77 Shadow Street (24 page)

A kind of head, no eyes, no face to speak of. What might be rows of gills along the neck, but no mouth …

He had never chatted with cops about time warps—or whatever this might be—nor about not-grub, not-spider monsters. He didn’t know how he was going to do that, how he was going to make the impossible sound like the truth, unless maybe he wasn’t the only one
who’d had a curious experience in the Pendleton, unless even the guard had seen something that he could not explain, something that might even have raised the hairs on the nape of his neck.

As Silas reached out to press the elevator-call button, he hesitated, alerted to danger by a strange sound behind the sliding doors, within the shaft.

Witness

On the roof, standing at the western parapet, rain streaming off his insulated nylon jacket, blue jeans soaked and feet damp in his saturated boots, Witness was not afraid of the lightning that ripped the black fabric of the sky and revealed the fury on the other side. He hoped that a bolt might strike him, but he doubted he would be lucky enough to die here.

Thus far, the transitions had not occurred at the same hour and minute. He wasn’t able to time the event so precisely that he could appear, like a magician, to speak it into existence with a conjuring word. Indeed, some of the transitions were more than a full day earlier or later than others. But once the fluctuations began, the moment of change was approaching and inevitable.

The house under him now was not the same version of the house in which he lived. Most of the people here were strangers to him, though he knew a great deal about them.

One second to the next, the rain stopped. The rooftop was dry except for the pavers onto which his clothes dripped. With the rain, the city vanished; all gone, the vast wonderful expanse of lights that was the most beautiful thing Witness had ever seen.

The house under him now, under this cloudless sky, was the house he knew, in which he lived, if his existence could be called living.

A moon sailed the heavens, slowly navigating across a sea of stars.
He found that lighted vault to be cold and somehow accusing. He did not care to look up, for the sky had none of the charm of the lost city.

The long, barren hill and the moonlit plain beyond were more daunting than the sky. In daylight, the waist-high grass was such a pale shade of green that it appeared almost white, but under the lunar lamp, it looked slightly greener because it glowed faintly, as though phosphorescent. The night was still, hushed, and though no breeze blew to stir the great meadow, the luminous grass swayed anyway, toward the south and then toward the north, south and north, changing direction with such precise timing that it might have been the feathery pelt of some sleeping leviathan, influenced by the sleeper’s inhalations and exhalations. The grassy plain did not appeal either in dawn’s light or in daylight, neither at twilight nor now at night. It was disturbingly unnatural in its ceaseless motion and even more unnatural if wind teased it into an arrhythmic frenzy, when it fluttered not in the manner of storm-tossed pasture but as if it were the hair of a furious medusa, every blade like a thin flat wriggling serpent.

Living in that trackless veldt were all manner of creatures, which could not correctly be called animals, though they were mobile and always seeking. They were less the work of nature than they were denizens of demented dreams, as if imagined into existence by insane gods. This legion of voracious species fed on one another but also cannibalized their own kind, and the grass devoured all of them when it wished.

The immense meadow and its inhabitants were ruled over by the trees, from the roots of which the grass shrank and under the boughs of which the ground remained as bare as salted soil. Each tree rose high and spread wide, not with grace but with tortured grasping limbs as jagged as fractures in quake-shocked stone. A few stood alone, but most were in widely separated clusters; each group grew in a circle with a clearing at the center, as any coven might convene
around a cauldron. They were black from roots to highest twigs. The bark of their trunks was fissured, and in the deepest of those cracks shone a moist red tissue, like blood-rich meat under the crust of a charred cadaver. In the spring the trees did not bud and flower, nor did they produce leaves, but they fruited. In the first warmth of the season, blisters appeared on the branches, swelled, depended like teardrops, and matured until they were twelve inches long and five to six inches in diameter at their widest point, with mottled-gray peels. They were fruit not biologically but metaphorically, for they didn’t have seeds and were not sweet. When ripe, usually on a night with a fierce moon that appeared to metallize the grassland, the huge trees dropped their fruit, which in falling flew, because this was less a harvest than a birthing. For a while the sky bristled with teeth. When the weak had fed upon the strong, the remaining flock winged west, as if harried toward the darkness by the dawn. Wherever they went, whatever they did when they got there, Witness didn’t know, and they never returned to this territory.

In
this
night, the most recent issue of the trees having months earlier flown westward, arm after arm of black branches reached high with twisted twigs like talons, clawing at the moon as if to drag it down and with it all the sky, to at last smother dying Earth in the vacuum of interstellar spaces.

One second to the next, the storm began again, the dry silence and then the rush of rain, the stars bright and then no stars at all. With the wet weather came the glimmering city, and Witness stood once more not on the roof of the Pendleton in which he lived but on the roof of the Pendleton in which mostly strangers resided. They were the same building but they were far apart in time.

The next fluctuation or the one after that, or the one after
that
, would prove to be the transition. The moment and the mystery loomed, and Witness no better understood these bizarre events than
did the residents who found themselves transported from one Pendleton to the other. He also did not understand why he, shifting from the Pendleton of the future, should not be trapped in this sweet time for hours, as the people of this age would be trapped in his bleak era. Living organisms were thrown backward in time during the fluctuations that led up to the transition, but they remained in the past only briefly. When the transition occurred, everyone in the building under him—every living soul, everything they wore, and everything they happened to be holding at the crucial moment—would be transported, and this Pendleton would stand empty, until the transition reversed, bringing back only those who belonged to this time. Bringing them if they were alive, not if they were dead.

