77 Shadow Street

27

Here and There

Bailey Hawks

Bailey watched Dime disappear into his apartment. Something was wrong with the guy. Maybe the stress of this event already snapped him, though that would mean he was less flexible psychologically than young Winny. Dime never seemed interested in others living in the Pendleton, never agreed to serve on the board or on any committee, never attended the Christmas social in the banquet room. He spoke to you in the halls if you happened to pass him, but only by comparison to a monk who had taken a vow of silence could the guy be called a conversationalist.

He had a pistol. He’d shot out two peculiar blue screens that had not been in this hallway before what Twyla Trahern called “the leap.” When Bailey had suggested that the best plan would be to round up other residents and thereafter stick together, Dime had disagreed in a tone of voice that was at least dismissive if not hostile. And part of what he’d said—What goes up does not have to come down, if you redefine the meaning of down—made no sense.

Bailey decided they would start the search for other neighbors in the south wing of the third floor, then move downstairs, coming back to this north wing only after Dime had some time to get a grip on himself, assuming there was any grip to get. Anyway, Bernard Abronowitz, who lived alone in 3-E, was currently in the hospital and therefore hadn’t made this trip through time with them. Senator Blandon, in 3-D, was likely to be halfway to drunk by this hour and less amiable than Mickey Dime; leaving the politician until later might also be wise.

“What was that all about?” Kirby Ignis asked, evidently having come out of the Cupps’ front door in time to overhear Bailey’s exchange with Dime.

“I don’t know. We’ll give him some time to adjust, cool down. Before we search the south wing, let’s see if Silas is here.”

The attorney’s apartment was the front corner unit, next to the Cupps. Bailey pressed the bell push but heard no chimes inside. A knock went unanswered. The door proved to be unlocked—in fact the lock wasn’t functioning—and when Silas didn’t reply to Bailey’s “Anyone home?” he and Kirby stepped inside to search the old man’s rooms.

Kirby carried a flashlight that he had borrowed from Twyla Trahern, which still left the women and children with Sparkle’s flashlight, and Martha had her pistol. Remembering the women’s hurried but vivid description of creatures they had seen, remembering Sally’s demon in the pantry, with the mysterious swimmer remaining clear in his mind from their early-morning encounter, Bailey kept a two-hand grip on his 9-mm Beretta.

Like other rooms they had seen since the leap, the attorney’s spaces were unfurnished, shabby, dirty, moldy, and long abandoned, lying in the half-light emitted by the fungus or whatever it was, an exhausted light that a dying sun might produce. Kirby had no police or military background, but he was smart and quick to recognize why his armed partner proceeded as he did. Inferring what was wanted of him, he accompanied Bailey as though they had teamed for searches before, clearing the apartment chamber by chamber.

Approaching the last room, the master bath, they saw within it a weaker dark-urine light than elsewhere. Step by step the smell of mold, mild but pervasive in this Pendleton, grew more pungent and seemed to lend the air a taste as well as a scent. When they stopped at the threshold, the flashlight beam probed beyond, revealing what might have been an abstract-art installation by a deranged sculptor: pale-green, black-mottled snakelike shapes that lined the walls, unmoving but sinuous, as if abruptly paralyzed in the act of seething copulation, snugged together on the vertical surfaces but spilling also onto part of the floor, a nest in torpor, in a winter dormancy. At several points in this hideous mass, clusters of mushrooms of the same coloration, some as big as one of Bailey’s fists but others as big as two, rose on thick stems, a puckered formation like the mouth of a drawstring purse at the crown of each bell-shaped cap.

“Two different forms,” Kirby Ignis said, “but all the same organism.”

“Organism? You mean animal?”

“Fungus is an organism. I’d say that’s what this is.”

“Not ambulatory though, like the things the others saw.”

“I don’t advise stepping in there to find out.”

Although the snake forms did not suddenly become mobile, they began to throb, as if lumps of something were passing through them, as if they were indeed snakes and were swallowing a series of mice.

Tom Tran

Protected by a black-vinyl slicker and a floppy-brimmed rain hat, Tom Tran had just minutes earlier stepped out of the converted carriage house into the cobbled passageway between that building and the Pendleton, pulling the door shut behind him, and he had taken but one step when the storm didn’t just relent but switched off. Abruptly rain stopped falling, the cobblestones were dry, and the cloudless sky was salted with stars and bright with a full moon.

Confused, his hat and slicker still dripping, Tom had turned in a circle—and had discovered that the carriage house was not there anymore, nor the new and larger garage behind it. At each end of the cobbled passage should have been gates between the Pendleton and the back building, one leading to an alley, the other opening to a narrow walkway. They were there, all right, hanging from eight-foot-high pony walls that protruded from the main building, but the bronze-work was twisted, missing staves, sagging on half-broken hinges, no longer connected to the missing carriage house.

Belatedly, Tom had realized that past the vanished buildings, across the top of Shadow Hill and beyond, the entire eastern reaches of the city were no longer aglow … were not even there. The night to the east appeared vast and trackless, and in places shimmered with pools of milky moonlight that revealed nothing, that looked wet and misty, as if they were spirit lakes in an eerie afterlife landscape.

As a boy, Tom Tran learned that Death wore many costumes, not just a black robe with a cowl, and hid behind an infinite number of faces. Death was everywhere, he was legion, and you couldn’t escape his attention, but in some places he manifested in greater numbers than in others. Tom sensed that to the east, in that inexplicable new immensity of darkness, entire armies of Death were hidden, and every field and forest was a killing ground.

The damaged gate in the back wall of the courtyard also hung open and askew, one of the three hinges torn loose of the masonry and the other two lumpy with corrosion. The Pendleton appeared to have been abandoned for decades, and Tom wondered crazily if he would be haggard and aged far beyond his years if he looked in a mirror.

No landscape lighting brightened the courtyard, and in the windows of the three embracing wings of the Pendleton, the lights were not only dimmer than usual but also a dragon-eye yellow that he had never seen before. The trees were gone, fountains tumbled, gardens overgrown with plants that, in the moonlight, he could not identify.

Tom felt not himself to the same degree that his world was not itself at the moment, and he wandered along the footpath, bewildered and trembling, as if he were a character in one of those folktales of spirits and ghosts and gods that his mother had told him when he was a child in Vietnam so long ago. He could have been wandering through a twisted version of “The Search for the Land of Bliss” or “The Raven’s Magic Gem,” or “The House of Forever.” Something like tall bamboo, but fleshy rather than hard and with long aerial roots, canopied the footpath here and there. Each time one of those dangling roots brushed his face, it seemed to have animal life, stroking his cheek or curling into an ear, or teasing a nostril, and he brushed it away, chilled by the contact, shuddering.

