by Dean Koontz
Witness
He was standing at the western-parapet balustrade when the steel bones and tendons of the building began to sing, which indicated that the fluctuations were soon to give way to the transition. One moment he stood in the rain and looked out upon the glowing city, the next moment in a cloudless night under a fat moon with the luminous pale-green meadow below, but then the rain and the great city once more, and then the world without cities, back and forth, as this moment in the past prepared to fling the residents of the Pendleton into the future and as a certain moment of the future attracted them with an inevitability equal to that of a black hole swallowing worlds.
The city vanished and did not return. The rain stopped, the sky cleared in that instant, the moon looked as cold as a ball of ice, and the building stood silent on Shadow Hill, overlooking the plain of hungry grass that undulated rhythmically although the night was windless. Witness was home. The strangers in the rooms below him were far from home and would remain here until the fluctuations began again and the entire mysterious process repeated, returning them to their time. Not all of them would make it home. Perhaps none of them.
One
Now the most important of all transitions has occurred. During the next ninety minutes, history will pivot toward me forever and ensure my dominion. I must allow no other outcome, and the path to triumph is clear. I exist here, and my existence is inevitable. All who have previously come to me have perished here or upon returning to their own time. Of these people who would dare to thwart me, all will die.
I cannot die. I am immortal.
In your wisdom, you understand my inevitability. The world cannot go on as it always has, infested with humanity and corrupted until it becomes a barren ball of rock. Send to me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and I will make of them the fodder and the seed bed of a new and better world.
25
Topper’s
Mac and Shelly Reeves had a window table in the restaurant, with a view of Shadow Street, where silver rain slashed through headlights and where stoop-shouldered pedestrians in foul-weather gear hurried past under bobbing umbrellas.
A bottle of good Cabernet Sauvignon, candlelight, and the high backs on their booth contributed to a romantic ambiance, and Shelly still daily stirred desire in Mac after twenty-two years of marriage. More important, as the years passed, his feelings for her became ever more tender, the physical aspect of love ever less important than the emotional side of it, though he didn’t anticipate that they would take a vow of celibacy together. And intellectually, they had always been an ideal match.
A booth at Topper’s was also a favorite place for them because it provided privacy, and both the staff and the clientele treated them like anyone else, not like celebrities. For over twenty years, their morning program, Mac and Shelly’s Breakfast Club, enjoyed by far the highest local-radio ratings during the 6:00 to 9:00 A.M. time slot. In a city with a smaller black population than some, their success in a vanilla format like a breakfast club made them even more recognizable.
Having recently been lured to a different station with a promise of tri-state syndication, they were currently in a three-week hiatus before launching their new program, which would be their old program, with the same Mac-and-Shelly shtick that was as much a part of their relationship off the air as on. For all these years, they had gotten up five days a week at 4:00 A.M. and had returned to bed at eight in the evening. During this break, however, they had gone wild—“Almost feral, dangerously close to the point where we might not be able to find our way back to civilization,” Mac had declared—staying up until ten, sometimes even to midnight, sleeping in until six, once even as late as ten past seven.
They were newcomers to the Pendleton, having purchased Apartment 3-G only ten months earlier. This evening, the comparative privacy of a booth at Topper’s was especially welcome because, as it turned out, their conversation drifted early to a discussion of their neighbors in that grand old residence.
The subject came up because, just as the maitre d’ said he would show them to their table, they had glimpsed Silas Kinsley and another man at the farther end of the foyer, donning their coats to brave the storm. Silas’s firm specialized in civil litigation, but until his retirement four years earlier, he had been their personal attorney. They loved Nora and missed her, as everyone did, and it was the occasional dinner at the Kinsley apartment that over the years convinced them to sell their home in the Oak Grove District and move here to Shadow Hill, in the true heart of the city.
