77 Shadow Street Read online

  Although Blandon belonged in prison instead of in an ultra-luxury condominium, he was nevertheless an apartment owner. Like any resident, he expected to have his privacy even in the public spaces of the Pendleton. Devon Murphy never followed residents, by camera, along hallways and into elevators, except for the ex-senator, who could be singularly entertaining.

  Once, having passed through the lobby and reached the ground-floor corridor, he had been too soused to maintain his deceptively regal posture and had dropped to all fours, crawling to the north elevator—and out of it on the third floor. On another post-midnight return, he strode confidently past the elevator, turned the corner into the north wing, seemed suddenly to become disoriented, opened the door to the concierge’s office, evidently mistook it for a bathroom, and urinated on the floor.

  That office was now kept locked when not in use.

  On this occasion, Blandon found the elevator easily enough, and he boarded it with an air of dignity worthy of a king climbing into his royal carriage. As the doors closed, and after he pressed the button for the third floor, he glanced up once at the security camera in the car, and then he looked around at the bird-and-cloud mural with an expression of pure contempt.

  The ex-senator had written two long letters to the homeowners’ association criticizing the mural with what he must have assumed was the erudition of a knowledgeable art connoisseur. The board, on which sat at least one genuine art connoisseur, instead found the letters to be contemptible, confrontational, and alarming. The security staff had not been bluntly told to observe Earl Blandon in the elevator when he returned home inebriated, against the possibility that he might deface the mural, but the suggestion had been made indirectly.

  Now, as the elevator passed the second floor, something unprecedented happened. An expression of surprise came over the senator’s face … and swirling currents of blue static, like nothing Devon had seen before, suddenly flushed the image from the screen. The five other screens, quartered into twenty camera shots, also succumbed to the static, and the security system went blind.

  Simultaneously, Devon heard low tympanic beats, hollow and strange and barely audible extended notes. Through the soles of his shoes, he felt vibrations in the concrete floor, subtle waves resonating in time with the drumming.

  He didn’t become alarmed, because the door and window monitors remained operative, and all the indicator lights were green on the board. No one was forcing entrance at any point. If the sound had grown louder and the accompanying vibrations had accelerated, Devon’s puzzlement and concern might have swelled into apprehension.

  The phenomenon continued at a consistent level, however, and after about half a minute, the low drumming faded, the last of the vibrations passed through the floor, and the blue static receded from the plasma screens. The many security-camera points of view returned.

  The elevator camera had a wide-angle lens and was mounted near the ceiling at a rear corner of the car, providing coverage of the entire interior, including the doors—which were closed. Earl Blandon was gone. Apparently the car had arrived at the third floor, and the ex-senator had disembarked.

  Devon switched to the camera covering the short length of public corridor serving Apartments 3-A and 3-C, and then to the camera that provided a view of the entire long north-wing hallway on the third floor. No Earl Blandon. His was the first apartment in that wing, 3-D, overlooking the courtyard. He must have stepped out of the elevator, turned the corner, and let himself through his front door during the time that the video surveillance failed.

  Devon cycled through all twenty-four cameras. Without exception, the public spaces were deserted. The Pendleton remained quiet and still. Evidently, above the basement, the sullen drumming and the vibrations had been so faint that, if anyone had been awakened, no one had been concerned enough to step out of his apartment and have a look around.

  3

  The Basement Pool

  Whether upon arising at four o’clock in the morning, as now, or after work, Bailey Hawks preferred to swim laps with only the underwater lights, the rest of the long room dark, the pool a great glowing jewel, bright watery reflections fluttering like diaphanous wings across the white ceramic-tile walls and ceiling. The pleasantly warm pool, the astringent scent of chlorine, the slish-slish of his limbs parting the water, the gentle swash of wavelets lapping at the pale-blue tiles … The tense expectation that preceded a trading day and the mental fatigue that followed one were sluiced from him when he swam.

