by Dean Koontz
“Beats me.”
“You think anyone’s still around to answer the call?”
“So far, I’d say no. So far.”
The door to Fielding Udell’s apartment was locked. The bell didn’t work. Bailey knocked loudly. No one answered.
Bailey shouted through the door: “Mr. Udell? Mr. Udell? It’s Bailey Hawks. I live in 2-C.” He waited. Then: “Mr. Udell, we’re all getting together in the Cupp apartment, riding this out together.”
When the only reply proved to be silence, Kirby said, “Maybe he was out of the building when it happened.”
“I don’t think he leaves his apartment much.”
“You want to break down the door, see if he’s in trouble?”
Bailey thought about it for a moment. “You know this guy?”
“I’ve run into him once or twice.”
“He’s pretty eccentric.”
“Eccentric is one word for it,” Kirby said.
“I’m thinking what if, like me and like Martha, he was packing a gun when the leap happened. The way Udell is, if we break down the door and he’s armed, either he might get shot, or me, maybe both.”
They went to the south stairs, at the west end of the hallway, and descended to the second floor.
Witness
He stood in what might once have been the library or the study, to one side of the open door to the living room, listening as the women helped one another to keep their courage strong.
Through the security-system communicator in his right ear, he heard the alarm and the call for extermination every time it sounded. There was a period, far in the past, when Witness was the one who did the required killing. Those few hardy souls who survived the Pogrom and subsequently survived the Fade tended to seek shelter in the Pendleton when they came upon it, for this building alone seemed to offer recognizable refuge in a changed world. But these final walls were for those people the walls of a trap. Witness made a good first impression on the ragged and weary survivors, because he looked like them, not like a Pogromite. Once millions in number, the Pogromites had dwindled to a few in those days, because they had massacred long and well, and therefore were without sufficient work to justify their existence in large numbers. He welcomed the people who escaped the Pogrom, invited them into his supposed fortress, and when they trusted him, he killed them ruthlessly.
No survivors had chanced by in many years, and he no longer killed. His only job for a long time had been to stand as witness, the sole repository of the history of the world before the Pogrom, and curator of this honored building.
Considering his solitude and the terrible unrelenting weight of his knowledge, his awareness of how the world had once been and his daily experience of what it had become, perhaps it should have been expected that he would change. Gradually he was overcome by a sense of grievous loss. Something like remorse arose in him, and even pity.
One hundred sixteen days previously, the melancholy routine of his isolated existence was interrupted. The first fluctuations began, those inexplicable flashbacks to the Pendleton as it had once been, in 1897, standing high on this hill but in a smaller version of the city that eventually grew. The fluctuations lasted two days, and for flickering moments the present and that particular moment of the past briefly occupied the same point on the continuum of time. Then the transition occurred, flinging Andrew North Pendleton, his wife, and their two children into this merciless future where the perpetually mutating denizens included no species that didn’t kill, a world of ceaseless violent predation.
Witness had not slaughtered the children and the wife. The sole remaining Pogromite in this region, perhaps in the entire world, had attacked little Sophia. It had administered the first paralyzing bite and the injection that began the family’s destruction. Other threats ensured that, when the transition reversed, only the father had been carried back to 1897, for only he remained alive.
Witness now knew from experience that this mysterious phenomenon occurred every thirty-eight years in the past, beginning in December 1897. Curiously, it was thirty-eight days between the experiences for him, at this end of the journey. The time separating the events in the past made it difficult for people then to see the pattern. But for Witness, the shorter interval here lent a sense of accelerating momentum to these incidents.
Thirty-six days after the Pendleton family transitioned to this time, the fluctuations began again, and following the Pendletons by thirty-eight days, the Ostocks and their live-in household staff were in essence shipwrecked on this shore. Thirty-eight days after the Ostocks, a bewildered man named Ricky Neems came out of the past alone, a construction worker from 1973, who met a gruesome fate shortly after his arrival.
