“Hold it!” I shouted.
Present-time Doogie blocked the door, half in the fluorescent corridor and half in the murky red elevator.
The throbbing electronic sound swelled louder. It was fearsome.
I remembered John Joseph Randolph’s pleasurable anticipation, his confidence that we would all be going to the other side soon, to that sideways place he wouldn’t name. The train, he’d said, was already beginning to pull out of the station. Suddenly I wondered if he’d meant the whole building might make that mysterious journey—not just whoever was in the egg room, but everyone within the walls of the hangar and the six basements below it.
With a renewed sense of urgency, I asked Doogie to look in the elevator and see if Bobby was there.
“I’m here,” said the Bobby in the hall.
“In there, you’re a pile of dead meat,” I told him.
“No way.”
“Way.”
“Ouch.”
“Maximum.”
I didn’t know why, but I thought it wouldn’t be a good idea to return upstairs to the hangar, beyond this zone of radically tangled time, with both Bobbys, the live one and the dead one.
Still holding the door, present-time Doogie stepped into the elevator, hesitated, then returned to the corridor. “There’s no Bobby in there!”
“Where’d he go?” asked present-time Sasha.
“The kids say he just…went. They’re jazzed about it.”
“The body’s gone because he wasn’t shot here, after all,” I explained, which was about as illuminating as describing a thermonuclear reaction with the words it go boom.
“You said I was dead meat,” the past-time Bobby said.
“What’s happening here?” the past-time Doogie demanded.
“Paradox,” I said.
“What’s that mean?”
“I read poetry,” I said with super-mondo frustration.
“Good work, son,” said both Roosevelts in perfect harmony, and then looked at each other in surprise.
To Bobby, I said, “Get in the elevator.”
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Out.”
“What about the kids?”
“We got them.”
“What about Orson?”
“He’s in the elevator.”
“Cool.”
“Will you move your ass?” I demanded.
“A little crabby, aren’t we?” he said, stepping forward, patting my shoulder.
“You don’t know what I’ve been through.”
“Wasn’t I the one who died?” he asked, and then disappeared into the murky red elevator, becoming another maroon blur.
The past-time Sasha, Doogie, Roosevelt, and even the past-time Chris Snow looked confused, and the past-time Chris said to me, “What are we supposed to do?”
Addressing myself, I said, “You disappoint me. I’d expect you, at least, to figure it out. Eliot and Pooh, for God’s sake!”
As the oscillating thrum of the egg-room engines grew louder and a faint but ominous rumble passed through the floor, like giant train wheels beginning to turn, I said, “You’ve got to go down and save the kids, save Orson.”
“You already saved them.”
My head was spinning. “But maybe you still have to go down and save them, or it’ll turn out that we didn’t.”
The past-time Roosevelt picked up the past-time Mungojerrie and said, “The cat understands.”
“Then just follow the damn cat!” I said.
All of us present-time types who were still in the corridor—Roosevelt, Sasha, me, Doogie holding the elevator door—stepped back into the red light, but when we were in the cab with the kids, there was no red light at all, just the incandescent bulb in the ceiling.
The corridor, however, was now flooded with red murk, and our past-time selves, minus Bobby, were maroon blurs once more.
Doogie pressed the button for the ground floor, and the doors closed.
Orson squeezed between me and Sasha, to be close to my side.
“Hey, bro,” I said softly.
He chuffed.
We were cool.
As we started upward at an excruciatingly slow pace, I looked at my wristwatch. The luminous LED digits weren’t racing either forward or backward, as I had seen them do previously. Instead, pulsing slowly across the watch were curious squiggles of light, which might have been distorted numbers. With growing dread, I wondered if this meant we were beginning to move sideways in time, heading toward the other side that Randolph was so eager to visit.
“You were dead,” Aaron Stuart said to Bobby.
“So I heard.”
“You don’t remember being dead?” Doogie asked.
“Not really.”
