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Theto his hel flew out of that baleful sky, as and whiplike tail, with the oyle had torn itself loose of the stone high on an ancient Gothic cathedral and had taken flight As it swooped down on Lumley, it appeared to spit out a streae peach pits but were so no doubt full of frenzied life Luh he had been hit by un fire, and several perfectly round holes appeared in his spacesuit, like those we had seen in poor daht

Luson stumbled backward in terror, away fro thing abruptly changed directions, streaking straight toward us

As the doors buainst them, and a series of dimples appeared in the steel, as if it had been hit by bullets with alh punch to penetrate to the interior of the cab

Sasha’s face was talcum white

Mine must have been whiter still, to one a paler shade of black

We ascended toward the ground floor through crashes of thunder, the grinding rumble of steel wheels on steel track, harsh whistles, shrieks, and the throbbing electronic hu, we also heard another noise, which waswas on the roof of the elevator cab Crawling, slithering

It could have been nothing but a loose cable, which round floor But it wasn’t a loose cable That ishful thinking This thing was alive Alive and purposeful

I couldn’t iotten into the shaft with us after the doors had shut, unless the inter of these two realities was nearly co on the roof pass through the ceiling and be aie remained focused on the indicator board above the doors, but the rest of us--animals, kids, and adults--turned our faces up toward thewas an escape hatch A way out A way in

Borrowing the Uzi fro Sasha also covered the trapdoor with her shotgun

I wasn’t optiunfire Unless I was ested that at least some of the expedition members were heavily armed when they went to the other side Guns hadn’t saved theroaned-rattled-squeaked upward

This side of the three-foot-square hatch featured neither hinges nor handles There was no latch bolt, either To escape, you had to push the panel up and out To enable rescue workers to pull it open froroove in which fingers could be hooked

The flying gargoyle had hands, thick talonlike fingers Maybe those huge fingers wouldn’t fit in a groove handle

A hard, frantic scraping noise So through A creak, a hard pop, a rending sound Silence

The kids clutched one another

Orson growled low in his throat

So did I

The walls seeh the elevator cab were reshaping itself into a group coffin The air was thick Each breath felt like sludge in an to flicker

With a h a great weight were pressing on it The frame in which it sat would not allow it to open inward

After a ht was removed, but the panel didn’t return entirely to normal It was distorted Steel plate Bent like plastic More force had been required for that task than I cared to think about

Sweat blurred my vision I wiped at ie said, as the G bulb lit on the indicator board

The promise of release was not ian to bob up and down, rising and falling as h the hoist cables and the liuides and the pulleys were all about to crack apart and send us plunging to the bottoworse--yanked on the escape hatch Its prior efforts had tweaked the panel in the fraed shut

The elevator doors were still shut, too, and Doogie angrily punched the button labeled open doors

With a shrill bark, the badly distorted rim of the steel trap stuttered in the frame, as the creature above furiously pulled on it

At last the elevator doors opened, and I spun toward them, sure that ere now surrounded by neverland, that the predator on the roof would have been joined by others

We were at the ground floor The hangar was noisier than a New Year’s Eve party in a train station with howling wolves and a punk band with nuclear aar: no red sky, no black trees, no slithering vines like nests of coral snakes

Overhead, the warped escape hatch screeched, rattled violently The surrounding fra apart

The elevator bobbed worse than ever The floor of the cab rose and fell in relation to the hangar floor, the way a dock slip ave the Uzi to Doogie, snatched upacross the shifting threshold, with Bobby and Orson close behind me

Sasha and Roosevelt hurried the kids out of the elevator, and Mungojerrie ca

As Sasha turned to cover the cab with her shotgun, the escape hatch was torn out of the ceiling The gargoyle cas were folded as it dropped, but then they spread to fill the cab The ed in the beast’s sleek, scaly li against the cab walls Silver eyes flashed Its rawforked tongue was black

I remembered the seedlike projectiles that it had spat at Luoyle shrieked She squeezed off a round fro parasites, the elevator broke apart and the cab plunged out of sight with the screahts and pulleys and steel beas, I expected it to rise out of the ruins and soar up the shaft, but then I realized that the shaft no longer existed Instead, I was looking into the starry void that I had gliht, where the stairwell should have been

Crazily, I thought of aas a doorway to the enchanted land of Narnia, do-card queen This was only a transient a I led our intrepid band across the hangar, where super-weird and , across this neverland of past, present, future, and sideways tihost workhosts that looked as if they would give us trouble, while trying as best I could not to put us in the same space that was about to be occupied by an objectfrom another time, and if you think all that was easy, you’re a kak