by Dean Koontz
Bailey said, “What is it? What have you seen?”
Dr. Ignis was too perceptive to miss the implication in Bailey’s words. “You’ve seen something, too. Something extraordinary. Was it a man in evening clothes, a butler perhaps, tall and white-haired and splattered with blood?”
“Where did you see him?”
Ignis indicated spots of blood on the carpet runner. “He told me he killed them all—the children, too. What children? What apartment? And then he …” The doctor frowned at the wall beside Bailey’s front door. “Well, I don’t know.… I don’t know where he went then.…”
Silas Kinsley
On the ground floor, Silas turned away from the south elevator, from the threatening voices that echoed behind the sliding doors. They were like mob voices in certain dreams, demanding, threatening yet incoherent, no word clear, the eager chanting of pursuing legions whose motivation he could not fathom but whose grim purpose was his destruction. He recalled awakening earlier in the day and listening to a terrible slithering within the wall behind his bed. These voices in the shaft were nothing like that sound, yet he knew their provenance must be the same. He went to the nearby stairs and hurried down to the basement.
Too old and too in need of his lost Nora to worry about losing his life, Silas was nevertheless fearful for his neighbors, anxious to warn them to evacuate the building. At the bottom of the stairs, he opened the door cautiously, quietly, worried that the hulking monstrosity Perry Kyser had seen in 1973, the thing that evidently had killed one of his workers, might be waiting there to attack. If Andrew Pendleton could be alive here on this night long after his suicide, then anyone—and anything—might walk this building from any period of its history.
The south corridor appeared deserted, leading past the storage units to the freight elevator at the back of the building, and the only presence in the long west corridor was a man who stepped out of the HVAC room. He closed that door and strode briskly away toward the distant north elevator.
Silas couldn’t see the guy well enough to positively identify him, but he felt pretty sure it was Mr. Mickey Dime. As a member of the homeowners’-association board of directors, Silas knew every resident, though he didn’t know all of them equally well. Dime was largely just a name to him, because the man kept to himself.
When Dime disappeared into the far elevator, Silas left the south stairs and hurried past the superintendent’s apartment. At the security room, he knocked lightly. When no one responded, he rapped somewhat louder. Finally he opened the door and went inside.
The security console wasn’t manned. No one was at the coffeemaker in the kitchenette alcove. The door stood open to the little bathroom, which offered a toilet and sink, and no one was in there, either.
According to security protocols, the guard on duty would leave his post only if called to an emergency elsewhere in the building or for fifteen minutes, at random, twice on the evening and the late-night shifts, to make the rounds of the basement, ground floor, and courtyard. But the earliest such tour never occurred before eight or nine o’clock, still hours from now.
Silas spotted a wet red exclamation point on the floor near one of the console chairs. He knelt to examine it. An inch-long line of blood. At the end of it, a punctuating dot of the same. So recently spilled that the air had not yet begun to crust it around the edges or lay a film upon it. Also on the floor, in the kneehole under the workstation, lay the guard’s utility belt with holster and pistol.
Silas’s mouth had gone dry. He realized he was breathing through it, rapidly and shallowly and perhaps ever since he stood listening to voices in the elevator shaft. He could hear a drum, the jungle drum of his heart, quick but not yet panicked, thumping in the wild deep darkness of his chest.
Either the smoke detectors in every room and every hallway or the security guard using this computer could trigger a strident fire alarm throughout the building. As a fail-safe precaution, the computer was tied to the emergency generator in case the city power went out before an alarm could be sounded.
Silas didn’t know how to use the computer for that purpose, but he was sure that Tom Tran could do it. He went next door to the superintendent’s apartment and rang the doorbell. He heard the seven-note chimes echoing through those rooms, but though he rang three times, no one answered.
The basement corridor looked no different from the way it had always looked, but it felt different. Wrong. The ceiling didn’t sag or the walls bow, but Silas sensed a tremendous burden on the building, as if the storm and the sky beyond the storm and the universe that was the sky were all pressing on the Pendleton, a weight so terrible that the structure would collapse into rubble, the rubble into dust.
Although he was many years removed from that period of his legal practice when he’d specialized in criminal defense, Silas hadn’t lost his intuitive recognition of deception and evil intention. Mr. Dime had not appeared furtive, in fact had proceeded with the air of a man openly going about legitimate business, but Silas couldn’t think of a reason why any resident would ever need to visit the HVAC vault.
Increasingly certain not that time was running out but that some incomprehensible calamity of time was about to befall the Pendleton, Silas needed to return to the ground floor, ask Padmini Bahrati if she knew where Tom Tran was or if she could trigger a fire alarm.
But first he felt compelled to return to the security room and take the guard’s abandoned pistol. He hadn’t been to a shooting range in ten years. He didn’t want to use a gun, but things didn’t always work out the way you preferred. From the utility belt he also took the canister of pepper spray and the flashlight. He stepped into the hallway and hurried to the next door on the left. It was unlocked. He stepped into the HVAC vault.
