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I backed away fro that the darkness would give way to the ht of an overcast sky This was as effective as wishing for world peace

To look through those s into the alleyway, I would have to clih feat But the odor and the chill that had passed through the ornaate were fresh in memory, and I was possessed by the--perhaps irrational--fear that a trap in the trailer roof would open under my feet and drop me into a kind of trouble that I had never known before

In need of a room with a view, I returned to the open stairwell door to listen The quiet was profound, a stillness as in a vacuum If anyone waited on the upper floor, he must be dead or Death

Previously, the wall on the left had been paneled in easy-to-clean yellow fiberboard, and the wall on the right had been brick Now they were both concrete On the steps, the glued-on rubber treads wereThe first ti at the sound of voices, it had been in my world Noas in soood cheeseburger usually restores my confidence If that doesn’t work, I watch an episode of some reality-TV show like The Real Housewives of Wherever, and by coram, I feel as solid as a blacksmith’s anvil

The stairwell seeht, no dust motes drifted in suspension Not one tattered strand of spider silk waited for a draft to flutter No desiccated flies or shriveled le scrap of lint littered the stairs

No cracks or water stainsacross the threshold, onto the botto, I felt that Icreature in a place to which even the spirits of the lingering dead never ventured

Warily, I climbed the stairs

Eleven

HALFWAY TOWARD THE MIDFLOOR LANDING, I WAS overcome once more by the perception that these concrete walls were not concrete at all, but were instead the idea of concrete, a thought that first occurred to me back at Star Truck, when Shower 5 in the real world abruptly became Shower 5 Elsewhere I didn’t knohat I meant by that, but my suspicion was evoked by the continuity of color and texture: an unvarying gray without the srain from the lumber forms into which the concrete would have been poured, no surface voids or exposed aggregate

When I slidthe inner wall, the surface felt at first like concrete, but then like fiberboard with a high-gloss finish, although toeyes it reht hand to the outer wall, ers slid across bricks and recessed h a moment later the texture of a smooth concrete surface returned

I didn’t knohat to make of all this, except that my reality and Elsewhere seemed to occupy the same space at the same time In Elsewhere, s; and inWhether this was true everywhere that I o or only in some locations, I could not know for sure, but I suspected that the two realities intersected only rarely, as in some roo

Wherever and whatever Elsewhere ht be, I didn’t think that it was a world like ours, that it was either peopled by different versions of ourselves or by another race entirely The cowboy trucker had parked his rig here, leaving the keys in the ignition, because he knew that in Elsewhere it would reested that Elsewhere was a dead zone of sorts, populated neither by anyone nor anything

Thehad no s I paused to listen but heard nothing other thanreceived the cheese meatloaf, steak fries, and coleslaw that I had all but sworn an oath to consume back at the truck stop I continued upward and, at the top of the second flight, I caht, withto the third floor

I didn’t need to seek the highest vantage point Any second-floor ould satisfy my curiosity about the untimely darkness that see was perhaps eighty years old, dirty and battered and unoccupied if not even abandoned; it had not in any recent decade been refurbished Judging by the design and the details of its construction, theIt should have been scratched and dih here it appeared to be as unmarked as it was on the day it had been installed

The immaculate condition of the door seemed not just improbable but impossible And when I concentrated closely and entirely upon it, searching its sn of wear, I was e of a door, like that in a clever troned stage setting, convincing not because of elaborate detail but because the artist’s use of perspective and light was rasp, and it turned without resistance The knuckles of the barrel hinges revolved soundlessly around the pivot pins, and the door opened as s into another, so that I could al in , walls, and floor were as unifore and stairwell Overhead hung the usual crude lamps When I stared hard at the nearest one, it produced less light, not because the bulb dimmed but because the bulb, the shade, and the chain all seemed to diminish in substance when studied intently, as if sufficient scrutiny ether I didn’t test that hypothesis because I didn’t want to be left whi in the dark

On both sides of the corridor were a few doors like the one through which I had just co--the e and eerily quiet place with lots of doors, waiting behind one of them will be either a psychopathic killer or a in Of course, if it’s an Adaoofy dude waiting to deliver a joke involving poop, pee, or genals I wasn’t in such a coht, because I preferred a psychopath or a ht, nothing bit off ray room

I crossed to the s and was stunned to see the sprawling suburbs of the valley cast in darkness, not one streetlaht to be seen Far beyond the Hollywood hills, to the southwest, no faintest glow rose froh on an ordinary night, the incandescence of civilization would shimmer in the air and paint the bellies of the clouds a burnt-butter yellow Above the black land, the blacker sky had been swept clean of moon and stars

In the lie-blue, like the baleful cae andtheir surroundings, as if the night air had unnatural weight sufficient to prevent the light froloo fires, the realm on the farther side of the as not blind-dark I was able to discern that the street in front of this building had vanished, replaced by barren ground And suddenly I knew that the suburbs and the city they encircled had not e but had ceased to exist either as intact structures or as ruins In hborhood, but in Elsewhere, it seemed to loom alone above a blackened wasteland