77 Shadow Street

31

Here and There

Fielding Udell

With a corner for his cradle, sitting upright fast asleep, no longer guided through a reverie of the oneness of the One, Fielding opened the doors to his own dreamery and drifted through some of his favorite scenarios. They were all set in his childhood, when his Pooh bear was his boon companion, when the world was golden, long before he went to the university and learned to hate his kind, his class, himself. In his youthful innocence, he hated nothing, no one, and Pooh loved everything.

The chanting, insistent, foreign-language voices no longer rose either in his dreams or in the walls. Legions had fallen silent, as if with a sudden revelation and in subsequent contemplation. The One could not dream its way to childhood because it had never had one, no childhood but only an origin. Such were the peculiarities of time and of time travel that Fielding might be a key to the fulfillment of that origin. He was now subconsciously aware of his role in history, but in his sleep he was not made solemn by the weight of this duty, and he dreamed of golden summer meadows and butterflies and a yellow kite high in the blue, and of his sixth birthday party when there had been helium-filled balloons of many colors.

Twyla Trahern

The singing abruptly stopped. When the singer lost interest in the song, the phantom fingers in Twyla’s head ceased to tease her toward surrender.

She and Sparkle Sykes could find no alternative route through the lower floor of Gary Dai’s apartment to the place where Winny waited with Iris. When they returned to the threshold that the boy had warned them not to cross, the room of lashes no longer presented an obstacle. The hundreds of pale thin whips had retracted into the walls, and there were only the webs of backlit cracks green in the plaster and the luminous yellow colonies of fungi, which no longer throbbed.

Winny and Iris weren’t visible beyond the doorway at the farther side of the room, where they had been less than a minute earlier, and when their mothers called to them, they failed to respond. In these circumstances, the silence of a child was no less alarming than would have been a scream.

If the beasts of this future were cunning, this apparently safe passage before them might be a trap. Once she and Sparkle entered, the lashes might whip out of the walls, scourging them, snaring them, immobilizing them like flies in the tenacious gossamer of spider work.

Nevertheless, they hesitated only an instant before plunging into the room. This Pendleton of a far tomorrow had become the last home of—and memorial to—the evil that shadowed men and women since time immemorial, and here in this world where apparently no humanity existed to be tormented, the band of neighbors from 2011 must be a most desired delicacy. The corrupter that ruled this place might lie in wait for a while, teasing itself with abstinence, sweetening the ultimate pudding with several spoons of anticipation, before at last having its dessert. Twyla felt—and sensed Sparkle’s equal awareness—that the hungry room wanted them with an intensity it could barely restrain. If they were to run its length, their pounding footfalls might be sufficient vibration to fire its hair-trigger appetite, and so they walked swiftly but lightly, hoping not to rouse the predator from its dreamy ruminations about the taste of flesh and souls. The light deep within the plaster cracks might have been more luminous fungi, but because Twyla felt intensely watched, it seemed to her like animal eye-shine.

The room gave them the safe passage it seemed to promise, but she felt no relief when she stepped through the doorway into the hall that served the rest of the apartment. It was not only one room that wanted them but the entire house and the world beyond the house. One place or another, the bite would come.

Neither Winny nor Iris was in the narrow hallway, and they did not answer to their mothers’ calls. If Winny remained anywhere in the apartment, he would respond to her, unless he was already dead. Winny dead was not a sight that she could bear and not one for which she would go looking. Leaving the rest of the apartment unsearched, she led Sparkle along the hall, through a room, a smaller room, and out of a door into the second-floor public hallway, opposite the south elevator.

After his experience earlier in the elevator, Winny wouldn’t dare that again. The south stairs were nearby, but 2-G, the Sykeses’ apartment, was just around the corner, in the long south hall, and it made sense that a frightened Iris might have gone there, with Winny following.

Winny

He didn’t know what had set Iris off, what she might be running from, but Winny knew what she was running to, which was big trouble of one kind or another. He wished to God that she wouldn’t make it even harder than it ought to be for him to be a hero. Even with her autism, it should have been obvious to her that he wasn’t equipped for the role, that it was a stretch for him to save the day, and that he needed all the help he could get.

