77 Shadow Street (55 page)

Winny

The HVAC vault in this ruined Pendleton was exactly the kind of place that any kid’s mother told him ten thousand times to stay away from: row after row and tier after tier of hulking old machines, any one of which would crush you if it tipped over, busted-out boilers, discarded tools with sharp edges, rotting machine platforms with splintery boards, loose ends of electrical conduits bristling with bare wires that might or might not carry enough live current to french fry your eyeballs in your own body fat, more rust than an acre of junkyard cars, mold and mildew, rat skeletons and therefore ancient powdered rat poop, lots of bent nails, and broken glass. In other circumstances, it would have been the coolest place ever to explore. “Other circumstances” meant without monsters.

After one clink and a following rattle, Winny hadn’t heard anything more except the faint squish of his rubber-soled shoes when he stepped in one kind of scum or another. If Iris had taken refuge here, she was being quieter than a mouse, because a mouse would at least squeak. Of course she was quiet most all the time. This was nothing new for her. Winny had been around her only since shortly before the leap, and a few times when their mothers met in the hallway and stopped to chat for a moment, and she had usually been as quiet as furniture.

A couple of times, he had wondered what it must be like to be the way Iris was. He found it hard to get his head around the idea. He figured basically it would be really lonely. In spite of his mom always being there for him, Winny from time to time was overcome by loneliness,
and it was never a good feeling. He supposed the lonely that he felt was a tiny fraction of the lonely that Iris lived with all her life. That thought always made him sad. He had wished that he could do something for her, but there had never been anything a skinny kid with his own problems could do for her or for anyone.

Until now.

Winny prowled through the machines, past metal shelving units containing moldering cardboard cartons. The shelves were festooned with something that looked like barnacles, wobbly because of the weight of those colonies. Everything in the big room seemed to be precariously balanced, ready to tip over if you sneezed or looked at it too hard.

He was squishing through something that smelled like old German cheese, making very little noise but just enough to mask, for a few steps, the sound that something else began making in another part of the room. When Winny passed through the last of the squishy stuff and heard the other noise, he became very still, head cocked, listening. The noises were stealthy, coming in short bursts, as if something didn’t want to call attention to itself. They were dry and quick, somewhat like crisp autumn leaves rustled along a sidewalk by a light breeze. With the third flurry of sounds he realized they came from overhead, not directly above, toward the farther end of the vault.

The yellow light here wasn’t as bright as in the lap-pool room. Where there were shadows, which was nearly everywhere, they were so thick and velvety that it seemed almost possible that you could take hold of them and pull them around you like a cloak of invisibility.

He couldn’t just freeze there, listening to the overhead rustle draw nearer and nearer in brief spurts of activity. He had to find the girl and get out of there before something raveled down from the high ceiling and bit off his head. He dared breathe,
“Iris,”
as he neared the end of another row of machines.

Winny was beyond fear. That didn’t mean he wasn’t afraid.
Beyond
mere fear was way-serious fear. He now knew what the gross term “scared shitless” truly meant. It didn’t mean you were so frightened you dumped everything in your system. It meant you clenched your butt so tight for so long that, if you survived, you were for sure going to be constipated for a month. For a little while, he had been flying in a sort of boy-adventurer spirit, spooked but not gut-clutched by fright. Without his quite realizing that it was happening, he had crossed out of just-spooked and into terror, probably because his intuition told him what his eyes and ears didn’t—that he was coming nearer and nearer to something that would tear his throat out.

If he could have pulled the velvety shadows around him like a cloak of invisibility, he wouldn’t have done it, because he could be sure that there was already something hostile wrapped in them and waiting there for him.

When he turned the corner into the next row of machinery, he saw Iris standing in front of a huge bubble or blister that formed in the corner where two walls met. It was about four feet wide and seven feet high, and it bellied out from the corner as if it were a giant water balloon. The blister glowed faintly, not nearly as bright as the fungus light, more green than yellow, and you didn’t need creepy music to tell you it was trouble.

Winny didn’t want to surprise Iris into flight, but he didn’t want to shout a big hello, either. He sidled up to her, not quite near enough to reach out and touch her, in case that the prospect of being touched would be enough to chase her off again.

The girl’s face was zombie-green, but only because of the pale light from the blister. Her eyes were very wide, and they shone with that eerie light, too. Her lips moved, as if she were speaking to someone, but no sound came from her.

From back toward the middle of the long vault came the overhead
rustle as something advanced another foot or two before pausing to listen.

While Winny tried to think what to say—his usual problem—he looked more closely at the blister and saw that it was a moist and tightly stretched membrane webbed with what appeared to be veins, translucent but not transparent. The light within it was very dim, but he saw something in there, something big and strange.

So the blister was a kind of womb. Something would sooner or later come out of it. He hoped later.

Iris continued to move her lips in silent speech. Since she wasn’t actually saying anything, Winny wondered if maybe she was mouthing the words that something in the blister was sending to her telepathically.

“Iris,”
he whispered, and she turned her head toward him.

