by Dean Koontz
Then maybe he imagined it or maybe it really happened, but in the elevator car, something crawled onto his imprisoned hand and began to explore it.
“There’s a bug!” Winny cried out, violating his rule against doing anything wimpy, opening himself to the charge of being a sissy, but he couldn’t control himself. “In there, on my hand, a big bug or something!”
Its legs or antennae quivered between all his fingers at the same time, simultaneously across the palm and the back of his hand, gross, disgusting, maybe a big centipede so flexible it could twine ceaselessly, busily through his fingers or maybe a swarm of smaller insects. He clenched his teeth and choked back a scream, waiting for the thing—or things—to bite or sting, shaking his hand to cast it off, trying to pull loose, the doors pinching his wrist tighter, his mother straining at the doors, her face red with the effort, the cords in her neck like taut ropes, and suddenly he was free of both the door and the bug.
Winny shot past his mom, across the hallway, turned, his back pressed to the door of the Dai apartment, certain that something radically weird must be coming out of the elevator. But the doors had slid shut. His mother was scared but not hurt, beads of sweat on her forehead, no bug climbing up her raincoat toward her face.
They were just thirty feet from the south stairwell, the only way out if they couldn’t use the elevator. His mom scooped her purse off the floor, didn’t bother with the dropped umbrella, pushed Winny ahead of her, and said, “Come on, the stairs!”
Maybe it was true instinct or maybe it was just a full-sissy moment that would live in infamy, but as he approached the fire door, Winny thought that the stairwell was a trap. Something was waiting for them along that spiral, and they would never get to the ground floor alive.
His mother must have felt it, too, because she whispered, “Winny, no. Wait.”
Vernon Klick
Vernon was so intent on watching the third floor for old saggy-assed Logan Spangler to stagger out of Senator Foghorn Leghorn’s apartment that the knock on the door startled him up from his chair. Before he could say “Come in,” the door opened, and Bailey Hawks entered as if he owned the room and was here to collect the rent.
Vernon disliked Hawks as much as anyone in the Pendleton and more than some of them. Logan Spangler, in his best bootlicking mode, said Hawks was a hero, apparently just because he was a marine and went to war and was given a chestful of stupid medals, which were probably awards for things like killing ten thousand innocent civilians and straddling a thousand third-world whores and torching orphanages. Real heroes were men like Vernon, who dared to reveal the private lives and sick secrets of holier-than-thou greed demons like the parasites who lived in this building.
During his search of Hawks’s apartment, Vernon had not been able to find any shockingly sick secrets of the kind that would help put his book at the top of best-seller lists and make his subscription website, when he created it, the place on the Internet. But just because he failed to find scandalous material about Hawks didn’t mean that such secrets did not exist. It meant that the orphan killer was extraordinarily clever at concealing evidence of his vicious crimes and disgusting perversities.
Anyway, Vernon did find lots of circumstantial evidence that Hawks was far from the hero old Logan Spangler thought he was. For one thing, Hawks subscribed to nine financial publications, which revealed a demented obsession with making money. He had a wine cooler full of high-dollar Cabernets, several expensive tailor-made suits, each of which cost six times as much as a perfectly serviceable off-the-rack garment, plus a collection of rare Bakelite radios from the Art Deco period. A decent man would not have spent all that money so selfishly or on such frivolous items. Although Vernon knew a lot about safes and how to crack them, Hawks’s free-standing model proved to be impenetrable, which must mean it contained scandalous material. And although Vernon knew a lot about computer hacking, he couldn’t get at Hawks’s client files because they were so well protected; he even began to think they were kept on a separate computer that was locked in the safe each night, no doubt because Hawks and his clients were engaged in stock fraud, commodities manipulation, and worse.
As Hawks came into the security room, he said, “Mr. Klick, I just now saw someone in the north stairwell who I don’t think lives here.”
Sitting down once more, peeved that he was called mister instead of officer, Vernon said, “Someone who?”