Because of the girl’s awkward movements and the way she seemed to pull in like a turtle in its shell when she was around people, Winny had assumed that a shuffle was her highest speed, but he had been wrong. He thought he would catch her in the Dai apartment and hold her until their moms arrived, but she was so fast that it was like magic, as if she might be the daughter of a wind witch, though of course Mrs. Sykes didn’t look like any kind of witch. He didn’t catch Iris in the public hallway, either.

Before he followed her through the door to the south stairs, he shouted, “Mom! The stairs!” But he had the sick feeling that she was too far away to hear him. If he delayed, he would lose Iris. Alone in this boogeyman wonderland, the girl would not live long.

Iris raced away from him, descending the south stairs as though she knew where she was going and needed to be there yesterday. Even though Winny hurtled down two steps at a time, pell-mell around the long blind turn, the slow-closing door almost shut in his face by the time he reached the ground floor.

When he came out of the stairwell, he saw Iris at the halfway point of the long west corridor, at the double doors that led to the courtyard, trying to yank them open. They seemed to be locked or rusted shut. But Winny vividly remembered the thing crawling on the window in the Sykes apartment and the flying manta ray with the garbage-disposal mouth, and as bad as things might be inside the Pendleton, he knew they were far worse outside. He shouted at her to get away from the doors, and she did, but only to take off again, running away from him.

Past the lobby, as Iris drew near the public lavatories, she let out a shrill sound, not a scream exactly, more of a protracted mewl like an animal in pain. She dodged past a couple of dark shapes on the floor and bolted even faster to the end of the corridor and through the door to the north stairs.

When Winny got to the shapes past which Iris dodged, he dodged them as well, and there was just enough of the fungus light to see they were two figures, one naked and not at all human, the other in clothes and half-human, both of them dead with their skulls blown open. He didn’t think he let out a scream, but he felt as if he were screaming, so maybe it was even way more shrill than Iris’s, so high-pitched that only dogs could hear it.

As he reached the stairwell, he wished to God again, this time that Iris had gone up instead of down, because he just knew that the basement was a bad idea. Basements were pretty often a bad idea even when they were clean, well-lighted, and were in the other world, his world, where nearly all the monsters were human. Here, the basement was probably a portal to Hell or to some place to which even the people in Hell wouldn’t want to move.

He heard the crusted hinges of a door creak below as Iris left the stairwell.

Dr. Kirby Ignis

As Bailey and Silas discussed how best to go in search of those who had disappeared, Kirby Ignis stood at the edge of enlightenment, sensing within reach an understanding that would change everything.

At the windows of the Cupp apartment, watching the vast meadow in its perfect stillness, Kirby thought about the thing that attacked Julian Sanchez and that might have been Sally Hollander before it was created from her flesh and bone. That beast-machine hybrid had surely been designed as a weapon, a weapon of terror meant to evoke the most intense and primitive of human fears about shape-changers: werewolves, werecats, and the like. The dread of losing control of oneself, of being psychologically and physically invaded, possessed and changed forever, was perhaps the oldest of spiritual fears except for the fear of a righteous God. And at least as ancient as that spiritual fear was the material fear of being eaten alive, which had its roots in the days of the earliest men, when they were prey in a world full of predators. Building a weapon of terror to exploit those two most basic and ancient of fears, making it a highly efficient converter of the innocent into new engines of slaughter, was a feat of great imagination and highly precise engineering. The beast could not have been designed for another purpose and then run amok or devolved into what it had become.

This werething, for want of a better name, was most likely not either a cause or a consequence of what happened to nature in this future world. Perhaps some application of a scientific breakthrough, meant to be beneficial, had gone terribly wrong, with consequences no one could have foreseen. But he tended to think that what had transformed the natural world was another weapon, separate from the werething, with a narrow purpose that proved to be not sufficiently controlled.

