by Dean Koontz
Sparkle Sykes
Smoke and Ashes once looked almost identical, with only the slightest difference in the tweak of their ears, in the color of their chest coats. But when Edna noticed what was happening to them and when everyone else saw it a split second after Edna made a strangled sound of revulsion, Smoke and Ashes didn’t even look much like cats anymore, let alone like each other. Something had gotten into them, and now it was coming out, and as it expressed itself, it seemed to change the very substance of them. They metamorphosed in different ways, similar only in that they were both bristling figures of biological chaos: lizard folded in with spider, pig-mean face, eye stacked above eye, mouth above snout, quivering antennas sprouting, scorpion tail.… In spite of being a novelist and a successful one, Sparkle didn’t often see literature in life the way that she saw life in literature, but this reminded her of some works of Thomas Pynchon, six genres in the same book, horror blooming out of horror with a feverish delight in the nihilistic outrageousness of it all.
For ten seconds she was paralyzed by and mesmerized by the new but not improved Smoke and Ashes. Then she turned to Iris, reaching out for the girl in spite of the panic that a touch might trigger, but Iris wasn’t where she had been—or anywhere—as if she had imagined the forest so vividly that she passed through a magic doorway to be with the deer. And Winny with her.
Twyla realized the kids were gone in the same instant that Sparkle made that discovery, and the terror they exchanged in a glance was like lightning leaping from the eyes of one to the eyes of the other. They would have been on the move a microsecond later, shouting for her girl, her boy, searching desperately through this time-whacked Pendleton, this unfunhouse, but they were driven to each other in sisterly defense when the not-Smoke and was-Ashes went ballistic.
Julian Sanchez
Over the past forty years, he made his peace with blindness, and the dark became his friend. Without visual stimuli to distract him, good music was a grand architecture of sound through which he walked. Audio books were worlds in which he lived so fully that he might have left his footprints in them. And when he contemplated himself, life, and what might come after, he traveled deeper into those darknesses than most men with sight might have done, where he discovered a light invisible, the lamp by which he found his way unfalteringly through the years.
Now, ear to the plaster, listening to the menacing voices that came from within the walls, Julian relied upon that lamp within to prevent his dread from darkening into full-blown fright. Ignorance was the father of panic, knowledge the father of peace, and he needed to locate neighbors who could explain what was happening.
He felt along the wall, into the foyer, to the front door, which stood ajar although he had left it locked. If furniture could vanish in an instant, if clean surfaces could become filthy from one moment to the next, there was no point worrying how locks could unlock themselves.
Always before, when he ventured out of his apartment, he took his white cane, because he didn’t know the whole world as well as he knew his rooms. But the cane no longer leaned against the foyer table, and he saw no reason to search for it on the floor because the table was gone, too. The cane hadn’t fallen or been misplaced, but had vanished with everything else.
The voices in the walls fell silent when Julian crossed the threshold into the public hallway. This space felt different from before, hollow and unwelcoming. He supposed that the console tables, the paintings, and the carpet runner were gone. Competing odors wove among one another: a thin astringent smell that he couldn’t identify, a vague rancidity that might have been cooking oil so long exposed to the air that it congealed into a thin paste, something like the brittle pages of time-yellowed books, dust, mildew.…
For a moment, he sensed that he was not alone. But then he was not sure about that. And then the hallway seemed deserted. In this strange new environment, his blind-man instincts weren’t as reliable as usual.
His initial intention was to turn right, proceed to the back of the north hall, to Apartment 1-C, where his friend Sally Hollander should be home at that hour. The apartment between his and hers was without a tenant, the owner having died several months earlier, the estate not yet settled.
But then he heard low voices speaking English, nothing like those sinister mutterings earlier, and they seemed to come from just around the corner in the west corridor. As he felt his way toward the junction, the wallpaper cracked and crumbled under his sliding hand, as if it were ancient. He found the open door to the small office used by the head concierge, and he eased past it.
