77 Shadow Street (33 page)

Her fear had gone away as if whatever the demon had disgorged into her included, among other things, a tranquilizer. She had no apprehension anymore, no slightest misgiving. Her mood was one of calm anticipation, a meditative placidity, not apathy but a relieved submission to some inevitable transformation.

Having been a punching bag for her former husband, having worked up the courage to leave him and to obtain a divorce, she had found her self-respect more than twenty years ago, and she had since
been too strong to submit that way to anyone. With a fortitude of which she was proud, she rejected apathy, embraced emotion and hope, and resigned herself to nothing—until now she resigned herself to
this
with an almost pleasant expectation.

Her skeletal structure began to surrender its integrity. She felt something moving
inside
her bones, as though her marrow had become animated, crawling this way and that in the cavities that contained it. She sensed that the bones in her legs and arms were gradually elongating. In her toes—and elsewhere—additional bones seemed to be forming. Something was happening in her joints, as well, and she felt cartilage reweaving itself to conform to the new reality of these junctions.

The words
werewolf
and
werecat
prowled her mind, but they did not raise her anxiety. Instead, the prospect of transformation was intriguing, and it inspired in her a tentative sense of possibility, a cautious willingness to wait and see, to consider that perhaps a change might be for the better. A part of her realized that this was not a natural reaction and must be, therefore, chemically induced. She supposed that as her body was being reprogrammed, so was her mind. But even that recognition did not alarm her, not even when she realized that her right hand, on the floor in front of her face where she could clearly see it, was growing longer. Each finger seemed to be adding one knuckle and one phalanx, bones squirming within the flesh, skin stretching and splitting and at once knitting up again.

Silas Kinsley

Taking refuge among the whirring ranks of the tall Multistack chillers, Silas watched Mickey Dime through a gap between two of the machines. Whatever had been piled on the hand truck and covered with
a blanket was apparently destined to go into the manhole with the body of Vernon Klick.

Having spent his life in law offices and courtrooms, Silas had respect for the law and even a love for it in spite of politicians’ determination to layer on ever more Byzantine statutes and in spite of the wretched purposes to which some people bent it. He was loath to let Dime dispose of the evidence in a capital crime. With no one certain of how far away the bottom of the lava pipe might be, with the possibility that it emptied into an underground lake or a river that would carry the corpse beyond discovery, it was likely that a city running a ruinous budget deficit in bad economic times would decline to mount an expensive and unpromising exploration deep into the earth. But Silas was an old man, feeling older by the day, armed but not confident that he retained any shooting skills. He was no match for Dime, who was half his age, fit, and evidently ruthless.

Besides, he remembered well the butler who, in 1935, killed the entire Ostock family and every member of the live-in staff before committing suicide to “save the world from eternal darkness,” and he remembered the seemingly irrational character of Andrew Pendleton’s journal so evident in the scraps that had survived the fire in which he meant to burn it. Whatever happened every thirty-eight years in this building, insanity might not be a consequence of the event but a part of it, a symptom of it. As he watched Dime open the manhole, he wondered if this man might be not an ordinary murderer who killed out of self-interest but instead the equivalent of the butler, Tolliver, perhaps driven mad by some toxin or occult energy.

No sooner had the words
occult energy
occurred to Silas than a radiant blue spiral of something shot out of the manhole, startling Dime, whirling to the ceiling like Independence Day fireworks, but then splashing across the concrete and dispersing. He would have
said it was light, but light itself couldn’t be shaped into spring form and sent corkscrewing through the air. Behind the first spiral came a second that was more substantial, brighter, and then a third.

With the third blue whirligig, the iron manhole appeared to tear loose of its hinges, shot to the ceiling, and clung there an instant, until the light purled away, whereupon the disc fell, rang against the concrete floor as loud as a cannon shot, bounced onto its edge, and rolled away like a giant coin.

