track, out there sideways in time, like we always knew, always knew but
didn’t want to believe.” I had been right when I’d suspected that truths
were hidden in his strange statements, and I wanted to hear him out and
understand, but staying there any longer would have been suicidal.
As I joined Doogie, the half-closed gate valve, which was the door of
the chamber, began to slide all the way shut.
Cursing, Doogie gripped the valve and put all his muscle against it, the
arteries in his neck bulging from the effort, slowly forcing the steel
disc back into the wall.
“Go! ” Doogie said.
Because I’m the kind of guy who knows good advice when he hears it, I
squeezed past the mambo king and sprinted along the sixteen-foot section
of tunnel between the two enormous valves.
Above a thundering and a wind like shrieking worthy of the final storm
on doomsday, I could hear John Joseph Randolph shouting, not with terror
but with joy, with passionate conviction, “I believe! I believe!
” Sasha, the kids, Mungojerrie, and Orson had already passed through to
the next section of tunnel beyond the outer gateway.
Roosevelt was wedged into the breach, to prevent the valve from sealing
Doogie and me in here. I could hear the motor grinding in the wall,
trying to drive the steel disc into the fully closed position.
I jammed the metal folding chair into the gap, above Roosevelt’s head,
bracing the valve open.
“Thanks, son, ” he said.
I followed Roosevelt through the gate.
The others were waiting beyond, with an ordinary flashlight.
Sasha looked far more beautiful when she wasn’t green.
The gap in the gateway was a tight fit for the sass man, but he popped
through, too, and then he wrenched the chair out of the gap, because we
were likely to need it again.
We passed the Mystery Train patch and the image of the crow. No draft
currently moved through this tunnel. None of the newspaper clippings
ahead of us stirred at all. And yet the large sheet of art paper, which
featured the graphite rubbing of the carved-stone bird, was fluttering
as if a gale-force wind were tearing at it. The loose ends of the paper
curled and flapped vigorously. The crow seemed to be pulling angrily at
the pieces of tape that fixed it to the curved steel surface, determined
to break out of the paper as, according to Randolph, it had once arisen
out of rock.
Maybe I was hallucinating this business with the crow, sure, and maybe I
was born to be a snake charmer, but I wasn’t going to hang around to see
if a real bird morphed out of the paper and took flight, any more than I
was going to lie down in a nest of cobras and hum show tunes to
entertain them.
On a hunch that I might want proof of what I’d seen down here, I tore a
few newspaper clippings from the wall and stuffed them in my pockets.
With the faux crow flapping furiously against the wall behind us, we
hurried on, keeping our group together, doing what any sane person would
do when the world was coming apart around him and death loomed at every
side, We followed the cat.
I tried not to think about Bobby. The first problem was just getting to
him. If we got to him, everything would be okay. He would be waiting for
us cold and sore and weak, but waiting by the elevator where we had left
him and he would remind me of my promise by saying, Carpe cerevisi, bro.
The faint iodine odor that had been with us all the way through the
labyrinth was sharper now. Threaded through it were whiffs of charcoal,
sulfur, rotting roses, and an indescribable, bitter scent unlike
anything I had smelled before.
If the time-shifting phenomena were spreading down here into the deepest
realms of the structure, we were at greater risk than at any moment
since we had entered the hangar. The worst possibility wasn’t that our
escape would be delayed or even cut off by the motor-driven valves.
Worse, if the wrong moment of the past intersected with the present, as