77 Shadow Street (20 page)

Sparkle Sykes

As Sparkle left the study, the television behind her said again,
“Exterminate. Exterminate.”

In Iris’s room, the girl still sat in bed, reading. She didn’t look up. She remained, as usual, in her autistic bubble.

Sparkle hurried to the first window and then to the second, to pull shut the draperies that her daughter had earlier opened. As the last set of panels drew together, the sky flared twice, three times, and in that shuddering fall of storm fire, the courtyard landscape lighting blinked off, as did lamps in all the windows in the north and west wings, although the lights remained on in her apartment. In fact, following that bright barrage, the golden glow of the city that usually silhouetted the chimneys and the parapet balustrade at the top of the house was also extinguished, as if the metropolis had lost all power except in these rooms.

Closing the draperies, turning away from the window, Sparkle told herself that she’d briefly been blinded to the courtyard and the other wings of the great house by the fear of being for an instant face-to-face with lightning. But she knew that explanation was self-deception. She had seen something—the absence of everything—that was related to the monstrous baby that vanished into a wall and to the voice coming from the pulsing blue rings on the TV. None of it was mescaline flashback all these years after her one experience of that hallucinogen. None of it was illusion. All of it was real, impossible yet true, and she desperately needed to understand it.

She turned to the window once more, hesitated, pulled the panels of fabric apart, and saw the courtyard as it should be. Backlighting the chimneys was the glorious radiance of a sprawling civilization that no storm or human folly had yet been able to extinguish. As she let out her pent-up breath in relief, she became aware of a presence on the outside of the window, creeping up from the sill, across the French panes and the thick bronze muntins.

Revealed somewhat by the rising lamplight from the courtyard but mostly by the light in this room, the creature on the casement window was even more alien than the monstrosity that had earlier crawled
past the closet door. The shape and size of a platter for serving a fish, as pale and putrescent-looking as some dead drowned creature bleached by sun and seawater, it progressed on four crablike legs that terminated not in claws but in feet resembling those of a frog, with sucker pads allowing it to cling confidently to vertical surfaces. She could see only the ventral aspect of it, but she sensed that it was thick, perhaps five or six inches.

The most disturbing aspect of the apparition was the face in its underside, where a face should never be: a deformed oval countenance that in spite of its twisted features appeared more human than not, distorted in an expression that seemed half rage and half anguish. The horror was even more compelling than it was repellent, so that Sparkle found herself leaning toward the window in spite of her fear, driven to confirm that the face was no trick of light and shadow. The eyes were closed, but as she stared at the tortured visage, the pale lids peeled back, revealing milky orbs. Although those eyes appeared to be veiled with heavy cataracts, she felt certain that they fixed upon her through the window, that she was seen by this miscreation—a conviction that seemed to be confirmed when the thin-lipped mouth opened and a pale tongue licked the glass.

Bailey Hawks

He felt uneasy about leaving Sally Hollander alone, though she insisted she wanted the comfort and seclusion of her apartment. The quick dark figure he’d seen and the menacing swimmer in the pool were surely manifestations of the same “demon” that rushed her in the Cupp sisters’ pantry. Whatever was happening in the Pendleton, whether supernatural or not, suggested that solitude wasn’t advisable.

On the other hand, though he had been snared by the ankle as he
fled the pool, Bailey easily kicked loose. And Sally hadn’t been injured, only frightened. These phantasms seemed to have malevolent intentions but perhaps not the power to commit the violence that they desired, which seemed to put them in the company of ghosts that haunted but could not harm.

Bailey didn’t believe in ghosts, but he had no other template by which to understand this situation: spirits, ghosts, specters, things that go bump in the night. If it wasn’t something like that, he could not imagine what else it might be.

After leaving Sally in 1-C, he took the north stairs, rather than the elevator, to the second floor. He often avoided elevators as part of his fitness regimen. The enclosed circular stairwell was original to Belle Vista; it hadn’t been added during the conversion to the Pendleton in 1973. The honed-marble treads were wide, and the ornamental bronze handrail attached to the inner wall was an example of the finest nineteenth-century craftsmanship that, today, would be prohibitively expensive to re-create. Climbing these stairs, Bailey was reminded of a French chateau he had once visited.

Because the staircase was circular, there were landings only at each floor, none mid-floor. As he reached the landing and put a hand to the exit door, he heard quick descending footsteps and a child in song:

“Sing a song of sixpence, a pocketful of rye, four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.…”

The voice was so clear and melodic that Bailey paused to see the singer. There were few children in the Pendleton.

