by Dean Koontz
She turned to the window once more, hesitated, pulled the panels of fabric apart, and saw the courtyard as it should be. Backlighting the chimneys was the glorious radiance of a sprawling civilization that no storm or human folly had yet been able to extinguish. As she let out her pent-up breath in relief, she became aware of a presence on the outside of the window, creeping up from the sill, across the French panes and the thick bronze muntins.
Revealed somewhat by the rising lamplight from the courtyard but mostly by the light in this room, the creature on the casement window was even more alien than the monstrosity that had earlier crawled past the closet door. The shape and size of a platter for serving a fish, as pale and putrescent-looking as some dead drowned creature bleached by sun and seawater, it progressed on four crablike legs that terminated not in claws but in feet resembling those of a frog, with sucker pads allowing it to cling confidently to vertical surfaces. She could see only the ventral aspect of it, but she sensed that it was thick, perhaps five or six inches.
The most disturbing aspect of the apparition was the face in its underside, where a face should never be: a deformed oval countenance that in spite of its twisted features appeared more human than not, distorted in an expression that seemed half rage and half anguish. The horror was even more compelling than it was repellent, so that Sparkle found herself leaning toward the window in spite of her fear, driven to confirm that the face was no trick of light and shadow. The eyes were closed, but as she stared at the tortured visage, the pale lids peeled back, revealing milky orbs. Although those eyes appeared to be veiled with heavy cataracts, she felt certain that they fixed upon her through the window, that she was seen by this miscreation—a conviction that seemed to be confirmed when the thin-lipped mouth opened and a pale tongue licked the glass.
Bailey Hawks
He felt uneasy about leaving Sally Hollander alone, though she insisted she wanted the comfort and seclusion of her apartment. The quick dark figure he’d seen and the menacing swimmer in the pool were surely manifestations of the same “demon” that rushed her in the Cupp sisters’ pantry. Whatever was happening in the Pendleton, whether supernatural or not, suggested that solitude wasn’t advisable.
On the other hand, though he had been snared by the ankle as he fled the pool, Bailey easily kicked loose. And Sally hadn’t been injured, only frightened. These phantasms seemed to have malevolent intentions but perhaps not the power to commit the violence that they desired, which seemed to put them in the company of ghosts that haunted but could not harm.
Bailey didn’t believe in ghosts, but he had no other template by which to understand this situation: spirits, ghosts, specters, things that go bump in the night. If it wasn’t something like that, he could not imagine what else it might be.
After leaving Sally in 1-C, he took the north stairs, rather than the elevator, to the second floor. He often avoided elevators as part of his fitness regimen. The enclosed circular stairwell was original to Belle Vista; it hadn’t been added during the conversion to the Pendleton in 1973. The honed-marble treads were wide, and the ornamental bronze handrail attached to the inner wall was an example of the finest nineteenth-century craftsmanship that, today, would be prohibitively expensive to re-create. Climbing these stairs, Bailey was reminded of a French chateau he had once visited.
Because the staircase was circular, there were landings only at each floor, none mid-floor. As he reached the landing and put a hand to the exit door, he heard quick descending footsteps and a child in song:
“Sing a song of sixpence, a pocketful of rye, four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.…”
The voice was so clear and melodic that Bailey paused to see the singer. There were few children in the Pendleton.
“When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing …”
On the stairs above him, a girl appeared, perhaps seven or eight years old, as pretty as her voice, with lively blue eyes. She wore what appeared to be a costume: a sky-blue cotton dress with a ruffled skirt and gathered sleeves, overlaid with an eggshell-white linen apronlike garment trimmed in simple lace, and white leggings. Her white-leather ankle-top shoes were buttoned instead of laced.
When she saw Bailey, she halted and performed a half-curtsy. “Good afternoon, sir.”
“You must have gotten that dress from Edna Cupp,” Bailey said.
