“Far as I know, they started November twenty-ninth, Thursday. The last might’ve been December first. You don’t seem surprised by this haunted-house talk.”
“I don’t believe it’s haunted, but like I told you on the phone, there’s something strange about the place. Seems like terrible things happen in the Pendleton every thirty-eight years.”
“The research you’ve done, the hours you put into it … Why?”
Silas hesitated, shrugged. “I don’t have anything else to do.”
“Retirement’s a bitch, huh?” The thinnest edge of sarcasm in Kyser’s voice suggested that he didn’t believe the answer and wanted a better one before being more forthcoming.
“Fair enough. Since I lost my wife, this is the only thing to come along that’s interested me. The usual distractions—TV, movies, books, music—none of them seems worth the time. Maybe this isn’t worth it, either. Maybe nothing is. But it’s what I’ve got now.”
Kyser considered that answer for a moment and then nodded. “I’ve still got Jenny. I can see how, if I didn’t have her, I might want a project of my own.” Again, he studied the people at the bar, as if he expected to see someone he knew.
Returning to the purpose of their meeting, Silas said, “You told me the phenomena ran from Thursday the twenty-ninth through the first of December. That was a Saturday. You worked Saturdays?”
Kyser’s attention shifted from the crowd gathered at the bar to his martini, into which he gazed as though the future could be read in the crystal clarity of the vodka. “The first twelve months we worked a big crew six days to meet our deadline. But by the end of ’73, we were on a five-day schedule with the finish work. I was there that Saturday morning, making a punch list, hundreds of small items we needed to get done to wrap the job by Christmas.”
Beyond the window, torrents overflowed gutters and blacktop shimmered with runoff. Shadow Street rose like a great storm swell on a night sea, and at its crest loomed the Pendleton, not stately and welcoming as it had seemed before, but as ominous as a colossal warship with massive guns loaded for battle.
“Our painting-crew chief, Ricky Neems, he was there that same Saturday, making his own punch list upstairs. Because of this”—he hesitated—“well, because of this thing that happened, I left early, didn’t finish my list. Ricky … we never saw again. Good painter, the best, but a few times each year, he’d fall off the wagon, go on a drinking binge, disappear for three days. Every time he came back, he’d say it was the flu or something, but we knew the truth. He was sober most of the time, and he was such a good guy when he was sober, we just worked around his benders. But Ricky never came back after Saturday. No one saw him again. Police took it as a missing-persons case, but they figured he got drunk, picked a fight with the wrong guy, got killed and dumped somewhere. I knew different. Or thought I did. My opinion is they didn’t break a sweat looking for Ricky, him being single, no family to push for answers. But even if they worked hard, they might not have found him … I think Ricky was snatched up and taken, soul and body, straight to Hell or someplace like it.”
This declaration of damnation seemed out of character for a construction supervisor who spent his life working with his hands and building on solid foundations. Again Perry fell silent, avoided Silas’s eyes, and studied people at the bar as he sipped his martini.
While taking any deposition, moments arose when a good lawyer knew a question might inhibit revelation, when patience and silence were required to extract an embedded splinter of truth. Silas waited.
When at last Perry Kyser met the attorney’s eyes, there was resolution in his unwavering gaze, an intensity and a challenge that suggested he anticipated encountering skepticism but that he also intended eventually to be believed.
“Anyway, I’m in the basement that Saturday, in what was going to be the gym, making my punch list. This noise comes from under the building, like a kettledrum, a timpani. Then it grows into a rumble, vibrations in the floor. I think earthquake or something, so I go into the hall … and it’s not like it should be, not clean and bright like we made it, but damp, dirty, musty. Half the ceiling lights are out. Mold on the walls, ceiling, some of it black, but some patches glowing yellow, brighter than the overhead lights. At each end of the hall these video screens, suspended from the ceiling, rings of blue light pulsing in them. Some floor tiles cracked. Nobody’s done any maintenance for a long time. Doesn’t make sense. So I think it’s me, something wrong with me, hallucination, seeing the hallway like it isn’t. Then I see this … this thing. It’s no trick of shadows, Silas. It won’t sound real, but it was as real as you sitting there.”
“You said on the phone you’ve never told anyone about this.”
“Never. I didn’t want people looking at me that way, you know, like you’d look at some guy says he’s flown on a UFO.”
“From my point of view, Perry, your silence all these years makes you all the more credible.”
Kyser finished his martini in one swallow. “So … I’m at one end of the hall, outside the gym. This thing is at the halfway point, near the doors to the heating-cooling plant. It’s big. Big as me. Bigger. Pale as a grub, a little like a grub, but not that, because it’s kind of like a spider, too, though not an insect, too fleshy for a spider. Now I’m thinking—who put what kind of drug in my coffee thermos? Nothing on Earth looks like this. It’s moving away, toward the security room, hears me or smells me, and it turns to me. It looks like it can move fast, but maybe it can’t because it doesn’t.”
Given the history of the Pendleton and the eerie nature of Andrew Pendleton’s journal scraps, Silas had expected Kyser to reveal a strange experience, which on the phone he’d hinted that he would. But this was more bizarre than anything Silas could have imagined.
Perry Kyser continued to meet Silas’s eyes and seemed to search them ceaselessly for signs of disbelief.
Lawyer’s intuition told Silas that this man wasn’t lying, that he couldn’t lie, not about this, maybe not about anything important.
“This voice comes out of the blue screens—‘Exterminate,’ it says, ‘Exterminate.’ The thing starts toward me. Now I can see how lumpy it is, not like any animal, lumpy flesh, pale skin. And wet, maybe wet with sweat, but milky wet, I don’t know what. A kind of head, no eyes, no face to speak of. What might be rows of gills along the neck, but no mouth. I’m backing toward the north stairs, hear myself saying very fast, ‘who are all good and deserving of all my love,’ so I’m halfway through an Act of Contrition, but I don’t even realize I started it. I’m sure I’m dead. As I back into the stairwell door and finish the Act of Contrition, the thing … it speaks to me.”
Surprised, Silas said, “It spoke? In English?”
“No mouth I could see, but it spoke. Such misery in that voice. Can’t convey the misery, despair. It says, ‘Help me. For God’s sake, someone help me.’ The voice is Ricky Neems. The painter who’s up on the third floor right then, making his punch list. I don’t know … is it Ricky for real or is it this thing imitating Ricky? Is this thing somehow Ricky? How can that be? All my life … I never scared easy. Never had anything worth being scared about after Korea, the war.”
Their waitress stopped at the table to ask if they wanted a second drink. Silas needed another round, but he didn’t want it. Perry declined as well.
“Korea was my war, too,” Silas said. “Living with that fear day after day, eventually you’re inoculated against it.”
“But in that basement hall, Silas, I’m so terrified the strength goes out of me like it never did in Korea. One hand on the doorknob to the stairs, can’t seem to turn it. My legs are weak. Only reason I’m still on my feet is I’m leaning against the door. Then everything changes. The lights get brighter. The dirty floor, the mold, the blue screens, everything that’s