77 Shadow Street (32 page)

Mickey Dime

He guided the hand truck across the raised threshold into the HVAC vault and closed the door behind him. He wheeled dead Jerry beside the body of Klick the Prick.

All around, machinery hummed and purred and whispered. Massed machines, regardless of their purpose, always seemed sexy to Mickey. The power. The efficiency. The unrelenting purpose.

He had toured a decommissioned nuclear-missile silo once. The ICBM and the machinery were long gone. Yet the place still possessed immense erotic impact. The dank air smelled like stale semen.

Now, somewhere in all the runs of pipe, a demand valve opened. He heard water rushing under pressure through a conduit. Very sexy.

On the manhole cover, a big release ring was folded flat. He flipped it up. He slipped his hand through the ring and pulled hard. The seal between the cover and the gasket broke with a sucking sound. The iron disc swung up and aside on underset hinges.

The overhead fluorescents failed to penetrate far into the black hole. No draft rose from the shaft, suggesting that if it connected with deep caverns, they were without any significant opening to the surface. The air below had only a faint lime scent, which probably came from the massive concrete foundation of the Pendleton rather than from the ancient volcanic vent below.

Mickey had learned about the lava pipe from his mother. She heard about it from Gary Dai, the dot-com-video-game-social-website wizard.
Gary Dai had read about the lava pipe in a pamphlet about the Pendleton that every owner received upon closing escrow. Mickey’s mother had not read the pamphlet. She read nothing but essays and books that she had written—as well as anything written
about
her. Mickey didn’t read.

No one knew for sure the length of the lava pipe. Experts said it could extend for a mile or two, perhaps longer. When Andrew North Pendleton built his mansion, an attempt was made to plumb the natural shaft. They lowered a lead weight on a cord for 1,522 feet before it encountered what at first was assumed to be the bottom. When a score of one-inch-diameter steel ball bearings were dropped at once into the hole, however, that bottom proved to be instead a curve in the pipe where the vertical drop led into a sloping tunnel. The bearings rang hard against the curve, then rolled noisily along the slope. They were never heard to come to a halt; the sound of their descent faded until they had traveled to such a distance that the lava pipe no longer echoed with their progress.

If the tunnel didn’t widen beyond five feet just for the turn—which it probably did, according to a volcanologist quoted in the owners’ pamphlet—the two dead men might get hung up there. Mickey was counting on 1,522 feet of momentum to tumble them around the curve and far down the slope beyond it.

For the next month, he’d visit the HVAC vault every few days to open the manhole and smell the air. If the stink of decomposition was present, he would know the cadavers hadn’t made it around the curve. Then he would have to engineer a rupture in one of these big pipes, flood the vault, and wash the dead men to a more distant resting place.

If there was no stench, however, the lava pipe would facilitate his fantasies about Sparkle and Iris Sykes. He could daydream about having them but also about popping them and dumping them, which
would be a more fully rounded fantasy than rape alone. He hoped that he might pass them soon in a public hallway. He would try to get close enough to catch their scents, a detail to fire his imagination.

As Mickey was turning away, intending to muscle Vernon Klick’s body into the long drop, a twist of blue light spiraled up the walls of the lava pipe, flashed through the open manhole, and corkscrewed to the ceiling, where it spread out across the concrete, crackling softly, and quickly dissipated.

Iris

Her room is safe. Other rooms in the apartment are less safe. The world beyond the apartment is dangerous, unbearable. So many people. Always changing. She wants to stay in her room.

Nothing changes in her room. Change is scary. She wants to be where change never happens. Her room. Her room.

But her mother calls her to the Bambi way. The Bambi way is to accept things as they are. To trust nature and to love the world.

Loving the world is so hard. Bambi believes the world loves him, was made for him. Iris does not believe the world loves her. She wants to believe it, but she doesn’t, she can’t.

She doesn’t know why she can’t. Not knowing why she can’t love the world is as bad as not loving it. The world in books seems worth loving. But she can’t love it. She fears it.

As a fawn, Bambi is often frightened. Of a ferret. Of blue jays. Of many things. He overcomes his fears. He is a very great and smart deer because he overcomes all his fear. Iris loves him for this. And envies him. But loves him very much.

She is afraid to love anyone but Bambi. Or afraid to show her love. She loves her mother but dares not show it. Loving people draws them close to you. She can’t tolerate being close. She can’t breathe with
people close. The lightest touch is a blow. She can’t tolerate being touched.

She doesn’t know why. At night, alone in her bed, she sometimes tries to think why she is this way. Thinking about it only makes her cry. When she’s alone in the dark, crying, she wishes that she lived in a book world, not this one.

She can love Bambi because he doesn’t live in this world. He lives in the book world. A world apart, she can love him desperately and never be too close.

Now her mother calls her to the Bambi way, and Iris steels herself to leave the apartment. There’s the boy, Winny, and the boy’s mother, Twyla, and that’s already bad enough, too many people. But now the four of them are going to leave the apartment, which means too many people
and
new places, change and more change.

