Ghosts of Punktown by Jeffrey Thomas Page B

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         Riding down in one of Tower 3's elevators, Cynth thought back now over things she had only half noticed since beginning work for Jango. The odd gurgling of what she figured was a water pipe behind one wall of her office. The way the office was hot as a sauna one day, icy cold the next. She had even complained of this, and maintenance people had looked into the problem; it hadn’t recurred so she’d assumed it had been resolved.
     
         The elevator took her down past the second floor, where the two home invaders had broken in all those years before. It didn’t stop there, but continued on toward the lobby. After speaking with Simon, though, Cynth had this fear that when she arrived, the doors wouldn’t open, that the elevator would keep her as a prisoner inside.
     
         It didn’t, however, and she left Tower 3 to cut across the triangular park, along a path through the snow that one of the service robots had plowed.
     
         Walking toward Tower 1, which loomed over her as if it might topple, cold in its giant’s shadow, Cynth remembered the last day her family had been inside the structure, inside apartment 933, before they’d left for Miniosis. Alone in her room, emptied of all her belongings except for the bed she had outgrown, ten-year-old Cynth had spoken softly to the air, as if partaking in a séance. “Good -bye, Mr. Moon.” She had been brave, had held back her tears. Barely. “I’ll miss you.”
     
         For the first time ever, Mr. Moon did not reply to her. At the time, she hadn’t been sure if –  because they were leaving – the computer mind felt it was no longer imperative for it to attend to its former masters. Or was it, instead, that Mr. Moon was at a loss for words?
     
         She entered the spacious lobby of Tower 1 and found it not much warmer inside than it was outside. The carpet was worn, tracked with mud. The interior metal of the walls and ceiling were not the green verdigris of the exterior, but were still tarnished almost black. A man lay mumbling to himself in uneasy sleep on one sofa, and on the other side of a low table strewn with old newspapers and ragged magazines, an elderly Choom woman slouched deeply in a once plush but now fungus-like chair. She and the sleeping man had gray hair and skin that looked leeched of color, or even life force. Glancing at the woman again, Cynth couldn’t tell if she were not so much elderly as very unwell, but the gray woman’s eyes followed Cynth with a bright curiosity as she made her way across the lobby to the elevator. Cynth had called for the lift, and it was taking an extra long time to arrive, when a voice rasped behind her, “Don’t you go down to the basement, now.”
     
         Cynth turned to see the faded, wrinkled woman smiling a huge Choom grin over the back of her chair, like the disembodied head of a mummified Cheshire cat. “Excuse me? What’s wrong with the basement?”
     
         “A terrible old man lives down there. I think he’s a ghost.”
     
         The elevator door hissed open behind Cynth, startling her.
     
    *     *     *
     
         When she entered the hallway, it was to find half its ornate crystal lights extinguished, so that it looked like an endless tunnel carpeted in moss. She walked between its riveted walls and somber dark doors until she came to one labeled 933.
     
         She was about to command the door to open when she felt a gaze upon her, and looked around to find a man watching her from the doorway of another apartment. In the gloom, his face appeared oddly distorted but she couldn’t be sure if he were a mutant. She called over to him, “Do you know if anyone lives in here now? In 933?”
     
         “No,” he said, very brusquely. “Who would want to live in there?” And then he withdrew into his flat and shut the door after him.
     
         Cynth faced the door again, and this time decided to test it first