77 Shadow Street

Tom Tran had come along the winding pathway. He had been wearing a raincoat and his ridiculous floppy- brimmed hat. Rain wasn’t falling anymore, but he dressed for it anyway. What an idiot.

Tom Tran was the superintendent. He was paid well to keep the Pendleton in tip-top condition. If anyone was to blame for what had happened, Tom Tran must be the one.

Mickey had tried to crank open the casement window so that he could shoot Tom Tran dead on the spot. If shooting Tom Tran didn’t fix things, nothing would. But the window wouldn’t budge. The crank was broken or something.

In the courtyard, Tom Tran had reached the doors to the ground floor. Mickey considered hurrying downstairs and shooting Tom. It didn’t matter if he shot Tom outside or inside the building. Just shooting him ought to fix everything.

Before Mickey could move, something else had come lurching along the winding path down there. Some thing. He didn’t know much about biology—except for sex, of course, about which he knew everything—but he didn’t think this thing was a known species with its picture in college textbooks. Whatever it was, it didn’t look like a thing that you could kill easily.

Reality was completely out of control now. He turned his back to the windows. He just couldn’t take it anymore, the way it was out there in the courtyard. He had stood here for a while now, not being able to take it.

When he wouldn’t let the changed world into his mind, Sparkle and Iris came into it more vividly than ever. So tempting. They were his fantasy, yet their expressions were haughty, disdainful. They came into his mind uninvited, and they mocked him. He needed to rein in reality, and as a start he needed to bring the writer and her daughter to heel.

To heel. That reminded him of that goofy-looking professor guy, Dr. Ignis, the one who sometimes wore bow ties and elbow-patch jackets, for God’s sake. Ignis used to have a dog. Big Labrador. He walked it on a leash. The dog sometimes growled low at Mickey. Ignis apologized, said it never growled before. Ignis was someone else who needed to be shot. That would probably fix everything.

But first, if the gone-wrong world continued to reject him, he’d find Sparkle and Iris, wherever they were in the Pendleton, and he would make them pay for this the way he’d made those other women pay fifteen years earlier. He would kill them harder than he had ever killed anyone. That would definitely fix everything.

Winny

All over the room, the radiant fungus throbbed sort of in time with the singing, slower but like the dance-floor lights in some stupid old disco movie, except they didn’t make you want to dance. They made you want to get the hell out of there because, as they brightened and dimmed, they cast shadows of themselves across every surface, creating the illusion that nasty things were slithering this way and that.

Unlike most of the interior apartment walls in the Pendleton, these were of textured plaster instead of Sheetrock. They were marred by cracks, as was the ceiling. Those jagged lines glowed as though there must be light inside the walls, green light leaking out through the cracks.

Winny couldn’t tell if Iris knew he was there with her. She didn’t stand with her shoulders slumped and her head bowed, as usual. She stood up straight, her head tipped back, her eyes closed, as if she were swept away by the simple wordless singing of the girl that Winny had thought was her.

Instead, the singing girl seemed to be in the walls with the green light. Not just in one of them. In four. Coming from all around, fully quadrophonic. Up close and personal, the singing was even eerier than it had been when he had followed it from the upper floor of this apartment. He could too easily imagine a little dead girl whose body had never been buried but had been walled up by an insane killer. She might even have been walled up while she was alive and pleading for her life, so that she was not only dead inside the wall but her ghost was also insane from her having been killed that way.

Maybe the one dangerous thing about reading a library’s worth of books was the way your imagination got pumped up like a bodybuilder on steroids.

Although Iris seemed to like this weird singing, Winny knew that she was highly sensitive to people talking to her, maybe especially people she didn’t know well. He didn’t want to say the wrong thing and send her into some kind of screaming fit.

The best he could do was lead her back the way they had come, to the Cupp apartment, and hope to meet their mothers along the way. But after his dad had told him that if he read too many books, he might wind up a sissy or an autistic, Winny had read about autism, and he knew that your average autistic person—not all but most—disliked being touched a whole lot more than she disliked talking with you. He didn’t need to read about sissyism because he already knew what that was.

Autism seemed very frustrating and sad, and mysterious. You couldn’t get it from reading books, of course; and Winny had wondered whether his father was snowing him or was a huge ignoramus. He didn’t want to think his father could be an ignoramus. So he had decided it must be a snow job, of which there was one after the other when old Farrel Barnett was around and trying to manipulate his boy into becoming a wrestling, guitar- playing, saxophone-crazed tough guy.

Even if the best thing was to lead Iris out of here, Winny was hesitant to take her hand. If he pinched the sleeve of her sweater and pulled her along that way, maybe she wouldn’t be offended or irritated, or scared, or whatever it was that she felt when she was touched.

Winny was about to risk going for the sweater when suddenly he felt something moving lightly through his head, as if he’d been born with a sac of spider eggs in his brain and they were just hatching.

When he put his hands over his ears, that didn’t make all the baby spiders stop dancing in his skull, but he realized that instinctively he knew it was the singing getting to him, trying to hypnotize him, zombify him.

Before he could grab Iris’s sleeve, she stepped forward toward the nearest wall, and at the same time something wriggled out of the web of cracks in the plaster. For an instant he thought they were part of the illusion created by the throbbing fungus lights, but then he knew they were real. They looked like pale squirming worms, or maybe they were the tendrils of some freaky plant, growing fast like in a stop-motion film or like that meat- eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors. Iris opened her arms wide, as if she intended to walk right up to the wall and press herself against those greedy tendrils or roots, whatever they were.

The baby spiders in Winny’s head had voices like in Charlotte’s Web, but these buggers weren’t nice like Charlotte. They were telling him that doing what Iris was about to do would be the best