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—we—expected trouble.
A minute ago, down on B-6, just as we had loaded Bobby’s corpse into the elevator, someone up here had pushed the call button. That someone was Bobby, a living Bobby from earlier in the night.
In this strangely afflicted building, time past, time present, and time future were all present here at once.
With my friends—and I myself—gaping at me in astonishment, as if I were a ghost, I turned right, toward the two oncoming security men that the others hadn’t yet seen. One of these guards had fired the shot that killed Bobby.
I squeezed off a burst from the Uzi, and both guards were cut down before they fired a shot.
My stomach twisted with revulsion at what I’d done, and I tried to escape my conscience by taking refuge in the fact that these men would have been killed by Doogie, anyway, after they had shot Bobby. I had only accelerated their fate while changing Bobby’s altogether, for a net saving of one life. But perhaps excuses of that sort make excellent paving stones for the road to Hell.
Behind me, Sasha, Doogie, and Roosevelt rushed into the corridor from the elevator.
The astonishment among all these doppelgängers was as thick as the peanut butter on the banana sandwiches that had ultimately killed Elvis.
I didn’t understand how this could be happening, because it had not happened earlier. We had never met ourselves in this hallway on our way down to find the children. But if we were meeting ourselves now, why didn’t I have a memory of it?
Paradox. Time paradox, I guess. You know me and math, me and physics. I’m more a Pooh guy, an Eliot guy. My head ached. I had changed Bobby Halloway’s fate, which was, to me, a pure miracle, not mere mathematics.
The elevator was full of muddy red light and the blurry maroon figures of the kids. The doors began to slide shut.
“Hold it!” I shouted.
Present-time Doogie blocked the door, half in the fluorescent corridor and half in the murky red elevator.
The throbbing electronic sound swelled louder. It was fearsome.
I remembered John Joseph Randolph’s pleasurable anticipation, his confidence that we would all be going to the other side soon, to that sideways place he wouldn’t name. The train, he’d said, was already beginning to pull out of the station. Suddenly I wondered if he’d meant the whole building might make that mysterious journey—not just whoever was in the egg room, but everyone within the walls of the hangar and the six basements below it.
With a renewed sense of urgency, I asked Doogie to look in the elevator and see if Bobby was there.
“I’m here,” said the Bobby in the hall.
“In there, you’re a pile of dead meat,” I told him.
“No way.”
“Way.”
“Ouch.”
“Maximum.”
I didn’t know why, but I thought it wouldn’t be a good idea to return upstairs to the hangar, beyond this zone of radically tangled time, with both Bobbys, the live one and the dead one.
Still holding the door, present-time Doogie stepped into the elevator, hesitated, then returned to the corridor. “There’s no Bobby in there!”
“Where’d he go?” asked present-time Sasha.
“The kids say he just…went. They’re jazzed about it.”
“The body’s gone because he wasn’t shot here, after all,” I explained, which was about as illuminating as describing a thermonuclear reaction with the words it go boom.
“You said I was dead meat,” the past-time Bobby said.
“What’s happening here?” the past-time Doogie demanded.
“Paradox,” I said.
“What’s that mean?”
“I read poetry,” I said with super-mondo frustration.
“Good work, son,” said both Roosevelts in perfect harmony, and then looked at each other in surprise.
To Bobby, I said, “Get in the elevator.”
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Out.”
“What about the kids?”
“We got them.”
“What about Orson?”
“He’s in the elevator.”
“Cool.”
“Will you move your ass?” I demanded.
“A little crabby, aren’t we?” he said, stepping forward, patting my shoulder.
“You don’t know what I’ve been through.”
“Wasn’t I the one who died?” he asked, and then disappeared into the murky red elevator, becoming another maroon blur.
The past-time Sasha, Doogie, Roosevelt, and even the past-time Chris Snow looked confused, and the past-time Chris said to me, “What are we supposed to do?”
Addressing myself, I said, “You disappoint me. I’d expect you, at least, to figure it out. Eliot and Pooh, for God’s sake!”
As the oscillating thrum of the egg-room engines grew louder and a faint but ominous rumble passed through the floor, like giant train wheels beginning to turn, I said, “You’ve got to go down and save the kids, save Orson.”
“You already saved them.”