  He got out of bed before dawn to exercise, have breakfast, and be at his desk when the markets opened, but rising early was not the cause of the exhaustion that he felt by every Friday evening. A day spent investing other people’s money could sometimes leave him as weary as any day of combat when he’d been a marine. At thirty-eight, he was in his sixth year as an independent wealth manager, after having worked for a major investment bank for three years following his military career. During his first year at the bank, he’d thought that eventually, as success built his confidence, he would be less oppressed by the responsibility to protect and grow his clients’ assets. But the burden never became lighter. Money could be a kind of freedom. If he lost a portion of someone’s investments, he would be throwing away a measure of that client’s liberty.

  When Bailey was a boy, his mother called him “my guardian.” His failure to protect her was an embedded thorn, perpetually working its way through his mind all these years later, too deep to pluck out. He could atone, if at all, only by reliable service to others.

  At the end of his fifth lap, he touched bottom with his feet and turned to face the farther end of the long rectangle of shimmering water, where he had entered by the submerged steps. The pool was five feet deep, and Bailey stood six two, so when he leaned back against the coping to rest before doing another five laps, the water rose not quite to his shoulders.

  He smoothed his wet hair back from his face—and saw a dark form coming toward him underwater. He hadn’t been aware of anyone entering the pool after him. The rippled surface spun the quivering light and wavelet shadows into purling patterns that severely distorted the approaching figure. When you were submerged, the greater resistance made progress harder than doing laps on the surface, but this swimmer bored through the water as if he were a torpedo. The exertion needed to make such headway should have forced the man to breach for air before he could complete a hundred-foot length, but he appeared to be as fully at home underwater as any fish.

  For the first time since his days in the Marine Corps, Bailey sensed mortal and imminent danger. Wasting not an instant second-guessing his instinct, he turned, pressed his palms flat atop the coping, and levered himself out of the pool, onto his knees. Behind him, someone seized his left ankle. He would have been pulled back into the water if he hadn’t kicked furiously with his right foot and struck what seemed to be his assailant’s face.

  Released, Bailey scrambled to his feet, staggered two steps on the matte-finish tile, and turned, suddenly breathless, overcome by the irrational fear that he was in the presence of something inhuman, one mythical monster or another that was not merely mythical anymore. Nothing confronted him.

  The underwater lamps were not as bright as they had been. In fact, the quality of the light had changed from crisp white to a sullen yellow. The blue water-line tile appeared green in this sour glow.

  The dark shape moved under the surface, sleek, swift, streaking back toward the steps. Bailey hurried along the apron, trying to get a better look at the swimmer. Now acid-yellow, the pool appeared to be polluted, clear in some places but cloudy in others. Discerning details of the person—or thing—in the water proved difficult. He thought he could make out legs, arms, a basic human form, yet the overall impression was of something deeply strange.

  For one thing, the swimmer didn’t frog kick, which was almost essential for making way underwater without swim fins, and he wasn’t using a breaststroke, either. He appeared to undulate with the muscular sinuosit
y of a shark, propelling himself in a way no human being could.

  If Bailey had been more prudent than curious, he would have snared his thick terry-cloth robe from the hook on which it hung, slipped into it and his flip-flops, and hurried to the nearby security room in the west wing of the basement. Devon Murphy would be on duty there. But Bailey was transfixed by the eerie nature of the swimmer, by the otherworldly mood that settled on the room.

  The building shuddered ever so slightly. A low rumble rose from the earth under the Pendleton’s foundation, and Bailey glanced at the floor in front of him, half expecting to see hairline cracks opening in the mortar joints between the tiles, though none did.

  With the brief shaking, the light in the pool changed again, from the pustulant shade of disease-darkened urine to red. Short of the steps, the swimmer turned with the serpentine ease of an eel, heading back toward the end of the pool from which Bailey had fled.

  Where clear, the water was the color of cranberry juice. Where clouded as if from disturbed silt, it resembled blood, and that vile stain now spread more rapidly through the pool.

