For Ryker saw that the circumstances of his third encounter with the Vanishing Lady had been reproduced. There was that same impression of additional gloom, a black hole opening, swiftly seen to be due to the elevator doors standing open and the cage dark, and the dim-gleaming slender figure of the Vanishing Lady in profile just inside and just beyond the column of control buttons.
But this time her posture did not seem dejected but relaxedly alive: her head was bent, it’s true, but it also seemed turned a little in his direction, as if she were scanning his approach coquettishly, there was more if anything of an elusive shimmering dim sparkle about her shoulders and her front, she held again (left hand this time, the nearer one) that mysterious little brass object he’d mistaken for a key, the total effect being surprisingly erotic, as if it were a black-and-silver drawing, “Assignation in the Shadows”; while all the while he hurried on eagerly, faster and faster, fiercely arming himself against any last-minute cringings aside, determined to let only a premature closing of its doors bar him from that elevator tonight.
Without the slightest hesitation he strode into the dark cage, bowing slightly to her as he did so, reaching his right hand toward the top of the buttons column, where the light switch was, to turn it on, and said in a low and respectful voice, “Good evening.” This last came out deeper and more resonant than he’d intended, so that it had a rather sepulchral sound. And his third movement was not completed, for just as he entered, she raised her head and simultaneously reached, her black-gloved right hand and that arm across her body and the lower half of her face, apparently anticipating his intention to switch on the light, so that his own hand drew back.
He turned facing her as he stepped past her and settled his back against that of the elevator. Her outstretched arm concealed her lips, so he couldn’t tell if she smiled or not, but hen gleaming eyes followed him as he moved across the cage, and at least they didn’t frown. The effect was provocative, alluring.
But her outreached hand did not turn on the light. Instead its black forefinger seemed to lay itself against the flat brass between the 12 and 14 buttons. But she must have pressed one or the other of those in so doing, for the doors growled shut and the cage moved upward.
That plunged the cage in gloom, but not quite as deeply as he would have expected, for the strange pale glimmering around her neck and her black coat’s closure seemed to strengthen a little, almost sparkle (real or imagined? her body’s aura, could it be? or only his old eyes dazzling?) and a twinkle of other light came in by the little window as they passed the second floor. In his state of heightened awareness he dimly yet distinctly saw her right hand drop away from the button panel and her other hand join it, creep a little way into its sleeve and then in one swift backward motion strip the glove from her right hand, which then uncurled gracefully toward him palm upward through the dark between them like a slender white sash ending in five slim white ribbons of unequal length. Advancing a step and bowing his head toward it, he gently received its cool weightless length upon his own fingers, touched his lips to the smooth slim palm, and withdrawing laid across it the white orchid he’d been carrying. Another little window winked by.
She pressed the slender spray against her throat and with her yet-gloved hand touched his as if in thanks. She wondered why she had pressed between the buttons and why the cage had responded, why she had not blacked out while drawing off her glove. Dark memories threatened opening, not without fear. She tugged a little at Ryker’s hand in drawing her own away.
Emboldened, he advanced another step, bringing him almost against her. Her cat-triangular small face tilted up toward his, half of it pale, the other half dark mouth, gray gleaming eyes, shadowed orbits under slim black brows. His left hand brushed her side and slid behind her, pressed her slim back. His right sought out the fingers at her throat holding his orchid and caressed them, playing with them gently. He felt her suede-soft gloved fingers creeping at the back of his neck.
She slid, the orchid with its insubstantial spray inside her coat and her ungloved moist hand stroked his dry cheek. His hand felt out two large round buttons at her neck, tilted them through their thread-bordered slits, and the collar of her coat fell open. The diamond sparkling that had long puzzled him intensified, gushed up and poured out fountainlike, as if he had uncovered her aura’s nest—or was his old heart blowing up a diamond hurricane? or his old eyes jaggedly spinning out a diamond migraine pattern? He gazed down through this ghostly scintillation, these microscopic stars, at a landscape pearly gray and cool as the moon’s, the smooth valley where the orchid lodged between her small jutting breasts with their dark silver nipples, a scene that was not lost, though it swung and narrowed a little, when her small hands drew his head down to hers and their lips met in a leisurely kiss that dizzied him unalarmingly.
It occurred to him whimsically that although the pearly landscape he continued to admire might seem to stretch on and on, it had an exceedingly low black sky, an extremely low ceiling, air people would say. Now why should that fantasy carry overtones which were more sinister than amusing? he wondered idly.
It was at that moment that he became aware that he was smelling cigar smoke. The discovery did not particularly startle or alarm him, but it did awaken his other senses a little from their present great dreamy preoccupation, though not entirely. Indeed, in one sense that preoccupation deepened, for at that moment the tip of her tongue drew a very narrow line into their kiss. But at the same time, as he noted that the elevator had come to rest, that its creaking groan had been replaced by a growling mutter which he liked still less, while a wavering ruddy glow, a shadowed reddish flickering, was mounting the walls of the cage from some unknown source below, and that the thin reek of cigar smoke was becoming more acrid.
Unwillingly, wearily (he was anything but tired, yet this cost an effort), he lifted his gaze without breaking their kiss, without thinking of breaking it, and continuing to fondle her back and neck, until he was looking across her shoulder.
He saw, by the red glow, that the door of the cage had opened without his having noticed it and that the elevator was at the fourteenth floor.
But not quite at the fourteenth floor, for the outer door was closed tight and the little window in it that had the numeral 14 painted under it stood about eighteen inches higher than it should.
So the floor of the cage must be the same distance below the floor of Fourteen.
Still unalarmed, grudging each effort, he advanced his head across her shoulder until he could look down over it. As he did so, she leaned her head back and turned it a little sideways, accommodating, so that their kiss was still unbroken, meanwhile hugging him more tightly and making muffled and inarticulate crooning sounds as if to say “It is all right.”
The space between the two floors (which was also the space between the ceiling of Twelve and the floor of Fourteen) was wide open, a doorway five feet wide and scarcely one foot high in the raw wall of the shaft, and through that doorway there was pouring into the bottom of the cage from the very low-ceilinged thirteenth floor a pulsing crimson glow which nevertheless seemed more steady in hue, more regular in its variations of intensity than that of any fire.
This furnace-light revealed, clustered around their ankles but spreading out more scatteredly to fill the elevator’s carpeted floor, a horde of dark squat forms, a milling host of what appeared to be (allowing for the extreme foreshortening) stocky Lilliputian human beings, some lifting their white faces to peer up, others bent entirely to the business at hand. For instance, two pairs of them struggled with dull metal hooks almost as large as they were and to which stout cords were attached, others carried long prybars, one jauntily balanced on shoulder what looked like a white paper packet about as big (relative to him) as an unfolded Sunday newspaper, while more than half of them held between two fingers tiny black cylinders from one end of which interweaving tiny tendrils of smoke arose, forming a thin cloud, and which when they applied the other ends to their tiny mugs, glowed winkingly red in the red light, as if they were a swarm of hellish lightless fireflies.