77 Shadow Street (31 page)

In the late 1800s, when the great house was built, environmental issues were of less concern than in the current age. Little if any thought was given to the possible contamination of the water table when the Pendleton’s bathtub, sink, and toilet drains were routed to terminate at the top of the seemingly bottomless lava pipe. In those days, the city was much smaller than now, only then beginning to plan a public sewer system. Septic tanks remained the primary means of gray-water and waste disposal, and the many thousands of cubic feet of the lava pipe offered a cheap and maintenance-free alternative to a standard tank.

The contractor included the manhole to provide service access in the unlikely event of a problem. When the cast-iron cover was removed, the lava pipe also functioned as an efficient outflow in the event that the basement should flood from a broken water line. In 1928, the Pendleton’s bathtub, sink, and toilet drains were rerouted to the public sewer system, but the manhole remained.

With the conversion of Belle Vista into the Pendleton in 1973, all the chillers and huge boilers of the new heating and cooling system raised a greater possibility of flooding. With the existing access to the lava pipe, the architect and contractor were spared the need to provide massive emergency pumps kept perpetually on standby, and could instead rely on the gravity-flow method of the original arrangement.

Dropping to one knee, Silas Kinsley was not interested in the manhole but in the rolled-up, quilted moving blanket that Dime had tied shut with furniture straps. Assessing the contents of the bundle with both hands, he felt what seemed to be legs, what were almost certainly
arms, and undoubtedly a head. One end of the roll had come open slightly when the knot in the securing strap had pulled loose. Silas reached inside and discovered the top of someone’s head. The curliness of the hair and the memory of the exclamation point of blood in the inexplicably deserted security room seemed sufficient evidence for him to conclude that the dead man was Vernon Klick. The lava pipe was to be his grave.

Silas thought that this killing must be related to the tragedies that occurred here every thirty-eight years. Dime’s murder of Vernon Klick must somehow be a part of the currently pending event that was presaged by rumbling in the earth, the appearance of the late Andrew North Pendleton in the lobby, the voices in the elevator shaft, and other signs. But related
how
?

More urgently than ever, he needed Padmini Bahrati to find Tom Tran or to trigger the fire alarm herself, if she knew how. He rose to his feet, crossed the room, and was within three steps of the door when something bumped against the farther side of it.

Fielding Udell

After the luminous blue energy sheeted across the ceiling, after the paper clips and other metal objects leaped to the light and then, when the light was extinguished, rained to the floor, Fielding stood transfixed. His mind raced toward a conclusion that he sought to avoid but that seemed inescapable. The Ruling Elite had found him.

They knew that
he
knew.

He knew. The original scientific consensus connecting residence near power lines with high cancer rates, later refuted and dismissed, was in fact true. Millions of such deaths must be occurring each year, the awful truth hidden by the Political Masters who throttled the free
speech of scientists and doctors, and by their Minions who altered medical records and forged death certificates.

He knew. The consensus claiming the chemical alar, used by apple growers, caused malignancies and worse, which had been brilliantly championed by a famous actress but had later been found to be bad science, was in fact also true. Good science, good. Too many apple farmers were destroyed, too many apple-related jobs were lost, so the Ruling Elite and their Minions came down on the side of Commerce rather than on the side of Health. Precious babies were dying from apple juice, toddlers from applesauce, legions of schoolchildren from the reckless consumption of raw apples and apple pies. But the Ruling Elite and their despicable Minions faked evidence to the contrary and mounted a pro-alar campaign. Now uncountable innocent children were dying horribly, perhaps so many that their bodies were secretly bulldozed into mass graves.

When the shimmering blue light did not return, he warily toured the rest of his apartment, prepared to find the phenomenon elsewhere. He suspected it might have been evidence of a mind-reading ray, with which his thoughts had been explored for insurrectionist sentiments. But he wanted to believe it had been something less ominous, perhaps just a census scan, which the Ruling Elite would probably take on a regular basis to determine just how rapidly the earth’s fast-dying population was moving toward extinction.

Fielding Udell knew. The eminent professor Paul Ehrlich, and a consensus of scientists, reported in 1981 that 250,000 species were becoming extinct per annum. Such a catastrophe meant that by 2011—
this very year!
—Earth would support no life whatsoever. Recently some scientists said only two or three species were lost each year and claimed this had been the case for centuries, which meant they were either corrupt or that their families were being held
hostage and tortured by the Ruling Elite. Fielding
knew
that the 250,000-per-year figure must be correct, that most of the world was now barren, that the images you saw on TV of a world pretty much as it had always been were elaborate special-effects lies, every bit as phony as the moon-landing footage shown to the world in July 1969, which had been staged in the Mojave Desert. The bitter truth: The earth was largely
dead
except for certain urban-suburban enclaves covered by force-field domes, inside which the brainwashed citizens lived an illusion of plenty and safety.

