77 Shadow Street

beyond the door a new place, and two old women with voices so nice that she dares to glance at them.

One of them has a gun.

Iris at once retreats again behind the foliage in her mind, to a moment in the earliest days of the fawn’s life, when Bambi was horrified to see a ferret kill a mouse:

Finally Bambi asked anxiously, “Shall we kill a mouse, too, sometime?”

“No,” replied his mother.

“Never?” asked Bambi.

“Never,” came the answer.

“Why not?” asked Bambi, relieved.

“Because we never kill anything,” said his mother simply.

Bambi grew happy again.

Silas Kinsley

Instead of a fourth spiral of blue light, a great rushing brilliance poured from the open manhole: whooooosh. Saturated with intense color, this was not a steady transparent beam like ordinary light, but translucent and churning with visible currents. It swarmed upward less like light than like water might gush from a broken main under extreme pressure. The radiance blued everything in the room, concrete and chillers, pipes and boilers, Mickey Dime’s face and hands and white shirt, and even tinted the shadows sapphire. As the manhole had torn off its hinges, so Silas’s watch vibrated on his wrist, the belt buckle against his abdomen, and the guard’s pistol in a raincoat pocket thumped against his thigh. The heavy machines and boilers were anchored to the floor, but the metal housings creaked, twanged, as though they might pop their welds and rivets.

The rushing radiance lasted ten seconds. Maybe fifteen. But when it winked out, its effects lingered or perhaps increased. Immediately with the extinguishing of the blue brilliance, a sound issued from within the thick walls, an eerie high-pitched resonance, continuously modulating like the shrieky whistle of interference on a shortwave radio, as though the intricate web of steel rebar encased in the concrete might be transmitting the blue energy in a form other than light to every corner of the building.

As if that keening called it forth, the rumbling rose beneath the Pendleton. The more shrill the sound grew within the walls, the deeper notes the rumbling struck, until the two swelled to their fullest at the same moment, whereupon everything changed.

Mickey Dime

Before his eyes, everything shimmered as if waves of intense heat were rising through the vault, but he felt no heat. The rows of machinery blurred. They appeared to ripple. The room seemed to be a mirage. He thought it might vanish just as a phantom oasis melted away from a thirsty traveler in the Sahara.

The racks of chain-hung fluorescent bulbs overhead went dark. Weaker yellow light, provided by irregularly placed and curiously shaped fixtures—not one like another—that had not been there a moment earlier, gave the vault a different and disturbing character. The shadows were more numerous, deeper, and sinister.

The machinery stood silent. The rounded masses of the boilers and the boxy chillers were sheathed in dust. Across the dirty floor lay a litter of fallen and broken fluorescent tubes, scraps of paper, rusting tools. Snarls of fur, scattered small bones, as well as intact skeletons of rats suggested that vermin had thrived here for a while, but not now.

The air felt cool, although not as cold as it should have been with no heat on a December night. Mickey smelled mold, damp concrete, an elusive rancid odor that came and went.

The manhole cover lay in its proper place, as if it had never exploded to the ceiling. Dull-red with rust and dust. The surrounding rubber gasket was cracked, crumbling.

Klick the Prick had vanished. The blanket and furniture straps that wrapped the body were gone.

Dead Jerry also gone. His little brother. Gone.

And the hand truck.

Gone.

Mickey’s mother had known everything. If this had happened to her, she would already have a theory to explain it.

No theories occurred to Mickey. He stood dumbstruck. Closed his eyes. Opened them. The room remained inexplicably changed.

He needed some aromatherapy to clear his mind.

He needed some time in the sauna.

He felt stupid. He had never before felt stupid.

His mother said stupidity should be a capital offense, except with so many stupid people everywhere you looked, there wouldn’t be enough steel in the world to build all the necessary guillotine blades or enough executioners to operate them.

He missed his mother. More than ever. He felt the loss of her. More than ever. Acutely.

Twyla Trahern

They were in the Cupp apartment, sharing their recent uncanny experiences, when it happened. It was like yet different from how the wall in Winny’s room rippled away to be replaced by a vision of abandonment and decay. An electronic keening seemed to come out of the bones of the building itself, and the ground under the Pendleton rumbled as it had done earlier. Twyla pulled Winny close when all around them the spacious living room blurred as if she were looking at it through rain-washed glass. The Victorian furniture, the fine stained-glass lamps, the classical busts on pedestals, the art and the ferns and the carpet all lost their sharp edges and details, seemed to be melting away. Only the people remained clear in an increasingly impressionistic scene, as if the room had been