77 Shadow Street

his senses, he was in the process of amending his personal definition of the word impossible.

“I don’t know the full story,” Bailey said. “Silas Kinsley, up in 3-C, he’s the Pendleton’s historian. He’ll have all the details. But in the thirties sometime, a butler killed the family who owned Belle Vista.”

“He’d be dead now.”

“Very dead,” Bailey agreed as he dropped spare cartridges into all the pockets of his sport coat. “If I remember right, he committed suicide back then.”

“I’m not the kind who goes to seances.”

“Me neither.” Bailey thought of Sophia Pendleton—Old King Cole was a merry old soul, and a merry old soul was he—singing her way down the stairs. “But this isn’t ghosts. It’s something stranger, bigger.”

“What have you seen?” Ignis asked.

“I’ll tell you on the way.”

“On the way where?”

“Martha and Edna Cupp, up in 3-A. They’re in their eighties. Whatever’s happening here, they need to be out of it.”

“Maybe we all need to be out of it,” Ignis said.

“Maybe we do.”

Mickey Dime

As Mickey rolled the hand truck and dead Jerry along the north hall on the third floor, he grew nostalgic for the childhood they had shared. By the time he turned the corner and stopped at the elevator to press the call button, however, he had exhausted his capacity for sentimentality.

Jerry had been Mickey’s brother but also a problem. Problem solved. His mother said the strong act, the weak react. She said the weak have regrets, the strong have triumphs. She said the weak believe in God, the strong believe in themselves. She said both the strong and the weak are part of the food chain, and it is better to eat than be eaten. She said that the strong have pride, that the weak have humility, and that she was proud of her humility and humble about her pride. She said that power justifies all things and that absolute power justifies all things absolutely. Because a famous California winery paid her handsomely to do a magazine ad and a TV commercial in their what-do-the-smartest-people-drink campaign, she said that a robust Cabernet Sauvignon was central to a life well-lived, that it was a metaphor for transcendence, that it was an essential tool for the redistribution of chic, and that it was both great art and literature in a bottle. She said that judging Cain for killing Abel was like condemning a vigorous wolf pup for drinking his share of mother’s milk and the share of the sickly pup that might otherwise have survived, to the detriment of the pack.

Mickey didn’t understand everything that his mother had said over the years, in part because she had said and written so much that no one could keep up with her. But he knew that everything she said was wise. And most of it was profound.

The elevator car arrived on the third floor. Mickey wheeled his brother into it.

Silas Kinsley

All of the lights were on in the HVAC vault, racks of hooded fluorescent tubes hanging on chains from the ceiling. The impressive ranks of complex machines, humming along as intended by the original engineer, presented a scene of such orderliness and normality that Silas could almost believe that all was right in the Pendleton regardless of the things that he had seen and heard.

He closed the door behind him. “Is anyone here? Mr. Tran? Tom?”

When no one responded, Silas set out to explore the service aisles between the rows of equipment. Instead he at once was drawn to the manhole in the center of the room and to the bundle lying beside it.

The manhole, which had been there since the Pendleton was constructed, provided access to a three-foot- diameter steel sleeve that penetrated the eight-foot-deep concrete foundation of the great mansion. The sleeve had been placed precisely to terminate at the mouth of a fault in the bedrock.

Not a fault in the sense of a fracture, but a smooth-walled lava pipe from which molten rock once gushed. Shadow Hill and surrounding territory was a stable mass of basalt, an extremely dense volcanic stone, and rhyolite, which was the volcanic form of granite. Tens of thousands of years earlier, at the end of the volcanic era in this region, when the eruptions were exhausted, a few long vent tunnels remained in the solid stone, including the one under the Pendleton, which seemed to average between four and five feet in width.

In the late 1800s, when the great house was built, environmental issues were of less concern than in the current age. Little if any thought was given to the possible contamination of the water table when the Pendleton’s bathtub, sink, and toilet drains were routed to terminate at the top of the seemingly bottomless lava pipe. In those days, the city was much smaller than now, only then beginning to plan a public sewer system. Septic tanks remained the primary means of gray-water and waste disposal, and the many thousands of cubic feet of the lava pipe offered a cheap and maintenance-free alternative to a standard tank.

The contractor included the manhole to provide service access in the unlikely event of a problem. When the cast-iron cover was removed, the lava pipe also functioned as an efficient outflow in the event that the basement should flood from a broken water line. In 1928, the Pendleton’s bathtub, sink, and toilet drains were rerouted to the public sewer system, but the manhole remained.

With the conversion of Belle Vista into the Pendleton in 1973, all the chillers and huge boilers of the new heating and cooling system raised a greater possibility of flooding. With the existing access to the lava pipe, the architect and contractor were spared the need to provide massive emergency pumps kept perpetually on standby, and could instead rely on the gravity-flow method of the original arrangement.

Dropping to one knee, Silas Kinsley was not interested in the manhole but in the rolled-up, quilted moving blanket that Dime had tied shut with furniture straps. Assessing the contents of the bundle with both hands, he felt what seemed to be legs, what were almost certainly arms, and undoubtedly a head. One end of the roll had come open slightly when the knot in the securing strap had pulled loose. Silas reached inside and discovered the top of someone’s head. The curliness of the hair and the memory of the exclamation point of blood in the inexplicably