by Dean Koontz
“The Pendletons? Is that a residence? Just a moment, please.” She returned after a silence: “We have no Pendletons listed anymore. By any chance … do you mean Belle Vista?”
Twyla was aware of just enough of the building’s history to know that when it was a single-family residence, it had been called Belle Vista. But that hadn’t been since sometime in the 1970s.
The operator said, “That would be Mr. Gifford Ostock and family. But I’m afraid that’s a private number.”
“Gifford Ostock?” The name meant nothing to Twyla.
“Yes, ma’am. Since Mr. Pendleton … passed away … well, Mr. Ostock has lived at Belle Vista.”
Andrew Pendleton had died more than a century earlier.
“This Ostock doesn’t live there now,” Twyla said.
“Oh, yes, ma’am. He’s lived there at least thirty years.”
Twyla had never known an operator as chatty and patient as this. As nice as the woman sounded, it was nonetheless tempting to think that her unprecedented forbearance must be a subtle mockery if not something more sinister.
Although she did not realize why she was asking the question until the last word fell from her lips, Twyla said, “I’m sorry. I was confused for a moment. Could you please give me the number of the Paramount Theater?”
The Paramount, an Art Deco movie palace from the 1930s, stood at the base of Shadow Hill, walking distance from the Pendleton.
The operator didn’t tell Twyla to dial 411 for directory assistance. Instead, after a pause, she said, “Yes, ma’am. That number is Deerfield 227.”
“DE-227. That’s only five numbers.”
“May I connect you, ma’am?”
“No. I can place the call later. Could you tell me—are the letters in the same place on a touch-tone phone as on a … rotary?”
As though she had decided she might be talking to a drunk, the operator at last sighed but remained polite: “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I don’t know the term ‘touch-tone.’ ”
“What year is this?” Twyla asked, which raised Winny’s eyebrows again.
After a hesitation, the operator said, “Ma’am, do you need medical assistance?”
“No. No, I don’t. I just need to know the year.”
“It’s 1935, of course.”
Twyla hung up.
Logan Spangler
In the transformed half bath of Senator Blandon’s apartment, in the inadequate yellow glow of the ameboid form on the ceiling, Logan Spangler played the LED flashlight over the walls of sinuous, pale-green, black-mottled, serpentine fungus from which, at six locations, sprouted clusters of similarly colored and oddly shaped mushrooms on thick short stems. Logan had never seen such specimens before, and he regarded them with curiosity but also with suspicion. They were suspect less because they were unusual than because their sinuous forms and eerie coloration disturbed him on a level so deep that he couldn’t plumb it, perhaps as deep as racial memory, an intuitive sense that he was in the presence of something not only foul, not merely poisonous, but also alien, corrupt, and corrupting.
Behind Logan, someone said something that he didn’t understand, but when he spun to face the speaker, no one loomed in the doorway or in the hall beyond. Silence. Then the voice came again from behind him, in a foreign language, low and whispery and ominous, not so much threatening as foreboding, like someone delivering terrible news. He turned again as the speaker fell silent, but no one had materialized in the bathroom while he’d been distracted. He remained alone.
Alone with the fungus. The voice came a third time, delivering another foreign sentence or two, very near, to his left, where the wall was entirely covered with the green-and-black growth. What sounded like the same chain of syllables at once came from the wall directly ahead, and yet another repetition from somewhere near the half-draped toilet. As Logan tried to follow the elusive voice with the LED beam, he found the light focusing on cluster after cluster of the mushrooms that swelled from the undulant snakelike base forms.
When he began to suspect that the voice came from the fungus—or whatever the hell it was—Logan drew his pistol. In all his years as a homicide detective, he’d drawn his piece perhaps a dozen times, and in his six years at the Pendleton, he had until now left it in his holster. Furniture vanishing around him, rooms falling into ruin but then magically restored: He sensed no immediate threat in those bizarre events, perhaps because the criminals with whom he’d dealt his entire life were mostly uninspired brutes and fools who resorted to violence to solve their problems and, therefore, didn’t require him to develop a rich imagination in order to find them and bring them to justice. But though his imagination might be impoverished, it wasn’t penniless, and now it paid out a bounty of anxiety.