My head was spinning. “But maybe you still have to go down and save them, or it’ll turn out that we didn’t.”
The past-time Roosevelt picked up the past-time Mungojerrie and said, “The cat understands.”
“Then just follow the damn cat!” I said.
All of us present-time types who were still in the corridor—Roosevelt, Sasha, me, Doogie holding the elevator door—stepped back into the red light, but when we were in the cab with the kids, there was no red light at all, just the incandescent bulb in the ceiling.
The corridor, however, was now flooded with red murk, and our past-time selves, minus Bobby, were maroon blurs once more.
Doogie pressed the button for the ground floor, and the doors closed.
Orson squeezed between me and Sasha, to be close to my side.
“Hey, bro,” I said softly.
He chuffed.
We were cool.
As we started upward at an excruciatingly slow pace, I looked at my wristwatch. The luminous LED digits weren’t racing either forward or backward, as I had seen them do previously. Instead, pulsing slowly across the watch were curious squiggles of light, which might have been distorted numbers. With growing dread, I wondered if this meant we were beginning to move sideways in time, heading toward the other side that Randolph was so eager to visit.
“You were dead,” Aaron Stuart said to Bobby.
“So I heard.”
“You don’t remember being dead?” Doogie asked.
“Not really.”
“He doesn’t remember dying because he never died,” I said too sharply.
I was still struggling with grief at the same time that a wild joy was surging in me, a manic glee, which was a weird combination of emotions, like being King Lear and Mr. Toad of Toad Hall at the same time. Plus my fear was feeding on itself, growing fatter. We weren’t out of here yet, and we had more than ever to lose, because if one of us died now, there was no chance that I’d be able to pull another rabbit out of a hat; I didn’t even have a hat.
As we ground slowly up, still short of B-2, a deep rumbling rose through the elevator shaft, as if we were in a submarine around which depth charges were detonating, and the lift mechanism began to creak.
“If it was me, I’d sure remember dying,” Wendy announced.
“He didn’t die,” I said more calmly.
“But he did die,” insisted Aaron Stuart.
“He sure did,” said Anson.
Jimmy Wing said, “You peed your pants.”
“I never,” Bobby denied.
“You told us you did,” said Jimmy Wing.
Bobby looked dubiously at Sasha, and she said, “You were dying, it was excusable.”
On my wristwatch, the luminous squiggles were twisting across the readout window faster than before. Maybe the Mystery Train was pulling out of the station, gathering speed. Sideways.
As we reached B-2, the building began to shake badly enough to cause the elevator cab to rattle against the walls of the shaft, and we grabbed at the handrails and at each other to keep our balance.
“My pants are dry,” Bobby noted.
“Because you didn’t die,” I said tightly, “which means you never wet your pants, either.”
“He did too,” said Jimmy Wing.
Sensing my state of mind, Roosevelt said, “Relax, son.”
Orson put one paw on my shoe, as if to indicate that I should listen to Roosevelt.
Doogie said, “If he never died, why do we remember him dying?”
“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.
“But how does that work?” Sasha asked.
“Like a toaster oven,” I said, meaning who knows?
Doogie pressed his thumb against G and kept it there. We didn’t want the door to open on B-1. B for bedlam. B for bad news. B for be prepared to die squishily.
Aaron Stuart said, “Mr. Snow?”
I took a deep breath: “Yes?”
“If Mr. Halloway didn’t die, then whose blood is on your hands?”
I looked at my hands. They were sticky-damp with Bobby’s blood, which had gotten on them when I’d dragged his body into the elevator.
“Weird,” I admitted.
Wendy Dulcinea said, “If the body went poof, why didn’t the blood on your hands go poof?”
My mouth was too dry, my tongue too thick, and my throat too tight to allow me to answer her.
The shuddering elevator briefly caught on something in the shaft, tore loose with a ripping-metal sound, and then we groaned to B-1. Where we stopped.
Doogie leaned on close door and on the button for the ground floor.
We didn’t ascend any farther.
The doors slid inexorably open. Heat, humidity, and that fetid stench rolled over us, and I expected the vigorous alien vegetation to grow into the cab and overwhelm us with explosive force.
In our slice of time, we’d risen one level, but William Hodgson was still out there in neverland, where we had left him. Pointing at us.