Day or night, its brass and Maldetto Vomito marble lobby atrium, containing six floors of the finest shops and boutiques, attracted thousands of shoppers. Offices occupied its middle floors, and above the eighteenth the sumptuous duplex and triplex luxury apartments began.
On this late Halloween afternoon, no one was shopping in the atrium shops. The tourists who had been caught in the building when the phones went dead were huddled at the ground-floor windows looking out with fear-haunted eyes, waiting for rescue.
No one dared leave. They had seen the terrible thing that had happened to any who made that mistake.
It was the same at the Fifty-sixth Street residential entrance. The doorman had opened the door to let a blue-haired matron out. He stepped onto the street, one hand on the brass door handle. It was very lucky for him that he kept his hand on the handle. The second he felt no solidity under his polished shoes, he pulled himself back in.
"What is it? What's wrong?" demanded the perplexed matron.
"My God! It felt like the sidewalk wasn't there."
"Are you drunk? One side, please."
The matron had a poodle on a leash. She let the poodle go ahead of her.
The poodle gave a frisky leap, yelped as if its tail had been run over, and the leash was pulled out of the surprised matron's hand.
"Joline!"
The matron started to step from the lobby, but the doorman pulled her back.
She whirled and slapped him.
"What are you doing?"
"Saving your life," said the doorman, pointing at the poodle's curly butt as it slipped into the pavement, like sausage through a meat-grinder.
"Joline! Come back!" The tail disappeared from sight, and she grabbed the doorman by his charcoal-gray jacket. "Save my Joline! Save my Joline!"
Any thought of rescue evaporated when one of the basement garage elevators rose to sidewalk level and a white stretch Lincoln rolled out.
Momentum carried it into the street. It was still moving forward as the wheels slipped into the asphalt. The grille tipped downward.
When the hood ornament dipped to ground level, the driver jumped free. His leap carried him clear of the car-and straight down into the unsupporting street.
People do strange things when confronted with danger. The chauffeur was up to his chest in gray street, and only a few feet away the stretch Lincoln was slipping from sight. Like a man grasping at a sinking straw he tried to flounder toward it, as if he were swimming in an unreal sea.
The chauffeur's head was lost to sight bare seconds after the Lincoln had vanished.
Not even an air bubble was left to show that they had sunk from sight on that mundane spot in midtown Manhattan.
"I think we'd better stay put," the doorman gulped.
The blue-haired matron said nothing. She had fainted.
Even now, three hours into the crisis, people were still stepping off the elevators, unaware that the Rumpp Tower had undergone an invisible but very dramatic transformation.
Whenever an unwary resident stepped off an elevator, a knot of the trapped would rush to intercept him.
"Please, don't leave the building!" they would implore.
The exchange was almost always the same. Beginning with the inevitable question.
"Why not?"
"Because it's not safe."
After the first dozen people had stepped out onto the sidewalk, and then into the sidewalk, the would-be Samaritans gave up telling the truth. The truth was too unbelievable. So they pleaded and cajoled, and sometimes held the person back by force.
Sometimes a simple demonstration was enough. Like the time two people demonstrated the unstable nature of the world beyond the Rumpp Tower when they rolled an R-shaped brass lobby ashtray to the Fifth Avenue entrance and shoved it out a revolving door.
The ashtray wobbled, tilted, and slowly began to sink. It tipped sand, and the sand seemed to melt into the cheerless gray pavement.
It was a convincing demonstration-and saved several lives-but soon they ran out of ashtrays.
Once, a brave fireman approached the Fifth Avenue entrance. By this time the block had been cordoned off with Public Works sawhorses and emergency vehicles. The fireman wore the black-and-yellow slicker and regulation fire hat of the Fire Department, which made him look like a sloppy yellow-jacket with an attitude. He carried a pole normally used to pick apart burning debris. He carried this like a blind man's cane, tapping the ground before him as if attempting to find a solid path through the apparently unstable concrete.
A cheer went up when, apparently by chance, he found a solid patch of pavement.
The door was thrown open for him. Hands reached out to shake his, to thank him, to touch the brave public servant who had defied an unbearable fate to rescue his fellow human beings.
No sooner had the fireman set foot on the splotchy pink marble apron extending from the lobby than he slipped from grateful hands and began sinking into its gleaming surface.
The fireman managed a stunned comment. "What the fuck!"
People rushed to his side. "Grab him! Don't let him sink!"
Gripping hands tried. They only slipped through the man's seemingly solid form. No one could touch him.
When he saw the marble floor creeping up to his waist, he screamed. It was a long scream. It went on for as long as he continued to sink and a little while after.
The last thing to go was his black fireman's hat.
Wide-eyed shoppers shrank back from the spot where the poor fireman had last been seen. They could see him scream, but no audible sounds reached their ears.
After that, those trapped in the lobby lost all hope and stared out the great windows like dull creatures in a zoo.
The Master of Sinanju regarded the lines of frightened faces from a position behind police lines.
He stood barely five feet tall, yet he stood out of the crowd like a lapis lazuli fireplug. This, despite the fact that several New Yorkers had crawled into their trick-or-treat costumes early.
His blue-and-gold kimono shimmered like the finest of silks. He carried his hands before him, tucked into the garment's wide, touching sleeves. His face was a webwork of wrinkles, like a papyrus death mask upon which spiders had toiled delicately over centuries.
In contrast to the stiffness in his visage, his young, hazel eyes looked out with a sharpness belying his full century of life.
"Nice costume," said a red-faced ghoul at his elbow.