by Dean Koontz
This apparition was more grotesque than anything Fielding Udell could have dreamed up in a thousand years of nightmares, beyond the power of any hallucinogen to conjure in the mind, more terrifying in its alienness than if a Tyrannosaurus rex had suddenly bounded into the courtyard, mouth agape and bristling with saber-length teeth. He thought of distant stars, of the airless vastness of deep space, of a journey measured in light-years, because the thing in the courtyard surely hadn’t been born on Earth. A chill went through him, through both body and soul, and his palms became damp and cold, as though the icy courage that had sustained his long researches was now melting out of him.
As Fielding stared down at the repulsive vision, transfixed as a rabbit might be by a sudden encounter with a coiled rattlesnake, the thing raised something like a head, a lumpish mass lacking the left-right symmetry of the heads of all animals in nature. It turned up toward him a face that was malignant in two senses: first, that it appeared to be a twisted cancerous mass; second, that it was a mask of perfect evil.
Perhaps it was looking only at the moon, as lunatic as it was misbegotten, but he believed that the thing fixed its gaze on him alone, if the three radiant silver orbs, clustered midface, were in fact eyes. His trance broken, Fielding stepped back from the dirty window, out of sight, certain that he had at last seen one of the elusive Ruling Elite.
Silas Kinsley
In the dismal yellow light, the oily shadows oozed away from the flashlight beam, and the immense room almost seemed to be underwater, the rays from overhead filtering down through countless fathoms. The broken and corroded HVAC equipment hulked and tilted like a sunken ship long settled on an ocean floor.
The vault lay silent but for an elusive susurration that might have been a draft born elsewhere in the building and carried through the maze of pipes that no longer contained water for the heating-cooling system and that were in some places broken or decoupled from their elbow joints. Given the circumstances, Silas wasn’t able to repress the suspicion that he was hearing not merely a draft but instead the whispering of people who were monitoring him from the cover of the defunct machinery. Or if not people, perhaps nearby might wait a creature like the one that Perry Kyser, the contractor, had seen in 1973, the abomination that spoke to him in the tortured voice of the missing painter.
With the guard’s pistol in hand, Silas pressed on, deeper into the labyrinth. He needed to know the full nature of the situation. If he allowed fear to triumph, he would make decisions based on emotion rather than on reason, which would be the quickest way to wind up dead.
The floor drain in this vault seemed to be the delivery system through which a periodic massive discharge of magnetic—or some other kind of—energy caused the present to fold temporarily into the future. Lawyer’s intuition suggested that here at the epicenter, he was more likely than elsewhere to find important clues that, linked together in a chain of evidence, might help him and his neighbors escape a death sentence.
His flashlight played across one of the chillers. The thin sheet-metal housing was pocked with bullet holes, in a few of which spiders had spun miniature webs as if they had been too exhausted to weave architectures with larger perimeters. The farther Silas went, the more punctures and ricochet trails and bullet-shattered gauges he found. He came to a litter of brass cartridge casings, first dozens and then hundreds, through which he stepped with care, inevitably causing a few to roll and to strike from others a faint but melodious ringing like fairy bells.
He expected to find the remains of the combatants around one turn or another, and soon he did, although they were not the remains of men. Lying near each other in an aisle between boilers and water softeners were two skeletons that lacked the angularity and the knobby joints of human bones. These specimens didn’t lie in jumbled, jagged disarray, not in the splay-legged and half-comic posture of tumbled human skeletons, which always appeared to have dropped to the floor at the conclusion of an antic dance. Death-stripped, these bones were graceful, as sleek as the lines of a master calligrapher intent on making visual art from sentences of cursive prose. Perhaps seven feet tall. Two-legged. Extra knuckles and phalanges in their long feet and hands. Six toes on each foot, the first and sixth longer than the other four, good for climbing. Their skulls were not as round as those of human beings, shaped more like large footballs without the pointed ends. Their jaws were long and strong for biting, teeth fearsome, death grins wide and shark-sharp.
The flashlight also revealed that these bones were not white but gray, and even the teeth were gray. The uniform shade suggested that they had always been gray, that this was not discoloration resulting from the passage of much time or from the stains left by decomposing flesh. When Silas crouched and lifted one of the arms, it felt much lighter than bone, but when he let it drop, it rang off the concrete with an almost metallic sound.
Not far from the first two skeletons, he found three more like them. From the bones, he could extrapolate with confidence that these creatures had been strong, agile, and very fast. Even in death, their teeth said predator.
Finally, in the southwest corner of the long room, he discovered fourteen human skeletons sitting with their backs to the wall, ten adults and four children. No flesh clung to their bones, and in the perpetual dampness of the vault, most of their clothes had rotted away, as well. Having received the rich fluids of decomposition, the concrete around them was dark and mottled. Although much time had passed since these luckless people met their end, Silas thought he could still smell a faint ghost of putrefaction, an olfactory haunting in this deeply spectral place.