He reached the doors between the courtyard and the ground-floor west hall, just opposite the inner doors of the lobby, fished his keys from a pocket of his slicker, and was about to let himself into the Pendleton when he heard noises behind him, short gasps like something venting under pressure but wound through with a prolonged hiss. There were clopping-scraping sounds, as well, as if a weary horse were dropping its heavy hooves and dragging each one a bit before finding the energy to lift it again.

When Tom turned to look back along the moonlit footpath, he saw nothing that might be the source of those noises, but movement at a third-floor window in the south wing drew his attention. Backdropped by dragon light, the ghostly white face at the French panes belonged to Fielding Udell, who might have been unaware of Tom. At the very moment that Udell reacted to something that he had seen farther east in the courtyard, the clopping-scraping ceased to echo through the night. The hissing and the pressurized venting didn’t stop, but the rhythm and the character of those disturbing sounds changed. With a sudden movement that clearly expressed his fear of being seen, Udell stepped back from the window. A moment later the clopping-scraping began again. Whatever had alarmed Udell now approached Tom along the winding footpath, still out of sight beyond the tall vegetation and beyond a turn or two.

He faced the doors again, inserted his key—and discovered that it didn’t work. He jiggled it in the keyway, slid it in and out, tried again, but had no luck. Either the lock had deteriorated with the rest of the building or a locksmith had changed it.

Behind him, a voice cried out, as shrill as that of a squealing child, an impatient and petulant child, and as Tom turned to confront whatever it might be, a second cry sounded angrier than the first—and needful. Thirty feet away, a creature with half a dozen legs, Tom’s height and at least twice his bulk, crabbed around a turn in the footpath, brushing through the vegetation that crowded it.

Either the gates of Hell had opened or Tom had lost his mind, for there could be nothing like this entity outside the precincts of the damned except in the fevered fantasies of a raving paranoid psychopath.

Julian Sanchez

Crossing into the dining room, Julian knew at once that it, too, must be unfurnished. For one thing, the area carpet was missing, and for another, his footsteps on the limestone floor resonated off the walls differently from how they would have sounded in a furnished space.

The voices he’d heard a moment earlier were silent now. He stood listening. In the same way that he could discern the positions of the furnishings around him by what was a kind of psychic radar, he could also to a pretty reliable degree intuit the presence of others. Even a person who stood at ease still produced telltale sounds—shifting weight from foot to foot, breathing shallowly, licking lips, sucking a bit of food from between teeth, the rustle of clothes, the tick of a wristwatch—but except for the small noises that he himself made, this room sounded deserted.

Julian had not been blind since birth. He’d lost his vision at the age of eleven, when retinoblastoma required the removal of both his eyes. Consequently, he had more than a decade of visual memories stored away, which allowed him to construct mental images and whole scenes—including colors—from clues to his environment provided by his other four senses. When he cruised his apartment, his mind’s eye saw every room in vivid detail even though he’d never actually seen any corner of the place.

The inexplicable change that had recently occurred, however, left him unable to visualize his new surroundings. The perception of vacancy, the dirt and debris, the rankness of mold and mildew and other unidentifiable malodors so fundamentally altered these rooms that he was almost as unable to picture them as would have been a man blind from birth and without visual memories.

When Julian stepped warily into his living room, the muttering voices rose once more. They were speaking in a foreign language that he couldn’t identify. Previously they had an urgency, as if they were delivering a warning. Now they remained urgent but began to sound quarrelsome. Julian imagined a dozen people, perhaps more, and their voices issued from all sides, as though he must be encircled by some conclave that had come there specifically to study him, analyze him. Judge him.

“Who’s there?” he asked. “Who are you? What do you want?”

At the same time that the voices seemed to press close to him, they lacked the clarity of intimate speech, and he could imagine as easily that these were utterances carried to him from other rooms, through an intervening wall or door.

Moving to where he thought the center of the living room should be, finding no furniture in his way, Julian spoke louder than before: “Where are you? What do you want?”

In his first year or two of blindness, he had felt vulnerable and had worried unduly about the many things that might happen to him because of his disability. But you couldn’t spend your life expecting a calamitous fall or an assault at any moment; fear soon exhausts itself. After forty years of successful sightless living, he felt not invulnerable but safe enough, and he came to believe the worst that would ever happen to him had already happened when he was eleven.

Suddenly his scalp prickled and the back of his neck went cold as fear proved to be as on-call as ever it had been. The quarrelsome nature of the voices darkened into threatening tones, and again he felt that they were shockingly near, the speakers close enough to touch. When he reached out, he found that he had shuffled out of the center of the room without realizing it, for he touched a wall.

The plaster vibrated in time with the speech waves of the angry chorus, as if the voices came from within the wall.

Sally Hollander

Free of all emotions, she was still lying on her kitchen floor, disconnected images from a fading identity blooming in the mostly lightless and drowned landscape of her mind. She seemed to be looking up from the bottom of a pond, through water toward a night sky, and the images were formed from fat drops of light falling like fitful rain, each drop spreading into colors and scenes as it struck and melded with the surface of the pond; and every scene shimmered for a moment like reverse paintings on glass, before bleeding away into darkness. Faces that she knew but to which she could no longer affix names, places she recognized but was unable to identify, moments out of a lost time that might have been an hour or a week or ten years in the past floated one after another across this drowning pool, colorful at first but then in black-and-white and shades of gray.

As she seemed to sink into the silt and the scum of her final resting place, as the now colorless moments of a fading consciousness grew ever dimmer, a sudden excruciatingly tender yearning overcame her, a keen nostalgia for what she could not remember, for what she felt slipping away from her forever, and there came also a piercing love for light, for life, for sounds and scents and tastes and sights and textures whether rough or smooth. These fervent feelings swelled until she seemed sure to burst with them—but then they passed.

She felt no further emotion. All grew dark in her, without want or meaning, and after a while she developed one desire but one only: to kill. She was not she anymore, she was a creature now without a past or gender, transformed by the sleek gray attacker into one of its kind, with one name only: Pogromite. It rose. It moved. It sought.

Bailey Hawks

From the threshold of Silas Kinsley’s bathroom, Bailey watched the serpentine organisms throb with something Kirby Ignis said was “like peristalsis.” In the flashlight beam, as those pulsations occurred more rapidly, the clusters of bell-shaped mushrooms became active as well. The puckered formation at the crown of each, which Bailey had likened to the mouths of drawstring purses, began to open and to peel back from the caps, whereupon those growths looked less like mushrooms than like engorged phalluses straining through their foreskins toward passionate release.

Simultaneously Bailey and Kirby recognized the implications of this unveiling. Bailey said, “Get back,” Kirby said, “It’s sporing,” and they retreated quickly from the bathroom threshold, across the bedroom, to the open door, where they paused to see if the thing might be peeling itself off the walls to follow them. It either didn’t possess the power of locomotion or was not in a mood to hunt them down, because it neither slithered nor crawled out of the dimly lighted bathroom.

