77 Shadow Street (60 page)

Shaking his head violently, refusing to accept what he’d been told, Ignis said, “No. No, it will be stopped. I won’t let it happen. I’ll start by closing our weapons division. I’ll cancel all of our contracts with the Department of Defense.”

“How far has your weapons division gone with this?” Tom Tran asked.

Acutely aware of the pistol in Tom’s hand, Ignis said, “It can be wound back. Everything that’s done can be wound back, undone.”

“That wasn’t exactly an answer,” Silas noted. “It wouldn’t please a prosecutor.”

“Unwind it all, not just the weapons division,” Tom said. “This entire institute of yours. Unwind it all.”

Ignis’s shock at his culpability was tempered now with a note of impatience. “There’s nothing wrong with the
science
. It’s only how the science was applied. You’ve got to make that distinction. The world doesn’t have to turn out this way just because of the
science
. We’ve been given this chance to set it right.”

No one replied to him.

Turning to Bailey, seeming to identify him as one who could be reasoned with, Ignis said, “Yes, this future is a catastrophe, but it
does
prove that the world can be dramatically changed. If it can be so totally changed for the worse, it can be totally changed for the better. It’s all in the
application
of the knowledge, it all depends on the technology developed from the science and with what wisdom it’s applied. We
can
make a perfect world.”

“The One suddenly stopped killing us,” Bailey said.

Ignis blinked. “What?”

“Maybe it stopped killing us because it decided that for you to go back to our time alone would bring too much attention to you, with all the rest of us missing. How would you explain it? So it stopped killing us to be sure that you’d go on with your work unhindered when you returned to your own time.”

Ignis shook his head. “It doesn’t rule me. It’s not my master. I’ll do what must be done when I get back.”

“ ‘What must be done,’ ” Bailey said. “Is that an interesting way to put it, Silas?”

“Deception cloaked in earnestness,” the attorney said.

Ignis closed his eyes. His jaw muscles bulged as he clenched his teeth, and his tightly pressed lips were bloodless. He seemed to be either biting back anger or searching for the words to convince them that he was as benign as he appeared to be.

When Ignis’s stillness and silence seemed about to become his only answer to Silas’s charge of deception, Bailey said, “Exactly what is it you think ‘must be done,’ Kirby?”

Ignis opened his eyes. He shook his head as if resigned to—but saddened by—their suspicion. “I don’t have to subject myself to this.” He turned away from them and walked toward the door.

Leveling Mickey Dime’s pistol at the scientist’s back, Bailey said, “Stop right there.”

Ignis kept moving. “You don’t dare kill me.”

The ceiling creaked, and behind those panels of Sheetrock, something slithered.

Witness said, “The One is all around us.”

Ignis left the kitchen, crossed the dining room.

Bailey glanced at Padmini, Padmini looked at Tom, and Tom said, “Where’s he going? He’s up to something.”

Winny

The Pogromite stood between them and escape, watching them but apparently with no immediate aggressive intentions.

Then it lifted its ugly head high, as though listening to a voice that only it could hear. Its shining eyes became dull behind what seemed
to be inner, semitransparent lids. The creature began to sway back and forth, as if to music. The beast was so lithe, Winny thought of a cobra charmed by a flute.

“It’s … gone away somewhere,” Mrs. Sykes whispered.

Winny’s mom said, “Stay together. Move around it. Quiet.”

Bailey Hawks

By the time Bailey reached the public hallway, Kirby Ignis was a third of the way to the north stairs. He wasn’t running, but he walked briskly, with apparent purpose.

Beside Bailey, Padmini said, “Look up.”

The ceiling seemed to have turned soggy and soft, sagging under some moist weight, and every seam shed the concealing plaster, as if the big panels of Sheetrock were coming apart.

Tom Tran stepped out of Ignis’s apartment, keeping Bailey’s Beretta on Mickey Dime. The killer’s dreamy smile was as unfaltering as if his lips had been sewn into their arc.

Silas followed, too, but Witness remained behind.

“Come on,” Bailey said, and led them after the scientist.

