by Dean Koontz
“Is it in you?”
“I’m the one thing here it’s not in. I’m apart. It allows that.”
“What the hell is it?”
“In this future, all life has become one. The One. Many individuals, one consciousness. The One is plant, animal, machine.”
In the stairwell, they realized he wasn’t following. Tom Tran called down to him.
Taking a two-hand grip on the Beretta, Bailey said, “Come on.”
“No. My position here is delicate. You must respect that.”
As the guy turned away from him, Bailey said, “You help us, or I’ll shoot you dead, I swear I will.”
“I can’t be killed,” the stranger said, and stepped out of sight through the open door to the gym.
Martha Cupp
The moment she saw Logan Spangler entering the living room from the foyer, Martha Cupp remembered vividly the feeling that she’d had on the night her first husband died, thirty-nine years earlier. Simon was struck down in an instant by a massive heart attack at 7:30 in the evening. Their son, an only child, was at boarding school. The body was taken away, and eventually the friends and family who had hurried to console Martha also departed. Alone, she didn’t wish to sleep in the bed she had shared with Simon, but she found that even in a guest room, sleep eluded her. Simon had been ineffectual in most things, averse to hard work, a bit vain, a gossip, and sentimental to an extent that was somewhat embarrassing in a man, but she loved him for his best qualities, for his ever-ready sense of humor and his genuinely affectionate nature. Perhaps she wasn’t anguished over the loss, not in a black despair, but certainly grief had its talons in her. At 2:30 in the morning, lying awake, she heard a man weeping bitterly elsewhere in the house. Mystified, she rose and went in search of the mourner, and soon found him. Simon, seemingly as alive as he had been at 7:29, was sitting on the edge of the bed in their room, so desolate and anguished that she could hardly bear to look at him. Wonderingly, she spoke his name, but he neither responded nor glanced at her. Distressed to see him in such abject misery but not afraid, she sat on the bed beside him. When she put a hand on his shoulder, he had no substance, and he seemed not to feel her touch as her trembling hand passed through him. Evidently he couldn’t see Martha, because his failure to look at her seemed not to be an intentional turning away. She had been a believer all her life, but not in ghosts. The way that he pulled at his face, fisted his hands against his temples, bit on his knuckles, and sometimes bent forward as if suffering paroxysms of excruciating emotion suggested to her that he wasn’t grieving over the fact of his death but over something else. His torment was so affecting that she could not bear to watch it, and after a few minutes, distressed and bewildered, wondering about the reliability of her senses, she returned to the bed in the guest room. For nearly an hour, the tormented weeping continued, and when at last it faded to silence, she tried to convince herself that she had dreamed the incident or that in her grief she imagined it; but she had no talent for self-deception, and she knew that Simon’s visitation had been as real as his sudden demise.
Although Logan Spangler looked nothing like Simon, though he had never before reminded her of Simon, though he appeared as real now as ever he had appeared in the past, she knew on first sight of him that he was not alive. Perhaps he was not a ghost either, but he was no more alive than Simon had been sitting on the edge of that bed. And this was the moment she had been dreading for thirty-nine years, since lying in bed listening to Simon’s wretched weeping, the moment before she would make the ultimate discovery.
“Thank God you’re here,” Edna said.
There was no chance for Martha to issue a warning. As Edna hurried toward Spangler, dinner gown rustling, he opened his mouth and spat a series of objects at her. They were dark and about the size of olives, four or five, and they traveled at a far higher velocity than a man could possibly spit out anything. They struck Edna in the chest and abdomen, and she doubled over not with a cry of agony but with a soft gasp of surprise. As Spangler turned to Martha, she said, “I love you, Edna,” in case her sister might for another moment be conscious and aware. Spangler spat another flurry of projectiles. Martha felt them pierce her, but she knew pain only for an instant. Then she felt something worse than pain, and she wished she had been shot dead with a pistol instead of this. What pierced her did not drill through as bullets would, but crawled within her on some terrifying quest. She opened her mouth to scream, but she couldn’t make a sound because something large and gelid was squirming in her throat. Three attempts at a scream were all that she made, for after the third attempt, she was no longer Martha Cupp.