The girl looked puzzled. “It’s from Partridge’s, where Mummy buys all our clothes. I’m Sophia. Are you a friend of Daddy’s?”
“I might be. Who’s your father?”
“The master of the house, of course. Anyway, I should hurry. The iceman’s delivering to the kitchen any minute. We’re going to shave some off one of the blocks and cover it in cherry syrup, which is ever so good.”
As she slipped past Bailey, off the landing and onto the stairs, he said, “What’s your last name, Sophia?”
“Pendleton, of course,” she said, and broke into another song as she followed the curving stairs out of sight. “Old King Cole was a merry old soul, and a merry old soul was he …”
The girl’s footsteps and voice faded to silence more quickly than the turning of the stairs explained.
Bailey waited to hear a door open and close, but the quiet of the windowless stairwell became a profound hush.
Without knowing quite what he intended, he descended to the ground floor and then to the basement, expecting to find the girl waiting below. The heavy fire doors could not be opened and closed soundlessly. Yet she was gone.
Twyla Trahern
Having just spoken on the phone either to a City Bell operator in 1935 or to a hoaxer who was part of a bizarre conspiracy with an inscrutable purpose, Twyla hurried Winny out of the kitchen, into the laundry room. She retrieved a raincoat and an umbrella from the corner closet, and Winny slipped into a hooded jacket.
The lightless plain that she had glimpsed earlier still fresh in her mind, she got two flashlights from a utility drawer and jammed them in her coat pockets.
They left by the back door, she locked the deadbolt, and they hurried along the short hallway to the south elevator, where she pushed the call button.
Winny said, “How could it change like that, the wall?”
“I don’t know, honey.”
“Where was that place, the grungy place that faded in and out?”
“I don’t know. I write songs. I don’t write sci-fi.” She pushed the call button again. “Come on, come on.”
“It was the same wall but different, like the Pendleton on some other world. You know, like parallel worlds in stories?”
“I don’t read those kinds of stories. Maybe you shouldn’t read them, either.”
“I didn’t make the wall-thing happen,” he assured her.
“No, of course you didn’t. That’s not what I meant.”
She didn’t know what she had meant. Her confusion dismayed her. Most of her life, she had known how to cope with anything that came her way, allowing herself no doubts and no excuses. Since she’d been eleven, whenever anything scary or painful happened, she composed a ballad or a spiritual or a torch piece or a country boogie-woogie number about it, and the fear and the hurt were cured by the writing of the lyrics, by the singing of the song. But painful events like the loss of her sweet father and frightening developments like the recognition that her marriage to Farrel was collapsing … Well, those were common human experiences for which music could be a medicine. In these weird circumstances, however, melody and poetry failed her. She wished that she possessed as many guns—or at least one!—as she had musical instruments.
With a ding the elevator arrived at the second floor.
Winny slipped through the doors even as they were sliding open.
On the threshold, Twyla halted when she saw that the elevator car had changed. Gone were the bluebird mural and the marble floor. Every surface in there was brushed stainless steel. Translucent panels in the ceiling cast an eerie blue light, the same blue that had pulsed from the TV and h
eralded the words “Exterminate. Exterminate.”
“Get out of there!” she ordered Winny, and the doors began to slide shut.
Logan Spangler
In the threatening darkness, the peristalsis pulsing through the snakelike fungus made a wet, disgusting sound, and the obscene mushrooms wheezed softly each time they exhaled their salt-grain spores.
In the tight LED beam, Logan could see that the pivot pins in the knuckles of the barrel hinges might be worked loose with the blade of the pocketknife that he carried. Before he could set to work, however, the lights in the half bath came on, not the yellow thing on the ceiling—which had vanished—but the can lights overhead and the soffit lights above the vanity, which earlier had been broken and corroded. The entire room was restored to its former condition, and the pale-green, black-mottled fungi, both the serpentine and mushroom forms, were gone as if they had never existed.
