell than to Wonderland, and it was difficult to imagine that they might be benign.

He wondered if contact with the spores caused the visions of abandoned and ruined rooms, but that made no sense because the fungi and their spores were part of those visions, not of the real world. Nevertheless, the thought persisted. He didn’t consciously summon them, yet images of the pale-green, black-mottled organisms rose in his mind’s eye, though they were not strictly memories of what he’d seen in the half bath because they were in motion. Not merely the swallowing reflex, the peristalsis. Flexing. Coiling. Writhing over and under one another, twining in excited, sinuous abandon. He could not drive the apparitions out of his mind. They became more real than the kitchen in which he stood, as he imagined an LSD experience might press aside reality, though he had never taken hallucinogens. On the clusters of mushrooms, around which serpentine fungi squirmed, the puckered skin of the caps peeled back, as they had in the half bath, but this time no clouds of spores burst from them. Instead, in this exotic mind movie, from some of the caps rose what appeared to be gray tongues, and from still others ascended yellow eyes on fibrous stalks, as if plants and animals had conjugated, producing demonic children. Abruptly—impossibly—the point of view changed within this delirium, and he found himself not staring at the fungi but peering out from within them, as if the eyes on stalks were his eyes, and he saw himself in his uniform, his face pale and sweaty, his eyes as bleak as an arctic dawn.

He realized that he had returned to the half bath, although he had not been aware of leaving the kitchen. He stood at the sink, gripping the marble countertop with both hands, as if to anchor himself in a turbulence, gazing at the mirror. The wall behind him crawled with repulsive fungi, but the light wasn’t dim like before, and when he turned from the mirror to confront the slithering colony, it wasn’t there in reality. It existed only in the reflection. The looking glass showed Logan as he was now but presented the wall behind him as it had been earlier. The mirror was not the problem. Something had gone wrong with Logan.

A tingling sensation drew his attention to his hands, with which he gripped the countertop. His fingernails were black.

Martha Cupp

By the time Martha entered the living room close on the heels of her sister, Smoke and Ashes had stopped squalling. Although the cats seldom did any climbing, both were atop an étagère filled with porcelain birds. They peeked around the pediment of that cabinet, their orange eyes wide. They were usually as self-satisfied and confident as any cats, but now they appeared to be alarmed.

Addressing the high-placed pair, Martha said, “What’s frightened you?”

“What do you think?” The tone of Edna’s question suggested that they both knew the answer.

“Not Satan,” Martha said impatiently. “With a world to corrupt, why would the prince of Hell be wasting so much time spooking around here—because we make good cakes?”

“He’s the king of Hell and the prince of this world.”

“Royalty has always bored me.”

“Anyway, I never said Satan, dear. I said Sally saw a demon. His name is legion, after all, and he has an army to do his work.”

Regarding the crouched cats on their high redoubt, Martha said, “They never were mousers. They’re a disgrace to their species in that regard.”

“There aren’t any mice in the Pendleton to test them. I’m sure if there were, they’d have left us many little gifts with tails. It wasn’t a mouse that scared them.”

“So it was the thunder.”

“Or not,” said Edna.

Smoke and Ashes reacted simultaneously, heads twitching as one toward a far corner of the room, and they hissed as if they had seen something they detested.

The sisters turned to seek the cause of the cats’ displeasure, and Martha caught the slightest glimpse of something that scurried between an armchair and a large overstuffed chesterfield.

“What was that?” she asked.

“What was what?”

“Something. I saw something.”

Lightning painted the windows, thunder vibrated in the panes, and rain washed them dark again.

After retrieving a long poker from the rack of brass fireplace tools on the hearth, Martha crossed the big room, weaving among an abundance of Victoriana—plump chairs, tables covered with valuable curios, plant stands from which trailed ferns, pedestals presenting busts of classical poets—toward the sofa behind which the small quick intruder seemed to have taken refuge. The hand that gripped the poker ached, but Martha’s swollen and arthritic knuckles remained strong enough that she could club a rat or a potentially dangerous exotic pet if some hopeless fool in the building had let one escape again.

Eight years earlier, a rock-and-roll musician had taken up residence in the Pendleton. He enjoyed three hit songs and one successful national tour before his career collapsed for lack of talent. Before he could drink away, sniff away, or otherwise squander his small fortune, he purchased a second-floor apartment for cash and moved in with a blonde named Bitta who had green hair and breasts as large as a pair of Butterball turkeys. Unknown to the homeowners’ association, with the glamorous couple had come a Gila monster named Cobain, which had the run of their apartment and which had escaped through their front door when they had unthinkingly left it ajar after coming home in the throes of drunken lust, singing bawdy lyrics in the hall. In the following eighteen hours, before the elusive Cobain could be cornered and captured and removed from the premises, pandemonium ensued in the Pendleton.