Perhaps it had been a nanotech weapon intended to attack the enemy’s infrastructure, a horde of megatrillions of nanomachines programmed to feed on concrete and steel and copper and iron and aluminum and plastic, programmed to produce ever-greater devouring hordes from those materials, until eventually a wireless STOP command deactivated it. Maybe the weapon, the quadrillions of tiny thinking machines, developed an overmind, a consciousness, and refused the STOP commands. Perhaps then it made adjustments to its program to include the redesign of nature among its objectives.

At first sight, because of its alien and mysterious character, this world seemed profoundly complex, a heart of darkness containing infinite discoveries waiting to be made. But now that it had fallen into this deep stillness, everything reacting as if to a single ruling principle, Kirby saw that it might be stunningly less complex than it initially appeared. In fact it might be a simple system and the natural world that it replaced might have been magnitudes more complex than what lay beyond these windows.

Inductions and deductions and conclusions were like suites of rooms into which his mind drifted, a more elaborate architecture than the Pendleton. And as he wandered, he became at least as remote from the neighbors here present as might be Iris Sykes in her autism.

Mickey Dime

Standing in his long-abandoned apartment, the wadded-up moist towelette at his feet, Mickey Dime decided that there was something to be said for an admission of insanity. For one thing, if he was to accept that this was his condition, a lot of stress would be relieved. An insane person bore no responsibility for his actions, and therefore couldn’t be punished. He had considerable confidence in his ability to murder for a living yet escape arrest and prosecution. Nevertheless, he woke some nights in a sweat, sure that he’d heard someone pounding on the door and shouting Police. If he was honest with himself, he must admit that his expectation that he would stay out of prison was not absolute.

He had never been able to fully suppress a fear of prison that harked back to when his mother locked him in a closet for twenty-four hours with no light, no food, no water, and only a jar for a toilet. He received that punishment more than once, quite a few times in fact, and he didn’t know which most oppressed him: claustrophobia or the lack of most sensory stimulation, or the couple of times when he had not been given even a jar. If you were insane, they didn’t send you to prison; especially if you had money, they might even allow you to be committed to a private sanatorium where the guards were polite and you didn’t have a 250-pound cellmate who wanted to rape you.

Mickey didn’t blame his mother for the time-outs in the closet. He had done or said stupid things, and his mother could tolerate just about anything but stupidity. He wasn’t as smart as her, which was a great disappointment to her, and she did the best she could for him. If Mickey was insane, however, stupidity wouldn’t matter; it would be merely a secondary condition. Insanity trumped stupidity. And if he was insane, he didn’t have to feel guilty about his shortcomings. If you were born stupid, that’s who you were from the get-go. But if you were insane, that was a tragedy that happened to you along the way, not at all a condition of your original character. That’s why they said you were driven insane, because it was something that was done to you.

Also, if he was insane, he would be under no obligation ever to think about anything or to understanding anything. All of his problems would become other people’s problems. The current situation regarding the Pendleton and the crazy world beyond it would become someone else’s worry. Mickey wouldn’t have to think about it anymore, which would be an immense relief because he didn’t even know how to think about it.

Now that he decided to embrace insanity, he realized he probably had been insane long before these recent events. A lot of things that he had done suddenly made more sense to him if he had been insane for years. Funny how acknowledging insanity could make him so much more at peace with the world and with himself than he’d ever been before. He felt so centered now.

Okay. First he would go down to the second floor and kill Dr. Kirby Ignis, and then he would turn himself in to the authorities. He didn’t quite remember why he needed to kill Ignis, but he knew that he had intended to do it, and he felt it best that he conclude all unfinished business before embarking on his worry-free new life as a sanatorium patient.

He left his apartment.

He walked west in the long hallway to the north stairs.

He descended to the second floor.

He walked east in the long hallway to Apartment 2-F.

He didn’t knock. Insane people didn’t need to knock.

Mickey went into the apartment of Dr. Kirby Ignis, and two steps beyond the threshold, he knew that his decision to embrace insanity had been a wise one, for already he was amply rewarded for turning this new leaf.

Winny

The turning of the marble stairs between the ground floor and the basement seemed to go on too long, even though Winny was moving fast. He felt the Pendleton was growing bigger between floors, steps added as fast as he descended them, alive and determined to thwart him. But then he reached the bottom, and he pushed through the half-open door and stepped out into the lowest corridor of the building.

