77 Shadow Street (50 page)

Martha stepped away from the wall against which she had been standing and went to Edna. She took her sister’s hand. “Remember the first cat we ever had? We were just little girls. You were nine and I was seven when Dad brought him home.”

Briefly Edna frowned, but then her sweet face brightened. “Mr. Jingles. He was a lovely boy.”

“All black with white socks, remember?”

“And the white diamond on his chest.”

“He was a hoot with a piece of string,” Martha said.

Edna’s gaze shifted past her sister, and she said to someone else, “Thank God you’re here.”

For an instant, Martha had the crazy thought that Father Murphy had arrived with the Roman Ritual, sanctified oil and salt and water, and the stole of his office.

But it was Logan Spangler, head of security, stepping out of the foyer. He must have gone off duty hours earlier, should have been out of the Pendleton and at home when the leap occurred, but here he was in uniform and gun belt.

Bailey Hawks

The five of them left the lap-pool room together. His familial tremors under control, Silas Kinsley drew his pistol from a raincoat pocket and led the way up the north stairs to the third floor. As the only other armed member of the party, Bailey went last.

Holding the door open, about to cross the threshold into the stairwell, he heard someone behind him say softly, “Bailey, wait.”

Although his name had been used and therefore he expected to
see someone he knew, Bailey let go of the door, blocking it open with his body, and swiveled left, bringing the Beretta toward the voice.

Halfway between Bailey and the open door to the gym stood a man in his late twenties.

“Who’re you?”

“I call myself Witness. Listen, the transition will reverse in sixty-two minutes. Then you’ll be back safe in your time.”

The guy wore jeans, a cotton sweater, an insulated jacket. Hair slick with water, jeans damp. His leather boots were darker where wet. He’d recently been in rain. In this future, the night was dry.

“The fluctuations that preceded the first transition won’t precede the reversal.”

Keeping the pistol on target, Bailey said, “How do you know any of this?”

“Higher is safer. It’s stronger in the basement, the elevator shafts.”

Bailey gestured with the pistol. “Come here, come with me.”

“In those places where it’s stronger, it can get in your head. Confuse you. Maybe control you.”

“Is it in you?”

“I’m the one thing here it’s not in. I’m apart. It allows that.”

“What the hell is it?”

“In this future, all life has become one. The One. Many individuals, one consciousness. The One is plant, animal, machine.”

In the stairwell, they realized he wasn’t following. Tom Tran called down to him.

Taking a two-hand grip on the Beretta, Bailey said, “Come on.”

“No. My position here is delicate. You must respect that.”

As the guy turned away from him, Bailey said, “You help us, or I’ll shoot you dead, I swear I will.”

“I can’t be killed,” the stranger said, and stepped out of sight through the open door to the gym.

Martha Cupp

The moment she saw Logan Spangler entering the living room from the foyer, Martha Cupp remembered vividly the feeling that she’d had on the night her first husband died, thirty-nine years earlier. Simon was struck down in an instant by a massive heart attack at 7:30 in the evening. Their son, an only child, was at boarding school. The body was taken away, and eventually the friends and family who had hurried to console Martha also departed. Alone, she didn’t wish to sleep in the bed she had shared with Simon, but she found that even in a guest room, sleep eluded her. Simon had been ineffectual in most things, averse to hard work, a bit vain, a gossip, and sentimental to an extent that was somewhat embarrassing in a man, but she loved him for his best qualities, for his ever-ready sense of humor and his genuinely affectionate nature. Perhaps she wasn’t anguished over the loss, not in a black despair, but certainly grief had its talons in her. At 2:30 in the morning, lying awake, she heard a man weeping bitterly elsewhere in the house. Mystified, she rose and went in search of the mourner, and soon found him. Simon, seemingly as alive as he had been at 7:29, was sitting on the edge of the bed in their room, so desolate and anguished that she could hardly bear to look at him. Wonderingly, she spoke his name, but he neither responded nor glanced at her. Distressed to see him in such abject misery but not afraid, she sat on the bed beside him. When she put a hand on his shoulder, he had no substance, and he seemed not to feel her touch as her trembling hand passed through him. Evidently he couldn’t see Martha, because his failure to look at her seemed not to be an intentional turning away. She had been a believer all her life, but not in ghosts. The way that he pulled at his face, fisted his hands against his temples, bit on his knuckles, and sometimes bent forward as if suffering
paroxysms of excruciating emotion suggested to her that he wasn’t grieving over the fact of his death but over something else. His torment was so affecting that she could not bear to watch it, and after a few minutes, distressed and bewildered, wondering about the reliability of her senses, she returned to the bed in the guest room. For nearly an hour, the tormented weeping continued, and when at last it faded to silence, she tried to convince herself that she had dreamed the incident or that in her grief she imagined it; but she had no talent for self-deception, and she knew that Simon’s visitation had been as real as his sudden demise.

