77 Shadow Street (42 page)

Kirby wasn’t interested enough to have an opinion regarding the theory of a link between beauty and the divine in the world he had left. But it seemed to him, as he gazed out of Gary Dai’s windows, that what pleased the eye in this world was not good and true but evil and deceptive. What made this vista alluring was not genuine harmony, which it somehow lacked, but its mystery and the sense that anything might be out there, that anything might happen, which had great appeal to the savage aspect of the human heart, which in the old world had to be repressed in the interest of civilization. Here no civilization existed, only the heart of darkness, bewitching in its immensity, charming because it promised raw brutal power, because it promised the freedom of madness, because it promised death without meaning.

From here the rhythmic swaying of the luminous meadow seemed to offer a mystical experience, but Kirby suspected that any walk he took there would be short and marked by exquisite cruelty.

In spite of his grandfatherly demeanor, he was a curmudgeon who found humankind—not every individual but as a species—to be largely foolish in the extreme, selfish and greedy and envious. Most were in love with power, with violence, users and despoilers. Kirby often thought the world would be a better place if dogs were the creatures of highest intelligence who lived in it. He didn’t miss the vanished city, because even the best of cities were beautiful only from a distance, squalid to one degree or another when experienced up close. However, this was a world without cities, without men,
and
no doubt without dogs and other innocent creatures, not a world returned to the condition of Eden, but a world polluted and perverted.

“I don’t think we need to explore every room,” Bailey said. “If anyone were here, they’d respond. Whatever we find during a search is
going to be one kind of funhouse pop-up or another, and we don’t need to put ourselves at risk just for the thrill of it.”

When they came out of Gary Dai’s apartment, the open elevator car remained empty, but murmuring voices in a foreign language issued from it—or more likely from the shaft in which it was suspended. They sounded just as Bailey had described them: portentous, urgent, ominous. In the world of the past, language was an exclusively human tool, but Kirby suspected that these voices were not those of people.

When they turned the corner into the long south hallway, a blue screen pulsed at the farther end, though no computer-simulated voice raised an alarm.

On the left were two apartments, the first belonging to Mac and Shelly Reeves. Kirby had little time to listen to radio, but the few occasions on which he’d heard the Reeveses’ show, it was amusing.

The door stood open. The first two rooms were like the desolate spaces they’d seen elsewhere. Nobody answered Bailey’s call.

“They might’ve been out to the theater or dinner when the leap occurred,” Kirby said.

“For their sake, let’s hope so.”

As they approached the door to 3-H, Fielding Udell’s apartment, the blue screen spoke: “
Two adult males. Aboveground. Third floor. South hallway. Exterminate. Exterminate.
”

Inspired by Mickey Dime, Bailey shot the screen.

“Some kind of security system?” Kirby wondered.

“Seems like it.”

“Why would an abandoned building need one?”

“Beats me.”

“You think anyone’s still around to answer the call?”

“So far, I’d say no. So far.”

The door to Fielding Udell’s apartment was locked. The bell didn’t work. Bailey knocked loudly. No one answered.

Bailey shouted through the door: “Mr. Udell? Mr. Udell? It’s Bailey Hawks. I live in 2-C.” He waited. Then: “Mr. Udell, we’re all getting together in the Cupp apartment, riding this out together.”

When the only reply proved to be silence, Kirby said, “Maybe he was out of the building when it happened.”

“I don’t think he leaves his apartment much.”

“You want to break down the door, see if he’s in trouble?”

Bailey thought about it for a moment. “You know this guy?”

“I’ve run into him once or twice.”

“He’s pretty eccentric.”

“
Eccentric
is one word for it,” Kirby said.

“I’m thinking what if, like me and like Martha, he was packing a gun when the leap happened. The way Udell is, if we break down the door and he’s armed, either he might get shot, or me, maybe both.”

They went to the south stairs, at the west end of the hallway, and descended to the second floor.

Witness

He stood in what might once have been the library or the study, to one side of the open door to the living room, listening as the women helped one another to keep their courage strong.

Through the security-system communicator in his right ear, he heard the alarm and the call for extermination every time it sounded. There was a period, far in the past, when Witness was the one who did the required killing. Those few hardy souls who survived the Pogrom and subsequently survived the Fade tended to seek shelter in the Pendleton when they came upon it, for this building alone seemed to offer recognizable refuge in a changed world. But these final walls were for those people the walls of a trap. Witness made a good first impression on the ragged and weary survivors, because he looked like
them, not like a Pogromite. Once millions in number, the Pogromites had dwindled to a few in those days, because they had massacred long and well, and therefore were without sufficient work to justify their existence in large numbers. He welcomed the people who escaped the Pogrom, invited them into his supposed fortress, and when they trusted him, he killed them ruthlessly.

No survivors had chanced by in many years, and he no longer killed. His only job for a long time had been to stand as witness, the sole repository of the history of the world before the Pogrom, and curator of this honored building.