“I don’t know who she was. But I wonder if you could check your video record to see if she left the stairs on the first floor or the basement. She passed me going down when I was at the second-floor landing.”
“If she does live here, letting you track her movement would be a violation of her privacy.”
“I don’t think she lives here.”
“But you don’t know for sure.”
“Listen, something’s wrong here.” Hawks hesitated. His eyes were shifty, just like you’d expect a crooked financial adviser’s eyes to be. “These odd things have been happening. This one happened like three or four minutes ago, but maybe she won’t appear on the video. That wouldn’t surprise me.”
Frowning, Vernon said, “So Spangler told you about the missing twenty-three seconds. Well, I’m the one said there must’ve been a heist or maybe somebody killed somebody. If that’s the way it turns out, he’ll say he suspected as much from the start, but it was me, not him, who did all the suspecting. If you’re saying there’s another intruder and maybe more funny stuff with the security video, they’re not going to get away with it on my watch. Let’s have a look.”
Vernon opted out of real-time images on the center screen and accessed archived video. As there were no cameras in the stairwells, he first called up the basement hall outside the north stairs, going back five minutes to watch for someone to come out of that door. If there was a heist going on, or a murder, or another murder, or some other kind of sick criminal shenanigans among the privileged vermin of the Pendleton, his book was going to be not just a hit but also a huge best-seller. A juicy multiple murder would be wonderful, especially if it involved sexual mutilation or cannibalism, which was probably asking too much, but on the other hand, you never knew what depravity these moneyed elites might indulge in next.
Mickey Dime
In the study, blanket-wrapped dead Jerry stood on the cargo ledge of the hand truck. Three tightly pulled straps bound him to the frame and held him erect.
Mickey considered the corpse from different angles. From every perspective it looked like a stiff in a blanket.
He retrieved two spare pillows from the linen closet. He kept them in a plastic bag with a lemon-scented sachet. He paused to bury his face in each pillow, savoring the fragrance of lemony goose down.
Using duct tape, he fixed the pillows to the microfiber blanket in the area of the dead man’s lower legs to disguise the limbs. He liked the strength, flexibility, and feel of duct tape. Duct tape was sexy.
From a cabinet under the kitchen sink, he fetched a bucket. He jammed the bucket over Jerry’s head and secured it with the tape.
In his bedroom closet were several book boxes containing his beloved mother’s correspondence with other famous intellectuals. Mickey was going to put them in order and donate them to Harvard, where she would be immortalized.
One of the boxes was only a third full. He tenderly removed the letters—which carried a vague trace of her signature perfume, Nightshade—and set them aside. He took the empty carton into the study, where he duct-taped it to Jerry’s chest.
He got another microfiber blanket from the closet. He draped it loosely over the bundled corpse and all of its taped-on accessories. Now dead Jerry looked like nothing more than a precarious stack of junk.
Mickey tipped the hand truck backward, onto its wheels. He rolled it out of the study and through the living room. In the foyer, he parked it near the front door.
In the bedroom, Mickey shrugged into a shoulder holster. He tucked the .32 pistol, with its sound suppressor,
into the rig and put on a sport coat tailored to conceal a weapon. He studied himself in the full-length mirror. He looked sexy.
He looked so good, in fact, that he thought he might not have to confine his erotic encounters with Sparkle Sykes to his imagination. If he came on to her, she might find him irresistible. Many women found him irresistible and not because he paid them. They often said that with him it wasn’t only about money, and he knew they were telling the truth. The risk was rejection, which he didn’t handle well. If she turned him down without being polite about it, he would as a matter of pride take what he wanted and clean up afterward. Better to restrain his affair with Sparkle to his imagination.
Mickey left Jerry on the hand truck, in the foyer. He stepped into the hall, locked the apartment, and set out to kill the guard in the security room.