The disembodied voice, deep but whispery, suddenly swelled to a chorus of voices, each of them saying something different from the others, all of them still low and murmurous and untranslatable, but more urgent than before. They seemed to be talking not to Logan but to one another, conspiring toward some action. As the flashlight beam stabbed here, there, elsewhere, he was convinced that if he could see the undersides of the mushroom caps, the fragile gills would be vibrating like vocal cords.
He had swung away from the fungus when he thought someone had spoken from the doorway behind him; but he was loath to turn his back on it again. Pistol in his right hand, flashlight in his left, he eased away from the grotesque organism—and the door slammed shut behind him.
A part of him argued that this was a dream, hallucination, that if he woke or got a grip on himself, he could make it all stop or fade away as the vision in the master bedroom had faded. But he had never before hallucinated, and no dream had ever been a fraction this vivid. He’d read once that maybe if you died in a dream you died for real, you never woke up, which was a theory that made sense to him, one that he didn’t want to test.
Logan set the small flashlight on the filthy vanity, beside the cracked and stained sink. Not daring to take his eyes off the many-voiced colony, his pistol ready, he reached blindly behind himself for the doorknob, put a hand on it, but discovered that it would not turn. He felt for a latch button. It wasn’t engaged. Bathroom doors didn’t lock from the outside, yet it was immovable, no play in it at all, as if it were nailed to the jamb.
On the ceiling, the luminous yellow disc, which hadn’t been there when first he searched this room, grew dimmer, dimmer. Logan snatched his flashlight from the vanity.
The vision of ruin and abandonment in the master suite had endured less than one minute. This fungal apparition had already lasted longer than that; surely it would soon relent, too, reality returning like a tide.
In the fading light, he saw the snake-form fungi begin to throb, not every row in unison, but first some and then others. A wave motion, like the peristalsis that forced food down the esophagus and through the digestive tract, pulsed in these tubular organisms as though they might be swallowing live rodents or as if these were the intestines of a great beast.
Logan’s previously fallow imagination was blossoming moment by moment. If the fungi were capable of internal movement so radically different from anything else in the plant kingdom, perhaps they were ambulant as well, able to crawl or slither. Or coil and strike.
Something was happening to the clustered mushrooms on the walls and on the half-draped toilet. The puckered formations at the crowns of the caps began to open and peel back, each resembling a foreskin receding from a swelling glans. As if from vents in the caps, small clouds of pale vapor plumed into the air, like exhalations on a wintry morning.
The glowing form on the ceiling went dark. In the crisp beam of the flashlight, the drifting particles glimmered as if they were diamond dust. Not vapor, after all. These particles were too big to be the components of a mist, as big as—some bigger than—grains of salt, yet evidently light because they remained airborne. Spores.
Instinctively, Logan Spangler held his breath. Rapidly modifying his perception of the
threat, no longer concerned that the serpentine forms might unravel from the walls and reveal tentacles and abruptly snare him, he worried that the cloud of spores would do what spores always sought to do: colonize. He holstered the pistol and turned to the door, examining the three hinges in the flashlight beam.
Vernon Klick
In the security room, Vernon Klick divided his attention between only two of the six plasma screens. One was a full-screen view of the short north wing of the west hall on the third floor, outside the north elevator, the other a shot of the north hall on the same floor.
He had watched the senile flatfoot, Logan Spangler, ring the bell at the jackass senator’s apartment, watched him phone someone—probably the kiss-ass superintendent, Tom Tran, who dressed like the guest of honor at a geek convention—and then watched him enter the apartment with a passkey. Vernon had been waiting ever since for Spangler to come out of 3-D, where he was probably stealing old slop-bucket Blandon’s ninety-year-old Scotch, sucking it out of the bottle with a straw.
