Chapter 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.

From the hallway beyond the open door, a computer voice again described Mickey Dime and announced his location. It might also have called for his extermination, as before, but another shot rang out, followed by silence.

Cautiously, Silas moved through the forest of machines and into the clearing at the center of which lay the manhole. The wrapped body of the guard and the hand truck with its burden were gone, which must mean that they had not made the leap from the Pendleton of 2011 to this later version of the building.

He had seen the iron cover explode off the manhole and to the ceiling, then fall and roll away into the gloom, as if the Fates were reluctant to call heads or tails, yet now the disc was in place. He supposed the hole remained uncovered in 2011, where that event had occurred. Between then and now, repairs must have been made to the hinges.

Still holding the pistol in his right hand, with his left he flipped up the ring-grip from its niche and pulled the heavy rusted cover aside. The gasket had deteriorated. Chunks of crumbling rubber fell away into the darkness below.

Rising from the lava pipe, something fluttered against his face, and he recoiled before he realized that it was nothing alive, nothing of substance. No draft would wash across him in such tight rhythmic waves; therefore, it must be pulses of some energy, perhaps a weak lingering residue of the great rushing blueness that had gushed out of the hole earlier. Far down in the shaft, scattered snakes of blue light formed, wriggled around the curving surface, were extinguished, and new ones were born. As the energy fluttered against him, he felt his belt buckle hum against his abdomen, and in his shirt pocket, his metal-rimmed reading glasses twitched feebly.

If part of the explanation for this event involved a magnetic field, he supposed that the lava pipe must be the upper section of a complicated transmission line leading all the way down to the very magnetic core of the earth itself. But he could not begin to imagine why only living creatures and their immediate possessions were flung forward in time, though that was evidently the case.

However it happened, they weren’t stranded here. Andrew North Pendleton had made it home again to his time, even if his wife and children did not. Of the nine members of the Ostock family and the seven members of their household staff who had been brought to this future, five of the former and three of the latter had returned to 1935 after their ordeal here—although only to be murdered by the butler, Nolan Tolliver.

With his left hand, he fished from a pocket the small flashlight that he had taken from the guard’s utility belt in the security room, before the change. He intended to make his way upstairs, where other residents must be reeling from the shock of what had happened. The history that he would share might give them a little hope if nothing else: We will go home again, those of us who live until the event reverses itself. A little hope but not a certainty.

The crisp beam of the LED flashlight revealed scattered bones and skulls—and a few complete skeletons—of rats. They were white hieroglyphics on the gray floor, symbols awaiting translation.

Perhaps the pistol gave Silas a foolish kind of courage, but when intuition told him there was something important to discover here before he went upstairs, he hesitated only briefly before moving away from the door to the hall. Without all the facts, you couldn’t win in a courtroom, and in this case, his life and those of all his neighbors were on trial.

He stepped carefully to avoid crushing the rat bones underfoot, proceeding deeper into the enormous room, playing the light across the hulking machines. When the beam touched a formation of luminous fungi, the colony throbbed more brightly for a moment, and there was a sensuous quality to its response, as if it took pleasure from the contact or perhaps knew pain.

Sparkle Sykes

Standing at the windows of the Cupps’ living room, watching the plain of luminous pale-green grass sway in the moonlight as if timing its changes of direction to a lazy metronome, listening to the urgent conversation of the others, Sparkle felt that she would get through this alive, that however she was meant to die, this was not the night or the place.

If some power so colossal as to change reality could bring them here, wherever here might be, then it could take them back again to where they had begun, to where they belonged. Life-changing lightning of the figurative kind could strike in series, just like the real father-killing, mother-killing kind.

A sense of the uncanny prickled the nape of her neck, but that was a reaction to the deep strangeness of the scene, not a symptom of fear. She had no fear for herself. Her life had been so shot through with bolts of fate that of necessity she long ago resigned herself to destiny, controlling what she could and refusing to worry about the rest. She had allowed herself to be afraid only of the lightning that killed her father and her mother, and now even that terror was behind her. If suddenly they found themselves in the lovely Pendleton as it ought to be, with a fierce storm raging over the city, she would go downstairs and into the courtyard, to stand gazing up calmly and with complete trust at the sky, confident that however she might be meant to meet her death, it would not take her until the moment that, from her birth, it had been ordained to do so.

Professor Talman Ringhals, mescaline poisoning, Iris, and other metaphorical lightning strikes blazed new paths through life for Sparkle, and this bizarre event was just the latest. She accepted it quicker than did her neighbors because for some months she had felt that she was overdue for another bolt.

