by Dean Koontz
For the past three years, he had contributed significant money to all kinds of dog-rescue groups, watched Dogs 101 on Animal Planet, and looked after Biscuit a couple of evenings each week, but now, as he arrived at the north elevator, he made up his mind to get a new companion before Christmas. He often thought that the world would be a better place if dogs were the smartest creatures on the planet and if human beings, with all their pride and desires and hatreds, had never evolved.
When the elevator doors slid open, a tall man in evening clothes exited. He carried himself like royalty at a function of great pomp. Nature had given him a distinguished face with a patrician nose, eyes as blue as pure deep water, a high brow, and snow-white hair.
Kirby stepped back, startled. This stranger’s shirt and face and hair were spattered with fresh blood. “Sir, are you all right? You’ve been hurt.”
The evening clothes were dirty, rumpled, torn in places, as if the man had been in a struggle, perhaps mugged in the street—though he was not rain-soaked. Seeming bewildered, he looked around at the hallway, at the double doors to the Trahern apartment on his left, to the door of the Hawks apartment ahead of him. “What is this place? It’s Belle Vista … yet it isn’t.”
In his voice was more than a note of perplexity, also a tremor of fear and what might have been despair.
On second look, Kirby saw that the noble countenance appeared pale and drawn. Horror crawled in the stricken blue eyes.
“What’s happened to you?” Kirby asked.
“This place … Where is this? How have I gotten here? Where am I?”
Kirby stepped forward to take the bloodied man by one arm, for he seemed wobbly and in need of support.
Before Kirby could touch him, the stranger raised both hands, which were slick with blood. “We almost made it, all untouched,” he muttered, “… and then the spores.”
Retreating again, Kirby said, “Spores?”
“Witness said they were from a benign species, nothing to fear. But he’s part of it all, not to be believed.”
The man’s gaze continued to travel over the walls, the ceiling, and his face wrenched with grievous emotion, as though his perplexity must be rapidly collapsing into a more profound confusion, his powers of perception, memory, and reason slipping away from him.
“I killed them all. The mister and the missus, the children, the staff.”
On consideration, Kirby saw that the suit of evening clothes was not an ordinary tuxedo. It looked more like stylish livery, a uniform that a highly placed servant might wear.
“They were infected, I’m sure of it, so I had to kill them all, even the beautiful children, God help me, I had to kill them all to save the world.”
Overcome by a sudden sense of mortal peril, heart knocking, Kirby backed away from the man, toward the door to the north stairs.
The butler, if that’s what he was, seemed to have no interest in Kirby, to have no malice left. He said, “Now I’ve got to get more ammunition so I can kill myself.” As he crossed the hallway, he began to grow translucent, as if he’d never been real, only an apparition. He disappeared through the wall, into the Hawks apartment.
Although Kirby didn’t believe in ghosts, this might have been one—except for the blood that had dripped off the man’s hands and now stained the hallway runner.
Winny
They couldn’t use the elevator because it was all wrong and there was a big bug in it or something that almost got his hand, and they were afraid of the stairs, so he and his mom took a time-out in the Sykes apartment because there seemed to be nowhere else to go.
Winny knew Mrs. Sykes just from saying hello to each other when they passed in the hallway or down in the lobby, and he knew who Iris was except she never said hello. Iris, who was three years older than Winny, couldn’t tolerate people, not because she thought they were stupid or mean or boring—though a lot of them were—but because she had autism. Winny’s mother said that most of the time, Iris couldn’t bear to be touched and that pretty much all of the time she became really upset if too many people were around. He kind of understood autism because he’d read a little about it, but he totally understood the way Iris felt about people, because he had his own problem. He always seemed to say the wrong thing or a dumb thing, or something that made no sense because he babbled. Iris couldn’t say anything, and Winny didn’t know what to say, so they were sort of in the same boat.
From the way that Mrs. Sykes snapped the thumb-turns of both deadbolts, rattled the security chain in place, and then tested the door to be sure it was locked even though it obviously was, Winny knew that something creepy had recently happened to her, too, and that she was scared.
