77 Shadow Street

Holding the door open but remaining in the hall, Logan called, “Senator Blandon? Sir, are you home?”

The senator’s apartment was half the size of that occupied by the Cupp sisters. Unless he was unconscious or in the shower, he should have heard Logan.

In an emergency, when there were reasons to believe that a resident might be mortally ill or otherwise incapacitated and unable to grant admittance, the owners’-association protocols required that a security guard enter the apartment with a passkey but only in the company of either the concierge or the superintendent. The idea was to further minimize the already small chance that anyone on the well-vetted security team might use such an occasion to engage in theft.

Because Earl Blandon had a short fuse and was so reliably saturated in alcohol that he was flammable if not explosive, Logan Spangler decided to enter the apartment alone. If the senator wasn’t in need of help, he would be greatly displeased by the intrusion. Paranoia was Blandon’s armor, righteous indignation his sword, and he never missed a chance to take offense. One uninvited visitor would anger him, but two would infuriate.

Interior design held no interest for Logan, but when he turned on the living-room lights, he noticed that the senator had mimicked the power decor of certain men’s clubs. Deeply coffered ceilings. Dark wood paneling. Immense leather armchairs. Heavy wood side tables on claw feet. Bronze lamps with parchment shades. Above the limestone fireplace mantel hung a glassy-eyed stag’s head with a fourteen-point rack that Blandon had undoubtedly bought rather than earned by his skill as a hunter.

In the dining room, the table was a long slab of highly polished mahogany. Every seat was a captain’s chair with arms and a high back, but at the head of the table stood a larger and more ornately carved chair, with silver inlays, as if to imply that the host, if not technically of royal blood, could nevertheless claim to be of a station superior to that of his guests.

As he toured the apartment, touching nothing but light switches and doors that needed to be pushed open, Logan remained, as always, aware of the pistol at his right side, though he did not imagine that he would need it. In a withering world that seemed to be darker and more violent by the day, the Pendleton offered an oasis of peace.

Continuing to call out to the senator as he proceeded through these chambers, Logan came to the master suite. Here, the ceiling coffers, with their baroque moldings, were painted white, and pale-gold paper gave a soft texture and a light pattern to the walls.

The bed was neatly made, everything in order. Because Earl Blandon didn’t seem to be the kind to routinely, meticulously clean up after himself, Logan suspected that the man had never made it to bed the previous night.

Those residents who did not have full- or part-time housekeepers of their own, like the senator, contracted with a domestic-service agency, approved by the owners’ association, for whatever assistance they required. Generally, they preferred a maid once or twice a week. According to the schedule filed with the security office by the head concierge, who arranged for the service, Earl Blandon’s maid came every Tuesday and Friday.

This was Thursday. No housekeeper had been here to make the bed.

In the master bathroom, a couple of large rumpled towels lay on the floor. When Logan stooped to finger them, he found they were not damp. When he opened the glass door, he saw not one bead of water in the marble-clad shower stall, and the grout joints appeared dry.

The senator had showered perhaps twenty-four hours earlier, before going out for the evening. He evidently had not slept in his bed the previous night. Evidence was mounting that on returning home, he’d gotten into the elevator but, impossibly, had never gotten out.

As much as politicians might try to convince the public that they were mages with magical solutions, they didn’t have cloaks of invisibility or get-small pills that shrunk them to the size of an ant. If the senator hadn’t disembarked from the elevator by its doors, he must have gone through the emergency exit in the ceiling.

How Blandon could have done that in the twenty-three seconds during which the elevator camera wasn’t functioning and why he would have done such a thing baffled Logan Spangler. A close inspection of the elevator might reveal a clue.

When he turned to leave the bath, another rumble rose from under the building, and the lights went off both in this room and the next. In the blinding blackness, he unclipped the six-inch flashlight from his belt and clicked it. The crisp white LED beam flared brighter than that of a traditional flashlight, yet he almost stepped out of the bathroom before he realized that everything around him had changed.

A few seconds in the dark seemed to have been years. The white marble floor, polished and gleaming earlier, was dulled by dust. Pieces were missing from the decorative braided border of green and black granite. Green stains and rust streaked the nickel-plated sink. Tattered cobwebs festooned the faucet handles and the spout, as if no water had been drawn here in a long time.