Nearly thirteen years earlier, when she found herself pregnant with Iris, her small inheritance no longer was sufficient to pay both living expenses and tuition. She dropped out of college, intending to get a job as a receptionist or clerk. Although she had never before bought a lottery ticket, she purchased two on the same day, and the second one paid her $245,000 only one week later. After taxes, her nest egg was enough to carry her for four or five years, even with the special care that Iris required; therefore, she decided not to return to the university, but instead embarked upon the work that she had hoped to pursue since shortly after she was orphaned on that stormy day in Maine.

Three years after the lottery, a new kind of lightning struck Sparkle when her work was spectacularly rewarded, whereupon she decided that this world was a place of deep mystery and enchantment, with occasional episodes of terror to give it texture. Death was merely the price of admission, cheap if you considered all that it bought you. Fearing death meant also fearing life, which stole all meaning from the act of living.

Until the improbable event this evening, she allowed herself the fear of lightning because she felt that to have no fear for oneself would be to tempt the Fates and invite calamity. Now, with no fear of anything, she was left only with fear for Iris, because the girl seemed to be a lightning rod upon which the Fates focused when they were in a bad mood. Losing her daughter might be the bolt that killed Sparkle, too, because she found it difficult to imagine how she could still be enchanted by the world if this difficult but most innocent girl was taken from her.

Iris stood apart from her mother, back to the windows, and the boy, Winny, stayed near her but at just enough distance to make it clear that he understood her need to maintain a certain personal space, a defense line against the world. Winny had a quality that Sparkle could not quite define, a winsomeness that would one day outlast his shyness.

With apparent effort, the boy even contributed to the group discussion, mentioning the parallel universes that he read about in some of his favorite novels, other Earths existing side by side with our own, some of them only slightly altered from ours, but others radically different.

Sparkle didn’t read novels of that kind. But for a few decades, fantasy fiction, in books and films, had so dominated the culture that it was impossible not to be somewhat familiar with the fantastic concepts that her neighbors now raised for consideration, one after the other. They talked urgently, interrupting one another until she was reminded of a Star Trek club meeting that she had chanced upon one evening in college, where the true nature of Klingons—or some topic equally profound—was being debated with such passion and in such quasi-scientific language that the two dozen participants sounded only half mad.

Hugging herself to ward off a chill that was internal, Sparkle turned from the windows and from the eerie meadows beyond, facing her neighbors. Except for the two children, who remained to one side, the others—Dr. Kirby Ignis, Bailey, Twyla, and the sisters Cupp—stood in a circle. They had no furniture on which to sit, and the wood floor was splintered, dirty, encrusted here and there with foul-looking mold.

Dr. Ignis, whom Sparkle didn’t know well, took control by virtue of his grandfatherly demeanor, which was calming, also by asserting that parallel worlds were theoretical and, in his opinion, highly problematic. He said, “The concept arose in the first place as a kind of desperate explanation of why our universe is meticulously ordered to make life inevitable.”

“Why would anyone need an explanation?” Edna Cupp asked. “What is simply is.”

“Yes, but you see, there are twenty universal constants from Planck’s minimums of time and space to gravitational fine structure, and if any one of them was the very slightest bit different from what it is, the universe would be a wildly disordered place incapable of forming galaxies, solar systems, or planets, incapable of supporting any kind of life. The odds of the universe being as hospitable as ours is … well, it’s impossible, quadrillions of trillions to one.”

“What is … is,” Edna repeated.

“Yes, but the highly specific nature of these constants implies design, in fact insists upon it. Science cannot, will not, tolerate the concept of a designer of the universe.”

“I tolerate it well enough,” Edna declared.

“My point is,” Ignis continued, “the likelihood of all twenty universal constants being what they are is so small that to explain our life-supporting universe without resorting to a designer, some physicists have supposed that there must be an infinite number of universes, not merely ours. If among trillions and trillions and trillions of universes there is one—our own—with those twenty constants precisely set to support order and life, then it’s likely that we’re the product of chance rather than of a designer.”

With one dismissive gesture, Ignis swatted away that theory as he might swat away an annoying fly, and he continued, “Whatever you care to believe, it’s a waste of time thinking that we might have been transported to some parallel world. This is our universe, our Earth, at some point in the far future. The things some of you have seen, the alien landscape we’ve all seen beyond those windows, are either the products of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution or they result from some unimaginably catastrophic event that brought worldwide change in but several centuries.”

