“Bailey, dear, Edna and I need your calming influence.” Martha Cupp, one of the elderly sisters who were among his clients in the Pendleton, spoke with a firmness that was not imperious but rather like that of a good schoolteacher who set high standards and, with affection, expected you to meet them always. “Sally is either off her nut or on the whiskey.” Sally Hollander was their housekeeper. “She says she’s seen Satan in the butler’s pantry, and she wants to quit her job. You know how we depend on Sally.”
“I’ll be there as quick as I can. Give me five minutes,” Bailey said.
“Dear boy, you are the son I never had.”
“You had a son.”
“But he’s nothing like you, I’m sorry to say. His failing chain of sushi restaurants will soon be as dead as the fish they serve. Now he wants me to back him in a wind farm, four thousand windmills on some dreary plain in Nevada, producing enough energy to power eleven houses while killing six thousand birds a day. The boy is a huge wind farm himself, he chatters faster than a carnival barker. Please hurry and talk some sense into our Sally.”
As Bailey racked the wall phone, he suspected that Sally’s encounter with the devil himself would turn out to have nothing to do with whiskey.
“What’s happening here?” he asked aloud, and waited only a moment for the disembodied voice to answer him in that unknown language. The kitchen was now as silent as it was bright.
One
I am the One, the all and the only. I live in the Pendleton as surely as I live everywhere. I am the Pendleton’s history and its destiny. The building is my place of conception, my monument, my killing ground.
In celebration of my triumph, I prepare this file to be conveyed to you of great faith, to you who knew the world had gone wrong and longed to repair it. The world you have known is destroyed. I will show you.…
Andrew North Pendleton, proud and ignorant, built his great house on this site not because the vista pleased him, but because of the legend of Shadow Hill. Like some others in the upper class in the late nineteenth century, Andrew was eager to pursue new ways of thinking, to throw off the chains of tired tradition. He became fascinated with various forms of spiritualism, and he had the leisure time to pursue them. Seances, sessions of automatic writing, crystal readings, past-life regression through hypnosis: He was a seeker, no less a fool than other men. An Indian mystic, of what tribe was never clear, told him the history of Shadow Hill, and Pendleton declared that he must build there to benefit from the spiritual energy of that hallowed ground.
Indians once settled atop the hill because at certain times of the year, a pale-blue light rose sporadically from old volcanic fumaroles, shimmering and dancing in the air. Infrequently, loved ones long dead appeared briefly among the living, as if the past and the present were one. The ground must be sacred, so they said, and the tribe would be protected by both the ghosts of those lost and by the shining blue spirits.
The mystic, secretly an agent for the owner of the land, failed to tell Andrew Pendleton that the Native Americans eventually moved off the hill when they experienced a more vivid spectacle that filled the night —and their encampment—with a seeming horde of bright-blue spirits less benign than those that had come before them.
On that night, half the tribesmen disappeared forever. They came to me. I partook of them, for they were an affront to my existence.
When Andrew Pendleton, his wife, and his children were presented to me, I allowed him alone to live. In a sense, I owed my existence to him, because he chose to build on Shadow Hill. His Belle Vista became not merely a house but also a vehicle that brought me into the world.
I am the One, and there can be no other. They come to me, and I receive them as the meat they are. In time, all will come to me, and then what must be will be. Thereafter only I shall know the sun and the moon.
Soon the current residents of the Pendleton will appear before me, bewildered by my many manifestations. I know them, for I know everything. Not all will perish, but nearly all. I especially desire the children; I do not tolerate innocence, and I despise gentleness. The ex-marine will discover that the concepts of honor and responsibility are not rewarded under my dominion.
Those who might love one another will not be saved by love. The only love that matters is self- love, and the only self worth loving is the One.
9
Apartment 2-A
Almost-nine-year-old Winny was curled in an armchair in his bedroom, examining three books, deciding which one to read next. Officially a fourth grader, he could read at a seventh-grade level. He’d been tested. It was true. He wasn’t all puffed-up proud of it. He knew he wasn’t smart or anything. If he was smart, he would know what to say to people. He never knew what to say to people. His mom said he was shy, and maybe he was, but he also never knew what he should say, which a truly smart person would know.
The reason that he could read so well was just because he read all the time, ever since he could remember. First picture books with a few words. Then books with fewer pictures and more words. Then books with no pictures at all. He read mostly young-adult fiction these days. But in a couple years, he’d probably be reading thousand-page adult books, whatever, unless he just read so much that his head exploded, and that would be that.
His dad, who had homes in Nashville and Los Angeles, who came around way less often than the FedEx delivery guy, almost as seldom as Santa Claus, didn’t want Winny to get lost in books all the time. He said any boy who got lost in books all the time might turn into a sissy or even an autistic, whatever that was. His dad wanted him to be more into music. Winny liked music, but not as much as he liked reading and writing.