In the public hallway, outside the apartment, Bailey closed the door and wished that he could lock it or had a chair with which to brace it shut. The empty chambers of the Pendleton, evidently stripped bare long ago for reasons unknowable, were not likely to provide them with hammers and nails or with any other tools they might use to seal off rooms either to contain the things in them or to create a refuge into which nothing deadly could intrude.

Tom Tran

Pulsing with a bleak and sour inner light, the thing was like some massive mutant tuber that had grown underground, in radioactive soil, developing many spongy lobes of malignant flesh, initially feeding on minerals in the ground but then on insects and worms, incorporating their DNA into its structure, eventually extruding that segmented wormlike part of it, sprouting legs and nasty pincers and a pair of horny mandibles with which to bite and rend. Maybe it was some alien life form, fallen to Earth in a seed pod, in a meteorite, self-aware from the start. Or maybe it gradually became self-aware as it lived below the surface like a trapdoor spider, pulling down unwary rats and rabbits and dogs and maybe even children, especially children, its lair a mass grave, feeding on them, gaining from their DNA a series of increasingly sophisticated brain designs, and at last burrowing to the surface with God alone knew what purpose.

It squealed again in that angry-child, tortured-child voice. And there was no way to read accurately its intention in its three radiant silvery eyes, though Tom saw in them the same hunger that he heard in the keening voice.

The beast’s asymmetrical structure and its weird hodgepodge of features, seemingly derived from multiple species, suggested that it must be semifunctional at best, clumsy by nature, awkward in action. He considered rushing toward it, dodging past it, off the path and through the tangled plants and away to the east gate. He was a boy again and as fast as a highland wind, for fear had returned him to the helplessness of childhood when he had compensated for his size and weakness by being fleet and clever and inexhaustible. Before Tom could move, however, the thing jittered forward, hissing and venting, closing from thirty feet to fifteen, quicker than a scuttling crab. But there it halted, studying him as if he might be as strange a sight to it as it was to him.

He didn’t hear the deadbolt retract behind him, didn’t hear the door open. He cried out in alarm when something seized him by the arm, less inclined to believe that he had any chance of being saved than that at his back was something no less freakish and no less vicious than the monster on the footpath. The rapid mortar fire of his heart whump-whumped so loud in his ears that he barely heard Padmini Bahrati say, “Quick! Inside!” But he did hear her, turned toward her, plunged inside and past her.

Padmini slammed the heavy door and with the thumb-turn shot home the deadbolt.

When Tom Tran whipped around to face the courtyard again, he was inexpressibly grateful that those French doors were made of bronze instead of wood, for this prince of Hell was right there. Up close it looked less like spongy tubers than like a salmagundi of exposed organs and entrails, like a thing turned inside out, all its bulbous parts slick with a thin milky fluid glistening in the yellow light that passed through the panes from the hallway.

The silver eyes were fixed on him, and the mandibles worked as if the creature were imagining the taste of him, and now he thought that the darker shapes within its semitranslucent body, those opaque lumps, might be smaller creatures it had devoured, all of them lying whole in its gut, like the limb-tangled bodies in the mass grave near Nha Trang. This was the very kind of thing that might have come to life—or the animated antithesis of life—deeply buried in the human compost and jungle mast of Nha Trang, Vietnam, never having been born but instead having become aware in the darkness and the decay and the heat that decay produced, the horror of Nha Trang given a suitably symbolic form. At last it had come for Tran Van Lung, known here as Tom Tran, now forty-five, who as a boy of ten had seen that open-air abattoir, the machine-gunned thousands of women, men, and children in the natural cavity of a pond long drained of water, not yet plowed over with a thick blanket of earth. With his father, he had quickly walked one curve of the rim of that obscene hole and safely away among the trees before authorities returned with the bulldozer that they had been too impatient to provide before the killing started. Behind him and his father, the jungle surrounding the grave had stood eerily silent in deep green witness.

“It’s not even trying to get in,” Padmini said.

Tom expected the creature to throw itself against the doors, but it did not. Neither did it shatter a pane of glass with its pincers.

“Why isn’t it trying?” Padmini asked.

The thing turned away from the door and retreated along the winding footpath.

“It must not be Nha Trang, after all,” Tom decided.

“What?”

“Nha Trang will never stop wanting me.”

Although the intensity of his fear declined as his racing heart beat less frantically, a chill pierced him with the suddenness of a dagger of ice falling from a high eave, and he shivered violently.

Dr. Kirby Ignis

Déjà vu didn’t describe the sensation. Kirby didn’t feel as if he had been here before, in these circumstances, in this Pendleton of the future. Yet as extraordinary as these events were, they did not seem utterly alien and incomprehensible to him. He had been surprised by the things he’d seen but, curiously, not shocked. In spite of the bizarre and radical changes this world had undergone, it was somehow familiar to him, or if not familiar, then potentially explainable. He could not explain it yet, but he sensed an understanding growing in him, a coral reef of theory slowly accreting, still unconscious but certain eventually to rise into view. The apparent chaos might be only apparent, a logical historic cause and a rational order just waiting to be revealed.

He and Bailey left the women and children with one gun and one flashlight, in the Cupp apartment. The encounter with the sporing colony of fungi in Kinsley’s bathroom proved that moments would arise when a quick response was essential to survival, but the larger the search team, the less agile it could be.

They accessed the south wing of the third floor through the Cupps’ back entrance. The high-mounted TV in the corner where the short and long hallways met didn’t pulse with blue light. The screen was shattered. A colony of glowing fungi lived in the shallow tube, indicating that this monitor hadn’t worked in a long time.

To their left the elevator doors stood open, the stainless-steel interior burnished by blue light. To Kirby Ignis, the unoccupied car seemed to be an invitation to go for a ride. Considering Winny’s experience and Kirby’s own encounter with the blood-spattered butler who came out of the north elevator from 1935, shortly before the leap to this future occurred, he would prefer the stairs for the duration.

The top floor of Gary Dai’s two-story apartment was immediately to their right, opposite the south elevator. The door had been broken down. It lay just beyond the threshold, cracked and sheathed in undisturbed dust; the hinges in the jamb were bent, torn halfway out of the wood. Back in 2011, Gary was in Singapore, so the leap would not have brought him with them to this Pendleton.

Nevertheless, they ventured into the upper floor of 3-B, where the radiant fungi were as prevalent as elsewhere, and Bailey called out—“Is anyone here?”—repeatedly as they moved from the foyer into the living room. The words echoed through other rooms and down the internal apartment stairs to the lower floor of the unit, but no one replied.

Beyond the west windows lay the plain of hypnotically swaying luminous grass and the circular stands of craggy black trees down-lit by the moon but also up-lit by the glowing meadow. The disturbing but undeniable allure of this future world was different from the beauty of the world now past, not just in the nature of its landscapes but in its fundamental quality.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty: Philosophers for ages had said that beauty was proof of design by a higher power, because living things could function just as well if they were ugly; if animals—including humans—were merely meat machines and if plants were merely machines of cellulose and chlorophyll produced by blind and mindless Nature, and if landscapes were sculpted by geological processes inspired by no Great Engineer, there wasn’t any reason for them to be appealing to the eye, which seemed to mean beauty must be a grace, a gift to the world.

