77 Shadow Street

24

Here and There

Vernon Klick

Displeased by Bailey Hawks’s intrusion into his domain, Vernon slumped in his chair and called up the video record from the cameras outside the north stairs on the ground floor and in the basement. Watching the plasma screen, he fast-forwarded through the few minutes in question, but no one came out of the stairwell on either level except Mr. Big War Hero himself, Bailey Hawks, just a minute earlier.

Vernon said, “If she really went down past you when you were on the second-floor landing—”

“I was, she did,” Hawks said impatiently, like you weren’t supposed to doubt anything he said because he won a bunch of medals for croaking maybe five hundred unarmed old Muslim dames and setting their grandchildren on fire.

“What did this woman look like?” Vernon asked.

“She was a girl. Seven or eight years old.”

Vernon raised his eyebrows. “You were following some little girl around the building?”

“I wasn’t following her. She was dressed strangely. Like in a costume. She went down past me on the stairs.”

“Well, the cameras say she didn’t. Unless she’s still in the stairwell, dead or not, or something.”

Hawks tried to look baffled, but Vernon was pretty sure he saw guilt in those shifty money-manager eyes. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Doesn’t mean anything,” Vernon said. “Just that we’ve already got ourselves a twenty-three-second mystery from last night, maybe a heist, a Pink Panther kind of thing, but most likely worse. And now this girl’s gone missing.”

“She said her name was Sophia Pendleton and her father was the master of the house.”

“That’s some story,” Vernon said, needling Hawks with the hope of getting a reaction that would make good copy in his tell-all book.

A rumbling rose from the earth under the building, swiftly built, then slowly waned.

“The damn fools,” Vernon said. “Nobody gets a permit to blast this late in the day.”

“It’s not blasting. The shock waves last far too long for that.”

Vernon wanted to ask if this was something Hawks learned when he was a big war hero blowing up hospitals and nursery schools, or if maybe he was just born knowing everything. To maintain his cover, to ensure that his book wouldn’t attract lawsuits and restraining orders before it was published, Vernon kept his mouth shut.

“Something’s happening here. Something’s wrong,” Hawks said, and hurried out of the security room.

“He waltzes in here like he owns the place,” Vernon said aloud to himself, “disrupts the security schedule, wants me to help him stalk some pretty little girl, for God’s sake, and then breezes out with not so much as a thank-you. Moneygrubbing, gun-sucking, self-important, arrogant, phony, clueless, pervert bastard.”

He returned his attention to the north hall on the third floor. Still no sign of Logan Spangler. Of course maybe the old fart left the idiot senator’s apartment while Vernon was distracted by Hawks.

“Self-righteous, warmongering, devious, greedy sicko,” Vernon fumed. “Twisted, ignorant, syphilitic, swindling, conceited, stupid, baby-killing, racist son of a pig!”

Silas Kinsley

On the ground floor, at the south elevator, Silas was desperate to get to the security room and convince the guard that the Pendleton needed to be evacuated immediately. Considering that the crisis wasn’t a fire or a bomb threat, was instead the perception that something seemed to be going badly wrong with the fundamental mechanism of time within the building, he would need all of his persuasive powers.

As anxious as he was to sound the alarm, he hesitated to press the elevator-call button because of the voices that abruptly arose in the shaft behind the sliding doors. Scores of them, all talking at once. He could not begin to identify the language, though he spoke four and was passingly familiar with two others. The phonemes and morphemes of this strange speech sounded not merely primitive but also savage, a limited language evolved by a culture void of mercy, by a people quick to violence and capable of great cruelty, a people whose beliefs and purposes were utterly alien from human ways of thinking. Intuition was always a quiet voice, the faintest whisper at the back of the mind, but this time it wailed as loud as a siren, and Silas drew his hand back from the call button just as blue light glimmered through the paper-thin crack between the elevator doors, as if the walls of the entire shaft were aglow.

Martha Cupp

As Martha probed under the chesterfield with the brass poker from the fireplace-tool set, Edna lifted the lace-trimmed train of her long dinner gown, revealing her shoes. Evidently she expected something to skitter from beneath the sofa, not necessarily a Gila monster in the tradition of Cobain, maybe just a mouse, but something unpleasant that might seek shelter under the train and climb one of her legs.

“Please, dear, don’t poke at it so aggressively,” Edna said.

“All I seem to be poking is empty air.”

“But if you do jab it, be gentle. Don’t enrage it.”

“Whatever it is, Sis, it won’t thank us for our hospitality and tip its hat on the way out.” She stopped poking. “There’s nothing under here.”

High on the étagère, Smoke and Ashes hissed, suggesting that the object of their disgust and fear remained in the living room.

Martha turned from the chesterfield and went exploring through the canyons of bulky Victorian furniture that offered innumerable places for a mouse to hide—or a Gila monster, for that matter.

“If it’s something supernatural,” Edna said, “it’s not going to be afraid of a brass poker.”

“It’s not supernatural.”

“You didn’t see it clearly. That’s the way supernatural entities are. Quick, vaguely glimpsed, enigmatic.”

“ ‘Quick, vaguely glimpsed, and enigmatic’ describes my first husband’s performance in the bedroom, and he wasn’t supernatural.”

“No, but he was cute,” Edna said.

From their elevated perch, the cats squalled and hissed with greater agitation.

Edna said, “Dear—the chesterfield!”

Turning to the plump sofa once more, Martha saw something moving inside of it. The horsehair-stuffed seat, with no removable cushions, was a single upholstered mass featuring a waterfall front edge. Under the striped fabric, stretching it out of shape, a creature that might have been about the size of one of the cats burrowed back and forth through the stuffing, seemingly frenzied but silent. Evidently it had chewed its way through the underside of the chesterfield and into the guts of the piece.

Martha stepped in front of the sofa, planted her feet wide, and raised the poker overhead.

“It might be a spirit,” Edna said. “Don’t strike a spirit.”

“It’s not a spirit,” Martha assured her.

“If it’s a good spirit, striking it is sacrilegious.”

Waiting for the thing in the sofa to slow down or pause so that she could be certain of clubbing it solidly on her first try, Martha said sarcastically, “What if it’s a demonic spirit?”

“Then, dear, you’ll just piss it off. Please let’s call Mr. Tran and have him deal with this.”

Martha said, “You’re the cake-recipe genius. I’m the business genius. What I have here is a business decision. Go bake something while I handle this.”

On the seat of the chesterfield, the upholstery split and the burrowing intruder erupted in a shower of horsehair.

Mickey Dime

While Mickey waited on the third floor for the north elevator, tremors shuddered through the Pendleton again. He wasn’t the least bit worried about them.

In the Philippines, he had once tracked two men to the lip of a volcano. He needed to kill them to fulfill a contract. As he was about to pull the trigger, an unanticipated minor eruption convulsed the mountain. A gout of white-hot lava spewed over the two men, all but vaporizing their flesh and reducing their bones to char. Though Mickey stood only fifteen feet from them, not a drop touched him. He walked away with the equivalent of a light sunburn on his face.

He had liked the smell of molten rock. Metallic, crisp, sexy.

A day later, the volcano blew in a big way. But by then he was ensconced in a Hong Kong hotel suite with a young prostitute and a can of whipped cream. She had been delicious.

If a volcano couldn’t get him, nothing would.

Now he rode the elevator to the basement. The doors slid open. Mickey stepped into the corridor.

Diagonally to his right and on the farther side of the hallway, the stairwell door was swinging shut behind someone. He watched it close. He liked the sound of the latch clacking into place. A solid, final sound.

He was reminded of the sound of the heavy latches on the steamer trunks in which he had packed the remains of the cocktail waitress named Mallory, her little sister, and her girlfriend. Fifteen years had passed since he’d disposed of those bodies, but that exhilarating night remained as crisp in memory as if those events had occurred earlier this very day. With his enormous willpower, he restricted himself to professional murder, though in his heart still lived the amateur who would have done the same work for the love of it.

Enjoying the faint scent of chlorine, he waited to see if anyone would come back through the door. Maybe the ding of the elevator arriving on station would engage that person’s curiosity. He couldn’t risk a witness who could place him here at this hour.

After maybe half a minute, Mickey turned left and walked to the security room. He opened the door and went inside.

The prick was on duty. Klick the Prick. Even though they were ex-cops, the other guards were all right. This Klick was a smug little prick who always seemed to be scheming at something.

Swiveling in his chair, Klick said, “Suddenly I’m as popular as Justin Timberlake or somebody. What brings you here, Mr. Dime?”

Mickey drew the pistol with the sound suppressor from his shoulder holster.

Eyes wide in terror as Mickey approached, Klick said, “I’ll never tell about the lingerie.”

Mickey shot him point-blank through the heart, twice. When you right away stop the heart pumping, there’s less blood to clean up.

He left the security room and went to the basement equipment room where he had earlier gotten the hand truck. This time, he fetched a thick moving blanket and two of the furniture straps that dangled from a wall rack.

Only when he returned to the security room did he stop to think about what Vernon Klick had said: I’ll never tell about the lingerie.

From the time Mickey had been a little boy, his mother warned him never to trust a man in a uniform. How right she had been.

