77 Shadow Street (18 page)

He knew this place from old photographs. This was not the lobby of the Pendleton in 2011, but instead the reception hall of Belle Vista in a distant age, the apartment building gone, the private home returned. Back in the late nineteenth century, Shadow Street had been the first in the city to receive electric service, and Belle Vista had been the first new house to be built here without gas lamps. The lighting was dimmer than usual because these bulbs were primitive Edison products from the early days of the illumination revolution.

Sometimes, under stress or in the grip of strong emotion, Silas suffered from familial tremors of the jaw, which caused his mouth to quiver, and of the right hand. He began to tremble now, not with fear but with wonder. Time past and time present seemed to meet here, as if all the yesterdays of history were just a door, a threshold, a step away.

Directly ahead, a door opened, and the haunting began. The man who entered had died decades before Silas Kinsley’s birth. Andrew Pendleton. Billionaire of the Gilded Age. The first owner of this residence. He was no ghost, no rattler of chains looking to torment
Ebenezer Scrooge, but rather a traveler out of time. He was dressed for another era: wide cuffs on his pants, narrow lapels on his suit coat, a high yoke on his vest, and a hand-knotted bow tie.

Startled, Pendleton said, “Who are you?”

Before Silas could respond, Belle Vista rippled away, as if it must have been a mirage, and the long-dead businessman shimmered out of sight with the reception room. Silas found himself standing in the brightly lighted lobby of the Pendleton, everything as it should be.

Beyond the concierge’s counter was an entrance to a walk-in coat closet used during parties in the nearby banquet room. Through that door came Padmini Bahrati, a slender beauty with enormous dark eyes, who reminded Silas of his own lost Nora.

“Mr. Kinsley,” said the concierge, “how are you this evening?”

Blinking, trembling, Silas remained speechless for a moment, and then he said, “Did you see him?”

Adjusting the cuffs of her blouse, she said, “Who?”

Judging by her demeanor, the transformation of the lobby had not extended to the coat closet. She was unaware of what had happened.

Silas strove to keep his voice steady. “A man. Leaving. Dressed as though he stepped out of the late eighteen hundreds.”

“Perhaps that’s a new fashion trend,” Padmini said, “which would be lovely, considering what you see people wearing these days.”

Twyla Trahern

As she slammed the door to Winny’s room, hoping to contain whatever malign force had tried to manifest in there, and as she hurried with the boy along the hallway toward the master suite, Twyla first thought that she would throw some essentials into a suitcase before leaving the Pendleton. By the time she reached the threshold of her bedroom, she decided it would be foolish to delay one minute longer
than necessary. Reality had changed before her eyes and then had changed again. She didn’t know what was happening here, but she needed to react to it as she would have reacted if she’d seen the ghost of a decapitated man who spoke to her from the head that he carried in the crook of his arm:
She needed to get the hell out
.

All she required was her purse. It contained her car keys, her checkbook, her credit cards. They could buy new clothes and anything else they needed.

“Stay close,” she urged Winny as she crossed the living room toward the wing of the apartment that included her study, where she had left her purse.

She wasn’t as much of a churchgoer as maybe she ought to be, but Twyla was a believer, raised in a house with a well-read Bible, where they prayed every evening before dinner and again at bedtime. In the small town where she was brought up, as in her immediate family, most people lived as best they could with the conviction that this life was preparation for another. When her daddy, Winston, died in the coal-cracker explosion, lots of people at his funeral said, “He’s in a better place now,” and meant it. There was this world and the world after, and Twyla once wrote a song about the need for humility in the light of our mortality and another about the mystery of grace, both hits.

Whatever the next world might be like, however, she knew for certain that the walls of Heaven weren’t crumbling and stained and greasy and crawling with black mold, like the wall that changed in Winny’s bedroom. If television existed in Heaven—which was about as likely as cancer wards existing in Heaven—there wouldn’t be either spyware that made every TV a surveillance device or deadpan computer voices ordering people exterminated. That didn’t even sound like Hell, but more like a hell on earth, maybe North Korea or Iran or some other place run by madmen.

In the study, as she snatched her purse from the piano bench and
turned to leave, her attention was drawn to the windows by a flash of lightning, and she remembered the brief illusion that the storm and the rain-washed panes had earlier presented to her: the city gone, replaced by an empty landscape, a sea of grass, strange trees—craggy and black—clawing at the sky.
That
had been part of
this
, not an illusion, but a glimpse of a different reality.

The knot of fear in her breast tightened.

As acutely perceptive as ever, Winny said, “What? What is it?”

“I don’t know. It’s crazy. Come on, sweetie. You go ahead of me, I don’t want you out of my sight. We need coats, umbrellas.”

Theirs was the largest apartment on the second floor, twice the size of the next biggest, and the only one with two entrances. The front doors opened into a short length of hallway, near the north elevator, and the service door opened near the south elevator. Their winter coats and rain gear were in a closet in the laundry room, near the back door.

As they crossed the kitchen, Twyla said, “Winny, wait a sec,” and snatched the handset from the wall phone. She pressed O, which in the Pendleton’s customized telecom system would ring the phones in both the concierge’s office and at the lobby reception counter.

A woman said, “Operator,” which wasn’t the standard greeting, and she didn’t sound like Padmini Bahrati, who was the only female concierge on the staff.

