77 Shadow Street (52 page)

Mickey Dime

Because of what he did for a living and because being the son of his special mother gave him certain privileges not recognized by the law, Mickey almost always carried a concealed weapon, sometimes with a silencer attached, sometimes not. Because he was always well-prepared, he also carried a spare magazine of ammunition.

He had used one round to kill his brother, Jerry, and two more to kill Klick the Prick. He had shot out four of the blue TV screens that kept annoying him. That left three rounds. Before going down to the second floor to get a leash and choke collar from the professor, Dr. Ignis, or to kill him, whichever, Mickey changed out the partial magazine for the full one.

When he slipped the first magazine into a sport-coat pocket, he found an unused moist towelette in a foil packet. A little quiver of delight went through him, and for a moment his mood lifted. The world wasn’t entirely alien and forbidding; here was something right with it, after all.

He stood in the center of his filthy, unfurnished living room and with great care peeled open the foil packet. The lemony fragrance was intoxicating. He stood enjoying it for a long delicious moment.

Carefully, he extracted the moist towelette. He let the empty packet flutter to the floor. He was reminded of a geisha girl whom he killed in Kyoto. She had been a slender young woman and, shot, had fluttered to the floor rather like this foil packet.

He unfolded the towelette, and the fragrance blossomed as he exposed a broader area of the paper to the air. He held it under his nose, inhaling deeply.

First, he washed his face. The liquid with which the towel was saturated proved to be most refreshing. It cooled his skin and even tingled slightly, like an aftershave applied immediately following a straight razor.

Next, he washed his hands. He hadn’t realized that they were slightly tacky, most likely from handling the corpse of Vernon Klick, who didn’t have the highest standards of personal hygiene. As the lemony moisture evaporated from his fingers, Mickey felt immeasurably better.

How wonderful to be reminded that sensation was everything, that
it was the
only
thing, the purpose of existence. Since the Pendleton had inexplicably changed, for the past half hour, Mickey had been trying to think through what might have happened, the whole cause-and-effect business. He’d been brooding incessantly about what he should do, and frankly it had all been too much, so much thinking, thinking, thinking, and no
feeling
. His mother could be a thinker and yet always remember that sensation was everything. Mickey simply wasn’t equipped to think a lot
and
still feel.

The limp and drying towelette looked sad now, mundane, nearly all the magic gone out of it, almost as dreary as this new world. He rolled it into a ball and held it on the palm of his right hand, wondering if there might be any more use he could make of it, any more sensation he could extract from it.

He supposed that it might have a lemon taste and might be worth chewing on, though he didn’t think swallowing it would be a pleasure. But then he remembered that, since he scrubbed his hands, the paper bore traces of Vernon Klick’s grime, which made it unappetizing.

As he dropped the sad-looking towelette, a new thought occurred to Mickey even though he was trying not to think so much. He wondered if he might be insane. He
did
feel a little bit like he had stepped off a ledge and was in slow free fall. Losing his mother had been a terrible shock, the kind of loss that might destabilize anyone, and having to kill his own brother without being paid for it stressed him perhaps more than he knew. If he’d lost his mind, that might explain why the world had changed: It might all be a delusion. The world might be exactly as it had always been; but he saw it differently now because he had slipped over the edge of reason.

This was such a big and difficult and daunting thought that Mickey became very still as he considered it.

Just as he froze, the voices in the walls fell silent. They didn’t fade away like they had faded in, but they abruptly ceased talking.

He had the impression that this entire world, whether real or illusion, had just stopped to think hard about something, had been astonished by a new thought, exactly as he had been, and was busily mapping out the ramifications if it should be true, the implications branching on and on.

Bailey Hawks

As Silas and Kirby searched one wing of the Cupp apartment, Bailey searched the other. He was half sick with dread, clearing each doorway and turning every corner with an expectation of one kind of horrific discovery or another. They should have all gone through the Pendleton together. They should never have separated, even if such a large search party would have been awkward and more vulnerable to assault. He felt that he had failed them, and the memory of his mother’s death inevitably pierced him.

By the time they returned simultaneously to the living room, they had found no trace of the missing women and children, or the cats. They had discovered nothing different from before except two piles of nanosludge.

