77 Shadow Street (54 page)

Now that he decided to embrace insanity, he realized he probably had been insane long before these recent events. A lot of things that he had done suddenly made more sense to him if he had been insane for years. Funny how acknowledging insanity could make him so much more at peace with the world and with himself than he’d ever been before. He felt so
centered
now.

Okay. First he would go down to the second floor and kill Dr. Kirby Ignis, and then he would turn himself in to the authorities. He didn’t quite remember why he needed to kill Ignis, but he knew that he had intended to do it, and he felt it best that he conclude all unfinished business before embarking on his worry-free new life as a sanatorium patient.

He left his apartment.

He walked west in the long hallway to the north stairs.

He descended to the second floor.

He walked east in the long hallway to Apartment 2-F.

He didn’t knock. Insane people didn’t need to knock.

Mickey went into the apartment of Dr. Kirby Ignis, and two steps beyond the threshold, he knew that his decision to embrace insanity had been a wise one, for already he was amply rewarded for turning this new leaf.

Winny

The turning of the marble stairs between the ground floor and the basement seemed to go on too long, even though Winny was moving fast. He felt the Pendleton was growing bigger between floors, steps added as fast as he descended them, alive and determined to
thwart him. But then he reached the bottom, and he pushed through the half-open door and stepped out into the lowest corridor of the building.

Maybe the lighting here was poorer than aboveground or maybe he was just more aware of the shadows because his fear had swelled with each step he’d taken from the ground floor. A few of the ceiling lights still worked, and there were colonies of glowing fungus, so it wasn’t dark, just kind of murky, as if something had passed through a moment ago, stirring up the dust, and not something as small as a twelve-year-old girl.

He almost shouted
Iris, where are you
, but he bit back the words because a still, small voice inside warned him that he and Iris were not alone in this place. From here on, any sound he made would draw the attention of something he would rather not have to chat with, because he would be more than ever at a loss for words.

The basement lay in a silence more complete than any Winny had ever heard. The hush was even deeper than in the field that time, behind his grandma’s farmhouse, on a night in January with the snow falling without any wind, nothing moving but the snowflakes wheeling down out of the sky, the quiet so immense that he felt small but safe in his smallness, too small to draw unwanted attention.

He did not feel safe here.

As he listened and tried to decide what to do next, he wondered if the fungus lights could switch themselves off. In that room in the Dai apartment, where the plant tentacles—if that’s what they were—whipped from the cracks in the walls, the lights throbbed bright and dim, bright and dim, so they probably could go full dark if the mood struck them. If the funguses extinguished themselves, they might be able to turn off the scattered, dust-dimmed ceiling lamps, as well. He didn’t have a flashlight.

What he was doing now was giving himself excuses to cut and run,
and he was a little ashamed, not mortified, but embarrassed although no one was here to see him trembling or to notice the sudden cold sweat on his brow.

The hard thing that he needed to do had gotten harder minute by minute, and now it was so hard that he doubted his strength to push forward. But if he went back now, whether or not Iris died because of his cowardice, he would always hereafter take the easy way, because he knew that’s what happened to people who backed off just once. If he ran from this, his future was eventually a failed marriage, icky bimbos, whiskey, a little dope, barroom fights, and an entourage of knuckleheads who said they were his friends but despised him. And that would be his future
after
he had spent the next ten years growing up, so God only knew what a mess he would make of himself between now and then.

He swallowed, swallowed again, and though he was aware that the lump in his throat wasn’t real, he swallowed a third time before he stepped quietly to the lap-pool door across the hall. He eased it open, relieved that the hinges made less noise than he expected, and he peered warily into a long room that was changed from what it had once been.

The chamber was brighter than the basement corridor, the walls encrusted with glowing fungus, the hundred-foot pool shimmering with red light. He could see all the way to the back, and no one was scheming at anything in there.

As he started to ease the door shut, he heard a small splash, listened, and heard it again. He kind of doubted that an autistic girl could learn to swim, and in his mind’s eye he saw Iris going under for the third time.

The door’s automatic closer didn’t work, and Winny was glad to let it stand open behind him. He was only a few steps from the water, and
he saw at once that the pool had rock walls now and seemed to be as deep as a canyon. He didn’t see Iris floundering and weighed down by sodden clothes, but he
did
see something that was kind of like a man but not one, dark and sleek and powerful, speeding away from him, maybe ten feet below the surface and as fast as any fish, evidently not needing to breathe while it swam.

