by Dean Koontz
5
Apartment 2-C
Bailey Hawks had not reported the encounter in the lap pool to building security. Out of consideration for the privacy of residents, no camera was mounted in that room; therefore, no proof existed that the bizarre incident had occurred.
Five residents of the Pendleton were among his clients: the Cupp sisters, Edna and Martha, in 3-A; Rawley and June Tullis in 2-D; and Gary Dai in 3-B. People with substantial investment portfolios were not likely to continue to entrust their assets to a man who began to rant about a supernatural experience, regardless of how solid his performance had been in the past.
Bailey spent most of the morning and early afternoon in his study, where he tracked the prices of stocks, bonds, and commodities on three dedicated computers while conducting research and analysis on a fourth. Only one of his two full-time employees, Jerry Allwine, worked here with him, and although Jerry was out with the flu, the day was not hectic. There wasn’t much movement in either equities or commodities, and when the major exchanges closed, at 2:00 his time, it proved to be a treading-water day.
Normally, Bailey possessed a sharp focus and singular powers of concentration, which served him as well on financial battlefields as in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As he worked that Thursday, however, his mind repeatedly drifted to the memory of the mysterious figure in the pool, and the sense of peril that he had felt back in the moment rose anew and lingered, though not as acute as it had been during the encounter.
Computers off, working by the light of a single lamp, he was still at his desk past three o’clock when shatters of rain against the north-facing windows drew his attention. For the first time he realized how dark the day had grown. Dusk had crept in two hours ahead of schedule. The lowering clouds were as plush and gray as the coats of the Cupp sisters’ cats, seeming not only to belly over the city but also to curl around it as if settling in for a long dreamy evening.
Serial lightning flashed, flashed, flashed. The bright flares caused geometric shadows of the French-window muntins and stiles to flutter through the dimly lighted room and briefly print themselves upon the walls.
The quick-following crash of thunder, loud enough to suggest Armageddon, did not bring Bailey up from his chair. But as his desk lamp dimmed, he bolted to his feet during the subsequent barrage of lightning because this time, among the flung grids of window-frame shadows, another shadow moved. Sinuous and fleet. It raced across the room not as if it might be a silhouette of something inanimate projected and set in motion by the storm light, but instead as if it must be an intruder revealed.
Man-tall when it leaped, the featureless dark figure seemed more pantherlike as the leap became a lower lope. Having spun in his chair even as he sprang up from it, Bailey turned to follow the specter, if that’s what it was. The thing eluded the eye, swift and quicksilvery, its motion smooth and continuous while the lightning-inspired shadows of the window frames flickered and twitched in the stroboscopic pulses of the storm.
The black form didn’t print itself upon the wall, along with the window grids, but seemed to pass through the plaster. The chain of lightning cast out its last bright link, the brass desk lamp grew brighter, and Bailey hurried from the study in pursuit of the thing that walls could not contain.
6
Apartment 3-C
After he stood staring for a moment at the Pendleton-related files on the kitchen table, Silas went to the coffeemaker. He filled a white ceramic mug and took down a bottle of brandy from a cupboard shelf and spiked the coffee. The clock showed 3:07 P.M., and though Silas never took a drink earlier than dinnertime, if at all, he felt the need to be fortified for a meeting at five o’clock.
He leaned against the counter, with his back to the double sink and to the window above it. Lightning flared, enlivening his shadow, which sprang forward and leaped back through the half-dark kitchen, forward and back again, as if the distorted silhouette were an entity with a mind of its own and with a keen desire to be free of him.
He sipped the coffee, which was as hot as he could tolerate, perhaps a cure not just for his unsteady nerves but also for the chills that plagued him. He was of half a mind to skip his scheduled meeting, to remain here and drink spiked coffee until his eyes grew heavy and he could no longer stay awake. Even in retirement, however, he was a lawyer who respected not just federal, state, and city laws, but also and primarily natural law, the code with which he believed that all men were born, a code of responsibilities that included the duty to love truth and always to pursue it.
Sometimes truth was elusive.…
After Tolliver, the butler, murdered the Ostock family and his fellow workers in 1935, Belle Vista stood empty for three years, until a bachelor oilman named Harmon Drew Firestone, undeterred by the history of violence, purchased the great house at a bargain price. He spent a fortune to restore it to its former grandeur. By World War II, Belle Vista had become the center of the city’s vibrant social scene. Old Harmon Firestone died quietly in his sleep, of natural causes, in the spring of 1972.
Firestone’s estate sold Belle Vista to a property-development trust that converted the building into twenty-three condominium apartments of various sizes. The high ceilings, the lavish and well-crafted architectural details, the hilltop views, and the elegant public spaces ensured that the units sold out quickly in 1974, for the highest per-square-foot cost in the history of the city. Thirty-seven years later, a couple of the original owners still lived in their apartments, but other units had changed hands more than once.
Only the previous day, Silas learned that the Pendleton’s history of bloodshed didn’t end in 1935, with Nolan Tolliver’s killing spree. Not only had there been more recent violence of a bizarre nature; apparently, the incidents also occurred with a predictable regularity, every thirty-eight years, give or take a day, which suggested that another atrocity might occur soon.
