Deeply Odd(94)

Overhead, the light-diffuser panels were gone, as were the fluorescent tubes that had once been behind them. The ceiling was smooth and gray, unmarked even by the outline of the top-exit door that had once been in the center of that space.

A kind of claustrophobia overcame me, made worse by worry for the children. Boo would guide them, yes, but Boo’s bite had no effect on living people, and the dead do not bark any more than they talk. I had left the kids with no protection other than words— I am not yours, you may not touch me—words that had seemed to mean something when I’d said them, but which I realized now were no more useful to them than was a would-be protector of the innocent who allowed himself to be trapped in the idea of an elevator.

At that moment, I knew one of the seventeen would die, perhaps more than one, perhaps all of them. If I succeeded to any degree this night, it would be but a partial success—with an intolerable element of failure, as on that awful day at the mall in Pico Mundo. The more certain I became of this, the smaller the elevator seemed to be and the more intensely claustrophobia wrapped its suffocating fabric around me.

I pressed on the walls and pried at the doors, to no avail. I almost shouted, though if anyone remained in this particular piece of Elsewhere, it would be the senoculus, which already knew where I was and which would not answer my shout with kind assistance. When I realized that I was circling the gray cube as if I were a frightened rat in a cage, I halted, leaned against a wall, clasped my head in my hands and tried to deny the claustrophobia and the fear for the children that exacerbated it, tried to clear my mind and think.

Three realities. The world into which I was born. The blasted black wasteland. Elsewhere.

Think.

Our world, a material realm, allowed us to apply the laws of physics and thermodynamics and other knowledge to shape tools, build machines, and use all the riches of nature to provide ourselves with the comforts of civilization, one of which was the leisure to ponder the meaning of our existence. I knew the systems and rules of our world, more or less how it worked and mostly why.

The world of the wasteland, a spiritual realm, call it Hell or what you will, was dark and mean, without grace, populated by spirits that thrived on hatred and pain, that were denied meaning—or had denied it to themselves—that wanted nothing but the destruction of our world, which they might one day achieve through their surrogates among us, and the destruction of themselves, which they would never achieve. If I thought about all of this long enough, I would be able to imagine in pretty accurate detail the systems and rules of their world, how it worked and mostly why.

There is, of course, yet another world than these three, the one to which Stormy Llewellyn had gone, but I didn’t need to know the systems and rules of that place, because visionaries and theologians have spent millennia pondering them, and I’d probably be given an orientation booklet when and if I ever arrived there.

So then, Elsewhere …

Elsewhere was neither largely material nor largely spiritual, but an in-between emptiness, not a world in full, merely an unmapped archipelago of reefs, atolls, and islands of which certain people in our world could make wicked use, into which denizens of the wasteland could venture. In this realm, willpower could shape reality to some extent, but at the same time, both those from my world and those from the wasteland had to move about as if walls and doors and stairways mattered. I did not think that any amount of time would be long enough for me to imagine the systems and rules of this eerie place, because it was … essentially so formless. No, not that. Because it was …

A hard metallic shriek and a cracking-buckling noise drew my attention to the ceiling. Even if I had wanted to live in denial, I couldn’t have done so, because as the clamor grew louder, a top-exit panel appeared in the smooth gray ceiling. The idea of an exit. It had been thought into existence not by me but by the senoculus, which was even now, on the second floor, prying open the sliding doors to the shaft, intending to descend by a service ladder. This square on the car ceiling wasn’t the idea of an exit, really, but the idea of an entrance, a trapdoor by which the demon could get at me.

For a moment, I couldn’t understand why it would come after me so indirectly if, with its stronger willpower, it could disable the elevator and halt me between floors. But then I understood that the elevator was at this impasse because our conflicted wills had come to a draw. I wanted the elevator car to descend to the ground floor, from which I might escape into my world, where my enemy could not follow me, and the senoculus wanted the car to return to the second floor, where it could steal everything from me with a kiss, as it had taken life and soul from Mr. Champagne. Its willpower and mine were equally matched.