Seize the Night (40 page)

“You don’t remember being dead?” Doogie asked.

“Not really.”

“He doesn’t remember dying because he never died,” I said too sharply.

I was still struggling with grief at the same time that a wild joy was surging in me, a manic glee, which was a weird combination of emotions, like being King Lear and Mr. Toad of Toad Hall at the same time. Plus my fear was feeding on itself, growing fatter. We weren’t out of here yet, and we had more than ever to lose, because if one of us died now, there was no chance that I’d be able to pull another rabbit out of a hat; I didn’t even
have
a hat.

As we ground slowly up, still short of B-2, a deep rumbling rose through the elevator shaft, as if we were in a submarine around which depth charges were detonating, and the lift mechanism began to creak.

“If it was me, I’d sure remember dying,” Wendy announced.

“He didn’t die,” I said more calmly.

“But he
did
die,” insisted Aaron Stuart.

“He sure did,” said Anson.

Jimmy Wing said, “You peed your pants.”

“I never,” Bobby denied.

“You told us you did,” said Jimmy Wing.

Bobby looked dubiously at Sasha, and she said, “You were dying, it was excusable.”

On my wristwatch, the luminous squiggles were twisting across the readout window faster than before. Maybe the Mystery Train was pulling out of the station, gathering speed. Sideways.

As we reached B-2, the building began to shake badly enough to cause the elevator cab to rattle against the walls of the shaft, and we grabbed at the handrails and at each other to keep our balance.

“My pants are dry,” Bobby noted.

“Because you didn’t die,” I said tightly, “which means you never wet your pants, either.”

“He did too,” said Jimmy Wing.

Sensing my state of mind, Roosevelt said, “Relax, son.”

Orson put one paw on my shoe, as if to indicate that I should listen to Roosevelt.

Doogie said, “If he never died, why do we remember him dying?”

“I don’t know,” I said miserably.

The elevator seemed to have gotten stuck at B-2, and abruptly the doors opened, though Doogie had pressed only the
G
button.

Maybe the kids weren’t able to see past us to what lay beyond the cab, but those of us in the front row had a good look, and the sight froze us. A corridor, either stripped to the bare concrete or equipped as it had been in years gone by, should have waited out there past the threshold, but we were facing a panoramic landscape instead. A smoldering red sky. Oily black fungus grew in gnarled, vaguely treelike masses, and thick rivulets of vile dark syrup oozed from puckered pustules on the trunks. From some limbs hung cocoons like those we had seen in the Dead Town bungalow, glossy and fat, pregnant with malignant life.

For a moment, as we stood stunned, no sound or odor issued from this twisted landscape, and I dared to hope it was more a vision than a physical reality. Then movement at the threshold drew my eye, and I saw the red-and-black-mottled tendrils of a ground-hugging vine, as beautiful and evil-looking as a nest of baby coral snakes, questing at the sill of the door, growing as fast as plants in a nature film run at high speed, wriggling into the cab.

“Shut the door!” I urged.

Doogie pressed a button labeled
close door
and then pushed the
G
button again, for the ground floor.

The doors didn’t close.

As Doogie jammed his thumb against the button again, something loomed in that otherworldly place, no more than two feet away from us, crossing from the left.

We brought up our guns.

It was a man in a bio-secure suit.
Hodgson
was stenciled across the brow of his helmet, but his face was that of an ordinary man, not crawling with parasites.

We were in the past
and
on the other side. Chaos.

The writhing tendrils of the black-and-red vine, the diameter of earthworms, lapped at the elevator carpet.

Orson sniffed them. The tendrils rose like swaying cobras, as if they would strike at his nose, and Orson twitched away from them.

Cursing, Doogie pounded the side of his fist against
close door
. Then against
G
.

Hodgson could see us. Amazement pried open his eyes.

The unnatural silence and stillness were broken when wind gusted into the cab. Hot and humid. Reeking of tar and rotting vegetation. Circling us and blowing out again, as if it were a living thing.

Careful to avoid stepping on the vine tendrils, afraid they would bore through the sole of my shoe and then through the sole of my foot, I tugged frantically at the door, trying to pull out the sliding panel on the left. It wouldn’t budge.

