Seize the Night

meaning who knows?
    Doogie pressed his thumb against G and kept it there. We didn't want the door to open on B-1. B for bedlam . B for bad news . B for be prepared to die squishily.
    Aaron Stuart said, “Mr. Snow?”
    I took a deep breath, “Yes?”
    “If Mr. Halloway didn't die, then whose blood is on your hands?”
    I looked at my hands. They were sticky-damp with Bobby's blood, which had gotten on them when I'd dragged his body into the elevator.
    “Weird,” I admitted.
    Wendy Dulcinea said, “If the body went poof, why didn't the blood on your hands go poof?”
    My mouth was too dry, my tongue too thick, and my throat too tight to allow me to answer her.
    The shuddering elevator briefly caught on something in the shaft, tore loose with a ripping-metal sound, and then we groaned to B-1.
    Where we stopped.
    Doogie leaned on close door and on the button for the ground floor.
    We didn't ascend any farther.
    The doors slid inexorably open. Heat, humidity, and that fetid stench rolled over us, and I expected the vigorous alien vegetation to grow into the cab and overwhelm us with explosive force.
    In our slice of time, we'd risen one level, but William Hodgson was still out there in neverland, where we had left him. Pointing at us.
    The man beyond Hodgson—Lumley, according to his helmet—also turned to look at us.
    Shrieking, something flew out of that baleful sky, among the black trees, a creature with glossy black wings and whiplike tail, with the muscular, scaly limbs of a lizard, as if a gargoyle 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 stream of objects, which looked like large peach pits but were something deadlier, something no doubt full of frenzied life. Lumley twitched and jerked as though he had been hit by machine-gun fire, and several perfectly round holes appeared in his spacesuit, like those we had seen in poor damn Hodgson's suit in the egg room the previous night.
    Lumley screamed as though he were being eaten alive, and Hodgson stumbled backward in terror, away from us.
    The elevator doors began to close, but the flying thing abruptly changed directions, streaking straight toward us.
    As the doors bumped shut, hard objects rattled against them, and a series of dimples appeared in the steel, as if it had been hit by bullets with almost enough punch to penetrate to the interior of the cab.
    Sasha's face was talcum white.
    Mine must have been whiter still, to match my name.
    Even Orson seemed to have gone 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 hum, but in spite of all those sounds of worlds colliding, we also heard another noise, which was more intimate, more terrifying. Something was on the roof of the elevator cab.
    Crawling, slithering.
    It could have been nothing but a loose cable, which might have explained our quaking, jerky progress toward the ground floor. But it wasn't a loose cable. That was wishful thinking. This thing was alive.
    Alive and purposeful.
    I couldn't imagine how anything could have gotten into the shaft with us after the doors had shut, unless the intermingling of these two realities was nearly complete. In which case, at any moment, might not the thing on the roof pass through the ceiling and be among us, like a ghost passing through a wall?
    Doogie remained focused on the indicator board above the doors, but the rest of us—animals, kids, and adults—turned our faces up toward the menacing sounds.
    In the center of the ceiling was an escape hatch. A way out. A way in .
    Borrowing the Uzi from Doogie once more, I aimed at the ceiling.
    Sasha also covered the trapdoor with her shotgun.
    I wasn't optimistic about the effectiveness of gunfire. Unless I was misremembering, Delacroix had suggested that at least some of the expedition members were heavily armed when they went to the other side.
    Guns hadn't saved them.
    The elevator groaned-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 from the other side, there would be a handle or a recessed groove in which fingers could be hooked.
    The flying gargoyle had hands, thick talon like