77 Shadow Street (51 page)

Wait until Mickey’s mother learned about what had happened, whatever it might be. She had no tolerance for incompetent fools. She always knew how to deal with them. Just wait. He was eager to see what his mother would do.

Tom Tran had come along the winding pathway. He had been wearing a raincoat and his ridiculous floppy-brimmed hat. Rain wasn’t falling anymore, but he dressed for it anyway. What an idiot.

Tom Tran was the superintendent. He was paid well to keep the Pendleton in tip-top condition. If anyone was to blame for what had happened, Tom Tran must be the one.

Mickey had tried to crank open the casement window so that he could shoot Tom Tran dead on the spot. If shooting Tom Tran didn’t fix things, nothing would. But the window wouldn’t budge. The crank was broken or something.

In the courtyard, Tom Tran had reached the doors to the ground
floor. Mickey considered hurrying downstairs and shooting Tom. It didn’t matter if he shot Tom outside or inside the building. Just shooting him ought to fix everything.

Before Mickey could move, something else had come lurching along the winding path down there. Some thing. He didn’t know much about biology—except for sex, of course, about which he knew everything—but he didn’t think this thing was a known species with its picture in college textbooks. Whatever it was, it didn’t look like a thing that you could kill easily.

Reality was completely out of control now. He turned his back to the windows. He just couldn’t take it anymore, the way it was out there in the courtyard. He had stood here for a while now, not being able to take it.

When he wouldn’t let the changed world into his mind, Sparkle and Iris came into it more vividly than ever. So tempting. They were
his
fantasy, yet their expressions were haughty, disdainful. They came into his mind uninvited, and they
mocked
him. He needed to rein in reality, and as a start he needed to bring the writer and her daughter to heel.

To heel. That reminded him of that goofy-looking professor guy, Dr. Ignis, the one who sometimes wore bow ties and elbow-patch jackets, for God’s sake. Ignis used to have a dog. Big Labrador. He walked it on a leash. The dog sometimes growled low at Mickey. Ignis apologized, said it never growled before. Ignis was someone else who needed to be shot. That would probably fix everything.

But first, if the gone-wrong world continued to reject him, he’d find Sparkle and Iris, wherever they were in the Pendleton, and he would make them pay for this the way he’d made those other women pay fifteen years earlier. He would kill them harder than he had ever killed anyone. That would definitely fix everything.

Winny

All over the room, the radiant fungus throbbed sort of in time with the singing, slower but like the dance-floor lights in some stupid old disco movie, except they didn’t make you want to dance. They made you want to get the hell out of there because, as they brightened and dimmed, they cast shadows of themselves across every surface, creating the illusion that nasty things were slithering this way and that.

Unlike most of the interior apartment walls in the Pendleton, these were of textured plaster instead of Sheetrock. They were marred by cracks, as was the ceiling. Those jagged lines glowed as though there must be light inside the walls, green light leaking out through the cracks.

Winny couldn’t tell if Iris knew he was there with her. She didn’t stand with her shoulders slumped and her head bowed, as usual. She stood up straight, her head tipped back, her eyes closed, as if she were swept away by the simple wordless singing of the girl that Winny had thought was her.

Instead, the singing girl seemed to be in the walls with the green light. Not just in one of them. In four. Coming from all around, fully quadrophonic. Up close and personal, the singing was even eerier than it had been when he had followed it from the upper floor of this apartment. He could too easily imagine a little dead girl whose body had never been buried but had been walled up by an insane killer. She might even have been walled up while she was alive and pleading for her life, so that she was not only dead inside the wall but her ghost was also insane from her having been killed that way.

Maybe the
one
dangerous thing about reading a library’s worth of books was the way your imagination got pumped up like a bodybuilder on steroids.

Although Iris seemed to like this weird singing, Winny knew that she was highly sensitive to people talking to her, maybe especially
people she didn’t know well. He didn’t want to say the wrong thing and send her into some kind of screaming fit.

The best he could do was lead her back the way they had come, to the Cupp apartment, and hope to meet their mothers along the way. But after his dad had told him that if he read too many books, he might wind up a sissy or an autistic, Winny had read about autism, and he knew that your average autistic person—not all but most—disliked being touched a whole lot more than she disliked talking with you. He didn’t need to read about sissyism because he already knew what that was.

Autism seemed very frustrating and sad, and mysterious. You couldn’t get it from reading books, of course; and Winny had wondered whether his father was snowing him or was a huge ignoramus. He didn’t want to think his father could be an ignoramus. So he had decided it must be a snow job, of which there was one after the other when old Farrel Barnett was around and trying to manipulate his boy into becoming a wrestling, guitar-playing, saxophone-crazed tough guy.