When he tried the previously locked door, it opened. He rushed out of the little bathroom, into the hallway, relieved to be free.
He sneezed, sneezed again. He pinched his nose between thumb and forefinger to stop a tingling in his nostrils. His lips felt dry, and when he licked them, they were crusted with something. He wiped one hand across his mouth. On his fingers and palm were perhaps a hundred tiny white spores.
Martha Cupp
After Bailey Hawks left with Sally, Martha decided to put all this demon-in-the-pantry nonsense out of her mind by perfecting her bridge game. She sat at the computer in the study, playing with a virtual partner named Alice, against a virtual team named Morris and Wanda. She selected MASTER LEVEL from a menu that offered five degrees of difficulty, but within a few minutes she regretted her choice. She’d been playing real bridge, with flesh-and-blood people, only for about a year. No matter how hard she pushed herself to improve, she wasn’t ready for master-level play. She became so frustrated so quickly that she accused Morris of cheating, although he was only a software character and incapable of hearing her. As for Wanda—well, she was a smug little tart, so annoyingly sure of herself.
From the open doorway, Edna said, “I’ve decided the situation calls for immediate action.”
To her virtual partner, Alice, Martha grumbled, “I’m sorry I’m no help. I should have selected dementia-level play.”
“First thing tomorrow,” Edna said, “I’ll call an exorcist.”
When Martha looked up from the computer, she saw that her sister had already changed costumes. Instead of the lilac-silk day wear, she wore a dinner gown: black silk covered with spotted-black chiffon, black-and-gold lace edging the neckline and repeated on the train of the skirt, gathered sleeves with abundant frill, and a black-velvet cummerbund. Bedecked with both a long rope of pearls knotted at the bustline and a diamond necklace with pendant, as well as small drop earrings, wearing long white gloves, she looked as though she was dressed to attend a banquet with the queen, rather than to share a previously prepared, microwaved meal with her sister, the rotten bridge player.
“And once all evil spirits have been exorcised, I’ll have the apartment blessed,” Edna declared.
“But where will you find an exorcist, dear? Father Murphy knows all about your belief in ancient astronauts, shadow people, witches among us.… He doesn’t approve, no priest would. He’s not going to put the dignity of the Church on the line by bringing in an exorcist, because he knows that by the time they show up, you will have decided it wasn’t a demon, after all, but a troll.”
Edna smiled and shook her head. “Sometimes I think you never listen to me, Martha. I don’t believe in trolls. Trolls are the stuff of children’s fairy tales, nothing more.”
“You believe in gremlins,” Martha reminded her.
“Because gremlins are real, of course. Do you know where our gremlin hid my reading glasses this time? I finally found them on the bottom shelf in the refrigerator next to the fruit yogurts. The little scamp.”
“Maybe you left them there yourself.”
Edna raised her eyebrows. “Whyever would I? I certainly don’t curl up in the refrigerator to do my reading.”
From elsewhere in the apartment came a squealing and squalling that certainly sounded like a cat fight, although Smoke and Ashes never quarreled.
“Whatever are they up to?” Edna wondered. She turned and hurried away, the short train of her dinner gown swishing along the floor.
Sparkle Sykes
When the tongue licked out of the contorted countenance on the underside of the creeping monstrosity and slid along the rain-slick glass, Sparkle knew it wasn’t tasting the cool water or doing anything other than taunting her. The face initially seemed to be twisted as much in anguish as in rage, but its expression darkened into fury unalloyed by anything but mockery as the mouth curled in a thin, obscene sneer.
Certain that the cataracted eyes saw her, she nevertheless left the drapery open because as long as she could see the horror, she knew where it was. As it angled up the window, the thing seemed less interested in making progress than in exploring along every junction of bronze muntins and glass with its sucker-pad toes, as if seeking some breach or weakness that it could exploit to gain entrance.
