by Dean Koontz
Beside Bailey, Padmini said, “Look up.”
The ceiling seemed to have turned soggy and soft, sagging under some moist weight, and every seam shed the concealing plaster, as if the big panels of Sheetrock were coming apart.
Tom Tran stepped out of Ignis’s apartment, keeping Bailey’s Beretta on Mickey Dime. The killer’s dreamy smile was as unfaltering as if his lips had been sewn into their arc.
Silas followed, too, but Witness remained behind.
“Come on,” Bailey said, and led them after the scientist.
There didn’t seem to be anything Ignis could do to put them in greater danger. And Bailey couldn’t imagine where the man thought he might flee to escape his responsibility when the transition reversed. But Ignis’s purposefulness suggested that he had a destination and a plan, which couldn’t be good for the rest of them.
The ceiling groaned behind them and softened ahead. Dry-wall nails squealed as they pulled slowly out of the overhead joists, and from that lumber came a worrisome cracking as if it must be under enormous, rapidly increasing stress. To the left and right, electric receptacles and the junction boxes in which they were seated blew out of the walls, trailing green and black and white wires, and something pale squirmed at the resultant rectangular holes, as if eager to get out of the wall and into the hallway.
Ignis disappeared through the stairwell door, but Bailey and Padmini were close on his tail now, Silas and Tom and Mickey not far behind. Ignis went down, moving faster than in the hallway, taking the steps two at a time, breathing rapidly, a thin rhythmic bleat of anxiety escaping him. They passed the ground floor. Bailey remembered Witness warning him that inside the house, the One was strongest in the elevator shafts and the basement.
Dr. Kirby Ignis
The survival of the One—its very creation—depended on Kirby making it back to 2011 alive, and his survival seemed to be assured only if he made the return journey alone. Bailey Hawks wasn’t to be relied upon. He was quick to make black-and-white moral judgments, giving little or no consideration to shades of gray. Silas Kinsley’s courtroom experience had given him a good ear for evasion, and he would keep confirming Hawks’s intuition. Having been to war and having survived, Hawks knew how to take action on those judgments and would not dither. He was the worst kind of man to have as an enemy.
The One had spoken to Kirby back there in his kitchen. Spoke to him from inside his head, not in words so much as images from which he made inferences. Down, it said. Basement, pool room, it said by showing him those places. He had no friends here anymore, not among his own kind, and he could trust only the One, the One and the house that it haunted in its myriad forms.
Bailey Hawks
When Bailey rushed out of the stairwell into the basement corridor, the door to the lap pool was just falling shut. Padmini and Silas moved past him, toward that room, but he put one hand on her shoulder, halting her and the attorney.
“Doorways are always bad,” he said, as Tom arrived with Mickey Dime. “And the pool, the way it is now … it’s a trap. We’ve been lured and herded here.”
The canyon that was now the swimming pool, a thousand fathoms deep or deeper, and everything else that might now lie beneath the Pendleton could have been excavated and constructed by nanomachines eating their way through bedrock. But whatever the origins of those deep redoubts, they seemed to bring together the future evil of the One with the evil that predated time, stories of which had been passed down through the history of humanity by word of mouth, by cave paintings, and eventually by the written word. Here all the millennia of earthly evil were condensed into one moment, and this house that was a bridge over a fault in space-time was also a temple to the forces that had so long sought the destruction of all things.
“He’s in there?” Tom asked. “And we’re not going after him? Then what are we going to do?”
The ceiling creaked. Crumbles of luminous fungi snowed down around them. The few operative overhead lights dimmed, brightened, dimmed. As upstairs, receptacles and junction boxes blew out of the walls, and pale forms slithered-pressed against those holes in the Sheetrock. From the elevator shaft came the sound of a car ascending from a great depth. They were being herded again, encouraged toward the lap-pool door.
“Wait,” Bailey insisted.
To their right, halfway along the corridor, Twyla and Sparkle came out of the HVAC vault, the children with them.
Bailey glanced at his watch. “Wait. Wait.”
