by Dean Koontz
When everything around her blurred and then when the blurry shapes, still familiar, were suddenly distorted beyond recognition, and when the squealing seemed perhaps to be coming from inside her head rather than from the walls, when there was an ominous rumbling as well, she thought that she must be having a stroke. She was only twenty-one, with so many dreams and so few of them yet fulfilled, and the unfairness of it was devastating. But even as she turned in place, squinting to make the smeary scene clarify, she thought of her mother and her father, Ganesh, and her brother, Vikram, and Anupama, and of course Sanjay, and was torn by the realization that she might be severely disabled and a burden to them, or that she would impose grief on them by dying, bring pain to those she loved the most. And then the noise stopped and the world became clear again.
Padmini could believe that a blood clot or an aneurysm might destroy her vital brain tissue even though she was so young, but she could not for a moment entertain the idea that she could ever go mad. She was as steady on her course as if she had a gyroscope in her head and was locked on to a satellite-guidance system. Right reason served as her walking stick, common sense her map.
The lobby that abruptly clarified around her in welcome silence was familiar but wrong. The marble floor was cracked and missing a few pieces, dirty, littered with twists of paper and brown shriveled leaves that must have blown in from outside. Of the cove lighting, only two of four LED tubes were still working. The central ceiling fixture hung dark. Additional sulfurous light came from the southeast end of the space, where a human skeleton sat with its back to the junction of the walls; the bones were a half-seen matrix over which had formed an encrustation of something luminous—perhaps a formation of crystals or a fungus, it was hard to see—that also climbed the corner to the ceiling, where it fanned out for a few feet, as if it had fed on the flesh of the dead man and had then stopped growing. This macabre lamp shed a bleak light that reminded her of nightmares she had as a child, passageways of stone through which she stalked—and was stalked by—Kali, the eight-armed Hindu goddess of death and destruction.
This could not be, but it was. As the concierge on duty, her job was to face the facts no matter how unlikely they seemed, accept the challenge, understand the cause, and put things right as quickly as she could. Her mouth was dry, her heart pounding, but her mind clear and her spirit resolute.
When Padmini realized that the lights of Shadow Street were no longer visible beyond the front doors and the flanking windows, she crossed the lobby, grimacing at the condition of the once-beautiful floor, and stepped outside, onto the receiving porch. In the Tiffany canopy, only a few lights remained operative. The rain had stopped. The sky was clear. The air felt ten or fifteen degrees warmer than it should have been on an early-December night. The street, the buildings that had once shared it with the Pendleton, and the rest of the city were gone.
In the moonlight, for a radius of about fifty yards, the hill appeared to be as barren as the surface of the moon. Beyond, in the dead-calm night, wave after wave of what might have been grass gave off a phosphoric light and swayed like sea anemones in the influence of strangely rhythmic currents.
A shriek in the dark turned Padmini’s head in time, and she saw something pale and bizarre flying at her face. Until now she hadn’t realized that in her right hand she still held the fork with which she had been eating Mausi Anupama’s delicious uttapam. In fact, she gripped it so tightly that her knuckles ached. She thrust with the fork and stopped her assailant at arm’s length, driving the tines into the forehead of what, in the glimpse she had of it, seemed to be a grub the size of a three-pound banana squash with leathery wings and a face that was half like that of a hairless cat and half like that of a featherless bird, the eyes radiant silver. The fork put an end to the shriek, and the creature flung itself away from her, looping through the air before flopping to the ground.
Padmini backed out of the night, into the Pendleton’s lobby.
As long as there was a concierge on duty at the reception desk, the front doors were never locked. Padmini locked them anyway.
Mickey Dime
He came out of the north stairs onto the third floor, where the same dreary conditions prevailed as in the basement. Mickey didn’t know what to do about it. He couldn’t fix the situation by killing someone. Or if he could, it didn’t matter, because he didn’t know who to kill to make things like they were supposed to be. Except for Jerry and Klick the Prick, his targets were chosen for him by people he didn’t know, whose faces he’d never seen. Until his phone rang and they gave him a name, he would just have to persevere through these deplorable conditions.
He saw another one of the pulsing blue screens set in the corner near the ceiling, angled to cover both the short west hall and the longer northern one. He decided the robotlike voice on the TV sounded snotty. This time, it was only able to say “Adult male” before Mickey shot out the screen.
At Apartment 3-D, he considered ringing the doorbell. Senator Earl Blandon might know who needed to be killed to set things right. Mickey’s mom had liked the senator. She said the senator’s only fault was that he used his power to ruin his enemies, when he should have used it to obliterate them. The people he ruined were still around to plot against him. On second thought, Mickey decided the senator might not be the best person from whom to seek advice.
As he passed 3-E, another damn blue TV at the end of the hall, past his apartment, near the freight elevator, said, “Adult male. Brown—”
Mickey blasted it, the screen went dark, and while the shot was ringing off the walls, someone behind him called out, “Mr. Dime!”
