Dean Koontz - 77 Shadow Street

So now he couldn’t honestly say his dad came around as seldom as Santa Claus because in truth Santa Claus never came, but sometimes his dad did. Of course, he hadn’t seen his dad in a long time, so maybe it would turn out that his dad never existed, either. Winny got a phone call now and then, but that could be a fake-out, the guy on the other end could be anyone. If his dad came for a Christmas visit, he would bring Winny what he always brought: a musical instrument or two, a stack of CDs, not just his own but also CDs by other singers, and a signed publicity photo if he had a new one. Every time Farrel Barnett got a new publicity photo, he made sure that Winny received one. Even though Santa Claus didn’t exist, he brought better presents than Winny’s dad, who was most likely real, though you never could tell.

Winny had almost decided which of the three books to read when the floor and walls shuddered. The lamp on the table beside his chair had a pull chain, and it swung back and forth, clinking against the base. At the windows, draperies swished a little, as if stirred by a draft, but there was no draft. In the open shelf of his bookcase headboard, Dragon World action figures vibrated against the wood. They jiggled around as if they were coming to life. They were jiggling a lot. But of course they were even deader than old Grace Lyman.

Winny sat through the shaking, the bright blasts of lightning at the windows, and the booming thunder. He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t going to wet his pants or anything. But he wasn’t calm and collected, either. He was in-between somewhere. He didn’t know the word for how he felt. The past couple of days, things were kind of strange in the Pendleton. Things were weird. But weird didn’t always have to be scary. Sometimes weird was really interesting. Last Christmas, his dad gave him a gold-plated saxophone, which was just about as big as Winny. That was more than a little weird, but it wasn’t either interesting or scary, just weird in a stupid kind of way.

He had kept secret the weird and interesting thing that happened to him twice in the past two days. Although he wanted to share his strange experiences with his mom, he suspected that she would feel she had to tell his dad. For all the right reasons, she was always trying to keep old Farrel Barnett involved in his son’s life. For sure, his dad would overreact, and the next thing Winny knew, he would be seeing a shrink twice a week, and there would be some kind of custody battle, and he would be in danger of Nashville or Los Angeles.

As the shaking came to an end, Winny glanced at the TV. It was dark and silent. Although the acrylic screen wasn’t polished enough to reflect him as he sat in the armchair, it didn’t appear flat but instead seemed to have forbidding depths, like a cloudy pool of water in the shade of a forest. The glow of his reading lamp, floating on the screen, seemed to be the pale distorted face of someone drowned and drifting just below the surface.

Twyla hurried from her study to Winny’s room at the farther end of the big apartment, which contained over thirty-five hundred square feet of living space in eight rooms, three baths, and a kitchen—one of the two largest units in the building. She knocked on his door, and he told her to come in, and when she crossed the threshold, she found him in the armchair, legs tucked under himself, three books in his lap.

He was luminous, at least to her, although she thought not only to her, because she had often seen people staring at him as if his appearance compelled their attention. He had her dark hair—almost black—and his father’s blue eyes, but his looks were not the essence of his appeal. In spite of his shyness and reserve, he possessed some ineffable quality that endeared him to people on first encounter. If a boy so young could be said to have charisma, Winny was charismatic, though he seemed to be oblivious of it.

“Honey, are you okay?” she asked.

“Sure. I’m all right. Are you okay?”

“What was that shaking?” she wondered.

“You don’t know? I figured you’d know.”

“I don’t think it was an earthquake.”

He said, “Maybe something blew up in the basement.”

“No. That would have set off an alarm.”

“It happened before.”

“When?”

“Earlier but not as bad. Maybe someone’s blasting somewhere. Some construction guys or someone.”

His bedroom had a twelve-foot-high coffered ceiling with an ornate gilded-plaster medallion in each coffer and exquisite panels of wainscoting with a gilded ground overpainted with a Japanese-style scene of dragonflies and bamboo, original to the Pendleton.

This almost daunting elegance was balanced by Winny’s toys and books, but Twyla wondered—and not for the first time—if she had made a mistake when she bought the apartment, if this was a suitable environment for a child. This was a safe building in a safe city, a privileged ambiance in which to grow up. But there weren’t many kids in the Pendleton, therefore few opportunities to have playmates. Winny had no interest in playmates; he always seemed to keep himself entertained. If he were to overcome his shyness, however, he needed to be around other kids his age, not just at school, but also playing and having fun.

Sitting on the footstool in front of her son’s armchair, Twyla said, “Honey, do you like it here in the Pendleton?”

“I don’t want to live in Nashville or L.A.,” he said at once.

“No, no,” she said. “That’s not what I mean. I don’t want to live in those places, either. I mean, maybe we could get a house in a regular neighborhood, not so fancy as this, a house with a yard, maybe near a park or something, where there’s lots of other kids. We could get a dog.”

“We could get a dog right here,” Winny said.

“Yes, we could, but it’s not as easy to take care of in the city as it would be in a suburb. Dogs like to have room to run.”

He frowned. “Anyway, you can’t just go and live in a regular neighborhood ’cause of who you are.”

“Who I am? I’m just me, just someone who writes songs. I’m nobody special.”

“You’ve been on TV sometimes. You even sang on TV that time. You sang really good.”

“I grew up in a regular neighborhood, you know. In fact it was a kind of shabby regular neighborhood.”

“Anyway, I don’t much like parks. I always get some itchy rash or something. You know how I get that rash. Or I can’t stop sneezing ’cause of the flowers and trees and all. Maybe it’s fun to go to a park in winter, you know, when everything’s all dead and frozen and covered in snow, but it’s not so great most of the year.”

She smiled. “So a park—that’s like a little piece of Hell right here on earth, huh?”

“I don’t know what Hell’s like, except probably hot. It must be worse than the park, since it’s the worst place ever. Let’s stay where we are.”

She loved Winny so much that she wanted to shout it out. She could hardly contain so much love. “I want you to be happy, kiddo.”

“I’m happy. Are you happy?”

“I’m happy with you,” she said. He was in his stocking feet. She took hold of his right foot by the toes and shook it affectionately. “Wherever I am, I’m happy if you’re there.”

He averted his eyes, embarrassed by her declaration of love. “I like it here okay. This place is cool. It’s different.”

“Anytime you want,” she said, “you could have kids from school for a sleepover or a Saturday afternoon.”

Frowning, he said, “What kids?”

“Any kids you want. Your friends. One or two, or a whole bunch, whoever.”