Seize the Night (34 page)

Into my mind’s eye came an image of Doogie in a tuxedo and such a helmet, leading a supermodel through a perfect tango in a dance competition.

There are two faces to the coin of my rich imagination.

The man-size door, inset in one of the forty-foot-high steel hangar doors, was closed. I couldn’t remember whether Bobby and I had shut it on our way out the night before. Probably not. We hadn’t been in a clean-up-after-yourself, turn-out-the-lights-and-close-the-door mood when we’d fled this place.

At the door, Doogie extracted two flashlights from jumpsuit pockets and gave them to Sasha and Roosevelt, so that Bobby and I would have both hands free for the shotguns.

Doogie tried the door. It opened inward.

Sasha’s crossing-the-threshold technique was even smoother than her on-air patter at KBAY. She moved to the left of the door before she switched on the light and swept the beam across the cavernous hangar, which was too large to be entirely within the reach of any flashlight. But she didn’t shoot at anyone, and no one shot at her, so it seemed likely that our presence was not yet known.

Bobby followed her, shotgun at the ready. With the cat in his arms, Roosevelt entered after Bobby. I followed, and Doogie brought up the rear, quietly closing the door behind us, as we had found it.

I looked expectantly at Roosevelt.

He stroked the cat and whispered, “We’ve got to go down.”

Because I knew the way, I led the group. Second star to the right, and straight on till morning. Watch out for the pirates and the crocodile with the ticking clock inside.

We crossed the vast room under the tracks that once supported a mobile crane, past the massive steel supports that held up these rails, moving cautiously around the deep wells in the floor, where hydraulic mechanisms had once been housed.

As we progressed, swords of shadow and sabers of light leaped off the elevated steel crane rails and silently fenced with one another across the walls and the curved ceiling. Most of the high clerestory windows were broken out, but reflections flared in the remaining few, like white sparks from clashing blades.

Suddenly I was halted by a sense of wrongness I can’t adequately describe: a change in the air too subtle to define; a mild tingle on my face; a quivering of the hairs in my ear canals, as if they were vibrating to a sound beyond my range of hearing.

Sasha and Roosevelt must have felt it, too, because they turned in circles, searching with their flashlights.

Doogie held the Uzi pistol in both hands.

Bobby was near one of the cylindrical steel posts that supported the crane tracks. He reached out, touched it, and whispered, “Bro.”

As I moved to his side, I heard a ringing so faint that I could not hold fast to the sound, which repeatedly came and went. When I put my fingertips against the post, I detected vibrations passing through the steel.

Abruptly, the air temperature changed. The hangar had been unpleasantly cool, almost cold; but from one instant to the next, it became fifteen or twenty degrees warmer. This would have been impossible even if the building had still contained a heating plant, which it did not.

Sasha, Doogie, and Roosevelt joined Bobby and me, instinctively forming a circle to guard against a threat from any direction.

The vibrations in the post grew stronger.

I looked toward the east end of the hangar. The door by which we had entered was about twenty yards away. The flashlights were able to reach that far, though they couldn’t chase away all the shadows. In that direction, I could see to the end of the shorter length of the overhead crane tracks, and all seemed as it had been when we’d first come into the building.

The flashlights were not able to probe to the west end of the structure, however; it lay at least eighty and perhaps as much as a hundred yards away. As far as I
could
see, there was nothing out of the ordinary.

What bothered me was the unyielding blackness in the last twenty or thirty yards. Not seamless blackness. Many shades of black and deepest grays, a montage of shadows.

I had an impression of a large, looming object concealed in that montage. A towering and complex shape. Something black and gray, so well camouflaged in the gloom that the eye couldn’t quite seize upon the outline of it.

Bobby whispered, “Sasha, your light. Here.”

She directed it where he pointed, at the floor.

The light gleamed off one of the inch-thick steel angle plates anchored to the concrete, where heavy machinery had once been mounted. These prickled up from the floor at many points in the room.

I didn’t understand why Bobby had called our attention to this unremarkable object.

“Clean,” he said.

Then I understood. When we had been here last night—in fact, on every occasion that I had passed through this hangar—these angle plates and the bolts holding them down had been smeared with grease and caked with dirt. This one was shiny, clean, as though someone had recently done maintenance on it.

Holding the cat in one arm, Roosevelt moved his light across the floor, up the steel post, across the tracks above us.

“
Everything’s
cleaner,” Doogie murmured, and he meant not since last night but just since we had entered the hangar.