Dr. Kirby Ignis

In his raincoat, carrying an umbrella, soon to be late meeting his colleague for dinner at Topper’s, Kirby locked his second-floor apartment just as shock waves rolled through the rock on which the Pendleton stood. The blasting contractors on the farther side of Shadow Hill were excavating later than usual. He wondered that anyone would want to pay overtime to build a high-rise in this dreadful economy, but he supposed they anticipated a turnaround a few years down the road.

As he walked briskly toward the west end of the north hall, strains of Chinese opera still lingered in his mind’s ear. Kirby hummed a few bars of a favorite aria.

The neighbors in 2-E, Cheryl and Henry Cordovan, in Europe since the previous Saturday and not scheduled to return for another twelve days, had left their springer spaniel, Biscuit, with their son and his family. Kirby missed the dog. A couple of times a week, when the Cordovans went out to dinner and Kirby intended to eat at home, they left Biscuit with him for a few hours. The spaniel was as cute as a dog could be and excellent company.

Three years previously, he’d had a companion of his own, a black Labrador retriever named Lucy, but cancer had taken her. The loss so devastated Kirby that only recently had he begun to think he might bring a new dog into his life, risking the grief again. Tropical fish were pretty to look at, but they weren’t great company.

Sitting on a comfy sofa with a dog’s head in his lap, rubbing its ears and stroking its head, Kirby could achieve a greater clarity of thought and more breakthroughs in the theory and the technology that made the Ignis Institute a success. A good dog brought with it a profound peace that made the mind soar and encouraged problem solving even more than did music or the graceful spectacle of swimming fish.

For the past three years, he had contributed significant money to all kinds of dog-rescue groups, watched Dogs 101 on Animal Planet, and looked after Biscuit a couple of evenings each week, but now, as he arrived at the north elevator, he made up his mind to get a new companion before Christmas. He often thought that the world would be a better place if dogs were the smartest creatures on the planet and if human beings, with all their pride and desires and hatreds, had never evolved.

When the elevator doors slid open, a tall man in evening clothes exited. He carried himself like royalty at a function of great pomp. Nature had given him a distinguished face with a patrician nose, eyes as blue as pure deep water, a high brow, and snow-white hair.

Kirby stepped back, startled. This stranger’s shirt and face and hair were spattered with fresh blood. “Sir, are you all right? You’ve been hurt.”

The evening clothes were dirty, rumpled, torn in places, as if the man had been in a struggle, perhaps mugged in the street—though he was not rain-soaked. Seeming bewildered, he looked around at the hallway, at the double doors to the Trahern apartment on his left, to the door of the Hawks apartment ahead of him. “What is this place? It’s Belle Vista … yet it isn’t.”

In his voice was more than a note of perplexity, also a tremor of fear and what might have been despair.

On second look, Kirby saw that the noble countenance appeared pale and drawn. Horror crawled in the stricken blue eyes.

“What’s happened to you?” Kirby asked.

“This place … Where is this? How have I gotten here? Where am I?”

Kirby stepped forward to take the bloodied man by one arm, for he seemed wobbly and in need of support.

Before Kirby could touch him, the stranger raised both hands, which were slick with blood. “We almost made it, all untouched,” he muttered, “… and then the spores.”

Retreating again, Kirby said, “Spores?”

“Witness said they were from a benign species, nothing to fear. But he’s part of it all, not to be believed.”

The man’s gaze continued to travel over the walls, the ceiling, and his face wrenched with grievous emotion, as though his perplexity must be rapidly collapsing into a more profound confusion, his powers of perception, memory, and reason slipping away from him.

“I killed them all. The mister and the missus, the children, the staff.”

On consideration, Kirby saw that the suit of evening clothes was not an ordinary tuxedo. It looked more like stylish livery, a uniform that a highly placed servant might wear.

“They were infected, I’m sure of it, so I had to kill them all, even the beautiful children, God help me, I had to kill them all to save the world.”

Overcome by a sudden sense of mortal peril, heart knocking, Kirby backed away from the man, toward the door to the north stairs.

The butler, if that’s what he was, seemed to have no interest in Kirby, to have no malice left. He said, “Now I’ve got to get more ammunition so I can kill myself.” As he crossed the hallway, he began to grow translucent, as if he’d never been real, only an apparition. He disappeared through the wall, into the Hawks apartment.

Although Kirby didn’t believe in ghosts, this might have been one—except for the blood that had dripped off the man’s hands and now stained the hallway runner.

Winny

They couldn’t use the elevator because it was all wrong and there was a big bug in it or something that almost got his hand, and they were afraid of the stairs, so he and his mom took a time-out in the Sykes apartment because there seemed to be nowhere else to go.

Winny knew Mrs. Sykes just from saying hello to each other when they passed in the hallway or down in the lobby, and he knew who Iris was except she never said hello. Iris, who was three years older than Winny, couldn’t tolerate people, not because she thought they were stupid or mean or boring—though a lot of them were—but because she had autism. Winny’s mother said that most of the time, Iris couldn’t bear to be touched and that pretty much all of the time she became really upset if too many people were around. He kind of understood autism because he’d read a little about it, but he totally understood the way Iris felt about people, because he had his own problem. He always seemed to say the wrong thing or a dumb thing, or something that made no sense because he babbled. Iris couldn’t say anything, and Winny didn’t know what to say, so they were sort of in the same boat.

From the way that Mrs. Sykes snapped the thumb-turns of both deadbolts, rattled the security chain in place, and then tested the door to be sure it was locked even though it obviously was, Winny knew that something creepy had recently happened to her, too, and that she was scared.

“Maybe I’m just locking something in with us,” Mrs. Sykes said, “not locking anything out. Anyway, if they can just go through walls, what good is a lock?”

Winny’s mom looked at him, and he made a half-goofy face so she wouldn’t see how much Mrs. Sykes spooked him. Whatever was happening, this was going to be a serious test of his strategies for avoiding the wimp-sissy label.

“I need to show you something,” Mrs. Sykes said. “I hope it’s still there. Or maybe I don’t. No, I do. I hope it’s there. Because if you see the damn thing, too, then I’ll know I’m not losing my mind.”

Winny made another half-goofy face at his mother, but this time it didn’t seem appropriate, as it had been only a moment earlier. Now he not only didn’t know what to say; he also didn’t know what to do with his face, or with his hands for that matter. He put his hands in his jacket pockets, but his face just hung out there for everyone to see.

Leading them across the living room, Mrs. Sykes realized that Iris wasn’t following. The girl just stood there, staring off into space, her hands fisted at her sides. Her mother spoke to her in an odd way that seemed like she was reciting lines of a poem: “ ‘Don’t be frightened. Come with me and don’t be frightened. I’m glad that I can take you to show you the way.’ ”

This time, Iris came with them, though she stayed a few steps behind. They went along a hallway and into a bedroom that must have belonged to her because it was in girl colors and stuffed toys were perched everywhere. Most of the toys were bunnies, a few frogs, a few silly birds, and one dopey squirrel, all plush and soft, none of them animals that, in the real world, had sharp teeth and killed other animals.

Winny was surprised to see so many books, because he thought some autistic kids never read well, maybe not at all. Evidently, Iris read a lot. He knew why. Books were another life. If you were shy and didn’t know what to say and felt you didn’t belong anywhere, books were a way to lead another life, a way to be someone else entirely, to be anyone at all. Winny didn’t know what he would do without his books, except probably go berserk and start killing people and making ashtrays out of their skulls even though he didn’t smoke and never would.

“It’s still there,” Mrs. Sykes said, pointing to a window.

A freaky thing clung to the glass panes in the rain: roughly the shape of a football although bigger, but flat on the bottom, with too many stumpy legs that looked like they were made for walking on another planet, and a face more human than not, except that the face was in its belly.

Part of Winny’s strategy for avoiding a reputation as a sissy was never to look away from the screen during a scary movie. Never ever. He always managed to keep his eyes on even the most gruesome action by conducting a commentary in his head, making fun of bad acting when he saw it, ridiculing idiotic dialogue, and mocking lousy special effects. Often tongue-tied with others, he could chatter nonstop when talking to himself. He also judged every psycho killer or monster on his take-a-dump-in-your-pants-and-run scale, on which the highest score was ten stars. But by being the toughest possible critic, he found that he could diminish the fright effect of any creature that had ever crept across a movie screen, and he never awarded more than six stars, which wasn’t even a pee-in-your-pants score.

The thing on the window was a seven.

He didn’t pee in his pants, however, and even though his mom cried out in shock and disgust when she saw the creeper, even though Mrs. Sykes said something about it being a mescaline dream, whatever that might be, Winny didn’t make a sound to reveal the fear that quickened through him.

Iris helped him to keep his composure. She didn’t say anything or make eye contact or even move from beside her bed, from which she had snatched a plush-toy bunny with big floppy ears. But her face was tight with anxiety, and she looked so vulnerable that Winny worried more about her than about himself. He didn’t think she had seen the thing on the window, because she wouldn’t make eye contact with him or with anyone, let alone with a monster, and he wanted to be sure she didn’t accidentally get a glimpse of it. Just having a couple of neighbors in her room made her want to go off like a bottle rocket—you could see how she struggled to control herself—so the thing on the window would probably make her blow every cork and strip every gear. Life was hard enough for her, she didn’t need monsters; nobody needed them, but especially not her.