Kirby wasn’t interested enough to have an opinion regarding the theory of a link between beauty and the divine in the world he had left. But it seemed to him, as he gazed out of Gary Dai’s windows, that what pleased the eye in this world was not good and true but evil and deceptive. What made this vista alluring was not genuine harmony, which it somehow lacked, but its mystery and the sense that anything might be out there, that anything might happen, which had great appeal to the savage aspect of the human heart, which in the old world had to be repressed in the interest of civilization. Here no civilization existed, only the heart of darkness, bewitching in its immensity, charming because it promised raw brutal power, because it promised the freedom of madness, because it promised death without meaning.

From here the rhythmic swaying of the luminous meadow seemed to offer a mystical experience, but Kirby suspected that any walk he took there would be short and marked by exquisite cruelty.

In spite of his grandfatherly demeanor, he was a curmudgeon who found humankind—not every individual but as a species—to be largely foolish in the extreme, selfish and greedy and envious. Most were in love with power, with violence, users and despoilers. Kirby often thought the world would be a better place if dogs were the creatures of highest intelligence who lived in it. He didn’t miss the vanished city, because even the best of cities were beautiful only from a distance, squalid to one degree or another when experienced up close. However, this was a world without cities, without men, and no doubt without dogs and other innocent creatures, not a world returned to the condition of Eden, but a world polluted and perverted.

“I don’t think we need to explore every room,” Bailey said. “If anyone were here, they’d respond. Whatever we find during a search is going to be one kind of funhouse pop-up or another, and we don’t need to put ourselves at risk just for the thrill of it.”

When they came out of Gary Dai’s apartment, the open elevator car remained empty, but murmuring voices in a foreign language issued from it—or more likely from the shaft in which it was suspended. They sounded just as Bailey had described them: portentous, urgent, ominous. In the world of the past, language was an exclusively human tool, but Kirby suspected that these voices were not those of people.

When they turned the corner into the long south hallway, a blue screen pulsed at the farther end, though no computer-simulated voice raised an alarm.

On the left were two apartments, the first belonging to Mac and Shelly Reeves. Kirby had little time to listen to radio, but the few occasions on which he’d heard the Reeveses’ show, it was amusing.

The door stood open. The first two rooms were like the desolate spaces they’d seen elsewhere. Nobody answered Bailey’s call.

“They might’ve been out to the theater or dinner when the leap occurred,” Kirby said.

“For their sake, let’s hope so.”

As they approached the door to 3-H, Fielding Udell’s apartment, the blue screen spoke: “Two adult males. Aboveground. Third floor. South hallway. Exterminate. Exterminate.”

Inspired by Mickey Dime, Bailey shot the screen.

“Some kind of security system?” Kirby wondered.

“Seems like it.”

“Why would an abandoned building need one?”

“Beats me.”

“You think anyone’s still around to answer the call?”

“So far, I’d say no. So far.”

The door to Fielding Udell’s apartment was locked. The bell didn’t work. Bailey knocked loudly. No one answered.

Bailey shouted through the door: “Mr. Udell? Mr. Udell? It’s Bailey Hawks. I live in 2-C.” He waited. Then: “Mr. Udell, we’re all getting together in the Cupp apartment, riding this out together.”

When the only reply proved to be silence, Kirby said, “Maybe he was out of the building when it happened.”

“I don’t think he leaves his apartment much.”

“You want to break down the door, see if he’s in trouble?”

Bailey thought about it for a moment. “You know this guy?”

“I’ve run into him once or twice.”

“He’s pretty eccentric.”

“Eccentric is one word for it,” Kirby said.

“I’m thinking what if, like me and like Martha, he was packing a gun when the leap happened. The way Udell is, if we break down the door and he’s armed, either he might get shot, or me, maybe both.”

They went to the south stairs, at the west end of the hallway, and descended to the second floor.

Witness

He stood in what might once have been the library or the study, to one side of the open door to the living room, listening as the women helped one another to keep their courage strong.

Through the security-system communicator in his right ear, he heard the alarm and the call for extermination every time it sounded. There was a period, far in the past, when Witness was the one who did the required killing. Those few hardy souls who survived the Pogrom and subsequently survived the Fade tended to seek shelter in the Pendleton when they came upon it, for this building alone seemed to offer recognizable refuge in a changed world. But these final walls were for those people the walls of a trap. Witness made a good first impression on the ragged and weary survivors, because he looked like them, not like a Pogromite. Once millions in number, the Pogromites had dwindled to a few in those days, because they had massacred long and well, and therefore were without sufficient work to justify their existence in large numbers. He welcomed the people who escaped the Pogrom, invited them into his supposed fortress, and when they trusted him, he killed them ruthlessly.

No survivors had chanced by in many years, and he no longer killed. His only job for a long time had been to stand as witness, the sole repository of the history of the world before the Pogrom, and curator of this honored building.

Considering his solitude and the terrible unrelenting weight of his knowledge, his awareness of how the world had once been and his daily experience of what it had become, perhaps it should have been expected that he would change. Gradually he was overcome by a sense of grievous loss. Something like remorse arose in him, and even pity.

One hundred sixteen days previously, the melancholy routine of his isolated existence was interrupted. The first fluctuations began, those inexplicable flashbacks to the Pendleton as it had once been, in 1897, standing high on this hill but in a smaller version of the city that eventually grew. The fluctuations lasted two days, and for flickering moments the present and that particular moment of the past briefly occupied the same point on the continuum of time. Then the transition occurred, flinging Andrew North Pendleton, his wife, and their two children into this merciless future where the perpetually mutating denizens included no species that didn’t kill, a world of ceaseless violent predation.

Witness had not slaughtered the children and the wife. The sole remaining Pogromite in this region, perhaps in the entire world, had attacked little Sophia. It had administered the first paralyzing bite and the injection that began the family’s destruction. Other threats ensured that, when the transition reversed, only the father had been carried back to 1897, for only he remained alive.

Witness now knew from experience that this mysterious phenomenon occurred every thirty-eight years in the past, beginning in December 1897. Curiously, it was thirty-eight days between the experiences for him, at this end of the journey. The time separating the events in the past made it difficult for people then to see the pattern. But for Witness, the shorter interval here lent a sense of accelerating momentum to these incidents.

Thirty-six days after the Pendleton family transitioned to this time, the fluctuations began again, and following the Pendletons by thirty-eight days, the Ostocks and their live-in household staff were in essence shipwrecked on this shore. Thirty-eight days after the Ostocks, a bewildered man named Ricky Neems came out of the past alone, a construction worker from 1973, who met a gruesome fate shortly after his arrival.

