by Dean Koontz
“What next?” Edna asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Besides calling Father Murphy,” Edna said, “what should we do, what should we expect to happen, how should we prepare?”
“Maybe nothing more is going to happen.”
“Something will happen,” Edna said confidently, almost happily, as if an infestation of demons would be just the thing to combat the doldrums of a rainy December night.
Before Martha could reply, a bright flood of shimmering, crackling blue light washed across the floor. She seemed to be standing in an intensely luminous fog.
The poker reacted as if it were a divining rod and she were a dowser searching for underground water, almost tearing out of her grip. She held fast to it, but the poker jerked her arm down, and the tip of it pierced the eerie luminosity.
Simultaneously, the remaining fireplace tools and the rack that held them overturned on the hearth, didn’t just topple into the light but slammed into it as if drawn by a tremendous power. The blueness receded from around Martha, shuddered across the room, seemed to suck the ornate fireplace screen into the firebox, and crackled away up the chimney, gone.
Sally Hollander
Lying on the kitchen floor, Sally felt the last of her bones succumb to the spreading cold. Now a skeleton of ice defined itself clearly in the warmth of her flesh. She had never previously been so consciously aware of her physiology. Although at the moment she remained paralyzed, she knew the position of each of her 206 bones, the precise shape of the various plates that were fused together to form her skull. She was conscious of the status of every joint: the ball-and-socket joints in shoulders and hips, the pivot joint in her neck between the second and third vertebrae, the elegant ellipsoidals in her wrists, the wonderfully functional hinges in her fingers and elbows and knees. Sally was able to feel the synovial membranes encapsulating her mobile joints and was vividly aware of the sticky, oozing synovial fluid that lubricated them. She sensed the fibers of every supporting ligament, the connecting tendons and the muscles poised to put the entire skeleton into motion on demand. It was as if her body had developed an acute self-awareness to match that of her mind.
Her fear had gone away as if whatever the demon had disgorged into her included, among other things, a tranquilizer. She had no apprehension anymore, no slightest misgiving. Her mood was one of calm anticipation, a meditative placidity, not apathy but a relieved submission to some inevitable transformation.
Having been a punching bag for her former husband, having worked up the courage to leave him and to obtain a divorce, she had found her self-respect more than twenty years ago, and she had since been too strong to submit that way to anyone. With a fortitude of which she was proud, she rejected apathy, embraced emotion and hope, and resigned herself to nothing—until now she resigned herself to this with an almost pleasant expectation.
Her skeletal structure began to surrender its integrity. She felt something moving inside her bones, as though her marrow had become animated, crawling this way and that in the cavities that contained it. She sensed that the bones in her legs and arms were gradually elongating. In her toes—and elsewhere—additional bones seemed to be forming. Something was happening in her joints, as well, and she felt cartilage reweaving itself to conform to the new reality of these junctions.
The words werewolf and werecat prowled her mind, but they did not raise her anxiety. Instead, the prospect of transformation was intriguing, and it inspired in her a tentative sense of possibility, a cautious willingness to wait and see, to consider that perhaps a change might be for the better. A part of her realized that this was not a natural reaction and must be, therefore, chemically induced. She supposed that as her body was being reprogrammed, so was her mind. But even that recognition did not alarm her, not even when she realized that her right hand, on the floor in front of her face where she could clearly see it, was growing longer. Each finger seemed to be adding one knuckle and one phalanx, bones squirming within the flesh, skin stretching and splitting and at once knitting up again.
Silas Kinsley
Taking refuge among the whirring ranks of the tall Multistack chillers, Silas watched Mickey Dime through a gap between two of the machines. Whatever had been piled on the hand truck and covered with a blanket was apparently destined to go into the manhole with the body of Vernon Klick.
