77 Shadow Street (48 page)

On the other hand, he couldn’t spend his life standing on the next-to-the-last step. That wouldn’t be much of a life, no matter how long it lasted. He thought of the boys in some of the books he read, of how they were always ready for adventure. He thought about Jim Nightshade in
Something Wicked This Way Comes
, always quick into the night with or without his friend Will. Of course, if you had a name like Jim Nightshade, courage would come easy. When everyone called you Winny and you only recently—belatedly—discovered Santa Claus didn’t exist, you had to stand on that step, working up some spit in your punk-dry mouth, convincing yourself that you weren’t going to pee your pants, talking yourself into being brave.

Iris’s wordless singing at last brought Winny off the stairs and into the lower room. In addition to the qualities that he heard previously in this melodic but eerie voice—the lament of a dead girl with dirt in her teeth, the yearning of a ventriloquist’s dummy with knives in her hands—Winny now detected melancholy and a note that was almost
despair. He owed it to Iris to buck up and do this. He didn’t quite know why he owed it to her, but he knew that he did. Maybe it was because they were the only two kids in this mess.

Moonlight flooded through the tall windows, much brighter than the glowing fungus here. His mom had written a really neat song about moonlight, which Winny could never admit he liked as much as he did because it was basically a girl’s song. The moonlight in his mom’s lyrics was a whole lot prettier than
this
stuff, which was the cold late-October light that made skeletons want to dance in deserted biology labs and called things out of mausoleums to prowl cemetery roads in search of young lovers doing whatever young lovers did in parked cars.

The shadow flew. It swooped, and Winny ducked. The wings made no sound, flung off no wind, and Winny realized almost as fast as Jim Nightshade would have done that the thing in the room was
only
a shadow and that the real action occurred beyond the windows. Out there in this Future World, which was no land they would ever feature at any Disney park, a thing as big as a backyard trampoline dove down out of the sky and past the window. It was more like a manta ray than like a bird, featherless and pale, with a long barbed tail.

Winny stood transfixed, in awe of the thing, because it was so huge and strange for any creature of the air. He could almost believe that the windows were the walls of an immense aquarium and that the manta thing swam past instead of flying. It arced up into the night, its fleshy wings as flowing, as supple as you imagined a blanket was when you threw it around your shoulders and ran through the apartment pretending to be Superman, which Winny had not done in a long time and would never do again, not since his father, with entourage, paid a surprise visit and caught him at it, thereafter calling him Clark Kent for the whole day and a half that the Barnett battalion hung around.

When the night flyer dove past the windows again, recklessly close this time, like a 747 buzzing a flight-control tower, Winny got a clear look at its face, which was too bizarre and disgusting to keep in his memory if he ever hoped to sleep again. Its mouth wasn’t a slit, but instead round and open like a drain, and the teeth reminded him of garbage-disposal blades. The eye on this side of the mouth rolled like the bulging eye of a big old frog spotting a tasty butterfly on a nearby blade of grass, and Winny had no doubt that the thing had seen him and was wondering how to get at him.

The French windows were bronze, but maybe they were corroded after all these years, and maybe they would collapse into the room if something big enough crashed against them. Rather than stand witness to the trustworthiness of the windows, Winny continued to follow the singing, which faded and then swelled, faded and swelled, until he found Iris.

The girl wasn’t the source of the song.

The
room
seemed to be singing to her.

Bailey Hawks

With Sally Hollander and Julian Sanchez dead, Bailey had accounted for everyone on the ground floor. Only Tom Tran lived in the basement, and he was already with them. The time had come to return to the Cupp apartment.

Remembering his experience during his morning swim, certain that the more they knew about this place the better prepared they would be to ride out their ordeal, Bailey wanted to go down to the basement and have a look at the pool as it was in this future. Kirby agreed to accompany him. Bailey thought the other three should go up to the third floor, but they insisted that the five of them remain together.

Descending the spiral stairs and then in the lower hall, outside the door to the lap pool, Silas succinctly explained about Mickey Dime in the HVAC vault, the great shaft of blue energy surging out of the lava pipe, and the well-armed skeletons of what might have been the members of the last homeowners’ association making their final stand in that deep redoubt at some unknowable time in the past.

The demon that Sally had seen in the pantry, the one that later must have attacked her, remained on the prowl. Therefore, any closed door had to be regarded as the lid of a jack-in-the-box from which something more deadly than a spring-bodied clown’s head might pop forth. The others stood aside while Bailey and Kirby effected a proper recon entry.

As his partner pushed open the door from the hinged side, Bailey went through low and fast. The room proved to be not as dark as he expected. Colonies of luminous fungus encrusted the walls, revealing that nothing lurked here, although the brightest light came from within the water.

This was not the welcoming glow by which he liked to swim, not the scintillation that traced patterns made by purling water on the walls and on the bottom of the lap pool. Just as he had glimpsed it that morning, the long rectangle was red, not opaque, clear enough but nonetheless disturbing because of the blood that it suggested. This pool had no bottom, or at least not one that could be seen. Beyond the coping were no ceramic tiles as there had once been, but instead rock walls that appeared to shear down hundreds of feet. The source of the queer incandescence emanated from irregularly spaced, luminous striations in the rock, dwindling into depths where the ruby water at last steadily darkened until it had the gravity and mystery of a black hole in space.

