Deeply Odd(34)
After bolting up two flights to the top of the stairs, I pulled on the door, which swung open as silently as those before it, as if its lever handle, latch, and hinges operated with zero friction. For a long moment, I stood on the landing, listening.
When the stairwell door opened on the second floor, I didn’t hear a sound. No sudden draft alerted me. I knew the visitor from the wasteland had entered the stairs only when his shadow preceded him, flowing onto the midfloor landing below in such a sinuous fashion as to suggest that the man yet unseen would prove to be in part a serpent.
I slipped into the hallway and eased the door shut, although left to gravity, it would most likely have closed without a click.
The third floor seemed identical to the second. I doubted that I had time to race all the way to the east stairs before my pursuer would arrive and see me.
Besides, switching stairwells for hours on end was not a strategy, hardly even worthy of the word tactic. That gambit was certain to result, sooner or later, in the two of us coming face-to-face in a doorway, which might not end well for me even though I had a pistol.
In my experience, sometimes the guy on the other side of the door possessed something more formidable than a handgun, such as a submachine gun or an automatic shotgun, or an enraged ferret that he threw in my face. Or he was clothed head to foot in body armor and held a surface-to-air missile that, if fired horizontally, could reduce you to a pile of flaming entrails. Or he was wearing a nine-sheath spring-loaded antique-Chinese automatic-knife breastplate, which in a split second could skewer you with enough stilettos to kill you and, should you have one, your cat as well.
Trusting to luck, such as it was, I hurried halfway along the corridor and chose a door to my left. Beyond, a dimly lighted flight of stairs led up to another door. I was pretty sure the building featured no more than three stories. Maybe these stairs went to an attic.
I don’t like attics any more than I like cellars.
Most people have never found anything in an attic more off-putting than silverfish, dry rot, and faded high-school photographs that remind them of how much promise they once had and of how little it has been fulfilled.
In my case, however, I tend to find things like a collection of shrunken heads hanging by their hair from the rafters or a fighting falcon trained to swoop down and pluck out an intruder’s eyes, or a tripwire-activated capture net that drops over any unwanted visitor and cinches ever tighter around him until he’s immobilized.
In spite of my experiences of attics, looking back the way I had come, when I saw the door begin to open at the west end of the hallway, I stepped across the threshold onto the landing. I drew the door shut behind me.
Once I was on the roof, I would be outside of the building’s envelope, with nowhere to run and with more than a forty-foot drop to the ground below. Nevertheless, I hastily climbed this last flight of stairs because, for one thing, when confronted with the Unknown, of which this man from the wasteland was an embodiment, it was never wise to be confrontational, and because rational optimism is required of anyone who hopes to be a survivor, and finally because there was nowhere else to go.
Twelve
THE DOOR AT THE HEAD OF THE STAIRS OPENED NOT into an attic but instead into a ten-foot-square room as featureless and somehow artificial as all those before it, which soon proved to be a kind of shed on the roof. Directly opposite the entrance door waited an exit, through which I stepped onto the flat and parapeted top of the building, closing that last door behind me.
Without a window between me and this absolute-black sky, the effect of such undetailed heavens was profound, frightening not just because of the uncanny darkness but also for a reason that eluded me. Or perhaps the reason was not elusive. Maybe I dreaded acknowledging and considering it, for fear that contemplation would soon sweep me out of the main currents of sanity, into a tributary of madness.
Indeed, the roof was a lunatic place, disorienting under a moonless and starless vault that seemed at first to be an eternal void, but the next moment might have been the low ceiling of a cavern deep in Earth’s crust, and then again a void. In spite of the distant lakes of fire, if they were truly fire, the land around this isolated structure lay nearly as dark as the sky above, providing so little ambient light that I could not see as far as any edge of the roof, which in my reality had been guarded by an Art Deco parapet. Even in the remote reaches of the Mojave, even on a night when two thousand feet of dense ecliptical clouds separated the desert from the glowing wonders of the universe, the land gave off at least a dim light, the product of natural radiation, of minerals in the soil, and of certain vaguely luminous plants. Not here. This outer darkness, so complete, seemed to be capable of a kind of osmosis, gradually penetrating me to blacken my thoughts and eventually extinguish my hope.