Martha Cupp

When the ornate fireplace screen was crumpled and twisted like paper and sucked into the firebox by the blue light, Martha threw aside the poker and hurried to her bedroom, where she kept a more formidable weapon in her nightstand drawer. You couldn’t shoot a magnetic field or whatever that blue light had been, but you could shoot any grotesque hateful squirming thing that ripped up your sofa
if it didn’t vanish before you could squeeze off a damn shot
!

Iris

They want to stay together but they also want to go up to the third floor right away to see some women up there. Too many people already. Now there’s going to be more.

One voice at a time is all right. Two is hard to listen to. Now there’s five, and what they’re saying is not even words to her anymore, half the time it’s just buzzing, like wasps, like a swarm of wasps in the room, the words fluttering against her face like brittle wings, buzzing, buzzing, and at any moment the words might begin to sting her, sting and sting until she can’t stand it anymore, until she starts screaming even though she doesn’t want to, and if the screaming starts so might
the hitting, though she hardly ever strikes out and doesn’t want to strike out, never wants that.

She tries to block out the voices, tries to hear the sounds of the forest as the words in the book describe them: …
the pheasants cackled loud and high. The call of the falcon shrilled, light and piercing, over the tree-tops, and the hoarse crow chorus was heard continuously
.

Animal sounds are all right. Animal voices don’t want anything from you, they don’t ask you to do anything, they don’t even expect you to answer them. Animal voices are soothing, and so are the sounds that the forest itself makes.

… the falling leaves whispered among the trees. They fluttered and rustled ceaselessly through the air from all the tree-tops and branches. A delicate silvery sound was falling constantly to earth. It was wonderful to awaken amidst it, wonderful to fall asleep to this mysterious and melancholy whispering
.

Under the animal sounds and the whisper of the leaves, her mother’s voice comes to Iris through the protective forest that she has imagined around herself, calls her again to the Bambi way. For the love of that deer who lives a world apart from her, in the book world, and for the love of her mother, which she can never express, Iris keeps her head down and goes with the herd. They walk and climb and walk again, and there is a door, beyond the door a new place, and two old women with voices so nice that she dares to glance at them.

One of them has a gun.

Iris at once retreats again behind the foliage in her mind, to a moment in the earliest days of the fawn’s life, when Bambi was horrified to see a ferret kill a mouse:

Finally Bambi asked anxiously, “Shall we kill a mouse, too, sometime?”

“No,” replied his mother
.

“Never?” asked Bambi
.

“Never,” came the answer
.

“Why not?” asked Bambi, relieved
.

“Because we never kill anything,” said his mother simply
.

Bambi grew happy again
.

Silas Kinsley

Instead of a fourth spiral of blue light, a great rushing brilliance poured from the open manhole:
whooooosh
. Saturated with intense color, this was not a steady transparent beam like ordinary light, but translucent and churning with visible currents. It swarmed upward less like light than like water might gush from a broken main under extreme pressure. The radiance blued everything in the room, concrete and chillers, pipes and boilers, Mickey Dime’s face and hands and white shirt, and even tinted the shadows sapphire. As the manhole had torn off its hinges, so Silas’s watch vibrated on his wrist, the belt buckle against his abdomen, and the guard’s pistol in a raincoat pocket thumped against his thigh. The heavy machines and boilers were anchored to the floor, but the metal housings creaked, twanged, as though they might pop their welds and rivets.

The rushing radiance lasted ten seconds. Maybe fifteen. But when it winked out, its effects lingered or perhaps increased. Immediately with the extinguishing of the blue brilliance, a sound issued from within the thick walls, an eerie high-pitched resonance, continuously modulating like the shrieky whistle of interference on a shortwave radio, as though the intricate web of steel rebar encased in the concrete might be transmitting the blue energy in a form other than light to every corner of the building.

As if that keening called it forth, the rumbling rose beneath the Pendleton. The more shrill the sound grew within the walls, the deeper notes the rumbling struck, until the two swelled to their fullest at the same moment, whereupon everything changed.