When he turned to leave the bath, another rumble rose from under the building, and the lights went off both in this room and the next. In the blinding blackness, he unclipped the six-inch flashlight from his belt and clicked it. The crisp white LED beam flared brighter than that of a traditional flashlight, yet he almost stepped out of the bathroom before he realized that everything around him had changed.
A few seconds in the dark seemed to have been years. The white marble floor, polished and gleaming earlier, was dulled by dust. Pieces were missing from the decorative braided border of green and black granite. Green stains and rust streaked the nickel-plated sink. Tattered cobwebs festooned the faucet handles and the spout, as if no water had been drawn here in a long time.
In the mirror, now clouded and mottled as if fungus growing behind it had eaten away portions of its silver backing, Logan’s reflection seemed to be an apparition, lacking the substance of a real man. The inexplicable sudden deterioration of his surroundings left him for a moment breathless, and he half expected to see that he had aged with the room. But he remained as he had been when he shaved before his own bathroom mirror that morning: the brush-cut gray hair, the face seamed by experience but not yet haggard with age.
As the rumbling faded, Logan saw that the glass in the shower-stall door was gone. Only the frame remained, corroded and sagging. On the floor, no towels were to be seen.
Bewildered but able to breathe once more, he crossed the threshold into the bedroom, which contained no furniture. The LED beam revealed that the bed, the nightstands, the dresser, the armchair, the art on the walls were all gone. The imitation Persian rug had vanished as well, revealing more of the wood floor.
The surprise of finding the space unfurnished gave way to consternation and to concern about his sanity when the trembling beam of light revealed that the bedroom appeared to be in a long-abandoned house. Worn and warped beneath the dust, the mahogany floor in places curled up from the concrete to which it had long been adhered. Stains like the velvet wings of enormous moths discolored the wallpaper, and overhead the once-white paint, now gray and yellow, dangled in delicate peels, as if the deep coffers had been the cocoons from which those insectile shapes had quivered free.
As a detective, Logan possessed unshakable faith in what his five senses revealed to him and in what meaning his mind—both with reason and intuition—would eventually make of those many details. Facts could be twisted by liars, but every fact was like a piece of memory metal that inevitably returned to its original shape. His eyes couldn’t lie to him, though he tried to blink away these impossible changes in the senator’s bedroom.
After so many years as a cop, he saw the whole world as a crime scene, and in every crime scene, truth waited to be found. Initially the evidence might be misinterpreted—but seldom for long, and never by him. Throughout his career, other cops called him Hawkeye, not only because he saw so clearly but also because he could look down on a case as if from a great height and see truth as the hawk sees the field mouse even in the tall grass. Yet though he knew that everything around him now must be a lie, he could not perceive the reality through the illusion.
After a moment, however, as if someone dialed a rheostat, light rose, at first from mysterious sources, but then from semitransparent shapes that resembled the lamps that had been here when Logan first entered the room. Not only lamps but also furniture materialized, ghostly shapes at first, like the weaker image in a photographic double exposure, but rapidly becoming more solid, more detailed. The Persian-style carpet reappeared under his feet.
While the reality of the senator’s bedroom reasserted, while the vision of an abandoned and deteriorated building faded, Logan turned slowly in place. The welling light rinsed the mothy stains from the pale-gold wallpaper. The gray and yellow ragged paint of the ceiling coffers raveled up into smooth white surfaces once more.
Over the years, Logan Spangler had so often acquitted himself well and with such equanimity in moments of peril that he thought he was all but incapable of fearing for his life. But astonishment quickly deepened into awe, and the mystery of the transforming room was so formidable that dread crept over him as he wondered what power might effect such a change and why.
Having turned 180 degrees, Logan Spangler faced the bathroom. Beyond the open door, the lights were bright. The dusty, damaged marble floor appeared clean again and in good repair.
Behind him, something hissed.
Apartment 2–G
To distract herself from the prospect of imminent death by electrocution as well as from a memory of blazing hair and smoking eyes, Sparkle Sykes decided to take an inventory of her dress shoes, of which she had 104 pairs. Sitting on a padded stool in her roomy walk-in closet, she took her time with each item of footwear, enjoying the taper of the heel, the roundness of the counter, the arch of the shank, the slope of the vamp, the smell of leather …
For the past twenty-four years, since her beloved daddy was struck by lightning and killed when she was eight years old, Sparkle Sykes had been afraid of thunderstorms. They were not just weather to her. They were thinking creatures, the electricity in their clouds serving the same cognitive function as the milder current that wove ceaselessly through her brain, from synapse to synapse. Like armadas of alien starships, they appeared on the horizon and conquered the entire sky, oppressing the land and the people below them. They were ancient gods, proud and cruel and demanding of sacrifices, beings of pure power, entering the world from outside of time, with the evil intention of inflicting suffering on mere mortals.
Sparkle supposed that, on the subject of thunderstorms, she was a little bit crazy.
Hours before the storm arrived, she had drawn heavy draperies across the windows of her apartment, which overlooked the Pendleton’s grand courtyard. When passing through rooms with a view, she did not glance at the windows, for fear that she would glimpse flashes of the storm’s fury pulsing behind the pleated panels of brocade.
Between three hundred and six hundred Americans were killed by lightning each year. Two thousand were injured. More people were killed by lightning than by any other weather phenomena, including floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes. The current in a lightning bolt could run as high as thirty thousand amperes with a million or more volts.
Some people thought that Sparkle’s encyclopedic knowledge of lightning must be a sign of obsession, but she thought of it as nothing more than a part of her family history. If your father had been a railroad engineer, no one would be surprised that you knew a great deal about trains. A ship captain’s daughter would likely be steeped in seafaring stories and the lore of the oceans. The child of a man cored through by the million-volt lance of a storm would surely be disrespectful of her father if she cared to know nothing about the instrument by which his fate was delivered to him. And then there was her mother’s horrific end.
Less than half an hour into Sparkle’s inspection of her footwear collection, she remembered one of hundreds of death-by-lightning cases that she had read in the press. Just a few years earlier, somewhere in New England, a bride outside a church, moments before her wedding, was struck down by the first bolt of a storm before even a drop of rain had fallen. The entry point had been her silver tiara, the exit point her right foot. She wore white-satin pumps with spike heels; the left shoe exploded into several pieces, but her right flash-burned and fused with her flesh.
An inventory of shoes no longer distracted Sparkle from the thunder that crashed down upon the Pendleton. Suddenly the sight of shoes reminded her of her own mother’s barefoot death dance.
She hesitated to leave the closet because it had no windows. Here she could not see the storm—or the storm see her. And here the cannonades of thunder were more muffled than elsewhere.
For a minute or two, she stood there, trying to decide where else to take refuge—and then Iris appeared in the doorway. At twelve, the girl was like Sparkle in two respects—petite in stature, with delicate facial features—but otherwise different. Sparkle was a blonde, but Iris had hair