On this ground floor, the ceilings in the public spaces, even in the corridors, were twelve feet high. As he arrived at the corner, he thought that he detected a stealthy sound overhead. He halted, listened, but heard nothing more from up there. Imagination.
Among the nearby voices, Julian recognized the melodic tones of Padmini Bahrati. Relieved to have found help, he proceeded to the corner and turned left into the west corridor.
“Padmini, something’s very wrong,” Julian said, and as he spoke, chips of what might have been ceiling plaster dribbled down on his head and shoulders.
Twyla Trahern
Winny and Iris had not been taken. They had run in fright. That was an article of faith with Twyla. She would not doubt it. They had run, they had not been taken, they had run.
No element of a cat remained recognizable in the two shrieking creatures, each a grotesque miscellany of parts, like a drunkard’s lifetime of DT nightmares snarled together, each still changing, perhaps ceaselessly changing, flexing, contracting, morphing. Eye sockets full of gnashing teeth, the lips of a mouth parting to reveal a bloody eye, impossible combinations metamorphosed with impossible rapidity into greater impossibilities, as if newt and bat and toad and more were recombining under a spell in a witch’s cauldron.
The beasts flung themselves across the room in herky-jerky movements, with none of the grace of the cats they had once been, chittering and squealing and hissing, but even their hisses were not catlike. They seemed to be as dysfunctional as they were malformed, but nonetheless terrifying. They bristled, quivered, full of feverish insectile energy, changing direction so suddenly that they appeared to be repeatedly and violently ricocheting off invisible barriers.
Weaponless but committed to mutual defense, Twyla and Sparkle moved together, trying to stay out of the way of those unpredictable horrors, which in spite of their awkward construction were as fast as water bugs. Each time it seemed that the women might be able to dash out of the room, they were harried in the other direction when one of the miscreations scuttled between them and the archway.
Martha had the gun, she clearly wanted to use it, except the things moved so fast and erratically that she couldn’t track them. Twyla could see that shooting one of them would be as difficult as killing a darting hummingbird with a slingshot and a stone, which as a little girl she had once seen cruel boys trying to do; the boys didn’t get a bird, but one of them popped the other in the forehead and dropped him unconscious in a heap. Trying to keep the train of her dinner gown off the floor and her long skirt tight around her even as she dodged this way and that, Edna had become separated from her sister. Twyla and Sparkle were in yet another part of the room. If Martha dared to squeeze off a shot, she might inadvertently blast someone instead of something.
It was unspoken but understood that Twyla and Sparkle intended to bolt after Winny and Iris at the first opportunity, and if one of them didn’t get out of this room alive, the other would go after both kids, all of them one family now, destined either to survive together or die together, nobody to be abandoned regardless of the cost.
The things that had been cats ricocheted off different invisible barriers and hard into each other, squalled furiously for a moment, their rage demonic, flung themselves away from each other—and seemed to collapse, shuddering, as if spent.
Amazed to have escaped untouched, Twyla and Sparkle moved at once toward the archway through whi
ch the kids must have gone.
Martha Cupp said, “Wait! Here, take the pistol.”
Glancing at the twitching monstrosities, Twyla said, “Keep it, you need it.”
“No,” Edna insisted. “The children matter more than we do.”
“Come with us.”
“We’ll slow you down,” Martha said, now holding the pistol by the barrel, circling the two small beasts. “You know how to shoot?”
“Daddy had guns,” Twyla said. “I hunted some, but it’s been a long time.”
Thrusting the pistol into Twyla’s hands, Martha said, “Go, go, find them!”
Padmini Bahrati
Bits of the glowing stuff twinkled down through yellow shadows onto Mr. Sanchez’s head and shoulders. Only then did Padmini realize that something large crawled on the ceiling.
