77 Shadow Street

32

Here and There

Twyla Trahern

When the elevator doors opened, Twyla said in surprise, “Martha, Edna,” and Sparkle asked, “What’re you doing here, where are you going?”

Even as the questions were being asked, Twyla realized they were not going to be answered. Something was terribly wrong with the Cupp sisters, as well as with the security chief. Martha’s face was less seamed with age than before. Not younger. Just fuller. She was bloated, like someone with a bad heart that caused fluid retention, and her skin had a yellow cast even in the elevator’s blue light. Edna was also bloated, and her flesh, like that of the other two, appeared to be soft, pitted with large pores, almost spongy, perhaps akin to the flesh of the six-legged baby-thing that Sparkle had described.

Their eyes were what chilled Twyla and most emphatically declared that they were no longer human. Lotus-petal eyes of people who had forgotten all the days of their lives, crocodilian eyes of insatiable hunger, they were smoky as if with early cataracts yet burning with implacable hatred.

Sparkle was nearer the elevator than Twyla, but she backed away when she registered the nature of those eyes.

Twyla brought up her pistol, gripping it with both hands, not really cool about shooting people she knew, even if they were not people anymore, but she would do whatever was necessary if they moved toward her. She fully expected them to rush out of the elevator, but they only stood there, staring intently, as though waiting for the doors to slide shut and for the car to carry them down to whatever hell might be their destination.

The murderous fury in the three figures was palpable, which made their restraint significant, though Twyla didn’t know what to deduce from it. Their arms hung slack, but their hands worked ceaselessly, as if with the urge to rend and strangle. Black fingernails. Edna’s mouth hung slightly open, and from what Twyla could see, the old woman’s teeth were also black. These two apparent women and Spangler were now in fact creatures more suited to swamps and fetid jungle ponds, to damp subcellars, to grottoes where stalactites dripped like snake fangs leaking venom.

In a voice recognizably his but wet and viscid, as if filtered through a mucus-clotted throat, the thing that had been Logan Spangler declared through black teeth, “I shall be.”

Twyla didn’t know what that meant, if it meant anything at all, whether it was a prelude to an attack or an invitation to become as they were.

She wasn’t holding the gun steady. It almost seemed to be alive, jumping in her hands. If she had to fire it, the muzzle would kick upward, it always kicked upward, and because her arms were so loose, she wouldn’t hit anyone, she’d put the round high in the wall. She made an effort to lock her wrists, lock her elbows, and bring the front sight low on target.

When Spangler repeated those words, Martha spoke them in time with him, in a gurgling voice, as if they were two individuals with one mind: “I shall be.”

The elevator doors should have closed automatically by now. But apparently the house kept them open, the house or whatever possessed the house.

Logan and Martha and now Edna repeated the three words, their voices synchronized: “I shall be.” And again with greater insistence: “I shall be!” Yet again with some of the fury so evident in their eyes: “I SHALL BE!”

Sparkle backed into the open doorway of Gary Dai’s apartment, prepared to turn and run.

On Martha’s chin and along her left cheek to her ear, a series of tiny mushrooms formed out of her flesh, like an outbreak of adolescent acne.

As Twyla also eased away from the elevator, the Edna thing formed its mouth into a parody of a kiss. Several dark projectiles spurted from between its lips, hissed past Twyla’s face, and thudded into the wall.

Reflexively, Twyla squeezed the trigger. The round took the Edna thing high in the chest, didn’t seem to faze it, and the stainless-steel doors slid shut.

As the elevator car hummed down into the shaft, Twyla spun to see what had been spat at her. They were slightly larger and longer than Brazil nuts, dark and oily, quivering as if with life. Two were embedded in the Sheetrock and seemed to be trying to burrow deeper, but having a hard time of it. Two others were on the floor, creeping like inchworms, seeming to search for something, maybe for food, which in their case was probably a synonym for flesh.

Stepping into the hall from the open door to the Dai apartment, Sparkle said, “What was that about? ‘I shall be’?”

Shaken, Twyla said, “I don’t know.”

“Why didn’t they kill us?”

“I don’t know.”

Indicating the apparently expiring things in the wall and on the floor, Sparkle wondered, “What if they’d hit your face?”

“They’d be in my brain, I’d be like the Cupp sisters.”

Sparkle said, “The kids,” and hurried toward the south stairs, as the sound of the descending elevator car went on and on.