Bailey Hawks
Bailey wouldn’t have shot the stranger in the back, and maybe the man had sensed the falseness of that promise. Perhaps his claim—I can’t be killed—was just bravado, as much a lie as Bailey’s threat. Yet Bailey believed it.
Quick footsteps on the stairs—“Mr. Hawks!”—were followed by the appearance of Tom Tran.
Lowering the pistol, turning from the open door of the gym to the stairwell, Bailey said, “I’m okay, Tom. I just thought I saw … something.”
“What did you see?”
My position here is delicate. You must respect that.
“Nothing,” Bailey said. “It was nothing.”
He would have liked to tell Tom and the others at least that they would be going home in sixty-two minutes. But he didn’t know that was true. An informant in a war might be a teller of truth or a master of lies. And this one’s motives were entirely mysterious.
Bailey followed Tom up the circular stairs to the second-floor landing, where the others had paused in case they needed to come to his defense.
As they all ascended toward the third floor in single file, Silas and Kirby continued a conversation they apparently had started between the basement and the second-floor landing.
“The things some of us saw vanishing into walls,” Kirby said, “weren’t really passing through them. In the couple of days before the leap—”
“Transition,” Bailey said.
“That is a better word for it,” Kirby Ignis said. “We didn’t actually leap off anything. Before the transition, our time and this future were building toward the transition, trying to come together, so there were moments of overlap—”
“Fluctuations,” Bailey said.
“Exactly,” Kirby said. “And during the fluctuations, we were making brief contact with creatures from this time—maybe also with people on previous nights of transition like 1897 and 1935. When they appeared to pass through walls, it was only the fluctuation ending, and they were fading back into their proper time.”
Bailey thought of young Sophia Pendleton gaily descending these very stairs earlier, headed to the kitchen to meet the iceman: Sing a song of sixpence, a pocketful of rye …
With a solemn assertiveness that might have been amusing under other circumstances, Padmini Bahrati said, “I do not intend to die in this terrible place. I have many important goals and much that I wish to achieve. Tell me, Dr. Ignis, do you have any theory about how long we might remain here?”
“Silas,” said Kirby, “you know the history. Any guess how long?”
“Not really. I just know the living go back. Andrew Pendleton did. And some of the Ostock family.”
Two minutes earlier, the man who couldn’t be killed had said that the transition would reverse in sixty-two minutes. According to Bailey’s wristwatch, that would be at 7:21. The time now was 6:21.
Bailey said, “I can’t tell you exactly why, but I think we’re safer on the third floor. Now that we’re all together, we should just hunker down there and try to ride this out.”
When they reached the Cupp apartment, the four women and the children were gone.
Mickey Dime
There were mumbling voices in the walls. And why not? Anything could happen now. There were no rules anymore.
His mother had said that rules were for the weak of mind and body, fo
r those who must be controlled in the interest of order. She said that for intellectuals, however, for the rightful masters of culture, rules and absolute freedom could not coexist.
But he didn’t think his mother meant the laws of nature, too, must be done away with. He didn’t think she defined absolute freedom to mean to hell with gravity.
Earlier, for a few minutes Mickey stood at a window, looking into the courtyard. Everything was changed down there. The change wasn’t good. It looked like hell down there. Somebody was responsible for it. Somebody had done a bad thing. Some incompetent fool.
Wait until Mickey’s mother learned about what had happened, whatever it might be. She had no tolerance for incompetent fools. She always knew how to deal with them. Just wait. He was eager to see what his mother would do.
Tom Tran had come along the winding pathway. He had been wearing a raincoat and his ridiculous floppy-brimmed hat. Rain wasn’t falling anymore, but he dressed for it anyway. What an idiot.