Each group transported from earlier eras, at least those who survived, remained in this future 38 percent less time than the previous crew. The dead remained forever. Andrew Pendleton and his family were here the longest, for 380 minutes. The Ostocks endured approximately 235, which was 38 percent less. The transition in which Ricky Neems perished lasted about 146 minutes. If the pattern held, the current travelers would be stranded here 90.6 minutes, which was 62 percent of 146.1. Witness didn’t understand the reason for the periodicity or the importance of the number 38, but he was certain of the length of each transition because it was part of his nature to be as aware of the passage of time as was any clock.

Likewise, he didn’t know the cause of this event, whether it was a natural phenomenon without meaning or whether there was a purpose of some kind behind it. If the Pendleton had by chance been built over a fault in space-time, all was happenstance. But whether chance or not, the forces involved were beyond Witness’s comprehension, of such immense power that they could fold time to bring different eras together, which was impossible according to the laws of physics—or at least impossible according to the laws of physics as they were thought to be.

His growing sense of increasing momentum led him to expect an approaching crescendo, not merely an end to these phenomena but a consummation beyond his ability to imagine. Maybe the violence he had witnessed for so long, the destruction of civilization worldwide, shaped his expectations, and maybe he was wrong, but he believed the end of these transitions, when it came, would be cataclysmic, worse than anything he had seen in his life.

Standing in the deserted library, listening to the women in the next room, he thought he would like them very much if he knew them better. He liked them some already, well enough that he hoped they might not perish here, although the chances of any of them living through the next ninety minutes was remote. He would not kill them, but he could not save them, either.

Tom Tran

In the west hallway of the ground floor, Tom seized Padmini’s hands and kissed them as he thanked her profusely for saving him from the spawn of the mass grave at Nha Trang or whatever it had been. She called it rakshasa, which she said was a race of demons, goblins, and though he didn’t know much about Hinduism, Tom thought that might be as good an explanation as any for the creature.

“Baba,” she said, “what has happened? Do you know why everything has changed?”

Baba, she’d told him, was an affectionate form of address used in India when speaking to little children or old men. Only forty-six, but more than twice her age, Tom Tran took no offense. He sometimes thought of Padmini as the daughter he’d never had. Anyway, her sweet nature ensured that only the most contentious cranks could work up any animosity toward her.

“In my experience,” he said, releasing her hands, “the world falls apart from time to time, and madness happens, but not madness like this.”

“I locked the main doors from the street,” she said.

“Good, good,” he said, glancing at the courtyard beyond the French doors, where the rakshasa had disappeared beyond masses of strange vegetation.

“I was going to go down to security, see what he knows.”

“Yes,” Tom said, beginning to regain some of his composure. “That’s what we should do.”

Together they hurried along the inexplicably filthy and poorly lighted corridor toward the south stairs, whereupon he noticed that high on the end wall hung a foot-square TV that had never been there previously. The mounting platform had partially failed, and the TV hung at an angle, the screen dark.

As they approached the stairwell door, it opened, startling them to a stop, and Silas Kinsley entered the hallway with a pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other.

“Mr. Kinsley,” Padmini said, “the world’s gone crazy, khiskela, everything is off, shifted.”

“Yes, I know,” the attorney said. “What have you seen?”

“Demons,” Tom replied and wondered what it meant that Silas Kinsley seemed not in the least surprised by that word.

Padmini said, “We were going down to security, to see what Vernon Klick might know.”

“He’s dead,” the attorney informed them. “The security room isn’t like it used to be. There’s nothing for us down there.”

Iris

They are too many, and they seem to talk all at once, and they have too much to say. Iris is not able to keep the forest real around her and follow the Bambi way with so much talking, the voices buzzing at her, buzzing. She doesn’t just hear the voices but feels them sawing in her ears, words with sharp little teeth, none of them soft voices right now but worried and rough. The words choke her, too, the words like a cord tightening around her throat, the way the trap line nearly strangled Friend Hare, so she finds it harder and harder to breathe.

The old woman has a gun, and guns are bad. The hunter killed Bambi’s friend Gobo, wounded Bambi in the shoulder, all the blood and Bambi wanting to lie down and sleep, just sleep, except sleep would have been death.

Iris keeps her hands over her ears for a while, but then she is afraid that she won’t hear the scream of the jaybird if it comes. She must be able to hear it, because the jay, with its scream, warns the whole forest when danger is near, when the hunter is among the trees.

Not daring to look up, certain to be overwhelmed by the sight of all these people talking, and everything changed, nothing as it ought to be, she focuses on the floor. Head bowed, arms folded across her chest, hands in her armpits, she tries to be as small and compact as she can, hoping not to be noticed.

The cats are on the floor again, nobody cuddling them, prowling around. She watches them because they make her think of the animals in the forest. She remembers the wonderful female deer like Faline and Aunt Ena and Aunt Nettla and Marena, and she is calmed when she keeps them in her mind.

One of the cats undoes Iris’s calm when it looks at her from a few feet away, and she sees that its orange eyes are changed, all black like pools of ink. The cat is moving different from the way it moved before, slower, not as graceful, as if it’s sick. It shudders away from her. The other cat appears in her line of sight, and it also has strange black eyes. It opens its mouth, in which something is wriggling, as if the cat caught a mouse with six tails, the gray tails slithering back and forth across its teeth.

The forest isn’t here anymore, and it’ll never be here in this room again because there are too many voices and too many changes, everything different, even the cats, nothing normal, nothing safe. The forest must be found somewhere else, away from the worried voices and the grinning cats.

As quiet as Friend Hare, quicker even than the squirrel, Iris slips out of the room, through an archway, trying to see the young beeches and goldenrod and blackthorns and alders, seeking the safe glade where sprays of hazel, furze, and dogwood weave together and the sun coming through them is a golden web, the safe and secret glade where Bambi was born.

Bailey Hawks

They didn’t search the second floor with care, only toured it quickly. Bailey, Twyla, Winny, Sparkle, Iris, and Kirby lived on this level and were accounted for. According to Sparkle, her immediate neighbors, the Shellbrooks in 2-H, were on vacation, as were the Cordovans in 2-E. Apartment 2-I was empty and for sale. Rawley and June Tullis in 2-D, the owners of Topper’s, put in long hours at the restaurant; both would have been at work when the leap occurred.

Bailey called out repeatedly, received no answer. He and Kirby went down the north stairs to the ground floor, where they saw three people near the doors to the lobby, all coming this way along the corridor. Bailey recognized Padmini Bahrati, and then Tom Tran and Silas Kinsley in rain gear.

The five of them met in front of the lavatories that were used primarily by people attending events in the banquet room. Because the fungus light here reminded Bailey of oil lamps with mica lenses playing off sandstone walls in a certain Afghanistan-desert grotto used as a weapons cache by the Taliban, he felt more than ever that this was not merely an adventure in time travel but also a war of long duration into which they had been plunged. None of their people had died here yet, as far as he knew, but hostilities could commence at any moment. Judging by the haunted look of them, Padmini, Tom, and Silas felt the same.