Drenched by rain, Witness leaned against the parapet balustrade, drinking in the vast sea of lights, the city brightly floating in the storm, streets shimmering, buildings rising like the tiered decks of a titanic vessel on a wondrous journey. Witness wept at the beauty of it, and at the tragedy that awaited it.

One

The young Sophia Pendleton descends the stairs in 1897 but also in 1935, in 1973, in 2011, and every thirty-eight years thereafter, although she has long been dead. During the brief period between the first crack in the space-time trapdoor and the instant when it is flung wide open, all the transitions past and future must occupy the same moment in the present, briefly melding. I bit the life from Sophia before the nineteenth century became the twentieth; yet she sings her nursery rhymes and descends the stairs in 2011 as in 1897, immortal for that brief moment
.

Likewise, an Indian brave from 1821 wanders for almost a minute through the Pendleton’s banquet kitchen and along the south hall on the ground floor. He is bewildered, frightened, a tomahawk raised and ready. But he fades away before anyone ever encounters him
.

Back in 1897, Sophia hurries to the kitchen of Belle Vista to enjoy her shaved ice flavored with cherry syrup, giving no thought to the hard life of the iceman who delivers the forty-pound blocks three times a week. He will no doubt exhaust himself by late middle age, die young, and leave this world as poor as he entered it
.

But exploitation is not always or even most often just a matter of the wealthy draining the blood of the poor. The wealthy themselves can be exploited by the likes of the envious security guard who is writing a tell-all book, by hired assassins like the son of the famous intellectual. Indians were exploited by the Europeans, but many Indian tribes previously had warred with and enslaved one another. As you have observed, it is the nature of human beings to exploit one another ruthlessly and to ravage nature as well, again and again and again over the centuries. No class or race or faction is innocent of that crime
.

In the kingdom of the One, there is never exploitation of any individual by another. No masters, no slaves. No wealth, no poverty. Every predator is prey, and every prey is a predator. The earth is never torn open and disfigured for its oil or its gold. I am the fulfillment of your vision, the justification of your life
.

Consider the boy, the songwriter’s son, who dreams of being a hero like those in the books that he incessantly reads. Yearning to be a hero, to live a life larger than life, he is no less a threat to everything you believe than he is a threat to me. By their nature, heroes leave outsize footprints, overblown and dangerous legends; therefore, in a well-ordered and efficient world, there can be no place for them
.

The boy will have no hope of being a hero when his eyes have been eaten from their sockets, when his tongue turns as black and silent as char, and when I reach within his heart and squirm through its throbbing chambers
.

22

Apartment 2-F

D
r. Kirby Ignis spent the latter part of that afternoon in an armchair, sipping hot green tea, listening to Italian operas sung in Chinese, and watching tropical fish swimming lazily in the large lighted aquarium that stood against one of his living-room walls.

Kirby owned one of the more modest apartments in the Pendleton, although he could have bought a mansion on a sprawling estate. He had earned serious money from his numerous patents; and the royalties flowed to him in greater streams every year.

He could afford the highest caliber interior design, but he chose to live simply. He bought his nondescript furniture on sale from various discount warehouses, with no consideration other than function and comfort.

While he appreciated fine art, he didn’t feel compelled to own any. Not one painting hung in his rooms. He had a few thousand books, perhaps a hundred of which were oversize volumes about painters whose work appealed to him. Photographs of great art were as satisfying to him as would have been the originals hanging on his walls.

Simplify, simplify. That was the secret to a happy life.

At the Ignis Institute, he had a wealth of space and equipment, as well as a support team of brilliant men and women. But these days, he did more work at home than at the office, saving travel time and sparing himself the worries of everyday operation and bureaucracy, which others could handle for him.

Kirby Ignis’s life was largely a life of the mind. He had little interest in material things, but an all-consuming interest in ideas and their consequences. Even now, watching the fish and listening to opera, his mind was occupied with a difficult research problem, a mare’s nest of seemingly contradictory facts that for weeks he had been patiently untangling. Day by day, he unknotted the bits of data and raveled them into order, and he anticipated that within another week, he would have the whole problem smoothed out and rolled as neat as a spool of new ribbon.

Although he lived alone, he wasn’t lonely. There had been a Mrs. Ignis—lovely Nofia—but she had needed a different life from the one that he wanted. With mutual regret, they divorced when they were twenty-six, twenty-four years previously. Since then he hadn’t met a woman who had Nofia’s effect on him. But he enjoyed a complex network of friends to which he added continuously. More than once, he’d been told that he had a character actor’s face such that he could play the amusing next-door neighbor, the favorite uncle, the charming eccentric—and soon the beloved grandfather. His face won him friends, as did his contagious laugh, as did the fact that he was a good listener. You never knew what people might say, and from time to time he heard a story or a fact or an opinion that, though it would seem to have no connection whatsoever to his work, nevertheless led him onto new pathways of thought that proved fruitful.