The glazed ceramic-tile roof of the great house appeared flat, but it was slightly sloped from the center point to all four walls of the waist-high balustrade that defined the parapet. The rain streamed away into copper scuppers that carried it to embedded downspouts in the corners of the structure.
Through the downpour, weaving among the chimneys and the vent stacks, which were as familiar to him as the patterns of his long-enduring melancholy, Witness approached the western parapet. He wore boots, jeans, a sweater, and an insulated jacket, but not a raincoat. He had come from a night where there was no rain; and he didn’t expect it here.
He stood at the high balustrade, gazing down upon the bustling traffic on the avenue and then at the sparkling sweep of the city spreading out upon the plain below. This was the fourth time he had seen the metropolis from this vantage point, and it was both brighter and larger than on the three previous occasions. If the lights of the streets and buildings hadn’t deliquesced into the shroud of rain, the city would have been even more impressive than it was.
Witness waited for sudden dryness, for darkness deep and vast.
Returning from his informative meeting with Perry Kyser in the bar at Topper’s, approaching the main entrance of the Pendleton, Silas hesitated because the lighting was dimmer and more yellow than it should have been, obscuring the transition from the first to the second step. The first step was as wide as two, and the second was actually a broad stoop, so people who were tipsy (which Silas was not) or elderly (which he certainly was) sometimes stumbled there.
Surrounded by an architrave of limestone carved in an ivy motif, the arched bronze-and-glass doors were recessed under a bubblelike glass-and-bronze canopy by Louis Comfort Tiffany. Tucked discreetly under the canopy, the lights shone down on the steps and doors. None was burned out, but the entrance appeared half as well illuminated as usual.
Pushing open one of the doors and stepping into the lobby, Silas discovered that the lights here were also dimmer than usual. Drawing back the hood of his raincoat, he realized that the lighting was the least of the changes the space had undergone. Bewildered, he found himself not in the familiar carpetless lobby but in a reconfigured room with a fine antique Tabriz carpet over part of the marble floor and two divans where arriving guests might wait to be received. To his left, the concierge counter was gone, replaced by a solid and handsomely paneled wall inset with a single arched door. The evening concierge, Padmini Bahrati, was nowhere to be seen. On the right, instead of two sets of double French doors leading to a large banquet room that residents used for parties too big to be accommodated in their apartments, another solid arched door was set in a paneled wall. Directly ahead, the pair of French doors to the ground-floor public hall had been replaced by a formidable arched doorway with an intricately carved surround; the double doors were closed to any view of the space beyond. Rather than indirect cove lighting and recessed can lights in the ceiling, there were a grand crystal chandelier and floor lamps with pleated-silk shades and tassels.
He knew this place from old photographs. This was not the lobby of the Pendleton in 2011, but instead the reception hall of Belle Vista in a distant age, the apartment building gone, the private home returned. Back in the late nineteenth century, Shadow Street had been the first in the city to receive electric service, and Belle Vista had been the first new house to be built here without gas lamps. The lighting was dimmer than usual because these bulbs were primitive Edison products from the early days of the illumination revolution.
Sometimes, under stress or in the grip of strong emotion, Silas suffered from familial tremors of the jaw, which caused his mouth to quiver, and of the right hand. He began to tremble now, not with fear but with wonder. Time past and time present seemed to meet here, as if all the yesterdays of history were just a door, a threshold, a step away.
Directly ahead, a door opened, and the haunting began. The man who entered had died decades before Silas Kinsley’s birth. Andrew Pendleton. Billionaire of the Gilded Age. The first owner of this residence. He was no ghost, no rattler of chains looking to torment Ebenezer Scrooge, but rather a traveler out of time. He was dressed for another era: wide cuffs on his pants, narrow lapels on his suit coat, a high yoke on his vest, and a hand-knotted bow tie.
Startled, Pendleton said, “Who are you?”
Before Silas could respond, Belle Vista rippled away, as if it must have been a mirage, and the long-dead businessman shimmered out of sight with the reception room. Silas found himself standing in the brightly lighted lobby of the Pendleton, everything as it should be.
Beyond the concierge’s counter was an entrance to a walk-in coat closet used during parties in the nearby banquet room. Through that door came Padmini Bahrati, a slender beauty with enormous dark eyes, who reminded Silas of his own lost Nora.
“Mr. Kinsley,” said the concierge, “how are you this evening?”
Blinking, trembling, Silas remained speechless for a moment, and then he said, “Did you see him?”
Adjusting the cuffs of her blouse, she said, “Who?”
Judging by her demeanor, the transformation of the lobby had not extended to the coat closet. She was unaware of what had happened.
Silas strove to keep his voice steady. “A man. Leaving. Dressed as though he stepped out of the late eighteen hundreds.”
“Perhaps that’s a new fashion trend,” Padmini said, “which would be lovely, considering what you see people wearing these days.”
As she slammed the door to Winny’s room, hoping to contain whatever malign force had tried to manifest in there, and as she hurried with the boy along the hallway toward the master suite, Twyla first thought that she would throw some essentials into a suitcase before leaving the Pendleton. By the time she reached the threshold of her bedroom, she decided it would be foolish to delay one minute longer than necessary. Reality had changed before her eyes and then had changed again. She didn’t know what was happening here, but she needed to react to it as she would have reacted if she’d seen the ghost of a decapitated man who spoke to her from the head that he carried in the crook of his arm:
All she required was her purse. It contained her car keys, her checkbook, her credit cards. They could buy new clothes and anything else they needed.
“Stay close,” she urged Winny as she crossed the living room toward the wing of the apartment that included
