77 Shadow Street

Sparkle didn’t read novels of that kind. But for a few decades, fantasy fiction, in books and films, had so dominated the culture that it was impossible not to be somewhat familiar with the fantastic concepts that her neighbors now raised for consideration, one after the other. They talked urgently, interrupting one another until she was reminded of a Star Trek club meeting that she had chanced upon one evening in college, where the true nature of Klingons—or some topic equally profound—was being debated with such passion and in such quasi- scientific language that the two dozen participants sounded only half mad.

Hugging herself to ward off a chill that was internal, Sparkle turned from the windows and from the eerie meadows beyond, facing her neighbors. Except for the two children, who remained to one side, the others—Dr. Kirby Ignis, Bailey, Twyla, and the sisters Cupp—stood in a circle. They had no furniture on which to sit, and the wood floor was splintered, dirty, encrusted here and there with foul-looking mold.

Dr. Ignis, whom Sparkle didn’t know well, took control by virtue of his grandfatherly demeanor, which was calming, also by asserting that parallel worlds were theoretical and, in his opinion, highly problematic. He said, “The concept arose in the first place as a kind of desperate explanation of why our universe is meticulously ordered to make life inevitable.”

“Why would anyone need an explanation?” Edna Cupp asked. “What is simply is.”

“Yes, but you see, there are twenty universal constants from Planck’s minimums of time and space to gravitational fine structure, and if any one of them was the very slightest bit different from what it is, the universe would be a wildly disordered place incapable of forming galaxies, solar systems, or planets, incapable of supporting any kind of life. The odds of the universe being as hospitable as ours is … well, it’s impossible, quadrillions of trillions to one.”

“What is … is,” Edna repeated.

“Yes, but the highly specific nature of these constants implies design, in fact insists upon it. Science cannot, will not, tolerate the concept of a designer of the universe.”

“I tolerate it well enough,” Edna declared.

“My point is,” Ignis continued, “the likelihood of all twenty universal constants being what they are is so small that to explain our life-supporting universe without resorting to a designer, some physicists have supposed that there must be an infinite number of universes, not merely ours. If among trillions and trillions and trillions of universes there is one—our own—with those twenty constants precisely set to support order and life, then it’s likely that we’re the product of chance rather than of a designer.”

With one dismissive gesture, Ignis swatted away that theory as he might swat away an annoying fly, and he continued, “Whatever you care to believe, it’s a waste of time thinking that we might have been transported to some parallel world. This is our universe, our Earth, at some point in the far future. The things some of you have seen, the alien landscape we’ve all seen beyond those windows, are either the products of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution or they result from some unimaginably catastrophic event that brought worldwide change in but several centuries.”

“This Pendleton is in regrettable condition,” Martha Cupp said, “but it hasn’t been here even for several centuries, certainly not for hundreds of thousands of years.”

“The city is gone,” Ignis reminded her. “A metropolis doesn’t collapse, crumble, and give way to grassland in mere decades.”

“Why is the Pendleton still standing—and nothing else?” Bailey Hawks asked. He indicated the seven of the twelve bronze sconces that had evidently been installed after the Cupps’ apartment was sold to a new owner and that still produced light. “Where does the power come from? And why would those bulbs work after centuries? Are there any people left in this future? If so, where are they? If there aren’t any people … who generates the electricity?”

They looked at one another, but no one offered a theory.

Then Twyla said, “We aren’t here permanently, are we? We can’t be. There’s got to be a way home.”

“The door to home won’t be one we can open at will,” Dr. Ignis said. “Any more than we opened the one that brought us here. It’ll do what it’ll do when the conditions are right.”

“What conditions?” Twyla asked.

Dr. Ignis shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Twyla said, “And why did only people make this … this leap?”

“People and cats,” Edna said as two handsome blue-gray felines warily entered from another room. She scooped one of them into her arms, but her sister didn’t want to put down her pistol to cuddle the other, so it let Dr. Ignis pluck it off the floor.

“Cats and people,” Twyla said. “And anything we were wearing or carrying. But nothing else.”

“Every living thing emits a weak direct-current electromagnetic field,” Dr. Ignis said. “Maybe that has something to do with it. Whatever’s immediately within a living thing’s electromagnetic field might be affected.”

“People have disappeared from the Pendleton before,” Martha Cupp declared. “Andrew Pendleton’s children, back in the late 1890s.”

“Weren’t they kidnapped?” Sparkle asked.

Martha said, “The wife and the two children. Kidnapping was the story, but they were never seen again. Disappeared. I don’t know the details. Silas Kinsley. He lives next door. He’s the self- appointed historian of the Pendleton. He said something once about violence occurring here every … I think it was every thirty-eight years. It sounded very tacky tabloid to me, and I didn’t encourage him. I think now we better talk to Silas.”

Dr. Ignis said, “We’re going to have to explore, learn what we can. The less we understand our situation”—he glanced at the children—“the less we’re likely to come through this as well as we’d like.”

“Sally,” Edna Cupp said. “Sally Hollander. She really saw what she said she saw in the pantry. She’s alone down on the ground floor. We’ve got to get her.”

“We will,” Bailey said. “We should search the building floor-by-floor, find out who else is here. Maybe there’s