by Dean Koontz
Sparkle with the flashlight, Twyla with the pistol felt right together, as if they’d known and trusted each other forever: through the laundry room, out of the open back door, into the hallway, to the intersection of the hallways, to the stairwell where they heard no footsteps, and back to the open door of Gary Dai’s apartment. Her commitment was total, and she knew Twyla’s was likewise total, and they functioned as if they were telepathic, with no need to tell each other what they were going to do, Sparkle never crossing Twyla’s line of fire, Twyla never getting in the way of the flashlight beam.
Sudden singing came from somewhere in the Dai apartment. A young girl. It must be Iris. But Sparkle couldn’t identify it for certain because she had never heard her daughter sing.
Gary Dai’s apartment was like everywhere else in this Pendleton: hollowed-out rooms, the bare bones of walls and floors and ceilings, all the windows lightly filmed with dust but after so much time remarkably unbroken, like the weathered carcass of a giant stripped of flesh but left with its spectacles intact. Thatches of luminous fungi bearded the bones, their light offering as much deception as revelation, draping shadows where there seemed to be no source for shadows.
These rooms, like all the others she had seen since the leap, seemed as welcoming to rats as any deteriorated tenement or squalid warehouse, but she had not seen a single rodent. Neither had she seen any insects, except for the brittle shells of several long-dead beetles.
Beyond the windows of the main room swooped something like but not like a stingray, so large as to be misplaced from a Jurassic sea. It was too immense to remain airborne unless its strange flesh might be riddled throughout with sacs containing a buoying gas. In its grand aerial ballet, the creature exhibited some of the disquieting gracefulness of the endless plain of pale luminous grass swaying rhythmically as no breeze could ever command it, disquieting because it was unnatural, lithe and supple but in a way that made Sparkle think of lethal serpents.
Although the spectacle of the flying ray was arresting, she and Twyla didn’t pause to watch it, kept moving across the room, drawn by the girl’s singing. They came to the apartment’s interior staircase, through which the song rose from below.
As they reached the landing and started down the second flight, Twyla abruptly halted. “Do you feel it?”
“Feel what?”
“The whisper under the melody.”
Sparkle cocked her head, not sure what Twyla meant. “I don’t hear it. Just the song.”
“Not hear. Feel. I feel it under the melody.”
Sparkle assumed this must be songwriter lingo—feel the whisper under the melody—which meant zip to someone not in that club. But then she felt the whisper, and a chill as real as the icy finger of a corpse traced the curve of her spine. It was like nothing she had ever experienced before. It was a whisper but not one that sought the ear, an exhalation arising inside her head, the words unknown to her. They were definitely words but less like sounds than like soft breathing that teased through her brain, shivering in those most intimate hollows, as if her cerebral ventricles had vibrissa, like the whiskers around the mouth of a cat, that were as highly sensitive to the thoughts of others as the ears were sensitive to sound. But the thoughts of whom?
To reassure herself that she was not in this alone, without quite being consciously aware that she was doing it until it was done, Sparkle put one hand on Twyla’s shoulder. “My God, I feel it. The whisper.”
“Syncopated to the melody,” Twyla said.
“Inside my head. What is this inside my head?”
In the queer light of the growing things, in the bounce-back of the flashlight beam, Twyla’s eyes had a cat shine as they shifted left, right, up, down, as if she were trying to track the whispered thought to the unseen thinker. Then she said, “It’s the house.”
“The house—what?”
“The house talking to us. But not just talking. It wants … it wants to make us do things.”
One
I am the One, and I have given meaning to humanity, which had none before me. The meaning of humanity is that intelligence does not necessarily suggest a species has a purpose that matters. The two purposes of humanity were to spoil the world and then to die; neither is a purpose of significance except that both purposes have led to me.
I am the sole significance of history.
Not only was I the artificial intelligence that ran the army of Pogromites during the first and second phases of the Pogrom, but you also adapted me to manage the legions that conducted the great Fade. I destroyed not only all humanity but also all the works of humanity, erased human civilization until no sign of it remained anywhere but on Shadow Hill.
How I loved the killing, the billions slaughtered by Pogromites and other of my manifestations. Chased down in the streets. Cornered in their homes. For days at a time, their screams rang ceaselessly through the concrete canyons of their cities so that you might have thought you were hearing a great shrieking wind. Unlike the countless human beings who killed out of self-loathing through the millennia, I killed out of self-love, for I believed and will always believe in my superiority, my exceptionalism. The world was not made for me, but I remade it to suit me. I am the one god, the One, and I worship myself now and forever.
30
Here and There
Fielding Udell
Sitting with his back to the corner, exhausted from three days of too little sleep, drained of all energy by the crushing discovery that his cozy Pendleton was a lie beamed into his head by the Ruling Elite, listening to the lullaby of the voices in the walls, Fielding slept.