Though I’d taken my hand off the post, I knew the vibrations in the steel had increased, because I could hear that faint ringing coming from the entire double colonnade that flanked us and from the tracks that the columns supported.

I looked toward the far, dark end of the building, and I swore that something immense was moving in the gloom.

“Bro!” Bobby said.

I glanced at him.

He was gaping at his wristwatch.

I checked mine and saw the digital readouts racing backward.

Sudden fear, like cold rain, washed through me.

A strange muddy red light rose throughout the hangar, evenly distributed, with no apparent source, as if the very molecules of the air had become radiant. Perhaps it was a dangerous light to an XPer like me, but this seemed the least of my troubles at the moment. The red air shimmered, and though the darkness retreated across the entire building, visibility hardly improved. This odd light cloaked as much as it revealed, and I felt almost as if I were underwater, in a drowned world…in water tinted with blood.

The flashlight beams were no longer effective. The light that they produced seemed to be trapped behind the lenses, pooling there, rapidly growing brighter and brighter, but unable to pass beyond the glass and penetrate the red air.

Here and there beyond the colonnades, dark forms began to quiver into existence where there had been nothing but bare floor. Machines of some kind. They looked real and yet not real, like objects in a mirage. Phantom machines at the moment…but becoming real.

The vibrations were getting louder, and their tone was changing, growing deeper, more ominous. A rumbling.

At the west end of the room, where there had been a troubling darkness, there was now a crane atop the tracks, and hanging from the boom was a massive…
something.
An engine, perhaps.

Though I could see the shape of the crane in the dire red light, as well as the object that it was lifting, I could also see
through
them, as if they were made of glass.

In the low rumbling that had grown out of the faint high-pitched ringing in the steel, I recognized the sound of train wheels, steel wheels revolving, grinding along steel tracks.

The crane would have steel wheels. Guide wheels above the track, upstop wheels below to lock it to the rails.

“…out of the way,” Bobby said, and when I looked at him, he was moving, as if in slo-mo, out from beneath the tracks, sliding around a support post with his back pressed to it.

Roosevelt, as wide-eyed as the cat he held, was on the move.

The crane was more solid than it had been a moment ago, less transparent. The big engine—or whatever the crane was transporting—hung from the end of the boom, below the tracks; this payload was the size of a compact car, and it was going to sweep through the space where we were standing as the crane rolled past overhead.

And here it came, moving faster than such a massive piece of equipment could possibly move, because it wasn’t really physically coming toward us; rather, I think that time was running backward to the moment when we and this equipment would be occupying the same space at the same instant. Hell, it didn’t matter whether it was the crane moving or time moving, because either way the effect would be the same: Two bodies
can’t
occupy the same place at the same time. If they tried, either there would be a fierce release of nuclear energy in a blast heard at least as far away as Cleveland, or one of the competing bodies—me or the car-size object dangling from the crane—would cease to exist.

Although I started to move, grabbing at Sasha to pull her with me, I knew that we had no hope of getting out of harm’s way in time.

Time.

As we reeled toward a moment in the past when the hangar had been filled with functional equipment, just as the oncoming crane appeared about to click into total reality…the temperature suddenly dropped. The muddy red light faded. The rumble of big steel wheels became a higher-pitched ringing.

I expected the crane to retreat, to roll back toward the west end of the building as it grew less substantial. When I looked up, however, it was passing over us, a shimmering mirage of a crane, and the burden that it carried, which was once more as transparent as glass, hit Sasha, then hit me.

Hit
isn’t the correct word. I don’t really know what it did to me. The ghost crane swept past overhead, and the ghost payload enveloped me, passed through me, and vanished on the other side of me. A cold wind briefly shook me. But it didn’t even stir my hair. It was entirely internal, an icy breath whistling between my very cells, playing my bones as if they were flutes. For an instant I thought it would blow apart the bonds among the molecules of which I’m composed, dispersing me as though I’d never been anything but dust.

The last of the red light vanished, and the pent-up beams sprang out of the flashlights.

I was still alive, glued together both physically and mentally.

Sasha gasped: “Raw!”

“Killer,” I agreed.

Shaken, she leaned against one of the track-support columns.

Doogie had been standing no more than six feet behind me. He had watched the ghost payload pass through us and vanish before it reached him.

“Time to go home?” he wondered only half jokingly.

“Need a glass of warm milk?”

“And six Prozac.”

“Welcome to the haunted laboratory,” I said.