Winny

When Iris turned her head toward him, Winny saw that her eyes didn’t glow green when she looked away from the cocoon. He realized that he had expected to see the light in them, coming from them, and he was relieved that Iris was still Iris. Relieved but still in the grip of terror. He might live in terror for the rest of his life, even if he survived to a hundred, even after there was no more reason to be afraid, like a happy lunatic might laugh all day and night even when nothing was funny.

Iris stared directly at him, into his eyes, which she had never done before. Her lips continued to move, although she wasn’t saying anything.

“What?” he asked. “What is it?”

She found her voice. “The powerful fall, but I endure.”

From the corner of his eye, Winny became aware of the cocoon growing brighter. When he turned to look at it, he saw the membrane becoming more transparent, like the lenses of those self-adjusting sunglasses became clear when you went from a bright day to a dark room, like something in bad-dream shadows relentlessly became more visible when you desperately wanted it to remain obscure—and the figure within clarified.

The veined blister was more of a sac than it was a spun cocoon, full to the top with luminous green fluid in which a pale dead man floated. The guy was naked, his mouth open in a scream from which all sound had long ago escaped, eyes wide in an expression of perpetual horror. He drifted like a specimen in a jar of formaldehyde, a trophy preserved as if for study by some professor from another world.

“The powerful fall, but I endure,” Iris repeated.

Winny realized that the girl wasn’t speaking for herself but for whatever had preserved the dead man, for whatever had earlier sung to them from within the walls. It spoke to Iris telepathically, as it had tried to communicate with Winny when he’d felt as if baby spiders were hatching in his brain.

When the dead man’s blank eyes refocused on Winny, he thought it was a trick of light and of his spook-haunted mind. But the specimen was not dead, after all, perhaps just paralyzed, drowned in the green fluid yet alive, not breathing, not one bubble of air escaping past his lips, in suspended animation, alive but surely driven insane by his condition. He was able to do nothing but refocus his field of vision from whatever mad delusions plagued him to the fear-struck boy who stood gaping like a rube at the prime-exhibit stall in a carnival freak show.

The anguish in those eyes was so great that Winny was smothered by it. He felt as if he, too, were sealed in a jar of preservative, put up for the winter in the dark pantry of something that ate small boys. When at last he breathed, he was half surprised that he didn’t inhale a fluid.

With a gulp of air he also breathed in recognition. The man in the sac was that mean neighbor, the one who could wither you with a look, whose usual expression seemed to say he saw no real difference between children and vermin. He’d been a politician, a senator or something, and almost a prisoner, and now he was a prisoner, body and mind and soul.

The senator’s eyes said Help me! They said For God’s sake get me out of here, punch a hole in this sac, drain it, give me air again and life!

But that still, small voice in Winny told him that if he drained the man out of the sac, the specimen collector would know at once and be furious. The specimen collector would bottle him and Iris for revenge, or sprinkle them with something that turned them inside out the way that salt did to caterpillars, or light them on fire to watch them thrash in agony. Winny had known a kid who was that way, who did those things to insects, a boy named Eric, and the creature that sang inside the walls and that stalked this Pendleton seemed to be Eric’s kindred spirit.

No longer speaking for anyone but herself, Iris whispered, “I’m scared.”

When Winny turned his attention from the senator, Iris was not only meeting his eyes but also clearly seeing him as never before. His fear-throttled heart had been thumping as if frantic to free itself from a clutching fist; suddenly, though it beat no slower, it seemed to break free from captivity. Now twined with the fear was a kind of wild excitement, nothing as magnificent as joy, simply a fragile gladness that she needed him and seemed to trust him. There was no boy-girl thing in this, only the sweet satisfaction that he had a purpose of real value, someone to help who needed help, and a chance to prove to himself that he was not the loser that his father thought he must be.

He dared to take Iris’s hand, and she dared to let him. He led her what he thought must be north along what he assumed to be the west wall of the immense room.

They had taken only a few steps, out of shadows into a drizzle of yellow light, when a noise overhead drew their attention to the ceiling. High up there, snaking among clustered runs of pipes and past colonies of radiant fungi, was something at least as large as a man but sleeker. In spite of its size, it traveled the ceiling with the confidence of a cockroach.

Winny whispered, “Run,” and pulled Iris into cloaking shadows, away from the wall and among the palisades of ancient machines and storage racks and things unknown.

Dr. Kirby Ignis

Out there in the night land, one moment the sky was a timeless black sea and the stars were ice adrift, the air uninhabited. At ground level, nature, radically redesigned, stood as still as if it were a colossal mechanism temporarily denied the power to operate.