“He doesn’t remember dying because he never died,” I said too sharply.
I was still struggling with grief at the same time that a wild joy was surging in me, a manic glee, which was a weird combination of emotions, like being King Lear and Mr. Toad of Toad Hall at the same time. Plus my fear was feeding on itself, growing fatter. We weren’t out of here yet, and we had more than ever to lose, because if one of us died now, there was no chance that I’d be able to pull another rabbit out of a hat; I didn’t even have a hat.
As we ground slowly up, still short of B-2, a deep rumbling rose through the elevator shaft, as if we were in a submarine around which depth charges were detonating, and the lift mechanism began to creak.
“If it was me, I’d sure remember dying,” Wendy announced.
“He didn’t die,” I said more calmly.
“But he did die,” insisted Aaron Stuart.
“He sure did,” said Anson.
Jimmy Wing said, “You peed your pants.”
“I never,” Bobby denied.
“You told us you did,” said Jimmy Wing.
Bobby looked dubiously at Sasha, and she said, “You were dying, it was excusable.”
On my wristwatch, the luminous squiggles were twisting across the readout window faster than before. Maybe the Mystery Train was pulling out of the station, gathering speed. Sideways.
As we reached B-2, the building began to shake badly enough to cause the elevator cab to rattle against the walls of the shaft, and we grabbed at the handrails and at each other to keep our balance.
“My pants are dry,” Bobby noted.
“Because you didn’t die,” I said tightly, “which means you never wet your pants, either.”
“He did too,” said Jimmy Wing.
Sensing my state of mind, Roosevelt said, “Relax, son.”
Orson put one paw on my shoe, as if to indicate that I should listen to Roosevelt.
Doogie said, “If he never died, why do we remember him dying?”
“I don’t know,” I said miserably.
The elevator seemed to have gotten stuck at B-2, and abruptly the doors opened, though Doogie had pressed only the G button.
Maybe the kids weren’t able to see past us to what lay beyond the cab, but those of us in the front row had a good look, and the sight froze us. A corridor, either stripped to the bare concrete or equipped as it had been in years gone by, should have waited out there past the threshold, but we were facing a panoramic landscape instead. A smoldering red sky. Oily black fungus grew in gnarled, vaguely treelike masses, and thick rivulets of vile dark syrup oozed from puckered pustules on the trunks. From some limbs hung cocoons like those we had seen in the Dead Town bungalow, glossy and fat, pregnant with malignant life.
For a moment, as we stood stunned, no sound or odor issued from this twisted landscape, and I dared to hope it was more a vision than a physical reality. Then movement at the threshold drew my eye, and I saw the red-and-black-mottled tendrils of a ground-hugging vine, as beautiful and evil-looking as a nest of baby coral snakes, questing at the sill of the door, growing as fast as plants in a nature film run at high speed, wriggling into the cab.
“Shut the door!” I urged.
&n
bsp; Doogie pressed a button labeled close door and then pushed the G button again, for the ground floor.
The doors didn’t close.
As Doogie jammed his thumb against the button again, something loomed in that otherworldly place, no more than two feet away from us, crossing from the left.
We brought up our guns.
It was a man in a bio-secure suit. Hodgson was stenciled across the brow of his helmet, but his face was that of an ordinary man, not crawling with parasites.
We were in the past and on the other side. Chaos.
The writhing tendrils of the black-and-red vine, the diameter of earthworms, lapped at the elevator carpet.
Orson sniffed them. The tendrils rose like swaying cobras, as if they would strike at his nose, and Orson twitched away from them.
Cursing, Doogie pounded the side of his fist against close door. Then against G.
Hodgson could see us. Amazement pried open his eyes.
The unnatural silence and stillness were broken when wind gusted into the cab. Hot and humid. Reeking of tar and rotting vegetation. Circling us and blowing out again, as if it were a living thing.
Careful to avoid stepping on the vine tendrils, afraid they would bore through the sole of my shoe and then through the sole of my foot, I tugged frantically at the door, trying to pull out the sliding panel on the left. It wouldn’t budge.
