77 Shadow Street

painted by Monet, the people by Rembrandt.

At the peak of this phenomenon, when the Cupp living room was little more than a colorful smear and the people were, by contrast, hyperrealistic, the experience became disorienting. Claustrophobia smothered Twyla, as if the space in which they stood were but a membrane collapsing around them, a plastic film in which they were being bundled and shrink-wrapped, but simultaneously she was also overcome by agoraphobia, equally certain that the Pendleton and the world itself would dissolve and plunge them into a lightless void. She saw Martha Cupp standing resolute, chin thrust forward, like some aging Joan of Arc seasoned by battlefields and faith, evidence of her fear confined to her eyes, the wide pupils like reflections of gun muzzles. Edna Cupp’s mouth was open not in a cry of alarm but in that ahhhh of wonder seen on children’s faces Christmas morning, her eyes shining with anticipation, as though throughout her life no thought of vulnerability had ever crossed her mind. Bailey tall and stalwart, eyes narrowed, seemed to regard the melting away of the room less with fear or wonder than with wary calculation, alert for the threat that would surely manifest at any moment. Dr. Ignis’s sweet face seemed incapable of masking his thoughts, and his fear was as evident as his amazement, his intellect perhaps for the first time overwhelmed by awe. Sparkle’s expression seemed to say here we go again, as though she must be long accustomed to such shocks, and Iris stood slump-shouldered, head bowed, hands over her ears to muffle the high-pitched electronic squealing. Twyla held fast to Winny not only for fear of losing him, but also as much because she needed him for support: Since his birth, he had been her still point in this dizzily turning world, the thing that made life’s struggles worthwhile, the one thing that convinced her that she had not wasted years of her life and had not debased herself by marrying Farrel Barnett.

The squealing in the walls and the rumbling crescendoed at the same instant. Silence fell as if commanded by the sharp downstroke of an orchestra conductor’s baton. The surrounding smear at once resolved into a new reality.

Without lamps, the two crystal ceiling fixtures, and the cove lighting, the room was more dimly illuminated than before, but it wasn’t dark. Flanking doorways, the fireplace, and the windows were bronze wall sconces that had not been here a moment earlier, twelve of them in all, seven of which were aglow.

The furnishings were gone. The room lay empty but worse than empty—cheerless, desolate. The floral- pattern fabric covering the walls had been replaced—but not recently—by wallpaper that wouldn’t have coordinated with the sisters’ decor; it was yellowed with age, water-stained, mottled with mold, peeling. In several places, dry rot had turned the mahogany flooring to dust, revealing the concrete beneath.

For a moment, they all stood speechless, rendered mute by the impossibility of what had happened. Perhaps the others, like Twyla, anticipated another imminent change, this time back to the way things had been less than a minute previously.

Dr. Ignis was the first to speak, pointing toward the windows, which were no longer flanked by draperies, no longer washed by rain on this suddenly clear night. “The city!”

Twyla looked, saw only night where there should have been a sea of lights, and assumed that a power failure must have struck the metropolis, leaving the Pendleton to rely on its emergency generator. But something about the darkness was not right, and the others must have sensed it, too, because they all moved to the windows along with her and Winny.

The pale fire of the full moon should have revealed the ghost of a skyline, should have silvered some windows and sifted a faux dust on sills, ledges, gargoyles, and on the cross that topped the cathedral spire. The city wasn’t just afflicted by a black-out. The city was gone.

Witness

He was standing at the western-parapet balustrade when the steel bones and tendons of the building began to sing, which indicated that the fluctuations were soon to give way to the transition. One moment he stood in the rain and looked out upon the glowing city, the next moment in a cloudless night under a fat moon with the luminous pale-green meadow below, but then the rain and the great city once more, and then the world without cities, back and forth, as this moment in the past prepared to fling the residents of the Pendleton into the future and as a certain moment of the future attracted them with an inevitability equal to that of a black hole swallowing worlds.

The city vanished and did not return. The rain stopped, the sky cleared in that instant, the moon looked as cold as a ball of ice, and the building stood silent on Shadow Hill, overlooking the plain of hungry grass that undulated rhythmically although the night was windless. Witness was home. The strangers in the rooms below him were far from home and would remain here until the fluctuations began again and the entire mysterious process repeated, returning them to their time. Not all of them would make it home. Perhaps none of them.

One

Now the most important of all transitions has occurred. During the next ninety minutes, history will pivot toward me forever and ensure my dominion. I must allow no other outcome, and the path to triumph is clear. I exist here, and my existence is inevitable. All who have previously come to me have perished here or upon returning to their own time. Of these people who would dare to thwart me, all will die.

I cannot die. I am immortal.

In your wisdom, you understand my inevitability. The world cannot go on as it always has, infested with humanity and corrupted until it becomes a barren ball of rock. Send to me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and I will make of them the fodder and the seed bed of a new and better world.

25

Topper’s

Mac and Shelly Reeves had a window table in the restaurant, with a view of Shadow Street, where silver rain slashed through headlights and where stoop-shouldered pedestrians in foul-weather gear hurried past under bobbing umbrellas.