Sins of the Father (27 page)

Mostly gone.

There was a wet thump as the gun, the man’s hand, and about six inches of his skinny forearm dropped to the carpet at Peter’s feet. The pristine, expensive, normal and familiar carpet. Then, as he watched, the carpet shifted to linoleum and back again beneath the twitching hand.

He nudged the hand with the tip of his shoe, then pulled his foot back.

Nothing happened.

He looked down to the far end of the hall, where Julia was staring out a window, then turned and looked the other way, where everything was normal. There were no other people anywhere to be seen.

He reached slowly toward the gun, mentally preparing himself for the unpleasant task of prying the vanished man’s dead fingers off of the grip.

Again, that smoky shimmer in the air and this time, Peter flinched away from it, snatching his fingers back. He felt something like a thousand needle-sharp cat claws raking the skin on his hand as he pulled it out of the shimmer. When he looked down at it, he saw that the skin was beaded with tiny crimson droplets. But thankfully it was still attached to his arm.

The severed hand and the gun were gone, though, although the bloodstain on the carpet remained as a grim reminder that everything he had seen was real.

At least I hope it was
, he mused.
I think…

He looked back at Julia and realized that both the cracked and dirty window and the little patch of worn linoleum under her feet were starting to shimmer just a little around the edges. Without conscious thought, he sprinted down the hallway at top speed and tackled her with his full weight, shoving her away from the shimmering window and knocking her to the floor. One of her chef’s clogs went flying.

It happened so fast that he didn’t have time to pay much attention to the view outside, but just for a second, he could have sworn that he saw a glimpse of the Twin Towers, looming between two office buildings.

“What’s the matter with you?” Julia demanded, squirming away from him.

“Look!” he said, pointing to her fallen shoe, lying on the carpet beneath the now clean and undamaged window.

The shoe had been raggedly cut, not exactly in half, but more like two-thirds of the way back. The rest was missing.

“Whatever this is,” Peter said, “It’s dangerous. Stay away from anything that shimmers.”

Julia got cautiously to her feet, kicking off her other clog. Her brows creased, and she spoke softly, almost as if to herself.

“Clearly the rifts are unstable here,” she muttered. “That, combined with the diffuse brain chemistry of the non-epileptic host…” She trailed off, walking over to the window and putting her palm against the flawless glass. Peter stepped up behind her and glanced out over her shoulder. The view was of the normal, familiar New York City skyline.

No Twin Towers. Of
course
they weren’t there.

They’d been gone for five years.

“Come on,” he said, gesturing toward the stairway door that was half clean and solid, and half dented and boarded up, covered with several scabby, peeling layers of cheap paint in a grim rainbow of drab, depressing shades. “He went thataway.”

Julia nodded and walked over to the stairway door. When she gripped the knob and pushed, only half of it opened, while the grungy half remained solidly in place. She turned her body sideways to squeeze through the open half.

Peter was taking a last, uncertain glance out of the window when she called for him to follow her. He did, and ran right into the fully closed door.

Rebounding and shaking his head, he realized that the entire thing had been replaced. The doorknob had been removed, and the hole that it left behind was plugged with a crumpled twist of newspaper.

He looked back down the hallway and saw that it was almost all back to its glossy, upscale normal. All except for about a six-foot radius around the door.

“Julia?” He rapped his knuckles on the barrier, then pressed his ear to it. “Julia can you hear me?”

Nothing.

If she could, he certainly couldn’t hear her. He couldn’t hear anything but the faint sound of city traffic.

He frowned and pulled the wadded-up newspaper out of the hole where the doorknob should have been. The traffic sounds became louder, and a light breeze fluttered through the hole.

He knelt down to peer through.

Instead of a view of the staircase that should have been on the other side of the door, Peter could see all the way outside. Buildings, fire escapes, and the faint yellow glow from streetlights below. The pulsing orange flash cast by a utility vehicle.

No stairs.

And there, on the very far right of his tiny, circular view of the city skyline, was what certainly looked very much like the World Trade Center.

That strange shimmer caught the corner of his eye again, causing him to leap back in alarm. The last thing he wanted was for his face to follow the example of the bum’s arm and Julia’s shoe. As he watched in awe, the shimmer increased, and the battered old door was swallowed up, shifting back to its smooth, normal form.

With hesitant fingers, Peter reached for the knob and pushed the door fully open, slipping through quickly before it had time to change again. Stepping onto the landing and listening to the heavy door swing automatically closed behind him, he froze.

No Julia, but without a doubt, their quarry had come this way. The stairs were partially there, but partially not. In the missing sections of staircase, there was nothing but eight stories of empty air above a crowded parking lot.

Yet there was no parking lot next to the Ambassador Hotel. In fact, there were no open-air parking lots at all in this pricy neighborhood—only underground garages.

It looked as if a large chunk of the stately old hotel had been demolished, exposing the building’s weathered brick hide in the place where the staircase should have been. But the brick was sooty and aged, as if it had been exposed to the elements for years—perhaps decades. Even assuming that the stairway had somehow partially collapsed, the brick that would have been revealed wouldn’t have deteriorated that way.