Although Logan Spangler looked nothing like Simon, though he had never before reminded her of Simon, though he appeared as real now as ever he had appeared in the past, she
knew
on first sight of him that he was not alive. Perhaps he was not a ghost either, but he was no more alive than Simon had been sitting on the edge of that bed. And this was the moment she had been dreading for thirty-nine years, since lying in bed listening to Simon’s wretched weeping, the moment before she would make the ultimate discovery.

“Thank God you’re here,” Edna said.

There was no chance for Martha to issue a warning. As Edna hurried toward Spangler, dinner gown rustling, he opened his mouth and spat a series of objects at her. They were dark and about the size of olives, four or five, and they traveled at a far higher velocity than a man could possibly spit out anything. They struck Edna in the chest and abdomen, and she doubled over not with a cry of agony but with a soft gasp of surprise. As Spangler turned to Martha, she said, “I love you, Edna,” in case her sister might for another moment be conscious and aware. Spangler spat another flurry of projectiles. Martha felt them pierce her, but she knew pain only for an instant. Then she felt something worse than pain, and she wished she had been shot dead with a pistol instead of this. What pierced her did not drill through as
bullets would, but crawled within her on some terrifying quest. She opened her mouth to scream, but she couldn’t make a sound because something large and gelid was squirming in her throat. Three attempts at a scream were all that she made, for after the third attempt, she was no longer Martha Cupp.

Bailey Hawks

Bailey wouldn’t have shot the stranger in the back, and maybe the man had sensed the falseness of that promise. Perhaps his claim—
I can’t be killed
—was just bravado, as much a lie as Bailey’s threat. Yet Bailey believed it.

Quick footsteps on the stairs—“Mr. Hawks!”—were followed by the appearance of Tom Tran.

Lowering the pistol, turning from the open door of the gym to the stairwell, Bailey said, “I’m okay, Tom. I just thought I saw … something.”

“What did you see?”

My position here is delicate. You must respect that
.

“Nothing,” Bailey said. “It was nothing.”

He would have liked to tell Tom and the others at least that they would be going home in sixty-two minutes. But he didn’t know that was true. An informant in a war might be a teller of truth or a master of lies. And this one’s motives were entirely mysterious.

Bailey followed Tom up the circular stairs to the second-floor landing, where the others had paused in case they needed to come to his defense.

As they all ascended toward the third floor in single file, Silas and Kirby continued a conversation they apparently had started between the basement and the second-floor landing.

“The things some of us saw vanishing into walls,” Kirby said, “weren’t really passing through them. In the couple of days before the leap—”

“Transition,” Bailey said.

“That
is
a better word for it,” Kirby Ignis said. “We didn’t actually leap off anything. Before the transition, our time and this future were building toward the transition, trying to come together, so there were moments of overlap—”

“Fluctuations,” Bailey said.

“Exactly,” Kirby said. “And during the fluctuations, we were making brief contact with creatures from this time—maybe also with people on previous nights of transition like 1897 and 1935. When they appeared to pass through walls, it was only the fluctuation ending, and they were fading back into their proper time.”

Bailey thought of young Sophia Pendleton gaily descending these very stairs earlier, headed to the kitchen to meet the iceman:
Sing a song of sixpence, a pocketful of rye …

With a solemn assertiveness that might have been amusing under other circumstances, Padmini Bahrati said, “I do not intend to die in this terrible place. I have many important goals and much that I wish to achieve. Tell me, Dr. Ignis, do you have any theory about how long we might remain here?”

“Silas,” said Kirby, “you know the history. Any guess how long?”

“Not really. I just know the living go back. Andrew Pendleton did. And some of the Ostock family.”

Two minutes earlier, the man who couldn’t be killed had said that the transition would reverse in sixty-two minutes. According to Bailey’s wristwatch, that would be at 7:21. The time now was 6:21.

Bailey said, “I can’t tell you exactly why, but I think we’re safer on the third floor. Now that we’re all together, we should just hunker down there and try to ride this out.”

When they reached the Cupp apartment, the four women and the children were gone.

Mickey Dime

There were mumbling voices in the walls. And why not? Anything could happen now. There were no rules anymore.

His mother had said that rules were for the weak of mind and body, for those who must be controlled in the interest of order. She said that for intellectuals, however, for the rightful masters of culture, rules and absolute freedom could not coexist.

But he didn’t think his mother meant the laws of nature, too, must be done away with. He didn’t think she defined absolute freedom to mean to hell with gravity.

Earlier, for a few minutes Mickey stood at a window, looking into the courtyard. Everything was changed down there. The change wasn’t good. It looked like hell down there. Somebody was responsible for it. Somebody had done a bad thing. Some incompetent fool.