balance even before he makes the jump-get hit by a hard gust of wind and
just fall right off the wall.”
“We’ll make it,” Jack said, trying to pump-up his own enthusiasm for the
venture.
She shook her head. Her hair blew in her face. She pushed it out of
her eyes. She said, “Maybe, with luck, both you and I could do it.
Maybe. But not the kids.”
“Okay. So one of us will jump on the other roof, and one of us will
stay here, and between us we’ll hand the kids across, from here to
there.”
“Pass them over the gap?”
“Yeah.”
“Over a fifty-foot drop?”
“There’s really not much danger,” he said, wishing he believed it. “From
these two roofs, we could reach across and hold hands.”
“Holding hands is one thing. But transferring something as heavy as a
child-”
“I’ll make sure you have a good grip on each of them before I let go.
And as you haul them in, you can brace yourself against the parapet over
there. No sweat.”
“Penny’s getting to be a pretty big girl.”
“Not that big. We can handle her.”
“But-”
“Rebecca, those things are in this building, right under our feet,
looking for us right this very minute.”
She nodded. “Who goes first?”
“You.”
“Gee, thanks.”
He said, “I can help you get up on top of the wall, and I can hold you
until just a split second before you jump. That way, there’s hardly any
chance you could lose your balance and fall.”
“But after I’m over there and after we’ve passed the kids across, who’s
going to help you get on top of the wall and keep your balance up
there?”
“Let me worry about that when the time comes,” he said.
Wind like a freight train whistled across the roof.
Snow didn’t cling to the corrugated metal storage shed at the rear of
Lavelle’s property. The falling flakes melted when they touched the
roof and walls of that small structure. Wisps of steam were actually
rising from the leeward slope of the roof; those pale snakes of vapor
writhed up until they came within range of the wind’s brisk broom; then
they were swept away.
Inside, the shed was stifling hot.
Nothing moved except the shadows. Rising out of the hole in the floor,
the irregularly pulsing orange light was slightly brighter than it had
been earlier. The flickering of it caused the shadows to shiver, giving
an illusion of movement to every inanimate object in the dirt-floored
room.
The cold night air wasn’t the only thing that failed to penetrate these
metal walls. Even the shrieking and sougn;pg of the storm wind was
inaudible herein. The atmosphere within the shed was unnatural,
uncanny, disquieting”as if the room had been lifted out of the ordinary
flow of tape and space, and was now suspended m a void. >.
The only sound was that-..^h came from deep within the pit. It was a
distant hissing.muring-whispering-growling, like ten thousand voices in
a far-off place, the distance-muffled roar of a crowd. An angry crowd.
Suddenly, the sound grew louder. Not a great deal louder. Just a
little.
At the same moment, the orange light beamed brighter than ever before.
Not a lot brighter. Just a little. It was as if a furnace door,
already ajar, had been pushed open another inch.
The interior of the shed grew slightly warmer, too.
The vaguely sulphurous odor became stronger.
And something strange happened to the hole in the floor. All the way
around the perimeter, bits of earth broke loose and fell inward, away
from the rim, vanishing into the mysterious light at the bottom. Like
the increase in the brilliance of that light, this alteration in the rim
of the hole wasn’t major; only an incremental change. The diameter was
increased by less than one inch. The dirt stopped falling away. The
perimeter stabilized. Once more, everything in the shed was perfectly
still.
But now the pit was bigger.
The top of the parapet was ten inches wide. To Rebecca it seemed no
wider than a tightrope.
At least it wasn’t icy. The wind scoured the snow off the narrow