77 Shadow Street

the building, which he’d heard previously during the day and about which he had called security to inquire.

When both of those noises faded, Julian knew immediately that something important had happened. The tattoo of rain slanting against glass, the swish and gurgle of water plummeting through a downspout near his kitchen window, the wet-leaf rustle of the courtyard trees, and all the other voices in the storm’s chorus fell silent in an instant. Refrigerator hum, dishwasher churn, icemaker drone, the faint tick of the glass pot expanding and contracting on the warming unit of the coffeemaker: Every familiar sound washed away with the passing of the storm, and the hush was at first profound.

Gone, too, were the familiar smells of his kitchen. No aroma of brewing coffee. No lingering pine scent of the cleaner that the housekeeper used earlier in the day, during her latest twice-a-week visit. No cinnamon scent from the breakfast rolls in the pastry box that should be on the counter nearby.

The half-open window no longer brought him the moist, ozone-crisp smell of the storm or the rich earthen fragrance of wet garden soil. When Julian reached across the sink with his left hand, he discovered that the interior window screen was missing. He felt for the crank handle that operated the left half of the casement window, but it wasn’t there; he found only the socket in which the handle should have been seated. He sought the right-side handle and gripped it, but he grimaced because it was swathed in cobwebs. When he tried to crank it, the mechanism seemed to be frozen.

Mystified, he sidestepped past the sink, and he put down his coffee mug, which didn’t ring off the counter as it should have done, but met the granite with a muffled ponk. Although the housekeeper had left less than two hours earlier, he discovered a thick layer of dust on the stone, and then debris of some kind, what were most likely tatters of rotted rags and what might have been crumbles of fallen plaster that gave off the smell of powdered gypsum and finely ground sand.

When he turned away from the counter to face the room, Julian smelled mildew. Something like stale urine.

His understanding of the space totally changed. He was so familiar with every square foot of the apartment and with the precise placement of the furniture that not only could he get about caneless and without barking his shins or stumbling over anything, but he could also perceive the shapes of things with something like a sixth sense, a kind of psychic radar. This unique perception now told him that the kitchen table and chairs were not where they should have been, that they were gone.

Usually, he didn’t feel his way around with arms outstretched, but he resorted to this technique now, worried not only that the familiar furniture had been removed but also that something else might have been set in its place. The kitchen proved to be as empty as his psychic radar indicated. Sandy grit and larger bits of debris crunched under his shoes.

Julian was proud of living independently and rarely needed to lean on anyone for anything. The weird transformation of the kitchen, however, spooked him. He needed someone with working eyes to come around and explain to him what had happened here.

He patted the pockets of his cardigan sweater and was relieved to find his cell phone where he expected it to be. He pressed the button, listened to the sign-on jingle, and then after a hesitation, entered the number of the concierge. Padmini was supportive without ever giving the slightest indication that a blind man evoked pity in her. Julian loathed being pitied. After entering the number and pressing SEND, he waited with the phone to his right ear … until he became convinced there was no cell service.

Confused and concerned, but not yet afraid, he went to where the doorway to the dining area had always been, and it was still in the same place. On the threshold, Julian heard murmuring voices elsewhere in the apartment, urgent and strange, though he should have been alone.

Fielding Udell

The world was in worse shape than he had imagined in his most wretched speculations. The situation was more like that movie, The Matrix, than Fielding had known. Everything was false, projections of a benign reality beamed into his head by the Ruling Elite, but now their Spin Machine failed, the projections faded, and reality asserted itself. He had imagined domed cities in which the last twenty or thirty million brainwashed citizens were protected from the toxin-choked, superheated, icebound, drought-ridden, storm-wracked, disease-riddled, nuclear-decimated, frogless wasteland that was most of this sorry planet, a poisonous hell where billions of corpses rotted in the fields and streets. But now he saw that he was not in a domed city, not safe under an impenetrable force field, as he had thought.

He had lived in ruins but had been mind-beam persuaded that he dwelt instead in a luxury apartment building. Not even his furniture had been real, for now when the Spin Machine failed, he saw that his rooms were empty of everything except dust and a few dead insects and scraps of age-yellowed paper.

When he went to a window, wiped a film of dust from the glass, and looked down into the courtyard three stories below, he saw in the moonlight not the flowers and the manicured hedges and the well-shaped trees and the fountains that had always been there before, but instead destruction and a primeval sprawl of vegetation. The bowls of the tiered fountains were toppled and broken, like cracked conch shells and pried-open clam shells of immense size. No trees remained. The other plants were not easily studied in the lunar glow, but he could tell that they were not like anything he had seen before; at best they were apostates to the timeless church of Nature, and at worst they were mutations so grotesque as to be demonic, cresting like the waves of a corrupted sea over the winding footpath that meandered from the double doors on the west end to the east wall, where a gate led to the Pendleton’s garages behind the main building.

On other nights, Fielding had been able to see the roof of the converted carriage house rising above the back wall of the courtyard, and beyond that the somewhat higher roofline of the larger garage, which had been added when Belle Vista was converted to the Pendleton. He could see neither structure now, though the full moon should have silvered their slate shingles. The big gate in the courtyard wall sagged open on buckled hinges, but beyond those bent bronze staves there seemed to be nothing but darkness. Nor was there any glow of city lights either above the parapeted roof of the north wing or to the east where the garages should have been.

Wherever his food came from, it wasn’t prepared by Salvatino’s Pizzeria or by any of the other restaurants from which he daily ordered. If the city didn’t exist, which the utter lack of lights suggested, then neither did establishments offering home-delivery of tasty meals. When he received those fragrant packages, they evidently came from despicable Minions of the Ruling Elite, and for all he knew, his submarine sandwiches and pasta Bolognese and moo goo gai pan were all the same thing, Soylent Green, flavored to deceive.

Fielding was less frightened than outraged, less outraged than overcome by a profound sense of vindication, for he had been correct all along about the condition of the world, more insightful than he had known. He trembled with righteous indignation.

Movement in the courtyard drew his attention. Something appeared around a bend in the winding walkway, a creature previously concealed by the riot of wicked vegetation. Fielding hissed involuntarily through clenched teeth, because although he didn’t know what kind of beast revealed itself below, he knew at once and without doubt that