Some of those ghost trains went rumbling beneath the Pendleton again on tracks that didn’t exist, and onto the tall window crawled another creature like the first, the same in every way except that the face in its belly wasn’t a man’s face but a woman’s, maybe even the face of a little girl, twisted like in a funhouse mirror. The lips peeled open, and a tongue fluttered against the glass.

If Winny and his mom had successfully fled the Pendleton, they wouldn’t have escaped whatever was happening. Maybe things were even crazier outside than inside the building.

Discovering an inner strength that surprised him, Winny dashed to the window, seized the pull cord, and drew shut the draperies, so that the monstrosities could no longer see them or be seen.

He said simply, before his mother and Mrs. Sykes could protest, “Iris.”

Martha Cupp

Out of the chesterfield sofa and onto the seat, in a spray of horsehair stuffing, spilled something like tangles of glistening intestines, although they were bloodless and gray. The entrails of any eviscerated mammal would never have spasmed and writhed like these unraveling coils, which seemed not to be part of some violently slashed-open animal but the entire intact animal itself, a long ropey colon of a thing, segmented as if by bands of muscle, as hideous a spectacle as Martha had ever seen either in or out of dreams.

Overcome by abhorrence and detestation even in excess of what she had ever felt toward the Internal Revenue Service, Martha was for a moment paralyzed. She held the poker in both hands, high above her head, and she wanted to strike with it more than she’d wanted anything else in her long life, but her arms were locked, her body unresponsive to her will, immobilized as much by dark wonder as by terror.

Smoke and Ashes shrieked quite unlike the docile cats they had always been. She heard them scrambling off the étagère, flinging themselves through the air, landing with thumps on padded furniture, and squealing their way out of the living room to safer realms.

The west-facing windows filled with the most brilliant barrages of lightning yet, the entire sky ablaze, as if the poles of Heaven and Hell had shifted, the fires of damnation now overhead and God’s angels all tumbled into caverns in the earth. The lamps flickered in sympathy with the flashing night, and a sudden jittering in the viscera-slick mass on the sofa might have been an illusion, the stroboscopic effect of the throbbing light.

The storm went dark and the lamps swelled and steadied to full brightness, revealing that the abomination on the chesterfield was sprouting black tarantula legs from among the sweating loops of its intestinelike body, and not only legs but also a cluster of red beaks that clicked, clicked, clicked as though eager to peck at something and shred it.

Breaking her brief paralysis, Martha swung the fireplace poker, and from her perspective the grotesque creature appeared to shimmer and vanish during the downswing. The brass poker slammed into the chesterfield, and horsehair plumed from between the lips of the rip in the fabric, but there was no satisfying splatter or wounded cry. Overcharged with loathing, fear, and outrage that her home had been invaded, she slammed the poker down again, a third time, and a fourth before she was able to acknowledge the lack of a target. Still furious, totally stoked, half sick with disgust, she refused to accept that the squirming monstrosity had evaporated into thin air. She dropped the poker, grabbed the front of the sofa with both hands, and overturned it, crashing it onto its back, revealing the underside—and no intruder. She saw the ragged hole that the beast had made in the black batting to insert itself into the springs and from there into the upholstery. Snatching up the poker once more, Martha dropped to her knees as if she’d never known a pang of arthritis in her life, and stabbed into the hole in the batting with the brass tool, stabbed this way and that, plucking a discord of brittle pings and twangy flat notes from the springs as though they were the strings of some instrument played only in the Hades Philharmonic, but eliciting not a single squeal from any living thing.

At last she clambered to her feet, still holding the poker even though her inflamed knuckles throbbed. She had broken into a sweat. Damp curls of hair hung in her face. She was breathing hard, and her heart hadn’t beat this fast since she had long ago stopped chasing her second husband around the bedroom.

She turned to her sister for corroboration that what she had seen wasn’t a delusion arising from dementia. Both Edna’s expression and posture confirmed the reality of the incident: Her eyes were hoot-owl wide, mouth formed in a perfect O of unvoiced astonishment.

After a silence, Edna said, “Dear, I haven’t seen you spring into action like that since back in the day when a board-of-directors meeting wasn’t going well and you had to whip them into line.”

Mickey Dime

He took the gun belt off Vernon Klick’s corpse and put it aside on the floor. Someday he would use this pistol in a hit because it was registered to the security service and disappeared with Klick the Prick, which is who they would be looking for when they found it at some future crime scene. A little bit of fun.

Later, Mickey would go into the security-video archives and scrub all the recorded feeds from every camera in the building. He would leave no evidence that his brother, Jerry, had come to visit. No clue about what happened to Vernon Klick. He had covered his trail this way on other occasions, in other cities. He knew how to ensure that the digital video could not be recovered.

He dragged Klick behind him, out of the security room, quickly along the main basement hall to the entrance to the HVAC vault. The corpse was wrapped in a moving blanket, tied with furniture straps. It slid easily on the tiled floor.

Mickey enjoyed the exertion. His trapezius muscles contracted into a solid ridge across his shoulders. His deltoids. His triceps so taut. He was in excellent physical shape. A real hardbody.

When he was at his country cottage, sitting nude in the yard in a summer storm, he liked to feel his muscles, up and down his body. Firmly massage them. Lightly caress them. Slick with rain, as if the storm oiled him. He enjoyed a double pleasure: receiving the caresses and giving them, his hands as thrilled as his body.

He unlocked the door to the HVAC vault with a key that he had taken from Klick. Here were the building’s heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems, as well as the hot-water heaters and bank after bank of breaker boxes. He switched on the lights. He dragged the dead man across the threshold. He closed the door.

The vault was actually a room, a fortified concrete box maybe seventy feet wide and almost forty feet front to back. Rows of seven-foot-tall chillers to the left. Two different sizes of industrial boilers to the right, the larger ones serving the four-pipe, fan-coil heating system that allowed separate controls for every apartment and every public space, the smaller ones—still large—that provided hot water to the residents. In and around and above it all was a maze of pipes, valves, pumps, monitoring devices, and other equipment that Mickey couldn’t identify.

Tom Tran kept the vault as clean as a hospital surgery. The labyrinthine machinery purred, whined, and thrummed, which was a kind of symphony to Mickey. A symphony of efficiency.

His late mother had said that human beings were just machines engineered by nature, through evolution. You could be either a good machine or a bad machine, but whichever you were had nothing to do with morality. The only standard was efficiency. Good machines did their chosen work efficiently, reliably.

Mickey judged himself an excellent machine. His chosen work was killing other machines of the human kind. Efficient action excited and satisfied him more than sex. Sex involved other people, and they always disappointed him because they were so much less efficient than he was. They were so easily distracted by such nonsense as affection and tenderness. Sex wasn’t about affection and tenderness. The big pumps in this room, laboring ceaselessly, knew more about sex than most people did.

Sparkle Sykes and her daughter intruded vividly in his thoughts again, as that cocktail waitress had done fifteen years earlier. They wouldn’t leave him alone. They came naked into his mind. He banished them, but they were insistent. They had just better back off. They had better stop teasing him.

Dragging Klick, he proceeded to a clear area in the center of the vault. There, inset in the floor, a thick rubber gasket embraced an iron manhole cover. In a few minutes, when Mickey returned with his brother, he would open the manhole and consign both bodies to a final resting place so deep that the remains would never be found. Even graveyard rats would not descend that far for a two-man banquet.

Bailey Hawks

When Bailey threw open the stairwell door on the second floor and crossed the threshold into the hallway, Dr. Kirby Ignis cried out in surprise. His pleasantly rumpled face, no doubt avuncular even in his youth but already grandfatherly at fifty, was pale and damp with a thin film of sweat. Ordinarily, Ignis had about him an air of wisdom and unflappable confidence, but now he appeared to be alarmed, as if he had expected someone other than Bailey to come out of the stairwell, someone hostile, which until today was not an expectation that made sense in a place as safe as the Pendleton.

Bailey said, “What is it? What have you seen?”

Dr. Ignis was too perceptive to miss the implication in Bailey’s words. “You’ve seen something, too. Something extraordinary. Was it a man in evening clothes, a butler perhaps, tall and white-haired and splattered with blood?”

“Where did you see him?”

Ignis indicated spots of blood on the carpet runner. “He told me he killed them all—the children, too. What children? What apartment? And then he …” The doctor frowned at the wall beside Bailey’s front door. “Well, I don’t know.… I don’t know where he went then.…”

Silas Kinsley

On the ground floor, Silas turned away from the south elevator, from the threatening voices that echoed behind the sliding doors. They were like mob voices in certain dreams, demanding, threatening yet incoherent, no word clear, the eager chanting of pursuing legions whose motivation he could not fathom but whose grim purpose was his destruction. He recalled awakening earlier in the day and listening to a terrible slithering within the wall behind his bed. These voices in the shaft were nothing like that sound, yet he knew their provenance must be the same. He went to the nearby stairs and hurried down to the basement.

