by Dean Koontz
“You said on the phone you’ve never told anyone about this.”
“Never. I didn’t want people looking at me that way, you know, like you’d look at some guy says he’s flown on a UFO.”
“From my point of view, Perry, your silence all these years makes you all the more credible.”
Kyser finished his martini in one swallow. “So … I’m at one end of the hall, outside the gym. This thing is at the halfway point, near the doors to the heating-cooling plant. It’s big. Big as me. Bigger. Pale as a grub, a little like a grub, but not that, because it’s kind of like a spider, too, though not an insect, too fleshy for a spider. Now I’m thinking—who put what kind of drug in my coffee thermos? Nothing on Earth looks like this. It’s moving away, toward the security room, hears me or smells me, and it turns to me. It looks like it can move fast, but maybe it can’t because it doesn’t.”
Given the history of the Pendleton and the eerie nature of Andrew Pendleton’s journal scraps, Silas had expected Kyser to reveal a strange experience, which on the phone he’d hinted that he would. But this was more bizarre than anything Silas could have imagined.
Perry Kyser continued to meet Silas’s eyes and seemed to search them ceaselessly for signs of disbelief.
Lawyer’s intuition told Silas that this man wasn’t lying, that he couldn’t lie, not about this, maybe not about anything important.
“This voice comes out of the blue screens—‘Exterminate,’ it says, ‘Exterminate.’ The thing starts toward me. Now I can see how lumpy it is, not like any animal, lumpy flesh, pale skin. And wet, maybe wet with sweat, but milky wet, I don’t know what. A kind of head, no eyes, no face to speak of. What might be rows of gills along the neck, but no mouth. I’m backing toward the north stairs, hear myself saying very fast, ‘who are all good and deserving of all my love,’ so I’m halfway through an Act of Contrition, but I don’t even realize I started it. I’m sure I’m dead. As I back into the stairwell door and finish the Act of Contrition, the thing … it speaks to me.”
Surprised, Silas said, “It spoke? In English?”
“No mouth I could see, but it spoke. Such misery in that voice. Can’t convey the misery, despair. It says, ‘Help me. For God’s sake, someone help me.’ The voice is Ricky Neems. The painter who’s up on the third floor right then, making his punch list. I don’t know … is it Ricky for real or is it this thing imitating Ricky? Is this thing somehow Ricky? How can that be? All my life … I never scared easy. Never had anything worth being scared about after Korea, the war.”
Their waitress stopped at the table to ask if they wanted a second drink. Silas needed another round, but he didn’t want it. Perry declined as well.
“Korea was my war, too,” Silas said. “Living with that fear day after day, eventually you’re inoculated against it.”
“But in that basement hall, Silas, I’m so terrified the strength goes out of me like it never did in Korea. One hand on the doorknob to the stairs, can’t seem to turn it. My legs are weak. Only reason I’m still on my feet is I’m leaning against the door. Then everything changes. The lights get brighter. The dirty floor, the mold, the blue screens, everything that’s wrong—it fades out. The hallway like it’s supposed to be, clean and fresh—it fades in. And the thing coming toward me fades away, too, like it was all a dream. But I’m awake. It wasn’t a dream. It was sure something, but not a dream.”
Perry stared out at the rainy night for a moment before he continued: “After that, I go upstairs, looking for Ricky, and he’s there, he’s all right. He heard that rumble, like the timpani, but nothing else happened to him, and I didn’t know how to tell him what I saw without sounding nuts. But I should’ve told him. I should have insisted he get out of there, do his punch list Monday. I did try to get him to call it a day, he wouldn’t, so I left him there to die.”
“You didn’t. You couldn’t know. Who could?”
“The next day, Sunday, I go to church. Hadn’t gone in a while. Felt the need. Monday, went to work with a pistol under my jacket. Didn’t think a pistol would do the job. What else would? A pistol was something. But … that was the end. No more shadow people, and nothing like what I’d seen. Maybe stuff happened Saturday, no one but Ricky Neems there to see. During the next month, we finished the job.”
Silas’s right hand was cold and wet with condensation from his Scotch glass. He blotted his fingers on a napkin. “Any theories?”
Perry Kyser shook his head. “Only what I said earlier. I got a glimpse of Hell. That encounter changed me. Frequent confession and regular Communion suddenly seemed like a good idea.”
“And you never told your son, your wife?”
“I figured … if I was given a glimpse of Hell, it’s because I needed the shock. To change me. I made the change but didn’t have the courage to tell my wife why it might have been necessary. You see?”
“Yes,” Silas said. “I don’t know about Hell. Right now, I don’t know for sure about much of anything.”
The waitress returned and left the check on the table.
As Silas calculated the tip and took cash from his wallet, Perry again studied the customers at the bar. “What’s wrong with them?”
Surprised, Silas said, “You sense it, too?”
“Something. Don’t know what. What’re they—mostly twenties and thirties? For their age, they’re trying too hard.”
“Too hard at what?”
“Being carefree. Should come natural that young. They seem, I don’t know … anxious.”