There didn’t seem to be anything Ignis could do to put them in greater danger. And Bailey couldn’t imagine where the man thought he might flee to escape his responsibility when the transition reversed. But Ignis’s purposefulness suggested that he had a destination and a plan, which couldn’t be good for the rest of them.

The ceiling groaned behind them and softened ahead. Dry-wall nails squealed as they pulled slowly out of the overhead joists, and from that lumber came a worrisome cracking as if it must be under enormous, rapidly increasing stress. To the left and right, electric receptacles and the junction boxes in which they were seated blew out
of the walls, trailing green and black and white wires, and something pale squirmed at the resultant rectangular holes, as if eager to get out of the wall and into the hallway.

Ignis disappeared through the stairwell door, but Bailey and Padmini were close on his tail now, Silas and Tom and Mickey not far behind. Ignis went down, moving faster than in the hallway, taking the steps two at a time, breathing rapidly, a thin rhythmic bleat of anxiety escaping him. They passed the ground floor. Bailey remembered Witness warning him that inside the house, the One was strongest in the elevator shafts and the basement.

Dr. Kirby Ignis

The survival of the One—its very creation—depended on Kirby making it back to 2011 alive, and his survival seemed to be assured only if he made the return journey alone. Bailey Hawks wasn’t to be relied upon. He was quick to make black-and-white moral judgments, giving little or no consideration to shades of gray. Silas Kinsley’s courtroom experience had given him a good ear for evasion, and he would keep confirming Hawks’s intuition. Having been to war and having survived, Hawks knew how to take action on those judgments and would not dither. He was the worst kind of man to have as an enemy.

The One had spoken to Kirby back there in his kitchen. Spoke to him from inside his head, not in words so much as images from which he made inferences.
Down
, it said.
Basement, pool room
, it said by showing him those places. He had no friends here anymore, not among his own kind, and he could trust only the One, the One and the house that it haunted in its myriad forms.

Bailey Hawks

When Bailey rushed out of the stairwell into the basement corridor, the door to the lap pool was just falling shut. Padmini and Silas moved past him, toward that room, but he put one hand on her shoulder, halting her and the attorney.

“Doorways are always bad,” he said, as Tom arrived with Mickey Dime. “And the pool, the way it is now … it’s a trap. We’ve been lured and herded here.”

The canyon that was now the swimming pool, a thousand fathoms deep or deeper, and everything else that might now lie beneath the Pendleton could have been excavated and constructed by nanomachines eating their way through bedrock. But whatever the origins of those deep redoubts, they seemed to bring together the future evil of the One with the evil that predated time, stories of which had been passed down through the history of humanity by word of mouth, by cave paintings, and eventually by the written word. Here all the millennia of earthly evil were condensed into one moment, and this house that was a bridge over a fault in space-time was also a temple to the forces that had so long sought the destruction of all things.

“He’s in there?” Tom asked. “And we’re not going after him? Then what are we going to do?”

The ceiling creaked. Crumbles of luminous fungi snowed down around them. The few operative overhead lights dimmed, brightened, dimmed. As upstairs, receptacles and junction boxes blew out of the walls, and pale forms slithered-pressed against those holes in the Sheetrock. From the elevator shaft came the sound of a car ascending from a great depth. They were being herded again, encouraged toward the lap-pool door.

“Wait,” Bailey insisted.

To their right, halfway along the corridor, Twyla and Sparkle came out of the HVAC vault, the children with them.

Bailey glanced at his watch. “Wait.
Wait
.”

From inside, the lap-pool door was torn open, wrenched off its hinges, and thrown aside.

Silas Kinsley

Out of the doorway came two of the creatures that Witness had called Pogromites, wet from the pool, but they were smaller than the others, the size of children. One shot directly toward Silas, faster than a cat, climbed his right leg, claws scrabbling at his raincoat, teeth snapping, its gargoyle eyes fixed on his eyes as though the black-hole gravity of those big pupils would pull him into oblivion. He struck at it with one fist, its teeth missed his hand, snagged in his coat cuff, he staggered backward, Padmini stepped in, the sleeve ripped, the thing shook the scrap of fabric out of its mouth, it swung its head toward Padmini and snapped at her, biting down not on her hand but on the barrel of the pistol, and she blew its crawling gray brains across the hallway floor.