Too old and too in need of his lost Nora to worry about losing his life, Silas was nevertheless fearful for his neighbors, anxious to warn them to evacuate the building. At the bottom of the stairs, he opened the door cautiously, quietly, worried that the hulking monstrosity Perry Kyser had seen in 1973, the thing that evidently had killed one of his workers, might be waiting there to attack. If Andrew Pendleton could be alive here on this night long after his suicide, then anyone—and anything—might walk this building from any period of its history.

The south corridor appeared deserted, leading past the storage units to the freight elevator at the back of the building, and the only presence in the long west corridor was a man who stepped out of the HVAC room. He closed that door and strode briskly away toward the distant north elevator.

Silas couldn’t see the guy well enough to positively identify him, but he felt pretty sure it was Mr. Mickey Dime. As a member of the homeowners’-association board of directors, Silas knew every resident, though he didn’t know all of them equally well. Dime was largely just a name to him, because the man kept to himself.

When Dime disappeared into the far elevator, Silas left the south stairs and hurried past the superintendent’s apartment. At the security room, he knocked lightly. When no one responded, he rapped somewhat louder. Finally he opened the door and went inside.

The security console wasn’t manned. No one was at the coffeemaker in the kitchenette alcove. The door stood open to the little bathroom, which offered a toilet and sink, and no one was in there, either.

According to security protocols, the guard on duty would leave his post only if called to an emergency elsewhere in the building or for fifteen minutes, at random, twice on the evening and the late-night shifts, to make the rounds of the basement, ground floor, and courtyard. But the earliest such tour never occurred before eight or nine o’clock, still hours from now.

Silas spotted a wet red exclamation point on the floor near one of the console chairs. He knelt to examine it. An inch-long line of blood. At the end of it, a punctuating dot of the same. So recently spilled that the air had not yet begun to crust it around the edges or lay a film upon it. Also on the floor, in the kneehole under the workstation, lay the guard’s utility belt with holster and pistol.

Silas’s mouth had gone dry. He realized he was breathing through it, rapidly and shallowly and perhaps ever since he stood listening to voices in the elevator shaft. He could hear a drum, the jungle drum of his heart, quick but not yet panicked, thumping in the wild deep darkness of his chest.

Either the smoke detectors in every room and every hallway or the security guard using this computer could trigger a strident fire alarm throughout the building. As a fail-safe precaution, the computer was tied to the emergency generator in case the city power went out before an alarm could be sounded.

Silas didn’t know how to use the computer for that purpose, but he was sure that Tom Tran could do it. He went next door to the superintendent’s apartment and rang the doorbell. He heard the seven-note chimes echoing through those rooms, but though he rang three times, no one answered.

The basement corridor looked no different from the way it had always looked, but it felt different. Wrong. The ceiling didn’t sag or the walls bow, but Silas sensed a tremendous burden on the building, as if the storm and the sky beyond the storm and the universe that was the sky were all pressing on the Pendleton, a weight so terrible that the structure would collapse into rubble, the rubble into dust.

Although he was many years removed from that period of his legal practice when he’d specialized in criminal defense, Silas hadn’t lost his intuitive recognition of deception and evil intention. Mr. Dime had not appeared furtive, in fact had proceeded with the air of a man openly going about legitimate business, but Silas couldn’t think of a reason why any resident would ever need to visit the HVAC vault.

Increasingly certain not that time was running out but that some incomprehensible calamity of time was about to befall the Pendleton, Silas needed to return to the ground floor, ask Padmini Bahrati if she knew where Tom Tran was or if she could trigger a fire alarm.

But first he felt compelled to return to the security room and take the guard’s abandoned pistol. He hadn’t been to a shooting range in ten years. He didn’t want to use a gun, but things didn’t always work out the way you preferred. From the utility belt he also took the canister of pepper spray and the flashlight. He stepped into the hallway and hurried to the next door on the left. It was unlocked. He stepped into the HVAC vault.

Winny

In the kitchen, Iris sat at the breakfast table, holding the floppy-eared bunny tight to her chest, rocking forward and back in her chair, whispering something to the toy that Winny couldn’t hear, whispering it over and over.

Something about the girl—Winny wasn’t sure what—made him want to be brave. It wasn’t that Iris was pretty, which she was. Although Winny was in many ways advanced for his age, he was too young to be interested in girls. Anyway, she was too old for him, three years older. Part of it might be that she needed books, and he needed books, and unlike most people who liked to talk about what books they read in their clubs, neither Iris nor Winny talked about what they read—in her case because she couldn’t talk, in his case because he was such a rotten talker that he would make good books sound like they sucked.

He didn’t sit at the table with Iris. Too wired to keep still, he roamed the kitchen, looking at the dishes displayed beyond the French doors in some of the cabinets and reading the notations Mrs. Sykes had made on various days on the December page of the wall calendar: “Accountant at 2:30, dinner with Tanya, Dr. Abbot, cheese sale.” He tried to decide if the apples and pears and bananas in the center of the work island had been carefully arranged to look like a still-life painting or had just been dumped willy-nilly into the big shallow bowl, which was such a peculiar thing to care about at a time like this that he wondered if maybe he was gay or something. He even counted the floor tiles, as if the number of them—stupid, stupid—might at some point be vital information that would save their lives.

He also listened to his mom and Mrs. Sykes trying to make calls with the kitchen phone and with both of their cell phones. Several times, before they punched in a complete number, they were connected to people speaking a foreign language, several voices on the line at the same time, gobbling like a flock of turkeys. Once his mom got an operator at City Bell, a different one from the first, and this lady also insisted that it was 1935, though she wasn’t as nice as the first. And Mrs. Sykes dropped her phone in surprise when shimmering sheets of blue lights flashed corner to corner across one kitchen wall.

Inside some of those cabinets, things rattled and clanged. A few lower doors flew open and several drawers rolled out. Cookware tumbled from open doors, stainless-steel flatware and metal utensils erupted from the drawers, and all of this stuff levitated, floating around one side of the kitchen in that blue light, pots and pans bonking against one another. Knives and forks and spoons were busy in midair as if a dozen poltergeists were rattling their tableware together to protest the lack of acceptable ghost food, the way prisoners in some old movies caused a commotion in the dining hall when the evil new warden embezzled money from the budget and served them cheap slop.

The waves of light washed right to left over the cabinets and then away, the junk storm abruptly ended, and everything fell at once in a clatter-crash. But the stuff didn’t just rain down all over the floor. Instead, the items clustered in weirdly balanced piles that gravity should have pulled apart at once but didn’t, pieces of the stainless-steel flatware bristling from among the pots-and-pans sculptures, vibrating like tuning forks, as though everything had been magnetized. After a moment, the magnetism must have fluxed away or something, because the vibrating stopped and the piles collapsed, scattering things across the floor. In the wake of all that commotion, the silence that fell over the kitchen was like a funeral-home hush—except for Iris whimpering like a puppy who was lost and wanted to be home.

Neither of the two moms screamed or went crazy-hysterical, or went into denial, the way that people usually did in movies where weird things happened. Winny was proud of them and grateful, because if one of them had lost her cool, he would have freaked out, too, and that would have been the end of being brave for Iris.

The waves of blue light reminded Winny of the pulsing circles on the TV and of the voice that said, “Exterminate.”

He suspected his mom was thinking of the same thing, because she said, “Maybe it isn’t safe to go outside, with those things crawling out there, but it’s not safe to stay inside, either.”

Mrs. Sykes said, “We need to get with other people. There’s got to be some safety in numbers.”

“Gary Dai’s in Singapore,” Winny’s mom said.

The lower level of Mr. Dai’s two-story unit was next door to their apartment. He was a software guru and a video-game-designer legend, so he might know what was happening and how to get through all the levels of play alive. Just their luck that he was halfway around the world when the quarter dropped and the action started.

“The people next door are away visiting their grandson,” Mrs. Sykes said. “And the end apartment is empty, for sale.”

Winny’s mom said, “Let’s go back through my place, over to the north hall, see if we can find Bailey Hawks in 2-C. There’s no one in the Pendleton I’d feel safer with right now.”

Bailey Hawks

On the kitchen island were two boxes of ammunition that Bailey retrieved from his master-bedroom closet. As he loaded a spare twenty-round magazine for his Beretta 9 mm, he listened to Kirby Ignis’s story of his startling encounter with the distinguished, blood-spattered man who spoke of killing everyone and who then vanished through a wall.

The doctor was too intelligent and too practical to waste time proposing rational but improbable explanations the way that some UFO debunkers resorted to suppositions of swamp gas, weather balloons, and swarms of iridescent insects. He had seen a man vanish into a wall, but instead of questioning his sanity and the reliability of his senses, he was in the process of amending his personal definition of the word impossible.

“I don’t know the full story,” Bailey said. “Silas Kinsley, up in 3-C, he’s the Pendleton’s historian. He’ll have all the details. But in the thirties sometime, a butler killed the family who owned Belle Vista.”

“He’d be dead now.”

“Very dead,” Bailey agreed as he dropped spare cartridges into all the pockets of his sport coat. “If I remember right, he committed suicide back then.”

