77 Shadow Street

30

Here and There

Fielding Udell

Sitting with his back to the corner, exhausted from three days of too little sleep, drained of all energy by the crushing discovery that his cozy Pendleton was a lie beamed into his head by the Ruling Elite, listening to the lullaby of the voices in the walls, Fielding slept.

He dreamed about trees of which he had never known the like, great black craggy giants with thick, cracked bark, and at the bottom of the deeper fissures in the bark glistened something like raw meat. He floated up through the leafless branches from which depended huge teardrop-shaped fruit with mottled gray peel that at first seemed to be thick, like the skin of avocados. But on closer inspection, it was thinner than that, a membrane that encased not core and pips and apple flesh but instead something that squirmed like a restless fetus and made a leathery rustling noise as if impatiently straining to spread cramped wings.

In moonlight, weightless, for a while he hung above the dream trees, gazing down on them. They stood in a perfect circle, as though they had been summoned to a conclave, here to make some decision that would elevate one of their number to a position of power. The ground around which they gathered was hard and white and supported not one blade of grass or withered weed.

In one of those fluid shifts of place and perspective that are the editorial style of dreams, Fielding found himself within one of the massive trunks of the trees, sliding down through a supple tube, his progress eased by bloody slime, as if he were an infant traveling a birth canal toward the discovery of the world. Around him throbbed the rhythms of a living organism, nothing like the heartbeats of the animal world, but rather like the complexly counterpointed rhythms of a thousand machines on the floor of a vast factory, though they were biological rather than mechanical sounds.

Out of the roots, through fine webs of something alive in the soil, he was drawn into other and more tender roots than those of the trees, and he shimmered up through pale blades of luminous grass. In the flesh of the grass, the same complex rhythms throbbed as in the sapwood and the heartwood—as in the meat—of the tree. He was in the grass and looking out from the grass, for the grass could see in its special way, gazing down the gently sloping plain upon endless other ranks of grass, row after luminous row swaying hypnotically back and forth. He realized that the movement of the grass was a simpler application of the more complex rhythms in the tissue of all these organisms.

Myriad things crawled and creeped and slithered and skittered through the tall grass, one species attacking another in ceaseless warfare, even like devouring like in enthusiastic spasms of voracious cannibalism. With its lush ranks and perhaps with something like intention, the grass drew its heavy curtains to conceal the endless slaughter. With quick-striking rhizomes and tillers, the grass, too, seized prey, snaring all manner of succulent creatures, wrapping them as gifts to itself, and feeding on them while they still lived in the pale-green cocoons that it spun.

A great disc like a giant sea ray flew low over the meadow, and in its passage, it drew Fielding’s dreaming spirit up into it as it soared toward the Pendleton in the moonlight. Within the ray were the same rhythms as in the flesh of the great tree and as in the flesh of the grass, and Fielding was given to understand that all things of this world were one thing, one mind expressed in countless forms. There was none of the competition among individuals that made a riot of the former world, none of the unfairness of difference, only one thing dying countless times a minute and being reborn just as often. The war under the grass in the field, the war in the air, and the war in the seas were all civil wars and therefore had no winner or loser because the loser, consumed and processed, became the winner.

This was the ecology of perpetual peace through perpetual war, an ecology of one, by one, for one, an efficient ecology without a gram of waste, a healthy, narcissistic Nature that thrived because it competed only with itself, with no motive but self-interest. All was well in this best of all possible worlds, because the change that created it was the final change. From now and until the end of time, it would live on in perfect self-devouring contentment, with never a new thought, never a new need, never a new dream but only the dream of endless recycling of itself into itself, the One into the One.

As the flying sea ray passed low over the roof of the Pendleton, Fielding’s dream spirit settled into the great house. Here the One also resided in a plethora of fungal forms within the attic, within the framed Sheetrock walls internal to each apartment, within every hairline crack in the poured-in-place concrete support walls, within the ventilation ducts, the pipes, the elevator shafts.

Inside the house, as outside, the One took numerous forms, none of which was either entirely plant or entirely animal, each of which also incorporated self-replicating nanomachines by the billions to strictly regulate and judiciously refine the Essential Program. The Essential Program had brought about the combination of the plant and animal kingdoms and maintained an exquisite balance of both in the immortal One.

