77 Shadow Street (2 page)

Sobered by a supernatural fear—fear of what, he could not say—Earl Blandon shrank away from the doors. With a
thud
, he backed into the rear wall of the car.

In his storied past, as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he had once been to a meeting in the bunker far beneath the White House, where the president might one day try to ride out a nuclear holocaust. That deep redoubt was bright and clean, yet it impressed him as more ominous than any graveyard at night. He had some experience of cemeteries from his earliest days as a state lawmaker, when he had thought that in such lonely places, from earth and graves and dust, no one could be raised up to witness the paying of a bribe. This quiet elevator felt far
more
ominous than even the presidential bunker.

He waited for the doors to open. And waited.

Throughout his life, he’d never been a fearful man. Instead, he inspired fear in others. He was surprised that he could be so suddenly and completely terrorized. But he understood what reduced him to this pathetic condition: evidence of something otherworldly.

A strict materialist, Earl believed only in what he could see, touch, taste, smell, and hear. He trusted nothing but himself, and he needed no one. He believed in the power of his mind, in his singular cunning, to bend any situation to his benefit.

In the presence of the uncanny, he was without defense.

Shudders passed through him with such violence that it seemed he should hear his bones knocking together. He tried to make fists,
but proved to be so weak with dread that he could not clench his hands. He raised them from his sides, looked at them,
willing
them to close into tight knuckled weapons.

He was sober enough now to realize that the two words tattooed on the middle finger of his right hand could have made his insult no clearer to the clueless third-world patron in the cocktail lounge. The guy probably couldn’t read English any more than he could speak it.

As close to a negative self-judgment as he had ever come, Earl Blandon muttered, “Idiot.”

As the car doors slid open, his enlarged prostate seemed to clench as his fists would not. He came perilously close to peeing in his pants.

Beyond the open doors lay only a darkness so perfect that it seemed to be an abyss, vast and perhaps bottomless, into which the blue light of the elevator could not penetrate. In this icy silence of the tomb, Earl Blandon stood motionless, deaf now even to the pounding in his chest, as if his heart were suddenly dry of blood. This was the quiet at the limit of the world, where no air existed to be breathed, where time ended. It was the most terrible thing he had ever heard—until a more alarming sound, that of something approaching, arose from the blackness beyond the open doors.

Ticking, scraping, muffled rustling: This was either the blind but persistent questing of something large and strange beyond the power of the senator’s imagination … or a horde of smaller but no less mysterious creatures, an eager swarm. A shrill keening, almost electronic in nature yet unmistakably a voice, quivered through the blackness, a cry that might have been of hunger or desire, or bloodletting frenzy, but certainly a cry of urgent need.

As panic trumped Earl’s paralyzing dread, he bolted to the control panel, scanning it for a CLOSE DOOR button. Every elevator offered such a feature. Except this one. There was neither a CLOSE DOOR nor an OPEN DOOR button, neither one labeled EMERGENCY STOP nor one
marked ALARM, neither a telephone nor a service intercom, only the numbers, as if this were an elevator that never malfunctioned or required service.

In his peripheral vision, he saw something loom in the open doorway. When he turned to face it directly, he thought the sight would stop his heart, but such an easy end was not his fate.

2

The Basement Security Room

H
aving been shot five times when responding to a domestic-disturbance call, having almost died in the ambulance, having almost died on the operating table, having subsequently contracted a vicious case of viral pneumonia and almost died while recuperating in the hospital, Devon Murphy had quit the police force two years earlier. Although he’d once been a patrol officer, the real deal, he wasn’t in the least embarrassed to spend the rest of his career as a security guard, as what some of his former brothers in blue would call a rent-a-cop or a Barney. Devon didn’t have a macho problem. He didn’t need to prove his toughness. He was only twenty-nine, and he wanted to live, and his chances of living were greatly increased by being a Barney in the Pendleton rather than a target for every thug and crackpot on the city streets.

On the west side of the basement, the security center occupied a room between the superintendent’s apartment and the big heating-cooling plant. The windowless space, eighteen feet by thirty-six feet, felt cozy but not claustrophobic. A microwave, a coffeemaker, a refrigerator, and a sink provided most of the comforts of home.

The khaki uniform was kind of dorky, and all that saved Devon from looking like a janitor was a gun belt, from which were suspended a Mace holder containing a small canister of Sabre pepper spray, a cell-phone holder, work keys, a small LED flashlight, and a swivel holster sheathing a Springfield Armory XDM chambered for .45 ACP. In a luxury condominium like the Pendleton, the likelihood that he’d have to use the pistol was hardly higher than the probability that he’d be abducted by extraterrestrials on his way home from work.

Primarily, he was required to cycle through the twenty-four security cameras in the building. And on a random schedule, twice a shift, he got some fresh air by patrolling the basement, the ground floor, and the courtyard, a beat that took fifteen minutes to cover.

Six wall-mounted plasma screens each presented four security-camera views in a quartered format. With a touch-screen Crestron control, Devon could instantly select any one of the cameras for a full-screen display if he saw something suspicious, which he never did. Seventy-Seven Shadow Street was the most peaceful address in the city.