In truth, the apparition in the courtyard, from which she had rescued Tom Tran, wasn’t anything like the rakshasa, that vicious race of demons in Hindu mythology, but the thing that launched itself off the hallway ceiling and onto Julian Sanchez’s back looked more the role. Lean but strong, gray and hairless, bullet head, fierce teeth, six-fingered hands of wicked configuration: Its kind might exist in any spiritual underworld ever conceived.
After a moment of shock and confusion, the two flashlight beams thrust, parried, met on point, revealing Mr. Sanchez driven to his knees, the demon on his back, the claws of its feet locked into his thighs, its knees clamping his rib cage, forcing his head backward with both its oversized hands, blood dribbling from a bite mark on his right cheek. The demon’s face was reversed to his face but its mouth covered his mouth, not as if delivering an abhorrent kiss but as if in a devouring rapture, its intention lurkao, to kill, but not merely to kill, as if it were sucking not just all sustaining breath from its victim, not just life itself, but also Mr. Sanchez’s atman, his very soul.
The frightening speed of the rakshasa, the terrifying intimacy of its violent assault, Mr. Sanchez’s apparent inability to resist, the way the blind man’s arched throat throbbed as though he swallowed scream after scream that he couldn’t force out through the vacuum silence of his assailant’s sucking mouth … This hideous spectacle at once flung up from the floor of memory all the long-dead fears of Padmini’s childhood, gave them new life, and sent them fluttering through her, bat-wing quick along every nerve path.
Perhaps only two seconds, three at most, passed from the instant the flashlight beams, wielded by Dr. Ignis and Mr. Kinsley, crossed upon the face of the fiend until Mr. Hawks acted. He rushed forward, pistol in a two-hand grip. As he approached, the rakshasa’s eyes widened and rolled in their sockets. Raising its mouth from the mouth of its victim, trailing a gray glistening tongue so round and long and strange that it might not have been a tongue at all, the demon began to release Mr. Sanchez, its long fingers peeling away from his chin, its other hand releasing a twisted fistful of the blind man’s hair. As quick as the thing was, Hawks nevertheless proved to be fast enough to jam the muzzle of the pistol against the sleek gray skull and squeeze the trigger twice before the rakshasa could spring upon him.
As the gunfire roared along the hallway, dark tissue spattered the wall. The fiend fell away from Mr. Sanchez, who collapsed onto his left side. Mr. Hawks stepped past the blind man and fired three rounds point-blank into the chest of the attacker, even though the head wounds seemed to have killed it.
For a moment Padmini lacked the power to move, not because of the horror or the violence, but because as the gun was pressed to the head of the rakshasa and as it rolled its fearsome eyes toward Hawks, she thought she saw something shocking in its face, a subtle likeness to someone she knew. The shots were fired, the creature killed, before a name came to Padmini. In that diabolic visage, she thought she had glimpsed traces of the face of Miss Hollander, pretty Sally Hollander, who worked for the Cupp sisters and who lived alone in Apartment 1-C. She must be mistaken, of course, rattled by events, confused by the crossed beams of the flashlights.
She went to Mr. Sanchez and knelt beside him, as did Tom Tran. The blind man was alive but seemed to be paralyzed, though without the slackness of paralysis, his muscles taut and his joints locked, as rigid as if he were resisting some relentless pressure.
His false eyes—not glass but realistic plastic hemispheres—had never accurately tracked her when she was talking with him. Now when she spoke his name, the eyes moved rapidly back and forth, fixing on nothing, as if he must be so disoriented that he couldn’t calculate her position from her voice. When she put a hand on his shoulder as she spoke his name again, the combination of touch and sound seemed to orient him; his sightless eyes stopped jiggling and turned toward her face.
His mouth hung open, but he seemed unable to speak. On his lips glistened something dark and wet and thick, which she first thought must be blood. But when Mr. Kinsley leaned in, shining his flashlight on poor Sanchez’s face, Padmini saw that the substance wasn’t red, that it was instead various shades of gray, mostly lead and charcoal, with silvery highlights.