In the mirror, now clouded and mottled as if fungus growing behind it had eaten away portions of its silver backing, Logan’s reflection seemed to be an apparition, lacking the substance of a real man. The inexplicable sudden deterioration of his surroundings left him for a moment breathless, and he half expected to see that he had aged with the room. But he remained as he had been when he shaved before his own bathroom mirror that morning: the brush-cut gray hair, the face seamed by experience but not yet haggard with age.

As the rumbling faded, Logan saw that the glass in the shower-stall door was gone. Only the frame remained, corroded and sagging. On the floor, no towels were to be seen.

Bewildered but able to breathe once more, he crossed the threshold into the bedroom, which contained no furniture. The LED beam revealed that the bed, the nightstands, the dresser, the armchair, the art on the walls were all gone. The imitation Persian rug had vanished as well, revealing more of the wood floor.

The surprise of finding the space unfurnished gave way to consternation and to concern about his sanity when the trembling beam of light revealed that the bedroom appeared to be in a long-abandoned house. Worn and warped beneath the dust, the mahogany floor in places curled up from the concrete to which it had long been adhered. Stains like the velvet wings of enormous moths discolored the wallpaper, and overhead the once-white paint, now gray and yellow, dangled in delicate peels, as if the deep coffers had been the cocoons from which those insectile shapes had quivered free.

As a detective, Logan possessed unshakable faith in what his five senses revealed to him and in what meaning his mind—both with reason and intuition—would eventually make of those many details. Facts could be twisted by liars, but every fact was like a piece of memory metal that inevitably returned to its original shape. His eyes couldn’t lie to him, though he tried to blink away these impossible changes in the senator’s bedroom.

After so many years as a cop, he saw the whole world as a crime scene, and in every crime scene, truth waited to be found. Initially the evidence might be misinterpreted—but seldom for long, and never by him. Throughout his career, other cops called him Hawkeye, not only because he saw so clearly but also because he could look down on a case as if from a great height and see truth as the hawk sees the field mouse even in the tall grass. Yet though he knew that everything around him now must be a lie, he could not perceive the reality through the illusion.

After a moment, however, as if someone dialed a rheostat, light rose, at first from mysterious sources, but then from semitransparent shapes that resembled the lamps that had been here when Logan first entered the room. Not only lamps but also furniture materialized, ghostly shapes at first, like the weaker image in a photographic double exposure, but rapidly becoming more solid, more detailed. The Persian-style carpet reappeared under his feet.

While the reality of the senator’s bedroom reasserted, while the vision of an abandoned and deteriorated building faded, Logan turned slowly in place. The welling light rinsed the mothy stains from the pale-gold wallpaper. The gray and yellow ragged paint of the ceiling coffers raveled up into smooth white surfaces once more.

Over the years, Logan Spangler had so often acquitted himself well and with such equanimity in moments of peril that he thought he was all but incapable of fearing for his life. But astonishment quickly deepened into awe, and the mystery of the transforming room was so formidable that dread crept over him as he wondered what power might effect such a change and why.

Having turned 180 degrees, Logan Spangler faced the bathroom. Beyond the open door, the lights were bright. The dusty, damaged marble floor appeared clean again and in good repair.

Behind him, something hissed.

Chapter 14 (#ulink_d848aa69-3035-51a3-bfda-bbeab6863ef2)

Apartment 2–G

To distract herself from the prospect of imminent death by electrocution as well as from a memory of blazing hair and smoking eyes, Sparkle Sykes decided to take an inventory of her dress shoes, of which she had 104 pairs. Sitting on a padded stool in her roomy walk-in closet, she took her time with each item of footwear, enjoying the taper of the heel, the roundness of the counter, the arch of the shank, the slope of the vamp, the smell of leather …

For the past twenty-four years, since her beloved daddy was struck by lightning and killed when she was eight years old, Sparkle Sykes had been afraid of thunderstorms. They were not just weather to her. They were thinking creatures, the electricity in their clouds serving the same cognitive function as the milder current that wove ceaselessly through her brain, from synapse to synapse. Like armadas of alien starships, they appeared on the horizon and conquered the entire sky, oppressing the land and the people below them. They were ancient gods, proud and cruel and demanding of sacrifices, beings of pure power, entering the world from outside of time, with the evil intention of inflicting suffering on mere mortals.

Sparkle supposed that, on the subject of thunderstorms, she was a little bit crazy.

Hours before the storm arrived, she had drawn heavy draperies across the windows of her apartment, which overlooked the Pendleton’s grand courtyard. When passing through rooms with a view, she did not glance at the windows, for fear that she would glimpse flashes of the storm’s fury pulsing behind the pleated panels of brocade.

