77 Shadow Street

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 center 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.

The haunter of this house, more real than any ghost, wasn’t attempting to pry its way into their minds, as it had tried to do earlier, but Sparkle could feel its mood, its urgent need, as surely as she would have felt cold radiating from an open freezer door. Its passion was icy, their death its greatest desire, their flesh its preferred mold bed from which to grow its next manifestation. All of this came to her in wordless impressions that didn’t require translation.

At the back of the kitchen, the door revealed that the storage room was overgrown with a succulent devoid of chlorophyll, its fleshy leaves as white and smooth as cheese, white even in the glow of the kitchen fungus formations, but whiter still in the flashlight beam. Among the leaves were numerous bi-lobe flowers like the carnivorous mouths of Venus flytraps, and most of them had sunk their glass-clear teeth into a leaf, slowly dissolving and consuming it in a perpetual self-cannibalism.

It was possible to believe that the bodies of children might lie at the roots of this thing, fleshy stalks rising out