Margaret Pendleton and her two children, Sophia and Alexander, disappeared on the night of December 2, 1897.
Thirty-eight years later, on December 3, 1935, the Ostock family and seven members of their household staff were murdered.
In 1973, thirty-eight years after the Ostock tragedy, no one had been living in Belle Vista because it was being remodeled into highend apartments; no residents died. However, in late November and early December of that year, tradesmen and craftsmen working on the conversion had experiences so unsettling that a few quit their jobs and for all these years kept silent about what they witnessed. One of them, Perry Kyser, was meeting Silas at five o’clock.
At the coffeemaker, he refilled his mug. He hadn’t put away the brandy. After a hesitation, he decided not to spike the brew again.
As he capped the bottle, he glimpsed movement from the corner of his eye, a dark and fleeting something. Heart quickening, he turned toward the open door to the hallway. Light from a pair of crystal ceiling fixtures revealed cream-colored walls, a Persian-carpet runner, a gleaming mahogany floor, but no trespasser.
His recent discoveries had pulled his nerves taut. If the Pendleton was destined to be a death house once more, as in certain other Decembers, time might be running out. This was Thursday, December 1, 2011.
Silas wasn’t in a mood to dismiss the fleeting figure in the hallway as a misperception. He put down his coffee mug and ventured out of the kitchen, head cocked, listening for an intruder.
The dining room lay to the left, the study and a half bath to the right. All were unoccupied.
Beyond the dining room lay the large living room with its cast-iron firebox and elaborately carved limestone surround that extended to a fourteen-foot-high ceiling ornamented with reeded and egg-and-dart moldings. Directly opposite the fireplace, snakes of rain wriggled down the tall windows.
At the farther end of the living room, in the foyer, both the deadbolt and the security chain were engaged on the front door.
Across the hall from the living room, no one lurked in the bedroom or in either of the two walk-in cl
osets. The quiet seemed deeper than usual, an expectant hush, although he might have been imagining the uncanny quality of this silence.
As he approached the half-open door to the spacious bathroom, a domain of gold-veined white marble and large expanses of mirrors, he thought that he heard susurrant voices or perhaps the slithering noise that had arisen within the wall during the night. But when he crossed the threshold, the bathroom also proved to be hushed—and deserted.
He stared at the room in one mirror and then in another, as if a reflection of the space might reveal something that could not be seen by looking directly. Because the mirrors faced each other, he stood among multiple Silas Kinsleys who were either advancing toward him single file or receding from him with their backs turned.
A long time had passed since he had studied his face in a mirror with full self-awareness. He appeared far older than he felt. He had aged ten years in the three since Nora died.
He glanced from face to face, half expecting to discover that one of them was that of a stranger, a malevolent Other hiding among the infinity of diminishing Silas Kinsleys. What a curious thought. The images were of course all identical old men.
As he returned to the hallway, a low and menacing rumble arose, not thunder, from underfoot, as if a subterranean train were passing beneath the building, although the city had no subway system. The Pendleton shuddered, and Silas swayed with it. He thought Earthquake, but in the fifty-five years that he had lived in this city, he never felt a temblor and never heard of a major fault underlying any part of the state. The shudder lasted ten or fifteen seconds, and then it faded away, leaving no damage in its wake.
In the study, Witness turned in a circle, wanting first to get the feel of the space. He might be there only seconds, a minute or two at most. This was a man’s room but warm, with one wall given to a gallery of photographs showing Silas Kinsley with some of the clients he had so ably represented; Silas and his late wife, Nora, in different exotic locales; and the two of them with various friends on celebratory occasions.
In the hallway, Kinsley walked past the open door, toward the kitchen. He didn’t glance this way. Witness waited for the attorney to reappear, belatedly alerted by peripheral vision, but domestic noises in the kitchen suggested that no confrontation was imminent.
How would he react to finding a stranger—a strong young man in boots, jeans, and sweater—in his apartment as if by magic? With the fear of an old man weakened by time or with the calm authority of a lawyer still confident after decades of courtroom triumphs? Witness suspected that this was a man whose composure wasn’t easily shaken.
Two walls of the room featured floor-to-ceiling shelves packed full of books. Most of them were books of laws, of cases that were significant for the interpretations of laws that set precedents, and thick biographies of important figures in the history of American jurisprudence.
With reverence, Witness slid one hand lightly across the spines of those books. Where he came from, there were no laws, no attorneys, no judges, no juries, no trials. The innocent had been swept away by a brutal tide of belief in the primacy of the primitive, by faith in the wrong things, by rebellion against reality and the elevation of idiot conviction to the status of the single Truth. He had killed many people in his time, certain that he would never be held to account for the blood he spilled. Nevertheless, he held the law in high regard, just as a man who lived in godless despair might esteem the idea of God that he was unable to embrace.
