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 talon like 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 metallic 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 worseyanked 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 never land, 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.
As Sasha turned to cover the cab with her shotgun, the escape hatch was
torn out of the ceiling. The gargoyle came down from the roof.
The leathery black wings were folded as it dropped, but then they spread
to fill the cab. The muscles bulged in the beast’s sleek, scaly limbs as
it tensed to spring forward. The tail whipped, lashing against the cab
walls. Silver eyes flashed. Its raw mouth appeared to be lined with red
velvet, but its long forked tongue was black.
I remembered the seed like projectiles that it had spat at Lumley and at