77 Shadow Street

it was hostile to human life, and evil.

Pale it was but not just pale, also slightly aglow, not because its surface reflected or emitted light, but luminous deep within. It was mostly shadowy shapes infused with slowly pulsing light that was unevenly distributed, jaundice-yellow and methyl-green. The light traveled through its mysterious flesh in slow waves and whorls, at various depths and different levels of intensity, revealing what might have been the dark lumps of internal organs that were more dense than the surrounding tissue. The length of a prowling lion but nearly as tall as a man, it appeared in the inadequate moonlight to be creeping along on insectile but meaty legs similar to those of a Jerusalem cricket. As best Fielding could tell, the body might have been a collection of bulbous forms—swollen bladders, pendulous sacs—all wound about and linked by a segmented something that reminded him of a thick tapeworm. The thing did not move fast, though he was certain that it could quicken considerably in the presence of prey, and it seemed to be focused on the pathway before it, as if following a scent.

This apparition was more grotesque than anything Fielding Udell could have dreamed up in a thousand years of nightmares, beyond the power of any hallucinogen to conjure in the mind, more terrifying in its alienness than if a Tyrannosaurus rex had suddenly bounded into the courtyard, mouth agape and bristling with saber-length teeth. He thought of distant stars, of the airless vastness of deep space, of a journey measured in light-years, because the thing in the courtyard surely hadn’t been born on Earth. A chill went through him, through both body and soul, and his palms became damp and cold, as though the icy courage that had sustained his long researches was now melting out of him.

As Fielding stared down at the repulsive vision, transfixed as a rabbit might be by a sudden encounter with a coiled rattlesnake, the thing raised something like a head, a lumpish mass lacking the left-right symmetry of the heads of all animals in nature. It turned up toward him a face that was malignant in two senses: first, that it appeared to be a twisted cancerous mass; second, that it was a mask of perfect evil.

Perhaps it was looking only at the moon, as lunatic as it was misbegotten, but he believed that the thing fixed its gaze on him alone, if the three radiant silver orbs, clustered midface, were in fact eyes. His trance broken, Fielding stepped back from the dirty window, out of sight, certain that he had at last seen one of the elusive Ruling Elite.

Silas Kinsley

In the dismal yellow light, the oily shadows oozed away from the flashlight beam, and the immense room almost seemed to be underwater, the rays from overhead filtering down through countless fathoms. The broken and corroded HVAC equipment hulked and tilted like a sunken ship long settled on an ocean floor.

The vault lay silent but for an elusive susurration that might have been a draft born elsewhere in the building and carried through the maze of pipes that no longer contained water for the heating-cooling system and that were in some places broken or decoupled from their elbow joints. Given the circumstances, Silas wasn’t able to repress the suspicion that he was hearing not merely a draft but instead the whispering of people who were monitoring him from the cover of the defunct machinery. Or if not people, perhaps nearby might wait a creature like the one that Perry Kyser, the contractor, had seen in 1973, the abomination that spoke to him in the tortured voice of the missing painter.

With the guard’s pistol in hand, Silas pressed on, deeper into the labyrinth. He needed to know the full nature of the situation. If he allowed fear to triumph, he would make decisions based on emotion rather than on reason, which would be the quickest way to wind up dead.

The floor drain in this vault seemed to be the delivery system through which a periodic massive discharge of magnetic—or some other kind of—energy caused the present to fold temporarily into the future. Lawyer’s intuition suggested that here at the epicenter, he was more likely than elsewhere to find important clues that, linked together in a chain of evidence, might help him and his neighbors escape a death sentence.

His flashlight played across one of the chillers. The thin sheet-metal housing was pocked with bullet holes, in a few of which spiders had spun miniature webs as if they had been too exhausted to weave architectures with larger perimeters. The farther Silas went, the more punctures and ricochet trails and bullet-shattered gauges he found. He came to a litter of brass cartridge casings, first dozens and then hundreds, through which he stepped with care, inevitably causing a few to roll and to strike from others a faint but melodious ringing like fairy bells.

He expected to find the remains of the combatants around one turn or another, and soon he did, although they were not the remains of men. Lying near each other in an aisle between boilers and water softeners were two skeletons that lacked the angularity and the knobby joints of human bones. These specimens didn’t lie in jumbled, jagged disarray, not in the splay-legged and half-comic posture of tumbled human skeletons, which always appeared to have dropped to the floor at the conclusion of an antic dance. Death-stripped, these bones were graceful, as sleek as the lines of a master calligrapher intent on making visual art from sentences of cursive prose. Perhaps seven feet tall. Two-legged. Extra knuckles and phalanges in their long feet and hands. Six toes on each foot, the first and sixth longer than the other four, good for climbing. Their skulls were not as round as those of human beings, shaped more like large footballs without the pointed ends. Their jaws were long and strong for biting, teeth fearsome, death grins wide and shark-sharp.

The flashlight also revealed that these bones were not white but gray, and even the teeth were gray. The uniform shade suggested that they had always been gray, that this was not discoloration resulting from the passage of much time or from the stains left by decomposing flesh. When Silas crouched and lifted one of the arms, it felt much lighter than bone, but when he let it drop, it rang off the concrete with an almost metallic sound.

Not far from the first two skeletons, he found three more like them. From the bones, he could extrapolate with confidence that these creatures had been strong, agile, and very fast. Even in death, their teeth said predator.

Finally, in the southwest corner of the long room, he discovered fourteen human skeletons sitting with their backs to the wall, ten adults and four children. No flesh clung to their bones, and in the perpetual dampness of the vault, most of their clothes had rotted away, as well. Having received the rich fluids of decomposition, the concrete around them was dark and mottled. Although much time had passed since these luckless people met their end, Silas thought he could still smell a faint ghost of putrefaction, an olfactory haunting in this deeply spectral place.

One of the adult skeletons still bit on the barrel of a pistol-grip, pump-action shotgun that had not dislodged when it blew out the back of the head. Two other adults lay with shotguns. Enduring stains on the wall led Silas to have a closer look at all fourteen, and he discovered exit wounds in the back of every skull. Here at the bottom of the building, in the windowless vault, they had made their final stand against the predators—saving the last of their ammunition for themselves. The adults apparently killed the children first to spare them whatever horrors the predators would have wrought upon them.

Perhaps these people had been the last generation of Pendleton residents, before the building had fallen into ruin. And now Silas could no longer avoid a question that he had been reluctant to ask, could not further delay going upstairs to seek the answer: If this great house had come to such a bitter end and if fantastic beasts of