77 Shadow Street

On the ground floor, at the south elevator, Silas was desperate to get to the security room and convince the guard that the Pendleton needed to be evacuated immediately. Considering that the crisis wasn’t a fire or a bomb threat, was instead the perception that something seemed to be going badly wrong with the fundamental mechanism of time within the building, he would need all of his persuasive powers.

As anxious as he was to sound the alarm, he hesitated to press the elevator-call button because of the voices that abruptly arose in the shaft behind the sliding doors. Scores of them, all talking at once. He could not begin to identify the language, though he spoke four and was passingly familiar with two others. The phonemes and morphemes of this strange speech sounded not merely primitive but also savage, a limited language evolved by a culture void of mercy, by a people quick to violence and capable of great cruelty, a people whose beliefs and purposes were utterly alien from human ways of thinking. Intuition was always a quiet voice, the faintest whisper at the back of the mind, but this time it wailed as loud as a siren, and Silas drew his hand back from the call button just as blue light glimmered through the paper-thin crack between the elevator doors, as if the walls of the entire shaft were aglow.

Martha Cupp

As Martha probed under the chesterfield with the brass poker from the fireplace-tool set, Edna lifted the lace- trimmed train of her long dinner gown, revealing her shoes. Evidently she expected something to skitter from beneath the sofa, not necessarily a Gila monster in the tradition of Cobain, maybe just a mouse, but something unpleasant that might seek shelter under the train and climb one of her legs.

“Please, dear, don’t poke at it so aggressively,” Edna said.

“All I seem to be poking is empty air.”

“But if you do jab it, be gentle. Don’t enrage it.”

“Whatever it is, Sis, it won’t thank us for our hospitality and tip its hat on the way out.” She stopped poking. “There’s nothing under here.”

High on the etagere, Smoke and Ashes hissed, suggesting that the object of their disgust and fear remained in the living room.

Martha turned from the chesterfield and went exploring through the canyons of bulky Victorian furniture that offered innumerable places for a mouse to hide—or a Gila monster, for that matter.

“If it’s something supernatural,” Edna said, “it’s not going to be afraid of a brass poker.”

“It’s not supernatural.”

“You didn’t see it clearly. That’s the way supernatural entities are. Quick, vaguely glimpsed, enigmatic.”

“ ‘Quick, vaguely glimpsed, and enigmatic’ describes my first husband’s performance in the bedroom, and he wasn’t supernatural.”

“No, but he was cute,” Edna said.

From their elevated perch, the cats squalled and hissed with greater agitation.

Edna said, “Dear—the chesterfield!”

Turning to the plump sofa once more, Martha saw something moving inside of it. The horsehair-stuffed seat, with no removable cushions, was a single upholstered mass featuring a waterfall front edge. Under the striped fabric, stretching it out of shape, a creature that might have been about the size of one of the cats burrowed back and forth through the stuffing, seemingly frenzied but silent. Evidently it had chewed its way through the underside of the chesterfield and into the guts of the piece.

Martha stepped in front of the sofa, planted her feet wide, and raised the poker overhead.

“It might be a spirit,” Edna said. “Don’t strike a spirit.”

“It’s not a spirit,” Martha assured her.

“If it’s a good spirit, striking it is sacrilegious.”

Waiting for the thing in the sofa to slow down or pause so that she could be certain of clubbing it solidly on her first try, Martha said sarcastically, “What if it’s a demonic spirit?”

“Then, dear, you’ll just piss it off. Please let’s call Mr. Tran and have him deal with this.”

Martha said, “You’re the cake-recipe genius. I’m the business genius. What I have here is a business decision. Go bake something while I handle this.”

On the seat of the chesterfield, the upholstery split and the burrowing intruder erupted in a shower of horsehair.

Mickey Dime

While Mickey waited on the third floor for the north elevator, tremors shuddered through the Pendleton again. He wasn’t the least bit worried about them.

In the Philippines, he had once tracked two men to the lip of a volcano. He needed to kill them to fulfill a contract. As he was about to pull the trigger, an unanticipated minor eruption convulsed the mountain. A gout of white-hot lava spewed over the two men, all but vaporizing their flesh and reducing their bones to char. Though Mickey stood only fifteen feet from them, not a drop touched him. He walked away with the equivalent of a light sunburn on his face.

He had liked the smell of molten rock. Metallic, crisp, sexy.

A day later, the volcano blew in a big way. But by then he was ensconced in a Hong Kong hotel suite with a young prostitute and a can of whipped cream. She had been delicious.

If a volcano couldn’t get him, nothing would.

Now he rode the elevator to the basement. The doors slid open. Mickey stepped into the corridor.

Diagonally to his right and on the farther side of the hallway, the stairwell door was swinging shut behind