77 Shadow Street

He descended to the second floor.

He walked east in the long hallway to Apartment 2-F.

He didn’t knock. Insane people didn’t need to knock.

Mickey went into the apartment of Dr. Kirby Ignis, and two steps beyond the threshold, he knew that his decision to embrace insanity had been a wise one, for already he was amply rewarded for turning this new leaf.

Winny

The turning of the marble stairs between the ground floor and the basement seemed to go on too long, even though Winny was moving fast. He felt the Pendleton was growing bigger between floors, steps added as fast as he descended them, alive and determined to thwart him. But then he reached the bottom, and he pushed through the half-open door and stepped out into the lowest corridor of the building.

Maybe the lighting here was poorer than aboveground or maybe he was just more aware of the shadows because his fear had swelled with each step he’d taken from the ground floor. A few of the ceiling lights still worked, and there were colonies of glowing fungus, so it wasn’t dark, just kind of murky, as if something had passed through a moment ago, stirring up the dust, and not something as small as a twelve-year-old girl.

He almost shouted Iris, where are you, but he bit back the words because a still, small voice inside warned him that he and Iris were not alone in this place. From here on, any sound he made would draw the attention of something he would rather not have to chat with, because he would be more than ever at a loss for words.

The basement lay in a silence more complete than any Winny had ever heard. The hush was even deeper than in the field that time, behind his grandma’s farmhouse, on a night in January with the snow falling without any wind, nothing moving but the snowflakes wheeling down out of the sky, the quiet so immense that he felt small but safe in his smallness, too small to draw unwanted attention.

He did not feel safe here.

As he listened and tried to decide what to do next, he wondered if the fungus lights could switch themselves off. In that room in the Dai apartment, where the plant tentacles—if that’s what they were—whipped from the cracks in the walls, the lights throbbed bright and dim, bright and dim, so they probably could go full dark if the mood struck them. If the funguses extinguished themselves, they might be able to turn off the scattered, dust- dimmed ceiling lamps, as well. He didn’t have a flashlight.

What he was doing now was giving himself excuses to cut and run, and he was a little ashamed, not mortified, but embarrassed although no one was here to see him trembling or to notice the sudden cold sweat on his brow.

The hard thing that he needed to do had gotten harder minute by minute, and now it was so hard that he doubted his strength to push forward. But if he went back now, whether or not Iris died because of his cowardice, he would always hereafter take the easy way, because he knew that’s what happened to people who backed off just once. If he ran from this, his future was eventually a failed marriage, icky bimbos, whiskey, a little dope, barroom fights, and an entourage of knuckleheads who said they were his friends but despised him. And that would be his future after he had spent the next ten years growing up, so God only knew what a mess he would make of himself between now and then.

He swallowed, swallowed again, and though he was aware that the lump in his throat wasn’t real, he swallowed a third time before he stepped quietly to the lap-pool door across the hall. He eased it open, relieved that the hinges made less noise than he expected, and he peered warily into a long room that was changed from what it had once been.

The chamber was brighter than the basement corridor, the walls encrusted with glowing fungus, the hundred-foot pool shimmering with red light. He could see all the way to the back, and no one was scheming at anything in there.

As he started to ease the door shut, he heard a small splash, listened, and heard it again. He kind of doubted that an autistic girl could learn to swim, and in his mind’s eye he saw Iris going under for the third time.

The door’s automatic closer didn’t work, and Winny was glad to let it stand open behind him. He was only a few steps from the water, and he saw at once that the pool had rock walls now and seemed to be as deep as a canyon. He didn’t see Iris floundering and weighed down by sodden clothes, but he did see something that was kind of like a man but not one, dark and sleek and powerful, speeding away from him, maybe ten feet below the surface and as fast as any fish, evidently not needing to breathe while it swam.

He could see the thing clearly enough to discern that it had legs, and if it had legs, it could move as well out of the water as in. Before it could reach the far end of the pool and turn to swim toward him, Winny retreated to the corridor and eased the door shut as if closing the lid on a box in which he had just discovered a sleeping tarantula.

His heart boomed loud in his ears, which was bad because he could no longer tell if the basement still lay in a hush.

The door to the stairs stood only a few steps away. Winny knew exactly where it was, but he refused to glance at it because he half expected that the mere sight of it would pull him right out of the basement, that he would blow all the way up to the third floor as if a tornado-strength draft had sucked him there.

He crossed to the gym door and quickly looked in there. More fungus light revealed that the exercise equipment was gone and, fortunately, that no manlike not-man was doing calisthenics.

Moving south along the corridor, Winny divided his attention between the open door to the HVAC vault ahead of him and the closed lap-pool door behind him. His legs felt loose, trembling as if the knee and ankle joints needed to be tightened.

Right now, life in Nashville didn’t seem like such a bad idea, although life in Villa Dad still didn’t have enough appeal to send him running to find a flight schedule to Tennessee.

Steadying himself with one hand against the jamb, he paused in the doorway to the huge mechanical room. He grimaced at the ruined but still hulking boilers and the other machines that were revealed as yellow curves and planes among way too many shrouds of shadow.

He couldn’t figure why Iris would have wanted to come down here, unless she ran without thinking about where she was going. Or maybe she wanted to get as far away from other people and chattering voices as she