Kidd took hold of the double end, ducked his head through, and hooked his arms over. (Griffin and Mantis flanked the door.) Thirteen, Denny, and Dragon Lady were handing out the other end among them.
“You just hold on,” Kidd said. “I’ll climb down.” He got onto his knees at the sill, holding the edge (one rough hand lost in griffin light), dropped one leg down, then the other. The shaft at his back was cool. He could not tell if the wind came from above or below. He went over the edge, had to keep away from the wall first with his knee, then with his foot.
“You all right?” Denny asked, legs wide, fists close.
Kidd grunted, pulling on the ropes, taut around his back (pushing something glass into his back) and taut under his arms: “Yeah.” The slanted bar of the door mechanism slid under his bare foot. His sandal toe scraped metal.
Swaying at either side of the door, the apparitions loomed, luminous.
Once he called: “You can lower it a little faster than that. I’m okay.”
“Sorry,” which was Thirteen, catching his breath; and the rope.
His shin scraped the basement door-sill. His bare foot hit something and slipped, in either grease or blood.
He turned, while the rope sagged around him, and looked at the—he had to be dead.
The shaft was momentarily silent, except for wind.
Finally Dragon Lady called down: “You still okay…?”
“Yeah.” Kidd took a breath. “I’ll tie the rope around him. You can haul him up.” He slipped the rope from under his arms, pulled it over his head, but left it around one shoulder; he stepped forward on the oozy filth, stooped, and tugged a leg from where it had wedged between two blackened bumper plates.
“…is he alive?” Thirteen called.
Kidd took another breath. “Naw.” He pulled at the arm, got a grip around the chest, which was all soft against him. His own shirt front soaked immediately. Blood dribbled along his forearm. Standing, he dragged the body back a step. A foot caught, pulled free; the leg fell back against his thigh—his thigh wet, warm, to the knee. Dragging it, limp, reaching for the rope, he thought: Is this what turns on blood and blade freaks? He thought of Tak, he thought of George, hunted in himself for any idle sexuality: he found it, disconcertingly, a small warmth above the loins that, as he bared his teeth and the rope slid through his sticky hand, went out. “Let me have another couple of feet!” Well, he had found it before in auto wrecks, in blue plush, in roots, in wet wood with the bark just stripped.
Rope dropped over his shoulder; the voices eighteen floors up came again:
Oh, Mom—
Is he all right? Kidd, have you found him yet? Bobby? Bobby, can you hear me at all?
Oh, Mom, you heard—
Bobby, are you all right?
He got the rope around the chest, got a clumsy knot done—like trying to do it with your hands in glue—that maybe would hold. Bobby sagged against Kidd’s knees, heavy enough to make his bare foot slide backward. “Okay!” He tugged the rope.
He could see it run across the sill above him, go taut, and slow. The weight lifted from against him. A sneaker dragged across his foot, thumped against the door, and swung away again, and raised, dripping on his cheek. He smeared at his face with the heel of his hand and stepped back.
“Jesus Christ…!” from a girl at the doorway silenced everything but the wind and the reverberating voice:
Bobby, Bobby, please, can you hear me at all?
Another boy said: “Hey, wow…!”
Then, Denny’s nervous laugh: “Oh, man, that’s a mess…!”
Dragon Lady said, “All right, I’m untying him here—you get that rope down to the kid.”
Standing on the bottom of the shaft, his bare heel wedged against one caked girder that crossed the bumper plates, Kidd stared up. For a moment he thought the elevator car descended at him. But it was a trick of light from the flanking beasts, both of whom swayed and flickered at the edge of sight.
The rope fell at him. He grabbed it with one hand, then the other. Someone pulled it; it rasped his coated palms. “Hey…!” It went slack again.
Dragon Lady leaned in, the rope wrapped around one fist. “You got it now?”
“Yeah.” Once more he shrugged it over his head, under his arms. “Got it.”
They tugged him up.
When his head reached the sill, Denny and somebody else were on their knees, catching him around under the armpits. The sill scraped his chin, his chest.
Smokey simply put her hand over her mouth and stepped back behind Thirteen.
Kidd crawled over, got to his feet, moved a few steps forward. The others fell back.
“God damn!” Dragon Lady shook her head, eyes wide, and rolled the rope against her thigh. “God…!”
Denny, with a funny smile, stepped back, black-lined nails moving over his chest. “Wow, you really…” He shook back pale hair, seemed to be considering several things to say. “You look just as bad as…” He glanced at the floor.
“Uh…” Thirteen said, “we got some clothes up at the place. You wanna look through them for something? To change into, well, that’s…all right.”
“Oh, yeah…” Kidd looked down at blood, on himself, on the floor. It didn’t run. It looked like jellied paste. “Thanks.” He looked at the thing on the floor too, while wind and the woman’s voice made torrents in the shaft. “I better get…him upstairs.”
Bobby’s shirt had ripped across the back. The flesh that wasn’t torn was purple.
“You could make a sling, or something,” Thirteen offered. “Hey, do we got anymore of that canvass stuff?”
Someone he didn’t recognize said: “We threw it out.”
Kidd sucked his teeth, stooped, got his arms under Bobby’s shoulders, tugged him over. One eye, open, had burst. The face, as though it had been made of clay, was flattened across one quarter.
Thirteen, glancing up the shaft, said: “Dragon Lady, why you want to go hollering up at her about her kid’s dead?”
“Because,” Dragon Lady said, “if I was his mother, I’d want to know!”
“But suppose he was still—”
“Man,” Dragon Lady said, “that ain’t like gettin’ dumped out a two story window. That’s seventeen, eighteen flights!”
Kidd wedged his hand under the knees, stood, unsteadily, stepped back.
“Watch it!” Denny grabbed Kidd’s shoulder. “You don’t want to go down there again, now, do you?”
Kidd said: “Make the elevator go!” In his arms, the body was heavy, not so warm, and dripped less.
“Huh?” from Dragon Lady, who was coiling up the rope. “Oh, yeah!” She swung into the car, did something else to the switches above the buttons.
The door started to close. She stopped it with her forearm. (K-chunk.)
Denny stepped back as Kidd carried Bobby inside.
“Baby, Adam, you go on up with the others,” Dragon Lady said from the back of the car.
But Kidd, turning to face the door as it rolled to, could not tell which of the people standing behind Thirteen and Smokey she addressed: their light shields had been extinguished.
A moment into darkness, he heard Dragon Lady’s hand move among her chains; and the car filled with light. “So you can see what you’re doing,” the dragon said. “Here, I’ll push the floor. Which one? Seventeen?”
“Yeah.” He nodded, stepped aside.
The car rose.
The dragon beside him, he realized, was bigger than the elevator. Since it was light, he would have expected walls and ceiling to cut off that side claw, the top of that head. The effect, however, was that those places in the blue, enameled walls and ceiling seemed transparent, and the claw and the head shone through. The apparition was reflected on four sides.