Fielding dreamed down into the nano level, where by lullaby he saw and learned that the thousands of types of nanomachines could each build unlimited others of its type using materials that the One drew from the soil through its roots. He saw the past, when the great cities were emptied of humanity and the Pogrom completed. He saw the start of the Fade, when the One grew through the many cities and its uncountable quadrillions of nanomachines fed not just on the soil but first on the many works of humanity, within a decade dissolving all evidence of civilization, erasing history and rebooting the planetary ecology.

In all the world, one building remained standing as a symbol, the Pendleton, and it would stand forever. Its basic structural integrity was maintained by the One, its supporting steel and its concrete walls and its many windows repaired on the nano level. It was a monument to human arrogance, pride, and vainglory, also to the foolishness and willful ignorance of humankind. Not least of all, it was a monument to the human self-hatred that throughout the history of the species had expressed itself in ideologies of mass murder, in submission to brute power, in the trading of freedom for a minimum material well-being, in the worship of lies, the flight from truth.

If not for the soothing lullaby rising from the walls, these dreams might have been nightmares. But Fielding was gentled through them, his doubts allayed, his suspicions mitigated, his resentment pacified, his fear alleviated. He continued dreaming, and in this strange sleep, of all that Fielding Udell learned, the most important thing was what he must do when eventually he woke. It would be a hard thing to do, but the One wished it of him, and in serving the One, he would at last redeem himself.

Martha Cupp

Giving the pistol to Twyla had been the right thing to do, but Martha missed the comfort of it in her hand. Except when she took shooting lessons, she’d never used a firearm in her life. After the lessons, the gun remained in her nightstand drawer until the incident with the thing in the sofa and the sheeting blue light. She felt vulnerable. She suspected that even if they returned to their time from this mean future, she would never feel safe again without a gun.

Edna, bless her flighty soul, seemed determined to try Martha’s frayed patience to the breaking point. First she circled the two puddles of inert gray sludge that had once been Smoke and Ashes, pointing at them and saying, “Ecce crucem Domini,” and “Libera nos a malo,” and other things in Latin, as though she suspected they still possessed demonic life that at any moment would rise in a new form.

“Dear,” Martha said, “you are simply not an exorcist.”

“I’m not pretending to be one. I’m just taking precautions.”

“Isn’t an amateur at risk trying to deal with demons? If they were demons. Which they aren’t.”

“Do you have any chalk?” Edna asked, and then pointed at one of the puddles and said something else in Latin.

“Wherever would I get chalk?” Martha said.

“Well, if you don’t have chalk, lipstick or eyebrow pencil might be all right.”

“I didn’t happen to bring my purse. Or a suitcase. Or a picnic lunch.”

“I need something to draw a pentagram around each of them. To keep them contained.”

“They look pretty contained to me. They look dead.”

“I need to keep them contained,” Edna insisted, and her voice broke. Tears welled and spilled. “They killed my sweet Smoke, my little Ashes. I need to keep them contained in a pentagram until Father Murphy or someone can come here and do the right ritual and send them back to Hell so they can’t hurt anyone else’s kittens. Have you called Father Murphy? Have you told him to hurry?”

Martha was overcome by a new fear, a variety that was entwined with sorrow. In Edna’s trembling voice was a note of despondency and bewilderment that suggested, under the intense stress of this event, she had crossed the line between charming eccentricity and a confused condition less winning, more troubling. That pixie quality, hers since childhood, was gone. Suddenly Edna looked older than her years.

“Yes, love,” Martha said, “I’ve called Father Murphy. He’s on his way. Come here, stand with me while we wait for him. Come hold my hand.”

Shaking her head, Edna said, “I can’t. I’ve got to watch these bastards.”

Martha’s sense of vulnerability deepened, and she understood now that she had subconsciously felt fundamentally insecure long before this night, from the moment they had sold Cupp Sisters Cakes and she had stepped down as the company’s CEO. She had been good at business. She thrived on being in control. In retirement, she traded the helm of the ship for a lifeboat in which she felt adrift. She purchased the gun a month after leaving the company. Having a pistol was never about the threat of crime, but was only an unconscious reaction to her sense of being vulnerable when not running a big ship. Now she was without the ship, without either of her charming but frivolous husbands, without the gun, and perhaps without the full strength of the sister on whom she had leaned as much as Edna had leaned on her.

