Deeply Odd(93)

On the floor beyond the doors, the guy on his back was trying to scream, probably not because of the spilled champagne, but the hand of the demon at his throat choked off his cry, so that he was able to make, inappropriate to the moment, a sound more like Donald Duck in a fit of pique. In addition to having six eyes in clusters of three, the senoculus proved to be somewhat less than my identical twin when it opened its mouth and a long forked tongue fluttered out. It licked teasingly at the lips of the luckless guy who had only wanted to have a little bubbly while he watched children being tortured and murdered.

Making urgent sounds as if I needed to go to the bathroom, which fortunately I did not, I pressed the CLOSE DOOR button again. Again.

Past the struggling pair, beyond the open archways, everything changed in the grand drawing room, carpets and furniture and books vanishing left to right as a bland gray wave remade the building in my world into a building in Elsewhere. The chamber wasn’t entirely empty. I saw pallets on which were stacked what appeared to be gold bars, hundreds of them, which suggested that the cult used that room in Elsewhere as a secret vault and that they knew something about the future of the U.S. monetary system that might be of interest to The Wall Street Journal. The crowd on the deck, waiting impatiently for the spectacle on the terrace, had vanished, apparently remaining on the deck in the world they shared with me. Mr. Champagne, already in the clutches of the senoculus, had the misfortune to be trapped here, which suddenly made me wonder why I was still trapped in this realm, why I had not remained in the building in my world when the senoculus willed us into Elsewhere.

The demon forced its mouth onto the open mouth of Mr. Champagne, which must have been an unpleasant kiss for both of them, complicated as it was by the forked tongue and the elaborate and now disarranged mustache.

Although I had done nothing—nothing—to the elevator, it seemed to be holding a grudge against me, like a really pissed-off machine in one of those movies about killer cars, which I had mocked earlier but now regretted mocking.

CLOSE DOOR, CLOSE DOOR, CLOSE DOOR, CLOSE DOOR.

My thumb was wearing out.

The dying man thrashed helplessly under his assailant. His eyes bulged in their sockets. His meaty face flushed red, and then purple, and then began to fade to gray as his thrashing subsided. Throughout this good-bye kiss, the senoculus made a series of greedy, disgusting noises that might have been like the groans of pleasure issuing from a ménage à trois that included Hannibal Lecter, the nest queen from Aliens, and Gumby.

I drew one Glock. Bullets didn’t faze this thing. I drew the other Glock. Forget Clint Eastwood. Two-Gun Odd is in town. Yeah, right. I holstered both weapons.

The doors began to close, and I was so grateful that I wanted to kiss them, except that the very idea of a kiss had been rendered icky for the foreseeable future.

Crouched atop its victim, the senoculus raised its mouth from the dead man’s face. A little cloud of vapor, reminiscent of that which had been wafting from the open champagne bottles, floated in its open mouth, enwrapping its hideous tongue. When thin ribbons of that mist began to slip away between the demon’s lips, it abruptly sucked them back, closed its mouth, and swallowed. As it looked at me through the gap between the closing doors, its six eyes were clouded, perhaps with ecstasy, but suddenly they cleared, and the thing threw itself at the doors—too late.

With a sigh and hiss indicating that it was moved from below by a hydraulic ram rather than by hoist cables and counterweights, the elevator started down. Relieved, I closed my eyes, savoring the motion and the sound of descent.

Elisha Graves Otis, who had built the first fully safe elevator in the United States, in a five-story department store in New York City, had probably not lingered in our world when he died in 1861. But if one day his spirit came around to seek my assistance, I would knock myself out to help him cross over to the Other Side.

Maybe the car traveled half the way to the ground floor before coming to a halt.

When I opened my eyes, I stood in the center of a smooth gray cube. The position indicator, now just a flat gray shape above the doors, lacked numbers. The car-station panel beside the doors still offered floor-selection buttons, but none of them had a number on it. I was not in an elevator any longer, but in the half-formed idea of an elevator, in Elsewhere.

Nevertheless, I pressed what had been the ground-floor button. Pressed and pressed it. But it had no give to it, no action. None of the other buttons functioned, either.

The idea of stairs is a lot more useful than the idea of an elevator. As I had proved more than once, you can get from here to there on the idea of stairs, but the idea of an elevator is about as useful as the idea of an ice-cream sundae.