“This Pendleton is in regrettable condition,” Martha Cupp said, “but it hasn’t been here even for several centuries, certainly not for hundreds of thousands of years.”

“The city is gone,” Ignis reminded her. “A metropolis doesn’t collapse, crumble, and give way to grassland in mere decades.”

“Why is the Pendleton still standing—and nothing else?” Bailey Hawks asked. He indicated the seven of the twelve bronze sconces that had evidently been installed after the Cupps’ apartment was sold to a new owner and that still produced light. “Where does the power come from? And why would those bulbs work after centuries? Are there any people left in this future? If so, where are they? If there aren’t any people … who generates the electricity?”

They looked at one another, but no one offered a theory.

Then Twyla said, “We aren’t here permanently, are we? We can’t be. There’s got to be a way home.”

“The door to home won’t be one we can open at will,” Dr. Ignis said. “Any more than we opened the one that brought us here. It’ll do what it’ll do when the conditions are right.”

“What conditions?” Twyla asked.

Dr. Ignis shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Twyla said, “And why did only people make this … this leap?”

“People and cats,” Edna said as two handsome blue-gray felines warily entered from another room. She scooped one of them into her arms, but her sister didn’t want to put down her pistol to cuddle the other, so it let Dr. Ignis pluck it off the floor.

“Cats and people,” Twyla said. “And anything we were wearing or carrying. But nothing else.”

“Every living thing emits a weak direct-current electromagnetic field,” Dr. Ignis said. “Maybe that has something to do with it. Whatever’s immediately within a living thing’s electromagnetic field might be affected.”

“People have disappeared from the Pendleton before,” Martha Cupp declared. “Andrew Pendleton’s children, back in the late 1890s.”

“Weren’t they kidnapped?” Sparkle asked.

Martha said, “The wife and the two children. Kidnapping was the story, but they were never seen again. Disappeared. I don’t know the details. Silas Kinsley. He lives next door. He’s the self-appointed historian of the Pendleton. He said something once about violence occurring here every … I think it was every thirty-eight years. It sounded very tacky tabloid to me, and I didn’t encourage him. I think now we better talk to Silas.”

Dr. Ignis said, “We’re going to have to explore, learn what we can. The less we understand our situation”—he glanced at the children—“the less we’re likely to come through this as well as we’d like.”

“Sally,” Edna Cupp said. “Sally Hollander. She really saw what she said she saw in the pantry. She’s alone down on the ground floor. We’ve got to get her.”

“We will,” Bailey said. “We should search the building floor-by-floor, find out who else is here. Maybe there’s not safety in numbers, but there’s at least the feeling of safety.”

Padmini Bahrati

Just before the world went away, Padmini was sitting on a stool behind the reception counter, taking a break, eating some of her mausi’s homemade uttapam, a rice-and-lentil dish. She wondered how her aunt could be such a far better cook than her mother, considering that they were sisters trained by their mother in the same kitchen. To Mausi Anupama, food was like paint and canvas to an artist, but to Padmini’s mother, Subhadra, food was a necessity and the preparation of it was often an annoying distraction.

Subhadra was a mathematician and a famous one, to the extent that mathematicians were ever famous. There were no American Idols on TV celebrating math whizzes instead of singers, and mathematicians were never surrounded by squads of bodyguards and rushed through screaming crowds of fans to limousines. In no danger of being famous, Anupama happily experimented with food, seeking to devise new and better dishes. Subhadra regarded a recipe as a structural engineer regarded the specs for building a bridge, with a sober recognition that one small mistake could lead to a fatal collapse; she measured each ingredient precisely, followed each instruction as literally as might be humanly possible, but even when she used Anupama’s recipes, Subhadra produced an edible though unexciting dinner. On the other hand, Anupama couldn’t balance a checkbook, and Subhadra had ten honorary doctorates in mathematics in addition to the one she had earned.

The lesson that Padmini took from the successful lives of Mausi Anupama and her mother was that, whatever you did, you must do it with passion and total commitment. Padmini was twenty-one, in her first job, after earning a degree in hotel management. She intended to spend two years at the Pendleton, move on to be concierge at a luxury hotel, work her way up to general manager, and one day own a significant hotel of her own. She liked people, she enjoyed solving problems for them and making them happy, and she was good at both math and cooking.

Sanjay, her boyfriend, said she had the right look, too, that she was phatakdi, as sexy as a firecracker, yet with such dignity and class and sisterly charm that she would never inspire envy in other women. Sanjay just wanted to chodo, a word Padmini would never speak aloud in any language. If Sanjay had to choose between food and chodo, he’d probably die of starvation. But he was a good boy, serious about his own career, and she had never known him to lie, not even to get his ever-ready lauda where he wanted it to be.

