77 Shadow Street (43 page)

“Yes, I know,” the attorney said. “What have you seen?”

“Demons,” Tom replied and wondered what it meant that Silas Kinsley seemed not in the least surprised by that word.

Padmini said, “We were going down to security, to see what Vernon Klick might know.”

“He’s dead,” the attorney informed them. “The security room isn’t like it used to be. There’s nothing for us down there.”

Iris

They are too many, and they seem to talk all at once, and they have too much to say. Iris is not able to keep the forest real around her and follow the Bambi way with so much talking, the voices buzzing at her, buzzing. She doesn’t just hear the voices but feels them sawing in her ears, words with sharp little teeth, none of them soft voices right now but worried and rough. The words choke her, too, the words like a cord tightening around her throat, the way the trap line nearly strangled Friend Hare, so she finds it harder and harder to breathe.

The old woman has a gun, and guns are bad. The hunter killed Bambi’s friend Gobo, wounded Bambi in the shoulder, all the blood and Bambi wanting to lie down and sleep, just sleep, except sleep would have been death.

Iris keeps her hands over her ears for a while, but then she is afraid that she won’t hear the scream of the jaybird if it comes. She must be able to hear it, because the jay, with its scream, warns the whole forest when danger is near, when the hunter is among the trees.

Not daring to look up, certain to be overwhelmed by the
sight
of all these people talking, and everything changed, nothing as it ought to be, she focuses on the floor. Head bowed, arms folded across her chest, hands in her armpits, she tries to be as small and compact as she can, hoping not to be noticed.

The cats are on the floor again, nobody cuddling them, prowling around. She watches them because they make her think of the animals in the forest. She remembers the wonderful female deer like Faline and Aunt Ena and Aunt Nettla and Marena, and she is calmed when she keeps them in her mind.

One of the cats undoes Iris’s calm when it looks at her from a few feet away, and she sees that its orange eyes are changed, all black like
pools of ink. The cat is moving different from the way it moved before, slower, not as graceful, as if it’s sick. It shudders away from her. The other cat appears in her line of sight, and it also has strange black eyes. It opens its mouth, in which something is wriggling, as if the cat caught a mouse with six tails, the gray tails slithering back and forth across its teeth.

The forest isn’t here anymore, and it’ll never be here in this room again because there are too many voices and too many changes, everything different, even the cats, nothing normal, nothing safe. The forest must be found somewhere else, away from the worried voices and the grinning cats.

As quiet as Friend Hare, quicker even than the squirrel, Iris slips out of the room, through an archway, trying to see the young beeches and goldenrod and blackthorns and alders, seeking the safe glade where sprays of hazel, furze, and dogwood weave together and the sun coming through them is a golden web, the safe and secret glade where Bambi was born.

Bailey Hawks

They didn’t search the second floor with care, only toured it quickly. Bailey, Twyla, Winny, Sparkle, Iris, and Kirby lived on this level and were accounted for. According to Sparkle, her immediate neighbors, the Shellbrooks in 2-H, were on vacation, as were the Cordovans in 2-E. Apartment 2-I was empty and for sale. Rawley and June Tullis in 2-D, the owners of Topper’s, put in long hours at the restaurant; both would have been at work when the leap occurred.

Bailey called out repeatedly, received no answer. He and Kirby went down the north stairs to the ground floor, where they saw three people near the doors to the lobby, all coming this way along the corridor.
Bailey recognized Padmini Bahrati, and then Tom Tran and Silas Kinsley in rain gear.

The five of them met in front of the lavatories that were used primarily by people attending events in the banquet room. Because the fungus light here reminded Bailey of oil lamps with mica lenses playing off sandstone walls in a certain Afghanistan-desert grotto used as a weapons cache by the Taliban, he felt more than ever that this was not merely an adventure in time travel but also a war of long duration into which they had been plunged. None of their people had died here yet, as far as he knew, but hostilities could commence at any moment. Judging by the haunted look of them, Padmini, Tom, and Silas felt the same.

Winny

He wasn’t aware of Iris leaving until he glanced toward the girl and saw that she was already beyond the archway, at the farther end of the adjoining room, a shadowy figure moving through veils of the creepy yellow light.

