by Dean Koontz
The haunter of this house, more real than any ghost, wasn’t attempting to pry its way into their minds, as it had tried to do earlier, but Sparkle could feel its mood, its urgent need, as surely as she would have felt cold radiating from an open freezer door. Its passion was icy, their death its greatest desire, their flesh its preferred mold bed from which to grow its next manifestation. All of this came to her in wordless impressions that didn’t require translation.
At the back of the kitchen, the door revealed that the storage room was overgrown with a succulent devoid of chlorophyll, its fleshy leaves as white and smooth as cheese, white even in the glow of the kitchen fungus formations, but whiter still in the flashlight beam. Among the leaves were numerous bi-lobe flowers like the carnivorous mouths of Venus flytraps, and most of them had sunk their glass-clear teeth into a leaf, slowly dissolving and consuming it in a perpetual self-cannibalism.
It was possible to believe that the bodies of children might lie at the roots of this thing, fleshy stalks rising out of empty eye sockets, and with a shudder of disgust, Sparkle wished that she had gasoline and a match. As if her thought was received and understood, several yawning blooms, not yet having found a leaf on which to feed, gnashed their transparent teeth. Their enemy’s hatred and thirst for violence weighed upon her more oppressively, and she was relieved to follow Twyla out of the kitchen.
But now the weight of its hatred pressed on them wherever they went: along the hallway, into Apartment 1-D, into Apartment 1-E. Even where there were only small or no manifestations, Sparkle could hear movement inside the walls, and at a few places it seemed to her that portions of a wall or a ceiling bellied out, swelled down, not only as if rotten but also as if distorted by some dark mass metastasizing behind it.
They peered through the gate of the freight elevator at the end of the hall. Although the big car stood empty, she had a sense of a strong presence in the shaft, something that seemed on the verge of surging up under the car and spilling out through the gate.
As they hurried toward the west hallway, Sparkle said, “You feel it? All around us?”
“Yeah,” Twyla confirmed.
“It wants to kill us.”
“So why the hell doesn’t it?”
“Maybe anticipation is sweet.”
“Delayed gratification? You ever really sold a guy on that?”
“This isn’t a guy. It’s some … some damn thing.”
They turned the corner into the west hallway, and Twyla’s voice was wrenched by worry and frustration when she shouted, “Winny? Where are you, Winny?”
There seemed to be no reason for stealth. The haunter of this Pendleton knew where they were at every moment, its presence as palpable here as in the catering kitchen.
Sparkle called to Iris, though even in ordinary times, Iris most often felt too oppressed to answer.
Mickey Dime
Sitting in Dr. Kirby Ignis’s kitchen, Mickey felt something crawling inside his head, and for some reason he thought of his mother’s blood-red fingernails and the way they would pick through bundles of mail from her admirers, selecting some to answer and others to discard as unworthy correspondents. These were not, of course, her fingers inside his head. Before this evening, he might have been freaked out by this sensation. Even though sensation was the end-all and be-all of existence, you wanted to avoid the bad sensations. But because he had recognized and embraced his insanity, he supposed this was just the loco part of himself sort of getting up and taking a stroll around the inside of his skull. Or something. He said, “Okay,” and just relaxed and let it happen.
The next thing he knew, he was in a waking dream, aware of the kitchen around him but also seeing very vividly a circular stand of giant craggy black trees. From there he went on a trip through the meat of the trees and into the earth, to all kinds of interesting places, and saw all manner of amazing things, including the Pogrom against humanity, the destruction of the cities, and the swift rise of the One. It was like the weirdest movie ever, with the biggest special-effects budget in history, directed by James Cameron on methamphetamines and Red Bull. Though he was left with the impression that the One found him too unreliable to be of use, the experience was so amazing, Mickey decided that insanity might prove to be the best thing that ever happened to him.
Winny
Running along the wall left them too exposed. They had to dodge in and out of the defunct machinery, the blasted boilers, the storage racks, scrambling over and under runs of large bundled pipes.
When he had just the luminous fungus to guide him, Winny’s eyes eventually started to ache, areas of light and shadow began to melt together in strange ways, and he got a little dizzy, not enough to lose his balance but just enough to get confused about direction. He thought they better not run along the aisles, either, because the ceiling crawler could more easily see them in those open lanes, whether it was still up there or had come down to the floor. In the poor light, squeezing through narrow spaces between all the ruined equipment, angling quickly across the lanes, he found it even more difficult to remain oriented and to work toward the door to the basement corridor.
Littered with debris, the floor was an obstacle course across which they could move either quickly or silently, but not both at the same time. After making way hastily but not quietly, Winny chose stealth because he knew that in any test of speed, the thing he’d glimpsed on the ceiling would win.
Holding fast to Iris’s hand, focused intently on the floor in front of them, he crossed a five-foot-wide lane, and pressed between two boxy pieces of equipment over seven feet tall. He pulled Iris with him into a narrow space where the next rank of machines backed up to the previous row.