Winny
In the kitchen, Iris sat at the breakfast table, holding the floppy-eared bunny tight to her chest, rocking forward and back in her chair, whispering something to the toy that Winny couldn’t hear, whispering it over and over.
Something about the girl—Winny wasn’t sure what—made him want to be brave. It wasn’t that Iris was pretty, which she was. Although Winny was in many ways advanced for his age, he was too young to be interested in girls. Anyway, she was too old for him, three years older. Part of it might be that she needed books, and he needed books, and unlike most people who liked to talk about what books they read in their clubs, neither Iris nor Winny talked about what they read—in her case because she couldn’t talk, in his case because he was such a rotten talker that he would make good books sound like they sucked.
He didn’t sit at the table with Iris. Too wired to keep still, he roamed the kitchen, looking at the dishes displayed beyond the French doors in some of the cabinets and reading the notations Mrs. Sykes had made on various days on the December page of the wall calendar: “Accountant at 2:30, dinner with Tanya, Dr. Abbot, cheese sale.” He tried to decide if the apples and pears and bananas in the center of the work island had been carefully arranged to look like a still-life painting or had just been dumped willy-nilly into the big shallow bowl, which was such a peculiar thing to care about at a time like this that he wondered if maybe he was gay or something. He even counted the floor tiles, as if the number of them—stupid, stupid—might at some point be vital information that would save their lives.
He also listened to his mom and Mrs. Sykes trying to make calls with the kitchen phone and with both of their cell phones. Several times, before they punched in a complete number, they were connected to people speaking a foreign language, several voices on the line at the same time, gobbling like a flock of turkeys. Once his mom got an operator at City Bell, a different one from the first, and this lady also insisted that it was 1935, though she wasn’t as nice as the first. And Mrs. Sykes dropped her phone in surprise when shimmering sheets of blue lights flashed corner to corner across one kitchen wall.
Inside some of those cabinets, things rattled and clanged. A few lower doors flew open and several drawers rolled out.
Cookware tumbled from open doors, stainless-steel flatware and metal utensils erupted from the drawers, and all of this stuff levitated, floating around one side of the kitchen in that blue light, pots and pans bonking against one another. Knives and forks and spoons were busy in midair as if a dozen poltergeists were rattling their tableware together to protest the lack of acceptable ghost food, the way prisoners in some old movies caused a commotion in the dining hall when the evil new warden embezzled money from the budget and served them cheap slop.
The waves of light washed right to left over the cabinets and then away, the junk storm abruptly ended, and everything fell at once in a clatter-crash. But the stuff didn’t just rain down all over the floor. Instead, the items clustered in weirdly balanced piles that gravity should have pulled apart at once but didn’t, pieces of the stainless-steel flatware bristling from among the pots-and-pans sculptures, vibrating like tuning forks, as though everything had been magnetized. After a moment, the magnetism must have fluxed away or something, because the vibrating stopped and the piles collapsed, scattering things across the floor. In the wake of all that commotion, the silence that fell over the kitchen was like a funeral-home hush—except for Iris whimpering like a puppy who was lost and wanted to be home.
Neither of the two moms screamed or went crazy-hysterical, or went into denial, the way that people usually did in movies where weird things happened. Winny was proud of them and grateful, because if one of them had lost her cool, he would have freaked out, too, and that would have been the end of being brave for Iris.
The waves of blue light reminded Winny of the pulsing circles on the TV and of the voice that said, “Exterminate.”
He suspected his mom was thinking of the same thing, because she said, “Maybe it isn’t safe to go outside, with those things crawling out there, but it’s not safe to stay inside, either.”
Mrs. Sykes said, “We need to get with other people. There’s got to be some safety in numbers.”
“Gary Dai’s in Singapore,” Winny’s mom said.
The lower level of Mr. Dai’s two-story unit was next door to their apartment. He was a software guru and a video-game-designer legend, so he might know what was happening and how to get through all the levels of play alive. Just their luck that he was halfway around the world when the quarter dropped and the action started.
“The people next door are away visiting their grandson,” Mrs. Sykes said. “And the end apartment is empty, for sale.”
Winny’s mom said, “Let’s go back through my place, over to the north hall, see if we can find Bailey Hawks in 2-C. There’s no one in the Pendleton I’d feel safer with right now.”
Bailey Hawks
On the kitchen island were two boxes of ammunition that Bailey retrieved from his master-bedroom closet. As he loaded a spare twenty-round magazine for his Beretta 9 mm, he listened to Kirby Ignis’s story of his startling encounter with the distinguished, blood-spattered man who spoke of killing everyone and who then vanished through a wall.
The doctor was too intelligent and too practical to waste time proposing rational but improbable explanations the way that some UFO debunkers resorted to suppositions of swamp gas, weather balloons, and swarms of iridescent insects. He had seen a man vanish into a wall, but instead of questioning his sanity and the reliability of his senses, he was in the process of amending his personal definition of the word impossible.
“I don’t know the full story,” Bailey said. “Silas Kinsley, up in 3-C, he’s the Pendleton’s historian. He’ll have all the details. But in the thirties sometime, a butler killed the family who owned Belle Vista.”
“He’d be dead now.”
