“He's dead, you guys. He wasn't before, but he is now. Ding-dong, the General's dead!” And to my total amazement, Herb Porter, the Barry Goldwater of 490 Park Avenue South, actually raised his hands, began snapping his fingers, and did a little Mexican hat-dance step.
“You're sick, Herb,” Bill said.
“He's also right,” I said. “The General's dead and so's—”
There came a clattery, disorganized knocking on the street door. It made us all jump and clutch each other. We must have looked like Dorothy and her friends on the Yellow Brick Road, faced with some new danger.
“Let go of me, both of you,” Bill said. “It's just the boss.”
It was indeed Roger, hammering on the door and peering in at us, with the tip of his nose squished into a little white dime against the glass. Bill let him in. Roger joined us. He also looked as if someone had lit him on fire and then blown him out, but at least he was dressed, socks and all. Probably he was on his way out, anyway.
“Where's Sandra?” was the first thing he asked.
“She was going to Cony Island,” Herb said. His color was coming back, and I realized he was blushing. It was sort of cute, in a ponderous way. “She might well turn up, though.” He paused. “If it carried that far. The telepathy thing, I mean.” He looked almost timid, an expression I never expected to see on Herb's face. “What do you guys think?”
“I think it might have,” Roger said. “That was her gadget that went off in our heads, wasn't it? The Dark and Stormy Night whatsit.” I nodded. So did Bill and Herb.
Roger took a deep breath, held it, then let it out. “Come on, let's see what kind of a mess we're in.” He paused. “And whether or not we can get out of it.”
The elevator seemed to take forever. None of us said anything, not out loud, anyway, and when I discovered I could turn off the run of their thoughts, I did so. Hearing all those muttering voices twined together in the middle of your head is distressing. I suppose that now I know how schizophrenics must feel.
When the door opened on the fifth floor and the smell hit us, we all winced. Not in distaste, but in surprise. “Oh man,” Herb said. “All the way out here in the fucking hall. Do you suppose anyone else could smell it? I mean, anyone else but us?”
Roger shook his head and started toward the Zenith offices, walking with his hands rolled into fists. He stopped outside the office door. “Which of you has the key? Because I left mine at home.”
I was rummaging for them in my pocket when Bill stepped forward and tried the knob. It turned. He looked at us with his eyebrows raised, then went in.
I'd characterize what we'd smelled when the elevator door opened on Five as a scent. In the reception office it was much, much stronger—what you would have called a reek, if it had been unpleasant. It wasn't, so what does that leave? Pungent, I suppose; a pungent, earthy smell.
This is so hard. To this point I've been racing along, wanting to get to what we found (and what we didn't), but here I find myself moving much more slowly, searching for ways to describe what is, essentially, indescribable. And it occurs to me how infrequently we are called upon to write about smells and the powerful ways in which they affect us. The smell in the Central Falls House of Flowers was similar to this in its strength, but in other ways, important ways, entirely different. The greenhouse smell was threatening, sinister. This one was like...
Well, I might as well just say it. It was like coming home.
Roger looked around at Bill and me and gave us a forbidding District Attorney stare. “Toast and jam?” he asked. “Popcorn? Honeysuckle? New goddam car?”
We shook our heads. Zenith had put its various disguises aside, perhaps because it no longer needs them to entice us. I tuned into their thoughts again, just enough to know that Bill and Roger smelled what I did. There were variations, I'm sure, as no two sets of perception are alike (not to mention no two sets of olfactory receptors), but basically it was the same thing. Green... strong... friendly... home. I just hope and pray I'm not wrong about the friendly part.
“Come on,” Roger said.
Herb grabbed his arm. “What if somebody—”
“Nobody's here,” I said. “Carlos was and the General was, but they're... you know... gone.”
“Don't gild the lily,” Bill said. “They're dead.”
“Come on,” Roger repeated, and we followed him.
The reception area was clean as a whistle, the garlic still holding Zenith at bay, but the first green scouts had already gotten to within five feet of the pass-through to the editorial department (there's no door at the reception end of the hallway, only a square arch flanked by Macho Man posters). Fifteen or twenty feet down, where the door to Roger's office opens on the left, the growth has thickened considerably, covering most of the carpet and climbing up the walls. By the point where Herb's office and Sandra's face each other, it has covered the old gray carpet in a new carpet of fresh green, as well as most of the walls. It has gotten a start on the ceiling for good measure, hanging from the fluorescent lights in ropy swags. Beyond that, down toward Riddley's country, it has become a jungle. Yet I knew that if I walked down there, it would open to let me pass.
Pass, friend, come home. Yes, I could hear it whispering that to me.
“Ho... lee... shit,” Bill said.
“We've created a monster,” Herb said, and even in that moment of stress and wonder it occurred to me that he'd been reading too many Anthony LaScorbia novels for his own good.
Roger started down the hallway, moving slowly. We had all heard pass, friend, and we all felt that undeniable welcome, but we were all ready to run, just the same. It was just too new, too weird.
Although there's only one corridor in the office suite, it makes that little zigzag jog in the middle. We call the part running through the editorial offices “the front corridor.” Beyond the jog are the mailroom, the janitor's cubby, and a utility room to which only the building's personnel are supposed to have access (although I suspect Riddley has a key). This part is called “the back corridor.”
In the front corridor, there are three offices on the left: Roger's, Bill's, and Herb's. On the right there's a small office supply closet mostly taken up by our cranky Xerox machine, then my office, and finally Sandra's. The doors to Roger's office, Bill's, and the supply closet were all closed. My door, Herb's door, and Sandra's door were all open.
“Fuu-uck,” Herb said in a horrified whisper. “Look on the side of her door.”
“It's not Kool-Aid, I can tell you that much,” Bill said.
“More on the carpet, too,” Roger said. Herb used the f-word again, once more breaking it into two syllables.
There was no blood on the ivy-runners, I noticed, and although I didn't want to think about that too much, I suppose I know why not. Our buddy gets hungry, and doesn't that make perfect sense? There's so much more of it to support now, so many new outposts and colonies, and our psychic vibrations can probably offer it only so much in the way of nourishment. There's an old blues tune on the subject. “Grits ain't groceries,” the chorus goes. By the same token, friendly thoughts and supportive editors ain't...
Well, they ain't blood.
Are they?
Roger looked into Herb's office and I looked into mine. My place looked okay, but I knew damned well Carlos had been there, and not just because of the fancy-shmancy attache case sitting on top of the desk. I could almost smell him.
“Things are a trifle disarranged in your cubby, Herbert,” Bill said in a really terrible English butler voice. Maybe it was his way of trying to lighten the tension. “In fact, I believe someone may have urinated a bit in theah.”
Herb glanced in, saw the destruction, and grunted an oath that sounded almost absent-minded before turning to Sandra's office. By then, I was getting a pretty clear picture. Two crazy men, both with grudges against different Zenith House editors. I didn't care how they got in or which of them had arrived first, but I was curious about how far apart in time they'd been. If they'd met in the lobby and had their lunatic shootout there, they could have saved us a lot of trouble. Only that probably wasn't the way Zenith wanted it. Aside from the fact that Carlos may have owed a rather large debt to something (or Something) in the Great Beyond, there's the fact that grits ain't groceries. Telepathic plants get more than lonely, it seems. Pore little fellers get hungry, too.