With a mighty heave, Remy felt the steel bar begin to yield. The iron door he had wedged it behind was bending, too, the edge turning up like a child’s pouty lip. The bar curled further and further but a light was opening up, a light unlike Remy had ever seen before. Then there was a loud clinking racket and Remy was on his ass, calves bloodied in the angle iron he’d been standing on, slack steel bar in his hands, and a sound like a soft blower over the whingeing hinges of the open door.
He felt the breeze and looked out. There was a brick wall which reached up fifty feet. Above that, something absolutely entrancing. Remy saw the blue vault of the sky for the first time, looking deep into it, trying to focus on it, to find the grain of the ceiling or some water-spot to gauge its distance, but only found his eye delving further into a color which he thought might envelop him, then pour in his eyes and his mouth and inhabit him, till he was all blue and profound and dimensionless as what he saw.
Losing his grip on the rusty sill, he tumbled down out of the little utility doorway onto the ground. There the harsh shock of concrete never hit; instead he was cushioned by tall grass. He clutched at the green blades, the brown tips, his neck was tickled by beating blades and soft chirping crickets.
He had stumbled into a little courtyard, about five by twenty, at the long end of which were some concrete stairs and a closed automatic door. A tiny patch of wilderness, oil-stained, still smelling strongly of grease and creosote, the brick walls looming high above him. But it was the greatest place he’d ever been.
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