With the stench came a faint but chilling sound like thousands of tortured voices, issuing from a distance—and threaded through those screams, also distant, was an inhuman shriek.

Hodgson turned more directly toward us, pointing for the benefit of another man in a bio-secure suit, who hove into view.

The doors began to close. The vine tendrils crunched between the sliding panels. The doors shuddered, almost retreated, but then pinched the vines off, and the cab rose.

Oozing yellow fluid and the bitter scent of sulfur, the severed tendrils curled and twisted with great agitation—and then dissolved into an inert mush.

The building shook as if it were the home of all thunder, the foundry where Thor forged his lightning bolts.

The vibrations were affecting either the elevator motor or the lift cables, perhaps both, because we were rising more slowly than before, grinding upward.

“Mr. Halloway’s pants are dry now,” Aaron Stuart said, picking up the conversation where it had left off, “but I smelled the pee.”

“Me too,” said Anson, Wendy, and Jimmy.

Orson woofed agreement.

“It’s a paradox,” Roosevelt said solemnly, as though to save me the trouble of explaining.

“There’s that word again,” Doogie said. His brow was furrowed, and his gaze remained riveted on the indicator board above the door, waiting for the B-1 bulb to light.

“A time paradox,” I said.

“But how does that work?” Sasha asked.

“Like a toaster oven,” I said, meaning
who knows?

Doogie pressed his thumb against G and kept it there. We didn’t want the door to open on B-1. B for
bedlam
. B for
bad news
. B for
be prepared to die squishily
.

Aaron Stuart said, “Mr. Snow?”

I took a deep breath: “Yes?”

“If Mr. Halloway didn’t die, then whose blood is on your hands?”

I looked at my hands. They were sticky-damp with Bobby’s blood, which had gotten on them when I’d dragged his body into the elevator.

“Weird,” I admitted.

Wendy Dulcinea said, “If the body went poof, why didn’t the blood on your hands go poof?”

My mouth was too dry, my tongue too thick, and my throat too tight to allow me to answer her.

The shuddering elevator briefly caught on something in the shaft, tore loose with a ripping-metal sound, and then we groaned to B-1. Where we stopped.

Doogie leaned on
close door
and on the button for the ground floor.

We didn’t ascend any farther.

The doors slid inexorably open. Heat, humidity, and that fetid stench rolled over us, and I expected the vigorous alien vegetation to grow into the cab and overwhelm us with explosive force.

In our slice of time, we’d risen one level, but William Hodgson was still out there in neverland, where we had left him. Pointing at us.

The man beyond Hodgson—
Lumley,
according to his helmet—also turned to look at us.

Shrieking, something flew out of that baleful sky, among the black trees: a creature with glossy black wings and whiplike tail, with the muscular, scaly limbs of a lizard, as if a gargoyle had torn itself loose of the stone high on an ancient Gothic cathedral and had taken flight. As it swooped down on Lumley, it appeared to spit out a stream of objects, which looked like large peach pits but were something deadlier, something no doubt full of frenzied life. Lumley twitched and jerked as though he had been hit by machine-gun fire, and several perfectly round holes appeared in his spacesuit, like those we had seen in poor damn Hodgson’s suit in the egg room the previous night.

Lumley screamed as though he were being eaten alive, and Hodgson stumbled backward in terror, away from us.

The elevator doors began to close, but the flying thing abruptly changed directions, streaking straight toward us.

As the doors bumped shut, hard objects rattled against them, and a series of dimples appeared in the steel, as if it had been hit by bullets with
almost
enough punch to penetrate to the interior of the cab.

Sasha’s face was talcum white.

Mine must have been whiter still, to match my name.

Even Orson seemed to have gone a paler shade of black.

We ascended toward the ground floor through crashes of thunder, the grinding rumble of steel wheels on steel track, harsh whistles, shrieks, and the throbbing electronic hum, but in spite of all those sounds of worlds colliding, we also heard another noise, which was more intimate, more terrifying. Something was on the roof of the elevator cab. Crawling, slithering.