From inside, the lap-pool door was torn open, wrenched off its hinges, and thrown aside.
Silas Kinsley
Out of the doorway came two of the creatures that Witness had called Pogromites, wet from the pool, but they were smaller than the others, the size of children. One shot directly toward Silas, faster than a cat, climbed his right leg, claws scrabbling at his raincoat, teeth snapping, its gargoyle eyes fixed on his eyes as though the black-hole gravity of those big pupils would pull him into oblivion. He struck at it with one fist, its teeth missed his hand, snagged in his coat cuff, he staggered backward, Padmini stepped in, the sleeve ripped, the thing shook the scrap of fabric out of its mouth, it swung its head toward Padmini and snapped at her, biting down not on her hand but on the barrel of the pistol, and she blew its crawling gray brains across the hallway floor.
The second small Pogromite launched at Bailey. He backed rapidly away at first sight, firing four rounds point-blank, scrambling its face, punching out the back of its skull. It collapsed at his feet, mostly brainless but spasming, snapping at his shoes. He kicked it aside, swung toward the pool-room door, and a third beast appeared, bigger than the others.
Something had seemed familiar about the first two, and now Silas knew why. As the Pogromite that had been formed out of the substance of Sally Hollander had vaguely resembled her, so this creature bore a subtle resemblance to Margaret Pendleton, the wife of Andrew, who with her daughter and son had gone missing in 1897. Silas had seen photographs of the woman and her children—and these were the things that they had become. This Pogromite was the size of Padmini, whom it at once attacked.
Twyla Trahern
The sudden eruption of the creatures from the lap-pool doorway distracted Twyla for an instant, and in that moment the Pogromite from the HVAC vault burst through the doorway behind her. So fast, so strong, it swept her aside with one arm, knocked her off her feet, and the gun flew from her hand. She landed on her left hip, pain shot the length of that leg. Sparkle screamed, Iris screamed. Twyla rolled over, sat up, saw the gray beast in the yellow gloom tear the rifle with the fixed bayonet out of Winny’s hands and toss it away. Pogromite. It called itself a Pogromite. She scrambled toward the pistol, something treacherous underfoot, oily fragments of glowing fungi that had fallen from the ceiling, as slick as ice. The Pogromite seized Winny by his arms, lifted him high, as though making an offering of him to some god of blood, and abruptly the Pendleton roared with psychotic voices, a psychic wave of hatred slammed over Twyla as she snatched up the pistol, convulsing her with its power, yellow light seemed to flare within her head, so that reflexively she fired the pistol, bullet-shattered bits of concrete prickling her face—
Tom Tran
With one six-fingered hand, almost quicker than the eye, the thing seized Padmini by the throat, and with the other hand, it encircled her, pulling her against it. Her gun was trapped between them, she squeezed off two shots into its abdomen, but it was more machine than flesh, only head shots—taking out the logic circuits—would stop it. The Pogromite snapped at her face as it dragged her backward, and she twisted her head away, avoiding one bite, then a second.
When the creature dragged her across the threshold into the lap-pool room, Tom followed close, the Beretta in a two-hand grip, hoping for a clear shot at the thing’s hateful face, afraid to fire because of the way Padmini whipped her head side to side as she desperately tried to avoid being bitten. Dr. Ignis was standing to one side, his face twisted in a lunatic expression that was h
alf terror and half triumph. Operating strictly on instinct, Tom shot Ignis in the right shoulder, and the many voices of the One exploded from every wall, from out of the pool, shrieking in rage. To protect Ignis, the Pogromite threw Padmini aside and sprang at Tom. Although not fully automatic, the pistol would fire as rapidly as he could squeeze the trigger, and the creature’s face was nearly dissolved when it crashed into him and knocked him off his feet.