Silas said, “I think they come here for the Deco, the music, the atmosphere, because they want to escape to a safe time.”
“Never was such a time.”
“Safer,” Silas corrected. “A safer time.”
“The thirties? War was coming.”
“But there was an end to it. Now … maybe never an end.”
Still focused on the bar crowd, Perry said, “I thought it was just me being old.”
“What was?”
“This feeling that everything is coming apart. More like being torn down. I have this nightmare now and then.”
Silas put away his wallet.
Perry Kyser said, “Everything torn down, every man for himself. Worse. It’s all against all.”
Silas looked out at Shadow Street, the Pendleton looming through volleys of rain.
“All against all,” Perry repeated, “murder, suicide, everywhere, day and night, unrelenting.”
“It’s just a nightmare,” Silas said.
“Maybe it is.” Perry looked at him. “What now?”
“I’m going home, sit and think awhile.”
“Home,” Perry agreed. “But I’m gonna try not to think.”
“Thanks for your time, for being so frank with me.”
As they got up from the booth, the big man said, “Thought talking about it at last would take the chill off. Didn’t, though.”
The bar crowd sounded louder, edgier. Their laughter was shrill.
In the small lobby, as they waited at the coat-check window, Perry said, “You have kids?”
“We never did.”
“We have kids, grandkids, great-grandkids.”
“That alone should take the chill off.”
“Just the opposite. I’m old enough to understand I can’t protect them. Not from the worst. Not from much of anything.”
Silas protested when Perry Kyser insisted on tipping the coat-check girl for both of them.
Outside, under the awning, in the cold breeze, they put up the hoods of their raincoats. They shook hands. Perry Kyser walked away downhill. Silas went uphill toward the Pendleton.
17
Apartment 3-D
In Senator Earl Blandon’s apartment, where luxury and order had for a moment vanished behind a bleak vision of vacancy and decay, Logan Spangler turned in the now restored bedroom, hand on the grip of the pistol in his swivel holster, seeking the source of the hiss that, although brief, had been as hostile a
challenge as any sound he’d ever heard, reminiscent of serpents and jungle cats and nameless things in dreams.
He saw a figure, tall and lean and quick, little more than a silhouette but definitely not the senator, as it sprang out of sight into the hallway. From that brief glimpse, he couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman—and he had the strangest impression that it might be neither, though it had been erect rather than on all fours like an animal.
A lifetime of police work habituated him to a responsible handling of firearms. He never drew a gun merely because there might be a potential for violent confrontation, but only when the potential hardened into a high probability. Once a weapon was drawn, it was more likely to be used, and not always as wisely as you might expect to use it. Logan was confident of his policing skills but remained acutely aware that he was only human and therefore capable of stupid mistakes. As he approached the door, he kept his right hand on the holstered .45.
No one waited in the hall. At the far end, past an archway, lay the living room. Between here and there, a door on the right led to the study; a door on the left served a guest room with its own bath and a second door led to a half bath, all of which he had previously toured in search of the senator.
On the threshold of the hallway, Logan paused, listening. After a silence, a great wheel of thunder rolled across the sky, muffled here because the hallway had no windows, and when it traveled to a far horizon and out of hearing, he continued to heed the deep quiet, which seemed to him to have an air of menace.
First he ventured into the guest room on the left, from there into the adjacent bath, where all was as it should be. Having opened the closet door earlier, he could see that no one lurked within.
Directly across the hall from the guest room, the study was also deserted. He went no farther than the threshold. Beyond the tall windows, landscape lighting rose from the large courtyard below, illuminating wind-billowed sheets of silvery rain like the tattered shrouds of something that crouched on the ledge and sought entrance.
Logan turned from the study and angled across the hall to the half bath, where the door stood ajar two inches. He remembered leaving it entirely open, but perhaps he was mistaken. Seen through the narrow gap between door and jamb, the quality of light was not what it should have been: yellower and dimmer than before.
The quiet after the thunder now deepened into a sea of silence in which not one sound swam. An oppressive quality to the stillness, a foreboding of violence, felt like a weight on his chest.
Using his left hand, Logan plucked the small aerosol can of pepper spray from his utility belt.
With one foot, he pushed on the door, which swung inward, and the half bath was not as it had been before. The two recessed lights in the soffit above the vanity no longer functioned, and the socket of one trailed out of its can on a length of wire. All light came from an eighteen-inch disc with irregular edges in the ceiling, which had not been there previously. The space felt damp, smelled of mold.
On part of the wall to the left of the door and on the entire back wall, draping over most of the toilet, grew what might have been two varieties of fungus, neither of a kind that Logan had ever seen before. Ceiling to floor, row after row of serpentine forms as thick as garden hoses conformed to one another’s curves like a sensuous sculpture, pale-green but mottled here and there with black. At a half dozen points, from between those snugly grown rows, clusters of mushrooms of the same coloration sprouted on thick short stems. They ranged in diameter from perhaps three to six inches, each with a puckered formation at its crown.