Each group transported from earlier eras, at least those who survived, remained in this future 38 percent less time than the previous crew. The dead remained forever. Andrew Pendleton and his family were here the longest, for 380 minutes. The Ostocks endured approximately 235, which was 38 percent less. The transition in which Ricky Neems perished lasted about 146 minutes. If the pattern held, the current travelers would be stranded here 90.6 minutes, which was 62 percent of 146.1. Witness didn’t understand the reason for the periodicity or the importance of the number 38, but he was certain of the length of each transition because it was part of his nature to be as aware of the passage of time as was any clock.
Likewise, he didn’t know the cause of this event, whether it was a natural phenomenon without meaning or whether there was a purpose of some kind behind it. If the Pendleton had by chance been built over a fault in space-time, all was happenstance. But whether chance or not, the forces involved were beyond Witness’s comprehension, of such immense power that they could fold time to bring different eras together, which was impossible according to the laws of physics—or at least impossible according to the laws of physics as they were thought to be.
His growing sense of increasing momentum led him to expect an approaching crescendo, not merely an end to these phenomena but a consummation beyond his ability to imagine. Maybe the violence he had witnessed for so long, the destruction of civilization worldwide, shaped his expectations, and maybe he was wrong, but he believed the end of these transitions, when it came, would be cataclysmic, worse than anything he had seen in his life.
Standing in the deserted library, listening to the women in the next room, he thought he would like them very much if he knew them better. He liked them some already, well enough that he hoped they might not perish here, although the chances of any of them living through the next ninety minutes was remote. He would not kill them, but he could not save them, either.
Tom Tran
In the west hallway of the ground floor, Tom seized Padmini’s hands and kissed them as he thanked her profusely for saving him from the spawn of the mass grave at Nha Trang or whatever it had been. She called it rakshasa, which she said was a race of demons, goblins, and though he didn’t know much about Hinduism, Tom thought that might be as good an explanation as any for the creature.
“Baba,” she said, “what has happened? Do you know why everything has changed?”
Baba, she’d told him, was an affectionate form of address used in India when speaking to little children or old men. Only forty-six, but more than twice her age, Tom Tran took no offense. He sometimes thought of Padmini as the daughter he’d never had. Anyway, her sweet nature ensured that only the most contentious cranks could work up any animosity toward her.
“In my experience,” he said, releasing her hands, “the world falls apart from time to time, and madness happens, but not madness like this.”
“I locked the main doors from the street,” she said.
“Good, good,” he said, glancing at the courtyard beyond the French doors, where the rakshasa had disappeared beyond masses of strange vegetation.
“I was going to go down to security, see what he knows.”
“Yes,” Tom said, beginning to regain some of his composure. “That’s what we sho
uld do.”
Together they hurried along the inexplicably filthy and poorly lighted corridor toward the south stairs, whereupon he noticed that high on the end wall hung a foot-square TV that had never been there previously. The mounting platform had partially failed, and the TV hung at an angle, the screen dark.
As they approached the stairwell door, it opened, startling them to a stop, and Silas Kinsley entered the hallway with a pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other.
“Mr. Kinsley,” Padmini said, “the world’s gone crazy, khiskela, everything is off, shifted.”
“Yes, I know,” the attorney said. “What have you seen?”
“Demons,” Tom replied and wondered what it meant that Silas Kinsley seemed not in the least surprised by that word.
Padmini said, “We were going down to security, to see what Vernon Klick might know.”
“He’s dead,” the attorney informed them. “The security room isn’t like it used to be. There’s nothing for us down there.”
Iris
They are too many, and they seem to talk all at once, and they have too much to say. Iris is not able to keep the forest real around her and follow the Bambi way with so much talking, the voices buzzing at her, buzzing. She doesn’t just hear the voices but feels them sawing in her ears, words with sharp little teeth, none of them soft voices right now but worried and rough. The words choke her, too, the words like a cord tightening around her throat, the way the trap line nearly strangled Friend Hare, so she finds it harder and harder to breathe.
