77 Shadow Street

Past the security room, past the superintendent’s apartment, a small TV hung in the corner, near the ceiling. Concentric circles of blue light pulsed outward from the center of the screen. After Mickey had taken eight or ten steps, some kind of robot voice came from the TV: “Adult male. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Basement. West wing. Exterminate. Exterminate.”

This was too much. The Pendleton fell to ruin in the wink of an eye. Dead Jerry and Klick the Prick disappeared. Nothing was the way it should be. And now some wiseguy was putting out a hit on him. Well, it didn’t work that way. Mickey killed, he didn’t get killed.

The strong act, the weak react. Mickey acted, drawing his pistol and blowing out the blue screen with a single shot.

He felt better, still confused but not completely disoriented. He realized he had gone the wrong direction.

Before turning back, he decided to have a look in the security room. He didn’t know how Vernon Klick’s body could have gotten back there from the HVAC vault, but it went somewhere, and this was as likely a place to look as any.

When he opened the door, he found the security room as changed as anything else, though not transformed in a similar way. Except for a thin layer of dust on the floor, the room was clean. The lights all worked. The coffee center and the under-the-counter refrigerator were gone. So were the chairs and the workstation. The walls were lined with computers, video screens, and racks of electronic devices that Mickey couldn’t identify, which sure as hell couldn’t have been installed in the short time since he had previously been here.

The equipment hummed, ticked, and blinked busily, as if the system took care of itself and didn’t need losers like Vernon Klick and Logan Spangler to monitor it. The guard’s corpse wasn’t there. Neither was the gun belt that Mickey had left with the intention of retrieving it later.

In the film of dust on the floor were flurries of footprints, all apparently left by the same pair of shoes.

Mickey didn’t know what to make of any of this. He wasn’t a police detective. He was the guy that homicide dicks tried and failed to track down. He knew how to avoid leaving evidence, but he didn’t have a clue how to connect pieces of evidence to solve a puzzle.

He didn’t want to learn, either. He didn’t want to change who he was. He loved who he was. He adored who he was.

If new facts seemed to upend your philosophy, you didn’t change what you believed. Only the weak changed their beliefs. The strong changed the facts. His mother said the best and the brightest didn’t alter their beliefs to conform to reality. They altered reality to conform to their beliefs. History’s greatest political visionaries just spent more and more money, exerted ever greater control over the educational system and the media, eliminated more and more dissidents as became necessary, until they molded society to fit their theory of an ideal civilization. Fools get eaten by reality. The wise put a choke collar and a leash on reality, and they make it heel.

Every time that he had heard his mom say those things, Mickey had been energized, thrilled. But now reality had done a sudden one-eighty on him; and he realized that he didn’t know how to get it back under control. His mom would have known. She had known everything. But though she had instructed Mickey how to think about reality, she hadn’t taught him anything about how to collar and leash-train it. Right now, reality seemed as slippery as a greased eel.

Once he was back in his own digs, with all his mom’s stuff around him, maybe he’d start to get his mind straight about this. Maybe she had taught him everything he needed to do to cope in a situation like this, not just the general principles of how to think about reality but also the specific techniques for controlling it. Surely she had taught him all that. He’d simply forgotten. Surrounded by mementoes of her, this confusion would dissipate, her wisdom would be recalled, and he would again be as a god.

He left the security room and walked the long creepily lighted corridor, past the HVAC vault. As he approached the north elevator, another pulsing blue screen issued the same threat as the one he had shot. He shot this one, too.

When the elevator responded to the call button and the doors slid open, it wasn’t the car with which he was familiar. The bird mural was gone. The interior surfaces were all stainless steel, and panels in the ceiling shed a cold blue light. He didn’t like the new reality of the elevator. He didn’t like it at all.

He decided to take the stairs to the third floor.

Silas Kinsley

In the acid-yellow light, he remained in the shadows among the chillers, expecting the murderer to return. Through the open door came a loud, possibly computerized voice describing Dime, specifying his location, and seeming to call for his extermination, a sentiment with which Silas could concur. Then a gunshot.

He didn’t know if someone had shot Mickey Dime or if Dime had gunned down someone else. Reluctant to step from cover until he had a better grasp of the situation, he drew Vernon Klick’s pistol from a pocket of his raincoat and stood motionless, listening.

The changes in the vault didn’t surprise Silas. Previously he had reached the startling but inescapable conclusion that something went wrong with time in this building every thirty-eight years. By the evidence of filth and ruin around him, he inferred that he was no longer in the Pendleton of 2011 but in a future Pendleton of an unknown year, though he had no idea how long he would be here.

He was less disturbed by the changes than by the atmosphere in the room, which was worse than merely unwholesome. In their day, he and Nora traveled to some exotic locations, and the quality of this sour-yellow light reminded him of the smoky glow rising from granite bowls full of low-burning tallow, in a jungle-draped temple where the towering stone god smiled but not benignly and where the altar was stained with the blood of generations from before it became a tourist mecca. The shadows were sulfur-black, and they struck him as being not an absence of light but crouched forms, alive and hostile and waiting for their moment. The irregular radiant shapes weren’t only on walls and ceiling, like an archipelago of atomic-test islands, but also on some of the machinery. Squinting, he was able to see through the nearest patch of luminosity to its source, which seemed to be a colony of minute light-emitting fungi. The malodors of mold, damp concrete, scaling rust, rancid grease, and a faint vileness that might have been desiccated flesh hung on the air. If evil didn’t already lie in wait here, the vault certainly welcomed its coming.

From the hallway beyond the open door, a computer voice again described Mickey Dime and announced his location. It might also have called for his extermination, as before, but another shot rang out, followed by silence.

Cautiously, Silas moved through the forest of machines and into the clearing at the center of which lay the