Martha stepped away from the wall against which she had been standing and went to Edna. She took her sister’s hand. “Remember the first cat we ever had? We were just little girls. You were nine and I was seven when Dad brought him home.”

Briefly Edna frowned, but then her sweet face brightened. “Mr. Jingles. He was a lovely boy.”

“All black with white socks, remember?”

“And the white diamond on his chest.”

“He was a hoot with a piece of string,” Martha said.

Edna’s gaze shifted past her sister, and she said to someone else, “Thank God you’re here.”

For an instant, Martha had the crazy thought that Father Murphy had arrived with the Roman Ritual, sanctified oil and salt and water, and the stole of his office.

But it was Logan Spangler, head of security, stepping out of the foyer. He must have gone off duty hours earlier, should have been out of the Pendleton and at home when the leap occurred, but here he was in uniform and gun belt.

Bailey Hawks

The five of them left the lap-pool room together. His familial tremors under control, Silas Kinsley drew his pistol from a raincoat pocket and led the way up the north stairs to the third floor. As the only other armed member of the party, Bailey went last.

Holding the door open, about to cross the threshold into the stairwell, he heard someone behind him say softly, “Bailey, wait.”

Although his name had been used and therefore he expected to see someone he knew, Bailey let go of the door, blocking it open with his body, and swiveled left, bringing the Beretta toward the voice.

Halfway between Bailey and the open door to the gym stood a man in his late twenties.

“Who’re you?”

“I call myself Witness. Listen, the transition will reverse in sixty-two minutes. Then you’ll be back safe in your time.”

The guy wore jeans, a cotton sweater, an insulated jacket. Hair slick with water, jeans damp. His leather boots were darker where wet. He’d recently been in rain. In this future, the night was dry.

“The fluctuations that preceded the first transition won’t precede the reversal.”

Keeping the pistol on target, Bailey said, “How do you know any of this?”

“Higher is safer. It’s stronger in the basement, the elevator shafts.”

Bailey gestured with the pistol. “Come here, come with me.”

“In those places where it’s stronger, it can get in your head. Confuse you. Maybe control you.”

“Is it in you?”

“I’m the one thing here it’s not in. I’m apart. It allows that.”

“What the hell is it?”

“In this future, all life has become one. The One. Many individuals, one consciousness. The One is plant, animal, machine.”

In the stairwell, they realized he wasn’t following. Tom Tran called down to him.

Taking a two-hand grip on the Beretta, Bailey said, “Come on.”

“No. My position here is delicate. You must respect that.”

As the guy turned away from him, Bailey said, “You help us, or I’ll shoot you dead, I swear I will.”

“I can’t be killed,” the stranger said, and stepped out of sight through the open door to the gym.

Martha Cupp

The moment she saw Logan Spangler entering the living room from the foyer, Martha Cupp remembered vividly the feeling that she’d had on the night her first husband died, thirty-nine years earlier. Simon was struck down in an instant by a massive heart attack at 7:30 in the evening. Their son, an only child, was at boarding school. The body was taken away, and eventually the friends and family who had hurried to console Martha also departed. Alone, she didn’t wish to sleep in the bed she had shared with Simon, but she found that even in a guest room, sleep eluded her. Simon had been ineffectual in most things, averse to hard work, a bit vain, a gossip, and sentimental to an extent that was somewhat embarrassing in a man, but she loved him for his best qualities, for his ever-ready sense of humor and his genuinely affectionate nature. Perhaps she wasn’t anguished over the loss, not in a black despair, but certainly grief had its talons in her. At 2:30 in the morning, lying awake, she heard a man weeping bitterly elsewhere in the house. Mystified, she rose and went in search of the mourner, and soon found him. Simon, seemingly as alive as he had been at 7:29, was sitting on the edge of the bed in their room, so desolate and anguished that she could hardly bear to look at him. Wonderingly, she spoke his name, but he neither responded nor glanced at her. Distressed to see him in such abject misery but not afraid, she sat on the bed beside him. When she put a hand on his shoulder, he had no substance, and he seemed not to feel her touch as her trembling hand passed through him. Evidently he couldn’t see Martha, because his failure to look at her seemed not to be an intentional turning away. She had been a believer all her life, but not in ghosts. The way that he pulled at his face, fisted his hands against his temples, bit on his knuckles, and sometimes bent forward as if suffering paroxysms of excruciating emotion suggested to her that he wasn’t grieving over the fact of his death but over something else. His torment was so affecting that she could not bear to watch it, and after a few minutes, distressed and bewildered, wondering about the reliability of her senses, she returned to the bed in the guest room. For nearly an hour, the tormented weeping continued, and when at last it faded to silence, she tried to convince herself that she had dreamed the incident or that in her grief she imagined it; but she had no talent for self-deception, and she knew that Simon’s visitation had been as real as his sudden demise.