The old woman has a gun, and guns are bad. The hunter killed Bambi’s friend Gobo, wounded Bambi in the shoulder, all the blood and Bambi wanting to lie down and sleep, just sleep, except sleep would have been death.
Iris keeps her hands over her ears for a while, but then she is afraid that she won’t hear the scream of the jaybird if it comes. She must be able to hear it, because the jay, with its scream, warns the whole forest when danger is near, when the hunter is among the trees.
Not daring to look up, certain to be overwhelmed by the sight of all these people talking, and everything changed, nothing as it ought to be, she focuses on the floor. Head bowed, arms folded across her chest, hands in her armpits, she tries to be as small and compact as she can, hoping not to be noticed.
The cats are on the floor again, nobody cuddling them, prowling around. She watches them because they make her think of the animals in the forest. She remembers the wonderful female deer like Faline and Aunt Ena and Aunt Nettla and Marena, and she is calmed when she keeps them in her mind.
One of the cats undoes Iris’s calm when it looks at her from a few feet away, and she sees that its orange eyes are changed, all black like pools of ink. The cat is moving different from the way it moved before, slower, not as graceful, as if it’s sick. It shudders away from her. The other cat appears in her line of sight, and it also has strange black eyes. It opens its mouth, in which something is wriggling, as if the cat caught a mouse with six tails, the gray tails slithering back and forth across its teeth.
The forest isn’t here anymore, and it’ll never be here in this room again because there are too many voices and too many changes, everything different, even the cats, nothing normal, nothing safe. The forest must be found somewhere else, away from the worried voices and the grinning cats.
As quiet as Friend Hare, quicker even than the squirrel, Iris slips out of the room, through an archway, trying to see the young beeches and goldenrod and blackthorns and alders, seeking the safe glade where sprays of hazel, furze, and dogwood weave together and the sun coming through them is a golden web, the safe and secret glade where Bambi was born.
Bailey Hawks
They didn’t search the second floor with care, only toured it quickly. Bailey, Twyla, Winny, Sparkle, Iris, and Kirby lived on this level and were accounted for. According to Sparkle, her immediate neighbors, the Shellbrooks in 2-H, were on vacation, as were the Cordovans in 2-E. Apartment 2-I was empty and for sale. Rawley and June Tullis in 2-D, the owners of Topper’s, put in long hours at the restaurant; both would have been at work when the leap occurred.
Bailey called out repeatedly, received no answer. He and Kirby went down the north stairs to the ground floor, where they saw three people near the doors to the lobby, all coming this way along the corridor. Bailey recognized Padmini Bahrati, and then Tom Tran and Silas Kinsley in rain gear.
The five of them met in front of the lavatories that were used primarily by people attending events in the banquet room. Because the fungus light here reminded Bailey of oil lamps with mica lenses playing off sandstone walls in a certain Afghanistan-desert grotto used as a weapons cache by the Taliban, he felt more than ever that this was not merely an adventure in time travel but also a war of long duration into which they had been plunged. None of their people had died here yet, as far as he knew, but hostilities could commence at any moment. Judging by the haunted look of them, Padmini, Tom, and Silas felt the same.
Winny
He wasn’t aware of Iris leaving until he glanced toward the girl and saw that she was already beyond the archway, at the farther end of the adjoining room, a shadowy figure moving through veils of the creepy yellow light.
