Deeply Odd ot-7

by Dean Koontz

  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.

  The seventh ceiling light remade itself into a chain-hung lamp, and my pursuer drew close enough in the sullen light for me to see his wealth of eyes, my face grotesquely ornamented, and I recalled both the cold, soft feel of this thing and its inhuman strength.

  The only advice that Mr. Hitchcock had had for me regarding the senoculus was Run, Mr. Thomas. Run. Even if he was not my guardian angel, which he had denied being, he was playing for the right team, and his advice should no doubt be heeded.

  I intended to delay as long as necessary before stepping out of the hall and slamming the door. I hoped that good Boo would have led Verena and the other captives all the way down to the mudroom before I followed them. Although the senoculus apparently wanted me above all others, there was every reason to suppose that if it saw the children or smelled them — all that delicious innocence — it would be compelled to fall upon them.

  In our previous encounter, this thing had not passed through walls as a spirit could, and it had not floated along swiftly above the floor as Mr. Hitchcock had done. I assumed that in Elsewhere, if not in its native wasteland, its means of getting from Point A to Point B were no more sophisticated than mine, an assumption that, if wrong, might lead to a hideous, cold kiss and to something worse than possession.

  The eighth of nine ceiling lights metamorphosed into a lamp on a chain, the gray of faux concrete crawled closer, and the senoculus spoke in my voice as he strode forward. “Give me your breath, piglet. I want it now.”

  I crossed the threshold, slammed the door, and descended only ten steps, two at a time, before I heard the door crash into the upper-landing wall behind me.

  Even if the kids were out of the stairwell, they surely had not already left the mudroom. If I managed to plunge to the bottom of the stairs without being snared by the senoculus, I would bring it with me, and it would be upon those innocents before all of them could escape the house, where — according to my theory — it could not pursue them.

  I hit the landing and flew pell-mell off it as the walls turned gray around me. The stairs were treacherous at high speed, my balance never that of a circus aerialist, and I caromed off the walls as I dove into that waterless well.

  From behind me, with an intimacy that made the skin crawl on the nape of my neck, the thing said, “Let me suck your tongue, piglet.”

  Thirty-four

  Quick through the door at the landing, out of the stairwell, onto the second floor, I heeded the advice of baseball great Satchel Paige, who said about life in general, “Don’t look back. Something may be gaining on you.” I ran as I had never run while on my high-school baseball team, because in baseball, happily, no rule allows the opposing team to bring in a supernatural soul-stealer to chase down the runner between bases.

  A short hall led to a pair of open French doors and a wider hall beyond. There were rooms behind closed doors to the right and open archways to the left, beyond which lay an enormous chamber lined with leatherbound books and furnished as a grand drawing room that offered numerous elegant seating areas on richly patterned Persian carpets. In the farther wall were sets of French doors standing open to the deep deck on which the crowd of cultists, their backs to me, waited for the Kens to appear with the children on the terrace below.

  Ahead of me, on the right, elevator doors opened. A man sporting Oscar the Grouch eyebrows and a Snidely Whiplash mustache, with a chin beard unsuitable for any cartoon character or Muppet, appeared with a bottle of champagne in each hand, the wire coiffes having already been removed and the corks popped, a thin vapor rising from the open necks. His expression told me that six-eyed death was on my heels, that Satchel Paige was a man of deep insight, as usual.

  I threw myself against the wall on my right, gracelessly slid-dropped-rolled-scrambled past the guy with all the facial hair, who found himself in the direct path of the senoculus. In that instant, my theory that the demon must be interested only in me proved to be woefully wrong. The thing leaped upon him, driving him to the floor, champagne bottles rolling away in gouts of foam and sparkling pale-gold wine. With savage violence, the senoculus slammed a knee into its victim’s crotch, then a second time even more violently, which seemed to be bad sportsmanship even for a demon. It seized the man’s throat and pressed down upon him, lowering its face toward his.

  Having slid-dropped-rolled-scrambled to the elevator just as the senoculus took down the party guy, I was alarmed to see the doors already sliding shut. The demon probably wouldn’t be distracted more than a few seconds by this appetizer, not long enough for me to get out of sight into a stairwell. I thrust one arm between the doors and had the disturbing thought that it would be amputated below the elbow when they proved to be as sharp as guillotine blades. I knew I should never have watched that Wes Craven movie. Instead, the electric eye triggered the safety mechanism, the doors glided open. I rolled into the elevator, thrust to my feet, pressed the 1 on the floor-selection panel, then pressed the CLOSE DOOR button.

  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 agai
n. 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.

  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, intendin
g 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.

  The senoculus could not will the shaft doors above to open because I was willing them to remain closed, which required it to resort to physical effort. My head hurt.

  Suddenly I realized that although this plain-gray cube had none of the fluorescent tubes of the car in the real elevator, in the real building, in my world, it nonetheless had light. The idea of light, all around, without source. The car should be dark. And it would be black as night just as soon as the demon wanted it that way.

  With a last bang and clatter, the busy senoculus apparently succeeded in tearing open the shaft doors on the second floor, because bits of debris ticked against the roof of the car.

  Darkness enveloped me. The claustrophobia, having abated slightly, surged back full force.