Having spent his life in law offices and courtrooms, Silas had respect for the law and even a love for it in spite of politicians’ determination to layer on ever more Byzantine statutes and in spite of the wretched purposes to which some people bent it. He was loath to let Dime dispose of the evidence in a capital crime. With no one certain of how far away the bottom of the lava pipe might be, with the possibility that it emptied into an underground lake or a river that would carry the corpse beyond discovery, it was likely that a city running a ruinous budget deficit in bad economic times would decline to mount an expensive and unpromising exploration deep into the earth. But Silas was an old man, feeling older by the day, armed but not confident that he retained any shooting skills. He was no match for Dime, who was half his age, fit, and evidently ruthless.
Besides, he remembered well the butler who, in 1935, killed the entire Ostock family and every member of the live-in staff before committing suicide to “save the world from eternal darkness,” and he remembered the seemingly irrational character of Andrew Pendleton’s journal so evident in the scraps that had survived the fire in which he meant to burn it. Whatever happened every thirty-eight years in this building, insanity might not be a consequence of the event but a part of it, a symptom of it. As he watched Dime open the manhole, he wondered if this man might be not an ordinary murderer who killed out of self-interest but instead the equivalent of the butler, Tolliver, perhaps driven mad by some toxin or occult energy.
No sooner had the words occult energy occurred to Silas than a radiant blue spiral of something shot out of the manhole, startling Dime, whirling to the ceiling like Independence Day fireworks, but then splashing across the concrete and dispersing. He would have said it was light, but light itself couldn’t be shaped into spring form and sent corkscrewing through the air. Behind the first spiral came a second that was more substantial, brighter, and then a third.
With the third blue whirligig, the iron manhole appeared to tear loose of its hinges, shot to the ceiling, and clung there an instant, until the light purled away, whereupon the disc fell, rang against the concrete floor as loud as a cannon shot, bounced onto its edge, and rolled away like a giant coin.
Martha Cupp
When the ornate fireplace screen was crumpled and twisted like paper and sucked into the firebox by the blue light, Martha threw aside the poker and hurried to her bedroom, where she kept a more formidable weapon in her nightstand drawer. You couldn’t shoot a magnetic field or whatever that blue light had been, but you could shoot any grotesque hateful squirming thing that ripped up your sofa if it didn’t vanish before you could squeeze off a damn shot!
Iris
They want to stay together but they also want to go up to the third floor right away to see some women up there. Too many people already. Now there’s going to be more.
One voice at a time is all right. Two is hard to listen to. Now there’s five, and what they’re saying is not even words to her anymore, half the time it’s just buzzing, like wasps, like a swarm of wasps in the room, the words fluttering against her face like brittle wings, buzzing, buzzing, and at any moment the words might begin to sting her, sting and sting until she can’t stand it anymore, until she starts screaming even though she doesn’t want to, and if the screaming starts so might the hitting, though she hardly ever strikes out and doesn’t want to strike out, never wants that.
She tries to block out the voices, tries to hear the sounds of the forest as the words in the book describe them: … the pheasants cackled loud and high. The call of the falcon shrilled, light and piercing, over the tree-tops, and the hoarse crow chorus was heard continuously.
Animal sounds are all right. Animal voices don’t want anything from you, they don’t ask you to do anything, they don’t even expect you to answer them. Animal voices are soothing, and so are the sounds that the forest itself makes.
… the falling leaves whispered among the trees. They fluttered and rustled ceaselessly through the air from all the tree-tops and branches. A delicate silvery sound was falling constantly to earth. It was wonderful to awaken amidst it, wonderful to fall asleep to this mysterious and melancholy whispering.
Under the animal sounds and the whisper of the leaves, her mother’s voice comes to Iris through the protective forest that she has imagined around herself, calls her again to the Bambi way. For the love of that deer who lives a world apart from her, in the book world, and for the love of her mother, which she can never express, Iris keeps her head down and goes with the herd. They walk and climb and walk again, and there is a door, beyond the door a new place, and two old women with voices so nice that she dares to glance at them.
One of them has a gun.
