Martha stepped away from the wall against which she had been standing and went to Edna. She took her sister’s hand. “Remember the first cat we ever had? We were just little girls. You were nine and I was seven when Dad brought him home.”
Briefly Edna frowned, but then her sweet face brightened. “Mr. Jingles. He was a lovely boy.”
“All black with white socks, remember?”
“And the white diamond on his chest.”
“He was a hoot with a piece of string,” Martha said.
Edna’s gaze shifted past her sister, and she said to someone else, “Thank God you’re here.”
For an instant, Martha had the crazy thought that Father Murphy had arrived with the Roman Ritual, sanctified oil and salt and water, and the stole of his office.
But it was Logan Spangler, head of security, stepping out of the foyer. He must have gone off duty hours earlier, should have been out of the Pendleton and at home when the leap occurred, but here he was in uniform and gun belt.
The five of them left the lap-pool room together. His familial tremors under control, Silas Kinsley drew his pistol from a raincoat pocket and led the way up the north stairs to the third floor. As the only other armed member of the party, Bailey went last.
Holding the door open, about to cross the threshold into the stairwell, he heard someone behind him say softly, “Bailey, wait.”
Although his name had been used and therefore he expected to see someone he knew, Bailey let go of the door, blocking it open with his body, and swiveled left, bringing the Beretta toward the voice.
Halfway between Bailey and the open door to the gym stood a man in his late twenties.
“Who’re you?”
“I call myself Witness. Listen, the transition will reverse in sixty-two minutes. Then you’ll be back safe in your time.”
The guy wore jeans, a cotton sweater, an insulated jacket. Hair slick with water, jeans damp. His leather boots were darker where wet. He’d recently been in rain. In this future, the night was dry.
“The fluctuations that preceded the first transition won’t precede the reversal.”
Keeping the pistol on target, Bailey said, “How do you know any of this?”
“Higher is safer. It’s stronger in the basement, the elevator shafts.”
Bailey gestured with the pistol. “Come here, come with me.”
“In those places where it’s stronger, it can get in your head. Confuse you. Maybe control you.”
“Is it in you?”
“I’m the one thing here it’s not in. I’m apart. It allows that.”
“What the hell is it?”
“In this future, all life has become one. The One. Many individuals, one consciousness. The One is plant, animal, machine.”
In the stairwell, they realized he wasn’t following. Tom Tran called down to him.
Taking a two-hand grip on the Beretta, Bailey said, “Come on.”
“No. My position here is delicate. You must respect that.”
As the guy turned away from him, Bailey said, “You help us, or I’ll shoot you dead, I swear I will.”
“I can’t be killed,” the stranger said, and stepped out of sight through the open door to the gym.
The moment she saw Logan Spangler entering the living room from the foyer, Martha Cupp remembered vividly the feeling that she’d had on the night her first husband died, thirty-nine years earlier. Simon was struck down in an instant by a massive heart attack at 7:30 in the evening. Their son, an only child, was at boarding school. The body was taken away, and eventually the friends and family who had hurried to console Martha also departed. Alone, she didn’t wish to sleep in the bed she had shared with Simon, but she found that even in a guest room, sleep eluded her. Simon had been ineffectual in most things, averse to hard work, a bit vain, a gossip, and sentimental to an extent that was somewhat embarrassing in a man, but she loved him for his best qualities, for his ever-ready sense of humor and his genuinely affectionate nature. Perhaps she wasn’t anguished over the loss, not in a black despair, but certainly grief had its talons in her. At 2:30 in the morning, lying awake, she heard a man weeping bitterly elsewhere in the house. Mystified, she rose and went in search of the mourner, and soon found him. Simon, seemingly as alive as he had been at 7:29, was sitting on the edge of the bed in their room, so desolate and anguished that she could hardly bear to look at him. Wonderingly, she spoke his name, but he neither responded nor glanced at her. Distressed to see him in such abject misery but not afraid, she sat on the bed beside him. When she put a hand on his shoulder, he had no substance, and he seemed not to feel her touch as her trembling hand passed through him. Evidently he couldn’t see Martha, because his failure to look at her seemed not to be an intentional turning away. She had been a believer all her life, but not in ghosts. The way that he pulled at his face, fisted his hands against his temples, bit on his knuckles, and sometimes bent forward as if suffering paroxysms of excruciating emotion suggested to her that he wasn’t grieving over the fact of his death but over something else. His torment was so affecting that she could not bear to watch it, and after a few minutes, distressed and bewildered, wondering about the reliability of her senses, she returned to the bed in the guest room. For nearly an hour, the tormented weeping continued, and when at last it faded to silence, she tried to convince herself that she had dreamed the incident or that in her grief she imagined it; but she had no talent for self-deception, and she knew that Simon’s visitation had been as real as his sudden demise.
Although Logan Spangler looked nothing like Simon, though he had never before reminded her of Simon, though he appeared as real now as ever he had appeared in the past, she