With the stench came a faint but chilling sound like thousands of tortured voices, issuing from a distance—and threaded through those screams, also distant, was an inhuman shriek.
Hodgson turned more directly toward us, pointing for the benefit of another man in a bio-secure suit, who hove into view.
The doors began to close. The vine tendrils crunched between the sliding panels. The doors shuddered, almost retreated, but then pinched the vines off, and the cab rose.
Oozing yellow fluid and the bitter scent of sulfur, the severed tendrils curled and twisted with great agitation—and then dissolved into an inert mush.
The building shook as if it were the home of all thunder, the foundry where Thor forged his lightning bolts.
The vibrations were affecting either the elevator motor or the lift cables, perhaps both, because we were rising more slowly than before, grinding upward.
“Mr. Halloway’s pants are dry now,” Aaron Stuart said, picking up the conversation where it had left off, “but I smelled the pee.”
“Me too,” said Anson, Wendy, and Jimmy.
Orson woofed agreement.
“It’s a paradox,” Roosevelt said solemnly, as though to save me the trouble of explaining.
“There’s that word again,” Doogie said. His brow was furrowed, and his gaze remained riveted on the indicator board above the door, waiting for the B-1 bulb to light.
“A time paradox,” I said.
“But how does that work?” Sasha asked.
“Like a toaster oven,” I said, meaning who knows?
Doogie pressed his thumb against G and kept it there. We didn’t want the door to open on B-1. B for bedlam. B for bad news. B for be prepared to die squishily.
Aaron Stuart said, “Mr. Snow?”
I took a deep breath: “Yes?”
“If Mr. Halloway didn’t die, then whose blood is on your hands?”
I looked at my hands. They were sticky-damp with Bobby’s blood, which had gotten on them when I’d dragged his body into the elevator.
“Weird,” I admitted.
Wendy Dulcinea said, “If the body went poof, why didn’t the blood on your hands go poof?”
My mouth was too dry, my tongue too thick, and my throat too tight to allow me to answer her.
The shuddering elevator briefly caught on something in the shaft, tore loose with a ripping-metal sound, and then we groaned to B-1. Where we stopped.
Doogie leaned on close door and on the button for the ground floor.
We didn’t ascend any farther.
The doors slid inexorably open. Heat, humidity, and that fetid stench rolled over us, and I expected the vigorous alien vegetation to grow into the cab and overwhelm us with explosive force.
In our slice of time, we’d risen one level, but William Hodgson was still out there in neverland, where we had left him. Pointing at us.
The man beyond Hodgson—Lumley, according to his helmet—also turned to look at us.
Shrieking, something flew out of that baleful sky, among the black trees: a creature with glossy black wings and whiplike tail, with the muscular, scaly limbs of a lizard, as if a gargoyle had torn itself loose of the stone high on an ancient Gothic cathedral and had taken flight. As it swooped down on Lumley, it appeared to spit out a stream of objects, which looked like large peach pits but were something deadlier, something no doubt full of frenzied life. Lumley twitched and jerked as though he had been hit by machine-gun fire, and several perfectly round holes appeared in his spacesuit, like those we had seen in poor damn Hodgson’s suit in the egg room the previous night.
Lumley screamed as though he were being eaten alive, and Hodgson stumbled backward in terror, away from us.
The elevator doors began to close, but the flying thing abruptly changed directions, streaking straight toward us.
As the doors bumped shut, hard objects rattled against them, and a series of dimples appeared in the steel, as if it had been hit by bullets with almost enough punch to penetrate to the interior of the cab.
Sasha’s face was talcum white.
Mine must have been whiter still, to match my name.
Even Orson seemed to have gone a paler shade of black.
