Before I was halfway to the stairs, the volume of the demented crowd subsided but swelled again, louder, louder and markedly more belligerent, more infernal, and more eerily ecstatic than it had been the first time.
The pandemonium inspired in me two feelings that I didn’t recall having previously been afflicted by simultaneously, stark terror and sorrow, terror at the prospect of falling into the hands of such people, sorrow at the realization of what they had lost—or thrown away—in their enthusiasm for the thrill of license, for the rewards of absolute corruption, and for the comfort of being in bondage to a master who would, for all their days in this world, provide for them anything they wanted, without admonition or rebuke.
As Boo passed through the stairwell door and as I opened it after him, the cacophony briefly subsided only to increase a third time, crescendoing to a Bedlam pitch. But then, as if an orchestra conductor had slashed his baton down to command a full stop, the roar abruptly became a silence.
Two seconds later, when Verena reached me at the stairwell door, the gong was struck. I could not conceive of its size, because the note was so low and so powerful that it echoed bong-ong-ong-ong-ong through my bones as if it would disjoint me, and the building around me rattled and shimmied as it would have done in an earthquake.
At the farther end of the third-floor hallway, one of the modern ceiling lights morphed into a chain-hung lamp with a conical shade. Over there, too, a smooth gray blandness spread across the plastered ceiling, across the wallpaper, across the wooden floor and carpet runner, creeping toward us.
Boo waited on the landing. I urged Verena to follow the dog, and promised to provide protection at the end of the procession. “Hurry, girl. Hurry!”
As the children hustled past me into the stairwell, I watched what they could not see behind them: another of the nine low-profile ceiling fixtures transforming into a crude hanging lamp, and then a third, the grayness seeping rapidly toward me.
The last of the children entered the stairs as the sixth hanging lamp appeared, and I would have followed them if a door hadn’t opened at the farther end of the hallway, perhaps the door to another set of stairs. The figure who stepped through that door was at too great a distance for me to see his face in fine detail, but by his height and weight and body type, by the way that he moved, I at once recognized myself, the Other Odd. When he drew nearer, I would surely see that he was my twin but for one detail: If Mr. Hitchcock could be believed, the lesser demon known as a senoculus would have three eyes clustered on each side of its head.
Although the cultists wanted the seventeen captives for the cruel sacrifices they had gathered here to celebrate, the senoculus wanted only me. If I followed the children, I would draw this thing to them; and I couldn’t guess what would happen then. I couldn’t risk that instead of providing them with protection, I would bring upon them their destruction with mine.
I stood my ground in the open stairwell door, watching the hallway in my world morph into a hallway in Elsewhere, the senoculus approaching just behind the transformation.
By the power of its will, the demon was causing that in-between realm to emerge and my reality to recede. In the stable in Elsewhere with its collection of heads, when I wanted to leave, I had brought my world to the fore and caused this one to submerge by a similar act of will.
In spite of my gift and the weird life that I live, I am not an expert in the occult. I have always thought it wise not to study that subject, for the same reason that it isn’t wise to make a party game of a Ouija board. Don’t knock on a door if you don’t know what might open it.
Nevertheless, I thought I understood enough about the way of such things to safely assume that the senoculus was native to the lightless wasteland and could also prowl the in-between world that I named Elsewhere. But it could not come at will into the world of the living, my world, unless conjured either by true believers and kept restrained in a pentagram by proper rituals, or unless it was drawn to take residence in one of the living by whatever action or weakness might be an invitation to possession.
Likewise, I was native to this world of ours and could, when I encountered a way station, move about in Elsewhere. But I could not go from Elsewhere into the wasteland. I was not Orpheus, the figure of Greek legend, who was able to enter Hell to try to rescue his beloved wife, Eurydice. Anyway, Stormy Llewellyn was not in Hell; I had no need to rescue her.
And so this entire residence was a way station. With acts of will, both I and the senoculus could make it emerge from beneath—or submerge below—the world of the living, to which I currently belonged, though perhaps not for much longer. In a contest between me and this creature, I suspected that its ability to summon Elsewhere around us was much more powerful than my ability to make that realm recede. We fry-cooks can be a stubborn bunch, but demons have a reputation for obstinacy that way exceeds ours.