by Dean Koontz
Tran Van Lung, who had legally Americanized his name to Thomas Tran, was the building superintendent. He lived in an apartment in the basement, next to the security center.
“No. That went on too long, much too long, for blast waves,” Bailey insisted. “And the first one I felt was in the pool room this morning, about four-fifteen. They wouldn’t be starting construction work at that hour.”
“Mr. Tran is the finest superintendent the Pendleton’s ever had,” Edna said. “He knows everything about the building. He can fix anything or knows who can, and he’s as trustworthy as anyone I’ve ever met.”
“I agree,” Bailey said. “But even Tom Tran can sometimes be operating on misinformation.”
When most young men of Bailey Hawks’s age squinted, they had but two or three small darts at the outer corners of their eyes. His years at war had stitched the memory of worry into his face so completely that when he was alarmed, his smooth skin folded into an array of pleats that aged him and gave him the aspect of a formidable man of fierce intentions.
When Bailey had sprung up from his chair, Martha Cupp glimpsed something even more revealing of his state of mind. Under his sport coat, he carried a gun in a shoulder holster.
13
Apartment 3-D
When Logan Spangler, chief of security, stepped out of the north elevator on the third floor, the double-door entrance to the Cupp sisters’ apartment was to his left. The single-door entrance to Silas Kinsley’s apartment stood directly in front of him. He thought of this as the geriatric corner. He liked the old dames and the retired attorney. They were quiet, proper, and considerate. The only owners who gave him fewer problems were those in 1-B, who had died nine months previously and whose estate was still being settled, and Mr. Beauchamp in 1-D, who had passed away of pneumonia two weeks earlier.
Having retired from the police department, Logan supposed that when he retired next from the Pendleton job, he might become head of security for a cemetery. A field full of stiffs in their narrow little condos would be even more quiet and proper than Edna and Martha Cupp. And when he retired from that job, he could just lie down in a prepared hole and let them cover him with a dirt blanket.
He wasn’t bitter about being forced out of the department at sixty-two. That was six years earlier, ancient history. Though not bitter, he had become a cynic. In truth he had always been something of a cynic and a grump on the job—which served him well when he was dealing with homicidal dirtbags, helped him to understand them and find them and bust them—but he had been good-humored and relatively easygoing when off-duty. With all of that action now gone from his life, however, Logan wasn’t working off this negative energy every day, and as a consequence, he suspected that he might be souring into an around-the-clock grump.
He could live with that.
From the elevator, he turned right, walked about twenty feet, and turned right again into the north corridor. The apartments were all on the right side, three of them, with views of the courtyard. The farthest belonged to Mickey Dime; in addition to having inherited money, Dime was supposed to be a successful corporate consultant for matters of employee-conflict resolution. The inherited money might be true, but Logan was convinced the rest of it was the product of a bull’s back end. Next door to Dime was the Abronowitz apartment. Bernard Abronowitz was in the hospital, recovering from surgery.
The nearest and largest of the three apartments belonged to the former senator, Earl Blandon. If the disgraced politician had gotten on the elevator but had never gotten off, as the security cameras seemed to suggest, there was a mystery to be solved that might test the wits of the cleverest of detectives. Considering how lacking in drama the past six years at the Pendleton had been, Logan doubted that any such puzzle waited to be solved, and he expected Blandon to answer the doorbell in one state of inebriation or another.
After Logan rang three times but received no answer, he rapped sharply on the door. He waited and then rapped again.
Earlier, he had phoned the day-shift concierge, who had relieved Norman Fixxer at 6:00 A.M., and had ascertained that the senator had not left the Pendleton through the lobby during the morning or early afternoon. Now he called the evening concierge, Padmini Bahrati, who had come on duty at 2:00 this afternoon, and she was certain that since she had been at the front desk, the senator had neither departed the building on foot nor asked for his car to be brought around to Shadow Street.
Of course, if Blandon left the grounds by the east gate of the courtyard, he could have gone to the garages behind the Pendleton and driven away without requesting valet service. With that possibility in mind, Logan phoned Tom Tran and asked him to check the senator’s garage stall.
Two minutes later, the superintendent reported that Blandon’s Mercedes was in the garage. He had not driven away.
After ringing the bell at 3-D yet again and after receiving no response, Logan unlocked the door with his passkey. If the senator was at home, he had not engaged either the security chain or the blind deadbolt that couldn’t be unlocked from the corridor.
Holding the door open but remaining in the hall, Logan called, “Senator Blandon? Sir, are you home?”
The senator’s apartment was half the size of that occupied by the Cupp sisters. Unless he was unconscious or in the shower, he should have heard Logan.
In an emergency, when there were reasons to believe that a resident might be mortally ill or otherwise incapacitated and unable to grant admittance, the owners’-association protocols required that a security guard enter the apartment with a passkey but only in the company of either the concierge or the superintendent. The idea was to further minimize the already small chance that anyone on the well-vetted security team might use such an occasion to engage in theft.