It could have been nothing but a loose cable, which might have explained our quaking, jerky progress toward the ground floor. But it wasn’t a loose cable. That was wishful thinking. This thing was alive. Alive and purposeful.

I couldn’t imagine how anything could have gotten into the shaft with us after the doors had shut, unless the intermingling of these two realities was nearly complete. In which case, at any moment, might not the thing on the roof pass through the ceiling and be among us, like a ghost passing through a wall?

Doogie remained focused on the indicator board above the doors, but the rest of us—animals, kids, and adults—turned our faces up toward the menacing sounds.

In the center of the ceiling was an escape hatch. A way out. A way
in.

Borrowing the Uzi from Doogie once more, I aimed at the ceiling. Sasha also covered the trapdoor with her shotgun.

I wasn’t optimistic about the effectiveness of gunfire. Unless I was misremembering, Delacroix had suggested that at least some of the expedition members were heavily armed when they went to the other side. Guns hadn’t saved them.

The elevator groaned-rattled-squeaked upward.

This side of the three-foot-square hatch featured neither hinges nor handles. There was no latch bolt, either. To escape, you had to push the panel up and out. To enable rescue workers to pull it open from the other side, there would be a handle or a recessed groove in which fingers could be hooked.

The flying gargoyle had hands, thick talonlike fingers. Maybe those huge fingers wouldn’t fit in a groove handle.

A hard, frantic scraping noise. Something clawing busily at the steel roof, as if trying to dig through. A creak, a hard pop, a rending sound. Silence.

The kids clutched one another.

Orson growled low in his throat.

So did I.

The walls seemed to press closer to one another, as though the elevator cab were reshaping itself into a group coffin. The air was thick. Each breath felt like sludge in my lungs. The overhead light began to flicker.

With a metallic squeal, the escape hatch sagged toward us as though a great weight were pressing on it. The frame in which it sat would not allow it to open inward.

After a moment, the weight was removed, but the panel didn’t return entirely to normal. It was distorted. Steel plate. Bent like plastic. More force had been required for that task than I cared to think about.

Sweat blurred my vision. I wiped at my eyes with the back of my hand.

“Yes!” Doogie said, as the
G
bulb lit on the indicator board.

The promise of release was not immediately fulfilled. The doors didn’t open.

The cab began to bob up and down, rising and falling as much as a foot with each sickening bounce, as though the hoist cables and the limit switches and the roller guides and the pulleys were all about to crack apart and send us plunging to the bottom of the shaft in a mass of mangling metal.

On the roof, the gargoyle—or something worse—yanked on the escape hatch. Its prior efforts had tweaked the panel in the frame, and now the trap was wedged shut.

The elevator doors were still shut, too, and Doogie angrily punched the button labeled
open doors
.

With a shrill bark, the badly distorted rim of the steel trap stuttered in the frame, as the creature above furiously pulled on it.

At last the elevator doors opened, and I spun toward them, sure that we were now
surrounded
by neverland, that the predator on the roof would have been joined by others.

We were at the ground floor. The hangar was noisier than a New Year’s Eve party in a train station with howling wolves and a punk band with nuclear amplifiers.

But it was recognizably the hangar: no red sky, no black trees, no slithering vines like nests of coral snakes.

Overhead, the warped escape hatch screeched, rattled violently. The surrounding frame was coming apart.

The elevator bobbed worse than ever. The floor of the cab rose and fell in relation to the hangar floor, the way a dock slip moves in relation to a boat deck in choppy seas.

I gave the Uzi to Doogie, snatched up my shotgun, and followed the sass man into the hangar, jumping across the shifting threshold, with Bobby and Orson close behind me.

Sasha and Roosevelt hurried the kids out of the elevator, and Mungojerrie came last, after a final curious glance at the ceiling.

As Sasha turned to cover the cab with her shotgun, the escape hatch was torn out of the ceiling. The gargoyle came down from the roof. The leathery black wings were folded as it dropped, but then they spread to fill the cab. The muscles bulged in the beast’s sleek, scaly limbs as it tensed to spring forward. The tail whipped, lashing against the cab walls. Silver eyes flashed. Its raw mouth appeared to be lined with red velvet, but its long forked tongue was black.