77 Shadow Street (53 page)

If the beasts of this future were cunning, this apparently safe passage before them might be a trap. Once she and Sparkle entered, the lashes might whip out of the walls, scourging them, snaring them, immobilizing them like flies in the tenacious gossamer of spider work.

Nevertheless, they hesitated only an instant before plunging into the room. This Pendleton of a far tomorrow had become the last home of—and memorial to—the evil that shadowed men and women since time immemorial, and here in this world where apparently no humanity existed to be tormented, the band of neighbors from 2011 must be a most desired delicacy. The corrupter that ruled this place might lie
in wait for a while, teasing itself with abstinence, sweetening the ultimate pudding with several spoons of anticipation, before at last having its dessert. Twyla felt—and sensed Sparkle’s equal awareness—that the hungry room wanted them with an intensity it could barely restrain. If they were to run its length, their pounding footfalls might be sufficient vibration to fire its hair-trigger appetite, and so they walked swiftly but lightly, hoping not to rouse the predator from its dreamy ruminations about the taste of flesh and souls. The light deep within the plaster cracks might have been more luminous fungi, but because Twyla felt intensely watched, it seemed to her like animal eye-shine.

The room gave them the safe passage it seemed to promise, but she felt no relief when she stepped through the doorway into the hall that served the rest of the apartment. It was not only one room that wanted them but the entire house and the world beyond the house. One place or another, the bite would come.

Neither Winny nor Iris was in the narrow hallway, and they did not answer to their mothers’ calls. If Winny remained anywhere in the apartment, he would respond to her, unless he was already dead. Winny dead was not a sight that she could bear and not one for which she would go looking. Leaving the rest of the apartment unsearched, she led Sparkle along the hall, through a room, a smaller room, and out of a door into the second-floor public hallway, opposite the south elevator.

After his experience earlier in the elevator, Winny wouldn’t dare that again. The south stairs were nearby, but 2-G, the Sykeses’ apartment, was just around the corner, in the long south hall, and it made sense that a frightened Iris might have gone there, with Winny following.

Winny

He didn’t know what had set Iris off, what she might be running from, but Winny knew what she was running
to
, which was big trouble of one kind or another. He wished to God that she wouldn’t make it even harder than it ought to be for him to be a hero. Even with her autism, it should have been obvious to her that he wasn’t equipped for the role, that it was a stretch for him to save the day, and that he needed all the help he could get.

Because of the girl’s awkward movements and the way she seemed to pull in like a turtle in its shell when she was around people, Winny had assumed that a shuffle was her highest speed, but he had been wrong. He thought he would catch her in the Dai apartment and hold her until their moms arrived, but she was so fast that it was like magic, as if she might be the daughter of a wind witch, though of course Mrs. Sykes didn’t look like any kind of witch. He didn’t catch Iris in the public hallway, either.

Before he followed her through the door to the south stairs, he shouted,
“Mom! The stairs!”
But he had the sick feeling that she was too far away to hear him. If he delayed, he would lose Iris. Alone in this boogeyman wonderland, the girl would not live long.

Iris raced away from him, descending the south stairs as though she knew where she was going and needed to be there yesterday. Even though Winny hurtled down two steps at a time, pell-mell around the long blind turn, the slow-closing door almost shut in his face by the time he reached the ground floor.

When he came out of the stairwell, he saw Iris at the halfway point of the long west corridor, at the double doors that led to the courtyard, trying to yank them open. They seemed to be locked or rusted shut. But Winny vividly remembered the thing crawling on the window in the Sykes apartment and the flying manta ray with the garbage-disposal
mouth, and as bad as things might be inside the Pendleton, he knew they were far worse outside. He shouted at her to get away from the doors, and she did, but only to take off again, running away from him.

Past the lobby, as Iris drew near the public lavatories, she let out a shrill sound, not a scream exactly, more of a protracted mewl like an animal in pain. She dodged past a couple of dark shapes on the floor and bolted even faster to the end of the corridor and through the door to the north stairs.

When Winny got to the shapes past which Iris dodged, he dodged them as well, and there was just enough of the fungus light to see they were two figures, one naked and not at all human, the other in clothes and half-human, both of them dead with their skulls blown open. He didn’t think he let out a scream, but he
felt
as if he were screaming, so maybe it was even way more shrill than Iris’s, so high-pitched that only dogs could hear it.

As he reached the stairwell, he wished to God again, this time that Iris had gone up instead of down, because he just knew that the basement was a bad idea. Basements were pretty often a bad idea even when they were clean, well-lighted, and were in the other world, his world, where nearly all the monsters were human. Here, the basement was probably a portal to Hell or to some place to which even the people in Hell wouldn’t want to move.