Between three hundred and six hundred Americans were killed by lightning each year. Two thousand were injured. More people were killed by lightning than by any other weather phenomena, including floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes. The current in a lightning bolt could run as high as thirty thousand amperes with a million or more volts.

Some people thought that Sparkle’s encyclopedic knowledge of lightning must be a sign of obsession, but she thought of it as nothing more than a part of her family history. If your father had been a railroad engineer, no one would be surprised that you knew a great deal about trains. A ship captain’s daughter would likely be steeped in seafaring stories and the lore of the oceans. The child of a man cored through by the million-volt lance of a storm would surely be disrespectful of her father if she cared to know nothing about the instrument by which his fate was delivered to him. And then there was her mother’s horrific end.

Less than half an hour into Sparkle’s inspection of her footwear collection, she remembered one of hundreds of death-by-lightning cases that she had read in the press. Just a few years earlier, somewhere in New England, a bride outside a church, moments before her wedding, was struck down by the first bolt of a storm before even a drop of rain had fallen. The entry point had been her silver tiara, the exit point her right foot. She wore white-satin pumps with spike heels; the left shoe exploded into several pieces, but her right flash-burned and fused with her flesh.

An inventory of shoes no longer distracted Sparkle from the thunder that crashed down upon the Pendleton. Suddenly the sight of shoes reminded her of her own mother’s barefoot death dance.

She hesitated to leave the closet because it had no windows. Here she could not see the storm—or the storm see her. And here the cannonades of thunder were more muffled than elsewhere.

For a minute or two, she stood there, trying to decide where else to take refuge—and then Iris appeared in the doorway. At twelve, the girl was like Sparkle in two respects—petite in stature, with delicate facial features—but otherwise different. Sparkle was a blonde, but Iris had hair as black as raven feathers. Sparkle’s eyes were blue, Iris’s a curiously luminous gray. Mother had fair skin, daughter an olive complexion.

Iris looked at Sparkle directly but only for a moment, and then turned her attention to the floppy plush-toy rabbit that she cradled in one arm as if it were a human infant.

“Does the storm frighten you, sweetie?” Sparkle asked, for she worried that her anxiety might infect this highly sensitive child who already found the world almost more abrasive than she could tolerate.

On a good day, Iris spoke fewer than a hundred words, and on many days none at all. She had a particular aversion to answering questions, which were often such a painful intrusion on her privacy that her face clenched with anguish.

In a voice as sweet as it was solemn, the girl said, “‘We’re going to the meadow now to dry ourselves off in the sun.’”

No meadow lay along the length of Shadow Street, nor was any sun to be seen on this dreary day. But Sparkle understood that the girl meant she’d at first been frightened but wasn’t afraid any longer. Iris’s words were from the novel Bambi, spoken by the famous fawn’s mother after the terror of a thunderstorm; she’d read the book dozens of times—as she did all her favorites—memorizing whole scenes.

Gazing solemnly at the toy bunny, Iris tenderly stroked its velveteen face. The rabbit’s fixed stare seemed, to Sparkle, only slightly less expressive than the lustrous eyes with which her daughter had so briefly regarded her.

As Iris turned from the open closet door and drifted across the master bedroom, toward the hallway, Sparkle longed to go after her, to touch her face as Iris petted the face of the rabbit, to put an arm around her and hold her close. The touch would not be welcome; she could bear to be touched only when in certain moods, and she could never tolerate a cuddle. An embrace would inspire the girl to shrink away, to thrash free, perhaps even to shriek and to lash out angrily, though she had fewer tantrums than some autistic children.

Only one-sixth of such kids were ever able to live any kind of independent life. Although Iris had a unique gift, she might not be that one in six. Only time would tell.

Sometimes an autistic child possessed one isolated special skill, perhaps an astonishing rote memory or an intuitive grasp of mathematics that enabled dauntingly complex mental computations to be made in but a second or two, all without a day of education in the subject. Some could sit at a piano and at once play melodically, even read and understand sheet music the first time they saw it.

Iris was that perhaps rarest of autistic savants: one who had an intuitive grasp of the relationship between phonemes, the basic sounds by which a language was constructed, and the printed word. One day when she was five, Iris picked up a children’s book for the first time—and quickly began reading, having had no instruction, because when she looked at a word on the page, she heard the sound of it in her mind and knew its meaning. When she had never encountered a word before, she searched for its definition in a dictionary and thereafter never forgot it.