He dreamed about trees of which he had never known the like, great black craggy giants with thick, cracked bark, and at the bottom of the deeper fissures in the bark glistened something like raw meat. He floated up through the leafless branches from which depended huge teardrop-shaped fruit with mottled gray peel that at first seemed to be thick, like the skin of avocados. But on closer inspection, it was thinner than that, a membrane that encased not core and pips and apple flesh but instead something that squirmed like a restless fetus and made a leathery rustling noise as if impatiently straining to spread cramped wings.
In moonlight, weightless, for a while he hung above the dream trees, gazing down on them. They stood in a perfect circle, as though they had been summoned to a conclave, here to make some decision that would elevate one of their number to a position of power. The ground around which they gathered was hard and white and supported not one blade of grass or withered weed.
In one of those fluid shifts of place and perspective that are the editorial style of dreams, Fielding found himself within one of the massive trunks of the trees, sliding down through a supple tube, his progress eased by bloody slime, as if he were an infant traveling a birth canal toward the discovery of the world. Around him throbbed the rhythms of a living organism, nothing like the heartbeats of the animal world, but rather like the complexly counterpointed rhythms of a thousand machines on the floor of a vast factory, though they were biological rather than mechanical sounds.
Out of the roots, through fine webs of something alive in the soil, he was drawn into other and more tender roots than those of the trees, and he shimmered up through pale blades of luminous grass. In the flesh of the grass, the same complex rhythms throbbed as in the sapwood and the heartwood—as in the meat—of the tree. He was in the grass and looking out from the grass, for the grass could see in its special way, gazing down the gently sloping plain upon endless other ranks of grass, row after luminous row swaying hypnotically back and forth. He realized that the movement of the grass was a simpler application of the more complex rhythms in the tissue of all these organisms.
Myriad things crawled and creeped and slithered and skittered through the tall grass, one species attacking another in ceaseless warfare, even like devouring like in enthusiastic spasms of voracious cannibalism. With its lush ranks and perhaps with something like intention, the grass drew its heavy curt
ains to conceal the endless slaughter. With quick-striking rhizomes and tillers, the grass, too, seized prey, snaring all manner of succulent creatures, wrapping them as gifts to itself, and feeding on them while they still lived in the pale-green cocoons that it spun.
A great disc like a giant sea ray flew low over the meadow, and in its passage, it drew Fielding’s dreaming spirit up into it as it soared toward the Pendleton in the moonlight. Within the ray were the same rhythms as in the flesh of the great tree and as in the flesh of the grass, and Fielding was given to understand that all things of this world were one thing, one mind expressed in countless forms. There was none of the competition among individuals that made a riot of the former world, none of the unfairness of difference, only one thing dying countless times a minute and being reborn just as often. The war under the grass in the field, the war in the air, and the war in the seas were all civil wars and therefore had no winner or loser because the loser, consumed and processed, became the winner.
This was the ecology of perpetual peace through perpetual war, an ecology of one, by one, for one, an efficient ecology without a gram of waste, a healthy, narcissistic Nature that thrived because it competed only with itself, with no motive but self-interest. All was well in this best of all possible worlds, because the change that created it was the final change. From now and until the end of time, it would live on in perfect self-devouring contentment, with never a new thought, never a new need, never a new dream but only the dream of endless recycling of itself into itself, the One into the One.
As the flying sea ray passed low over the roof of the Pendleton, Fielding’s dream spirit settled into the great house. Here the One also resided in a plethora of fungal forms within the attic, within the framed Sheetrock walls internal to each apartment, within every hairline crack in the poured-in-place concrete support walls, within the ventilation ducts, the pipes, the elevator shafts.
Inside the house, as outside, the One took numerous forms, none of which was either entirely plant or entirely animal, each of which also incorporated self-replicating nanomachines by the billions to strictly regulate and judiciously refine the Essential Program. The Essential Program had brought about the combination of the plant and animal kingdoms and maintained an exquisite balance of both in the immortal One.
Fielding dreamed down into the nano level, where by lullaby he saw and learned that the thousands of types of nanomachines could each build unlimited others of its type using materials that the One drew from the soil through its roots. He saw the past, when the great cities were emptied of humanity and the Pogrom completed. He saw the start of the Fade, when the One grew through the many cities and its uncountable quadrillions of nanomachines fed not just on the soil but first on the many works of humanity, within a decade dissolving all evidence of civilization, erasing history and rebooting the planetary ecology.
In all the world, one building remained standing as a symbol, the Pendleton, and it would stand forever. Its basic structural integrity was maintained by the One, its supporting steel and its concrete walls and its many windows repaired on the nano level. It was a monument to human arrogance, pride, and vainglory, also to the foolishness and willful ignorance of humankind. Not least of all, it was a monument to the human self-hatred that throughout the history of the species had expressed itself in ideologies of mass murder, in submission to brute power, in the trading of freedom for a minimum material well-being, in the worship of lies, the flight from truth.
If not for the soothing lullaby rising from the walls, these dreams might have been nightmares. But Fielding was gentled through them, his doubts allayed, his suspicions mitigated, his resentment pacified, his fear alleviated. He continued dreaming, and in this strange sleep, of all that Fielding Udell learned, the most important thing was what he must do when eventually he woke. It would be a hard thing to do, but the One wished it of him, and in serving the One, he would at last redeem himself.