When he looked back, he saw Bailey Hawks standing in the debris from the first gunshot TV. They knew each other to say hello, nothing more. Hawks was ex-military. He’d been a kind of gunner, you might say, and Mickey suspected that Hawks could smell the gunner in him. He didn’t trust Hawks. He didn’t trust anyone since his mother died. Only hours earlier, his own brother tried to kill him. There was no reason why Hawks wouldn’t try to kill him, too.
“There’s eight of us in the Cupps’ place. We’re going to go floor-to-floor to gather everyone together.”
“Not me,” Mickey said, turned away, and walked to his apartment.
“Mr. Dime! Whatever’s happening, we need to stick together.”
“The strong act, the weak react,” Mickey replied.
“What did you say?”
“What goes up does not have to come down, if you redefine the meaning of down.”
That wasn’t one of his mother’s sayings. Mickey had invented it when he was ten, hoping to please her. He thought the line was good, but she locked him in a closet for twenty-four hours without food or water and with only a jar for a toilet. He learned to appreciate how sensuous darkness could be. He also learned he wasn’t a philosopher or a cultural critic.
Hawks called out again, but Mickey ignored him.
The door to his apartment stood open. The light switch didn’t work. More of that glowing mold or moss or whatever it was. More of it everywhere, the rooms drizzled with a depressing urine-yellow light. Mickey felt pissed on. He really did.
His furniture was gone. Nobody could have stolen all his stuff in the few minutes since he’d been here last.
The furniture must have gone where dead Jerry and Vernon Klick went. He didn’t know where that was. He couldn’t get his arms around the situation.
He stood in his bedroom, pistol in hand, but there was no one to shoot. This new reality, this bad reality, was all around him, out of control, and he needed to make it heel. What had she meant by “choke collar”? What had she meant by “leash”? What had she meant by “heel”? It had all sounded deep and smart and true at the time. But reality wasn’t a dog you could grab by the scruff of the neck.
She was the most admired intellectual of her time. So she must have been right. The fault must be in Mickey. He was too stupid to understand.
He needed to think harder about th
is. Maybe he should close himself in a closet for twenty-four hours with just a jar for a toilet. Maybe he would get his mind right, and the better reality would be back in place, this bad reality gone, when he came out. Maybe. But he didn’t even have a jar.
Julian Sanchez
Most people live in a rushing river of images, a river always at flood stage, surging currents of color, liquid harmonies of form, the occasional chaos of rapids, and they are swept along by this torrent of sights with little or no consideration of how it affects their thoughts, shapes their minds, and influences the itinerary of their lives from the headwaters of birth through the delta of old age. When you considered sensory input as digitized data, fifty percent was received through the eyes, more than the four other senses combined.
During forty years of deepest night, Julian Sanchez had known the world mostly by the shapes and textures that slid beneath his sensitive fingers and by the constant music of life that might at times be merely the soft arrhythmic paradiddle of rain blown against the window and at other times the symphony of a busy city street. He was so sensitive to sounds that when bothered by a buzzing fly, he could more often than not snatch it from the air and fold it in his fist.
He was standing in his kitchen in Apartment 1-A, sipping coffee from a mug and listening to the storm through the window that he had cranked open a few inches, when an electronic squealing, unlike anything he’d heard before, arose around him, its source impossible to pinpoint. With that eerie keening came the rumbling from under the building, which he’d heard previously during the day and about which he had called security to inquire.
When both of those noises faded, Julian knew immediately that something important had happened. The tattoo of rain slanting against glass, the swish and gurgle of water plummeting through a downspout near his kitchen window, the wet-leaf rustle of the courtyard trees, and all the other voices in the storm’s chorus fell silent in an instant. Refrigerator hum, dishwasher churn, icemaker drone, the faint tick of the glass pot expanding and contracting on the warming unit of the coffeemaker: Every familiar sound washed away with the passing of the storm, and the hush was at first profound.
Gone, too, were the familiar smells of his kitchen. No aroma of brewing coffee. No lingering pine scent of the cleaner that the housekeeper used earlier in the day, during her latest twice-a-week visit. No cinnamon scent from the breakfast rolls in the pastry box that should be on the counter nearby.
The half-open window no longer brought him the moist, ozone-crisp smell of the storm or the rich earthen fragrance of wet garden soil. When Julian reached across the sink with his left hand, he discovered that the interior window screen was missing. He felt for the crank handle that operated the left half of the casement window, but it wasn’t there; he found only the socket in which the handle should have been seated. He sought the right-side handle and gripped it, but he grimaced because it was swathed in cobwebs. When he tried to crank it, the mechanism seemed to be frozen.
Mystified, he sidestepped past the sink, and he put down his coffee mug, which didn’t ring off the counter as it should have done, but met the granite with a muffled ponk. Although the housekeeper had left less than two hours earlier, he discovered a thick layer of dust on the stone, and then debris of some kind, what were most likely tatters of rotted rags and what might have been crumbles of fallen plaster that gave off the smell of powdered gypsum and finely ground sand.
When he turned away from the counter to face the room, Julian smelled mildew. Something like stale urine.
His understanding of the space totally changed. He was so familiar with every square foot of the apartment and with the precise placement of the furniture that not only could he get about caneless and without barking his shins or stumbling over anything, but he could also perceive the shapes of things with something like a sixth sense, a kind of psychic radar. This unique perception now told him that the kitchen table and chairs were not where they should have been, that they were gone.