“Maybe I’m just locking something in with us,” Mrs. Sykes said, “not locking anything out. Anyway, if they can just go through walls, what good is a lock?”
Winny’s mom looked at him, and he made a half-goofy face so she wouldn’t see how much Mrs. Sykes spooked him. Whatever was happening, this was going to be a serious test of his strategies for avoiding the wimp-sissy label.
“I need to show you something,” Mrs. Sykes said. “I hope it’s still there. Or maybe I don’t. No, I do. I hope it’s there. Because if you see the damn thing, too, then I’ll know I’m not losing my mind.”
Winny made another half-goofy face at his mother, but this time it didn’t seem appropriate, as it had been only a moment earlier. Now he not only didn’t know what to say; he also didn’t know what to do with his face, or with his hands for that matter. He put his hands in his jacket pockets, but his face just hung out there for everyone to see.
Leading them across the living room, Mrs. Sykes realized that Iris wasn’t following. The girl just stood there, staring off into space, her hands fisted at her sides. Her mother spoke to her in an odd way that seemed like she was reciting lines of a poem: “ ‘Don’t be frightened. Come with me and don’t be frightened. I’m glad that I can take you to show you the way.’ ”
This time, Iris came with them, though she stayed a few steps behind. They went along a hallway and into a bedroom that must have belonged to her because it was in girl colors and stuffed toys were perched everywhere. Most of the toys were bunnies, a few frogs, a few silly birds, and one dopey squirrel, all plush and soft, none of them animals that, in the real world, had sharp teeth and killed other animals.
Winny was surprised to see so many books, because he thought some autistic kids never read well, maybe not at all. Evidently, Iris read a lot. He knew why. Books were another life. If you were shy and didn’t know what to say and felt you didn’t belong anywhere, books were a way to lead another life, a way to be someone else entirely, to be anyone at all. Winny didn’t know what he would do without his books, except probably go berserk and start killing people and making ashtrays out of their skulls even though he didn’t smoke and never would.
“It’s still there,” Mrs. Sykes said, pointing to a window.
A freaky thing clung to the glass panes in the rain: roughly the shape of a football although bigger, but flat on the bottom, with too many stumpy legs that looked like they were made for walking on another planet, and a face more human than not, except that the face was in its belly.
Part of Winny’s strategy for avoiding a reputation as a sissy was never to look away from the screen during a scary movie. Never ever. He always managed to keep his eyes on even the most gruesome action by conducting a commentary in his head, making fun of bad acting when he saw it, ridiculing idiotic dialogue, and mocking lousy special effects. Often tongue-tied with others, he could chatter nonstop when talking to himself. He also judged every psycho killer or monster on his take-a-dump-in-your-pants-and-run scale, on which the highest score was ten stars. But by being the toughest possible critic, he found that he could diminish the fright effect of any creature that had ever crept across a movie screen, and he never awarded more than six stars, which wasn’t even a pee-in-your-pants score.
The thing on the window was a seven.<
br />
He didn’t pee in his pants, however, and even though his mom cried out in shock and disgust when she saw the creeper, even though Mrs. Sykes said something about it being a mescaline dream, whatever that might be, Winny didn’t make a sound to reveal the fear that quickened through him.
Iris helped him to keep his composure. She didn’t say anything or make eye contact or even move from beside her bed, from which she had snatched a plush-toy bunny with big floppy ears. But her face was tight with anxiety, and she looked so vulnerable that Winny worried more about her than about himself. He didn’t think she had seen the thing on the window, because she wouldn’t make eye contact with him or with anyone, let alone with a monster, and he wanted to be sure she didn’t accidentally get a glimpse of it. Just having a couple of neighbors in her room made her want to go off like a bottle rocket—you could see how she struggled to control herself—so the thing on the window would probably make her blow every cork and strip every gear. Life was hard enough for her, she didn’t need monsters; nobody needed them, but especially not her.
