77 Shadow Street (44 page)

Sparkle Sykes

Smoke and Ashes once looked almost identical, with only the slightest difference in the tweak of their ears, in the color of their chest coats. But when Edna noticed what was happening to them and when everyone else saw it a split second after Edna made a strangled sound of revulsion, Smoke and Ashes didn’t even look much like cats anymore, let alone like each other. Something had gotten into them, and now it was coming out, and as it expressed itself, it seemed to change the very substance of them. They metamorphosed in different ways, similar only in that they were both bristling figures of biological chaos: lizard folded in with spider, pig-mean face, eye stacked above eye, mouth above snout, quivering antennas sprouting, scorpion tail.… In spite of being a novelist and a successful one, Sparkle didn’t often see literature in life the way that she saw life in literature, but
this reminded her of some works of Thomas Pynchon, six genres in the same book, horror blooming out of horror with a feverish delight in the nihilistic outrageousness of it all.

For ten seconds she was paralyzed by and mesmerized by the new but not improved Smoke and Ashes. Then she turned to Iris, reaching out for the girl in spite of the panic that a touch might trigger, but Iris wasn’t where she had been—or anywhere—as if she had imagined the forest so vividly that she passed through a magic doorway to be with the deer. And Winny with her.

Twyla realized the kids were gone in the same instant that Sparkle made that discovery, and the terror they exchanged in a glance was like lightning leaping from the eyes of one to the eyes of the other. They would have been on the move a microsecond later, shouting for her girl, her boy, searching desperately through this time-whacked Pendleton, this unfunhouse, but they were driven to each other in sisterly defense when the not-Smoke and was-Ashes went ballistic.

Julian Sanchez

Over the past forty years, he made his peace with blindness, and the dark became his friend. Without visual stimuli to distract him, good music was a grand architecture of sound through which he walked. Audio books were worlds in which he lived so fully that he might have left his footprints in them. And when he contemplated himself, life, and what might come after, he traveled deeper into those darknesses than most men with sight might have done, where he discovered a light invisible, the lamp by which he found his way unfalteringly through the years.

Now, ear to the plaster, listening to the menacing voices that came from within the walls, Julian relied upon that lamp within to prevent
his dread from darkening into full-blown fright. Ignorance was the father of panic, knowledge the father of peace, and he needed to locate neighbors who could explain what was happening.

He felt along the wall, into the foyer, to the front door, which stood ajar although he had left it locked. If furniture could vanish in an instant, if clean surfaces could become filthy from one moment to the next, there was no point worrying how locks could unlock themselves.

Always before, when he ventured out of his apartment, he took his white cane, because he didn’t know the whole world as well as he knew his rooms. But the cane no longer leaned against the foyer table, and he saw no reason to search for it on the floor because the table was gone, too. The cane hadn’t fallen or been misplaced, but had vanished with everything else.

The voices in the walls fell silent when Julian crossed the threshold into the public hallway. This space felt different from before, hollow and unwelcoming. He supposed that the console tables, the paintings, and the carpet runner were gone. Competing odors wove among one another: a thin astringent smell that he couldn’t identify, a vague rancidity that might have been cooking oil so long exposed to the air that it congealed into a thin paste, something like the brittle pages of time-yellowed books, dust, mildew.…

For a moment, he sensed that he was not alone. But then he was not sure about that. And then the hallway seemed deserted. In this strange new environment, his blind-man instincts weren’t as reliable as usual.

His initial intention was to turn right, proceed to the back of the north hall, to Apartment 1-C, where his friend Sally Hollander should be home at that hour. The apartment between his and hers was without a tenant, the owner having died several months earlier, the estate not yet settled.

But then he heard low voices speaking English, nothing like those sinister mutterings earlier, and they seemed to come from just around the corner in the west corridor. As he felt his way toward the junction, the wallpaper cracked and crumbled under his sliding hand, as if it were ancient. He found the open door to the small office used by the head concierge, and he eased past it.

On this ground floor, the ceilings in the public spaces, even in the corridors, were twelve feet high. As he arrived at the corner, he thought that he detected a stealthy sound overhead. He halted, listened, but heard nothing more from up there. Imagination.

Among the nearby voices, Julian recognized the melodic tones of Padmini Bahrati. Relieved to have found help, he proceeded to the corner and turned left into the west corridor.

“Padmini, something’s very wrong,” Julian said, and as he spoke, chips of what might have been ceiling plaster dribbled down on his head and shoulders.

Twyla Trahern

Winny and Iris had not been taken. They had run in fright. That was an article of faith with Twyla. She would not doubt it. They had run, they had not been taken, they had run.

No element of a cat remained recognizable in the two shrieking creatures, each a grotesque miscellany of parts, like a drunkard’s lifetime of DT nightmares snarled together, each still changing, perhaps ceaselessly changing, flexing, contracting, morphing. Eye sockets full of gnashing teeth, the lips of a mouth parting to reveal a bloody eye, impossible combinations metamorphosed with impossible rapidity into greater impossibilities, as if newt and bat and toad and more were recombining under a spell in a witch’s cauldron.