  The fluttering watery reflections on the glossy white tiles of the walls and ceiling morphed into tongues of faux fire. The long room grew dimmer, murkier, and shadows swelled like billowing smoke.

  Nearing the farther end of the lap pool, the swimmer became harder to see, although still visible in the fouled water. No man could have swum three lengths so quickly without once needing to surface for a breath.

  The shuddering lasted five or six seconds, and half a minute after it subsided and after the building grew silent, the pool lamps phased from red to yellow to white again. The faux fire licking along the glossy walls became dancing wings of light as before, and the room brightened. The cloudy water turned crystalline once more. The mysterious swimmer had vanished.

  Bailey Hawks stood with his hands fisted at his sides, dripping into the puddle in which he stood. His heart knocked with less force than it might have when he was under enemy fire, back in the day, but nevertheless hard enough for him to hear it hammering.

  4

  Apartment 3-C

  At 4:13 A.M. Silas Kinsley was awakened by a low thunderlike sound and thought the building seemed to be shaking. But the brief rumble and the movement stopped by the time that he sat up and came fully to his senses. He waited in darkness, listening for a moment, and then decided that the disturbance had been part of a dream.

  When he lowered his head to the pillow once more, however, a sound arose from within the wall against which his bed stood. The whispery slithering noise brought to mind images of snakes writhing between the studs behind the plasterboard, which seemed improbable if not impossible. He had never before heard anything like it. He suspected—intuited—that it must be related to the disquieting history of the house.

  The disturbance continued for perhaps five minutes. He lay listening, wondering, not fearful but certainly wary and alert for any change in the sound that might help him to identify the cause.

  The subsequent silence was the expectant kind that fostered insomnia. Having recently turned seventy-nine, he usually found sleep elusive once it had been interrupted. Silas was a retired civil-litigation attorney, but his mind hummed as busily these days as when his calendar had been fully booked with clients. He rose before dawn, showered, dressed, and was frying eggs in butter when, beyond the kitchen window, the hot-pink light of morning painted coral reefs across the sky.

  Later, after lunch, he fell asleep in an armchair. When he sat up in alarm an hour later, he could not recall much of the nightmare from which he had fled, only that it involved catacombs of flowstone, in which there were no skeletal remains, as in most catacombs, but empty burial niches carved into the sinuous walls. Something silent and unseen, something with implacable intent, had sought him through that maze of passageways.

  His hands were as cold as those of a corpse. He stared at the rising moon at the base of each of his fingernails.

  Still later on that somber December afternoon, Silas stood at a living-room window of his third-floor apartment in the Pendleton, on the crown of Shadow Hill, watching the lower avenues fade behind an advancing wall of rain. Buildings of buff brick, of red brick, of limestone, as well as newer and taller and uglier curtain-glass towers were at once bleached to a uniform gray as the storm washed over them, becoming like the ghostly structures of a long-dead city in a dream of plague and desolation. Neither the warm room nor his cashmere sweater could relieve the chills that, like a winged horde, fluttered through him.

  The official story was that, 114 years earlier, Margaret Pendleton and her children—Sophia and Alexander—had been snatched from this house and murdered. Silas had come to doubt that the long-ago kidnapping occurred. Back in the day, something stranger than murder happened to those three, something worse.

  Shadow Hill rose to the highest point in this heartland city, and the third floor was the Pendleton’s topmost. The west-facing structure seemed to rule the rain-swept metropolis below. Both hill and street were named for the shadows of trees and buildings that, on a sunny afternoon, grew longer by the hour until, at twilight, they crept to the summit and met the night as it came in from the east.

  Not just a great house, not merely a mansion, the Pendleton was more accurately a Beaux Arts palace built in 1889, at the height of the Gilded Age, sixty thousand square feet under roof, not counting the vast basement or the separate carriage house. A combination of Georgian and French Renaissance styles, the building was clad in limestone, with elaborately carved window surrounds. Neither the Carnegies nor the Vanderbilts, nor even the Rockefellers, had ever owned a grander house.

