Dean Koontz: 77 Shadow Street

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 sinuosity 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.