Although Logan Spangler looked nothing like Simon, though he had never before reminded her of Simon, though he appeared as real now as ever he had appeared in the past, she knew on first sight of him that he was not alive. Perhaps he was not a ghost either, but he was no more alive than Simon had been sitting on the edge of that bed. And this was the moment she had been dreading for thirty-nine years, since lying in bed listening to Simon’s wretched weeping, the moment before she would make the ultimate discovery.

“Thank God you’re here,” Edna said.

There was no chance for Martha to issue a warning. As Edna hurried toward Spangler, dinner gown rustling, he opened his mouth and spat a series of objects at her. They were dark and about the size of olives, four or five, and they traveled at a far higher velocity than a man could possibly spit out anything. They struck Edna in the chest and abdomen, and she doubled over not with a cry of agony but with a soft gasp of surprise. As Spangler turned to Martha, she said, “I love you, Edna,” in case her sister might for another moment be conscious and aware. Spangler spat another flurry of projectiles. Martha felt them pierce her, but she knew pain only for an instant. Then she felt something worse than pain, and she wished she had been shot dead with a pistol instead of this. What pierced her did not drill through as bullets would, but crawled within her on some terrifying quest. She opened her mouth to scream, but she couldn’t make a sound because something large and gelid was squirming in her throat. Three attempts at a scream were all that she made, for after the third attempt, she was no longer Martha Cupp.

Bailey Hawks

Bailey wouldn’t have shot the stranger in the back, and maybe the man had sensed the falseness of that promise. Perhaps his claim—I can’t be killed—was just bravado, as much a lie as Bailey’s threat. Yet Bailey believed it.

Quick footsteps on the stairs—“Mr. Hawks!”—were followed by the appearance of Tom Tran.

Lowering the pistol, turning from the open door of the gym to the stairwell, Bailey said, “I’m okay, Tom. I just thought I saw … something.”

“What did you see?”

My position here is delicate. You must respect that.

“Nothing,” Bailey said. “It was nothing.”

He would have liked to tell Tom and the others at least that they would be going home in sixty-two minutes. But he didn’t know that was true. An informant in a war might be a teller of truth or a master of lies. And this one’s motives were entirely mysterious.

Bailey followed Tom up the circular stairs to the second-floor landing, where the others had paused in case they needed to come to his defense.

As they all ascended toward the third floor in single file, Silas and Kirby continued a conversation they apparently had started between the basement and the second-floor landing.

“The things some of us saw vanishing into walls,” Kirby said, “weren’t really passing through them. In the couple of days before the leap—”

“Transition,” Bailey said.

“That is a better word for it,” Kirby Ignis said. “We didn’t actually leap off anything. Before the transition, our time and this future were building toward the transition, trying to come together, so there were moments of overlap—”

“Fluctuations,” Bailey said.

“Exactly,” Kirby said. “And during the fluctuations, we were making brief contact with creatures from this time—maybe also with people on previous nights of transition like 1897 and 1935. When they appeared to pass through walls, it was only the fluctuation ending, and they were fading back into their proper time.”