Sharp lightning scored the sky, and for the first time since Sparkle saw her father seared and slain, she failed to cringe in fear of its lethal potential. The hideous thing upon the window merited her terror more than did Nature’s bright fury. In fact, the flaring night seemed to caress the creature as if it were a child born from the storm.
She needed to call security. She didn’t know what she could say that wouldn’t sound crazy. Just tell the guard there was something he had to come and see for himself. Tell him it was urgent.
Iris’s room lacked a phone. No matter how pleasant the ringtone, it always irritated her.
Keeping her eyes on the freak at the window, Sparkle eased backward to her daughter’s bed. She spoke softly, with no note of alarm that might trigger one of the girl’s anxiety attacks. “Honey, Iris, it’s treat time. Ice cream, honey. Ice-cream time in the kitchen.”
The girl neither replied nor moved.
As the abomination quested from one pane to the next, its suctorial feet squeaked on the glass.
She couldn’t leave the child here alone, not even just long enough to get to the nearest phone and call security.
Autism was a ruthless censor that denied Iris the ability to communicate. Having memorized large portions of the beloved novel Bambi, the girl found a way to use quotations from the book as a kind of code that now and then enabled her to slip a thought past her oppressor by cloaking it in the words of another.
Hoping to build a bridge between herself and her psychologically isolated daughter, Sparkle had read and reread the novel. Sometimes the girl listened to familiar lines from Bambi and acted upon them, though if the same request was made with different words, she ignored it or responded temperamentally. Sparkle had identified and memorized numerous lines that proved to be useful.
“ ‘He is in the woods, and we must go,’ ” she said, referring to the hunter who terrified the deer in the woods by the River Danube.
Iris looked up from her book, though not directly at her mother, as eye contact pained her.
“ ‘Don’t be frightened,’ ” Sparkle said, quoting the old stag, Bambi’s father, from the next-to-last chapter of the novel. “ ‘Come with me and don’t be frightened. I’m glad that I can take you and show you the way.…’ ”
Again, the famous novel worked its magic. Iris put aside the book she was currently reading, got off the bed, and approached her mother, oblivious of the crawling horror seeking entrance at the casement window.
Sparkle wanted to take the girl’s hand, but that contact would shatter the mood, put an end to cooperation, and perhaps inspire a violent physical reaction. Instead, she turned and went to the open door, as if confident that her daughter would follow her as any fawn would follow the doe that brought it into the world. Crossing the threshold into the hallway, she gl
anced back and saw Iris shuffling after her.
Sparkle thought she heard an inhuman cry, a shrill expression of intense craving, frustration, and rage, muffled by window glass. But the sound was so alien and so chilling that she wanted to believe it was only the voice of the skirling wind, blown into the thinnest falsetto.
Winny
When Winny slipped through the opening elevator doors, he right away realized that the bird mural was gone, that all the surfaces were stainless steel, and that the usual cove lighting and crystal ceiling fixture were gone, replaced by circles that rained down a moody blue light. A second later, he made the connection between this blue light and the luminous rings pulsing on the TV set in his room—which was just when his mom said, “Get out of there!”—and the doors started to slide shut.
These doors were supposed to stop closing if you stepped between them, it was a safety feature, but they clamped on to Winny as if they were jaws. They weren’t sharp, they couldn’t bite him, but they were maybe powerful enough to slowly squeeze the breath out of him or to snap his ribs and force the broken ends inward to his heart. As his mother grabbed him by his jacket, in his mind’s eye, Winny saw blood squirting from his nose, trickling from his ears, and that scared him enough to writhe and twist in the grip of the doors until he wrenched free.
Almost free. The doors closed on his left wrist, tight enough to hurt, and he couldn’t skinny down his hand enough to slip it loose. His mom hooked her fingers in the narrow gap, trying to pull the doors apart just enough to allow Winny to liberate himself, but she couldn’t do it because the doors were crazy powerful. She was grunting from the effort and cursing, and his mother never cursed.