guys, they have a thing for ghost stories. They don’t invent ’em, I’m not saying they do, but if any stories are in circulation about the project site, these guys will know ’em and talk ’em up during breaks, at lunch. In that environment, when little things happen nobody would think twice about otherwise, odd little things, then they take on a bigger meaning than they should. Even level-headed people imagine they see things … but they really
“The power of suggestion,” Silas said.
“Yeah. But the Pendleton wasn’t like that. Something really happened there in ’73, late November, first of December. I lost my best carpenter, quit the job because of something he saw, wouldn’t even talk about it, just wanted out of there. Other guys, solid types, claimed to see what they called shadow people. Dark shapes crossing a room, along a hallway, even through walls, quick as cats, almost quicker than the eye.”
“Did you see them?”
“No. Not me.” Kyser surveyed the other customers, hesitating to proceed, as if having second thoughts about sharing his experience. “Not the shadow people.”
Silas pressed him: “You said ‘late November, first of December.’ Do you remember exactly how long these phenomena lasted?”
“Far as I know, they started November twenty-ninth, Thursday. The last might’ve been December first. You don’t seem surprised by this haunted-house talk.”
“I don’t believe it’s haunted, but like I told you on the phone, there’s something strange about the place. Seems like terrible things happen in the Pendleton every thirty-eight years.”
“The research you’ve done, the hours you put into it … Why?”
Silas hesitated, shrugged. “I don’t have anything else to do.”
“Retirement’s a bitch, huh?” The thinnest edge of sarcasm in Kyser’s voice suggested that he didn’t believe the answer and wanted a better one before being more forthcoming.
“Fair enough. Since I lost my wife, this is the only thing to come along that’s interested me. The usual distractions—TV, movies, books, music—none of them seems worth the time. Maybe this isn’t worth it, either. Maybe nothing is. But it’s what I’ve got now.”
Kyser considered that answer for a moment and then nodded. “I’ve still got Jenny. I can see how, if I didn’t have her, I might want a project of my own.” Again, he studied the people at the bar, as if he expected to see someone he knew.
Returning to the purpose of their meeting, Silas said, “You told me the phenomena ran from Thursday the twenty-ninth through the first of December. That was a Saturday. You worked Saturdays?”
Kyser’s attention shifted from the crowd gathered at the bar to his martini, into which he gazed as though the future could be read in the crystal clarity of the vodka. “The first twelve months we worked a big crew six days to meet our deadline. But by the end of ’73, we were on a five-day schedule with the finish work. I was there that Saturday morning, making a punch list, hundreds of small items we needed to get done to wrap the job by Christmas.”
Beyond the window, torrents overflowed gutters and blacktop shimmered with runoff. Shadow Street rose like a great storm swell on a night sea, and at its crest loomed the Pendleton, not stately and welcoming as it had seemed before, but as ominous as a colossal warship with massive guns loaded for battle.
“Our painting-crew chief, Ricky Neems, he was there that same Saturday, making his own punch list upstairs. Because of this”—he hesitated—“well, because of this thing that happened, I left early, didn’t finish my list. Ricky … we never saw again. Good painter, the best, but a few times each year, he’d fall off the wagon, go on a drinking binge, disappear for three days. Every time he came back, he’d say it was the flu or something, but we knew the truth. He was sober most of the time, and he was such a good guy when he was sober, we just worked around his benders. But Ricky never came back after Saturday. No one saw him again. Police took it as a missing- persons case, but they figured he got drunk, picked a fight with the wrong guy, got killed and dumped somewhere. I knew different. Or thought I did. My opinion is they didn’t break a sweat looking for Ricky, him being single, no family to push for answers. But even if they worked hard, they might not have found him.… I think Ricky was snatched up and taken, soul
This declaration of damnation seemed out of character for a construction supervisor who spent his life working with his hands and building on solid foundations. Again Perry fell silent, avoided Silas’s eyes, and studied people at the bar as he sipped his martini.
While taking any deposition, moments arose when a good lawyer knew a question might inhibit revelation, when patience and silence were required to extract an embedded splinter of truth. Silas waited.
When at last Perry Kyser met the attorney’s eyes, there was resolution in his unwavering gaze, an intensity and a challenge that suggested he anticipated encountering skepticism but that he also intended eventually to be believed.
“Anyway, I’m in the basement that Saturday, in what was going to be the gym, making my punch list. This noise comes from under the building, like a kettledrum, a timpani. Then it grows into a rumble, vibrations in the floor. I think earthquake or something, so I go into the hall … and it’s not like it should be, not clean and bright like we made it, but damp, dirty, musty. Half the ceiling lights are out. Mold on the walls, ceiling, some of it black, but some patches glowing yellow, brighter than the overhead lights. At each end of the hall these video screens, suspended from the ceiling, rings of blue light pulsing in them. Some floor tiles cracked. Nobody’s done any maintenance for a long time. Doesn’t make sense. So I think it’s me, something wrong with me, hallucination, seeing the hallway like it isn’t. Then I see this … this
“You said on the phone you’ve never told anyone about this.”
“Never. I didn’t want people looking at me that way, you know, like you’d look at some guy says he’s flown on a UFO.”
“From my point of view, Perry, your silence all these years makes you all the more credible.”
Kyser finished his martini in one swallow. “So … I’m at one end of the hall, outside the gym. This thing is at the halfway point, near the doors to the heating-cooling plant. It’s big. Big as me. Bigger. Pale as a grub, a little like a grub, but not that, because it’s kind of like a spider, too, though not an insect, too fleshy for a spider. Now I’m thinking—who put what kind of drug in my coffee thermos? Nothing on Earth looks like this. It’s moving away, toward the security room, hears me or smells me, and it turns to me. It looks like it can move fast, but maybe it
