already be scared shitless, no matter how contemporary and cool and
tough they were. I couldn’t expect them to clap their hands with glee at
the prospect of taking an elevator ride up from Hell with a corpse for
company, and I didn’t blame them, but that was the way it had to be.
When they saw that I wasn’t going any damn where without Bobby Halloway,
Sasha and Doogie helped me drag him into the elevator.
The rumbling, the banshee shrieking, the snap-crackle-pop that seemed to
indicate imminent structural implosion all faded suddenly, and the
drizzle of concrete chips stopped, but I knew this had to be temporary.
We were in the eye of the time hurricane, and worse was coming.
Just as we got Bobby inside, the elevator doors started to close, and
Orson slipped in with so little time to spare that he almost caught his
tail.
“What the hell? ” Doogie said. “I didn’t press a button.”
“Somebody called it, someone upstairs, ” Sasha said.
The elevator motor whined, and the cab rose.
Already crazy-desperate, I became crazier when I realized that my hands
were slick with Bobby’s blood, and more desperate as I was overcome by
the idea that there was something I could do to change all this.
The past and the present are present in the future, and the future is
contained in the past, as T. S. Eliot wrote, therefore, all time is
unredeemable, and what will be will be. What might have been that’s an
illusion, because the only thing that could have happened is what does
happen, and there’s not anything we can do to change it, because we’re
doomed by destiny, fucked by fate, though Mr. Eliot hadn’t put it in
exactly those words. On the other hand, Winnie-the-Pooh, much less of a
broody type than Mr. Eliot, believed in the possibility of all things,
which might be because he was only a stuffed bear with a head full of
nothing, but it also might be the case that Mr. Pooh was, in fact, a Zen
master who knew as much about the meaning of life as did Mr. Eliot. The
elevator rosewe were at B-5and Bobby lay dead on the floor, and my hands
were slick with blood, and there was nevertheless hope in my heart,
which I didn’t understand at all, but as I tried to see clearly the why
of my hope, I reasoned that the answer was in combining Mr. Eliot’s
insights and those of Mr. Pooh. As we reached B-4, I glanced down at
Orson, whom I’d thought was dead but was now alive again, resuscitated
just as Tinker Bell had been after she’d drunk the cup of poison to save
Peter Pan from the murderous schemes of the homicidal Hook. I was beyond
crazy, caught in a wave of totally macking lunacy, sick with terror,
sicker with despair, sickest with hope, and I could not stop thinking
about good Tink being saved by sheer belief by all the dreaming kids in
the world clapping their small hands to proclaim their belief in
fairies. Subconsciously, I must have known where I was going, but when I
snatched the Uzi out of Doogie’s hands, I had no conscious idea what I
intended to do with it, though judging by the expression on the waltz
wizard’s face, I must have looked even crazier than I felt.
B-3.
The elevator doors opened on B-3, and the corridor beyond was filled
with muddy red light.
In this mysterious radiance were five tall, blurry, distorted maroon
figures. They might have been human, but they might have been something
even worse.
With them was a smaller creature, also a maroon blur, with four legs and
a tail, which might have been a cat.
In spite of all the might-have-beens, I didn’t hesitate, because only
precious seconds remained in which to act. I stepped out of the
elevator, into the muddy red glow, but then the corridor was full of
fluorescent light when I crossed into it.
Roosevelt, Doogie, Sasha, Bobby, Mungojerrie, and I me, myself,
Christopher Snow stood in the corridor, facing the elevator doors,
looking as if they expected trouble.