by Dean Koontz
If he could have pulled the velvety shadows around him like a cloak of invisibility, he wouldn’t have done it, because he could be sure that there was already something hostile wrapped in them and waiting there for him.
When he turned the corner into the next row of machinery, he saw Iris standing in front of a huge bubble or blister that formed in the corner where two walls met. It was about four feet wide and seven feet high, and it bellied out from the corner as if it were a giant water balloon. The blister glowed faintly, not nearly as bright as the fungus light, more green than yellow, and you didn’t need creepy music to tell you it was trouble.
Winny didn’t want to surprise Iris into flight, but he didn’t want to shout a big hello, either. He sidled up to her, not quite near enough to reach out and touch her, in case that the prospect of being touched would be enough to chase her off again.
The girl’s face was zombie-green, but only because of the pale light from the blister. Her eyes were very wide, and they shone with that eerie light, too. Her lips moved, as if she were speaking to someone, but no sound came from her.
From back toward the middle of the long vault came the overhead rustle as something advanced another foot or two before pausing to listen.
While Winny tried to think what to say—his usual problem—he looked more closely at the blister and saw that it was a moist and tightly stretched membrane webbed with what appeared to be veins, translucent but not transparent. The light within it was very dim, but he saw something in there, something big and strange.
So the blister was a kind of womb. Something would sooner or later come out of it. He hoped later.
Iris continued to move her lips in silent speech. Since she wasn’t actually saying anything, Winny wondered if maybe she was mouthing the words that something in the blister was sending to her telepathically.
“Iris,” he whispered, and she turned her head toward him.
One
If you could see the power of my creation, if you could be one of those who lived in the Pendleton and could have come with this current crop, you would stand in awe of the brute strength and the exquisite regimentation of this new world. Then you would know that it is worthy of your vision, that you alone among the human herd—you alone in all of human history—not only saw what must be done to make things right but took the correct steps to bring about the ultimate revolution. You did not expect me to redesign nature. You would have been satisfied if I had only trimmed back the cancerous mass of humanity. But I know your heart, as I know the hearts of all men, and I am certain that if you could see what I have done, you would approve. I will send a messenger through whom you may see, even if secondhand, the wonder of the One.
32
Here and There
Twyla Trahern
When the elevator doors opened, Twyla said in surprise, “Martha, Edna,” and Sparkle asked, “What’re you doing here, where are you going?”
Even as the questions were being asked, Twyla realized they were not going to be answered. Something was terribly wrong with the Cupp sisters, as well as with the security chief. Martha’s face was less seamed with age than before. Not younger. Just fuller. She was bloated, like someone with a bad heart that caused fluid retention, and her skin had a yellow cast even in the elevator’s blue light. Edna was also bloated, and her flesh, like that of the other two, appeared to be soft, pitted with large pores, almost spongy, perhaps akin to the flesh of the six-legged baby-thing that Sparkle had described.
Their eyes were what chilled Twyla and most emphatically declared that they were no longer human. Lotus-petal eyes of people who had forgotten all the days of their lives, crocodilian eyes of insatiable hunger, they were smoky as if with early cataracts yet burning with implacable hatred.
Sparkle was nearer the elevator than Twyla, but she backed away when she registered the nature of those eyes.
Twyla brought up her pistol, gripping it with both hands, not really cool about shooting people she knew, even if they were not people anymore, but she would do whatever was necessary if they moved toward her. She fully expected them to rush out of the elevator, but they only stood there, staring intently, as though waiting for the doors to slide shut and for the car to carry them down to whatever hell might be their destination.
The murderous fury in the three figures was palpable, which made their restraint significant, though Twyla didn’t know what to deduce from it. Their arms hung slack, but their hands worked ceaselessly, as if with the urge to rend and strangle. Black fingernails. Edna’s mouth hung slightly open, and from what Twyla could see, the old woman’s teeth were also black. These two apparent women and Spangler were now in fact creatures more suited to swamps and fetid jungle ponds, to damp subcellars, to grottoes where stalactites dripped like snake fangs leaking venom.
In a voice recognizably his but wet and viscid, as if filtered through a mucus-clotted throat, the thing that had been Logan Spangler declared through black teeth, “I shall be.”
Twyla didn’t know what that meant, if it meant anything at all, whether it was a prelude to an attack or an invitation to become as they were.
She wasn’t holding the gun steady. It almost seemed to be alive, jumping in her hands. If she had to fire it, the muzzle would kick upward, it always kicked upward, and because her arms were so loose, she wouldn’t hit anyone, she’d put the round high in the wall. She made an effort to lock her wrists, lock her elbows, and bring the front sight low on target.
When Spangler repeated those words, Martha spoke them in time with him, in a gurgling voice, as if they were two individuals with one mind: “I shall be.”
The elevator doors should have closed automatically by now. But apparently the house kept them open, the house or whatever possessed the house.
