manhole. The wrapped body of the guard and the hand truck with its burden were gone, which must mean that they had not made the leap from the Pendleton of 2011 to this later version of the building.
He had seen the iron cover explode off the manhole and to the ceiling, then fall and roll away into the gloom, as if the Fates were reluctant to call heads or tails, yet now the disc was in place. He supposed the hole remained uncovered in 2011, where that event had occurred. Between then and now, repairs must have been made to the hinges.
Still holding the pistol in his right hand, with his left he flipped up the ring-grip from its niche and pulled the heavy rusted cover aside. The gasket had deteriorated. Chunks of crumbling rubber fell away into the darkness below.
Rising from the lava pipe, something fluttered against his face, and he recoiled before he realized that it was nothing alive, nothing of substance. No draft would wash across him in such tight rhythmic waves; therefore, it must be pulses of some energy, perhaps a weak lingering residue of the great rushing blueness that had gushed out of the hole earlier. Far down in the shaft, scattered snakes of blue light formed, wriggled around the curving surface, were extinguished, and new ones were born. As the energy fluttered against him, he felt his belt buckle hum against his abdomen, and in his shirt pocket, his metal-rimmed reading glasses twitched feebly.
If part of the explanation for this event involved a magnetic field, he supposed that the lava pipe must be the upper section of a complicated transmission line leading all the way down to the very magnetic core of the earth itself. But he could not begin to imagine why only living creatures and their immediate possessions were flung forward in time, though that was evidently the case.
However it happened, they weren’t stranded here. Andrew North Pendleton had made it home again to his time, even if his wife and children did not. Of the nine members of the Ostock family and the seven members of their household staff who had been brought to this future, five of the former and three of the latter had returned to 1935 after their ordeal here—although only to be murdered by the butler, Nolan Tolliver.
With his left hand, he fished from a pocket the small flashlight that he had taken from the guard’s utility belt in the security room, before the change. He intended to make his way upstairs, where other residents must be reeling from the shock of what had happened. The history that he would share might give them a little hope if nothing else:
The crisp beam of the LED flashlight revealed scattered bones and skulls—and a few complete skeletons—of rats. They were white hieroglyphics on the gray floor, symbols awaiting translation.
Perhaps the pistol gave Silas a foolish kind of courage, but when intuition told him there was something important to discover here before he went upstairs, he hesitated only briefly before moving away from the door to the hall. Without all the facts, you couldn’t win in a courtroom, and in this case, his life and those of all his neighbors were on trial.
He stepped carefully to avoid crushing the rat bones underfoot, proceeding deeper into the enormous room, playing the light across the hulking machines. When the beam touched a formation of luminous fungi, the colony throbbed more brightly for a moment, and there was a sensuous quality to its response, as if it took pleasure from the contact or perhaps knew pain.
Standing at the windows of the Cupps’ living room, watching the plain of luminous pale-green grass sway in the moonlight as if timing its changes of direction to a lazy metronome, listening to the urgent conversation of the others, Sparkle felt that she would get through this alive, that however she was meant to die, this was not the night or the place.
If some power so colossal as to change reality could bring them here, wherever
A sense of the uncanny prickled the nape of her neck, but that was a reaction to the deep strangeness of the scene, not a symptom of fear. She had no fear for herself. Her life had been so shot through with bolts of fate that of necessity she long ago resigned herself to destiny, controlling what she could and refusing to worry about the rest. She had allowed herself to be afraid only of the lightning that killed her father and her mother, and now even that terror was behind her. If suddenly they found themselves in the lovely Pendleton as it ought to be, with a fierce storm raging over the city, she would go downstairs and into the courtyard, to stand gazing up calmly and with complete trust at the sky, confident that however she might be meant to meet her death, it would not take her until the moment that, from her birth, it had been ordained to do so.
Professor Talman Ringhals, mescaline poisoning, Iris, and other metaphorical lightning strikes blazed new paths through life for Sparkle, and this bizarre event was just the latest. She accepted it quicker than did her neighbors because for some months she had felt that she was overdue for another bolt.
Nearly thirteen years earlier, when she found herself pregnant with Iris, her small inheritance no longer was sufficient to pay both living expenses and tuition. She dropped out of college, intending to get a job as a receptionist or clerk. Although she had never before bought a lottery ticket, she purchased two on the same day, and the second one paid her $245,000 only one week later. After taxes, her nest egg was enough to carry her for four or five years, even with the special care that Iris required; therefore, she decided not to return to the university, but instead embarked upon the work that she had hoped to pursue since shortly after she was orphaned on that stormy day in Maine.
Three years after the lottery, a new kind of lightning struck Sparkle when her work was spectacularly rewarded, whereupon she decided that this world was a place of deep mystery and enchantment, with occasional episodes of terror to give it texture. Death was merely the price of admission, cheap if you considered all that it bought you. Fearing death meant also fearing life, which stole all meaning from the act of living.
Until the improbable event this evening, she allowed herself the fear of lightning because she felt that to have no fear for oneself would be to tempt the Fates and invite calamity. Now, with no fear of anything, she was left only with fear
Iris stood apart from her mother, back to the windows, and the boy, Winny, stayed near her but at just enough distance to make it clear that he understood her need to maintain a certain personal space, a defense line against the world. Winny had a quality that Sparkle could not quite define, a winsomeness that would one day outlast his shyness.
With apparent effort, the boy even contributed to the group discussion, mentioning the parallel universes that he read about in some of his favorite novels, other Earths existing side by side with our own, some of them only slightly altered from ours, but others radically different.
