77 Shadow Street. Dean Koontz

know how to tell him what I saw without sounding nuts. But I should’ve told him. I should have insisted he get out of there, do his punch list Monday. I did try to get him to call it a day, he wouldn’t, so I left him there to die.”

      “You didn’t. You couldn’t know. Who could?”

      “The next day, Sunday, I go to church. Hadn’t gone in a while. Felt the need. Monday, went to work with a pistol under my jacket. Didn’t think a pistol would do the job. What else would? A pistol was something. But … that was the end. No more shadow people, and nothing like what I’d seen. Maybe stuff happened Saturday, no one but Ricky Neems there to see. During the next month, we finished the job.”

      Silas’s right hand was cold and wet with condensation from his Scotch glass. He blotted his fingers on a napkin. “Any theories?”

      Perry Kyser shook his head. “Only what I said earlier. I got a glimpse of Hell. That encounter changed me. Frequent confession and regular Communion suddenly seemed like a good idea.”

      “And you never told your son, your wife?”

      “I figured … if I was given a glimpse of Hell, it’s because I needed the shock. To change me. I made the change but didn’t have the courage to tell my wife why it might have been necessary. You see?”

      “Yes,” Silas said. “I don’t know about Hell. Right now, I don’t know for sure about much of anything.”

      The waitress returned and left the check on the table.

      As Silas calculated the tip and took cash from his wallet, Perry again studied the customers at the bar. “What’s wrong with them?”

      Surprised, Silas said, “You sense it, too?”

      “Something. Don’t know what. What’re they—mostly twenties and thirties? For their age, they’re trying too hard.”

      “Too hard at what?”

      “Being carefree. Should come natural that young. They seem, I don’t know … anxious.”

      Silas said, “I think they come here for the Deco, the music, the atmosphere, because they want to escape to a safe time.”

      “Never was such a time.”

      “Safer,” Silas corrected. “A safer time.”

      “The thirties? War was coming.”

      “But there was an end to it. Now … maybe never an end.”

      Still focused on the bar crowd, Perry said, “I thought it was just me being old.”

      “What was?”

      “This feeling that everything is coming apart. More like being torn down. I have this nightmare now and then.”

      Silas put away his wallet.

      Perry Kyser said, “Everything torn down, every man for himself. Worse. It’s all against all.”

      Silas looked out at Shadow Street, the Pendleton looming through volleys of rain.

      “All against all,” Perry repeated, “murder, suicide, everywhere, day and night, unrelenting.”

      “It’s just a nightmare,” Silas said.

      “Maybe it is.” Perry looked at him. “What now?”

      “I’m going home, sit and think awhile.”

      “Home,” Perry agreed. “But I’m gonna try not to think.”

      “Thanks for your time, for being so frank with me.”

      As they got up from the booth, the big man said, “Thought talking about it at last would take the chill off. Didn’t, though.”

      The bar crowd sounded louder, edgier. Their laughter was shrill.

      In the small lobby, as they waited at the coat-check window, Perry said, “You have kids?”

      “We never did.”

      “We have kids, grandkids, great-grandkids.”

      “That alone should take the chill off.”

      “Just the opposite. I’m old enough to understand I can’t protect them. Not from the worst. Not from much of anything.”

      Silas protested when Perry Kyser insisted on tipping the coat-check girl for both of them.

      Outside, under the awning, in the cold breeze, they put up the hoods of their raincoats. They shook hands. Perry Kyser walked away downhill. Silas went uphill toward the Pendleton.

       Chapter 17

      Apartment 3–D

      In Senator Earl Blandon’s apartment, where luxury and order had for a moment vanished behind a bleak vision of vacancy and decay, Logan Spangler turned in the now restored bedroom, hand on the grip of the pistol in his swivel holster, seeking the source of the hiss that, although brief, had been as hostile a challenge as any sound he’d ever heard, reminiscent of serpents and jungle cats and nameless things in dreams.

      He saw a figure, tall and lean and quick, little more than a silhouette but definitely not the senator, as it sprang out of sight into the hallway. From that brief glimpse, he couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman—and he had the strangest impression that it might be neither, though it had been erect rather than on all fours like an animal.