Although seeing Silas had prompted them to wax on about some of their neighbors, they spent little time talking about him because he didn’t inspire gossip. Silas’s qualities were all endearing, and his sole eccentricity was an obsession with the history of the Pendleton, which seemed normal and harmless when compared to, say, the interests of their next-door neighbor, Fielding Udell. Just between themselves, Shelly and Mac called Udell Chicken Little or Chick for short.
She said, “I step out the front door this morning to get the paper, and Chick is there in the hall, picking up his usual humongous pile of publications. The delivery guy must love old Chick, a few more years and he’ll have put away a handsome retirement from that one account. So before I can grab our paper and duck back inside, Chick asks do I know what’s happening to the lousewort.”
“Did you fake a hearing-aid problem?”
“I don’t think I’ll try that one again. He knows we’re in radio, we need to have good hearing for that.”
“Sudden debilitating heart arrhythmia.”
“That’s your excuse. He’s not going to believe both of us have heart disease as young as we are.”
“So do you know what’s happening to the lousewort?”
“I said I’ve known a couple of louses but neither of them had warts.”
“You are my favorite wife. Then what did he say?”
“He said all kinds of louseworts are headed for extinction, and the consequences are catastrophic.”
“They always are. What is a lousewort, anyway?”
“Turns out it’s a plant. All kinds of grazing animals like it.”
“Cows?”
“Cows, sheep, goats, Bigfoot for all I know.”
“Is Bigfoot a grazing animal?”
“Well, he’s an omnivore, so he chows down on anything he wants—lousewort, cats, small children.”
“I have a theory about Bigfoot,” Mac said. “I know it’s highly controversial—but my theory is he doesn’t exist.”
“Radical. That’ll get you a full three hours on the weekend edition of Coast to Coast AM with Ian Punnett.”
“So what catastrophe exactly?”
“Seems that certain grasses thrive only in the vigorous presence of lousewort, and other grasses only thrive in an environment that includes pollen from those grasses. I may have that all wrong, since I was preoccupied at the time with thoughts of homicide. But the end-all is some kind of biological chain-reaction that results in the extinction of thousands of varieties of grass.”
“What are we going to use for lawns?”
“We don’t have a lawn in our apartment.”
“Don’t just think of yourself. What about suburbia?”
“If they don’t have to mow the lawn,” Shelly said, “they have more time to listen to radio. See here, I don’t believe you’re extrapolating from the lousewort to the big picture.”
“I assume Chick extrapolated for you.”
“He very kindly did. If we lose the grasses, we lose all the grazing animals. That means we lose our primary sources of meat, milk, cheese, wool, leather, bone meal, and antler racks to hang above hunting-lodge fireplaces. Famine ensues. And bad shoes.”
After a pause for wine, Mac said, “I saw Mickey Dime today in Butterworth’s.”
“That’s never going to sound like a men’s clothing store to me.”
“They were having a necktie sale.”
“Soun
ds like a waffle syrup.”
“Racks and racks of ties. I saw Dime, but he didn’t see me.”
Shelly said, “Baby, it’s uncanny how still you are when you’re pretending to be a mannequin.”
“He’s interested in the silk ties. But first he takes a moist towelette from a foil packet and washes his hands.”
With the snap of a forefinger, she pinged her wineglass for emphasis: “Just like I saw him do in the fresh-fruit aisle of Whole Foods. Did he also sniff the towelette?”
“Nearly inhaled it. Made me wonder if it was a cocaine-infused moist towelette.”
“The man does love the fragrance of those moist towelettes.”
“Once his hands are clean, he starts fingering the silk ties.”
“Fingering?”
Mac gave her a demonstration with his cloth napkin.
Fanning herself with the wine list as if just watching this performance inflamed her libido, Shelly said, “He’s a spooky dude.”
“He smelled some of them.”
“Smelled the ties? Tell me he didn’t lick them, too.”
“He didn’t. Maybe he wanted to. He was into those silk ties.”
“How long did this go on?”
“I watched maybe five minutes. But then I left. I didn’t want to be there for the climax.”