The beasts flung themselves across the room in herky-jerky movements,
with none of the grace of the cats they had once been, chittering and squealing and hissing, but even their hisses were not catlike. They seemed to be as dysfunctional as they were malformed, but nonetheless terrifying. They bristled, quivered, full of feverish insectile energy, changing direction so suddenly that they appeared to be repeatedly and violently ricocheting off invisible barriers.

Weaponless but committed to mutual defense, Twyla and Sparkle moved together, trying to stay out of the way of those unpredictable horrors, which in spite of their awkward construction were as fast as water bugs. Each time it seemed that the women might be able to dash out of the room, they were harried in the other direction when one of the miscreations scuttled between them and the archway.

Martha had the gun, she clearly wanted to use it, except the things moved so fast and erratically that she couldn’t track them. Twyla could see that shooting one of them would be as difficult as killing a darting hummingbird with a slingshot and a stone, which as a little girl she had once seen cruel boys trying to do; the boys didn’t get a bird, but one of them popped the other in the forehead and dropped him unconscious in a heap. Trying to keep the train of her dinner gown off the floor and her long skirt tight around her even as she dodged this way and that, Edna had become separated from her sister. Twyla and Sparkle were in yet another part of the room. If Martha dared to squeeze off a shot, she might inadvertently blast someone instead of something.

It was unspoken but understood that Twyla and Sparkle intended to bolt after Winny and Iris at the first opportunity, and if one of them didn’t get out of this room alive, the other would go after both kids, all of them one family now, destined either to survive together or die together, nobody to be abandoned regardless of the cost.

The things that had been cats ricocheted off different invisible
barriers and hard
into
each other, squalled furiously for a moment, their rage demonic, flung themselves away from each other—and seemed to collapse, shuddering, as if spent.

Amazed to have escaped untouched, Twyla and Sparkle moved at once toward the archway through which the kids must have gone.

Martha Cupp said, “Wait! Here, take the pistol.”

Glancing at the twitching monstrosities, Twyla said, “Keep it, you need it.”

“No,” Edna insisted. “The children matter more than we do.”

“Come with us.”

“We’ll slow you down,” Martha said, now holding the pistol by the barrel, circling the two small beasts. “You know how to shoot?”

“Daddy had guns,” Twyla said. “I hunted some, but it’s been a long time.”

Thrusting the pistol into Twyla’s hands, Martha said, “Go, go,
find them
!”

Padmini Bahrati

Bits of the glowing stuff twinkled down through yellow shadows onto Mr. Sanchez’s head and shoulders. Only then did Padmini realize that something large crawled on the ceiling.

In truth, the apparition in the courtyard, from which she had rescued Tom Tran, wasn’t anything like the
rakshasa
, that vicious race of demons in Hindu mythology, but the thing that launched itself off the hallway ceiling and onto Julian Sanchez’s back looked more the role. Lean but strong, gray and hairless, bullet head, fierce teeth, six-fingered hands of wicked configuration: Its kind might exist in any spiritual underworld ever conceived.

After a moment of shock and confusion, the two flashlight beams
thrust, parried, met on point, revealing Mr. Sanchez driven to his knees, the demon on his back, the claws of its feet locked into his thighs, its knees clamping his rib cage, forcing his head backward with both its oversized hands, blood dribbling from a bite mark on his right cheek. The demon’s face was reversed to his face but its mouth covered his mouth, not as if delivering an abhorrent kiss but as if in a devouring rapture, its intention
lurkao
, to kill, but not
merely
to kill, as if it were sucking not just all sustaining breath from its victim, not just life itself, but also Mr. Sanchez’s
atman
, his very soul.

The frightening speed of the
rakshasa
, the terrifying intimacy of its violent assault, Mr. Sanchez’s apparent inability to resist, the way the blind man’s arched throat throbbed as though he swallowed scream after scream that he couldn’t force out through the vacuum silence of his assailant’s sucking mouth … This hideous spectacle at once flung up from the floor of memory all the long-dead fears of Padmini’s childhood, gave them new life, and sent them fluttering through her, bat-wing quick along every nerve path.

Perhaps only two seconds, three at most, passed from the instant the flashlight beams, wielded by Dr. Ignis and Mr. Kinsley, crossed upon the face of the fiend until Mr. Hawks acted. He rushed forward, pistol in a two-hand grip. As he approached, the
rakshasa
’s eyes widened and rolled in their sockets. Raising its mouth from the mouth of its victim, trailing a gray glistening tongue so round and long and strange that it might not have been a tongue at all, the demon began to release Mr. Sanchez, its long fingers peeling away from his chin, its other hand releasing a twisted fistful of the blind man’s hair. As quick as the thing was, Hawks nevertheless proved to be fast enough to jam the muzzle of the pistol against the sleek gray skull and squeeze the trigger twice before the
rakshasa
could spring upon him.