Twyla Trahern
—Winny lifted over the Pogromite’s head, the sweet lamb to the high altar, but then brought down face-to-face, and the gray priest hissing in consecration of the sacrifice, baring its teeth for the mortal bite, with Sparkle in the quick of it and plunging the bayonet into the small of the beast’s back to no effect. Twyla fast, no music in her now, only a shrill discordant cry of rage and terror and all-shattering love, the pistol bucking in her hands once, twice, and again. Gray teeth to the smooth cheek—but then the head bursting, the Pogromite falling, Winny dropping, Winny unbitten, Winny with gray nanocomputers crawling across his face.
Bailey Hawks
Shaken, Padmini came through the lap-pool door into the hallway.
Tom Tran followed her, gripping Kirby Ignis by one arm, pressing the muzzle of the pistol against his throat.
“Stalemate,” Bailey shouted.
Recognizing that it might never come to exist if Ignis died, the shrieking legions of the One grew quieter, though the voices were no less enraged.
Clutching his shoulder wound with his left hand, Kirby Ignis looked surprised, which didn’t speak well for him, that he could be surprised by anything after seeing the One and the world that his institute had furthered. He didn’t expect the wound because in spite of his expressed regret and the acknowledgment that such a future must never come to pass, he still did not truly see himself at fault. He was aghast at the dire unintended consequences, but incapable of admitting to any responsibility for what had happened.
Within the walls, legions continued to protest, all expressing the same wordless outrage in the same voice, the latest version of the faceless mobs of history. The One seemed to be arguing with itself, deciding on its next move.
“Bailey, you’re making a terrible mistake,” Ignis said. “My work, our work at the institute, can relieve all human suffering. The world can be made right.”
Bailey thought of how often they looked like what they were not. The men around Hitler could have been your sweet-faced uncle, your chubby-cheeked cousin, your grandfather with his pipe and slippers and easy smile. At times in his life, Albert Speer somewhat resembled Gregory Peck, the actor with the perfect looks for righteous roles. Roosevelt called Stalin “Uncle Joe.” Uncle Joe and Uncle Ho Chi Minh. When he smiled, Pol Pot, of the Cambodian killing fields, might have been the nice man behind the counter at your dry-cleaning shop.
As the voices in the walls seethed, Ignis appealed to Padmini Bahrati. “With nanomachines to edit the DNA of the fetus in the womb, no child will ever be born with disabilities.”
“Or perhaps no child will ever be born,” she said.
“No, no. Listen. Listen to me. Nanobot microbivores swimming in the bloodstream could download instructions for recognizing any virus or bacteria and wipe out any disease hundreds of times faster than antibiotics.”
Entering from the stairwell, Witness said, “There is no disease in this future.”
Ignis said, “Forget about this future. This was never intended.”
Urging everyone to join forces with Sparkle and Twyla at the midpoint of the corridor, Bailey glanced back at Witness, who chose not to accompany them, and asked, “What year is this, anyway?”
“Not as far from your time as you think. This is 2049.”
Smiling, shaking his head, Mickey Dime said, “I didn’t hear that. I don’t want to think about that. It makes no sense.”
With a ding, the elevator arrived at the basement from realms below.
Sparkle Sykes
She wiped frantically at the sludge on Winny’s face, afraid that the horde would dissolve his flesh, and suddenly Iris was there and engaged, finding the courage to endure contact with another, wiping tenderly at Winny’s left ear, at his neck. The nanothings tingled over Sparkle’s hands, like thousands of swarming ants, but they didn’t bite or sting, and Winny’s face remained unscathed. As she wiped her hands vigorously on her clothes, the horde already seemed to be moving more sluggishly across her skin.
Bailey Hawks
As everyone came together in the middle of the hallway, finishing plaster cracked and fell from overhead and drywall screws popped loose. A slab of Sheetrock swung down like a big trapdoor, fanning Bailey with powdered gypsum and nearly knocking Tom Tran to his knees. Overhead, seething between the ceiling joists, death-loving life in pale profusion squirmed and thrashed and reached down for them.
Jamming the muzzle harder into Ignis’s throat, Tom Tran shouted, “I’ll kill him!”