Vernon Klick was not a patient man. He was thirty years old and on his way to the top, and anyone who delayed his rise to riches and fame, even for so much as five minutes, earned a place on his enemies list. The list was long, filling twelve pages of a lined legal-size tablet. The day was coming when he would have the resources to screw each of those people, one way or another, in such a fashion as to let them know exactly who had paid them back.
If not for the powers that be and their numerous despicable toadies, Vernon would have already gotten to the top. But the game was fixed against guys like him. He had to work three times as hard as those for whom the game was rigged and be ten times more clever in order to achieve the success he deserved. Even to get where he was now, he had needed to push past countless obstacles that were put in his way by the Jews, the Wall Street bankers, the Wall Street bankers who were also Jews, the oil companies, the Republicans, all the New York publishers who conspired to keep truth tellers of exceptional talent out of the marketplace, the scheming Armenians, the state of Israel—which was, no surprise, run by Jews—and not least of all, two stupid high-school guidance counselors who really deserved to be fed alive to wild hogs, even thirteen years after their treachery.
Vernon was so close to attaining his long-held dreams that this would be the next-to-last night he spent as a security guard in the Pendleton, this cesspool of greed and privilege, among all these snotty bitches and smug bastards, not to mention old hags like the Cupp sisters and ancient freaks like Silas Kinsley, who for years had nothing to offer society yet continued to suck up its resources instead of doing everybody a favor and dying. Only two apartments remained that Vernon needed to explore and to photograph, and the residents were out of town through the coming weekend.
For months, Vernon worked first the graveyard shift and then the evening shift, using the security team’s universal key to go anywhere he wished to go in the building. In his large briefcase were a camera and spare memory sticks, a laptop computer, and a pocket recorder on which he could dictate notes as he conducted his explorations and collected his evidence.
Toward the end of his eight hours, he always hacked into the security-camera video archives and deleted the portions of the recordings that showed him walking hallways and entering vacant apartments when he should have been manning the guard desk here in the basement. No one noticed the editing because no one reviewed the boring video unless there had been an incident—a medical emergency, a false fire alarm—during that shift. Besides, Logan Spangler was an old crock who knew even less about computers than the Dalai Lama knew about big-game hunting; the geezer assumed the video archives were immune from tampering simply because they had been designed to be safe. Old Flatfoot Spangler wasn’t prepared for someone as brilliant and skilled and destined for greatness as Vernon Klick.
But until Spangler stopped sucking down Scotch in the idiot senator’s apartment, returned with the precious universal key, put it in the drawer where it was always kept, and went home to his withered hag of a wife and his flea-bitten cat, Vernon had no way to complete his secret work. He stared intently at the plasma screen, watching that north hall, waiting for Spangler to leave 3-D. He muttered, “Come on, come on, you stupid old fart.”
At the farther end of that hallway from the Blandon apartment, Mickey Dime stepped out of 3-F, closing the door behind him. He walked toward the camera, past the thieving senator’s apartment, turned the corner, and boarded the north elevator.
Vernon had no interest in Dime. Weeks earlier, he inspected the man’s apartment and found nothing of interest. Dime didn’t indulge in appalling luxuries other than having an immense bathroom with an illegal high-pressure showerhead that wasted immense quantities of water and a sauna that was likewise an unnecessary drain on the city’s power supply. His furniture was modern, with clean lines, probably expensive but not shamefully so. On the walls were several large ugly paintings, but ugly in a way you had to like them because you looked at them and said, Yes, that’s how life is. And after checking out the artists online, Vernon found that their work wasn’t horrendously pricey; Dime wasn’t squandering fortunes that could be better used by society; in fact two of the artists had committed suicide years previously, perhaps because they sold too few of their paintings. There was a safe that Vernon couldn’t get into, but given the evidence in the rest of the apartment, it probably didn’t contain anything embarrassing.
