Mr. Vandemar blinked, slowly, like an antique camera, and said, “What?”
Mr. Croup scratched his chin. “The corpses-to-be have a point,” he said to Mr. Vandemar. He walked toward the angel, who stood, arms folded, in front of the door. “Sir? It might be wise for you to settle up, before you commence the next stage of your travels.”
The angel turned, and looked down at him as if he were less important than the least speck of dirt. Then it turned away. Richard wondered what it was contemplating. “It is of no matter now,” said the angel. “Soon, all the rewards your revolting little minds can conceive of will be yours. When I have my throne.”
“Jam tomorrow, eh?” said Richard.
“Don’t like jam,” said Mr. Vandemar. “Makes me belch.”
Mr. Croup waggled a finger at Mr. Vandemar, “He’s welching out on us,” he said. “You don’t welch on Mister Croup and Mister Vandemar, me bucko. We collect our debts.”
Mr. Vandemar walked over to where Mr. Croup was standing. “In full,” he said.
“With interest,” barked Mr. Croup.
“And meat hooks,” said Mr. Vandemar
“From Heaven?” called Richard, from behind them. Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar walked toward the contemplative angel. “Hey!” said Mr. Croup.
The door had opened, only a crack, but it was open. Light flooded through the crack in the door. The angel took a step forward. It was as if it were dreaming with its eyes wide open. The light from the crack in the door bathed its face, and it drank it in like wine. “Have no fear,” it said. “For when the vastness of creation is mine, and they gather about my throne to sing hosannas to my name, I shall reward the worthy and cast down those who are hateful in my sight.”
With an effort, Door wrenched the black door fully open. The view through the door was blinding in its intensity: a swirling maelstrom of color and light. Richard squinted his eyes, and turned his head away from the glare, all vicious orange and retinal purple. Is that what Heaven looks like? It seems more like Hell.
And then he felt the wind. A candle flew past his head, and vanished through the door. And then another. And then the air was filled with candles, all spinning and tumbling through the air, heading for the light. If was as if the whole room were being sucked through the door. It was more than a wind, though. Richard knew that. His wrists began to hurt where they were manacled—it was as if, suddenly, he weighed twice as much as he ever had before. And then his perspective changed. The view through the doorway— it was looking down: it was not merely the wind that was pulling everything toward the door. It was gravity. The wind was only the air in the hall being sucked into the place on the other side of the door. He wondered what was on the other side of the door—the surface of a star, perhaps, or the event horizon of a black hole, or something he could not even imagine.
Islington grabbed hold of the pillar beside the door, and held on desperately. “That’s not Heaven,” it shouted, gray eyes flashing, spittle on its perfect lips. “You mad little witch. What have you done?”
Door was clutching the chains that held her to the black pillar, white-knuckled. There was triumph in her eyes. Mr. Vandemar had caught hold of a table leg, while Mr. Croup, in his turn, had caught hold of Mr. Vandemar. “It wasn’t the real key,” said Door, triumphantly, over the roar of the wind. “That was just a copy of the key I had Hammersmith make in the market.”
“But it opened the door,” screamed the angel.
“No,” said the girl with the opal eyes, distantly. “I opened a door. As far and hard away as I could, I opened a door.”
There was no longer any trace of kindness or compassion on the angel’s face; only hatred, pure and honest and cold. “I will kill you,” it told her.
“Like you killed my family? I don’t think you’re going to kill anyone anymore.”
The angel was hanging onto the pillar with pale fingers, but its body was at a ninety-degree angle to the room, and was most of the way through the door. It looked both comical and dreadful. It licked its lips. “Stop it,” it pleaded. “Close the door. I’ll tell you where your sister is . . . She’s still alive . . . ” Door flinched.
And Islington was sucked through the door, a tiny, plummeting figure, shrinking as it tumbled into the blinding gulf beyond. The pull was getting stronger. Richard prayed that his chains and manacles would hold: he could feel himself being sucked toward the opening, and, from the corner of his eye, he could see the marquis dangling from his chains, like a string-puppet being sucked up by a vacuum cleaner.
The table, the leg of which Mr. Vandemar was holding tightly, flew through the air and jammed in the open doorway. Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar were dangling out of the door. Mr. Croup, who was clinging, quite literally, to Mr. Vandemar’s coattails, took a deep breath and began slowly to clamber, hand over hand, up Mr. Vandemar’s back. The table creaked. Mr. Croup looked at Door, and he smiled like a fox. “I killed your family,” said Mr. Croup. “Not him. And now I’m—finally—going to finish the . . . “
It was at that moment that the fabric of Mr. Vandemar’s dark suit gave way. Mr. Croup tumbled, screaming, into the void, clutching a long strip of black material. Mr. Vandemar looked down at the flailing figure of Mr. Croup as it fell away from them. He, too, looked over at Door, but there was no menace in his gaze. He shrugged, as best as one can shrug while holding on to a table leg for dear life, and then he said, mildly, “Bye-bye,” and let go of the table leg.
Silently he plunged through the door, into the light, shrinking as he fell, heading for the tiny figure of Mr. Croup. Soon the two shapes merged into one little blob of blackness in a sea of churning purple and white and orange light, and then the black dot, too, was gone. It made some sort of sense, Richard thought: they were a team, after all.
It was getting harder to breathe. Richard felt giddy and light-headed. The table in the doorway splintered and was sucked away through the door. One of Richard’s manacles popped open, and his right arm whipped free. He grabbed the chain holding the left hand, and gripped it as tightly as he could, grateful that the broken finger was on the hand that was still in the manacle; even so, red and blue flashes of pain were shooting up his left arm. He could hear himself, distantly, shouting in pain.
He could not breathe. White blotches of light exploded behind his eyes. He could feel the chain beginning to give way . . .