77 Shadow Street

unknown origin stalked its rooms, what had happened to the rest of the world?

One

I am the One, and I see all.

But the blind man in Apartment 1-A is blind in many ways, as are all human beings, even those with functioning eyes. They are blind to their folly, to their ignorance, to their history, to the future that they will make for themselves. A future born of self-loathing.

Even those who know that the twenty universal constants ensure a universe that will support life, who know intellectually as well as intuitively that the human race must be exceptional and must be graced with a destiny, even they are capable of hating not only others of their kind but also their kind in general. Some are capable of such self-loathing that they fantasize a world without humanity and take comfort from that dream.

The concierge is not one of them, but she will die with the others, with the billions who will perish between her present and my present, which is her future. She might have gone far in the hospitality business, but the material success her kind pursues cannot provide her life with meaning. She is one of those who, had she not been cast into my kingdom, might have found her meaning in time. She might have become one of those who would stand up against the misanthropes, the people haters, to save humanity. But there are too few of her, too few with her insight and drive and tenderness of heart; for humanity to survive, it cannot afford to lose even one like her. But she is now mine.

27

Here and There

Bailey Hawks

Bailey watched Dime disappear into his apartment. Something was wrong with the guy. Maybe the stress of this event already snapped him, though that would mean he was less flexible psychologically than young Winny. Dime never seemed interested in others living in the Pendleton, never agreed to serve on the board or on any committee, never attended the Christmas social in the banquet room. He spoke to you in the halls if you happened to pass him, but only by comparison to a monk who had taken a vow of silence could the guy be called a conversationalist.

He had a pistol. He’d shot out two peculiar blue screens that had not been in this hallway before what Twyla Trahern called “the leap.” When Bailey had suggested that the best plan would be to round up other residents and thereafter stick together, Dime had disagreed in a tone of voice that was at least dismissive if not hostile. And part of what he’d said—What goes up does not have to come down, if you redefine the meaning of down—made no sense.

Bailey decided they would start the search for other neighbors in the south wing of the third floor, then move downstairs, coming back to this north wing only after Dime had some time to get a grip on himself, assuming there was any grip to get. Anyway, Bernard Abronowitz, who lived alone in 3-E, was currently in the hospital and therefore hadn’t made this trip through time with them. Senator Blandon, in 3-D, was likely to be halfway to drunk by this hour and less amiable than Mickey Dime; leaving the politician until later might also be wise.

“What was that all about?” Kirby Ignis asked, evidently having come out of the Cupps’ front door in time to overhear Bailey’s exchange with Dime.

“I don’t know. We’ll give him some time to adjust, cool down. Before we search the south wing, let’s see if Silas is here.”

The attorney’s apartment was the front corner unit, next to the Cupps. Bailey pressed the bell push but heard no chimes inside. A knock went unanswered. The door proved to be unlocked—in fact the lock wasn’t functioning —and when Silas didn’t reply to Bailey’s “Anyone home?” he and Kirby stepped inside to search the old man’s rooms.

Kirby carried a flashlight that he had borrowed from Twyla Trahern, which still left the women and children with Sparkle’s flashlight, and Martha had her pistol. Remembering the women’s hurried but vivid description of creatures they had seen, remembering Sally’s demon in the pantry, with the mysterious swimmer remaining clear in his mind from their early-morning encounter, Bailey kept a two-hand grip on his 9-mm Beretta.

Like other rooms they had seen since the leap, the attorney’s spaces were unfurnished, shabby, dirty, moldy, and long abandoned, lying in the half-light emitted by the fungus or whatever it was, an exhausted light that a dying sun might produce. Kirby had no police or military background, but he was smart and quick to recognize why his armed partner proceeded as he did. Inferring what was wanted of him, he accompanied Bailey as though they had teamed for searches before, clearing the apartment chamber by chamber.

Approaching the last room, the master bath, they saw within it a weaker dark-urine light than elsewhere. Step by step the smell of mold, mild but pervasive in this Pendleton, grew more pungent and seemed to lend the air a taste as well as a scent. When they stopped at the threshold, the flashlight beam probed beyond, revealing what might have been an abstract-art installation by a deranged sculptor: pale-green, black-mottled snakelike shapes that lined the walls, unmoving but sinuous, as if abruptly paralyzed in the act of seething copulation, snugged together on the vertical surfaces but spilling also onto part of the floor, a nest in torpor, in a winter dormancy. At several points in this hideous mass, clusters of mushrooms of the same coloration, some as big as one of Bailey’s fists but others as big as two, rose on thick stems, a puckered formation like the mouth of a drawstring purse at the crown of each bell-shaped cap.

“Two different forms,” Kirby Ignis said, “but all the same organism.”

“Organism? You mean animal?”

“Fungus is an organism. I’d say that’s what this is.”

“Not ambulatory though, like the things the others saw.”

“I don’t advise stepping in there to find out.”

Although the snake forms did not suddenly become mobile, they began to throb, as if lumps of something were passing through them, as if they were indeed snakes and were swallowing a series of mice.

Tom Tran