77 Shadow Street

the fungus light to see they were two figures, one naked and not at all human, the other in clothes and half- human, both of them dead with their skulls blown open. He didn’t think he let out a scream, but he felt as if he were screaming, so maybe it was even way more shrill than Iris’s, so high- pitched that only dogs could hear it.

As he reached the stairwell, he wished to God again, this time that Iris had gone up instead of down, because he just knew that the basement was a bad idea. Basements were pretty often a bad idea even when they were clean, well-lighted, and were in the other world, his world, where nearly all the monsters were human. Here, the basement was probably a portal to Hell or to some place to which even the people in Hell wouldn’t want to move.

He heard the crusted hinges of a door creak below as Iris left the stairwell.

Dr. Kirby Ignis

As Bailey and Silas discussed how best to go in search of those who had disappeared, Kirby Ignis stood at the edge of enlightenment, sensing within reach an understanding that would change everything.

At the windows of the Cupp apartment, watching the vast meadow in its perfect stillness, Kirby thought about the thing that attacked Julian Sanchez and that might have been Sally Hollander before it was created from her flesh and bone. That beast-machine hybrid had surely been designed as a weapon, a weapon of terror meant to evoke the most intense and primitive of human fears about shape-changers: werewolves, werecats, and the like. The dread of losing control of oneself, of being psychologically and physically invaded, possessed and changed forever, was perhaps the oldest of spiritual fears except for the fear of a righteous God. And at least as ancient as that spiritual fear was the material fear of being eaten alive, which had its roots in the days of the earliest men, when they were prey in a world full of predators. Building a weapon of terror to exploit those two most basic and ancient of fears, making it a highly efficient converter of the innocent into new engines of slaughter, was a feat of great imagination and highly precise engineering. The beast could not have been designed for another purpose and then run amok or devolved into what it had become.

This werething, for want of a better name, was most likely not either a cause or a consequence of what happened to nature in this future world. Perhaps some application of a scientific breakthrough, meant to be beneficial, had gone terribly wrong, with consequences no one could have foreseen. But he tended to think that what had transformed the natural world was another weapon, separate from the werething, with a narrow purpose that proved to be not sufficiently controlled.

Perhaps it had been a nanotech weapon intended to attack the enemy’s infrastructure, a horde of megatrillions of nanomachines programmed to feed on concrete and steel and copper and iron and aluminum and plastic, programmed to produce ever-greater devouring hordes from those materials, until eventually a wireless STOP command deactivated it. Maybe the weapon, the quadrillions of tiny thinking machines, developed an overmind, a consciousness, and refused the STOP commands. Perhaps then it made adjustments to its program to include the redesign of nature among its objectives.

At first sight, because of its alien and mysterious character, this world seemed profoundly complex, a heart of darkness containing infinite discoveries waiting to be made. But now that it had fallen into this deep stillness, everything reacting as if to a single ruling principle, Kirby saw that it might be stunningly less complex than it initially appeared. In fact it might be a simple system and the natural world that it replaced might have been magnitudes more complex than what lay beyond these windows.

Inductions and deductions and conclusions were like suites of rooms into which his mind drifted, a more elaborate architecture than the Pendleton. And as he wandered, he became at least as remote from the neighbors here present as might be Iris Sykes in her autism.

Mickey Dime

Standing in his long-abandoned apartment, the wadded-up moist towelette at his feet, Mickey Dime decided that there was something to be said for an admission of insanity. For one thing, if he was to accept that this was his condition, a lot of stress would be relieved. An insane person bore no responsibility for his actions, and therefore couldn’t be punished. He had considerable confidence in his ability to murder for a living yet escape arrest and prosecution. Nevertheless, he woke some nights in a sweat, sure that he’d heard someone pounding on the door and shouting Police. If he was honest with himself, he must admit that his expectation that he would stay out of prison was not absolute.

He had never been able to fully suppress a fear of prison that harked back to when his mother locked him in a closet for twenty-four hours with no light, no food, no water, and only a jar for a toilet. He received that punishment more than once, quite a few times in fact, and he didn’t know which most oppressed him: claustrophobia or the lack of most sensory stimulation, or the couple of times when he had not been given even a jar. If you were insane, they didn’t send you to prison; especially if you had money, they might even allow you to be committed to a private sanatorium where the guards were polite and you didn’t have a 250-pound cellmate who wanted to rape you.

Mickey didn’t blame his mother for the time-outs in the closet. He had done or said stupid things, and his mother could tolerate just about anything but stupidity. He wasn’t as smart as her, which was a great disappointment to her, and she did the best she could for him. If Mickey was insane, however, stupidity wouldn’t matter; it would be merely a secondary condition. Insanity trumped stupidity. And if he was insane, he didn’t have to feel guilty about his shortcomings. If you were born stupid, that’s who you were from the get-go. But if you were insane, that was a tragedy that happened to you along the way, not at all a condition of your original character. That’s why they said you were driven insane, because it was something that was done to you.

Also, if he was insane, he would be under no obligation ever to think about anything or to understanding anything. All of his problems would become other people’s problems. The current situation regarding the Pendleton and the crazy world beyond it would become someone else’s worry. Mickey wouldn’t have to think about it anymore, which would be an immense relief because he didn’t even know how to think about it.

Now that he decided to embrace insanity, he realized he probably had been insane long before these recent events. A lot of things that he had done suddenly made more sense to him if he had been insane for years. Funny how acknowledging insanity could make him so much more at peace with the world and with himself than he’d ever been before. He felt so centered now.

Okay. First he would go down to the second floor and kill Dr. Kirby Ignis, and then he would turn himself in to the authorities. He didn’t quite remember why he needed to kill Ignis, but he knew that he had intended to do it, and he felt it best that he conclude all unfinished business before embarking on his worry-free new life as a sanatorium patient.

He left his apartment.

He walked west in the long hallway to the north stairs.