Both nice people and jerks lived in the Pendleton, but the homeowners’ association treated employees well. Devon was provided with a comfortable Herman Miller office chair. The refrigerator was stocked with bottled water, fresh cream, various flavors of coffee, and all of the fixings for whatever brew might be the favorite of the guard on duty.

He was drinking a Jamaican-Colombian blend with a dash of cinnamon when a
breet-breet
signal alerted him that someone had opened the lobby door to enter from the street. He looked to the appropriate plasma display, summoned the lobby camera to full screen, and saw Senator Earl Blandon come in from the December night.

Blandon was one of the jerks. He belonged in jail, but he bought his freedom by loading up on attorneys in five-thousand-dollar suits. No doubt he had also threatened to take half his political party down
with him if they didn’t put their hands up the backsides of their puppet prosecutors and puppet judges to ensure that the Muppet show called justice would follow the plot he preferred.

Police work had made Devon somewhat cynical.

With Blandon’s thick white hair and Roman-coin face, he still looked like a senator, and he seemed to think that appearance alone should continue to command the respect that he had received before he disgraced his office. He was curt, dismissive, arrogant, and in need of having his ear hair trimmed, a detail that fascinated Devon, who was meticulous about his personal grooming.

Blandon had sopped up so much sauce over the years that he was inoculated against visible displays of inebriation; he no longer revealed his drunkenness with slurred speech or with an unsteady gait. Instead of staggering when he was loaded, he walked taller and threw his shoulders back farther and raised his chin more imperially than when he was sober. The telltales of his intoxication were faultless posture and an almost flamboyant poise.

Norman Fixxer, the night concierge, released the lock on the inner lobby door. A
breet-breet
signal issued from the security-station door monitor.

Although Blandon belonged in prison instead of in an ultra-luxury condominium, he was nevertheless an apartment owner. Like any resident, he expected to have his privacy even in the public spaces of the Pendleton. Devon Murphy never followed residents, by camera, along hallways and into elevators, except for the ex-senator, who could be singularly entertaining.

Once, having passed through the lobby and reached the ground-floor corridor, he had been too soused to maintain his deceptively regal posture and had dropped to all fours, crawling to the north elevator—and out of it on the third floor. On another post-midnight return, he strode confidently past the elevator, turned the corner into
the north wing, seemed suddenly to become disoriented, opened the door to the concierge’s office, evidently mistook it for a bathroom, and urinated on the floor.

That office was now kept locked when not in use.

On this occasion, Blandon found the elevator easily enough, and he boarded it with an air of dignity worthy of a king climbing into his royal carriage. As the doors closed, and after he pressed the button for the third floor, he glanced up once at the security camera in the car, and then he looked around at the bird-and-cloud mural with an expression of pure contempt.

The ex-senator had written two long letters to the homeowners’ association criticizing the mural with what he must have assumed was the erudition of a knowledgeable art connoisseur. The board, on which sat at least one genuine art connoisseur, instead found the letters to be contemptible, confrontational, and alarming. The security staff had not been bluntly told to observe Earl Blandon in the elevator when he returned home inebriated, against the possibility that he might deface the mural, but the suggestion had been made indirectly.

Now, as the elevator passed the second floor, something unprecedented happened. An expression of surprise came over the senator’s face … and swirling currents of blue static, like nothing Devon had seen before, suddenly flushed the image from the screen. The five other screens, quartered into twenty camera shots, also succumbed to the static, and the security system went blind.

Simultaneously, Devon heard low tympanic beats, hollow and strange and barely audible extended notes. Through the soles of his shoes, he felt vibrations in the concrete floor, subtle waves resonating in time with the drumming.

He didn’t become alarmed, because the door and window monitors remained operative, and all the indicator lights were green on
the board. No one was forcing entrance at any point. If the sound had grown louder and the accompanying vibrations had accelerated, Devon’s puzzlement and concern might have swelled into apprehension.

The phenomenon continued at a consistent level, however, and after about half a minute, the low drumming faded, the last of the vibrations passed through the floor, and the blue static receded from the plasma screens. The many security-camera points of view returned.

The elevator camera had a wide-angle lens and was mounted near the ceiling at a rear corner of the car, providing coverage of the entire interior, including the doors—which were closed. Earl Blandon was gone. Apparently the car had arrived at the third floor, and the ex-senator had disembarked.

Devon switched to the camera covering the short length of public corridor serving Apartments 3-A and 3-C, and then to the camera that provided a view of the entire long north-wing hallway on the third floor. No Earl Blandon. His was the first apartment in that wing, 3-D, overlooking the courtyard. He must have stepped out of the elevator, turned the corner, and let himself through his front door during the time that the video surveillance failed.

Devon cycled through all twenty-four cameras. Without exception, the public spaces were deserted. The Pendleton remained quiet and still. Evidently, above the basement, the sullen drumming and the vibrations had been so faint that, if anyone had been awakened, no one had been concerned enough to step out of his apartment and have a look around.

3

The Basement Pool