If looks were an advantage for a concierge and a hotel manager and—ultimately—a hotel owner, they could be a hindrance sometimes. Senator Blandon had taken special notice of her, and his idea of flirting was to tell inappropriate jokes that were just short of smutty and that made her blush. He also found someone who gave him words he could say to her to show that he was cool with her culture. Sometimes he said she was one of the apsaras, which were heavenly nymphs, or he called her batasha, which was candied sugar. He called her Bibi Padmini, which merely meant “Miss.” But whoever was feeding him these words must have had contempt for him, because Blandon also unwittingly called her bhajiyas, which was a fried snack, and akha anda, which meant a “total egg,” and chotti gadda, which meant “little mattress.” He was a supreme test of her patience and composure, but she managed always to pretend to be flattered by his inept attempts to employ the languages of India, and she never laughed in his face.

Thus far on her current shift, Padmini hadn’t encountered the senator, which she took to be divine providence, but at 5:51 by her watch, something worse happened. An electronic squeal abruptly issued from all around her, startling her up from the stool. The magazine she was reading, Hotelier, slid onto the floor. She pushed through the gate, from behind the reception counter, into the lobby. When the fire alarm was tested, it issued an electronic bleat, but this was nothing like that. Nevertheless, Padmini knew that such a shrillness couldn’t mean anything good.

When everything around her blurred and then when the blurry shapes, still familiar, were suddenly distorted beyond recognition, and when the squealing seemed perhaps to be coming from inside her head rather than from the walls, when there was an ominous rumbling as well, she thought that she must be having a stroke. She was only twenty-one, with so many dreams and so few of them yet fulfilled, and the unfairness of it was devastating. But even as she turned in place, squinting to make the smeary scene clarify, she thought of her mother and her father, Ganesh, and her brother, Vikram, and Anupama, and of course Sanjay, and was torn by the realization that she might be severely disabled and a burden to them, or that she would impose grief on them by dying, bring pain to those she loved the most. And then the noise stopped and the world became clear again.

Padmini could believe that a blood clot or an aneurysm might destroy her vital brain tissue even though she was so young, but she could not for a moment entertain the idea that she could ever go mad. She was as steady on her course as if she had a gyroscope in her head and was locked on to a satellite-guidance system. Right reason served as her walking stick, common sense her map.

The lobby that abruptly clarified around her in welcome silence was familiar but wrong. The marble floor was cracked and missing a few pieces, dirty, littered with twists of paper and brown shriveled leaves that must have blown in from outside. Of the cove lighting, only two of four LED tubes were still working. The central ceiling fixture hung dark. Additional sulfurous light came from the southeast end of the space, where a human skeleton sat with its back to the junction of the walls; the bones were a half-seen matrix over which had formed an encrustation of something luminous—perhaps a formation of crystals or a fungus, it was hard to see—that also climbed the corner to the ceiling, where it fanned out for a few feet, as if it had fed on the flesh of the dead man and had then stopped growing. This macabre lamp shed a bleak light that reminded her of nightmares she had as a child, passageways of stone through which she stalked—and was stalked by—Kali, the eight-armed Hindu goddess of death and destruction.

This could not be, but it was. As the concierge on duty, her job was to face the facts no matter how unlikely they seemed, accept the challenge, understand the cause, and put things right as quickly as she could. Her mouth was dry, her heart pounding, but her mind clear and her spirit resolute.

When Padmini realized that the lights of Shadow Street were no longer visible beyond the front doors and the flanking windows, she crossed the lobby, grimacing at the condition of the once-beautiful floor, and stepped outside, onto the receiving porch. In the Tiffany canopy, only a few lights remained operative. The rain had stopped. The sky was clear. The air felt ten or fifteen degrees warmer than it should have been on an early-December night. The street, the buildings that had once shared it with the Pendleton, and the rest of the city were gone.

In the moonlight, for a radius of about fifty yards, the hill appeared to be as barren as the surface of the moon. Beyond, in the dead-calm night, wave after wave of what might have been grass gave off a phosphoric light and swayed like sea anemones in the influence of strangely rhythmic currents.

