77 Shadow Street (12 page)

That vivid mind movie stole from Sparkle the courage to leave her closet. Glued to the stool again, she wished that her name really might be magical, because then she’d use it to charm away the current storm.

She happened to be staring at the open door when in the bedroom the thing crawled past. It came from the direction of the bathroom, following the path that Iris had taken toward the hallway.

The lamps and ceiling fixture were on in the bedroom, to ensure that storm light behind draperies would be less noticeable. Sparkle could see the creature clearly, but it nevertheless defied belief.

If it resembled one thing more than any other, it looked like a naked baby with an unnaturally large head, about twelve or thirteen months old, still just a crawler, not yet a toddler, single-mindedly
creeping forward, but it wasn’t a baby. For one thing, it was too big, the size of a three-year-old, perhaps thirty-five pounds or more, and for another thing, its skin wasn’t pink and healthy but pale-gray mottled with green.

Sparkle neither cried out in fear nor leaped to her feet at the sight of this nightmarish intruder. Her response to any shock or threat had been programmed when lightning struck down her father so many years earlier. She went rigid that day on the porch, paralyzed with guilt and horror. Having wished her father would never leave home again, would stay there forever, she was wretchedly certain that her magical power had called down the lightning, which answered her wish in a way that she never could have imagined. Not only guilt had frozen her but also fear, for young Sparkle believed that, if she moved, surely another spear of lightning would strike
her
down, considering that she had wished, as well, to be with her daddy forever.

Her guilt had passed in a few weeks, though not her grief, and she had not believed in magic for a long time. But now she responded to the hideous crawler as to her father’s corpse: paralyzed by the conviction that she was safe only if she didn’t move or make a sound.

The large misshapen head, the size of the creature, and the gangrenous color of its skin were not the only details that argued against it being either an infant or human. Although its plump legs and small feet resembled those of a baby, it had
six
of them. It did not use its hands to crawl, but held its arms out in front of it, as if reaching for something, its stubby fingers ceaselessly raking the air. The thing was lumpy, too, as if it were riddled with tumors. In locomotion, it moved not with the rhythmic flexion and contraction of efficient muscles but in repulsive swellings and deflations occurring at multiple points across its body. For reasons that Sparkle could not explain, she thought it must be as much fungus as flesh, a weird hybrid of plant and animal.

As this beast from an acidhead’s delirium passed the open doorway and crawled across the bedroom toward the hallway, she rose from the stool, suddenly shaking with fear, swallowing repeatedly to force down a scream that swelled in her throat almost with the substance of a vomitous mass. She looked around for a weapon, but she saw nothing in the closet that would give her courage. Nevertheless, she stepped to the open doorway, in quiet pursuit, convinced that the hellish creature was on Iris’s trail and that it was a predator.

Witness positioned himself to ensure that the next fluctuation would take him to the third place he hoped to see, which was the study belonging to Sparkle Sykes. Here were even more books than in the attorney’s apartment. They were not law books but volumes used for research, poetry, and mostly novels.

He knew about this woman because he knew about all things, but also because in his youth, when he had not merely looked like a man in his twenties but also had been exactly that, he had read what she’d written.

Later, when he was required to kill, he had done so with what now seemed inexplicable enthusiasm. The only time he had hesitated was when a young woman named April, thinking him a friend, had taken from her backpack a book by Sparkle Sykes, one he had read long before, and wanted to share it with him. He repeated for her passages from memory. She had been thrilled to find, in such grim circumstances, one who shared with her the love of this enduring light. He gave her the mercy of killing her quickly with an iron bar to the back of her skull.

His bottomless memory was his greatest curse, for it was dark water, an abyss, in which drifted the bodies of April and so many men and women and children, not just those whom he had killed but uncountable
others who perished when the great blade of monstrous history cut them down. He passed his days now on the floor of that ocean of death, where the feeble yellow illumination illuminated nothing, and when he sometimes walked in daylight, he still felt drowned.

His time in Sparkle Sykes’s study, as it had been when she wrote to shape the world, was much shorter than Witness hoped. But then he supposed it was more than he deserved. He faded from the room, the room from him.

15

Apartment 2-A

W
inny didn’t want music when he was reading because music reminded him of his dad, and his dad didn’t approve of reading too much. His dad wanted him to put down the books and do manly things like join the wrestling team at school. Of course, there wasn’t a wrestling team in the fourth grade. For sure not at the Grace Lyman School. Although judging by the humongous painting of the late Mrs. Grace Lyman in the school lobby, she could have wrestled her way to a state championship. Winny’s dad wanted him to go all-out nuts for football, Tae Kwon Do, kick-boxing, and also learn to play a manly musical instrument like a guitar or a piano but not, for God’s sake, a flute or a clarinet. Winny didn’t know why his dad thought some instruments were manly and some were sissy. He
did
know that if he turned on music while he was reading, no matter what kind it was or who the singer was, his father would get in his head so much that he wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the book.

He never switched on the TV when he read, either, but twice the previous day, Wednesday, the set in his room had turned itself on to Channel 106, which on local cable was a dead channel. Instead of
electronic snow, rings of blue light pulsed from the center of the screen to its borders.

