77 Shadow Street (21 page)

When he tried the previously locked door, it opened. He rushed out of the little bathroom, into the hallway, relieved to be free.

He sneezed, sneezed again. He pinched his nose between thumb
and forefinger to stop a tingling in his nostrils. His lips felt dry, and when he licked them, they were crusted with something. He wiped one hand across his mouth. On his fingers and palm were perhaps a hundred tiny white spores.

Martha Cupp

After Bailey Hawks left with Sally, Martha decided to put all this demon-in-the-pantry nonsense out of her mind by perfecting her bridge game. She sat at the computer in the study, playing with a virtual partner named Alice, against a virtual team named Morris and Wanda. She selected MASTER LEVEL from a menu that offered five degrees of difficulty, but within a few minutes she regretted her choice. She’d been playing real bridge, with flesh-and-blood people, only for about a year. No matter how hard she pushed herself to improve, she wasn’t ready for master-level play. She became so frustrated so quickly that she accused Morris of cheating, although he was only a software character and incapable of hearing her. As for Wanda—well, she was a smug little tart, so annoyingly sure of herself.

From the open doorway, Edna said, “I’ve decided the situation calls for immediate action.”

To her virtual partner, Alice, Martha grumbled, “I’m sorry I’m no help. I should have selected dementia-level play.”

“First thing tomorrow,” Edna said, “I’ll call an exorcist.”

When Martha looked up from the computer, she saw that her sister had already changed costumes. Instead of the lilac-silk day wear, she wore a dinner gown: black silk covered with spotted-black chiffon, black-and-gold lace edging the neckline and repeated on the train of the skirt, gathered sleeves with abundant frill, and a black-velvet cummerbund. Bedecked with both a long rope of pearls knotted at the bustline and a diamond necklace with pendant, as well as small drop
earrings, wearing long white gloves, she looked as though she was dressed to attend a banquet with the queen, rather than to share a previously prepared, microwaved meal with her sister, the rotten bridge player.

“And once all evil spirits have been exorcised, I’ll have the apartment blessed,” Edna declared.

“But where will you find an exorcist, dear? Father Murphy knows all about your belief in ancient astronauts, shadow people, witches among us.… He doesn’t approve, no priest would. He’s not going to put the dignity of the Church on the line by bringing in an exorcist, because he knows that by the time they show up, you will have decided it wasn’t a demon, after all, but a troll.”

Edna smiled and shook her head. “Sometimes I think you never listen to me, Martha. I don’t believe in trolls. Trolls are the stuff of children’s fairy tales, nothing more.”

“You believe in gremlins,” Martha reminded her.

“Because gremlins are
real
, of course. Do you know where our gremlin hid my reading glasses this time? I finally found them on the bottom shelf in the refrigerator next to the fruit yogurts. The little scamp.”

“Maybe you left them there yourself.”

Edna raised her eyebrows. “Whyever would I? I certainly don’t curl up in the refrigerator to do my reading.”

From elsewhere in the apartment came a squealing and squalling that certainly sounded like a cat fight, although Smoke and Ashes never quarreled.

“Whatever are they up to?” Edna wondered. She turned and hurried away, the short train of her dinner gown swishing along the floor.

Sparkle Sykes

When the tongue licked out of the contorted countenance on the underside of the creeping monstrosity and slid along the rain-slick glass, Sparkle knew it wasn’t tasting the cool water or doing anything other than taunting her. The face initially seemed to be twisted as much in anguish as in rage, but its expression darkened into fury unalloyed by anything but mockery as the mouth curled in a thin, obscene sneer.

Certain that the cataracted eyes saw her, she nevertheless left the drapery open because as long as she could see the horror, she knew where it was. As it angled up the window, the thing seemed less interested in making progress than in exploring along every junction of bronze muntins and glass with its sucker-pad toes, as if seeking some breach or weakness that it could exploit to gain entrance.

Sharp lightning scored the sky, and for the first time since Sparkle saw her father seared and slain, she failed to cringe in fear of its lethal potential. The hideous thing upon the window merited her terror more than did Nature’s bright fury. In fact, the flaring night seemed to caress the creature as if it were a child born from the storm.

She needed to call security. She didn’t know what she could say that wouldn’t sound crazy. Just tell the guard there was something he had to come and see for himself. Tell him it was urgent.

Iris’s room lacked a phone. No matter how pleasant the ringtone, it always irritated her.

Keeping her eyes on the freak at the window, Sparkle eased backward to her daughter’s bed. She spoke softly, with no note of alarm that might trigger one of the girl’s anxiety attacks. “Honey, Iris, it’s treat time. Ice cream, honey. Ice-cream time in the kitchen.”

The girl neither replied nor moved.

As the abomination quested from one pane to the next, its suctorial feet squeaked on the glass.