7
Apartment 2-A
The storm was a gift. The lyrics of “One Rainy Night in Memphis” needed a melody with bounce but also with a melancholy edge, which was not an easy combination to achieve, especially for Twyla Trahern. The bounce part gave her no difficulty, but melancholy was for her a secondhand experience, something that happened to other people, and though she had written a few melancholy songs before, she needed a moody environment to inspire her. With her guitar, she sat on a stool by a window in the study of her apartment on the second floor of the Pendleton, gazing at the timely rain, at the city lights twinkling in the premature twilight that the thunderheads impressed upon the day, picking out notes and trying various chords, seeking the sound of sorrow.
Although she didn’t always compose this way, she got the chorus first, because that was where the bounce needed to be most emphatic. She worked on it—the final refinements would be made at the piano—leaving the eight-bar bridge for later, which she would write after she had extrapolated the clean lines of the melody from the refrain.
As usual, she had earlier laid down the lyrics line by line, verse by verse, polishing each until it had a shine but not so much that it was slick. Shine without slickness was a hard standard to meet. Many lyricists could spring all the way through a song, knowing that a few lines weren’t good enough, that they would have to go back later to rewrite, but Twyla could not work that way. Sometimes, to get the syncopations correct, to make the syllables fall gracefully with the music, she would have to tweak the words once she completed the melody, but tweaking always proved to be the extent of it.
She wrote country and she was country, the daughter of a farmer who lost his farm in the recession of 1980, when she was two years old. He worked thereafter as a maintenance mechanic in a coal-fired power plant, mostly in windowless chambers where the heat could reach 130 degrees. Ten hours a day, five and sometimes six days a week. Sweating continuously. Often doing dangerous work in air smoky with the fine ash of pulverized coal that was flash-burned in a continuous controlled explosion. Winston Trahern endured his job for twenty-two years, to keep his family clothed and fed and comfortable. Twyla never heard her dad complain, and he always showered at the plant, after his shift, and came home looking fresh and clean. When Twyla was twenty-four, a coal cracker at the plant exploded, killing her father and two other men.
She had gotten from him the sunny disposition that made it hard work to write a melancholy song, which was a better inheritance than a pot of money would have been.
As flags of rain unfurled across the city and rippled down the window glass, the melody coalesced around the lyrics. Twyla began to realize she was writing a song that nobody could sing better than Farrel Barnett, her former husband. His first big hit as a performer and her first top-ten tune as a songwriter was “Leaving Late and Low,” and they were married as she finished writing four songs for his second CD.
At the time, she thought she loved Farrel. Maybe she did. Eventually, she realized that in part she had been drawn to him because his eyes were the same shade of blue as her daddy’s and because he had about him an air of trustworthiness and unshakable good cheer reminiscent of Win Trahern.
In Farrel’s case, the cheerfulness was real, though sometimes manic and sometimes inappropriate to the moment. But the trustworthy air was a projection as ephemeral as the beam of light that paints pictures on a movie screen. He went through women like a tornado through a Kansas town, tearing apart other marriages and stripping his more vulnerable lovers of their sense of self-worth as if he took pleasure not in the sex but instead in the destruction that he left behind. Although he always treated Twyla tenderly, he was not as respectful of other women. On a few occasions, one of these wretched specimens, rinsed through with bitterness, washed up on Twyla’s doorstep, as though having endured Farrel Barnett made them sisters in suffering who could console each other and plan a mutual vengeance.
After four years, she had no longer loved him. She had needed two more years before she realized that if she didn’t divorce him, he would blow apart her life and scatter the wreckage so widely that she wouldn’t be able to put herself together as she’d once been. By then, Farrel had made the country-music charts with fifteen songs, twelve written by Twyla, eight of which reached number one.
More important, they created a child together—Winston, named for Twyla’s father—and Twyla was at first determined that Winny would not be raised in a home without a dad. Eventually she came to understand that in som
e rare cases, a broken home might be better for a boy than one in which his narcissistic old man showed up only occasionally and then merely to recuperate from touring and from marathon adultery, less engaged with his young son than with his little entourage of sycophantic buddies.
Although she didn’t love Farrel anymore, didn’t even like him much, she didn’t hate him, either. When she finished “One Rainy Night in Memphis,” she would offer it to Farrel first because he would do the best job with it. Her songs supported her aging mother. They were Winny’s future. What was best for a song trumped settling old scores.
When the rumble rose not from the storm-torn heavens but from the ground under the building, Twyla’s fingers froze on the frets and raised the plectrum from the strings. As the last chord faded, she felt tremors pass through the Pendleton. Her Grammy and Country Music Association awards rattled on the glass shelves in the display case behind her piano.
In expectation of some impending disaster, she was still gazing through the tall window when barbed lashes of lightning flailed the sky, several great flashes that made the rain appear to descend haltingly, that flared as if with apocalyptic power and seemed to obliterate the other buildings flanking Shadow Street. As the tremors rising from the ground passed and as hard thunderclaps shook the afternoon, the lightning and rain conspired for a moment to make the four lanes of pavement seem to disappear. The city streets below vanished, the buildings and their lights. In the flickering celestial display there appeared to be nothing but a vast, empty landscape, the long hill and a terrible plain below it, something like a sea of tall grass stippled with clusters of black trees, their craggy limbs clawing at the gloom.