The first time this happened, having never seen anything like it before, Winny thought the TV must be haywire. When he tried to turn it off, the remote didn’t work. Because there wasn’t any noise with the pulses of blue light, he decided to continue reading and see if the set might switch itself off.

After ten minutes, he had felt maybe the TV was watching him. Well, not the TV but someone using the TV somehow to spy on people. That sounded fully whacko, just the kind of thing that would land him on a nut-doctor’s couch, in a custody battle, and in a new home in Nashville with his manly, musical dad.

So he had pulled the plug, and the TV had gone dark.

Later Wednesday, when he had come back to his room, the TV was plugged in again. Mrs. Dorfman, the housekeeper, must have done it. She was nice enough, but she just couldn’t leave anything alone. When she cleaned, she always moved things around, like Winny’s Dragon World action figures, arranging them ways that
she
liked. She was full-time but she was a live-out housekeeper, not live-in. If she was a live-in, by now she would have worn out all the carpets with her endless sweeping.

Anyway, the TV had been plugged in again yesterday—Wednesday—evening. And not long after Winny settled down to read, the set had switched on. Like before, rings of light throbbed outward from the center of the screen. They reminded him of the light on sonar scopes in old submarine movies, except they were blue instead of green.

Again he had felt that he was being watched.

Then a deep voice had spoken a single word from the throbbing rings of light: “
Boy
.”

Maybe a word leaked into the dead channel from a program on a nearby live channel. Maybe it was just a coincidence that Winny was
a boy and that the TV, which seemed to be watching him, said “boy,” instead of “banana” or something else.

“Boy,”
it said again, and Winny pulled the plug.

Wednesday night, he had difficulty sleeping soundly. He kept waking up, expecting the TV to be pulsing with blue light even though it was unplugged.

Of course on this gloomy Thursday, while Winny was at Mrs. Grace Lyman’s School for Wrestlers, Mrs. Dorfman had plugged the set in yet again, when she sterilized his room for the day. He thought about unplugging it before anything could happen. But part of him wanted to know what this was all about. It was weird, the interesting kind of weird, not the scary kind that might give you a stroke or make you pee your pants, just creepy.

So maybe half an hour after his mom said, “Love you, my little man,” and left his room, while gusts of wind rattled rain against the window, it happened. From the corner of his eye, Winny saw the TV fill with throbbing rings of blue light. He looked up from his book, and the voice said again,
“Boy.”

Winny never knew what to say to most people when they tried to drag him into a conversation. He found it even harder to figure out what to reply to a TV that seemed to be watching him and saying hello, or whatever it meant by that one word.

“Boy,”
it repeated.

Talking back to a TV set seemed a little screwy, like talking to furniture. Putting his book aside, Winny said, “Who are you?” Although the question sounded stupid, he couldn’t think of anything smarter.

The voice was deep but kind of flat, like someone on a public-address system reading a boring announcement: “
Boy. Aboveground. Second floor. West wing.
”

The TV seemed to be telling Winny where he was in the Pendleton. He already knew where he was. He didn’t need to be told. If there was
a guy watching through the TV, he seemed even worse at conversation than was Winny.

But of course there couldn’t be anyone watching. TV worked only one way. A television received. It didn’t broadcast. Something else was going on here, a little mystery that would be solved if he just thought about it long enough. He wasn’t supersmart, but he wasn’t stupid, either, not half as stupid as the boy characters in some of the books he read.

“
Boy. Black hair. Blue eyes.
”

Winny shot up from the armchair.

“Aboveground. Second floor. West wing.”

Black hair, blue eyes: Someone somewhere could see him through the TV. No doubt about it. The little mystery was suddenly big.

Winny didn’t like the way his voice trembled when he said, “What do you want?”

“
Boy. Black hair. Blue eyes. Aboveground. Second floor. West wing. Exterminate. Exterminate.
”

Because he was somewhat short for his age and scrawny, still waiting for his biceps to appear, Winny figured that if he ever did the slightest wimpy thing, people would be sure he was a gutless sissy. Once people thought you were a sissy, they would never
un
think it except maybe if you saved a hundred little kids from a burning orphanage or disarmed a terrorist and beat him up until he cried for his mommy. Winny wouldn’t be big enough to beat up anyone for at least ten years, if ever. He didn’t know an orphanage anywhere, and even if he did know one, he might wait around the rest of his life for a fire that never happened, unless he started it himself. So he tried never to do or say anything sissyish. He never showed fear in a scary movie. When he accidentally cut himself, he didn’t cry or appear to be alarmed at the sight of blood. Bugs spooked him, all those legs and
antennas, so he forced himself to pick up beetles and things that were gross but didn’t sting, to study them in the palm of his hand.

When the TV said “
Exterminate
,” lots of fourth-grade boys from the Grace Lyman School would have been scared, and at least a few might have run away in panic to hide. Instead, Winny stayed calm and walked—didn’t run—to the kitchen, where the warm air smelled cinnamony. His mom was looking at something through the window in the upper oven door.