Some of those ghost trains went rumbling beneath the Pendleton again on tracks that didn’t exist, and onto the tall window crawled another creature like the first, the same in every way except that the face in its belly wasn’t a man’s face but a woman’s, maybe even the face of a little girl, twisted like in a funhouse mirror. The lips peeled open, and a tongue fluttered against the glass.
If Winny and his mom had successfully fled the Pendleton, they wouldn’t have escaped whatever was happening. Maybe things were even crazier outside than inside the building.
Discovering an inner strength that surprised him, Winny dashed to the window, seized the pull cord, and drew shut the draperies, so that the monstrosities could no longer see them or be seen.
He said simply, before his mother and Mrs. Sykes could protest, “Iris.”
Martha Cupp
Out of the chesterfield sofa and onto the seat, in a spray of horsehair stuffing, spilled something like tangles of glistening intestines, although they were bloodless and gray. The entrails of any eviscerated mammal would never have spasmed and writhed like these unraveling coils, which seemed not to be part of some violently slashed-open animal but the entire intact animal itself, a long ropey colon of a thing, segmented as if by bands of muscle, as hideous a spectacle as Martha had ever seen either in or out of dreams.
Overcome by abhorrence and detestation even in excess of what she had ever felt toward the Internal Revenue Service, Martha was for a moment paralyzed. She held the poker in both hands, high above her head, and she wanted to strike with it more than she’d wanted anything else in her long life, but her arms were locked, her body unresponsive to her will, immobilized as much by dark wonder as by terror.
Smoke and Ashes shrieked quite unlike the docile cats they had always been. She heard them scrambling off the étagère, flinging themselves through the air, landing with thumps on padded furniture, and squealing their way out of the living room to safer realms.
The west-facing windows filled with the most brilliant barrages of lightning yet, the entire sky ablaze, as if the poles of Heaven and Hell had shifted, the fires of damnation now overhead and God’s angels all tumbled into caverns in the earth. The lamps flickered in sympathy with the flashing night, and a sudden jittering in the viscera-slick mass on the sofa might have been an illusion, the stroboscopic effect of the throbbing light.
The storm went dark and the lamps swelled and steadied to full brightness, revealing that the abomination on the chesterfield was sprouting black tarantula legs from among the sweating loops of its intestinelike body, and not only legs but also a cluster of red beaks that clicked, clicked, clicked as though eager to peck at something and shred it.
Breaking her brief paralysis, Martha swung the fireplace poker, and from her perspective the grotesque creature appeared to shimmer and vanish during the downswing. The brass poker slammed into the chesterfield, and horsehair plumed from between the lips of the rip in the fabric, but there was no satisfying splatter or wounded cry. Overcharged with loathing, fear, and outrage that her home had been invaded, she slammed the poker down again, a third time, and a fourth before she was able to acknowledge the lack of a target. Still furious, totally stoked, half sick with disgust, she refused to accept that the squirming monstrosity had evaporated into thin air. She dropped the poker, grabbed the front of the sofa with both hands, and overturned it, crashing it onto its back, revealing the underside—and no intruder. She saw the ragged hole that the beast had made in the black batting to insert itself into the springs and from there into the upholstery. Snatching up the poker once more, Martha dropped to her knees as if she’d never known a pang of arthritis in her life, and stabbed into the hole in the batting with the brass tool, stabbed this way and that, plucking a discord of brittle pings and twangy flat notes from the springs as though they were the strings of some instrument played only in the Hades Philharmonic, but eliciting not a single squeal from any living thing.
At last she clambered to her feet, still holding the poker even though her inflamed knuckles throbbed. She had broken into a sweat. Damp curls of hair hung in her face. She was breathing hard, and her heart hadn’t beat this fast since she had long ago stopped chasing her second husband around the bedroom.
She turned to her sister for corroboration that what she had seen wasn’t a delusion arising from dementia. Both Edna’s expression and posture confirmed the reality of the incident: Her eyes were hoot-owl wide, mouth formed in a perfect O of unvoiced astonishment.