Winny

He wasn’t aware of Iris leaving until he glanced toward the girl and saw that she was already beyond the archway, at the farther end of the adjoining room, a shadowy figure moving through veils of the creepy yellow light.

In most of the books that Winny read, there was always a hero, sometimes more than one. Of course he identified with the hero, not with the bad guy. Being a bad guy was easy, but being a hero was hard. For a while now, Winny had realized that always taking the harder challenge was the way to success and happiness. His mom loved songwriting, but getting the lyrics and the melody right didn’t come easily. She worked long hours, composing, perfecting. But she was happy and successful. She qualified as a hero in her own way. Winny’s dad, Farrel Barnett, couldn’t be called a villain exactly. He didn’t go around blowing up churches or setting fire to puppies, or hacking old ladies to death with an axe. But you couldn’t call him a hero, either, because he too often took the easy way. Getting naked with any bimbo that winked at him was a lot easier than being faithful to his wife. Winny had seen him drunk sometimes with his buddies. Getting plastered was about as easy as anything you could do. And ragging your son about being more manly, in front of everyone—that was easy, too. The hard thing was being the one getting ragged and just smiling through it. Sending a copy of your latest publicity photo was a lot easier than coming to see your kid and maybe taking him to an amusement park or something. Winny’s dad wasn’t a villain-level bad guy, but he was a little bit over there on the dark side. Once you were over there, it was easier to slide a lot farther down. Winny didn’t want to go the easy way because he wanted to be happy. In spite of being famous, rich, and adored by millions of fans, Farrel Barnett wasn’t happy. Winny could see how unhappy his dad was, which made him sad and angry and afraid. He always thought something terrible was going to happen to the old man, and he didn’t want to see what it might be. He couldn’t tell his dad to take the hard challenges instead of the easy ones, because he didn’t want to have his face shoved in a toilet bowl. One of Farrel’s hanger-on drinking buddies got in a fight with him once, both of them stupid drunk, and old Farrel shoved the poor guy’s face in a toilet. Fortunately it had been flushed before the dunking. Winny couldn’t save his dad. All he could do was avoid what was easy, make the hard choices, and hope for the best.

For that reason he dashed after Iris as she disappeared through a doorway at the end of the adjoining room. Just because he did the hard thing didn’t make him a hero already. He was at the bottom of a thousand-foot cliff, and the heroes were at the top, and he’d hardly begun to climb. For one thing, a hero needed not only to be brave but also to think smart. The smart thing would have been to alert the others that Iris was running off, but he didn’t think to cry out until he was through the archway into the adjacent room. Then before he could say anything, his mom and Mrs. Sykes and the two old ladies all shouted at once. For another thing, a smart hero would not assume anything, would be sure of his facts, but Winny assumed—stupid, stupid—that they were shouting at him and at Iris, that they were in pursuit. He kept going, dashed out of the second room, sprinted along a hallway, and ahead of him, Iris shouldered through a swinging door. He hurried after her across the kitchen, into a laundry room, through the back door of the Cupp apartment, and into the short west hall at the south end of the third floor.

Iris was gone. She hadn’t been far ahead of Winny. If she had turned the corner into the long south hall, he would still hear her footsteps. Silence.

To Winny’s left was the elevator, from which he had barely escaped earlier. If Iris had gone into the waiting car, she might be bug food already.

On his right was the entrance to Gary Dai’s apartment. The door had been broken down but not recently.

Suddenly a voice came from in there, high and sweet, a girl’s voice, probably Iris’s, though he’d never heard her say anything. She was singing a tune, no lyrics, just a lot of na-na-na, la-la-la, and like that. He called her name in a loud whisper, and then louder, but Iris didn’t answer. The singing wasn’t the hopscotch-jumprope-happy kind. This was the kind of singing that, if you tracked it to its source, you might find a little girl in a moldy old burial dress, her skin pitted and green, with lots of coffin splinters and dirt between her teeth.

No one had followed him out of the Cupp apartment. Where was his mom? Mrs. Sykes?

If you were going to make a big deal about doing the hard thing, then once you started doing it, you couldn’t stop when the hard thing became too hard, when your mommy wasn’t there to back you up. That was big-time sissy, and if you were going to quit that way, you might as well find a toilet and shove your own face into it.

The singing sounded like a girl, all right, but like a girl who was up to something, because there was this sort of sea-siren sound to it, like a mermaid luring idiot sailors toward jagged rocks that would sink them. Winny wasn’t a sailor, and he wasn’t old enough to get all sexed up by some hot siren. And Iris was for sure no mermaid, she was just this messed-up girl who was going to get herself killed. Winny in the quick, when he either gave it or he didn’t, decided there was nothing to go back to except the Mrs. Grace Lyman wrestling team, a saxophone as big as he was, and a career in music. He crossed the threshold, walking on the broken-down door, which wobbled under him, and braved forward through the fungus light, seeking the singer.

Sparkle Sykes

Smoke and Ashes once looked almost identical, with only the slightest difference in the tweak of their ears, in the color of their chest coats. But when Edna noticed what was happening to them and when everyone else saw it a split second after Edna made a strangled sound of revulsion, Smoke and Ashes didn’t even look much like cats anymore, let alone like each other. Something had gotten into them, and now it was coming out, and as it expressed itself, it seemed to change the very substance of them. They metamorphosed in different ways, similar only in that they were both bristling figures of biological chaos: lizard folded in with spider, pig-mean face, eye stacked above eye, mouth above snout, quivering antennas sprouting, scorpion tail.… In spite of being a novelist and a successful one, Sparkle didn’t often see literature in life the way that she saw life in literature, but this reminded her of some works of Thomas Pynchon, six genres in the same book, horror blooming out of horror with a feverish delight in the nihilistic outrageousness of it all.

For ten seconds she was paralyzed by and mesmerized by the new but not improved Smoke and Ashes. Then she turned to Iris, reaching out for the girl in spite of the panic that a touch might trigger, but Iris wasn’t where she had been—or anywhere—as if she had imagined the forest so vividly that she passed through a magic doorway to be with the deer. And Winny with her.

Twyla realized the kids were gone in the same instant that Sparkle made that discovery, and the terror they exchanged in a glance was like lightning leaping from the eyes of one to the eyes of the other. They would have been on the move a microsecond later, shouting for her girl, her boy, searching desperately through this time-whacked Pendleton, this unfunhouse, but they were driven to each other in sisterly defense when the not-Smoke and was-Ashes went ballistic.

Julian Sanchez

Over the past forty years, he made his peace with blindness, and the dark became his friend. Without visual stimuli to distract him, good music was a grand architecture of sound through which he walked. Audio books were worlds in which he lived so fully that he might have left his footprints in them. And when he contemplated himself, life, and what might come after, he traveled deeper into those darknesses than most men with sight might have done, where he discovered a light invisible, the lamp by which he found his way unfalteringly through the years.