She couldn’t leave the child here alone, not even just long enough to get to the nearest phone and call security.

Autism was a ruthless censor that denied Iris the ability to communicate. Having memorized large portions of the beloved novel
Bambi
, the girl found a way to use quotations from the book as a kind of code that now and then enabled her to slip a thought past her oppressor by cloaking it in the words of another.

Hoping to build a bridge between herself and her psychologically isolated daughter, Sparkle had read and reread the novel. Sometimes the girl listened to familiar lines from
Bambi
and acted upon them, though if the same request was made with different words, she ignored it or responded temperamentally. Sparkle had identified and memorized numerous lines that proved to be useful.

“ ‘
He
is in the woods, and we must go,’ ” she said, referring to the hunter who terrified the deer in the woods by the River Danube.

Iris looked up from her book, though not directly at her mother, as eye contact pained her.

“ ‘Don’t be frightened,’ ” Sparkle said, quoting the old stag, Bambi’s father, from the next-to-last chapter of the novel. “ ‘Come with me and don’t be frightened. I’m glad that I can take you and show you the way.…’ ”

Again, the famous novel worked its magic. Iris put aside the book she was currently reading, got off the bed, and approached her mother, oblivious of the crawling horror seeking entrance at the casement window.

Sparkle wanted to take the girl’s hand, but that contact would shatter the mood, put an end to cooperation, and perhaps inspire a violent physical reaction. Instead, she turned and went to the open door, as if confident that her daughter would follow her as any fawn would follow the doe that brought it into the world. Crossing the threshold into the hallway, she glanced back and saw Iris shuffling after her.

Sparkle thought she heard an inhuman cry, a shrill expression of intense craving, frustration, and rage, muffled by window glass. But the sound was so alien and so chilling that she wanted to believe it was only the voice of the skirling wind, blown into the thinnest falsetto.

Winny

When Winny slipped through the opening elevator doors, he right away realized that the bird mural was gone, that all the surfaces were stainless steel, and that the usual cove lighting and crystal ceiling fixture were gone, replaced by circles that rained down a moody blue light. A second later, he made the connection between this blue light and the luminous rings pulsing on the TV set in his room—which was just when his mom said, “Get out of there!”—and the doors started to slide shut.

These doors were supposed to stop closing if you stepped between them, it was a safety feature, but they clamped on to Winny as if they were jaws. They weren’t sharp, they couldn’t bite him, but they were maybe powerful enough to slowly squeeze the breath out of him or to snap his ribs and force the broken ends inward to his heart. As his mother grabbed him by his jacket, in his mind’s eye, Winny saw blood squirting from his nose, trickling from his ears, and that scared him enough to writhe and twist in the grip of the doors until he wrenched free.

Almost
free. The doors closed on his left wrist, tight enough to hurt, and he couldn’t skinny down his hand enough to slip it loose. His mom hooked her fingers in the narrow gap, trying to pull the doors apart just enough to allow Winny to liberate himself, but she couldn’t do it because the doors were crazy powerful. She was grunting from the effort and cursing, and his mother never cursed.

Then maybe he imagined it or maybe it really happened, but in the elevator car, something crawled onto his imprisoned hand and began to explore it.

“
There’s a bug
!” Winny cried out, violating his rule against doing anything wimpy, opening himself to the charge of being a sissy, but he couldn’t control himself. “
In there, on my hand, a big bug or something
!”

Its legs or antennae quivered between all his fingers at the same time, simultaneously across the palm and the back of his hand, gross, disgusting, maybe a big centipede so flexible it could twine ceaselessly, busily through his fingers or maybe a swarm of smaller insects. He clenched his teeth and choked back a scream, waiting for the thing—or things—to bite or sting, shaking his hand to cast it off, trying to pull loose, the doors pinching his wrist tighter, his mother straining at the doors, her face red with the effort, the cords in her neck like taut ropes, and suddenly he
was
free of both the door and the bug.

Winny shot past his mom, across the hallway, turned, his back pressed to the door of the Dai apartment, certain that something radically weird must be coming out of the elevator. But the doors had slid shut. His mother was scared but not hurt, beads of sweat on her forehead, no bug climbing up her raincoat toward her face.

They were just thirty feet from the south stairwell, the only way out if they couldn’t use the elevator. His mom scooped her purse off the floor, didn’t bother with the dropped umbrella, pushed Winny ahead of her, and said, “
Come on, the stairs
!”

Maybe it was true instinct or maybe it was just a full-sissy moment that would live in infamy, but as he approached the fire door, Winny thought that the stairwell was a trap. Something was waiting for them along that spiral, and they would never get to the ground floor alive.

His mother must have felt it, too, because she whispered, “
Winny, no. Wait.
”