One of the adult skeletons still bit on the barrel of a pistol-grip, pump-action shotgun that had not dislodged when it blew out the back of the head. Two other adults lay with shotguns. Enduring stains on the wall led Silas to have a closer look at all fourteen, and he discovered exit wounds in the back of every skull. Here at the bottom of the building, in the windowless vault, they had made their final stand against the predators—saving the last of their ammunition for themselves. The adults apparently killed the children first to spare them whatever horrors the predators would have wrought upon them.
Perhaps these people had been the last generation of Pendleton residents, before the building had fallen into ruin. And now Silas could no longer avoid a question that he had been reluctant to ask, could not further delay going upstairs to seek the answer: If this great house had come to such a bitter end and if fantastic beasts of unknown origin stalked its rooms, what had happened to the rest of the world?
One
I am the One, and I see all.
But the blind man in Apartment 1-A is blind in many ways, as are all human beings, even those with functioning eyes. They are blind to their folly, to their ignorance, to their history, to the future that they will make for themselves. A future born of self-loathing.
Even those who know that the twenty universal constants ensure a universe that will support life, who know intellectually as well as intuitively that the human race must be exceptional and must be graced with a destiny, even they are capable of hating not only others of their kind but also their kind in general. Some are capable of such self-loathing that they fantasize a world without humanity and take comfort from that dream.
The concierge is not one of them, but she will die with the others, with the billions who will perish between her present and my present, which is her future. She might have gone far in the hospitality business, but the material success her kind pursues cannot provide her life with meaning. She is one of those who, had she not been cast into my kingdom, might have found her meaning in time. She might have become one of those who would stand up against the misanthropes, the people haters, to save humanity. But there are too few of her, too few with her insight and drive and tenderness of heart; for humanity to survive, it cannot afford to lose even one like her. But she is now mine.
27
Here and There
Bailey Hawks
Bailey watched
Dime disappear into his apartment. Something was wrong with the guy. Maybe the stress of this event already snapped him, though that would mean he was less flexible psychologically than young Winny. Dime never seemed interested in others living in the Pendleton, never agreed to serve on the board or on any committee, never attended the Christmas social in the banquet room. He spoke to you in the halls if you happened to pass him, but only by comparison to a monk who had taken a vow of silence could the guy be called a conversationalist.
He had a pistol. He’d shot out two peculiar blue screens that had not been in this hallway before what Twyla Trahern called “the leap.” When Bailey had suggested that the best plan would be to round up other residents and thereafter stick together, Dime had disagreed in a tone of voice that was at least dismissive if not hostile. And part of what he’d said—What goes up does not have to come down, if you redefine the meaning of down—made no sense.
Bailey decided they would start the search for other neighbors in the south wing of the third floor, then move downstairs, coming back to this north wing only after Dime had some time to get a grip on himself, assuming there was any grip to get. Anyway, Bernard Abronowitz, who lived alone in 3-E, was currently in the hospital and therefore hadn’t made this trip through time with them. Senator Blandon, in 3-D, was likely to be halfway to drunk by this hour and less amiable than Mickey Dime; leaving the politician until later might also be wise.
“What was that all about?” Kirby Ignis asked, evidently having come out of the Cupps’ front door in time to overhear Bailey’s exchange with Dime.
“I don’t know. We’ll give him some time to adjust, cool down. Before we search the south wing, let’s see if Silas is here.”
The attorney’s apartment was the front corner unit, next to the Cupps. Bailey pressed the bell push but heard no chimes inside. A knock went unanswered. The door proved to be unlocked—in fact the lock wasn’t functioning—and when Silas didn’t reply to Bailey’s “Anyone home?” he and Kirby stepped inside to search the old man’s rooms.
Kirby carried a flashlight that he had borrowed from Twyla Trahern, which still left the women and children with Sparkle’s flashlight, and Martha had her pistol. Remembering the women’s hurried but vivid description of creatures they had seen, remembering Sally’s demon in the pantry, with the mysterious swimmer remaining clear in his mind from their early-morning encounter, Bailey kept a two-hand grip on his 9-mm Beretta.
Like other rooms they had seen since the leap, the attorney’s spaces were unfurnished, shabby, dirty, moldy, and long abandoned, lying in the half-light emitted by the fungus or whatever it was, an exhausted light that a dying sun might produce. Kirby had no police or military background, but he was smart and quick to recognize why his armed partner proceeded as he did. Inferring what was wanted of him, he accompanied Bailey as though they had teamed for searches before, clearing the apartment chamber by chamber.
Approaching the last room, the master bath, they saw within it a weaker dark-urine light than elsewhere. Step by step the smell of mold, mild but pervasive in this Pendleton, grew more pungent and seemed to lend the air a taste as well as a scent. When they stopped at the threshold, the flashlight beam probed beyond, revealing what might have been an abstract-art installation by a deranged sculptor: pale-green, black-mottled snakelike shapes that lined the walls, unmoving but sinuous, as if abruptly paralyzed in the act of seething copulation, snugged together on the vertical surfaces but spilling also onto part of the floor, a nest in torpor, in a winter dormancy. At several points in this hideous mass, clusters of mushrooms of the same coloration, some as big as one of Bailey’s fists but others as big as two, rose on thick stems, a puckered formation like the mouth of a drawstring purse at the crown of each bell-shaped cap.
