77 Shadow Street

4

Apartment 3-C

At 4:13 A.M. Silas Kinsley was awakened by a low thunderlike sound and thought the building seemed to be shaking. But the brief rumble and the movement stopped by the time that he sat up and came fully to his senses. He waited in darkness, listening for a moment, and then decided that the disturbance had been part of a dream.

When he lowered his head to the pillow once more, however, a sound arose from within the wall against which his bed stood. The whispery slithering noise brought to mind images of snakes writhing between the studs behind the plasterboard, which seemed improbable if not impossible. He had never before heard anything like it. He suspected—intuited—that it must be related to the disquieting history of the house.

The disturbance continued for perhaps five minutes. He lay listening, wondering, not fearful but certainly wary and alert for any change in the sound that might help him to identify the cause.

The subsequent silence was the expectant kind that fostered insomnia. Having recently turned seventy-nine, he usually found sleep elusive once it had been interrupted. Silas was a retired civil-litigation attorney, but his mind hummed as busily these days as when his calendar had been fully booked with clients. He rose before dawn, showered, dressed, and was frying eggs in butter when, beyond the kitchen window, the hot-pink light of morning painted coral reefs across the sky.

Later, after lunch, he fell asleep in an armchair. When he sat up in alarm an hour later, he could not recall much of the nightmare from which he had fled, only that it involved catacombs of flowstone, in which there were no skeletal remains, as in most catacombs, but empty burial niches carved into the sinuous walls. Something silent and unseen, something with implacable intent, had sought him through that maze of passageways.

His hands were as cold as those of a corpse. He stared at the rising moon at the base of each of his fingernails.

Still later on that somber December afternoon, Silas stood at a living-room window of his third-floor apartment in the Pendleton, on the crown of Shadow Hill, watching the lower avenues fade behind an advancing wall of rain. Buildings of buff brick, of red brick, of limestone, as well as newer and taller and uglier curtain-glass towers were at once bleached to a uniform gray as the storm washed over them, becoming like the ghostly structures of a long-dead city in a dream of plague and desolation. Neither the warm room nor his cashmere sweater could relieve the chills that, like a winged horde, fluttered through him.

The official story was that, 114 years earlier, Margaret Pendleton and her children—Sophia and Alexander—had been snatched from this house and murdered. Silas had come to doubt that the long-ago kidnapping occurred. Back in the day, something stranger than murder happened to those three, something worse.

Shadow Hill rose to the highest point in this heartland city, and the third floor was the Pendleton’s topmost. The west-facing structure seemed to rule the rain-swept metropolis below. Both hill and street were named for the shadows of trees and buildings that, on a sunny afternoon, grew longer by the hour until, at twilight, they crept to the summit and met the night as it came in from the east.

Not just a great house, not merely a mansion, the Pendleton was more accurately a Beaux Arts palace built in 1889, at the height of the Gilded Age, sixty thousand square feet under roof, not counting the vast basement or the separate carriage house. A combination of Georgian and French Renaissance styles, the building was clad in limestone, with elaborately carved window surrounds. Neither the Carnegies nor the Vanderbilts, nor even the Rockefellers, had ever owned a grander house.

Upon taking up residence shortly before Christmas 1889, Andrew North Pendleton—a billionaire in an era when a billion dollars was still real money—christened his new house Belle Vista. And so the place was known for eighty-four years; but in 1973, it was converted into condominium units and renamed the Pendleton.

Andrew Pendleton remained happy in Belle Vista until December 1897, when his wife, Margaret, and their two young children were supposedly abducted and never found. Thereafter, Andrew became a pitied recluse whose eccentricity matured into a genteel kind of madness.

Silas Kinsley had lost his wife in 2008, after fifty-three years of marriage. He and Nora were never blessed with children. Having been a widower for three years, he could imagine how loneliness and grief might have robbed Andrew Pendleton of his sanity.

Nevertheless, Silas had concluded that loneliness and loss were not the primary causes of the billionaire’s long-ago decline and suicide. Andrew North Pendleton had been driven insane also by some terrible knowledge, by a mysterious experience that he struggled to understand for seven years, on which he remained fixated until he took his own life.

A kind of fixation had gripped Silas, too, following Nora’s death. After selling their home and buying this apartment, he had filled his time by taking an interest in the history of this landmark building. That curiosity ripened into such an obsession that he spent uncounted hours poring through public records, back issues of newspapers more than a century old, and other archives in search of facts, no matter how ordinary, that might add to his knowledge of the Pendleton.

Now, although he had watched the legions of the storm marching out of the lowlands and up the long north slope of Shadow Hill, Silas startled back one step when the first wet volley snapped against the French panes, as if the rain, mistaken for mere weather, were instead a malevolent assault aimed specifically at him. The city blurred, the day seemed to darken, and the silvering effect of the living-room lamplight made an inadequate mirror of the window. In the wet glass, his face was transparent and lacking sufficient detail, as if it were not in fact his reflection but instead must be the face of another, the pale countenance of something less than fully human, a visitor from an occult realm temporarily connected to this world by the power of the storm.

Spikes of lightning split the darkening day, and Silas turned away from the window as thunder jackhammered the sky. He went to the kitchen, where the under-cabinet fluorescents brightened the golden-granite countertops and where all other lights were off. His files about the Pendleton littered the dinette table: newspaper articles, Xeroxes of public records, transcripts of interviews with people who claimed to have some experience of the building prior to 1974, and photocopies of the eleven scraps that remained of a handwritten journal that Andrew North Pendleton had destroyed immediately before killing himself.

Each surviving piece of Pendleton’s writing was an incomplete fragment, each singed brown around the edges because he burned the journal in his bedroom fireplace prior to biting a shotgun barrel and receiving a mortal meal of buckshot. Each of the eleven scraps of prose was intriguing, suggesting that Andrew Pendleton endured an experience so extraordinary as to be otherworldly. Or perhaps in the final stages of his madness, he was tormented by a dementia in which he mistook nightmares and hallucinations for memories of real events.

Of the eleven surviving scraps, Silas most often returned to a cryptic, disturbing fragment about Pendleton’s daughter, Sophia, who was seven years old when she disappeared. The words and all their possible meanings so haunted him that he’d committed them to memory: … and her once-pink skin gone gray, her lips as gray as ashes, and her eyes like smoke, a humorless and iron-gray grin, no longer my Sophie and less Sophie by the moment.

Andrew Pendleton’s loss of his family was not the only tragedy in the history of the great house. The second owner, Gifford Ostock, who was the sole heir to considerable wealth made in coal mining and in railroad coal-car manufacturing, lived well and fully in Belle Vista from 1905 until 1935. One night in December of ’35, the butler, Nolan Tolliver, slaughtered the Ostock family and all the live-in staff before killing himself. Tolliver left an incoherent handwritten note claiming to have murdered them in order to “save the world from eternal darkness,” and though he took responsibility for all sixteen killings, eight of the dead were never found. To this day it was not known why or how Tolliver disposed of half his victims, or why he did not likewise dispose of the other eight.