In most of the books that Winny read, there was always a hero, sometimes more than one. Of course he identified with the hero, not with the bad guy. Being a bad guy was easy, but being a hero was hard. For a while now, Winny had realized that always taking the harder challenge was the way to success and happiness. His mom loved songwriting, but getting the lyrics and the melody right didn’t come easily. She worked long hours, composing, perfecting. But she was happy and successful. She qualified as a hero in her own way. Winny’s dad, Farrel Barnett, couldn’t be called a villain exactly. He didn’t go around blowing up churches or setting fire to puppies, or hacking old ladies to death with an axe. But you couldn’t call him a hero, either, because he too often took the easy way. Getting naked with any bimbo that winked at him was a lot easier than being faithful to his wife. Winny had seen him drunk sometimes with his buddies. Getting plastered was about as easy as anything you could do. And ragging your son about being more manly, in front of everyone—that was easy, too. The hard thing was being the one getting ragged and just smiling through it. Sending a copy of your latest publicity photo was a lot easier than coming to see your kid and maybe taking him to an amusement park or something. Winny’s dad wasn’t a villain-level bad guy, but he was a little bit over there on the dark side. Once you were over there, it was easier to slide a lot farther down. Winny didn’t want to go the easy way because he wanted to be happy. In spite of being famous, rich, and adored by millions of fans, Farrel Barnett wasn’t happy. Winny could see how unhappy his dad was, which made him sad and angry and afraid. He always thought something terrible was going to happen to the old man, and he didn’t want to see what it might be. He couldn’t tell his dad to take the hard challenges instead of the easy ones, because he didn’t want to have his face shoved in a toilet bowl. One of Farrel’s hanger-on drinking buddies got in a fight with him once, both of them stupid drunk, and old Farrel shoved the poor guy’s face in a toilet. Fortunately it had been flushed before the dunking. Winny couldn’t save his dad. All he could do was avoid what was easy, make the hard choices, and hope for the best.
For that reason he dashed after Iris as she disappeared through a doorway at the end of the adjoining room. Just because he did the hard thing didn’t make him a hero already. He was at the bottom of a thousand-foot cliff, and the heroes were at the top, and he’d hardly begun to climb. For one thing, a hero needed not only to be brave but also to think smart. The smart thing would have been to alert the others that Iris was running off, but he didn’t think to cry out until he was through the archway into the adjacent room. Then before he could say anything, his mom and Mrs. Sykes and the two old ladies all shouted at once. For another thing, a smart hero would not assume anything, would be sure of his facts, but Winny assumed—stupid, stupid�
��that they were shouting at him and at Iris, that they were in pursuit. He kept going, dashed out of the second room, sprinted along a hallway, and ahead of him, Iris shouldered through a swinging door. He hurried after her across the kitchen, into a laundry room, through the back door of the Cupp apartment, and into the short west hall at the south end of the third floor.
Iris was gone. She hadn’t been far ahead of Winny. If she had turned the corner into the long south hall, he would still hear her footsteps. Silence.
To Winny’s left was the elevator, from which he had barely escaped earlier. If Iris had gone into the waiting car, she might be bug food already.
On his right was the entrance to Gary Dai’s apartment. The door had been broken down but not recently.
Suddenly a voice came from in there, high and sweet, a girl’s voice, probably Iris’s, though he’d never heard her say anything. She was singing a tune, no lyrics, just a lot of na-na-na, la-la-la, and like that. He called her name in a loud whisper, and then louder, but Iris didn’t answer. The singing wasn’t the hopscotch-jumprope-happy kind. This was the kind of singing that, if you tracked it to its source, you might find a little girl in a moldy old burial dress, her skin pitted and green, with lots of coffin splinters and dirt between her teeth.
No one had followed him out of the Cupp apartment. Where was his mom? Mrs. Sykes?
If you were going to make a big deal about doing the hard thing, then once you started doing it, you couldn’t stop when the hard thing became too hard, when your mommy wasn’t there to back you up. That was big-time sissy, and if you were going to quit that way, you might as well find a toilet and shove your own face into it.
The singing sounded like a girl, all right, but like a girl who was up to something, because there was this sort of sea-siren sound to it, like a mermaid luring idiot sailors toward jagged rocks that would sink them. Winny wasn’t a sailor, and he wasn’t old enough to get all sexed up by some hot siren. And Iris was for sure no mermaid, she was just this messed-up girl who was going to get herself killed. Winny in the quick, when he either gave it or he didn’t, decided there was nothing to go back to except the Mrs. Grace Lyman wrestling team, a saxophone as big as he was, and a career in music. He crossed the threshold, walking on the broken-down door, which wobbled under him, and braved forward through the fungus light, seeking the singer.
