77 Shadow Street

thing in the world. He couldn’t understand their language, but he understood their meaning: that he should follow the girl’s lead and accept the happiness that she was about to embrace.

Maybe all these years of enduring his father’s propaganda had built up Winny’s resistance to brainwashing, but he wasn’t buying anything the head spiders were trying to sell him. He shouted—“Iris, no!”—grabbed a fistful of her sweater, and pulled her toward the door as the thrashing white tendrils reached frantically for them.

Twyla Trahern

“Iris, no!”

As she came off the bottom step into the lower floor of the Dai apartment, Twyla heard her son cry out in the next room or in the room beyond that. She thrilled to those two words because they meant that he was alive. But the alarm in his voice was a prod to her heart, which kicked against her ribs like hooves against a stall door.

With Sparkle at her side, she raced across an empty chamber, toward the singing, calling out to him, “Winny! I’m here!”

As they neared an archway between rooms, Winny shouted over the singing, “Mom, stay back!”

She almost didn’t heed the warning. Nothing was going to keep her from him. Although Sparkle no doubt felt the same need to get to Iris, she seized Twyla’s arm, and they stumbled to a stop at the brink of the next room.

Past the threshold, the luminous formations on the walls and ceiling waxed and waned, not synchronized, causing shadows to leap and scurry. Hundreds of pale cords, six to ten feet long, narrower than a pencil, pressed out of cracks in the custom-patterned plaster of the ceiling and walls. Half undulated lazily, others scourged the air as though seeking someone to punish, and a few lashed hard enough to crack like whips.

At the farther end of that room, twenty feet away, beyond an open door, Winny stood with Iris. They appeared to be all right.

“Don’t go in there,” Winny warned. “It wants you, don’t go.”

More than ever, Twyla was aware of cold ghostly fingers feeling along the folds and fissures of her brain as if reading her thoughts like braille. Or maybe it was writing, creating a little story about how she wanted to go into the room, about how easy it would be to get through those pale whips, which only looked like they could hurt her, which were actually feeble, she could brush them aside like the silky fibers of a spider’s web, she could walk straight to her boy in mere seconds, put her arm around him, keep him safe, she had the gun, with the gun there was nothing to fear, Winny so close, so close, and nothing, nothing, nothing to fear—

Sparkle stepped across the threshold, into the room.

Startled out of her own half-trance, Twyla grabbed the woman by one arm and pulled her backward as the nearer whips snaked toward her through the air.

“Think of the words to a song, any song, keep singing them to yourself, block the damn thing out.” She called to Winny, “Stay right there, kiddo. Don’t move. We’ll find another way to you.”

The wordless singing changed in character, from a wistful kind of melancholy to a sneering menace. Although the voice still sounded like that of a little girl, she was a corrupted child with dark knowledge and cruel intention.

Mentally repeating the refrain from a song of her own—Just pour me another beer/and keep them comin’, Joe/I’ve given up on women/so I’ll be leavin’ late and low—Twyla led Sparkle Sykes away from the arch, toward a closed door.

Winny

Iris allowed herself to be pulled from the room, but as soon as they were across the threshold, in a hallway where there were no cracks in the plaster, she made small fretful noises and impatiently tugged at the grip he had on the sleeve of her sweater. No sooner had Winny’s mom told him to stay where he was, that she would find another way to him, than Iris hauled off and smacked him in the face. The blow didn’t hurt much, but it surprised him. Reflexively he let go of her sweater. She shoved him hard, right off his feet, so he fell on his butt, and she ran as fast as a deer.

Mickey Dime

Because of what he did for a living and because being the son of his special mother gave him certain privileges not recognized by the law, Mickey almost always carried a concealed weapon, sometimes with a silencer attached, sometimes not. Because he was always well-prepared, he also carried a spare magazine of ammunition.

He had used one round to kill his brother, Jerry, and two more to kill Klick the Prick. He had shot out four of the blue TV screens that kept annoying him. That left three rounds. Before going down to the second floor to get a leash and choke collar from the professor, Dr. Ignis, or to kill him, whichever, Mickey changed out the partial magazine for the full one.

When he slipped the first magazine into a sport-coat pocket, he found an unused moist towelette in a foil packet. A little quiver of delight went through him, and for a moment his mood lifted. The world wasn’t entirely alien and forbidding; here was something right with it, after all.

He stood in the center of his filthy, unfurnished living room and with great care peeled open the foil packet. The lemony fragrance was intoxicating. He stood enjoying it for a long delicious moment.

Carefully, he extracted the moist towelette. He let the empty packet flutter to the floor. He was reminded of a geisha girl whom he killed in Kyoto. She had been a slender young woman and, shot, had fluttered to the floor rather like this foil packet.

He unfolded the towelette, and the fragrance blossomed as he exposed a broader area of the paper to the air. He held it under his nose, inhaling deeply.

First, he washed his face. The liquid with which the towel was saturated proved to be most refreshing. It cooled his skin and even tingled slightly, like an aftershave applied immediately following a straight razor.

Next, he washed his hands. He hadn’t realized that they were slightly tacky, most likely from handling the