After the waitress stopped by to tell them the chef’s specials, Shelly said, “With a mother like his, poor Dime didn’t stand a chance of turning out normal.”
“Well, to be fair, we only met her once.” Speaking ill of the dead always made Mac uncomfortable. “She might’ve been having an off day.”
“Renata Dime told me she was immortal.”
“She died just the same.”
“I’ll bet it came as a surprise to her.”
“She meant immortal through her books,” Mac said.
“We both tried to read one, remember?”
He sighed. “It made my eyes bleed.”
Outside, a siren rose, and drivers curbed their vehicles where they could to facilitate the passage of a police patrol with its roof rack of emergency beacons swiveling blue-red-blue-red. As the cop car raced down Shadow Street, Mac Reeves looked past it, to the Pendleton at the summit. Although the police cruiser was neither coming from nor going to that grand old mansion, the place did not look the same to Mac, not as stately as it usually appeared, not as welcoming, and in fact inexplicably ominous. A sense of foreboding overcame him, and he shivered.
As observant as ever, Shelly said, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I don’t know. Maybe talking about Renata Dime put me off my mood.”
“Then we won’t talk about her anymore.”
26
Here and There
Mickey Dime
He didn’t know what had happened to the bodies. He didn’t know why the HVAC vault had changed. He didn’t know what to do next.
Finally he decided that he should go back to his apartment. The photographs of his mother, her furnishings, the things that she loved would bring him as close as he could get to her. Her belongings, her memory, would inspire him. Then he would know what to do.
And if that didn’t work, maybe the time had come for Sparkle and Iris. He felt rejected, after all, as he’d felt when the cocktail waitress humiliated him fifteen years earlier. Now the world was rejecting him. He had felt small and stupid when she dissed him, but so much better when he took what he wanted from her, her sister, and her girlfriend; his sense of self and well-being was sensationally restored.
When he stepped out of the vault, the basement corridor proved to be as changed as the room behind him. Filthy, littered. Half the ceiling lights dark and broken. Spongy-looking growths on the walls and ceiling, some black, others glowing yellow. The air smelled bad, nothing like the essence of lime or silk lingerie.
Disoriented, he turned right, away from the north elevator that he needed. Fragments of fluorescent lightbulbs crunched underfoot. His footsteps seemed to stir a foul, astringent odor from the litter on the floor.
Past the security room, past the superintendent’s apartment, a small TV hung in the corner, near the ceiling. Concentric circles of blue light pulsed outward from the center of the screen. After Mickey had taken eight or ten steps, some kind of robot voice came from the TV: “Adult male. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Basement. West wing. Exterminate. Exterminate.”
This was too much. The Pendleton fell to ruin in the wink of an eye. Dead Jerry and Klick the Prick disappeared. Nothing was the way it should be. And now some wiseguy was putting out a hit on him. Well, it didn’t work that way. Mickey killed, he didn’t get killed.
The strong act, the weak react. Mickey acted, drawing his pistol and blowing out the blue screen with a single shot.
He felt better, still confused but not completely disoriented. He realized he had gone the wrong direction.
Before turning back, he decided to have a look in the security room. He didn’t know how Vernon Klick’s body could have gotten back there from the HVAC vault, but it went somewhere, and this was as likely a place to look as any.
When he opened the door, he found the security room as changed as anything else, though not transformed in a similar way. Except for a thin layer of dust on the floor, the room was clean. The lights all worked. The coffee center and the under-the-counter refrigerator were gone. So were the chairs and the workstation. The walls were lined with computers, video screens, and racks of electronic devices that Mickey couldn’t identify, which sure as hell couldn’t have been installed in the short time since he had previously been here.
The equipment hummed, ticked, and blinked busily, as if the system took care of itself and didn’t need losers like Vernon Klick and Logan Spangler to monitor it. The guard’s corpse wasn’t there. Neither was the gun belt that Mickey had left with the intention of retrieving it later.