Tom Tran was the superintendent. He was paid well to keep the Pendleton in tip-top condition. If anyone was to blame for what had happened, Tom Tran must be the one.
Mickey had tried to crank open the casement window so that he could shoot Tom Tran dead on the spot. If shooting Tom Tran didn’t fix things, nothing would. But the window wouldn’t budge. The crank was broken or something.
In the courtyard, Tom Tran had reached the doors to the ground floor. Mickey considered hurrying downstairs and shooting Tom. It didn’t matter if he shot Tom outside or inside the building. Just shooting him ought to fix everything.
Before Mickey could move, something else had come lurching along the winding path down there. Some thing. He didn’t know much about biology—except for sex, of course, about which he knew everything—but he didn’t think this thing was a known species with its picture in college textbooks. Whatever it was, it didn’t look like a thing that you could kill easily.
Reality was completely out of control now. He turned his back to the windows. He just couldn’t take it anymore, the way it was out there in the courtyard. He had stood here for a while now, not being able to take it.
When he wouldn’t let the changed world into his mind, Sparkle and Iris came into it more vividly than ever. So tempting. They were his fantasy, yet their expressions were haughty, disdainful. They came into his mind uninvited, and they mocked him. He needed to rein in reality, and as a start he needed to bring the writer and her daughter to heel.
To heel. That reminded him of that goofy-looking professor guy, Dr. Ignis, the one who sometimes wore bow ties and elbow-patch jackets, for God’s sake. Ignis used to have a dog. Big Labrador. He walked it on a leash. The dog sometimes growled low at Mickey. Ignis apologized, said it never growled before. Ignis was someone else who needed to be shot. That would probably fix everything.
But first, if the gone-wrong world continued to reject him, he’d find Sparkle and Iris, wherever they were in the Pendleton, and he would make them pay for this the way he’d made those other women pay fifteen years earlier. He would kill them harder than he had ever killed anyone. That would definitely fix everything.
Winny
All over the room, the radiant fungus throbbed sort of in time with the singing, slower but like the dance-floor lights in some stupid old disco movie, except they didn’t make you want to dance. They made you want to get the hell out of there because, as they brightened and dimmed, they cast shadows of themselves across every surface, creating the illusion that nasty things were slithering this way and that.
Unlike most of the interior apartment walls in the Pendleton, these were of textured plaster instead of Sheetrock. They were marred by cracks, as was the ceiling. Those jagged lines glowed as though there must be light inside the walls, green light leaking out through the cracks.
Winny couldn’t tell if Iris knew he was there with her. She didn’t stand with her shoulders slumped and her head bowed, as usual. She stood up straight, her head tipped back, her eyes closed, as if she were swept away by the simple wordless singing of the girl that Winny had thought was her.
Instead, the singing girl seemed to be in the walls with the green light. Not just in one of them. In four. Coming from all around, fully quadrophonic. Up close and personal, the singing was even eerier than it had been when he had followed it from the upper floor of this apartment. He could too easily imagine a little dead girl whose body had never been buried but had been walled up by an insane killer. She might even have been walled up while she was alive and pleading for her life, so that she was not only dead inside the wall but her ghost was also insane from her having been killed that way.
Maybe the one dangerous thing about reading a library’s worth of books was the way your imagination got pumped up like a bodybuilder on steroids.
Although Iris seemed to like this weird singing, Winny knew that she was highly sensitive to people talking to her, maybe especially people she didn’t know well. He didn’t want to say the wrong thing and send her into some kind of screaming fit.
The best he could do was lead her back the way they had come, to the Cupp apartment, and hope to meet their mothers along the way. But after his dad had told him that if he read too many books, he might wind up a sissy or an autistic, Winny had read about autism, and he knew that your average autistic person—not all but most—disliked being touched a whole lot more than she disliked talking with you. He didn’t need to read about sissyism because he already knew what that was.