“When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing …”

On the stairs above him, a girl appeared, perhaps seven or eight years old, as pretty as her voice, with lively blue eyes. She wore what appeared to be a costume: a sky-blue cotton dress with a ruffled skirt and gathered sleeves, overlaid with an eggshell-white linen apronlike
garment trimmed in simple lace, and white leggings. Her white-leather ankle-top shoes were buttoned instead of laced.

When she saw Bailey, she halted and performed a half-curtsy. “Good afternoon, sir.”

“You must have gotten that dress from Edna Cupp,” Bailey said.

The girl looked puzzled. “It’s from Partridge’s, where Mummy buys all our clothes. I’m Sophia. Are you a friend of Daddy’s?”

“I might be. Who’s your father?”

“The master of the house, of course. Anyway, I should hurry. The iceman’s delivering to the kitchen any minute. We’re going to shave some off one of the blocks and cover it in cherry syrup, which is ever so good.”

As she slipped past Bailey, off the landing and onto the stairs, he said, “What’s your last name, Sophia?”

“Pendleton, of course,” she said, and broke into another song as she followed the curving stairs out of sight. “Old King Cole was a merry old soul, and a merry old soul was he …”

The girl’s footsteps and voice faded to silence more quickly than the turning of the stairs explained.

Bailey waited to hear a door open and close, but the quiet of the windowless stairwell became a profound hush.

Without knowing quite what he intended, he descended to the ground floor and then to the basement, expecting to find the girl waiting below. The heavy fire doors could not be opened and closed soundlessly. Yet she was gone.

Twyla Trahern

Having just spoken on the phone either to a City Bell operator in 1935 or to a hoaxer who was part of a bizarre conspiracy with an inscrutable
purpose, Twyla hurried Winny out of the kitchen, into the laundry room. She retrieved a raincoat and an umbrella from the corner closet, and Winny slipped into a hooded jacket.

The lightless plain that she had glimpsed earlier still fresh in her mind, she got two flashlights from a utility drawer and jammed them in her coat pockets.

They left by the back door, she locked the deadbolt, and they hurried along the short hallway to the south elevator, where she pushed the call button.

Winny said, “How could it change like that, the wall?”

“I don’t know, honey.”

“Where was that place, the grungy place that faded in and out?”

“I don’t know. I write songs. I don’t write sci-fi.” She pushed the call button again. “Come on, come on.”

“It was the same wall but different, like the Pendleton on some other world. You know, like parallel worlds in stories?”

“I don’t read those kinds of stories. Maybe you shouldn’t read them, either.”

“I didn’t make the wall-thing happen,” he assured her.

“No, of course you didn’t. That’s not what I meant.”

She didn’t know
what
she had meant. Her confusion dismayed her. Most of her life, she had known how to cope with anything that came her way, allowing herself no doubts and no excuses. Since she’d been eleven, whenever anything scary or painful happened, she composed a ballad or a spiritual or a torch piece or a country boogie-woogie number about it, and the fear and the hurt were cured by the writing of the lyrics, by the singing of the song. But painful events like the loss of her sweet father and frightening developments like the recognition that her marriage to Farrel was collapsing … Well, those were common human experiences for which music could be a medicine. In
these weird circumstances, however, melody and poetry failed her. She wished that she possessed as many guns—or at least one!—as she had musical instruments.

With a
ding
the elevator arrived at the second floor.

Winny slipped through the doors even as they were sliding open.

On the threshold, Twyla halted when she saw that the elevator car had changed. Gone were the bluebird mural and the marble floor. Every surface in there was brushed stainless steel. Translucent panels in the ceiling cast an eerie blue light, the same blue that had pulsed from the TV and heralded the words
“Exterminate. Exterminate.”

“
Get out of there
!” she ordered Winny, and the doors began to slide shut.

Logan Spangler

In the threatening darkness, the peristalsis pulsing through the snakelike fungus made a wet, disgusting sound, and the obscene mushrooms wheezed softly each time they exhaled their salt-grain spores.

In the tight LED beam, Logan could see that the pivot pins in the knuckles of the barrel hinges might be worked loose with the blade of the pocketknife that he carried. Before he could set to work, however, the lights in the half bath came on, not the yellow thing on the ceiling—which had vanished—but the can lights overhead and the soffit lights above the vanity, which earlier had been broken and corroded. The entire room was restored to its former condition, and the pale-green, black-mottled fungi, both the serpentine and mushroom forms, were gone as if they had never existed.