Dean Koontz - 77 Shadow Street

Ignis disappeared through the stairwell door, but Bailey and Padmini were close on his tail now, Silas and Tom and Mickey not far behind. Ignis went down, moving faster than in the hallway, taking the steps two at a time, breathing rapidly, a thin rhythmic bleat of anxiety escaping him. They passed the ground floor. Bailey remembered Witness warning him that inside the house, the One was strongest in the elevator shafts and the basement.

Dr. Kirby Ignis

The survival of the One—its very creation—depended on Kirby making it back to 2011 alive, and his survival seemed to be assured only if he made the return journey alone. Bailey Hawks wasn’t to be relied upon. He was quick to make black-and-white moral judgments, giving little or no consideration to shades of gray. Silas Kinsley’s courtroom experience had given him a good ear for evasion, and he would keep confirming Hawks’s intuition. Having been to war and having survived, Hawks knew how to take action on those judgments and would not dither. He was the worst kind of man to have as an enemy.

The One had spoken to Kirby back there in his kitchen. Spoke to him from inside his head, not in words so much as images from which he made inferences. Down , it said. Basement, pool room , it said by showing him those places. He had no friends here anymore, not among his own kind, and he could trust only the One, the One and the house that it haunted in its myriad forms.

Bailey Hawks

When Bailey rushed out of the stairwell into the basement corridor, the door to the lap pool was just falling shut. Padmini and Silas moved past him, toward that room, but he put one hand on her shoulder, halting her and the attorney.

“Doorways are always bad,” he said, as Tom arrived with Mickey Dime. “And the pool, the way it is now … it’s a trap. We’ve been lured and herded here.”

The canyon that was now the swimming pool, a thousand fathoms deep or deeper, and everything else that might now lie beneath the Pendleton could have been excavated and constructed by nanomachines eating their way through bedrock. But whatever the origins of those deep redoubts, they seemed to bring together the future evil of the One with the evil that predated time, stories of which had been passed down through the history of humanity by word of mouth, by cave paintings, and eventually by the written word. Here all the millennia of earthly evil were condensed into one moment, and this house that was a bridge over a fault in space-time was also a temple to the forces that had so long sought the destruction of all things.

“He’s in there?” Tom asked. “And we’re not going after him? Then what are we going to do?”

The ceiling creaked. Crumbles of luminous fungi snowed down around them. The few operative overhead lights dimmed, brightened, dimmed. As upstairs, receptacles and junction boxes blew out of the walls, and pale forms slithered-pressed against those holes in the Sheetrock. From the elevator shaft came the sound of a car ascending from a great depth. They were being herded again, encouraged toward the lap-pool door.

“Wait,” Bailey insisted.

To their right, halfway along the corridor, Twyla and Sparkle came out of the HVAC vault, the children with them.

Bailey glanced at his watch. “Wait. Wait .”

From inside, the lap-pool door was torn open, wrenched off its hinges, and thrown aside.

Silas Kinsley

Out of the doorway came two of the creatures that Witness had called Pogromites, wet from the pool, but they were smaller than the others, the size of children. One shot directly toward Silas, faster than a cat, climbed his right leg, claws scrabbling at his raincoat, teeth snapping, its gargoyle eyes fixed on his eyes as though the black-hole gravity of those big pupils would pull him into oblivion. He struck at it with one fist, its teeth missed his hand, snagged in his coat cuff, he staggered backward, Padmini stepped in, the sleeve ripped, the thing shook the scrap of fabric out of its mouth, it swung its head toward Padmini and snapped at her, biting down not on her hand but on the barrel of the pistol, and she blew its crawling gray brains across the hallway floor.

The second small Pogromite launched at Bailey. He backed rapidly away at first sight, firing four rounds point-blank, scrambling its face, punching out the back of its skull. It collapsed at his feet, mostly brainless but spasming, snapping at his shoes. He kicked it aside, swung toward the pool-room door, and a third beast appeared, bigger than the others.

Something had seemed familiar about the first two, and now Silas knew why. As the Pogromite that had been formed out of the substance of Sally Hollander had vaguely resembled her, so this creature bore a subtle resemblance to Margaret Pendleton, the wife of Andrew, who with her daughter and son had gone missing in 1897. Silas had seen photographs of the woman and her children—and these were the things that they had become. This Pogromite was the size of Padmini, whom it at once attacked.

Twyla Trahern

The sudden eruption of the creatures from the lap-pool doorway distracted Twyla for an instant, and in that moment the Pogromite from the HVAC vault burst through the doorway behind her. So fast, so strong, it swept her aside with one arm, knocked her off her feet, and the gun flew from her hand. She landed on her left hip, pain shot the length of that leg. Sparkle screamed, Iris screamed. Twyla rolled over, sat up, saw the gray beast in the yellow gloom tear the rifle with the fixed bayonet out of Winny’s hands and toss it away. Pogromite. It called itself a Pogromite. She scrambled toward the pistol, something treacherous underfoot, oily fragments of glowing fungi that had fallen from the ceiling, as slick as ice. The Pogromite seized Winny by his arms, lifted him high, as though making an offering of him to some god of blood, and abruptly the Pendleton roared with psychotic voices, a psychic wave of hatred slammed over Twyla as she snatched up the pistol, convulsing her with its power, yellow light seemed to flare within her head, so that reflexively she fired the pistol, bullet-shattered bits of concrete prickling her face—

Tom Tran

With one six-fingered hand, almost quicker than the eye, the thing seized Padmini by the throat, and with the other hand, it encircled her, pulling her against it. Her gun was trapped between them, she squeezed off two shots into its abdomen, but it was more machine than flesh, only head shots—taking out the logic circuits—would stop it. The Pogromite snapped at her face as it dragged her backward, and she twisted her head away, avoiding one bite, then a second.

When the creature dragged her across the threshold into the lap-pool room, Tom followed close, the Beretta in a two-hand grip, hoping for a clear shot at the thing’s hateful face, afraid to fire because of the way Padmini whipped her head side to side as she desperately tried to avoid being bitten. Dr. Ignis was standing to one side, his face twisted in a lunatic expression that was half terror and half triumph. Operating strictly on instinct, Tom shot Ignis in the right shoulder, and the many voices of the One exploded from every wall, from out of the pool, shrieking in rage. To protect Ignis, the Pogromite threw Padmini aside and sprang at Tom. Although not fully automatic, the pistol would fire as rapidly as he could squeeze the trigger, and the creature’s face was nearly dissolved when it crashed into him and knocked him off his feet.