Usually, he didn’t feel his way around with arms outstretched, but he resorted to this technique now, worried not only that the familiar furniture had been removed but also that something else might have been set in its place. The kitchen proved to be as empty as his psychic radar indicated. Sandy grit and larger bits of debris crunched under his shoes.
Julian was proud of living independently and rarely needed to lean on anyone for anything. The weird transformation of the kitchen, however, spooked him. He needed someone with working eyes to come around and explain to him what had happened here.
He patted the pockets of his cardigan sweater and was relieved to find his cell phone where he expected it to be. He pressed the button, listened to the sign-on jingle, and then after a hesitation, entered the number of the concierge. Padmini was supportive without ever giving the slightest indication that a blind man evoked pity in her. Julian loathed being pitied. After entering the number and pressing SEND, he waited with the phone to his right ear … until he became convinced there was no cell service.
Confused and concerned, but not yet afraid, he went to where the doorway to the dining area had always been, and it was still in the same place. On the threshold, Julian heard murmuring voices elsewhere in the apartment, urgent and strange, though he should have been alone.
Fielding Udell
The world was in worse shape than he had imagined in his most wretched speculations. The situation was more like that movie, The Matrix, than Fielding had known. Everything was false, projections of a benign reality beamed into his head by the Ruling Elite, but now their Spin Machine failed, the projections faded, and reality asserted itself. He had imagined domed cities in which the last twenty or thirty million brainwashed citizens were protected from the toxin-choked, superheated, icebound, drought-ridden, storm-wracked, disease-riddled, nuclear-decimated, frogless wasteland that was most of this sorry planet, a poisonous hell where billions of corpses rotted in the fields and streets. But now he saw that he was not in a domed city, not safe under an impenetrable force field, as he had thought.
He had lived in ruins but had been mind-beam persuaded that he dwelt instead in a luxury apartment building. Not even his furniture had been real, for now when the Spin Machine failed, he saw that his rooms were empty of everything except dust and a few dead insects and scraps of age-yellowed paper.
When he went to a window, wiped a film of dust from the glass, and looked down into the courtyard three stories below, he saw in the moonlight not the flowers and the manicured hedges and the well-shaped trees and the fountains that had always been there before, but instead destruction and a primeval sprawl of vegetation. The bowls of the tiered fountains were toppled and broken, like cracked conch shells and pried-open clam shells of immense size. No trees remained. The other plants were not easily studied in the lunar glow, but he could tell that they were not like anything he had seen before; at best they were apostates to the timeless church of Nature, and at worst they were mutations so grotesque as to be demonic, cresting like the waves of a corrupted sea over the winding footpath that meandered from the double doors on the west end to the east wall, where a gate led to the Pendleton’s garages behind the main building.
On other nights, Fielding had been able to see the roof of the converted carriage house rising above the back wall of the courtyard, and beyond that the somewhat higher roofline of the larger garage, which had been added when Belle Vista was converted to the Pendleton. He could see neither structure now, though the full moon should have silvered their slate shingles. The big gate in the courtyard wall sagged open on buckled hinges, but beyond those bent bronze staves there seemed to be nothing but darkness. Nor was there any glow of city lights either above the parapeted roof of the north wing or to the east where the garages should have been.
Wherever his food came from, it wasn’t prepared by Salvatino’s Pizzeria or by any of the other restaurants from which he daily ordered. If the city didn’t exist, which the utter lack of lights suggested, th
en neither did establishments offering home-delivery of tasty meals. When he received those fragrant packages, they evidently came from despicable Minions of the Ruling Elite, and for all he knew, his submarine sandwiches and pasta Bolognese and moo goo gai pan were all the same thing, Soylent Green, flavored to deceive.
Fielding was less frightened than outraged, less outraged than overcome by a profound sense of vindication, for he had been correct all along about the condition of the world, more insightful than he had known. He trembled with righteous indignation.
Movement in the courtyard drew his attention. Something appeared around a bend in the winding walkway, a creature previously concealed by the riot of wicked vegetation. Fielding hissed involuntarily through clenched teeth, because although he didn’t know what kind of beast revealed itself below, he knew at once and without doubt that it was hostile to human life, and evil.
Pale it was but not just pale, also slightly aglow, not because its surface reflected or emitted light, but luminous deep within. It was mostly shadowy shapes infused with slowly pulsing light that was unevenly distributed, jaundice-yellow and methyl-green. The light traveled through its mysterious flesh in slow waves and whorls, at various depths and different levels of intensity, revealing what might have been the dark lumps of internal organs that were more dense than the surrounding tissue. The length of a prowling lion but nearly as tall as a man, it appeared in the inadequate moonlight to be creeping along on insectile but meaty legs similar to those of a Jerusalem cricket. As best Fielding could tell, the body might have been a collection of bulbous forms—swollen bladders, pendulous sacs—all wound about and linked by a segmented something that reminded him of a thick tapeworm. The thing did not move fast, though he was certain that it could quicken considerably in the presence of prey, and it seemed to be focused on the pathway before it, as if following a scent.