In most of the books that Winny read, there was always a hero, sometimes more than one. Of course he identified with the hero, not with the bad guy. Being a bad guy was easy, but being a hero was hard. For a while now, Winny had realized that always taking the harder challenge was the way to success and happiness. His mom loved songwriting, but getting the lyrics and the melody right didn’t come easily. She worked long hours, composing, perfecting. But she was happy and successful. She qualified as a hero in her own way. Winny’s dad, Farrel Barnett, couldn’t be called a villain exactly. He didn’t go around blowing up churches or setting fire to puppies, or hacking old ladies to death with an axe. But you couldn’t call him a hero, either, because
he too often took the easy way. Getting naked with any bimbo that winked at him was a lot easier than being faithful to his wife. Winny had seen him drunk sometimes with his buddies. Getting plastered was about as easy as anything you could do. And ragging your son about being more manly, in front of everyone—that was easy, too. The hard thing was being the one getting ragged and just smiling through it. Sending a copy of your latest publicity photo was a lot easier than coming to see your kid and maybe taking him to an amusement park or something. Winny’s dad wasn’t a villain-level bad guy, but he was a little bit over there on the dark side. Once you were over there, it was easier to slide a lot farther down. Winny didn’t want to go the easy way because he wanted to be happy. In spite of being famous, rich, and adored by millions of fans, Farrel Barnett wasn’t happy. Winny could see how unhappy his dad was, which made him sad and angry and afraid. He always thought something terrible was going to happen to the old man, and he didn’t want to see what it might be. He couldn’t tell his dad to take the hard challenges instead of the easy ones, because he didn’t want to have his face shoved in a toilet bowl. One of Farrel’s hanger-on drinking buddies got in a fight with him once, both of them stupid drunk, and old Farrel shoved the poor guy’s face in a toilet. Fortunately it had been flushed before the dunking. Winny couldn’t save his dad. All he could do was avoid what was easy, make the hard choices, and hope for the best.

For that reason he dashed after Iris as she disappeared through a doorway at the end of the adjoining room. Just because he did the hard thing didn’t make him a hero already. He was at the bottom of a thousand-foot cliff, and the heroes were at the top, and he’d hardly begun to climb. For one thing, a hero needed not only to be brave but also to think smart. The smart thing would have been to alert the others that Iris was running off, but he didn’t think to cry out until he
was through the archway into the adjacent room. Then before he could say anything, his mom and Mrs. Sykes and the two old ladies all shouted at once. For another thing, a smart hero would not assume anything, would be sure of his facts, but Winny assumed—stupid, stupid—that they were shouting at him and at Iris, that they were in pursuit. He kept going, dashed out of the second room, sprinted along a hallway, and ahead of him, Iris shouldered through a swinging door. He hurried after her across the kitchen, into a laundry room, through the back door of the Cupp apartment, and into the short west hall at the south end of the third floor.

Iris was gone. She hadn’t been far ahead of Winny. If she had turned the corner into the long south hall, he would still hear her footsteps. Silence.

To Winny’s left was the elevator, from which he had barely escaped earlier. If Iris had gone into the waiting car, she might be bug food already.

On his right was the entrance to Gary Dai’s apartment. The door had been broken down but not recently.

Suddenly a voice came from in there, high and sweet, a girl’s voice, probably Iris’s, though he’d never heard her say anything. She was singing a tune, no lyrics, just a lot of
na-na-na, la-la-la
, and like that. He called her name in a loud whisper, and then louder, but Iris didn’t answer. The singing wasn’t the hopscotch-jumprope-happy kind. This was the kind of singing that, if you tracked it to its source, you might find a little girl in a moldy old burial dress, her skin pitted and green, with lots of coffin splinters and dirt between her teeth.

No one had followed him out of the Cupp apartment. Where was his mom? Mrs. Sykes?

If you were going to make a big deal about doing the hard thing, then once you started doing it, you couldn’t stop when the hard
thing became
too
hard, when your mommy wasn’t there to back you up. That was big-time sissy, and if you were going to quit that way, you might as well find a toilet and shove your own face into it.

The singing sounded like a girl, all right, but like a girl who was up to something, because there was this sort of sea-siren sound to it, like a mermaid luring idiot sailors toward jagged rocks that would sink them. Winny wasn’t a sailor, and he wasn’t old enough to get all sexed up by some hot siren. And Iris was for sure no mermaid, she was just this messed-up girl who was going to get herself killed. Winny in the quick, when he either gave it or he didn’t, decided there was nothing to go back to except the Mrs. Grace Lyman wrestling team, a saxophone as big as he was, and a career in music. He crossed the threshold, walking on the broken-down door, which wobbled under him, and braved forward through the fungus light, seeking the singer.