Although he was many years removed from that period of his legal practice when he’d specialized in criminal defense, Silas hadn’t lost his intuitive recognition of deception and evil intention. Mr. Dime had not appeared furtive, in fact had proceeded with the air of a man openly going about legitimate business, but Silas couldn’t think of a reason why any resident would ever need to visit the HVAC vault.
Increasingly certain not that time was running out but that some incomprehensible calamity of time was about to befall the Pendleton, Silas needed to return to the ground floor, ask Padmini Bahrati if she knew where Tom Tran was or if she could trigger a fire alarm.
But first he felt compelled to return to the security room and take the guard’s abandoned pistol. He hadn’t been to a shooting range in ten years. He didn’t want to use a gun, but things didn’t always work out the way you preferred. From the utility belt he also took the canister of pepper spray and the flashlight. He stepped into the hallway and hurried to the next door on the left. It was unlocked. He stepped into the HVAC vault.
In the kitchen, Iris sat at the breakfast table, holding the floppy-eared bunny tight to her chest, rocking forward and back in her chair, whispering something to the toy that Winny couldn’t hear, whispering it over and over.
Something about the girl—Winny wasn’t sure what—made him want to be brave. It wasn’t that Iris was pretty, which she was. Although Winny was in many ways advanced for his age, he was too young to be interested in girls. Anyway, she was too old for him, three years older. Part of it might be that she needed books, and he needed books, and unlike most people who liked to talk about what books they read in their clubs, neither Iris nor Winny talked about what they read—in her case because she couldn’t talk, in his case because he was such a rotten talker that he would make good books sound like they sucked.
He didn’t sit at the table with Iris. Too wired to keep still, he roamed the kitchen, looking at the dishes displayed beyond the French doors in some of the cabinets and reading the notations Mrs. Sykes had made on various days on the December page of the wall calendar: “Accountant at 2:30, dinner with Tanya, Dr. Abbot, cheese sale.” He tried to decide if the apples and pears and bananas in the center of the work island had been carefully arranged to look like a still-life painting or had just been dumped willy-nilly into the big shallow bowl, which was such a peculiar thing to care about at a time like this that he wondered if maybe he was gay or something. He even counted the floor tiles, as if the number of them—stupid, stupid—might at some point be vital information that would save their lives.
He also listened to his mom and Mrs. Sykes trying to make calls with the kitchen phone and with both of their cell phones. Several times, before they punched in a complete number, they were connected to people speaking a foreign language, several voices on the line at the same time, gobbling like a flock of turkeys. Once his mom got an operator at City Bell, a different one from the first, and this lady also insisted that it was 1935, though she wasn’t as nice as the first. And Mrs. Sykes dropped her phone in surprise when shimmering sheets of blue lights flashed corner to corner across one kitchen wall.
Inside some of those cabinets, things rattled and clanged. A few lower doors flew open and several drawers rolled out. Cookware tumbled from open doors, stainless-steel flatware and metal utensils erupted from the drawers, and all of this stuff levitated, floating around one side of the kitchen in that blue light, pots and pans bonking against one another. Knives and forks and spoons were busy in midair as if a dozen poltergeists were rattling their tableware together to protest the lack of acceptable ghost food, the way prisoners in some old movies caused a commotion in the dining hall when the evil new warden embezzled money from the budget and served them cheap slop.
The waves of light washed right to left over the cabinets and then away, the junk storm abruptly ended, and everything fell at once in a clatter-crash. But the stuff didn’t just rain down all over the floor. Instead, the items clustered in weirdly balanced piles that gravity should have pulled apart at once but didn’t, pieces of the stainless- steel flatware bristling from among the pots-and-pans sculptures, vibrating like tuning forks, as though everything had been magnetized. After a moment, the magnetism must have fluxed away or something, because the vibrating stopped and the piles collapsed, scattering things across the floor. In the wake of all that commotion, the silence that fell over the kitchen was like a funeral-home hush—except for Iris whimpering like a puppy who was lost and wanted to be home.
Neither of the two moms screamed or went crazy-hysterical, or went into denial, the way that people usually did in movies where weird things happened. Winny was proud of them and grateful, because if one of them had lost her cool, he would have freaked out, too, and that would have been the end of being brave for Iris.
The waves of blue light reminded Winny of the pulsing circles on the TV and of the voice that said,
He suspected his mom was thinking of the same thing, because she said, “Maybe it isn’t safe to go outside, with those things crawling out there, but it’s not safe to stay inside, either.”
Mrs. Sykes said, “We need to get with other people. There’s got to be some safety in numbers.”
“Gary Dai’s in Singapore,” Winny’s mom said.
The lower level of Mr. Dai’s two-story unit was next door to their apartment. He was a software guru and a video-game-designer legend, so he might know what was happening and how to get through all the levels of play alive. Just their luck that he was halfway around the world when the quarter dropped and the action started.
“The people next door are away visiting their grandson,” Mrs. Sykes said. “And the end apartment is empty, for sale.”
Winny’s mom said, “Let’s go back through my place, over to the north hall, see if we can find Bailey Hawks in 2-C. There’s no one in the Pendleton I’d feel safer with right now.”
On the kitchen island were two boxes of ammunition that Bailey retrieved from his master-bedroom closet. As he loaded a spare twenty-round magazine for his Beretta 9 mm, he listened to Kirby Ignis’s story of his startling encounter with the distinguished, blood-spattered man who spoke of killing everyone and who then vanished through a wall.
The doctor was too intelligent and too practical to waste time proposing rational but improbable explanations the way that some UFO debunkers resorted to suppositions of swamp gas, weather balloons, and swarms of iridescent insects. He had seen a man vanish into a wall, but instead of questioning his sanity and the reliability of