A shriek in the dark turned Padmini’s head in time, and she saw something pale and bizarre flying at her face. Until now she hadn’t realized that in her right hand she still held the fork with which she had been eating Mausi Anupama’s delicious uttapam. In fact, she gripped it so tightly that her knuckles ached. She thrust with the fork and stopped her assailant at arm’s length, driving the tines into the forehead of what, in the glimpse she had of it, seemed to be a grub the size of a three-pound banana squash with leathery wings and a face that was half like that of a hairless cat and half like that of a featherless bird, the eyes radiant silver. The fork put an end to the shriek, and the creature flung itself away from her, looping through the air before flopping to the ground.

Padmini backed out of the night, into the Pendleton’s lobby.

As long as there was a concierge on duty at the reception desk, the front doors were never locked. Padmini locked them anyway.

Mickey Dime

He came out of the north stairs onto the third floor, where the same dreary conditions prevailed as in the basement. Mickey didn’t know what to do about it. He couldn’t fix the situation by killing someone. Or if he could, it didn’t matter, because he didn’t know who to kill to make things like they were supposed to be. Except for Jerry and Klick the Prick, his targets were chosen for him by people he didn’t know, whose faces he’d never seen. Until his phone rang and they gave him a name, he would just have to persevere through these deplorable conditions.

He saw another one of the pulsing blue screens set in the corner near the ceiling, angled to cover both the short west hall and the longer northern one. He decided the robotlike voice on the TV sounded snotty. This time, it was only able to say “Adult male” before Mickey shot out the screen.

At Apartment 3-D, he considered ringing the doorbell. Senator Earl Blandon might know who needed to be killed to set things right. Mickey’s mom had liked the senator. She said the senator’s only fault was that he used his power to ruin his enemies, when he should have used it to obliterate them. The people he ruined were still around to plot against him. On second thought, Mickey decided the senator might not be the best person from whom to seek advice.

As he passed 3-E, another damn blue TV at the end of the hall, past his apartment, near the freight elevator, said, “Adult male. Brown—”

Mickey blasted it, the screen went dark, and while the shot was ringing off the walls, someone behind him called out, “Mr. Dime!”

When he looked back, he saw Bailey Hawks standing in the debris from the first gunshot TV. They knew each other to say hello, nothing more. Hawks was ex-military. He’d been a kind of gunner, you might say, and Mickey suspected that Hawks could smell the gunner in him. He didn’t trust Hawks. He didn’t trust anyone since his mother died. Only hours earlier, his own brother tried to kill him. There was no reason why Hawks wouldn’t try to kill him, too.

“There’s eight of us in the Cupps’ place. We’re going to go floor-to-floor to gather everyone together.”

“Not me,” Mickey said, turned away, and walked to his apartment.

“Mr. Dime! Whatever’s happening, we need to stick together.”

“The strong act, the weak react,” Mickey replied.

“What did you say?”

“What goes up does not have to come down, if you redefine the meaning of down.”

That wasn’t one of his mother’s sayings. Mickey had invented it when he was ten, hoping to please her. He thought the line was good, but she locked him in a closet for twenty-four hours without food or water and with only a jar for a toilet. He learned to appreciate how sensuous darkness could be. He also learned he wasn’t a philosopher or a cultural critic.

Hawks called out again, but Mickey ignored him.

The door to his apartment stood open. The light switch didn’t work. More of that glowing mold or moss or whatever it was. More of it everywhere, the rooms drizzled with a depressing urine-yellow light. Mickey felt pissed on. He really did.

His furniture was gone. Nobody could have stolen all his stuff in the few minutes since he’d been here last.

The furniture must have gone where dead Jerry and Vernon Klick went. He didn’t know where that was. He couldn’t get his arms around the situation.

He stood in his bedroom, pistol in hand, but there was no one to shoot. This new reality, this bad reality, was all around him, out of control, and he needed to make it heel. What had she meant by “choke collar”? What had she meant by “leash”? What had she meant by “heel”? It had all sounded deep and smart and true at the time. But reality wasn’t a dog you could grab by the scruff of the neck.

She was the most admired intellectual of her time. So she must have been right. The fault must be in Mickey. He was too stupid to understand.

He needed to think harder about this. Maybe he should close himself in a closet for twenty-four hours with just a jar for a toilet. Maybe he would get his mind right, and the better reality would be back in place, this bad reality gone, when he came out. Maybe. But he didn’t even have a jar.

Julian Sanchez

Most people live in a rushing river of images, a river always at flood stage, surging currents of color, liquid harmonies of form, the occasional chaos of rapids, and they are swept along by this torrent of sights with little or no consideration of how it affects their thoughts, shapes their minds, and influences the itinerary of their lives from the headwaters of birth through the delta of old age. When you considered sensory input as digitized data, fifty percent was received through the eyes, more than the four other senses combined.