Joining us, Bobby said, “Whatever was going on in the egg room last night, it’s affecting the entire building now.”

“Because of us?” I wondered.

“We didn’t build the place, bro.”

“But did we start it up last night, by energizing it?”

“I don’t think, just because we used two flashlights, we’re major villains here.”

Roosevelt said, “We’ve got to move fast. The whole place is…coming apart.”

“Is that what Mungojerrie thinks?” Sasha asked.

In ordinary times, Roosevelt Frost could fix you with a solemn look that any undertaker would envy. With one eye still full of dark amazement at what he had just seen, and with the other eye swollen half shut and shot through with blood, he made me think I’d better pack my bags and get ready to meet that glory-bound train.

He said, “It’s not what Mr. Mungojerrie thinks. It’s what he
knows.
Everything here is going to…come apart. Soon.”

“Then let’s go down and find the kids and Orson.”

Roosevelt nodded. “Let’s go down.”

24

In the southwest corner of the hangar, the empty elevator shaft was as it had been the previous night. But the stainless-steel jamb and threshold at the stairhead doorway—overlooked by salvagers—were free of grease and dust, which they had not been at any time since I first explored this structure, nearly a year earlier. In the beam from Sasha’s flashlight, the first several steps were not covered in dust any longer, and the dead pill bugs were gone.

Either a kindly gnome was preceding us, making the world more pleasing to the eye, or the phenomena that Bobby and I had witnessed in the egg room, one night before, were leaching beyond the walls of that mysterious chamber. My money was not on the gnome.

Mungojerrie stood on the second step, peering down the concrete stairwell, sniffing the air, ears pricked. Then he descended.

Sasha followed the cat.

The stairs were wide enough for two people to walk abreast, with room to spare, and I stayed at Sasha’s side, relieved to be sharing the point-position risk with her. Roosevelt followed, then Doogie with the Uzi. Bobby was our tail gunner, keeping his back to one wall, crabbing sideways down the stairs, to make sure no one crept in behind us.

Aside from being suspiciously clean, the first flight of steps was as it had been on my previous visit. Bare concrete on all sides. Evenly spaced core holes in the ceiling, which had once been the end points of electrical chaseways. Painted iron pipe attached to one wall, as a handrail. The air was cold, thick, redolent with the scent of lime that leached from the concrete.

When we reached the landing and turned toward the second flight, I put one hand on Sasha’s arm, halting her, and to our feline scout I whispered, “Whoa, cat.”

Mungojerrie halted four steps into the next flight and, with an expectant expression, looked up at us.

The ceiling ahead was fitted with fluorescent fixtures. Because these lights weren’t switched on, they posed no danger to me.

But they hadn’t been here before. They had been torn out and carted away when Fort Wyvern shut down. In fact, this particular structure might have been scoured to the bare concrete long
before
the base was closed, when the Mystery Train ran off the tracks and scared its designers into the realization that their project had been pursued with a truly
loco
motive.

Time past and time present existed here simultaneously, and our future was here, too, though we could not see it. All time, said the poet T. S. Eliot, is eternally present, leading inexorably to an end that we believe results from our actions but over which our control is mere illusion.

At the moment, that bit of Eliot was too bleak for me. While I studied the fluorescent lights, trying to imagine what might wait ahead of us, I mentally recited the initial couplet of the first-ever poetry about Winnie-the-Pooh—“A bear, however hard he tries / Grows tubby without exercise”—but A. A. Milne failed to drive Eliot from my mind.

We could no more retreat from the dangers below, from this eerie confusion of past and present, than I could return to my childhood. Nevertheless, how lovely it would be to crawl under the covers with my own Pooh and Tigger, and pretend that the three of us would be friends, still, when I was a hundred and Pooh was ninety-nine.

“Okay,” I told Mungojerrie, and we continued our descent.

When we reached the next landing, which was at the doorway to the first of the three subterranean levels, Bobby whispered, “Bro.”

I looked back. The fluorescent-light fixtures above the steps behind us had vanished. The concrete ceiling featured only cored holes from which the fixtures and the wiring had been stripped.

Time present was again more present than time past, at least for the moment.

Scowling, Doogie murmured, “Give me Colombia anytime.”

“Or Calcutta,” Sasha said.

On behalf of Mungojerrie, Roosevelt said, “Got to hurry. Going to be blood if we don’t hurry.”

Led by the fearless cat, we slowly descended four more flights, to the third and final level beneath the hangar.

