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“I think it came up at the wedding.”

“Please don’t get killed by this place.”

He kissed her knuckles again. “I won’t. I promise.”

Someone pounded on the door and they both jumped at the sound. Clive smiled and gave his wife’s hand a squeeze. “You want to get it?”

“I’ve been crying,” she said. “And I’ve been awful to everyone.”

“You’ll get sympathy, then,” he said.

“Meanie.” She wiped her eyes and whoever was in the hall pounded again. It sounded urgent. She went to the door and peered through the peephole.

Andrew stood front and center. There were a few other people with him, but because of the fish-eye view she couldn’t be sure who they were.

Debbie spun the deadbolt and unhooked the safety chain. She opened the door and Andrew’s eyes tracked over to her face. She got a quick look at the other people and didn’t recognize any of them.

“Good evening, Deborah,” said Andrew. “I’m so very sorry about this.”

“What? Is there something—”

Andrew’s hand cracked across her jaw. He couldn’t bring himself to make a fist, but his backhand slap was still enough to send her staggering back into her apartment. He pushed the door open and moved after her. The others followed him in. An old woman in the back of the group closed the door behind them and twisted the deadbolt closed again.

Clive saw Debbie fall and leaped forward and Andrew swung another backhand. This time he made a fist. Clive’s head twisted on his neck. He’d been whacked in the head by a swinging two-by-four once. It hadn’t hit as hard as Andrew’s casual blow.

He tried to form another thought, white spots whirled in front of his eyes, and he was on the floor near Debbie. She blinked away her own surprise. Blood dripped from her nose and from a split in her upper lip.

Clive tried to roll back to his feet but one of the men pushed him back down. The man’s foot was wrong. Clive could feel the shape of it through the cheap sneaker and wondered if the man had a fake leg. Maybe a bionic fake leg.

Andrew stood over them. He held his off-color bible. He looked down on them the way someone looked down at a cat or a dog.

“To think that all this time,” he said, “you were living with the key to salvation and never knew it. That may be enough to make you one of the chosen, even though you’re not part of our congregation.”

The squat old woman worked her way through the group until she stood next to Andrew. Something was wrong with her face. It reminded Clive of embryo pictures where the mouth was nothing but a line and the eyes were still too large and far apart for the head. She blinked and it made him realize just how big her eyes were. The dull white of her eye blurred against the gray tone of her skin.

Andrew reached over and patted the old woman on the arm like a doting son. “This is Auntie Bradbury,” he said. “These are my spiritual brothers, Zebediah, Lucas, Charles, and Howard.”

They each bowed their heads as they were introduced. None of them spoke. All their eyes were wide and round, like Andrew’s.

“They’re all members of my congregation,” he explained. “You could say we’re a Family.”

Tim felt it first.

He’d noticed the hum weeks ago. It was a subtle vibration, the kind you got on a plane or large ship. A hint that there were things going on under the floor.

When he felt the change, he knew it was something that’d been going on for ten or fifteen minutes. That was a bad sign. It used to be that nothing could sneak up on him.

The hum was a little faster, a little higher pitched. Just enough he was sure it’d changed.

The vibration was different, too. Since he first noticed it, the ever-so-faint tremble had been clean and steady. It synced with the hum. Now they’d fallen apart and become two distinct elements. The vibration was slowing and becoming less steady. It was more of a low
thrum
now, like a guitar. It was as if he could feel the pulse of the building, and the building was...

Tim’s mind snapped into crisis mode. He ran into his small bedroom, threw some shoes aside, and pulled a high-impact case from under the bed. Three combinations leaped to mind, a different one for each lock, and he spun the first dial.

* * *

Nate and Veek might have noticed sooner if they hadn’t been distracted in the kitchen and then on the futon couch. As it was, they became aware of the change at the same moment Tim was throwing open the case from under his bed.

Nate stood to drag his pants up and paused with his hand on the zipper. “Do you feel that?” he asked. “Like a...like a throbbing, kind of?”

Veek pulled her shirt over her head and smirked. “If you’re fishing for compliments, I think you got enough while we were—”

“No, seriously.” He gave his fly a quick tug, buttoned the jeans, and crouched next to Veek’s bare legs. She still wore her socks. He set his hand on the floor. “It feels like someone’s blasting their stereo downstairs.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

He shook his head. “Neither do I, but that sure feels like a big set of speakers.”

She set her own feet down and took a few quick steps to where her jeans had landed. The lights were out but the windows were wide open. “Yeah,” she said, “it does. What the heck is that?”

Nate grabbed his shirt from the kitchen floor. In his drying rack two glasses were trembling. They started to clatter against each other. “Is it an earthquake?”

“No,” she said, stepping into her pant legs. “If it was an earthquake it’d...” Her voice trailed off and her eyes went wide behind her glasses. “Oh, shit.”

Someone pounded on the door. Any harder and whoever it was would be trying to break the door down. They glanced at each other.

“Who is it?” shouted Nate.

“It’s Tim,” he hollered. “I think we’ve got a problem.”

* * *

Xela saw it next. Her headphones were in, and the pounding voice of Jessie J was blocking out all other sounds and sensations.

She was working on another painting of the building. This was her third in as many weeks, acrylics on canvas. For such a fascinating subject, she couldn’t come up with a way to picture it that didn’t feel trite or overused. The canvas in front of her was a mix of architecture lines and circuit boards. She’d been shooting for an optical illusion.

It looked like crap.