Because Earl Blandon had a short fuse and was so reliably saturated in alcohol that he was flammable if not explosive, Logan Spangler decided to enter the apartment alone. If the senator wasn’t in need of help, he would be greatly displeased by the intrusion. Paranoia was Blandon’s armor, righteous indignation his sword, and he never missed a chance to take offense. One uninvited visitor would anger him, but two would infuriate.
Interior design held no interest for Logan, but when he turned on the living-room lights, he noticed that the senator had mimicked the power decor of certain men’s clubs. Deeply coffered ceilings. Dark wood paneling. Immense leather armchairs. Heavy wood side tables on claw feet. Bronze lamps with parchment shades. Above the limestone fireplace mantel hung a glassy-eyed stag’s head with a fourteen-point rack that Blandon had undoubtedly bought rather than earned by his skill as a hunter.
In the dining room, the table was a long slab of highly polished mahogany. Every seat was a captain’s chair with arms and a high back, but at the head of the table stood a larger and more ornately carved chair, with silver inlays, as if to imply that the host, if not technically of royal blood, could nevertheless claim to be of a station superior to that of his guests.
As he toured the apartment, touching nothing but light switches and doors that needed to be pushed open, Logan remained, as always, aware of the pistol at his right side, though he did not imagine that he would need it. In a withering world that seemed to be darker and more violent by the day, the Pendleton offered an oasis of peace.
Continuing to call out to the senator as he proceeded through these chambers, Logan came to the master suite. Here, the ceiling coffers, with their baroque moldings, were painted white, and pale-gold paper gave a soft texture and a light pattern to the walls.
The bed was neatly made, everything in order. Because Earl Blandon didn’t seem to be the kind to routinely, meticulously clean up after himself, Logan suspected that the man had never made it to bed the previous night.
Those residents who did not have full- or part-time housekeepers of their own, like the senator, contracted with a domestic-service agency, approved by the owners’ association, for whatever assistance they required. Generally, they preferred a maid
once or twice a week. According to the schedule filed with the security office by the head concierge, who arranged for the service, Earl Blandon’s maid came every Tuesday and Friday.
This was Thursday. No housekeeper had been here to make the bed.
In the master bathroom, a couple of large rumpled towels lay on the floor. When Logan stooped to finger them, he found they were not damp. When he opened the glass door, he saw not one bead of water in the marble-clad shower stall, and the grout joints appeared dry.
The senator had showered perhaps twenty-four hours earlier, before going out for the evening. He evidently had not slept in his bed the previous night. Evidence was mounting that on returning home, he’d gotten into the elevator but, impossibly, had never gotten out.
As much as politicians might try to convince the public that they were mages with magical solutions, they didn’t have cloaks of invisibility or get-small pills that shrunk them to the size of an ant. If the senator hadn’t disembarked from the elevator by its doors, he must have gone through the emergency exit in the ceiling.
How Blandon could have done that in the twenty-three seconds during which the elevator camera wasn’t functioning and why he would have done such a thing baffled Logan Spangler. A close inspection of the elevator might reveal a clue.
When he turned to leave the bath, another rumble rose from under the building, and the lights went off both in this room and the next. In the blinding blackness, he unclipped the six-inch flashlight from his belt and clicked it. The crisp white LED beam flared brighter than that of a traditional flashlight, yet he almost stepped out of the bathroom before he realized that everything around him had changed.
A few seconds in the dark seemed to have been years. The white marble floor, polished and gleaming earlier, was dulled by dust. Pieces were missing from the decorative braided border of green and black granite. Green stains and rust streaked the nickel-plated sink. Tattered cobwebs festooned the faucet handles and the spout, as if no water had been drawn here in a long time.
In the mirror, now clouded and mottled as if fungus growing behind it had eaten away portions of its silver backing, Logan’s reflection seemed to be an apparition, lacking the substance of a real man. The inexplicable sudden deterioration of his surroundings left him for a moment breathless, and he half expected to see that he had aged with the room. But he remained as he had been when he shaved before his own bathroom mirror that morning: the brush-cut gray hair, the face seamed by experience but not yet haggard with age.
As the rumbling faded, Logan saw that the glass in the shower-stall door was gone. Only the frame remained, corroded and sagging. On the floor, no towels were to be seen.
Bewildered but able to breathe once more, he crossed the threshold into the bedroom, which contained no furniture. The LED beam revealed that the bed, the nightstands, the dresser, the armchair, the art on the walls were all gone. The imitation Persian rug had vanished as well, revealing more of the wood floor.
The surprise of finding the space unfurnished gave way to consternation and to concern about his sanity when the trembling beam of light revealed that the bedroom appeared to be in a long-abandoned house. Worn and warped beneath the dust, the mahogany floor in places curled up from the concrete to which it had long been adhered. Stains like the velvet wings of enormous moths discolored the wallpaper, and overhead the once-white paint, now gray and yellow, dangled in delicate peels, as if the deep coffers had been the cocoons from which those insectile shapes had quivered free.
As a detective, Logan possessed unshakable faith in what his five senses revealed to him and in what meaning his mind—both with reason and intuition—would eventually make of those many details. Facts could be twisted by liars, but every fact was like a piece of memory metal that inevitably returned to its original shape. His eyes couldn’t lie to him, though he tried to blink away these impossible changes in the senator’s bedroom.