Iris at once retreats again behind the foliage in her mind, to a moment in the earliest days of the fawn’s life, when Bambi was horrified to see a ferret kill a mouse:
Finally Bambi asked anxiously, “Shall we kill a mouse, too, sometime?”
“No,” replied his mother.
“Never?” asked Bambi.
“Never,” came the answer.
“Why not?” asked Bambi, relieved.
“Because we never kill anything,” said his mother simply.
Bambi grew happy again.
Silas Kinsley
Instead of a fourth spiral of blue light, a great rushing brilliance poured from the open manhole: whooooosh. Saturated with intense color, this was not a steady transparent beam like ordinary light, but translucent and churning with visible currents. It swarmed upward less like light than like water might gush from a broken main under extreme pressure. The radiance blued everything in the room, concrete and chillers, pipes and boilers, Mickey Dime’s face and hands and white shirt, and even tinted the shadows sapphire. As the manhole had torn off its hinges, so Silas’s watch vibrated on his wrist, the belt buckle against his abdomen, and the guard’s pistol in a raincoat pocket thumped against his thigh. The heavy machines and boilers were anchored to the floor, but the metal housings creaked, twanged, as though they might pop their welds and rivets.
The rushing radiance lasted ten seconds. Maybe fifteen. But when it winked out, its effects lingered or perhaps increased. Immediately with the extinguishing of the blue brilliance, a sound issued from within the thick walls, an eerie high-pitched resonance, continuously modulating like the shrieky whistle of interference on a shortwave radio, as though the intricate web of steel rebar encased in the concrete might be transmitting the blue energy in a form other than light to every corner of the building.
As if that keening called it forth, the rumbling rose beneath the Pendleton. The more shrill the sound grew within the walls, the deeper notes the rumbling struck, until the two swelled to their fullest at the same moment, whereupon everything changed.
Mickey Dime
Before his eyes, everything shimmered as if waves of intense heat were rising through the vault, but he felt no heat. The rows of machinery blurred. They appeared to ripple. The room seemed to be a mirage. He thought it might vanish just as a phantom oasis melted away from a thirsty traveler in the Sahara.
The racks of chain-hung fluorescent bulbs overhead went dark. Weaker yellow light, provided by irregularly placed and curiously shaped fixtures—not one like another—that had not been there a moment earlier, gave the vault a different and disturbing character. The shadows were more numerous, deeper, and sinister.
The machinery stood silent. The rounded masses of the boilers and the boxy chillers were sheathed in dust. Across the dirty floor lay a litter of fallen and broken fluorescent tubes, scraps of paper, rusting tools. Snarls of fur, scattered small bones, as well as intact skeletons of rats suggested that vermin had thrived here for a while, but not now.
The air felt cool, although not as cold as it should have been with no heat on a December night. Mickey smelled mold, damp concrete, an elusive rancid odor that came and went.
The manhole cover lay in its proper place, as if it had never exploded to the ceiling. Dull-red with rust and dust. The surrounding rubber gasket was cracked, crumbling.
Klick the Prick had vanished. The blanket and furniture straps that wrapped the body were gone.
Dead Jerry also gone. His little brother. Gone.
And the hand truck.
Gone.
Mickey’s mother had known everything. If this had happened to her, she would already have a theory to explain it.
No theories occurred to Mickey. He stood dumbstruck. Closed his eyes. Opened them. The room remained inexplicably changed.
He needed some aromatherapy to clear his mind.
He needed some time in the sauna.
He felt stupid. He had never before felt stupid.
His mother said stupidity should be a capital offense, except with so many stupid people everywhere you looked, there wouldn’t be enough steel in the world to build all the necessary guillotine blades or enough executioners to operate them.
He missed his mother. More than ever. He felt the loss of her. More than ever. Acutely.