After a silence, Edna said, “Dear, I haven’t seen you spring into action like that since back in the day when a board-of-directors meeting wasn’t going well and you had to whip them into line.”
Mickey Dime
He took the gun belt off Vernon Klick’s corpse and put it aside on the floor. Someday he would use this pistol in a hit because it was registered to the security service and disappeared with Klick the Prick, which is who they would be looking for when they found it at some future crime scene. A little bit of fun.
Later, Mickey would go into the security-video archives and scrub all the recorded feeds from every camera in the building. He would leave no evidence that his brother, Jerry, had come to visit. No clue about what happened to Vernon Klick. He had covered his trail this way on other occasions, in other cities. He knew how to ensure that the digital video could not be recovered.
He dragged Klick behind him, out of the security room, quickly along the main basement hall to the entrance to the HVAC vault. The corpse was wrapped in a moving blanket, tied with furniture straps. It slid easily on the tiled floor.
Mickey enjoyed the exertion. His trapezius muscles contracted into a solid ridge across his shoulders. His deltoids. His triceps so taut. He was in excellent physical shape. A real hardbody.
When he was at his country cottage, sitting nude in the yard in a summer storm, he liked to feel his muscles, up and down his body. Firmly massage them. Lightly caress them. Slick with rain, as if the storm oiled him. He enjoyed a double pleasure: receiving the caresses and giving them, his hands as thrilled as his body.
He unlocked the door to the HVAC vault with a key that he had taken from Klick. Here were the building’s heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems, as well as the hot-water heaters and bank after bank of breaker boxes. He switched on the lights. He dragged the dead man across the threshold. He closed the door.
The vault was actually a room, a fortified concrete box maybe seventy feet wide and almost forty feet front to back. Rows of seven-foot-tall chillers to the left. Two different sizes of industrial boilers to the right, the larger ones serving the four-pipe, fan-coil heating system that allowed separate controls for every apartment and every public space, the smaller ones—still large—that provided hot water to the residents. In and around and above it all was a maze of pipes, valves, pumps, monitoring devices, and other equipment that Mickey couldn’t identify.
&nbs
p; Tom Tran kept the vault as clean as a hospital surgery. The labyrinthine machinery purred, whined, and thrummed, which was a kind of symphony to Mickey. A symphony of efficiency.
His late mother had said that human beings were just machines engineered by nature, through evolution. You could be either a good machine or a bad machine, but whichever you were had nothing to do with morality. The only standard was efficiency. Good machines did their chosen work efficiently, reliably.
Mickey judged himself an excellent machine. His chosen work was killing other machines of the human kind. Efficient action excited and satisfied him more than sex. Sex involved other people, and they always disappointed him because they were so much less efficient than he was. They were so easily distracted by such nonsense as affection and tenderness. Sex wasn’t about affection and tenderness. The big pumps in this room, laboring ceaselessly, knew more about sex than most people did.
Sparkle Sykes and her daughter intruded vividly in his thoughts again, as that cocktail waitress had done fifteen years earlier. They wouldn’t leave him alone. They came naked into his mind. He banished them, but they were insistent. They had just better back off. They had better stop teasing him.
Dragging Klick, he proceeded to a clear area in the center of the vault. There, inset in the floor, a thick rubber gasket embraced an iron manhole cover. In a few minutes, when Mickey returned with his brother, he would open the manhole and consign both bodies to a final resting place so deep that the remains would never be found. Even graveyard rats would not descend that far for a two-man banquet.
Bailey Hawks
When Bailey threw open the stairwell door on the second floor and crossed the threshold into the hallway, Dr. Kirby Ignis cried out in surprise. His pleasantly rumpled face, no doubt avuncular even in his youth but already grandfatherly at fifty, was pale and damp with a thin film of sweat. Ordinarily, Ignis had about him an air of wisdom and unflappable confidence, but now he appeared to be alarmed, as if he had expected someone other than Bailey to come out of the stairwell, someone hostile, which until today was not an expectation that made sense in a place as safe as the Pendleton.