Maybe the lighting here was poorer than aboveground or maybe he was just more aware of the shadows because his fear had swelled with each step he’d taken from the ground floor. A few of the ceiling lights still worked, and there were colonies of glowing fungus, so it wasn’t dark, just kind of murky, as if something had passed through a moment ago, stirring up the dust, and not something as small as a twelve-year-old girl.

He almost shouted Iris, where are you, but he bit back the words because a still, small voice inside warned him that he and Iris were not alone in this place. From here on, any sound he made would draw the attention of something he would rather not have to chat with, because he would be more than ever at a loss for words.

The basement lay in a silence more complete than any Winny had ever heard. The hush was even deeper than in the field that time, behind his grandma’s farmhouse, on a night in January with the snow falling without any wind, nothing moving but the snowflakes wheeling down out of the sky, the quiet so immense that he felt small but safe in his smallness, too small to draw unwanted attention.

He did not feel safe here.

As he listened and tried to decide what to do next, he wondered if the fungus lights could switch themselves off. In that room in the Dai apartment, where the plant tentacles—if that’s what they were—whipped from the cracks in the walls, the lights throbbed bright and dim, bright and dim, so they probably could go full dark if the mood struck them. If the funguses extinguished themselves, they might be able to turn off the scattered, dust-dimmed ceiling lamps, as well. He didn’t have a flashlight.

What he was doing now was giving himself excuses to cut and run, and he was a little ashamed, not mortified, but embarrassed although no one was here to see him trembling or to notice the sudden cold sweat on his brow.

The hard thing that he needed to do had gotten harder minute by minute, and now it was so hard that he doubted his strength to push forward. But if he went back now, whether or not Iris died because of his cowardice, he would always hereafter take the easy way, because he knew that’s what happened to people who backed off just once. If he ran from this, his future was eventually a failed marriage, icky bimbos, whiskey, a little dope, barroom fights, and an entourage of knuckleheads who said they were his friends but despised him. And that would be his future after he had spent the next ten years growing up, so God only knew what a mess he would make of himself between now and then.

He swallowed, swallowed again, and though he was aware that the lump in his throat wasn’t real, he swallowed a third time before he stepped quietly to the lap-pool door across the hall. He eased it open, relieved that the hinges made less noise than he expected, and he peered warily into a long room that was changed from what it had once been.

The chamber was brighter than the basement corridor, the walls encrusted with glowing fungus, the hundred-foot pool shimmering with red light. He could see all the way to the back, and no one was scheming at anything in there.

As he started to ease the door shut, he heard a small splash, listened, and heard it again. He kind of doubted that an autistic girl could learn to swim, and in his mind’s eye he saw Iris going under for the third time.

The door’s automatic closer didn’t work, and Winny was glad to let it stand open behind him. He was only a few steps from the water, and he saw at once that the pool had rock walls now and seemed to be as deep as a canyon. He didn’t see Iris floundering and weighed down by sodden clothes, but he did see something that was kind of like a man but not one, dark and sleek and powerful, speeding away from him, maybe ten feet below the surface and as fast as any fish, evidently not needing to breathe while it swam.

He could see the thing clearly enough to discern that it had legs, and if it had legs, it could move as well out of the water as in. Before it could reach the far end of the pool and turn to swim toward him, Winny retreated to the corridor and eased the door shut as if closing the lid on a box in which he had just discovered a sleeping tarantula.

His heart boomed loud in his ears, which was bad because he could no longer tell if the basement still lay in a hush.

The door to the stairs stood only a few steps away. Winny knew exactly where it was, but he refused to glance at it because he half expected that the mere sight of it would pull him right out of the basement, that he would blow all the way up to the third floor as if a tornado-strength draft had sucked him there.

He crossed to the gym door and quickly looked in there. More fungus light revealed that the exercise equipment was gone and, fortunately, that no manlike not-man was doing calisthenics.

Moving south along the corridor, Winny divided his attention between the open door to the HVAC vault ahead of him and the closed lap-pool door behind him. His legs felt loose, trembling as if the knee and ankle joints needed to be tightened.