Iris keeps her head down. Keeps her head down and pretends that she is Bambi. To live the Bambi way, it is better to try to be Bambi, to think like he would think.

Iris follows her mother into the hallway because Bambi follows his mother whenever she tells him that he must. They go around the corner to the back door of Twyla’s apartment. Iris has been in the hallway before, but never in these people’s apartment. So now all this is new.
Everything
is new. New is dangerous, hostile. Now everything is hostile. Everything, everything.

She must make it all familiar and friendly. She must be Bambi, and this must be the forest, for only then will she be both brave and safe. She tries to look directly only at her mother’s back. She sees things from the corners of her eyes, of course, or when she inadvertently glances left or right, but she imagines those things to be what they are not, to be a part of her beloved forest.

Words come to Iris, memorized from so many readings of the precious book:
Round about grew hazel bushes, dogwoods, black-thorns and young elders. Tall maples, beeches and oaks wove a green roof over the thicket and from the firm dark-brown earth sprung fern fronds, wood-vetch and sage.…

Her mother and Twyla talk to each other, and the boy talks to both of them, but Iris can’t bear the weight of what they are saying to one another. What they are saying to one another is going to crush her if she listens to it. Crush, crush, crush her.
Exterminate
, they say. Exterminate means to kill.

Instead, Iris listens to the melody of the woods:
The whole forest resounded with myriad voices, was penetrated by them in a joyous agitation. The woodthrush rejoiced incessantly, the doves cooed without stopping, the blackbirds whistled, the tit-mice chirped.…

They go out through the front door of the strange apartment, into another hallway, where Twyla rings a doorbell. There is a man they call Bailey and another man they call Dr. Ignis. There is yet another new place.

This is too much, the new just coming at her and coming at her, constant change, unbearable.

Desperate, Iris gives herself to the forest, which rises in her mind to embrace her as it always embraces Bambi:
Out of the earth came whole troops of flowers, like motley stars, so that the soil of the twilit forest floor shone with a silent, ardent, colorful gladness.…

Martha Cupp

She wasn’t sure which was worse: the unearthly thing that burst out of the sofa and then disappeared, leaving the fabric torn and the horsehair billowing—or Edna’s I-told-you-so expression and her satisfaction that her belief in an invading demonic force seemed to have been substantiated by the bizarre incident. Well, on reflection, Edna’s smug expression was by far the worse of the two, because if the beast
in the chesterfield showed up again, Martha could always club it mercilessly, but she couldn’t very well take a fireplace poker to her sister.

Still holding the train of her dinner gown off the floor, Edna said, “I’m sure that if Father Murphy had seen that nasty critter, he wouldn’t care one whit if I believe in Bigfoot or ancient astronauts. He would break out the exorcised water, oil, salt—and begin the Prayer against Malefice immediately and at the top of his voice.”

Martha knew that by continuing to hold the poker at the ready, she would appear to be conceding the point to her sister, but she was damn well
not
going to put it down, have a glass of warm milk, and go to bed. Even if Edna asked Father Murphy to perform an exorcism of place instead of an exorcism of person, and even if he agreed to do it, Martha would stand ready throughout the ritual to start swinging with that pleasingly heavy length of brass.

“What next?” Edna asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Besides calling Father Murphy,” Edna said, “what should we do, what should we expect to happen, how should we prepare?”

“Maybe nothing more is going to happen.”

“Something will happen,” Edna said confidently, almost happily, as if an infestation of demons would be just the thing to combat the doldrums of a rainy December night.

Before Martha could reply, a bright flood of shimmering, crackling blue light washed across the floor. She seemed to be standing in an intensely luminous fog.

The poker reacted as if it were a divining rod and she were a dowser searching for underground water, almost tearing out of her grip. She held fast to it, but the poker jerked her arm down, and the tip of it pierced the eerie luminosity.

Simultaneously, the remaining fireplace tools and the rack that held them overturned on the hearth, didn’t just topple into the light
but
slammed
into it as if drawn by a tremendous power. The blueness receded from around Martha, shuddered across the room, seemed to suck the ornate fireplace screen into the firebox, and crackled away up the chimney, gone.

Sally Hollander

Lying on the kitchen floor, Sally felt the last of her bones succumb to the spreading cold. Now a skeleton of ice defined itself clearly in the warmth of her flesh. She had never previously been so consciously aware of her physiology. Although at the moment she remained paralyzed, she knew the position of each of her 206 bones, the precise shape of the various plates that were fused together to form her skull. She was conscious of the status of every joint: the ball-and-socket joints in shoulders and hips, the pivot joint in her neck between the second and third vertebrae, the elegant ellipsoidals in her wrists, the wonderfully functional hinges in her fingers and elbows and knees. Sally was able to feel the synovial membranes encapsulating her mobile joints and was vividly aware of the sticky, oozing synovial fluid that lubricated them. She sensed the fibers of every supporting ligament, the connecting tendons and the muscles poised to put the entire skeleton into motion on demand. It was as if her body had developed an acute self-awareness to match that of her mind.