The One seemed to have decided it must risk its creator’s life, because out of the blue light of the elevator surged a furious swarm of hideous manifestations, animal-plant-machine entities at the sight of which his eyes rebelled and his heart shrank, a hobgoblin horde that might have been the denizens of the nightmares that demons dreamed when they slept in Hell. This pack would have torn them to pieces if sudden sheets of blue light had not shimmered up the walls. The transition reversed, the roar of bedlam voices abruptly silenced, rust and ruin vanished, as did the dead Pogromites and those borne by the elevator. And here were the surviving neighbors, here where the future had not yet happened, here in the still point of ever-turning time, where all was possible and nothing was yet lost.
Home.
One
From pole to pole, I pause in my entirety, every manifestation utterly still, the world hushed in anticipation. The boy escapes me, as does the ex-marine, but my messenger has gone with them. Moment by moment, my triumph seems to be validated. I am the prince of this world not just for a time but for all time. The two geniuses of the institute will proceed as required, and I will be well. I will be well and all will be well in this best of all possible worlds.
34
77 Shadow Street
In the basement corridor, the gap in the ceiling was closed as if it had never opened. No creaking issued from within the walls or ceiling, no slithering, no voices. The demonic multitude had vanished before their eyes, as had Witness.
Having been released by Tom, one hand still clamped to his shoulder wound, Ignis said, “You won’t regret sparing me, Bailey. I will fix it. Everything. I’ll make it all right.”
Bailey said, “Silas, can it be coincidence that this one house in all the world happens to be built over a fault in space-time?”
“In the courtroom, it’s cause and effect, motive and intent. We don’t like coincidence.”
“Neither do I. Tom, can it be coincidence that the man who will ruin the future just happens to live in the one house in the world that’s built over a fault in space-time?”
“Coincidence is mere random chance,” Tom Tran said. “I believe in patterns and mystery.”
Grimacing in pain, impatient, Ignis said, “What’s the point of this? I’m bleeding here. I need medical attention.”
“Padmini,” Bailey said, “if the real ruiner of the world was a man named Von Norquist, why wouldn’t his residence have been the one preserved as a shrine?”
“Your question is a riddle I can’t solve,” Padmini said.
Sitting at the table, Mickey Dime said, “My mother liked you, Dr. Ignis. She said you had vision. She didn’t mean just eyesight.”
To Ignis, Bailey said, “Time and fate are complicated things. Is there just one future … or many possible futures?”
“This is all moot,” Ignis said. His face had gone pale. Fine beads of sweat stippled his brow. “I will not let that future happen. It will never come to pass.”
Bailey said, “Which came first—the work you did to ruin the future or your glimp
se of that possible future where the One rules? Did you make that future before we saw it … or after seeing it, have you now been inspired to make a ‘better’ future?”
“What are you saying? Look, I’m in pain here. I’m not thinking clearly. I’m not following you.”
“Time and fate,” Bailey repeated, “are complicated things. Do you think each of us, every person in the world, is an instrument of destiny?”
Shaking his head, Ignis said, “I don’t know what that means.”
“I do,” Padmini said. “I am an instrument of destiny, Mr. Hawks. We all are.”
“What power employs you?” Bailey asked Ignis. “What dark destiny works through you to be born?”
“Don’t be stupid, Bailey. I know you’re not a stupid man. Don’t talk to me about crap like destiny. I’m not doomed to that future we saw. I have the power to shape a better world, a freer world, a world as safe and clean as Eden, a world where the human impulse to corrupt and destroy is put back in the bottle forever.”
Bailey shot him three times point-blank in the chest with Mickey Dime’s pistol, perhaps saving the world as he had been unable to save his mother from a drunk and violent father.
Hugs had never felt so good to Sparkle Sykes. After a minute or so, Iris stiffened in her mother’s embrace, but the girl continued to allow the affection. No less amazing, to the degree that she was able, she returned it.
Thereafter, the eight of them worked as one, not as a single mind, but as a community with a mutual purpose.
Tom erased the past twenty-four hours of recordings from the security-video archives.