Autism seemed very frustrating and sad, and mysterious. You couldn’t get it from reading books, of course; and Winny had wondered whether his father was snowing him or was a huge ignoramus. He didn’t want to think his father could be an ignoramus. So he had decided it must be a snow job, of which there was one after the other when old Farrel Barnett was around and trying to manipulate his boy into becoming a wrestling, guitar-playing, saxophone-crazed tough guy.
Even if the best thing was to lead Iris out of here, Winny was hesitant to take her hand. If he pinched the sleeve of her sweater and pulled her along that way, maybe she wouldn’t be offended or irritated, or scared, or whatever it was that she felt when she was touched.
Winny was about to risk going for the sweater when suddenly he felt something moving lightly through his head, as if he’d been born with a sac of spider eggs in his brain and they were just hatching.
When he put his hands over his ears, that didn’t make all the baby spiders stop dancing in his skull, but he realized that instinctively he knew it was the singing getting to him, trying to hypnotize him, zombify him.
Before he could grab Iris’s sleeve, she stepped forward toward the nearest wall, and at the same time something wriggled out of the web of cracks in the plaster. For an instant he thought they were part of the illusion created by the throbbing fungus lights, but then he knew they were real. They looked like pale squirming worms, or maybe they were the tendrils of some freaky plant, growing fast like in a stop-motion film or like that meat-eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors. Iris opened her arms wide, as if she intended to walk right up to the wall and press herself against those greedy tendrils or roots, whatever they were.
The baby spiders in Winny’s head had voices like in Charlotte’s Web, but these buggers weren’t nice like Charlotte. They were telling him that doing what Iris was about to do would be the best thing in the world. He couldn’t understand their language, but he understood their meaning: that he should follow the girl’s lead and accept the happiness that she was about to embrace.
Maybe all these years of enduring his father’s propaganda had built up Winny’s resistance to brainwashing, but he wasn’t buying anything the head spiders were trying to sell him. He shouted—“Iris, no!”—grabbed a fistful of her sweater, and pulled her toward the door as the thrashing white tendrils reached frantically for them.
Twyla Trahern
“Iris, no!”
As she came off the bottom step into the lower floor of the Dai apartmen
t, Twyla heard her son cry out in the next room or in the room beyond that. She thrilled to those two words because they meant that he was alive. But the alarm in his voice was a prod to her heart, which kicked against her ribs like hooves against a stall door.
With Sparkle at her side, she raced across an empty chamber, toward the singing, calling out to him, “Winny! I’m here!”
As they neared an archway between rooms, Winny shouted over the singing, “Mom, stay back!”
She almost didn’t heed the warning. Nothing was going to keep her from him. Although Sparkle no doubt felt the same need to get to Iris, she seized Twyla’s arm, and they stumbled to a stop at the brink of the next room.
Past the threshold, the luminous formations on the walls and ceiling waxed and waned, not synchronized, causing shadows to leap and scurry. Hundreds of pale cords, six to ten feet long, narrower than a pencil, pressed out of cracks in the custom-patterned plaster of the ceiling and walls. Half undulated lazily, others scourged the air as though seeking someone to punish, and a few lashed hard enough to crack like whips.
At the farther end of that room, twenty feet away, beyond an open door, Winny stood with Iris. They appeared to be all right.
“Don’t go in there,” Winny warned. “It wants you, don’t go.”
More than ever, Twyla was aware of cold ghostly fingers feeling along the folds and fissures of her brain as if reading her thoughts like braille. Or maybe it was writing, creating a little story about how she wanted to go into the room, about how easy it would be to get through those pale whips, which only looked like they could hurt her, which were actually feeble, she could brush them aside like the silky fibers of a spider’s web, she could walk straight to her boy in mere seconds, put her arm around him, keep him safe, she had the gun, with the gun there was nothing to fear, Winny so close, so close, and nothing, nothing, nothing to fear—