  Upon taking up residence shortly before Christmas 1889, Andrew North Pendleton—a billionaire in an era when a billion dollars was still real money—christened his new house Belle Vista. And so the place was known for eighty-four years; but in 1973, it was converted into condominium units and renamed the Pendleton.

  Andrew Pendleton remained happy in Belle Vista until December 1897, when his wife, Margaret, and their two young children were supposedly abducted and never found. Thereafter, Andrew became a pitied recluse whose eccentricity matured into a genteel kind of madness.

  Silas Kinsley had lost his wife in 2008, after fifty-three years of marriage. He and Nora were never blessed with children. Having been a widower for three years, he could imagine how loneliness and grief might have robbed Andrew Pendleton of his sanity.

  Nevertheless, Silas had concluded that loneliness and loss were not the primary causes of the billionaire’s long-ago decline and suicide. Andrew North Pendleton had been driven insane also by some terrible knowledge, by a mysterious experience that he struggled to understand for seven years, on which he remained fixated until he took his own life.

  A kind of fixation had gripped Silas, too, following Nora’s death. After selling their home and buying this apartment, he had filled his time by taking an interest in the history of this landmark building. That curiosity ripened into such an obsession that he spent uncounted hours poring through public records, back issues of newspapers more than a century old, and other archives in search of facts, no matter how ordinary, that might add to his knowledge of the Pendleton.

  Now, although he had watched the legions of the storm marching out of the lowlands and up the long north slope of Shadow Hill, Silas startled back one step when the first wet volley snapped against the French panes, as if the rain, mistaken for mere weather, were instead a malevolent assault aimed specifically at him. The city blurred, the day seemed to darken, and the silvering effect of the living-room lamplight made an inadequate mirror of the window. In the wet glass, his face was transparent and lacking sufficient detail, as if it were not in fact his reflection but instead must be the face of another, the pale countenance of something less than fully human, a visitor from an occult realm temporarily connected to this world by the power of the storm.

  Spikes of lightning split the darkening day, and Silas
turned away from the window as thunder jackhammered the sky. He went to the kitchen, where the under-cabinet fluorescents brightened the golden-granite countertops and where all other lights were off. His files about the Pendleton littered the dinette table: newspaper articles, Xeroxes of public records, transcripts of interviews with people who claimed to have some experience of the building prior to 1974, and photocopies of the eleven scraps that remained of a handwritten journal that Andrew North Pendleton had destroyed immediately before killing himself.

  Each surviving piece of Pendleton’s writing was an incomplete fragment, each singed brown around the edges because he burned the journal in his bedroom fireplace prior to biting a shotgun barrel and receiving a mortal meal of buckshot. Each of the eleven scraps of prose was intriguing, suggesting that Andrew Pendleton endured an experience so extraordinary as to be otherworldly. Or perhaps in the final stages of his madness, he was tormented by a dementia in which he mistook nightmares and hallucinations for memories of real events.

  Of the eleven surviving scraps, Silas most often returned to a cryptic, disturbing fragment about Pendleton’s daughter, Sophia, who was seven years old when she disappeared. The words and all their possible meanings so haunted him that he’d committed them to memory: … and her once-pink skin gone gray, her lips as gray as ashes, and her eyes like smoke, a humorless and iron-gray grin, no longer my Sophie and less Sophie by the moment.

  Andrew Pendleton’s loss of his family was not the only tragedy in the history of the great house. The second owner, Gifford Ostock, who was the sole heir to considerable wealth made in coal mining and in railroad coal-car manufacturing, lived well and fully in Belle Vista from 1905 until 1935. One night in December of ’35, the butler, Nolan Tolliver, slaughtered the Ostock family and all the live-in staff before killing himself. Tolliver left an incoherent handwritten note claiming to have murdered them in order to “save the world from eternal darkness,” and though he took responsibility for all sixteen killings, eight of the dead were never found. To this day it was not known why or how Tolliver disposed of half his victims, or why he did not likewise dispose of the other eight.