by Dean Koontz
From the hallway beyond the open door, a computer voice again described Mickey Dime and announced his location. It might also have called for his extermination, as before, but another shot rang out, followed by silence.
Cautiously, Silas moved through the forest of machines and into the clearing at the center of which lay the manhole. The wrapped body of the guard and the hand truck with its burden were gone, which must mean that they had not made the leap from the Pendleton of 2011 to this later version of the building.
He had seen the iron cover explode off the manhole and to the ceiling, then fall and roll away into the gloom, as if the Fates were reluctant to call heads or tails, yet now the disc was in place. He supposed the hole remained uncovered in 2011, where that event had occurred. Between then and now, repairs must have been made to the hinges.
Still holding the pistol in his right hand, with his left he flipped up the ring-grip from its niche and pulled the heavy rusted cover aside. The gasket had deteriorated. Chunks of crumbling rubber fell away into the darkness below.
Rising from the lava pipe, something fluttered against his face, and he recoiled before he realized that it was nothing alive, nothing of substance. No draft would wash across him in such tight rhythmic waves; therefore, it must be pulses of some energy, perhaps a weak lingering residue of the great rushing blueness that had gushed out of the hole earlier. Far down in the shaft, scattered snakes of blue light formed, wriggled around the curving surface, were extinguished, and new ones were born. As the energy fluttered against him, he felt his belt buckle hum against his abdomen, and in his shirt pocket, his metal-rimmed reading glasses twitched feebly.
If part of the explanation for this event involved a magnetic field, he supposed that the lava pipe must be the upper section of a complicated transmission line leading all the way down to the very magnetic core of the earth itself. But he could not begin to imagine why only living creatures and their immediate possessions were flung forward in time, though that was evidently the case.
However it happened, they weren’t stranded here. Andrew North Pendleton had made it home again to his time, even if his wife and children did not. Of the nine members of the Ostock family and the seven members of their household staff who had been brought to this future, five of the former and three of the latter had returned to 1935 after their ordeal here—although only to be murdered by the butler, Nolan Tolliver.
With his left hand, he fished from a pocket the small flashlight that he had taken from the guard’s utility belt in the security room, before the change. He intended to make his way upstairs, where other residents must be reeling from the shock of what had happened. The history that he would share might give them a little hope if nothing else: We will go home again, those of us who live until the event reverses itself. A little hope but not a certainty.
The crisp beam of the LED flashlight revealed scattered bones and skulls—and a few complete skeletons—of rats. They were white hieroglyphics on the gray floor, symbols awaiting translation.
Perhaps the pistol gave Silas a foolish kind of courage, but when intuition told him there was something important to discover here before he went upstairs, he hesitated only briefly before moving away from the door to the hall. Without all the facts, you couldn’t win in a courtroom, and in this case, his life and those of all his neighbors were on trial.
He stepped carefully to avoid crushing the rat bones underfoot, proceeding deeper into the enormous room, playing the light across the hulking machines. When the beam touched a formation of luminous fungi, the colony throbbed more brightly for a moment, and there was a sensuous quality to its response, as if it took pleasure from the contact or perhaps knew pain.
Sparkle Sykes
Standing at the windows of the Cupps’ living room, watching the plain of luminous pale-green grass sway in the moonlight as if timing its changes of direction to a lazy metronome, listening to the urgent conversation of the others, Sparkle felt that she would get through this alive, that however she was meant to die, this was not the night or the place.
If some power so colossal as to change reality could bring them here, wherever here might be, then it could take them back again to where they had begun, to where they belonged. Life-changing lightning of the figurative kind could strike in series, just like the real father-killing, mother-killing kind.
A sense of the uncanny prickled the nape of her neck, but that was a reaction to the deep strangeness of the scene, not a symptom of fear. She had no fear for herself. Her life had been so shot through with bolts of fate that of necessity she long ago resigned herself to destiny, controlling what she could and refusing to worry about the rest. She had allowed herself to be afraid only of the lightning that killed her father and her mother, and now even that terror was behind her. If suddenly they found themselves in the lovely Pendleton as it ought to be, with a fierce storm raging over the city, she would go downstairs and into the courtyard, to stand gazing up calmly and with complete trust at the sky, confident that however she might be meant to meet her death, it would not take her until the moment that, from her birth, it had been ordained to do so.
Professor Talman Ringhals, mescaline poisoning, Iris, and other metaphorical lightning strikes blazed new paths through life for Sparkle, and this bizarre event was just the latest. She accepted it quicker than did her neighbors because for some months she had felt that she was overdue for another bolt.
Nearly thirteen years earlier, when she found herself pregnant with Iris, her small inheritance no longer was sufficient to pay both living expenses and tuition. She dropped out of college, intending to get a job as a receptionist or clerk. Although she had never before bought a lottery ticket, she purchased two on the same day, and the second one paid her $245,000 only one week later. After taxes, her nest egg was enough to carry her for four or five years, even with the special care that Iris required; therefore, she decided not to return to the university, but instead embarked upon the work that she had hoped to pursue since shortly after she was orphaned on that stormy day in Maine.