Logan and Martha and now Edna repeated the three words, their voices synchronized: “I shall be.” And again with greater insistence: “I shall be!” Yet again with some of the fury so evident in their eyes: “I SHALL BE!”
Sparkle backed into the open doorway of Gary Dai’s apartment, prepared to turn and run.
On Martha’s chin and along her left cheek to her ear, a series of tiny mushrooms formed out of her flesh, like an outbreak of adolescent acne.
As Twyla also eased away from the elevator, the Edna thing formed its mouth into a parody of a kiss. Several dark projectiles spurted from between its lips, hissed past Twyla’s face, and thudded into the wall.
Reflexively, Twyla squeezed the trigger. The round took the Edna thing high in the chest, didn’t seem to faze it, and the stainless-steel doors slid shut.
As the elevator car hummed down into the shaft, Twyla spun to see what had been spat at her. They were slightly larger and longer than Brazil nuts, dark and oily, quivering as if with life. Two were embedded in the Sheetrock and seemed to be trying to burrow deeper, but having a hard time of it. Two others were on the floor, creeping like inchworms, seeming to search for something, maybe for food, which in their case was probably a synonym for flesh.
Stepping into the hall from the open door to the Dai apartment, Sparkle said, “What was that about? ‘I shall be’?”
Shaken, Twyla said, “I don’t know.”
“Why didn’t they kill us?”
“I don’t know.”
Indicating the apparently expiring things in the wall and on the floor, Sparkle wondered, “What if they’d hit your face?”
“They’d be in my brain, I’d be like the Cupp sisters.”
Sparkle said, “The kids,” and hurried toward the south stairs, as the sound of the descending elevator car went on and on.
Winny
When Iris turned her head toward him, Winny saw that her eyes didn’t glow green when she looked away from the cocoon. He realized that he had expected to see the light in them, coming from them, and he was relieved that Iris was still Iris. Relieved but still in the grip of terror. He might live in terror for the rest of his life, even if he survived to a hundred, even af
ter there was no more reason to be afraid, like a happy lunatic might laugh all day and night even when nothing was funny.
Iris stared directly at him, into his eyes, which she had never done before. Her lips continued to move, although she wasn’t saying anything.
“What?” he asked. “What is it?”
She found her voice. “The powerful fall, but I endure.”
From the corner of his eye, Winny became aware of the cocoon growing brighter. When he turned to look at it, he saw the membrane becoming more transparent, like the lenses of those self-adjusting sunglasses became clear when you went from a bright day to a dark room, like something in bad-dream shadows relentlessly became more visible when you desperately wanted it to remain obscure—and the figure within clarified.
The veined blister was more of a sac than it was a spun cocoon, full to the top with luminous green fluid in which a pale dead man floated. The guy was naked, his mouth open in a scream from which all sound had long ago escaped, eyes wide in an expression of perpetual horror. He drifted like a specimen in a jar of formaldehyde, a trophy preserved as if for study by some professor from another world.
“The powerful fall, but I endure,” Iris repeated.
Winny realized that the girl wasn’t speaking for herself but for whatever had preserved the dead man, for whatever had earlier sung to them from within the walls. It spoke to Iris telepathically, as it had tried to communicate with Winny when he’d felt as if baby spiders were hatching in his brain.
When the dead man’s blank eyes refocused on Winny, he thought it was a trick of light and of his spook-haunted mind. But the specimen was not dead, after all, perhaps just paralyzed, drowned in the green fluid yet alive, not breathing, not one bubble of air escaping past his lips, in suspended animation, alive but surely driven insane by his condition. He was able to do nothing but refocus his field of vision from whatever mad delusions plagued him to the fear-struck boy who stood gaping like a rube at the prime-exhibit stall in a carnival freak show.
The anguish in those eyes was so great that Winny was smothered by it. He felt as if he, too, were sealed in a jar of preservative, put up for the winter in the dark pantry of something that ate small boys. When at last he breathed, he was half surprised that he didn’t inhale a fluid.
With a gulp of air he also breathed in recognition. The man in the sac was that mean neighbor, the one who could wither you with a look, whose usual expression seemed to say he saw no real difference between children and vermin. He’d been a politician, a senator or something, and almost a prisoner, and now he was a prisoner, body and mind and soul.
The senator’s eyes said Help me! They said For God’s sake get me out of here, punch a hole in this sac, drain it, give me air again and life!
But that still, small voice in Winny told him that if he drained the man out of the sac, the specimen collector would know at once and be furious. The specimen collector would bottle him and Iris for revenge, or sprinkle them with something that turned them inside out the way that salt did to caterpillars, or light them on fire to watch them thrash in agony. Winny had known a kid who was that way, who did those things to insects, a boy named Eric, and the creature that sang inside the walls and that stalked this Pendleton seemed to be Eric’s kindred spirit.
No longer speaking for anyone but herself, Iris whispered, “I’m scared.”
