Rabbits(67)

“Sid,” he said, “what’s going on?”

“Don’t get in the middle of this, Albert. I need to go upstairs.”

“Sure,” Albert said. “That’s fine, but you have to wait for clearance.”

“This is bullshit,” Sidney said, stepping out of the elevator with Chloe behind her.

“Your clearance is coming,” Albert said.

Sidney was clearly surprised. “It is?”

Albert nodded. “Ten minutes.”

As I stepped out of the elevator behind Sidney and Chloe, something changed. The air was different suddenly, heavier, charged somehow.

Something was coming.

The back of the foyer, directly across from the elevators, started filling up with dark swirling shapes, and the familiar thick tingling of the gray feeling began gnawing its way into my skull.

But something was different.

I had no idea what this thing was, this gray emptiness that had become such a large part of my life, but I eventually realized what it was that felt different. It was excited.

It wanted me to step back into the elevator.

So I did.

As soon as I started moving backward, the shadows surged forward and slammed me into the back of the elevator.

As I hit the wall, I heard Chloe yell my name. The sound of her voice snapped me out of whatever spell the gray things had cast and I lunged for the open door button. But I was too late. The elevator was rising.

I looked up at the numbers. I hadn’t pressed anything, but the wide PH button was illuminated.

The elevator ascended at a remarkably high speed. My ears popped after a few seconds and I could feel what was left of the buzzing and tingling sensations leaving my brain.

And then the doors opened and I stepped out.

The floor was smooth black marble and the walls were finished with some kind of polished metal. A large abstract painting filled the wall at the end of the wide hallway to my left, and a set of glass double doors were visible at the other end of the hall in the distance.

Nothing stood out about the shapes and colors of the painting, although part of me thought I’d seen it in an art history textbook during my first year of college.

I turned away from the painting and walked toward the double doors. The air was cool and clean, the humidity high and refreshing. Somebody had clearly spared no expense to make the atmosphere perfect.

I pushed through the doors and entered a small lobby. There was a high reception desk to my right and a few chairs and small tables to my left. Behind the reception desk was a set of dark wooden doors. They were a few feet taller than normal, and almost completely covered in intricately carved symbols.

There was nobody around, no phone to call or bell to ring, so I walked over to the wooden doors and knocked.

No answer.

There was a small security panel to the right of the doors, which led me to believe I’d need some kind of access code to get in, but when I turned the handle and pulled, the door opened easily, with a barely audible click.

I stepped through the door and onto the thick glass floor of a mezzanine of some kind. In front of me and to the right, a floating staircase—with wide steps made of the same thick glass—led down to the main level.

The room was a bit dark, so it took my eyes a moment to adjust, but once they did, I couldn’t stop looking around.

I felt like I’d stepped into a library from another world.

The walls were three or four times the height of a standard office, and the ceiling featured three extremely wide skylights that looked like giant backlit canvas paintings of an overcast gray sky.

The wall on the left was covered with antique floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Bisecting the bookshelves was a thick glass walkway accessible by two additional floating glass staircases. There were Victorian-era chairs and tables up there where someone could sit and read, and a number of old-style wooden rolling ladders on both the main and mezzanine walkway levels that could easily be used to reach the books on the top shelves of either section. Two huge lighting fixtures hanging from the ornate ceiling reminded me of the midcentury–meets–Native American décor of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. If you’d told me this was the Victorian headquarters of the National Geographic Society, that would have made perfect sense.

The wall to my right, which ran adjacent to the bookshelves, was covered by the biggest screen I’d ever seen outside of a football stadium, and the wall directly in front of me was nothing but windows covered with what appeared to be electronically adjustable neutral-density filters. I’d seen those filters in Wired recently, and if the skylights featured the same technology, this entire floor could go from bright sunlight to total darkness with the simple press of a button.

The expansive view of the city visible through the windows grounded me a little. Although I’d clearly entered some kind of bizarre H. G. Wells dreamscape, at least that dreamscape appeared to be located in Seattle. And even though the room was enormous, it didn’t feel empty. An impressive collection of art covered the myriad desks and tables, and everything, from the furniture to the area rugs, had been arranged in a way that made perfect use of the space.

On the floor, the antique-meets-cool-glass aesthetic turned slightly midcentury modern. Facing the enormous screen were two black-and-brown Eames lounge chairs on a large worn Persian carpet. There was loud music playing from a modern vertical-style turntable mounted on a nearby wall.