A year later, after a night of disastrous gambling in Vegas, the rock and roller had lost his money and Bitta. He was long gone from the Pendleton, but this was an age in which fools of many kinds were more plentiful than ever. Martha half expected to find another exotic animal. If it proved to be of a species with wicked teeth and a vicious temperament and evil intentions, she would defend herself with the necessary ferocity, regardless of whether its name was Cobain or Fluffy.

“Whatever are you doing?” Edna asked as Martha, with the poker raised, stalked the intruder.

“Remember Cobain?”

Smoke and Ashes hissed from atop the étagère, though Cobain had been before their time.

“You saw a Gila monster?” Edna asked.

“If that’s what I saw, then I’d have said so. I saw something, I don’t know what.”

“We should call someone.”

“I simply will not summon an exorcist,” Martha said as she warily rounded the chesterfield.

“I meant the superintendent, Mr. Tran.”

Nothing lurked behind the massive sofa.

Perhaps the thing she had glimpsed darting away from the armchair now hid under the chesterfield. Martha bent forward, probing beneath the furniture with the poker.

Sparkle Sykes

Crossing the living room toward the kitchen with Iris shuffling behind her, eager to call security and report the thing that was no doubt still probing at the bedroom window, Sparkle heard a commotion in the public hallway. A child cried something about a “big bug.”

She changed course, hurried into the foyer, and peered through the fish-eye lens in the door. She saw no one in the south hall, but she heard a woman say urgently, “Come on, the stairs!”

After a hesitation, Sparkle opened the door. To the right, ten feet away, at the junction of the south and west wings, two people moved toward the stairwell door. Twyla Trahern, that nice woman from 2-A, the songwriter with the famous singer husband. Her young son was Winslow or Winston or something. She called him Winny. They were dressed for the storm.

Clearly agitated, the boy was in the lead, but he halted with his hand on the door to the stairs when his mother warned, “Winny, no! Wait.”

Winny said, “I know, I feel it, there’s maybe something waiting on the stairs.”

Startling them, Sparkle asked, “Do you need help?”

When they turned toward her and she saw their faces straight on, they looked exactly like Sparkle felt: perplexed, alarmed, afraid.

Sally Hollander

Paralyzed by the initial bite, with the demon’s long tubular tongue thrust deep in her throat, choking on the cold thick substance that gushed out of that hollow tube and into her, Sally clung to consciousness less as a consequence of extreme terror than because of her intense revulsion. Regardless of her paralysis, she remained desperate to break free and to cleanse herself, for she felt soiled beyond endurance by this creature’s touch, bite, and violation.

When its tongue at last retracted, it released Sally from its arms, and she slid to the floor. The coldness in her stomach couldn’t have been greater if the monster had pumped a slush of ice into her. She was overcome by a slithering nausea, she wanted to vomit, purge herself, but she couldn’t.

Limp, helpless, each ragged exhalation a cry for help that no one under Heaven could possibly hear, each inhalation a desperate wheeze, Sally watched the feet of her assailant as it prowled the kitchen, examining things with what seemed to be curiosity. Six elongated, webbed toes. The first and sixth were longer than the middle four, each with an extra knuckle and a large pad at the end, as if they served as a pair of long opposable thumbs. Gray feet, the skin subtly patterned as if with scales. Not ordinary scales, not like those of a snake or lizard, not designed to provide extreme flexibility alone but also to serve as a kind of … armor. Maybe she thought of armor because of the color, which was like badly tarnished silver serving pieces before she polished them. And then just as in the Cupps’ pantry, every detail of the demon darkened until it was merely a silhouette, a slinking black shadow that vanished through a wall.

Her queasy stomach grew greasier, seemed to slide around within her, but still she couldn’t vomit, and then the nausea faded to be replaced by something worse. Instead of her body heat thawing out whatever had been injected into her, the iciness of the stuff in her stomach slowly began to leach into the surrounding tissues, first up into her ribs, so she could feel that cage of bones as she had never felt it before, as if it wasn’t natural to her anymore but was some armature that had been surgically implanted, alien now and cold in her warm flesh. And it leached down into her hips, where she felt the precise shape and position of her pelvis as she had never felt it before, those bones as icy now as her rib cage.