He could see the thing clearly enough to discern that it had legs, and if it had legs, it could move as well out of the water as in. Before it could reach the far end of the pool and turn to swim toward him, Winny retreated to the corridor and eased the door shut as if closing the lid on a box in which he had just discovered a sleeping tarantula.

His heart boomed loud in his ears, which was bad because he could no longer tell if the basement still lay in a hush.

The door to the stairs stood only a few steps away. Winny knew exactly where it was, but he refused to glance at it because he half expected that the mere sight of it would pull him right out of the basement, that he would blow all the way up to the third floor as if a tornado-strength draft had sucked him there.

He crossed to the gym door and quickly looked in there. More fungus light revealed that the exercise equipment was gone and, fortunately, that no manlike not-man was doing calisthenics.

Moving south along the corridor, Winny divided his attention between the open door to the HVAC vault ahead of him and the closed lap-pool door behind him. His legs felt loose, trembling as if the knee and ankle joints needed to be tightened.

Right now, life in Nashville didn’t seem like such a bad idea, although life in Villa Dad still didn’t have enough appeal to send him running to find a flight schedule to Tennessee.

Steadying himself with one hand against the jamb, he paused in the doorway to the huge mechanical room. He grimaced at the
ruined but still hulking boilers and the other machines that were revealed as yellow curves and planes among way too many shrouds of shadow.

He couldn’t figure why Iris would have wanted to come down here, unless she ran without thinking about where she was going. Or maybe she wanted to get as far away from other people and chattering voices as she could get, and the basement promised the deepest quiet, the most certain solitude.

He heard a clink and rattle from within the HVAC vault, and he whispered, “
Iris
,” so low that she might not have heard if she had been standing next to him.

Bailey Hawks

Although the women and children disappeared from this room, the quickly reached consensus held that the Cupp apartment was no more dangerous than any other place in the Pendleton. As far as they knew, Sparkle, Twyla, the sisters, and the kids had left of their own free will, for some reason that might have to do with the strange sludge on the floor. They also reached agreement that the less they made a group target of themselves, the more survivors there might be when the transition reversed. As long as each group possessed a gun and a flashlight, everyone would be equally prepared for an attack.

In consideration of Silas’s familial tremors, he gave his pistol to Padmini, for it turned out that she was an accomplished shooter. She said that everywhere you went these days, there was a
tapori
, a
hara-amkhor
, or a
vediya
—a punk hoodlum, a thief, or a nutcase—and a wise woman knew how to defend herself. She would stay in the Cupp apartment with Kirby Ignis and Silas.

Bailey with his Beretta—and Tom Tran with the flashlight—would
set out to find the missing … if they were anywhere to be found. When he checked his watch and saw that the time was now just 6:28, Bailey found it difficult to believe that only a little more than three hours earlier, he had been at his desk, concluding the day’s work, when the intruding silhouette of what must have been the thing that later bit Sally Hollander leaped across his room and then seemed to disappear through a wall, which had motivated him to load and carry his pistol.

Sparkle Sykes

Iris had not fled to the familiarity of their apartment, or if indeed she had done that, she had then left at once upon discovering the place as changed as everywhere else in the Pendleton. Sparkle and Twyla searched the other two apartments in the south wing of the second floor, and those rooms were likewise deserted.

“She’s okay, somewhere okay,” Twyla assured her as they hurried along the hallway toward the stairs.

And Sparkle paid it back: “So is he, you’d feel it, know it, if he weren’t.”

They hadn’t said anything like that previously, and Sparkle thought they needed to say it now because they were trying to keep their hope from sinking in a sea of dread.

They were almost to the stairs when she heard the elevator car humming-hissing in the shaft, just around the corner. The indicator board showed it coming down from the third floor.

Maybe Winny wouldn’t get in the elevator again, after what had happened to him, but Iris might be in it.
Somebody
had to be in it, and there was no reason it couldn’t be Iris, so Sparkle pressed the call button to be sure the car wouldn’t whistle past them.

“Maybe not,” Twyla warned as Sparkle pressed the button.

A moment later the locator bell dinged, the doors slid open, and in the stainless-steel car stood Logan Spangler and the Cupp sisters.