Then, suddenly, four strange and unexpected things happened at once.
First, Remo felt wrong. It was a kind of wrongness that was difficult to describe. His teeth hurt. His vision blurred for a microsecond, almost too quickly for an ordinary person to detect.
Chiun stopped in mid-warble.
"Remo!" he squeaked. "Something is wrong!"
"I know. I feel it, too."
They looked around. All seemed normal. Except for the persistent IRS operatives.
Then Remo noticed Delpha Rohmer hurrying from the elevator banks.
Simultaneously, the Master of Sinanju spied Cheeta Ching clopping in off the street.
Delpha and Cheeta were both headed toward the same thing: the revolving door.
They reached it simultaneously. Cheeta noticed Delpha, and Delpha spotted her mortal enemy. In between, the trapped revenue collector pounded futilely for release.
He, at least, got his wish granted.
Cheeta took a run at the door. Delpha, in the act of entering the revolving door, hesitated. Cheeta bulled through. Literally through. She passed through the door as if it were a brass and glass mirage.
The sight of that was enough to start the IRS man's adrenaline pumping. Like a slave lashed to a grinding wheel, he kept pushing the stubborn revolving door, forcing it to squeal and groan.
The door surrendered. The rubber weather stripping slapped and squeaked as Delpha, caught by surprise, was swallowed up and carried between two sheets of brass-bound glass.
The revolving door ejected the revenue collector onto the steps. He was so happy that he didn't realize he was sinking into cold concrete until he had reached the sidewalk and found he had no traction.
Delpha Rohmer saw the man standing-apparently-on his ankles, then looked down at her own feet and clutched for a brass awning pole, moaning, "O Ishtar, save your daughter!"
She was on the last step. It seemed solid.
The IRS man looked up to her with a beseeching expression on his wide face. "Help me!"
When Delpha recoiled, he grabbed for one of her pale wrists. Delpha tried to kick him. She lost her balance and fell into the sidewalk.
Delpha Rohmer had wanted to be a witch since she was a little girl. Witches were her role models. As she crouched on the intangible sidewalk, staring at her hands slipping into the gray concrete, her mind flashed back to childhood.
"Help me!" she screamed in a high, skittery voice. "I'm melting! Oh, I'm melting!"
In a matter of seconds, she was a pair of legs sticking up from the pavement and collecting a horrified crowd.
Oblivious to the fact that she had walked through solid glass, Cheeta Ching stumbled into the lobby yelling, "You'll rue the day you met me, Hortense!"
Seeing no sign of her prey, Cheeta stopped, her eyes raking the lobby.
She started sinking into the floor almost at once.
Chiun shrieked, "Cheeta! She is sinking!"
"We lost Broomhilda, too," Remo said. "What the heck's going on?"
The Master of Sinanju didn't reply. His face a knot of concern, he bounded for the helpless figure of Cheeta Ching.
"Do not fear, child. I am here."
Cheeta seemed not to hear. She was staring at her legs as they vanished into the lobby marble, taking the rest of her with them. Her arms were lifted high. They trembled.
The Master of Sinanju reached out to help her. His thin fingers grasped solid flesh, only to come away empty.
"Remo!" Chiun said in a horrified voice. "I am helpless!"
Remo jumped to his side, but found he could no more touch Cheeta Ching than the Master of Sinanju. He said, "Get down to the basement and catch her there."
Chiun flew off. Remo hit the revolving door. It was as solid as it looked. So were the steps. He took them in one leap.
At the last step, Remo reached out for the crying IRS man. He accepted Remo's outstretched hands gratefully. Remo pulled him to solid ground, then got down on his knees.
He was too late. Delpha Rohmer's kicking feet vanished like popped soap bubbles.
"Damn!" he muttered, rising again.
Along Fifth Avenue, passersby gawked and shouted. They made the same sound as silent movie actors. Which is to say, none.
"What in God's name is happening?" the IRS man moaned.
"Halloween decided to stick around an extra day," Remo said, pushing the man back up the steps.
Back in the lobby, Remo left the man to his fellow agents and went in search of the stairs to the basement.
On the way down, he felt weird again. His teeth chattered briefly, and his vision blurred. The sensation reminded him of the vibrating floor-plates in carnival fun houses he had visited as a boy.
"Now what?" he growled.
IRS agent Gerard Vonneau had gone through the thirteenth floor twice without finding the hidden office. On his third run-through, he decided to be scientific about it.
He located a suite where the phone sounded loudest. In the adjoining suite, it was equally loud. He stormed across the hall. Softer. Definitely softer.
So Vonneau went back to the first suite. Then it hit him. There was probably a connecting suite. Sure enough, what he had taken for a closet door opened on the most immodest office Vonneau had ever seen in a twenty-year career of auditing large corporations.
The telephone was a sophisticated model. He raced to it, snatched up the receiver, and shouted "Hello?" before the entire universe turned white and his right ear was filled with a roar that made him dream of diesel locomotives crackling with static electricity.
It was twenty minutes before the shock wore off.
By that time the floating, white, manlike thing had merged with the ceiling, like a melting ice cream bar. His dangling wrists and limp fingers were the last things to disappear from sight.
Yuli Batenin was seated on the wide, warm bed in his fourteenth-floor suite, watching the latest bulletin with his fellow Shield operatives.
The American anchorman Don Cooder was framed in the screen, looking, to Batenin's eyes, like a wellbarbered water buffalo.
"As yet there has been no explanation for the mysterious reversing of the Rumpp Tower situation. Less than twenty minutes ago, a sharp-eyed National Guard helicopter pilot noticed what no one else had-that his rotor blades were causing the trees decorating the lower building to sway. A team of rescue firefighters braved possible death to enter the building and liberate the people trapped on the ground floor. Efforts are now under way to evacuate the entire building before the uncanny events of Halloween Eve can recur. Of the man at the heart of the controversy, Randal Rumpp, omninously, there is no word."
Captain Igor Gerkoff turned to Batenin, his bulldog face dully curious.
"What does this mean, Batenin?"
"I do not know, but we must watch carefully. All channels."
"There is more than one channel on American TV .
Batenin nodded. "There are hundreds."
And the men of Shield laughed at the hilarious joke. Until Batenin began running up and down the dial with sure clicks of his remote control.
A Russian muttered thickly, "It is no wonder we lost Cold War."
Gerkoff slapped him and Batenin settled on another channel, saying, "Go to other room and watch other televisions. They will bring Brashnikov out. That is when we will strike."
"By then it will be too late."
"No. We could not hope to succeed. There are too many people. Too many cameras."
"So? We kill them all. We have bullets."
"No. It cannot work. We will allow Brashnikov to show himself, and we will find him later. This is a socalled open society. It will be easy."
"I am in charge here, Batenin."
"And I am only one who is certain to recognize Rair Brashnikov when he shows his face."
Captain Gerkoff jumped to his feet angrily. Batenin stiffened where he sat.