Logan Spangler
In the kitchen of Earl Blandon’s apartment, Logan gargled repeatedly with some of the senator’s whiskey supply and spat it in the sink, hoping that it would destroy—or at least wash out—any spores that might have gotten into his mouth and throat. He blew his nose so often and so hard that he risked rupturing a blood vessel, hoping to purge most of the tiny seeds from his tingling nasal passages and sinuses.
Logan worried that the spores might be toxic. Perhaps not a lethal poison, but in some way disabling. There were fungi that, when eaten, produced hallucinations and even lasting psychological damage. The bizarre fungi in the half bath seemed like something Alice might have found if she went through a looking glass so dark that the land beyond was nearer to Hell than to Wonderland, and it was difficult to imagine that they might be benign.
He wondered if contact with the spores caused the visions of abandoned and ruined rooms, but that made no sense because the fungi and their spores were part of those visions, not of the real world. Nevertheless, the thought persisted. He didn’t consciously summon them, yet images of the pale-green, black-mottled organisms rose in his mind’s eye, though they were not strictly memories of what he’d seen in the half bath because they were in motion. Not merely the swallowing reflex, the peristalsis. Flexing. Coiling. Writhing over and under one another, twining in excited, sinuous abandon. He could not drive the apparitions out of his mind. They became more real than the kitchen in which he stood, as he imagined an LSD experience might press aside reality, though he had never taken hallucinogens. On the clusters of mushrooms, around which serpentine fungi squirmed, the puckered skin of the caps peeled back, as they had in the half bath, but this time no clouds of spores burst from them. Instead, in this exotic mind movie, from some of the caps rose what appeared to be gray tongues, and from still others ascended yellow eyes on fibrous stalks, as if plants and animals had conjugated, producing demonic children. Abruptly—impossibly—the point of view changed within this delirium, and he found himself not staring at the fungi but peering out from within them, as if the eyes on stalks were his eyes, and he saw himself in his uniform, his face pale and sweaty, his eyes as bleak as an arctic dawn.
He realized that he had returned to the half bath, although he had not been aware of leaving the kitchen. He stood at the sink, gripping the marble countertop with both hands, as if to anchor himself in a turbulence, gazing at the mirror. The wall behind him crawled with repulsive fungi, but the light wasn’t dim like before, and when he turned from the mirror to confront the slithering colony, it wasn’t there in reality. It existed only in the reflection. The looking glass showed Logan as he was now but presented the wall behind him as it had been earlier. The mirror was not the problem. Something had gone wrong with Logan.
A tingling sensation drew his attention to his hands, with which he gripped the countertop. His fingernails were black.
Martha Cupp
By the time Martha entered the living room close on the heels of her sister, Smoke and Ashes had stopped squalling. Although the cats seldom did any climbing, both were atop an étagère filled with porcelain birds. They peeked around the pediment of that cabinet, their orange eyes wide. They were usually as self-satisfied and confident as any cats, but now they appeared to be alarmed.
Addressing the high-placed pair, Martha said, “What’s frightened you?”
“What do you think?” The tone of Edna’s question suggested that they both knew the answer.
“Not Satan,” Martha said impatiently. “With a world to corrupt, why would the prince of Hell be wasting so much time spooking around here—because we make good cakes?”
“He’s the king of Hell and the prince of this world.”
“Royalty has always bored me.”
“Anyway, I never said Satan, dear. I said Sally saw a demon. His name is legion, after all, and he has an army to do his work.”
Regarding the crouched cats on their high redoubt, Martha said, “They never were mousers. They’re a disgrace to their species in that regard.”
“There aren’t any mice in the Pendleton to test them. I’m sure if there were, they’d have left us many little gifts with tails. It wasn’t a mouse that scared them.”
“So it was the thunder.”
“Or not,” said Edna.
Smoke and Ashes reacted simultaneously, heads twitching as one toward a far corner of the room, and they hissed as if they had seen something they detested.
The sisters turned to seek the cause of the cats’ displeasure, and Martha caught the slightest glimpse of something that scurried between an armchair and a large overstuffed chesterfield.
“What was that?” she asked.
“What was what?”