Considering his solitude and the terrible unrelenting weight of his knowledge, his awareness of how the world had once been and his daily experience of what it had become, perhaps it should have been expected that he would change. Gradually he was overcome by a sense of grievous loss. Something like remorse arose in him, and even pity.

One hundred sixteen days previously, the melancholy routine of his isolated existence was interrupted. The first fluctuations began, those inexplicable flashbacks to the Pendleton as it had once been, in 1897, standing high on this hill but in a smaller version of the city that eventually grew. The fluctuations lasted two days, and for flickering moments the present and that particular moment of the past briefly occupied the same point on the continuum of time. Then the transition occurred, flinging Andrew North Pendleton, his wife, and their two children into this merciless future where the perpetually mutating denizens included no species that didn’t kill, a world of ceaseless violent predation.

Witness had not slaughtered the children and the wife. The sole remaining Pogromite in this region, perhaps in the entire world, had attacked little Sophia. It had administered the first paralyzing bite and the injection that began the family’s destruction. Other threats
ensured that, when the transition reversed, only the father had been carried back to 1897, for only he remained alive.

Witness now knew from experience that this mysterious phenomenon occurred every thirty-eight
years
in the past, beginning in December 1897. Curiously, it was thirty-eight
days
between the experiences for him, at this end of the journey. The time separating the events in the past made it difficult for people then to see the pattern. But for Witness, the shorter interval here lent a sense of accelerating momentum to these incidents.

Thirty-six days after the Pendleton family transitioned to this time, the fluctuations began again, and following the Pendletons by thirty-eight days, the Ostocks and their live-in household staff were in essence shipwrecked on this shore. Thirty-eight days after the Ostocks, a bewildered man named Ricky Neems came out of the past alone, a construction worker from 1973, who met a gruesome fate shortly after his arrival.

Each group transported from earlier eras, at least those who
survived
, remained in this future 38 percent less time than the previous crew. The dead remained forever. Andrew Pendleton and his family were here the longest, for 380 minutes. The Ostocks endured approximately 235, which was 38 percent less. The transition in which Ricky Neems perished lasted about 146 minutes. If the pattern held, the current travelers would be stranded here 90.6 minutes, which was 62 percent of 146.1. Witness didn’t understand the reason for the periodicity or the importance of the number 38, but he was certain of the length of each transition because it was part of his nature to be as aware of the passage of time as was any clock.

Likewise, he didn’t know the cause of this event, whether it was a natural phenomenon without meaning or whether there was a purpose of some kind behind it. If the Pendleton had by chance been built over a fault in space-time, all was happenstance. But whether
chance or not, the forces involved were beyond Witness’s comprehension, of such immense power that they could fold time to bring different eras together, which was impossible according to the laws of physics—or at least impossible according to the laws of physics as they were thought to be.

His growing sense of increasing momentum led him to expect an approaching crescendo, not merely an end to these phenomena but a consummation beyond his ability to imagine. Maybe the violence he had witnessed for so long, the destruction of civilization worldwide, shaped his expectations, and maybe he was wrong, but he believed the end of these transitions, when it came, would be cataclysmic, worse than anything he had seen in his life.

Standing in the deserted library, listening to the women in the next room, he thought he would like them very much if he knew them better. He liked them some already, well enough that he hoped they might not perish here, although the chances of any of them living through the next ninety minutes was remote. He would not kill them, but he could not save them, either.

Tom Tran

In the west hallway of the ground floor, Tom seized Padmini’s hands and kissed them as he thanked her profusely for saving him from the spawn of the mass grave at Nha Trang or whatever it had been. She called it
rakshasa
, which she said was a race of demons, goblins, and though he didn’t know much about Hinduism, Tom thought that might be as good an explanation as any for the creature.

“
Baba
,” she said, “what has happened? Do you know why everything has changed?”

Baba
, she’d told him, was an affectionate form of address used in India when speaking to little children or old men. Only forty-six, but
more than twice her age, Tom Tran took no offense. He sometimes thought of Padmini as the daughter he’d never had. Anyway, her sweet nature ensured that only the most contentious cranks could work up any animosity toward her.

“In my experience,” he said, releasing her hands, “the world falls apart from time to time, and madness happens, but not madness like this.”

“I locked the main doors from the street,” she said.

“Good, good,” he said, glancing at the courtyard beyond the French doors, where the
rakshasa
had disappeared beyond masses of strange vegetation.

“I was going to go down to security, see what he knows.”

“Yes,” Tom said, beginning to regain some of his composure. “That’s what we should do.”

Together they hurried along the inexplicably filthy and poorly lighted corridor toward the south stairs, whereupon he noticed that high on the end wall hung a foot-square TV that had never been there previously. The mounting platform had partially failed, and the TV hung at an angle, the screen dark.

As they approached the stairwell door, it opened, startling them to a stop, and Silas Kinsley entered the hallway with a pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other.

“Mr. Kinsley,” Padmini said, “the world’s gone crazy,
khiskela
, everything is off, shifted.”