The wind tried to hold the door shut. Jack shouldered it open, and then the wind caught it and pulled on it instead of pushing, tore it away from him, flung it outward with such tremendous force that it banged against the outside wall. He stepped across the threshold, onto the flat roof.
Up here, the storm was a living thing. With a lion's ferocity, it leapt out of the night, across the parapet, roaring and sniffing and snorting. It tugged at Jack's coat. It stood his hair on end, then plastered it to his head, then stood it on end again. It expelled its frigid breath in his face and slipped cold fingers under the collar of his coat.
He crossed to that edge of the roof which was nearest the next brownstone. The crenelated parapet was waist-high. He leaned against it, looked out and down. As he had expected, the gap between the buildings was only about four feet wide.
Rebecca and the kids joined him, and Jack said, “We'll cross over.”
“How do we bridge it?” Rebecca asked.
“Must be something around that'll do the job.”
He turned and surveyed the roof, which wasn't entirely cast in darkness; in fact, it possessed a moon-pale luminescence, thanks to the sparkling blanket of snow that covered it. As far as he could see, there were no loose pieces of lumber or anything else that could be used to make a bridge between the two buildings. He ran to the elevator housing and looked on the other side of it, and he looked on the far side of the exit box that contained the door at the head of the stairs, but he found nothing. Perhaps something useful lay underneath the snow, but there was no way he could locate it without first shoveling off the entire roof.
He returned to Rebecca and the kids. Penny and Davey remained hunkered down by the parapet, sheltering against it, keeping out of the biting wind, but Rebecca rose to meet him.
He said, “We'll have to jump.”
“What?”
“Across. We'll have to jump across.”
“We can't,” she said.
“It's less than four feet.”
“But we can't get a running start.”
“Don't need it. Just a small gap.”
“We'll have to stand on this wall,” she said, touching the parapet, “and jump from there.”
“Yeah.”
“In this wind, at least one of us is sure as hell going to lose his balance even before he makes the jump — get hit by a hard gust of wind and just fall right off the wall.”
“We'll make it,” Jack said, trying to pump-up his own enthusiasm for the venture.
She shook her head. Her hair blew in her face. She pushed it out of her eyes. She said, “Maybe, with luck, both you and I could do it. Maybe. But not the kids.”
“Okay. So one of us will jump on the other roof, and one of us will stay here, and between us we'll hand the kids across, from here to there.”
“Pass them over the gap?”
“Yeah.”
“Over a fifty-foot drop?”
“There's really not much danger,” he said, wishing he believed it. “From these two roofs, we could reach across and hold hands.”
“Holding hands is one thing. But transferring something as heavy as a child—”
“I'll make sure you have a good grip on each of them before I let go. And as you haul them in, you can brace yourself against the parapet over there. No sweat.”
“Penny's getting to be a pretty big girl.”
“Not that big. We can handle her.”
“But—”
“Rebecca, those things are in this building, right under our feet, looking for us right this very minute.”
She nodded. “Who goes first?”
“You.”
“Gee, thanks.”
He said, “I can help you get up on top of the wall, and I can hold you until just a split second before you jump. That way, there's hardly any chance you could lose your balance and fall.”
“But after I'm over there and after we've passed the kids across, who's going to help you get on top of the wall and keep your balance up there?”
“Let me worry about that when the time comes,” he said.
Wind like a freight train whistled across the roof.
V
Snow didn't cling to the corrugated metal storage shed at the rear of Lavelle's property. The falling flakes melted when they touched the roof and walls of that small structure. Wisps of steam were actually rising from the leeward slope of the roof; those pale snakes of vapor writhed up until they came within range of the wind's brisk broom; then they were swept away.
Inside, the shed was stifling hot.
Nothing moved except the shadows. Rising out of the hole in the floor, the irregularly pulsing orange light was slightly brighter than it had been earlier. The flickering of it caused the shadows to shiver, giving an illusion of movement to every inanimate object in the dirt-floored room.
The cold night air wasn't the only thing that failed to penetrate these metal walls. Even the shrieking and soughing of the storm wind was inaudible herein. The 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 b'a,ced on the wall, in a half crouch. The wind 'buffeted her, and she was sure that she would save 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.