77 Shadow Street

Iris looked up from her book, though not directly at her mother, as eye contact pained her.

“ ‘Don’t be frightened,’ ” Sparkle said, quoting the old stag, Bambi’s father, from the next-to-last chapter of the novel. “ ‘Come with me and don’t be frightened. I’m glad that I can take you and show you the way.…’ ”

Again, the famous novel worked its magic. Iris put aside the book she was currently reading, got off the bed, and approached her mother, oblivious of the crawling horror seeking entrance at the casement window.

Sparkle wanted to take the girl’s hand, but that contact would shatter the mood, put an end to cooperation, and perhaps inspire a violent physical reaction. Instead, she turned and went to the open door, as if confident that her daughter would follow her as any fawn would follow the doe that brought it into the world. Crossing the threshold into the hallway, she glanced back and saw Iris shuffling after her.

Sparkle thought she heard an inhuman cry, a shrill expression of intense craving, frustration, and rage, muffled by window glass. But the sound was so alien and so chilling that she wanted to believe it was only the voice of the skirling wind, blown into the thinnest falsetto.

Winny

When Winny slipped through the opening elevator doors, he right away realized that the bird mural was gone, that all the surfaces were stainless steel, and that the usual cove lighting and crystal ceiling fixture were gone, replaced by circles that rained down a moody blue light. A second later, he made the connection between this blue light and the luminous rings pulsing on the TV set in his room—which was just when his mom said, “Get out of there!”—and the doors started to slide shut.

These doors were supposed to stop closing if you stepped between them, it was a safety feature, but they clamped on to Winny as if they were jaws. They weren’t sharp, they couldn’t bite him, but they were maybe powerful enough to slowly squeeze the breath out of him or to snap his ribs and force the broken ends inward to his heart. As his mother grabbed him by his jacket, in his mind’s eye, Winny saw blood squirting from his nose, trickling from his ears, and that scared him enough to writhe and twist in the grip of the doors until he wrenched free.

Almost free. The doors closed on his left wrist, tight enough to hurt, and he couldn’t skinny down his hand enough to slip it loose. His mom hooked her fingers in the narrow gap, trying to pull the doors apart just enough to allow Winny to liberate himself, but she couldn’t do it because the doors were crazy powerful. She was grunting from the effort and cursing, and his mother never cursed.

Then maybe he imagined it or maybe it really happened, but in the elevator car, something crawled onto his imprisoned hand and began to explore it.

“There’s a bug!” Winny cried out, violating his rule against doing anything wimpy, opening himself to the charge of being a sissy, but he couldn’t control himself. “In there, on my hand, a big bug or something!”

Its legs or antennae quivered between all his fingers at the same time, simultaneously across the palm and the back of his hand, gross, disgusting, maybe a big centipede so flexible it could twine ceaselessly, busily through his fingers or maybe a swarm of smaller insects. He clenched his teeth and choked back a scream, waiting for the thing—or things—to bite or sting, shaking his hand to cast it off, trying to pull loose, the doors pinching his wrist tighter, his mother straining at the doors, her face red with the effort, the cords in her neck like taut ropes, and suddenly he was free of both the door and the bug.

Winny shot past his mom, across the hallway, turned, his back pressed to the door of the Dai apartment, certain that something radically weird must be coming out of the elevator. But the doors had slid shut. His mother was scared but not hurt, beads of sweat on her forehead, no bug climbing up her raincoat toward her face.

They were just thirty feet from the south stairwell, the only way out if they couldn’t use the elevator. His mom scooped her purse off the floor, didn’t bother with the dropped umbrella, pushed Winny ahead of her, and said, “Come on, the stairs!”

Maybe it was true instinct or maybe it was just a full-sissy moment that would live in infamy, but as he approached the fire door, Winny thought that the stairwell was a trap. Something was waiting for them along that spiral, and they would never get to the ground floor alive.

His mother must have felt it, too, because she whispered, “Winny, no. Wait.”

Vernon Klick

Vernon was so intent on watching the third floor for old saggy-assed Logan Spangler to stagger out of Senator Foghorn Leghorn’s apartment that the knock on the door startled him up from his chair. Before he could say “Come in,” the door opened, and Bailey Hawks entered as if he owned the room and was here to collect the rent.

Vernon disliked Hawks as much as anyone in the Pendleton and more than some of them. Logan Spangler, in his best bootlicking mode, said Hawks was a hero, apparently just because he was a marine and went to war and was given a chestful of stupid medals, which were probably awards for things like killing ten thousand innocent civilians and straddling a thousand third-world whores and torching orphanages. Real heroes were men like Vernon, who dared to reveal the private lives and sick secrets of holier-than-thou greed demons like the parasites who lived in this building.

During his search of Hawks’s apartment, Vernon had not been able to find any shockingly sick secrets of the kind that would help put his book at the top of best-seller lists and make his subscription website, when he created it, the place on the Internet. But just because he failed to find scandalous material about Hawks didn’t mean that such secrets did not exist. It meant that the orphan killer was extraordinarily clever at concealing evidence of his vicious crimes and disgusting perversities.

Anyway, Vernon did find lots of circumstantial evidence that Hawks was far from the hero old Logan Spangler thought he was. For one thing, Hawks subscribed to nine financial publications, which revealed a demented obsession with making money. He had a wine cooler full of high-dollar Cabernets, several expensive tailor-made suits, each of which cost six times as much as a perfectly serviceable off-the-rack garment, plus a collection of rare Bakelite radios from the Art Deco period. A decent man would not have spent all that money so selfishly or on such frivolous items. Although Vernon knew a lot about safes and how to crack them, Hawks’s free-standing model proved to be impenetrable, which must mean it contained scandalous material. And although Vernon knew a lot about computer hacking, he couldn’t get at Hawks’s client files because they were so well protected; he even began to think they were kept on a separate computer that was locked in the safe each night, no doubt because Hawks and his clients were engaged in stock fraud, commodities manipulation, and worse.

As Hawks came into the security room, he said, “Mr. Klick, I just now saw someone in the north stairwell who I don’t think lives here.”