77 Shadow Street (36 page)

Every time that he had heard his mom say those things, Mickey had been energized, thrilled. But now reality had done a sudden one-eighty on him; and he realized that he didn’t know how to get it back under control. His mom would have known. She had known everything. But though she had instructed Mickey how to think about reality,
she hadn’t taught him anything about how to collar and leash-train it. Right now, reality seemed as slippery as a greased eel.

Once he was back in his own digs, with all his mom’s stuff around him, maybe he’d start to get his mind straight about this. Maybe she
had
taught him everything he needed to do to cope in a situation like this, not just the general principles of how to think about reality but also the specific techniques for controlling it. Surely she
had
taught him all that. He’d simply forgotten. Surrounded by mementoes of her, this confusion would dissipate, her wisdom would be recalled, and he would again be as a god.

He left the security room and walked the long creepily lighted corridor, past the HVAC vault. As he approached the north elevator, another pulsing blue screen issued the same threat as the one he had shot. He shot this one, too.

When the elevator responded to the call button and the doors slid open, it wasn’t the car with which he was familiar. The bird mural was gone. The interior surfaces were all stainless steel, and panels in the ceiling shed a cold blue light. He didn’t like the new reality of the elevator. He didn’t like it at all.

He decided to take the stairs to the third floor.

Silas Kinsley

In the acid-yellow light, he remained in the shadows among the chillers, expecting the murderer to return. Through the open door came a loud, possibly computerized voice describing Dime, specifying his location, and seeming to call for his extermination, a sentiment with which Silas could concur. Then a gunshot.

He didn’t know if someone had shot Mickey Dime or if Dime had gunned down someone else. Reluctant to step from cover until he had
a better grasp of the situation, he drew Vernon Klick’s pistol from a pocket of his raincoat and stood motionless, listening.

The changes in the vault didn’t surprise Silas. Previously he had reached the startling but inescapable conclusion that something went wrong with time in this building every thirty-eight years. By the evidence of filth and ruin around him, he inferred that he was no longer in the Pendleton of 2011 but in a future Pendleton of an unknown year, though he had no idea how long he would be here.

He was less disturbed by the changes than by the atmosphere in the room, which was worse than merely unwholesome. In their day, he and Nora traveled to some exotic locations, and the quality of this sour-yellow light reminded him of the smoky glow rising from granite bowls full of low-burning tallow, in a jungle-draped temple where the towering stone god smiled but not benignly and where the altar was stained with the blood of generations from before it became a tourist mecca. The shadows were sulfur-black, and they struck him as being not an absence of light but crouched forms, alive and hostile and waiting for their moment. The irregular radiant shapes weren’t only on walls and ceiling, like an archipelago of atomic-test islands, but also on some of the machinery. Squinting, he was able to see through the nearest patch of luminosity to its source, which seemed to be a colony of minute light-emitting fungi. The malodors of mold, damp concrete, scaling rust, rancid grease, and a faint vileness that might have been desiccated flesh hung on the air. If evil didn’t already lie in wait here, the vault certainly welcomed its coming.

From the hallway beyond the open door, a computer voice again described Mickey Dime and announced his location. It might also have called for his extermination, as before, but another shot rang out, followed by silence.

Cautiously, Silas moved through the forest of machines and into the clearing at the center of which lay the manhole. The wrapped body of the guard and the hand truck with its burden were gone, which must mean that they had not made the leap from the Pendleton of 2011 to this later version of the building.

He had seen the iron cover explode off the manhole and to the ceiling, then fall and roll away into the gloom, as if the Fates were reluctant to call heads or tails, yet now the disc was in place. He supposed the hole remained uncovered in 2011, where that event had occurred. Between then and now, repairs must have been made to the hinges.

Still holding the pistol in his right hand, with his left he flipped up the ring-grip from its niche and pulled the heavy rusted cover aside. The gasket had deteriorated. Chunks of crumbling rubber fell away into the darkness below.

Rising from the lava pipe, something fluttered against his face, and he recoiled before he realized that it was nothing alive, nothing of substance. No draft would wash across him in such tight rhythmic waves; therefore, it must be pulses of some energy, perhaps a weak lingering residue of the great rushing blueness that had gushed out of the hole earlier. Far down in the shaft, scattered snakes of blue light formed, wriggled around the curving surface, were extinguished, and new ones were born. As the energy fluttered against him, he felt his belt buckle hum against his abdomen, and in his shirt pocket, his metal-rimmed reading glasses twitched feebly.

If part of the explanation for this event involved a magnetic field, he supposed that the lava pipe must be the upper section of a complicated transmission line leading all the way down to the very magnetic core of the earth itself. But he could not begin to imagine why only living creatures and their immediate possessions were flung forward in time, though that was evidently the case.

However it happened, they weren’t stranded here. Andrew North Pendleton had made it home again to his time, even if his wife and children did not. Of the nine members of the Ostock family and the seven members of their household staff who had been brought to this future, five of the former and three of the latter had returned to 1935 after their ordeal here—although only to be murdered by the butler, Nolan Tolliver.

With his left hand, he fished from a pocket the small flashlight that he had taken from the guard’s utility belt in the security room, before the change. He intended to make his way upstairs, where other residents must be reeling from the shock of what had happened. The history that he would share might give them a little hope if nothing else:
We will go home again, those of us who live until the event reverses itself
. A little hope but not a certainty.

The crisp beam of the LED flashlight revealed scattered bones and skulls—and a few complete skeletons—of rats. They were white hieroglyphics on the gray floor, symbols awaiting translation.

