“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.
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.