“I’m not the kind who goes to séances.”

“Me neither.” Bailey thought of Sophia Pendleton—Old King Cole was a merry old soul, and a merry old soul was he—singing her way down the stairs. “But this isn’t ghosts. It’s something stranger, bigger.”

“What have you seen?” Ignis asked.

“I’ll tell you on the way.”

“On the way where?”

“Martha and Edna Cupp, up in 3-A. They’re in their eighties. Whatever’s happening here, they need to be out of it.”

“Maybe we all need to be out of it,” Ignis said.

“Maybe we do.”

Mickey Dime

As Mickey rolled the hand truck and dead Jerry along the north hall on the third floor, he grew nostalgic for the childhood they had shared. By the time he turned the corner and stopped at the elevator to press the call button, however, he had exhausted his capacity for sentimentality.

Jerry had been Mickey’s brother but also a problem. Problem solved. His mother said the strong act, the weak react. She said the weak have regrets, the strong have triumphs. She said the weak believe in God, the strong believe in themselves. She said both the strong and the weak are part of the food chain, and it is better to eat than be eaten. She said that the strong have pride, that the weak have humility, and that she was proud of her humility and humble about her pride. She said that power justifies all things and that absolute power justifies all things absolutely. Because a famous California winery paid her handsomely to do a magazine ad and a TV commercial in their what-do-the-smartest-people-drink campaign, she said that a robust Cabernet Sauvignon was central to a life well-lived, that it was a metaphor for transcendence, that it was an essential tool for the redistribution of chic, and that it was both great art and literature in a bottle. She said that judging Cain for killing Abel was like condemning a vigorous wolf pup for drinking his share of mother’s milk and the share of the sickly pup that might otherwise have survived, to the detriment of the pack.

Mickey didn’t understand everything that his mother had said over the years, in part because she had said and written so much that no one could keep up with her. But he knew that everything she said was wise. And most of it was profound.

The elevator car arrived on the third floor. Mickey wheeled his brother into it.

Silas Kinsley

All of the lights were on in the HVAC vault, racks of hooded fluorescent tubes hanging on chains from the ceiling. The impressive ranks of complex machines, humming along as intended by the original engineer, presented a scene of such orderliness and normality that Silas could almost believe that all was right in the Pendleton regardless of the things that he had seen and heard.

He closed the door behind him. “Is anyone here? Mr. Tran? Tom?”

When no one responded, Silas set out to explore the service aisles between the rows of equipment. Instead he at once was drawn to the manhole in the center of the room and to the bundle lying beside it.

The manhole, which had been there since the Pendleton was constructed, provided access to a three-foot-diameter steel sleeve that penetrated the eight-foot-deep concrete foundation of the great mansion. The sleeve had been placed precisely to terminate at the mouth of a fault in the bedrock.

Not a fault in the sense of a fracture, but a smooth-walled lava pipe from which molten rock once gushed. Shadow Hill and surrounding territory was a stable mass of basalt, an extremely dense volcanic stone, and rhyolite, which was the volcanic form of granite. Tens of thousands of years earlier, at the end of the volcanic era in this region, when the eruptions were exhausted, a few long vent tunnels remained in the solid stone, including the one under the Pendleton, which seemed to average between four and five feet in width.

In the late 1800s, when the great house was built, environmental issues were of less concern than in the current age. Little if any thought was given to the possible contamination of the water table when the Pendleton’s bathtub, sink, and toilet drains were routed to terminate at the top of the seemingly bottomless lava pipe. In those days, the city was much smaller than now, only then beginning to plan a public sewer system. Septic tanks remained the primary means of gray-water and waste disposal, and the many thousands of cubic feet of the lava pipe offered a cheap and maintenance-free alternative to a standard tank.

The contractor included the manhole to provide service access in the unlikely event of a problem. When the cast-iron cover was removed, the lava pipe also functioned as an efficient outflow in the event that the basement should flood from a broken water line. In 1928, the Pendleton’s bathtub, sink, and toilet drains were rerouted to the public sewer system, but the manhole remained.

With the conversion of Belle Vista into the Pendleton in 1973, all the chillers and huge boilers of the new heating and cooling system raised a greater possibility of flooding. With the existing access to the lava pipe, the architect and contractor were spared the need to provide massive emergency pumps kept perpetually on standby, and could instead rely on the gravity-flow method of the original arrangement.

Dropping to one knee, Silas Kinsley was not interested in the manhole but in the rolled-up, quilted moving blanket that Dime had tied shut with furniture straps. Assessing the contents of the bundle with both hands, he felt what seemed to be legs, what were almost certainly arms, and undoubtedly a head. One end of the roll had come open slightly when the knot in the securing strap had pulled loose. Silas reached inside and discovered the top of someone’s head. The curliness of the hair and the memory of the exclamation point of blood in the inexplicably deserted security room seemed sufficient evidence for him to conclude that the dead man was Vernon Klick. The lava pipe was to be his grave.

Silas thought that this killing must be related to the tragedies that occurred here every thirty-eight years. Dime’s murder of Vernon Klick must somehow be a part of the currently pending event that was presaged by rumbling in the earth, the appearance of the late Andrew North Pendleton in the lobby, the voices in the elevator shaft, and other signs. But related how?

More urgently than ever, he needed Padmini Bahrati to find Tom Tran or to trigger the fire alarm herself, if she knew how. He rose to his feet, crossed the room, and was within three steps of the door when something bumped against the farther side of it.

Fielding Udell

After the luminous blue energy sheeted across the ceiling, after the paper clips and other metal objects leaped to the light and then, when the light was extinguished, rained to the floor, Fielding stood transfixed. His mind raced toward a conclusion that he sought to avoid but that seemed inescapable. The Ruling Elite had found him.

They knew that he knew.

He knew. The original scientific consensus connecting residence near power lines with high cancer rates, later refuted and dismissed, was in fact true. Millions of such deaths must be occurring each year, the awful truth hidden by the Political Masters who throttled the free speech of scientists and doctors, and by their Minions who altered medical records and forged death certificates.

He knew. The consensus claiming the chemical alar, used by apple growers, caused malignancies and worse, which had been brilliantly championed by a famous actress but had later been found to be bad science, was in fact also true. Good science, good. Too many apple farmers were destroyed, too many apple-related jobs were lost, so the Ruling Elite and their Minions came down on the side of Commerce rather than on the side of Health. Precious babies were dying from apple juice, toddlers from applesauce, legions of schoolchildren from the reckless consumption of raw apples and apple pies. But the Ruling Elite and their despicable Minions faked evidence to the contrary and mounted a pro-alar campaign. Now uncountable innocent children were dying horribly, perhaps so many that their bodies were secretly bulldozed into mass graves.

When the shimmering blue light did not return, he warily toured the rest of his apartment, prepared to find the phenomenon elsewhere. He suspected it might have been evidence of a mind-reading ray, with which his thoughts had been explored for insurrectionist sentiments. But he wanted to believe it had been something less ominous, perhaps just a census scan, which the Ruling Elite would probably take on a regular basis to determine just how rapidly the earth’s fast-dying population was moving toward extinction.

Fielding Udell knew. The eminent professor Paul Ehrlich, and a consensus of scientists, reported in 1981 that 250,000 species were becoming extinct per annum. Such a catastrophe meant that by 2011—this very year!—Earth would support no life whatsoever. Recently some scientists said only two or three species were lost each year and claimed this had been the case for centuries, which meant they were either corrupt or that their families were being held hostage and tortured by the Ruling Elite. Fielding knew that the 250,000-per-year figure must be correct, that most of the world was now barren, that the images you saw on TV of a world pretty much as it had always been were elaborate special-effects lies, every bit as phony as the moon-landing footage shown to the world in July 1969, which had been staged in the Mojave Desert. The bitter truth: The earth was largely dead except for certain urban-suburban enclaves covered by force-field domes, inside which the brainwashed citizens lived an illusion of plenty and safety.

Finding no shimmering blue light anywhere, Fielding took his empty glass to the kitchen for a refill of his homemade cola.

Sometimes he wondered from where the food came to feed the dome-city residents like him, considering that the farmlands were polluted and unproductive. He remembered an old sci-fi movie, Soylent Green, in which the revolutionary new food that staved off famine in an overpopulated future world proved to be made secretly from cadavers. Charlton Heston shouts, “Soylent Green is people!” Maybe all those apple-poisoned children weren’t bulldozed into mass graves, after all, but were carted off to processing plants.

Now and then Fielding had difficulty eating his dinner, even though it looked like the same food he had dined upon all his life. The only thing that kept him from becoming bulimic was the fact that Soylent Green was set in the year 2022, which meant that more than a decade remained before the Ruling Elite would deceive humankind into embracing cannibalism.

Carrying the glass of cola, he returned to his main workroom and his computer. He resumed his online investigation, probing, probing, on the trail of the identity of the Ruling Elite. He half expected a sharp knock at the door and the arrival of a goon squad armed with a warrant, the results of the blue-light scan of his mind, and some kind of brain-wipe thingy that would erase his memory and leave him unaware of the great work that he had done these past twenty years.