He paused there in deep shadow, breathing shallowly through his mouth, straining to hear something other than the pounding of his heart. The air smelled of rust and mildew and of things he couldn’t name, and it tasted faintly bitter as it came cool across his tongue. Winny wondered what he was inhaling that might take up permanent residence in his lungs.
Iris’s grip on Winny’s hand tightened, and when he turned his head to the right, he could see even in the inky shadows that her eyes were wide with fright. Through the gap between machines, she seemed to have glimpsed something unsettling in the next service lane.
Cautiously he tilted his head to the left, peering through the gap on that side—and saw the ceiling crawler on the floor, walking upright. It was reptilian but also feline, and ultimately neither. Tall, lean, strong. Each of its long-fingered hands looked big enough and powerful enough to cover a boy’s face from below the chin to past the hairline and rip it off, pluck it from the skull beneath, as easily as tearing a mask from a masquerader.
The creature stalked out of sight, and Winny waited a moment before easing ahead, pulling Iris by the hand, between machines. He leaned forward, exposing his head, and looked left in time to see the beast turn left at the end of the service lane, moving out of sight and in the direction from which they had come.
He had been right to think the service lanes were dangerous. As the fungus light seemed slowly to be dimming, he and Iris—who for the moment had found a haven in her autism where she could focus and stay calm—zigzagged through the forest of machinery, like Hansel and Gretel on the lam from a child-eating witch, except that this thing wasn’t as pleasant as a witch and it wasn’t bothering to lure them with gingerbread.
Seventy feet by forty, the vault encompassed twenty-eight hundred square feet, more than the average big house, but to Winny it seemed three or four times that size. When they came to an open space that was not yet the area near the doors, his frustration and disappointment were matched by a thrill of fresh fright, because the floor was littered with expended brass cartridges and along the wall sat fourteen human skeletons, ten adults and four children, some holding guns and others slumped beside their dropped weapons.
Winny worried that he might drag Iris into such an extreme experience that she could no longer maintain her new equilibrium, but
among the firearms he saw one that he must have. The automatic weapons were probably without ammunition and too corroded to be fired. Anyway, the recoil would knock him on his butt and tear the gun out of his hands, and it would be just his luck that a ricochet would pop him dead-center in the forehead. One rifle, however, had a fixed bayonet, and he could see himself using that. If cornered, it would be better than bare hands.
He whispered, “We’ll be okay,” though he was amazed that they weren’t dead already, and he led her into the boneyard. With one hand, he picked up the rifle, and was surprised to discover that it was heavier than he ever imagined. He could carry it for a while with one hand, but if he ever had to brace it against an assault or try to thrust with it, he would need both hands, and he would have to let go of the girl.
The bayonet was firmly fixed to the gun barrel, and as Winny considered whether it was as worth having as it first seemed to be, an eager and inhuman cry echoed out of the massed machinery and off the walls of the vault. It was difficult to place but near enough that Winny feared they would never be able to get out of the open quickly enough to elude the creature—and might dash straight into it. Straight into its claws, its teeth.
Make a stand with the bayonet or hide? Easy. Hide.
Between two of the adult dead was enough room for him and Iris. He pulled her to the floor, encouraging her to sit with her back to the wall, by his side, between the carcasses, each of which leaned toward them. Instead of wrenching loose of him, as she once might have done, her hand tightened on his so hard that she mashed his knuckles together painfully.
The dead men’s clothes had moldered and partly rotted as time had vanished the flesh from their bones, and the tattered garments hung loosely on those macabre frames. Unable to pull free of the girl’s fiercely clenched hand, Winny could use only his left hand to reach across Iris and quickly adjust the greasy coat of the dead man to cover part of her.
The upper half of that skeleton slid along the wall and slumped against the girl, eliciting from her a soft “Urrrrr,” nothing more.
Winny flapped part of the clothes of the other dead guy over himself. That skeleton, too, slid along the wall, leaning on him, its bony shoulder against his face.
Most of his and Iris’s bodies—though only part of their faces—were covered. But the light here was poor, the shadows cloaking. They might be safe until someone came to find them, if anyone ever came, or at least for a few minutes, until maybe the creature decided they had slipped out of the HVAC vault and sought them elsewhere.
The portion of the dead man’s rotting coat sleeve that draped half of Winny’s face smelled vile, and he tried not to think about how it had acquired such a disgusting odor. Resisting the urge to gag, he whispered to Iris, “You’re very brave.”
Off to the right, beyond the section of open floor across which were scattered scores of empty brass casings, twelve or fourteen feet away, the beast appeared from the end of a service aisle. It froze there, alert, turning its head this way and that. Winny thought it might be a good thing that even after all this time the clothes on the skeletons stank of death—and therefore obscured the scent of young life.
The creature abruptly raced past the skeletons and disappeared among the shadows and the machinery, on the hunt. They dared not assume that it was gone for good. They were safer here, among the bones and the reeking garments of the dead, as long as they could tolerate the tension and the smell.
Besides, being able to step out of the chase gave Winny time to think. He needed time to think. He needed like a month.
He whispered to Iris again, “You’re very brave.”
Slick with the cold sweat of both, their hands seemed to be welded together as surely as if the sweat were solder.
