77 Shadow Street

of lightning flailed the sky, several great flashes that made the rain appear to descend haltingly, that flared as if with apocalyptic power and seemed to obliterate the other buildings flanking Shadow Street. As the tremors rising from the ground passed and as hard thunderclaps shook the afternoon, the lightning and rain conspired for a moment to make the four lanes of pavement seem to disappear. The city streets below vanished, the buildings and their lights. In the flickering celestial display there appeared to be nothing but a vast, empty landscape, the long hill and a terrible plain below it, something like a sea of tall grass stippled with clusters of black trees, their craggy limbs clawing at the gloom.

This vision must have been a trick of storm light on rain-washed glass, nothing more, because when the pyrotechnics stopped, the city was there as before, the buildings and the parks. The busy traffic ascended and descended the long boulevard, the blacktop streaming with rain and with glimmering reflections of headlights, with slithering red rivulets of taillights.

Twyla discovered that she’d gotten off the stool and had lowered her guitar to the carpet without being aware of either action. She stood at the window. What she had seen could have been nothing but an optical illusion. Yet her mouth went dry as she waited for another volley of lightning. In the next barrage, the city did not disappear, but held its ground. The unpopulated vastness, glimpsed before, did not reappear. A mirage. An illusion.

She turned to look past the piano at the display case. None of the awards had fallen over, but the shuddering of the building had been real, not a trick of light and rain-blurred window.

8

Apartment 2-C

Bailey turned on all the lamps and ceiling fixtures in the living room, dining room, kitchen, master bedroom, guest bedroom, and both baths. He left them blazing even when he found no one lurking anywhere in the apartment. He wasn’t frightened by what he had seen. More curious than anything. The brighter the light in the place, the likelier he was to get a better look at whatever—if anything—came next.

He wasted no time considering the possibility that he might have hallucinated the entity in the swimming pool and the phantom that passed through a wall. He didn’t do drugs. He didn’t drink to excess. If he suffered from a brain tumor or another mortal condition, there had been no previous indication. In his experience, post-traumatic stress disorder, caused by the horrors of the battlefield, was chiefly the invention of psychiatrists bent upon stigmatizing the military.

In the bedroom, he retrieved a pistol from the bottom drawer in his nightstand. The Beretta 9 mm featured a twenty-round magazine, a six-inch Mag-na-ported Jarvis barrel, and Trijicon night sights. He had purchased the weapon after returning to civilian life, and he never had occasion to use it except on the shooting range.

Once armed, he didn’t know what to do next. If the things that he had seen were not full-blown supernatural apparitions, they were at least paranormal. In either case, a pistol might not be of any use. He intended to keep the gun handy, anyway.

He stood by the bed, holding the weapon, feeling frustrated and somewhat foolish. In war, he never had a problem identifying his enemies. They were the guys who wanted him dead, who were shooting at him and his men. They might run away when their surprise attack failed to gain them a quick triumph, but they didn’t simply vanish. To survive a firefight, to win it, marines had to do more than persevere; they had to be strategists and tacticians, which required a solid grasp of reality, a capacity for clear reasoning. Now here he stood with the Beretta, waiting for an enemy to materialize out of the wall, for an apparition, a boogeyman, a manifestation of unreason, as if he were not a marine and never had been, as if he were instead a character from the movie Ghostbusters.

As in the pool room eleven hours earlier, a rumble rose from the ground under the Pendleton. This time it escalated rapidly, became louder than before, and the building shuddered for perhaps five or six seconds before both the sound and the tremors faded. He had no doubt that this apparently seismic event was somehow related to the mysterious swimmer and to the inky specter that passed cat-quick through his study. Techniques of financial analysis, no less than battlefield experience, had taught him that coincidences were rare and that unseen connections were everywhere waiting to be uncovered.

No sooner had the Pendleton become still and quiet than Bailey heard the voice. Low and portentous, it sounded like a newscaster reporting disaster on a radio in another room, the shape of the words distorted, their meaning elusive—except that this voice was here, as intimate as a lover’s murmurs.

When he bent to listen to the clock radio on the nightstand, the voice seemed to come from across the room. He went to the armoire that housed the television, opened the doors to reveal the dead dark screen—and heard the speaker now behind him, seemingly close and yet still unintelligible.

Wherever he went in the bedroom, the unseen speaker spoke in a corner different from the one to which he had been drawn, as though taunting him.

When Bailey stepped into the adjacent bathroom, the voice was there as surely as it had been in the previous room. It seemed to issue from behind a mirror, but then from out of an air-intake grill near the ceiling, and then from behind the textured plaster of the ceiling itself.

As Bailey proceeded through the bright rooms, pistol held down at his side with the muzzle toward the floor, the voice grew darker, more menacing. The direction of origin changed even more rapidly, as though the speaker were a crazed ventriloquist succumbing to the fear that, of he and his dummy, only the puppet was real.

And then in the kitchen, the words became clearer, more fully formed, but no more intelligible. Bailey realized he was listening to a foreign language. Neither French nor Italian, nor Spanish. Not German. Not Russian. Nothing Slavic. Nothing Asian. He had never heard anything like it before, which perhaps should have made it seem like one of those extraterrestrial languages in science-fiction movies. Instead he thought it sounded ancient and primitive, though he didn’t know why he felt that way about it.

Not once did he suspect that the voice came from the apartment next door. The Pendleton was a steel- reinforced, poured-in-place concrete structure, and the renovators employed that same technique to separate condominium units from one another, augmenting it with modern sound-suppression technology. The only neighbor with whom he shared a wall on this floor was Twyla Trahern, the songwriter, and he couldn’t hear even the faintest chords of her piano when she was composing.

Standing by the kitchen island, turning in place, he listened to the voice issue from the air all around him, at first louder but then fading as if someone somewhere was turning down a volume knob.

As the voice became less than a muttered curse, the wall phone rang, and he picked it up. “Hello?”