77 Shadow Street

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 after 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