Descending the spiral stairs and then in the lower hall, outside the door to the lap pool, Silas succinctly explained about Mickey Dime in the HVAC vault, the great shaft of blue energy surging out of the lava pipe, and the well-armed skeletons of what might have been the members of the last homeowners’ association making their final stand in that deep redoubt at some unknowable time in the past.
The demon that Sally had seen in the pantry, the one that later must have attacked her, remained on the prowl. Therefore, any closed door had to be regarded as the lid of a jack-in-the-box from which something more deadly than a spring-bodied clown’s head might pop forth. The others stood aside while Bailey and Kirby effected a proper recon entry.
As his partner pushed open the door from the hinged side, Bailey went through low and fast. The room proved to be not as dark as he expected. Colonies of luminous fungus encrusted the walls, revealing that nothing lurked here, although the brightest light came from within the water.
This was not the welcoming glow by which he liked to swim, not the scintillation that traced patterns made by purling water on the walls and on the bottom of the lap pool. Just as he had glimpsed it that morning, the long rectangle was red, not opaque, clear enough but nonetheless disturbing because of the blood that it suggested. This pool had no bottom, or at least not one that could be seen. Beyond the coping were no ceramic tiles as there had once been, but instead rock walls that appeared to shear down hundreds of feet. The source of the queer incandescence emanated from irregularly spaced, luminous striations in the rock, dwindling into depths where the ruby water at last steadily darkened until it had the gravity and mystery of a black hole in space.
The five of them stood along the coping, gazing down into the watery abyss, saying nothing because there was nothing to be said, no explanation worth suggesting. Their faces glowed as if they were gathered at a fire.
After a moment, Padmini pointed. “Look!”
Perhaps thirty or forty feet below, a figure appeared as if out of a recess or a tunnel in the rock. Manlike in form, it swam with the muscular sinuosity of a shark, cruising one length of the pool, and then again, before diving down, down, out of sight.
Bailey assumed that what swam below was the same thing that had grabbed his ankle as he’d escaped the pool earlier in the day. And it was perhaps the same creature that had effected Sally Hollander’s transformation, as she had then effected Julian’s.
Iris and Winny had not left the Cupp apartment by the front door. If they had gone that way, they would have passed between Sparkle and Twyla, past Martha and Edna. They would have been seen.
Twyla led the way through what had been the dining room, along a short hallway, into a kitchen with termite-eaten cabinetry and broken granite countertops. Twyla checked the pantry, Sparkle the broom closet.
For years she had lived fearlessly, afraid only of lightning, and now she had put that last fear behind her. She had given birth to Iris because to fail to do so would have been to surrender to fear. By the time that she discovered Iris’s condition, she’d had her first bestselling novel, not just a success but a phenomenon, and she was flush enough to put her daughter in the excellent care of others. That would have been an act of fear, a lack of faith in her own ability to cope. And now she would not give in to the fear of losing Iris because she
Sparkle with the flashlight, Twyla with the pistol felt right together, as if they’d known and trusted each other forever: through the laundry room, out of the open back door, into the hallway, to the intersection of the hallways, to the stairwell where they heard no footsteps, and back to the open door of Gary Dai’s apartment. Her commitment was total, and she knew Twyla’s was likewise total, and they functioned as if they were telepathic, with no need to tell each other what they were going to do, Sparkle never crossing Twyla’s line of fire, Twyla never getting in the way of the flashlight beam.
Sudden singing came from somewhere in the Dai apartment. A young girl. It must be Iris. But Sparkle couldn’t identify it for certain because she had never heard her daughter sing.
Gary Dai’s apartment was like everywhere else in this Pendleton: hollowed-out rooms, the bare bones of walls and floors and ceilings, all the windows lightly filmed with dust but after so much time remarkably unbroken, like the weathered carcass of a giant stripped of flesh but left with its spectacles intact. Thatches of luminous fungi bearded the bones, their light offering as much deception as revelation, draping shadows where there seemed to be no source for shadows.
These rooms, like all the others she had seen since the leap, seemed as welcoming to rats as any deteriorated tenement or squalid warehouse, but she had not seen a single rodent. Neither had she seen any insects, except for the brittle shells of several long-dead beetles.
Beyond the windows of the main room swooped something like but not like a stingray, so large as to be misplaced from a Jurassic sea. It was too immense to remain airborne unless its strange flesh might be riddled throughout with sacs containing a buoying gas. In its grand aerial ballet, the creature exhibited some of the disquieting gracefulness of the endless plain of pale luminous grass swaying rhythmically as no breeze could ever command it, disquieting because it was unnatural, lithe and supple but in a way that made Sparkle think of lethal serpents.
Although the spectacle of the flying ray was arresting, she and Twyla didn’t pause to watch it, kept moving across the room, drawn by the girl’s singing. They came to the apartment’s interior staircase, through which the song rose from below.
As they reached the landing and started down the second flight, Twyla abruptly halted. “Do you feel it?”
“Feel what?”
“The whisper under the melody.”
Sparkle cocked her head, not sure what Twyla meant. “I don’t hear it. Just the song.”
“Not hear. Feel. I feel it under the melody.”
