77 Shadow Street (56 page)

When Iris turned her head toward him, Winny saw that her eyes didn’t glow green when she looked away from the cocoon. He realized that he had expected to see the light in them, coming
from
them, and he was relieved that Iris was still Iris. Relieved but still in the grip of terror. He might live in terror for the rest of his life, even if he survived to a hundred, even after there was no more reason to be afraid, like a happy lunatic might laugh all day and night even when nothing was funny.

Iris stared directly at him, into his eyes, which she had never done before. Her lips continued to move, although she wasn’t saying anything.

“What?” he asked. “What is it?”

She found her voice. “The powerful fall, but I endure.”

From the corner of his eye, Winny became aware of the cocoon growing brighter. When he turned to look at it, he saw the membrane becoming more transparent, like the lenses of those self-adjusting sunglasses became clear when you went from a bright day to a dark room, like something in bad-dream shadows relentlessly became more visible when you desperately wanted it to remain obscure—and the figure within clarified.

The veined blister was more of a sac than it was a spun cocoon, full to the top with luminous green fluid in which a pale dead man floated. The guy was naked, his mouth open in a scream from which all sound
had long ago escaped, eyes wide in an expression of perpetual horror. He drifted like a specimen in a jar of formaldehyde, a trophy preserved as if for study by some professor from another world.

“The powerful fall, but I endure,” Iris repeated.

Winny realized that the girl wasn’t speaking for herself but for whatever had preserved the dead man, for whatever had earlier sung to them from within the walls. It spoke to Iris telepathically, as it had tried to communicate with Winny when he’d felt as if baby spiders were hatching in his brain.

When the dead man’s blank eyes refocused on Winny, he thought it was a trick of light and of his spook-haunted mind. But the specimen was not dead, after all, perhaps just paralyzed, drowned in the green fluid yet alive, not breathing, not one bubble of air escaping past his lips, in suspended animation, alive but surely driven insane by his condition. He was able to do nothing but refocus his field of vision from whatever mad delusions plagued him to the fear-struck boy who stood gaping like a rube at the prime-exhibit stall in a carnival freak show.

The anguish in those eyes was so great that Winny was smothered by it. He felt as if he, too, were sealed in a jar of preservative, put up for the winter in the dark pantry of something that ate small boys. When at last he breathed, he was half surprised that he didn’t inhale a fluid.

With a gulp of air he also breathed in recognition. The man in the sac was that mean neighbor, the one who could wither you with a look, whose usual expression seemed to say he saw no real difference between children and vermin. He’d been a politician, a senator or something, and almost a prisoner, and now he
was
a prisoner, body and mind and soul.

The senator’s eyes said
Help me!
They said
For God’s sake get me out of here, punch a hole in this sac, drain it, give me air again and life!

But that still, small voice in Winny told him that if he drained the man out of the sac, the specimen collector would know at once and be furious. The specimen collector would bottle him and Iris for revenge, or sprinkle them with something that turned them inside out the way that salt did to caterpillars, or light them on fire to watch them thrash in agony. Winny had known a kid who was that way, who did those things to insects, a boy named Eric, and the creature that sang inside the walls and that stalked this Pendleton seemed to be Eric’s kindred spirit.

No longer speaking for anyone but herself, Iris whispered, “
I’m scared
.”

When Winny turned his attention from the senator, Iris was not only meeting his eyes but also clearly
seeing
him as never before. His fear-throttled heart had been thumping as if frantic to free itself from a clutching fist; suddenly, though it beat no slower, it seemed to break free from captivity. Now twined with the fear was a kind of wild excitement, nothing as magnificent as joy, simply a fragile gladness that she needed him and seemed to trust him. There was no boy-girl thing in this, only the sweet satisfaction that he had a purpose of real value, someone to help who needed help, and a chance to prove to himself that he was not the loser that his father thought he must be.

He dared to take Iris’s hand, and she dared to let him. He led her what he thought must be north along what he assumed to be the west wall of the immense room.

They had taken only a few steps, out of shadows into a drizzle of yellow light, when a noise overhead drew their attention to the ceiling. High up there, snaking among clustered runs of pipes and past colonies of radiant fungi, was something at least as large as a man but sleeker. In spite of its size, it traveled the ceiling with the confidence of a cockroach.

Winny whispered, “
Run
,” and pulled Iris into cloaking shadows, away from the wall and among the palisades of ancient machines and storage racks and things unknown.

Dr. Kirby Ignis

Out there in the night land, one moment the sky was a timeless black sea and the stars were ice adrift, the air uninhabited. At ground level, nature, radically redesigned, stood as still as if it were a colossal mechanism temporarily denied the power to operate.

The next moment, the sky remained a timeless sea and every star a point of ice, but the air welcomed back the flying creatures that had in unison flung themselves to the ground, most small but others large, all of them soaring repeatedly toward—and repeatedly swooping away from—the seductive moon. Down the western slope of Shadow Hill, across the grand sweep of the plain where once a city stood, to the dark horizon at the curve of the earth, trillions of blades of tall luminous grass moved as one, swaying as if to the lazy beat of some Hawaiian song.

