"I don't know what I saw and heard," he muttered, upset and trying to hide it. "I saw something, but that doesn't mean I actually saw what I think I saw." He thought back to the strain of the subcommittee hearing, the way he'd stalked out of the Capitol Building. "I've been under a lot of stress here lately."
"So have I," she said.
A little of the tension began to leave him. "There you go. I'll bet that's it. We've both been under pressure and it's affected our perceptions. We were listening to a wild tale in an empty restaurant, all decorated to match the story, and we had some booze and imagined a few things." The revelation came to him fast and unbidden and he grasped at it the way a taxpayer would an extra deduction.
"Sure, I know what happened. Somebody spent a lot of money to make that place look like Africa, or someplace tropical, anyway. Plants, carpeting, the whole bit. My first time there, your first time there. I'll bet there's some kind of sophisticated audio system to make jungle noises, add to the atmosphere for the diners. Something like that would be a natural. I'll bet you when they're not serving lunch or dinner they're checking out the ambience, testing the electronics."
She looked unsure. "What about the lion? How do you explain the lion?"
"Big screen video, rear projection." He was feeling much better now. "That kind of stuff's easy to do." The cat-thing—maybe a big rat. Or maybe a real cat, a kitchen scavenger allowed to run around loose between serving times to keep the rats out. The grass underfoot for an instant? His own imagination, or sweat in his eyes. An easy explanation for everything.
"I've got to hand it to you, old man. You work for this place? Is your boss back there now, congratulating himself on the efficiency of his updated electronics? Or is he waiting for us below? You made me pull my gun. I think you owe us a free dinner at least." Merry was tugging at his arm. "You ought to be in Hollywood. You're wasting your talents in a place like this." The tugging grew more insistent.
"Josh." There was fear in Merry's voice.
"Now what?"
"The elevator," she said in a small voice. "The elevator."
They were still descending. The building was only ten floors high and they were still going down. The light on the control panel had fallen beyond "G" and was now locked, blinking irregularly, on "B." For basement. Blinking as they continued to descend smoothly—to where? What lay beneath the basement? Far beneath the basement, beneath ground level, beneath the unmarked sub-basement with its conduits and pipes and electric lines?
Where were they going and what would they see when they finally stopped and the doors opened?
Something landed heavily on the roof of the elevator cab. Whatever it was it was big and solid. What it definitely was not was something projected by a hidden speaker or rear-screen projection unit. Merry Sharrow moaned softly and shrank back into the corner of the elevator, which continued its steady, precipitous, impossible descent. The cab was beginning to rattle and shake, just as if they were picking up speed.
"What's going on?" she asked in a tiny voice. "What's happening to us? I don't want to be here. I want to be someplace else, please, I want to be someplace else."
Oak was watching the ceiling. He had the .38 clenched in his right fist. Something else landed on the other side of the roof. It was heavy enough to make the elevator jerk on the end of its cable. You could hear them moving around up there, whatever they were. He thought he could hear that chittering laughter again but he couldn't be sure because of the racket the elevator was making.
How far had they descended? A thousand feet? Two thousand? What unsuspected shaft lay beneath the city of Washington? Had something been dug here long ago and abandoned by the government or the KGB?
The cab rang like a bell as something huge and powerful smashed through the ceiling. The metal bulged inward as if it had been struck by a falling girder, and the decorative plastic grillwork shattered, littering the floor with chunks of what looked like oversized white Wheat Chex. Light from the exposed fluorescents flooded the elevator. One tube hung swaying and crackling from two wires. Merry Sharrow screamed and tried to hide her face in her hands.
Olkeloki was trying to raise his staff over his head parallel to the floor, but the cab wasn't wide enough. Another blow reverberated in their ears and a second indentation appeared in the ceiling alongside the first. The elevator rattled on its cable and the lights flickered and threatened to go out.