The next moment, the sky remained a timeless sea and every star a point of ice, but the air welcomed back the flying creatures that had in unison flung themselves to the ground, most small but others large, all of them soaring repeatedly toward—and repeatedly swooping away from—the seductive moon. Down the western slope of Shadow Hill, across the grand sweep of the plain where once a city stood, to the dark horizon at the curve of the earth, trillions of blades of tall luminous grass moved as one, swaying as if to the lazy beat of some Hawaiian song.

Earlier, Padmini had said that this strange new natural world, when falling into perfect stillness, seemed to be in contemplation, as if it were Gaea, a planetary female consciousness, who required perfect stillness in all her many manifestations in order to meditate upon some grand thought that had just occurred to her. As fanciful an idea as that might be, minute by minute it seemed to make more sense to Kirby. And when all living things beyond the window suddenly moved as one, resuming their familiar rhythms, he understood what he saw before him and how it might have come to exist. He knew whose work might have been the crucible of this Gaea’s creation and with what intention it might have been done.

The chill that pierced him was a colder fear than any that he had known before. But no. Not fear. Or not fear alone. Also awe. He yielded his mind to a suddenly perceived truth so grand in character, so formidable in power, that no matter how terrible the world beyond the window might be, he could not help but also find it mesmerizing and darkly alluring.

If this Gaea had indeed gone still in contemplation, he thought he knew what realization might have occurred to her and what decision she might have reached.

Sparkle Sykes

They hurried down the winding south stairs, a stone throat that swallowed and swallowed them. The limestone walls, the decorative bronze handrail, and the honed-marble stairs were well-known to her yet strange, the way that dreams distorted familiar places and lent mystery to the mundane.

This Pendleton at history’s end, its walls shot through with strange life, seemed to be growing, no longer merely a Beaux Arts mansion but a sprawling castle, remaining stone yet expanding with organic vigor. That impression might have been largely a consequence of being separated from Iris. Every minute Sparkle remained apart from her daughter, she imagined the girl dwindling into darkness just as an astronaut, untethered from a space shuttle, would recede into the void, adrift unto eternity.

But the sense that the building might of its own power be able to unfold new rooms and corridors, perhaps new levels, seemed to be supported when they reached the ground floor and heard the elevator car, with the Cupp sisters and Logan Spangler, still humming-hissing down, surely long past the basement.

The first room along the south hall was the enormous catering kitchen where meals were prepared to be served at special events in the banquet room off the lobby. Under more of the ubiquitous luminous fungus were great architectures of tattered cobwebs but no spiders, stainless-steel appliances now as dull and mottled as galvanized tin, and three rectangular center islands behind which a child might lie hidden. At the farther end of the kitchen stood a half-open door to a storage room that couldn’t be entered from the hallway.

Twyla with the pistol, Sparkle following with the flashlight, entered the space, wary but quick, and abruptly the quiet gave way to a chorus of threatening sounds from the sinks: insistent voices in an unknown language, hissing and gurgling, and slithery noises as though serpents were in the drains and rising. Around them, diabolic creatures woke from slumber. Through the grimy view windows of the four ovens, things only half seen thrashed in slow motion, gray tentacular forms sliding over the tempered glass, perhaps having invaded those compartments from the walls behind or perhaps having been seeded there through vents. Inside the upper cabinets, something followed the women around the room, rattling the doors as it brushed against the backs of them, as though it would at any moment fling one open and spring at them. Overhead, moldering joists creaked as if a great weight burdened them, metal ductwork twanged and rattled, and dust filtered down through exhaust-vent screens. From Sparkle’s hand the flashlight beam jumped here, there, back again, and Twyla kept changing her mind about which sounds to track with the pistol.

The haunter of this house, more real than any ghost, wasn’t attempting to pry its way into their minds, as it had tried to do earlier, but Sparkle could feel its mood, its urgent need, as surely as she would have felt cold radiating from an open freezer door. Its passion was icy, their death its greatest desire, their flesh its preferred mold bed from which to grow its next manifestation. All of this came to her in wordless impressions that didn’t require translation.

At the back of the kitchen, the door revealed that the storage room was overgrown with a succulent devoid of chlorophyll, its fleshy leaves as white and smooth as cheese, white even in the glow of the kitchen fungus formations, but whiter still in the flashlight beam. Among the leaves were numerous bi-lobe flowers like the carnivorous mouths of Venus flytraps, and most of them had sunk their glass-clear teeth into a leaf, slowly dissolving and consuming it in a perpetual self-cannibalism.