Earlier, Padmini had said that this strange new natural world, when falling into perfect stillness, seemed to be in contemplation, as if it were Gaea, a planetary female consciousness, who required perfect stillness in all her many manifestations in order to meditate upon some grand thought that had just occurred to her. As fanciful an idea as that might be, minute by minute it seemed to make more sense to Kirby. And when all living things beyond the window suddenly moved as one, resuming their familiar rhythms, he understood what he saw before him and how it might have come to exist. He knew whose work might have been the crucible of this Gaea’s creation and with what intention it might have been done.

The chill that pierced him was a colder fear than any that he had known before. But no. Not fear. Or not fear alone. Also awe. He yielded his mind to a suddenly perceived truth so grand in character, so formidable in power, that no matter how terrible the world beyond the window might be, he could not help but also find it mesmerizing and darkly alluring.

If this Gaea had indeed gone still in contemplation, he thought he knew what realization might have occurred to her and what decision she might have reached.

Sparkle Sykes

They hurried down the winding south stairs, a stone throat that swallowed and swallowed them. The limestone walls, the decorative bronze handrail, and the honed-marble stairs were well-known to her yet strange, the way that dreams distorted familiar places and lent mystery to the mundane.

This Pendleton at history’s end, its walls shot through with strange life, seemed to be growing, no longer merely a Beaux Arts mansion but a sprawling castle, remaining stone yet expanding with organic vigor. That impression might have been largely a consequence of being separated from Iris. Every minute Sparkle remained apart from her daughter, she imagined the girl dwindling into darkness just as an astronaut, untethered from a space shuttle, would recede into the void, adrift unto eternity.

But the sense that the building might of its own power be able to unfold new rooms and corridors, perhaps new levels, seemed to be supported when they reached the ground floor and heard the elevator car, with the Cupp sisters and Logan Spangler, still humming-hissing down, surely long past the basement.

The first room along the south hall was the enormous catering
kitchen where meals were prepared to be served at special events in the banquet room off the lobby. Under more of the ubiquitous luminous fungus were great architectures of tattered cobwebs but no spiders, stainless-steel appliances now as dull and mottled as galvanized tin, and three rectangular center islands behind which a child might lie hidden. At the farther end of the kitchen stood a half-open door to a storage room that couldn’t be entered from the hallway.

Twyla with the pistol, Sparkle following with the flashlight, entered the space, wary but quick, and abruptly the quiet gave way to a chorus of threatening sounds from the sinks: insistent voices in an unknown language, hissing and gurgling, and slithery noises as though serpents were in the drains and rising. Around them, diabolic creatures woke from slumber. Through the grimy view windows of the four ovens, things only half seen thrashed in slow motion, gray tentacular forms sliding over the tempered glass, perhaps having invaded those compartments from the walls behind or perhaps having been seeded there through vents. Inside the upper cabinets, something followed the women around the room, rattling the doors as it brushed against the backs of them, as though it would at any moment fling one open and spring at them. Overhead, moldering joists creaked as if a great weight burdened them, metal ductwork twanged and rattled, and dust filtered down through exhaust-vent screens. From Sparkle’s hand the flashlight beam jumped here, there, back again, and Twyla kept changing her mind about which sounds to track with the pistol.

The haunter of this house, more real than any ghost, wasn’t attempting to pry its way into their minds, as it had tried to do earlier, but Sparkle could feel its mood, its urgent need, as surely as she would have felt cold radiating from an open freezer door. Its passion
was
icy, their death its greatest desire, their flesh its preferred mold bed from which to grow its next manifestation. All of this came to her in wordless impressions that didn’t require translation.

At the back of the kitchen, the door revealed that the storage room was overgrown with a succulent devoid of chlorophyll, its fleshy leaves as white and smooth as cheese, white even in the glow of the kitchen fungus formations, but whiter still in the flashlight beam. Among the leaves were numerous bi-lobe flowers like the carnivorous mouths of Venus flytraps, and most of them had sunk their glass-clear teeth into a leaf, slowly dissolving and consuming it in a perpetual self-cannibalism.

It was possible to believe that the bodies of children might lie at the roots of this thing, fleshy stalks rising out of empty eye sockets, and with a shudder of disgust, Sparkle wished that she had gasoline and a match. As if her thought was received and understood, several yawning blooms, not yet having found a leaf on which to feed, gnashed their transparent teeth. Their enemy’s hatred and thirst for violence weighed upon her more oppressively, and she was relieved to follow Twyla out of the kitchen.

But now the weight of its hatred pressed on them wherever they went: along the hallway, into Apartment 1-D, into Apartment 1-E. Even where there were only small or no manifestations, Sparkle could hear movement inside the walls, and at a few places it seemed to her that portions of a wall or a ceiling bellied out, swelled down, not only as if rotten but also as if distorted by some dark mass metastasizing behind it.

They peered through the gate of the freight elevator at the end of the hall. Although the big car stood empty, she had a sense of a strong presence in the shaft, something that seemed on the verge of surging up under the car and spilling out through the gate.

As they hurried toward the west hallway, Sparkle said, “You feel it? All around us?”