“Two different forms,” Kirby Ignis said, “but all the same organism.”
“Organism? You mean animal?”
“Fungus is an organism. I’d say that’s what this is.”
“Not ambulatory though, like the things the others saw.”
“I don’t advise stepping in there to find out.”
Although the snake forms did not suddenly become mobile, they began to throb, as if lumps of something were passing through them, as if they were indeed snakes and were swallowing a series of mice.
Tom Tran
Protected by a black-vinyl slicker and a floppy-brimmed rain hat, Tom Tran had just minutes earlier stepped out of the converted carriage house into the cobbled passageway between that building and the Pendleton, pulling the door shut behind him, and he had taken but one step when the storm didn’t just relent but switched off. Abruptly rain stopped falling, the cobblestones were dry, and the cloudless sky was salted with stars and bright with a full moon.
Confused, his hat and slicker still dripping, Tom had turned in a circle—and had discovered that the carriage house was not there anymore, nor the new and larger garage behind it. At each end of the cobbled passage should have been gates between the Pendleton and the back building, one leading to an alley, the other opening to a narrow walkway. They were there, all right, hanging from eight-foot-high pony walls that protruded from the main building, but the bronze-work was twisted, missing staves, sagging on half-broken hinges, no longer connected to the missing carriage house.
Belatedly, Tom had realized that past the vanished buildings, across the top of Shadow Hill and beyond, the entire eastern reaches of the city were no longer aglow … were not even there. The night to the east appeared vast and trackless, and in places shimmered with pools of milky moonlight that revealed nothing, that looked wet and misty, as if they were spirit lakes in an eerie afterlife landscape.
As a boy, Tom Tran learned that Death wore many costumes, not just a black robe with a cowl, and hid behind an infinite number of faces. Death was everywhere, he was legion, and you couldn’t escape his attention, but in some places he manifested in greater numbers than in others. Tom sensed that to the east, in that inexplicable new immensity of darkness, entire armies of Death were hidden, and every field and forest was a killing ground.
The damaged gate in the back wall of the courtyard also hung open and askew, one of the three hinges torn loose of the masonry and the other two lumpy with corrosion. The Pendleton appeared to have been abandoned for decades, and Tom wondered crazily if he would be haggard and aged far beyond his years if he looked in a mirror.
No landscape lighting brightened the courtyard, and in the windows of the three embracing wings of the Pendleton, the lights were not only dimmer than usual but also a dragon-eye yellow that he had never seen before. The trees were gone, fountains tumbled, gardens overgrown with plants that, in the moonlight, he could not identify.
Tom felt not himself to the same degree that his world was not itself at the moment, and he wandered along the footpath, bewildered and trembling, as if he were a character in one of those folktales of spirits and ghosts and gods that his mother had told him when he was a child in Vietnam so long ago. He could have been wandering through a twisted version of “The Search for the Land of Bliss” or “The Raven’s Magic Gem,” or “The House of Forever.” Something like tall bamboo, but fleshy rather than hard and with long aerial roots, canopied the footpath here and there. Each time one of those dangling roots brushed his face, it seemed to have animal life, stroking his cheek or curling into an ear, or teasing a nostril, and he brushed it away, chilled by the contact, shuddering.
He reached the doors between the courtyard and the ground-floor west hall, just opposite the inner doors of the lobby, fished his keys from a pocket of his slicker, and was about to let himself into the Pendleton when he heard noises behind him, short gasps like something venting under pressure but wound through with a prolonged hiss. There were clopping-scraping sounds, as well, as if a weary horse were dropping its heavy hooves and dragging each one a bit before finding the energy to lift it again.
When Tom turned to look back along the moonlit footpath, he saw nothing that might be
the source of those noises, but movement at a third-floor window in the south wing drew his attention. Backdropped by dragon light, the ghostly white face at the French panes belonged to Fielding Udell, who might have been unaware of Tom. At the very moment that Udell reacted to something that he had seen farther east in the courtyard, the clopping-scraping ceased to echo through the night. The hissing and the pressurized venting didn’t stop, but the rhythm and the character of those disturbing sounds changed. With a sudden movement that clearly expressed his fear of being seen, Udell stepped back from the window. A moment later the clopping-scraping began again. Whatever had alarmed Udell now approached Tom along the winding footpath, still out of sight beyond the tall vegetation and beyond a turn or two.
He faced the doors again, inserted his key—and discovered that it didn’t work. He jiggled it in the keyway, slid it in and out, tried again, but had no luck. Either the lock had deteriorated with the rest of the building or a locksmith had changed it.
Behind him, a voice cried out, as shrill as that of a squealing child, an impatient and petulant child, and as Tom turned to confront whatever it might be, a second cry sounded angrier than the first—and needful. Thirty feet away, a creature with half a dozen legs, Tom’s height and at least twice his bulk, crabbed around a turn in the footpath, brushing through the vegetation that crowded it.
Either the gates of Hell had opened or Tom had lost his mind, for there could be nothing like this entity outside the precincts of the damned except in the fevered fantasies of a raving paranoid psychopath.