We found no additional indications of hobgoblins or bugaboos until we reached the bottom of the stairwell. As Mungojerrie was about to lead us into the outer corridor that encircles this entire oval-shaped level of the building, the muddy red light that we had first seen on the ground floor of the hangar pulsed beyond the doorway. It lasted only an instant and then was replaced by darkness.

A general dismay rose from our little group, mostly expressed in whispered expletives, and the cat hissed.

Other voices echoed from somewhere in this sub-subbasement, deep and distorted. They were like the voices on a tape played at too slow a speed.

Sasha and Roosevelt switched off their flashlights, leaving us in gloom.

Beyond the doorway, the bloody glow pulsed again, and then several more times, like the revolving emergency beacon on a police cruiser. Each pulse was longer than the one before it, until the darkness in the hallway retreated entirely and the eerie luminosity finally held fast.

The voices were growing louder. They were still distorted, but almost intelligible.

Curiously, not one scintilla of the malign red light in the corridor penetrated to the space at the bottom of the stairs, where we huddled together. The doorway appeared to be a portal between two realities: utter darkness on this side, the red world on the other side. The line of bloody light along the floor, at the threshold, was as sharp as a knife edge.

As in the hangar upstairs, this radiance brightened the space it filled but did little to illuminate what it touched: a murky light, alive with phantom shapes and movement that could be detected only from the corner of the eye, creating more mysteries than it resolved.

Three tall figures passed the doorway, darker maroon shapes in the red light, perhaps men but possibly something even worse. As these individuals crossed our line of sight, the voices grew louder and less distorted, then faded as the figures moved out of view along the hall.

Mungojerrie padded through the doorway.

I expected him to flare as if sizzled by a death ray, leaving no trace behind except the stink of scorched fur. Instead, he became a small maroon shape, elongated, distorted, not easily identifiable as a cat even though you could tell that he had four feet, a tail, and attitude.

The radiance in the hall began to pulse, now darker than blood, now red-pink, and with each cycle from dark to bright, a throbbing electronic hum swelled through the building, low and ominous. When I touched the concrete wall, it was vibrating faintly, as the steel post had vibrated in the hangar.

Abruptly, the corridor light flashed from red to white. The pulsing stopped. We were looking through the doorway at a hall blazingly revealed under fluorescent ceiling panels.

Instantaneously with the change of light, my ears popped, as if from a sudden decrease in air pressure, and a warm draft gusted into the stairwell, bringing with it a trace of the crisp ozone scent that lingers on a rainy night in the wake of lightning.

Mr. Mungojerrie was in the corridor, no longer a maroon blur, gazing at something off to the right. He was standing not on bare concrete but on clean white ceramic floor tiles that had not been there before.

I peered up the dark stairs behind us, which appeared to be firmly anchored in our time, in the present rather than the past. The building was not phasing entirely in and out of the past; the phenomenon occurred in a crazy-quilt pattern.

I was tempted to sprint up the steps as fast as I could, into the hangar and from there into the night, but we were past the point of no return. We had passed it when Jimmy Wing was kidnapped and Orson disappeared. Friendship required us to venture off the map of the known world, into areas that ancient cartographers couldn’t have imagined when they had inked those words
Here there be monsters.

Squinting, I withdrew my sunglasses from an inside jacket pocket and slipped them on. I had no choice but to risk letting the light bathe my face and hands, but the glare was so bright that it would have stung tears from my eyes.

When we moved cautiously into the corridor, I knew beyond doubt that we had stepped into the past, into a time when this facility had not yet been shut down, before it had been stripped of all evidence. I saw a grease-pencil scheduling chart on one wall, a bulletin board, and two wheeled carts holding peculiar instruments.

The throbbing hum had not fallen silent with the disappearance of the red light. I suspected that it was the sound of the egg room in full operation. It seemed to pierce my eardrums, penetrate my skull, and vibrate directly against the surface of my brain.

Metal doors had appeared on the previously doorless rooms that opened off the inner wall of the curving hallway, and the nearest of these was wide open. In the small chamber beyond, two swivel chairs were unoccupied in front of a complex control board, not unlike the mixing board that any radio-station engineer uses. On one side of this board stood a can of Pepsi and a bag of potato chips, proving that even the architects of doomsday enjoy a snack and a refreshing beverage now and then.