Bailey thought of young Sophia Pendleton gaily descending these very stairs earlier, headed to the kitchen to meet the iceman: Sing a song of sixpence, a pocketful of rye …

With a solemn assertiveness that might have been amusing under other circumstances, Padmini Bahrati said, “I do not intend to die in this terrible place. I have many important goals and much that I wish to achieve. Tell me, Dr. Ignis, do you have any theory about how long we might remain here?”

“Silas,” said Kirby, “you know the history. Any guess how long?”

“Not really. I just know the living go back. Andrew Pendleton did. And some of the Ostock family.”

Two minutes earlier, the man who couldn’t be killed had said that the transition would reverse in sixty-two minutes. According to Bailey’s wristwatch, that would be at 7:21. The time now was 6:21.

Bailey said, “I can’t tell you exactly why, but I think we’re safer on the third floor. Now that we’re all together, we should just hunker down there and try to ride this out.”

When they reached the Cupp apartment, the four women and the children were gone.

Mickey Dime

There were mumbling voices in the walls. And why not? Anything could happen now. There were no rules anymore.

His mother had said that rules were for the weak of mind and body, for those who must be controlled in the interest of order. She said that for intellectuals, however, for the rightful masters of culture, rules and absolute freedom could not coexist.

But he didn’t think his mother meant the laws of nature, too, must be done away with. He didn’t think she defined absolute freedom to mean to hell with gravity.

Earlier, for a few minutes Mickey stood at a window, looking into the courtyard. Everything was changed down there. The change wasn’t good. It looked like hell down there. Somebody was responsible for it. Somebody had done a bad thing. Some incompetent fool.

Wait until Mickey’s mother learned about what had happened, whatever it might be. She had no tolerance for incompetent fools. She always knew how to deal with them. Just wait. He was eager to see what his mother would do.

Tom Tran had come along the winding pathway. He had been wearing a raincoat and his ridiculous floppy-brimmed hat. Rain wasn’t falling anymore, but he dressed for it anyway. What an idiot.

Tom Tran was the superintendent. He was paid well to keep the Pendleton in tip-top condition. If anyone was to blame for what had happened, Tom Tran must be the one.

Mickey had tried to crank open the casement window so that he could shoot Tom Tran dead on the spot. If shooting Tom Tran didn’t fix things, nothing would. But the window wouldn’t budge. The crank was broken or something.

In the courtyard, Tom Tran had reached the doors to the ground floor. Mickey considered hurrying downstairs and shooting Tom. It didn’t matter if he shot Tom outside or inside the building. Just shooting him ought to fix everything.

Before Mickey could move, something else had come lurching along the winding path down there. Some thing. He didn’t know much about biology—except for sex, of course, about which he knew everything—but he didn’t think this thing was a known species with its picture in college textbooks. Whatever it was, it didn’t look like a thing that you could kill easily.

Reality was completely out of control now. He turned his back to the windows. He just couldn’t take it anymore, the way it was out there in the courtyard. He had stood here for a while now, not being able to take it.

When he wouldn’t let the changed world into his mind, Sparkle and Iris came into it more vividly than ever. So tempting. They were his fantasy, yet their expressions were haughty, disdainful. They came into his mind uninvited, and they mocked him. He needed to rein in reality, and as a start he needed to bring the writer and her daughter to heel.

To heel. That reminded him of that goofy-looking professor guy, Dr. Ignis, the one who sometimes wore bow ties and elbow-patch jackets, for God’s sake. Ignis used to have a dog. Big Labrador. He walked it on a leash. The dog sometimes growled low at Mickey. Ignis apologized, said it never growled before. Ignis was someone else who needed to be shot. That would probably fix everything.

But first, if the gone-wrong world continued to reject him, he’d find Sparkle and Iris, wherever they were in the Pendleton, and he would make them pay for this the way he’d made those other women pay fifteen years earlier. He would kill them harder than he had ever killed anyone. That would definitely fix everything.

Winny

All over the room, the radiant fungus throbbed sort of in time with the singing, slower but like the dance-floor lights in some stupid old disco movie, except they didn’t make you want to dance. They made you want to get the hell out of there because, as they brightened and dimmed, they cast shadows of themselves across every surface, creating the illusion that nasty things were slithering this way and that.

