77 Shadow Street (23 page)

“He’s the
king
of Hell and the prince of this world.”

“Royalty has always bored me.”

“Anyway, I never said Satan, dear. I said Sally saw a demon. His name is legion, after all, and he has an army to do his work.”

Regarding the crouched cats on their high redoubt, Martha said, “They never were mousers. They’re a disgrace to their species in that regard.”

“There aren’t any mice in the Pendleton to test them. I’m sure if there were, they’d have left us many little gifts with tails. It wasn’t a mouse that scared them.”

“So it was the thunder.”

“Or not,” said Edna.

Smoke and Ashes reacted simultaneously, heads twitching as one toward a far corner of the room, and they hissed as if they had seen something they detested.

The sisters turned to seek the cause of the cats’ displeasure, and Martha caught the slightest glimpse of something that scurried between an armchair and a large overstuffed chesterfield.

“What was that?” she asked.

“What was what?”

“Something. I saw something.”

Lightning painted the windows, thunder vibrated in the panes, and rain washed them dark again.

After retrieving a long poker from the rack of brass fireplace tools
on the hearth, Martha crossed the big room, weaving among an abundance of Victoriana—plump chairs, tables covered with valuable curios, plant stands from which trailed ferns, pedestals presenting busts of classical poets—toward the sofa behind which the small quick intruder seemed to have taken refuge. The hand that gripped the poker ached, but Martha’s swollen and arthritic knuckles remained strong enough that she could club a rat or a potentially dangerous exotic pet if some hopeless fool in the building had let one escape again.

Eight years earlier, a rock-and-roll musician had taken up residence in the Pendleton. He enjoyed three hit songs and one successful national tour before his career collapsed for lack of talent. Before he could drink away, sniff away, or otherwise squander his small fortune, he purchased a second-floor apartment for cash and moved in with a blonde named Bitta who had green hair and breasts as large as a pair of Butterball turkeys. Unknown to the homeowners’ association, with the glamorous couple had come a Gila monster named Cobain, which had the run of their apartment and which had escaped through their front door when they had unthinkingly left it ajar after coming home in the throes of drunken lust, singing bawdy lyrics in the hall. In the following eighteen hours, before the elusive Cobain could be cornered and captured and removed from the premises, pandemonium ensued in the Pendleton.

A year later, after a night of disastrous gambling in Vegas, the rock and roller had lost his money and Bitta. He was long gone from the Pendleton, but this was an age in which fools of many kinds were more plentiful than ever. Martha half expected to find another exotic animal. If it proved to be of a species with wicked teeth and a vicious temperament and evil intentions, she would defend herself with the necessary ferocity, regardless of whether its name was Cobain or Fluffy.

“Whatever are you doing?” Edna asked as Martha, with the poker raised, stalked the intruder.

“Remember Cobain?”

Smoke and Ashes hissed from atop the étagère, though Cobain had been before their time.

“You saw a Gila monster?” Edna asked.

“If that’s what I saw, then I’d have said so. I saw something, I don’t know what.”

“We should call someone.”

“I simply will not summon an exorcist,” Martha said as she warily rounded the chesterfield.

“I meant the superintendent, Mr. Tran.”

Nothing lurked behind the massive sofa.

Perhaps the thing she had glimpsed darting away from the armchair now hid
under
the chesterfield. Martha bent forward, probing beneath the furniture with the poker.

Sparkle Sykes

Crossing the living room toward the kitchen with Iris shuffling behind her, eager to call security and report the thing that was no doubt still probing at the bedroom window, Sparkle heard a commotion in the public hallway. A child cried something about a “big bug.”

She changed course, hurried into the foyer, and peered through the fish-eye lens in the door. She saw no one in the south hall, but she heard a woman say urgently, “
Come on, the stairs
!”

After a hesitation, Sparkle opened the door. To the right, ten feet away, at the junction of the south and west wings, two people moved toward the stairwell door. Twyla Trahern, that nice woman from 2-A, the songwriter with the famous singer husband. Her young son was
Winslow or Winston or something. She called him Winny. They were dressed for the storm.

Clearly agitated, the boy was in the lead, but he halted with his hand on the door to the stairs when his mother warned, “
Winny, no
!
Wait
.”

Winny said, “I know, I feel it, there’s maybe something waiting on the stairs.”

Startling them, Sparkle asked, “Do you need help?”

When they turned toward her and she saw their faces straight on, they looked exactly like Sparkle felt: perplexed, alarmed, afraid.

Sally Hollander

Paralyzed by the initial bite, with the demon’s long tubular tongue thrust deep in her throat, choking on the cold thick substance that gushed out of that hollow tube and into her, Sally clung to consciousness less as a consequence of extreme terror than because of her intense revulsion. Regardless of her paralysis, she remained desperate to break free and to cleanse herself, for she felt soiled beyond endurance by this creature’s touch, bite, and violation.