Something drifted overhead, casting a large shadow. It looked like the Goodyear blimp, but not quite. Then he noticed another one, smaller and further in the distance.

There were so many things wrong with this that Peter’s brain could hardly process them all. But a moment later he spotted Julia—she seemed to be stranded on the switchback landing below, which was suspended in mid-air halfway down to the next floor. She was frozen with an expression of dreamy, mesmerized terror.

That was the moment the landing under his feet chose to begin to shimmer at the edges.

Almost in a panic, he leapt over a large, irregular gap in the steps, clinging to a chunk of floating railing, toes on a small chunk of fire escape. To his surprise, the railing was solid and steady, even though it didn’t seem to be attached to anything. When he looked back up at the landing he’d just left, it was gone—nothing left but the outside of the rusty and battered door.

No way to go but down.

“Julia,” he called. “Stay right where you are.”

She didn’t seem to hear him.

He told himself not to look down, but that just seemed to draw his attention to the yawning gaps in the stairs and the empty air below. He forced himself to hopscotch two steps, then three. Arms wheeling for balance, he steadied himself and then looked down at Julia. He was only three more stairs away from her.

There should have been five.

She was kneeling on her hands and knees, clinging to the edge of her floating landing and staring down at the bustling street below like a suicide trying to work up the nerve. The step on which he was precariously balanced began to shimmer and shift around the edges. He swore and leapt for the landing.

He made it, but there was barely enough room for the two of them together and he wound up having to stand straddling her waist as if he were about to ride on her back like a kid playing horsey.

“I have to get down,” she was saying over and over, so softly that Peter could barely hear her over the rush of the wind and the hum of city traffic. They had to get to safety, somehow, and he glanced around, finally spotting something that might do the trick.

“
I have to get down
,” she said again.

“I know,” Peter said, reaching down to touch her shoulder. “Come on, we can make it.”

She flinched away from his touch, grip tightening on the edge of the landing.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “I have to get down
there
…”

“Julia.” He gripped her arm. “Julia, look at me. We
are
going to get down. But unless you plan on jumping to your death, the only other option is there.”

She looked up at him, eyes wild and way too wide. He pointed to a door in the side of the hotel building about a dozen steps below them. Give or take a missing step or two. Or ten. The stairs kept shifting, winking in and out of existence with no recognizable rhythm.

Peter was trying to come up with a way to get her moving, when their landing began to shimmer around the edges.

That’ll do it
, he thought.

Julia yanked her hands away from the edge as if it was on fire, and sprang to her feet as if she’d been hit with a riding crop, almost knocking him from their perch. She leapt for the next solid step down. When she landed, her adrenaline-fueled forward momentum made her half fall and half jump to the next step, and then the one after. She clung to a small chunk of floating railing the size of a baseball bat, and craned her neck to look back at him.

The solid section of landing beneath Peter’s feet had shrunken down to the size of a seat cushion, and the deadly shimmering fault lines were creeping inexorably closer to his toes. He had no choice but to jump.

The awkward, desperate leap propelled him forward and down with way too much momentum. Before he could stop himself, he slammed into Julia from behind, knocking the two of them down to the lower landing and into the door. It flew open under their combined weight, and they spilled together into the hallway, landing in a sprawling pile on the carpeted floor.

He groaned, and untangled himself from her.

“You okay?” Peter asked, rolling off Julia and pulling himself up on his elbows.

“I think so,” she said.

The scary, unfathomable intensity he’d seen in her eyes, out on the impossible staircase, seemed to have dissipated. She still looked frightened, but sane. He hoped the madness hadn’t just ducked under the surface.

When Peter looked around, he realized they were on the spa level. Fortunately for them, it was deserted—most likely because anyone who might have been using the spa was downstairs at the Democrats banquet. The lighting in this part of the hotel was low and indirect, mostly hidden behind extravagant arrangements of orchids and tropical foliage. The color palate that had been chosen for the walls and carpet was soothing and muted. There was a subtle aroma of lavender and chlorine in the warm air.

Once again, however, he could tell where their mutating quarry had to have gone—there was a clear trail of fluctuating, lenticular weirdness that led down the hall to the pool door. There were also several long, uneven smears along the walls and carpet that couldn’t be anything but blood.

“How much time do we have before that guy and his fist-sized zits go kablooey?” Peter asked, scrambling to his feet and offering his hand to help Julia.

“As I said earlier,” she replied, taking his hand, “Different people, different metabolisms. However, I’ve found that female subjects consistently reach the critical stage much faster than males.”

“Well, that’s a refreshing change,” he said. “I just hope you’re right. Come on.”

Peter took the lead, following the trail and avoiding the shimmers until he reached the heavy door that led to the pool area. When he pushed it open, a warm blast of chlorinated air wafted out, reminding him of childhood swimming lessons.

The area was decorated with extravagant art deco tile work, blue and white with gold accents. All around the pool itself were large, vertically striped columns with gilded tops and inlaid images of stylized sea creatures. There was a design of some kind on the bottom of the pool, as well, glittering abstract swirls intersecting beneath the clear still water.