Now, ear to the plaster, listening to the menacing voices that came from within the walls, Julian relied upon that lamp within to prevent his dread from darkening into full-blown fright. Ignorance was the father of panic, knowledge the father of peace, and he needed to locate neighbors who could explain what was happening.

He felt along the wall, into the foyer, to the front door, which stood ajar although he had left it locked. If furniture could vanish in an instant, if clean surfaces could become filthy from one moment to the next, there was no point worrying how locks could unlock themselves.

Always before, when he ventured out of his apartment, he took his white cane, because he didn’t know the whole world as well as he knew his rooms. But the cane no longer leaned against the foyer table, and he saw no reason to search for it on the floor because the table was gone, too. The cane hadn’t fallen or been misplaced, but had vanished with everything else.

The voices in the walls fell silent when Julian crossed the threshold into the public hallway. This space felt different from before, hollow and unwelcoming. He supposed that the console tables, the paintings, and the carpet runner were gone. Competing odors wove among one another: a thin astringent smell that he couldn’t identify, a vague rancidity that might have been cooking oil so long exposed to the air that it congealed into a thin paste, something like the brittle pages of time-yellowed books, dust, mildew.…

For a moment, he sensed that he was not alone. But then he was not sure about that. And then the hallway seemed deserted. In this strange new environment, his blind-man instincts weren’t as reliable as usual.

His initial intention was to turn right, proceed to the back of the north hall, to Apartment 1-C, where his friend Sally Hollander should be home at that hour. The apartment between his and hers was without a tenant, the owner having died several months earlier, the estate not yet settled.

But then he heard low voices speaking English, nothing like those sinister mutterings earlier, and they seemed to come from just around the corner in the west corridor. As he felt his way toward the junction, the wallpaper cracked and crumbled under his sliding hand, as if it were ancient. He found the open door to the small office used by the head concierge, and he eased past it.

On this ground floor, the ceilings in the public spaces, even in the corridors, were twelve feet high. As he arrived at the corner, he thought that he detected a stealthy sound overhead. He halted, listened, but heard nothing more from up there. Imagination.

Among the nearby voices, Julian recognized the melodic tones of Padmini Bahrati. Relieved to have found help, he proceeded to the corner and turned left into the west corridor.

“Padmini, something’s very wrong,” Julian said, and as he spoke, chips of what might have been ceiling plaster dribbled down on his head and shoulders.

Twyla Trahern

Winny and Iris had not been taken. They had run in fright. That was an article of faith with Twyla. She would not doubt it. They had run, they had not been taken, they had run.

No element of a cat remained recognizable in the two shrieking creatures, each a grotesque miscellany of parts, like a drunkard’s lifetime of DT nightmares snarled together, each still changing, perhaps ceaselessly changing, flexing, contracting, morphing. Eye sockets full of gnashing teeth, the lips of a mouth parting to reveal a bloody eye, impossible combinations metamorphosed with impossible rapidity into greater impossibilities, as if newt and bat and toad and more were recombining under a spell in a witch’s cauldron.

The beasts flung themselves across the room in herky-jerky movements, with none of the grace of the cats they had once been, chittering and squealing and hissing, but even their hisses were not catlike. They seemed to be as dysfunctional as they were malformed, but nonetheless terrifying. They bristled, quivered, full of feverish insectile energy, changing direction so suddenly that they appeared to be repeatedly and violently ricocheting off invisible barriers.

Weaponless but committed to mutual defense, Twyla and Sparkle moved together, trying to stay out of the way of those unpredictable horrors, which in spite of their awkward construction were as fast as water bugs. Each time it seemed that the women might be able to dash out of the room, they were harried in the other direction when one of the miscreations scuttled between them and the archway.

Martha had the gun, she clearly wanted to use it, except the things moved so fast and erratically that she couldn’t track them. Twyla could see that shooting one of them would be as difficult as killing a darting hummingbird with a slingshot and a stone, which as a little girl she had once seen cruel boys trying to do; the boys didn’t get a bird, but one of them popped the other in the forehead and dropped him unconscious in a heap. Trying to keep the train of her dinner gown off the floor and her long skirt tight around her even as she dodged this way and that, Edna had become separated from her sister. Twyla and Sparkle were in yet another part of the room. If Martha dared to squeeze off a shot, she might inadvertently blast someone instead of something.

It was unspoken but understood that Twyla and Sparkle intended to bolt after Winny and Iris at the first opportunity, and if one of them didn’t get out of this room alive, the other would go after both kids, all of them one family now, destined either to survive together or die together, nobody to be abandoned regardless of the cost.

The things that had been cats ricocheted off different invisible barriers and hard into each other, squalled furiously for a moment, their rage demonic, flung themselves away from each other—and seemed to collapse, shuddering, as if spent.

Amazed to have escaped untouched, Twyla and Sparkle moved at once toward the archway through which the kids must have gone.

Martha Cupp said, “Wait! Here, take the pistol.”

Glancing at the twitching monstrosities, Twyla said, “Keep it, you need it.”

“No,” Edna insisted. “The children matter more than we do.”

“Come with us.”

“We’ll slow you down,” Martha said, now holding the pistol by the barrel, circling the two small beasts. “You know how to shoot?”

“Daddy had guns,” Twyla said. “I hunted some, but it’s been a long time.”

Thrusting the pistol into Twyla’s hands, Martha said, “Go, go, find them!”

Padmini Bahrati

Bits of the glowing stuff twinkled down through yellow shadows onto Mr. Sanchez’s head and shoulders. Only then did Padmini realize that something large crawled on the ceiling.

In truth, the apparition in the courtyard, from which she had rescued Tom Tran, wasn’t anything like the rakshasa, that vicious race of demons in Hindu mythology, but the thing that launched itself off the hallway ceiling and onto Julian Sanchez’s back looked more the role. Lean but strong, gray and hairless, bullet head, fierce teeth, six-fingered hands of wicked configuration: Its kind might exist in any spiritual underworld ever conceived.

After a moment of shock and confusion, the two flashlight beams thrust, parried, met on point, revealing Mr. Sanchez driven to his knees, the demon on his back, the claws of its feet locked into his thighs, its knees clamping his rib cage, forcing his head backward with both its oversized hands, blood dribbling from a bite mark on his right cheek. The demon’s face was reversed to his face but its mouth covered his mouth, not as if delivering an abhorrent kiss but as if in a devouring rapture, its intention lurkao, to kill, but not merely to kill, as if it were sucking not just all sustaining breath from its victim, not just life itself, but also Mr. Sanchez’s atman, his very soul.