During forty years of deepest night, Julian Sanchez had known the world mostly by the shapes and textures that slid beneath his sensitive fingers and by the constant music of life that might at times be merely the soft arrhythmic paradiddle of rain blown against the window and at other times the symphony of a busy city street. He was so sensitive to sounds that when bothered by a buzzing fly, he could more often than not snatch it from the air and fold it in his fist.

He was standing in his kitchen in Apartment 1-A, sipping coffee from a mug and listening to the storm through the window that he had cranked open a few inches, when an electronic squealing, unlike anything he’d heard before, arose around him, its source impossible to pinpoint. With that eerie keening came the rumbling from under the building, which he’d heard previously during the day and about which he had called security to inquire.

When both of those noises faded, Julian knew immediately that something important had happened. The tattoo of rain slanting against glass, the swish and gurgle of water plummeting through a downspout near his kitchen window, the wet-leaf rustle of the courtyard trees, and all the other voices in the storm’s chorus fell silent in an instant. Refrigerator hum, dishwasher churn, icemaker drone, the faint tick of the glass pot expanding and contracting on the warming unit of the coffeemaker: Every familiar sound washed away with the passing of the storm, and the hush was at first profound.

Gone, too, were the familiar smells of his kitchen. No aroma of brewing coffee. No lingering pine scent of the cleaner that the housekeeper used earlier in the day, during her latest twice-a-week visit. No cinnamon scent from the breakfast rolls in the pastry box that should be on the counter nearby.

The half-open window no longer brought him the moist, ozone-crisp smell of the storm or the rich earthen fragrance of wet garden soil. When Julian reached across the sink with his left hand, he discovered that the interior window screen was missing. He felt for the crank handle that operated the left half of the casement window, but it wasn’t there; he found only the socket in which the handle should have been seated. He sought the right-side handle and gripped it, but he grimaced because it was swathed in cobwebs. When he tried to crank it, the mechanism seemed to be frozen.

Mystified, he sidestepped past the sink, and he put down his coffee mug, which didn’t ring off the counter as it should have done, but met the granite with a muffled ponk. Although the housekeeper had left less than two hours earlier, he discovered a thick layer of dust on the stone, and then debris of some kind, what were most likely tatters of rotted rags and what might have been crumbles of fallen plaster that gave off the smell of powdered gypsum and finely ground sand.

When he turned away from the counter to face the room, Julian smelled mildew. Something like stale urine.

His understanding of the space totally changed. He was so familiar with every square foot of the apartment and with the precise placement of the furniture that not only could he get about caneless and without barking his shins or stumbling over anything, but he could also perceive the shapes of things with something like a sixth sense, a kind of psychic radar. This unique perception now told him that the kitchen table and chairs were not where they should have been, that they were gone.

Usually, he didn’t feel his way around with arms outstretched, but he resorted to this technique now, worried not only that the familiar furniture had been removed but also that something else might have been set in its place. The kitchen proved to be as empty as his psychic radar indicated. Sandy grit and larger bits of debris crunched under his shoes.

Julian was proud of living independently and rarely needed to lean on anyone for anything. The weird transformation of the kitchen, however, spooked him. He needed someone with working eyes to come around and explain to him what had happened here.

He patted the pockets of his cardigan sweater and was relieved to find his cell phone where he expected it to be. He pressed the button, listened to the sign-on jingle, and then after a hesitation, entered the number of the concierge. Padmini was supportive without ever giving the slightest indication that a blind man evoked pity in her. Julian loathed being pitied. After entering the number and pressing SEND, he waited with the phone to his right ear … until he became convinced there was no cell service.

Confused and concerned, but not yet afraid, he went to where the doorway to the dining area had always been, and it was still in the same place. On the threshold, Julian heard murmuring voices elsewhere in the apartment, urgent and strange, though he should have been alone.

Fielding Udell

The world was in worse shape than he had imagined in his most wretched speculations. The situation was more like that movie, The Matrix, than Fielding had known. Everything was false, projections of a benign reality beamed into his head by the Ruling Elite, but now their Spin Machine failed, the projections faded, and reality asserted itself. He had imagined domed cities in which the last twenty or thirty million brainwashed citizens were protected from the toxin-choked, super heated, icebound, drought-ridden, storm-wracked, disease-riddled, nuclear-decimated, frogless wasteland that was most of this sorry planet, a poisonous hell where billions of corpses rotted in the fields and streets. But now he saw that he was not in a domed city, not safe under an impenetrable force field, as he had thought.