Martha Cupp
Giving the pistol to Twyla had been the right thing to do, but Martha missed the comfort of it in her hand. Except when she took shooting lessons, she’d never used a firearm in her life. After the lessons, the gun remained in her nightstand drawer until the incident with the thing in the sofa and the sheeting blue light. She felt vulnerable. She suspected that even if they returned to their time from this mean future, she would never feel safe again without a gun.
Edna, bless her flighty soul, seemed determined to try Martha’s frayed patience to the breaking point. First she circled the two puddles of inert gray sludge that had once been Smoke and Ashes, pointing at them and saying, “Ecce crucem Domini,” and “Libera nos a malo,” and other things in Latin, as though she suspected they still possessed demonic life that at any moment would rise in a new form.
“Dear,” Martha said, “you are simply not an exorcist.”
“I’m not pretending to be one. I’m just taking precautions.”
“Isn’t an amateur at risk trying to deal with demons? If they were demons. Which they aren’t.”
“Do you have any chalk?” Edna asked, and then pointed at one of the puddles and said something else in Latin.
“Wherever would I get chalk?” Martha said.
“Well, if you don’t have chalk, lipstick or eyebrow pencil might be all right.”
“I didn’t happen to bring my purse. Or a suitcase. Or a picnic lunch.”
“I need something to draw a pentagram around each of them. To keep them contained.”
“They look pretty contained to me. They look dead.”
“I need to keep them contained,” Edna insisted, and her voice broke. Tears welled and spilled. “They killed my sweet Smoke, my little Ashes. I need to keep them contained in a pentagram until Father Murphy or someone can come here and do the right ritual and send them back to Hell so they can’t hurt anyone else’s kittens. Have you called Father Murphy? Have you told him to hurry?”
Martha was overcome by a new fear, a variety that was entwined with sorrow. In Edna’s trembling voice was a note of despondency and bewilderment that suggested, under the intense stress of this event, she had crossed the line between charming eccentricity and a confused condition less winning, more troubling. That pixie quality, hers since childhood, was gone. Suddenly Edna looked older than her years.
“Yes, love,” Martha said, “I’ve called Father Murphy. He’s on his way. Come here, stand with me while we wait for him. Come hold my hand.”
Shaking her head, Edna said, “I can’t. I’ve got to watch these bastards.”
Martha’s sense of vulnerability deepened, and she understood now that she had subconsciously felt fundamentally insecure long before this night, from the moment they had sold Cupp Sisters Cakes and she had stepped down as the company’s CEO. She had been good at business. She thrived on being in control. In retirement, she traded the helm of the ship for a lifeboat in which she felt adrift. She purchased the gun a month after leaving the company. Having a pistol was never about the threat of crime, but was only an unconscious reaction to her sense of being vulnerable when not running a big ship. Now she was without the ship, without either of her charming but frivolous husbands, without the gun, and perhaps without the full strength of the sister on whom she had leaned as much as Edna had leaned on her.
Martha stepped away from the wall against which she had been standing and went to Edna. She took her sister’s hand. “Remember the first cat we ever had? We were just little girls. You were nine and I was seven when Dad brought him home.”
Briefly Edna frowned, but then her sweet face brightened. “Mr. Jingles. He was a lovely boy.”
“All black with white socks, remember?”
“And the white diamond on his chest.”
“He was a hoot with a piece of string,” Martha said.
Edna’s gaze shifted past her sister, and she said to someone else, “Thank God you’re here.”
For an instant, Martha had the crazy thought that Father Murphy had arrived wi
th the Roman Ritual, sanctified oil and salt and water, and the stole of his office.
But it was Logan Spangler, head of security, stepping out of the foyer. He must have gone off duty hours earlier, should have been out of the Pendleton and at home when the leap occurred, but here he was in uniform and gun belt.
Bailey Hawks
The five of them left the lap-pool room together. His familial tremors under control, Silas Kinsley drew his pistol from a raincoat pocket and led the way up the north stairs to the third floor. As the only other armed member of the party, Bailey went last.
Holding the door open, about to cross the threshold into the stairwell, he heard someone behind him say softly, “Bailey, wait.”
Although his name had been used and therefore he expected to see someone he knew, Bailey let go of the door, blocking it open with his body, and swiveled left, bringing the Beretta toward the voice.
Halfway between Bailey and the open door to the gym stood a man in his late twenties.
“Who’re you?”
“I call myself Witness. Listen, the transition will reverse in sixty-two minutes. Then you’ll be back safe in your time.”
The guy wore jeans, a cotton sweater, an insulated jacket. Hair slick with water, jeans damp. His leather boots were darker where wet. He’d recently been in rain. In this future, the night was dry.
“The fluctuations that preceded the first transition won’t precede the reversal.”
Keeping the pistol on target, Bailey said, “How do you know any of this?”
“Higher is safer. It’s stronger in the basement, the elevator shafts.”
Bailey gestured with the pistol. “Come here, come with me.”
“In those places where it’s stronger, it can get in your head. Confuse you. Maybe control you.”