Darkfall

atmosphere within the shed was unnatural, uncanny, disquieting, as if the room had been lifted out of the ordinary flow of tape and space, and was now suspended in a void.
    The only sound was that which came from deep within the pit. It was a distant hissing-murmuring-whispering-growling, like ten thousand voices in a far-off place, the distance-muffled roar of a crowd. An angry crowd.
    Suddenly, the sound grew louder. Not a great deal louder. Just a little.
    At the same moment, the orange light beamed brighter than ever before. Not a lot brighter. Just a little. It was as if a furnace door, already ajar, had been pushed open another inch.
    The interior of the shed grew slightly warmer, too.
    The vaguely sulphurous odor became stronger.
    And something strange happened to the hole in the floor. All the way around the perimeter, bits of earth broke loose and fell inward, away from the rim, vanishing into the mysterious light at the bottom. Like the increase in the brilliance of that light, this alteration in the rim of the hole wasn’t major; only an incremental change. The diameter was increased by less than one inch. The dirt stopped falling away. The perimeter stabilized. Once more, everything in the shed was perfectly still.
    But now the pit was bigger.
    VI
    The top of the parapet was ten inches wide. To Rebecca it seemed no wider than a tightrope.
    At least it wasn’t icy. The wind scoured the snow off the narrow surface, kept it clean and dry.
    With Jack’s help, Rebecca balanced on the wall, in a half crouch. The wind buffeted her, and she was sure that she would have been toppled by it if Jack hadn’t been there.
    She tried to ignore the wind and the stinging snow that pricked her exposed face, ignored the chasm in front of her, and focused both her eyes and her mind on the roof of the next building. She had to jump far enough to clear the parapet over there and land on the roof. If she came down a bit short, on top of that waist-high wall, on that meager strip of stone, she would be unbalanced for a moment, even if she landed flat on both feet. In that instant of supreme vulnerability, the wind would snatch at her, and she might fall, either forward onto the roof, or backward into the empty air between the buildings. She didn’t dare let herself think about that possibility, and she didn’t look down.
    She tensed her muscles, tucked her arms in against her sides, and said, “Now,” and Jack let go of her, and she jumped into the night and the wind and the driving snow.
    Airborne, she knew at once that she hadn’t put enough power into the jump, knew she was not going to make it to the other roof, knew she would crash into the parapet, knew she would fall backwards, knew that she was going to die.
    But what she knew would happen didn’t happen. She cleared the parapet, landed on the roof, and her feet slipped out from under her, and she went down on her backside, hard enough to hurt but not hard enough to break any bones.
    As she got to her feet, she saw the dilapidated pigeon coop. Pigeon-keeping was neither a common nor an unusual hobby in this city; in fact, this coop was smaller than some, only six feet long. At a glance she was able to tell that it hadn’t been used for years. It was so weathered and in such disrepair that it would soon cease to be a coop and would become just a pile of junk.
    She shouted to Jack, who was watching from the other building: “I think maybe I’ve found our bridge!”
    Aware of how fast time was running out, she brushed some of the snow from the roof of the coop and saw that it appeared to be formed by a single six-foot sheet of one-inch plywood. That was even better than she had hoped; now they wouldn’t have to deal with two or three loose planks. The plywood had been painted many times over the years, and the paint had protected it from rot once the coop was abandoned and maintenance discontinued; it seemed sturdy enough to support the kids and even Jack. It was loose along one entire side, which was a great help to her. Once she brushed the rest of the snow off the coop roof, she gripped it by the loose end, pulled it up and back. Some of the nails popped out, and some snapped off because they were rusted clear through. In a few seconds she had wrenched the plywood free.
    She dragged it to the parapet. If she tried to lever it onto the wall and shove it out toward Jack, the strong wind would get under it, treat it like a sail, lift it, tear it out of her