Twyla Trahern
They were in the Cupp apartment, sharing their recent uncanny experiences, when it happened. It was like yet different from how the wall in Winny’s room rippled away to be replaced by a vision of abandonment and decay. An electronic keening seemed to come out of the bones of the building itself, and the ground under the Pendleton rumbled as it had done earlier. Twyla pulled Winny close when all around them the spacious living room blurred as if she were looking at it through rain-washed glass. The Victorian furniture, the fine stained-glass lamps, the classical busts on pedestals, the art and the ferns and the carpet all lost their sharp edges and details, seemed to be melting away. Only the people remained clear in an increasingly impressionistic scene, as if the room had been painted by Monet, the people by Rembrandt.
At the peak of this phenomenon, when the Cupp living room was little more than a colorful smear and the people were, by contrast, hyperrealistic, the experience became disorienting. Claustrophobia smothered Twyla, as if the space in which they stood were but a membrane collapsing around them, a plastic film in which they were being bundled and shrink-wrapped, but simultaneously she was also overcome by agoraphobia, equally certain that the Pendleton and the world itself would dissolve and plunge them into a lightless void. She saw Martha Cupp standing resolute, chin thrust forward, like some aging Joan of Arc seasoned by battlefields and faith, evidence of her fear confined to her eyes, the wide pupils like reflections of gun muzzles. Edna Cupp’s mouth was open not in a cry of alarm but in that ahhhh of wonder seen on children’s faces Christmas morning, her eyes shining with anticipation, as though throughout her life no thought of vulnerability had ever crossed her mind. Bailey tall and stalwart, eyes narrowed, seemed to regard the melting away of the room less with fear or wonder than with wary calculation, alert for the threat that would surely manifest at any moment. Dr. Ignis’s sweet face seemed incapable of masking his thoughts, and his fear was as evident as his amazement, his intellect perhaps for the first time overwhelmed by awe. Sparkle’s expression seemed to say here we go again, as though she must be long accustomed to such shocks, and Iris stood slump-shouldered, head bowed, hands over her ears to muffle the high-pitched electronic squealing. Twyla held fast to Winny not only for fear of losing him, but also as much because she needed him for support: Since his birth, he had been her still point in this dizzily turning world, the thing that made life’s struggles worthwhile, the one thing that convinced her that she had not wasted years of her life and had not debased herself by marrying Farrel Barnett.
The squealing in the walls and the rumbling crescendoed at the same instant.
Silence fell as if commanded by the sharp downstroke of an orchestra conductor’s baton. The surrounding smear at once resolved into a new reality.
Without lamps, the two crystal ceiling fixtures, and the cove lighting, the room was more dimly illuminated than before, but it wasn’t dark. Flanking doorways, the fireplace, and the windows were bronze wall sconces that had not been here a moment earlier, twelve of them in all, seven of which were aglow.
The furnishings were gone. The room lay empty but worse than empty—cheerless, desolate. The floral-pattern fabric covering the walls had been replaced—but not recently—by wallpaper that wouldn’t have coordinated with the sisters’ decor; it was yellowed with age, water-stained, mottled with mold, peeling. In several places, dry rot had turned the mahogany flooring to dust, revealing the concrete beneath.
For a moment, they all stood speechless, rendered mute by the impossibility of what had happened. Perhaps the others, like Twyla, anticipated another imminent change, this time back to the way things had been less than a minute previously.
Dr. Ignis was the first to speak, pointing toward the windows, which were no longer flanked by draperies, no longer washed by rain on this suddenly clear night. “The city!”
Twyla looked, saw only night where there should have been a sea of lights, and assumed that a power failure must have struck the metropolis, leaving the Pendleton to rely on its emergency generator. But something about the darkness was not right, and the others must have sensed it, too, because they all moved to the windows along with her and Winny.
The pale fire of the full moon should have revealed the ghost of a skyline, should have silvered some windows and sifted a faux dust on sills, ledges, gargoyles, and on the cross that topped the cathedral spire. The city wasn’t just afflicted by a black-out. The city was gone.
