77 Shadow Street

Indicating the blind man’s mutant remains, Bailey said, “You can see for yourself.”

“Weapons are made. Who can make such a weapon?”

“No one in the time we come from. Someone between then and now.”

Tom shook his head. “What I mean is—why would anyone make such a weapon? Are there people in this world who would do such a thing?”

“What kind of people developed nuclear weapons?” Kirby asked. “They weren’t monsters. They had good motives—an end to World War II, maybe make war so terrible that it would become unthinkable.”

“We know how well that worked,” Bailey said.

Kirby nodded. “I’m just saying, let’s not go off on some tangent like extraterrestrials. These creatures were born in our past, not on another planet.”

Padmini said, “The one that attacked poor Mr. Sanchez? Was that once … was it Miss Hollander?”

“I saw something of her in it,” Silas said. “I think it was.”

“I’m sure it was her. Used to be her,” Bailey agreed.

“Then there’s another in the building,” Padmini said. “The one that bit Miss Hollander, changed her. That one is still somewhere in the building.”

Winny

In Gary Dai’s apartment, when the thing flew through the room immediately below him, Winny almost froze on the second step from the bottom. Crawling, scuttling, squirming creepers were bad enough. Over the years he had pretty much gotten over his fear of bugs by picking them up, holding them in his hands, and studying them. Beetles, caterpillars, earwigs, spiders—but not the brown ones because they might be brown recluses with venom that dissolved your flesh. He had never been freaked out by things with wings, not even bats, but the swooping presence below, glimpsed only as a shadowy form, was a lot bigger than a bat, big enough to carry off a cocker spaniel if not even a German shepherd. Winny didn’t weigh nearly as much as your average shepherd. Something to think about.

On the other hand, he couldn’t spend his life standing on the next-to-the-last step. That wouldn’t be much of a life, no matter how long it lasted. He thought of the boys in some of the books he read, of how they were always ready for adventure. He thought about Jim Nightshade in Something Wicked This Way Comes, always quick into the night with or without his friend Will. Of course, if you had a name like Jim Nightshade, courage would come easy. When everyone called you Winny and you only recently—belatedly— discovered Santa Claus didn’t exist, you had to stand on that step, working up some spit in your punk-dry mouth, convincing yourself that you weren’t going to pee your pants, talking yourself into being brave.

Iris’s wordless singing at last brought Winny off the stairs and into the lower room. In addition to the qualities that he heard previously in this melodic but eerie voice—the lament of a dead girl with dirt in her teeth, the yearning of a ventriloquist’s dummy with knives in her hands—Winny now detected melancholy and a note that was almost despair. He owed it to Iris to buck up and do this. He didn’t quite know why he owed it to her, but he knew that he did. Maybe it was because they were the only two kids in this mess.

Moonlight flooded through the tall windows, much brighter than the glowing fungus here. His mom had written a really neat song about moonlight, which Winny could never admit he liked as much as he did because it was basically a girl’s song. The moonlight in his mom’s lyrics was a whole lot prettier than this stuff, which was the cold late-October light that made skeletons want to dance in deserted biology labs and called things out of mausoleums to prowl cemetery roads in search of young lovers doing whatever young lovers did in parked cars.

The shadow flew. It swooped, and Winny ducked. The wings made no sound, flung off no wind, and Winny realized almost as fast as Jim Nightshade would have done that the thing in the room was only a shadow and that the real action occurred beyond the windows. Out there in this Future World, which was no land they would ever feature at any Disney park, a thing as big as a backyard trampoline dove down out of the sky and past the window. It was more like a manta ray than like a bird, featherless and pale, with a long barbed tail.

Winny stood transfixed, in awe of the thing, because it was so huge and strange for any creature of the air. He could almost believe that the windows were the walls of an immense aquarium and that the manta thing swam past instead of flying. It arced up into the night, its fleshy wings as flowing, as supple as you imagined a blanket was when you threw it around your shoulders and ran through the apartment pretending to be Superman, which Winny had not done in a long time and would never do again, not since his father, with entourage, paid a surprise visit and caught him at it, thereafter calling him Clark Kent for the whole day and a half that the Barnett battalion hung around.

When the night flyer dove past the windows again, recklessly close this time, like a 747 buzzing a flight-control tower, Winny got a clear look at its face, which was too bizarre and disgusting to keep in his memory if he ever hoped to sleep again. Its mouth wasn’t a slit, but instead round and open like a drain, and the teeth reminded him of garbage-disposal blades. The eye on this side of the mouth rolled like the bulging eye of a big old frog spotting a tasty butterfly on a nearby blade of grass, and Winny had no doubt that the thing had seen him and was wondering how to get at him.

The French windows were bronze, but maybe they were corroded after all these years, and maybe they would collapse into the room if something big enough crashed against them. Rather than stand witness to the trustworthiness of the windows, Winny continued to follow the singing, which faded and then swelled, faded and swelled, until he found Iris.

The girl wasn’t the source of the song.

The room seemed to be singing to her.

Bailey Hawks

With Sally Hollander and Julian Sanchez dead, Bailey had accounted for everyone on the ground floor. Only Tom Tran lived in the basement, and he was already with them. The time had come to return to the Cupp apartment.

Remembering his experience during his morning swim, certain that the more they knew about this place the better prepared they would be to ride out their ordeal, Bailey wanted to go down to the basement and have a look at the pool as it was in this future. Kirby agreed to accompany him. Bailey thought the other three should go up to the third floor, but they insisted that the five of them remain together.