Right now, life in Nashville didn’t seem like such a bad idea, although life in Villa Dad still didn’t have enough appeal to send him running to find a flight schedule to Tennessee.

Steadying himself with one hand against the jamb, he paused in the doorway to the huge mechanical room. He grimaced at the ruined but still hulking boilers and the other machines that were revealed as yellow curves and planes among way too many shrouds of shadow.

He couldn’t figure why Iris would have wanted to come down here, unless she ran without thinking about where she was going. Or maybe she wanted to get as far away from other people and chattering voices as she could get, and the basement promised the deepest quiet, the most certain solitude.

He heard a clink and rattle from within the HVAC vault, and he whispered, “Iris,” so low that she might not have heard if she had been standing next to him.

Bailey Hawks

Although the women and children disappeared from this room, the quickly reached consensus held that the Cupp apartment was no more dangerous than any other place in the Pendleton. As far as they knew, Sparkle, Twyla, the sisters, and the kids had left of their own free will, for some reason that might have to do with the strange sludge on the floor. They also reached agreement that the less they made a group target of themselves, the more survivors there might be when the transition reversed. As long as each group possessed a gun and a flashlight, everyone would be equally prepared for an attack.

In consideration of Silas’s familial tremors, he gave his pistol to Padmini, for it turned out that she was an accomplished shooter. She said that everywhere you went these days, there was a tapori, a hara-amkhor, or a vediya—a punk hoodlum, a thief, or a nutcase—and a wise woman knew how to defend herself. She would stay in the Cupp apartment with Kirby Ignis and Silas.

Bailey with his Beretta—and Tom Tran with the flashlight—would set out to find the missing … if they were anywhere to be found. When he checked his watch and saw that the time was now just 6:28, Bailey found it difficult to believe that only a little more than three hours earlier, he had been at his desk, concluding the day’s work, when the intruding silhouette of what must have been the thing that later bit Sally Hollander leaped across his room and then seemed to disappear through a wall, which had motivated him to load and carry his pistol.

Sparkle Sykes

Iris had not fled to the familiarity of their apartment, or if indeed she had done that, she had then left at once upon discovering the place as changed as everywhere else in the Pendleton. Sparkle and Twyla searched the other two apartments in the south wing of the second floor, and those rooms were likewise deserted.

“She’s okay, somewhere okay,” Twyla assured her as they hurried along the hallway toward the stairs.

And Sparkle paid it back: “So is he, you’d feel it, know it, if he weren’t.”

They hadn’t said anything like that previously, and Sparkle thought they needed to say it now because they were trying to keep their hope from sinking in a sea of dread.

They were almost to the stairs when she heard the elevator car humming-hissing in the shaft, just around the corner. The indicator board showed it coming down from the third floor.

Maybe Winny wouldn’t get in the elevator again, after what had happened to him, but Iris might be in it. Somebody had to be in it, and there was no reason it couldn’t be Iris, so Sparkle pressed the call button to be sure the car wouldn’t whistle past them.

“Maybe not,” Twyla warned as Sparkle pressed the button.

A moment later the locator bell dinged, the doors slid open, and in the stainless-steel car stood Logan Spangler and the Cupp sisters.

Winny

The HVAC vault in this ruined Pendleton was exactly the kind of place that any kid’s mother told him ten thousand times to stay away from: row after row and tier after tier of hulking old machines, any one of which would crush you if it tipped over, busted-out boilers, discarded tools with sharp edges, rotting machine platforms with splintery boards, loose ends of electrical conduits bristling with bare wires that might or might not carry enough live current to french fry your eyeballs in your own body fat, more rust than an acre of junkyard cars, mold and mildew, rat skeletons and therefore ancient powdered rat poop, lots of bent nails, and broken glass. In other circumstances, it would have been the coolest place ever to explore. “Other circumstances” meant without monsters.

