77 Shadow Street

On the stairs above him, a girl appeared, perhaps seven or eight years old, as pretty as her voice, with lively blue eyes. She wore what appeared to be a costume: a sky-blue cotton dress with a ruffled skirt and gathered sleeves, overlaid with an eggshell-white linen apronlike garment trimmed in simple lace, and white leggings. Her white-leather ankle-top shoes were buttoned instead of laced.

When she saw Bailey, she halted and performed a half-curtsy. “Good afternoon, sir.”

“You must have gotten that dress from Edna Cupp,” Bailey said.

The girl looked puzzled. “It’s from Partridge’s, where Mummy buys all our clothes. I’m Sophia. Are you a friend of Daddy’s?”

“I might be. Who’s your father?”

“The master of the house, of course. Anyway, I should hurry. The iceman’s delivering to the kitchen any minute. We’re going to shave some off one of the blocks and cover it in cherry syrup, which is ever so good.”

As she slipped past Bailey, off the landing and onto the stairs, he said, “What’s your last name, Sophia?”

“Pendleton, of course,” she said, and broke into another song as she followed the curving stairs out of sight. “Old King Cole was a merry old soul, and a merry old soul was he …”

The girl’s footsteps and voice faded to silence more quickly than the turning of the stairs explained.

Bailey waited to hear a door open and close, but the quiet of the windowless stairwell became a profound hush.

Without knowing quite what he intended, he descended to the ground floor and then to the basement, expecting to find the girl waiting below. The heavy fire doors could not be opened and closed soundlessly. Yet she was gone.

Twyla Trahern

Having just spoken on the phone either to a City Bell operator in 1935 or to a hoaxer who was part of a bizarre conspiracy with an inscrutable purpose, Twyla hurried Winny out of the kitchen, into the laundry room. She retrieved a raincoat and an umbrella from the corner closet, and Winny slipped into a hooded jacket.

The lightless plain that she had glimpsed earlier still fresh in her mind, she got two flashlights from a utility drawer and jammed them in her coat pockets.

They left by the back door, she locked the deadbolt, and they hurried along the short hallway to the south elevator, where she pushed the call button.

Winny said, “How could it change like that, the wall?”

“I don’t know, honey.”

“Where was that place, the grungy place that faded in and out?”

“I don’t know. I write songs. I don’t write sci-fi.” She pushed the call button again. “Come on, come on.”

“It was the same wall but different, like the Pendleton on some other world. You know, like parallel worlds in stories?”

“I don’t read those kinds of stories. Maybe you shouldn’t read them, either.”

“I didn’t make the wall-thing happen,” he assured her.

“No, of course you didn’t. That’s not what I meant.”

She didn’t know what she had meant. Her confusion dismayed her. Most of her life, she had known how to cope with anything that came her way, allowing herself no doubts and no excuses. Since she’d been eleven, whenever anything scary or painful happened, she composed a ballad or a spiritual or a torch piece or a country boogie-woogie number about it, and the fear and the hurt were cured by the writing of the lyrics, by the singing of the song. But painful events like the loss of her sweet father and frightening developments like the recognition that her marriage to Farrel was collapsing … Well, those were common human experiences for which music could be a medicine. In these weird circumstances, however, melody and poetry failed her. She wished that she possessed as many guns—or at least one!—as she had musical instruments.

With a ding the elevator arrived at the second floor.

Winny slipped through the doors even as they were sliding open.

On the threshold, Twyla halted when she saw that the elevator car had changed. Gone were the bluebird mural and the marble floor. Every surface in there was brushed stainless steel. Translucent panels in the ceiling cast an eerie blue light, the same blue that had pulsed from the TV and heralded the words “Exterminate. Exterminate.”

“Get out of there!” she ordered Winny, and the doors began to slide shut.

Logan Spangler

In the threatening darkness, the peristalsis pulsing through the snakelike fungus made a wet, disgusting sound, and the obscene mushrooms wheezed softly each time they exhaled their salt-grain spores.

In the tight LED beam, Logan could see that the pivot pins in the knuckles of the barrel hinges might be worked loose with the blade of the pocketknife that he carried. Before he could set to work, however, the lights in the half bath came on, not the yellow thing on the ceiling—which had vanished—but the can lights overhead and the soffit lights above the vanity, which earlier had been broken and corroded. The entire room was restored to its former condition, and the pale-green, black-mottled fungi, both the serpentine and mushroom forms, were gone as if they had never existed.

When he tried the previously locked door, it opened. He rushed out of the little bathroom, into the hallway, relieved to be free.

He sneezed, sneezed again. He pinched his nose between thumb and forefinger to stop a tingling in his nostrils. His lips felt dry, and when he licked them, they were crusted with something. He wiped one hand across his mouth. On his fingers and palm were perhaps a hundred tiny white spores.