To the right of the stairs, sixty or eighty feet farther along the corridor, three men were moving away from us, unaware that we were behind them. One wore jeans and a white shirt, sleeves rolled up. The second was in a dark suit, and the third wore khakis and a white lab coat. They were walking close together, heads bent, as if conferring, but I couldn’t hear their voices over the pulsing electronic hum.

These were surely the three maroon figures that had passed the stairwell in the murky red light, so blurry and distorted that I had not been able to tell whether they were, in fact, human.

I glanced to the left, worrying that someone else might appear and, seeing us, raise an alarm. Currently, however, that length of the corridor was deserted.

Mungojerrie was still watching the departing trio, apparently unwilling to lead us farther until they had rounded the curve in the long racetrack-shaped corridor or entered one of the rooms. This straightaway was five hundred feet long, from curve to curve, and at least a hundred fifty feet remained ahead of the three men before they would turn out of sight.

We were dangerously exposed. We needed to retreat until the Mystery Train staffers were gone. Besides, I was already nervous about the quantity of light that was hammering my face.

I caught Sasha’s attention and gestured toward the stairwell.

Her eyes widened.

When I followed her gaze, I saw that a door blocked access to the stairs. From inside the stairwell, there had been no door; we had seen straight through to the red—and then to the fluorescent-drenched—hallway. We had passed directly from there to here without obstruction. From this side, however, the barrier existed.

I went quickly to the door, yanked it open, and almost crossed the threshold. Fortunately, I hesitated when I sensed a
wrongness
about the darkness beyond.

Sliding my sunglasses down my nose, peering over the frames, I expected concrete-walled gloom with steps leading up. Instead, before me was a clear night sky, necklaces of stars, and a pendant moon. This skyscape was the
only
thing out there where the stairs had been, as though this door now opened high above the earth’s atmosphere, in interplanetary space, a long way from the nearest doughnut shop. Or perhaps it opened into a time when the earth no longer existed. No floor lay beyond the threshold, nothing but empty space jeweled with more stars, a cold and infinite drop from the bright corridor in which I stood.

Sharky.

I closed the door. I gripped the shotgun fiercely in both hands, not because I expected to use it but because it was
real,
solid and unyielding, an anchor in this sea of strangeness.

Sasha was now immediately behind me.

When I turned to face her, I could tell that she had seen the same celestial panorama that had rocked me. Her gray eyes were as clear as ever, but they were darker than before.

Doogie hadn’t glimpsed the impossible sight, because he was holding the Uzi at the ready and watching the three departing men.

Frowning, standing with his fists balled tightly at his sides, Roosevelt studied the cat.

From his position, Bobby couldn’t have seen through the doorway, either, but he knew something was wrong. His face was as solemn as that of a rabbit reading a cookbook recipe for hare soup.

Mungojerrie was the only one of us who didn’t appear to be about to blow out snarled springs like an overwound cuckoo clock.

Trying not to dwell on what I’d seen beyond the stairwell door, I wondered how the cat could find Orson and the kids if they were in a present-time place while we were stuck here in the past. But then I figured that if we could pass from one time period to another, be caught up in the time shifts taking place around us, so could my four-footed brother and the children.

Anyway, from every indication, we hadn’t actually traveled back in time. Rather, the past and present—and perhaps the future—were occurring simultaneously, weirdly pressed together by whatever force or force field the engines of the egg room had generated. And perhaps it was not only one night from the past that was bleeding into our present time; maybe we were experiencing moments from different days and nights when the egg room had been in operation.

The three men were still walking away from us. Ambling. Taking their sweet time.

The rhythmic swell and recession of the electronic sound began to have an odd psychological effect. A mild vertigo overcame me, and the corridor—this entire subterranean floor—seemed to be turning like a carousel.

My grip on the shotgun was too fierce. Unwittingly, I was exerting dangerous pressure on the trigger. I hooked my finger around the trigger guard instead.

I had a headache. It wasn’t a result of being knocked around by Father Tom at the Stanwyk house. I was sustaining a brain bruise from pondering time paradoxes, from trying to make sense of what was happening. This required a talent for mathematics and theoretical physics; but although I can balance my checkbook, I haven’t inherited my mother’s love of math and science. In the most general sense, I understand the theory of leverage that explains the function of a bottle opener, why gravity makes it a bad idea to leap off a high building, and why running headlong into a brick wall will have little effect on the bricks. Otherwise, I trust the cosmos to run itself efficiently without my having to understand it, which is also pretty much my attitude toward electric razors, wristwatches, bread-baking machines, and other mechanical devices.