As the master bedroom had transformed around him, so this small chamber had changed in his absence. He doubted neither his sanity nor the proof of his eyes; with an alacrity that somewhat surprised him, he had adapted to the idea that in this place and at this moment of time, the impossible might be possible. He was as determined to understand these phenomena as he had always been committed to solving any homicide case assigned to him.
Before the bathroom might return to its previous condition, he inserted the can of pepper spray into the holder on his utility belt and traded it for his small flashlight. Playing the crisp white LED beam over the fungi, he crossed the threshold into the half bath.
18
Apartment 1-C
Earlier, before she met the demon in the pantry, Sally Hollander made dinner for Martha and Edna, and now she wanted to leave for the day. Everything was in the refrigerator and needed only to be heated. The creature—or spirit, whatever—that she’d seen might not be limited to haunting the Cupp apartment; it might appear beside her after she’d gone to the farthest end of the earth to escape it. Nevertheless, she would feel better in her own place. After she had time to think about what she’d seen, without Edna’s explanations, one more far-out than the next, her nerves would most likely mend so that she would have the courage to return to work in the morning.
Bailey Hawks offered to escort her to the apartment in which she lived, at the back of the Pendleton, in the north wing of the ground floor. That unit was owned by the Cupp sisters, and she lived there for free. They took good care of her, and she couldn’t imagine what she would do without them; therefore, in the comfort and solitude of her rooms, she needed to get her mind right about what had happened.
Sally wasn’t a weak sister. She had endured worse frights than the thing in the pantry. But she accepted Bailey’s offer with relief and gratitude.
In the elevator going down from the third floor, they didn’t say a word about her extraordinary encounter, but talked of the Cupps with mutual affection. Nearly the same age, she and Bailey had always been easy with each other, like old friends from the start. She was fond of him and thought he was fond of her.
Occasionally she wondered what they would be like together, but it wasn’t her nature to initiate a romance. She wasn’t fainthearted, though she admitted to being a bit of a wallflower. And because the Cupps were Bailey’s clients, Sally figured that he felt it would be inappropriate to date her.
That was just as well. Romance had failed her before, and she had done without it happily enough for twenty years. Falling in love could be like falling off a cliff, no water below but plenty of rocks.
She had once been married. Her husband, Vince, was a musician, a guitarist with a combo that enjoyed steady employment playing in nightclubs and at private parties. Sometimes Vince started drinking during the band’s breaks, continued pouring down his favorite poison after the performance, and came home fully boiled. He wanted sex but was too inebriated to be capable of it, and in his frustration he turned to what he called “the next-best thing,” which proved to be a nightcap of physical and emotional abuse.
The first time she had been taken by surprise. He seized a fistful of her hair, pulled it hard enough to bring tears to her eyes, slapped her repeatedly and viciously, using his body to jam her into a corner so hard that she thought her spine might snap if he didn’t relent. As he worked on her, Vince called her the vilest names, intent on administering as much humiliation as pain, and in her shock and rapid disorientation, she failed to fight back.
She was embarrassed to recall how, for a while, she had thought that half the blame for that episode must have been hers. The sober Vince, a gentle and soft-spoken musician, seemed to have no fault except jealousy, for which he often apologized; but the drunken Vince was Mr. Hyde on steroids, and he apologized for nothing. The second time it happened, she resisted—and learned that he was much stronger than she had thought and that resistance only inflamed him. Slaps became punches, and he reveled in the assault. When he was finished and she lay bruised and bleeding at his feet, he said, “I should have been a drummer, I sure can beat some crazy rhythms on the skins.” He promised her that he would kill her if she ever left him.
She eventually escaped from Vince, divorced him, and started a new life. The Cupp sisters not only provided a fine salary but also a sense of family. Sally had gone from profound despair to contentment in a matter of months
, from self-loathing to self-respect, such a long journey in such a short time that she would always remain aware that life could change for the worse as suddenly as it had changed for the better.
At her apartment door, as Sally turned the key in the lock, Bailey said, “Would it make you feel more comfortable if I came in while you check your rooms just to be sure there’s nothing … out of order?”
The question reminded her of how seriously he had listened to her story in the Cupp sisters’ kitchen, with not a word of disbelief, with not the slightest expression of doubt or amusement. Now she saw in him a tension she hadn’t noticed before, a not fully concealed wariness of the hallway around them, of the threshold they crossed, of the foyer into which they entered, as if he believed implicitly in the possibility of a threat in this safest of residences.
If that was the case, she was not foolish enough to think that her story of the demon in the pantry had been so electrifying that it had convinced a rock-steady investment adviser and former marine that something supernatural was afoot. He would be wary only if he’d had an experience of his own that was supported by her tale.
“That’s nice of you, Bailey. And I’ll take you up on it. I’m still a little … shaky.”
Once in her apartment, he subtly took the lead, staying at her side, maneuvering her through the rooms not in the way she would have chosen to proceed but instead perhaps according to strategies he had been taught in the military. He didn’t appear to believe that he was conducting a dangerous search, pretty well maintained the attitude of a friendly neighbor concerned more about her peace of mind than about any genuine peril she might face, but Sally nonetheless perceived the seriousness with which he conducted the task.