Unlike most of the interior apartment walls in the Pendleton, these were of textured plaster instead of Sheetrock. They were marred by cracks, as was the ceiling. Those jagged lines glowed as though there must be light inside the walls, green light leaking out through the cracks.

Winny couldn’t tell if Iris knew he was there with her. She didn’t stand with her shoulders slumped and her head bowed, as usual. She stood up straight, her head tipped back, her eyes closed, as if she were swept away by the simple wordless singing of the girl that Winny had thought was her.

Instead, the singing girl seemed to be in the walls with the green light. Not just in one of them. In four. Coming from all around, fully quadrophonic. Up close and personal, the singing was even eerier than it had been when he had followed it from the upper floor of this apartment. He could too easily imagine a little dead girl whose body had never been buried but had been walled up by an insane killer. She might even have been walled up while she was alive and pleading for her life, so that she was not only dead inside the wall but her ghost was also insane from her having been killed that way.

Maybe the one dangerous thing about reading a library’s worth of books was the way your imagination got pumped up like a bodybuilder on steroids.

Although Iris seemed to like this weird singing, Winny knew that she was highly sensitive to people talking to her, maybe especially people she didn’t know well. He didn’t want to say the wrong thing and send her into some kind of screaming fit.

The best he could do was lead her back the way they had come, to the Cupp apartment, and hope to meet their mothers along the way. But after his dad had told him that if he read too many books, he might wind up a sissy or an autistic, Winny had read about autism, and he knew that your average autistic person—not all but most—disliked being touched a whole lot more than she disliked talking with you. He didn’t need to read about sissyism because he already knew what that was.

Autism seemed very frustrating and sad, and mysterious. You couldn’t get it from reading books, of course; and Winny had wondered whether his father was snowing him or was a huge ignoramus. He didn’t want to think his father could be an ignoramus. So he had decided it must be a snow job, of which there was one after the other when old Farrel Barnett was around and trying to manipulate his boy into becoming a wrestling, guitar-playing, saxophone-crazed tough guy.

Even if the best thing was to lead Iris out of here, Winny was hesitant to take her hand. If he pinched the sleeve of her sweater and pulled her along that way, maybe she wouldn’t be offended or irritated, or scared, or whatever it was that she felt when she was touched.

Winny was about to risk going for the sweater when suddenly he felt something moving lightly through his head, as if he’d been born with a sac of spider eggs in his brain and they were just hatching.

When he put his hands over his ears, that didn’t make all the baby spiders stop dancing in his skull, but he realized that instinctively he knew it was the singing getting to him, trying to hypnotize him, zombify him.

Before he could grab Iris’s sleeve, she stepped forward toward the nearest wall, and at the same time something wriggled out of the web of cracks in the plaster. For an instant he thought they were part of the illusion created by the throbbing fungus lights, but then he knew they were real. They looked like pale squirming worms, or maybe they were the tendrils of some freaky plant, growing fast like in a stop-motion film or like that meat-eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors. Iris opened her arms wide, as if she intended to walk right up to the wall and press herself against those greedy tendrils or roots, whatever they were.

The baby spiders in Winny’s head had voices like in Charlotte’s Web, but these buggers weren’t nice like Charlotte. They were telling him that doing what Iris was about to do would be the best thing in the world. He couldn’t understand their language, but he understood their meaning: that he should follow the girl’s lead and accept the happiness that she was about to embrace.

Maybe all these years of enduring his father’s propaganda had built up Winny’s resistance to brainwashing, but he wasn’t buying anything the head spiders were trying to sell him. He shouted—“Iris, no!”—grabbed a fistful of her sweater, and pulled her toward the door as the thrashing white tendrils reached frantically for them.

Twyla Trahern

“Iris, no!”

As she came off the bottom step into the lower floor of the Dai apartment, Twyla heard her son cry out in the next room or in the room beyond that. She thrilled to those two words because they meant that he was alive. But the alarm in his voice was a prod to her heart, which kicked against her ribs like hooves against a stall door.

With Sparkle at her side, she raced across an empty chamber, toward the singing, calling out to him, “Winny! I’m here!”