He had lived in ruins but had been mind-beam persuaded that he dwelt instead in a luxury apartment building. Not even his furniture had been real, for now when the Spin Machine failed, he saw that his rooms were empty of everything except dust and a few dead insects and scraps of age-yellowed paper.

When he went to a window, wiped a film of dust from the glass, and looked down into the courtyard three stories below, he saw in the moonlight not the flowers and the manicured hedges and the well-shaped trees and the fountains that had always been there before, but instead destruction and a primeval sprawl of vegetation. The bowls of the tiered fountains were toppled and broken, like cracked conch shells and pried-open clam shells of immense size. No trees remained. The other plants were not easily studied in the lunar glow, but he could tell that they were not like anything he had seen before; at best they were apostates to the timeless church of Nature, and at worst they were mutations so grotesque as to be demonic, cresting like the waves of a corrupted sea over the winding footpath that meandered from the double doors on the west end to the east wall, where a gate led to the Pendleton’s garages behind the main building.

On other nights, Fielding had been able to see the roof of the converted carriage house rising above the back wall of the courtyard, and beyond that the somewhat higher roofline of the larger garage, which had been added when Belle Vista was converted to the Pendleton. He could see neither structure now, though the full moon should have silvered their slate shingles. The big gate in the courtyard wall sagged open on buckled hinges, but beyond those bent bronze staves there seemed to be nothing but darkness. Nor was there any glow of city lights either above the parapeted roof of the north wing or to the east where the garages should have been.

Wherever his food came from, it wasn’t prepared by Salvatino’s Pizzeria or by any of the other restaurants from which he daily ordered. If the city didn’t exist, which the utter lack of lights suggested, then neither did establishments offering home-delivery of tasty meals. When he received those fragrant packages, they evidently came from despicable Minions of the Ruling Elite, and for all he knew, his submarine sandwiches and pasta Bolognese and moo goo gai pan were all the same thing, Soylent Green, flavored to deceive.

Fielding was less frightened than outraged, less outraged than overcome by a profound sense of vindication, for he had been correct all along about the condition of the world, more insightful than he had known. He trembled with righteous indignation.

Movement in the courtyard drew his attention. Something appeared around a bend in the winding walkway, a creature previously concealed by the riot of wicked vegetation. Fielding hissed involuntarily through clenched teeth, because although he didn’t know what kind of beast revealed itself below, he knew at once and without doubt that it was hostile to human life, and evil.

Pale it was but not just pale, also slightly aglow, not because its surface reflected or emitted light, but luminous deep within. It was mostly shadowy shapes infused with slowly pulsing light that was unevenly distributed, jaundice-yellow and methyl-green. The light traveled through its mysterious flesh in slow waves and whorls, at various depths and different levels of intensity, revealing what might have been the dark lumps of internal organs that were more dense than the surrounding tissue. The length of a prowling lion but nearly as tall as a man, it appeared in the inadequate moonlight to be creeping along on insectile but meaty legs similar to those of a Jerusalem cricket. As best Fielding could tell, the body might have been a collection of bulbous forms—swollen bladders, pendulous sacs—all wound about and linked by a segmented something that reminded him of a thick tapeworm. The thing did not move fast, though he was certain that it could quicken considerably in the presence of prey, and it seemed to be focused on the pathway before it, as if following a scent.

This apparition was more grotesque than anything Fielding Udell could have dreamed up in a thousand years of nightmares, beyond the power of any hallucinogen to conjure in the mind, more terrifying in its alienness than if a Tyrannosaurus rex had suddenly bounded into the courtyard, mouth agape and bristling with saber-length teeth. He thought of distant stars, of the airless vastness of deep space, of a journey measured in light-years, because the thing in the courtyard surely hadn’t been born on Earth. A chill went through him, through both body and soul, and his palms became damp and cold, as though the icy courage that had sustained his long researches was now melting out of him.

As Fielding stared down at the repulsive vision, transfixed as a rabbit might be by a sudden encounter with a coiled rattlesnake, the thing raised something like a head, a lumpish mass lacking the left-right symmetry of the heads of all animals in nature. It turned up toward him a face that was malignant in two senses: first, that it appeared to be a twisted cancerous mass; second, that it was a mask of perfect evil.

Perhaps it was looking only at the moon, as lunatic as it was misbegotten, but he believed that the thing fixed its gaze on him alone, if the three radiant silver orbs, clustered midface, were in fact eyes. His trance broken, Fielding stepped back from the dirty window, out of sight, certain that he had at last seen one of the elusive Ruling Elite.