The five of them stood along the coping, gazing down into the watery abyss, saying nothing because there was nothing to be said, no
explanation worth suggesting. Their faces glowed as if they were gathered at a fire.

After a moment, Padmini pointed. “Look!”

Perhaps thirty or forty feet below, a figure appeared as if out of a recess or a tunnel in the rock. Manlike in form, it swam with the muscular sinuosity of a shark, cruising one length of the pool, and then again, before diving down, down, out of sight.

Bailey assumed that what swam below was the same thing that had grabbed his ankle as he’d escaped the pool earlier in the day. And it was perhaps the same creature that had effected Sally Hollander’s transformation, as she had then effected Julian’s.

Sparkle Sykes

Iris and Winny had not left the Cupp apartment by the front door. If they had gone that way, they would have passed between Sparkle and Twyla, past Martha and Edna. They would have been seen.

Twyla led the way through what had been the dining room, along a short hallway, into a kitchen with termite-eaten cabinetry and broken granite countertops. Twyla checked the pantry, Sparkle the broom closet.

For years she had lived fearlessly, afraid only of lightning, and now she had put that last fear behind her. She had given birth to Iris because to fail to do so would have been to surrender to fear. By the time that she discovered Iris’s condition, she’d had her first bestselling novel, not just a success but a phenomenon, and she was flush enough to put her daughter in the excellent care of others. That would have been an act of fear, a lack of faith in her own ability to cope. And now she would not give in to the fear of losing Iris because she
would not lose her
. Here in the future, there was no storm beyond the windows, no chance that she would be fried like her parents, and
if a metaphorical bolt of some kind was even now on its way from the quiver of Fate, it would damn well be
good
lightning, like Iris had been good, like the lottery win, like the success of her first book. And if it wasn’t good, if it slammed her hard, she would take the blow and turn it into something good, take the bolt and bend it, reshape it. She was
Sparkle Sykes
, that magic name, she was
Sparkle Sykes
, many quick streams rushing always forward, clear and sweet and sparkling, with the power to dazzle and bewitch, and nothing was ever going to beat her into submission,
no damn thing
.

Sparkle with the flashlight, Twyla with the pistol felt right together, as if they’d known and trusted each other forever: through the laundry room, out of the open back door, into the hallway, to the intersection of the hallways, to the stairwell where they heard no footsteps, and back to the open door of Gary Dai’s apartment. Her commitment was total, and she knew Twyla’s was likewise total, and they functioned as if they were telepathic, with no need to tell each other what they were going to do, Sparkle never crossing Twyla’s line of fire, Twyla never getting in the way of the flashlight beam.

Sudden singing came from somewhere in the Dai apartment. A young girl. It must be Iris. But Sparkle couldn’t identify it for certain because she had never heard her daughter sing.

Gary Dai’s apartment was like everywhere else in this Pendleton: hollowed-out rooms, the bare bones of walls and floors and ceilings, all the windows lightly filmed with dust but after so much time remarkably unbroken, like the weathered carcass of a giant stripped of flesh but left with its spectacles intact. Thatches of luminous fungi bearded the bones, their light offering as much deception as revelation, draping shadows where there seemed to be no source for shadows.

These rooms, like all the others she had seen since the leap, seemed as welcoming to rats as any deteriorated tenement or squalid warehouse,
but she had not seen a single rodent. Neither had she seen any insects, except for the brittle shells of several long-dead beetles.

Beyond the windows of the main room swooped something like but not like a stingray, so large as to be misplaced from a Jurassic sea. It was too immense to remain airborne unless its strange flesh might be riddled throughout with sacs containing a buoying gas. In its grand aerial ballet, the creature exhibited some of the disquieting gracefulness of the endless plain of pale luminous grass swaying rhythmically as no breeze could ever command it, disquieting because it was unnatural, lithe and supple but in a way that made Sparkle think of lethal serpents.

Although the spectacle of the flying ray was arresting, she and Twyla didn’t pause to watch it, kept moving across the room, drawn by the girl’s singing. They came to the apartment’s interior staircase, through which the song rose from below.

As they reached the landing and started down the second flight, Twyla abruptly halted. “Do you feel it?”

“Feel what?”

“The whisper under the melody.”

Sparkle cocked her head, not sure what Twyla meant. “I don’t hear it. Just the song.”

“Not hear. Feel. I feel it under the melody.”

Sparkle assumed this must be songwriter lingo—
feel the whisper under the melody
—which meant zip to someone not in that club. But then she
felt
the whisper, and a chill as real as the icy finger of a corpse traced the curve of her spine. It was like nothing she had ever experienced before. It was a whisper but not one that sought the ear, an exhalation arising inside her head, the words unknown to her. They were definitely words but less like sounds than like soft breathing that teased through her brain, shivering in those most intimate hollows, as if her cerebral ventricles had vibrissa, like the
whiskers around the mouth of a cat, that were as highly sensitive to the thoughts of others as the ears were sensitive to sound. But the thoughts of whom?