As they neared an archway between rooms, Winny shouted over the singing, “Mom, stay back!”

She almost didn’t heed the warning. Nothing was going to keep her from him. Although Sparkle no doubt felt the same need to get to Iris, she seized Twyla’s arm, and they stumbled to a stop at the brink of the next room.

Past the threshold, the luminous formations on the walls and ceiling waxed and waned, not synchronized, causing shadows to leap and scurry. Hundreds of pale cords, six to ten feet long, narrower than a pencil, pressed out of cracks in the custom-patterned plaster of the ceiling and walls. Half undulated lazily, others scourged the air as though seeking someone to punish, and a few lashed hard enough to crack like whips.

At the farther end of that room, twenty feet away, beyond an open door, Winny stood with Iris. They appeared to be all right.

“Don’t go in there,” Winny warned. “It wants you, don’t go.”

More than ever, Twyla was aware of cold ghostly fingers feeling along the folds and fissures of her brain as if reading her thoughts like braille. Or maybe it was writing, creating a little story about how she wanted to go into the room, about how easy it would be to get through those pale whips, which only looked like they could hurt her, which were actually feeble, she could brush them aside like the silky fibers of a spider’s web, she could walk straight to her boy in mere seconds, put her arm around him, keep him safe, she had the gun, with the gun there was nothing to fear, Winny so close, so close, and nothing, nothing, nothing to fear—

Sparkle stepped across the threshold, into the room.

Startled out of her own half-trance, Twyla grabbed the woman by one arm and pulled her backward as the nearer whips snaked toward her through the air.

“Think of the words to a song, any song, keep singing them to yourself, block the damn thing out.” She called to Winny, “Stay right there, kiddo. Don’t move. We’ll find another way to you.”

The wordless singing changed in character, from a wistful kind of melancholy to a sneering menace. Although the voice still sounded like that of a little girl, she was a corrupted child with dark knowledge and cruel intention.

Mentally repeating the refrain from a song of her own—Just pour me another beer/and keep them comin’, Joe/I’ve given up on women/so I’ll be leavin’ late and low—Twyla led Sparkle Sykes away from the arch, toward a closed door.

Winny

Iris allowed herself to be pulled from the room, but as soon as they were across the threshold, in a hallway where there were no cracks in the plaster, she made small fretful noises and impatiently tugged at the grip he had on the sleeve of her sweater. No sooner had Winny’s mom told him to stay where he was, that she would find another way to him, than Iris hauled off and smacked him in the face. The blow didn’t hurt much, but it surprised him. Reflexively he let go of her sweater. She shoved him hard, right off his feet, so he fell on his butt, and she ran as fast as a deer.

Mickey Dime

Because of what he did for a living and because being the son of his special mother gave him certain privileges not recognized by the law, Mickey almost always carried a concealed weapon, sometimes with a silencer attached, sometimes not. Because he was always well-prepared, he also carried a spare magazine of ammunition.

He had used one round to kill his brother, Jerry, and two more to kill Klick the Prick. He had shot out four of the blue TV screens that kept annoying him. That left three rounds. Before going down to the second floor to get a leash and choke collar from the professor, Dr. Ignis, or to kill him, whichever, Mickey changed out the partial magazine for the full one.

When he slipped the first magazine into a sport-coat pocket, he found an unused moist towelette in a foil packet. A little quiver of delight went through him, and for a moment his mood lifted. The world wasn’t entirely alien and forbidding; here was something right with it, after all.

He stood in the center of his filthy, unfurnished living room and with great care peeled open the foil packet. The lemony fragrance was intoxicating. He stood enjoying it for a long delicious moment.

Carefully, he extracted the moist towelette. He let the empty packet flutter to the floor. He was reminded of a geisha girl whom he killed in Kyoto. She had been a slender young woman and, shot, had fluttered to the floor rather like this foil packet.

He unfolded the towelette, and the fragrance blossomed as he exposed a broader area of the paper to the air. He held it under his nose, inhaling deeply.

First, he washed his face. The liquid with which the towel was saturated proved to be most refreshing. It cooled his skin and even tingled slightly, like an aftershave applied immediately following a straight razor.