One

If you could see the power of my creation, if you could be one of those who lived in the Pendleton and could have come with this current crop, you would stand in awe of the brute strength and the exquisite regimentation of this new world. Then you would know that it is worthy of your vision, that you alone among the human herd—you alone in all of human history—not only saw what must be done to make things right but took the correct steps to bring about the ultimate revolution. You did not expect me to redesign nature. You would have been satisfied if I had only trimmed back the cancerous mass of humanity. But I know your heart, as I know the hearts of all men, and I am certain that if you could see what I have done, you would approve. I will send a messenger through whom you may see, even if secondhand, the wonder of the One
.

32

Here and There

Twyla Trahern

W
hen the elevator doors opened, Twyla said in surprise, “Martha, Edna,” and Sparkle asked, “What’re you doing here, where are you going?”

Even as the questions were being asked, Twyla realized they were not going to be answered. Something was terribly wrong with the Cupp sisters, as well as with the security chief. Martha’s face was less seamed with age than before. Not younger. Just fuller. She was bloated, like someone with a bad heart that caused fluid retention, and her skin had a yellow cast even in the elevator’s blue light. Edna was also bloated, and her flesh, like that of the other two, appeared to be soft, pitted with large pores, almost spongy, perhaps akin to the flesh of the six-legged baby-thing that Sparkle had described.

Their eyes were what chilled Twyla and most emphatically declared that they were no longer human. Lotus-petal eyes of people who had forgotten all the days of their lives, crocodilian eyes of insatiable hunger, they were smoky as if with early cataracts yet burning with implacable hatred.

Sparkle was nearer the elevator than Twyla, but she backed away when she registered the nature of those eyes.

Twyla brought up her pistol, gripping it with both hands, not really cool about shooting people she knew, even if they were not people anymore, but she would do whatever was necessary if they moved toward her. She fully expected them to rush out of the elevator, but they only stood there, staring intently, as though waiting for the doors to slide shut and for the car to carry them down to whatever hell might be their destination.

The murderous fury in the three figures was palpable, which made their restraint significant, though Twyla didn’t know what to deduce from it. Their arms hung slack, but their hands worked ceaselessly, as if with the urge to rend and strangle. Black fingernails. Edna’s mouth hung slightly open, and from what Twyla could see, the old woman’s teeth were also black. These two
apparent
women and Spangler were now in fact creatures more suited to swamps and fetid jungle ponds, to damp subcellars, to grottoes where stalactites dripped like snake fangs leaking venom.

In a voice recognizably his but wet and viscid, as if filtered through a mucus-clotted throat, the thing that had been Logan Spangler declared through black teeth, “I shall be.”

Twyla didn’t know what that meant, if it meant anything at all, whether it was a prelude to an attack or an invitation to become as they were.

She wasn’t holding the gun steady. It almost seemed to be alive, jumping in her hands. If she had to fire it, the muzzle would kick upward, it always kicked upward, and because her arms were so loose, she wouldn’t hit anyone, she’d put the round high in the wall. She made an effort to lock her wrists, lock her elbows, and bring the front sight low on target.

When Spangler repeated those words, Martha spoke them in time
with him, in a gurgling voice, as if they were two individuals with one mind: “I shall be.”

The elevator doors should have closed automatically by now. But apparently the house kept them open, the house or whatever possessed the house.

Logan and Martha and now Edna repeated the three words, their voices synchronized: “I shall be.” And again with greater insistence: “
I shall be
!” Yet again with some of the fury so evident in their eyes: “
I SHALL BE
!”

Sparkle backed into the open doorway of Gary Dai’s apartment, prepared to turn and run.

On Martha’s chin and along her left cheek to her ear, a series of tiny mushrooms formed out of her flesh, like an outbreak of adolescent acne.

As Twyla also eased away from the elevator, the Edna thing formed its mouth into a parody of a kiss. Several dark projectiles spurted from between its lips, hissed past Twyla’s face, and thudded into the wall.

Reflexively, Twyla squeezed the trigger. The round took the Edna thing high in the chest, didn’t seem to faze it, and the stainless-steel doors slid shut.

As the elevator car hummed down into the shaft, Twyla spun to see what had been spat at her. They were slightly larger and longer than Brazil nuts, dark and oily, quivering as if with life. Two were embedded in the Sheetrock and seemed to be trying to burrow deeper, but having a hard time of it. Two others were on the floor, creeping like inchworms, seeming to search for something, maybe for food, which in their case was probably a synonym for flesh.

Stepping into the hall from the open door to the Dai apartment, Sparkle said, “What was that about? ‘I shall be’?”

Shaken, Twyla said, “I don’t know.”

“Why didn’t they kill us?”

“I don’t know.”

Indicating the apparently expiring things in the wall and on the floor, Sparkle wondered, “What if they’d hit your face?”

“They’d be in my brain, I’d be like the Cupp sisters.”

Sparkle said, “The kids,” and hurried toward the south stairs, as the sound of the descending elevator car went on and on.

Winny