Over the droning vibration from below the deck he could presently hear children laughing, and when he came to a gleaming wooden staircase he saw a little girl with blond braids come flying down the banister; she rebounded from the floor and the wall like a big beach ball, and her long white dress spread out in an air-filled bell to let her sink gently to the carpeted landing.
Another girl came zooming down right behind her to do the same trick, and a third simply spun swan-diving down through the vertical space of the stairwell, graceful as a leaf.
“Up, up!” cried girl voices from the landing above, and when Strube stepped forward to tilt his head back and peer in that direction, he saw three more blond little girls stamping their feet with impatience.
All six of the girls seemed to be identical—sextuplets?—and to be about seven years old. How could they be doing these impossible acrobatics? They were a little higher up than he was—was the gravity weaker up in that ring? When he counted them all again, he got seven; then five; then eight.
“Girls,” he said dizzily; but the three or four on his level were holding hands and dancing in a ring, chanting, “When the sky began to roar, ‘twas like a lion at the door!” and the three or four above went on calling, “Up, up!”
“Girls!” he said, more loudly.
The several who had been dancing dropped their hands now and stared at him wide-eyed. “He can see us!” said one to another.
Strube was dizzy. His neck was wet, and he couldn’t shake the notion that it was wet with blood rather than sweat, but with his hands cuffed behind him he couldn’t reach up to find out.
“Of course I can see you,” he said. “Listen to me. I need to find a grown-up. Where’s your mother?”
“We don’t think we have a mother,” said one of the girls in front of him. “Where is your mother, please?”
This was getting him nowhere. “What are your names?”
One of the girls at the landing above called down, “We’re each named Kelley. We all became friends because of that, and because we couldn’t sleep, even though it was pitch dark.”
“In most gardens,” spoke up a girl in front of Strube, “they make the beds too soft, so the flowers are always asleep.”
“We came from a hard, noisy garden,” put in one who was sliding slowly down the banister. “We’ve got to go up,” she told her companions. “If there isn’t the sun, there’ll be the moon.”
“Who is taking care of you?” Strube insisted. “Who did you come here with?”
“We were thrown out of a dark place,” said one of the girls above. The four or five below were climbing the stairs now with graceful spinning hops. “Again,” put in another.
At least they seem to be well cared for, Strube thought. Then he looked more closely at a couple of them and noticed their pallor and their sunken cheeks, and he saw that their dresses were made of some coarsely woven white stuff that looked like matted cobwebs.
“Where do you live?” asked Strube, speaking more shrilly than he had meant to. His heart was pounding and his breath was fast and shallow; he realized that he was frightened, though not of these girls, directly.
“We live in Hell,” one of the Kelleys told him in a matter-of-fact tone. “But we’re climbing out,” one of her companions added.
Strube wasn’t able to think clearly, and he knew it was because of the bang his head had taken against the floor back up the hallway. His stomach felt inverted; he would have to find a men’s room soon and throw up. But he felt that he couldn’t leave these defenseless, demented children down here in these roaring, flexing catacombs.
“I’ll lead you out of here,” he said, stepping up the stairs after them. He had to hunch his left shoulder up and stretch his right arm to hold on to the banister, for the ship was rolling ponderously. “We’ve all got to get out of here.”
The girls looked down at him doubtfully from the landing. One of them said “Would you know the sun, or the moon, if you saw either of them?”
Jesus, thought Strube. “Yes. Definitely.”
“What if it’s just another painted canvas?” one of the girls asked.
“I’ll tear it down,” Strube said desperately. “The real one’ll be up there, trust me.”
“Come on, then,” a Kelley told him, and the girls whirled and leaped around him as he climbed on up the stairs. The gravity did seem to be weaker as one ascended higher, and he had to restrain himself from dancing with them.
A LIFT attendant had abruptly appeared in the elevator, cramping things terribly. He was an elderly man in a white shirt and black tie, and in a fretful English accent he demanded to know what class of accommodations Sullivan and Kootie and Elizalde had booked.
Sullivan glanced bewilderedly at Elizalde, and then said heartily, “Oh, first-class!”
“All the way!” added Kootie.
The old man stared at their dirty jeans and disordered hair, and he said, “I think not.” He pushed the button for R Deck, and a moment later the elevator car rocked to a stop. “The Tourist Class Dining Saloon is down the hall ahead of you,” he said sternly as he leaned between Sullivan and Kootie to slide open the gate, “just past the stairs. See that you go no higher up.”
Sullivan hesitated, and considered just throwing the old man out of the car and resuming their upward course; but he and Kootie and Elizalde were deep in the ghost world now, and they might well find the solid ghosts of security guards from the 1930s waiting for them on the higher decks.
“I think we’d better play along,” he said quietly to Elizalde. “We’re in good cover so far, and I doubt that Edison’s field shows up at all in this chaos.” He stepped out of the car onto a carpeted hallway.
After an agonized, tooth-baring whine, Elizalde followed him out, tugging Kootie along by the hand.
Behind them the gate slid closed, and the car began to sink away down the shaft.
The ship was alive with voices now, and Sullivan and his companions seemed to have left the rumble of the screws below them.
Many of the room doors were open, and laughter and excited shouting shook the tobacco-scented air, but when they peeked into the lighted staterooms they passed, they could see only empty couches, and mirrored vanity tables, and paneled walls with motionless curtains over the portholes.
At the open, polished burl walnut stairway they could hear children’s voices ascending from below; but the dining-room doors were ahead of them, and a steamy beef smell and a clatter of cutlery on china was accompanying the voices from beyond the closed doors, and Sullivan led the way around the stairs and pushed the doors open.
The noises were loud now, but the tables and chairs set across the ship’s-width hardwood floor were empty; though a chair here and there did occasionally shift, as if invisible diners were turning their attentions from one companion to another.
Sullivan took Elizalde’s cold hand, while she took Kootie’s, and he led them between the noisy tables toward the service doors in the far bulkhead; and though there were no diners visible, Sullivan tried to thread his way exactly between the tables, and not violate the body spaces of any ghosts.
They exited the dining room through the starboard service door, and now, among the kitchens, they saw people.
Nearly solid men in white chef’s hats were pushing carts in and out of open kitchen doorways, apparently oblivious of the unauthorized intruders; the dishes on the carts were covered with steel domes, and, since the kitchen staff didn’t seem able to see Sullivan and he hadn’t eaten at all today, he reached out and touched one of the covers on a cart that had been momentarily left against the hallway bulkhead. The cover handle was warmly solid, and he lifted the dome away.