Next, he washed his hands. He hadn’t realized that they were slightly tacky, most likely from handling the corpse of Vernon Klick, who didn’t have the highest standards of personal hygiene. As the lemony moisture evaporated from his fingers, Mickey felt immeasurably better.

How wonderful to be reminded that sensation was everything, that it was the only thing, the purpose of existence. Since the Pendleton had inexplicably changed, for the past half hour, Mickey had been trying to think through what might have happened, the whole cause-and-effect business. He’d been brooding incessantly about what he should do, and frankly it had all been too much, so much thinking, thinking, thinking, and no feeling. His mother could be a thinker and yet always remember that sensation was everything. Mickey simply wasn’t equipped to think a lot and still feel.

The limp and drying towelette looked sad now, mundane, nearly all the magic gone out of it, almost as dreary as this new world. He rolled it into a ball and held it on the palm of his right hand, wondering if there might be any more use he could make of it, any more sensation he could extract from it.

He supposed that it might have a lemon taste and might be worth chewing on, though he didn’t think swallowing it would be a pleasure. But then he remembered that, since he scrubbed his hands, the paper bore traces of Vernon Klick’s grime, which made it unappetizing.

As he dropped the sad-looking towelette, a new thought occurred to Mickey even though he was trying not to think so much. He wondered if he might be insane. He did feel a little bit like he had stepped off a ledge and was in slow free fall. Losing his mother had been a terrible shock, the kind of loss that might destabilize anyone, and having to kill his own brother without being paid for it stressed him perhaps more than he knew. If he’d lost his mind, that might explain why the world had changed: It might all be a delusion. The world might be exactly as it had always been; but he saw it differently now because he had slipped over the edge of reason.

This was such a big and difficult and daunting thought that Mickey became very still as he considered it.

Just as he froze, the voices in the walls fell silent. They didn’t fade away like they had faded in, but they abruptly ceased talking.

He had the impression that this entire world, whether real or illusion, had just stopped to think hard about something, had been astonished by a new thought, exactly as he had been, and was busily mapping out the ramifications if it should be true, the implications branching on and on.

Bailey Hawks

As Silas and Kirby searched one wing of the Cupp apartment, Bailey searched the other. He was half sick with dread, clearing each doorway and turning every corner with an expectation of one kind of horrific discovery or another. They should have all gone through the Pendleton together. They should never have separated, even if such a large search party would have been awkward and more vulnerable to assault. He felt that he had failed them, and the memory of his mother’s death inevitably pierced him.

By the time they returned simultaneously to the living room, they had found no trace of the missing women and children, or the cats. They had discovered nothing different from before except two piles of nanosludge.

Tom Tran and Padmini stood side by side at the western windows, fascinated by the moonlit plain of massive black trees and luminous grass.

As Bailey, Silas, and Kirby worriedly discussed what to do next, Padmini said, “It’s stopped.”

“All of a sudden,” Tom said.

At the windows, Bailey saw that the grass, always before swaying, now stood tall and stiff, utterly motionless.

“There were some flying things in the distance,” Padmini said. “You couldn’t see them too clearly, but they all fell to the ground at the moment the grass stopped swaying.”

In motion, the strange landscape had been haunting, the rhythm of the grass like the mesmerizing back-and-forth of an arcing blade in a dream of Death the harvester, like the slow-motion dancers or the languid waves of a silent sea in the time-stalled world of sleep. But this breathless stillness was haunting, too, in its completeness. Bailey had never seen nature come to such a perfect stop, as if a spell had been cast upon it, everything turned to ice and stone in the cold light of the moon.

He remembered what the undying man had said in the basement hallway: … all life has become one. The One. Many individuals, one consciousness.

This frozen vista might have suggested to Bailey that the One had suddenly gone to sleep, but there was a sense of expectation to the scene, not merely an expectation that he inferred but one that was clearly implied. The entire land, every living thing within view, seemed to have been struck by the same intention and now considered whether and how to act upon it.

The others felt it, too, for Padmini said, “Something’s going to happen.”

Tom Tran said, “Dr. Ignis?”

“I don’t know,” Kirby said. “I can’t guess.”

The One prepared itself for something.