One
Pride goes before a fall. But that was then; and this is now. My pride in this matter is justified. I have learned from the entire past of the human race, from even before humanity, from the great arc of time and even from before time. This is my world now, and it shall be forever mine. Those who do not die here will die soon enough in their time, when civilization collapses around them in the Pogrom and the Fade. I am plant, animal, machine. I am posthuman, and the condition of humanity is not my condition. I am free.
33
Here and There
Tom Tran
In Tom’s life, long before this transformation of the Pendleton, there had been moments when events occurred of such grotesque nature that they seemed to distort the very fabric of reality, and in the wake of those events, the laws of nature seemed to become elastic for a while.
The thousands of bodies in the mass grave outside Nha Trang had been an outrage so profound that for a while after he and his father walked the rim of that horror, the world was literally not the same. The jungle through which they fled seemed familiar but changed: the palms appeared deformed, with spiky rather than feathery fronds; eucalyptuses were too dark in color, almost black, and smelled like gasoline; the schefflera that usually bore dull red flowers now were bedecked by blood-red blooms so bright that they seemed artificial; the gum trees and the many ferns, the datura and the waratah, the philodendrons and the cissus weren’t as they always had been before, different in ways that were sometimes obvious but were at other times difficult to define, altered and strange and alien. They spent two days in that wilderness, walking fourteen of every twenty-four hours, when they should have gotten to their destination in eight hours at the most. They were not lost, not wandering in a delirium, so it seemed to both of them that set distances suddenly became elastic, the world more vast and unwelcoming than before.
A similar thing had happened in the inadequate boat in which he and his father eventually put to sea with fifty other refugees. After being set upon by Thai pirates, after thirty of their own people were slaughtered and the pirates took enough losses to retreat, with the decks awash in blood, time seemed to be distorted on the South China Sea, each period of daylight lasting but a few hours, the nights impossibly long and all the stars out of their usual positions in the heavens. Tom knew that anyone not there would insist it had been delirium, but those who endured were certain that it was something more mysterious.
And now, in this changed Pendleton, he and Bailey Hawks moved along corridors that they could swear expanded ahead of them and prowled room after ruined room in apartments and public spaces that he did not remember previously having so many chambers. They were never lost but several times disoriented, gripped by the feeling that this building was far different from the Pendleton of their time not just because of its miserable condition but also for other reasons that eluded them.
They found ever stranger formations of fungi and other growths, heard movement in the walls, and felt the oppressive presence of the hidden ruler of this Pendleton. It must have had some telepathic power, for Tom could feel it curling through his mind like tendrils of cold mist, and Bailey described it as a someone-walking-on-my-grave feeling. What it conveyed to them by this intrusion was its contempt, its unalloyed hatred.
The longer they searched, the more certain Tom became that they would die here, and soon. Yet the attack did not come.
Although he thought they had not finished searching elsewhere, and although he could not recall how they had returned to the north wing on the second floor, which they had searched before, Tom kept moving as they stepped out of 2-D, the Tullis apartment, and turned right. At the end of the hallway, a young man whom Tom had never seen before appeared out of the open door to 2-F and motioned for them to join him.
“Witness,” Bailey Hawks said.
Winny
Under the circumstances, taking time out to think might be a good idea, but only if you were smart enough to scheme up a great strategy. Tucked in among the skeletons, swaddled in the odorous deathbed clothes, Winny brooded hard about what would be the best course of action for him and Iris, but the only thing he could think to do was stay right where they were, pretending to be dead until either they were fou
nd by their mothers or they actually were dead.
For a while he had felt amazingly good about himself, scared shitless but forging forward, but now he was crashing back from a hero-in-the-making to the usual skinny Winny. Strategizing meant having a serious internal conversation, and to his great dismay he discovered that, under pressure, he did not even know what to say to himself. He could almost hear his father telling him that he’d have been better prepared for this emergency if he hadn’t read so damn many books, if he had learned Tae Kwon Do and how to play a manly musical instrument, if he had spent a summer or two wrestling alligators and had worked at growing some hair on his chest. Winny didn’t yet have a single hair on his chest, and now he probably never would.
Poor Iris. She had worked up all her courage and had done the thing hardest for her to do, only to commit herself to the dork of the year, the decade, the century. She probably thought he was Clark Kent, when in fact if he was any comic-book hero, he was SpongeBob SquarePants. Since he was a bust with strategy, he tried to think of the words with which to break the bad news to her.
Of course those words wouldn’t come to him either, and as he struggled to find them, bits of luminous fungi drifted down in front of him, past his one uncovered eye, like flakes of yellow snow, which seemed fitting. When the second flurry of fungi glowed past him, he belatedly realized what they signified.
He told himself, Don’t look up, as if what was about to happen could occur only if he were dreaming this entire trip to the future. If he dreamed that the flakes of glowing fungi never drifted past him, then he and Iris would be safe. If he dreamed all of them back to the good old Pendleton of their time, then they would suddenly be there, and the worst thing he would have to worry about was his dad showing up with a gift of a punching bag and boxing gloves.