77 Shadow Street
Authors: Dean Koontz
Tags: #Horror, #Suspense, #Fiction, #General, #Thrillers
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Dean Koontz
The Moonlit Mind
copyright © 2011 by Dean Koontz
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
A signed, limited edition has been privately printed by Charnel House.
Charnelhouse.com
BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Title page art from an original photograph by Dora Pete
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Koontz, Dean R. (Dean Ray)
77 Shadow Street: a novel / Dean Koontz.
p. cm.
The Moonlit Mind
was originally published separately as an eBook original by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2011.
eISBN: 978-0-345-53236-7
1. Haunted places—Fiction. 2. Parapsychology—Fiction. I. Title.
II. Title: Seventy-seven Shadow Street.
PS3561.O55S38 2011
813′.54—dc22 2011031435
Jacket design: Scott Biel
Jacket images: Stephen Youll (house), David Muir/Getty Images (key)
www.bantamdell.com
Cover design: Scott Biel
Cover images: Stephen Youll (house), David Muir/Getty Images (key)
v3.1_r1
Contents
Part One - Where the Shadows Gather
Chapter 1 - The North Elevator
Chapter 2 - The Basement Security Room
Chapter 3 - The Basement Pool
Chapter 4 - Apartment 3-C
Chapter 5 - Apartment 2-C
Chapter 6 - Apartment 3-C
Chapter 7 - Apartment 2-A
Chapter 8 - Apartment 2-C
Chapter 9 - Apartment 2-A
Chapter 10 - The Basement Security Room
Chapter 11 - Apartment 3-F
Chapter 12 - Apartment 3-A
Chapter 13 - Apartment 3-D
Chapter 14 - Apartment 2-G
Chapter 15 - Apartment 2-A
Chapter 16 - Topper’s
Chapter 17 - Apartment 3-D
Chapter 18 - Apartment 1-C
Chapter 19 - Apartment 2-G
Chapter 20 - Apartment 3-F
Chapter 21 - Here and There
Chapter 22 - Apartment 2-F
Chapter 23 - Apartment 3-H
Chapter 24 - Here and There
Part Two - Something Deeply Hidden
Chapter 25 - Topper’s
Chapter 26 - Here and There
Chapter 27 - Here and There
Chapter 28 - Topper’s
Chapter 29 - Here and There
Chapter 30 - Here and There
Chapter 31 - Here and There
Chapter 32 - Here and There
Chapter 33 - Here and There
Chapter 34 - 77 Shadow Street
O dark dark dark.
They all go into the dark …
—T. S. ELIOT,
East Coker
If you cannot read the above floor plan on your device, click here to download a PDF version:
http://rhlink.com/shadmain
1
The North Elevator
B
itter and drunk, Earl Blandon, a former United States senator, got home at 2:15 A.M. that Thursday with a new tattoo: a two-word obscenity in blue block letters between the knuckles of the middle finger of his right hand. Earlier in the night, at a cocktail lounge, he’d thrust that stiff digit at another customer who didn’t speak English and who was visiting from some third-world backwater where the meaning of the offending gesture evidently wasn’t known in spite of countless Hollywood films in which numerous cinema idols had flashed it. In fact, the ignorant foreigner seemed to mistake the raised finger for some kind of friendly hello and reacted by nodding repeatedly and smiling. Earl was frustrated directly out of the cocktail lounge and into a nearby tattoo parlor, where he resisted the advice of the needle artist and, at the age of fifty-eight, acquired his first body decoration.
When Earl strode through the front entrance of the exclusive Pendleton, into the lobby, the night concierge, Norman Fixxer, greeted him by name. Norman sat on a stool behind the reception counter to the left, a book open in front of him, looking like a ventriloquist’s
dummy: eyes wide and blue and glassy, pronounced marionette lines like scars in his face, head cocked at an odd angle. In a tailored black suit and a crisp white shirt and a black bow tie, with a fussily arranged white pocket handkerchief blossoming from the breast pocket of his coat, Norman was overdressed by the standards of the two other concierges who worked the earlier shifts.
Earl Blandon didn’t like Norman. He didn’t trust him. The concierge tried too hard. He was excessively polite. Earl didn’t trust polite people who tried too hard. They always proved to be hiding something. Sometimes they hid the fact that they were FBI agents, pretending instead to be lobbyists with a suitcase full of cash and a deep respect for the power of a senator. Earl didn’t suspect that Norman Fixxer was an FBI agent in disguise, but the concierge was for damn sure something more than what he pretended to be.