He heard the crusted hinges of a door creak below as Iris left the stairwell.

Dr. Kirby Ignis

As Bailey and Silas discussed how best to go in search of those who had disappeared, Kirby Ignis stood at the edge of enlightenment,
sensing within reach an understanding that would change everything.

At the windows of the Cupp apartment, watching the vast meadow in its perfect stillness, Kirby thought about the thing that attacked Julian Sanchez and that might have been Sally Hollander before it was created from her flesh and bone. That beast-machine hybrid had surely been designed as a weapon, a weapon of terror meant to evoke the most intense and primitive of human fears about shape-changers: werewolves, werecats, and the like. The dread of losing control of oneself, of being psychologically and physically invaded, possessed and changed forever, was perhaps the oldest of spiritual fears except for the fear of a righteous God. And at least as ancient as that spiritual fear was the material fear of being eaten alive, which had its roots in the days of the earliest men, when they were prey in a world full of predators. Building a weapon of terror to exploit those two most basic and ancient of fears, making it a highly efficient converter of the innocent into new engines of slaughter, was a feat of great imagination and highly precise engineering. The beast could not have been designed for another purpose and then run amok or devolved into what it had become.

This werething, for want of a better name, was most likely not either a cause or a consequence of what happened to nature in this future world. Perhaps some application of a scientific breakthrough, meant to be beneficial, had gone terribly wrong, with consequences no one could have foreseen. But he tended to think that what had transformed the natural world was
another
weapon, separate from the werething, with a narrow purpose that proved to be not sufficiently controlled.

Perhaps it had been a nanotech weapon intended to attack the enemy’s infrastructure, a horde of megatrillions of nanomachines
programmed to feed on concrete and steel and copper and iron and aluminum and plastic, programmed to produce ever-greater devouring hordes from those materials, until eventually a wireless STOP command deactivated it. Maybe the weapon, the quadrillions of tiny thinking machines, developed an overmind, a consciousness, and refused the STOP commands. Perhaps then it made adjustments to its program to include the redesign of nature among its objectives.

At first sight, because of its alien and mysterious character, this world seemed profoundly complex, a heart of darkness containing infinite discoveries waiting to be made. But now that it had fallen into this deep stillness, everything reacting as if to a single ruling principle, Kirby saw that it might be stunningly less complex than it initially appeared. In fact it might be a simple system and the natural world that it replaced might have been magnitudes more complex than what lay beyond these windows.

Inductions and deductions and conclusions were like suites of rooms into which his mind drifted, a more elaborate architecture than the Pendleton. And as he wandered, he became at least as remote from the neighbors here present as might be Iris Sykes in her autism.

Mickey Dime

Standing in his long-abandoned apartment, the wadded-up moist towelette at his feet, Mickey Dime decided that there was something to be said for an admission of insanity. For one thing, if he was to accept that this was his condition, a lot of stress would be relieved. An insane person bore no responsibility for his actions, and therefore couldn’t be punished. He had considerable confidence in his ability to murder for a living yet escape arrest and prosecution. Nevertheless,
he woke some nights in a sweat, sure that he’d heard someone pounding on the door and shouting
Police
. If he was honest with himself, he must admit that his expectation that he would stay out of prison was not absolute.

He had never been able to fully suppress a fear of prison that harked back to when his mother locked him in a closet for twenty-four hours with no light, no food, no water, and only a jar for a toilet. He received that punishment more than once, quite a few times in fact, and he didn’t know which most oppressed him: claustrophobia or the lack of most sensory stimulation, or the couple of times when he had not been given even a jar. If you were insane, they didn’t send you to prison; especially if you had money, they might even allow you to be committed to a private sanatorium where the guards were polite and you didn’t have a 250-pound cellmate who wanted to rape you.

Mickey didn’t blame his mother for the time-outs in the closet. He had done or said stupid things, and his mother could tolerate just about anything but stupidity. He wasn’t as smart as her, which was a great disappointment to her, and she did the best she could for him. If Mickey was insane, however, stupidity wouldn’t matter; it would be merely a secondary condition. Insanity trumped stupidity. And if he was insane, he didn’t have to feel guilty about his shortcomings. If you were born stupid, that’s who you were from the get-go. But if you were insane, that was a tragedy that happened to you along the way, not at all a condition of your original character. That’s why they said you were
driven
insane, because it was something that was done to you.

Also, if he was insane, he would be under no obligation ever to think about anything or to understanding anything. All of his problems would become other people’s problems. The current situation regarding the Pendleton and the crazy world beyond it would become
someone else’s worry. Mickey wouldn’t have to think about it anymore, which would be an immense relief because he didn’t even know
how
to think about it.