A wave of despair washed over her, but she managed to get above it. Art was her destiny. She knew it for a fact. She just needed to get past this creative block.

The light in her apartment shifted as the streetlights came on. There was one right by her front window that lit up her place at night. It was crappy yellow light, though, way too diffuse and scattered to be any good.

In all truth, she knew she hadn’t created anything worthwhile in months. Nothing that felt good enough, anyway. One of her teachers had told her being able to accept your work was no good was a vital step, a sign of growth and maturity in an artist.

Xela was very ready for the next vital step.

She toyed with the idea of grabbing her stubby little roller and covering the whole thing with titanium white. It’d be awesome to be able to cut canvases to shreds with a knife, or to smash their frames and burn them. Probably a great emotional release.

She couldn’t afford new canvases, though. As it was she had to work with the cheapie ones from Michael’s Crafts. And she had to paint over those four or five times, until they were too stiff to use.

The streetlight flared. For a moment she thought it had burned out, but then it went back to its regular levels. Then it flashed again. And a third time.

Xela glanced out the window and all thoughts of painting vanished from her mind. She yanked out her headphones and the hum assaulted her ears. She dashed into the hall just in time to see Nate and Veek following Tim down the back stairwell.

* * *

Mandy sat at her computer and checked her credit score. Someone had told her they were updated once every four or five days, but she was sure the bad news got updated more often. The news of Mrs. Knight moving out had convinced Mandy she was guilty by association. Everyone knew the banks and the government were one big socialist group, so it made sense they’d try to damage her score even more now.

While she waited for the website, the screen jumped like an old television. The image scrolled up and back so fast she could’ve blinked and missed it. But Mandy hadn’t blinked and she’d also heard the low, distant rumble.

She looked away from the monitor and saw the summer evening had become dark and dreary. A haze of fog hung outside her window, and she heard another rumble of thunder. This one shook the building.

And the building kept shaking. Her window panes started to rattle.

She heard someone bang on the door across the hall. Nate’s door. There were raised voices and running footsteps.

Her computer screen went blank and her heart sank. She should’ve unplugged it at the first sign of thunder. She wouldn’t be able to get it fixed. Unless Veek would be willing to fix it in exchange for...well, whatever Mandy could give her that she wanted.

Then the monitor lit back up. Mandy took a relieved breath and then her heart sank again. The screen was all nonsense. Green squiggles scrolled up the screen. They looked like Chinese or Muslim or one of those languages that used chickenscratch instead of proper letters.

Her whole room was shaking and the roar of thunder wouldn’t stop. Her tall lamp tipped over and a picture of her parents dropped off the wall. Out of the corner of her eyes she could see flashes of lightning through the fog.

A circle appeared on the monitor. It was filled with more squiggles. And the squiggles moved across the computer screen like little worms.

Or little tentacles.

* * *

Andrew stood before the control panel. Auntie Bradbury had given him the honor of shutting the machine down, but it didn’t feel right to do it all by himself. That would be selfish. This was a joyous moment which needed to be shared with as many people as possible. He’d insisted Auntie be first. The old woman had smiled with pleasure, selected a large lever, and pulled it down.

Debbie and Clive had yelled and shouted. They still didn’t understand what was going on. Clive fought to his feet but Charles grabbed his arm and Andrew punched him once in the stomach. Clive dropped back to the floor.

Zebediah and Lucas each picked a knob and gave them a hard twist. Howard set his hand across a row of switches and pushed them all down. Charles pulled another lever. And then Andrew flipped down every switch he could see.

One needle pegged itself to the far side of the dial. Another swung back and forth like an inverted pendulum. One twitched between thirty and forty.

They all heard the arcs of electricity behind the panels and saw the flashes. The machine howled and the air in the building roared back. Andrew could see the sky changing outside the windows, and for the first time in his life his faith was rewarded with the sight of one of his lords, soaring in the sky by the dying sun.

He reached out to either side and held hands with Auntie Bradbury and Brother Charles. The group formed a chain in front of the control panel. Auntie led them in a prayer.

At last
, Andrew thought,
the time is right.

* * *

Roger parked his truck and walked home down Beverly. Home before nine on a Friday. It was going to be a good weekend.

He’d expected to see midnight on set. There were ten and two-eighths pages on the call sheet for that day. The whole crew had started the day with doom hanging over them.

But the actors had their shit down today and the director had kicked serious ass. He’d minimized setups. He rearranged the call sheet so they could block-shoot three scenes. Two of the others he did as one-ers. The assistant director called the martini shot at seven-thirty, and even with a last-minute olive they’d wrapped by eight-oh-nine. A few of the guys had invited him out for drinks and Roger’d been surprised how cool it felt to tell them his woman and some friends were already waiting on him.

He pressed the button for the walk signal and glanced up Kenmore towards his home.

All thoughts of Thai food and movies and fooling around with Xela up on the sun deck under the stars vanished.

The Kavach Building was glowing. At first he thought everyone had their lights on, but it was the building itself. A flicker raced around the edges of each brick, the way static chased fingertips across an old television screen.

Roger took a moment to check traffic and then crossed the street against the light. By the time he reached the far curb he was running.

Power hung in the air. It prickled his skin and tugged at his hair. He could feel the hum in his teeth and hear glass trembling in the windows.

A few people from nearby buildings looked out windows or stood out on their stoops. There was a crowd gathered around the gate, almost two dozen men and women Roger didn’t know.