Free 77 Shadow Street by Dean Koontz Page B

supernatural experience, rather than the possibility that the encounter might have been real.
    “Demonic,” Edna declared. “A creature of the Pit. No ordinary spirit.”
    To the housekeeper, Bailey said, “But it didn’t bite you.”
    She shook her head. “This sounds so weird … but as it came at me, it changed again, from something very real to just a black shape, and it flew past. I could feel it brushing past me.”
    “And how did it leave the butler’s pantry?” Bailey asked.
    “How did it leave? Well, just like that. Whoosh and gone.”
    “Did it pass through a wall?”
    “A wall? I don’t know. It was just gone.”
    “Oh, walls mean nothing to demons,” Edna assured them.
    “ Demons ,” Martha said derisively enough to make it clear she considered such talk nonsense.
    Sally said, “I don’t know if it was any demon, ma’am. I didn’t conjure it, for sure. But it was something, all right. As real as me, it was. I don’t nip at a bottle when I’m working, and I didn’t hallucinate it.”
    As earlier, a rumble arose from underfoot, and this time the Pendleton shook sufficiently to rattle glassware in cabinets and flatware in drawers. Dangling from a rack over the center work island, copper pans and pots swung on their hooks, although not enough to clang against one another.
    The shaking persisted longer than previously, ten or fifteen seconds, and halfway through the tremors, Bailey pushed his chair back from the table, getting to his feet as though anticipating calamity.
    Sally Hollander warily surveyed the kitchen, as though she expectedthat cracks might zigzag up its walls, and Martha stepped away from the counter when upper cabinet doors rattled behind her.
    Seemingly amused by her companions’ alarm, toying girlishly with the rucked silk at the lace yoke of her dress, Edna said, “I spoke earlier with sweet Mr. Tran, and he’s quite sure these quakes are just because of bedrock blasting to carve out the foundation for that new high-rise on the east side of Shadow Hill.”
    Tran Van Lung, who had legally Americanized his name to Thomas Tran, was the building superintendent. He lived in an apartment in the basement, next to the security center.
    “No. That went on too long, much too long, for blast waves,” Bailey insisted. “And the first one I felt was in the pool room this morning, about four-fifteen. They wouldn’t be starting construction work at that hour.”
    “Mr. Tran is the finest superintendent the Pendleton’s ever had,” Edna said. “He knows everything about the building. He can fix anything or knows who can, and he’s as trustworthy as anyone I’ve ever met.”
    “I agree,” Bailey said. “But even Tom Tran can sometimes be operating on misinformation.”
    When most young men of Bailey Hawks’s age squinted, they had but two or three small darts at the outer corners of their eyes. His years at war had stitched the memory of worry into his face so completely that when he was alarmed, his smooth skin folded into an array of pleats that aged him and gave him the aspect of a formidable man of fierce intentions.
    When Bailey had sprung up from his chair, Martha Cupp glimpsed something even more revealing of his state of mind. Under his sport coat, he carried a gun in a shoulder holster.

13
    Apartment 3-D
    W hen Logan Spangler, chief of security, stepped out of the north elevator on the third floor, the double-door entrance to the Cupp sisters’ apartment was to his left. The single-door entrance to Silas Kinsley’s apartment stood directly in front of him. He thought of this as the geriatric corner. He liked the old dames and the retired attorney. They were quiet, proper, and considerate. The only owners who gave him fewer problems were those in 1-B, who had died nine months previously and whose estate was still being settled, and Mr. Beauchamp in 1-D, who had passed away of pneumonia two weeks earlier.
    Having retired from the police department, Logan supposed