Confused, Twyla said, “Is this the concierge?”

“The what? Excuse me. No, ma’am. This is the operator.”

Perhaps she was some new employee who didn’t know the protocols.

“This is Twyla Trahern in 2-A. Will you please have my Escalade brought around from the garage right away?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. You’ve dialed the operator. If you’ve got a number for this concierge person, I’ll be happy to place the call for you.”

Dialed? Place the call?

Watching his mother, Winny raised his eyebrows.

To the operator, Twyla said, “Aren’t you at the front desk?”

“No ma’am. I’m at City Bell, the central exchange. Whom do you wish to call?”

Twyla had never heard of City Bell. She said, “I’m trying to reach the front desk of the Pendleton.”

“The Pendletons? Is that a residence? Just a moment, please.” She returned after a silence: “We have no Pendletons listed anymore. By any chance … do you mean Belle Vista?”

Twyla was aware of just enough of the building’s history to know that when it was a single-family residence, it had been called Belle Vista. But that hadn’t been since sometime in the 1970s.

The operator said, “That would be Mr. Gifford Ostock and family. But I’m afraid that’s a private number.”

“Gifford Ostock?” The name meant nothing to Twyla.

“Yes, ma’am. Since Mr. Pendleton … passed away … well, Mr. Ostock has lived at Belle Vista.”

Andrew Pendleton had died more than a century earlier.

“This Ostock doesn’t live there now,” Twyla said.

“Oh, yes, ma’am. He’s lived there at least thirty years.”

Twyla had never known an operator as chatty and patient as this. As nice as the woman sounded, it was nonetheless tempting to think that her unprecedented forbearance must be a subtle mockery if not something more sinister.

Although she did not realize why she was asking the question until the last word fell from her lips, Twyla said, “I’m sorry. I was confused for a moment. Could you please give me the number of the Paramount Theater?”

The Paramount, an Art Deco movie palace from the 1930s, stood at the base of Shadow Hill, walking distance from the Pendleton.

The operator didn’t tell Twyla to dial 411 for directory assistance. Instead, after a pause, she said, “Yes, ma’am. That number is Deerfield 227.”

“DE-227. That’s only five numbers.”

“May I connect you, ma’am?”

“No. I can place the call later. Could you tell me—are the letters in the same place on a touch-tone phone as on a … rotary?”

As though she had decided she might be talking to a drunk, the operator at last sighed but remained polite: “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I don’t know the term ‘touch-tone.’ ”

“What year is this?” Twyla asked, which raised Winny’s eyebrows again.

After a hesitation, the operator said, “Ma’am, do you need medical assistance?”

“No. No, I don’t. I just need to know the year.”

“It’s 1935, of course.”

Twyla hung up.

Logan Spangler

In the transformed half bath of Senator Blandon’s apartment, in the inadequate yellow glow of the ameboid form on the ceiling, Logan Spangler played the LED flashlight over the walls of sinuous, pale-green, black-mottled, serpentine fungus from which, at six locations, sprouted clusters of similarly colored and oddly shaped mushrooms on thick short stems. Logan had never seen such specimens before, and he regarded them with curiosity but also with suspicion. They were suspect less because they were unusual than because their sinuous forms and eerie coloration disturbed him on a level so deep that he couldn’t plumb it, perhaps as deep as racial memory, an intuitive sense that he was in the presence of something not
only foul, not merely poisonous, but also alien, corrupt, and corrupting.

Behind Logan, someone said something that he didn’t understand, but when he spun to face the speaker, no one loomed in the doorway or in the hall beyond. Silence. Then the voice came again from behind him, in a foreign language, low and whispery and ominous, not so much threatening as foreboding, like someone delivering terrible news. He turned again as the speaker fell silent, but no one had materialized in the bathroom while he’d been distracted. He remained alone.

Alone with the fungus. The voice came a third time, delivering another foreign sentence or two, very near, to his left, where the wall was entirely covered with the green-and-black growth. What sounded like the same chain of syllables at once came from the wall directly ahead, and yet another repetition from somewhere near the half-draped toilet. As Logan tried to follow the elusive voice with the LED beam, he found the light focusing on cluster after cluster of the mushrooms that swelled from the undulant snakelike base forms.

When he began to suspect that the voice came from the fungus—or whatever the hell it was—Logan drew his pistol. In all his years as a homicide detective, he’d drawn his piece perhaps a dozen times, and in his six years at the Pendleton, he had until now left it in his holster. Furniture vanishing around him, rooms falling into ruin but then magically restored: He sensed no immediate threat in those bizarre events, perhaps because the criminals with whom he’d dealt his entire life were mostly uninspired brutes and fools who resorted to violence to solve their problems and, therefore, didn’t require him to develop a rich imagination in order to find them and bring them to justice. But though his imagination might be impoverished, it wasn’t penniless, and now it paid out a bounty of anxiety.

The disembodied voice, deep but whispery, suddenly swelled to a
chorus of voices, each of them saying something different from the others, all of them still low and murmurous and untranslatable, but more urgent than before. They seemed to be talking not to Logan but to one another, conspiring toward some action. As the flashlight beam stabbed here, there, elsewhere, he was convinced that if he could see the undersides of the mushroom caps, the fragile gills would be vibrating like vocal cords.