It was possible to believe that the bodies of children might lie at the roots of this thing, fleshy stalks rising out of empty eye sockets, and with a shudder of disgust, Sparkle wished that she had gasoline and a match. As if her thought was received and understood, several yawning blooms, not yet having found a leaf on which to feed, gnashed their transparent teeth. Their enemy’s hatred and thirst for violence weighed upon her more oppressively, and she was relieved to follow Twyla out of the kitchen.

But now the weight of its hatred pressed on them wherever they went: along the hallway, into Apartment 1-D, into Apartment 1-E. Even where there were only small or no manifestations, Sparkle could hear movement inside the walls, and at a few places it seemed to her that portions of a wall or a ceiling bellied out, swelled down, not only as if rotten but also as if distorted by some dark mass metastasizing behind it.

They peered through the gate of the freight elevator at the end of the hall. Although the big car stood empty, she had a sense of a strong presence in the shaft, something that seemed on the verge of surging up under the car and spilling out through the gate.

As they hurried toward the west hallway, Sparkle said, “You feel it? All around us?”

“Yeah,” Twyla confirmed.

“It wants to kill us.”

“So why the hell doesn’t it?”

“Maybe anticipation is sweet.”

“Delayed gratification? You ever really sold a guy on that?”

“This isn’t a guy. It’s some … some damn thing.”

They turned the corner into the west hallway, and Twyla’s voice was wrenched by worry and frustration when she shouted, “Winny? Where are you, Winny?”

There seemed to be no reason for stealth. The haunter of this Pendleton knew where they were at every moment, its presence as palpable here as in the catering kitchen.

Sparkle called to Iris, though even in ordinary times, Iris most often felt too oppressed to answer.

Mickey Dime

Sitting in Dr. Kirby Ignis’s kitchen, Mickey felt something crawling inside his head, and for some reason he thought of his mother’s blood-red fingernails and the way they would pick through bundles of mail from her admirers, selecting some to answer and others to discard as unworthy correspondents. These were not, of course, her fingers inside his head. Before this evening, he might have been freaked out by this sensation. Even though sensation was the end-all and be-all of existence, you wanted to avoid the bad sensations. But because he had recognized and embraced his insanity, he supposed this was just the loco part of himself sort of getting up and taking a stroll around the inside of his skull. Or something. He said, “Okay,” and just relaxed and let it happen.

The next thing he knew, he was in a waking dream, aware of the kitchen around him but also seeing very vividly a circular stand of giant craggy black trees. From there he went on a trip through the meat of the trees and into the earth, to all kinds of interesting places, and saw all manner of amazing things, including the Pogrom against humanity, the destruction of the cities, and the swift rise of the One. It was like the weirdest movie ever, with the biggest special-effects budget in history, directed by James Cameron on methamphetamines and Red Bull. Though he was left with the impression that the One found him too unreliable to be of use, the experience was so amazing, Mickey decided that insanity might prove to be the best thing that ever happened to him.

Winny

Running along the wall left them too exposed. They had to dodge in and out of the defunct machinery, the blasted boilers, the storage racks, scrambling over and under runs of large bundled pipes.

When he had just the luminous fungus to guide him, Winny’s eyes eventually started to ache, areas of light and shadow began to melt together in strange ways, and he got a little dizzy, not enough to lose his balance but just enough to get confused about direction. He thought they better not run along the aisles, either, because the ceiling crawler could more easily see them in those open lanes, whether it was still up there or had come down to the floor. In the poor light, squeezing through narrow spaces between all the ruined equipment, angling quickly across the lanes, he found it even more difficult to remain oriented and to work toward the door to the basement corridor.

Littered with debris, the floor was an obstacle course across which they could move either quickly or silently, but not both at the same time. After making way hastily but not quietly, Winny chose stealth because he knew that in any test of speed, the thing he’d glimpsed on the ceiling would win.

Holding fast to Iris’s hand, focused intently on the floor in front of them, he crossed a five-foot-wide lane, and pressed between two boxy pieces of equipment over seven feet tall. He pulled Iris with him into a narrow space where the next rank of machines backed up to the previous row.

He paused there in deep shadow, breathing shallowly through his mouth, straining to hear something other than the pounding of his heart. The air smelled of rust and mildew and of things he couldn’t name, and it tasted faintly bitter as it came cool across his tongue. Winny wondered what he was inhaling that might take up permanent residence in his lungs.

Iris’s grip on Winny’s hand tightened, and when he turned his head to the right, he could see even in the inky shadows that her eyes were wide with fright. Through the gap between machines, she seemed to have glimpsed something unsettling in the next service lane.