They would fail. He had prepared. In the bedroom, taped to the underside of his sock drawer, were two manila envelopes containing a total of 104 pages of a report on the Case for Prosecution of the Ruling Elite. The report began with these words: The Worst People in the World have erased portions of your memory, but herein is the Great Truth they have stolen from you. If he was robbed of his past, he would eventually find those two envelopes and reclaim his purpose and his destiny.

Logan Spangler

He didn’t know how long he might have stood in the half bath in the senator’s apartment, staring at his black fingernails. They didn’t seem to be mere nails anymore but were like ten little arched windows through which he could look into a perfect darkness within his hands.

Logan remembered a murderer he had apprehended three decades earlier, name of Marsden, a guy in his early thirties, who liked to rape and kill. In his confession, he said he liked to kill so much that sometimes he even forgot to rape his victim first. Marsden had none of the edginess or hyperactivity seen in many psychopaths. He was as calm as sheep grazing in a marijuana meadow and claimed to be equally tranquil during the act of murder. He said his inner landscape was perpetually dark, that he could remember his entire life but could see in his mind’s eye only events that had occurred at night. And when he slept his dreams always unfolded in dark places, sometimes in venues so lightless that he was blind in his dreams. “I am,” he said with some pride, delighting in himself, “so dark inside that I’m certain the blood in my veins runs black.”

Gazing at his black fingernails, Logan was not alarmed, but as calm as Marsden had been. Such a serenity had come over him that he felt above all storm and shadow, imperturbable. He could not recall why he was here in the senator’s half bath or why his nails were black, or what he had intended to do next.

When moments—or hours—later he found himself in the senator’s bedroom, he had no memory of proceeding there. He continued into the master bathroom and opened the glass door to the roomy shower. The stall featured a built-in marble bench that matched the walls, and it doubled as a steam bath. He dialed up the steam, stepped out of the stall, crossed the room, and switched off the lights. In the blind dark, he somehow knew his way, returning to the shower without a single misstep. In the stall, he pulled the door shut behind him. Fully clothed, he sat on the marble bench as warm clouds enveloped him.

He needed darkness, dampness, warmth. Just for a little while. He had nowhere to go, nothing to do. He could rest here for a time. Darkness, dampness, warmth. Pieces of the past came to him, random moments from his life, not in any order, none seemingly related to another, playing out like little movies, and all of them were things that had happened to him at night, just as Marsden had been able to conjure in his mind’s eye only night moments from his past. In the pitch dark of the windowless bathroom, in the lesser darkness of his memories, he sighed softly and inhaled the thick warm mist, which soothed him. Darkness, dampness, warmth. He breathed in all three, filling himself with darkness, dampness, warmth. He was tranquil, peaceful, relaxed, self-possessed. Possessed. There was nowhere that he needed to go, nothing that he needed to do. There was no one he needed to be. Soon the memories of night moments from his life faded, and his inner landscape was as lightless as the bathroom in which he sat. For a short time, he searched for one memory or another, any memory, but he was a blind man in a maze of empty rooms. Anyway, there was nowhere he needed to go, nothing he needed to do, no one he needed to be. He relaxed. Stopped exploring the inner blackness. Stopped thinking. He was in the dark and the dark in him. After a while, deep within, he became aware of something blindly feeling its way through him.

Mickey Dime

He guided the hand truck across the raised threshold into the HVAC vault and closed the door behind him. He wheeled dead Jerry beside the body of Klick the Prick.

All around, machinery hummed and purred and whispered. Massed machines, regardless of their purpose, always seemed sexy to Mickey. The power. The efficiency. The unrelenting purpose.

He had toured a decommissioned nuclear-missile silo once. The ICBM and the machinery were long gone. Yet the place still possessed immense erotic impact. The dank air smelled like stale semen.

Now, somewhere in all the runs of pipe, a demand valve opened. He heard water rushing under pressure through a conduit. Very sexy.

On the manhole cover, a big release ring was folded flat. He flipped it up. He slipped his hand through the ring and pulled hard. The seal between the cover and the gasket broke with a sucking sound. The iron disc swung up and aside on underset hinges.

The overhead fluorescents failed to penetrate far into the black hole. No draft rose from the shaft, suggesting that if it connected with deep caverns, they were without any significant opening to the surface. The air below had only a faint lime scent, which probably came from the massive concrete foundation of the Pendleton rather than from the ancient volcanic vent below.

Mickey had learned about the lava pipe from his mother. She heard about it from Gary Dai, the dot-com-video-game-social-website wizard. Gary Dai had read about the lava pipe in a pamphlet about the Pendleton that every owner received upon closing escrow. Mickey’s mother had not read the pamphlet. She read nothing but essays and books that she had written—as well as anything written about her. Mickey didn’t read.

No one knew for sure the length of the lava pipe. Experts said it could extend for a mile or two, perhaps longer. When Andrew North Pendleton built his mansion, an attempt was made to plumb the natural shaft. They lowered a lead weight on a cord for 1,522 feet before it encountered what at first was assumed to be the bottom. When a score of one-inch-diameter steel ball bearings were dropped at once into the hole, however, that bottom proved to be instead a curve in the pipe where the vertical drop led into a sloping tunnel. The bearings rang hard against the curve, then rolled noisily along the slope. They were never heard to come to a halt; the sound of their descent faded until they had traveled to such a distance that the lava pipe no longer echoed with their progress.

If the tunnel didn’t widen beyond five feet just for the turn—which it probably did, according to a volcanologist quoted in the owners’ pamphlet—the two dead men might get hung up there. Mickey was counting on 1,522 feet of momentum to tumble them around the curve and far down the slope beyond it.

For the next month, he’d visit the HVAC vault every few days to open the manhole and smell the air. If the stink of decomposition was present, he would know the cadavers hadn’t made it around the curve. Then he would have to engineer a rupture in one of these big pipes, flood the vault, and wash the dead men to a more distant resting place.

If there was no stench, however, the lava pipe would facilitate his fantasies about Sparkle and Iris Sykes. He could daydream about having them but also about popping them and dumping them, which would be a more fully rounded fantasy than rape alone. He hoped that he might pass them soon in a public hallway. He would try to get close enough to catch their scents, a detail to fire his imagination.

As Mickey was turning away, intending to muscle Vernon Klick’s body into the long drop, a twist of blue light spiraled up the walls of the lava pipe, flashed through the open manhole, and corkscrewed to the ceiling, where it spread out across the concrete, crackling softly, and quickly dissipated.

Iris

Her room is safe. Other rooms in the apartment are less safe. The world beyond the apartment is dangerous, unbearable. So many people. Always changing. She wants to stay in her room.

Nothing changes in her room. Change is scary. She wants to be where change never happens. Her room. Her room.

But her mother calls her to the Bambi way. The Bambi way is to accept things as they are. To trust nature and to love the world.

Loving the world is so hard. Bambi believes the world loves him, was made for him. Iris does not believe the world loves her. She wants to believe it, but she doesn’t, she can’t.

She doesn’t know why she can’t. Not knowing why she can’t love the world is as bad as not loving it. The world in books seems worth loving. But she can’t love it. She fears it.

As a fawn, Bambi is often frightened. Of a ferret. Of blue jays. Of many things. He overcomes his fears. He is a very great and smart deer because he overcomes all his fear. Iris loves him for this. And envies him. But loves him very much.

She is afraid to love anyone but Bambi. Or afraid to show her love. She loves her mother but dares not show it. Loving people draws them close to you. She can’t tolerate being close. She can’t breathe with people close. The lightest touch is a blow. She can’t tolerate being touched.

She doesn’t know why. At night, alone in her bed, she sometimes tries to think why she is this way. Thinking about it only makes her cry. When she’s alone in the dark, crying, she wishes that she lived in a book world, not this one.

She can love Bambi because he doesn’t live in this world. He lives in the book world. A world apart, she can love him desperately and never be too close.

Now her mother calls her to the Bambi way, and Iris steels herself to leave the apartment. There’s the boy, Winny, and the boy’s mother, Twyla, and that’s already bad enough, too many people. But now the four of them are going to leave the apartment, which means too many people and new places, change and more change.

Iris keeps her head down. Keeps her head down and pretends that she is Bambi. To live the Bambi way, it is better to try to be Bambi, to think like he would think.

Iris follows her mother into the hallway because Bambi follows his mother whenever she tells him that he must. They go around the corner to the back door of Twyla’s apartment. Iris has been in the hallway before, but never in these people’s apartment. So now all this is new. Everything is new. New is dangerous, hostile. Now everything is hostile. Everything, everything.

She must make it all familiar and friendly. She must be Bambi, and this must be the forest, for only then will she be both brave and safe. She tries to look directly only at her mother’s back. She sees things from the corners of her eyes, of course, or when she inadvertently glances left or right, but she imagines those things to be what they are not, to be a part of her beloved forest.

Words come to Iris, memorized from so many readings of the precious book: Round about grew hazel bushes, dogwoods, black-thorns and young elders. Tall maples, beeches and oaks wove a green roof over the thicket and from the firm dark-brown earth sprung fern fronds, wood-vetch and sage.…

Her mother and Twyla talk to each other, and the boy talks to both of them, but Iris can’t bear the weight of what they are saying to one another. What they are saying to one another is going to crush her if she listens to it. Crush, crush, crush her. Exterminate, they say. Exterminate means to kill.