Finding no shimmering blue light anywhere, Fielding took his empty glass to the kitchen for a refill of his homemade cola.

Sometimes he wondered from where the food came to feed the dome-city residents like him, considering that the farmlands were polluted and unproductive. He remembered an old sci-fi movie,
Soylent Green
, in which the revolutionary new food that staved off famine in an overpopulated future world proved to be made secretly from cadavers. Charlton Heston shouts, “
Soylent Green is people
!” Maybe all those apple-poisoned children weren’t bulldozed into mass graves, after all, but were carted off to processing plants.

Now and then Fielding had difficulty eating his dinner, even though it looked like the same food he had dined upon all his life. The only thing that kept him from becoming bulimic was the fact that
Soylent Green
was set in the year 2022, which meant that more than a decade remained before the Ruling Elite would deceive humankind into embracing cannibalism.

Carrying the glass of cola, he returned to his main workroom and his computer. He resumed his online investigation, probing, probing, on the trail of the identity of the Ruling Elite. He half expected a sharp knock at the door and the arrival of a goon squad armed with a warrant, the results of the blue-light scan of his mind, and some kind
of brain-wipe thingy that would erase his memory and leave him unaware of the great work that he had done these past twenty years.

They would fail. He had prepared. In the bedroom, taped to the underside of his sock drawer, were two manila envelopes containing a total of 104 pages of a report on the Case for Prosecution of the Ruling Elite. The report began with these words:
The Worst People in the World have erased portions of your memory, but herein is the Great Truth they have stolen from you
. If he was robbed of his past, he would eventually find those two envelopes and reclaim his purpose and his destiny.

Logan Spangler

He didn’t know how long he might have stood in the half bath in the senator’s apartment, staring at his black fingernails. They didn’t seem to be mere nails anymore but were like ten little arched windows through which he could look into a perfect darkness within his hands.

Logan remembered a murderer he had apprehended three decades earlier, name of Marsden, a guy in his early thirties, who liked to rape and kill. In his confession, he said he liked to kill so much that sometimes he even forgot to rape his victim first. Marsden had none of the edginess or hyperactivity seen in many psychopaths. He was as calm as sheep grazing in a marijuana meadow and claimed to be equally tranquil during the act of murder. He said his inner landscape was perpetually dark, that he could remember his entire life but could see in his mind’s eye only events that had occurred at night. And when he slept his dreams always unfolded in dark places, sometimes in venues so lightless that he was blind in his dreams. “I am,” he said with some pride, delighting in himself, “so dark inside that I’m certain the blood in my veins runs black.”

Gazing at his black fingernails, Logan was not alarmed, but as calm
as Marsden had been. Such a serenity had come over him that he felt above all storm and shadow, imperturbable. He could not recall why he was here in the senator’s half bath or why his nails were black, or what he had intended to do next.

When moments—or hours—later he found himself in the senator’s bedroom, he had no memory of proceeding there. He continued into the master bathroom and opened the glass door to the roomy shower. The stall featured a built-in marble bench that matched the walls, and it doubled as a steam bath. He dialed up the steam, stepped out of the stall, crossed the room, and switched off the lights. In the blind dark, he somehow knew his way, returning to the shower without a single misstep. In the stall, he pulled the door shut behind him. Fully clothed, he sat on the marble bench as warm clouds enveloped him.

He needed darkness, dampness, warmth. Just for a little while. He had nowhere to go, nothing to do. He could rest here for a time. Darkness, dampness, warmth. Pieces of the past came to him, random moments from his life, not in any order, none seemingly related to another, playing out like little movies, and all of them were things that had happened to him at night, just as Marsden had been able to conjure in his mind’s eye only night moments from his past. In the pitch dark of the windowless bathroom, in the lesser darkness of his memories, he sighed softly and inhaled the thick warm mist, which soothed him. Darkness, dampness, warmth. He breathed in all three, filling himself with darkness, dampness, warmth. He was tranquil, peaceful, relaxed, self-possessed. Possessed. There was nowhere that he needed to go, nothing that he needed to do. There was no one he needed to be. Soon the memories of night moments from his life faded, and his inner landscape was as lightless as the bathroom in which he sat. For a short time, he searched for one memory or another, any memory, but he was a blind man in a maze of empty rooms.
Anyway, there was nowhere he needed to go, nothing he needed to do, no one he needed to be. He relaxed. Stopped exploring the inner blackness. Stopped thinking. He was in the dark and the dark in him. After a while, deep within, he became aware of something blindly feeling its way through him.