For a minute, as the cold spread down into her femurs and then into the other bones of her legs, she thought that she must be in the last moment of her life. But then she knew, without knowing how she knew, that life was not fading from her. She would survive. She was not dying: She was becoming something else, someone else than the woman she had always been.

Silas Kinsley

After briefly encountering Andrew North Pendleton in a late-nineteenth-century version of the lobby—which had been a receiving room in those days, more than a century earlier—and following his brief conversation with Padmini Bahrati after the Belle Vista transformed into the Pendleton once more, Silas knew that whatever happened in this building every thirty-eight years was happening again, sooner than he had first expected. Having spoken with Perry Kyser at Topper’s restaurant, he knew this wasn’t going to be a party that anyone would be happy to attend—or even be lucky enough to survive—and his first impulse was to leave the building at once, bolt through the front door into the rain, run for it.

Three years after losing Nora, childless in a world where most of his friends had died before him, Silas had nowhere to run and no one to live for. His sole duty was to the people in the Pendleton, his neighbors, not all of whom he knew.

For a moment he could not imagine how to proceed. There were no break-the-glass-and-pull-the-lever boxes in the building’s fire-alarm system, which was fully automated with smoke detectors and sprinklers recessed in every ceiling. He had nothing with which to light a fire that might trigger the alarm and cause the residents to evacuate.

Cocking her head, smiling quizzically, Padmini said, “Is there something wrong, Mr. Kinsley?”

He felt old and tired and helpless. Anything he could think to say to her would sound foolish, would raise in her the suspicion that he was suffering from dementia.

“I need to speak to the security guard,” he said, proceeding to the doors between the lobby and the ground-floor hallway.

Before Silas could fumble his key from a raincoat pocket, Padmini stepped behind the reception counter and buzzed him through.

“Shall I call ahead to him?” she asked, but Silas didn’t reply as he stepped into the ground-floor hallway and let the French doors close behind him. The electronic lock engaged with a zzzz-clack.

Whatever was about to happen here—had been happening since early this morning—involved time, some problem with time, the late 1800s flowing into 2011, past and present confused. And maybe not just past and present. Maybe the future, as well. That thing Perry Kyser had seen in the basement corridor back in 1973, during the renovation, wasn’t from 2011 or from any age that had come before now.

Perry’s voice echoed ominously in memory: 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 …

Silas turned right and hurried to the south elevator. It would drop him directly across from the security-room door.

He wondered who was on duty and hoped that it would be a former police officer, which most of them seemed to be. He had not always been a civil-litigation attorney. He had started out as a criminal-defense lawyer, but he hadn’t been any good at it because he couldn’t find much sympathy in himself for most of the human debris he was called upon to defend. He identified with the victims. Everyone deserved a defense, of course, even the worst rapists and murderers. So after a few years, he changed careers, leaving criminal defense to those men who had a nobler attitude and bigger—or colder—hearts than his. But during that first phase of his law career, he learned to talk to cops, nearly all of whom he had liked immeasurably more than he liked his clients.

A kind of head, no eyes, no face to speak of. What might be rows of gills along the neck, but no mouth …

He had never chatted with cops about time warps—or whatever this might be—nor about not-grub, not-spider monsters. He didn’t know how he was going to do that, how he was going to make the impossible sound like the truth, unless maybe he wasn’t the only one who’d had a curious experience in the Pendleton, unless even the guard had seen something that he could not explain, something that might even have raised the hairs on the nape of his neck.

As Silas reached out to press the elevator-call button, he hesitated, alerted to danger by a strange sound behind the sliding doors, within the shaft.

Witness

On the roof, standing at the western parapet, rain streaming off his insulated nylon jacket, blue jeans soaked and feet damp in his saturated boots, Witness was not afraid of the lightning that ripped the black fabric of the sky and revealed the fury on the other side. He hoped that a bolt might strike him, but he doubted he would be lucky enough to die here.

Thus far, the transitions had not occurred at the same hour and minute. He wasn’t able to time the event so precisely that he could appear, like a magician, to speak it into existence with a conjuring word. Indeed, some of the transitions were more than a full day earlier or later than others. But once the fluctuations began, the moment of change was approaching and inevitable.

The house under him now was not the same version of the house in which he lived. Most of the people here were strangers to him, though he knew a great deal about them.

