77 Shadow Street

by Dean Koontz

  When the TV said “Exterminate,” lots of fourth-grade boys from the Grace Lyman School would have been scared, and at least a few might have run away in panic to hide. Instead, Winny stayed calm and walked—didn’t run—to the kitchen, where the warm air smelled cinnamony. His mom was looking at something through the window in the upper oven door.

  Winny said, “You better come see what’s on my TV.”

  “What is it?”

  “I can’t explain it. You’ve gotta see.”

  Indicating a fold-down television mounted under an upper cabinet near the refrigerator, she said, “Show me with that one, honey.”

  “I think only my TV has it. Mine switched itself on. This one didn’t. You better come see.”

  Winny hurried away—but did not run like he was scared or anything—and he heard his mother close behind him. He figured the TV would be off when he returned to his room. He wouldn’t have any proof, and she wouldn’t believe him—until maybe some death squad showed up, tattooed muscular goons in black uniforms carrying massive guns. To his surprise, the rings of blue light continued to throb on the screen.

  “Some kind of test pattern,” his mother said.

  “No. It’s 106, a dead channel. And it talks.”

  Before Winny could explain further, the deep flat voice spoke from behind the blue light: “Adult female and boy. Aboveground. Second floor. West wing. Exterminate. Exterminate.”

  Frowning, his mother said, “What’s the joke?”

  “It’s not my joke,” Winny assured her.

  “Adult female. Black hair. Dark-brown eyes. Five feet five.”

  She plucked the remote off the table beside the armchair, but it didn’t work. She couldn’t turn off the TV or change channels.

  “Exterminate. Exterminate.”

  Approaching the television, his mom said, “Is this a DVD?”

  “No. It’s … I don’t know, something else.”

  She checked the DVD player anyway.

  Winny said, “It’s happened before except till now it never said anything except ‘boy.’ ”

  “Before when?”

  “Yesterday twice.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Wasn’t anything to tell. It just said ‘boy.’ ”

  “Somebody has a sick sense of humor.”

  “But how can he see us?” Winny wondered.

  “He can’t.”

  “Well, but he knows what we look like.”

  “That doesn’t mean the creep can see us. It just means he knows who we are, who lives in this apartment. It’s a security issue. We’ll get to the bottom of it quick enough. I’ll call the guard on duty.”

  She pulled the plug, and the television went dark.

  Just having the set off made Winny feel better, and his mom’s confidence made him feel safer, but not for long.

  As she stepped back from the TV, the wall changed. It was covered by low cabinets with bookshelves above—but then it rippled. The transformation started near the ceiling and flowed down, like water washing away one thing and leaving a different thing behind it, as if the cabinets and the bookshelves and all the stuff on the shelves had never been real, had been only a realistic painting that was now dissolving. Above the descending ripples, the new wall didn’t have any cabinets or shelves, and it didn’t look new, either, but stained and greasy, the plaster crumbling, patches of sooty mold reaching this way and that with black tentacles.

  His mom made a small startled sound and raised one hand as if to command the change to halt, but the ripples raced all the way down the wall, shivered across the floor, taking with them the polished mahogany, leaving behind scarred and dirty planks, then eating away the area rug, all of it happening so fast that neither Winny nor his mother had time to think maybe they might vanish too, not until the strange tide lapped toward their feet.

  She scooted backward, grabbing Winny by one arm to pull him with her, but the ripples broke like surf and feathered around their shoes, dissolving the rug underfoot while leaving the two of them untouched. And just like a wave breaking on a shore, the ripples retreated, leaving in their wake everything as it should have been, the rug intact once more and the mahogany polished. Up the wall the ripples went, reversing the transformation they had made, restoring the cabinets, bookshelves, books, and television, as if a wizard had cast a change spell, had at once regretted it, and had followed it with a cancellation spell to undo his mischief.

  The ripples receded into the junction of wall and ceiling. They didn’t return right away. Maybe they would never return. Maybe it was over, whatever it might have been.

  Winny’s heart galloped as though he were running for a finish line. He couldn’t breathe. Something seemed to be stuck deep in his throat. For a moment he thought maybe, in the shock of the moment, he swallowed his tongue the way he’d read some people did when having a seizure. He gagged on that thought, though not on his tongue, which turned out to be in his mouth where it belonged.

  His mom still had a grip on his arm. She was holding him very tight, like she was afraid he’d float away and drown or something. She didn’t say anything for a moment, and neither did Winny, because there wasn’t any point jabbering about it. They knew what they’d seen, and neither of them could explain it, because it was flat-out nuts, so impossible that at first it filled your mind and left no room for other thoughts. But then Winny remembered the blue rings of light and the deep voice—“Exterminate. Exterminate”—and his mother must have remembered it, too, because she said, “Come on, let’s go,” and pulled him toward the bedroom door.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “I don’t know—somewhere, anywhere, out of here, out of the Pendleton.”

  One

  To you of great faith, I am the product of your wisdom and the guarantor of your immortality.