The frightening speed of the rakshasa, the terrifying intimacy of its violent assault, Mr. Sanchez’s apparent inability to resist, the way the blind man’s arched throat throbbed as though he swallowed scream after scream that he couldn’t force out through the vacuum silence of his assailant’s sucking mouth … This hideous spectacle at once flung up from the floor of memory all the long-dead fears of Padmini’s childhood, gave them new life, and sent them fluttering through her, bat-wing quick along every nerve path.

Perhaps only two seconds, three at most, passed from the instant the flashlight beams, wielded by Dr. Ignis and Mr. Kinsley, crossed upon the face of the fiend until Mr. Hawks acted. He rushed forward, pistol in a two-hand grip. As he approached, the rakshasa’s eyes widened and rolled in their sockets. Raising its mouth from the mouth of its victim, trailing a gray glistening tongue so round and long and strange that it might not have been a tongue at all, the demon began to release Mr. Sanchez, its long fingers peeling away from his chin, its other hand releasing a twisted fistful of the blind man’s hair. As quick as the thing was, Hawks nevertheless proved to be fast enough to jam the muzzle of the pistol against the sleek gray skull and squeeze the trigger twice before the rakshasa could spring upon him.

As the gunfire roared along the hallway, dark tissue spattered the wall. The fiend fell away from Mr. Sanchez, who collapsed onto his left side. Mr. Hawks stepped past the blind man and fired three rounds point-blank into the chest of the attacker, even though the head wounds seemed to have killed it.

For a moment Padmini lacked the power to move, not because of the horror or the violence, but because as the gun was pressed to the head of the rakshasa and as it rolled its fearsome eyes toward Hawks, she thought she saw something shocking in its face, a subtle likeness to someone she knew. The shots were fired, the creature killed, before a name came to Padmini. In that diabolic visage, she thought she had glimpsed traces of the face of Miss Hollander, pretty Sally Hollander, who worked for the Cupp sisters and who lived alone in Apartment 1-C. She must be mistaken, of course, rattled by events, confused by the crossed beams of the flashlights.

She went to Mr. Sanchez and knelt beside him, as did Tom Tran. The blind man was alive but seemed to be paralyzed, though without the slackness of paralysis, his muscles taut and his joints locked, as rigid as if he were resisting some relentless pressure.

His false eyes—not glass but realistic plastic hemispheres—had never accurately tracked her when she was talking with him. Now when she spoke his name, the eyes moved rapidly back and forth, fixing on nothing, as if he must be so disoriented that he couldn’t calculate her position from her voice. When she put a hand on his shoulder as she spoke his name again, the combination of touch and sound seemed to orient him; his sightless eyes stopped jiggling and turned toward her face.

His mouth hung open, but he seemed unable to speak. On his lips glistened something dark and wet and thick, which she first thought must be blood. But when Mr. Kinsley leaned in, shining his flashlight on poor Sanchez’s face, Padmini saw that the substance wasn’t red, that it was instead various shades of gray, mostly lead and charcoal, with silvery highlights.

“Be careful there,” Mr. Hawks warned sharply, rising from the body of the rakshasa. “Don’t touch Julian, get away from him.”

“He’s hurt,” Padmini said. “He needs help.”

“We don’t know what he needs.”

That admonition made no sense to Padmini, but before she could ask what Hawks meant, she saw that the silver-flecked gray sludge on the blind man’s lips was moving, not drooling downward but crawling from his upper lip toward his nostrils, and from his lower lip across the side of his face, as if the stuff must be alive.

Winny

In the fungus light, the upper floor of Gary Dai’s abandoned two-level apartment was spook city, not because of what waited there to be seen and recoiled from, but because of what seemed to be there, looming around every corner, lurking in every murky shadow. Winny saw hunched shapes with swollen heads, lean shapes like scarecrows that had climbed down from their stations in cornfields, shapes in flowing robes and hoods. But always they melted away, maybe because they had never been real or maybe because they were slipping around behind him to seize him just when he began to gain a little confidence, like in the movies when the axe cleaved the guy’s head about four seconds after he thought the worst was past.

Winston Trahern Barnett was a mouthful of a name, and Winny had never been more aware than he was now that he had been named after fearless men. His mom’s father had been Winston, who was called Win by everyone and died in a coal-cracker explosion. Win Trahern’s dad admired Winston Churchill and named his boy for the British leader. Those were hard acts to follow. Winny was never going to go anywhere near a coal cracker unless someone put a gun to his head. And while he might have to fight in a war one day—supposing he ever developed biceps and passed the physical—he didn’t think he’d ever be clever enough to command successfully the entire military of a nation. For one thing, he wouldn’t know what to say to his generals, let alone what to say to maybe a hundred million people watching him on TV and expecting him to explain why he sent the sixth fleet—if there was a sixth fleet—on the most ill-conceived mission in the history of warfare. The best he could hope for himself was to keep his cool and remain brave enough to find Iris.

Her silvery singing came and went, creepier each time that it arose. Winny kept picturing the little dead girl in a burial dress, with dirt and coffin splinters between her too-sharp teeth. When he tried to repress that ridiculous image, into his mind’s eye came another little girl who was really a ventriloquist’s dummy, and though her operator had disappeared, she sang anyway, her blue-glass eyes twinkling darkly, holding a knife in each hand. By the time Winny came to the interior steps that led down to the lower floor of the duplex apartment, listening to Iris’s wordless song rising from below, his armpits were sweat faucets and the hairs were standing up so stiff on the back of his neck that they would probably twang like guitar strings if the ghost of some musician plucked them.

Although Winny had been in Gary Dai’s apartment hardly a minute, his mother and Mrs. Sykes should have been here already. Reluctantly, he had to face the fact that when he heard them all shouting at once behind him, they hadn’t been responding to Iris’s flight or to his pursuit of her, but to something else that happened back there—and for sure not something good. They were probably in some kind of big trouble, and he ought to hurry back there to defend his mom. But when you were small for your age and when you had arms as skinny as tube cheese, your mom would insist on defending you, not the other way around, which would distract her and put her at greater risk, and in the end everyone would wind up dead or worse.

As long as Iris needed finding but not saving, Winny figured he might be up to the job, assuming there were no dragons to slay or any need to wield a mace against an ogre. A mace would probably be too heavy for him to wield even if he’d had one. He didn’t dare dwell on the thought of his mom in trouble, for if he did, he would be undone; there would prove to be no Winston in him, he would be all Winny and useless to everyone. So he thought Iris, and steeling himself for what might be waiting for him, he descended the first flight of stairs.

In the narrow staircase, the fungus light was dimmer than elsewhere, and shadows ruled. As he reached the landing, pleased by how quietly he stepped from tread to tread, the singing girl seemed to be wandering away through the lower rooms. Fearing that her voice would fade forever, Winny went down the second flight faster than he had descended the first.

The space below was brighter than the stairs, flooded more with moonlight than with the yellow glow of the fungus. Winny was two steps from the bottom when something dark and quick flew across the part of the room that he could see. Too fast for the eye, it swelled like wings but oared the air without a flap or whoosh.