Instead, Iris listens to the melody of the woods: The whole forest resounded with myriad voices, was penetrated by them in a joyous agitation. The woodthrush rejoiced incessantly, the doves cooed without stopping, the blackbirds whistled, the tit-mice chirped.…

They go out through the front door of the strange apartment, into another hallway, where Twyla rings a doorbell. There is a man they call Bailey and another man they call Dr. Ignis. There is yet another new place.

This is too much, the new just coming at her and coming at her, constant change, unbearable.

Desperate, Iris gives herself to the forest, which rises in her mind to embrace her as it always embraces Bambi: Out of the earth came whole troops of flowers, like motley stars, so that the soil of the twilit forest floor shone with a silent, ardent, colorful gladness.…

Martha Cupp

She wasn’t sure which was worse: the unearthly thing that burst out of the sofa and then disappeared, leaving the fabric torn and the horsehair billowing—or Edna’s I-told-you-so expression and her satisfaction that her belief in an invading demonic force seemed to have been substantiated by the bizarre incident. Well, on reflection, Edna’s smug expression was by far the worse of the two, because if the beast in the chesterfield showed up again, Martha could always club it mercilessly, but she couldn’t very well take a fireplace poker to her sister.

Still holding the train of her dinner gown off the floor, Edna said, “I’m sure that if Father Murphy had seen that nasty critter, he wouldn’t care one whit if I believe in Bigfoot or ancient astronauts. He would break out the exorcised water, oil, salt—and begin the Prayer against Malefice immediately and at the top of his voice.”

Martha knew that by continuing to hold the poker at the ready, she would appear to be conceding the point to her sister, but she was damn well not going to put it down, have a glass of warm milk, and go to bed. Even if Edna asked Father Murphy to perform an exorcism of place instead of an exorcism of person, and even if he agreed to do it, Martha would stand ready throughout the ritual to start swinging with that pleasingly heavy length of brass.

“What next?” Edna asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Besides calling Father Murphy,” Edna said, “what should we do, what should we expect to happen, how should we prepare?”

“Maybe nothing more is going to happen.”

“Something will happen,” Edna said confidently, almost happily, as if an infestation of demons would be just the thing to combat the doldrums of a rainy December night.

Before Martha could reply, a bright flood of shimmering, crackling blue light washed across the floor. She seemed to be standing in an intensely luminous fog.

The poker reacted as if it were a divining rod and she were a dowser searching for underground water, almost tearing out of her grip. She held fast to it, but the poker jerked her arm down, and the tip of it pierced the eerie luminosity.

Simultaneously, the remaining fireplace tools and the rack that held them overturned on the hearth, didn’t just topple into the light but slammed into it as if drawn by a tremendous power. The blueness receded from around Martha, shuddered across the room, seemed to suck the ornate fireplace screen into the firebox, and crackled away up the chimney, gone.

Sally Hollander

Lying on the kitchen floor, Sally felt the last of her bones succumb to the spreading cold. Now a skeleton of ice defined itself clearly in the warmth of her flesh. She had never previously been so consciously aware of her physiology. Although at the moment she remained paralyzed, she knew the position of each of her 206 bones, the precise shape of the various plates that were fused together to form her skull. She was conscious of the status of every joint: the ball-and-socket joints in shoulders and hips, the pivot joint in her neck between the second and third vertebrae, the elegant ellipsoidals in her wrists, the wonderfully functional hinges in her fingers and elbows and knees. Sally was able to feel the synovial membranes encapsulating her mobile joints and was vividly aware of the sticky, oozing synovial fluid that lubricated them. She sensed the fibers of every supporting ligament, the connecting tendons and the muscles poised to put the entire skeleton into motion on demand. It was as if her body had developed an acute self-awareness to match that of her mind.

Her fear had gone away as if whatever the demon had disgorged into her included, among other things, a tranquilizer. She had no apprehension anymore, no slightest misgiving. Her mood was one of calm anticipation, a meditative placidity, not apathy but a relieved submission to some inevitable transformation.

Having been a punching bag for her former husband, having worked up the courage to leave him and to obtain a divorce, she had found her self-respect more than twenty years ago, and she had since been too strong to submit that way to anyone. With a fortitude of which she was proud, she rejected apathy, embraced emotion and hope, and resigned herself to nothing—until now she resigned herself to this with an almost pleasant expectation.

Her skeletal structure began to surrender its integrity. She felt something moving inside her bones, as though her marrow had become animated, crawling this way and that in the cavities that contained it. She sensed that the bones in her legs and arms were gradually elongating. In her toes—and elsewhere—additional bones seemed to be forming. Something was happening in her joints, as well, and she felt cartilage reweaving itself to conform to the new reality of these junctions.

The words werewolf and werecat prowled her mind, but they did not raise her anxiety. Instead, the prospect of transformation was intriguing, and it inspired in her a tentative sense of possibility, a cautious willingness to wait and see, to consider that perhaps a change might be for the better. A part of her realized that this was not a natural reaction and must be, therefore, chemically induced. She supposed that as her body was being reprogrammed, so was her mind. But even that recognition did not alarm her, not even when she realized that her right hand, on the floor in front of her face where she could clearly see it, was growing longer. Each finger seemed to be adding one knuckle and one phalanx, bones squirming within the flesh, skin stretching and splitting and at once knitting up again.

Silas Kinsley

Taking refuge among the whirring ranks of the tall Multistack chillers, Silas watched Mickey Dime through a gap between two of the machines. Whatever had been piled on the hand truck and covered with a blanket was apparently destined to go into the manhole with the body of Vernon Klick.

Having spent his life in law offices and courtrooms, Silas had respect for the law and even a love for it in spite of politicians’ determination to layer on ever more Byzantine statutes and in spite of the wretched purposes to which some people bent it. He was loath to let Dime dispose of the evidence in a capital crime. With no one certain of how far away the bottom of the lava pipe might be, with the possibility that it emptied into an underground lake or a river that would carry the corpse beyond discovery, it was likely that a city running a ruinous budget deficit in bad economic times would decline to mount an expensive and unpromising exploration deep into the earth. But Silas was an old man, feeling older by the day, armed but not confident that he retained any shooting skills. He was no match for Dime, who was half his age, fit, and evidently ruthless.

Besides, he remembered well the butler who, in 1935, killed the entire Ostock family and every member of the live-in staff before committing suicide to “save the world from eternal darkness,” and he remembered the seemingly irrational character of Andrew Pendleton’s journal so evident in the scraps that had survived the fire in which he meant to burn it. Whatever happened every thirty-eight years in this building, insanity might not be a consequence of the event but a part of it, a symptom of it. As he watched Dime open the manhole, he wondered if this man might be not an ordinary murderer who killed out of self-interest but instead the equivalent of the butler, Tolliver, perhaps driven mad by some toxin or occult energy.

No sooner had the words occult energy occurred to Silas than a radiant blue spiral of something shot out of the manhole, startling Dime, whirling to the ceiling like Independence Day fireworks, but then splashing across the concrete and dispersing. He would have said it was light, but light itself couldn’t be shaped into spring form and sent corkscrewing through the air. Behind the first spiral came a second that was more substantial, brighter, and then a third.

With the third blue whirligig, the iron manhole appeared to tear loose of its hinges, shot to the ceiling, and clung there an instant, until the light purled away, whereupon the disc fell, rang against the concrete floor as loud as a cannon shot, bounced onto its edge, and rolled away like a giant coin.

Martha Cupp

When the ornate fireplace screen was crumpled and twisted like paper and sucked into the firebox by the blue light, Martha threw aside the poker and hurried to her bedroom, where she kept a more formidable weapon in her nightstand drawer. You couldn’t shoot a magnetic field or whatever that blue light had been, but you could shoot any grotesque hateful squirming thing that ripped up your sofa if it didn’t vanish before you could squeeze off a damn shot!

Iris

They want to stay together but they also want to go up to the third floor right away to see some women up there. Too many people already. Now there’s going to be more.

One voice at a time is all right. Two is hard to listen to. Now there’s five, and what they’re saying is not even words to her anymore, half the time it’s just buzzing, like wasps, like a swarm of wasps in the room, the words fluttering against her face like brittle wings, buzzing, buzzing, and at any moment the words might begin to sting her, sting and sting until she can’t stand it anymore, until she starts screaming even though she doesn’t want to, and if the screaming starts so might the hitting, though she hardly ever strikes out and doesn’t want to strike out, never wants that.

She tries to block out the voices, tries to hear the sounds of the forest as the words in the book describe them: … the pheasants cackled loud and high. The call of the falcon shrilled, light and piercing, over the tree-tops, and the hoarse crow chorus was heard continuously.

Animal sounds are all right. Animal voices don’t want anything from you, they don’t ask you to do anything, they don’t even expect you to answer them. Animal voices are soothing, and so are the sounds that the forest itself makes.

… the falling leaves whispered among the trees. They fluttered and rustled ceaselessly through the air from all the tree-tops and branches. A delicate silvery sound was falling constantly to earth. It was wonderful to awaken amidst it, wonderful to fall asleep to this mysterious and melancholy whispering.

