Flashing their lights around them, they left the balcony and headed up the stairs.
"Feels solid," Cora said. "But after what happened to Vinnie, to be safe maybe we should go up in single file. That way, there's less pressure on the stairs."
"Excellent idea." The professor was always ready with praise for Cora, Balenger noted. "Keeping a slight distance between each of us would be useful, too."
Forming a line, they climbed higher through the shadows. On occasion, the stairs creaked, making Balenger tense, but the wood remained steady, and he decided the sound wasn't any different from the normal sounds that old stairs made when someone climbed them.
The professor gasped as a bird on an upper banister panicked, bursting into the air, desperate to escape their intrusion. It slammed into a wall and swung away in greater panic. Blinded, it circled their lights, its wings thrashing. At once, it veered down the stairs, disappearing into the darkness.
"Well, that certainly got the old heart racing," Conklin said.
Balenger turned toward him. "Are you sure you're okay, Professor?"
"Couldn't be better." The stocky man was out of breath again.
"Only two more levels to go."
"Terrific."
Footsteps echoing, they reached level five.
"Uh!" Rick jumped away.
"What's wrong?" Cora shouted.
"This." Rick pointed. "Something brushed the top of my hat."
They aimed their lights above Rick's head.
"For God's sake, that looks like-"
"Roots," Vinnie said.
What resembled ropes and strings dangled from the floor of the balcony above them. Threads seemed attached to them: smaller roots.
"I've never seen anything like… What's growing up there?"
They reached the continuation of the stairs. Rick took the lead, then Cora, Vinnie, Balenger, and finally the professor, whose slow pace made it natural for him to be the last.
Balenger now had a chance to study the skylight. It was spacious, perhaps forty feet square, shaped like the tip of a pyramid. Large segments of glass were held in place by crisscrossing copper supports, their metal green with age.
But many segments were missing or broken. After so many years, heavy accumulations of ice and snow had weakened the supports. Balenger remembered the shattered glass at the bottom of the stairwell. Yes, this is how the birds get in, he thought. He saw a half moon disappearing behind clouds. The wind whistled past the gaps in the skylight, the source of one of the sounds he'd earlier heard. The air got colder.
Something's wrong, he realized. "The stairs don't go higher. We're coming to the sixth level. There should be another set of stairs leading up to Carlisle's penthouse on the seventh. But there aren't any. How do we get up to it?"
"Take a look at that." Rick aimed his flashlight at the balcony he climbed toward.
As one, the group imitated him, their lights revealing the area from which the roots dangled.
"Some kind of…" Cora paused in astonishment. "For the love of… Is that a tree?"
Five feet tall, leafless and listing, its scraggly trunk and branches cast shadows from their lights.
"But how the hell…"
"A bird brought a seed in," Cora said. "Or the wind did it."
"Yes, but how did it manage to grow?"
Balanger's flashlight revealed a shattered urn. Dirt lay in a pile among the broken pieces. The tree grew out of the dirt. "There's your explanation. Add a little rain from the broken skylight, and it manages to stay alive."
"Barely," Rick said. "It looks like it's trying to feed off the carpet and the wooden floor. That's why the roots are so long. It's desperate to find food."
"The floor will be weak over there." Conklin paused behind Balenger. "Stay away from it."
Ahead, Rick stepped onto the balcony. Cora got there next. Then Vinnie. Balenger left the stairs and looked for a way up to Carlisle's penthouse. He glanced behind him toward where Conklin trudged up.
Creak.