With a corner for his cradle, sitting upright fast asleep, no longer guided through a reverie of the oneness of the One, Fielding opened the doors to his own dreamery and drifted through some of his favorite scenarios. They were all set in his childhood, when his Pooh bear was his boon companion, when the world was golden, long before he went to the university and learned to hate his kind, his class, himself. In his youthful innocence, he hated nothing, no one, and Pooh loved everything.
The chanting, insistent, foreign-language voices no longer rose either in his dreams or in the walls. Legions had fallen silent, as if with a sudden revelation and in subsequent contemplation. The One could not dream its way to childhood because it had never had one, no childhood but only an origin. Such were the peculiarities of time and of time travel that Fielding might be a key to the fulfillment of that origin. He was now subconsciously aware of his role in history, but in his sleep he was not made solemn by the weight of this duty, and he dreamed of golden summer meadows and butterflies and a yellow kite high in the blue, and of his sixth birthday party when there had been helium-filled balloons of many colors.
The singing abruptly stopped. When the singer lost interest in the song, the phantom fingers in Twyla’s head ceased to tease her toward surrender.
She and Sparkle Sykes could find no alternative route through the lower floor of Gary Dai’s apartment to the place where Winny waited with Iris. When they returned to the threshold that the boy had warned them not to cross, the room of lashes no longer presented an obstacle. The hundreds of pale thin whips had retracted into the walls, and there were only the webs of backlit cracks green in the plaster and the luminous yellow colonies of fungi, which no longer throbbed.
Winny and Iris weren’t visible beyond the doorway at the farther side of the room, where they had been less than a minute earlier, and when their mothers called to them, they failed to respond. In these circumstances, the silence of a child was no less alarming than would have been a scream.
If the beasts of this future were cunning, this apparently safe passage before them might be a trap. Once she and Sparkle entered, the lashes might whip out of the walls, scourging them, snaring them, immobilizing them like flies in the tenacious gossamer of spider work.
Nevertheless, they hesitated only an instant before plunging into the room. This Pendleton of a far tomorrow had become the last home of—and memorial to—the evil that shadowed men and women since time immemorial, and here in this world where apparently no humanity existed to be tormented, the band of neighbors from 2011 must be a most desired delicacy. The corrupter that ruled this place might lie in wait for a while, teasing itself with abstinence, sweetening the ultimate pudding with several spoons of anticipation, before at last having its dessert. Twyla felt—and sensed Sparkle’s equal awareness—that the hungry room wanted them with an intensity it could barely restrain. If they were to run its length, their pounding footfalls might be sufficient vibration to fire its hair- trigger appetite, and so they walked swiftly but lightly, hoping not to rouse the predator from its dreamy ruminations about the taste of flesh and souls. The light deep within the plaster cracks might have been more luminous fungi, but because Twyla felt intensely watched, it seemed to her like animal eye-shine.
The room gave them the safe passage it seemed to promise, but she felt no relief when she stepped through the doorway into the hall that served the rest of the apartment. It was not only one room that wanted them but the entire house and the world beyond the house. One place or another, the bite would come.
Neither Winny nor Iris was in the narrow hallway, and they did not answer to their mothers’ calls. If Winny remained anywhere in the apartment, he would respond to her, unless he was already dead. Winny dead was not a sight that she could bear and not one for which she would go looking. Leaving the rest of the apartment unsearched, she led Sparkle along the hall, through a room, a smaller room, and out of a door into the second- floor public hallway, opposite the south elevator.
After his experience earlier in the elevator, Winny wouldn’t dare that again. The south stairs were nearby, but 2-G, the Sykeses’ apartment, was just around the corner, in the long south hall, and it made sense that a frightened Iris might have gone there, with Winny following.
He didn’t know what had set Iris off, what she might be running from, but Winny knew what she was running
Because of the girl’s awkward movements and the way she seemed to pull in like a turtle in its shell when she was around people, Winny had assumed that a shuffle was her highest speed, but he had been wrong. He thought he would catch her in the Dai apartment and hold her until their moms arrived, but she was so fast that it was like magic, as if she might be the daughter of a wind witch, though of course Mrs. Sykes didn’t look like any kind of witch. He didn’t catch Iris in the public hallway, either.
Before he followed her through the door to the south stairs, he shouted,
Iris raced away from him, descending the south stairs as though she knew where she was going and needed to be there yesterday. Even though Winny hurtled down two steps at a time, pell-mell around the long blind turn, the slow-closing door almost shut in his face by the time he reached the ground floor.
When he came out of the stairwell, he saw Iris at the halfway point of the long west corridor, at the double doors that led to the courtyard, trying to yank them open. They seemed to be locked or rusted shut. But Winny vividly remembered the thing crawling on the window in the Sykes apartment and the flying manta ray with the garbage-disposal mouth, and as bad as things might be inside the Pendleton, he knew they were far worse outside. He shouted at her to get away from the doors, and she did, but only to take off again, running away from him.
Past the lobby, as Iris drew near the public lavatories, she let out a shrill sound, not a scream exactly, more of a protracted mewl like an animal in pain. She dodged past a couple of dark shapes on the floor and bolted even faster to the end of the corridor and through the door to the north stairs.
When Winny got to the shapes past which Iris dodged, he dodged them as well, and there was just enough of
