77 Shadow Street

by Dean Koontz

  Sparkle stepped across the threshold, into the room.

  Startled out of her own half-trance, Twyla grabbed the woman by one arm and pulled her backward as the nearer whips snaked toward her through the air.

  “Think of the words to a song, any song, keep singing them to yourself, block the damn thing out.” She called to Winny, “Stay right there, kiddo. Don’t move. We’ll find another way to you.”

  The wordless singing changed in character, from a wistful kind of melancholy to a sneering menace. Although the voice still sounded like that of a little girl, she was a corrupted child with dark knowledge and cruel intention.

  Mentally repeating the refrain from a song of her own—Just pour me another beer/and keep them comin’, Joe/I’ve given up on women/so I’ll be leavin’ late and low—Twyla led Sparkle Sykes away from the arch, toward a closed door.

  Winny

  Iris allowed herself to be pulled from the room, but as soon as they were across the threshold, in a hallway where there were no cracks in the plaster, she made small fretful noises and impatiently tugged at the grip he had on the sleeve of her sweater. No sooner had Winny’s mom told him to stay where he was, that she would find another way to him, than Iris hauled off and smacked him in the face. The blow didn’t hurt much, but it surprised him. Reflexively he let go of her sweater. She shoved him hard, right off his feet, so he fell on his butt, and she ran as fast as a deer.

  Mickey Dime

  Because of what he did for a living and because being the son of his special mother gave him certain privileges not recognized by the law, Mickey almost always carried a concealed weapon, sometimes with a silencer attached, sometimes not. Because he was always well-prepared, he also carried a spare magazine of ammunition.

  He had used one round to kill his brother, Jerry, and two more to kill Klick the Prick. He had shot out four of the blue TV screens that kept annoying him. That left three rounds. Before going down to the second floor to get a leash and choke collar from the professor, Dr. Ignis, or to kill him, whichever, Mickey changed out the partial magazine for the full one.

  When he slipped the first magazine into a sport-coat pocket, he found an unused moist towelette in a foil packet. A little quiver of delight went through him, and for a moment his mood lifted. The world wasn’t entirely alien and forbidding; here was something right with it, after all.

  He stood in the center of his filthy, unfurnished living room and with great care peeled open the foil packet. The lemony fragrance was intoxicating. He stood enjoying it for a long delicious moment.

  Carefully, he extracted the moist towelette. He let the empty packet flutter to the floor. He was reminded of a geisha girl whom he killed in Kyoto. She had been a slender young woman and, shot, had fluttered to the floor rather like this foil packet.

  He unfolded the towelette, and the fragrance blossomed as he exposed a broader area of the paper to the air. He held it under his nose, inhaling deeply.

  First, he washed his face. The liquid with which the towel was saturated proved to be most refreshing. It cooled his skin and even tingled slightly, like an aftershave applied immediately following a straight razor.

  Next, he washed his hands. He hadn’t realized that they were slightly tacky, most likely from handling the corpse of Vernon Klick, who didn’t have the highest standards of personal hygiene. As the lemony moisture evaporated from his fingers, Mickey felt immeasurably better.

  How wonderful to be reminded that sensation was everything, that it was the only thing, the purpose of existence. Since the Pendleton had inexplicably changed, for the past half hour, Mickey had been trying to think through what might have happened, the whole cause-and-effect business. He’d been brooding incessantly about what he should do, and frankly it had all been too much, so much thinking, thinking, thinking, and no feeling. His mother could be a thinker and yet always remember that sensation was everything. Mickey simply wasn’t equipped to think a lot and still feel.

  The limp and drying towelette looked sad now, mundane, nearly all the magic gone out of it, almost as dreary as this new world. He rolled it into a ball and held it on the palm of his right hand, wondering if there might be any more use he could make of it, any more sensation he could extract from it.