After so many years as a cop, he saw the whole world as a crime scene, and in every crime scene, truth waited to be found. Initially the evidence might be misinterpreted—but seldom for long, and never by him. Throughout his career, other cops called him Hawkeye, not only because he saw so clearly but also because he could look down on a case as if from a great height and see truth as the hawk sees the field mouse even in the tall grass. Yet though he knew that everything around him now must be a lie, he could not perceive the reality through the illusion.
After a moment, however, as if someone dialed a rheostat, light rose, at first from mysterious sources, but then from semitransparent shapes that resembled the lamps that had been here when Logan first entered the room. Not only lamps but also furniture materialized, ghostly shapes at first, like the weaker image in a photographic double exposure, but rapidly becoming more solid, more detailed. The Persian-style carpet reappeared under his feet.
While the reality of the senator’s bedroom reasserted, while the vision of an abandoned and deteriorated building faded, Logan turned slowly in place. The welling light rinsed the mothy stains from the pale-gold wallpaper. The gray and yellow ragged paint of the ceiling coffers raveled up into smooth white surfaces once more.
Over the years, Logan Spangler had so often acquitted himself well and with such equanimity in moments of peril that he thought he was all but incapable of fearing for his life. But astonishment quickly deepened into awe, and the mystery of the transforming room was so formidable that dread crept over him as he wondered what power might effect such a change and why.
Having turned 180 degrees, Logan Spangler faced the bathroom. Beyond the open door, the lights were bright. The dusty, damaged marble floor appeared clean again and in good repair.
Behind him, something hissed.
14
Apartment 2-G
To distract herself from the prospect of imminent death by electrocution as well as from a memory of blazing hair and smoking eyes, Sparkle Sykes decided to take an inventory of her dress shoes, of which she had 104 pairs. Sitting on a padded stool in her roomy walk-in closet, she took her time with each item of footwear, enjoying the taper of the heel, the roundness of the counter, the arch of the shank, the slope of the vamp, the smell of leather.…
For the past twenty-four years, since her beloved daddy was struck by lightning and killed when she was eight years old, Sparkle Sykes had been afraid of thunderstorms. They were not just weather to her. They were thinking creatures, the electricity in their clouds serving the same cognitive function as the milder current that wove ceaselessly through her brain, from synapse to synapse. Like armadas of alien starships, they appeared on the horizon and conquered the entire sky, oppressing the land and the people below them. They were ancient gods, proud and cruel and demanding of sacrifices, beings of pure power, entering the world from outside of time, with the evil intention of inflicting suffering on mere mortals.
Sparkle supposed that, on the subject of thunderstorms, she was a little bit crazy.
Hours before the storm arrived, she had drawn heavy draperies across the windows of her apartment, which overlooked the Pendleton’s grand courtyard. When passing through rooms with a view, she did not glance at the windows, for fear that she would glimpse flashes of the storm’s fury pulsing behind the pleated panels of brocade.
Between three hundred and six hundred Americans were killed by lightning each year. Two thousand were injured. More people were killed by lightning than by any other weather phenomena, including floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes. The current in a lightning bolt could run as high as thirty thousand amperes with a million or more volts.
Some people thought that Sparkle’s encyclopedic knowledge of lightning must be a sign of obsession, but she thought of it as nothing more than a part of her family history. If your father had been a railroad engineer, no one would be surprised that you knew a great deal about trains. A ship captain’s daughter would likely be steeped in seafaring stories and the lore of the oceans. The child of a man cored through by the million-volt lance
of a storm would surely be disrespectful of her father if she cared to know nothing about the instrument by which his fate was delivered to him. And then there was her mother’s horrific end.
Less than half an hour into Sparkle’s inspection of her footwear collection, she remembered one of hundreds of death-by-lightning cases that she had read in the press. Just a few years earlier, somewhere in New England, a bride outside a church, moments before her wedding, was struck down by the first bolt of a storm before even a drop of rain had fallen. The entry point had been her silver tiara, the exit point her right foot. She wore white-satin pumps with spike heels; the left shoe exploded into several pieces, but her right flash-burned and fused with her flesh.
An inventory of shoes no longer distracted Sparkle from the thunder that crashed down upon the Pendleton. Suddenly the sight of shoes reminded her of her own mother’s barefoot death dance.
She hesitated to leave the closet because it had no windows. Here she could not see the storm—or the storm see her. And here the cannonades of thunder were more muffled than elsewhere.
For a minute or two, she stood there, trying to decide where else to take refuge—and then Iris appeared in the doorway. At twelve, the girl was like Sparkle in two respects—petite in stature, with delicate facial features—but otherwise different. Sparkle was a blonde, but Iris had hair as black as raven feathers. Sparkle’s eyes were blue, Iris’s a curiously luminous gray. Mother had fair skin, daughter an olive complexion.
Iris looked at Sparkle directly but only for a moment, and then turned her attention to the floppy plush-toy rabbit that she cradled in one arm as if it were a human infant.
“Does the storm frighten you, sweetie?” Sparkle asked, for she worried that her anxiety might infect this highly sensitive child who already found the world almost more abrasive than she could tolerate.