We ascended toward the ground floor through crashes of thunder, the grinding rumble of steel wheels on steel track, harsh whistles, shrieks, and the throbbing electronic hum, but in spite of all those sounds of worlds colliding, we also heard another noise, which was more intimate, more terrifying. Something was on the roof of the elevator cab. Crawling, slithering.
It could have been nothing but a loose cable, which might have explained our quaking, jerky progress toward the ground floor. But it wasn’t a loose cable. That was wishful thinking. This thing was alive. Alive and purposeful.
I couldn’t imagine how anything could have gotten into the shaft with us after the doors had shut, unless the intermingling of these two realities was nearly complete. In which case, at any moment, might not the thing on the roof pass through the ceiling and be among us, like a ghost passing through a wall?
Doogie remained focused on the indicator board above the doors, but the rest of us—animals, kids, and adults—turned our faces up toward the menacing sounds.
In the center of the ceiling was an escape hatch. A way out. A way in.
Borrowing the Uzi from Doogie once more, I aimed at the ceiling. Sasha also covered the trapdoor with her shotgun.
I wasn’t optimistic about the effectiveness of gunfire. Unless I was misremembering, Delacroix had suggested that at least some of the expedition members were heavily armed when they went to the other side. Guns hadn’t saved them.
The elevator groaned-rattled-squeaked upward.
This side of the three-foot-square hatch featured neither hinges nor handles. There was no latch bolt, either. To escape, you had to push the panel up and out. To enable rescue workers to pull it open from the other side, there would be a handle or a recessed groove in which fingers could be hooked.
The flying gargoyle had hands, thick talonlike fingers. Maybe those huge fingers wouldn’t fit in a groove handle.
A hard, frantic scraping noise. Something clawing busily at the steel roof, as if trying to dig through. A creak, a hard pop, a rending sound. Silence.
The kids clutched one another.
Orson growled low in his throat.
So did I.
The walls seemed to press closer to one another, as though the elevator cab were reshaping itself into a group coffin. The air was thick. Each breath felt like sludge in my lungs. The overhead light began to flicker.
With a metalli
c squeal, the escape hatch sagged toward us as though a great weight were pressing on it. The frame in which it sat would not allow it to open inward.
After a moment, the weight was removed, but the panel didn’t return entirely to normal. It was distorted. Steel plate. Bent like plastic. More force had been required for that task than I cared to think about.
Sweat blurred my vision. I wiped at my eyes with the back of my hand.
“Yes!” Doogie said, as the G bulb lit on the indicator board.
The promise of release was not immediately fulfilled. The doors didn’t open.
The cab began to bob up and down, rising and falling as much as a foot with each sickening bounce, as though the hoist cables and the limit switches and the roller guides and the pulleys were all about to crack apart and send us plunging to the bottom of the shaft in a mass of mangling metal.
On the roof, the gargoyle—or something worse—yanked on the escape hatch. Its prior efforts had tweaked the panel in the frame, and now the trap was wedged shut.
The elevator doors were still shut, too, and Doogie angrily punched the button labeled open doors.
With a shrill bark, the badly distorted rim of the steel trap stuttered in the frame, as the creature above furiously pulled on it.
At last the elevator doors opened, and I spun toward them, sure that we were now surrounded by neverland, that the predator on the roof would have been joined by others.
We were at the ground floor. The hangar was noisier than a New Year’s Eve party in a train station with howling wolves and a punk band with nuclear amplifiers.
But it was recognizably the hangar: no red sky, no black trees, no slithering vines like nests of coral snakes.
Overhead, the warped escape hatch screeched, rattled violently. The surrounding frame was coming apart.
The elevator bobbed worse than ever. The floor of the cab rose and fell in relation to the hangar floor, the way a dock slip moves in relation to a boat deck in choppy seas.
I gave the Uzi to Doogie, snatched up my shotgun, and followed the sass man into the hangar, jumping across the shifting threshold, with Bobby and Orson close behind me.
Sasha and Roosevelt hurried the kids out of the elevator, and Mungojerrie came last, after a final curious glance at the ceiling.