“Be careful there,” Mr. Hawks warned sharply, rising from the body of the rakshasa. “Don’t touch Julian, get away from him.”
“He’s hurt,” Padmini said. “He needs help.”
“We don’t know what he needs.”
That admonition made no sense to Padmini, but before she could ask what Hawks meant, she saw that the silver-flecked gray sludge on the blind man’s lips was moving, not drooling downward but crawling from his upper lip toward his nostrils, and from his lower lip across the side of his face, as if the stuff must be alive.
Winny
In the fungus light, the upper floor of Gary Dai’s abandoned two-level apartment was spook city, not because of what waited there to be seen and recoiled from, but because of what seemed to be there, looming around every corner, lurking in every murky shadow. Winny saw hunched shapes with swollen heads, lean shapes like scarecrows that had climbed down from their stations in cornfields, shapes in flowing robes and hoods. But always they melted away, maybe because they had never been real or maybe because they were slipping around behind him to seize him just when he began to gain a little confidence, like in the movies when the axe cleaved the guy’s head about four seconds after he thought the worst was past.
Winston Trahern Barnett was a mouthful of a name, and Winny had never been more aware than he was now that he had been named after fearless men. His mom’s father had been Winston, who was called Win by everyone and died in a coal-cracker explosion. Win Trahern’s dad admired Winston Churchill and named his boy for the British leader. Those were hard acts to follow. Winny was never going to go anywhere near a coal cracker unless someone put a gun to his head. And while he might have to fight in a war one day—supposing he ever developed biceps and passed the physical—he didn’t think he’d ever be clever enough to command successfully the entire military of a nation. For one thing, he wouldn’t know what to say to his generals, let alone what to say to maybe a hundred million people watching him on TV and expecting him to explain why he sent the sixth fleet—if there was a sixth fleet—on the most ill-conceived mission in the history of warfare. The best he could hope for himself was to keep his cool and remain brave enough to find Iris.
Her silvery singing came and went, creepier each time that it arose. Winny kept picturing the little dead girl in a burial dress, with dirt and coffin splinters between her too-sharp teeth. When he tried to repress that ridiculous image, into his mind’s eye came another little girl who was really a ventriloquist’s dummy, and though her operator had disappeared, she sang anyway, her blue-glass eyes twinkling darkly, holding a knife in each hand. By the time Winny came to the interior steps that led down to the lower floor of the duplex apartment, listening to Iris’s wordless song rising from below, his armpits were sweat faucets and the hairs were standing up so stiff on the back of his neck that they would probably twang like guitar strings if the ghost of some musician plucked them.
Although Winny had
been in Gary Dai’s apartment hardly a minute, his mother and Mrs. Sykes should have been here already. Reluctantly, he had to face the fact that when he heard them all shouting at once behind him, they hadn’t been responding to Iris’s flight or to his pursuit of her, but to something else that happened back there—and for sure not something good. They were probably in some kind of big trouble, and he ought to hurry back there to defend his mom. But when you were small for your age and when you had arms as skinny as tube cheese, your mom would insist on defending you, not the other way around, which would distract her and put her at greater risk, and in the end everyone would wind up dead or worse.
As long as Iris needed finding but not saving, Winny figured he might be up to the job, assuming there were no dragons to slay or any need to wield a mace against an ogre. A mace would probably be too heavy for him to wield even if he’d had one. He didn’t dare dwell on the thought of his mom in trouble, for if he did, he would be undone; there would prove to be no Winston in him, he would be all Winny and useless to everyone. So he thought Iris, and steeling himself for what might be waiting for him, he descended the first flight of stairs.
In the narrow staircase, the fungus light was dimmer than elsewhere, and shadows ruled. As he reached the landing, pleased by how quietly he stepped from tread to tread, the singing girl seemed to be wandering away through the lower rooms. Fearing that her voice would fade forever, Winny went down the second flight faster than he had descended the first.