  He supposed that it might have a lemon taste and might be worth chewing on, though he didn’t think swallowing it would be a pleasure. But then he remembered that, since he scrubbed his hands, the paper bore traces of Vernon Klick’s grime, which made it unappetizing.

  As he dropped the sad-looking towelette, a new thought occurred to Mickey even though he was trying not to think so much. He wondered if he might be insane. He did feel a little bit like he had stepped off a ledge and was in slow free fall. Losing his mother had been a terrible shock, the kind of loss that might destabilize anyone, and having to kill his own brother without being paid for it stressed him perhaps more than he knew. If he’d lost his mind, that might explain why the world had changed: It might all be a delusion. The world might be exactly as it had always been; but he saw it differently now because he had slipped over the edge of reason.

  This was such a big and difficult and daunting thought that Mickey became very still as he considered it.

  Just as he froze, the voices in the walls fell silent. They didn’t fade away like they had faded in, but they abruptly ceased talking.

  He had the impression that this entire world, whether real or illusion, had just stopped to think hard about something, had been astonished by a new thought, exactly as he had been, and was busily mapping out the ramifications if it should be true, the implications branching on and on.

  Bailey Hawks

  As Silas and Kirby searched one wing of the Cupp apartment, Bailey searched the other. He was half sick with dread, clearing each doorway and turning every corner with an expectation of one kind of horrific discovery or another. They should have all gone through the Pendleton together. They should never have separated, even if such a large search party would have been awkward and more vulnerable to assault. He felt that he had failed them, and the memory of his mother’s death inevitably pierced him.

  By the time they returned simultaneously to the living room, they had found no trace of the missing women and children, or the cats. They had discovered nothing different from before except two piles of nanosludge.

  Tom Tran and Padmini stood side by side at the western windows, fascinated by the moonlit plain of massive black trees and luminous grass.

  As Bailey, Silas, and Kirby worriedly discussed what to do next, Padmini said, “It’s stopped.”

  “All of a sudden,” Tom said.

  At the windows, Bailey saw that the grass, always before swaying, now stood tall and stiff, utterly motionless.

  “There were some flying things in the distance,” Padmini said. “You couldn’t see them too clearly, but they all fell to the ground at the moment the grass stopped swaying.”

  In motion, the strange landscape had been haunting, the rhythm of the grass like the mesmerizing back-and-forth of an arcing blade in a dream of Death the harvester, like the slow-motion dancers or the languid waves of a silent sea in the time-stalled world of sleep. But this breathless stillness was haunting, too, in its completeness. Bailey had never seen nature come to such a perfect stop, as if a spell had been cast upon it, everything turned to ice and stone in the cold light of the moon.

  He remembered what the undying man had said in the basement hallway: … all life has become one. The One. Many individuals, one consciousness.

  This frozen vista might have suggested to Bailey that the One had suddenly gone to sleep, but there was a sense of expectation to the scene, not merely an expectation that he inferred but one that was clearly implied. The entire land, every living thing within view, seemed to have been struck by the same intention and now considered whether and how to act upon it.

  The others felt it, too, for Padmini said, “Something’s going to happen.”

  Tom Tran said,
“Dr. Ignis?”

  “I don’t know,” Kirby said. “I can’t guess.”

  The One prepared itself for something.

  One

  I can sing or speak from within the walls in any of billions of voices, in any of numerous languages, for I contain the memories of all whom I have killed. Their souls, should they have any, are gone, but their memories are forever suspended in me, in time, in the moment of their death. Memories are data. Souls are less than vapor. I offer the only kind of immortality that matters.

  Time. I pause in all my manifestations. Across my world, the killing stops and nothing is reborn. For a moment, I cannot attend to those functions as I consider the ways of time.

  Time is a treacherous thing. I exist here in my time, but the steps necessary to ensure my creation have not yet been taken in your time. Although killing has always abetted my plans and has thus far ensured my dominion of the earth, I suspect that I should spare a few more of the current crop of Pendleton residents than I had intended. The boy will still be mine to devour, and the ex-marine. Perhaps a third. Even I, the prince of this world, must in this situation proceed with caution, for all is at stake.