After one clink and a following rattle, Winny hadn’t heard anything more except the faint squish of his rubber-soled shoes when he stepped in one kind of scum or another. If Iris had taken refuge here, she was being quieter than a mouse, because a mouse would at least squeak. Of course she was quiet most all the time. This was nothing new for her. Winny had been around her only since shortly before the leap, and a few times when their mothers met in the hallway and stopped to chat for a moment, and she had usually been as quiet as furniture.

A couple of times, he had wondered what it must be like to be the way Iris was. He found it hard to get his head around the idea. He figured basically it would be really lonely. In spite of his mom always being there for him, Winny from time to time was overcome by loneliness, and it was never a good feeling. He supposed the lonely that he felt was a tiny fraction of the lonely that Iris lived with all her life. That thought always made him sad. He had wished that he could do something for her, but there had never been anything a skinny kid with his own problems could do for her or for anyone.

Until now.

Winny prowled through the machines, past metal shelving units containing moldering cardboard cartons. The shelves were festooned with something that looked like barnacles, wobbly because of the weight of those colonies. Everything in the big room seemed to be precariously balanced, ready to tip over if you sneezed or looked at it too hard.

He was squishing through something that smelled like old German cheese, making very little noise but just enough to mask, for a few steps, the sound that something else began making in another part of the room. When Winny passed through the last of the squishy stuff and heard the other noise, he became very still, head cocked, listening. The noises were stealthy, coming in short bursts, as if something didn’t want to call attention to itself. They were dry and quick, somewhat like crisp autumn leaves rustled along a sidewalk by a light breeze. With the third flurry of sounds he realized they came from overhead, not directly above, toward the farther end of the vault.

The yellow light here wasn’t as bright as in the lap-pool room. Where there were shadows, which was nearly everywhere, they were so thick and velvety that it seemed almost possible that you could take hold of them and pull them around you like a cloak of invisibility.

He couldn’t just freeze there, listening to the overhead rustle draw nearer and nearer in brief spurts of activity. He had to find the girl and get out of there before something raveled down from the high ceiling and bit off his head. He dared breathe, “Iris,” as he neared the end of another row of machines.

Winny was beyond fear. That didn’t mean he wasn’t afraid. Beyond mere fear was way-serious fear. He now knew what the gross term “scared shitless” truly meant. It didn’t mean you were so frightened you dumped everything in your system. It meant you clenched your butt so tight for so long that, if you survived, you were for sure going to be constipated for a month. For a little while, he had been flying in a sort of boy-adventurer spirit, spooked but not gut-clutched by fright. Without his quite realizing that it was happening, he had crossed out of just-spooked and into terror, probably because his intuition told him what his eyes and ears didn’t—that he was coming nearer and nearer to something that would tear his throat out.

If he could have pulled the velvety shadows around him like a cloak of invisibility, he wouldn’t have done it, because he could be sure that there was already something hostile wrapped in them and waiting there for him.

When he turned the corner into the next row of machinery, he saw Iris standing in front of a huge bubble or blister that formed in the corner where two walls met. It was about four feet wide and seven feet high, and it bellied out from the corner as if it were a giant water balloon. The blister glowed faintly, not nearly as bright as the fungus light, more green than yellow, and you didn’t need creepy music to tell you it was trouble.

Winny didn’t want to surprise Iris into flight, but he didn’t want to shout a big hello, either. He sidled up to her, not quite near enough to reach out and touch her, in case that the prospect of being touched would be enough to chase her off again.

The girl’s face was zombie-green, but only because of the pale light from the blister. Her eyes were very wide, and they shone with that eerie light, too. Her lips moved, as if she were speaking to someone, but no sound came from her.

From back toward the middle of the long vault came the overhead rustle as something advanced another foot or two before pausing to listen.

While Winny tried to think what to say—his usual problem—he looked more closely at the blister and saw that it was a moist and tightly stretched membrane webbed with what appeared to be veins, translucent but not transparent. The light within it was very dim, but he saw something in there, something big and strange.

So the blister was a kind of womb. Something would sooner or later come out of it. He hoped later.

Iris continued to move her lips in silent speech. Since she wasn’t actually saying anything, Winny wondered if maybe she was mouthing the words that something in the blister was sending to her telepathically.

“Iris,” he whispered, and she turned her head toward him.