Even if the best thing was to lead Iris out of here, Winny was hesitant to take her hand. If he pinched the sleeve of her sweater and pulled her along that way, maybe she wouldn’t be offended or irritated, or scared, or whatever it was that she felt when she was touched.

Winny was about to risk going for the sweater when suddenly he felt something moving lightly through his head, as if he’d been born with a sac of spider eggs in his brain and they were just hatching.

When he put his hands over his ears, that didn’t make all the baby spiders stop dancing in his skull, but he realized that instinctively he knew it was the
singing
getting to him, trying to hypnotize him, zombify him.

Before he could grab Iris’s sleeve, she stepped forward toward the nearest wall, and at the same time something wriggled out of the web
of cracks in the plaster. For an instant he thought they were part of the illusion created by the throbbing fungus lights, but then he knew they were real. They looked like pale squirming worms, or maybe they were the tendrils of some freaky plant, growing fast like in a stop-motion film or like that meat-eating plant in
Little Shop of Horrors
. Iris opened her arms wide, as if she intended to walk right up to the wall and press herself against those greedy tendrils or roots, whatever they were.

The baby spiders in Winny’s head had voices like in
Charlotte’s Web
, but these buggers weren’t nice like Charlotte. They were telling him that doing what Iris was about to do would be the best thing in the world. He couldn’t understand their language, but he understood their meaning: that he should follow the girl’s lead and accept the happiness that she was about to embrace.

Maybe all these years of enduring his father’s propaganda had built up Winny’s resistance to brainwashing, but he wasn’t buying anything the head spiders were trying to sell him. He shouted—“
Iris, no
!”—grabbed a fistful of her sweater, and pulled her toward the door as the thrashing white tendrils reached frantically for them.

Twyla Trahern

“Iris, no!”

As she came off the bottom step into the lower floor of the Dai apartment, Twyla heard her son cry out in the next room or in the room beyond that. She thrilled to those two words because they meant that he was alive. But the alarm in his voice was a prod to her heart, which kicked against her ribs like hooves against a stall door.

With Sparkle at her side, she raced across an empty chamber, toward the singing, calling out to him,
“Winny
!
I’m here
!”

As they neared an archway between rooms, Winny shouted over the singing,
“Mom, stay back!”

She almost didn’t heed the warning. Nothing was going to keep her from him. Although Sparkle no doubt felt the same need to get to Iris, she seized Twyla’s arm, and they stumbled to a stop at the brink of the next room.

Past the threshold, the luminous formations on the walls and ceiling waxed and waned, not synchronized, causing shadows to leap and scurry. Hundreds of pale cords, six to ten feet long, narrower than a pencil, pressed out of cracks in the custom-patterned plaster of the ceiling and walls. Half undulated lazily, others scourged the air as though seeking someone to punish, and a few lashed hard enough to crack like whips.

At the farther end of that room, twenty feet away, beyond an open door, Winny stood with Iris. They appeared to be all right.

“Don’t go in there,” Winny warned. “It wants you,
don’t go
.”

More than ever, Twyla was aware of cold ghostly fingers feeling along the folds and fissures of her brain as if reading her thoughts like braille. Or maybe it was
writing
, creating a little story about how she wanted to go into the room, about how easy it would be to get through those pale whips, which only looked like they could hurt her, which were actually feeble, she could brush them aside like the silky fibers of a spider’s web, she could walk straight to her boy in mere seconds, put her arm around him, keep him safe, she had the gun, with the gun there was nothing to fear, Winny so close, so close, and nothing, nothing, nothing to fear—

Sparkle stepped across the threshold, into the room.

Startled out of her own half-trance, Twyla grabbed the woman by one arm and pulled her backward as the nearer whips snaked toward her through the air.

“Think of the words to a song, any song, keep singing them to yourself, block the damn thing out.” She called to Winny, “Stay right there, kiddo. Don’t move. We’ll find another way to you.”

The wordless singing changed in character, from a wistful kind of melancholy to a sneering menace. Although the voice still sounded like that of a little girl, she was a corrupted child with dark knowledge and cruel intention.

Mentally repeating the refrain from a song of her own—
Just pour me another beer/and keep them comin’, Joe/I’ve given up on women/so I’ll be leavin’ late and low
—Twyla led Sparkle Sykes away from the arch, toward a closed door.

Winny

Iris allowed herself to be pulled from the room, but as soon as they were across the threshold, in a hallway where there were no cracks in the plaster, she made small fretful noises and impatiently tugged at the grip he had on the sleeve of her sweater. No sooner had Winny’s mom told him to stay where he was, that she would find another way to him, than Iris hauled off and smacked him in the face. The blow didn’t hurt much, but it surprised him. Reflexively he let go of her sweater. She shoved him hard, right off his feet, so he fell on his butt, and she ran as fast as a deer.