The second blow, or punch, or whatever, had cracked the metal roof. Oak thought he could see something vast moving in the darkness above. Holding the pistol in both hands he took careful aim and fired, three quick shots in succession. In the enclosed metal box of the elevator the sound of the .38 going off was deafening. Merry screamed again.
Something on top of the cab made a sound like a belch—or maybe it was a moan. Oak hoped it was a moan. In any event the elevator slowed to a gradual stop. The only sound was that of Merry hyperventilating in her corner.
Cautiously Oak moved until he was standing beneath the crack in the roof. His finger tense on the trigger, he tried to see outside. No sound, no movement came from above. Whatever had been up there trying to get at them, solid or ethereal, had no taste for a .38 slug. He was suddenly aware that it was downright hot in the elevator. He was sweating profusely. From the tension no doubt. They couldn't have descended that far, surely.
What now? Somehow he didn't think pushing the red button marked "Emergency" on the control panel would do much good. The light continued to blink steadily behind the letter "B." Being a properly conditioned creature of technological habit, he reflexively pushed the button for "G." At first nothing, and then the elevator gave a jerk like bait at the end of a fishing line and wondrously, gloriously, began to rise on its cable. The comforting whine of machinery was clearly audible through the crack in the ceiling.
Mbatian Oldoinyo Olkeloki never took his eyes from the roof as he spoke. "Do you still think, Joshua Oak, that I am the representative of some government agency or amusement park?"
"I don't know who the hell you are, or what this is all about."
Merry Sharrow had managed to get back on her feet without help. "It was real." All three of them were watching the ceiling. No one looked at his neighbor, not yet. "I was all real. I could see it and—you could smell it. I can still smell it."
Oak could too. Perfumed carrion. He forced himself to breathe slow and steady, regularizing his heartbeat, until the elevator slowed and the light on the instrument panel shifted from "B" to "G." Merry moved a little closer to him.
The doors parted.
"Christ, buddy, take it easy!"
A young man with neatly cropped hair, red-and-blue-striped tie splitting the front of a blue suit, raised both hands and stumbled backward a couple of steps. Oak blinked at him, suddenly conscious of the picture he presented: clothes reeking of sweat and fear, hair disheveled, not to mention the .38, which he hastily returned to its holster.
"Sorry," he mumbled. "Mistake."
The young man dropped his hands in stages. "Hell of a mistake."
A slightly older man came up alongside the first. "What's going on, Dave?"
Oak stumbled out into the hall. It was full of junior bureaucrats and senior paper-pushers, male and female, hurrying to and fro. The bright light made his eyes water. Merry Sharrow and Mbatian Olkeloki were right behind him as they pushed their way down the hall.
"That guy had a gun," Dave muttered as he and his friend watched the harried trio retreat. "Looked stoned, too."
His companion shrugged the confrontation off. "What do you expect in a town like this? Come on or we'll miss the meeting." Together they stepped into the elevator.
Oak lunged through the open doorway and out onto the campus of George Washington University. The air was filled with the intermittent roar of traffic on nearby Pennsylvania Avenue. In the intense sunlight he turned to stare back at the building they'd fled. A perfectly ordinary office building. Restaurant decorated in a tropical motif on top, of
fices below, and something impossible and unsuspected beneath. Storage in the event of a nuclear attack? Crazy as that was, access to anything like that would be strictly controlled. And even if you did accidentally manage to bypass alarms and security, you'd encounter guards. Not something much bigger than a man, capable of punching a hole in the steel roof of an elevator cab.
Merry Sharrow leaned up against him. One hand clutched at his coat. "I—I don't feel so good."
Oak didn't feel so good himself. He grabbed her with both hands and held her steady, looked left and right. Street vendors half a block away. "Hang on. We'll get you a Coke or something."
"We have to talk." Olkeloki looked anxious but otherwise unaffected by the nightmare in the elevator.
"Yeah, sure, you bet your ass we have to talk. But not out here and not in any more restaurants. Someplace where I know I can chat without putting my sanity on the line. Where are you staying?"