Three years after the lottery, a new kind of lightning struck Sparkle when her work was spectacularly rewarded, whereupon she decided that this world was a place of deep mystery and enchantment, with occasional episodes of terror to give it texture. Death was merely the price of admission, cheap if you considered all that it bought you. Fearing death meant also fearing life, which stole all meaning from the act of living.
Until the improbable event this evening, she allowed herself the fear of lightning because she felt that to have no fear for oneself would be to tempt the Fates and invite calamity. Now, with no fear of anything, she was left only with fear for Iris, because the girl seemed to be a lightning rod upon which the Fates focused when they were in a bad mood. Losing her daughter might be the bolt that killed Sparkle, too, because she found it difficult to imagine how she could still be enchanted by the world if this difficult but most innocent girl was taken from her.
Iris stood apart from her mother, back to the windows, and the boy, Winny, stayed near her but at just enough distance to make it clear that he understood her need to maintain a certain personal space, a defense line against the world. Winny had a quality that Sparkle could not quite define, a winsomeness that would one day outlast his shyness.
With apparent effort, the boy even contributed to the group discussion, mentioning the parallel universes that he read about in some of his favorite novels, other Earths existing side by side with our own, some of them only slightly altered from ours, but others radically different.
Sparkle didn’t read novels of that kind. But for a few decades, fantasy fiction, in books and films, had so dominated the culture that it was impossible not to be somewhat familiar with the fantastic concepts that her neighbors now raised for consideration, one after the other. They talked urgently, interrupting one another until she was reminded of a Star Trek club meeting that she had chanced upon one evening in college, where the true nature of
Klingons—or some topic equally profound—was being debated with such passion and in such quasi-scientific language that the two dozen participants sounded only half mad.
Hugging herself to ward off a chill that was internal, Sparkle turned from the windows and from the eerie meadows beyond, facing her neighbors. Except for the two children, who remained to one side, the others—Dr. Kirby Ignis, Bailey, Twyla, and the sisters Cupp—stood in a circle. They had no furniture on which to sit, and the wood floor was splintered, dirty, encrusted here and there with foul-looking mold.
Dr. Ignis, whom Sparkle didn’t know well, took control by virtue of his grandfatherly demeanor, which was calming, also by asserting that parallel worlds were theoretical and, in his opinion, highly problematic. He said, “The concept arose in the first place as a kind of desperate explanation of why our universe is meticulously ordered to make life inevitable.”
“Why would anyone need an explanation?” Edna Cupp asked. “What is simply is.”
“Yes, but you see, there are twenty universal constants from Planck’s minimums of time and space to gravitational fine structure, and if any one of them was the very slightest bit different from what it is, the universe would be a wildly disordered place incapable of forming galaxies, solar systems, or planets, incapable of supporting any kind of life. The odds of the universe being as hospitable as ours is … well, it’s impossible, quadrillions of trillions to one.”
“What is … is,” Edna repeated.
“Yes, but the highly specific nature of these constants implies design, in fact insists upon it. Science cannot, will not, tolerate the concept of a designer of the universe.”
“I tolerate it well enough,” Edna declared.
“My point is,” Ignis continued, “the likelihood of all twenty universal constants being what they are is so small that to explain our life-supporting universe without resorting to a designer, some physicists have supposed that there must be an infinite number of universes, not merely ours. If among trillions and trillions and trillions of universes there is one—our own—with those twenty constants precisely set to support order and life, then it’s likely that we’re the product of chance rather than of a designer.”
With one dismissive gesture, Ignis swatted away that theory as he might swat away an annoying fly, and he continued, “Whatever you care to believe, it’s a waste of time thinking that we might have been transported to some parallel world. This is our universe, our Earth, at some point in the far future. The things some of you have seen, the alien landscape we’ve all seen beyond those windows, are either the products of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution or they result from some unimaginably catastrophic event that brought worldwide change in but several centuries.”
“This Pendleton is in regrettable condition,” Martha Cupp said, “but it hasn’t been here even for several centuries, certainly not for hundreds of thousands of years.”
“The city is gone,” Ignis reminded her. “A metropolis doesn’t collapse, crumble, and give way to grassland in mere decades.”
“Why is the Pendleton still standing—and nothing else?” Bailey Hawks asked. He indicated the seven of the twelve bronze sconces that had evidently been installed after the Cupps’ apartment was sold to a new owner and that still produced light. “Where does the power come from? And why would those bulbs work after centuries? Are there any people left in this future? If so, where are they? If there aren’t any people … who generates the electricity?”
They looked at one another, but no one offered a theory.
Then Twyla said, “We aren’t here permanently, are we? We can’t be. There’s got to be a way home.”
“The door to home won’t be one we can open at will,” Dr. Ignis said. “Any more than we opened the one that brought us here. It’ll do what it’ll do when the conditions are right.”
“What conditions?” Twyla asked.
Dr. Ignis shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Twyla said, “And why did only people make this … this leap?”