  31

  Here and There

  Fielding Udell

  With a corner for his cradle, sitting upright fast asleep, no longer guided through a reverie of the oneness of the One, Fielding opened the doors to his own dreamery and drifted through some of his favorite scenarios. They were all set in his childhood, when his Pooh bear was his boon companion, when the world was golden, long before he went to the university and learned to hate his kind, his class, himself. In his youthful innocence, he hated nothing, no one, and Pooh loved everything.

  The chanting, insistent, foreign-language voices no longer rose either in his dreams or in the walls. Legions had fallen silent, as if with a sudden revelation and in subsequent contemplation. The One could not dream its way to childhood because it had never had one, no childhood but only an origin. Such were the peculiarities of time and of time travel that Fielding might be a key to the fulfillment of that origin. He was now subconsciously aware of his role in history, but in his sleep he was not made solemn by the weight of this duty, and he dreamed of golden summer meadows and butterflies and a yellow kite high in the blue, and of his sixth birthday party when there had been helium-filled balloons of many colors.

  Twyla Trahern

  The singing abruptly stopped. When the singer lost interest in the song, the phantom fingers in Twyla’s head ceased to tease her toward surrender.

  She and Sparkle Sykes could find no alternative route through the lower floor of Gary Dai’s apartment to the place where Winny waited with Iris. When they returned to the threshold that the boy had warned them not to cross, the room of lashes no longer presented an obstacle. The hundreds of pale thin whips had retracted into the walls, and there were only the webs of backlit cracks green in the plaster and the luminous yellow colonies of fungi, which no longer throbbed.

  Winny and Iris weren’t visible beyond the doorway at the farther side of the room, where they had been less than a minute earlier, and when their mothers called to them, they failed to respond. In these circumstances, the silence of a child was no less alarming than would have been a scream.

  If the beasts of this future were cunning, this apparently safe passage before them might be a trap. Once she and Sparkle entered, the lashes might whip out of the walls, scourging them, snaring them, immobilizing them like flies in the tenacious gossamer of spider work.

  Nevertheless, they hesitated only an instant before plunging into the room. This Pendleton of a far tomorrow had become the last home of—and memorial to—the evil that shadowed men and women since time immemorial, and here in this world where apparently no humanity existed to be tormented, the band of neighbors from 2011 must be a most desired delicacy. The corrupter that ruled this place might lie in wait for a while, teasing itself with abstinence, sweetening the ultimate pudding with several spoons of anticipation, before at last having its dessert. Twyla felt—and sensed Sparkle’s equal awareness—that the hungry room wanted them with an intensity it could barely restrain. If they were to run its length, their pounding footfalls might be sufficient vibration to fire its hair-trigger appetite, and so they walked swiftly but lightly, hoping not to rouse the predator from its dreamy ruminations about the taste of flesh and souls. The light deep within the plaster cracks might have been more luminous fungi, but because Twyla felt intensely watched, it seemed to her like animal eye-shine.

  The room gave them the safe passage it seemed to promise, but she felt no relief when she stepped through the doorway into the hall that served the rest of the apartment. It was not only one room that wanted them but the entire house and the world beyond the house. One place or another, the bite would come.

  Neither Winny nor Iris was in the narrow hallway, and they did not answer to their mothers’ calls. If Winny remained anywhere in the apartment, he would respond to her, unless he was already dead. Winny dead was not a sight that she could bear and not one for which she would go looking. Leaving the rest of the apartment unsearched, she led Sparkle along the hall, through a room, a smaller room, and out of a door into the second-floor public hallway, opposite the south elevator.

  After his experience earlier in the elevator, Winny wouldn’t dare that again. The south stairs were nearby, but 2-G, the Sykeses’ apartment, was just around the corner, in the long south hall, and it made sense that a frightened Iris might have gone there, with Winny following.