Under the animal sounds and the whisper of the leaves, her mother’s voice comes to Iris through the protective forest that she has imagined around herself, calls her again to the Bambi way. For the love of that deer who lives a world apart from her, in the book world, and for the love of her mother, which she can never express, Iris keeps her head down and goes with the herd. They walk and climb and walk again, and there is a door, beyond the door a new place, and two old women with voices so nice that she dares to glance at them.

One of them has a gun.

Iris at once retreats again behind the foliage in her mind, to a moment in the earliest days of the fawn’s life, when Bambi was horrified to see a ferret kill a mouse:

Finally Bambi asked anxiously, “Shall we kill a mouse, too, sometime?”

“No,” replied his mother.

“Never?” asked Bambi.

“Never,” came the answer.

“Why not?” asked Bambi, relieved.

“Because we never kill anything,” said his mother simply.

Bambi grew happy again.

Silas Kinsley

Instead of a fourth spiral of blue light, a great rushing brilliance poured from the open manhole: whooooosh. Saturated with intense color, this was not a steady transparent beam like ordinary light, but translucent and churning with visible currents. It swarmed upward less like light than like water might gush from a broken main under extreme pressure. The radiance blued everything in the room, concrete and chillers, pipes and boilers, Mickey Dime’s face and hands and white shirt, and even tinted the shadows sapphire. As the manhole had torn off its hinges, so Silas’s watch vibrated on his wrist, the belt buckle against his abdomen, and the guard’s pistol in a raincoat pocket thumped against his thigh. The heavy machines and boilers were anchored to the floor, but the metal housings creaked, twanged, as though they might pop their welds and rivets.

The rushing radiance lasted ten seconds. Maybe fifteen. But when it winked out, its effects lingered or perhaps increased. Immediately with the extinguishing of the blue brilliance, a sound issued from within the thick walls, an eerie high-pitched resonance, continuously modulating like the shrieky whistle of interference on a shortwave radio, as though the intricate web of steel rebar encased in the concrete might be transmitting the blue energy in a form other than light to every corner of the building.

As if that keening called it forth, the rumbling rose beneath the Pendleton. The more shrill the sound grew within the walls, the deeper notes the rumbling struck, until the two swelled to their fullest at the same moment, whereupon everything changed.

Mickey Dime

Before his eyes, everything shimmered as if waves of intense heat were rising through the vault, but he felt no heat. The rows of machinery blurred. They appeared to ripple. The room seemed to be a mirage. He thought it might vanish just as a phantom oasis melted away from a thirsty traveler in the Sahara.

The racks of chain-hung fluorescent bulbs overhead went dark. Weaker yellow light, provided by irregularly placed and curiously shaped fixtures—not one like another—that had not been there a moment earlier, gave the vault a different and disturbing character. The shadows were more numerous, deeper, and sinister.

The machinery stood silent. The rounded masses of the boilers and the boxy chillers were sheathed in dust. Across the dirty floor lay a litter of fallen and broken fluorescent tubes, scraps of paper, rusting tools. Snarls of fur, scattered small bones, as well as intact skeletons of rats suggested that vermin had thrived here for a while, but not now.

The air felt cool, although not as cold as it should have been with no heat on a December night. Mickey smelled mold, damp concrete, an elusive rancid odor that came and went.

The manhole cover lay in its proper place, as if it had never exploded to the ceiling. Dull-red with rust and dust. The surrounding rubber gasket was cracked, crumbling.

Klick the Prick had vanished. The blanket and furniture straps that wrapped the body were gone.

Dead Jerry also gone. His little brother. Gone.

And the hand truck.

Gone.

Mickey’s mother had known everything. If this had happened to her, she would already have a theory to explain it.

No theories occurred to Mickey. He stood dumbstruck. Closed his eyes. Opened them. The room remained inexplicably changed.

He needed some aromatherapy to clear his mind.

He needed some time in the sauna.

He felt stupid. He had never before felt stupid.

His mother said stupidity should be a capital offense, except with so many stupid people everywhere you looked, there wouldn’t be enough steel in the world to build all the necessary guillotine blades or enough executioners to operate them.

He missed his mother. More than ever. He felt the loss of her. More than ever. Acutely.

Twyla Trahern

They were in the Cupp apartment, sharing their recent uncanny experiences, when it happened. It was like yet different from how the wall in Winny’s room rippled away to be replaced by a vision of abandonment and decay. An electronic keening seemed to come out of the bones of the building itself, and the ground under the Pendleton rumbled as it had done earlier. Twyla pulled Winny close when all around them the spacious living room blurred as if she were looking at it through rain-washed glass. The Victorian furniture, the fine stained-glass lamps, the classical busts on pedestals, the art and the ferns and the carpet all lost their sharp edges and details, seemed to be melting away. Only the people remained clear in an increasingly impressionistic scene, as if the room had been painted by Monet, the people by Rembrandt.

At the peak of this phenomenon, when the Cupp living room was little more than a colorful smear and the people were, by contrast, hyperrealistic, the experience became disorienting. Claustrophobia smothered Twyla, as if the space in which they stood were but a membrane collapsing around them, a plastic film in which they were being bundled and shrink-wrapped, but simultaneously she was also overcome by agoraphobia, equally certain that the Pendleton and the world itself would dissolve and plunge them into a lightless void. She saw Martha Cupp standing resolute, chin thrust forward, like some aging Joan of Arc seasoned by battlefields and faith, evidence of her fear confined to her eyes, the wide pupils like reflections of gun muzzles. Edna Cupp’s mouth was open not in a cry of alarm but in that ahhhh of wonder seen on children’s faces Christmas morning, her eyes shining with anticipation, as though throughout her life no thought of vulnerability had ever crossed her mind. Bailey tall and stalwart, eyes narrowed, seemed to regard the melting away of the room less with fear or wonder than with wary calculation, alert for the threat that would surely manifest at any moment. Dr. Ignis’s sweet face seemed incapable of masking his thoughts, and his fear was as evident as his amazement, his intellect perhaps for the first time overwhelmed by awe. Sparkle’s expression seemed to say here we go again, as though she must be long accustomed to such shocks, and Iris stood slump-shouldered, head bowed, hands over her ears to muffle the high-pitched electronic squealing. Twyla held fast to Winny not only for fear of losing him, but also as much because she needed him for support: Since his birth, he had been her still point in this dizzily turning world, the thing that made life’s struggles worthwhile, the one thing that convinced her that she had not wasted years of her life and had not debased herself by marrying Farrel Barnett.

The squealing in the walls and the rumbling crescendoed at the same instant. Silence fell as if commanded by the sharp downstroke of an orchestra conductor’s baton. The surrounding smear at once resolved into a new reality.

Without lamps, the two crystal ceiling fixtures, and the cove lighting, the room was more dimly illuminated than before, but it wasn’t dark. Flanking doorways, the fireplace, and the windows were bronze wall sconces that had not been here a moment earlier, twelve of them in all, seven of which were aglow.

The furnishings were gone. The room lay empty but worse than empty—cheerless, desolate. The floral-pattern fabric covering the walls had been replaced—but not recently—by wallpaper that wouldn’t have coordinated with the sisters’ decor; it was yellowed with age, water-stained, mottled with mold, peeling. In several places, dry rot had turned the mahogany flooring to dust, revealing the concrete beneath.

For a moment, they all stood speechless, rendered mute by the impossibility of what had happened. Perhaps the others, like Twyla, anticipated another imminent change, this time back to the way things had been less than a minute previously.

Dr. Ignis was the first to speak, pointing toward the windows, which were no longer flanked by draperies, no longer washed by rain on this suddenly clear night. “The city!”

Twyla looked, saw only night where there should have been a sea of lights, and assumed that a power failure must have struck the metropolis, leaving the Pendleton to rely on its emergency generator. But something about the darkness was not right, and the others must have sensed it, too, because they all moved to the windows along with her and Winny.

The pale fire of the full moon should have revealed the ghost of a skyline, should have silvered some windows and sifted a faux dust on sills, ledges, gargoyles, and on the cross that topped the cathedral spire. The city wasn’t just afflicted by a black-out. The city was gone.

Witness

He was standing at the western-parapet balustrade when the steel bones and tendons of the building began to sing, which indicated that the fluctuations were soon to give way to the transition. One moment he stood in the rain and looked out upon the glowing city, the next moment in a cloudless night under a fat moon with the luminous pale-green meadow below, but then the rain and the great city once more, and then the world without cities, back and forth, as this moment in the past prepared to fling the residents of the Pendleton into the future and as a certain moment of the future attracted them with an inevitability equal to that of a black hole swallowing worlds.

The city vanished and did not return. The rain stopped, the sky cleared in that instant, the moon looked as cold as a ball of ice, and the building stood silent on Shadow Hill, overlooking the plain of hungry grass that undulated rhythmically although the night was windless. Witness was home. The strangers in the rooms below him were far from home and would remain here until the fluctuations began again and the entire mysterious process repeated, returning them to their time. Not all of them would make it home. Perhaps none of them.