When its tongue at last retracted, it released Sally from its arms, and she slid to the floor. The coldness in her stomach couldn’t have been greater if the monster had pumped a slush of ice into her. She was overcome by a slithering nausea, she wanted to vomit, purge herself, but she couldn’t.

Limp, helpless, each ragged exhalation a cry for help that no one under Heaven could possibly hear, each inhalation a desperate wheeze, Sally watched the feet of her assailant as it prowled the kitchen, examining things with what seemed to be curiosity. Six elongated, webbed toes. The first and sixth were longer than the middle four, each with an extra knuckle and a large pad at the end, as if they
served as a pair of long opposable thumbs. Gray feet, the skin subtly patterned as if with scales. Not ordinary scales, not like those of a snake or lizard, not designed to provide extreme flexibility alone but also to serve as a kind of … armor. Maybe she thought of armor because of the color, which was like badly tarnished silver serving pieces before she polished them. And then just as in the Cupps’ pantry, every detail of the demon darkened until it was merely a silhouette, a slinking black shadow that vanished through a wall.

Her queasy stomach grew greasier, seemed to slide around within her, but still she couldn’t vomit, and then the nausea faded to be replaced by something worse. Instead of her body heat thawing out whatever had been injected into her, the iciness of the stuff in her stomach slowly began to leach into the surrounding tissues, first up into her ribs, so she could feel that cage of bones as she had never felt it before, as if it wasn’t natural to her anymore but was some armature that had been surgically implanted, alien now and cold in her warm flesh. And it leached down into her hips, where she felt the precise shape and position of her pelvis as she had never felt it before, those bones as icy now as her rib cage.

For a minute, as the cold spread down into her femurs and then into the other bones of her legs, she thought that she must be in the last moment of her life. But then she knew, without knowing
how
she knew, that life was not fading from her. She would survive. She was not dying: She was becoming something else, someone else than the woman she had always been.

Silas Kinsley

After briefly encountering Andrew North Pendleton in a late-nineteenth-century version of the lobby—which had been a receiving room in those days, more than a century earlier—and following
his brief conversation with Padmini Bahrati after the Belle Vista transformed into the Pendleton once more, Silas knew that whatever happened in this building every thirty-eight years was happening again, sooner than he had first expected. Having spoken with Perry Kyser at Topper’s restaurant, he knew this wasn’t going to be a party that anyone would be happy to attend—or even be lucky enough to survive—and his first impulse was to leave the building at once, bolt through the front door into the rain, run for it.

Three years after losing Nora, childless in a world where most of his friends had died before him, Silas had nowhere to run and no one to live for. His sole duty was to the people in the Pendleton, his neighbors, not all of whom he knew.

For a moment he could not imagine how to proceed. There were no break-the-glass-and-pull-the-lever boxes in the building’s fire-alarm system, which was fully automated with smoke detectors and sprinklers recessed in every ceiling. He had nothing with which to light a fire that might trigger the alarm and cause the residents to evacuate.

Cocking her head, smiling quizzically, Padmini said, “Is there something wrong, Mr. Kinsley?”

He felt old and tired and helpless. Anything he could think to say to her would sound foolish, would raise in her the suspicion that he was suffering from dementia.

“I need to speak to the security guard,” he said, proceeding to the doors between the lobby and the ground-floor hallway.

Before Silas could fumble his key from a raincoat pocket, Padmini stepped behind the reception counter and buzzed him through.

“Shall I call ahead to him?” she asked, but Silas didn’t reply as he stepped into the ground-floor hallway and let the French doors close behind him. The electronic lock engaged with a
zzzz-clack
.

Whatever was about to happen here—had
been
happening since early this morning—involved time, some problem with time, the late 1800s flowing into 2011, past and present confused. And maybe not just past and present. Maybe the future, as well. That thing Perry Kyser had seen in the basement corridor back in 1973, during the renovation, wasn’t from 2011 or from any age that had come before now.

Perry’s voice echoed ominously in memory:
It’s big. Big as me. Bigger. Pale as a grub, a little like a grub, but not that, because it’s kind of like a spider, too, though not an insect, too fleshy for a spider …

Silas turned right and hurried to the south elevator. It would drop him directly across from the security-room door.

He wondered who was on duty and hoped that it would be a former police officer, which most of them seemed to be. He had not always been a civil-litigation attorney. He had started out as a criminal-defense lawyer, but he hadn’t been any good at it because he couldn’t find much sympathy in himself for most of the human debris he was called upon to defend. He identified with the victims. Everyone deserved a defense, of course, even the worst rapists and murderers. So after a few years, he changed careers, leaving criminal defense to those men who had a nobler attitude and bigger—or colder—hearts than his. But during that first phase of his law career, he learned to talk to cops, nearly all of whom he had liked immeasurably more than he liked his clients.