Seize the Night

Page 52

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.
I remembered the seedlike projectiles that it had spat at Lumley and at Hodgson, and as I cried out to Sasha, the gargoyle shrieked. She squeezed off a round from the shotgun, but before she could be riddled with squirming parasites, the elevator broke apart and the cab plunged out of sight with the screaming creature still aboard, trailing cables and counterweights and pulleys and steel beams.
Because the beast had wings, I expected it to rise out of the ruins and soar up the shaft, but then I realized that the shaft no longer existed. Instead, I was looking into the starry void that I had glimpsed earlier in the night, where the stairwell should have been.
Crazily, I thought of a magical wardrobe serving as a doorway to the enchanted land of Narnia, mirrors and rabbit holes leading to a bizarre kingdom ruled by a playing-card queen. This was only a transient madness.
Recovering, I did the Pooh thing and gamely accepted all that I had seen—and was still seeing. I led our intrepid band across the hangar, where super-weird and maximum-sharky stuff was happening, across this neverland of past, present, future, and sideways time, saying hello to a startled ghost workman in a hard hat, brandishing the shotgun at three ghosts that looked as if they would give us trouble, while trying as best I could not to put us in the same space that was about to be occupied by an object materializing from another time, and if you think all that was easy, you’re a kak.
At times we were in a dark and abandoned warehouse, then we were in the murky red light of a time shift, but ten steps later, we were walking through a well-lighted and bustling place populated by busy ghosts as solid as we were. The worst moment was when we passed through a red fog and, though still far from the exit door, found ourselves beyond the warehouse, in a landscape where black masses of fungus rose with vaguely treelike forms and clawed at a red sky in which two dim suns burned low on the horizon. But an instant later, we were among the workmen ghosts again, then in darkness, and finally at the exit.
Nothing and no one followed us into the night, but we kept running until we had nearly reached the Hummer, where at last we stopped and turned and stared at the hangar, which was caught in a time storm. The concrete base of the structure, the corrugated steel walls, and the curve of the Quonset-style roof were pulsing with that red radiance. From the high clerestory windows came white beams as intense as those from a lighthouse, jabbing at the sky, carving bright arcs. Judging by the sound, you would have thought that a thousand bulls were smashing through a thousand china shops inside the building, that tanks were clashing on battlefields, that mobs of rioters were screaming for blood. The ground under our feet was trembling, as though from an earthquake, and I wondered if we were at a safe distance.
I expected the structure to explode or burst into flames, but instead it began to unravel. The red glow faded, the searchlights spearing from the high windows went dark, and we watched while the huge building flickered as though two thousand days and nights were passing in just two minutes, moonglow alternating with sunshine and darkness, the corrugated walls appearing to flutter in the strobing light. Then suddenly the building began to dismantle itself, as if it were unraveling into time past. Workmen swarmed over its surface, all moving backward; scaffolding and construction machinery appeared around it; the roof vanished, and the walls peeled down, and trains of trucks sucked the concrete out of the foundation, back into their mixers, and steel beams were craned out of the ground, like dinosaur bones from a paleontological dig, until all six subterranean floors must have been deconstructed, whereupon a blinding fury of massive dump trucks and excavators replaced the earth that they had once removed, and then after a final crackle of red light passed across the site and winked out, all was still.
The hangar and everything under it had ceased to exist.
The spectacle left the kids ecstatic, as if they had met E.T. and ridden on the back of a brontosaurus and taken a quick trip to the moon all in one evening.
“It’s over?” Doogie wondered.
“As if it never was,” I suggested.
Sasha said, “But it was.”
“The residual effect. A runaway residual effect. The whole place imploded into…the past, I guess.”
“But if it never existed,” Bobby said, “why do I remember being inside the place?”
“Don’t start,” I warned him.
We packed ourselves into the Hummer—five adults, four excited kids, one shaky dog, and a smug cat—and Doogie drove to the bungalow in Dead Town, where we had to deal with Delacroix’s rotting cadaver and the ceilings festooned with frankfurter-size cocoons. An exorcist’s work is never done.
On the way, Aaron Stuart, the troublemaker, reached a solemn conclusion about the blood on my hands. “Mr. Halloway must be dead.”
“We’ve done this,” I said impatiently. “He’s not dead anymore.”
“He’s dead,” Anson agreed.
“I may be dead,” Bobby said, “but my pants are dry.”
“Dead,” Jimmy Wing agreed.
“Maybe he is dead,” Wendy brooded.
“What the hell is wrong with you kids?” I demanded, turning in my seat to glare at them. “He’s not dead, it’s a paradox, but he’s not dead! All you’ve got to do is believe in fairies, clap your hands, and Tinker Bell will live! Is that so hard to understand?”
“Ice it down, Snowman,” Sasha advised me.
“I’m cool.”
I was still glaring at the kids, who were in the third and final seat. Orson was in the cargo space behind them. He cocked his burly head and looked at me over the kids’ heads, as if to say Ice it down.
“I’m mellow,” I assured him.
He sneezed a sneeze of disagreement.
Bobby had been dead. As in dead and gone. As in deader than dead. All right. Time to get over it. Here in Wyvern, life goes on, occasionally even for the deceased. Besides, we were more than half a mile from the beach, so anything that happened here couldn’t be that important.
“Son, the Tinker Bell thing makes perfect sense,” Roosevelt said, either to placate me or because he had gone stark, raving mad.
“Yeah,” said Jimmy Wing. “Tinker Bell.”
“Tinker Bell,” the twins said, nodding in unison.
“Yeah,” Wendy said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Mungojerrie meowed. I don’t know what that meant.
Doogie drove over the curb, across the sidewalk, and parked on the front lawn at the bungalow.
The kids stayed in the vehicle with Orson and Mungojerrie.
Sasha, Roosevelt, and Doogie took positions around the Hummer, standing guard.
At Sasha’s suggestion, Doogie had included two cans of gasoline in the provisions. With the criminal intention of destroying still more government property, Bobby and I carried these ten gallons of satisfyingly flammable liquid to the bungalow.
Going back into this small house was even less appealing than submitting to extensive gum surgery, but we were manly men, and so we climbed the steps and crossed the porch without hesitation, though quietly.
In the living room, we set down the gasoline cans with care, as though to avoid waking a quarrelsome sleeper, and I switched on a flashlight.
The cocoons that had been clustered overhead were gone.
At first I thought the residents of those silky tubes had chewed free and were now loose in the bungalow in a form that was sure to prove troublesome. Then I realized that not even one wisp of gossamer filament remained in any corner, and none floated on the floor.
The lone red sock, which might once have belonged to one of the Delacroix children, lay where it had been previously, still caked with dust. In general, the bungalow was as I remembered it.
No cocoons hung in the dining room. None were to be found in the kitchen, either.
Leland Delacroix’s corpse was gone, as were the photographs of his family, the votive-candle glass, the wedding ring, and the gun with which he had killed himself. The ancient linoleum was still cracked and peeling, but I could see no biological stains that would have indicated that a dead body had been rotting here recently.
“The Mystery Train was never built,” I said, “so Delacroix never went to…the other side. Never opened the door.”
Bobby said, “Never got infected—or possessed. Whatever. And he never infected his family. So they’re all alive somewhere?”