Perhaps the pistol gave Silas a foolish kind of courage, but when intuition told him there was something important to discover here before he went upstairs, he hesitated only briefly before moving away from the door to the hall. Without all the facts, you couldn’t win in a courtroom, and in this case, his life and those of all his neighbors were on trial.

He stepped carefully to avoid crushing the rat bones underfoot, proceeding deeper into the enormous room, playing the light across the hulking machines. When the beam touched a formation of luminous fungi, the colony throbbed more brightly for a moment, and there was a sensuous quality to its response, as if it took pleasure from the contact or perhaps knew pain.

Sparkle Sykes

Standing at the windows of the Cupps’ living room, watching the plain of luminous pale-green grass sway in the moonlight as if timing its changes of direction to a lazy metronome, listening to the urgent conversation of the others, Sparkle felt that she would get through this alive, that however she was meant to die, this was not the night or the place.

If some power so colossal as to change reality could bring them here, wherever
here
might be, then it could take them back again to where they had begun, to where they belonged. Life-changing lightning of the figurative kind could strike in series, just like the real father-killing, mother-killing kind.

A sense of the uncanny prickled the nape of her neck, but that was a reaction to the deep strangeness of the scene, not a symptom of fear. She had no fear for herself. Her life had been so shot through with bolts of fate that of necessity she long ago resigned herself to destiny, controlling what she could and refusing to worry about the rest. She had allowed herself to be afraid only of the lightning that killed her father and her mother, and now even that terror was behind her. If suddenly they found themselves in the lovely Pendleton as it ought to be, with a fierce storm raging over the city, she would go downstairs and into the courtyard, to stand gazing up calmly and with complete trust at the sky, confident that however she might be meant to meet her death, it would not take her until the moment that, from her birth, it had been ordained to do so.

Professor Talman Ringhals, mescaline poisoning, Iris, and other metaphorical lightning strikes blazed new paths through life for Sparkle, and this bizarre event was just the latest. She accepted it quicker than did her neighbors because for some months she had felt that she was overdue for another bolt.

Nearly thirteen years earlier, when she found herself pregnant with Iris, her small inheritance no longer was sufficient to pay both living expenses and tuition. She dropped out of college, intending to get a job as a receptionist or clerk. Although she had never before bought a lottery ticket, she purchased two on the same day, and the second one paid her $245,000 only one week later. After taxes, her nest egg was enough to carry her for four or five years, even with the special care that Iris required; therefore, she decided not to return to the university, but instead embarked upon the work that she had hoped to pursue since shortly after she was orphaned on that stormy day in Maine.

Three years after the lottery, a new kind of lightning struck Sparkle when her work was spectacularly rewarded, whereupon she decided that this world was a place of deep mystery and enchantment, with occasional episodes of terror to give it texture. Death was merely the price of admission, cheap if you considered all that it bought you. Fearing death meant also fearing life, which stole all meaning from the act of living.

Until the improbable event this evening, she allowed herself the fear of lightning because she felt that to have no fear for oneself would be to tempt the Fates and invite calamity. Now, with no fear of anything, she was left only with fear
for
Iris, because the girl seemed to be a lightning rod upon which the Fates focused when they were in a bad mood. Losing her daughter might be the bolt that killed Sparkle, too, because she found it difficult to imagine how she could still be enchanted by the world if this difficult but most innocent girl was taken from her.

Iris stood apart from her mother, back to the windows, and the boy, Winny, stayed near her but at just enough distance to make it clear that he understood her need to maintain a certain personal
space, a defense line against the world. Winny had a quality that Sparkle could not quite define, a winsomeness that would one day outlast his shyness.

With apparent effort, the boy even contributed to the group discussion, mentioning the parallel universes that he read about in some of his favorite novels, other Earths existing side by side with our own, some of them only slightly altered from ours, but others radically different.

Sparkle didn’t read novels of that kind. But for a few decades, fantasy fiction, in books and films, had so dominated the culture that it was impossible not to be somewhat familiar with the fantastic concepts that her neighbors now raised for consideration, one after the other. They talked urgently, interrupting one another until she was reminded of a Star Trek club meeting that she had chanced upon one evening in college, where the true nature of Klingons—or some topic equally profound—was being debated with such passion and in such quasi-scientific language that the two dozen participants sounded only
half
mad.

Hugging herself to ward off a chill that was internal, Sparkle turned from the windows and from the eerie meadows beyond, facing her neighbors. Except for the two children, who remained to one side, the others—Dr. Kirby Ignis, Bailey, Twyla, and the sisters Cupp—stood in a circle. They had no furniture on which to sit, and the wood floor was splintered, dirty, encrusted here and there with foul-looking mold.

Dr. Ignis, whom Sparkle didn’t know well, took control by virtue of his grandfatherly demeanor, which was calming, also by asserting that parallel worlds were theoretical and, in his opinion, highly problematic. He said, “The concept arose in the first place as a kind of desperate explanation of why our universe is meticulously ordered to make life inevitable.”

“Why would anyone need an explanation?” Edna Cupp asked. “What is simply is.”

“Yes, but you see, there are twenty universal constants from Planck’s minimums of time and space to gravitational fine structure, and if any
one
of them was the very slightest bit different from what it is, the universe would be a wildly disordered place incapable of forming galaxies, solar systems, or planets, incapable of supporting any kind of life. The odds of the universe being as hospitable as ours is … well, it’s impossible, quadrillions of trillions to one.”