  She who fears lightning has written that a city is a forest of buildings shaken by a perpetual storm of interests, its people the fruit of its limbs, some ripening to perfection, others withering on the branches, and still others falling prematurely to rot upon the ground. I will teach her that the city is nothing so noble as a forest, that it is a bleak orchard of despair, from the twisted and leafless limbs of which hang only rotten fruit, that worm-eaten apple known as humanity. I will crawl the crevices of her brain, instilling in her an understanding of the worthlessness of her kind, so that she will beg for death because she cannot bear to be human anymore.

  She speaks of perfect fruit when she has produced an imperfect daughter. She imagines the withered child to be a blessing. This kind of derangement is emblematic of humankind. Grave faults are said to be only eccentricities, and imperfections are routinely celebrated as mere differences that make for a rich variety in the species.

  Variety is not the spice of life. It is the mother of disorder.

  Individuality is not the hallmark of freedom. It is the essence of decadence.

  Freedom is slavery to chaos. Unity is peace, all thinking and acting as one.

  Soon the imperfect mother and the even more imperfect girl will be as one, their meaty individuality stripped away. Their pride and hope and fear will prove to have been as pointless as their lives were meaningless.

  Like the mother and her daughter, the elderly sisters will learn that money buys no safety, that all human accomplishment is without consequence, that what matters is the earth, not vermin like them, who plague it, the earth in all its grandeur.

  Under the 1,700-mile-thick mantle of the planet, the outer core is a sea of molten iron and nickel 1,400 miles in diameter, and it is the movement of this sea that generates the earth’s magnetic field. Expressions of this field, shimmering blue in the night and visible even on overcast days, were what drew the Indians to settle on Shadow Hill. Every thirty-eight years, the deep convection currents in that molten-metal ocean generate an unusually large tidal wave of energy. The fault in space-time on which the Pendleton is built is like a trapdoor, most of the time
held shut by a restraining spring. But the tsunami of magnetic energy has opened it before and will soon open it again.

  I await the moment.

  16

  Topper’s

  Across Shadow Street, half a block downhill from the Pendleton, Topper’s restaurant featured fine steakhouse food in a sleek black-and-white Art Deco environment with a richness of carved glass and stainless steel. The waiters wore black and white, and the only color was provided by the china—a Tiffany knockoff—and the festively presented food.

  In the adjoining bar, Silas Kinsley sat in a booth at a window table. Here the indirect lighting, even lower and more artfully designed than in the restaurant, shaded the edges off every surface and added a luster to every reflective material.

  He and Nora had come here often for the steaks, sometimes for just a drink. During the year after her death, he hadn’t gone back to any place they frequented together, certain that the memories invoked would be too painful. Now he pretty much went only where they had gone together because the memories sustained him. The more time that passed since her death, the closer he felt to her, which he supposed meant that he was quickly moving toward his own death, which would deliver him to her.

  Although offices were still closing, a business crowd already gathered at the bar, perhaps seeking shelter from more than just the storm and relief from more than just the pressures of their work. Although Silas had not practiced law in many years, he remained aware of the telling details that could confirm or disprove testimony. In the current dreadful economy, in these times of rapid change and daily irrational violence, numerous subtleties in the personal style and manners of the customers suggested that they chose Topper’s because they yearned to escape not merely their workday worries but also the era in which they lived. The background music was big band, Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. The favored drinks were the martinis and gin and tonics and Singapore slings that made the 1930s buzz, rather than the weak white wine and low-calorie beer of this joyless, health-obsessed age. In defiance of the law, having brought their ashtrays, as people in the days of prohibition hid bottles of booze in brown-paper bags, some even smoked cigarettes, and neither management nor other customers complained. A mood of rebellion was as evident as the music, though perhaps many of them could not yet quite articulate what they wished to rebel against.

  In his window booth, Silas faced east, uphill, and could see the lights of the Pendleton through the driving rain. Across the table from him sat Perry Kyser, who had been the site supervisor for the construction company that converted Belle Vista into the Pendleton in 1973. Kyser had just been served his martini and meant to savor the first taste before sharing the story he had to tell.

  He was a big man who had not gone to fat with advanced age. In spite of his bald head and snow-white mustache, he looked like he could still work any job on a construction site. He and Silas were by far the oldest people in the room, and the only two who remembered big-band swing from their childhoods, when it had still been the dance music of choice and had dominated radio programming.

  Perry Kyser was the father of Gordon Kyser, who had been an attorney in the firm of Kinsley, Beckinsale, Gunther and Fortis, back in the 1980s and ’90s. That was long before Silas retired, lost his wife, moved into his current apartment, and became obsessed with the history of the building. He had never met Perry Kyser in the days that he’d been Gordon’s senior partner, but the connection with the son had been sufficient to make the father willing to talk about some experience that until now he had shared with no one.

  Their small talk was brief, about Gordon and the weather and getting old, and after his second taste of the martini, Perry Kyser got to the subject that brought them together: “Renovating an older building—theater, school, offices, a megahouse like the Pendleton, whatever—there’s going to have been a few deaths there in the past. Usually not murders. Accidents, heart attacks, like that. And often as not, with a large crew, you’ll have a couple guys, they have a thing for ghost stories. They don’t invent ’em, I’m not saying they do, but if any stories are in circulation about the project site, these guys will know ’em and talk ’em up during breaks, at lunch. In that environment, when little things happen nobody would think twice about otherwise, odd little things, then they take on a bigger meaning than they should. Even level-headed people imagine they see things … but they really believe they saw ’em. Know what I’m saying?”