Silas Kinsley

In the dismal yellow light, the oily shadows oozed away from the flashlight beam, and the immense room almost seemed to be underwater, the rays from overhead filtering down through countless fathoms. The broken and corroded HVAC equipment hulked and tilted like a sunken ship long settled on an ocean floor.

The vault lay silent but for an elusive susurration that might have been a draft born elsewhere in the building and carried through the maze of pipes that no longer contained water for the heating-cooling system and that were in some places broken or decoupled from their elbow joints. Given the circumstances, Silas wasn’t able to repress the suspicion that he was hearing not merely a draft but instead the whispering of people who were monitoring him from the cover of the defunct machinery. Or if not people, perhaps nearby might wait a creature like the one that Perry Kyser, the contractor, had seen in 1973, the abomination that spoke to him in the tortured voice of the missing painter.

With the guard’s pistol in hand, Silas pressed on, deeper into the labyrinth. He needed to know the full nature of the situation. If he allowed fear to triumph, he would make decisions based on emotion rather than on reason, which would be the quickest way to wind up dead.

The floor drain in this vault seemed to be the delivery system through which a periodic massive discharge of magnetic—or some other kind of—energy caused the present to fold temporarily into the future. Lawyer’s intuition suggested that here at the epicenter, he was more likely than elsewhere to find important clues that, linked together in a chain of evidence, might help him and his neighbors escape a death sentence.

His flashlight played across one of the chillers. The thin sheet-metal housing was pocked with bullet holes, in a few of which spiders had spun miniature webs as if they had been too exhausted to weave architectures with larger perimeters. The farther Silas went, the more punctures and ricochet trails and bullet-shattered gauges he found. He came to a litter of brass cartridge casings, first dozens and then hundreds, through which he stepped with care, inevitably causing a few to roll and to strike from others a faint but melodious ringing like fairy bells.

He expected to find the remains of the combatants around one turn or another, and soon he did, although they were not the remains of men. Lying near each other in an aisle between boilers and water softeners were two skeletons that lacked the angularity and the knobby joints of human bones. These specimens didn’t lie in jumbled, jagged disarray, not in the splay-legged and half-comic posture of tumbled human skeletons, which always appeared to have dropped to the floor at the conclusion of an antic dance. Death-stripped, these bones were graceful, as sleek as the lines of a master calligrapher intent on making visual art from sentences of cursive prose. Perhaps seven feet tall. Two-legged. Extra knuckles and phalanges in their long feet and hands. Six toes on each foot, the first and sixth longer than the other four, good for climbing. Their skulls were not as round as those of human beings, shaped more like large footballs without the pointed ends. Their jaws were long and strong for biting, teeth fearsome, death grins wide and shark-sharp.

The flashlight also revealed that these bones were not white but gray, and even the teeth were gray. The uniform shade suggested that they had always been gray, that this was not discoloration resulting from the passage of much time or from the stains left by decomposing flesh. When Silas crouched and lifted one of the arms, it felt much lighter than bone, but when he let it drop, it rang off the concrete with an almost metallic sound.

Not far from the first two skeletons, he found three more like them. From the bones, he could extrapolate with confidence that these creatures had been strong, agile, and very fast. Even in death, their teeth said predator.

Finally, in the southwest corner of the long room, he discovered fourteen human skeletons sitting with their backs to the wall, ten adults and four children. No flesh clung to their bones, and in the perpetual dampness of the vault, most of their clothes had rotted away, as well. Having received the rich fluids of decomposition, the concrete around them was dark and mottled. Although much time had passed since these luckless people met their end, Silas thought he could still smell a faint ghost of putrefaction, an olfactory haunting in this deeply spectral place.

One of the adult skeletons still bit on the barrel of a pistol-grip, pump-action shotgun that had not dislodged when it blew out the back of the head. Two other adults lay with shotguns. Enduring stains on the wall led Silas to have a closer look at all fourteen, and he discovered exit wounds in the back of every skull. Here at the bottom of the building, in the windowless vault, they had made their final stand against the predators—saving the last of their ammunition for themselves. The adults apparently killed the children first to spare them whatever horrors the predators would have wrought upon them.

Perhaps these people had been the last generation of Pendleton residents, before the building had fallen into ruin. And now Silas could no longer avoid a question that he had been reluctant to ask, could not further delay going upstairs to seek the answer: If this great house had come to such a bitter end and if fantastic beasts of unknown origin stalked its rooms, what had happened to the rest of the world?