Tom Tran and Padmini stood side by side at the western windows, fascinated by the moonlit plain of massive black trees and luminous grass.

As Bailey, Silas, and Kirby worriedly discussed what to do next, Padmini said, “It’s stopped.”

“All of a sudden,” Tom said.

At the windows, Bailey saw that the grass, always before swaying, now stood tall and stiff, utterly motionless.

“There were some flying things in the distance,” Padmini said. “You couldn’t see them too clearly, but they all fell to the ground at the moment the grass stopped swaying.”

In motion, the strange landscape had been haunting, the rhythm of the grass like the mesmerizing back-and-forth of an arcing blade in a dream of Death the harvester, like the slow-motion dancers or the languid waves of a silent sea in the time-stalled world of sleep. But this breathless stillness was haunting, too, in its completeness. Bailey had never seen nature come to such a perfect stop, as if a spell had been cast upon it, everything turned to ice and stone in the cold light of the moon.

He remembered what the undying man had said in the basement hallway: …
all life has become one. The One. Many individuals, one consciousness
.

This frozen vista might have suggested to Bailey that the One had suddenly gone to sleep, but there was a sense of expectation to the scene, not merely an expectation that he inferred but one that was clearly implied. The entire land, every living thing within view, seemed to have been struck by the same intention and now considered whether and how to act upon it.

The others felt it, too, for Padmini said, “Something’s going to happen.”

Tom Tran said, “Dr. Ignis?”

“I don’t know,” Kirby said. “I can’t guess.”

The One prepared itself for something.

One

I can sing or speak from within the walls in any of billions of voices, in any of numerous languages, for I contain the memories of all whom I have killed. Their souls, should they have any, are gone, but their memories are forever suspended in me, in time, in the moment of their death. Memories are data. Souls are less than vapor. I offer the only kind of immortality that matters
.

Time. I pause in all my manifestations. Across my world, the killing stops and nothing is reborn. For a moment, I cannot attend to those functions as I consider the ways of time
.

Time is a treacherous thing. I exist here in my time, but the steps necessary to ensure my creation have not yet been taken in your time. Although killing has always abetted my plans and has thus far ensured my dominion of the earth, I suspect that I should spare a few more of the current crop of Pendleton residents than I had intended. The boy will still be mine to devour, and the ex-marine. Perhaps a third. Even I, the prince of this world, must in this situation proceed with caution, for all is at stake
.

31

Here and There

Fielding Udell

W
ith a corner for his cradle, sitting upright fast asleep, no longer guided through a reverie of the oneness of the One, Fielding opened the doors to his own dreamery and drifted through some of his favorite scenarios. They were all set in his childhood, when his Pooh bear was his boon companion, when the world was golden, long before he went to the university and learned to hate his kind, his class, himself. In his youthful innocence, he hated nothing, no one, and Pooh loved everything.

The chanting, insistent, foreign-language voices no longer rose either in his dreams or in the walls. Legions had fallen silent, as if with a sudden revelation and in subsequent contemplation. The One could not dream its way to childhood because it had never had one, no childhood but only an origin. Such were the peculiarities of time and of time travel that Fielding might be a key to the fulfillment of that origin. He was now subconsciously aware of his role in history, but in his sleep he was not made solemn by the weight of this duty, and he dreamed of golden summer meadows and butterflies and a
yellow kite high in the blue, and of his sixth birthday party when there had been helium-filled balloons of many colors.

Twyla Trahern

The singing abruptly stopped. When the singer lost interest in the song, the phantom fingers in Twyla’s head ceased to tease her toward surrender.

She and Sparkle Sykes could find no alternative route through the lower floor of Gary Dai’s apartment to the place where Winny waited with Iris. When they returned to the threshold that the boy had warned them not to cross, the room of lashes no longer presented an obstacle. The hundreds of pale thin whips had retracted into the walls, and there were only the webs of backlit cracks green in the plaster and the luminous yellow colonies of fungi, which no longer throbbed.

Winny and Iris weren’t visible beyond the doorway at the farther side of the room, where they had been less than a minute earlier, and when their mothers called to them, they failed to respond. In these circumstances, the silence of a child was no less alarming than would have been a scream.