Dime kept a small collection of fancy women’s panties and other lingerie in a black-leather carryall on a high shelf in his master closet. But there were no photos of him wearing those garments and no reason to think that he did anything particularly strange with them. No doubt he liked to smell them and rub his face in them, as did Vernon with his own somewhat larger collection, but that wasn’t aberrant behavior and didn’t come close to the kind of outrage that he could use for the book he was writing and for the associated website. Probably most men had such collections, which explained why lingerie was always a profitable business, even in the worst of times, because both genders were buying it.
Where the hell was Logan Spangler, what was he doing so long in the moron senator’s apartment, was the geezer gumshoe collecting information for his own best-selling book and scandal website?
Mickey Dime
In the basement, Mickey Dime stepped out of the elevator. He turned away from the gym. He walked past the two pairs of double doors to the heating-cooling plant, past the security office, past the entrance to the superintendent’s apartment.
He liked the click-click-click of his heels on the tile floor. A purposeful, no-nonsense sound. The way the footsteps echoed off the walls pleased him. Except when he needed to be stealthy, he wore only shoes with leather soles and heels because he liked to hear himself going places with authority.
Although the swimming pool was at the north end of the enormous basement and behind closed doors, the air everywhere on this level had a faint chlorine scent. Others might not notice. Mickey’s senses were highly refined. All six of them.
Mickey’s mother had helped him to refine his sixth sense: the ability to detect almost instantly the degree—and precise points—of physical and emotional vulnerability in others.
He turned left into the corridor that served the twelve-foot-square storage units, one per apartment.
At the end of the corridor, to the left of the freight elevator, an equipment room contained, among other items, various sizes of hand trucks and wheeled carts and moving blankets that residents used to transport items from their apartments to the storage lockers or vice versa. Mickey chose a large hand truck with a deep cargo ledge and three adjustable straps to hold the load in place.
The nearby freight elevator served only the south side of the building. Because Apartments 2-A and 3-A were large and had both front and back entrances, the west hallway on those levels did not go entirely across the building to connect the other two, parallel wings. And the north freight elevator only served the th
ree aboveground floors because of the swimming pool that occupied that side of the basement.
Mickey wheeled the hand truck back to the main north elevator in which he had descended. The mural of bluebirds joyously soaring through a sky full of golden clouds made him uneasy. He didn’t know why. This was pure kitsch. Art that was consciously pretty usually just annoyed him. But this mural always made him … apprehensive.
In his apartment once more, he wheeled the hand truck into the study, where the bundled corpse of his brother, Jerry, awaited disposal.
Mickey missed his mother terribly, but he was glad that she had not lived to see how easy Jerry had been to kill. She would have been disappointed in him for being taken so unawares. Of course, that disappointment would have been balanced by her pride in Mickey.
Sparkle Sykes
As Sparkle left the study, the television behind her said again, “Exterminate. Exterminate.”
In Iris’s room, the girl still sat in bed, reading. She didn’t look up. She remained, as usual, in her autistic bubble.
Sparkle hurried to the first window and then to the second, to pull shut the draperies that her daughter had earlier opened. As the last set of panels drew together, the sky flared twice, three times, and in that shuddering fall of storm fire, the courtyard landscape lighting blinked off, as did lamps in all the windows in the north and west wings, although the lights remained on in her apartment. In fact, following that bright barrage, the golden glow of the city that usually silhouetted the chimneys and the parapet balustrade at the top of the house was also extinguished, as if the metropolis had lost all power except in these rooms.
Closing the draperies, turning away from the window, Sparkle told herself that she’d briefly been blinded to the courtyard and the other wings of the great house by the fear of being for an instant face-to-face with lightning. But she knew that explanation was self-deception. She had seen something—the absence of everything—that was related to the monstrous baby that vanished into a wall and to the voice coming from the pulsing blue rings on the TV. None of it was mescaline flashback all these years after her one experience of that hallucinogen. None of it was illusion. All of it was real, impossible yet true, and she desperately needed to understand it.
