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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, rene bottles, floated in its open ue When thin ribbons of that an to slip away between the demon’s lips, it abruptly sucked them back, closed its ap 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 rahts, the elevator started down Relieved, I closedthe 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 departered 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 co to a halt

When I opened ray 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 theer, 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 et 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-creaone, as were the fluorescent tubes that had once been behind theray, unmarked even by the outline of the top-exit door that had once been in the center of that space

A kind of claustrophobia overcauide the 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, youwhen I’d said them, but which I realized noere 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 ree 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 thefabric around me

I pressed on the walls and pried at the doors, to no avail I alh if anyone remained in this particular piece of Elsewhere, it would be the senoculus, which already knehere 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 there 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 theof our existence I knew the systems and rules of our world, more or less hoorked and mostly why

The world of the wasteland, a spiritual realrace, populated by spirits that thrived on hatred and pain, that were deniedbut the destruction of our world, which theyus, and the destruction of theht about all of this long enough, I would be able to iine in pretty accurate detail the systems and rules of their world, hoorked and mostly why

There is, of course, yet another world than these three, the one to which Storone, but I didn’t need to know the systeians have spent iven an orientation booklet when and if I ever arrived there

So then, Elsewhere…

Elsewhere was neither largely ely spiritual, but an in-between eo 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 aine the systems and rules of this eerie place, because it was … essentially so formless No, not that Because it was…