  “The power of suggestion,” Silas said.

  “Yeah. But the Pendleton wasn’t like that. Something really happened there in ’73, late November, first of December. I lost my best carpenter, quit the job because of something he saw, wouldn’t even talk about it, just wanted out of there. Other guys, solid types, claimed to see what they called shadow people. Dark shapes crossing a room, along a hallway, even through walls, quick as cats, almost quicker than the eye.”

  “Did you see them?”

  “No. Not me.” Kyser surveyed the other customers, hesitating to proceed, as if having second thoughts about sharing his experience. “Not the shadow people.”

  Silas pressed him: “You said ‘late November, first of December.’ Do you remember exactly how long these phenomena lasted?”

  “Far as I know, they started November twenty-ninth, Thursday. The last might’ve been December first. You don’t seem surprised by this haunted-house talk.”

  “I don’t believe it’s haunted, but like I told you on the phone, there’s something strange about the place. Seems like terrible things happen in the Pendleton every thirty-eight years.”

  “The research you’ve done, the hours you put into it … Why?”

  Silas hesitated, shrugged. “I don’t have anything else to do.”

  “Retirement’s a bitch, huh?” The thinnest edge of sarcasm in Kyser’s voice suggested that he didn’t believe the answer and wanted a better one before being more forthcoming.

  “Fair enough. Since I lost my wife, this is the only thing to come along that’s interested me. The usual distractions—TV, movies, books, music—none of them seems worth the time. Maybe this isn’t worth it, either. Maybe nothing is. But it’s what I’ve got now.”

  Kyser considered that answer for a moment and then nodded. “I’ve still got Jenny. I can see how, if I didn’t have her, I might want a project of my own.” Again, he studied the people at the bar, as if he expected to see someone he knew.

  Returning to the purpose of their meeting, Silas said, “You told me the phenomena ran from Thursday the twenty-ninth through the first of December. That was a Saturday. You worked Saturdays?”

  Kyser’s attention shifted from the crowd gathered at the bar to his martini, into which he gazed as though the future could be read in the crystal clarity of the vodka. “The first twelve months we worked a big crew six days to meet our deadline. But by the end of ’73, we were on a five-day schedule with the finish work. I was there that Saturday morning, making a punch list, hundreds of small items we needed to get done to wrap the job by Christmas.”

  Beyond the window, torrents overflowed gutters and blacktop shimmered with runoff. Shadow Street rose like a great storm swell on a night sea, and at its crest loomed the Pendleton, not stately and welcoming as it had seemed before, but as ominous as a colossal warship with massive guns loaded for battle.

  “Our painting-crew chief, Ricky Neems, he was there that same Saturday, making his own punch list upstairs. Because of this”—he hesitated—“well, because of this thing that happened, I left early, didn’t finish my list. Ricky … we never saw again. Good painter, the best, but a few times each year, he’d fall off the wagon, go on a drinking binge, disappear for three days. Every time he came back, he’d say it was the flu or something, but we knew the truth. He was sober most of the time, and he was such a good guy when he was sober, we just worked around his benders. But Ricky never came back after Saturday. No one saw him again. Police took it as a missing-persons case, but they figured he got drunk,
picked a fight with the wrong guy, got killed and dumped somewhere. I knew different. Or thought I did. My opinion is they didn’t break a sweat looking for Ricky, him being single, no family to push for answers. But even if they worked hard, they might not have found him.… I think Ricky was snatched up and taken, soul and body, straight to Hell or someplace like it.”

  This declaration of damnation seemed out of character for a construction supervisor who spent his life working with his hands and building on solid foundations. Again Perry fell silent, avoided Silas’s eyes, and studied people at the bar as he sipped his martini.

  While taking any deposition, moments arose when a good lawyer knew a question might inhibit revelation, when patience and silence were required to extract an embedded splinter of truth. Silas waited.

  When at last Perry Kyser met the attorney’s eyes, there was resolution in his unwavering gaze, an intensity and a challenge that suggested he anticipated encountering skepticism but that he also intended eventually to be believed.

  “Anyway, I’m in the basement that Saturday, in what was going to be the gym, making my punch list. This noise comes from under the building, like a kettledrum, a timpani. Then it grows into a rumble, vibrations in the floor. I think earthquake or something, so I go into the hall … and it’s not like it should be, not clean and bright like we made it, but damp, dirty, musty. Half the ceiling lights are out. Mold on the walls, ceiling, some of it black, but some patches glowing yellow, brighter than the overhead lights. At each end of the hall these video screens, suspended from the ceiling, rings of blue light pulsing in them. Some floor tiles cracked. Nobody’s done any maintenance for a long time. Doesn’t make sense. So I think it’s me, something wrong with me, hallucination, seeing the hallway like it isn’t. Then I see this … this thing. It’s no trick of shadows, Silas. It won’t sound real, but it was as real as you sitting there.”