One second to the next, the rain stopped. The rooftop was dry except for the pavers onto which his clothes dripped. With the rain, the city vanished; all gone, the vast wonderful expanse of lights that was the most beautiful thing Witness had ever seen.

The house under him now, under this cloudless sky, was the house he knew, in which he lived, if his existence could be called living.

A moon sailed the heavens, slowly navigating across a sea of stars. He found that lighted vault to be cold and somehow accusing. He did not care to look up, for the sky had none of the charm of the lost city.

The long, barren hill and the moonlit plain beyond were more daunting than the sky. In daylight, the waist-high grass was such a pale shade of green that it appeared almost white, but under the lunar lamp, it looked slightly greener because it glowed faintly, as though phosphorescent. The night was still, hushed, and though no breeze blew to stir the great meadow, the luminous grass swayed anyway, toward the south and then toward the north, south and north, changing direction with such precise timing that it might have been the feathery pelt of some sleeping leviathan, influenced by the sleeper’s inhalations and exhalations. The grassy plain did not appeal either in dawn’s light or in daylight, neither at twilight nor now at night. It was disturbingly unnatural in its ceaseless motion and even more unnatural if wind teased it into an arrhythmic frenzy, when it fluttered not in the manner of storm-tossed pasture but as if it were the hair of a furious medusa, every blade like a thin flat wriggling serpent.

Living in that trackless veldt were all manner of creatures, which could not correctly be called animals, though they were mobile and always seeking. They were less the work of nature than they were denizens of demented dreams, as if imagined into existence by insane gods. This legion of voracious species fed on one another but also cannibalized their own kind, and the grass devoured all of them when it wished.

The immense meadow and its inhabitants were ruled over by the trees, from the roots of which the grass shrank and under the boughs of which the ground remained as bare as salted soil. Each tree rose high and spread wide, not with grace but with tortured grasping limbs as jagged as fractures in quake-shocked stone. A few stood alone, but most were in widely separated clusters; each group grew in a circle with a clearing at the center, as any coven might convene around a cauldron. They were black from roots to highest twigs. The bark of their trunks was fissured, and in the deepest of those cracks shone a moist red tissue, like blood-rich meat under the crust of a charred cadaver. In the spring the trees did not bud and flower, nor did they produce leaves, but they fruited. In the first warmth of the season, blisters appeared on the branches, swelled, depended like teardrops, and matured until they were twelve inches long and five to six inches in diameter at their widest point, with mottled-gray peels. They were fruit not biologically but metaphorically, for they didn’t have seeds and were not sweet. When ripe, usually on a night with a fierce moon that appeared to metallize the grassland, the huge trees dropped their fruit, which in falling flew, because this was less a harvest than a birthing. For a while the sky bristled with teeth. When the weak had fed upon the strong, the remaining flock winged west, as if harried toward the darkness by the dawn. Wherever they went, whatever they did when they got there, Witness didn’t know, and they never returned to this territory.

In this night, the most recent issue of the trees having months earlier flown westward, arm after arm of black branches reached high with twisted twigs like talons, clawing at the moon as if to drag it down and with it all the sky, to at last smother dying Earth in the vacuum of interstellar spaces.

One second to the next, the storm began again, the dry silence and then the rush of rain, the stars bright and then no stars at all. With the wet weather came the glimmering city, and Witness stood once more not on the roof of the Pendleton in which he lived but on the roof of the Pendleton in which mostly strangers resided. They were the same building but they were far apart in time.

The next fluctuation or the one after that, or the one after that, would prove to be the transition. The moment and the mystery loomed, and Witness no better understood these bizarre events than did the residents who found themselves transported from one Pendleton to the other. He also did not understand why he, shifting from the Pendleton of the future, should not be trapped in this sweet time for hours, as the people of this age would be trapped in his bleak era. Living organisms were thrown backward in time during the fluctuations that led up to the transition, but they remained in the past only briefly. When the transition occurred, everyone in the building under him—every living soul, everything they wore, and everything they happened to be holding at the crucial moment—would be transported, and this Pendleton would stand empty, until the transition reversed, bringing back only those who belonged to this time. Bringing them if they were alive, not if they were dead.

Drenched by rain, Witness leaned against the parapet balustrade, drinking in the vast sea of lights, the city brightly floating in the storm, streets shimmering, buildings rising like the tiered decks of a titanic vessel on a wondrous journey. Witness wept at the beauty of it, and at the tragedy that awaited it.