“People and cats,” Edna said as two handsome blue-gray felines warily entered from another room. She scooped one of them into her arms, but her sister didn’t want to put down her pistol to cuddle the other, so it let Dr. Ignis pluck it off the floor.
“Cats and people,” Twyla said. “And anything we were wearing or carrying. But nothing else.”
“Every living thing emits a weak direct-current electromagnetic field,” Dr. Ignis said. “Maybe that has something to do with it. Whatever’s immediately within a living thing’s electromagnetic field might be affected.”
“People have disappeared from the Pendleton before,” Martha Cupp declared. “Andrew Pendleton’s children, back in the late 1890s.”
“Weren’t they kidnapped?” Sparkle asked.
Martha said, “The wife and the two children. Kidnapping was the story, but they were never seen again. Disappeared. I don’t know the details. Silas Kinsley. He lives next door. He’s the self-appointed historian of the Pendleton. He said something once about violence occurring here every … I think it was every thirty-eight years. It sounded very tacky tabloid to me, and I didn’t encourage him. I think now we better talk to Silas.”
Dr. Ignis said, “We’re going to have to explore, learn what we can. The less we understand our situation”—he glanced at the children—“the less we’re likely to come through this as well as we’d like.”
“Sally,” Edna Cupp said. “Sally Hollander. She really saw what she said she saw in the pantry. She’s alone down on the ground floor. We’ve got to get her.”
“We will,” Bailey said. “We should search the building floor-by-floor, find out who else is here. Maybe there’s not safety in numbers, but there’s at least the feeling of safety.”
Padmini Bahrati
Just before the world went away, Padmini was sitting on a stool behind the reception counter, taking a break, eating some of her mausi’s homemade uttapam, a rice-and-lentil dish. She wondered how her aunt could be such a far better cook than her mother, considering that they were sisters trained by their mother in the same kitchen. To Mausi Anupama, food was like paint and canvas to an artist, but to Padmini’s mother, Subhadra, food was a necessity and the preparation of it was often an annoying distraction.
Subhadra was a mathematician and a famous one, to the extent that mathematicians were ever famous. There were no American Idols on TV celebrating math whizzes instead of singers, and mathematicians were never surrounded by squads of bodyguards and rushed through screaming crowds of fans to limousines. In no danger of being famous, Anupama happily experimented with food, seeking to devise new and better dishes. Subhadra regarded a recipe as a structural engineer regarded the specs for building a bridge, with a sober recognition that one small mistake could lead to a fatal collapse; she measured each ingredient precisely, followed each instruction as literally as might be humanly possible, but even when she used Anupama’s recipes, Subhadra produced an edible though unexciting dinner. On the other hand, Anupama couldn’t balance a checkbook, and Subhadra had ten honorary doctorates in mathematics in addition to the one she had earned.
The lesson that Padmini took from the successful lives of Mausi Anupama and her mother was that, whatever you did, you must do it with passion and total commitment. Padmini was twenty-one, in her first job, after earning a degree in hotel management. She intended to spend two years at the Pendleton, move on to be concierge at a luxury hotel, work her way up to general manager, and one day own a significant hotel of her own. She liked people, she enjoyed solving problems for them and making them happy, and she was good at both math and cooking.
Sanjay, her boyfriend, said she had the right look, too, that she was phatakdi, as sexy as a firecracker, yet with such dignity and class and sisterly charm that she would never inspire envy in other women. Sanjay just wanted to chodo, a word Padmini would never speak aloud in any language. If Sanjay had to choose between food and chodo, he’d probably
die of starvation. But he was a good boy, serious about his own career, and she had never known him to lie, not even to get his ever-ready lauda where he wanted it to be.
If looks were an advantage for a concierge and a hotel manager and—ultimately—a hotel owner, they could be a hindrance sometimes. Senator Blandon had taken special notice of her, and his idea of flirting was to tell inappropriate jokes that were just short of smutty and that made her blush. He also found someone who gave him words he could say to her to show that he was cool with her culture. Sometimes he said she was one of the apsaras, which were heavenly nymphs, or he called her batasha, which was candied sugar. He called her Bibi Padmini, which merely meant “Miss.” But whoever was feeding him these words must have had contempt for him, because Blandon also unwittingly called her bhajiyas, which was a fried snack, and akha anda, which meant a “total egg,” and chotti gadda, which meant “little mattress.” He was a supreme test of her patience and composure, but she managed always to pretend to be flattered by his inept attempts to employ the languages of India, and she never laughed in his face.
Thus far on her current shift, Padmini hadn’t encountered the senator, which she took to be divine providence, but at 5:51 by her watch, something worse happened. An electronic squeal abruptly issued from all around her, startling her up from the stool. The magazine she was reading, Hotelier, slid onto the floor. She pushed through the gate, from behind the reception counter, into the lobby. When the fire alarm was tested, it issued an electronic bleat, but this was nothing like that. Nevertheless, Padmini knew that such a shrillness couldn’t mean anything good.