"I have a hotel room, but now that a few of them have found me I fear it may be under observation."
"Observation?" He remembered what he'd seen, or thought he'd seen, through the hole in the roof of the elevator. Shapes, outlines, inhuman silhouettes. Ugly things. And that smell. He experienced a sudden, desperate urge to run like mad back toward the sanity and safety of the Bureau offices, or the Capitol Building, or the Smithsonian. He might have, too, except there was Merry Sharrow, clinging to him.
"Let's go to my place. It's a ways out of town and I think the ride would do us all good." He glanced along the avenue, searching for a cab.
"Your house?" Not all of Merry's reflexes were paralyzed.
Oak checked his watch, a bit surprised to see that it still ran. Less than an hour since he'd rescued Olkeloki and Merry from the mob outside the White House. It seemed like days.
"Are you kidding? Even if I wanted to try something, Olkeloki will be with us. Believe me, I'm not in the mood for anything except explanations. Hey!" He waved and whistled sharply.
The cabbie saw his arm and slid neatly over to the curb.
Oak and Merry slid in back. Olkeloki got in next to the driver and looked back at them. "I have already explained it all once, but I will be happy to explain again. It will be simpler this time because you have seen."
Oak gave the cabbie an address. The ride was going to be expensive but he didn't care. All of a sudden the city no longer seemed familiar and unfriendly.
"Seen? I haven't seen anything," he said defensively. It was not one of his usual smooth, efficient lies.
Olkeloki simply smiled back at him. "You are not blind, Joshua Burton Oak. Neither are you dumb, however much you might wish it. You are the right ilmeet man. Merry Sharrow is the right ilmeet woman. You were made known to me. You cannot stop what is going to happen."
We'll see about that, Oak thought as the cab pulled away from the curb.
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9
Near Burke Lake,
Virginia—19 June
It was a source of endless amusement to Oak's colleagues that someone of his temperament and profession should choose to live in a place with the unlikely name of Butts Corners. He preferred it that way. The long commute didn't bother him because he rarely had to make it, his assignments keeping him away from hearth, home, and city for long stretches at a time. When he was home he was usually off duty. From his house he could walk to Burke Park and the lake, where he could sit alone among the elms and oaks and just watch the water and its inhabitants. Not for Joshua Oak the fast life of a condo on the Potomac. When he finally concluded—no, survived—an assignment, he needed to slow down, not speed up.
He paid the cabbie and led Merry and Olkeloki up the flagstone walk to the modest two-bedroom house. Trees grew thick and close around the walls, shielding it from passing eyes. A station wagon with plastic wood flanks showed its backside in the open garage. The raised door was a signal that his housekeeper, Mrs. Hernandez, had been on the job. The very ordinariness of the home was comforting. There was nothing unusual about the house's appearance, but the special keyless entry system wasn't visible from the street. Oak was about to enter the combination releasing the twin locks when Olkeloki stepped past him.
"Wait." The old man caressed the doorknob with long, wrinkled fingers, ran them along the edges of the jamb, and finally nodded. "It is all right now."
"Glad to hear it." Oak entered the combination and the locks clicked. As he pushed open the door he wondered why he felt so nervous entering his own home. It's all right now. Merry was talking to Olkeloki.
"The thing I hit on the road, that I thought was a dog? That was a shetani?"
"An N'tedi, from your description. They have very bright eyes set high up on their heads, like many insects, and long tails. The right side of their mouth droops and drags upon the ground."
Oak listened as he absently shut the door behind them. The events of the morning had left him badly shaken. His neat, rational world view was full of cracks. He spent his life dealing with irrational, illogical people. There was always some way of categorizing them, classifying them. How did you classify what had happened in the elevator, or the restaurant? What was happening to him?
The first thing that struck Merry Sharrow about the interior of Oak's house was its cleanliness. She had suspected the presence of a housekeeper but even so was startled. The condition of the home bordered on the antiseptic.