When Winny turned his attention from the senator, Iris was not only meeting his eyes but also clearly seeing him as never before. His fear-throttled heart had been thumping as if frantic to free itself from a clutching fist; suddenly, though it beat no slower, it seemed to break free from captivity. Now twined with the fear was a kind of wild excitement, nothing as magnificent as joy, simply a fragile gladness that she needed him and seemed to trust him. There was no boy-girl thing in this, only the sweet satisfaction that he had a purpose of real value, someone to help who needed help, and a chance to prove to himself that he was not the loser that his father thought he must be.
He dared to take Iris’s hand, and she dared to let him. He led her what he thought must be north along what he assumed to be the west wall of the immense room.
They had taken only a few steps, out of shadows into a drizzle of yellow light, when a noise overhead drew their attention to the ceiling. High up there, snaking among clustered runs of pipes and past colonies of radiant fungi, was something at least as large as a man but sleeker. In spite of its size, it traveled the ceiling with the confidence of a cockroach.
Winny whispered, “Run,” and pulled Iris into cloaking shadows, away from the wall and among the palisades of ancient machines and storage racks and things unknown.
Dr. Kirby Ignis
Out there in the night land, one moment the sky was a timeless black sea and the stars were ice adrift, the air uninhabited. At ground level, nature, radically redesigned, stood as still as if it were a colossal mechanism temporarily denied the power to operate.
The next moment, the sky remained a timeless sea and every star a point of ice, but the air welcomed back the flying creatures that had in unison flung themselves to the ground, most small but others large, all of them soaring repeatedly toward—and repeatedly swooping away from—the seductive moon. Down the western slope of Shadow Hill, across the grand sweep of the plain where once a city stood, to the dark horizon at the curve of the earth, trillions of blades of tall luminous grass moved as one, swaying as if to the lazy beat of some Hawaiian song.
Earlier, Padmini had said that this strange new natural world, when falling into perfect stillness, seemed to be in contemplation, as if it were Gaea, a planetary female consciousness, who required perfect stillness in all her many manifestations in order to meditate upon some grand thought that had just occurred to her. As fanciful an idea as that might be, minute by minute it seemed to make more sense to Kirby. And when all living things beyond the window suddenly moved as one, resuming their familiar rhythms, he understood what he saw before him and how it might have come to exist. He knew whose work might have been the crucible of this Gaea’s creation and with what intention it might have been done.
The chill that pierced him was a colder fear than any that he had known before. But no. Not fear. Or not fear alone. Also awe. He yielded his mind to a suddenly perceived truth so grand in character, so formidable in power, that no matter how terrible the world beyond the window might be, he could not help but also find it mesmerizing and darkly alluring.
If this Gaea had indeed gone still in contemplation, he thought he knew what realization might have occurred to her and what decision she might have reached.
Sparkle Sykes
They hurried down the winding south stairs, a stone throat that swallowed and swallowed them. The limestone walls, the decorative bronze handrail, and the honed-marble stairs were well-known to her yet strange, the way that dreams distorted familiar places and lent mystery to the mundane.
This Pendleton at history’s end, its walls shot through with strange life, seemed to be growing, no longer merely a Beaux Arts mansion but a sprawling castle, remaining stone yet expanding with organic vigor. That impression might have been largely a consequence of being separated from Iris. Every minute Sparkle remained apart from her daughter, she imagined the girl dwindling into darkness just as an astronaut, untethered from a space shuttle, would recede into the void, adrift unto eternity.
But the sense that the building might of its own power be able to unfold new rooms and corridors, perhaps new levels, seemed to be supported when they reached the ground floor and heard the elevator car, with the Cupp sisters and Logan Spangler, still humming-hissing down, surely long past the basement.
The first room along the south hall was the enormous catering kitchen where meals were prepared to be served at special events in the banquet room off the lobby. Under more of the ubiquitous luminous fungus were great architectures of tattered cobwebs but no spiders, stainless-steel appliances now as dull and mottled as galvanized tin, and three rectangular cen
ter islands behind which a child might lie hidden. At the farther end of the kitchen stood a half-open door to a storage room that couldn’t be entered from the hallway.
Twyla with the pistol, Sparkle following with the flashlight, entered the space, wary but quick, and abruptly the quiet gave way to a chorus of threatening sounds from the sinks: insistent voices in an unknown language, hissing and gurgling, and slithery noises as though serpents were in the drains and rising. Around them, diabolic creatures woke from slumber. Through the grimy view windows of the four ovens, things only half seen thrashed in slow motion, gray tentacular forms sliding over the tempered glass, perhaps having invaded those compartments from the walls behind or perhaps having been seeded there through vents. Inside the upper cabinets, something followed the women around the room, rattling the doors as it brushed against the backs of them, as though it would at any moment fling one open and spring at them. Overhead, moldering joists creaked as if a great weight burdened them, metal ductwork twanged and rattled, and dust filtered down through exhaust-vent screens. From Sparkle’s hand the flashlight beam jumped here, there, back again, and Twyla kept changing her mind about which sounds to track with the pistol.