In the film of dust on the floor were flurries of footprints, all apparently left by the same pair of shoes.
Mickey didn’t know what to make of any of this. He wasn’t a police detective. He was the guy that homicide dicks tried and failed to track down. He knew how to avoid leaving evidence, but he didn’t have a clue how to connect pieces of evidence to solve a puzzle.
He didn’t want to learn, either. He didn’t want to change who he was. He loved who he was. He adored who he was.
If new facts seemed to upend your philosophy, you didn’t change what you believed. Only the weak changed their beliefs. The strong changed the facts. His mother said the best and the brightest didn’t alter their beliefs to conform to reality. They altered reality to conform to their beliefs. History’s greatest political visionaries just spent more and more money, exerted ever greater control over the educational system and the media, eliminated more and more dissidents as became necessary, until they molded society to fit their theory of an ideal civilization. Fools get eaten by reality. The wise put a choke collar and a leash on reality, and they make it heel.
Every time that he had heard his mom say those things, Mickey had been energized, thrilled. But now reality had done a sudden one-eighty on him; and he realized that he didn’t know how to get it back under control. His mom would have known. She had known everything. But though she had instructed Mickey how to think about reality, she hadn’t taught him anything about how to collar and leash-train it. Right now, reality seemed as slippery as a greased eel.
Once he was back in his own digs, with all his mom’s stuff around him, maybe he’d start to get his mind straight about this. Maybe she had taught him everything he needed to do to cope in a situation like this, not just the general principles of how to think about reality but also the specific techniques for controlling it. Surely she had taught him all that. He’d simply forgotten. Surrounded by mementoes of her, this confusion would dissipate, her wisdom would be recalled, and he would again be as a god.
He left the security room and walked the long creepily lighted corridor, past the HVAC vault. As he approached
the north elevator, another pulsing blue screen issued the same threat as the one he had shot. He shot this one, too.
When the elevator responded to the call button and the doors slid open, it wasn’t the car with which he was familiar. The bird mural was gone. The interior surfaces were all stainless steel, and panels in the ceiling shed a cold blue light. He didn’t like the new reality of the elevator. He didn’t like it at all.
He decided to take the stairs to the third floor.
Silas Kinsley
In the acid-yellow light, he remained in the shadows among the chillers, expecting the murderer to return. Through the open door came a loud, possibly computerized voice describing Dime, specifying his location, and seeming to call for his extermination, a sentiment with which Silas could concur. Then a gunshot.
He didn’t know if someone had shot Mickey Dime or if Dime had gunned down someone else. Reluctant to step from cover until he had a better grasp of the situation, he drew Vernon Klick’s pistol from a pocket of his raincoat and stood motionless, listening.
The changes in the vault didn’t surprise Silas. Previously he had reached the startling but inescapable conclusion that something went wrong with time in this building every thirty-eight years. By the evidence of filth and ruin around him, he inferred that he was no longer in the Pendleton of 2011 but in a future Pendleton of an unknown year, though he had no idea how long he would be here.
He was less disturbed by the changes than by the atmosphere in the room, which was worse than merely unwholesome. In their day, he and Nora traveled to some exotic locations, and the quality of this sour-yellow light reminded him of the smoky glow rising from granite bowls full of low-burning tallow, in a jungle-draped temple where the towering stone god smiled but not benignly and where the altar was stained with the blood of generations from before it became a tourist mecca. The shadows were sulfur-black, and they struck him as being not an absence of light but crouched forms, alive and hostile and waiting for their moment. The irregular radiant shapes weren’t only on walls and ceiling, like an archipelago of atomic-test islands, but also on some of the machinery. Squinting, he was able to see through the nearest patch of luminosity to its source, which seemed to be a colony of minute light-emitting fungi. The malodors of mold, damp concrete, scaling rust, rancid grease, and a faint vileness that might have been desiccated flesh hung on the air. If evil didn’t already lie in wait here, the vault certainly welcomed its coming.