Small glass sculptures here and there, net rows of records (all alphabetized according to composer or performer, she noted), bookshelves stocked with books that had actually been read, and a kitchen as clean as the bathroom. Unintentionally she found herself comparing it to Donald's more typical bachelor pad, with its articles of clothing tossed in corners, sports equipment in the refrigerator, and general aura of comfortable chaos. Oak's house was neater than her own.
Olkeloki hardly paid his companions any attention. "I must check each room and all the furniture. Only then can we relax and talk."
"Go right ahead." Oak collapsed into a chair that looked out of place among the clean lines of the rest of the furniture. It appeared to have been made in the thirties or forties and reupholstered three or four times since. The successive upholsterers had done a bad job of matching the previous fabric. The result was a kind of off-color, crazy-quilt charm.
Merry took a seat on a nearby couch. The books looked more worn than most of the furniture. She and Oak watched while Olkeloki scrutinized the den, peering beneath tables, behind the television, even removing several of the larger books to look behind them. Without a word he moved on to the next room.
"Josh, what do you make of what's happened to us?"
"What?" He'd been lost in thought, now looked sharply over at her. "What the hell am I supposed to make of it? What do you make of it?"
"I asked you first."
He sat up straight. "Okay. I can rationalize what happened in the restaurant. You heard me do it. As to the elevator," he hesitated, "I can't explain what happened in the elevator. I think the only one who can explain that is in there." He indicated the kitchen, where Olkeloki could be heard moving around among the appliances and utensils. "And I can't accept his explanation."
"You were there. You saw, you felt the same things I did."
"Oh, something happened to us in that elevator. We weren't asleep and we weren't hypnotized. I may be a skeptic, but I'm not an ostrich." He looked lost, and it shocked her. Somehow she knew Joshua Oak had never been this lost before.
"I don't know what's going on here, Merry. I'm not sure I can handle it. I've always been able to handle anything that was thrown my way, and I've been in some pretty difficult situations." He put a peculiar emphasis on "difficult."
"But this—how do you handle something like this?"
"There are times when we just have to accept things, Josh. I mean, if a flying saucer were to land in your backyard tonight…"
He bent forward and put his head in his hands. "Please, no talk about flying saucers. Not now."
"All I'm saying is that the world is full of unexplained phenomena. Up where I come from people believe in a man-thing called Bigfoot or Sasquatch. Nobody's ever proven its existence, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Maybe these shetani, maybe they're like that."
Oak found a certain amount of relief in the course of deductive logic. "Then how come if they're causing trouble, like Olkeloki claims, nobody's seeing them now?"
"Maybe you have to look at them a certain way. Maybe they flip in and out of our reality like shadows, only they're becoming stronger because of this crack or weakness in the Out Of he keeps talking about. Josh, I saw something. I hit it with my car and I watched it run off into the woods. I tried to tell myself it was a dog, but it wasn't a dog. Now I've seen another one like it, that little thing that ran off under the tables in the restaurant. You saw it too."
"Yeah, I saw it." It was quiet for a while. They listened to Olkeloki rummaging around in the back rooms. "Remember what the old man said, about needing our help and how we'd made ourselves known to him?"
She nodded. There was a bowl of trail mix on the coffee table and she began picking out the coconut and raisins. "He said it was prophesied."
"Right. Now, I believe in prophecy and divination even less than I believe in these shetani or whatever they are."
"How do you explain the fact that you brought us together outside the White House? Him all the way from Africa and me from Seattle?"
"I don't explain it. I can't explain it any more than I can explain any of the rest of what's happened today. But you and I can understand. You've encountered one of these things previously. Maybe you're sensitized to them or something. But what about me? Why me? How do I fit into the picture?"
"He said you had the same middle name as a famous explorer of his country."
"Pure coincidence and even if it's not, so what? How does that qualify me for a role in this looney tune?"
"Josh, what do you do for a living?"
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