  Winny

  He didn’t know what had set Iris off, what she might be running from, but Winny knew what she was running to, which was big trouble of one kind or another. He wished to God that she wouldn’t make it even harder than it ought to be for him to be a hero. Even with her autism, it should have been obvious to her that he wasn’t equipped for the role, that it was a stretch for him to save the day, and that he needed all the help he could get.

  Because of the girl’s awkward movements and the way she seemed to pull in like a turtle in its shell when she was around people, Winny had assumed that a shuffle was her highest speed, but he had been wrong. He thought he would catch her in the Dai apartment and hold her until their moms arrived, but she was so fast that it was like magic, as if she might be the daughter of a wind witch, though of course Mrs. Sykes didn’t look like any kind of witch. He didn’t catch Iris in the public hallway, either.

  Before he followed her through the door to the south stairs, he shouted, “Mom! The stairs!” But he had the sick feeling that she was too far away to hear him. If he delayed, he would lose Iris. Alone in this boogeyman wonderland, the girl would not live long.

  Iris raced away from him, descending the south stairs as though she knew where she was going and needed to be there yesterday. Even though Winny hurtled down two steps at a time, pell-mell around the long blind turn, the slow-closing door almost shut in his face by the time he reached the ground floor.

  When he came out of the stairwell, he saw Iris at the halfway point of the long west corridor, at the double doors that led to the courtyard, trying to yank them open. They seemed to be locked or rusted shut. But Winny vividly remembered the thing crawling on the window in the Sykes apartment and the flying manta ray with the garbage-disposal mouth, and as bad as things might be inside the Pendleton, he knew they were far worse outside. He shouted at her to get away from the doors, and she did, but only to take off again, running away from him.

  Past the lobby, as Iris drew near the public lavatories, she let out a shrill sound, not a scream exactly, more of a protracted mewl like an animal in pain. She dodged past a couple of dark shapes on the floor and bolted even faster to the end of the corridor and through the door to the north stairs.

  When Winny got to the shapes past which Iris dodged, he dodged them as well, and there was just enough of the fungus light to see they were two figures, one naked and not at all human, the other in clothes and half-human, both of them dea
d with their skulls blown open. He didn’t think he let out a scream, but he felt as if he were screaming, so maybe it was even way more shrill than Iris’s, so high-pitched that only dogs could hear it.

  As he reached the stairwell, he wished to God again, this time that Iris had gone up instead of down, because he just knew that the basement was a bad idea. Basements were pretty often a bad idea even when they were clean, well-lighted, and were in the other world, his world, where nearly all the monsters were human. Here, the basement was probably a portal to Hell or to some place to which even the people in Hell wouldn’t want to move.

  He heard the crusted hinges of a door creak below as Iris left the stairwell.

  Dr. Kirby Ignis

  As Bailey and Silas discussed how best to go in search of those who had disappeared, Kirby Ignis stood at the edge of enlightenment, sensing within reach an understanding that would change everything.

  At the windows of the Cupp apartment, watching the vast meadow in its perfect stillness, Kirby thought about the thing that attacked Julian Sanchez and that might have been Sally Hollander before it was created from her flesh and bone. That beast-machine hybrid had surely been designed as a weapon, a weapon of terror meant to evoke the most intense and primitive of human fears about shape-changers: werewolves, werecats, and the like. The dread of losing control of oneself, of being psychologically and physically invaded, possessed and changed forever, was perhaps the oldest of spiritual fears except for the fear of a righteous God. And at least as ancient as that spiritual fear was the material fear of being eaten alive, which had its roots in the days of the earliest men, when they were prey in a world full of predators. Building a weapon of terror to exploit those two most basic and ancient of fears, making it a highly efficient converter of the innocent into new engines of slaughter, was a feat of great imagination and highly precise engineering. The beast could not have been designed for another purpose and then run amok or devolved into what it had become.