“Very dead,” Bailey agreed as he dropped spare cartridges into all the pockets of his sport coat. “If I remember right, he committed suicide back then.”
“I’m not the kind who goes to séances.”
“Me neither.” Bailey thought of Sophia Pendleton—Old King Cole was a merry old soul, and a merry old soul was he—singing her way down the stairs. “But this isn’t ghosts. It’s something stranger, bigger.”
“What have you seen?” Ignis asked.
“I’ll tell you on the way.”
“On the way where?”
“Martha and Edna Cupp, up in 3-A. They’re in their eighties. Whatever’s happening here, they need to be out of it.”
“Maybe we all need to be out of it,” Ignis said.
“Maybe we do.”
Mickey Dime
As Mickey rolled the hand truck and dead Jerry along the north hall on the third floor, he grew nostalgic for the childhood they had shared. By the time he turned the corner and stopped at the elevator to press the call button, however, he had exhausted his capacity for sentimentality.
Jerry had been Mickey’s brother but also a problem. Problem solved. His mother said the strong act, the weak react. She said the weak have regrets, the strong have triumphs. She said the weak believe in God, the strong believe in themselves. She said both the strong and the weak are part of the food chain, and it is better to eat than be eaten. She said that the strong have pride, that the weak have humility, and that she was proud of her humility and humble about her pride. She said that power justifies all things and that absolute power justifies all things absolutely. Because a famous California winery paid her handsomely to do a magazine ad and a TV commercial in their what-do-the-smartest-people-drink campaign, she said that a robust Cabernet Sauvignon was central to a life well-lived, that it was a metaphor for transcendence, that it was an essential tool for the redistribution of chic, and that it was both great art and literature in a bottle. She said that judging Cain for killing Abel was like condemning a vigorous wolf pup for drinking his share of mother’s milk and the share of the sickly pup that might otherwise have survived, to the detriment of the pack.
Mickey didn’t understand everything that his mother had said over the years, in part because she had said and written so much that no one could keep up with her. But he knew that everything she said was wise. And most of it was profound.
The elevator car arrived on the third floor. Mickey wheeled his brother into it.
Silas Kinsley
All of the lights were on in the HVAC vault, racks of hooded fluorescent tubes hanging on chains from the ceiling. The impressive ranks of complex machines, humming along as intended by the original engineer, presented a scene of such orderliness and normality that Silas could almost believe that all was right in the Pendleton regardless of the things that he had seen and heard.
He closed the door behind him. “Is anyone here? Mr. Tran? Tom?”
When no one responded, Silas set out to explore the service aisles between the rows of equipment. Instead he at once was drawn to the manhole in the center of the room and to the bundle lying beside it.
The manhole, which had been there since the Pendleton was constructed, provided access to a three-foot-diameter steel sleeve that penetrated the eight-foot-deep concrete foundation of the great mansion. The sleeve had been placed precisely to terminate at the mouth of a fault in the bedrock.
Not a fault in the sense of a fracture, but a smooth-walled lava pipe from which molten rock once gushed. Shadow Hill and surrounding territory was a stable mass of basalt, an extremely dense volcanic stone, and rhyolite, which was the volcanic form of granite. Tens of thousands of years earlier, at the end of the volcanic era in this region, when the eruptions were exhausted, a few long vent tunnels remained in the solid stone, including the one under the Pendleton, which seemed to average between four and five feet in width.
In the late 1800s, when the great house was built, environmental issues were of less concern than in the current age. Little if any thought was given to the possible contamination of the water table when the Pendleton’s bathtub, sink, and toilet drains were routed to terminate at the top of the seemingly bottomless lava pipe. In those days, the city was much smaller than now, only then beginning to plan a public sewer system. Septic tanks remaine
d the primary means of gray-water and waste disposal, and the many thousands of cubic feet of the lava pipe offered a cheap and maintenance-free alternative to a standard tank.
The contractor included the manhole to provide service access in the unlikely event of a problem. When the cast-iron cover was removed, the lava pipe also functioned as an efficient outflow in the event that the basement should flood from a broken water line. In 1928, the Pendleton’s bathtub, sink, and toilet drains were rerouted to the public sewer system, but the manhole remained.
With the conversion of Belle Vista into the Pendleton in 1973, all the chillers and huge boilers of the new heating and cooling system raised a greater possibility of flooding. With the existing access to the lava pipe, the architect and contractor were spared the need to provide massive emergency pumps kept perpetually on standby, and could instead rely on the gravity-flow method of the original arrangement.
Dropping to one knee, Silas Kinsley was not interested in the manhole but in the rolled-up, quilted moving blanket that Dime had tied shut with furniture straps. Assessing the contents of the bundle with both hands, he felt what seemed to be legs, what were almost certainly arms, and undoubtedly a head. One end of the roll had come open slightly when the knot in the securing strap had pulled loose. Silas reached inside and discovered the top of someone’s head. The curliness of the hair and the memory of the exclamation point of blood in the inexplicably deserted security room seemed sufficient evidence for him to conclude that the dead man was Vernon Klick. The lava pipe was to be his grave.