Cautiously he tilted his head to the left, peering through the gap on that side—and saw the ceiling crawler on the floor, walking upright. It was reptilian but also feline, and ultimately neither. Tall, lean, strong. Each of its long-fingered hands looked big enough and powerful enough to cover a boy’s face from below the chin to past the hairline and rip it off, pluck it from the skull beneath, as easily as tearing a mask from a masquerader.

The creature stalked out of sight, and Winny waited a moment before easing ahead, pulling Iris by the hand, between machines. He leaned forward, exposing his head, and looked left in time to see the beast turn left at the end of the service lane, moving out of sight and in the direction from which they had come.

He had been right to think the service lanes were dangerous. As the fungus light seemed slowly to be dimming, he and Iris—who for the moment had found a haven in her autism where she could focus and stay calm—zigzagged through the forest of machinery, like Hansel and Gretel on the lam from a child-eating witch, except that this thing wasn’t as pleasant as a witch and it wasn’t bothering to lure them with gingerbread.

Seventy feet by forty, the vault encompassed twenty-eight hundred square feet, more than the average big house, but to Winny it seemed three or four times that size. When they came to an open space that was not yet the area near the doors, his frustration and disappointment were matched by a thrill of fresh fright, because the floor was littered with expended brass cartridges and along the wall sat fourteen human skeletons, ten adults and four children, some holding guns and others slumped beside their dropped weapons.

Winny worried that he might drag Iris into such an extreme experience that she could no longer maintain her new equilibrium, but among the firearms he saw one that he must have. The automatic weapons were probably without ammunition and too corroded to be fired. Anyway, the recoil would knock him on his butt and tear the gun out of his hands, and it would be just his luck that a ricochet would pop him dead-center in the forehead. One rifle, however, had a fixed bayonet, and he could see himself using that. If cornered, it would be better than bare hands.

He whispered, “We’ll be okay,” though he was amazed that they weren’t dead already, and he led her into the boneyard. With one hand, he picked up the rifle, and was surprised to discover that it was heavier than he ever imagined. He could carry it for a while with one hand, but if he ever had to brace it against an assault or try to thrust with it, he would need both hands, and he would have to let go of the girl.

The bayonet was firmly fixed to the gun barrel, and as Winny considered whether it was as worth having as it first seemed to be, an eager and inhuman cry echoed out of the massed machinery and off the walls of the vault. It was difficult to place but near enough that Winny feared they would never be able to get out of the open quickly enough to elude the creature—and might dash straight into it. Straight into its claws, its teeth.

Make a stand with the bayonet or hide? Easy. Hide.

Between two of the adult dead was enough room for him and Iris. He pulled her to the floor, encouraging her to sit with her back to the wall, by his side, between the carcasses, each of which leaned toward them. Instead of wrenching loose of him, as she once might have done, her hand tightened on his so hard that she mashed his knuckles together painfully.

The dead men’s clothes had moldered and partly rotted as time had vanished the flesh from their bones, and the tattered garments hung loosely on those macabre frames. Unable to pull free of the girl’s fiercely clenched hand, Winny could use only his left hand to reach across Iris and quickly adjust the greasy coat of the dead man to cover part of her.

The upper half of that skeleton slid along the wall and slumped against the girl, eliciting from her a soft “Urrrrr,” nothing more.

Winny flapped part of the clothes of the other dead guy over himself. That skeleton, too, slid along the wall, leaning on him, its bony shoulder against his face.

Most of his and Iris’s bodies—though only part of their faces—were covered. But the light here was poor, the shadows cloaking. They might be safe until someone came to find them, if anyone ever came, or at least for a few minutes, until maybe the creature decided they had slipped out of the HVAC vault and sought them elsewhere.

The portion of the dead man’s rotting coat sleeve that draped half of Winny’s face smelled vile, and he tried not to think about how it had acquired such a disgusting odor. Resisting the urge to gag, he whispered to Iris, “You’re very brave.”

Off to the right, beyond the section of open floor across which were scattered scores of empty brass casings, twelve or fourteen feet away, the beast appeared from the end of a service aisle. It froze there, alert, turning its head this way and that. Winny thought it might be a good thing that even after all this time the clothes on the skeletons stank of death—and therefore obscured the scent of young life.

The creature abruptly raced past the skeletons and disappeared among the shadows and the machinery, on the hunt. They dared not assume that it was gone for good. They were safer here, among the bones and the reeking garments of the dead, as long as they could tolerate the tension and the smell.

Besides, being able to step out of the chase gave Winny time to think. He needed time to think. He needed like a month.

He whispered to Iris again, “You’re very brave.”

Slick with the cold sweat of both, their hands seemed to be welded together as surely as if the sweat were solder.