Earl acknowledged Norman’s greeting with only a scowl. He wanted to raise his newly lettered middle finger, but he restrained himself. Offending a concierge was a bad idea. Your mail might go missing. The suit you expected back from the dry cleaner by Wednesday evening might be delivered to your apartment a week later. With food stains. Although flashing the finger at Norman would be satisfying, a full apology would require doubling the usual Christmas gratuity.
Consequently, Earl scowled across the marble-floored lobby, his embellished finger curled tightly into his fist. He went through the inner door that Norman buzzed open for him and into the communal hallway, where he turned left and, licking his lips at the prospect of a nightcap, proceeded to the north elevator.
His third-floor apartment was at the top of the building. He did not have a city view, only windows on the courtyard, and seven other apartments shared that level, but his unit was sufficiently well-positioned to justify calling it his penthouse, especially because it
was in the prestigious Pendleton. Earl once owned a five-acre estate with a seventeen-room manor house. He liquidated it and other assets to pay the ruinous fees of the blood-sucking, snake-hearted, lying-bastard, may-they-all-rot-in-hell defense attorneys.
As the elevator doors slid shut and as the car began to rise, Earl surveyed the hand-painted mural that covered the walls above the white wainscoting and extended across the ceiling: bluebirds soaring joyously through a sky in which the clouds were golden with sunlight. Sometimes, like now, the beauty of the scene and the joy of the birds seemed forced, aggravatingly insistent, so that Earl wanted to get a can of spray paint and obliterate the entire panorama.
He might have vandalized it if there hadn’t been security cameras in the hallways and in the elevator. But the homeowners’ association would only restore it and make him pay for the work. Large sums of money no longer came to him in suitcases, in valises, in fat manila envelopes, in grocery bags, in doughnut-shop boxes, or taped to the bodies of high-priced call girls who arrived naked under leather trench coats. These days, this former senator so frequently felt the urge to deface so many things that he needed to strive to control himself lest he vandalize his way into the poorhouse.
He closed his eyes to shut out the schmaltzy scene of sun-washed bluebirds. When the air temperature abruptly dropped perhaps twenty degrees in an instant, as the car passed the second floor, Earl’s eyes startled open, and he turned in bewilderment when he saw that the mural no longer surrounded him. The security camera was missing. The white wainscoting had vanished, too. No inlaid marble underfoot. In the stainless-steel ceiling, circles of opaque material shed blue light. The walls, doors, and floor were all brushed stainless steel.
Before Earl Blandon’s martini-marinated brain could fully absorb and accept the elevator’s transformation, the car stopped ascending—and
plummeted. His stomach seemed to rise, then to sink. He stumbled sideways, clutched the handrail, and managed to remain on his feet.
The car didn’t shudder or sway. No thrumming of hoist cables. No clatter of counterweights. No friction hum of rollers whisking along greased guide rails. With express-elevator speed, the steel box raced smoothly, quietly down.
Previously, the car-station panel—B, 1, 2, 3—had been part of the controls to the right of the doors. It still was there, but now the numbers began at 3, descended to 2 and 1 and B, followed by a new 1 through 30. He would have been confused even if he’d been sober. As the indicator light climbed—7, 8, 9—the car dropped. He couldn’t be mistaking upward momentum for descent. The floor seemed to be falling out from under him. Besides, the Pendleton had just four levels, only three aboveground. The floors represented on this panel must be subterranean, all
below
the basement.
But that made no sense. The Pendleton had one basement, a single underground level, not thirty or thirty-one.
So this could not be the Pendleton anymore. Which made even less sense. No sense at all.
Maybe he had passed out. A vodka nightmare.
No dream could be this vivid, this intensely
physical
. His heart thundered. His pulse throbbed in his temples. Acid reflux burned his throat, and when he swallowed hard to force down the bitter flood, the effort brought tears that blurred his vision.
He blotted the tears with a suit-coat sleeve. He blinked at the indicator board: 13, 14, 15.…
Panicked by a sudden intuitive conviction that he was being conveyed to a place as terrifying as it was mysterious, Earl let go of the handrail. He crossed the car and scanned the backlit control board for an EMERGENCY STOP button.
None existed.
As the car passed 23, Earl jammed a thumb hard against the button for 26, but the elevator didn’t stop, didn’t even slow until it passed 29. Then rapidly yet smoothly, momentum fell. With a faint liquid hiss like hydraulic fluid being compressed in a cylinder, the car came to a full stop, apparently thirty floors under the city.