“Something. I saw something.”
Lightning painted the windows, thunder vibrated in the panes, and rain washed them dark again.
After retrieving a long poker from the rack of brass fireplace tools on the hearth, Martha crossed the big room, weaving among an abundance of Victoriana—plump chairs, tables covered with valuable curios, plant stands from which trailed ferns, pedestals presenting busts of classical poets—toward the sofa behind which the small quick intruder seemed to have taken refuge. The hand that gripped the poker ached, but Martha’s swollen and arthritic knuckles remained strong enough that she could club a rat or a potentially dangerous exotic pet if some hopeless fool in the building had let one escape again.
Eight years earlier, a rock-and-roll musician had taken up residence in the Pendleton. He enjoyed three hit songs and one successful national tour before his career collapsed for lack of talent. Before he could drink away, sniff away, or otherwise squander his small fortune, he purchased a second-floor apartment for cash and moved in with a blonde named Bitta who had green hair and breasts as large as a pair of Butterball turkeys. Unknown to the homeowners’ association, with the glamorous couple had come a Gila monster named Cobain, which had the run of their apartment and which had escaped through their front door when they had unthinkingly left it ajar after coming home in the throes of drunken lust, singing bawdy lyrics in the hall. In the following eighteen hours, before the elusive Cobain could be cornered and captured and removed from the premises, pandemonium ensued in the Pendleton.
A year later, after a night of disastrous gambling in Vegas, the rock and roller had lost his money and Bitta. He was long gone from the Pendleton, but this was an age in which fools of many kinds were more plentiful than ever. Martha half expected to find another exotic animal. If it proved to be of a species with wicked teeth and a vicious temperament and evil intentions, she would defend herself with the necessary ferocity, regardless of whether its name was Cobain or Fluffy.
“Whatever are you doing?” Edna asked as Martha, with the poker raised, stalked the intruder.
“Remember Cobain?”
Smoke and Ashes hissed from atop the étagère, though Cobain had been before their time.
“You saw a Gila monster?” Edna asked.
“If that’s what I saw, then I’d have said so. I saw something, I don’t know what.”
“We should call someone.”
“I simply wi
ll not summon an exorcist,” Martha said as she warily rounded the chesterfield.
“I meant the superintendent, Mr. Tran.”
Nothing lurked behind the massive sofa.
Perhaps the thing she had glimpsed darting away from the armchair now hid under the chesterfield. Martha bent forward, probing beneath the furniture with the poker.
Sparkle Sykes
Crossing the living room toward the kitchen with Iris shuffling behind her, eager to call security and report the thing that was no doubt still probing at the bedroom window, Sparkle heard a commotion in the public hallway. A child cried something about a “big bug.”
She changed course, hurried into the foyer, and peered through the fish-eye lens in the door. She saw no one in the south hall, but she heard a woman say urgently, “Come on, the stairs!”
After a hesitation, Sparkle opened the door. To the right, ten feet away, at the junction of the south and west wings, two people moved toward the stairwell door. Twyla Trahern, that nice woman from 2-A, the songwriter with the famous singer husband. Her young son was Winslow or Winston or something. She called him Winny. They were dressed for the storm.
Clearly agitated, the boy was in the lead, but he halted with his hand on the door to the stairs when his mother warned, “Winny, no! Wait.”
Winny said, “I know, I feel it, there’s maybe something waiting on the stairs.”
Startling them, Sparkle asked, “Do you need help?”
When they turned toward her and she saw their faces straight on, they looked exactly like Sparkle felt: perplexed, alarmed, afraid.
Sally Hollander
Paralyzed by the initial bite, with the demon’s long tubular tongue thrust deep in her throat, choking on the cold thick substance that gushed out of that hollow tube and into her, Sally clung to consciousness less as a consequence of extreme terror than because of her intense revulsion. Regardless of her paralysis, she remained desperate to break free and to cleanse herself, for she felt soiled beyond endurance by this creature’s touch, bite, and violation.